I had a friend from the old country that I met and worked with my first few years out of college. Let's call her "X". We were really close friends during that time, but after I left to go to Central America we lost touch, as often happens in the industry I was working in. Ten years later I got a call from her. She had somehow managed to track me down in Baltimore. She was getting married and wanted me to come.
I got the invite about a week later. It was an evening "costume wedding" occuring the weekend before Halloween. I'm not a person who likes Halloween, and I'm horrible at picking out costumes, so I was a little annoyed, but figured between myself and my friend Eva we could come up with something good. X and I spoke on the phone often over the next few months, but we talked about what we had been doing in the past 10 years, not the wedding.
At one point she and her boyfriend invited me to NYC to visit. I was at a bar with X and her friends. I stepped outside to smoke and her fiance came out with me. He was all over me, trying to get me to give him the key to my hotel room. It was disturbing. I ended up leaving right after breakfast the next day. The fiance made a point at breakfast of complaining about his hangover. I figured that was his way of saying "I was drunk last night! Oops! Did I hit on you? Ha ha!" I felt even worse about the whole thing when X asked me to be in her wedding party. After some wrangling with the family her mom agreed to let her have me as a double bridesmaid with X's sister. This was decided the week before the wedding, relieving me of having to get a dress or throw any parties. All I had to do was stand up there while vows were exchanged and to try to stay awake (religious services are worse than boring).
So the wedding was also held in NYC. At that time I had a very stressful job. I wanted to spend a three day weekend up there but couldn't because of work. So Friday night, while everyone else was at the rehearsal dinner, I was running around Saks looking for a dress after a 12 hour day in the office. It wasn't ideal to be looking for my costume the night before the wedding, but it was the only time I had to do it.
Eva and I had decided I should be a black cat. Yes, the decision was made while we were drinking. I showed up at her house around 830 PM Friday, and she got out her sewing machine. She was going to sew a tail I had also purchased that evening to the back of the dress. The dress was this great little Betsy Johnson black silk sheath with beads all over it. The bottom had a fringe of beads as well so it made a clicking noise when I walked. In most cases it was probably too avant garde, but I figured it would be fine for the costume wedding.
Eva and I drank a bottle of wine, and then she proceeded to try to sew the tail on the dress. Since the bodice of the dress was covered in beads, it was not easy to do. The needle would break on the bead, or the tail would sew on crooked, or the silk material would shred. Compounding the problem was that Eva and I had moved on to port. I passed out at their house (at that time I had two guest bedrooms there, mostly because I lived there on the weekend even though my apartment was only a 20 minute drive away) and barely woke up in time to leave for NYC.
Traffic was terrible and the 4 hour drive turned into 7 hours. X called frantically every half hour. I got to the hotel, showered, and pulled on my costume, which now consisted of the black dress with a tail, a set of cat ears attached to a head band (which, it turns out, I was allergic to), a collar with a bell on it, and then a fluffy grey scarf. Luckily the wedding was being held in the hotel. I got ready in 20 minutes and made a mad dash to the room where the wedding was supposed to be starting in 5 minutes.
But as I ran down the steps disaster struck. It turned out the tail was too heavy for the silk fabric of the dress. It literally fell off as I rounded a flight of steps, leaving me with a GAPING hole in the back of my costume. Insert "honey moon" joke here. I picked up the tail and ran behind the registration desk where two nice ladies safety pinned the tail on my dress, and then stapled the remaining gap. It was horrible but at that point what choice did I have.
By the time I got to the room, the bride's mother was standing in the hallway fuming. The rest of the wedding party had already paraded down the aisle, and the whole event was waiting on me to show up. As the mother got a look at my "costume", though, she whispered in the meanest voice ever "You are OUT of the wedding!" and stalked into the room. I followed behind, and all eyes turned on me.
That's when I noticed everyone else was wearing formal evening gowns and tux suits. I met eyes with X and she was blushing as much as I was. Seems she had talked me up quite a bit at the rehearsal dinner. And now here I was dressed as a cat. Turns out, when people from the old country (or, I guess, anywhere in Europe) say "costume" they mean "formal attire". When they say "fancy dress" they mean "costume". Is it any wonder we went to war with them twice in twenty years?
As if sitting on a cat tail with staples poking into my ass wasn't humiliating enough, I had no other clothes to change in to for the reception. I went back to the front desk and the ladies again helped me, taking the tail off and closing up the back of the dress so that on top of being an ass I wasn't also showing my ass. X did ask me to leave the cat ears on because she thought it was funny that in the two wedding party pictures I was allowed to be in I still looked like a cat. By the end of the evening they caused me to get a rash on my scalp that spread to my neck and forehead. Sexy.
And, as I was one of the few people not getting drunk I ended up having to take X's sister up to her room after she drank too much and passed out in a hotel toilet stall (you try climbing over the top of a stall in 4 inch heels and a dress). That was when she threw up on me. Also, during one of the traditional dances with the groom, he solicited me for sex, saying we could pretend to be taking presents up to the honeymoon suite. The camera man caught the whole exchange on tape. Finally, in the process of taking presents up to the honeymoon suite, I walked in on X's best friend fucking her date on the bed. Tacky.
X never spoke to me again after the wedding. I never even got a copy of the picture I was in. I'm not sure if it's because I showed up as a cat or because her husband hit on me or because her sister threw up on me or because I walked in on her best friend defiling the honeymoon bed. I heard from a mutual friend that they dissolved their union after two years of marriage. They didn't have any kids.
I do wonder if they fought over who got to keep their cat...
Yes, this was a true story. I know these things only happen to me.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
dude, that's my neti pot
Boise airport. 4:30 AM. Insomnia headache. I was standing in line thinking “I could be hit by a hellfire missile right now and I wouldn’t feel any different”. The lady in front of me has apparently missed the changes in airport security that have occurred over the past 10 or so years. I was trying to stay calm by doing some tiger breathing. It occurs to me after some sleep that I might have looked a little weird. My eyes were also blood shot from eighteen hour days at my computer trying to finish a client engagement that should have been scheduled for two weeks instead of three days.
I walked through the metal detector and the guard called for a bag check. I realized that I had left my wine bottle opener in my suitcase. So annoying. Even though it has no knife on it they always inspect it. And while logic would suggest that if I can actually kill someone, or even injure them, with a wine bottle opener knife that can barely cut a label the problem is not the wine bottle opener, I am still forced to sit through the security scrutiny.
I felt like I was looking through sand as I slogged over to the “special table”. I could tell the guard was psyched to have busted me on something. I was getting this vibe from him that if it were just the two of us alone he would have already shot me. He opened my case and began rifling through the contents even though I told him exactly where the opener was. He poked at my yoga toes with a pen. I’m sure he thought they were some kind of kinky sex implement. Then he spied my neti pot.
“Don’t MOVE!” he yelled at me. He talked into his shoulder mike: “I’ve got some drug paraphernalia.” What for the love of ganesh is this idiot talking about? I wondered. The drug guy came over. They conferenced about the situation off to the side. I hear something about “pipe”. It finally dawns on me that they are talking about my neti pot.
“Dude, that’s my NETI POT” I say. They look at me as if I’ve suddenly sprouted 2 more arms and started playing the ukulele. Then they discovered the salt that goes in my neti pot.
I will spare you the rest of the details. The drug dog came over and drooled on my suitcase. I swear that one of them went and looked up “neti pot” on the web to find out what it was. They finally let me go. I went to my gate and slumped down in a seat wishing I had the supernatural power to cause men to get ingrown hair on their testicles. The DEA guy paraded past my gate at least 5 or 6 times, usually with his buddy, and usually talking very loudly about hippies or druggies not being welcome in Boise. Everyone at the gate kept staring at me.
I think someone should make up a shirt that says “Dude, that’s my neti pot” and sell it alongside shirts that say things like “Don’t taze me bro”.
I walked through the metal detector and the guard called for a bag check. I realized that I had left my wine bottle opener in my suitcase. So annoying. Even though it has no knife on it they always inspect it. And while logic would suggest that if I can actually kill someone, or even injure them, with a wine bottle opener knife that can barely cut a label the problem is not the wine bottle opener, I am still forced to sit through the security scrutiny.
I felt like I was looking through sand as I slogged over to the “special table”. I could tell the guard was psyched to have busted me on something. I was getting this vibe from him that if it were just the two of us alone he would have already shot me. He opened my case and began rifling through the contents even though I told him exactly where the opener was. He poked at my yoga toes with a pen. I’m sure he thought they were some kind of kinky sex implement. Then he spied my neti pot.
“Don’t MOVE!” he yelled at me. He talked into his shoulder mike: “I’ve got some drug paraphernalia.” What for the love of ganesh is this idiot talking about? I wondered. The drug guy came over. They conferenced about the situation off to the side. I hear something about “pipe”. It finally dawns on me that they are talking about my neti pot.
“Dude, that’s my NETI POT” I say. They look at me as if I’ve suddenly sprouted 2 more arms and started playing the ukulele. Then they discovered the salt that goes in my neti pot.
I will spare you the rest of the details. The drug dog came over and drooled on my suitcase. I swear that one of them went and looked up “neti pot” on the web to find out what it was. They finally let me go. I went to my gate and slumped down in a seat wishing I had the supernatural power to cause men to get ingrown hair on their testicles. The DEA guy paraded past my gate at least 5 or 6 times, usually with his buddy, and usually talking very loudly about hippies or druggies not being welcome in Boise. Everyone at the gate kept staring at me.
I think someone should make up a shirt that says “Dude, that’s my neti pot” and sell it alongside shirts that say things like “Don’t taze me bro”.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Hockey Sticks and Raw Fish
I must be doing something right in my current life. I am spending the week in Boise, Idaho, which is a pretty cool city (the current weather non-withstanding - apparently they are having the worst snow storms in the past 20 years - bringing natural disasters where ever I go).
And what could be better than Boise? Well, the theater across from my hotel has the Banff films playing (not that I have time to see them with my work load, but still). And, even better, there is a sushi restaurant IN MY HOTEL. Yes, the gods and goddesses are definitely shining down on me in my sushi induced coma, saying "we just want you to be happy - have another eel roll".
So what could make this place even more of a heaven on earth? Well, try professional hockey players. It turns out the lobby of my hotel is actually some kind of, whatever you call it, hockey stadium thingy with a big ice rink and everything. I discovered it when I got lost coming out of the parking garage. I was escorted to the lobby of my hotel by two hockey players (both with fake choppers) who were staying there. I have no idea what team they are, but I know they are pro based on some recky I did (that's spying for those not in the industry).
And what's not to love about hockey players. They get to wear those little chin straps so they always seem to be smiling. And the pads under their uniforms make them look really muscular. There's something feminine, yet artistic and deadly about skates. Kind of like people who do fencing. Gay until they stab someone, then it's pretty sexy. And the gloves. I like a man with big hands. The standard hockey luggage is a very sensible bag of epic proportions. If needed, you could stuff the stray corpse in it and ride down the elevator with Sherlock Holmes and not get caught. Which is not to say that luggage is everything in a relationship, but just to say it is something to consider.
Of course, many hockey players are short. And have fake choppers. I don't mind really great fake teeth but I hate caps. I do not want to see metal when I'm staring at some one's pearly whites. For some reason it makes me think of biting into an empty aluminum can. Yikes. Also, most hockey players are under 5'10", and I can't imagine dating a guy that short. Because you know he will never appreciate the 6 inch stilettos...
And what could be better than Boise? Well, the theater across from my hotel has the Banff films playing (not that I have time to see them with my work load, but still). And, even better, there is a sushi restaurant IN MY HOTEL. Yes, the gods and goddesses are definitely shining down on me in my sushi induced coma, saying "we just want you to be happy - have another eel roll".
So what could make this place even more of a heaven on earth? Well, try professional hockey players. It turns out the lobby of my hotel is actually some kind of, whatever you call it, hockey stadium thingy with a big ice rink and everything. I discovered it when I got lost coming out of the parking garage. I was escorted to the lobby of my hotel by two hockey players (both with fake choppers) who were staying there. I have no idea what team they are, but I know they are pro based on some recky I did (that's spying for those not in the industry).
And what's not to love about hockey players. They get to wear those little chin straps so they always seem to be smiling. And the pads under their uniforms make them look really muscular. There's something feminine, yet artistic and deadly about skates. Kind of like people who do fencing. Gay until they stab someone, then it's pretty sexy. And the gloves. I like a man with big hands. The standard hockey luggage is a very sensible bag of epic proportions. If needed, you could stuff the stray corpse in it and ride down the elevator with Sherlock Holmes and not get caught. Which is not to say that luggage is everything in a relationship, but just to say it is something to consider.
Of course, many hockey players are short. And have fake choppers. I don't mind really great fake teeth but I hate caps. I do not want to see metal when I'm staring at some one's pearly whites. For some reason it makes me think of biting into an empty aluminum can. Yikes. Also, most hockey players are under 5'10", and I can't imagine dating a guy that short. Because you know he will never appreciate the 6 inch stilettos...
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Clean Like China
WARNING: do NOT read this blog if you are eating, driving, or praying. Do NOT read this blog if you are prone to sickness, including motion sickness, sleeping sickness, morning sickness, or if you are sick at heart.
Seriously, I have warned you. I do NOT want a bunch of vomit spattered emails asking why I can't write about things like daisies and funny things to do with chopsticks.
So, since we are on the subject of chopsticks, I've been doing some consulting in a lab. Without going into too much detail let's just say it's a lab that does scary things with radioactive materials. Needless to say, you need a lot of bright people to work at this lab to make sure there isn't a bad boom boom that might cause blight on the West Coast. So the lab is full of Chinese people, the second most intelligent race in the world, with the Jews being first of course.
So, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. My doctor TOLD me to brush my teeth after I eat and I am not being OCD so nip it all you climber guys who avoid the bristles like they cause plague. This Chinese woman walked in to the bathroom. I know she is Chinese because we talked earlier in the lunchroom (she was impressed with my pearls of jasmine tea, which she immediately recognized as coming from China, although, full disclosure, I was pulling them out of a tin that had Chinese writing on it).
The past few weeks I've been trying to figure out how the Chinese manage to trash a bathroom so badly. At my company kickoff in Paris I would walk into the bathroom and immediately be able to tell which stalls the Chis had been in. There would be toilet paper all over the floor. The seat would be up. There would usually be water (hope it was water) spattered on the walls. While talking to a UK consultant I was like "dude, wtf?" and he said "well, they are trying".
Back to the lab, where I noticed the same problems in the stalls, I couldn't help but glance over as this Chi woman walked into a stall. She didn't close the door. I saw her make a huge wad of toilet paper which she threw into the toilet. Then she flushed. This was repeated 3 times. Then she pulled a toddler sized wad of toilet paper off the spool.
NOTE: this is your LAST warning to stop reading
She then dipped the wad of toilet paper into the toilet water and proceeded to scrub the toilet seat and the bowl with it. I couldn't see how much of the inside of the bowl she was "cleaning" because of the angle of where I was standing compared to where she was. I did mention that this was a public restroom, didn't I?
I suddenly flashed back to this lovely Italian movie called Bread and Tulips (recommended by Nini, thanks Nini!) where the main character drops something in the toilet and is afraid to reach in and grab it. This leads to her being left by her bitch ass husband at a rest stop, and then her creating a new life for herself sans kids and aforementioned human tumor, oops, I meant to say "spouse".
Anyway, after scrubbing the toilet "clean" with toilet water, the Chi closed the stall door. I heard two more flushes. God only knows what happened in there. And then the Chi walked out without washing her hands. There was toilet paper all over the floor in her stall, some of which was accumulation from the cleaning, and some of which collected on the floor after the stall door closed.
A mystery that provided some answers, but that still leaves questions...
Seriously, I have warned you. I do NOT want a bunch of vomit spattered emails asking why I can't write about things like daisies and funny things to do with chopsticks.
So, since we are on the subject of chopsticks, I've been doing some consulting in a lab. Without going into too much detail let's just say it's a lab that does scary things with radioactive materials. Needless to say, you need a lot of bright people to work at this lab to make sure there isn't a bad boom boom that might cause blight on the West Coast. So the lab is full of Chinese people, the second most intelligent race in the world, with the Jews being first of course.
So, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. My doctor TOLD me to brush my teeth after I eat and I am not being OCD so nip it all you climber guys who avoid the bristles like they cause plague. This Chinese woman walked in to the bathroom. I know she is Chinese because we talked earlier in the lunchroom (she was impressed with my pearls of jasmine tea, which she immediately recognized as coming from China, although, full disclosure, I was pulling them out of a tin that had Chinese writing on it).
The past few weeks I've been trying to figure out how the Chinese manage to trash a bathroom so badly. At my company kickoff in Paris I would walk into the bathroom and immediately be able to tell which stalls the Chis had been in. There would be toilet paper all over the floor. The seat would be up. There would usually be water (hope it was water) spattered on the walls. While talking to a UK consultant I was like "dude, wtf?" and he said "well, they are trying".
Back to the lab, where I noticed the same problems in the stalls, I couldn't help but glance over as this Chi woman walked into a stall. She didn't close the door. I saw her make a huge wad of toilet paper which she threw into the toilet. Then she flushed. This was repeated 3 times. Then she pulled a toddler sized wad of toilet paper off the spool.
NOTE: this is your LAST warning to stop reading
She then dipped the wad of toilet paper into the toilet water and proceeded to scrub the toilet seat and the bowl with it. I couldn't see how much of the inside of the bowl she was "cleaning" because of the angle of where I was standing compared to where she was. I did mention that this was a public restroom, didn't I?
I suddenly flashed back to this lovely Italian movie called Bread and Tulips (recommended by Nini, thanks Nini!) where the main character drops something in the toilet and is afraid to reach in and grab it. This leads to her being left by her bitch ass husband at a rest stop, and then her creating a new life for herself sans kids and aforementioned human tumor, oops, I meant to say "spouse".
Anyway, after scrubbing the toilet "clean" with toilet water, the Chi closed the stall door. I heard two more flushes. God only knows what happened in there. And then the Chi walked out without washing her hands. There was toilet paper all over the floor in her stall, some of which was accumulation from the cleaning, and some of which collected on the floor after the stall door closed.
A mystery that provided some answers, but that still leaves questions...
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Three Snow Whites Offend in Paris
I swear this story is true. If my friend John J. sends the picture I will find a way to post it on this blog...
I was at Disney in Paris the past week for a company kickoff. As part of the kick off we had a night where people dressed in costume (referred to as "fancy dress" on our invite, not to be confused with "costume", which is black tie - no wonder why we went to war with UK - we probably just had a semantic mis-understanding with them). One of my new company friends, a kid named Duncan, dressed up as snow white, along with two of his mates. They formed the Snow White trio and they ended up winning an award for their costumes.
The co-winner was a team of two guys dressed as babies. I found the costumes extremely disturbing. Maybe it was the adult sized pacifiers, or seeing two guys who were over 6 feet tall dressed in pink pajamas and bonnets. But apparently it was fine for these guys to later frequent the bar in their getups. Not so the Snow White trio.
Apparently, as they were leaving their hotel to go to the costume dinner, they caused some children to be traumatized. Someone complained. Management at Disney decided that the trio was "besmirching the image of Snow White". They were forced to go back to their hotel and change before going anywhere else in the Disney park. Disney management later said they had an existing policy about not allowing people to dress up as Snow White for any reason. Which seems weird since the boys bought their costumes at the park...
I was at Disney in Paris the past week for a company kickoff. As part of the kick off we had a night where people dressed in costume (referred to as "fancy dress" on our invite, not to be confused with "costume", which is black tie - no wonder why we went to war with UK - we probably just had a semantic mis-understanding with them). One of my new company friends, a kid named Duncan, dressed up as snow white, along with two of his mates. They formed the Snow White trio and they ended up winning an award for their costumes.
The co-winner was a team of two guys dressed as babies. I found the costumes extremely disturbing. Maybe it was the adult sized pacifiers, or seeing two guys who were over 6 feet tall dressed in pink pajamas and bonnets. But apparently it was fine for these guys to later frequent the bar in their getups. Not so the Snow White trio.
Apparently, as they were leaving their hotel to go to the costume dinner, they caused some children to be traumatized. Someone complained. Management at Disney decided that the trio was "besmirching the image of Snow White". They were forced to go back to their hotel and change before going anywhere else in the Disney park. Disney management later said they had an existing policy about not allowing people to dress up as Snow White for any reason. Which seems weird since the boys bought their costumes at the park...
You Think You're Free?????
I know I will be getting hated on for this posting but someone had to say it...
The other night I was flying into Washington state. There were two Marines on the flight. They sat in front of me. It was an evening flight. Through the two hours neither of them said a word. I was stuck next to the window and I could see through the space between the plane window and the seat that tears were running down the Marine's face. When we landed at the airport there was a huge group of people waiting to welcome the Marines.
They were blasting patriotic songs and waving flags. As we came up to the crowd the Marine that had been crying turned to the other and said "I can't wait to take this fucking thing off", referring to his uniform.
I went to the rental car counter to pick up my car and they started blasting this country song, the name of which is unknown, but the words go "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free". I found it ironic that they would play that song in an airport. These soldiers went to Iraq and did whatever they were assigned to do under the auspices of maintaining freedom in the US. It hasn't made a damn bit of difference here, and it's made things worse in a lot of ways. And the current administration and policies are taking away more freedoms every day.
If you don't believe me, spend the next week flying. I have seen the following at airports in the past three months:
-A woman was arrested at a security checkpoint for "arguing" with the TSA guy checking IDs. She did not understand that she couldn't board a plane with a printed itinerary and that she needed a boarding card. Rather than helping the woman the TSA guy kept telling her "You can't get on a plane with that. You need to go over there," pointing vaguely towards the checkin counter. When the woman said in a louder voice "But this is an e-ticket" the TSA guy called security and had her arrested. She was kind of an idiot, but he wasn't helping her and I don't blame her for raising her voice.
-I was stopped and harassed by immigration because, coming from Paris to the US, I lost my re-embarkation card but didn't realize until I got to the immigration counter. Having been awake for almost two days at that point I was fumbling to explain to the immigration guy why I walked up to his counter without having the card filled out. He started yelling at me and accusing me of trying to pull something funny. I was like asspipe, I spent 17 years of my fucking life working with the government and now I am being accused of being a terrorist? Because I lost my re-embarkation card? Are you fucking serious?
-I had all of my clothes taken out of my suitcase because I had nail clippers in a side pocket of the suit case. They didn't take them away from me, just made a mess of my clothes. I asked if it was now illegal to carry nail clippers on a plane and was told that if I was making a threat I would not be allowed to fly that day, even though I'm not sure how "So are nail clippers now illegal?" could be considered a threat.
-I was told to take a sweater off before walking through an x-ray, even after explaining to the idiot at security that I didn't have anything on under the sweater. They made me roll the sweater up to prove this before letting me through the x-ray.
Security is being run by a bunch of fucking gerbils. I fly every Monday and every Friday, and I would be happy to have all those assholes just go away. They aren't doing anything but annoying frequent flyers like myself. If you go to any other foreign country they don't do any extra security checks for flights not going to the US and guess what, they aren't getting hijacked or blown up.
I will take my chances that some idiot from Al Quaeda is going to try to blow up my plane. Also, for anyone who thinks those security checks are doing any good, guess what. I know how to get three ounces of liquid through security. I've even gotten an unopened can of Coke through. I carried an orange through the x-ray machine that could have contained an explosive.
I wish we as Americans would stop buying in to the fear mongering of the Bush administration/Fox News. If someone wants to kill you, they will. So get over it and stop thinking that some guy x-raying your 1.7 ounce shampoo bottle saved your life...
The other night I was flying into Washington state. There were two Marines on the flight. They sat in front of me. It was an evening flight. Through the two hours neither of them said a word. I was stuck next to the window and I could see through the space between the plane window and the seat that tears were running down the Marine's face. When we landed at the airport there was a huge group of people waiting to welcome the Marines.
They were blasting patriotic songs and waving flags. As we came up to the crowd the Marine that had been crying turned to the other and said "I can't wait to take this fucking thing off", referring to his uniform.
I went to the rental car counter to pick up my car and they started blasting this country song, the name of which is unknown, but the words go "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free". I found it ironic that they would play that song in an airport. These soldiers went to Iraq and did whatever they were assigned to do under the auspices of maintaining freedom in the US. It hasn't made a damn bit of difference here, and it's made things worse in a lot of ways. And the current administration and policies are taking away more freedoms every day.
If you don't believe me, spend the next week flying. I have seen the following at airports in the past three months:
-A woman was arrested at a security checkpoint for "arguing" with the TSA guy checking IDs. She did not understand that she couldn't board a plane with a printed itinerary and that she needed a boarding card. Rather than helping the woman the TSA guy kept telling her "You can't get on a plane with that. You need to go over there," pointing vaguely towards the checkin counter. When the woman said in a louder voice "But this is an e-ticket" the TSA guy called security and had her arrested. She was kind of an idiot, but he wasn't helping her and I don't blame her for raising her voice.
-I was stopped and harassed by immigration because, coming from Paris to the US, I lost my re-embarkation card but didn't realize until I got to the immigration counter. Having been awake for almost two days at that point I was fumbling to explain to the immigration guy why I walked up to his counter without having the card filled out. He started yelling at me and accusing me of trying to pull something funny. I was like asspipe, I spent 17 years of my fucking life working with the government and now I am being accused of being a terrorist? Because I lost my re-embarkation card? Are you fucking serious?
-I had all of my clothes taken out of my suitcase because I had nail clippers in a side pocket of the suit case. They didn't take them away from me, just made a mess of my clothes. I asked if it was now illegal to carry nail clippers on a plane and was told that if I was making a threat I would not be allowed to fly that day, even though I'm not sure how "So are nail clippers now illegal?" could be considered a threat.
-I was told to take a sweater off before walking through an x-ray, even after explaining to the idiot at security that I didn't have anything on under the sweater. They made me roll the sweater up to prove this before letting me through the x-ray.
Security is being run by a bunch of fucking gerbils. I fly every Monday and every Friday, and I would be happy to have all those assholes just go away. They aren't doing anything but annoying frequent flyers like myself. If you go to any other foreign country they don't do any extra security checks for flights not going to the US and guess what, they aren't getting hijacked or blown up.
I will take my chances that some idiot from Al Quaeda is going to try to blow up my plane. Also, for anyone who thinks those security checks are doing any good, guess what. I know how to get three ounces of liquid through security. I've even gotten an unopened can of Coke through. I carried an orange through the x-ray machine that could have contained an explosive.
I wish we as Americans would stop buying in to the fear mongering of the Bush administration/Fox News. If someone wants to kill you, they will. So get over it and stop thinking that some guy x-raying your 1.7 ounce shampoo bottle saved your life...
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Funny Cause the Bible Says I'm Funny
I've made an interesting discovery while reading an article about a guy who went to the deserts of Israel to understand the ecology in the logical framework of the three great monotheistic religions experienced there (yes, I have an obsession with the desert, otherwise no, I wouldn't be reading this article). If the last sentence confused you, fear not, just go back to watching Fox News and pretend this blog never happened.
My Christian name means freedom, which I knew. But I also discovered, through the article, that my Hebrew name, Yitzak (Isaac), female version Yitzi, means [DRUM ROLL]
"(s)he laughs"
What's in a name indeed.
Interestingly enough, as I also discovered in the article, the idea of eternity was introduced by desert monks.
And, if you're bored, think about this for a minute:
"The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgement within emptiness. The paradox of monotheism is that there is no paradox - only unfathomable singularity."
-Robert Rodriguez
My Christian name means freedom, which I knew. But I also discovered, through the article, that my Hebrew name, Yitzak (Isaac), female version Yitzi, means [DRUM ROLL]
"(s)he laughs"
What's in a name indeed.
Interestingly enough, as I also discovered in the article, the idea of eternity was introduced by desert monks.
And, if you're bored, think about this for a minute:
"The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgement within emptiness. The paradox of monotheism is that there is no paradox - only unfathomable singularity."
-Robert Rodriguez
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
million little pieces of paper...that some guy ate
Once I was riding the subway from Old Town Alexandria to DC with a work colleague. This was back in 1992. Her name escapes me at the moment, I think it might have been Arlene; in any case she was hands down the WORST systems engineer I have ever dealt with.
Anyway, it was around 10 am on I think it was a Wednesday, and we were prepping for a briefing when the train stopped and this homeless looking guy got on. The car was empty except for us and the homeless guy. At that point I was able to ignore homeless people, but apparently he was making, fine, let's call her Arlene, uncomfortable. I was trying to make sure she was prepared for our upcoming briefing, which involved asking congress for money, a lot of money actually, but she kept staring at the guy instead of paying attention to me. For fuck's sake, I remember thinking. Then I looked at the guy too.
He had a stack of porno magazines in his lap. He was holding a straight edge razor in his hand. Flipping through the magazines, he would stop when he came to a picture of a woman with her breasts exposed. He would then use the straight edge razor to, shall we say, extract the breasts from the page. And no, for all you engineers out there, he didn't check the other side of the page to see if there were better breasts, leading one to assume he must have had a liberal arts degree.
After extracting the breasts, he would take the piece of paper containing the breasts and fold it up into tinier and tinier pieces. When he could no longer fold the breasts into smaller squares he would put the folded paper into his mouth, chew it, and swallow.
He got off at the same metro stop we did. The stop happened to be the stop for tourists going to the white house. Coincidence? I report, you decide...
for more stories about my fun with homeless people, check out my blog about the dead guy in denver and the Italian guy who gave me the full monty in London
Anyway, it was around 10 am on I think it was a Wednesday, and we were prepping for a briefing when the train stopped and this homeless looking guy got on. The car was empty except for us and the homeless guy. At that point I was able to ignore homeless people, but apparently he was making, fine, let's call her Arlene, uncomfortable. I was trying to make sure she was prepared for our upcoming briefing, which involved asking congress for money, a lot of money actually, but she kept staring at the guy instead of paying attention to me. For fuck's sake, I remember thinking. Then I looked at the guy too.
He had a stack of porno magazines in his lap. He was holding a straight edge razor in his hand. Flipping through the magazines, he would stop when he came to a picture of a woman with her breasts exposed. He would then use the straight edge razor to, shall we say, extract the breasts from the page. And no, for all you engineers out there, he didn't check the other side of the page to see if there were better breasts, leading one to assume he must have had a liberal arts degree.
After extracting the breasts, he would take the piece of paper containing the breasts and fold it up into tinier and tinier pieces. When he could no longer fold the breasts into smaller squares he would put the folded paper into his mouth, chew it, and swallow.
He got off at the same metro stop we did. The stop happened to be the stop for tourists going to the white house. Coincidence? I report, you decide...
for more stories about my fun with homeless people, check out my blog about the dead guy in denver and the Italian guy who gave me the full monty in London
Monday, January 7, 2008
Power Bars and Pests
In a previous life, I worked in an environment called a SCIF, which stands for secured classified information facility. I am disappointed that someone in the government was not clever enough to come up with a different description that would have resulted in the acronym SHIT, because that's what working in a SCIF amounts to. Imagine spending 10 hours a day in a sardine tin that has been encased in one of those little fire proof safes you can buy at home depot. Someone farted in the safe before it was sealed closed and no fresh air can get in. That summarizes a SCIF environment.
SCIFs normally don't have windows, so forget natural light. Most of the main entry ways require you to open a combo lock that is older than your grandparents. Not good with numbers? You'll never get into your office. Every place you go in a SCIF requires you to enter a code or swipe a badge. And since the SCIF is classified, OSHA is never going to inspect it.
The furniture usually has mold on it, the carpet looks like it was purchased from a fraternity house that burned down after one last puke fest, and the walls are normally painted some color that makes you want to kill yourself every time you look at them.
Most SCIFs are far off from civilization, so people bring food in with them and just eat lunch at their desk. That is the reason why I had a box of 24 power bars in my office in a SCIF. I had procured the power bars from a Costco with the help of my friend Eva. I went to a Costco once by myself and sustained serious injuries to my head (mild concussion) and my knee (it was even bleeding), as well as breaking a freezer door (after which I was thrown out by the management), and after that I never went in there by myself.
The usual plan for my Saturday evenings back in those days was for me to go to Eva's house. We would sit in the movie room eating cookies, pretending we were going to go to Costco. Eventually Dan, Eva's husband, would give up on us getting to Costco and back in time for dinner. So Dan would go instead, and we could eat more cookies and watch movies instead of going shopping. Strictly Ballroom was a favorite ("Not FRAN!").
But then a bad thing happened. Dan went out of town. We were out of cherry tomatoes and peanut M&Ms. Survival through the weekend was threatened. So we ventured into Costco and somehow ended up in the parking lot with a whole cart full of stuff without quite knowing where it came from, including a box of 24 power bars. I must have been really hungry, and drunk, because I was somehow convinced I was going to eat a power bar every morning for breakfast, and that was my justification for buying them.
Wine goggling + food = bad purchase decisions
I brought the weighty box into my office the following Monday. It had three different types of bars in it. The bar type was distinguished by what was referred to as "flavors". There was "apple and cinnamon", "oatmeal", and "peanut butter". The quotes indicate the veracity of taste when compared to what, for example, actual peanut butter tastes like.
I opened a bar labeled peanut butter and took a bite. It sucked. I threw the power bar into a file drawer next to my desk. I opened the apple and cinnamon. Even worse. I decided to sample the third flavor, oatmeal. It tasted kind of like oatmeal, if the oatmeal was made in a bark bowl and then set on a sand dune in the Sahara for a week before it was consumed. These bars, with one bite taken out, also went into the file drawer.
Over the next month I would forget how bad the power bars tasted and I would open one and bite it. After a mouthful they would go into the file drawer. A few times I was at the office late and had to open a power bar and take a bite to keep my blood sugar up. Eventually all bars ended up in the file drawer.
Approximately 6 months later we were temporarily forbidden to go into the SCIF because there was a rodent infestation. I ended up leaving the SCIF shortly afterwards to go work somewhere else. Another 6 months past and I was working in that SCIF again. They were still having rodent problems.
And then one day a secretary that I knew pretty well because she was always standing outside smoking came storming down the hallway. She had a box full of power bars with a human bite taken out of them at one end, and mouse bites taken out at the other end.
"I just can't BELIEVE this!" she raged. "SOMEONE put all these food bars in a drawer after partially eating them! They attracted mice and now we are going to have to bring in a specialist!" It turned out, on top of snacking on the power bars, the mice had also eaten through some of the network cabling and almost brought down a major system. Oops.
"This is just DISGUSTING!" the secretary continued. "I can't BELIEVE an ADULT would do such a thing! I just know it was [a guy we both despised because he was always blowing his food up in the microwave without a thought to cleaning it up - once he blew up some kind of pasta dish and it looked like someone had run over a squirrel and then stuffed the squirrel in our microwave].
I put on my best poker face and said nothing at the time. Eventually the word leaked out that the power bars belonged to me. I became an outcast in the SCIF and was glad when I was finally moved to a different location.
And, for the record, I recently had a little critter eat the Clif bars I keep in my climbing backpack in my front closet. Thank god, because I wasn't going to eat them. I almost put out a glue trap for the little pest but then decided not to since it didn't eat any of my backpack. Since ridding the front closet of gu and food bars the critter seems to have gone back to where ever it came from.
SCIFs normally don't have windows, so forget natural light. Most of the main entry ways require you to open a combo lock that is older than your grandparents. Not good with numbers? You'll never get into your office. Every place you go in a SCIF requires you to enter a code or swipe a badge. And since the SCIF is classified, OSHA is never going to inspect it.
The furniture usually has mold on it, the carpet looks like it was purchased from a fraternity house that burned down after one last puke fest, and the walls are normally painted some color that makes you want to kill yourself every time you look at them.
Most SCIFs are far off from civilization, so people bring food in with them and just eat lunch at their desk. That is the reason why I had a box of 24 power bars in my office in a SCIF. I had procured the power bars from a Costco with the help of my friend Eva. I went to a Costco once by myself and sustained serious injuries to my head (mild concussion) and my knee (it was even bleeding), as well as breaking a freezer door (after which I was thrown out by the management), and after that I never went in there by myself.
The usual plan for my Saturday evenings back in those days was for me to go to Eva's house. We would sit in the movie room eating cookies, pretending we were going to go to Costco. Eventually Dan, Eva's husband, would give up on us getting to Costco and back in time for dinner. So Dan would go instead, and we could eat more cookies and watch movies instead of going shopping. Strictly Ballroom was a favorite ("Not FRAN!").
But then a bad thing happened. Dan went out of town. We were out of cherry tomatoes and peanut M&Ms. Survival through the weekend was threatened. So we ventured into Costco and somehow ended up in the parking lot with a whole cart full of stuff without quite knowing where it came from, including a box of 24 power bars. I must have been really hungry, and drunk, because I was somehow convinced I was going to eat a power bar every morning for breakfast, and that was my justification for buying them.
Wine goggling + food = bad purchase decisions
I brought the weighty box into my office the following Monday. It had three different types of bars in it. The bar type was distinguished by what was referred to as "flavors". There was "apple and cinnamon", "oatmeal", and "peanut butter". The quotes indicate the veracity of taste when compared to what, for example, actual peanut butter tastes like.
I opened a bar labeled peanut butter and took a bite. It sucked. I threw the power bar into a file drawer next to my desk. I opened the apple and cinnamon. Even worse. I decided to sample the third flavor, oatmeal. It tasted kind of like oatmeal, if the oatmeal was made in a bark bowl and then set on a sand dune in the Sahara for a week before it was consumed. These bars, with one bite taken out, also went into the file drawer.
Over the next month I would forget how bad the power bars tasted and I would open one and bite it. After a mouthful they would go into the file drawer. A few times I was at the office late and had to open a power bar and take a bite to keep my blood sugar up. Eventually all bars ended up in the file drawer.
Approximately 6 months later we were temporarily forbidden to go into the SCIF because there was a rodent infestation. I ended up leaving the SCIF shortly afterwards to go work somewhere else. Another 6 months past and I was working in that SCIF again. They were still having rodent problems.
And then one day a secretary that I knew pretty well because she was always standing outside smoking came storming down the hallway. She had a box full of power bars with a human bite taken out of them at one end, and mouse bites taken out at the other end.
"I just can't BELIEVE this!" she raged. "SOMEONE put all these food bars in a drawer after partially eating them! They attracted mice and now we are going to have to bring in a specialist!" It turned out, on top of snacking on the power bars, the mice had also eaten through some of the network cabling and almost brought down a major system. Oops.
"This is just DISGUSTING!" the secretary continued. "I can't BELIEVE an ADULT would do such a thing! I just know it was [a guy we both despised because he was always blowing his food up in the microwave without a thought to cleaning it up - once he blew up some kind of pasta dish and it looked like someone had run over a squirrel and then stuffed the squirrel in our microwave].
I put on my best poker face and said nothing at the time. Eventually the word leaked out that the power bars belonged to me. I became an outcast in the SCIF and was glad when I was finally moved to a different location.
And, for the record, I recently had a little critter eat the Clif bars I keep in my climbing backpack in my front closet. Thank god, because I wasn't going to eat them. I almost put out a glue trap for the little pest but then decided not to since it didn't eat any of my backpack. Since ridding the front closet of gu and food bars the critter seems to have gone back to where ever it came from.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Pee T
The details of my heinous knee surgery are not worth going into here. Suffice it to say for two weeks after the surgery I honestly thought I was going to die from pain. And I mean I physically thought I was going to die.
One thing that lessened the pain was physical therapy. Or maybe the pain I endured in therapy was so great that the normal, every day pain of recovery seemed less. Anyway, when I moved to Baltimore from San Fran one of the first things I did was find myself a PT. It happened that a woman, who I will call X, had just opened a clinic in my gym. I became one of her first patients.
X was around my age. She was engaged to Y, who worked as her assistant. She spent hours doing extra therapy for me, and I often would be in sessions with her until 830 at night. There was a bar right next to the gym (good planning on some one's part!) and I would usually retire there for a drink and some peanuts before heading home.
As part of my PT I was also given a free personal trainer for a month. Let's just call him Z. He was a professional runner and in pretty high demand. Oddly enough, he had a close resemblance to my high school running friend Doug Rippey. I had gone through the other five trainers the gym had to offer in about a week, finding them all lacking and incompetent in even the most mundane aspects of working out (for the record, at that point I was going on 4 years working with a personal trainer, and was spoiled rotten by Tom Mendall and Shelley Hines, love and miss you both!). Z started joining me for my bar sessions after PT, and even participated in a few sessions to learn how to work better with my injuries. I kept waiting for Z to ask me out, but he never did.
So the holidays rolled around, and X invited me to her house for a party. She claimed she wanted to set me up with Z, who was shy, but who might open up in a social environment. So on the appointed night I showed up. The party had been in full swing for 3 or 4 hours (I was working late that Friday) and X was trashed. She grabbed my hand and pretended she was introducing me to people at the party, dragging me around like a child at a funeral, but it just seemed...weird. It was almost as though she were introducing people to me as her date.
Then, as I sat on the sofa next to Z and started trying to talk to him, X ran over, planted herself in my lap and put her head on my shoulder. Ignoring this, I continued trying to engage Z in conversation. I might as well have been talking to a frozen dog turd. The situation in my lap, however, was escalating. X began trying to fondle my tits. Then she grabbed my neck and started trying to force her tongue down my throat. I managed to fend her off, pretending that I had to go to the bathroom, but she followed me and was saying some very sexual stuff outside the bathroom door while I was peeing, including that it turned her on to listen to me pee.
I left the party shortly afterwards. Z ended up following me to my car. The interest of a female piqued his interest in me I guess.
For the record, I went on one date with him. He invited three of his friends. It was very high school. Also, when I was driving to his house to pick him up (get the picture - he was the bitch) I got lost because his directions sucked and I was on the cell with him and asked "so are you near the deaf kid sign?", the only visible land marker for miles, and it turns out the sign was in front of his house. I was like "why didn't you just say turn at the deaf kid sign" and he said "because the deaf kid is my brother and that's why the sign is there". How embarrassing.
I should also note that the hot guy muscle head of the gym got so wrecked at X's party that he peed his pants, and it was the talk of gym for the next few months. Why are the hot ones always so stupid?
Anyway, the next PT session was kind of awkward and I spent most of the time working with X's fiance Y. He assured me that X was just drunk and her behavior didn't mean anything, blah blah blah. Later, I went to the bathroom, and X followed me. I thought she was coming into the bathroom with me to apologize or something. To the contrary. While I was peeing she stood outside my stall door and said "You have a very strong stream". Oy vey. I cancelled all my remaining appointments, and started going to the gym at 430 in the morning so I could avoid everyone, X, Y, Z, and the idiot muscle head, who knew I knew he peed his pants and had taken to telling me stories about being abused as a child while I was trying to do my pull ups.
Shortly after the whole incident, X and Y broke off their engagement. X closed up shop and went back to her home town in New Jersey. I don't know what happened to Y. Muscle guy quit the gym and went to work for some other gym that offered Tae-Bo. As for Z, we had a heart to heart talk about life.
He told me that his deaf brother also had a drug problem and was mentally challenged. His mom started wearing a wig when he was in elementary school for reasons unknown. I suggested she might have converted to a very rigorous version of Judaism, which he said was "impossible". I was like dude, she is WEARING A WIG! NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!
Anyway, the drama was too much and as much as I lusted after free shoes and running clothes from his sponsor, I couldn't bring myself to date him. Also, his check engine light was on in his car all the time and he never got it checked. It practically gave me an ulcer.
I wish I could say X was the last woman in Maryland who hit on me, but that is not the case...
One thing that lessened the pain was physical therapy. Or maybe the pain I endured in therapy was so great that the normal, every day pain of recovery seemed less. Anyway, when I moved to Baltimore from San Fran one of the first things I did was find myself a PT. It happened that a woman, who I will call X, had just opened a clinic in my gym. I became one of her first patients.
X was around my age. She was engaged to Y, who worked as her assistant. She spent hours doing extra therapy for me, and I often would be in sessions with her until 830 at night. There was a bar right next to the gym (good planning on some one's part!) and I would usually retire there for a drink and some peanuts before heading home.
As part of my PT I was also given a free personal trainer for a month. Let's just call him Z. He was a professional runner and in pretty high demand. Oddly enough, he had a close resemblance to my high school running friend Doug Rippey. I had gone through the other five trainers the gym had to offer in about a week, finding them all lacking and incompetent in even the most mundane aspects of working out (for the record, at that point I was going on 4 years working with a personal trainer, and was spoiled rotten by Tom Mendall and Shelley Hines, love and miss you both!). Z started joining me for my bar sessions after PT, and even participated in a few sessions to learn how to work better with my injuries. I kept waiting for Z to ask me out, but he never did.
So the holidays rolled around, and X invited me to her house for a party. She claimed she wanted to set me up with Z, who was shy, but who might open up in a social environment. So on the appointed night I showed up. The party had been in full swing for 3 or 4 hours (I was working late that Friday) and X was trashed. She grabbed my hand and pretended she was introducing me to people at the party, dragging me around like a child at a funeral, but it just seemed...weird. It was almost as though she were introducing people to me as her date.
Then, as I sat on the sofa next to Z and started trying to talk to him, X ran over, planted herself in my lap and put her head on my shoulder. Ignoring this, I continued trying to engage Z in conversation. I might as well have been talking to a frozen dog turd. The situation in my lap, however, was escalating. X began trying to fondle my tits. Then she grabbed my neck and started trying to force her tongue down my throat. I managed to fend her off, pretending that I had to go to the bathroom, but she followed me and was saying some very sexual stuff outside the bathroom door while I was peeing, including that it turned her on to listen to me pee.
I left the party shortly afterwards. Z ended up following me to my car. The interest of a female piqued his interest in me I guess.
For the record, I went on one date with him. He invited three of his friends. It was very high school. Also, when I was driving to his house to pick him up (get the picture - he was the bitch) I got lost because his directions sucked and I was on the cell with him and asked "so are you near the deaf kid sign?", the only visible land marker for miles, and it turns out the sign was in front of his house. I was like "why didn't you just say turn at the deaf kid sign" and he said "because the deaf kid is my brother and that's why the sign is there". How embarrassing.
I should also note that the hot guy muscle head of the gym got so wrecked at X's party that he peed his pants, and it was the talk of gym for the next few months. Why are the hot ones always so stupid?
Anyway, the next PT session was kind of awkward and I spent most of the time working with X's fiance Y. He assured me that X was just drunk and her behavior didn't mean anything, blah blah blah. Later, I went to the bathroom, and X followed me. I thought she was coming into the bathroom with me to apologize or something. To the contrary. While I was peeing she stood outside my stall door and said "You have a very strong stream". Oy vey. I cancelled all my remaining appointments, and started going to the gym at 430 in the morning so I could avoid everyone, X, Y, Z, and the idiot muscle head, who knew I knew he peed his pants and had taken to telling me stories about being abused as a child while I was trying to do my pull ups.
Shortly after the whole incident, X and Y broke off their engagement. X closed up shop and went back to her home town in New Jersey. I don't know what happened to Y. Muscle guy quit the gym and went to work for some other gym that offered Tae-Bo. As for Z, we had a heart to heart talk about life.
He told me that his deaf brother also had a drug problem and was mentally challenged. His mom started wearing a wig when he was in elementary school for reasons unknown. I suggested she might have converted to a very rigorous version of Judaism, which he said was "impossible". I was like dude, she is WEARING A WIG! NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!
Anyway, the drama was too much and as much as I lusted after free shoes and running clothes from his sponsor, I couldn't bring myself to date him. Also, his check engine light was on in his car all the time and he never got it checked. It practically gave me an ulcer.
I wish I could say X was the last woman in Maryland who hit on me, but that is not the case...
Clouds
My dad was on the road all the time when I was a kid. I never really understood where he went when he was gone. All I knew is that he was on a plane, presumably flying around somewhere. I thought he was in a plane just flying around our house. I used to stand in the backyard and look up at the sky. I assumed he was on whatever plane happened to fly over the house.
One day I got a great idea, inspired by having to present something at a school show and tell. The last show and tell I had brought in my favorite stuffed animal, a shark from Sea World that didn't have any eyes because my dog had chewed them off. I was ridiculed for weeks afterwards. So I decided that I would bring a cloud in for the show and tell, and that the cloud would be supplied by my dad.
I cleaned out a jar that had contained sweet relish. I believe I even wrote "cloud" on a piece of masking take and stuck it to the jar. I packed the jar in my dad's briefcase. I thought all he would have to do is roll down the window of the plane, stick the jar out, and then put the cap on once the jar filled up with cloud. I imagined a it would be like a soft cotton blanket and was pretty excited at the thought of having my own cloud. I even found a hiding place in our house to make sure one of my siblings didn't let my cloud go during one of our fights.
My dad was pretty pissed when he returned from his trip because I has put a relish jar in his briefcase. He then gave me a lecture about clouds, and I'm sure it was along the lines of:
"A cloud is a visible mass of condensed droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth. the condensing substance is typically water vapor, which forms small droplets or ice crystals, typically 0.01 mm in diameter. When surrounded by billions of other droplets or crystals they become visible as clouds. Dense deep clouds exhibit a high reflectance (70% to 95%) throughout the visible range of wavelengths. Thus they appear white, at least from the top."
I didn't believe him, and I was really mad because I had told everyone at school that I was bringing in a cloud. I ended up bringing in a copy of the book Jaws that I had purchased at a garage sale, and was subsequently sent to the principal's office for bringing an "adult" book into school. Sister Mary Paul (see my eighth grade talent show for more on my school) took the book away from me and I never saw it again.
The moral of the story is, if you want to raise a kid who isn't obsessed with great whites, fill a jar full of whatever and tell the kid it's a cloud.
One day I got a great idea, inspired by having to present something at a school show and tell. The last show and tell I had brought in my favorite stuffed animal, a shark from Sea World that didn't have any eyes because my dog had chewed them off. I was ridiculed for weeks afterwards. So I decided that I would bring a cloud in for the show and tell, and that the cloud would be supplied by my dad.
I cleaned out a jar that had contained sweet relish. I believe I even wrote "cloud" on a piece of masking take and stuck it to the jar. I packed the jar in my dad's briefcase. I thought all he would have to do is roll down the window of the plane, stick the jar out, and then put the cap on once the jar filled up with cloud. I imagined a it would be like a soft cotton blanket and was pretty excited at the thought of having my own cloud. I even found a hiding place in our house to make sure one of my siblings didn't let my cloud go during one of our fights.
My dad was pretty pissed when he returned from his trip because I has put a relish jar in his briefcase. He then gave me a lecture about clouds, and I'm sure it was along the lines of:
"A cloud is a visible mass of condensed droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth. the condensing substance is typically water vapor, which forms small droplets or ice crystals, typically 0.01 mm in diameter. When surrounded by billions of other droplets or crystals they become visible as clouds. Dense deep clouds exhibit a high reflectance (70% to 95%) throughout the visible range of wavelengths. Thus they appear white, at least from the top."
I didn't believe him, and I was really mad because I had told everyone at school that I was bringing in a cloud. I ended up bringing in a copy of the book Jaws that I had purchased at a garage sale, and was subsequently sent to the principal's office for bringing an "adult" book into school. Sister Mary Paul (see my eighth grade talent show for more on my school) took the book away from me and I never saw it again.
The moral of the story is, if you want to raise a kid who isn't obsessed with great whites, fill a jar full of whatever and tell the kid it's a cloud.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Bad Water
NOTE: this story contains the word "vomit", excessively so perhaps. So if the word bothers you don't eat while reading this story.
It was a warm, perfect Ouray* day in August (2007). Clint and I were doing an overnight hiking trip. The plan was to hike the Bear Creek trail, link to the Horsethief trail, link to the Bridge of Heaven, and come down the Old Horsethief Trail, a round trip of about 27 miles (http://www.trails.com/tcatalog_trail.asp?trailid=HGR271-002).
The Old Horsethief Trail would drop us on the outskirts of Ouray, where we would walk 1 mile back to Clint’s apartment. Getting our usual alpine start around noon, we got a little lost and missed our trail turn off, and ended up coming up a gully to American Flats. Sunset was earlier than we had expected on that side of the ridge. The wind was blowing cold, and there was already a light snow coating the plain, which is at about 11,800 feet.
In the distance we could see little white tents of the sheep herders. They looked like little tissues dropped in the grass. The area where we were hiking is used by ranchers to graze their sheep. We found a boggy, somewhat flat field to set up the tent, and we went to a nearby stream to filter water for dinner. By this time it was rapidly getting dark. We noticed a few sheep droppings and sheep prints around the creek but thought nothing of it.
I am normally insistent that the water be chemically treated, but the San Juans are, comparatively, rarely traveled and filtering is normally all that is needed for most of the mountain streams. In fact, the morning we left for the hike, Clint insisted that I unpack the small, 1 ounce bottle of chemicals for purifying water that I had put in my backpack.
After getting our camp site set up Clint made a quick dinner dinner of broccoli, rice, and mashed potatoes. I decided to re-hydrate myself by drinking half a bottle of red wine, where as Clint stuck with the more traditional approach of water. After dinner Clint buried our food and stove under a pile of rocks in a boulder field about 200 yards away from the tent in an attempt to keep the marmots out of our food. I was organizing our tent and didn’t pay much attention to where he put the stuff sack with our stove and food. We then settled in to the tent around 830, with the idea of getting up around midnight to see the Hale Bopp meteor shower, which was almost over. I had spent numerous nights during August driving to various locations around Denver at 2 am to see the shower with no success. The meteor shower was coming to an end and this was my last chance to see it.
I had brought along the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which turned out to be a pretty bad choice for reading at 12,500 feet. I started dozing off, with the occasional suggestion from Clint that I drink some water waking me. I had decided to not drink much water that night because it was about 20 degrees F, and I had just come from 100 degree F temperatures in Denver. The thought of going out in the cold every few hours to pee was less than appealing.
Around midnight I was trying to rouse myself and get some clothes on to see the meteor shower. Clint suddenly sat up and lunged for the front of the tent. Not sure what was going on I watched as he fumbled the zipper, stuck his head out the tent door, and then started making a noise that sounded as if he was being strangled.
Still half asleep and wondering if he was playing some kind of joke on me, I sat up too. The smell of broccoli and cheese vomit wafted into the tent.
That’s interesting, I thought to myself, pulling my clothes on at a more hurried pace while trying to remember if the side of the tent Clint was puking on was the same side where I had put my backpack. He struggled out of his sleeping bag and ran a short distance from the tent as I pulled my shoes on. I found my head lamp and crawled outside, avoiding the big vomit pile just outside the tent entryway.
It appeared his body was doing a full exorcism of everything he had eaten in his past three lives. He squatted in the dark at the edge of the field seemingly attempting to shit and vomit himself to death. I started trying to piece together what was wrong with him. The situation appeared to be an allergic reaction, at least from my personal experience. But everything we had for dinner was a staple in his diet. I wondered if he was having a combination high altitude/too much wine vomit attack. I knew it couldn’t be food poisoning because that meant I would have been sick as well.
Then it suddenly hit me. The water.
When Clint finally came back to the tent he insisted on drinking more water to re-hydrate, even though I tried to convince him otherwise. I pointed out to him that the water was the only thing he ingested that I had not. All the water I had been drinking during the day and that evening I had packed in with me. The stream water that we used to make dinner had been boiled. There was no other factor that could have been making him so ill.
After another attack of vomiting, he finally agreed with me.
I headed over to the boulder field to locate the stove to boil some water so that Clint could re-hydrate without getting sicker. I also had snuck a Coke into the food stuff sack when Clint wasn’t looking, and I figured he could drink that as well. I stumbled around the boulder field with my headlamp trying to locate the tragically colored black stuff sack that had the stove and Coke in it (the stuff sack was about the size of a loaf of bread). It took about twenty minutes to locate. I also remembered, as I was walking back to the tent, that we had taken an almost empty gas canister with us because we didn’t think we would need much fuel. I hoped there was enough gas left to boil at least a few ounces of water.
Back at the tent Clint’s vomit and shit fest seemed to be waning. He got the stove fired up (for some reason he doesn’t trust me to light the stove, although I have patiently explained to him many times that all my stove calamities have been with the big appliances) and we boiled the contents of his Nalgene bottle, about 64 ounces of water. He mixed 6 ounces of water in with some Emergen-C and drank that. Then he drank about half the can of Coke. This seemed to re-ignite the evil water spirit. More vomiting and shitting ensued.
We still had a 12 mile hike out the next day, with about 4,000 feet of upward climbing between the down climbs as we crossed the various ridges. It was not going to be an easy hike out. Also, I was unfamiliar with the area we were hiking in, and there weren’t many good landscape features to pick out the trail based on the topographical map we had. Parts of the trail were still covered with a thin layer of snow making it even harder to figure out where to go.
I started thinking about what I was going to do if Clint wasn’t able to hike the next day. There was no simple way back to civilization from where we were. I stared pensively up at the sky, just to have something to look at besides Clint crouched over in a pool of headlamp light, rocking forward into the grass as he spewed Coke and Emergen-C. At that moment I saw five meteors shooting across the sky.
“Look! The meteor shower!” I yelled to Clint. He responded by puking.
Around 330 am we crawled back into the tent and Clint managed to fall into a light sleep. His breath still smelled like broccoli and rice, mixed with bile and probably pieces of stomach lining. I regretted agreeing to let him use my sleeping bag for the trip.
I finally fell into a light sleep myself, waking up at first light. I thought about our predicament. At least 12 miles away from help. Only 32 ounces of water to get us through those 12 miles. Two severely dehydrated hikers. Me, the healthy one, lacking knowledge of where the trail went. A temperature variance that would have us hiking the first 6 miles in temperatures cold enough to preserve snow, and the last 6 miles in summer time temps, causing further dehydration.
Well, the situation can’t possibly get any worse, I thought to myself. And then I looked out the tent flap. It had started to snow.
Clint woke up around 830 and I started packing up the camp while he drank more water. The morning was solemn and a herd of thick grey clouds seemed to be wandering our way. We got on the trail and started our hike out. At that point I had not had anything to drink since around 8 the previous evening, when I had the wine. But given Clint’s situation I couldn’t really complain about myself. I decided to let him drink all the water, partially because he was so sick, and partially because the Nalgene bottle he was drinking out of smelled like puke.
We walked along in the snow, and then the rain. We constantly had to take off or put on clothes to adjust to the weather. Clint’s feet were dragging in the dirt, and he had to stop every 15 or 20 minutes because his body kept trying to disgorge any remaining fluid. He would take a sip of water and throw it up 5 minutes later. His listlessness was starting to scare me. We didn’t talk because he said even the effort of listening to me say anything made him want to puke. Hmmm….
We finally found what we thought was the old Horsethief trail and started down it. It was a relief to be across the ridges and headed downward. We did stop for a few minutes at the Bridge of Heaven, but I was so worried about Clint that I barely remember it.
As we got further down the trail we realized we had gone the wrong way. We were much further from the outskirts of town that we expected. We ended up taking a different trail back towards the town since neither of us really felt like hiking 3 miles along the highway into Ouray. The trail was steep and little used, and dangerously unstable due to the rain that was falling intermittently. I worried that one of us would slip and fall because the narrow trail kept crumbling under the weight of our steps.
We finally arrived back at Clint’s apartment around 330 PM. I had not had anything to drink for the whole hike so I guzzled water. I then headed off to the pharmacy to some stomach medication for Clint. While he slept I did research and determined that we had gotten leptospiriosis, a small bacteria caused by sheep urine and feces in stream water. It turns out lepto is a rare bacteria and one of the few that can’t be filtered. It must be treated either by boiling or adding chemicals to the water. It normally takes 2 days to manifest itself, but for some reason it hit Clint right away, possibly due to altitude, or the amount of water he drank, or his level of dehydration.
That night we were sitting on the sofa watching a movie. I was smugly congratulating myself for not getting sick, as I am usually the one puking. I assumed the reason was because the only water I had consumed had been boiled. But then Clint pointed out to me that the hot cocoa I had at dinner was only heated and not boiled. But he couldn’t remember if the water came from the packed in bottles or the stream.
The next day I became extremely ill. It was even worse than the time I almost died from appendicitis. I was up all night repeating Clint’s performance. It was a day before I could hold down fluids, and another two days before I could eat. We had to take two different courses of antibiotics to get rid of the bacteria and both of us still have relapses, although that is supposed to stop after 6 months or so.
So, next backpacking trip, I’m in charge of the water…
*Ouray, Co, located outside of Telluride
It was a warm, perfect Ouray* day in August (2007). Clint and I were doing an overnight hiking trip. The plan was to hike the Bear Creek trail, link to the Horsethief trail, link to the Bridge of Heaven, and come down the Old Horsethief Trail, a round trip of about 27 miles (http://www.trails.com/tcatalog_trail.asp?trailid=HGR271-002).
The Old Horsethief Trail would drop us on the outskirts of Ouray, where we would walk 1 mile back to Clint’s apartment. Getting our usual alpine start around noon, we got a little lost and missed our trail turn off, and ended up coming up a gully to American Flats. Sunset was earlier than we had expected on that side of the ridge. The wind was blowing cold, and there was already a light snow coating the plain, which is at about 11,800 feet.
In the distance we could see little white tents of the sheep herders. They looked like little tissues dropped in the grass. The area where we were hiking is used by ranchers to graze their sheep. We found a boggy, somewhat flat field to set up the tent, and we went to a nearby stream to filter water for dinner. By this time it was rapidly getting dark. We noticed a few sheep droppings and sheep prints around the creek but thought nothing of it.
I am normally insistent that the water be chemically treated, but the San Juans are, comparatively, rarely traveled and filtering is normally all that is needed for most of the mountain streams. In fact, the morning we left for the hike, Clint insisted that I unpack the small, 1 ounce bottle of chemicals for purifying water that I had put in my backpack.
After getting our camp site set up Clint made a quick dinner dinner of broccoli, rice, and mashed potatoes. I decided to re-hydrate myself by drinking half a bottle of red wine, where as Clint stuck with the more traditional approach of water. After dinner Clint buried our food and stove under a pile of rocks in a boulder field about 200 yards away from the tent in an attempt to keep the marmots out of our food. I was organizing our tent and didn’t pay much attention to where he put the stuff sack with our stove and food. We then settled in to the tent around 830, with the idea of getting up around midnight to see the Hale Bopp meteor shower, which was almost over. I had spent numerous nights during August driving to various locations around Denver at 2 am to see the shower with no success. The meteor shower was coming to an end and this was my last chance to see it.
I had brought along the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which turned out to be a pretty bad choice for reading at 12,500 feet. I started dozing off, with the occasional suggestion from Clint that I drink some water waking me. I had decided to not drink much water that night because it was about 20 degrees F, and I had just come from 100 degree F temperatures in Denver. The thought of going out in the cold every few hours to pee was less than appealing.
Around midnight I was trying to rouse myself and get some clothes on to see the meteor shower. Clint suddenly sat up and lunged for the front of the tent. Not sure what was going on I watched as he fumbled the zipper, stuck his head out the tent door, and then started making a noise that sounded as if he was being strangled.
Still half asleep and wondering if he was playing some kind of joke on me, I sat up too. The smell of broccoli and cheese vomit wafted into the tent.
That’s interesting, I thought to myself, pulling my clothes on at a more hurried pace while trying to remember if the side of the tent Clint was puking on was the same side where I had put my backpack. He struggled out of his sleeping bag and ran a short distance from the tent as I pulled my shoes on. I found my head lamp and crawled outside, avoiding the big vomit pile just outside the tent entryway.
It appeared his body was doing a full exorcism of everything he had eaten in his past three lives. He squatted in the dark at the edge of the field seemingly attempting to shit and vomit himself to death. I started trying to piece together what was wrong with him. The situation appeared to be an allergic reaction, at least from my personal experience. But everything we had for dinner was a staple in his diet. I wondered if he was having a combination high altitude/too much wine vomit attack. I knew it couldn’t be food poisoning because that meant I would have been sick as well.
Then it suddenly hit me. The water.
When Clint finally came back to the tent he insisted on drinking more water to re-hydrate, even though I tried to convince him otherwise. I pointed out to him that the water was the only thing he ingested that I had not. All the water I had been drinking during the day and that evening I had packed in with me. The stream water that we used to make dinner had been boiled. There was no other factor that could have been making him so ill.
After another attack of vomiting, he finally agreed with me.
I headed over to the boulder field to locate the stove to boil some water so that Clint could re-hydrate without getting sicker. I also had snuck a Coke into the food stuff sack when Clint wasn’t looking, and I figured he could drink that as well. I stumbled around the boulder field with my headlamp trying to locate the tragically colored black stuff sack that had the stove and Coke in it (the stuff sack was about the size of a loaf of bread). It took about twenty minutes to locate. I also remembered, as I was walking back to the tent, that we had taken an almost empty gas canister with us because we didn’t think we would need much fuel. I hoped there was enough gas left to boil at least a few ounces of water.
Back at the tent Clint’s vomit and shit fest seemed to be waning. He got the stove fired up (for some reason he doesn’t trust me to light the stove, although I have patiently explained to him many times that all my stove calamities have been with the big appliances) and we boiled the contents of his Nalgene bottle, about 64 ounces of water. He mixed 6 ounces of water in with some Emergen-C and drank that. Then he drank about half the can of Coke. This seemed to re-ignite the evil water spirit. More vomiting and shitting ensued.
We still had a 12 mile hike out the next day, with about 4,000 feet of upward climbing between the down climbs as we crossed the various ridges. It was not going to be an easy hike out. Also, I was unfamiliar with the area we were hiking in, and there weren’t many good landscape features to pick out the trail based on the topographical map we had. Parts of the trail were still covered with a thin layer of snow making it even harder to figure out where to go.
I started thinking about what I was going to do if Clint wasn’t able to hike the next day. There was no simple way back to civilization from where we were. I stared pensively up at the sky, just to have something to look at besides Clint crouched over in a pool of headlamp light, rocking forward into the grass as he spewed Coke and Emergen-C. At that moment I saw five meteors shooting across the sky.
“Look! The meteor shower!” I yelled to Clint. He responded by puking.
Around 330 am we crawled back into the tent and Clint managed to fall into a light sleep. His breath still smelled like broccoli and rice, mixed with bile and probably pieces of stomach lining. I regretted agreeing to let him use my sleeping bag for the trip.
I finally fell into a light sleep myself, waking up at first light. I thought about our predicament. At least 12 miles away from help. Only 32 ounces of water to get us through those 12 miles. Two severely dehydrated hikers. Me, the healthy one, lacking knowledge of where the trail went. A temperature variance that would have us hiking the first 6 miles in temperatures cold enough to preserve snow, and the last 6 miles in summer time temps, causing further dehydration.
Well, the situation can’t possibly get any worse, I thought to myself. And then I looked out the tent flap. It had started to snow.
Clint woke up around 830 and I started packing up the camp while he drank more water. The morning was solemn and a herd of thick grey clouds seemed to be wandering our way. We got on the trail and started our hike out. At that point I had not had anything to drink since around 8 the previous evening, when I had the wine. But given Clint’s situation I couldn’t really complain about myself. I decided to let him drink all the water, partially because he was so sick, and partially because the Nalgene bottle he was drinking out of smelled like puke.
We walked along in the snow, and then the rain. We constantly had to take off or put on clothes to adjust to the weather. Clint’s feet were dragging in the dirt, and he had to stop every 15 or 20 minutes because his body kept trying to disgorge any remaining fluid. He would take a sip of water and throw it up 5 minutes later. His listlessness was starting to scare me. We didn’t talk because he said even the effort of listening to me say anything made him want to puke. Hmmm….
We finally found what we thought was the old Horsethief trail and started down it. It was a relief to be across the ridges and headed downward. We did stop for a few minutes at the Bridge of Heaven, but I was so worried about Clint that I barely remember it.
As we got further down the trail we realized we had gone the wrong way. We were much further from the outskirts of town that we expected. We ended up taking a different trail back towards the town since neither of us really felt like hiking 3 miles along the highway into Ouray. The trail was steep and little used, and dangerously unstable due to the rain that was falling intermittently. I worried that one of us would slip and fall because the narrow trail kept crumbling under the weight of our steps.
We finally arrived back at Clint’s apartment around 330 PM. I had not had anything to drink for the whole hike so I guzzled water. I then headed off to the pharmacy to some stomach medication for Clint. While he slept I did research and determined that we had gotten leptospiriosis, a small bacteria caused by sheep urine and feces in stream water. It turns out lepto is a rare bacteria and one of the few that can’t be filtered. It must be treated either by boiling or adding chemicals to the water. It normally takes 2 days to manifest itself, but for some reason it hit Clint right away, possibly due to altitude, or the amount of water he drank, or his level of dehydration.
That night we were sitting on the sofa watching a movie. I was smugly congratulating myself for not getting sick, as I am usually the one puking. I assumed the reason was because the only water I had consumed had been boiled. But then Clint pointed out to me that the hot cocoa I had at dinner was only heated and not boiled. But he couldn’t remember if the water came from the packed in bottles or the stream.
The next day I became extremely ill. It was even worse than the time I almost died from appendicitis. I was up all night repeating Clint’s performance. It was a day before I could hold down fluids, and another two days before I could eat. We had to take two different courses of antibiotics to get rid of the bacteria and both of us still have relapses, although that is supposed to stop after 6 months or so.
So, next backpacking trip, I’m in charge of the water…
*Ouray, Co, located outside of Telluride
Reflections on London
I meant to post this back in November when I was in London. But I somehow spaced it and just found it today when cleaning up my hard drive.
London is much more expensive that I had imagined. I was here in the late 1990’s a lot and it didn’t seem that bad. But, as an example, today I paid about $34 to ride the London Underground for 3 days. The ticket is only good for one station (i.e. I didn’t pay that much money for a pass that I could use to go anywhere), and the station I’m riding to is only 2.7 miles from my hotel. That comes out to about $2.09 a mile, which, interestingly enough, is also the exchange rate right now (1 BPS to 2.09USD). I would walk but cobblestones + 4 inch heels = haven’t my knees suffered enough.
The office I’m working in is amazing. Watching British romantic comedies used to make me scoff at the places where the characters worked. Now I realize there actually are offices like that in the city. This particular client’s office is all glass walls, fancy glass doors, lounges with wide plank wood floors and modern couches that aren’t moldy and stained, trendy yet tasteful colors on the walls, and cube wall dividers that are curvy and covered in colored material rather than the usual square metal set up that is conducive to boredom and depression.
The bad thing is every time someone starts talking to me I start thinking about Monty Python’s flying circus and I have to think of something sad (e.g. dogs that have been run over by cars) so I don’t start laughing. Especially when they say “cheers” or “right, then”. And today when I was going out to get a sandwich the guy sitting next to me said “going out for some lunchy munchy then?” and I had to think about buying Lucent stock at $72 and selling it at $6 to not crack up. I also think it’s funny the way certain words have an “s” on the end. For example, they have a bin for recycling that says “drinks cans”. There is also a “motors parks” and a “computers lab” in the building.
My favorite thing that I have discovered (besides how cheap, relative to US, French wines are – the only cheap thing in UK and it’s unfortunate I can’t spend my entire day drinking) is a snack called flap cakes. They are oatmeal and something called “inverted sugar” pressed into a bar. It’s like being able to eat oatmeal without needing a bowl. Flap cakes come plain or with fruit. And inverted sugar is my favorite ingredient that I’ve ever heard of, replacing “lemon zest”, which in real life is rather disappointing. “Zest” suggests some kind of excitement and zest is essentially just pieces of a peel in your food. Even I can do that. Inverted sugar sounds very X games-ish and daring, like something a chef would make in a bake off sponsored by Red Bull, and the next day there would be the headline: Chef Pulls Inverted Sugar – Wins Bakeoff.
London is much more expensive that I had imagined. I was here in the late 1990’s a lot and it didn’t seem that bad. But, as an example, today I paid about $34 to ride the London Underground for 3 days. The ticket is only good for one station (i.e. I didn’t pay that much money for a pass that I could use to go anywhere), and the station I’m riding to is only 2.7 miles from my hotel. That comes out to about $2.09 a mile, which, interestingly enough, is also the exchange rate right now (1 BPS to 2.09USD). I would walk but cobblestones + 4 inch heels = haven’t my knees suffered enough.
The office I’m working in is amazing. Watching British romantic comedies used to make me scoff at the places where the characters worked. Now I realize there actually are offices like that in the city. This particular client’s office is all glass walls, fancy glass doors, lounges with wide plank wood floors and modern couches that aren’t moldy and stained, trendy yet tasteful colors on the walls, and cube wall dividers that are curvy and covered in colored material rather than the usual square metal set up that is conducive to boredom and depression.
The bad thing is every time someone starts talking to me I start thinking about Monty Python’s flying circus and I have to think of something sad (e.g. dogs that have been run over by cars) so I don’t start laughing. Especially when they say “cheers” or “right, then”. And today when I was going out to get a sandwich the guy sitting next to me said “going out for some lunchy munchy then?” and I had to think about buying Lucent stock at $72 and selling it at $6 to not crack up. I also think it’s funny the way certain words have an “s” on the end. For example, they have a bin for recycling that says “drinks cans”. There is also a “motors parks” and a “computers lab” in the building.
My favorite thing that I have discovered (besides how cheap, relative to US, French wines are – the only cheap thing in UK and it’s unfortunate I can’t spend my entire day drinking) is a snack called flap cakes. They are oatmeal and something called “inverted sugar” pressed into a bar. It’s like being able to eat oatmeal without needing a bowl. Flap cakes come plain or with fruit. And inverted sugar is my favorite ingredient that I’ve ever heard of, replacing “lemon zest”, which in real life is rather disappointing. “Zest” suggests some kind of excitement and zest is essentially just pieces of a peel in your food. Even I can do that. Inverted sugar sounds very X games-ish and daring, like something a chef would make in a bake off sponsored by Red Bull, and the next day there would be the headline: Chef Pulls Inverted Sugar – Wins Bakeoff.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
a sad story about a cat
The story you are about to read happened to my friend John Mitchell. I did not, repeat, DID NOT make it up. John, if you are out there somewhere, please verify.
John lived at Woodlawn plantation in a house that was divided in two. On one side was John's place, which he shared with his sister. On the other side was this crack head kind of couple that had a million cats. Okay, actually they only had about 20 cats. Anyway, the cats kept getting eaten by foxes or whatever, and the crack head wife (they weren't crack heads, actually, they were just really weird not quite hippy people and I think the guy wore black socks every day, and his wife was that crazy lady with 20 cats, you know the type) kept accusing John of trying to poison, strangle, capture, torture, barbecue, or relocate (the cat version of extreme rendition) her brood.
John is the type of guy who would never hurt a living creature unless it was human. So it used to make him mad because the cats would pee in his flowers and scratch up his screen and the only thing he ever did was yell at them. Once one pooped in his softball shoes, which he had left out on the porch because they were wet.
Fast forward to the point of the story. One cold, rainy morning John went out to the driveway to start his truck. The driveway was a long dirt thing ending in a big circle from which everyone's parked vehicle radiated like petals on a pollution flower. He put the truck into gear and started to back up. Suddenly he heard a horrible howl.
He pulled forward and hopped out of the truck. There, on the ground, was a flattened cat. And not just ANY cat, but the crazy lady's FAVORITE cat. It seems the cat went to sleep in the well of John's back wheel because it was dry and warm. The cat did not register that starting the truck meant moving the truck.
John was in a panic. He didn't want to tell crazy lady that he killed her cat. So he did what any man in his position would do. He got a small shovel and pried the cat off his tire tread where it was lodged. Then he placed the cat on the back tire of the crazy lady's car.
Amazingly, it worked. The woman had a nervous breakdown and she and her husband moved from Woodlawn Plantation. We had a huge party, which, oddly enough, is the last time I saw my friend Doug Rippey. Apparently I was wearing leather pants at the party. Oy vey.
John lived at Woodlawn plantation in a house that was divided in two. On one side was John's place, which he shared with his sister. On the other side was this crack head kind of couple that had a million cats. Okay, actually they only had about 20 cats. Anyway, the cats kept getting eaten by foxes or whatever, and the crack head wife (they weren't crack heads, actually, they were just really weird not quite hippy people and I think the guy wore black socks every day, and his wife was that crazy lady with 20 cats, you know the type) kept accusing John of trying to poison, strangle, capture, torture, barbecue, or relocate (the cat version of extreme rendition) her brood.
John is the type of guy who would never hurt a living creature unless it was human. So it used to make him mad because the cats would pee in his flowers and scratch up his screen and the only thing he ever did was yell at them. Once one pooped in his softball shoes, which he had left out on the porch because they were wet.
Fast forward to the point of the story. One cold, rainy morning John went out to the driveway to start his truck. The driveway was a long dirt thing ending in a big circle from which everyone's parked vehicle radiated like petals on a pollution flower. He put the truck into gear and started to back up. Suddenly he heard a horrible howl.
He pulled forward and hopped out of the truck. There, on the ground, was a flattened cat. And not just ANY cat, but the crazy lady's FAVORITE cat. It seems the cat went to sleep in the well of John's back wheel because it was dry and warm. The cat did not register that starting the truck meant moving the truck.
John was in a panic. He didn't want to tell crazy lady that he killed her cat. So he did what any man in his position would do. He got a small shovel and pried the cat off his tire tread where it was lodged. Then he placed the cat on the back tire of the crazy lady's car.
Amazingly, it worked. The woman had a nervous breakdown and she and her husband moved from Woodlawn Plantation. We had a huge party, which, oddly enough, is the last time I saw my friend Doug Rippey. Apparently I was wearing leather pants at the party. Oy vey.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
New Computer Status Choices
I hope someone reading this has contacts at Microsoft. Ever since Dell "upgraded" my "operating system" to Windows Vista, I've been coming up with new computer status options (accessed when you go to, for example, log off):
-Instead of just sleeping, how about sleeping with the fishes, for when my bastard machine refuses to boot up and then I open it up and touch the mother board without grounding myself and of course I'm standing on a shag wool carpet wearing a fleece. Bye bye mother board. I never learn my lesson...
-Instead of just hibernating, how about hibernating for the winter. I have had luck leaving a computer off for a couple of months, and then turning it on and discovering it works again.
-Defenestrate - or is throwing Windows out the window redundant?
-Recrash - for when you want to reboot but you know the bastard is going to just crash again, so why not just say recrash instead of leading us down the hopeful path that some day the computer might reboot.
-Sleeping but possessed - For some reason the blue power button on my new computer starts flashing randomly in the middle of the night.
It wakes me up and makes me think of Poltergeist the movie. Does anyone know where I can get some virtual holy water, or maybe I should burn some sage in the DVD drive...
-Sleeping with nightmares - sometimes when I put my computer to sleep it seems to wake up, but then when I try to do something with it, it slips back to sleep. Strange.
-Instead of just sleeping, how about sleeping with the fishes, for when my bastard machine refuses to boot up and then I open it up and touch the mother board without grounding myself and of course I'm standing on a shag wool carpet wearing a fleece. Bye bye mother board. I never learn my lesson...
-Instead of just hibernating, how about hibernating for the winter. I have had luck leaving a computer off for a couple of months, and then turning it on and discovering it works again.
-Defenestrate - or is throwing Windows out the window redundant?
-Recrash - for when you want to reboot but you know the bastard is going to just crash again, so why not just say recrash instead of leading us down the hopeful path that some day the computer might reboot.
-Sleeping but possessed - For some reason the blue power button on my new computer starts flashing randomly in the middle of the night.
It wakes me up and makes me think of Poltergeist the movie. Does anyone know where I can get some virtual holy water, or maybe I should burn some sage in the DVD drive...
-Sleeping with nightmares - sometimes when I put my computer to sleep it seems to wake up, but then when I try to do something with it, it slips back to sleep. Strange.
Monday, December 10, 2007
George's Air Supply
I first met George the weekend my mother came to visit me for a shoe shopping, um, I mean, business trip right after I had moved to Baltimore. We were eating at a restaurant called Mt. Washington Tavern, on the outskirts of the city. The restaurants claim to fame, among other things, is that the chandeliers date back to 1889. That used to be impressive until I bought my house, built in 1890.
Anyway, we were at the bar waiting for a table when my mother was assaulted by this red headed Irish guy named George. He tried to buy her a drink, hit on her, etc. He was there with some colleagues who were all reporters for Fox news. He dropped that fact on me as if I would find it impressive. He didn't believe me when I told him I didn't have a TV and didn't know what Fox was (I thought it was a sitcom, which, it sort of is, except some people don't realize that because it doesn't have a laugh track). His colleagues eventually dragged him out of the bar and then my mother and I were seated at our table.
We were seated in a booth right against a window so we could see the main thoroughfare, and were just about to start on our salads when we heard a loud thunk. We both looked over to the window to see George with his face smashed against the glass, speaking incomprehensibly, partially because of the glass and partially because of the booze. His friends pulled him off the side of the building, and our window, so he proceeded to make an ass of himself on the sidewalk. At one point when I went to the ladies room my mom made contact with George and said something along the lines of "although I'm not interested my daughter is single and just moved here - maybe you should take her out sometime".
I wasn't George's type but he did make a few obligatory calls, which I didn't return, until the day he called and said he had free tickets to see Cats but didn't want to go and did I want the free tickets? I accepted the tickets, as well as others to see Beethoven's Fidelo and Ninth, Cabaret, Chicago, and a string of other shows. He got the tickets free for his job but never went because he found shows boring. I decided I at least owed him dinner and we went to dinner at a restaurant called An Poitin where his twin brother worked. Free tickets and free food - George was turning out to be one of the best friends my mother has ever found for me.
George's twin brother had a kidney removed in an attempt to save George's dad. George's dad lived for a few years after getting the new kidney before succumbing to whatever illness it was that he had (I didn't pry to find out). Whenever George and his brother were fighting George's brother would grab the side where the kidney was removed and say "it's hurting".
The kidney was a weird issue between the brothers. They both got tested to see if they were an acceptable tissue type for the transplant. If you volunteer to do this, just for future reference, and you are the right type, you can still say you don't want to be a donor and the doctor tells your family you weren't a match. So George's brother always suspected George was too much of a wimp to get his kidney taken out and told the doctor to say he wasn't a match. The fact that George and his brother were almost identical twins did cast a shadow of doubt on George's story, but seeing how much it hurt George to even joke about it, I know he would have given anything to help his father.
So, the point of this story: one night I met George and his brother out at An Poitin for my free Friday dinner. George was in pain and said his stomach was killing him. He was sure he had an ulcer. As I plowed through my dinner George's pain got worse and worse. The owner of the bar brought George back to a private room to lie down. An hour later he said the pain was excruciating, so I agreed to take him to the hospital.
If you know nothing about downtown Baltimore you have no idea what I was signing up for. Special Forces train in UM Baltimore because it's one of the few places in the US where they will experience gun shot wounds similar to what they will experience in Iraq.
We waited for hours to see a doctor. I cradled George's head in my lap and tried to wipe the spit off his mouth before it landed on my jeans. We finally were brought back to see a doctor 6 hours after arrival. He put George on a gurney and whisked him off for tests. The whole time I kept reminding myself how many free tickets he had given me, because the last place I wanted to be on a Friday was the emergency room of a city hospital. As the hours crept on the population of the hospital was slowly getting scarier.
Finally they brought George into this room that had 20 beds separated by blue curtains hanging from the ceiling. There were women crying because their boyfriends were shot. Women crying because their boyfriends beat them. Men crying because their friends were dying of overdoses. And then me and George, the whitest white people ever. But George swore his pain was as bad as the gunshot victims' pain, and I believed him.
The doctor strolled in around 230 in the morning. "What have we got here?" he asked. George, with tears welling in his eyes, explained his pain. The doc looked at the blood tests, scans, and x-rays. He could find nothing wrong. Wondering if it might be some early stage appendicitis he told George to lie flat while the doctor pushed on his stomach trying to pinpoint the spot where the pain was coming from. As the doctor put his hands on the lower right side of George's abdomen and pushed, George emitted the fart to end all farts. It rang through the entire emergency room and seem to last as long as a fire drill. If the walls of Jericho had still been standing, this fart would have knocked them down. It even silenced the gang bangers in the room with us.
George felt instantly better, and was released from the hospital. I was not allowed to tease him about saying he was going to die due to a fart. I tried to stay friends with him but couldn't face him without laughing, especially at inappropriate moments. He stopped calling me and offering me free tickets and then I started school and that was that...
Anyway, we were at the bar waiting for a table when my mother was assaulted by this red headed Irish guy named George. He tried to buy her a drink, hit on her, etc. He was there with some colleagues who were all reporters for Fox news. He dropped that fact on me as if I would find it impressive. He didn't believe me when I told him I didn't have a TV and didn't know what Fox was (I thought it was a sitcom, which, it sort of is, except some people don't realize that because it doesn't have a laugh track). His colleagues eventually dragged him out of the bar and then my mother and I were seated at our table.
We were seated in a booth right against a window so we could see the main thoroughfare, and were just about to start on our salads when we heard a loud thunk. We both looked over to the window to see George with his face smashed against the glass, speaking incomprehensibly, partially because of the glass and partially because of the booze. His friends pulled him off the side of the building, and our window, so he proceeded to make an ass of himself on the sidewalk. At one point when I went to the ladies room my mom made contact with George and said something along the lines of "although I'm not interested my daughter is single and just moved here - maybe you should take her out sometime".
I wasn't George's type but he did make a few obligatory calls, which I didn't return, until the day he called and said he had free tickets to see Cats but didn't want to go and did I want the free tickets? I accepted the tickets, as well as others to see Beethoven's Fidelo and Ninth, Cabaret, Chicago, and a string of other shows. He got the tickets free for his job but never went because he found shows boring. I decided I at least owed him dinner and we went to dinner at a restaurant called An Poitin where his twin brother worked. Free tickets and free food - George was turning out to be one of the best friends my mother has ever found for me.
George's twin brother had a kidney removed in an attempt to save George's dad. George's dad lived for a few years after getting the new kidney before succumbing to whatever illness it was that he had (I didn't pry to find out). Whenever George and his brother were fighting George's brother would grab the side where the kidney was removed and say "it's hurting".
The kidney was a weird issue between the brothers. They both got tested to see if they were an acceptable tissue type for the transplant. If you volunteer to do this, just for future reference, and you are the right type, you can still say you don't want to be a donor and the doctor tells your family you weren't a match. So George's brother always suspected George was too much of a wimp to get his kidney taken out and told the doctor to say he wasn't a match. The fact that George and his brother were almost identical twins did cast a shadow of doubt on George's story, but seeing how much it hurt George to even joke about it, I know he would have given anything to help his father.
So, the point of this story: one night I met George and his brother out at An Poitin for my free Friday dinner. George was in pain and said his stomach was killing him. He was sure he had an ulcer. As I plowed through my dinner George's pain got worse and worse. The owner of the bar brought George back to a private room to lie down. An hour later he said the pain was excruciating, so I agreed to take him to the hospital.
If you know nothing about downtown Baltimore you have no idea what I was signing up for. Special Forces train in UM Baltimore because it's one of the few places in the US where they will experience gun shot wounds similar to what they will experience in Iraq.
We waited for hours to see a doctor. I cradled George's head in my lap and tried to wipe the spit off his mouth before it landed on my jeans. We finally were brought back to see a doctor 6 hours after arrival. He put George on a gurney and whisked him off for tests. The whole time I kept reminding myself how many free tickets he had given me, because the last place I wanted to be on a Friday was the emergency room of a city hospital. As the hours crept on the population of the hospital was slowly getting scarier.
Finally they brought George into this room that had 20 beds separated by blue curtains hanging from the ceiling. There were women crying because their boyfriends were shot. Women crying because their boyfriends beat them. Men crying because their friends were dying of overdoses. And then me and George, the whitest white people ever. But George swore his pain was as bad as the gunshot victims' pain, and I believed him.
The doctor strolled in around 230 in the morning. "What have we got here?" he asked. George, with tears welling in his eyes, explained his pain. The doc looked at the blood tests, scans, and x-rays. He could find nothing wrong. Wondering if it might be some early stage appendicitis he told George to lie flat while the doctor pushed on his stomach trying to pinpoint the spot where the pain was coming from. As the doctor put his hands on the lower right side of George's abdomen and pushed, George emitted the fart to end all farts. It rang through the entire emergency room and seem to last as long as a fire drill. If the walls of Jericho had still been standing, this fart would have knocked them down. It even silenced the gang bangers in the room with us.
George felt instantly better, and was released from the hospital. I was not allowed to tease him about saying he was going to die due to a fart. I tried to stay friends with him but couldn't face him without laughing, especially at inappropriate moments. He stopped calling me and offering me free tickets and then I started school and that was that...
Friday, December 7, 2007
the naked physicist
So there I was, the new kid in Baltimore, back after a stint overseas and in San Fran. My best friend Rita had taken up with a man that she eventually married, so, with my partner in crime occupied, I ended up going out a lot by myself. It wasn’t particularly fun.
One day at work I was walking out of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) with some of my colleagues. As the name implies, it’s a place filled with ill dressed, out of shape, wonder bread boys, most of whom have never realized you can buy clothes made from natural fibers. Imagine my surprise when this gorgeous creature walked through the door in the opposite direction.
“Hey Morgan!” my colleagues said.
“Hhhrgh.” said Morgan.
I managed to make it to the car before I asked about him.
“So, is he single?” I queried.
A round of snickers and giggles ensued. Working with software developers is torture. Finally one of them said “Oh, I’m pretty sure he’s single.” Another round of the giggle fits. It took all my willpower not to punch every one of them in the balls.
I got Morgan’s email address at the lab and sent him an email from my yahoo account. I wrote “Hi, we have some colleagues in common (blah blah about them) and I’m working with APL on (blah blah). My favorite weapon is the lawn dart.”
He replied a couple of minutes later acknowledging my lawn dart joke, and then inquiring about my academic pedigree. The end of his email said “Just so you know, I do not date women without PhDs.”
It turns out Morgan had two PhDs, one in physics and one in engineering. I could feel the beginnings of a crush: gorgeous, in shape, and over educated. Right up my alley. I tried tempting him into a cup of tea by sending a favorite logic puzzle from Smullyan’s Riddle of Scheherazade. He liked but said no to tea. My wit was no match for his stubbornness.
Finally I sent him a story I had written about ice climbing, which I had submitted to a local paper, so it had my real name on it, as opposed to my nick name. Within seconds I got a response back that said “Are you related to Dr. X?” When I confirmed he said “I must meet you and experience your DNA in person.”
It turns out Morgan had used some research my dad had done on, I am not making this up, something about “Dynamic Elastic Moduli of Titanium Aluminides”, super alloys, and vacuum processing for something or other. Morgan looked up my home number and had left 5 messages for me while I was at work. He wanted to go out on a date. Things seemed to be falling into place.
We agreed to go to a place called 8x10, and for Morgan to walk over to pick me up. He lived, oddly enough, only 5 blocks from me. The club we were going to was ½ mile from my apartment.
I told the boys at work I had a date with Morgan. More snickers and giggles. Idiots, I thought to myself, ignoring them as best I could. Morgan had proven to be a first rate e-mailer, and a thoughtful guy who sent little notes and poems throughout the day. All the women at work were sighing over his picture, which I had found on the Hopkin’s web site, where he worked part time as a professor.
The morning of our date I logged on Yahoo. I emailed him asking what he was up to for the day. He sent an email back saying he was sending naked pictures of himself to all his friends. This was typical of our exchanges (much more clever if you read the originals). So I sent back saying I must not be a friend because I hadn’t gotten a picture yet. That afternoon I checked my email again. All the women from work were standing behind me to see what sweet things Morgan had written.
I had received an e-card so I clicked on the link. There, to my embarrassment, was a naked picture of Morgan, with a little smirk on his face. And when I say naked I mean naked as the day he sprung out of his mom’s vagina and said “Oh goody! Only 17 more years until I can go to college!” Oy vey. I had a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, but most of the women, after getting over the initial shock, found the picture provided even more incentive for me to date him.
That night I was on standby to buzz Morgan into the apartment building when my land line rang. It was Morgan. “Dude, you are supposed to be here right now picking me up” I said. I hate it when people are late.
“Well, there’s…a little problem,” he said.
The problem turned out to be an illness issue that he had not been disclosed. Morgan suffered from agoraphobia. He had a hard time leaving his apartment most days, unless he was going some place familiar, which my apartment building decidedly was not.
“So, I’m just going to chill for 15 minutes, and then I’ll be over,” he promised. 15 minutes later the phone rang. Same problem. Same solution. This went on for two hours until I finally lost it. “Get your ass over here or fuck off!” I yelled into the phone. Seven minutes later my buzzer went off.
I buzzed Morgan up to my place. I should mention that I was living in a department store building that was being made into loft apartments. I was the first, and at that point the only, tenant in the building. The hallways were still uncarpeted and detritus from construction abounded throughout. My apartment was more or less finished and was in its usual manically clean state.
Morgan pushed open my door, which I had left propped, and rushed over to the kitchen sink. “I’m just going to wash my hands,” he said. No problem, the building is dirty, I thought. But then he kept washing his hands. For five minutes. And then he dried them off and started washing them again.
The reason for my colleagues amusement over my date was suddenly becoming crystal clear.
It turns out Morgan was very intelligent, and as a result, mentally ill. He suffered from agoraphobia, OCD, haphephobia (fear of being touched), misophobia (fear of dirt and germs), and a whole host of other things. He had tried to take drugs but felt they made him dopey and slow witted so he coped as best as he could. Which, on this evening, was probably not very well, as he was not able to stop washing his hands.
I poured myself a glass of cognac and contemplated jumping out the window. I was on the 10th floor.
“Gross, don’t get near me with that!” said Morgan. He had wrapped my hand towels around his hands and headed into the living room. “I hate the smell of alcohol. It makes me want to vomit. I am going to have to lie on your floor for a minute because my back is bothering me.” I transferred more cognac to my glass, thought for a second, transferred that into a larger glass, which I topped off, and went into the living room.
He had not taken off his leather jacket (it was winter time) and the sleeves were pulled over his hands. I noticed, for the first time, that he was wearing a pair of really thick wool socks and Birkenstocks. Very few men can get away with that look. Morgan, on a good day, was one of them. But this was not, as mentioned above, a good day. Mental illness, academic snobbery, allergy to alcohol - all that could be forgiven. But not the Birkenstocks.
“Please leave.” I said, sinking down onto my sofa.
“I can’t leave now. I am just getting used to this place. I’m going to have to work myself up to go back out into that filthy hallway.”
“So how long will it take until you can leave?” I asked. He didn’t answer.
He started telling me his life story, including a play he wrote about a blow up doll, how his old girlfriend was murdered in Baltimore, about working at Hopkins, various patents he had applied for or currently held, and on and on. Finally, around 4 in the morning, I ran out of patience, energy, and, more importantly, cognac. I had to find a way to get him to leave.
A plan came to mind, a plan so preposterous I knew it would work. I started scratching my nails against the side of my sofa. Morgan stopped his monologue, delivered to the ceiling, and whipped his head around pretty quickly for a guy that had back problems.
“Did you hear that?” he asked in a frighten tone.
“Oh, that scratching sound?” I responded casually.
“What is it?” Morgan asked in a tone that said he didn’t really want to know.
“Well, a lot of the apartments don’t have external windows (this was true). The workmen leave their lunch stuff lying around (this was also true – most unfinished apartments looked like homes for wayward McDonald wrappers) and the rats come in at night and eat the food. There’s one rat that seems to be trying to get into my…”
Before I could finish Morgan moved off my floor with almost supernatural grace. His birks didn’t even come off. He rushed to my door and swung a be-sleeved hand in the direction of the knob. He looked like he was about to have a massive breakdown and couldn’t produce an intelligible sound.
I opened the door for him and he ran all the way from my apartment to the elevators. Two separate pairs of gloves fell out of his pockets but he didn’t stop. When he got to the elevator it was still waiting for him (they were set to end up on certain floors and not leave that floor until someone pressed a button because of the construction). The doors closed. I knew I would never see him again.
I went to bed around 430, relieved that my ordeal was over and vowing to not date again. Around 8 am the phone rang. It was Morgan, telling me what a great time he had had and asking if I was free for lunch that day as he wanted me to meet his friends. He warned me to not mention the ice climbing to any of his friends as he feared that would make me look too manly. He continued chattering away until I interrupted him.
“Fuck off.” I said, and hung up the phone.
As an odd afterward to this story, I was at an engineering dinner with my dad about two years later and I was talking to some physicists about Morgan. They seemed shocked that I was shocked that he sent me a naked picture. Apparently most physicists are crazy and like to give women naked pictures of themselves.
So ladies, if you are still looking for Mr. Right, consider yourselves warned…
One day at work I was walking out of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) with some of my colleagues. As the name implies, it’s a place filled with ill dressed, out of shape, wonder bread boys, most of whom have never realized you can buy clothes made from natural fibers. Imagine my surprise when this gorgeous creature walked through the door in the opposite direction.
“Hey Morgan!” my colleagues said.
“Hhhrgh.” said Morgan.
I managed to make it to the car before I asked about him.
“So, is he single?” I queried.
A round of snickers and giggles ensued. Working with software developers is torture. Finally one of them said “Oh, I’m pretty sure he’s single.” Another round of the giggle fits. It took all my willpower not to punch every one of them in the balls.
I got Morgan’s email address at the lab and sent him an email from my yahoo account. I wrote “Hi, we have some colleagues in common (blah blah about them) and I’m working with APL on (blah blah). My favorite weapon is the lawn dart.”
He replied a couple of minutes later acknowledging my lawn dart joke, and then inquiring about my academic pedigree. The end of his email said “Just so you know, I do not date women without PhDs.”
It turns out Morgan had two PhDs, one in physics and one in engineering. I could feel the beginnings of a crush: gorgeous, in shape, and over educated. Right up my alley. I tried tempting him into a cup of tea by sending a favorite logic puzzle from Smullyan’s Riddle of Scheherazade. He liked but said no to tea. My wit was no match for his stubbornness.
Finally I sent him a story I had written about ice climbing, which I had submitted to a local paper, so it had my real name on it, as opposed to my nick name. Within seconds I got a response back that said “Are you related to Dr. X?” When I confirmed he said “I must meet you and experience your DNA in person.”
It turns out Morgan had used some research my dad had done on, I am not making this up, something about “Dynamic Elastic Moduli of Titanium Aluminides”, super alloys, and vacuum processing for something or other. Morgan looked up my home number and had left 5 messages for me while I was at work. He wanted to go out on a date. Things seemed to be falling into place.
We agreed to go to a place called 8x10, and for Morgan to walk over to pick me up. He lived, oddly enough, only 5 blocks from me. The club we were going to was ½ mile from my apartment.
I told the boys at work I had a date with Morgan. More snickers and giggles. Idiots, I thought to myself, ignoring them as best I could. Morgan had proven to be a first rate e-mailer, and a thoughtful guy who sent little notes and poems throughout the day. All the women at work were sighing over his picture, which I had found on the Hopkin’s web site, where he worked part time as a professor.
The morning of our date I logged on Yahoo. I emailed him asking what he was up to for the day. He sent an email back saying he was sending naked pictures of himself to all his friends. This was typical of our exchanges (much more clever if you read the originals). So I sent back saying I must not be a friend because I hadn’t gotten a picture yet. That afternoon I checked my email again. All the women from work were standing behind me to see what sweet things Morgan had written.
I had received an e-card so I clicked on the link. There, to my embarrassment, was a naked picture of Morgan, with a little smirk on his face. And when I say naked I mean naked as the day he sprung out of his mom’s vagina and said “Oh goody! Only 17 more years until I can go to college!” Oy vey. I had a sudden sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, but most of the women, after getting over the initial shock, found the picture provided even more incentive for me to date him.
That night I was on standby to buzz Morgan into the apartment building when my land line rang. It was Morgan. “Dude, you are supposed to be here right now picking me up” I said. I hate it when people are late.
“Well, there’s…a little problem,” he said.
The problem turned out to be an illness issue that he had not been disclosed. Morgan suffered from agoraphobia. He had a hard time leaving his apartment most days, unless he was going some place familiar, which my apartment building decidedly was not.
“So, I’m just going to chill for 15 minutes, and then I’ll be over,” he promised. 15 minutes later the phone rang. Same problem. Same solution. This went on for two hours until I finally lost it. “Get your ass over here or fuck off!” I yelled into the phone. Seven minutes later my buzzer went off.
I buzzed Morgan up to my place. I should mention that I was living in a department store building that was being made into loft apartments. I was the first, and at that point the only, tenant in the building. The hallways were still uncarpeted and detritus from construction abounded throughout. My apartment was more or less finished and was in its usual manically clean state.
Morgan pushed open my door, which I had left propped, and rushed over to the kitchen sink. “I’m just going to wash my hands,” he said. No problem, the building is dirty, I thought. But then he kept washing his hands. For five minutes. And then he dried them off and started washing them again.
The reason for my colleagues amusement over my date was suddenly becoming crystal clear.
It turns out Morgan was very intelligent, and as a result, mentally ill. He suffered from agoraphobia, OCD, haphephobia (fear of being touched), misophobia (fear of dirt and germs), and a whole host of other things. He had tried to take drugs but felt they made him dopey and slow witted so he coped as best as he could. Which, on this evening, was probably not very well, as he was not able to stop washing his hands.
I poured myself a glass of cognac and contemplated jumping out the window. I was on the 10th floor.
“Gross, don’t get near me with that!” said Morgan. He had wrapped my hand towels around his hands and headed into the living room. “I hate the smell of alcohol. It makes me want to vomit. I am going to have to lie on your floor for a minute because my back is bothering me.” I transferred more cognac to my glass, thought for a second, transferred that into a larger glass, which I topped off, and went into the living room.
He had not taken off his leather jacket (it was winter time) and the sleeves were pulled over his hands. I noticed, for the first time, that he was wearing a pair of really thick wool socks and Birkenstocks. Very few men can get away with that look. Morgan, on a good day, was one of them. But this was not, as mentioned above, a good day. Mental illness, academic snobbery, allergy to alcohol - all that could be forgiven. But not the Birkenstocks.
“Please leave.” I said, sinking down onto my sofa.
“I can’t leave now. I am just getting used to this place. I’m going to have to work myself up to go back out into that filthy hallway.”
“So how long will it take until you can leave?” I asked. He didn’t answer.
He started telling me his life story, including a play he wrote about a blow up doll, how his old girlfriend was murdered in Baltimore, about working at Hopkins, various patents he had applied for or currently held, and on and on. Finally, around 4 in the morning, I ran out of patience, energy, and, more importantly, cognac. I had to find a way to get him to leave.
A plan came to mind, a plan so preposterous I knew it would work. I started scratching my nails against the side of my sofa. Morgan stopped his monologue, delivered to the ceiling, and whipped his head around pretty quickly for a guy that had back problems.
“Did you hear that?” he asked in a frighten tone.
“Oh, that scratching sound?” I responded casually.
“What is it?” Morgan asked in a tone that said he didn’t really want to know.
“Well, a lot of the apartments don’t have external windows (this was true). The workmen leave their lunch stuff lying around (this was also true – most unfinished apartments looked like homes for wayward McDonald wrappers) and the rats come in at night and eat the food. There’s one rat that seems to be trying to get into my…”
Before I could finish Morgan moved off my floor with almost supernatural grace. His birks didn’t even come off. He rushed to my door and swung a be-sleeved hand in the direction of the knob. He looked like he was about to have a massive breakdown and couldn’t produce an intelligible sound.
I opened the door for him and he ran all the way from my apartment to the elevators. Two separate pairs of gloves fell out of his pockets but he didn’t stop. When he got to the elevator it was still waiting for him (they were set to end up on certain floors and not leave that floor until someone pressed a button because of the construction). The doors closed. I knew I would never see him again.
I went to bed around 430, relieved that my ordeal was over and vowing to not date again. Around 8 am the phone rang. It was Morgan, telling me what a great time he had had and asking if I was free for lunch that day as he wanted me to meet his friends. He warned me to not mention the ice climbing to any of his friends as he feared that would make me look too manly. He continued chattering away until I interrupted him.
“Fuck off.” I said, and hung up the phone.
As an odd afterward to this story, I was at an engineering dinner with my dad about two years later and I was talking to some physicists about Morgan. They seemed shocked that I was shocked that he sent me a naked picture. Apparently most physicists are crazy and like to give women naked pictures of themselves.
So ladies, if you are still looking for Mr. Right, consider yourselves warned…
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Things Not To Say When in Texas
So I have a rowdy group of "cowboys" that I am working with here in the city that...sleeps...a lot...which must be why everything but the Olive Garden and Taco Cabana close down at 6 PM sharp.
In any case, back in the day, 1993 to be exact, I was sentenced to work 8 months in what I consider hell on Earth. That's right, College Station, Texas. I was attacked by bull frogs the size of Johns Hopkins lacrosse players while trying to run on a soccer field my first morning in that god forsaken place. I barely escaped with my shins intact. In any case, I came to think of Texas as a place where EVERYONE carries a gun. Even 5 year olds.
So, I'm having lunch with these guys, 2007, expecting the normal conversation about .357 Pythons, .45s, etc. but they were all talking about video games, and specifically, the new Wii. I don't play video games. I used to get killed in pac man after about 20 seconds of playtime and was permanently banned from spending any money at Dave and Busters after I managed to crash my helicopter twice in 20 seconds while playing a game that cost $3. I was feeling a little left out of the conversation. So, in my usual smart ass way I announced "You know, last time I was in Texas, everyone was talking about their guns. Now all you guys want to talk about is playing with your Wiis."
A moment later my brain caught up with my mouth.
Dead silence resumed for the rest of lunch. I haven't been invited out with them since.
Cowards...
In any case, back in the day, 1993 to be exact, I was sentenced to work 8 months in what I consider hell on Earth. That's right, College Station, Texas. I was attacked by bull frogs the size of Johns Hopkins lacrosse players while trying to run on a soccer field my first morning in that god forsaken place. I barely escaped with my shins intact. In any case, I came to think of Texas as a place where EVERYONE carries a gun. Even 5 year olds.
So, I'm having lunch with these guys, 2007, expecting the normal conversation about .357 Pythons, .45s, etc. but they were all talking about video games, and specifically, the new Wii. I don't play video games. I used to get killed in pac man after about 20 seconds of playtime and was permanently banned from spending any money at Dave and Busters after I managed to crash my helicopter twice in 20 seconds while playing a game that cost $3. I was feeling a little left out of the conversation. So, in my usual smart ass way I announced "You know, last time I was in Texas, everyone was talking about their guns. Now all you guys want to talk about is playing with your Wiis."
A moment later my brain caught up with my mouth.
Dead silence resumed for the rest of lunch. I haven't been invited out with them since.
Cowards...
Notes from the Front Range - Chicken Confusion Cleared
Again, emailed from Janet Estes:
"Franki, THAT was a Turkey. You know, Thanksgiving and Turkeys go together. And the stuff in the ass of the turkey, that's called dressing. Or Stuffing for people from the south. Potatoes usually come mashed, in a separate container. The chicken pot pie thing - - -that is what Clint and Brian made from grandma's recipe the day before our Thanksgiving meal. It is really Chicken and Dumplins'. But the kids all called it pot pie growing up. I hope this kind of clarifies the food thing. I know, being food challenged, how you could get a 24 lb turkey and a chicken confused.:-)"
She has obviously heard the story about how I couldn't find butter in the grocery store because I didn't realize it had to be refrigerated...
"Franki, THAT was a Turkey. You know, Thanksgiving and Turkeys go together. And the stuff in the ass of the turkey, that's called dressing. Or Stuffing for people from the south. Potatoes usually come mashed, in a separate container. The chicken pot pie thing - - -that is what Clint and Brian made from grandma's recipe the day before our Thanksgiving meal. It is really Chicken and Dumplins'. But the kids all called it pot pie growing up. I hope this kind of clarifies the food thing. I know, being food challenged, how you could get a 24 lb turkey and a chicken confused.:-)"
She has obviously heard the story about how I couldn't find butter in the grocery store because I didn't realize it had to be refrigerated...
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