Tim-Alone No More

So I started this blog a year and a half ago, a week after my ex moved out. At the time, I called it "Tim Alone" because it was in opposition to Timbecca, which had been our joint blog.

I chose the URL http://tim-alone.blogspot.com. (This was because Timal One was already taken.)

Some time later I changed the name of the blog to Just Tim, although I was unable to change the URL. For a long while now I have been uncomfortable with this URL, because it sounds whiny and pathetic.

I've been trying to figure out how to change the URL of this blog while keeping the old one, so that people trying to visit the old address would just be forwarded to the new one. It does not appear possible.

So it looks like the only option is to create yet another new blog. So I introduce The Timblog, the eighth blog I've had in my life. It will be a continuation of this one, posting whatever weird shit pops into my mind, mostly updates of my life, half-read book reviews, and the occasional rant on politics thrown in.

Please update your bookmarks to the new address: http://tim4814.blogspot.com/.

Thanks for reading. Both of you.

Tim Alone is officially retired.

Let Me Insulate You

When I bought my house last July, the home inspector said the insulation in the attic was too thin. I guess by 1950's standards, having 3-4 inches of insulation is fine. But insulation requirements have escalated over the years, and now they recommend 9-12 inches. I'm guessing in a another thirty years they'll recommend you just fill your entire house with insulation and burrow through it like a hamster.

Everyone told me that it would be easy: you just buy it in rolls and roll it out. No problem! Even a novice homeowner like me could do it. Look at how easy it is for this guy:

There are several things I would like to point out about this picture:

• The area is well-lit
• There is nothing but infrastructure and insulation there-- no random objects to get in the way of the rolls
  
• That room is pristine
  
• Although he has gloves and a mask, he's not wearing glasses
• He's not hunched over like he lives in the bell tower of Notre Dame
• He's not crawling on his belly trying to get into the corners
  
• He's not coughing or rubbing his eyes
• There's no bubble of swear words emanating from his head
  
• He has meaty forearms that tells you he's done this type of thing before. Even if any of the above conditions were not perfect, you know he'd be able to handle it.
  

My experience was not so ideal. First of all, I'm afraid of heights, so maneuvering off of and onto the ladder to get into the attic is an exercise in terror. It's pitch black up there. After two trips to the hardware store, I finally found a light that would work, but I still have to point it in the right direction, and if I get between it and what I'm looking at, there's a shadow.

Once I'm up in the attic, there's tons of crap up there. In the past month I have discovered hideous carpet remnants from every decade of the second half of the 20th century:

Every time I go up there, I find more carpet remnants hidden in lost corners. I've been slowly throwing them out. Not only are they ugly, but like every thing in my attic, they are DIS-GUST-ING. Everything in the attic is covered in soot and dirt and schmutz and whatever the hell else has collected up there in 50 years.

But carpet remnants aren't the only thing in the way up there. A stack of tiles for the kitchen ceiling, a bunch of long rods I can't identify, a screen door. In the middle of the attic, taking up a huge chunk of real estate, is my air conditioning unit. It's sitting on top of huge plywood boards, and I can't very well insulate under those. There are also tons of random boards placed across the joists (the vertical boards that the insulation fits between.) Some of these boards are nailed down, some are not. These make it easier to walk up there, but you can't put insulation over them (or under them very well.)

So to do a thorough job I have to move the boards that can be moved, and try to stuff the insulation under the ones that can't. The image of simply rolling out the insulation is a lie; there are a hundred different sections up there, and each one has different needs.


Because of the fiberglass insulation fibers that cut into your skin, I have to cover my body. I wear gloves and a mask and a hat. I wore my old beat up painter's hat from high school: Go Grimsley Whirlies! I also wear glasses, so when I try to breathe with the mask on, it fogs up my glasses. Then it gets really hot up there, and I start to sweat, and the sweat falls into my glasses. So I'm blind, hot and sweaty; and trying to negotiate walking on the joists so I don't fall through the floor. Eventually I decided to just take off my glasses.

Not only is the roof slanted, but whenever I try to move around, beams appear at random locations to smack me on the head. There are also nails sticking out from the ceiling. (Maybe from where they nailed in the shingles?) I hit my head about 20 times in an hour and a half. That's also about the same number of times I yelled a word that rhymes with "udderplucker."

Finally, after getting the hang of it, I was able to install two rolls of insulation. I did the section over the couch in my living room, where I spend the most time. I would estimate that it's only about 10% of the surface area of the attic, though. I have a lot more work ahead of me if I plan to insulate the whole thing.

After I cleaned all the debris (carpet remnants, etc.) off the garage floor, I went inside to take off my clothes, which were filthy. When I took off my hat, I noticed this:

Notice the tear in it along with a red stain. Is that my blood? I wonder. Oh, shit, I guess one of those nails got me! No wonder it hurt like an udderplucker.

I take a shower, hoping to get all the fiberglass fibers and other detritus off of me. As an illustration of how filthy my attic is, whenever I go up there (even when I wear a mask) and I blow my nose afterward, whatever comes out is gray. Hardcore gray, if there is a such a word.

After my shower I use a mirror to look at the back of my head. Besides the depressing hurricane-shaped hole in my thinning hair, I see where the nail got me.


I guess this is a bonding moment with my house. I'm giving it my blood, sweat, and tears. And in return it's trying to give me tetanus. That's love for you.

Alleged Shooter

The shooting at Fort Hood is a horrifying story. Not only is it terrible that American soldiers, already skittish about having to go into a war zone, have to deal with some nutjob going berserk at home. It's also unfortunate that the nutjob happened to be Muslim, because now there's sure to be a backlash toward all Muslims, based on this one very troubled individual's action.

But those are all delicate issues that I don't want to get into here. Being a language guy, the thing that I keep noticing is the phrase the media is using to describe the shooter.

They keep referring to him as the "alleged shooter," as if the jury is still out on his guilt. As if he didn't mow down dozens of people in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses, stopped only when the police shot him down. I know it's a legal technicality-- you have to add the word "alleged" to any suspect in a crime case. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. I get that.

But in this case it just sounds kind of silly. To me it's like saying the "alleged plane" crashed into the Alps. Or the "alleged hurricane" hit Miami beach. The "alleged fireman" saved the kitten from the tree.

Is there any doubt, legal or otherwise, who did this?

Homophobia and the Church

Sometimes I can't decide which blog to use for a certain post. Since this deals primarily with religion, I posted it to my Timicism blog:

John Shelby Spong: Honorary Timicist.

Gay Hemingway

I've been listening to Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and although it's an interesting book, there are some slow moments. But I woke the hell up when the narrator started reading this passage:

...Golz was gay and he had wanted him to be gay too before he left, be he hadn't been.

All the best ones, when you thought it over, were gay. It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive. That was a complicated one. There were not many of them left though. No, there were not many of the gay ones left. There were very damned few of them left...

The 12-year-old boy in me had to giggle at this passage. Haha, he said he wants to be gay!!

But it's an interesting illustration of how language changes. Obviously in 1940 Hemingway was not talking about homosexuality. (Because of course there were no gays back then!) Even with the current meaning of the word, it's still a very interesting passage. But I wonder what Hemingway would think if he knew how the meaning of his words had changed.

It makes you wonder what innocuous words we use today will take on a whole new meaning in the future. I mean, what if the word hope someday becomes slang for flatulence? Or tired turns into horny? Or facebook becomes a sexual position? (If any of these examples come true, you read it here first.)

It's like historical Mad Libs.

Superbad

I started watching the movie Superbad two years ago.

I didn't finish it until this week.

I went to see the movie in the theater when it came out. And although I liked it, my mom was sitting right next to me. And her 80-year-old husband was right next to her. It's not the kind of movie you want to see with your parents.

All we knew about the movie before we went was that it was a comedy produced by Seth Rogan, who had also done the 40 Year Old Virgin. My mom had seen and enjoyed that movie, despite the subject matter, because it was funny and (basically) innocent and had a nice message.

But Superbad is a whole different kind of funny. High school boys trying to get laid and talk of nothing but sex in the most graphic language, and try to score alcohol illegally (to aid their quest to get laid.) With every "fuck" and "handjob" and "dick", I squirmed a little more in my seat, knowing that my mother was right next to me. Half way through the movie, when a creepy guy hits one of the boys with his car and then offers to take them to a party, I got a foreboding sense of pedophilia. I turned to my mom and said, "Are you enjoying this? Do you want to leave?" She said yes.

Then I put Superbad in my Netflix queue. At any given time there's usually 60-70 movies on the list, and I must be going through about 30 movies a year, because it took about two years for Superbad to work it's way to the top of the queue. I just got it last week.

Watching the whole thing through, with my cats, was a much better experience. I laughed. I cried. I cringed. At one point near the end I yelled at Michael Cera's character for wimping out when the girl he pines after comes on to him (probably because I would have wimped out the same way in high school.)

But the movie redeemed itself with a sweet ending. Despite all the language and lechery, it turns out not to be just another Teenagers Getting Laid movie. It's about growing up.

And dick jokes. Lots and lots of dick jokes.

Roger Ebert agrees with me. (Or maybe I agree with him?)

The Lottery Mentality

Here's a test to determine where you are on the fiscal political spectrum:

• In 2004, the average American CEO at a large company was payed 431 times the pay received by the the average worker at their company.
• In 1980, that ratio was 42 to 1.
• In Japan, in 2004, it was 10 to 1.

I read these numbers in a book which only cited this article. Unfortunately, that article only provides the first statistic. I don't know where the other two numbers came from. I spent way too much time tracking down the other numbers, and while I couldn't find them specifically, I found tons of data that supports the point, which is that the gap between the rich and the poor in this country has increased dramatically over the past 30 years, and specifically over the past 10. (Of those that I found, this article probably does the best job of summarizing the issue, as well as makes most of the points I planned to make in this blog, rendering the rest of my argument redundant.)

But the point is, whether these specific numbers are accurate or not, your reaction to them will tell you where you stand politically.

If you're a liberal, those numbers bother you. A lot. Congratulations! You have a social conscience.

But conservatives, at least the ones I've talked to, are not phased by such numbers. Either they look at you like you just told them that rich people make a lot of money ("Well, duh") or they actively defend the numbers. What's the big deal? Poor people are still making more than they did. It's the "rising tide lifts all boats" theory. If rich people are doing well, it means the economy is doing well. It's better for everyone.

Well, maybe. But if you believe in any kind of fairness, how can you really justify someone making 400 times what other people make? Do they work 400 times harder than their workers? Put in 400 times more hours? Do they need 400 times the income to support their families? Is their personal risk 400 times greater than the workers? Does Jesus love them 400 times more?

Aside from the inherent unfairness of the growing gap between the rich and the poor, there are practical concerns. It's just not sustainable. A strong economy requires a strong middle class. When the gap between the rich and the poor widens, the middle class shrinks. This is bad for everyone: the rich, the poor, and the (shrinking) middle.

``````````````````````````````````````
Like liberals, there are conservatives in every income bracket. The thing I don't get is why poor and middle class conservatives support policies that only seem to help out their rich compatriots. It's certainly not reciprocal-- the rich ones aren't looking out for the poor & middle class ones.

So why are conservatives so concerned about protecting the rights of rich people? I think it stems from something I call the "lottery mentality." A lot of people in America need to believe that, at any moment, they might strike it rich. Or maybe, through a lifetime of hard work, they will one day become a member of the wealthy elite. There's certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence for this, even if the odds of a typical poor person becoming a member of the wealthy elite are less than getting hit by lightning. But in the slight chance that that might happen, they want to protect their interests.

This belief in the lottery mentality is so strong that Americans are willing to forgo many social safety nets that exist in every other industrialized country. Their hope for winning the lottery is more important than leading a comfortable, yet modest, middle class existence.

Two examples of this: Back during the 2004 election, I heard many people bashing the Democrats for wanting to increase taxes (or just roll back Bush's tax cuts) on the richest Americans. I heard one person complain thusly: "Kerry and Edwards are already rich, now they want to stop the rest of us from getting rich!"

I don't get how increasing the tax on the wealthiest Americans a few percentage points would prevent you from getting rich. Seriously, the only thing holding you back from unimaginable wealth is having to pay a few extra grand in taxes? Really? Are are you so caught up in the lottery mentality that it personally offends you when a rich person loses more income than you'll ever make in a year?

The Daily Show sent Wyatt Cenac to Sweden a few months ago to report on the "socialist state" there. It appears that the lottery mentality does not exist in Sweden.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Stockholm Syndrome Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

They show a clip on 50 Cent showing off his huge palace in some American documentary show:

50 CENT: I want to show you my crib.
CENAC: ...the possibilities of capitalism.
50 CENT: [In a huge room with a theater-sized TV.] I be in here watching, you know, kung fu flicks and pornos.

Then Cenac visits Robin, "Sweden's biggest pop star." She lives in what looks like a modest apartment. She has a twin bed set up in a small living room for her mother-in-law.

CENAC: Let's check out the kitchen in Robin's crib. We're checking out—. Is that the biggest TV you have?
ROBIN: Yeah, that's the biggest TV. I only have that one, actually.
CENAC: [Looking at a bunch of bags under the table.] Alright, so somebody's been doing some shopping.
ROBIN: Uh, no, it's my recycling station.
CENAC: Alright. This isn't [bleeped] working. [To camera] No. Cut it, cut it.

CENAC (voiceover): It was shocking. Sweden's pop stars live like our reality show stars.

In the second part of this report, Cenac compares the American lottery mentality to that in Sweden. Our pop stars (50 Cent):

Get Rich or Die Tryin'
Their pop stars (guy from ABBA):

Live Comfortably and Die in a State Hospital


Why are Americans so scared of that message?

Jinxing the Jinx

The last time I was at the public library, back in August, I checked out about five books. I've been slowly working my way through them. As always, some are better than others.

But the one that I've been reluctant to pick up and read is this one:

Fired!: Tales of the Canned, Canceled, Downsized, & Dismissed by Annabelle Gurwitch.

It's not that I didn't think it would be a good read. I love bite-sized real life stories like these.

I was afraid to pick it up. Because I'm superstitious, and I thought that if I read a book about getting fired, it would happen to me. I can't afford to be unemployed right now: I just bought a house. The thought of losing my job in this brutal economy was horrifying. I just couldn't risk reading that book.

But I overcame my superstition and opened it up last week. So far, it's mildly entertaining, and I have realized that my superstition was all for naught. Most of the "firing" they talk about in the book is either the kind of temporary part-time jobs you have as a teenager or student; or Hollywood firing. And Hollywood firing is a completely different animal. Those people choose to work in a volatile field where they fight and scrap for any kind of work in the hopes of striking it big. It's worlds away from the boring, but safe, cocoon of tenured academia that I live in.

Reading the stories made me feel all smug about the fact that I'd never been fired from a job. But then I remembered my very first job.

==========================
I was sixteen, and needing money to buy a car, I walked down to the nearest grocery store to apply for a job as a bagboy. When I went to hand in the application at the customer service window, I passed out in front of the manager. I was really nervous and he was interrogating me. He asked me all these hard needling questions, like what hours I wanted to work, and I folded under the pressure. I woke up a few seconds later with a group of people huddled over me. The manager took me into his office and called my dad to come pick me up.

I figured there was no way I’d get the job, but a few days later a different manager saw my application and called me. He interviewed me over the phone and hired me. After school, I walked the mile down to the store to report for my first day of work. I worked four hours bagging groceries. When my shift was over, I didn’t feel very good, so I went into the manager’s office to sit down. Then I threw up all over the floor.

When I reported for my second day of work, I was refreshed and ready to go. The manager, who had witnessed me faint and puke in the two times he’d worked with me, eyed me suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked me. I assured him I was healthy and read to work. Then he explained that the company had just been bought out by a larger supermarket chain. It wouldn’t be worth it for him to train me, since he didn’t know if there would be layoffs. (Even his job was probably in jeopardy.) So he laid me off. He wasn’t lying about the company getting bought out. It was all over the local news that day.

So after passing out and throwing up, I was laid off from my very first job after four hours of work.

As far as I remember, that's the last time I was fired.

==========================

I may be taunting fate by writing that, but I think the fact that I'm writing about the superstition itself will protect me. If I say I'm afraid of something on my blog, it won't happen. The superstition goes both ways. I'm jinxing the jinx.

Timicism

Readers of my blog my wonder why I went almost a whole month without any posts. It's because I was working on the newest version of Timicism.

Timicism 3.0 is now up and running, this time as a blog.

Take a look and let me know all the things that are wrong with it.

Community

A day in the life of a community college librarian:

A student comes up to me at the reference desk and asks if I can help him with a library quiz. I gave a library presentation to his remedial reading class last week, and now the class has to take a ridiculously easy quiz on what I covered. The questions on the quiz are things that I emphasized, again and again and again, verbally, with a PowerPoint, and with two worksheets.

I tell him that I don't think I should be helping him complete a quiz. (I don't know why the instructor made such an easy test a "take-home," but that's a whole other issue.) He says it's okay, he told his instructor he was going to talk to me. I'm still not buying it. "Um, I really don't think I should be giving you the answers. Part of being a college student is taking quizzes on your own."

He's polite and friendly, smiles a lot, but he's persistent. Slides the quiz over to me to take a look. I ask him, "Which questions are you having trouble with?" He can't answer that. He wants me to look over the whole thing. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to go over the whole thing with you. If there are particular questions you're not sure about, I could maybe give you some hints."

Picking one at random, he points to the last question, which is by far the easiest one on the quiz. It's a throwaway question about what the Reference Librarian does. The first three answers are jokes: "a.) sits at the Reference Desk and looks important; b.) helps your instructor only, c.) writes your papers for you; d.) answer any questions you have about using the library or finding information." Even if you've never had the library orientation (which he had, and I'd emphasized this point about five times), any person with minimal intelligence could figure out the right answer.

I don't even know how to give him a hint. I tell him, "There's really only one serious answer there." He had circled the right one, but why should I have to confirm it?

After a while, he says, "I can tell you're not comfortable with this, so I will go." I reply, "After the test is graded, if you have any questions about ones you got wrong, I'll be happy to sit down with you and discuss them. I just don't think I should be helping you with this right now."

Later, I run into his instructor and tell her about it. I don't identify the student, but she immediately figures out who it was, and says, "He's always trying to pull one over on me." Great, so he lied to me about telling the instructor he was going to see me. I'm glad I didn't help him out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A few minutes after that, a student comes to the desk with a Russian-English dictionary that she had checked out. She can't figure out how to use it. Thinking that she doesn't understand the difference between cyrillic and transliterated Russian words, I explain to her that she needs to know cyrillic, the Russian alphabet, in order to use it. "You can't just look up the English equivalent of words, you need to know the Russian alphabet first," I explain.

She points to some words in the English section and asks about the pronunciation symbols that follow the word. "Oh, those are just symbols that tell you how to pronounce the word in English. They won't help you with the Russian word. "

She says, "I need to look up the parts of the word for my reading class." Oh, another remedial reading student. It suddenly dawns on me: She's not trying to learn Russian at all! She needs an ENGLISH dictionary. She has no idea what kind of dictionary she picked out.

It turns out one of the clerks had taken her to the English dictionaries and told her to pick out one she wanted. She must have wandered from the English ones through the Germanic section (German, Dutch) and on to the Slavic (Russian, Baltic, Albanian) dictionaries, where she found the Russian-English one. Maybe because it was a pocket version and smaller than the others. How she never noticed that it was a Russian dictionary, even after looking up words, blows my mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In addition to these episodes I had a long day that involved countless trips to a student printer that kept jamming, boxing up a large collection of books, and doing two classes at our satellite campus, half an hour further away from home.

As the second class was winding up on this very long day, at 7:30 pm, I was looking forward to my 1.5-hour drive home. The class itself had gone well-- the students were attentive and I was able to go off script and make a few jokes that went over well. I was showing students my very last thing, a list of library databases that deal with lots of specific subjects, like art encyclopedias and business dictionaries and car repair manuals, when one of them focused on a group of cultural encyclopedias titled things like, "The African American Experience" and "The Latino American Experience."

She asked, "Why don't they have the American American experience?" Someone else (in this room full of whites) spoke up, "Yeah, that's racist!"

I sighed. On top of my day full of dishonesty and stupidity, I get to end it with a heaping helping of racism? I pointed to to our link to the Encyclopedia Britannica Online and said, "That's your 'American American' Experience."

I just don't get all these white people who get so bent out of shape when you try to acknowledge other cultures. We've had 400 years of American history written by, for, and about white people. ("American Americans" as my student would say.) It's like a child who has been gorging on food and candy all day (pizza, hamburgers, soda, ice cream, cake) and then bitches when you give the neighbor, a starving little emaciated boy, a piece of chocolate. "Where's my chocolate?!?" the fat little glutton shouts.

Perfect end to a perfect day at a rural Midwestern community college.

What Are You Reading?

I know carrying a book around in public, like in an airport, restaurant, or doctor's office, is a great conversation piece. Lots of people like to ask you what you're reading. But that's not why I carry a book around everywhere I go. I do it to keep from getting bored.

In fact, I would prefer not to talk about my taste in reading with every stranger or casual acquaintance I come across.

Last year I was in the break room at work and a lady who works in my building came in to get something out of the fridge. She was just being polite when she asked the dreaded, "What are you reading?"

I cringed. Because at the moment, I just happened to be reading a book about breasts: big, bouncy, bra-busting boobs.

Susan Seligson's Stacked: A 32DDD Reports from the Front is a sometimes humorous, sometimes anthropological memoir about the challenges of spending her life carrying around some massive mammaries.

And I just happened to be reading it when someone I hardly know asked me what I'm reading. Whenever this happens, I usually just hold up the cover and let them read it themselves. If they're so interested in reading, let them do a little of the leg work themselves.

I sighed, held up the book, and said sheepishly, "It's a book about breasts." I could have tried to explain more, but I felt like at that point any thing else I said would just dig me into a deeper hole. I accepted my reputation as the quiet, perverted librarian.

One good thing resulted from this awkward encounter: She never asked me again what I'm reading.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Even though I don't like discussing my reading habits with strangers or acquaintances, I like talking about it with good friends and family. Or announcing it to the whole world on my blog.

Right now I'm in the middle of two very fun companion books. I have no idea if the books intentionally came out at the same time, if one is a reaction to the other, or if it's merely a coincidence.

The first is called What Was I Thinking? 58 Bad Boyfriend Stories. It was written by the ladies.


Then I discovered the counter-balance, Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, written by the guys.

I'm reading them both at the same time, enjoying a few stories at a time from each, trying to parcel out the yummy vignettes as if they were Ghirardelli chocolates.

This is my absolute favorite kind of literature: memoiry, first-person creative nonfiction. And one of my favorite subjects: gossipy anecdotes about failed relationships with crazy partners.

I have noticed some differences in the approach, tone, and subject matter between the men and the women. In general, the women beat themselves up about staying with loser boyfriends. They learn lessons about how to avoid guys like that in the future. The men, in general, tend to beat themselves up for being losers. For doing stupid shit that got them dumped or rejected. It sort of gives the impression that, again in general, women are the ones who control what happens in a relationship. Men are the applicants, the seekers, the hunters. Women are the hirers, the prize, the prey. And they decide whether to allow themselves to be caught or not.

Sometimes the two books seem to be having a direct dialogue with each other. For example, one of the ladies' stories starts thusly:

"Before we start, I have to say this: I love artists. Always have, always will. Tell me you are a musician, a painter, an actor, and your cuteness quotient goes up about 83 percent."

One of the guys' laments that he could never win the heart (or any other body part) of a girl he was after:

"She also had a weakness for musicians. It killed me. How could she fall for that cliche? Why not a weakness for something more original...say, Boggle players?"

What I like about the Bad Boyfriends book is that each story pinpoints the moment when the woman knew the relationship was over. Some times it's the wrong kind of gift ("I would never be a black camisole kind of girl"), the pretentious misuse of a word (a "creche" is not a "caraffe"), or a cosmetic change that puts him in a whole new light ("Why would you do this to us?" she asks her boyfriend after he waxed his unibrow.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Here are few of my favorites:

One of the ladies writes about dating a guy who appeared to really have his shit together. Dressed well, took care of himself, very metrosexual. They go out a few times and then plan to spend the night together. He convinces her to come to his place because it will be easier for her to bring her stuff to his place rather than vice versa. (Easier for who? she thinks.) But she comes over with a few overnight things.

When bedtime arrives, he suggests that she go into the bathroom first. She enters his bathroom and sees that every single inch of space is covered with bottles of creams, lotions, and soaps. She changes into a teddy and waits for him in bed. He takes 45 minutes in the bathroom and comes out looking like the Bride of Frankenstein: his face, hands, body covered in creams and ointments. Despite all this, she's still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. She leans in to kiss him good night, and he shouts, "Don't kiss me! It'll mess up my collagen lip balm!"

Her next boyfriend, the first time they spent the night, showed up at her house with a toothbrush, razor, deodorant, and flowers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One guy talks about trying to pick up a girl with a bad joke. He was born in 1968, which was an ugly year in American history. So he'd make this lame joke about the year he was born, "It was such a lovely year...the assassination of Martin Luther King...the assassination of Bobby Kennedy...the race riots..."

So he tries this joke out on a girl in a bar, only in the middle of telling it he realizes how lame it is. So he stops after, "It was such a lovely year...the assassination of Martin Luther King..." When he doesn't continue, she gives him a nasty look, calls him a skinhead racist, and walks off.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Patton Oswalt writes that dating a stripper was the best thing he could have done for his marriage. Compared to his stripper ex-girlfriend, his wife is a model of patience, love, and sanity. Trying to summarize the story doesn't do it justice, so here's a sample:

MY WIFE AT HER WORST:
Buys a lot of, in my opinion, overpriced skin-care products.

MY STRIPPER EX-GIRLFRIEND AT HER BEST:
CHIVAS: So you're going to start work in a movie next week?
ME: Yeah. It should be fun.

CHIVAS: I need to borrow some money.
ME: What for? You okay?

CHIVAS: My landlord is a Nazi Hitler.
ME: What's wrong?

CHIVAS: He's all like, "You haven't paid rent in five months, and if you don't cough up the money, I'm going to be a total Hitler and padlock your apartment."
ME: Why haven't you paid your rent?

CHIVAS: What are you, my dad?

Full story here: http://www.playboy.com/magazine/features/pole-dancing/pole-dancing.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One girl had a crush on her Italian teacher in college. She was really impressed with the nice suits and stylish ties he would wear to teach. They started having coffee and getting to know each other better.

One day he came to class in a pink Barbie Doll tie. She thought it must be ironic, so after the class she asked him about it. No, it wasn't ironic: he was the president of the local Barbie Doll fan club.

As she so eloquantly writes, "At [that] exact second...my infatuation ended with a sharp internal yowl..."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm coming to the end of both books, and I've been reading slower because I don't want them to end.

Health Care Rant

Like a cold, it starts with a tickle in your throat. A twitch in your eye.

Before you know it, you're sending nasty emails to family members and blogging about how stupid the American public is, the vein in your forehead pulsing with fury.

I feel a rant coming on and I'm about to blog all over my keyboard.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My insurance company recently sent me a form. They wanted me to explain, on three separate forms, exactly how I broke my clavicle. Please provide as much detail as possible, or it may delay the processing of your claim.

There is absolutely no medical reason why the insurance company needs this information. It will not speed up my recovery or enable them to provide better medical care. In fact, no doctor or nurse who cares for me will ever see this form. So why are they asking for it? Because they want to know if someone else might be responsible for my injury. They're looking to get out of paying for my medical care.

It shouldn't be this complicated. I have a broken clavicle. Who cares how it happened. It's real and it needs to be fixed. I pay health insurance (or my employer does) precisely for this kind of situation.

How much time, energy and money are wasted by insurance companies trying to get out of doing exactly what we pay them to do?

In other countries they have something called a single-payer system that bypasses all of this bullshit.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Speaking of other countries, I don't understand why we're the only rich country in the world (and the richest of them all, at that) that doesn't consider health care a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT, along the lines of public education, clean water, a fair court system, free elections, etc. Why are people so afraid of this?

We're the richest country in the world, but we're #42 in life expectancy. We pay more for health care, with worse results, than 41 other countries. There's so much to admire about this country, so why can't we provide for our citizens like the rest of the civilized world does? Why is this not even a priority for us?

Okay, I'm being rhetorical, because I have lots of theories about why we're the outlier. And none of them are charitable toward Republicans, conservatives, and most "Christians." There is a disease among people on the right that makes them believe that the government is bad. It doesn't serve any worthwhile purpose. Forget about schools and roads and police and national defense and a hundred other services that girder the system we operate within, the government is not to be trusted.

One of the most hilarious and distressing things I've heard was hollered at one of these town hall meetings lately was, "Get the government out of my Medicare!"

I can't even think of an analogy that illustrates a total lack of rationality more than that. I could try: it's like saying, "Get God out of my church!" But that's still not as clearly ridiculous as the quote I'm trying to analogize.

Guess what, Medicare is the government!! It's a government-run social program that provides health care to Americans over 65. See, the government can run health care!! It was started in the 1960's by LBJ, a Democratic president, and was opposed by most Republicans, most notably Ronald Reagan. But it's been wildly popular, and some people theorize it was the passing of this popular social program by Democrats that kept the Republicans out of power for so long.

It was funny listening to Michael Steele, the Republican committee chairman, trying to do verbal gymnastics on NPR this morning to explain his attitude toward Medicare. He won't say whether he's for it or against it, just that he wants to improve it. Even though it's a government-run health care system, and he's against those. But he can't come right out and say that he's against Medicare, because it would be political suicide. But he can come right out and say he's against the government running health care. Except that Medicare does that. And except when it (the government) regulates insurance companies.

So, I ask, again rhetorically, what is wrong with all these old people who cling to Medicare like their life depends on it (because it does) and yet furiously decry any form of government-run health care? Jesus, people, pull your head out of your Glenn Beck!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There are two right-wing "compassionate Christians" who submit comments on my brother Dan's blog. During debates about the role of government and social programs, both of them have voiced a similar attitude that absolutely baffles me.

They've said that as Christians it is their duty to voluntarily help the poor. So if the government gets in the business of helping the poor, it takes away their choice. It takes away their ability to honor God. If they're forced to help the poor, they don't get credit for it.

Please forgive me if I've misunderstood. Perhaps they're just not very good at expressing what they mean. But what it sounds like to me is that they need poor people in order to be good Christians. Their goal is not to eradicate poverty, but to be good Christians. It's Christianity for robots. Jesus said care for the meek, so we better go find us some meek. Maybe even cultivate a group of meek that we can keep as pets. We'll be such good Christians when we care for them!

Obviously, I find this attitude incredibly nearsighted, selfish, and repugnant. Notice how this isn't at all about the people you claim to want to help (or volunteer to help), but about you. You want to be a good Christian. You want to volunteer to help. The people who don't have adequate health care? They're just a means for you to get into heaven.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who would Jesus deny health care to?

Addressing My Home

My new house needs a name.

Like my cats, my car, and my family members, I give names to things that are important in my life.

Right now the house is only known by its address. As addresses go, it's an awesome one: 1710 [FAKE STREET.] I love the house number 1710. It's simple and short. There's no letters or apartment numbers or dashes ("Apt. 5a-208".) Seventeen-Ten. Four syllables. And the number reminds me of a good football score. Or a good historical year, like for example, the year that Johann Kaspar (Jean-Gaspard) Reichsgraf Basselet von La Rosée was born.

The street name, [FAKE STREET], is simple, appropriate, and unpretentious. It's right across the street from a [FAKE URBAN FEATURE] and it's a [FAKE TOPOGRAPHICAL FEATURE] of middle class Americana. There's no cute spellings or pretentious words that have nothing to do with the geography of the area (i.e. Parke Harbour.) I don't have to spell it out when I give people my address.

Still, I'd like to have a name to go along with the awesome address.

The only other name I've used for a place of residence before is when I christened the first house I rented with my ex Timbecca Manor. (This was part of the larger Timbecca Empire, which, like the Roman empire, became too large and crumbled.)

So I'm taking suggestions on what to name my house. Some possibilities:

• Timland Ranch
• Timpire State Building
• Fortress of Timitude
• Furball Central
• The Brick Haven
  

I'll have to think some more on it.

Even a Broken Clavicle is Right Twice a Day

If my life were the Chinese Zodiac, this would be the Year of the Physician.


I've been to six different doctors this year, about a dozen different times. And the year is only half over.

But it wasn't until August that I'd made it to the emergency room.

********************************

There were only about 10 minutes left in the two-hour tennis workout. We were playing doubles and the old man hit a shot that was short and wide. My first instinct was to just let it go, but then my competitive spirit kicked in. I can get to it! I thought. So I sprinted for the corner of the court. Going full-speed, I stretched out my racket. The ball hit the racket and bounced back from whence it came.

But I couldn't stop. About to lose my balance, heading face first into the pavement, I did what I thought you were supposed to do in this situation: I turned my shoulder and rolled.

I did a somersault on the hard concrete court. It must have looked graceful enough, because after the cursory "Are you okay" from my companions, they asked if I was ready to continue. I wasn't. I knew immediately that something was horribly wrong. I was dizzy and my shoulder felt out of whack. I put my left hand up to my right shoulder and felt a bone sticking out-- under the skin, but definitely not where it's supposed to be.

"You won the point" the old man told me. "Well, that's a consolation," I said, and sat down against the fence trying to get my bearings. I was convinced that I'd dislocated my shoulder. It felt all out of whack. Like literally, whatever whack is, my shoulder was way out of it.

*****************************
A tennis friend drove me to the emergency room.

They took x-rays and I waited for the diagnosis. While I was sitting on the bed a cute nurse came up to me and said, "What have you done to yourself, my dear?"

I told her, "I hurt my shoulder playing tennis...but I won the point!"

"Was it worth it?" she asked in a motherly voice.

"No."

"Well, I can't tell you what's wrong, but I've seen your x-rays and you really did a number on yourself...But we'll get you fixed up."

At this point I was still convinced that my shoulder was dislocated. I'd heard stories about dislocated shoulders, and how popping them back into place hurts like a motherfucker, but after a moment of agonizing pain you feel good as new. So I was bracing myself for someone to pop it back into place.

**************************************

The doctor came in. He was friendly but didn't waste a lot of time. "You broke your clavicle."

Well, fuck me! I thought. I guess you can't just snap the bone back into place like a Lego piece, can you? He must have read my mind, because he said, "You're looking at 4-6 weeks."

It turns out there's not much they can do for a broken clavicle. It's like a broken toe. It heals on its own and all they can do is make it more comfortable. The bone sticking up would eventually work itself back in place. In very rare cases, they need surgery. He offered me painkillers, told me to take Advil or Tylenol for the pain, and said they'd give me a sling to help support it while it heals. He even said I could play tennis if I wanted (with the heavy implication that I wouldn't want to play tennis for a while.)

But contact sports like football, MMA, and cage wrestling are definitely out.

*************************************

Although I had a pretty good idea before, I can definitely, unequivocally and with authority say that I do not recommend breaking your clavicle. Since it's my right shoulder, I'm learning to do a lot of things with my left hand. Drive. Brush my teeth. Carry groceries. Wash myself. Dress myself.

Thankfully, I can still type and operate a mouse with no trouble. Four to six weeks without tennis and without playing on the computer? I don't know if I could handle that. But any activity that requires me to raise my right elbow is painful. Getting dressed and showering are the worst. Fortunately I only do those about once or twice a day.

I also have this ugly-ass sling that I have to wear.

(Mine looks exactly like this, right down to the ugly sky blue padding sticking out that clashes with all of my clothes.) Not only is it a form of torture to get into the sling, but once I'm in it it shouts, "Dork! Dork! Dork!" And not just any dork, but clearly a dork looking for attention. Ask me about my injury! it shouts.

I was wearing the sling inside my shirt, but my brother and sister-in-law convinced me that I have to wear it on the outside, as a warning to other people to Handle Me With Care. (Otherwise the cops might rough me up or something.) They have a point, but I still hate wearing it in public. I mean, really, would you ever have sex with the guy in that picture?

**************************************
Although I don't recommend breaking your clavicle, I have to admit that there are some silver linings to this ugly, blue-padded cloud.

There's never really an optimum time to break your clavicle, but the timing for this break was not terrible. I just finished moving into my house and getting everything unpacked. The very day before I had hung the last of my things on the wall. There's no way I could pound nails into the wall with a broken clavicle.

All three of my summer tennis leagues ended last week. The fall ones don't start until September. Although I'll be missing a tournament next week, this is a pretty optimum time to be missing a month of tennis. Plus, the entry form for the tournament was sitting on my car seat when I got injured. I had planned to turn it in that afternoon. But getting injured when I did, I saved myself the $10 entry fee.

The end of the semester is this week. After Thursday, I'll get two weeks off to devote to my recovery.

****************************************
But perhaps the best thing about this injury is my obsession with the word clavicle. (Collar bone is the other word for it, but that's not nearly as funny.) As I was driving to the tennis courts the morning of the injury I was listening to NPR, and they had an interview with Harold Ramis about writing comedy. He talked about funny words and mentioned that the "k" sound is funny (Hoboken, kangaroo). Well, clavicle has two "k" sounds.

It's a funny word that I could say over and over again.

On Saturday night, as I was nursing my injury and watching TiVo, I saw the pilot to Parks and Recreation that had aired on Thursday. In it, Amy Poehler falls into a pit and is convinced she broke her clavicle. (The nurse who examines her tells her she's fine, but she still wears a neck brace.) The very same day I break my clavicle, I watch a joke about one? What are the odds? How often do you hear that word on NBC sitcoms?

I called my good friend and asked him, "Hey, how's your clavicle?!"

My dream is that one day Steven Colbert will start wearing a ClavicleStrong! shoulder strap.

I'll leave you with a song that's been in my head the past two days: O Tannenbaum with a few modifications:

O Clavicle, o Clavicle,
Wie treu sind deine Knochen!

(Oh clavicle, oh clavicle,
how loyal are your bones!)

Lunch

One of my favorite Onion Headlines:

Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day


I'm that way about lunch.

Why I [Heart] Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart isn't always the best debater, but he caught Bill Kristol in a mess of twisted logic the other day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNfamHulC6Y

Kristol was, as usual, trotting out some tired old conservative talking points, maintaining that the evil government will ruin health care. He made the following statements:

1. Government-run health care is expensive, inefficient, and ineffectual.
2. Our soldiers have a government-run health care system.
3. Our soldiers deserve, AND HAVE, the best health care system in the world.

   Stewart got a little distracted by Kristol's point that soldiers' deserve better health care than the general public, but he soon put all the pieces of Kristol's argument together to come up with the following conclusion:

4. The best health care system in the world is government-run.

Kristol tried to backpedal from this, but he'd already realized his mistake. Stewart then pinned him down that it's not so much that the government can't deliver good health care, but that it's just too expensive for the unwashed masses. A common conservative point of view, but one they don't like to admit in public.

********************************
Why is it that whenever I hear a conservative pundit, they have to resort to such twisted logic to get their point across? Either that or they appear to be trying way too hard to hide their true agenda. When they do show glimpses of their true agenda, they come across as monsters, like when:

• Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's, or
  
• Glenn Beck, dispensing with an pretense that minorities watch his show, decried the fact that whites will be a minority in 50 years and encouraged whites to start making babies, or
• Bill O'Reilly told the son of 9/11 victim to shut up because he disagreed with his politics.
  

Not all conservatives are illogical monsters, but it does seem to me that the conservative point of view requires a lot more mental gymnastics to justify itself. When you have to really consider the nuances of every issue, and thoughtfully include alternative viewpoints, conservative ideals eventually lose out. It's no coincidence that intellectuals lean toward the left and there are more bullies on the right. After all, slavery, segregation, denial of voting rights-- these were all conservative ideals at one time.

Like Steven Colbert says, reality has a liberal bias.

The Box Collector

Here are most of the boxes I used to move into my new home recently. (This picture doesn't tell the whole story, since the bigger boxes have multiple smaller boxes inside them.) For the past two years, these boxes had been stored in my brother's crawlspace.

When I went into the crawlspace to collect my boxes in preparation for the move, I had to admit something about myself:

I'm a box collector.

I've done it for years now, probably because I move so often. Because every home is a temporary one, I want to hang on to the boxes that were so helpful to me during the last move. Meanwhile, I buy new stuff and keep the boxes it came in, in case I'll need them for my next move. (In my latest move I probably had at least a dozen shoe boxes, for example.)

Some boxes have been in my life a long time. I got the one above when I left my first public library job in 1994. It's a nice big, sturdy box, with handle-holes, made for transporting books. For 15 years, through 11 moves, I've filled it up with my oversize books-- atlases, coffee table novelties, and large comic books-- and lugged it to my new place. It's been with me longer than most of the people in my life.

My predilection for keeping boxes was really just a symptom of my transient nature. But now that I've bought a house, I'm putting down roots and don't anticipate another move. And so it's time to deal with my "problem." I need to let go of my boxes. The first step was letting my brother throw out a bunch of empty ones that were not even employed in this move. There was a pile of them left in my empty apartment and he wanted to throw them out. I grit my teeth and said, "I'm going to look the other way. You do what you need to do."

Then a friend of my brother's family was looking for boxes because she was moving. I reluctantly agreed to let her at my beautiful, beautiful box collection. It's time to let go. So I piled all my boxes in the corner of my spare bedroom and let her take what she wanted. I was a little offended when she rejected some of them. In other cases, she took the box but left the lid! How can you disrespect the sanctity of the box like that? Why, a moving box without the lid is like...like...like... well, I can't think of a better metaphor than a box without a lid!

I was secretly thankful that, before I let select her boxes, I had put a few special ones in the closet. Like the library box above. It's been in my life too long to be discarded like that.

Now let me tell you about my bag collection...

Language Stickler Buys a House

During the hectic final days before the closing on my new awesome house (which successfully happened last week-- woo-hoo!), I received an email from the assistant to my mortgage loan officer.

Before the mortgage holding company could process the loan, they needed some documentation to explain why my W2's show my annual income so much higher than my (so far) biweekly paychecks would indicate. (There's a clear, but long, explanation for this-- having to do with my summer contract-- but it did require another flurry of paperwork to sort out.)

But they didn't explain it quite that way. The mortgage company told my loan officer they needed following: "Satisfactory explanation from employer why borrowers YTD and W2 income is so much higher then his bi weekly pay [sic]."

This is a professional correspondence between a mortgage company and a loan officer, and they can't even exhibit a basic grasp of possessives and comparative phrases? Plus, who are they calling bi?

And these are the people who will be in charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money?

Is this why the mortgage industry crashed?

...mortgagor owe's more then there income...

What Part of STUPID Do You Not Understand?

I know I don't have to worry about calling her stupid on my blog, because I know she will never, ever read it.

This is, after all, someone who refuses to turn on a computer. Even during a college class. That meets in a COMPUTER LAB.

The old lady in the front row of class was very attentive during my PowerPoint introduction. She took notes and asked questions about library catalogs and indexes. I should have known there might be a problem when she asked about the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, an obsolete print magazine index that I have never used in six years of librarianship. (All of the indexes are online now.) But it was the first time I've ever had a student bring up the Reader's Guide and I was impressed. Wow, I thought, she really knows her library stuff!

Trying to put her at ease about the online indexes, I told her how much of an advantage she would have using our databases if she already was familiar with the Reader's Guide.

But when I passed out the worksheet for the class to acquaint themselves with library resources, she said, "No, thanks" as if I was offering her a chocolate turd. While the rest of the class got busy looking up books and articles on our online catalog and databases, she just sat there and stared at the wall. Her computer remained turned off.

After a minute I asked her, "Would you like me to help you get started?"

"No," she said. "I hate computers."

A few minutes later I came back to try again. "Um," I said, "there really is no other way to look up stuff in a library. If you want to know how to do research, you have to use a computer."

"What part of no don't you understand?" She said. Well, I guess it's the part where a student can simply refuse to participate in a class assignment.

I let her stew in her own juices while I made a pass around the room to check on the other students. They were all working diligently, filling out their worksheet. Hers lay untouched in front of her. How could she expect to pass this class, a composition class that meets IN A COMPUTER LAB, if she wouldn't even turn on a computer?

The old lady snagged me as I walked around the room. "Can I ask you something personal?" Sure. "What do you think of all this technology?" Instead of waiting for my reply, she launched into a diatribe against all things cyber. She railed against cell phones and email and twitter. You can't do anything these days without a computer. It's so unfair that kids these days don't even have the option of saying no to technology. If they don't go along with this fad, if they don't like computers, then they're left out.

I had no idea how to respond to someone who thought computers were a fad, so I said, "Well, you know, there was a time when people thought the telephone was..."

"...an instrument of the devil?" She said, laughing. How crazy people were back then!!

She told me I could take the worksheet back, because she wouldn't be filling it out. This is a challenge of being a guest speaker. I don't have any authority to make her do the work. The class instructor is a young lady who's kind of passive. But surely you can't just sit in class and refuse to participate?

I was dying to ask the instructor what this lady's story was, but I couldn't do that within earshot of the student.

So I asked the instructor, "Um, how many times has the class met so far?"

Instructor: "This is the fourth meeting."

Me: "And is this the first time you've used the computers?"

Instructor: "Yeah, actually, I think it is."

The instructor, however, did not pick up on my signals and did not elaborate further.

At the end of the class the old lady tried to give me the worksheet back, and I told her to keep it in case she wanted to fill it out later. "Oh, you're really persistent. You won't take 'no' for an answer. You're just like all these other people trying to get me to use cell phones and internet and email...Oh, you can send pictures to your grandchildren! I have a better way to send mail: pen and paper!!"

"Okay," I said, "just keep it as a souvenir."

After she walked out I approached the instructor, because I was dying to know what this lady's deal was. As it turns out, she was just auditing the class (not taking it for grades or credit) so she could refuse to do work she didn't want to.

It still begs the question, if she wants to audit a class, why take a composition class that focuses on academic writing and research? You can't do academic research without turning on a computer. And how is she going to complete written assignments? By hand? I don't know any college instructors who accept hand-written papers anymore.

Again, not the belabor the point, but what the hell is she doing taking a class IN A FUCKING COMPUTER LAB if she refuses to turn on a computer? That's like going to an orgy and then refusing to look at any naked people.

I don't call her stupid for being afraid of technology. A lot of people are. But the whole point of education is to learn new things, even if it means facing your fears. If you think you can participate in the academic world by refusing to engage with the most basic tool of writing, research, and communication, well then, you're stupid.

What part of that do you not understand?

I Have Found Me a Home

I bought a house.

The story of how and why I bought one is long and involved, and I'm so busy with homebuying details right now that I don't have the time to tell it properly. Here's a quick summary:

On May 12th, I found out that my apartment had been rented to someone else for the next year. I would be getting kicked out in two months.

On June 12th, I made an offer on a house.

By July 12th, I will be moved in.

The field was strong, the competition fierce. I looked at 50-60 online listings. I made a spreadsheet of the top 25, drove around to see them from the outside, then ranked the top 14 that I wanted to see in person. Of the 14 ranked candidates, three made the final cut.

After bringing my consultants to look at each of the finalists a second time, I was ready to make an offer on one of them, but I couldn't get the offer together before my trip to New York. When I came back, it was sold.

Back to the drawing board. Round two consisted of about 5-7 more houses. I quickly narrowed this field down to two: a small cheap bungalow that seemed a good fit for me, and a more expensive, but a better valued brick home that needed some minor work.

All four of my consultants agreed that the latter house was the better choice. So I chose it.


The Good

• This is the largest 2 BR house I've ever seen: 1400 square feet.
• Large-ish room off the living room could be nice office. (Can't be called a bedroom because there's no closet-- but there is a fake fireplace.)
• There is new carpet in half the house. Love that new carpet smell. (When I come home to my apartment and see that one of the cats has barfed on the carpet, I tell them, "Get all of it out of your system now, kitties, because you WILL NOT be barfing on the new carpet in the new house.")
  
• The living room is large and sunny. Has a gas fireplace.
  
• The hall and bedrooms have hardwood floors.
  
• There are two huge built-in closet/dressers in the hallway.
  
• Lots of closet space.
• Brand new furnace. Heating system is hot water, which is really efficient. House has central AC, which was not listed on the real estate info sheet. (Bonus!)
• Brick exterior is more efficient, sturdy, and attractive.
• One-car attached garage.
• Large laundry/utility room with deep sink. Ideal place for cat bathroom (the room-- not the sink.)
• Large kitchen with nice green walls.
  
• Good neighborhood
  
• Yard is just the right size: not too big, not too small.
• Great value. It was an estate home, and sold for 7K less than what the home was assessed at for taxing purposes. This is rare, as the tax assessment is usually well below market value. When the time comes, it should be easy to resell.
• It's vacant, so I can move in as soon as I get all the financing in order.
  

The Bad

• No dishwasher, no disposal, and an old fridge with no icemaker. This will be a step back from where I'm living now. Oh, how I love my dishwasher!
  
• The kitchen drawers and cabinets are metal, and the overhang on the range has those curvy sharp angles that makes it looks like a 1950's vision of the future, like a George Jetson house. Not a fan. I may have to redo it some day.
  
• The lone bathroom is pretty ugly. Pink Bakelite(?) tiles on the wall. It will need some work.
  
• The first thing to go will be the awning over the front steps. It keeps the natural sunlight out of the living room and makes the house look like a barber shop. Also going bye-bye is the thin brown carpet covering the concrete front steps. This is not a Putt-Putt.
  
  
• The backyard has this weird rectangular indentation that no one can figure out. There are remnants of stone around the perimeter of it, so theories range from an old garage to outhouse to bomb shelter. Personally, I think it may be an old Indian burial ground or a portal to hell.
  
  
• No basement (this is offset by the garage, the utility room, and lots of closet space.)
  
• The roof may need to be replaced in the next few years.
• It's more space than I need. I probably won't even use the second bedroom at first.
• The windows are old and some of them don't open.
  
• There are some maintenance issues that may turn out to be a real headache.
  

The Awesome

• It will be mine.
  

Humor Impairement

A One-Act Play

Characters:

• CW (Co-Worker)
• Me (Tim)

Setting: End-of-the-semester lunch at work. Very social atmosphere.

CW: There's a yankee, an oriole, a cardinal, and a cub.
Me: When you say, "Yankee" do you mean someone from the North or any American?
CW: From New York...
Me: A New Yorker?
CW: ...baseball.
Me; Oh, the Yankees! Is it a fan, or one of the players?
CW: Yeah, it's a player. [Rolling her eyes.] They're in uniform and carrying bats! Yankee, Oriole, Cardinal, Cub.
Me: Oh, the teams! I thought you meant the actual animals. I wondered what a person was doing with all those animals. Okay, go ahead.
CW: So the Yankee jumps off a cliff and says, "I'll do anything for the Yankees!"
Me: Wait a minute. Why did he jump off the cliff? How does jumping off a cliff help his team?
CW: [Staring daggers at me.] I don't know why.
Me: It just doesn't make any sense.
CW: [Undeterred] So then the Oriole says, "I'll do anything for the Orioles!" And jumps off the cliff. Then the Cardinal turns to the Cub and says, "Will you do anything for the Cubs?" And the Cub says,"Yes," and pushes the Cardinal off the cliff.
[Pause]
Me: I don't understand why they were jumping off a cliff to begin with. I mean, how does it help your team? Did the team ask them to jump off a cliff? Was it to show their loyalty?
CW: Maybe they were really terrible players. Or lemmings. Why do you have to overanalyze the joke?
Me: I wasn't overanalyzing the joke. I was analyzing it the perfect amount. It doesn't make sense.

THE END

Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I ask you: which of these characters is humor impaired?