Drivel

Wednesday, March 1st, 2006

BLOGGING THE APOCALYPSE: All the sirens in Madison began to whoop as I walked past the capitol at noon. Of the dozen of people all around me, nobody so much as blinked, so I guessed it was nothing more than a monthly test and not the end of the world — which got me thinking: If it had been the end of the world, would they announce it with sirens? Would they bother to announce it at all? Because, you know, what’s the point? “It’s the end of the world ... stay tuned to find out if it ends in fire, floods or ice.” Yeah, I’d be glued to the set waiting for that info.

 

ON SALE AT THE LIBRARY: “The Perfect Eyebrow,” and no small book, either, but about 150 pages, illustrated. I don’t know how I’ve lived so long in ignorance of the fact that people were not only spending time writing books about shaping the perfect eyebrow, but also reading about it.

 

DOES THIS MAKE MY EYE LOOK FAT? In the last chapter of The Saga Of Bonkers we learned that the CT scan found a “mass” in his eye socket. In tonight’s chapter the results of the biopsy finally come to light: there is no growth, malignant or otherwise; he had a severe case of cellulitis – swollen fatty tissue caused by infection. Treatment calls for continuing the course of antibiotics he’s already taking, with an anti-inflammatory drug to chase it. The CT scan apparently wasn’t necessary, but it added an interesting chapter to the saga.

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

She was so totally worn out by a long day at the DMV grindstone that she turned in early last night and was sawing logs just two or three minutes after the lights went out. I could hardly bring myself to wake her this morning, but there was no way to put it off. The DMV needed her, curse them.

Visiting the Land of Nod was a tad bit harder for me after the buffalo burgers we had for supper. They were delicious, but too filling by half, and my stomach and upper GI tract were in revolt all night and well into the morning. There’s nothing I can’t handle about being revolting in the daytime, but after dark it’s another matter.

 

At work, Steve mumbled to himself as he sat at a typewriter filling out forms.

“What’d you say?” I asked him.

“Wasn’t talking to you,” he answered, trying to smack me down.

“Talking to yourself, then?”

“I don’t talk to myself,” he said. Pretty weak. He’s not much good at talking smack.

“You talk to yourself all the time in your office,” I shot back. “You don’t think I hear you, but I do.”

“I’m not talking to myself,” he tried to explain, “I’m talking to my imaginary friend.”

“Is your imaginary friend a big bunny?” I asked.

“Nope. Supermodel.”

Okay, not a bad comeback at all. If you’re going to have an imaginary friend, might as well shoot for the big money.

Friday, March 3rd, 2006

Tim laid out his problem for us last night after supper: He must have a car by the time he’s a senior. Must. The problem with this imperative is, his mother and I won’t let him drive just any car, and inasmuch as we’ll have to cosign a title, a loan and pay for insurance, we’ve got this crazy idea that we have some say in the matter.

He doesn’t have to drive a new car; that would probably be impossible anyway, unless one of us can correctly guess the Powerball. But it’ll have to be a late model used car, something that’s never been in a wreck and has air bags. Side-curtain air bags would be best. (What was that about ‘smothering?’) Tim’s requirements boil down to just one thing: It has to be cool-looking. He’s thinking of something like a Toyota Rav 4.

The problem is, Tim’s smart enough to do the math and he’s worried that, at fifteen, sixteen or seventeen years old, he won’t be able to find a job where he’ll be able to earn enough to pay for the kind of car he wants.

Welcome to the world, Tim.

Not that he thought his lack of money would keep him from getting the car of his dreams before his senior year. He figured he could take a loan for it. We pointed out that he’d have to earn a paycheck, regardless of how large it was, and bring it home every two weeks for a while before we cosigned a bank loan.

“I’m not talking about a bank loan,” he said, as if the idea was ridiculous. “I figured you guys could loan me the money.”

After the laughter died away and Barb and I could catch our collective breath again, we asked him where he got the car-razy idea we had that kind of loose change.

“It’s, like, five thousand bucks!” he objected. “That’s practically nothing!”

Perspective had changed with astounding speed; one minute he was dejected over how it would take a seemingly infinite number of years to earn enough to buy a car, the next he figured we could pop five thousand loose without blinking an eye. “Why would we do that, by the way?” I asked him. “My parents didn’t buy a car for me.” I turned to Barb: “Did they buy a car for you?”

“I had to buy my own,” she answered. And she had to cosign the loan, and every penny she made at every job she worked went toward paying off that loan. “You want to work your bum off every day after school to pay for a car?”

My memory’s a little fuzzy on his reply, but the way I remember the conversation, I recall he didn’t figure on giving up his entire paycheck. Me, yes. His mom, her too. Him, not so much. We made a slight adjustment to his ideas on that matter.

That’s as close as we came to solving his problem, and I don’t think it was what he considered a satisfactory solution at all. A fulfilled need, a loan, and a car was all he was looking for, I think. A lecture, a whole raft of rules and a smack in the face from reality was what he got. Total bummer. But that was only the first try at bat. He rarely gives up so easily when a desire like this is at stake. Stay tuned.

 

USA Jobs is one of the web-based job-search services I used regularly when I was searching far and wide for employment and I thought I might like to work for the government. I even ticked the box so the web site would send me an e-mail every time a job popped up in my areas of expertise, such as they were. Although I selected clerical work I also wanted to know of jobs in the administrative field, which lead me to receive notice of jobs such as Supreme Overlord Of Security And Punishment, or Administrative Czar Of Application & Denial, jobs that I would have gladly accepted at the low end of the advertised pay scale (usually starting around $65,000 and going up into six digits) had I been qualified to do them. As my most senior management job ever was to babysit eighty junior enlisted folk, and administering multimillion-dollar bureaus is a notch or two above that, I didn’t feel these jobs had anything to do with my qualifications, so I usually hit the ‘delete’ key whenever I saw job titles longer than three words, or salaries above the suggested retail price of a late-model Ferrari sports car.

Compared to jobs like that, yesterday’s e-mail was quite a hoot: vendor supply technician, eight bucks an hour. I’ve received notice of entry-level jobs in a pay range that would be considered low- to mid-range, but that was the first time they ever told me about any job at an hourly rate, and a pretty crappy one, to boot.

Now there’s an odd turn of phrase; why a boot, and what’s it got to do with signaling an additional thought? Is it because boots come in pairs? I couldn’t tell from looking at the contradictory explanations available on the internet.

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

“Where do you live?” the saleslady asked me, clicking her pen open to jot it down.

“Cottage Grove,” I told her.

“And your address?”

“241 East Cottage Grove Road.”

She had to smile and mention how much she liked that. “How nice and easy to remember.”

“Easy enough to remember,” I told her, “but more than enough to give you writer’s cramp.”

‘Cottage Grove’ is a cozy, almost lyrical name, but writing it out is as much trouble as trying to get through ‘Albuquerque,’ to say nothing of having to write it twice. Try fitting it into the tiny little blanks on forms and subscription cards; nine times out of ten, it just doesn’t work, and in the upper left-hand corner of an envelope it goes on and on across half the envelope. I’ll be a lot happier writing “Sylvan Lane, Monona.”

 

I’m crap at remembering names, even the names of people I work with every day, but there’s a special place in my brain, which I just named The Face Bank (I told you I was crap with names), that files away a snapshot of every face I’ve ever seen, and it’s wired to an alarm that goes off whenever I see that face again, as if to say, “Already filed that one! Don’t need another copy!” Fine and dandy, but I want to know how and where I saw that face before. The Face Bank doesn’t keep a copy of that information, so sorry.

The snapshot in The Face Bank is pretty vague. I can see the face, sometimes the hair, not very often the neck or the collar of a shirt. Almost never the rest of the body; I just get a face, no context at all; just a nagging image that bothers me until I realize where I saw that person before. I’d take a lot more pleasure from that tingling eureka-like moment if it didn’t almost always hit me in the middle of doing something that required my utmost concentration, such as trying not to hit a bus.

Most of the time, I see a face in a crowd, the alarm goes off, and I can switch it off if I can convince myself that I’ve seen that face before in a crowd. It was nobody I know, ever knew, or will ever know. Eight or nine times out of ten, that works. Last night, though, it wasn’t a face in the crowd. It was very definitely somebody I had met before, a woman who was engaged to one of Barb’s coworkers. Funny thing about that was, I had never met any of her coworkers before, and certainly none of their wives-to-be. This was an alarm that wasn’t going to be easy to shut off.

They all wanted to gather at The Great Dane tavern after work, so Barb and I plowed through rush-hour traffic to Fitchburg, south of town, to hoist a few in a crowded, smoky bar, something we hadn’t done in many moons.

They still have smoky bars in Fitchburg. Madison outlawed smoking in public buildings, but suburbs like Fitchburg, Verona, Middleton and Monona didn’t, so the taverns in those towns are making a killing! It’s opportunism at it’s best. But I digress.

Barb searched through the downstairs bar and dining room before she spotted about a half-dozen of her coworkers eating dinner. She said her hellos all around, then introduced me quickly, but since there wasn’t any room for us at the table, and they said a few more people were upstairs at the bar, we went up to say ‘hi’ and maybe grab some refreshments.

We’d been to one of these after-work get-togethers before, but at that gathering only one of Barb’s coworkers showed up, also a new hire. There was almost nobody else in the bar, so we sat around making small talk for about an hour. “Could they be jeeping you?” I asked Barb. (A newbie in the Air Force is a jeep; conning the newbie into looking for something that doesn’t exist, a box of grid squares or a bucket of prop wash, is a jeep joke.) They didn’t think so, but we left without meeting anybody else.

They made up for it this time, though. We chatted with two or three more guys upstairs at the bar. Well, I say “chatted,” but it was more like “shouted at.” This was a very loud bar. We returned to the dining room after the first round of beers to join the rest of the group, much to the consternation of the waitress, who was faced with a dozen people fetching their own beers and paying no tips.

The Face Bank alarm went off when I was introduced to the people at the table the first time; it went off again after we came back, a really loud alarm the second time. The woman in the corner was somebody I had spoken to before, not once but several times. What bugged me about it was that I couldn’t imagine how I’d met her before. When I asked Barb she looked at me like I was crazy, so she very obviously didn’t think it was possible we’d met before, either. I puzzled and puzzed until my puzzler was sore, and just when I figured this was going to keep me up all night it came back to me: She was one of the managers at the apartment house where we rented a place the month we arrived in Madison. I whispered the answer to Barb and she gasped. “Oh, my god, you’re right!” Small world.

 

I’ve been beating my brains out trying to find a way to describe Sin City, a movie that roughly seven out of ten critics (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic) could hardly stop drooling over long enough to tap out a review lavishing praise on it before their laptops, awash to the tops of the key tiles, shorted out. “I loved it, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it,” Slate’s David Edelstein gushed orgasmically. “I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it. Sin City [is] the most relentless display of torture and sadism I’ve encountered in a mainstream movie.” This is a recommendation?

His and other critics’ positive reviews are what moved me to rent this movie in the first place. I want to say they’re all that kept me from walking out on it, but I could force myself to watch no more than thirty minutes of Kill Bill even though every English-speaking critic on the planet wouldn’t shut up about how great that movie was. Didn’t learn my lesson, I guess.

It’s not that I don’t occasionally like to watch a movie about beating up bad guys. I do. I watched The Transporter and liked it enough to watch it again. (I’m going to watch the sequel, even though it got panned.) Sin City was beating people up to the extreme. It even lived up to the promise of its title and had what movies like The Transporter didn’t have: Dozens of hard-body women in fishnet stockings who tore off their shirts at the wink of an eye, hard-bodied women with machine guns, and ninja women with swords. In theory, this movie should have been a manly man’s best night out.

Instead, it was two painfully long hours of Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Clive Owens squaring their jaws and constantly, repetitively, excruciatingly beating the gore out of one bad guy after another, no matter how many times the bad guys shot them, beat them or ran over them with cars. And it was so boring! God, it was boring!

In other words, I didn’t like it. None of it. Especially not that it was black and white with occasional splashes of color. I could easily tell that everything but the actors was computer generated, and it bugged me. And everybody spoke in clipped one-liners that sounded almost, but not quite, noir-ish.

Bleh. Ick. Phu. I want my two hours back.

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

The land of furniture has much uneven ground. At its peaks, there are lovingly hand-made pieces made of rich, carefully-polished oak, maple and cherry wood, all gorgeously finished in hand-rubbed oil. In its valleys, there is camp furniture made of iron and canvas. But in its bogs, here there be monsters — factory-made, particle-board eyesores dressed up in paper-thin veneer, trimmed by gold and silver plastic, tarted up with gaudy mirrors, cheap glass and spotlights.

Barb and I descended into the bogs yesterday afternoon.

Our adventure began not in the bogs, but among the peaks. Tired of living with make-do furniture that we bought time and again packed flat in boxes for do-it-yourself assembly with a tack hammer and a hex wrench, Barb and I wanted to peruse the selection of fine furniture at the Henry Simon Furniture Company on the west side of town. The proprietors had collected a treasure trove of hand-made pieces at the front of the store, a treasure trove gorgeous enough to make anybody stare in drop-jawed wonder.

The breathtaking cost of each piece was also guaranteed to give pause. After some careful math, we figured that, if we each sell a kidney on e-bay, we can buy a living room set and a sideboard with hutch in one go. Otherwise we may have to collect one piece at a time, on an installment plan, if we eat fish heads and rice twice a week and drink nothing but water from here on out.

“We should stop by [NAME OF BIG-BOX FURNITURE WAREHOUSE DELETED] on the way home,” Barb suggested in the car, “while everything’s fresh in our minds, just to compare.” Slumming for an hour at the furniture warehouse after floating all morning in the cloud-bedecked world of hand-made furniture was such a magnetic idea that I couldn’t refuse, although I should have. It was depressing. There was no way at all I could fake a desire for a hutch made of waferboard that reeked of glue and formaldehyde after seeing what a talented woodworker could do with cherry wood. We might have stayed as long as a half-hour, but no more before we dejectedly headed out the door.

 

It was a trip to the monthly auction north of DeForest for us today. We had some hopes of finding a nice sideboard or a hutch at a bargain price, but all we came away with was a nifty clock and a platter imprinted with an Escher-like interlocking fish design. Couldn’t have been happier. The platter reminded Barb of Japan and she snagged it for three bucks. I’m crazy for clocks and I got one that looks like the hands are floating in a ring with no visible connection to the clockworks; cost me a double sawbuck, but, as I say, I’m crazy.

Then, bonus points! Barb got the one and only bid for a box full of glassware that she’d been drooling over since we arrived. But that was all we found, except for the flower-petal cups glazed in primary colors. They would have made pretty dishes for condiments, but the auctioneer heaped them into a box filled with a ton of other crap that somebody else wanted a lot more than we wanted the cups.

 

Heavy, wet snow was falling as we made our way carefully home. I had to break ice off the windshield wipers when we stopped at the grocery store to pick up milk. Our car gives me practically nothing to complain about, but those windshield wipers ice up nearly every time the snow is wet and heavy. There’s got to be a way to fix that. Stopping every twenty minutes or so to knead the encrusted ice off the wipers with bare fingers doesn’t seem to be the best engineering solution, or maybe I expect too much.

Monday, March 6th, 2006

Last week, Sue lent us the first half of her CD recording of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and we listened to the first chapter during our commute to work this morning.

This is the first time I’ve ever listened to a recorded book in the car. No, I take that back; I once shared a ride to Branson, Missouri, with a friend, Laura, who picked up a ‘books on tape’ recording at a gas station along the way because we were driving non-stop across Kansas. There isn’t a human being alive who can carry on a conversation that long. I wasn’t much impressed with the medium. The story wasn’t very engaging and my friend said the reader was bad, and that it was also heavily edited. The recording of Wicked hasn’t been abridged; it’s made up of sixteen CDs! Sue lent us the first four and will pass off the following disks as she makes her way through the story.

It begins with the Witch of the West descending on Dorothy and the rest of her foursome as they pause on their way along the Yellow Brick Road. The witch hides in a willow tree to listen in on their conversation, and is astounded to hear the outrageous lies they tell about her. It’s a empathizing look at Westy’s life, you see, filling her with motivations, emotions, interests and so on, and I have to say it was jarring. I never looked at Margaret Hamilton (and no matter what this recording does to my perceptions of the story, the Wicked Witch will always be Margaret Hamilton) and asked myself what made her tick. She had a green face! She cackled as she set people on fire! She was baaaaad! There was no need to ask why.

I have to admit this recording wasn’t bad, so I may have to change my opinion of recorded books. We listened to just one chapter, as I said, but it held my interest and the reader was very good. I looked forward to the next chapter on the ride home.

I haven’t read the book Wicked, and if we keep on listening to the recording, I don’t intend to; what would be the point of that? I haven’t read The Wizard of Oz, either. I’ve only seen the movie about two-dozen times, same as everybody else who grew up in the sixties and seventies. Does it still air on television every year? I can’t remember when they did that, Thanksgiving or Christmas. I want to say Thanksgiving.

There was one very odd thing about the experience, though: it took me the longest time to recall the last memory I had of somebody reading to me. I’m sure my parents must have, but I couldn’t come up with a specific memory I recalled sitting in my great-grandmother’s lap as she read (of all things!) Little Black Sambo. I have plenty of memories of reading to my children, but that’s still the only memory I have of anybody reading to me.

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

I’m on spring break! No class tonight! And when you’re a middle-aged man and you get two weeks off from night school, do you dance naked in a drunken stupor on a barroom table with the rest of the spring-break revelers? You do not! You’re much too individualistic for that. You march to the beat of your own drummer. You stay home, fix yourself a ham sandwich and relax in front of your laptop, writing meaningless drivel about your private brand of selfish hedonism. Hoo-ah! I’m living large!

I have never danced naked in a drunken stupor on a barroom table. It’s probably better that I never consider trying to catch up, either, after seeing how it all ends up on the internet these days.

Slow day at work. Very, very quiet for the first hour or so, then a slug of paperwork, but nothing I couldn’t finish before lunch. The afternoon was mostly slow and steady, with one fairly challenging task in the middle, and then a long, slow coasting ride to the five o’clock whistle.

It’d be cool if there was a five o’clock whistle, just like at Fred Flintstone’s job, would it? It’d give the end of the work day a raucous finality that screamed, EVERYBODY OUT! Not that the mad dash for the door we have now isn’t suitably final, but I’m a firm believer that almost any action can be improved with the right sound effects, especially loud ones.

Speaking of jobs, I got an e-mail from USA Jobs, the message robot that keeps sending me notices of government job vacancies no matter how employed I am. I guess they’re a bit like the military; once you sign up with them, you’re in for life. USA Jobs sent me notice of a vacancy in the Wisconsin branch of the Federal Highway Administration. The job title was rather highfalutin, but a careful reading of the duties required led me to believe it was almost exactly the same job I’m doing now — answering the phone, filing papers, scheduling meetings, that sort of thing. The up side: low end of the pay scale was ten grand a year more than I’m making now. The down side: I’d be working for the feds again. It’s a pretty big down side, but ten grand a year more is a pretty big up side. I’m conflicted. I hate making these decisions.

There’s a new grump, if you’re interested in grumpy.

Wednesday, March 8th, 2006

The Girl Scouts have come to our door bearing cookies. A pox upon them! How can I refuse to buy cookies from a Girl Scout, particularly when the cookies are nearly as addictive as heroin? I can’t, and they know it. I buy three or four boxes without realizing what I’m doing. And besides being irresistible, there never seems to be enough cookies in a box, no matter how many boxes we get. We wolf them down almost without knowing it. A box of Girl Scout cookies lasts about half a day in this house, and nobody here can say how that happens. One of us opens the box, we each have ‘just one or two,’ but the next time somebody goes looking for a sweet treat, the damned box is empty and nobody can explain it. Very mysterious.

 

“Hello, Dave?” the caller asked, not as if he were asking me if my name was Dave, but as if he were a friend who wanted to know if I had time to talk. This guy was good.

“Hello,” I said, as if addressing somebody I knew, but I didn’t have a lot of time to chat. I’m no slouch myself. I’ve spoken to a few telemarketers in my time.

He gave me an easygoing chuckle and asked, “Is this Dave?” We both knew what was going on, he wasn’t giving anything away, so he switched to trying to set me at ease with a smile in his voice.

I decided to keep my answers clipped. “Yep.”

“Dave, have you ever been to Branson, Missouri?” he asked. His tone suggested that it was a vacation destination that held promises of fun, relaxation and self-indulgence. Unluckily for him, my answer to that question was not a simple “yes,” but rather would have been a more expansive, “Buddy, I’m never going back to Branson until I’m eight-five years old, confined to a wheelchair and so badly afflicted with dementia that my nurse has to wring out my drool bib every five minutes.”

Yes, I’ve been to Branson. I went there to be a party to the wedding of my brother and his lovely bride, a joyous occasion I felt honored to accept the invitation to. The town of Branson, however, wasn’t terribly impressive; or, rather, it was, but it didn’t impress me the way it obviously impressed the kind of people who brought the town a ton of money every season. I’ve been to one or two tourist traps in my time, but if I were giving away a prize for a town that performed a self-dignityectomy and transplanted it with a super-sized helping of schmaltz and kitsch, no town I’ve ever been to even begins to compare with Branson, not even the town with life-sized cement dinosaurs painted in primary colors. Not even Ruby Falls.

I didn’t give him the long answer, though, because I wasn’t feeling smart-mouthed enough to lip off to him then. Little did I know that I didn’t have an answer that would have fazed this guy. After another clipped “yes” from me, he launched into a breathtaking sales pitch that included three days and two nights, continental breakfast every morning, dinner and a show for only a million zillion dollars.

“Thanks, I’m not interested,” I told him, when I could break in. Believe it or not, this usually works on other telemarketers. I deliver the line with my own specially formulated, dismissive chuckle, a tone that tells the caller he’s wasting his time, but in a friendly manner, because he gets plenty of abuse from people who hang up abruptly, yell at him, blow whistles or air horns at the phone, et cetera.

“How about if I throw in all dinners and money for gas?” he said, then did a quick review of all the great bargains he’d offered me. He made it a little longer this time with lots of “wonderfuls” and “greats” and other dressy words. Why’d I let him go on, even after he had my answer and I knew nothing he could say would change my mind? Because of telephone etiquette: It’s rude to hang up on people. I have a certain reputation for being rude, but that doesn’t mean I try to cultivate it.

“Listen, fellah,” I broke in again when he came up for air, “money’s pretty tight right now, and we just don’t have the time to visit Branson, but thanks.”

There. That ought to show him I’m serious.

He chuckled. It might even have been a maniacal chuckle. “You’re a bargainer, I can tell,” he said. I tried to break in, but he wouldn’t stop. “I’m not supposed to do this, but ...” and he went on to offer me tickets, travel, all expenses paid, blah blah blah blah blah if only I would sign up with him right now. “Visa or Mastercard?” he asked.

“I can see you’re a hard-working guy,” I started. He tried to start again, but I plowed ahead. “I’m trying to end this on a friendly note: I don’t have the money or the time to travel right now and I wouldn’t travel to Branson if I did. I can’t say yes to your offer. Bye.”

But he was off and running before I got the word “offer” out of my mouth. “This offer’s good for three-hundred sixty-five days, yadda yadda blah blah blah ...”

At this point, I resorted to rudeness: I set the phone on the countertop and read a few pages from Anna Karenina, the book I was relaxing with when he called me. It’s okay to be rude on the phone when the other guy starts it, and there was no question he was being rude now. When he paused, I picked up the phone again.

“Hi. I don’t want to be rude to you by hanging up, but ... ”

“If you haven’t hung up, then I’m doing my job right! And you can — ”

BIP!

Zow. First time I’ve talked to a guy who literally wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

By contrast, I took a call from Elaine about an hour before Mr. Pushy called. Elaine who, Dave? Well, that’s the same question I asked myself when she called. She was the saleslady who answered our questions at the furniture store last weekend, and she was calling back to ask if we had any questions about the color swatches we looked at, or the prices we discussed. I had to sheepishly admit that we didn’t have any questions because we hadn’t discussed it much after we left, but that we’d call her with any questions that came up. “That’s just fine,” she said, thanked me and rang off, almost in a hurry to go. She was the least pushy salesperson I think I’ve ever spoken to, aside from the recruiter who put me on a bus to San Antonio.

 

The wheels in my head are still turning over this job vacancy with the Federal Highway Administration (see yesterday if you feel you’re in the dark). Barb thought I should apply for it because it’s essentially the same job I’m doing, but with a huge pay raise, way lots huger than I could ever get where I’m working now, and there’s room for promotion and an even hugerer pay raise in the future. (Pay raises like these inspire me to make up superlatives.)

I’ve been weighing pros and cons ever since we talked it over. (I’m just thinking out loud here, no need to follow along.) Actually, I’ve been weighing the pros and pros; I’m trying not to think of cons, although some of them seem to come out as cons. Talking in circles am I now. sheesh.

Thinking in terms of two or three years, if I stay where I’m at, I’ll have put down roots in a good company where I’m getting to know a lot of friendly people. My aunt works there; she brings snacks and prezzies and I stop by to chat with her. It’s a cozy atmosphere. I work downtown; I like downtown Madison a lot. If I stay, I get a three percent raise each year; basically a cost-of-living adjustment that keeps up with inflation. I work in a great department, but if I stayed at the bank, I’d like to move to the IT department, because that’s where my interests lie. Still, I’d have friends in another department, never a bad thing.

If I got the job at FHWA, I’d be the new guy, starting over once again in an unknown place; it’d be a drag, but I’ve done it before; I can do it again. I’d be working in a commercial park in the suburbs, way out on the west side of town; I’d have to drive another fifteen or twenty minutes after I dropped Barb off at work. (She’d like being dropped off.) The pay grade is GS-6, with room to move up to GS-7.

Dropping the job at a good business downtown for a federal hive in the suburbs is one heck of a trade-off for the benefit of earning ten grand more a year — but then again, ten grand would make life a lot less complicated right now (mortgage, college, car insurance for young Mario Andretti). Yikes, it’s a lot to think about. Easier to bang my head against a wall.

 

LATER: I decided to refresh my resume (because it needed refreshing, and not necessarily because I’ve decided to apply for the vacancy at FHWA). After a trip to the basement I brought up an overstuffed orange folder bulging with some of the paperwork that I generated during last summer’s job search. (Gawd! Was it only last summer?) I flipped through every page, sorted the papers I needed from everything else and finally, an hour later, I had enough information to provide my name, address, social security number, the name of my place of employment and my supervisor’s name — exactly what was already in my wrinkled brain.

Somewhere in this house, a folder filled with job applications and college transcripts is hiding from me. I hate this part of job hunting. Not that I’m hunting.

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

That 70’s classic, No Time Left For You, sent its subtle message over the radio during the evening drive home. I can’t think of an example of a good brush-off song right now, but this has to be one of the worst: She loves him but he wants his freedom so, hey, he’s out of here. Nothing personal; he’s changed, it’s the way things are. And just in case she didn’t get the message, he threatens her with death, then chants, “No time left for you,” and, “Ah got got got got no time,” until she would certainly not only want to break up with him, but I wouldn’t blame her for piling all his stuff on the lawn and setting fire to it. “I don’t think he’s got any time for her,” I mentioned to Barb, “what do you think?”

 

According to the good people at reunion.com, someone is searching for me! “Who could it be, Dave Okonski? Your best friend? Your high school sweetie? Log in to find out today!” I created an account at reunion.com years ago. Building a profile with photos and links to your e-mail and web site is kind of fun, but if you want to search for your old school chums, you’ve got to cough up some green. That’s to be expected; I shell out a few clams to keep this site going, after all. The good people at reunion.com probably aren’t doing their thing as a hobby. Once you build a profile there, though, they don’t stop sending e-mail to you.

If the messages aren’t just advertising hype, two or three people search for my profile every week. I don’t think they have to pay the forty bucks a month for the subscription to reunion.com to do that, but none of them are sending e-mail to me, although my address is easy to find if they’d google for it. Strange.

Friday, March 10th, 2006

“The next time you write about a song,” Barb said to me last night, “would you at least make it a song that I like?” She was referring to the griping I did about No Time Left For You, the bit of 70’s pop we heard on the radio day before yesterday. She read the drivel I wrote and it was stuck in her head. But the biggest problem with an earworm (the technical term for a song stuck in your head, believe it or not) is that it’s almost never a song you like. I say ‘almost never’ because once I had Harry Connick’s Wink And A Smile stuck in my head for a couple days, which got a little tedious after a while but was far from the torture of getting stuck on Madonna’s Like A Virgin.

Whups! Sorry, Barb. Focus on Harry Connick. Forget I even mentioned Madonna. Relax. Relax.

 

There’s good juju in our home these days. Tim’s been earning outstanding grades at school, as well as picking up his fair share of the work around the house. He aced a test in Spanish yesterday and worked all week on a speech, practicing every morning in the shower, for history. His teacher, who’s notorious as a hard grader, awarded him an A. (He performed it for us yesterday after supper, speaking as Samuel Gompers, rousing the workers to unionize. Another socialist in the family.)

It’s worth mentioning because he’s doing it on his own, as far as I can tell. We’ve had a couple sit-down heart-to-heart talks before, but they didn’t seem to have much of an effect. The last time we discussed school and his future (and there isn’t a lecture he loathes more than the one he gets about school and/or his future), we simply threw our hands up and told him, “This is the last lecture. You sink or swim on your own. If all you want is a minimum-wage job after school, go for it.” We didn’t expect that to have an effect one way or another; we simply wanted to make it plain where we stood. And I’d have to be pretty full of myself to say our lecture had any effect, after all. Maybe his biological alarm clock started ringing and woke him from his malaise.

In any case, he’s working harder at school, he’s helping out at home — how could a parent not be happy?

 

Friday night is pizza night in the O-Manse; we blew a wad and had it delivered. Pizza’s not a good idea for me. It gets down into my gut and rumbles around in there all weekend, even when I take lactaid pills, but we don’t have pizza that often and it’s so good! Half the crap I ate when I was young and indestructible tastes like cardboard and lard to me now, but pizza is still The Wonder Food.

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

It’s Saturday, and time to get things done. Can’t get things done on a weekday, because that’s when I’ve got to work. Weird that working isn’t getting things done, but it isn’t. Working is digging up a road, busing a table, designing a skyscraper, or making good use of your golden parachute by bailing out of the top position at a Fortune 500 country — bringing home a paycheck. Getting things done is cleaning the house, trolling through the aisles for the button-down Oxford on sale at Kohl’s, taking the car into the garage to have the tires rotated and the oil changed — spending the paycheck. The difference is pretty easy to grasp, once you think about it.

The first task on Saturday’s to-do list was: Get new eyeglasses. About three weeks ago, one of the bows broke off the glasses I’ve been wearing for the past two years, and Wednesday I finally got so sick of poking myself in the eye with the stunted bow every time I put the glasses on that I picked up the phone and made an appointment to get a new pair. I picked Saturday because I’m cheap; I could have taken time off from work and still gotten paid for it, but I would have had to park the car in town, which costs ten bucks. Yes, I really am that tight-fisted.

The strip-mall eyeglass factory I went to wouldn’t simply measure the glasses I’m wearing and issue me a new pair; I had to go through an eye exam. They must have wanted me to feel as though I was getting my money’s worth because they put me through the whole nine yards: color blindness test, field of vision test, cover one eye with the paddle while reading the chart test, and stick your chin in the cup so the machine can go POOF! I really hate that last one. I can make myself stare at the bright light for the first poof, but there’s no power in the universe that can keep the other eye open in anticipation of that second poof.

An optometrist who spoke so fast I would bet the farm he drinks way too much espresso (“Consider using more periods,” I wanted to write on the customer comment card, “or at least one comma, maybe two, with every patient.”) offered me a seat in his black padded chair. Those things are way more scary-looking than they need to be, don’t you think? It’s a simple eye exam, but whoever designed that chair was not thinking of putting the patient at ease; if he was, it would look more like a Lay-Z-Boy. Instead it looks like the kind of chair that should have arm and leg restraints, but they’ve been carefully hidden away, ready to emerge after the doctor clamps the googly-eyed Viz-O-Tronic Mind Eraser over your face.

My eyes are normal; the doctor found nothing he could charge me hundreds of extra dollars for. “Just the usual soaking today,” he told his assistant, who took me back to the lobby, where I would have to choose a set of frames. Talk about torture; I hate this part almost as much as the poofy machine. They never have frames I like. Or rather, there’s usually a set of cartoony-looking frames I like, but I look stoopit in cartoony-looking frames. I especially like really tiny, wire-rimmed circular spectacles and Ben Franklin glasses. I’d wear purple-tinted Ben Franklin glasses all day long, but I’d feel awkward in certain, more formal situations, unless I wore a light-up, spinning bowtie and a fake arrow through my head with it.

I met a guy once who wore the teeny-tiny circular glasses. He was about three inches taller than me and had more muscles than all the weight lifters at your local Gold’s Gym. They looked good on him. Even if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have ever mentioned it, not to his face.

My problem is, I have a very wide face and baggy eyes. For years, I’ve thought the only frames that look good on me are aviator glasses. They had some aviator glasses on display, and I kept trying them out, but I couldn’t help thinking it was time for a change. After trying on about three dozen different frames, I gradually gravitated toward a pair of black, wire-framed rectangles with rounded corners, almost Ben Franklins but bigger. Good choice? Only time, and the derision heaped upon me by others, will tell.

It took them about an hour to grind the lenses for my glasses. An hour! About a dozen people were in the store the same time I was and it only took the wizards in the back room an hour to grind my lenses and cut them to fit my frames. I can complain about a lot of things, but that’s not one of them. To pass the time, I got a cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie the size of a manhole cover at the café in Borders book store, found a table by the window, and rapped out this drivel. And you know what I found out? Borders is even cheaper than I am! They don’t have free wireless internet! Hello? What kind of coffee shop doesn’t have internet access? Sheesh.

When I tried out the glasses after going back, it turned out there might be a teensy-tiny problemette; some people can’t get used to polycarbonate glass (which means “scratch-resistant,” but it’s way cooler to say “polycarbonate”), and I might be one of them. They said I should try them until Monday, and if I couldn’t get used to them by then, they’d cut me another pair in plastic. I left the store blinking as I tried to convince myself this could work. I had to concentrate to refocus, and I noticed a fisheye effect whenever I moved my head. The longer I wore them, the more I felt it wasn’t getting easier. This probably isn’t the last chapter in the saga.

 

I saw a robin scratching in the undergrowth along the side of the road on the way to the mall. Is that still a sign of spring? I hope so. Even if it isn’t any more, the mild temperature, pushing sixty, we basked in all day long and the pouring rain that came after dinner time certainly is spring-like. I’ve heard snow in the forecast, but this weekend is weather to go walking in all day long.

 
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Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Yesterday, Barb and I went to The Century House to look at imported Danish and German furniture. Great Googly-Moogly, that just sounds expensive, doesn’t it? I don’t know why we love to punish ourselves like this, but it’s becoming a trend.

They sure make some sleek furniture in the Old World, most of it out of teak and cherry wood, and most of it folds up somehow so it doesn’t crowd their tiny apartments when they’re not using it. (Although, weirdly enough, they don’t seem to have worked out anything like a Murphy bed.) The niftiest of these was a small circular table made of three wedges that slid away from the center pedestal if you turned a cam underneath; then you could pop a set of leaves up from the pedestal that would open, blossom-like, to make the table big enough to invite guests for dinner. Four-thousand bucks. We’d have to invite a lot of guests to pot luck if we bought one of those, but I have a feeling they’d keep coming back just for the novelty. “Don’t open the table until we get there!”

Almost everything they had in stock was so good-looking that we’d like to have a house full of it, but so expensive that, if each of us put a double sawbuck in a coffee can on payday, we’d be able to buy a piece every three or four years. I don’t know where teak comes from, but it’s more expensive than OPEC oil.

 

Barb bought two boxes of Apple Jacks cereal Friday night. She’ll get Tim a box of super-sweet cereal for the weekend to treat him because she’s not above spoiling him a little bit. He may be a sarcastic teenager now, but she’s a mom, after all. I don’t know why she got two; I guess the Apple Jacks were on sale.

Yesterday, Tim ate one. Not one bowl, one box. According to the label, a box is nine servings, although both our boys would poo-poo that measurement. If they fill a bowl level with the brim, instead of heaping it as they usually do, they might stretch it to four or five bowls. Either way, it’s one-hundred fifty-four grams of sugary jitters. I feel diabetic just thinking about it. Eating one bowl gives me the shakes.

Tim finished off the second box today, but he didn’t get it all: Barb had hidden it behind a pile of luggage in the bedroom to give me a chance to eat at least some of it. Given an opportunity like that, I could hardly pass up a bowl. They made my teeth hurt.

 

It was an almost-lazy Sunday today. I woke up at my usual, insane hour, six o’clock, but I didn’t get out of bed right away. It was so cozy and warm, curled up beside Barb, that I decided to while away the time with a little cat nap or two. Ironically, I had to lock the cats out of the room, as they were hungry and kept trying to get me out of bed to feed them. Boo did this by leaping into the middle of the bed, then scrambling away before I could swat her; Bonkers just sat in the doorway and cried. After I closed the door behind them, they fought with each other; I can only presume it was because they blamed each other for their utter failure to get any kibble from me.

After making a pot of coffee I fetched the paper from the end of the driveway. There’s one chore I won’t miss when we move next month. I’ll still have to collect the paper from the driveway, but it won’t be the hike it is now, and semi trucks won’t be roaring past on the road. Back inside, I weeded out all the junk we don’t read — advertisements, both part of the sports section, Parade — then sat in the sunny patch in the middle of the living room floor to read the funnies while I sipped from a hot mug o’ joe. Boo wasn’t too happy about that; she claimed the sunny spot for her own, but she can’t pick me up and move me, something I can easily do to her. Too bad.

I got through every section of the paper and two cups of coffee before Barb roused herself from slumber. She helped herself to a cuppa java and, while she settled down with the paper, I polished my résumé some more. It’s very nearly ready, but I realized today that I’ll need to list my supervisor and boss as professional references, so I should probably have a talk with Bill first thing in the morning about my job application to FHWA. How do I tell my boss that I love working for him, but I’ve got an opportunity to make bags more money? (Probably just like that.)

I fiddled with my résumé, and Barb read the paper, until neither of us could drag it out any longer. We both knew we had to clean the house before lunch, so we frittered away the morning on everything but cleaning until the last possible minute. That’s the kind of dedicated procrastinators we are.

We couldn’t put it off past lunch, though, because we had tickets to the afternoon performance of Chess at the Madison Area Technical College. Not a bad show; sometimes the orchestra drowned out the singers, and I just flat-out couldn’t understand anything the guy playing Walter was saying, but otherwise very enjoyable.

Brats in beer for supper. Life is good.

Monday, March 13th, 2006

I must have mentioned to you before that I’m lactose intolerant, even though I grew up in Wisconsin back when we still had cheese-yellow license plates with “The Dairy State” stamped in black across the top. I drank gallons of milk, ate gobs of ice cream and I’m a huge cheese-lover, even to this day, but now I can eat only the tiniest amounts of any dairy product if, and only if, I gulp down a couple of lactaid pills first — and even then, it’s a touch-and-go proposition.

Last night, I touched when I should have go-ed.

Barb brought home a quart of caramel choco-chunk ice cream from the grocer’s and scooped out a big bowl of it to treat herself before she started on a patchwork quilt. It gets the creative juices going, don’tcha know. I swallowed a couple lactaid pills and joined her, just because I’m a glutton. Wow, did that turn out to be a mistake, and there wasn’t enough Alka-Seltzer in all the aisles of a Cub Foods Warehouse Store to undo it.

My guts stopped tying themselves in knots about two hours later, after I drank a gallon or so of clear water. I don’t remember tossing and turning or bad dreams, so I must have slept okay, but I woke up this morning with something like a hangover. I know it sounds weird, and it felt weirder. No headache, but a nasty feeling in my guts, as if I’d spent last night in a smoky bar drinking way too many beers, then calling Earl on the big white telephone.

And the worst aftereffect? Milk farts. I don’t know how I forgot about them. I had to excuse myself to the rest room a half-dozen times to avoid what at best would have been an embarrassing incident. At worst, they might have called the fire department to search for a dead body lodged in the ventilation system. Now that I’ve refreshed my memory of what happens to me when I eat ice cream, I won’t have to do that again for a couple years.

 

After a brief taste of spring on Saturday we got a shot of cold, dank weather on Sunday, a downpour with lightning and thunder Sunday night, and today looks like a day straight out of the grayest depths of November. I know there’s nothing you can do about it; I just wanted to complain, that’s all.

 

Barb gazed up at the calendar, heaved a huge sigh and wished aloud, “I want to move now!” But there was no magic flash and bang of transformation, no roiling red cloud to bear us through time to the end of April. Bummer.

We still have a few preparations to make, simple things like buying homeowner’s insurance and claiming the household goods from long-term storage, but we’re all mentally ready now to settle down, and settle down hard. I myself don’t want to move again for years and years. The closing date is so close now, but we’re not quite there yet. How do we make it through these next six weeks without going stir-crazy?

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

If there’s a hidden, second purpose behind a job application, it must be to make applicants feel as though their education is about as advanced as printing inch-tall block letters with crayons. I nominate the federal Department of Transportation’s “core questionnaire” as an effective tool to thoroughly crush anybody’s ego, especially when it comes to those “pick all that apply” columns where an applicant is supposed to choose from a laundry list of experiences such as, “I have composed, reviewed, authorized and approved every kind of correspondence and documentation known to humankind,” or “I have procured supplies using electronic Pan-Galactic computer assistance.” I ended up checking “I have no experience in any of the above activities” just once, because twenty-one years in the military turns out to be good for something, but I felt pretty feeble when I did it.

I spent about two and a half hours last night filling out the first part of the federal government’s job application, and not only did it make me feel downright infantile but, at times, I thought I was applying for a fellowship in the field of quantum physics instead of the clerical job answering the phone and filing papers. If this is what the application is like, I kept asking myself, what kind of job am I getting myself into?

Applications are always like this, I answered myself, and kept plugging away at it. And felt just a bit reassured at the dumber questions. After answering ‘no’ to “Have you ever been a federal civilian employee?” the five or six questions immediately after that asked what kind of federal work I’d done. This is a computerized form?

I finally finished the application after dinner tonight. It took me twice as long to figure out how to get back into the form I’d saved last night as it did to finish, and after wrestling with it most of the night last night, I sort of felt as though I’d forgotten something this time. But I double-checked everything, and it seems to be complete. Now all that’s left is to fax in some documentation and wait for the phone call begging me to start working at the high end of the pay scale, after which I will certainly wake up.

 

Kind of a slow day at work. I had all my regular chores done way ahead of time. My boss slipped me a couple special projects that kept me busy for a while, but I still had some time to gaze out the window at the deceptively sunny day, deceptive because it was freaking cold. Temps stayed around the freezing mark, and the wind was blowing about thirty zillion miles an hour. If you sat inside with little to do but gaze at the sunshine, however, you might step out during your lunch hour without tightly wrapping your scarf around your neck, or making sure your hat was firmly seated on your head. Well, you might not, but I would.

 

I’m going to reveal a significant plot point of Stealth, the movie about an intelligent robot fighter jet, so if you want to see the movie and feel I might ruin the surprise for you, well, you’re a pretty sorry sack of beans, because anybody who can’t answer the question “Who died first?” doesn’t know the first thing about buddy movies, war movies, or movies in general. One of the three Naval aviators, acted (and I use the term loosely) by Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel and Jamie Foxx, gets killed when the robot gets struck by lightning and goes rogue on them. “Jamie Foxx,” Tim said, when I asked him which pilot got killed.

“Very good! How’d you know?” He didn’t even watch the movie, but he guessed correctly.

“The black guy always gets killed,” he answered. It’s such a solid movie cliché that a fifteen-year-old knows it.

If you didn’t see that coming, sorry, my bad, didn’t mean to ruin the surprise for you. On the other hand, if you couldn’t see that coming then you probably don’t watch this kind of movie, so I’ve done you a favor by warning you off. I watched it because a guy at work lent it to me. “You want to see a funny movie?” he asked as he handed it over.

I glanced at the cover. “I didn’t know it was a comedy.”

“I don’t think it was meant to be,” he said, “but a lot of it was hilarious.”

And a lot of it was pretty dull. Not the dogfights, they were awesome, but every time the action stopped and the actors (there’s that word again) started bantering, the movie slowed to a crawl that I dealt with by hitting the FFWD button. It was a harsh thing to do, but it was the only way I could maintain interest in what was going on.

Wednesday, March 15th, 2006

Sue complimented me on my new glasses, told me they were fashionable without being pretentious, or something like that. She added they made me look smart. Tim said the same thing. When I hear that glasses “make me look smart” I think of black horn-rims; that’s how far behind the fashion curve I am.

Two coworkers noticed the new glasses and gave a thumbs-up, and Barb likes them. The score so far: 5-0 in favor. I feel a bit less self-conscious each time they turn in a good review.

 

“See you in the morning, Rog,” I said to one of my co-workers on the way out the door last night.

“Unless I’ve got something better to do,” he answered, just to have something smart-alecky to say.

I stopped. “And even if you do, see you tomorrow. Kind of sucks, doesn’t it?”

 

It’s white-shirt day, not because I got the memo but because it’s the only clean shirt I have, except for one with long sleeves so short that I look like the next scene in a before/after growth elixir advertisement when I wear it. I meant to dump the rest of my button-downs in the wash machine last night but I got so caught up in finishing a job application that it slipped my mind until I was done, when it was far too late. An emergency back-up white shirt had been freshly laundered in last weekend’s frenzied clothes-washing — ‘frenzied’ because, while a lot of ‘washing’ took place, very little ‘folding’ or ‘putting away’ followed, so the washed clothes remained heaped in baskets at the foot of our bed. The cotton shirt had more wrinkles than a bus load of old codgers crowded into a resort hotel pool. I had to fill the steam iron with plenty of water.

It happened to be the only job-interview shirt I had when I came to Madison seven months ago. No use counting the blue uniform shirt in my luggage that only went with the blue uniform pants and blue uniform blazer I had worn professionally for oh so long. The only job interview I’d be wearing those to would be a re-indoctrination after they recalled me to active duty. It would have been a short interview, too. They would have asked me to raise my right hand, and if I had, they would have hired me. If I hadn’t, I would’ve moved on to the back-up job they had waiting for me, making little rocks out of big rocks.

That didn’t happen, thank doogie, but I did get calls for two other job interviews, and the second one was with the people who hired me, so this white button-down has a .500 batting average. He ought to retire when he’s on top.

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

Thursday night: Supper, then My Name Is Earl and The Office. No chatter with the boy tonight; he was deprived of computer access all day and felt an overpowering need to cram in as much gaming time as possible before lights out, so he was off to the basement as soon as he was done clearing the table.

Then ER came on, so I grabbed my laptop and scuttled off to the bedroom, closed the door, and tried not to listen to the melodrama. The overwrought intensity of the show was so great, however, that it was impossible to ignore. I typed at a frantic pace, desperate to distract myself, but the inane dialogue was getting through no matter what I did, paralyzing my phonological loop! Helllllp Meeeeee!

Wait! There could be — I dug into the briefcase past the odds and ends that plug into the laptop until I found it: ear buds! I called up Pandora on the web, asked for some music by Stan Getz, and voila! Audio isolation! Bliss!

Okay, I was in the bedroom, safely ensconced in my magical musical world, ready to drivel. Looked around, found a subject:

 

My darling wife still loves me; I know this because she bought me Pop Tarts when we went to the grocer’s last Friday. She hid them under the bed, only I noticed tonight they’re under the bed stand, which means either the cat swatted them out there because she needed more room to stretch out in her favorite hiding place, or Tim found them. Probably Tim found them. Yes. A quick check found the box was open and the two bonus strawberry Pop Tarts were gone, a classic example of my youngest son’s modus operandi (goes hunting for food blatantly hidden from him, leaves the broken-in boxes because he doesn’t give a rip, will brazenly deny any culpability when asked). Check of proof: the cat doesn’t like strawberry. (LATER: Barb laid claim to the strawberry Pop Tarts; bagged them to squirrel away in her office pantry, so I owe Tim an apology. Mea culpa.)

 

A storm was supposed to creep into south-central Wisconsin shortly after midnight last night and dump as much as six inches of snow on us before sunrise. I was almost certainly one of the few people no longer attending public school who was disappointed when I looked out the window and gazed upon a driveway entirely clear of any trace of snow.

The snow started falling at about sevenish this morning and, although the flurries made the storm look quite promising at first, it ended up leaving town at around four in the afternoon having dumped only an inch or so. What little accumulation stuck after sundown will certainly be gone by tomorrow noon. What a shame.

 

My spotty clothes have laid in a heap on the floor where I deposited them eight weeks ago after I unfortunately put them in the clothes drier with a leaky ball-point pen. I don’t know why I brought that up; it was just a random observation.

 

The closet in our bedroom was made with the cheapest hollow-core bi-fold doors available in 1967. If you remember when bi-fold doors were the height of modern urban closet technology, you’re old! At least as old as I am, anyway. The house we’re buying is even older: The closets there have sliding doors, but at least they work. One of the bi-fold doors in the rental popped out of its track almost immediately after we moved in and it would fold no more after that, bi or otherwise. Ooooh, I can’t wait to get out of this place! Six more weeks!

Friday, March 17th, 2006

The thought occurred to me, as I was toweling off after a shower, that this was Friday. Friday! How’d I not realize that the end of the week was nigh? It was like putting on a jacket I hadn’t worn in months and finding a wadded-up fin in a corner of a pocket. I’d be on the edge of my seat all day, waiting for five o’clock and the start of the weekend.

Friday means casual day, the one day at work I can wear a shirt so garish it looks like it was cut from the canvas of a candy-store awning. Most of my casual shirts are somewhat brightly-colored. The most conservative of the bunch is spattered top to bottom with tiny vignettes of Mighty Mouse beating up cats — SMASH! BIFF! POW!

A casual shirt for my taste that I can wear to work is a little hard to find because my employer insists that our shirts have collars, and almost all collared shirts are either carefully conservative, or pink. Pink is not my color.

But on a trip to a local Goodwill store, I spied with my little eye a shirt so dazzlingly candy-striped that I ran for it and grabbed it off the rack as though I were racing to get it before anybody else in the store got there before me. Which, in a way, I was, but only because I have a overdeveloped sense of paranoia. It was only after I took it home that I realized it would be perfect for casual day because it was a button-down shirt with a collar. See? It’s legal in every respect!

 

Speaking of legal in every respect, I took part in a sports pool at the office, strictly for fun, no money involved because that would be wrong. Also because I know nothing about sports, and this was one time I knew nobody would care much that I had no idea who was on the teams or even where they came from.

My criteria for picking winners relied entirely on picking the team with the name that sounded better: for instance, when Monmouth went up against Hampton, I chose Monmouth because ‘Hampton’ sounds snotty and ‘Monmouth’ sounds like the name of a radioactive monster insect that once battled Godzilla to the death. I picked Kentucky over whoever they went up against because the funniest guy I know is from Kentucky; it only stands to reason the team would be better. I picked Air Force to win (until they went up against Kentucky) because the Air Force has bombs (funnier beats bombs). And so on.

My methods weren’t entirely without merit; Monmouth really did with over Hampton, but so far as I know the team didn’t unleash an electromagnetic death ray during the game. Wouldn’t it have been sweet if they did, though?

 

As if to say “Happy Saint Paddy’s Day!” in the most insistent way possible, the radio station I listen to at work broadcast Celtic music, on fiddle and guitar, all morning long (they go to a talk format in the afternoon, when I usually tune in oldies), and the Irish pub on Main Street, just a few doors down from the bank, hired two bagpipers to stand and skrill traditional pipe music through the day. The pipers must have been from sturdy Celtic stock: It was thirty degrees out there and they were standing in the shadows, but wearing kilts nonetheless.

If you’re the kind of person who likes Celtic music, it was a heavenly day; if you don’t, it was hell on earth. Happily, I’m in the first category. My toe was tapping through the morning as I listened to performers on the radio sawing their bows and fiddles to dust, or cocking an ear for the pipers, their music easily carrying to the seventh floor. Not a drop of Irish blood in my family anywhere that I know of, but that music feels like home to me.

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

“I don’t see what’s so funny about this,” Barb said, reading the printout I’d brought home. It was one of those jokes that gets forwarded a zillion times through e-mail; Dan gave me a copy and I tucked it in my backpack because I knew Tim would love it.

We always hear “The Rules” from the female point of view. Now here are the rules from the male side. Please note they are all numbered ‘1’ — ON PURPOSE!

1. Men are not mind readers.

1. Learn to work the toilet seat. You’re a big girl. If it’s up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don’t hear us complaining about you leaving it down.

1. Crying is blackmail.

1. Ask for what you want. Subtle hints don’t work. Strong hints don’t work. Obvious hints don’t work. Just say it!

1. Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That’s what we do. Sympathy are what your girlfriends are for.

... and so on.

I was absolutely right: Tim thought it was a great laugh. Barb, however, didn’t see the humor in it. I’d venture to guess it’s because she’s a woman. It’s written strictly for men, and men communicate with all the delicacy of banging rocks together. We speak a language so far beneath the complexities of the way women interact that it’s almost outside the frequencies of their hearing. That, and the thing about the toilet seat spins her up something awful.

 

Transporter 2 was a huge disappointment. Some critics liked it better than the original movie because they said the sequel focused on plot and dialogue and didn’t rely so much on fight scenes, which only proves they didn’t understand the first movie at all. The Transporter was so much fun because the plot was no more than a rudimentary way to introduce bad guys to Jason Statham so he could kick the living snot out of them in ways that were not only impossible, they were hardly even imaginable. Transporter 2 was more like a weak James Bond movie (and weren’t they all, after Goldfinger?). There were only two or three fight scenes in the whole movie, but only one of them was worth watching and it was over in thirty seconds! Bore-ring!

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

It’s two people watching the Barrymore Theater’s production of The Greatest Story Ever Told with a cast of thousands.

It’s a theater audience rushing the stage in protest after the understudy muffed her lines.

It’s an antique dealer’s and collector’s fair, held at the Barrymore Theater on Atwood Avenue. It is.

I went there with the idea in my head that it was a flea market and I would find all sorts of wonderful trinkets and shiny geegaws and indispensable gadgets, so I was a bit disappointed to find hideously overpriced “vintage” clothing, collectable Star Wars toys and primitive furniture (for example, a pine-plank bench that sat exposed to the weather in a barnyard and was saved from becoming fuel for a furnace by an antique dealer who sold it for the freakish amount of three hundred dollars to a condominium dweller).

The day was not a complete loss, though. One of the dealers was selling off boxes of LPs for nothing and I found a Woody Herman album and what has to be a pretty rare recording of an authentic New Orleans Dixieland jazz band (two bucks!). And while Barb was pawing through the odds and ends of another dealer’s wares, she let out a yelp and held up a thermometer from Paul Bunyan’s Logging Camp Restaurant, where I spent a summer waiting tables to save money for my last year of college.

The dealers crammed way too many tables onto the stage and in the orchestra pit, forcing us to shuffle slowly and carefully past the crowds and, simultaneously, check and re-check our coats and bags to make sure they weren’t about to knock an antique desk lamp to the floor, dashing its barf-brown bakelite lampshade to pieces. Forty years ago that lamp’s owner would have thanked you for the excuse to buy a sleek new stainless-steel lamp, but the dealer would have charged us seventy-five bucks, and no haggling.

Speaking of haggling, I caught the tail-end of a deal between a skinflint who offered twenty-five dollars to for a cute little teapot that was marked fifty dollars. After thinking it over for a moment or two, the seller said he couldn’t let it go for anything less than thirty-six dollars. The tightwad demurred, but her husband wasn’t about to let it go. “Would you take thirty-five for it?” Yowza! This guy really knows how to wheel and deal, doesn’t he? I used to think I was the world’s worst haggler, but I feel like Donald Trump after watching that exchange.

 

After tucking our finds in the car, we ate brunch at Monty’s Blue Plate Diner, right across the street. I can tell you it was a hugely popular place this Sunday morning; a very trendy crowd was waiting up to twenty minutes, many of them in the parking lot where temps hovered near freezing, to hear their name barked over the PA system. Barb and I didn’t have to wait more than five minutes, though; when two stools opened up at the counter, we pounced on them like kittens on kibble. Barb tried the huevos rancheros, while I went for a big old stick-to-your-ribs stack of pancakes smothered in maple syrup (I may be wrong, but I don’t think it was real maple syrup; shhhh! Mum’s the word).

It’s worth mentioning that service was excellent; our waitress never let our coffee get cold or our ice water get warm, and when I found that one of my pancakes was underdone she whisked it away in a blink and served up another before I could tell her not to bother, I’d never finish the two I had left (they were each the size of trash can lids).

 

Barb and I joined a rally downtown yesterday to mark the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It was my first rally; I had no idea what to do. I didn’t even bring a sign, wear my fatigue jacket or paint a peace symbol on my face. The rally’s organizers didn’t seem to expect much, though; they were simply grateful they got anybody to show up. About two or three hundred gathered in the library mall, but more seemed to joint the march as it wound through the streets, until it seemed that there could have been as much as 1,000 in the parade, chanting and waving flags and signs.

Barb and I marched all the way, but we didn’t do any chanting. We’re not chanting people, and except for when they shouted “Troops Out Now!” the chanting was sort of lame, to be frank. I mean to say, “Troops Out Now!” is a very clearly defined message, but when a couple hundred people, even a thousand, chant, “This is what democracy looks like!” you can’t help but wonder about the irony. Same goes for calling for peace using Army road march cadences.

Weirdest thing about the march: The majority of the marchers were my age or older. College students pointed at us from the windows of their apartments, but I didn’t notice that many of them joined us. I guess that won’t happen unless the feds start drafting them.

Monday, March 20th, 2006

Here’s a math problem for you: If we close on the house on the 28th of April, do we have 38 days left, 39 or 40?

It’s not so much a math question, I guess, as a semantic one; it depends on whether you count today and the day of the closing. I don’t, which confuses the hell out of people. I don’t even try to explain it any longer.

But for you, I’ll make an exception: If the closing were tomorrow, a lot of people would say, “One more day, eh?” but the way I figure it, there would be no days left to count between now and then. Today doesn’t count because it’s not a whole day, and tomorrow’s the day, so it doesn’t count either. No days.

When I was counting down to the day I retired from the military, a few people, through a perverse trick of math, counted ‘today’ and the day of my retirement and added two days to my countdown. Using April 28th as an example, this is the way they figured it: twenty-eight days in April plus the twelve days this month equals forty days. Is that unfair or what?

I’ll let it pass when they add one day, but not two. When they add two, I spend quite a bit of time enlightening them. They rarely make the mistake again. Come to think of it, they rarely bring it up again.

So, by my count, we have 38 days left until we close on the house. Mark your calendars, and don’t try to correct my math because I won’t hear it.

 

The vending machine in the break room had no orange juice.

Mabel moves the apple crates at midnight.

Three green peas ate Lurleen.

Okay, enough code phrases for the resistance; it was orange juice I was after, but I’ve always been easily distracted. (And that was the point of mentioning the orange juice; how about that?) As I found none in the vending machine, I went to the bakery next door to buy a bottle from their cooler. Now, what are the odds a guy with the self-control of a Labrador puppy can go into a bakery without buying a doughnut? So close to nil as to make no difference. A row of cake doughnuts with chocolate frosting and brightly-colored candy sprinkles caught my eye, and next thing I knew I was pointing at one. It was happening without any conscious participation on my part at all; not like a demonic possession, more like simple distraction and laziness. I suppose I could have resisted, but that would have taken some effort and I am, by nature, more than a little lazy.

I should not be eating doughnuts for breakfast, I kept telling myself. This is the path to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and extreme lard-buttedness, although I’m thinking I may never have to fear that last one. I have the male gene that whittles my butt away to nothing with each passing year. This used to worry me until I looked around and noticed that lots and lots of guys my age, or close to it, have no butt at all. We eat chocolate-covered doughnuts with impunity! We chortle with glee at pot luck dinners and all-you-can-eat smorgasbords! We cannot ever find a pair of swimming trunks that will not slide straight down our bean-pole legs and float to the water’s surface after we dive into the pool. The trunks with the little tie-off made me feel confident enough to dive in, but I always give my hips a pat-down to make sure I’m still betrunked before I head up for air.

 

I clipped the New York Times crossword puzzle out of the Sunday paper and noodled over it in bed last night, trying my darndest to fall asleep in record time. I haven’t been able to solve more than ten percent of any of their crosswords for about the last two months, and in the last two weeks I haven’t even pretended to try.

I honestly didn’t figure on doing any better last night; I figured my eyes would be slamming shut before I read all the clues for the upper left corner, but, drat the luck, I jotted out one answer, than another, missed a few, got another, crossed one or two words, and before I knew it I had about half the upper left quadrant penciled in and I was only a few letters away from deciphering the theme when I ran up against a wall. I couldn’t break through no matter how hard I tried. When I reach that point, the best thing to do is put the pencil down and sleep on it.

Two more answers came to me almost instantly when I browsed through the empty squares tonight, and then I had the theme — it was puns! “Training with building strips” was BATTEN PRACTICE and “pics featured at Dollywood” was PARTON SHOTS. I pulled two or three more out of the air before I stalled again and had to put it down, wander away, and let the gray matter percolate over it. It’s the only way I ever come close to solving these things (I only ever ‘come close to solving’ them; I have yet to solve one in its entirety).

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

As usual, a cat woke me promptly at five this morning; she expected breakfast service directly after that. I made my coffee first, and took my time at it, but I fed them both before I climbed into the shower, so the anxious little jumper-onner got what she wanted, and in pretty good time, too. What a life. I took her into my home and now I do whatever she wants, when she wants it! Nice work, if you can get it. If only I could find someone to adopt me as her personal cuddle-bunny. Oh, wait, I did that.

Being a cuddle-bunny has its hazards. Have you ever wakened in the same position you fell asleep in? (That seems like too many “Ins” but I’m too busy to fuss with the grammar right now.) I don’t know about you, but when that happens to me, my arms and legs feel as though they’re made of lead and every joint has rusted solid. I can move only with great effort, and then only very slowly.

About an hour before the alarm went off this morning I woke feeling a lot like that. I wasn’t lying exactly the way I fell asleep; I had rolled to the left, and Barb had snuggled up against me with her arm over my shoulder. My left arm was a paralyzed lump of dead meat, but I’ll do anything to keep a cuddle going, so I didn’t move until she started snoring in my ear. I would’ve even put up with that for a cuddle, except she was snoring RIGHT. INTO. MY. EAR. and as much as I like a snuggle, my ears already ring all day long by without any more help. I flattened out as slowly as possible, but she rolled over almost right away, so I had to stay warm on my own until the cat jumped on me and it was time to get up.

 

I ended up with a killer cowlick this morning. No matter which direction I combed my hair or how often I applied The Paul Wolfowitz Method (extend tongue, slather teeth of comb with a generous helping of drool, apply to hair, repeat as necessary), it wouldn’t go away, not even when I tried reverse-psychology and combed my hair straight up in a cowlick. It continued to point crazily up and out in all directions.

It’s not that I mind having a cowlick. I rather like the devil-may-care suggestion it lends me, a sort of Dennis the Menace halo. What I can’t stand is the way it feels, as if I have a plume of feathers sprouting from the top of my head that waves in the breeze and shifts every time I look up from my desk. I hate that.

No, I don’t just hate that, I loathe it. It makes me want to combust. It’s so discombobulatin’ (you didn’t know I used to be the voice of Snaggletooth Tiger, did you?) that, when they cart me off to the gulag they won’t water-board me or assault my ears by blaring the same hip-hop tune over and over at top volume in my tiny cell, not if their web-crawling data miners have been watching these pages. No, they’ll spritz a bottle of Vidal Sassoon in my hair, tease it into the mother of all cowlicks, set an oscillating fan behind me and leave the room for twenty-four hours to let the irritation drive me screaming mad, which will take place in the first ten minutes.

 

It was a long Tuesday. Wait, that should have a capital initial in bold face, like this: Long Tuesday. “Long” could even use a couple more o’s, like this: Loooong Tuesday. They’re always long, but that makes it look and sound longer (if you’re a big dork like me).

The afternoon dragged. I was busy enough in the morning, but I had to make up stuff to do to keep me busy in the afternoon, and even then I kept stalling. I went to class after work and had to use every last minute of the lab period because I wasn’t getting a very good grip on the problems I had to solve. Then I had to drive back to downtown Madison to pick up Barb, who was doing volunteer work for Fair Wisconsin, a coalition of groups working to defeat the ‘defense of marriage’ amendment. We didn’t get home until ten o’clock, which leaves us just enough time to change into pajamas and crawl into bed. I’m pooped.

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006

“Did you sleep well?” I asked She Who May Always Snore In My Ear. (She read yesterday’s drivel and took a little dig at me last night. I couldn’t tell if she was miffed or just having fun with me. Snore in my ear all night, my love; it is as music to my dreams.)

“I always sleep well,” she answered groggily. “I just don’t wake well.”

 

Auntie Sue rubbed my legs with a wire coat hanger when I stopped by her office yesterday. It’s just how we say hello in our family: Hug, kiss on both cheeks, wire coat hanger up the pants legs. You should see the looks we get when we cross paths at church.

I kid. (As if you couldn’t figure that out.) I had enough static electricity building up in my trousers all day yesterday to light every fluorescent bulb and neon sign on The Great White Way, but since there were no electric lights around my pants legs had to make do with bunching up around my knees and staying there, no matter how much I pulled and smoothed them down. By the end of the day I was so crazy from pulling and smoothing that, when Sue asked me, “What’s up?” it was the first thing out of my mouth. That’s when she accosted me with the coat hanger.

It was probably some tip from a Martha Stewart magazine, but I’ve seen Bill Nye the Science Guy do similarly goofy things on his television show and his crazy experiments work, so I stood still while she invaded my personal space, instead of bugging my eyes out, wailing, “You’re MAD, woman!” and fleeing the scene. The trick didn’t work; my trousers stayed resolutely bunched up around my knees, comically displaying my turkey legs for the world to point and chuckle at.

 

“Was Pink Floyd the greatest rock band of all time, or what?” Barb asked, while I was listening to a cut from Dark Side of the Moon this evening, taking me by surprise just a little bit. I didn’t know she was such a fan.

If they weren’t the best, they were up there in the top five. Dark Side of the Moon was one of those albums I played over and over again, I knew every word of The Wall by heart, and I was one of the first kids in line to cough up my lunch money for a copy of The Final Cut when it went on sale at the campus bookstore.

Tim calls Pink Floyd’s sound ‘alternative’ and says it “seriously weirds me out,” but he couldn’t say why. I loved to turn out the lights and listen to it half-asleep through headphones.

Peter Gabriel was the only other favorite I would wait in line for back then — and, now that I mention it, the only rock star I went out of my way for to see in concert. He went on tour, shortly after he released So, I think, and I took the train from Bedford where I was stationed (it was my first station in the Air Force) to Manchester, quite a long ride, but well worth it, even though my ticket was in the nosebleed section. I liked the concert so much, I ran down to London next weekend and saw him again.

 

Howl’s Moving Castle was not my favorite cartoon by Hayao Miyazaki (that’ll always be Spirited Away), but it was an awful lot of fun, and it became available on DVD just recently, along with My Neighbor, Totoro. Artist Gregg Chadwick celebrated the home video release by assembling a delightful collection of the drawings Miyazaki made to prepare the artists who would help animate the cartoons, and captioning them with commentary like this from film critic AO Scott:

Miyazaki is both an extravagant fantasist and an exacting naturalist; as a storyteller, he is an inventor of fables that seem at once utterly new and almost unspeakably ancient.

I couldn’t have said it better. You should check it out. Right now. No, really, check it out. Go.

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

Although usually I sketch out the beginnings of this drivel in the early morning, at home, over a cup of coffee and a bowl of hot cereal, while the rest of the O-folk are still asleep, it’s a project that gets spread out through the morning. The laptop goes with me to work, where I flesh out the ideas, and I usually end up posting them to the net from the Central branch of the public library, a block off capital square. There’s a three-tiered book case in the Large Print Section that’s just the right height to be a writing desk, where I set up the laptop and pound away at the keys.

All this to explain how I noticed, as my eyes wandered while I collected my thoughts, the many books by author M.M. Kaye: Death in Berlin, Death in Kashmir, Death in Cyprus, Death in Andamanskaya, Death in Zanzibar. Is this guy obsessing, or has he simply overdone the franchise?

 

We’ve been listening to Wicked on the drive to and from work for about two weeks; I’m still not sure I like it. Don’t tell my darling bride or she’ll think I don’t want to listen to it. I do; after listening to almost half the recording, I really have to finish, but I can’t say I like it yet.

I started out liking it. The first chapter was a treat, the Wicked Witch eavesdropping on the Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and Dorothy beside the Yellow Brick Road. I liked the focus on the Witch’s point of view, and I liked the idea of exploring her background.

But once author Gregory Maguire went back to the Witch’s past, before her birth, even, the world he conjured up wasn’t very Oz-like, the only way I can think of to describe the Technicolor world I know from the movie, which for me is the definitive source (I started reading The Wizard of Oz today, and haven’t read any of the other Oz books). In the movie’s incarnation, Oz was a dream, a world Dorothy conjured up to wander in while she recovered from a bump on the head. The movie, I thought, did an especially good job of capturing the anything-goes feel of the dream world.

The world of Wicked is a fantasy, but not particularly dream-like. Maguire painted the land’s various mysticisms in matter-of-fact descriptions of gods and magic without much depth beneath them. Elphaba, as Maguire has named the Witch of the West, was born green because her father and mother had a spat on the eve of her birth, said something vaguely portentous about evil, and there you go.

The politics of Maguire’s Oz are likewise pretty clunky. The Wizard lords over Oz like a Hitler, ruthlessly crushing dissent, but it’s a dictatorship described in bland, academic tones. And really — can you believe that the fumbling, chubby-cheeked Man Behind The Curtain was Hitler?

Maguire’s not much good at imagining conversation, either (I’m on a roll; I might as well keep on trashing him). The Witch speaks in a believable voice, but the rest of the characters affect various dialects that are more distracting than colorful, and their exchanges seem forced. Real people don’t talk to one another this way, not even when they were likely to break into song. (It just occurred to me that the Witch never sang in the movie. Even the coroner got to warble out four couplets in melody. She was at her most theatric when she did that great cackle and laughed like a maniac.)

And there’s one other thing that bugs me every time it comes up: Elphaba’s phobic aversion to water. Anybody familiar with the story knows why she won’t go near it, but Maguire never explores her aversion in any way, only brings it up now and then. It’s pointless to be reminded again and again how she avoids it, without spinning a story out of it — it could have been gripping, for instance, to hear how she learned that water was deadly to her. But a story never emerges.

But I’m in it for the long-haul; I’ve got to find out how it ends. Well, I know how it ends, for the Witch; but I’ve got to find out how Wicked ends. And once this is all over I’m going to rent The Wizard of Oz to get Oz right in my head again.

 

“I would definitely call my battleship the Crushasaurus.” Tim wants a battleship of his very own, at least as much as he wanted a car and probably more so, and he’s monumentally bummed nobody makes them any more. It’s sort of the same way I feel about the Volkswagen Beetle, except that his desires work on a much grander scale; money’s no object.

Those new ones are cute, but they’re not the same as the trusty old cans that Volkswagen used to be most well-known for. I was the owner of three different vans, myself, but I bought a bug to drive to work when we returned to the States from Germany, married just three years and so poor we only had one ‘o’ to spell it with. The front fenders were rusting off and the engine hatch was stove in from when the car had been rear-ended, so the owner let me have it for four-hundred bucks.

The gate guard at Buckley air base shook his head when he saw it and told me, “I thought I had the junkiest vee-double-you in the state, but yours beats mine, hands-down!”

It may have been a rolling junk heap, but that bug made it through the worst snow storms Colorado could throw at me. One morning after work, after the snow plows had done their darndest to block all the side roads, I gunned the engine and the beetle nosed up and over every single drift; it was so short from front to back that it never hung up on a snowbank, just tipped right over and kept on going, easily sailing over the deep snow on the unplowed back streets like a skiff over the surface of a calm lake. It was almost magical.

Tim still remembers it as “the blue bug.” He was all of two or three years old and used to ride in a second-hand child seat in the back, but he can easily describe all the goofy rubber monster heads a previous owner had installed over the knobs on the dashboard, and the fossil I found tucked behind an armrest, so he must have been at least as taken with it as I was. Kids love go-karts, and a bug is like the best go-cart ever made. Too bad our roads are just too fast and our cars too big for them any more.

Friday, March 24th, 2006

“What have you been up to all day?” I asked Tim, over a dinner of meat-lover’s pizza. He’s been on break all week long, and his school’s still on break until Tuesday.

“Well, I slept pretty much all day,” he answered, when he finally chewed his way through a mouthful. “Until almost three this afternoon. I woke up over and over, but kept falling back asleep. I slept nearly the whole time you were working.” He thought that was mighty funny.

 

This popped out of my brain today, for no reason I know of:

ohm eye gout dime boar two tiers

No, wait, not for no reason at all; I was, in fact, bored to tears at the time, but that’s just background noise. This weird affliction strikes me from out of the blue. If the plot to the all-American novel ever hit me the way these things do, I could probably retire for real. But no, I get these little tics.

It usually starts with a phrase that’s stuck in my head — in this case, it was “oh, my god, I’m bored to tears” — and then the first two or three words transmogrify into two or three words that have nothing to do with the original phrase, except that they sound the same. When this phrase transmogrified, I got stuck after “ohm eye gout” and it became a puzzle I played with, breaking the sounds into pieces and trying to fit them back together. The goal is to use no word that’s in the original phrase, and preferably to use very short words that break up the visual flow but still scan to sound much the same.

I had the song “Le Poissons” (from The Little Mermaid) stuck in my head one afternoon, and after the name “Champs-Elysses” knocked around in my phonological loop for a while, this popped out:

Sean say ‘lease,’ eh?

Because, you know, Sean say ‘lease’ all the time. I didn’t say it was a particularly intelligible word game, only that it was a pleasant diversion. At least I’m not making up puns.

You wouldn’t happen to know what this kind of word play is called, would you? Sometimes it turns out to be a pun, but not always. I know it’s got a more precise name; I read an essay or a story about it several years ago and I seem to remember the French have a word for it. The story used the example Isle of View, a transmogrification of “I love you,” as an example; I tried punching that into google but I got about fifty-thousand hits, forty-nine thousand of which were about a fantasy novel by Piers Anthony. It must be a freaking popular novel.

 

The baskets. I think I mentioned the baskets.

We’ve perfected the art, such as it is, of living out of laundry baskets, not because we’re lazy (well, maybe a little bit), but because doing the laundry takes too long, and life’s short enough — who wants to spend time folding t-shirts? Bore-ing!

Sunday is usually wash day. The whole kit and kaboodle goes through the wash machine, comes out of the drier and ends up heaped in the baskets on top of the machines. Sometimes one of us gets the brainy idea to haul the baskets up to the bedroom and leave them at the foot of the bed, where they’re easy to get at, but about half the time they get left on top of the drier, a huge tower of overflowing clothes baskets.

We all talk ourselves into believing that this works just fine, and of course it does, until it’s time to dig out a pair of undershorts and a t-shirt; they’re at the very bottom of the basket in the very bottom of the stack of baskets, naturally. Re-stack them any way you like, but it’s a physical law of some sort that, when you come back to them the following morning, your underwear will be on the bottom again, and nobody will be able to explain how the baskets got stacked that way.

Having to dig underthings from the bottom of the basket not only makes dressing in the early morning hours a nagging pain in the keester, it also upsets the carefully-laid order of clean clothes. We’ve not only convinced ourselves it’s better to stumble down to the chilly wash room in the darkest hours of the morning to claw our way, puffy-eyed, through unfolded clothes, we also believe that, if we carefully lay the clothes out flat, one layer smoothed out on top of the one before, that it almost sort of counts as folding them. If we lay them out flat, they won’t get any wrinkles, right?

Of course they will. It’s another one of those annoying physical laws. We can’t go digging for underwear at the bottom of the basket without disturbing the smooth layer of clothing on top. What am I saying: The clothes don’t get ‘disturbed,’ they get wadded, balled-up and crushed until even the stretch socks need fifteen minutes under a steam iron.

We’ve tried other ways, even the oh-so-conventional method of folding the clothes into neat little squares and systematically stacking them in dresser drawers where they’re easily found and wrinkle-free, but we ask ourselves: Do we really want to be seen by one and all as ‘conventional?’ We do not! There’s so much more to life, and our way of caring for clothes (patent pending), perfected over the years, works so well that we can’t see ourselves forsaking it. How sad would that be?

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

How many times has this happened to you: You’re driving down the road and the driver of the oncoming car is yakking on her cell phone, not paying any attention at all to you when you cross into her lane, so you smack right into her car head-on? Don’t you just hate people who do that?

That’s not exactly what happened to me this morning. Almost, but I was able to avoid that last bone-shattering, fender-bending part. And we weren’t in the road, technically. I was trying to cross the parking lot to get to the drive-through of the Muddy Moose so I could get a hot cuppa joe. But other than not crashing and not being in the road, the rest happened just like that.

Worst thing about it was, she had just pulled out of the drive-through and had a steaming take-away latte in the cupholder of her Dodge Monstro, so it’s not like it was all that complicated for her to figure out what I was trying to do, if she’d been giving any of her attention at all to driving her road hog instead of trading gossip with her girlfriend, who now that I think of it was probably threading her way through traffic, too, half her mind on driving and the other half on whatever she was clucking to the hen I was about to smack into.

All I wanted to do was swing wide to the left side of the parking lot, which is the only way to get into the drive-through. She was coming out of the drive-through and was trying to keep to the right, which was, coincidentally, my left. We ended up in one and the same lane — only I was there first, dammit!

I set the brakes to claim the lane in my name, and mine only, and she came to a slow stop in front of me while brightly-colored cartoon question marks erupted from her head and I watched her say something along the lines of, “Hand on a sec, Delores, this moron’s trying to front-end me.” When her lips stopped moving and her brain finally devoted itself 100% to driving, she quickly figured out what I wanted to do and cranked the wheel of her Monstro around to steer out of our potential collision. I waved thankfully, turned into the drive-through and got myself a decaf.

 

When I write drivel at the table, I sit cross-legged and Bonkers will always, always jump into my lap and spread himself out across my legs. I’ve never met such a consistently lappy cat, not even Eliza.

The only trouble, and it’s a small thing, really, is that, once Bonkers has made himself comfortable in my lap, I’m loathe to disturb him. If he’s got his head propped on my knee, I’ll even keep one arm in the air to avoid brushing against his ear, which will flutter and twitch if I don’t. I can keep that up to the point when pins and needles dance all up and down my legs and just before my hips feel as though they’ll spontaneously dislocate themselves if I don’t shift position within the next minute.

Why do we keep cats? It must be for perks like this.

 

We tried to watch Rent last night, but couldn’t gin up any interest in it after the first musical number. Barb and I both love most musicals, and we both like the first song (it’s got a clunky name, “525,600 Minutes,” but it’s very catchy and enjoyable)[CORRECTION: Barb says this song is called “Seasons of Love,” and indeed at quick search on the internet confirms that she is right, not that I doubted her; I should have looked that up in the first place], but there was something missing from Rent. Barb didn’t say any more than that she couldn’t maintain any interest in it. I found it hard to get to that moment when I believed that people break into song whenever the plot changes direction, a pretty critical juncture when watching a musical.

Just as critical, the songs didn’t seem very singable. That’s not a terribly useful criticism, but even Roger Ebert found it hard to explain. How about an explanation something like this: The music never seemed to coalesce into a unity of words and melody. The words kept cutting up the tunes, and the lyrics were phrased in a way that didn’t make them very easy to follow. Almost all the numbers sounded like choppy, unpoetic dialogue forced into song. If I’d gone to four years at Juliard I might be able to explain it better than that, but this will have to do.

We watched about twenty minutes of it, then gave up. Barb watched more of it later, but said it didn’t improve much.

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

There was plenty I had to do today: I had to study my homework, and I had to clean the bathroom. I could knock off the bathroom in about an hour or so, but the homework was an unknown variable. I’m still trying to wrap my head around populating multidimensional arrays. Just the sound of it is scary, don’t you think?

I pieced together a notional timetable as I ground the beans for our morning pot of java: fetch the paper, read the headlines, write some drivel, clean the bathroom. I should have had plenty of time to get that done before noon, leaving me plenty of time after lunch to shoehorn some study time in before dinner.

All it took to blow my well-intentioned plans to pieces was a short walk to the end of the driveway. In the space of less than thirty feet I couldn’t help but notice the sky was clear, the air was warm and the sun felt like a mother’s loving kiss on my face. I stood at the end of the driveway without picking up the rolled-up newspaper, and as I gazed over the farm field across the road I figured I could waste a gorgeous morning like this by spending it crouched on the bathroom floor scrubbing scum off the underside of a toilet, or I could lace up my walking shoes and take a look around. It was sort of a no-brainer.

 

It’s very nearly impossible for me to describe what they do in the stage show Stomp without rolling my eyes and starting, “I know this sounds kind of dumb ...”

The opening number, for instance, began with a single man sweeping the stage with a push broom. For at least two full minutes, he simply swept the stage, raising alarmingly huge clouds of dust, before pretending to notice that he had an audience. He smiled at us, picked a fuzzball out of the bristles of his push broom, and flicked it into the first row, grinning at the person it landed on as if to say, “Paid a lot for that seat, didn’t you?”

Then he went back to sweeping the stage, just sweeping.

A second performer came out, sweeping, and as they swept they made up a barely noticeable rhythm to their work, brush-brush tap, brush-brush tap, nothing terribly impressive, no more interesting than the way you and I might goof around to break the boredom of sweeping a wide-open floor.

It was the forth or fifth performer who added a counter-beat to the rhythm they were building up, and after all seven performers were on stage they began to thump the handles of their brooms against the floor. They threw the brooms through the air. They clacked the handles together as if sword-fighting, and they stomped across the stage like berserk tap dancers. It was like watching a half-dozen Gene Kellys turned loose on a sound stage with nothing to play with but whatever fell out of the janitor’s closet.

Every five minutes or so the lights went down and came up again on a different act, introducing a new exploration of rhythm teased out of a set of everyday items: folding chairs, plastic bags, newspapers, plastic drums, hub caps. They moderated the percussive acts by playing with the tones beaten out of long and short lengths of plastic pipe, or lashed themselves to the wall and tapped a tune out of road signs, tire rims and propane tanks. They somehow kept that up for two hours. I’d have to eat dozens of sugar doughnuts washed down with pots of coffee to keep up the energy they must have burned up dancing around the way they did for that long.

I know it sounds kind of stupid, maybe even tedious. More than once I found myself wondering how they sold the idea to a producer in the first place, and I have no idea how they convinced audiences to go see it. There was a moment at the end of the first act, the one where they banged the brooms together that ended when they pounded a climactic rumble of broomsticks against the floor. There was no hush as sometimes follows immediately after the end of a performance; the rumble from the last beat of the broomsticks rolled across the stage and was reflected back to them transformed into a roar of applause from the audience, and I thought I detected in the smile of the troupe a bit of relief that gave away what most performers must feel when they’ve connected with the public: “They bought it!”

To hold on to the connection, the lights came up on the next act, a single performer standing at the footlights. It was the same guy who opened the show with a push broom, but this time he had no props. He looked out at us as if wondering what to do, then almost experimentally clapped twice. A few scattered members of the audience returned his clap. He hung his head. He looked up again, pleaded with his eyes, and again he clapped twice. This time, the whole audience clapped twice in return; not all together, not very loudly, but they answered. He teeter-tottered one hand in the air: So-so. Then he beat out a little scat number against his legs, arms, chest and butt, and ended by clapping twice. We answered the clap loudly. He pumped an arm in the air. He had us.

From then on it was nothing but fun! I think my favorite act was a rhythm quartet playing stainless-steel kitchen sinks, hung around their necks and sounding a bit like Calypso drums, a bit of willful misdirection because it quickly turned into a golden slapstick moment. The sinks were filled with water to give each a different pitch, but the four stooges turned it from a musical act into a pie fight, ending with a perfectly-executed potty joke, if there is such a thing. Barb laughed so hard she nearly peed herself.

We had seats in the second row, but I think we could’ve enjoyed this show from the nosebleed seats in the third balcony. In fact, the final act, the now-famous garbage-can finale that most people know about, was something I would have preferred hearing from about a hundred feet away BUT having said that, I’d have to admit it was the perfect finale to a show like this — whatever kind of show this is.

Our standing ovation at the end of the show, by the way, earned an encore performance: more happy-clappy audience participation. One guy in the third row got so into it that he earned a broom, thrown from the stage.

Monday, March 27th, 2006

I did a little typing with my face at work this afternoon. I was so bored and tired that I just couldn’t help nodding. The morning went by quickly, with plenty of work to do, but the afternoon was awfully slow and, with nothing to focus on, my mind kept drifting away.

It didn’t help that I’d been awake, on and off, since about two-thirty this morning. A sour stomach from a touch of twenty-four hour virus woke me, and a panic attack from trying to figure out how I was going to get my homework done kept me awake. The damn cats had laid claim in the night to a substantial portion of my half of the bed, too, and wouldn’t give it up for several hours. I devoted a lot of time and strategy to prying some real estate away from them by using my bony knees and elbows as levers, and finally achieved a very limited measure of success when they finally jumped down from the bed and stalked away in disgust, about a half-hour before my alarm clock went off.

 

I haven’t done a lot of hiking or biking in the last nine months. To tell the truth, civilian life has made me downright slothful. I guess the biggest problem with laziness is the temptation; it’s so much easier than having to work for something.

Case in point: My short hike down the Glacial Drumlin Trail yesterday morning. I drove to the trailhead. Tim took a special kind of perverse pleasure in pointing out to me how stupid it seemed that I was driving somewhere to go hiking, but heck, it’s a mile from my house, and I’m well aware how I’ve let my legs go flabby during the winter. I didn’t want to be tuckered out before I got so far as the beginning of the trail.

The Glacial Drumlin Trail is an old railroad grade turned into a bike path; it’s as flat as milk in a saucer. You never see freight trains porpoising over hills in large part because steel tires on steel rails couldn’t be any slipperier unless you greased them with lard, so rail lines tended to be as straight and flat as the track gangs could make them. I figured it wasn’t going to be the most taxing workout, so I planned for a round trip of about three miles, give or take a hundred yards, just out to the bridge over Koshkonong Creek and back. I’m not ashamed to tell you that by the time I was coming into the home stretch on the return trip I was wishing I had cut it short by at least a half-mile. I’ve got to get out more.

Wait, I said that wrong: What I was really wishing was that I could keep on going at least another half mile, but my knees soon put in a passionate and rather lengthy complaint about the distance I chose to travel; they creaked and popped every time I crouched to snap a photo, and when I finally made it back to the parking lot the tendons up the backs of my legs were so tight I could have plucked out a mariachi tune on them. Next time, I’ll have to make use of the stretches I learned in all those years of group PT.

The western end of the Glacial Drumlin Trail starts in Cottage Grove, not because Cottage Grove is any place special, but because the railroad is still using the track bed until it gets here. The rails come to an abrupt halt before they cross Heather Drive, and the bike trail takes over from there. It keeps going a little more than fifty miles east across Wisconsin to Waukesha, just outside of Milwaukee, not that I was thinking of going that far. Well, not this time, anyway, but it would make a pretty cool day trip to hop on a bike and go at least as far as the first town, Deerfield, about seven miles on from Cottage Grove. Yesterday, I just wanted to make it to that bridge.

The trailhead is on Main Street behind a tavern; an access road winds over the hill beyond the parking lot and parallels the railroad tracks for about a quarter-mile. The crushed-gravel surface of the trailhead was still a little mucky in the low spots, rutted where bicyclists cut through it, but once it leveled out on the old road bed the going was so dry and smooth and firm that I naturally stretched my legs out and settled into a Paul-Bunyanish stride (that soon had my knees begging for mercy).

They say Spring officially started about a week ago. I had my doubts. The foliage left over from last fall was not entirely gone; brown leaves, still clinging here and there to the branches of crippled-looking oak trees, rattled in the light breeze. The snow was melted out of all but the darkest shadows of the embankments, but it was still too early for any of the trees or undergrowth to bud out yet, and that’s what marks Spring for me.

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Tonight I was just a heartbeat or two away from withdrawing from the computer software course I’m taking at tech school. Out of the five labs assignments that were due I had finished two, and I had no idea how to even start on the section project; that was due tonight, too. The material wouldn’t sink in unless I spent hours reading each paragraph, tinkering with the software, re-reading the text a couple more times again, and finally slamming my head in the refrigerator door until the light went out. That was supposed to be a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ joke, but it’s late and I’ve been instantiating array structures, so you’ll forgive me if I’m a little unfocused.

The instructor introduced some of the material to us before we left for spring break, but he didn’t want us to start anything until we came back, so I didn’t. I read the assigned text; it all seemed to make sense, and I figured we’d have plenty of time during class to work on the labs. Silly me.

I think I spent most of the period working on the first lab assignment, and I managed to cobble together a working sketch of the second lab in the remaining twenty minutes. At that rate, I should have been able to finish the additional three labs in about forty days and forty nights ... and then there was that pesky project. It was meant to combine all the techniques I should’ve learned while accomplishing the lab work. Because I was learning lab techniques at the rate of about zero per hour, the project would have required an infinite amount of time to complete, or an infinite number of monkeys. I had neither.

The instructor gave a short lecture tonight, then turned us loose to work. When he asked me if I had any questions, I told him to leave me and help somebody who was close to finishing. That’s the basic premise of triage, right? First help the ones who can be saved, then shoot the rest, rather than postpone the inevitable? I hunched over my keyboard and waited for the sound of the gunshot.

Astoundingly, he didn’t put me out of my misery; he was very patient with me, even after it became clear that I had no idea how to do the work and wouldn’t have it done before the end of class. “Will you have it done before midnight?” he asked. He was serious. It’s a rule. We have until midnight on the night of class to turn in our homework, although I thought it was a rhetorical flourish, or at best a technicality. I didn’t anybody actually did that.

I had to be frank with him: There was no way I could finish the work, even if I considered the possibility of staying up until midnight, which I didn’t. Then he asked, “Do you think you could have it done by Friday?”

I blinked at him. “Could you allow that?” Sure, he said matter-of-factly. So I said I’d give it a try, and if I wasn’t getting anywhere I’d ask him via e-mail. You can always fix things up by e-mail.

 

It’s happening! Tiny green shoots are popping up from the bulbs that have been hiding beneath the flower beds around the capital. As if to underline the point, a cold, wet March drizzle fell all through the afternoon yesterday — not snow, not sleet, not a rain-snow mix. We’re supposed to get more as we head for the weekend, and the weatherman, that epitome of accuracy, that tribune of veracity, is calling for temps to climb into the high fifties. Spring has come (the grass is grizz).

 

I still don’t know how I feel about assisted suicide, but our toaster is begging us for it, so I may have to make up my mind a lot sooner than I thought.

It made its latest cry for help last night when Tim started cussing over it. “The handle won’t stay down,” he said, trying to weight it with a dinner plate and failing in such a spectacularly slapstick way that I wanted to film it for the top prize on America’s Funniest Videos.

Barb wasn’t surprised. “I’d say we got our money’s worth out of it,” she said, not at all sorry that the toaster was on its last legs. We paid all of four bits at a garage sale for it, back when we were living out of suitcases and piecing together a household by visiting thrift shops. We knew it was a piece of junk, but for half a buck we figured it would at least be a good doorstop if it didn’t measure up in the toasting department. It didn’t, but we kept using it anyway.

The bread came out darkly toasted on one side, nearly raw in spots on the other, and it never popped up far enough to grab it out of the slots. I thought Barbara was going to take me over her knee and beat my behind with a strap the morning I got so frustrated from trying to pick toast out of the slots that I stuck a butter knife in the toaster without unplugging it.

Oh, sure, tell me you’ve never done that. No; I meant look me in the eye and tell me. Yeh, I thought so.

Now it’s come to this: I have to stand over it with a thumb on the handle if I want toast with my morning cup o’ joe, which I do, so I did. And, as I was standing there waiting for two slices of nut bread to toast, I quickly noticed, to my chagrin, that I left none of my refreshment within arm’s reach of the toaster; my OJ was next to the coffee, just out of reach. Death’s too good for this toaster.

Wednesday, March 29th, 2006

I got a drink of water down the wrong pipe this morning and was immediately wracked by a coughing fit so violent I felt my eyes popping out of my head. Not sort of like they might pop out. They very definitely would have popped out if I’d kept on coughing like that.

I’ll take a moment to admit that, no, my eyes have never before popped out of my head. I have only my imagination to, rather than the benefit of experience, to tell me what it feels like when my eyes pop out. That, and one or two very colorful stories I heard, one from a friend at work, the other from the actor Raul Julia who supposedly poked his own eye out during dinner at a restaurant.

I’m going to bet the farm, though, that it wouldn’t feel half as awful as the coughing fit that nearly did the trick today. That felt as though I’d swallowed a swarm of bees, yet I was so startled by the sensation of my eyeballs nearly squeezed from their sockets that I pressed the heels of my hands against my face and completely forgot to carry on coughing.

But my eyes didn’t pop out, and there was still quite a bit of water in the wrong pipe. I hacked and spat a bit more.

What if they had popped out? I don’t know what to do with popped-out eyeballs, do you? I’d guess the best thing for them would be to keep them moist and warm, but would I be able to pop them in my mouth without completely grossing out? Could I even get them into my mouth, or are they connected to my head on a short leash? And do I really want a close-up look at my throat?

I wonder if my head tried to squeeze my eyes out as some kind of evolutionary self-preservation mechanism, like maybe my brain wanted to take a look down my throat for signs of obstruction. Ah, I see I’ve wandered far out into left field.

 

“You’re wearing a button,” Dan noticed, as we stood waiting for the elevator yesterday evening after work. Yes, I was wearing a button; it was about the size of a tea saucer and it was pinned to the strap of my man-purse, which, when slung over my shoulder, put it right next to my face. It was hard to miss. You might even say impossible.

I’m not normally the kind of guy to wear buttons. It feels like wearing my heart on my sleeve. Anybody who knows me well, knows I’ll discuss my concerns passionately; heck, I’ll talk you to death about virtually any subject except professional sports. I’m not one to foist an opinion on you, though. If you ask for it, I figure, well, you asked for it! But if you didn’t, I’m not in your face with it. Hence my aversion to buttons.

And buttons are usually too cute by half if they’re the manufactured kind. Worse, the home-made variety can be so serious that many of them seem to seethe anger; you get the feeling from some of the most strident button-borne opinions that the wearer might have written it in blood, if only he’d thought of that before he sealed it behind cellophane and put a pin on the back.

The one I decided to wear, though, seemed right for the times. It combined a number of signs and sayings so deftly that I felt compelled to buy it and parade around with it in plain view, shamelessly. What a hussy I can be.

 

Is there anything more mind-blowingly useful than a laptop computer? I mean, so far as computer go, obviously; a laptop wouldn’t be much use hemming a pair of new dress slacks, or skiing the blue diamond slopes at Keystone, but for sheer gee-whiz kicks it’s got to be what television was to the fifties and sixties, only more so.

With television you have to take what they give you, but a laptop’s like having a library with you everywhere you go. Not only can you listen to Louie, Louie, but you can also look up the lyrics (the real lyrics and the made-up dirty ones), find out when it was written, who wrote it, and how it made The Kingsmen filthy rich.

The portability of a laptop’s got a television beat all to hell, too. I started writing this drivel in the morning at the kitchen table; I’ll write some more at my desk, in the thirty minutes or so between the time Barb drops me off downtown and the time the whistle blows at eight; and I’ll finish it up after dinner, although on Thursday nights I usually work on it in bed, while I’m trying to hide from ER.

Thursday, March 30th, 2006

Phone call to the computer help desk at Madison Area Technical College:

“Kin I hep you?” He sounded like he was eating.

“I’d like to work on my project for a class I’m taking in visual basic,” I explained. “Where can I find a computer to work on that?”

“Your instructor should be able to tell you that,” he answered.

What the hell? I’m asking you, fellah. “My instructor told me to call the help desk. I got your phone number off the web site.”

“You could try the computer lab,” he offered.

“What room is that in?”

“Two-twenty something, A or B, I think. Or C. You’ll have to look around when you get to the top of the escalator.”

“How late is it open?” I asked.

“This is the library computer help desk. I don’t know about the computer lab.”

Oh ye gods, give me strength. “Is there a phone in the computer lab so I can call and ask?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. Just go up and look at the schedule, you’ll find out.”

“Thanks for all your help,” I said, trying to wrap this up and troweling on an extra-heavy layer of sarcasm.

“Oh, no problem, you’re very welcome, call again.”

A computer help desk that isn’t helpful. What an unusual notion.

 

We got paid today. Usually it’s on Friday, but this week Barb said today’s the day, and I’ve learned not to question these things. I go to the teller line and present the check she gave me, bring back a stack of green and we all live happily ever after. It’s an arrangement that’s worked so well all these years it would be foolish for someone as financially inept as I am to tinker with things.

The stack isn’t so green these days, have you noticed? First the twenties got sort of tan in the middle, and this week was the first time I’ve seen the new sawbucks. The paper is printed overall in a sepia tone, the green portrait and border is overlaid with a red bird, perhaps a turkey, on the left and the words “We the People” on the right, and tiny little 10s are scattered all over the front and back like candy sprinkles on a pop-tart. Total chaos.

I went on a trip to France with a buddy of mine a long time ago. We were both Midwestern boys, used to good old by-God Merkan greenbacks, and when we exchanged our money we had no end of fun trying to figure out if the French francs looked more like candy wrappers or wallpaper. (They looked like both, depending on the bill.) Our new tenners aren’t quite that garish, but they’re not far off, either.

“Bet you get a lot of comments about those,” I remarked to the teller.

“Most people say they look burned,” she said.

 

Tim’s inherited whatever gene it is that makes people need to turn on the radio in the morning, not to listen to anything in particular, just to have it on. My mother had the same gene; it must have skipped a generation, because I love the peace and quiet in the early morning.

All this week, Tim has been snapping on the kitchen radio as soon as he comes up for breakfast. Doesn’t mess with the station it’s on; doesn’t care. It’s usually tuned to National Public Radio for the morning news; he doesn’t listen. “I just need some noise,” he explained. “Silence creeps me out.”

This is Tim’s first full week back at school after two weeks of staying up until two o’clock in the morning and sleeping until three in the afternoon on his school’s spring break. Or rather, it would have been a full week, if he’d gone to school on Monday. He thought Tuesday was the first day back to the grindstone after break, and we didn’t bother to check because Monona Grove has so many ‘teacher work days’ and other breaks that Tim’s home almost as much as he’s in class. When he went in Tuesday morning, all his buds were asking him where he was on Monday. Lucky for him that nothing much got done that day.

 

Children’s books like Why Mommy Is A Democrat, and Help! There’s a Liberal Under My Bed! were the topic of discussion on this morning’s radio call-in show. The books’ authors were on hand to answer questions from callers or, more often, defend their positions. Callers to these shows usually express opinions that could be made a little stronger, but only with the help of large-bore handguns.

One caller was incensed that anybody had a problem with reading to children, no matter what the subject matter. So long as you’re reading to them, it doesn’t matter what the book’s about, he said.

“Mommy, Mister Ben next door read to me today from one of his private, very special books!”

“That’s nice, honey. What was the book called?”

“I don’t know; the front was covered with brown paper. But it was about a bunch of friends who lived together and loved each other very much, all the time. And they loved their pets, too. And the milkman.”

... so long as you’re reading to them, it doesn’t matter what the book’s about.

 

Speaking of books, I’ve officially given up on trying to read Anna Karenina. It’s a book I’ve started at least three times now; this time I finished the first book, the farthest I’ve ever gotten. I bought a pocket-sized copy at a library book sale a couple weeks ago and have been carrying it with me everywhere I go so I can knock out a chapter whenever I have fifteen minutes or so to spare.

I can’t get any further than Part One in this edition, though, because the translation was just awful — dry, artless, clunky, flat, pointless. I don’t know how to find a better one; I’m beginning to think the only way I’m every going to get through the whole book will be to read it in Russian. As if.

 

The days are long enough now that the sun comes up when I get out of bed at five and we leave the house in full daylight. This morning, the sun shone across green fields this morning. Green! Not brown or gray or white, green! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

“Thank goodness,” Barb said, after I pointed it out to her. “Winter can be so dreary.”

“Makes me appreciate this even more,” I answered. Dreariness has its uses.

Friday, March 31st, 2006

I was going to start off a drivel this way:

“The delivery guy who restocks the candy machine in the break room at work has very quietly replaced all the regular candy bars with oversized bars that cost twice as much.”

But I’ve changed my mind.

There’s BIG FREAKING MONSTER CANDY in the break room now! The chocolate bars are the size of BRICKS! Packets of M&Ms are big as GUNNY SACKS! You could pack an upright PIANO in a Junior Mints box!

Who eats such an obscene amount of chocolate at a sitting? And don’t try to tell me that you eat some of the candy and save the rest for later. Oh, no you don’t! Maybe you tell yourself you will, but if you buy sweets from a machine you’ve got the same sweet tooth everybody has. You’ll eat the whole damn box, because, you know, it’s open. Who wants stale candy? (Or some equally lame excuse.)

I couldn’t help but notice these humungo chocolates cost almost twice as much as normal, human-sized candy did. I know I’m a whiny skinflint about this. It’s only in the last year that I’d gotten used to dropping seventy-five cents in the slot for my occasional chocolate fix, then this revolting development reared its ugly head. I felt like munching on a few peanut M&Ms the other day, wandered down to the machine, looked up from counting the odd coins in my hand and FER THE LUVVA PETE! It’s a BUCK SIXTY-FIVE! YA GOTTA BE KIDDIN ME!

How am I supposed to maintain my girlish, hourglass figure if I can’t pad it with carbs now and again? Guess I’m off to the doughnut shop; jelly-filled Berliners just aren’t the same, but they’ll have to do.

 

The maintenance guys at work turned the air conditioning on yesterday, another official sign of spring. My boss’s office, which has been a sweat lodge all winter long, became so cold that Jim moved up the list of employees most likely to perish from hypothermia while working at his desk; he kept his suit coat on almost all day.

 

Getting new eyeglasses has forced me to face yet another of the encroaching signs of geezerhood. My new prescription I got is so strong that I have to take the glasses off when I work at a computer or read papers at my desk. Can that mean that I may need bifocals? Not today, but probably the next time I get my eyes examined.

 

Update to my picture page today. No new pictures yet, I’m sorry to have to tell you; just a new format. I started getting ready to upload photos and realized I had done nothing new to the format in years. To a web page nerd like me, that’s a double-dog-dare. I’ve been working on it all night. Tell me you love it. Please, please tell me how much you love it. Okay, don’t.

 
More drivel! Onward to April 06
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