liquid igloo

Learning #18 : Listen to your Mother

2012-01-25T15:45:00.000-08:00

When I was a junior high school, I went to Palm Springs on Spring Break with my family and my friend Jenny.

Also, when I was a junior in high school, I was a teenage girl.

Here is why I mention this: a teenage girl in 1988 had lots of oversized, empowering accessories. These include, but are not limited to: notably aerodynamic bangs, large dangly earrings, shoulder pads, slouchy sweaters, shoe-boots... the list goes on.

Being adorned with such festoonery demands, of course, a certain amount of sassy teenage attitude. Hey, it's the costume.

Not the actual Volvo... (though I wish it were...)

In any case, upon our arrival in 1988 Palm Springs on Spring Break, Jenny and I decided to get on downtown immediately so that we could do what all teenage girls like to do, which is shop and chat and determine the best and/or closest place (depending on your shoes) to find some ice cream. And, with this worthy plan in mind, we hopped into my Mom's shiny gold Volvo sedan (Mmm... the smell of aged, heated leather in the desert sun... Ouch! Hot leather on my thighs!) and headed downtown.

We parked the car and got out. And that's when Jenny saw something Very Exciting. It was a sign. A white sign, with block red lettering that looked very much like the angry protest signs that the Teamsters had been waving at us outside the front gates of school due to their diligent boycott of the movie production that was being filmed at our high school (did I mention that we grew up in L.A.?).

But this sign did not read... well, whatever it was that the Teamsters put on their signs. I mean, I'm on my way to school, Teamsters, can you just move your sign-toting selves so I can get to Chemistry Lab on time? I'm not thrilled to be out here before 8 either, thanks... wait, what did that sign say, anyway? Ugh, I'm late again - outta my way, Teamster!

This sign simply read:

BONO FOR MAYOR

Cool.

So we both started looking around and these signs were all over the place, mostly in shop windows and such. And, as we started walking around, we became extremely excited about these signs for one reason, and that reason is:

We were both very big U2 fans.
And the posters didn't have a pronunciation guide.

And so, like any devout U2 fans would, we decided that we wanted a "BONO FOR MAYOR" sign as a keepsake of our awesomely timed Spring Break trip.

We went into a store and noticed a young-ish proprietor, who looked like an easy target. He had super nice, tailored clothes and good hair, and and he was pretty cute too. So, like any self-respecting 17-year-old girls with excellent hair volume ourselves even in that sweltering heat, we figured that we'd bat our eyelashes and sweetly ask if we could have one of his signs.

Instead of "Of course, girls! Go right ahead" (which is what we expected), he said, "No, of course you can't have one of my signs."

We had not expected this. We were, in fact, entirely unprepared for a rebuff, coiffed and cologne-scented or otherwise. It should be noted here that, having been in Catholic school for the past several years, neither of us actually knew that we knew what a gay man looked and talked like - had we known, I'm sure we would have gone in with a better game plan. In retrospect, of course, I'm sure we both realize that our Aerobics/French teacher - he taught both; he did not teach French Aerobics, though that sounds hilarious - who wore leg warmers and had a voice not unlike Richard Simmons reminded us of this shopkeeper, but at the time we were pretty much in the dark.

In the dark without a campaign sign.

We tried again, but our coquettish "Please?" did not sway this infuriatingly stubborn man to bend to our extremely reasonable requests. So, somewhat defeated, I simply asked "Why not?" and he said, "Because when he wins I'm going to have Sonny sign them!"

Jenny and I looked at each other, wonderingly, but before we could say anything he said, "You know, you might just try campaign headquarters. They might give you a sign. It's right down the street," and he pointed us in the right direction.

So, feeling pretty excited about being one step closer to the coolest U2/Spring Break memento ever, and figuring that Bono running for mayor meant that we might run into Larry Mullen, Jr., who was very high on the "dreamy" list at the time, we decided to head straightaway to Campaign Headquarters.

On the way, we had a brief discussion as to how odd it was that neither of us had known that Bono's first name was Sonny, but figured that he would just be using it for his political campaign, because having a mayor without a first and last name would be a little weird, and probably violated a statute or something. We also conducted a brief analysis as to whether it was odd it was that an Irish singer would be running for Mayor of Palm Springs, but concluded that (a) Palm Springs probably didn't have the same rule that America had about how you have to be born there to run for the highest office, (b) lots of celebrities went to Palm Springs, (c) our President for the last 8 years had been an actor (that's Reagan, for the youths out there), and (d) Bono generally looked as though he'd seen about as much sun as the zombies in the "Thriller" video, and it was possible that he just needed a tan. (Remember: we were from L.A.)

And as we finished these conclusions, we were suddenly at Campaign HQ! OMG!

Which in those days was actually spelled out, so:

OhMyGod!

Was Bono in there? Was a jam session happening in the background? Were Bono's celebrity friends milling about and drinking things? Was Bob Geldof there, planning another Africa-saving ballad with Bono and Larry Mullen, Jr. and - the other two guys - and aforementioned celebrity friends? There was only one way to find out, and that way was to walk right on in there.

Adjust shoulder pads. Shake earrings and hair. Quick-check reflection in window. Enter.

...And... huh. This was a pretty boring-looking office for a rock star, but of course this was a rock star trying to be taken seriously as a public official, so... OK, Bono. Got it. But... no Bono at Bono for Mayor offices? Not that we really expected him to be there, but... Oh, well. We could still get a sign.

So we walked up to the counter and the guy behind it asked us if he could help us. And the answer, of course, was "Yes, please, can we have a campaign sign?"

He gave us a slightly puzzled look, and asked why we wanted one. And I said, "Well, we both really like U2."

And then he stared at us. And, just maybe, one of the staff members giggled a little bit. Oh, dear - apparently being ordinary fans wasn't enough to get a cool sign. So we both figured we'd better demonstrate just how big of fans we were, and we started going on about how much we like U2 and Bono and ... um, so can we have a sign, Nice Mister, please?

The guy looked at us and said, "You know what? You can have one, and I'll even have it signed for you. Just let me go in the back here and get it signed."

Holy. Moses. Was this guy telling us that Bono was RIGHT THERE IN THE BACK ROOM?! Right behind that door?! No. Way. !!!!!!!!!!!!!

We couldn't contain ourselves. We had to ask. "Is he really back there?"

He nodded at us. "Sonny is here today."

This Sonny business again. Was Bono going to use this name from now on, or was this just for his political career? Because, seriously, just Bono sounded a lot cooler than Sonny Bono or just Sonny.

And, with that, he walked into the back room with our sign. And he was in there for kind of a long time, actually. And, just maybe, we heard some laughing back there... no doubt from the raucous celebrity party that was taking place right behind that mystery door!

In the meantime, though, I was getting bored waiting - my attention span at 17 being somewhat like that of a caffeinated gnat - so while the front-office staffers smirked at us (something we expected from staffers working for a rock star, being L.A. trained and all), I decided to check out all the cool celebrity photos on the walls.

And this is when I noticed something strange. There was a man in all these photos, but this man was not Bono. This man had a mustache and questionable hair and looked, vaguely, like he might even be related to me. (The great Nuccio tradition of an impressive Italian mustache was enthusiastically embraced throughout the '70's and '80's, and has only recently evolved to include a beard.)

And, as I was pondering this oddity, the guy came back out with our sign. Our autographed sign!

He handed it to us, and our conversation went something like this:

Him: Here you go, girls.
Me: Wait - that's you in all these pictures.
Him: Yes, it is.
Me: But - why are you in all these pictures, and not Bono?
Him: [shrug]
Me: Oh, are you like running his campaign or something?
Him: Yes. (Knowing Smile)
Me: (Why is this little man giving me this strange smile?) Oh, cool. Well, thanks a lot!

And, feeling very clever and gratified and extra sassy and saucy and otherwise pleased with ourselves and our new SIGNED (!!!) memento, and of course feeling extra tickled that we already had an autographed sign before the election, when that guy who wouldn't even give us a sign thought he was so cool... well, Jenny and I headed back to the gold Volvo (Ouch! Even hotter leather on my thighs! Should I sit on this sign? Hmm.. probably not...), and back to the house we went with our trophy.

We walked into the house to find my Mom so that we could tell her this awesome story. But we didn't get very far, because as soon as we came to the part about how Jenny saw the "Bono for Mayor" sign, my Mom stopped me. This conversation went something like this:

Mom: Girls, Bono is not running for Mayor of Palm Springs. Sonny Bono is running for Mayor of Palm Springs. (Pronounced: BOH-NO)
Me: Right, Bono! Sonny is his first name! (Pronounced: BAH-NO)
Mom: No, Leslie, Sonny Bono was married to Cher.
Me: Bono was married to Cher? (I will permit myself a slightly anachronistic snark here to serve as representative of what I thought in the moment: If She Could Turn Back Time, indeed.)
Mom: No, Bono and Sonny Bono are not the same person. Sonny Bono is the Sonny from Sonny and Cher, don't you remember watching that when you were little?
Me: Um... maybe... but... no, Bono is running for mayor, we were at his campaign headquarters!

It was at this point that I probably should have put 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 together to make 8. But I just knew that I had to be right, because otherwise, who in the heck had signed our campaign sign?

So I argued with my Mom, in the way of 17-year-old girls who know that they're right (like always), by telling her about how we went to his campaign headquarters and how his campaign manager told us that Bono was there and how he went in the back to have the poster signed, and... and..

And my Mom, who started with patience and tried to be reasonable and explain this to me yet again, finally realized that ration was getting her nowhere, and threw down the gauntlet.

"I'll bet you $10 that you're wrong."

Oh, dear. A bet.

My Mom rarely made bets - and she wasn't known for losing them, either. And $10 was a whole week's allowance, so... was it possible that she knew something I didn't? But... the sign! And that man told us that Bono was there and that he signed it, didn't he?

So, of course, I took the bet. But who could be the impartial arbitrator? No, Dad was just siding with Mom because that's what parents do, so that of course doesn't count. So how was this bet to be settled?

This critical dilemma was, fortuitously, solved shortly thereafter by the 5:00 evening news, which immediately launched into the story of Sonny Bono's current campaign for Mayor.

Sonny BOH-NO. (And then they showed him campaigning through the street of Palm Springs.)

OH-NO. (This man looked very familiar.)

My Mom pointed to the TV and said, "See, Leslie? That's Sonny Bono!"

Jenny and I couldn't contain ourselves, and yelled, "That's the man we talked to at campaign headquarters! He's the one who gave us the sign!"

And both of my parents just started at us, much as this supposed Sonny Bono character had started at us earlier. And then they started to laugh.

And Jenny and I just started, unbelievingly, at the television report about this Sonny BOH-NO, who was either the identical twin of the man who'd given us the autographed poster, or was - it was suddenly all coming together now - actually the man himself!

This man was not, incidentally, Bono. At. All.

Damn!

And so I begrudgingly gave my mom the $10, feeling pretty tricked out of it by that Sonny Bono fellow who was pretty lucky that I wasn't 18 and living in Palm Springs, because tricking a voter out of $10... well, I never... but figuring that a story that gave my parents this much of a laugh was probably worth $10.

Jenny ended up with the sign (her rationale being that she was the one who'd had the idea to get a sign in the first place, which was entirely true), and I - swear to all that is Sonny Bono - eventually ended up with one of the Teamster's signs. (Teamsters, as it turned out, were much more receptive to high school girlishness than that strangely unaffected but ultimately helpful store proprietor in Palm Springs.)

Learning #17 : Time is money.

2011-10-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

In an effort to reduce clutter and try to keep myself organized, I recently decided to convert all my photos to digital by sending off 2 extremely large boxes to sunny Red Bluff, CA, home of the magical photo scanning elves at GoPhoto.

This rad picture, at left, is me on a pair of homemade stilts that my Uncle Bob gave to me one Christmas. There is also a picture of my sister with a yellow pair of stilts, wearing the exact same powder blue Levi cords and fly OP shirt with the wood buttons, but I'll spare her by leaving that to the family archives. I actually remember taking this picture, so it was fun to find it again.

It took me about 20 minutes to find all my old albums, find 2 boxes big enough to fit everything, print 2 labels, pack them in a semi-orderly fashion (emphasis on "semi" – good thing GoPhoto does negative scanning, because there were a fair amount of random envelopes full of mystery memories), find the packing tape, and tape them up. Then I drove them over to the UPS store, and off they went.

All told, I spent under an hour on my photo scanning project, and I had around 3500 photos and negatives that I needed to convert to digital. (While slide scanning is a pretty popular service 'round GoPhoto, I'm just slightly too young to have any of those.)

As I drove home from UPS, I did the math:

3500 images x $.37 = $1300 - 20% off (hey, I have a coupon) = $1040 if I keep all the scans, which is unlikely. Since you only pay for the scans you keep, I figure I can probably delete at least 500, so now we're at

3000 images x $.37 – 20% off = $888

Which seems like sort of a lot, except that I've literally just digitized and preserved my entire life's history. Which is, seriously, very cool once you're looking at it all on screen. Plus, if I want to spend less, I can delete more scans. Do I really need 4 different versions of essentially the same picture of me and my freshman year roommate wearing our sweet '90's sweaters and hats, looking vaguely Punky-Brewster-like, drinking some light beer swill? Not really.

But I digress. After doing the $$ math, I did this math:

3000 images x 3 minutes = 10,500 minutes = 175 hours

Now, keep in mind that 3 minutes each is a low estimate, because realistically I’m going to get distracted looking at photos and I’m going to have to take them out of albums and put them back and color correction/dust and scratch removal takes time, and I’m also probably going to get bored and space out and take even longer due to being generally annoyed with the project. But even at 3 minutes each…

That’s twenty-one 8-hour days of non-stop scanning. Which is 2.5 months of weekends.

And I have to buy the scanner anyway, so now we have to factor in $250 for a good scanner (which still isn’t as good a scanner as GoPhoto has), and suddenly I’m actually only paying myself $3.64 and hour (or $4.90 without a coupon). Do I want to pay myself less than $4/hour to miss 3 full weeks of weekends wherein I’m spending 8 full hours a day doing nothing but scanning photos?

Um, no. No, I really don’t.

And that’s the thing about photo scanning that people don’t realize: you think you can do it (and technically, you can), but you’re probably not going to. Because it’s a bigger project than you think it is, and you most likely have much better ways to spend your time.

So: although I’m a serial DIYer, when it comes to converting my own photos to digital, I’m really glad that I outsourced to a team in not-so-far-off Northern-Central-ish California. Because I only have so many weekends, and spending 10 of them curled up with a scanner isn’t the best or most enjoyable use of my time.

(This is, incidentally, the same reason that I’m not going to dig up the freaking oleander stumps in my back yard myself. Anyone who’s tried to dig in clay soil knows what I’m talking about.)

Learning #16 : Don't judge a book by its Berkeley

2011-09-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

When I was pregnant, I immediately started reading books loaned to me by other mom friends. In reading these books, it was painfully clear that I had some immediate homework to do - namely, to come up with a "birth plan."

This seemed like a lot of work. I mean, I was really not aware that we would need a plan beyond "I'll go into labor, we'll head to the hospital, the baby will come out," but Ricki Lake definitely felt otherwise.

And so, somewhere toward the middle of my first trimester, I started interviewing doulas.

Now, at this point I was not hugely attuned to the difference between a doula and a midwife. (In a nutshell, for those who haven't used either: a doula is a labor coach there to help you through labor. This includes giving your partner a break, etc. The midwife, like a doctor, is there to get the baby out.)

Living in the Bay Area means that you can pretty much swing a cat and hit a doula (though doing that around here might get both the animal rights and the doula rights people after you). But I wanted to make sure that the person getting on-board to shepherd me through labor was a good personality fit, because, being my first pregnancy and all, we weren't exactly sure how things were going to shake out on The Big Day.

And so we ended up in Berkeley one sunny morning with Betsy Appell, who seemed to know what she was doing, had trained with midwives, had a toddler herself courtesy a homebirth with one of the midwives I'd interviewed, had a super mellow and nurturing energy, and - as an extra bonus - taught a Zen birthing class as part of her services.

Knowing even less about the Zen tradition that I did about birth ("The Art of Zen" having sat, untouched, on my bookshelf for years - right next to "The Art of War," actually, which I have read), I felt like I'd be in good hands with Berkeley Betsy, who was also a prenatal yoga teacher and probably a vegetarian or something and, therefore, we assumed (correctly) that she would be a nice calming influence when The Big Day arrived.

What I hadn't counted upon was the homework. Betsy immediately sent us a CD that we were supposed to start listening to, like, immediately. So, always one to do my homework on time, I uploaded the CD into my iTunes and set about this hypnobirthing prep business.

It should be noted here that I am frightfully nearsighted. Without my contacts in or my glasses on I really can't see anything but suggestive shapes and blurs. It's sort of like living in a Monet painting, with less color and far less water lilies - the last of which is a good thing, I suppose, because if I'm without my contacts next to a body of water, well... it just sounds like a bad idea.

It should also be noted here that we did not have an iPod docking station in the bedroom at the time. And so, since we were supposed to listen to the CD before bed, we just used my laptop.

The Zen lesson started out normally enough: "Get into a comfortable position, and either close your eyes, or open your eyes, looking downward with a soft gaze..."

Details after that are fuzzy, because my partner generally fell asleep practically at the end of this sentence, and I was usually out by the time we were laying on my magical beach.

But then, there was the song.

Having usually drifted off to sleep before the talking ended, I started being awakened by this weird song at the end of the exercise. It started out somewhat normally enough, with a sort of hippie-ish guitar that could definitely be the choice of a yoga teacher who lived in Berkeley. But then the guy started singing, and the first lines of the song seemed just like a really odd choice for a Zen hypnobirthing practice CD:

She left her father, been 30 years

She drew some water to dry his tears

She said I'm sorry, I've been lonely. I need another

Um... what? What was Betsy trying to tell us with this song? That we shouldn't cling to our child and make her look after us for 30 years? That the baby was lucky to have 2 moms? I wasn't sure, but the song went on:

She crossed through deserts and rivers wide

She walked through valleys and mountains high

She crossed the seas through storm and night

To find a lover

???????

Was Betsy trying to tell us that we need to nurture our child and teach her about love early, so that she doesn't have to circumnavigate the globe to find it?

Now, bear in mind that I'm half asleep here. Not for long, though, because suddenly the song picks up tempo and the singer starts bellowing pretty loudly:

LOOOOOOOOOVE Bet-SAAAAAY

Somebody is going to love you someday

It was at this point that I figured that Betsy either hadn't really listened to the words of this song, or that she was in dire need of a hug.

The first explanation seemed more probable. I figured that this song was her signoff. Like, "Thanks for doing your Zen birthing homework! Love, Betsy." I mean, that seemed like a nice thing to do, something that maybe a Berkeley yogi might do.

And so, seeing as how she was a tea-drinking probable vegetarian Zen student prenatal yoga teacher from Berkeley, this explanation made sense to me. And so we continued to listen to the lesson, every night, with my partner continuing to fall asleep within 5 minutes and me generally falling asleep at some point, only to be awakened by that freaking song. And then I started dreading the song, so sometimes I didn't manage to fall asleep at all, and I started waiting for the perfect time to turn off the computer so that I could avoid that Stupid Freaking Song which made No Freaking Sense and was seriously putting a dent into My Freaking Zen.

I thought about talking to Betsy about this. Maybe giving her a helpful tip, like,"You know... I like the lesson, but the song is just a wee bit disruptive..." But I figured that Zenmaster Betsy knew what she was doing, so I let it be.

Her husband actually called us to reschedule our first birth class (Berkeley Betsy being at a Berkeley Birth), and I asked him about it. I said, "We fall asleep before the CD is over - my partner falls asleep like 5 minutes in, and I usually fall asleep before the song," and he told me a funny story about how he fell asleep while she was making the CD.

No mention of the song. And so I didn't mention it again.

And then, one day, I talked to my partner about this annoying, annoying song, and asked her if it bothered her at all. Being the world's soundest sleeper and having never actually made it to the song, she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I pulled out my laptop and, having the benefit of my contact lenses in my eyes at this point, I realized something important:

The Freaking Song, as it turned out, wasn't actually part of the hypnobirthing lesson. It was a Big Head Todd and the Monsters nong, called "Love Betsy." And the reason that it played at the end of our hypnobirthing lesson is because, without the benefit of my contacts in or my glasses on (which is generally how I go to sleep), I was just squinting horribly at iTunes and typing "Betsy" into the search box primarily by muscle memory, assuming that the only thing that would come up would be Betsy Appell's Greatest Zen Birthing hits. And I could sort of see that the search result was quite short, so it never occurred to me that some random, terrible Big Head Todd song had surfaced. Hell, I didn't even know I had a Big Head Todd album, let alone a Big Head Todd album with the world's cheesiest song about a lonely Betsy who apparently lived with her father for 30 years before traveling the globe to find... well, to find another.

It was at this point that my partner began to laugh. Reeeeeeally hard. Once she listened to the song we were both just howling.

I then sent the song to Betsy, with an explanation of what had happened. Apparently the Zen tradition allows for uncontrollable laughter, which is nice.

Namaste.

Learning #15 : Time ages everything

2011-09-16T10:42:00.000-07:00

This photo, like me, aging over time...

Sometimes it's easy to forget that I was cute once.

Photo scanning being all the rage these days, my Dad was nice enough to scan this picture of me when I was around 3 months old, to compare with my then 3-month-old daughter. Here is a list of things we learned in this experience, in no particular order:

1) The hardest part about finding a matching yellow lion toy is that the sheer volume of plush lion toys is enough to make one wonder whether or not their numbers exceed real-life lions. So if you were worried about the status of the lion on the endangered plush-species list, don't be. Population: stable.

2) A single old photo scan takes kind of a long time, and it still looks about as comparatively good as the person in it after all that time. By the time my Dad scanned it, touched it up and emailed it to me, he'd spent 20 minutes on this. (And if he's saying 20, I'm saying 30...)

3) I was cute once. See? And I was way, way ahead of the fauxhawk trend.

4) Sending your child a decades-old baby photo that depicts her at the same age her first baby is makes it far too tempting to spend far too much time planning to take an identical-as-possible photo of her own baby.

And thus we arrive at the series of photos taken of my somewhat unwilling offspring after I spent an embarrassing chunk of a Saturday morning finding Just The Right Yellow Lion Toy for the occasion.

Now, I'm not exactly proud of myself for fancying up my child and subjecting her to the apparently unruly Mr. Yellow Lionface, but fancy her up I did. She's in a frilly dress and everything. Hey, we're making memories here, people.

After the ordeal, it then occurred to me that it might be nice to scan my whole baby book so that I might compare the 200-ish photos commemorating my entire childhood with the 2000-ish photos I managed to accrue in the first few months of my child's life. Not to mention that, given the condition of my baby pic, it's probably a good idea to get these things scanned before they fade any more.

But man - the time it would take. Do I want to spend an entire weekend scanning and touching up old photos? Um... no way. It was bad enough spending 2 hours looking for that lion.

And so, as I write this, I am waiting on my baby book to come back from Red Bluff, CA, home to the magical scanning elves at GoPhoto. I sent 2 boxes, literally crammed with every piece of photography I could find: photo albums, random envelopes full of miscellaneous negatives, loose pictures - they all made the journey up North, along with my baby book. I didn't bother sorting through anything; since you can delete any of the scans you don't keep and don't have to pay for them, I figured it's easier to sort through them online once everything's digitized.

(So once I decide that, perhaps, my Freshman 15 doesn't need to be immortalized quite so thoroughly, well, there's a handy delete button.)

As for the lion toy, he regrettably met a swift end at the paws (er, teeth...) of my dogs. I'm just glad we got to commemorate his short, baby-slobbered life with a series of somewhat amateurish photographs. Sleep well, Yellow Lion Toy. And don't worry: Mr. Giraffe is still around to play with the baby.

Learning #14: read the safety instructions...

2011-09-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

(...if you can see)

When an eye care company who makes a product for contact lenses knows that this product might, like, burn your cornea off your freaking eyeball if your eyeball comes into contact with it, you'd think that they'd:

1) Not make their bottle look like a saline bottle, and
2) Not pretend that they aren't making their bottle look like a saline bottle by putting a tiny red stripe on the label -

- since, after all, people using their product have contact lenses. Which means that, in the course of using said product, it's very possible that some extremely nearsighted people will be in frightfully close proximity to a white-ish saline-shaped bottle that's next to the saline, because they were of course using this product when they took their contact lenses out and so the bottle is still sitting there, because who's cleaning the bathroom before bedtime when they can't even see? And it's entirely possible, too, you know, that these people might then the next morning remove their lenses from their overnight sterile de-funking bubble bath, and then accidentally wash their lenses with this product and then actually insert a contact lens, thus relegating ~~her~~ their eyes to hostile, burning, stormy tornadoes of searing pain, and of course now these folks are going to have to go to the freaking optometrist and explain what happened while the desk staff sort of snickers behind their hands and everyone pretends that ~~you~~ these poor, poor, misled consumers aren't complete eejits -

And all this could be avoided with better packaging. Make the entire freaking bottle red, people! Don't try to invoke some fuzzy "this is good for your eyes" feeling by trying to make your bottle look like a Bausch & Lomb saline bottle. Because this product isn't actually for the eyes, it's some crazed Lysol-like sterilizer for the actual lenses, and as such the packaging would be more appropriate if the bottle were shaped like a cleansing solution bottle. Or a branding iron.

I mean, I'm just saying.

Learning #13 : Actually...

2011-09-15T20:21:00.003-07:00

...Keeping track of these numbers isn't that difficult, since my dashboard lists them all for me. I think I was just being lazy. Or cranky. Or both.

Learning #12 : Keeping track of these numbers is...

2011-09-15T20:21:00.001-07:00

...a huge pain in the arse. And, thusly, they shall therefore cease to be numbered.

Learning #11 : seriously, don't forget your towel

2011-07-05T19:04:00.000-07:00

It turns out that "Hitchikers' Guide to the Galaxy" wasn't wrong about this.

Today I decided to bathe the offspring via a Bumbo chair and a hose, as the weather has recently gone from "Where the hell is Spring? (It's cloudy and freezing!)" to "What the hell happened to Spring? (It's infernally hot!)"

She enjoys sitting in her foam chair while I magically make it rain via the hose nozzle pointed up in the air. It's a good thing, too, because it turns out that the Bumbo chair is most assuredly not for use in a bathtub, which I found out the hard way once the water level started rising and it freed itself from the bottom of the bathtub and became an extremely unstable raft, baby and all.

And this is learning #11a : read the instructions on baby products. Especially the ones made out of magical foam.

Anyway, once I took the child from her foam roost, I realized that I'd forgotten a towel for her. And just as I was thinking "Dammit, I forgot a towel," she added a bio-exclamation point to the sentiment by peeing on me. Now, perhaps the learning here is actually "don't forget a diaper," (we'll call it learning #11b), but for the purposes of drying her off and saving me somewhat from being christened in baby pee, I think a towel would have done the trick.

This reminded me, of course, of the original incident that made me realize that you should just always have a towel. And no, it wasn't the duck incident. It was the "I need a new gym" incident.

As this incident has been immortalized in an open W2W personal ad entitled "I was wet and naked; you were dry and in uniform," I'll simply note it here:

An open letter to the Bally's housekeeper who may or may not be telling this story at parties:

I suppose you might have wondered why you were being approached by a naked, dripping girl in flip flops in the Bally's locker room. Indeed, you may have wondered, "Why doesn't this girl have a towel?"

Or, more appropriately, "Por que ella no tiene una toalla?"

This is a good question, in both languages. Allow me to explain.

I did have a towel. Unfortunately, that towel was locked in my locker along with any other form of clothing or other woven item that might have covered my private parts.

You see, I'd been in the pool. I was appropriately attired in the pool, as I must express that I am not an exhibitionist of any kind. Quite the opposite, in fact: I often wonder why women feel the need to be gratuitously naked in the locker room. Do you really need to be naked to apply makeup? To dry your hair? To ask me an inane question about the weather as I struggle to look sideways so as not to catch a glimpse of your nether regions?

You must understand, I was raised in Catholic schools and have earned myself a healthy fear of my own genitals. Not wanting to think about my own paraphernalia, I really don't want to be forced to confront that of a stranger.

In any case, my point is that I don't make a habit of parading my bare ass around public locker rooms. So when I chose to swim laps yesterday, rest assured that I was in fact wearing a very modest, granny-like one-piece bathing suit.

Upon exiting the pool and going to the sauna, I wrapped my towel around myself. I don't like parading around in a bathing suit much either, as the nuns taught me well that tight clothing leaves little to the imagination, and the Bally's clientele is not particularly one I want imagining anything about me. Good God, these are are strangers, after all.

Upon exiting the sauna, I had to cross through the pool room again. Woozy from the unrelenting sauna heat, I apparently did not fasten my towel well enough around my waist. It deserted me as I was crossing by the pool, and fell into a puddle of other-people's-after-pool-footwater. Yuk.

The good sisters also taught me that cleanliness is next to Godliness. I would just as soon wipe my own bare ass (or someone else's) with my hand than infest myself with funky foot germs from Lord knows who and how many. Children swim in that pool, for Chrissakes - which is something I don't like to think about when I'm in there, but it's the gospel truth. Those little petri dishes and their hair-trigger bladders are allowed in the pool on weekends.

That being the case, I was left in a conundrum. I had no other towel, you see. I was also in a hurry. So, I decided that a quick, nekkid dash from my locker to the shower and back wouldn't be a big deal. Moving quickly enough, I might even dry myself off. And at least I had my flip-flops.

Sister Jeanne Marie and Co. having instilled in me a deeply ingrained appreciation for being neat and tidy, I of course opened my locker and put my soiled towel and wet bathing suit in it. I then locked it*, since I have no idea as to whether the Bally's clientele was privy to the same Catholic upbringing as I was - which is to say that some Godless folks might be prone to breaking Commandments, most notably the ones about coveting and stealing. Call me paranoid; I call myself a good old-fashioned Christian.

As it turned out, my naked dash to the shower wasn't so bad. Nobody saw me. I had a nice, soapy shower with Bally's crap-ass cheap foamy skin-drying soap, and made the trip back to my locker unscathed. Planning to dry myself quickly with a clean, extra T-shirt, I immediately fiddled with my lock in order to end my public nudity as expeditiously as possible. Unfortunately for me, the fates turned at that point. My trusty Master Lock simply

would
not
open

This had to be a mistake. Damnation, I just opened the godforsaken lock 10 minutes previously. I tried again. And again. And again.

No dice.

Now, I know what you're thinking (in addition to "Eres es una Catolica loca!"), but you're wrong. I did not forget my locker combination. For whatever reason, the combination simply didn't work. Perhaps my Master Lock had been possessed by the devil. I'll never know.**

I tried various combinations for a good 10 minutes, as well as the one I knew it was. Keep in mind (and as you noticed all too quickly), I'm naked here. The only good thing about standing there like an idiot in a public locker room while you're naked and dripping and trying to open a lock is that you have a little time to drip dry.

I will tell you that I did look around the locker room to see whether anyone had recognized my godawful plight. Everyone seemed studiously unaware of my dilemma, and since all the women in there were clothed I didn't really feel a burning motivation to prance up to any one of them in my birthday suit and explain the situation. And my cellphone was in my locker. With my underpants. And my damn towel, which at that point was seeming less and less infested with other people's germs.

But then, as I was really about to panic and was considering removing a shower curtain to use as an impromptu plastic toga in order to find some help...

You!

Like a winged angel sent straight from the Heavens, glowing resplendently in the coveted gray Bally's employee polo shirt, mop bucket gliding happily beside you, you entered.

You seemed a bit confused as I approached. I understand. I'm sure I looked a little frazzled (and a lot naked), and of course I explained everything in English the first time.

I might add that I have rarely been so happy I studied Spanish as I was yesterday, explaining my plight for the second time in your native tongue.

Now, I would first and foremost like to thank you for not laughing. I'm certain that you had yourself a good chuckle as you left the locker room, but you do get a heartfelt prayer from me tonight for sparing my feelings so bravely.

When you returned with the bolt cutters, I must say - and I'm not trying to be ungrateful here, truly - but I must say that I was a wee bit disappointed that you didn't bring me a towel. I also noticed that you looked a little dubious as you handed a sharp metal cutting tool to the crazy white naked girl, and I agree that your doubt was well-founded. I might suggest that you do the honors of the lock cutting next time, should the other party be dripping and naked. It's really just a safety issue, isn't it? Those handles can be slippery when wet, and given that being nude inherently entails a lack of proper protective gear, I can only imagine that naked bolt-cutting is an activity on which your Loss Control and Legal departments would frown.

I'd like you to understand, incidentally, that I was not trying to stick any naked part of myself so close to your head, but since my locker was on the top I needed to stand on the dressing bench in order to get the appropriate leverage for naked bolt-cutting. I hope you forgive me, and that you're able to erase the memory from your mind.

In any case, I think we can both agree that my lat flies have paid off, as I'm certain I heard an audible sigh of appreciation from you as I snapped that lock like a priest snaps a Communion wafer. Hallelujah.

And may God bless you, Locker Room Savior.

Signed,

The Wet Naked Blushing Dripping Bolt-cutting Bilingual Catholic Schoolgirl

*Did I lock it? See below.

**Today I bravely revisited the gym and found my lock in my gym bag. Not the lock that was cut, mind you, but my actual lock. How, in span of stowing a soiled towel and bathing suit and taking a shower, a stranger's identical lock ended up on my locker and mine ended up in my gym bag is up for debate.

And to the woman whose lock I've unwittingly vandalized and stolen, I either apologize or I put a pox on you and your misplaced lock.

Signed,

The Formerly Naked Lock-vandalizing Bolt-cutting Gym Member

--

I told this story recently to someone who asked me a very good question, which was: "Why didn't you wear your bathing suit into the shower?"

And the answer is: I just didn't think of that.

Learning #11c: if you find yourself in a situation where you need to abandon your towel and will therefore be naked in public, keep any available clothes with you.

Learning #10 : you don't need a p

2011-06-18T18:17:00.000-07:00

It's been aaaaaages since I wrote anything non-work-related that's more complicated than an emailed diaper order cancellation. When I went on maternity leave in September of 2010, I rather confidently announced to myself, in an internal monologue accompanied by a John-Williams-esque-overly-orchestrated-trumpeting-to-crescendo tune, that I would now have time to write! Write all day long, uninterrupted by the soon-to-be squealing bundle of potential that would almost certainly ensure that I would no longer have time to do even the most basic of self-grooming tasks, let alone ever have a spare second to sit down, collect my thoughts (the best I ever do, which is to say strung together with too many commas and dashes and apostrophes and parenthetical digressions), and write... something.

What I was going to write was unclear to me, but it had better be fantastic. I mean, if I was going to sit down and write, it had better be good because this was time I was spending, after all, and I we were about to get into a dwindling resource situation as far as time was concerned. So maybe I'd write a children's book, or a collection of essays, or just a kick-ass novel about... something. No, that might take too long to write. But the time I would have! I could at least write something.

It probably took a week of maternity leave before I was feeling reeeeeally pregnant and overwhelmed with choices like "Will a baby in flannel pajamas stick to flannel sheets, thus creating a velcro-like effect that may harm her due to some sort of limb dislocation, or will they create any sort of sparking effect that might cause a crib fire that we won't catch despite the fancypants 'I will sound a blood-curdling alarm if the child stops moving for 20 seconds or more' (which might, you will find, mean that the child has pinned herself sideways up against her crib bars despite being swaddled, as though an Oreo cookie standing up on its side. And not because she's in distress, but because you've spawned a creature who for whatever reason just likes to sleep that way, thus intermittently setting off the monitor alarm and scaring everyone half to death), or will she be hot in flannel sheets, or is bamboo better - wait, do they even make bamboo sheets for newborns, and - crap, do they have them in any gender-neutral colors so as not to convince our child that girl = pink even though, secretly, I think little girls in pink are hugely adorable, but somebody's got to take a stand, and anyway she'll probably get my regrettable lack of melanin, and I look like utter shit in pink, and... wait, what was I about to do?"

And, feeling justly overwhelmed, I reasoned that my baby would obviously come out well-behaved and docile enough to allow me the time to write.

To be fair, she actually was a really easy baby (I like to think this is because I called her "Lil' Sleepy" in utero, in order to suggest a basic behavior pattern), but she was, after all, a baby. A really new and wobbly baby who slept like 22 hours a day, but not exactly right in a row. Well, um, OK, she actually slept like 8-10 hours a night starting at about 2 weeks old, but ... I was busy. There were the diapers to change, and one day I clocked the number of hours spent in my nursing chair in a 24-hour period, and it was 8 hours. Eight! And that didn't even count dancing around to Hall 'n Oates because rocking around while seated was not producing the all-important newborn fhbreeeeeeeeeeeeeerphhh (which is what a newborn burp sounds like). I mean, feeding this bundle of wonderful was amazingly awesome, truly. Which was a pretty darn good thing, too, because I was doing it 40 hours a week.

And, feeling, justly time-challenged, I decided I'd wait until she was about 6 months old, or eating via something that wasn't inexorably attached to me, and then I'd write. Something. Seriously, like maybe a children's book, but maybe a children's book for adults or something. Wait, that sounds kind of hard, actually, so maybe I'm being overly ambitious about this children's book... (And why is my computer underlining "children's" in red? Is this a mistake? Childrens' doesn't seem right, unless childrens' is the new extra plural or something... does that even make sense? What is an extra plural and what in the hell am I talking about?)

Anyway: 6 months passed. I was, medically speaking, recovered from the rather unexpected C-section that had dramatically announced our daughter to the world. But now I'd gone and done it: we were in escrow.

Moving the contents of a house you've lived in for 5 years is bad. Doing a sprint of a remodel in your new house - one that you're actually doing hands-on, which is to say that your handy partner is doing all the physical work while you do the very hard work of choosing paint colors and asking when it might be done and whether you'll be on time to move in and otherwise worrywarting around, which has to be someone's job, after all - anyway, having all of that DIY drama while simultaneously getting ready to dislocate the contents of a house you've lived in for 5 years with someone else that also contains all the stuff you got at 2 baby showers for your first baby and everything you need to manage 4 dogs plus there's a basement full of forgotten stuff... argh. Now I see why people stay in the same house for 20 years. Moving stinks!

And then there was the packing, the unpacking, the 6 and then 7 and then almost 8 month old... I'd definitely have time to write when we unpacked, though. (Which, incidentally, seems as though it may be sometime next spring, and that - given the weather lately - would seem to indicate that it will be sometime next... June? July? What is this climate change of which you speak?)

With all of these challenges, it seemed almost cosmic that the computer was, tragically and arguably forebodingly, missing its p key. Which is to say that the computer is now a comuter or a com[find a p somewhere on the screen, ctrl+c and ctrl+v]uter or a comhttp://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=wearing+sweatants+in+ublic&aq=f&aqi=g-l1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=951dc7972bfd90fb&biw=1280&bih=553uter*, that last since I use that ctrl+c / ctrl+v a lot in general.

Surely, I can't write a serious work of ... something ... with a missing p key, people. Which is to say: surely, I can't write a serious work of ... something ... with a missing (925) 376-4040 key, oele.

But the thing is, I can. I mean, I can at least sit down at the desk between feedings (just had one) and between baby-staring and marveling over how well she can roll over and laughing at her wanting to feed herself almost immediately after trying solid foods and using the camera semi-obsessively to document as many fleeting moments as I can so that I can always remember her wee progression through babyhood. And I can do this because not only am I the one in charge of making the time (I'm the Mom, after all), and not only am I tired of my own excuses to dilly-dally and whatnot (which is to say procrastinate, which really doesn't have very many quality p-free synonyms), but I can definitely do this because it turns out that I can actually often avoid the letter p due to a mild childhood obsession with a thesaurus, and so I'm somewhat out of excuses.

And so I did. Because it doesn't have to be erfect, it just has to be.

The child is still alive and everything. Um... and chewing on a Thank-You note.

*(I would here like to that Google for allowing me to enter most my search terms containing the missing letter without bothering to include it and still give me the correct result as well as"did you mean?" header, thus allowing me the chance to [ctrl+c] + [ctrl+v] and get that p back.)

Learning #9: it's good to be a banksta

2010-01-11T17:14:00.000-08:00

I haven't been a big fan of the bank bailouts or the auto bailouts or the mortgage bailouts. I wasn't a fan when Bush started them (a fact seemingly subject to collective Republican onset amnesia - that, and the fact that the Bush tax cuts cost $2.48 trillion [over twice that of the public option healthcare plan], of which over 50% has gone to the wealthiest 5% of the citizenry), and I'm not a fan of Obama's bailout bonanza either.

And today, I'm even less of a fan after an... enlightening?... call with my bank.

People wondered how the banks were going to pay back the taxpayers, and after talking with a few friends and my own bank it would seem that the answer is: ever-increasing finance charges.

And this is where I have to shake my head (and fist) at the government. If the banks are going to pay back the taxpayers by extorting exorbitant APR's and fees, then what in the holy hell did they need the bailout money for in the first place? The government could be doing far more productive (and less costly) things than playing middleman, and the taxpayers can do better than having to pay for a bailout that, in turn, gets... maybe... paid for again from the very people who helped cause the freaking personal credit crisis in the first place. (Read: less-than-responsible consumers who couldn't pay their mortgages/debt.)

I really don't understand how it helps stimulate the economy to take a bunch of money from the taxpayers, hand it to the banks (to bonus employees and go on lavish vacations), and then have the banks turn around and put the thumbscrews to the already-harangued American consumer. If you want money to go back into the economy, you need to make it easier for the everyman to spend money - not harder.

You know who really gets screwed here? The loan sharks. Pretty hard to be a respectable loan shark when the banks are legally going up to 30% APR rates on credit cards. I mean, really: Joey Fingers must be beside himself with worry about declining customers. Bank of America has online banking, paperless billing, and its late fees don't come with a broken leg.

Then again, Joey Fingers does deliver on the paperless bill eco-score, and perhaps a knuckle sandwich for late payments is better than the auto-applied "finance charge" which, of course, will now be added to your debt and subject to the same bastardly APR that was making it impossible to pay off this card in the first place. Which is to say that compound fractures might be less painful to some than compound interest.

Actually, perhaps there's an open opportunity in the loan shark market these days: undercut the bank fees (and ditch the broken legs), and you might garner a client list that could eventually turn you into - gasp! - a neighborhood credit union.

Dare to dream, Joey Fingers. Ditch the tire irons and I'm there. Imagine how proud Mom would be...

I for one think that American consumers need to be accountable for their purchases. This is true. But I can't get over the fact that banks are bragging about paying back bailout money and posting profits (which are supposed to be a sign of an improving economy) when the main reason for the upswing is that they're extorting the American consumer.

I actually called my bank today (Chase) to get an explanation. After being really defensive about bailout money and telling me that they "didn't need it" but were legally forced to take it (and paid it back with interest), I asked about the banks (including them) increasing APR fees as a way to pay back the money.

After being reminded that they "didn't need the money," I was told that this decision was made so that Chase could continue serving its customers in the future.

Which means absolutely nothing. Actually, what it means is "We really don't want to answer this question, and we are not going to give your our actual business rationale, so we are going to come up with a script for our phone operators that sounds vaguely consumer-positive while conveying absolutely nothing about the fact that we're making extra money directly off our consumer base because we can, and you consumers can't do a thing about it because everyone's doing it. Oh dear, we've gone off script."

Here's the deal: banks shouldn't give credit out to people who can't afford that level of credit. Yes, the inherent nature of credit means that you're spending money you don't necessarily have - but it's a bank's job to look at a guy who makes $35,000 a year and realize that This Freakin' Guy can't afford a $25,000 credit line. And it's not right for the bank, at that point, to start sending a bunch of "introductory APR!" offers to This Freakin' Guy so that they can sucker him into a trail that inevitably ends up with them being able to, at their whimsy, raises the finance charges just as he actually has a balance. And so the cycle begins. Sure, it's legal. Sure, it's a consumer's job to make sound decisions. But it's still not right.

It's also This Freakin' Guy's job to figure out that credit cards are the opposite of free money that won't ever have to be paid back. The lack of accountability on both sides of this clusterfudgecicle is just outrageous, and it embarrasses me as an American. But in the end the banks always make out, and the poor bastard ends up poorer. (And in the meantime, our schools and parks and other public services are suffering.)

And that's why it's good to be a banksta. And less good to be a loan shark. (Get crackin', Joey Fingers. No, the other kind.)

Learning #8: you are what you eat

2010-01-03T18:05:00.000-08:00

I've never been one to succumb to the various calorie-bomb offerings at the holiday time, but for whatever reason (recession? iron deficiency? scurvy?) I went hog-wild from mid-November (hey, it was almost Thanksgiving) until... OK, until tomorrow. Really.

I am now sporting a fashionable Holiday Fun Belt of Food Love 2009, sure to sustain me should I be stranded with no sustenance on a desert island in the near future.

Learning #8A: bacon-wrapped dates go nicely with bourbon egg nogs.
Learning #8B: boozy egg nog counts as breakfast due to the eggs and milk. and bourbon.
Learning #8C: going to the gym sounds way less fun after too many boozy egg nogs.

(Back to the gym tomorrow. Goodnight, nog. Goodnight, pig.)

Learning #7: Philly really is the city of brotherly love

2009-11-18T15:35:00.000-08:00

And I mean that in a gender-ist way.

It was bad enough when Philly decided to overlook Michael Vick's complete lack of remorse, ethics, a moral code, and any semblance as a normal, not-a-psychopath human being and draft him as QB for the Eagles. Because Lord knows that the employment of someone who can throw a football all manly-man style is just way more important than the objections of a bunch of whiny, left-wing hippie animal rights activists pointing out the insane fact that a sociopath who TORTURED AND KILLED DOGS WITH HIS OWN TWO HANDS is being held up as a hero to the people of Philadelphia.

A guy who, after doing all that, pled "Not Guilty" to animal cruelty.

I mean, really. I don't know that I expect any better from the NFL (and I certainly don't expect better from Vick, who before getting caught torturing dogs was wantonly infecting women with herpes), but I did somehow expect more from Philly. Philly was our nation's capital - briefly, but still. And I've been to Philly. I ate cheesesteaks and got lost in traffic circles and saw the Liberty Bell overall had a positive experience there. But really, Philly? Michael Vick? Ew.

Having fostered one of his dogs, perhaps I'm a bit closer to that particular issue than most. And yet I feel that anyone with a shred of human decency can, if they choose, understand the objections of those of us who know far too much about what Vick did to those dogs. The fighting ring, as horrible as that certainly was, was the least of it. Strangling dogs with your own two hands, slamming them into the ground until they die, laughing while outmatched dogs are shredded in the ring, hanging them, attaching them to car batteries and throwing them into a pool filled with shallow water to ensure they dogs suffer a certain, slow, painful death - even on paper these are deeds that most would associate with "sociopath," and the fact that this douchebag is out there throwing a football to the cheers of local fans is just freaking un.be.lieve.able.

(But of course it is the NFL, home to mother-rapers and father-stabbers and father-rapers and, perhaps, even the occasional litterbug.)

And I was almost ready to forgive Philly, sort of, or just shelve the grudge against and entire city and blame football. Which is to say that I was ready to root against the underdogs in the World Series. I mean, I was trying... right up until I found out that the subway workers of Philly were going on strike in the middle of the World Series because they didn't feel their health plan provided enough Viagra.

I know, right?

Apparently the 10 pills of monthly Viagra covered by the SEPTA health plan isn't enough for these cheesesteak-eating male transit workers to keep themselves... um, up. The 10 pills, incidentally, are enough for 20 nights of sex. And that's without the (admittedly hilarious-sounding) side effects of erections lasting longer than 4 hours.

So while millions of unemployed Americans worried about rent and having no health insurance, and the working class of Philly spent hours commuting because these SEPTA union bosses chose the dire issue of their monthly allotment of happypants pills, of all things, as a primary reason to hold a transit strike, I re-thought my attempt to forgive Philadelphia for Michael Vick.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise me that Philly caved on the strike, though neither side is discussing specifics. Neither side is discussing the fact that an ex-SEPTA employee was caught illegally trying to obtain large quantities of Viagra to presumably sell on the black market a few years ago, either.

Congratulations, Philly. You've made me a huge Yanks fan.

Learning #6: Don't leave water in a wooden bowl

2009-10-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

*cough*

See, I was trying to soak it. And by "soak" I don't mean "waterlog," though I suppose that the actual definition of the word "soak" should have entered my consciousness when I decided to fill a new wooden bowl with water and leave it there indefinitely.

What I meant by "soak" was "fill with a substance that shall magically clean this bowl whilst I sleep."

Regrettably, I have now defiled my new IKEA salad bowl. From hereon out this bowl shall be known as OVÜRSOAKD.

Learning #5: Optimism can cost ya

2009-10-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

I'm a person who overall tends to look on the bright side of things, and tries to believe that most people out there are fundamentally good. Really, I try.

And yet I'm also a person who's a bit jaded by people overall, and having lived with a career con artist my bullshit detector is actually fairly good. Yes, I am a high-level thinker who may not notice minute detail; yes, because I like people in general I'm easier to engage in conversation than some; yes, I am easily distracted by shiny objects. But I'm a storyteller myself and I like listening to other people's stories, so if you're making up some elaborate lie you'd best cross your i's and dot your t's because if there's a hole in your story I'll notice it.

And yet, more often than not I just don't call people on their bullshit. It's almost a big cosmic gamble to me - if I let them go on thinking I believe them, what will happen?

And such was the case on a nice mid-morning Sunday, when I was having brunch and some random guy rung the doorbell.

Living in a "transitional" neighborhood in Oakland means that most people that show up on my porch uninvited aren't people I want on my front porch*. On the plus side, having a pack o' pit bulls means that a group of barking dogs running to the door is the norm when the doorbell rings (well, Pandora barks - she's the mix; thanks, Lab genes), so I pretty much figure that anyone standing there who isn't supposed to be there may as well notice the K9 posse (and the "Bad Dogs!" sign on the mailbox) waiting to greet them.

So: a guy rings the door. He's a mid-40-ish guy with gold... um, rims?... on his front teeth, exceptionally shellacked longish hair (unwittingly invoking the Soul Glo song in my internal monologue - see? shiny objects) and a cheap suit. He's spinning a tale about being a pastor who's locked out of his van down around the corner, and the van has a flat tire, and he owns Everett & Jones and if I help him out he'll give me a free dinner, and he just bought the apartment building around the corner and thought he was taking a day off but now he's stranded...

I thought the guy needed a phone or a ride. Instead he says he needs $8.13 for 2 cans of Fix-a-Flat. He promises he'll "bring it right back." He then gestures to himself and says "I'm not a bum, you know? Do I look like a bum?"

What I'm thinking is: Yes, actually you do kind of look like a bum. But you look more like a seedy hack of a huckster going to great lengths (and interrupting a leisurely, home-cooked Sunday brunch that I've just served) to take advantage of the better side of human nature and, in doing so, violating both my personal space and sense of community, all in the effort to scam a grand total of $8 from me.

In the first place, this story just makes no sense whatsoever. If you need 2 cans of anything to fix a flat, you need a new tire. Not to mention the fact that Fix-a-Flat isn't going to get you back into your van. If you're actually locked out of your car and you have a flat tire, what you need is a phone.

I first tell the guy (who looks appropriately wary of the dogs) that I don't have any cash. And then, for reasons I'm still exploring internally, I tell him to hang on and that I'll see what I have.

Now, I know from the get-go that this guy is lying. The story is too elaborate, it doesn't make sense, and I even think about asking him "What church?" or "Gimme a sermon!" or "What's your name? I'm going to call Everett and Jones**, and yet for some reason I just can't bring myself to call him on his bullshit. I almost hate myself for knowing so immediately that he's full of shit; what happened to the wondrous suspension of disbelief that allowed us to put teeth under our pillows and write letters to Santa?

(Answer: guys like this)

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for people when they're such crappy liars, and then I get frustrated that they're not trying harder to be good at it because now they're putting me in the awkward position of calling them on it. And then I start to wonder about what's really going on and why are they going to such lengths to lie so badly about something so stupid, and in this case I start figuring that this guy's life is probably just way worse than mine and that maybe, just maybe, there's the teeniest, tiniest chance that this $8.13 will come back to me. Like, maybe he'll take it and then start feeling really guilty about it, and bring it back later with a note or something. Or maybe he really is a pastor, and he thinks that this isn't enough because people are so jaded, and so he makes up the restaurant part because he thinks that I'll only give him money with a quid pro quo.

While I'm thinking all these things, I recognize that I'm trying to justify my actions by convincing myself that I believe him. But I'm still collecting quarters. Remember, I'm an optimist.

So I raid my change dish, fully resigning myself to the fact that the next time I'm in downtown Oakland dealing with their Gestapo-like newly-extended parking hours and fees and need a quarter I'll be cursing this guy for stealing all my quarters.

Or maybe, just maybe he's just borrowing them... (Not!)

So: I give the guy 4 $1 bills and $4.13 in change, and as I'm putting it into his hand I notice that his hand is worn and cracked and rough as sandpaper. These are simply not the hands of a pastor/restaurant mogul/new landlord. They are in fact much more like the hands of a bum than the hands of a regular pulpit resident,*** but I hand the money to him anyway. Bye bye, 4 hours & 3 minutes of parking in downtown Oakland. You may be missed (but probably not - the machines take cards).

He leaves, and the pessimist in me decides that his wild story was an elaborate scheme to case the house. But the cynic-optimist in me recognizes that having the opportunity to showcase a pack of pit bulls to a seedy shyster so devoid of ethics or morals that he'd invoke God as a reason to give him money (and who may have equally shady friends in the neighborhood) may actually be $8.13 well-spent.

I immediately call Everett and Jones to determine whether or not Dorothy Everett is related to a pastor/apartment owner who drives a van which may or may not now have a flat tire (answer: no), and then I call my insurance company to raise my insurance limits high enough to replace all my personal effects just in case he was actually casing the house.

And no, he did not come back with my $8.13. But I like to think that he feels really, really bad about it. And that he won't do it again.

And that, folks, is optimism. Well, sort of.

*A friend came over one day to find that we'd accidentally left the front window slightly open (not something to be doing in any part of Oakland, really), and there was a guy on our front porch with a half-pack of hot dogs from Grocery Outlet standing in front of it. This leads to so many questions: did he go to Grocery Outlet for hot dogs specifically because he noticed that my front window was open? If so, was the plan to steal my crap after braving the dogs by offering them hot dogs, or was he simply planning to break in and have a midday weenie roast in the ginormous kitchen? And what happened to the other half of the hot dogs? Had the actual dogs already enjoyed some? Had he eaten them on the way to my house? So many unanswered questions...

**I've in fact been to Everett and Jones, read their story on the menu, have the BBQ sauce in my 'fridge with the story on it, and therefore know that this is a woman-owned business that was started in the 70's by Dorothy Everett.

***disregarding Jesus, of course, since he was a carpenter and all

Learning #4: have spare keys handy (but not too handy)

2009-08-22T22:22:00.000-07:00

I am a serial car key loser. In my defense, I drive a Prius and you don't actually have to hold the key to get into your car. You in fact don't have a key for this egg-shaped car at all, you have a little square transpondery Keything. With Keything you just have to stand in the general vicinity of your car and pull a door handle, and voila! Open, sesame. It's so gratifying.

In fact, Spare Keything (two Keythings are better than one, especially because replacements cost 50 times what any self-respecting key would) unwittingly led to a non-dramatic car break-in wherein all of my dirty change was stolen, as well as all my CD's. This really pissed me off and made me laugh all at the same time, as I strongly suspect that my CD thief found that the street value of burned indie and jam band CD's had even less value than my "Best of Culture Club" and various Ani DiFranco albums.

Spare Keything, you see, had been stashed in my User's Manual. Not being a reader of manuals or directions in general (dunno if I'll ever summon the courage to publicly tell the absolute best historical illustration of this point, so you'll have to take my word for it), I didn't open the manual package. Thus I didn't know that my spare key was in there. Thus I didn't know that, for the first 3 weeks I owned my car, anyone could have not just gotten into it but also driven off with it.

Whether the person(s) who broke into (er... opened) my Prius to abscond with my Built to Spill collection knew that they could have added Grand Theft Auto to Grand Theft Ani is anyone's guess.

Anyway, that's why you don't want to keep spare keys too handy. Good learning.

So as I was saying before I interrupted myself, Keything opens my car if it's close to the car and I pull a door handle. This has made me even lazier about knowing the exact location of my keys, and it's gotten me out of the habit of having them in my hands.

This is bad. This is bad because I lost car keys even before Keything entered my life and catered to every lazy bone in my fingers (especially the metatarsals - they're slackers), and because I tend to operate on muscle memory when I'm not paying attention, and since I'm not known for paying attention to car keys or when getting ready in the morning or when doing 5 things at once (usual)...

Sometimes I think that Einstein's theory of finite brain storage is correct. But regrettably, I just don't know a way to tell my brain that retaining every word and cadence of "Alice's Restaurant" is less important than keeping track of my keys.

What's worse is that my house key is the only actual key on Keything, and when I forget that I don't have Keything and I walk out of the house and close the door I get locked out. I have a habit of locking myself out of various houses, both mine and those belonging to others. At some point I realized that others were more dependable than I am, so I started giving out keys to multiple friends, and in their absence I've climbed trees, slit screens, stood on recycle bins to scale rooftops and jimmy French doors, dismantled French door panels, and once had a cousin come over to crawl through the basement (ew) and let himself in through the closet floor in my sister's room (I was a teenager).

So, to sum up: I lose my keys a lot, and I get locked out a lot. And that is why I used to have a lot of spare keys around, hidden in groovy places. Problem is, the spares always get lost - usually, maddeningly, by other people who forgot their keys to my house and know where my spare is. Or was. Argh. So I don't have any sweet Hide-a-Keys anymore, but I do have speed dial and a really pathetic "I'm locked out" voice that might make you want to come save me, especially since I'll probably make you dinner or something.

And all of this leads me to realize that I probably should have thought better than to put the keys to the basement on my car keys. It was only a matter of time before I went down there wearing something with no pockets (thus my keys were reunited with my hands), went inside, put my keys down to stash a dog costume or find a feather boa, came back out and locked the basement. With my keys inside.

And so it is now a quiet weekend, while I sit around and scratch my head and try to remember where in the holy heck Spare Keything is. The dogs have, thus far, proven themselves worthless at the "Find It!" game for my keys. Every time I try they run outside and want to play ball.

I wish I had an iPhone app to find lost keys.

Learning #3: Animals are smarter than us sometimes

2009-08-18T15:14:00.001-07:00

You have to read through Learning #2 as to why. Yes, you may skip to the end.

And in the event that you're concerned about the various sad faces on the dogs in this photo, don't fret: they'd all just been bathed. And they were smart enough to act so woeful that I decided to spoil them and give them couch and blankie time.

I'm not proud.

Learning #2: Always bring a towel

2009-08-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

1) I knew there was a reason I always loved "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

2) I don't eat duck anymore.

3) A police car often sits in a somewhat hidden pullout at the bottom of the 101 North Hillsdale onramp in San Mateo, waiting to trap hapless speeders and carpool meter lane violators.

What could these three things have in common, you ask?

Duck. A Mama duck, to be exact, and her babies. Like, a lot of babies. Little fuzzy ones.

And I reflect on the fact that I don't eat duck anymore pretty much every time I see a police car or two at the bottom of that onramp. And here's why:

One Saturday morning, I had to go into the office (San Mateo). After the office I hit the gym, and after the gym I headed up Hillsdale to head home so that I could get ready for dinner in San Francisco.
Things were proceeding as planned until I hit the arcing onramp that makes a 180 degree turn onto 101, and suddenly everyone was hitting their breaks at the beginning of the curve. I jogged left into the carpool lane (thanks, Prius HOV stickers) and then saw that a silver Mercedes had stopped with the hazards on.

It was then that I realized why the driver had stopped: a mother duck and a huge... um, litter? gaggle? collection?... of ducklings had tried to cross the freeway onramp and was now trapped up against the retaining wall with nowhere to go.

On the drop over the wall is a freeway offramp/street. On another side is 101. And up the ramp is E. Hillsdale, which is a busy street on its own. I have no idea where the heck this duck came from or how she came to be in the carpool lane on this onramp (to be fair, she had more than enough passengers to earn her the right of passage), but this was most assuredly not the place for a duck crossing.

Resigned to possibly making myself a bit late for dinner, I stopped the car on the carpool lane shoulder, flicked the hazards on and tried to figure out what to do. The woman who'd already stopped jumped out of her car to divert traffic around us and the ducks.

Fortunately, we were towards the top of the onramp and in very full view of anyone entering the onramp, so it's not like we threw ourselves into the middle of 60 MPH traffic or anything. However, we did have the odd problem of figuring out how to safely collect a Mom duck and her... um, brood?... and then figuring out what the heck to do with them.

The woman was on the phone with 911 and was freaking out in the way that diamond-studded Peninsula ladies do so well, so I figured I'd better get to the business of collecting ducklings. The picture at right is not the ducklings in question, but a good representation of them - though the ducklings in question were a younger and fuzzier than these guys (like the wee guy below).

So, to sum up:

There were a LOT of ducklings. I counted 13, but a couple were jumping around so there may have been a couple more. And they were wee little fuzzy things and couldn't remotely fly. And Mom was not happy about her situation, as evidenced by her... honking? squawking?.., which caused me momentary pause while I considered whether or not Mama ducks are prone to aggressive attack when they've unwittingly led their babies to be trapped against a freeway wall and some crazy human decides to interfere.

I must admit, it was at this point that I wished I had a net. But there wasn't much time to regret such equipment absence - the babies and Mom were in imminent danger of being squashed if they decided to bolt, and Mom was squawking away and about as agitated as the gal on the phone.

At this point I figured I'd better try to save the babies first seeing as how Mom probably wouldn't leave them. Of course, I was trying to figure out how to do this without getting myself attaked by an angry duck, or - worse - leading Mom to fly either away or into oncoming traffic to her demise, thus leaving me with 13 orphaned ducklings. Which is the last thing I need. Seriously. 4 dogs is more than enough pets, thanks.

I would, at this point, like to thank Whole Foods for providing sturdy paper shopping bags that I keep in my car to re-use when I grocery shop. In addition to providing a good re-usable bag alternative, it turns out that Whole Foods bags are also good for providing quality, earth-friendly temporary duckling housing.

So, task 1 was completed: ducklings were safe in the Whole Foods bag, cheep cheep cheeping away and letting Mom know where they were.

Mom, on the other hand, would not come so easily.

Without going into huge detail, let's just say that trying to catch an adult duck who's surrounded by busy streets full of potentially fatal traffic is not the easiest thing in the world. Here's what I learned:

Don't try to use your gym towel to catch an adult duck. It will fly away from it. You're just too slow. And you will look and feel silly.
Ditto to your gym bag.
Mama ducks will stay with their ducklings, even when their ducklings are in the footwell of a Prius on a freeway onramp. They'll also follow you around if you carry that bag and try to lure them out of traffic.
Baby ducks are sinfully cute and are generally content to hang out in the bottom of a Whole Foods bag. However, there's always those few bastard babies that will try to jump out of the bag (or your hands), so if you're going to try to lure Mom with a single baby in your hand you should choose one of the mellow ones that's hanging out sleeping with some siblings, rather than the jumping cheeping one.
Ducks won't get into your car willingly. Even if you put their bag o' babies in your footwell. Instead they'll keep running under your car and out the other side again and again, thus making you look like a complete jackass to oncoming traffic. And to any other passing ducks, probably.
Ducks don't actually have much in the way of human-harming weaponry. They have bills, not beaks. So the best course of action to catch a duck is to get over the fear of the duck and grab it without hurting it. They're not as ill-tempered as geese (nor nearly as large), so just go for it. Carefully.
To grab an adult duck, you probably need more than one person. Try to corner the duck up against a high surface, since ducks can't fly straight up. Then grab the duck (gentle - it's a bird, and birds are fragile) and hold it close, trying to contain the wings.
The gym towel that made such a poor net makes a really good police uniform stain shield, if you happen to get an officer in your passenger seat holding a frantic Mama duck and that officer is afraid of spoiling his uniform with duck poop. Indeed, your gym towel can serve and protect.

#5 - #8 are what happened once the police showed up and got done with screaming at us for blocking traffic.

Now, to be fair, the babies being in a Whole Foods bag in my footwell meant that to all passerbys and the cops it looked like 2 crazy ladies were running around a freeway onramp chasing a duck that can clearly fly away on its own.

However, I'd just spent 45 minutes trying to wrangle a very frantic Mama duck. This had included hopping the retaining wall when she flew over, diverting traffic when she flew into the iceplant onramp median, luring her out of traffic various times with a bag full of babies, and trying various ridiculous "come here, ducky ducky!" calls to get her into my car while having horrible images of being the guardian of 13 orphaned ducks who were going to imprint on me and follow me forever. And it was hot. And now I was running late. So being confronted by a screeching, red-faced police officer that looked all of 19 years old wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

After cussing at Opie (as this officer will now be known), the other lady took off. My response to Opie also regrettably included a big fat curse word, which I fortunately delivered while revealing the inside of the bag. He took a peek in and was met with a view that looked something like this photo, at which point he lightened up and told me that I needed to move my car to the somewhat hidden pullout at the bottom arc of the ramp.

Problem: Mom duck was still up at the top of the onramp. Opie, though, quickly solved this conundrum by making a clumsy grab for her, causing her to panic and fly over the retaining wall and into oncoming traffic on the street side.

Awesome.

Fortunately, Mama then flew out of traffic and onto the sidewalk next to the retaining wall. And we were back to square 1. Well, OK, maybe we'd reached square 1.a. - she was on the other side of the wall, after all.

So, the new situation:

Mama duck's against a wall. I'm holding a Whole Foods bag o' cheeping ducklings. Cars (we had 2 squad cars) are tucked safely in the bus lane. And now I'm watching 2 rookie cops look at each other and say "What are we supposed to do now?"

It was at this point I realized that these two needed a pep talk. So I tried to give them the best one I had in me, which contained phrases like "You can do it!" and "I'm sure it'll be fine!" and "She's a duck, not a Mama bear - could be worse," all the while convincing them that they really, really, really needed to catch Mom so that the babies wouldn't pull a "Fly Away Home" on me.

Finally, Opie got over his fear of being attacked and managed to grab Mom up against the wall.

After securing her wings we decided that he should probably just get into my car and I'd drive everyone to the park, which was the best place we could think of for the ducks. I mean, her duck husband is presumably in Foster City somewhere (and where was he during this crisis, hmm? Out drinking at the Mallard?) so I didn't want to take her too far away. Plus I don't think Opie was up for a long-distance duck relocation commute, what with having left his squad car in a bus turnout and seeing as how he was holding an angry Mama duck, who thanked him for lending his lap by pecking him and trying to fly out of his arms every few minutes.

And right then, watching Opie wrastle with that duck in my passenger seat and wondering if he could get his seatbelt on (answer: no), I decided to name the duck Matilda. I don't know why, but the sight of a baby-faced rookie cop being pecked repeatedly by a flapping angry duck just made me go "Matilda, stop trying to attack the officer!" And so it was.

So, with babies and a duck-wrastlin' cop and Matilda in my Prius, we headed off to the park with a police escort behind us. This is where I lent the officer my gym towel, since he told me that his "tans" are dry-clean only and we figured Matilda might poop on him out of fear. Or spite. Or both.

And that's how it came to be that the park-hangin' denizens of Foster City were greeted with the assuredly odd sight of a police officer holding an angry, flapping duck (he'd lost his hold on her wings) while being escorted from a Prius by a girl carrying a Whole Foods bag.

He put Matilda down on the lawn, and I scooped out various loads of babies and put them on the lawn, whereupon they waddled over to a very relieved Mama. After lecturing Matilda for her poor choice in duck crossings, I left.

And I still thought I could make dinner. Except that when I got home it turned out that one of my dogs had jumped out a window (so we thought) to explore the neighborhood, and my 'hood is also surrounded by busy streets that make a very poor dog crossing.

So I then spent the next 90 minutes trying to find a rogue exploring dog, who ended up coming home on his own and wondering what the big deal was. But that's another story. And it's boring, except for the part about how he created a trick board in the fence that swung open with his nose and then swung back into place once he was through, thus leaving me scratching my head to wonder how in the holy hell this dog was getting out of the yard.

But I just told you the interesting part, so there you have it. Two animal adventure stories in one.

And since there's two stories, I should add another lesson I learned:

Lesson #3:

Animals are smarter than us sometimes. But it's OK, because it keeps us humble.

Learning #1: Think outside the map

2009-08-14T19:27:00.000-07:00

The name of this blog has nothing to do with Eskimos, really. For that matter, saying that it has to do with Alaska is a bit of a stretch. It has about as much to do with Alaska as it does with Canada and Florida...

This blog will be organized by Learnings, in no particular order. Because being a woefully clueless person stumbling through life means that I learn things. A lot. Things you think I'd know (like "unplug that toaster before you stick a fork in it, for Chrissakes"), but things I just don't. Or just forgot. Or just decide I don't want to know, I suppose.

And that is why, when deciding what to call my blog, which will probably be a place for me to tell the various stories that lead friends to use me as the poster child of the difference between "book smarts" and "street smarts," I remembered a story.

This story may or may not illustrate the difference between book smarts and street smarts, though, technically. But it's close enough.

Anyway, as you'll see by the map above and the associated Google images link that takes you to a lot of nice pictures of the United States, Alaska sits in a nice little box there off the coasts of California and Texas. In other maps it's off to the left of California, next to Hawaii. And when I was a kid, all the maps I ever got had it over in the lower right-hand corner of the map. Hawaii: lower left corner. Alaska: lower right corner.

And this is why I thought Alaska was a floating island somewhere off the coast of Florida until I was 20 years old.

Now, for those people who wonder what you learn in college, I have an answer: I learned the exact location of Alaska, whereabouts previously uknowingly unknown. And this came in handy during the 2008 election, wherein Sarah Palin's addition to the McCain ticket led me to nod sagely and feel somehow extra informed, knowing that I knew exactly where that crazy young state was now.

I learned where Alaska was, oddly enough, in Spanish class. We were doing some exercise that involved locating this snow-machine trodden landscape on a world map, which was regretfully specific in its placement of the various locations it displayed so proudly. That being the case, Alaska was not relegated to a box in any corner of the map. This is of course why I couldn't find it.

I thought the map was broken or something. So I called in the aid of my classmate, who pointed to Canada. Well, a little section of Northwestern Canada.

Me: That's Canada
Him (thinking I'm kidding): No, that's Alaska.
Me: No, that's Canada.
Him (thinking I'm probably kidding): No, that's Alaska, hello.
Me: Hi, why would Alaska be in freaking Canada all the way up there next to Russia? That makes no sense at all.
Him (realizing that I may not be kidding): So where do you think Alaska is?
Me: I dunno, it's usually in the lower right-hand corner of the map, so I guess it's down there somewhere.
Him (realizing that I may have been dropped on my head as a child): Let me get this straight: you think that Alaska is a floating, arctic island off the coast of Florida?
Me (realizing that this is, indeed, what I thought and that, perhaps, I was dropped on my head as a child): Um... yeah, I guess so... but way way down there, like when it gets cold again... ?

At this point various eavesdroppers realized that the kid from Los Angeles couldn't locate Alaska on a World Map, and making matters worse was the fact that (a) I was a Foreign Service major (hey, the planes would get me there, who needs Geography?) and (b) my teacher was Canadian.

After the various jokes were made about the geo-centric attitude of people from L.A. and California in general (I went to Georgetown, which is in Washington D.C.., both of which are populated overall by people who can locate Alaska on a world map), I simply sat, dejected, upset that my childhood maps and teachers had failed me so.

And here's the deal, mapmakers: if you're going to stick Alaska in a freaking box, put the freaking box in the UPPER LEFT-HAND CORNER OF THE MAP. Is that so hard? You manage to put Hawaii and Puerto Rico in their appropriately respective corners of the map, so why are you getting all fancy with Alaska?

People have asked how I never wondered about the differences in climate between Alaska and, say, Barbados. The answer is: I just never thought about it. I'm a visual person, and it didn't occur to me to doubt the very official mapmakers, beacon of hope and learnings for travelers and 3rd graders everywhere. No, it didn't make me scratch my head when I saw pictures of Eskimos, all bundled up and stashed in houses made of symmetrical, perfectly-frozen blocks of ice (OK, maybe those were cartoons). I just figured that Alaska was, you know, far enough down to the right there that the weather got cold again.

Because the world is round, right? (Good thing I had a globe. I just never looked at it too closely.)

People have also wondered how I thought Alaska was an island considering that it has a straight edge. I must admit that, being visual and all, I did notice the straight edge and did correctly assume that something was on the other side of Alaska. What I thought was on the other side, I'm not sure - I sort of had a vague idea that it might be some other... protectorate?... thus making Alaska the arctic counterpart to Hispaniola.

Yeah, that's right, bitches. I knew about Hispaniola. I even knew where it was, sort of. I mean, I knew it was an island somewhere warm and near Spanish-speaking countries, OK? Because it's in the right place on the map, not shoved in a random box somewhere near Iceland.

Anyway, I've named this blog liquid igloo because of this story. Mostly to remind myself that sometimes water is just water.