Just Tim

Tim-Alone No More

2009-11-21T16:51:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-15T17:41:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-27T17:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-15T20:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-14T19:27:00.000-07:00

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.

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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

2009-10-06T18:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T13:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-08-27T19:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-02T21:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-30T05:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

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:

Government-run health care is expensive, inefficient, and ineffectual.
Our soldiers have a government-run health care system.
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:
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

2009-07-26T17:36:00.001-07:00

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

2009-07-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-06-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

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?

Best in Pound

2009-05-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

Back when I had two cats, I used to say that my cats were like Sith Lords. There are always two of them, an old one and a young one. When one dies, a new one has to step in and take its place.

So my universe has been out of whack since last January, when Katya, my primary cat, died. That left Hermione, the backup one, to fill the role of both primary and auxiliary cat. It's way too much to ask of one cat, especially a psycho kitty who's spent her entire life playing a supporting role.

After four months of mourning, I'm ready to let a new Sith kitty into my life. So I went to the Humane Society to try to restore balance and order to the universe, and give a cat a home at the same time.

I was determined not to make any decisions on my first visit, but two clear favorites emerged from it. Abandoning my joke about Sith Lords, I decided I wanted an adult cat, about the same age as Hermione (who's six.) That's the age Katya was when I got her, and she turned out to the be the Best Cat Ever. And I thought an adult cat might be able to give Hermy the discipline she needs. Both of the candidates, unfortunately, had fur the same color and texture as Katya. The leading candidate was a petite and adorable female named Baby Girl.

I took her into the "getting acquainted" room, and she was so sweet and affectionate, rubbing up against me and demanding affection, that I almost fell in love with her right there. The problem was that she looked and felt way too much like Katya, and I was afraid she would turn into a replacement kitty. I'd have to call her Katya II (or K2) and that would just be too creepy.

The second candidate was Lloyd, a large male who was also quite affectionate.

He's a sweetheart, but notice they don't show his body in this picture (provided on their website.) That's because he's huge. One advantage to him was that he was declawed, which would work better with Hermione, who is also declawed. (I'm ambivalent on the issue of declawing, and felt terribly guilty when I got Hermy declawed. I did it because Katya was already declawed when I got her, and I thought it wouldn't be fair to leave Hermy with hers.)

For a week I pondered the advantages and disadvantages of Baby Girl vs. Lloyd. I was also trying to think of names for them, since obviously a lame name like Baby Girl would need to be changed. ("Baby Girl" is a description, not a name. That's like calling your son "Male Child.") I wrote out a list of possible names:

Katya II
Onion
Methodius (Methodia for a female)
Butters
Kitty Buffett
Blog
Quagmire
Admiral Kitty von Sqeezington
Dupaws O'lickity Furburger

Although Baby Girl seemed like a better choice, near the end of the week I was leaning toward Lloyd, because he was the greater deviation from my dear dead cat. Plus, he would be harder to find a home for because of his size. One of the many factors I was considering was adoptability. A cat with high adoptability would be likely to find a good home. Baby Girl was so beautiful and affectionate she was sure to get snatched up by someone else. I wasn't so sure about Lloyd, though.

By the end of the week I even had a full name picked out for Sir Lloyd. Since he was about as big as a battleship, I would go with Admiral Lloyd Dobler Roger d'Claude Onion von Kittyburg. The "Lloyd Dobler" is from Say Anything, which I just saw (again) recently and is a classic. A friend on Facebook suggested "d'Claude", which I thought was brilliant. And "Roger" is included because another friend suggested Rafa (Nadal), which made me think of tennis, and because I'm more of a Federer fan, I decided on Roger, which also has cross appeal to American Dad.

So I went to the Humane Society on Saturday all ready to choose the Lloydster and give him his new expanded name. But when I got there, Lloyd had been moved to a new room. It's a lounge room with a couch and scratching posts and cat perchy things where they can roam around freely. Out of his cage, I was able to experience Lloyd in all of his glory. And boy, was he huge. Like, I could hardly pick him up. I'd guess he was about 30 pounds. As much as I hate to admit it, I just don't want that much cat. I mean, a cat this big, I didn't even know if he could jump up on my bed.

While I was hanging out in the cat room, I interacted with some of the others. One black long-haired kitty hid in the corner, but when I called to him, he came out and jumped on my lap. "Oh, you really want a new home!" I said to him. His name was Jinxy:

I hated to add a new candidate to an already crowded field, but I felt Jinxy had earned his way in by sitting on my lap. And black cats are way low on the adoptability scale. I don't know why that is, but it's a fact. People don't choose black cats. (Racism!) Jinxy had been at the shelter longer than any of the others-- since February.

So then I was leaning toward Jinxy, until I went to the back room and visited Baby Girl again. She was in her cage, but kept reaching out her paw to me. "Hey, baby, come here and I'll give you some good lovin!" When I stuck my fingers into my cage she would lick and rub against them. Oh, Baby Girl, you are breaking my heart, I thought.

Then I talked to a lady who volunteers/works at the shelter. Apparently Baby Girl is not always so sweet and loving. Among the shelter workers she has a reputation for being quite difficult. I never would have guessed it, as sweet as she was with me. I guess she's like a girlfriend who sleeps with you on the first date, so you think she's awesome, but then after a few weeks turns into a crazy lady. Since I already have one drama queen cat, I think I'll pass.

I gave Jinxy a few more tests, like a brushing test and a purr test. He passed the first but failed the second. I decided to go home and sleep on it, since it was a pretty big decision. I've never adopted a cat from a shelter before.

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

I came back on Sunday determined to adopt Jinxy. When I walked into the room, however, Lloyd was the one who ran up to greet me. I sat on the couch and he jumped up on my lap. (So he can at least jump that high.) Oh, Lloyd, you're breaking my heart. I've already decided to get Jinxy!

When I told the lady at the counter I wanted to adopt Jinxy, she gave me an application to fill out. I understand the rationale for making me fill out an application. They don't want to give the cats to just anyone. What if I'm on the Registered Kitty Offenders list? What if I'm running catfights out of my basement? But there was a section on the application that felt a whole lot like push polling. Questions like, "What will you do with your cat when you go on vacation?" and "Do you know that your cat may live 10 to 20 years?" These are certainly good things for people to think about when they adopt a cat. But these "questions" are not really soliciting information, are they?

The hardest question was, "Can you imagine a situation when you would give the cat up?" Hey, I can imagine a lot of stuff. What if I become an invalid? Or homeless? Or nuclear armageddon causes a worldwide famine and I have to eat my cat to stay alive? In those cases, I might not be an ideal cat owner. But they don't really leave that much space on the form to explain all that. So I lie: No, I can't imagine anything.

I thought the questions were so interesting that I wanted to blog about it, so I asked the lady if I could have a copy of the application I filled out. She was very suspicious and said, "We've never had anyone ask for that before." I waved it off and said, "It's not important." I didn't want her to think I was from a rival shelter trying to steal all their secrets.

While I was filling out the application, sitting on the couch in the cat room, a family burst in. A little girl ran toward Lloyd and said, "There's Lloyd! There's our cat!!"

I asked them, "Are you adopting Lloyd?" When they said they were, I was elated. "Oh, that is so great!" I said. "I wanted to get Lloyd, but I didn't think he was right for me. I'm so glad that someone else is giving him a home!" It was almost too good to be true, as if I were in a Hollywood movie. A movie where all the cats get adopted and all the single people end up coupled.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So I gave them my application, and they'll run a background check on me and stuff. If I don't hear anything, I can pick up my new cat on Wednesday. That gives me three days to finalize a name for him.

I'm currently at Roger Jinxy Methodius d'Claude Onioncat. The problem is I hardly ever get a chance to name something, and I have too many great ideas for names. Most of them, however, don't pass the "vet test." When I first found Hermy, as a stray, I wanted to name her Krustybutt. However, when I took her to the vet, I found that I couldn't bring myself to tell the vet I'd named my cat Krustybutt. So I went with Hermione, which sounded much better on a vet file. Her full name is Hermione Krustybutt Psychokitten Kitty.

I haven't decided if the new cat's vet name will be Roger or Jinxy. He came with Jinxy, and I kinda like it, but I have a history of naming cats after hobbies that I'm into at the time. My first cat was named Walter, after Walter Payton. My second cat was Bob, named during my Dylan period in early college. And Hermione got her name during my Harry Potter craze. Roger would certainly be consistent with that trend, since Tennis is my new obsession.

We'll have to see what sticks. These things tend to have a way of working themselves out.

Mystery Player

2009-04-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

My last opponent in the Silver League this season was very elusive. Not on the court, but in avoiding my attempts to schedule a match with him. By our last week, he'd only played two matches (out of six), and I'd heard stories from other players that he was impossible to get a hold of.

On the Sunday of the week our match was to be played, I emailed him to set up a match. He didn't respond. There was a phone number next to his name on the league roster (labeled "work phone") but every time I tried to call it, the phone just rang and rang and rang. What the hell is this guy's deal? I wondered. Why would you sign up to play in a league, pay $90, and then not bother to schedule your matches (or even respond to attempts to schedule)?

He had an Asian name, so I wondered if it was a language/culture thing. He did finally respond to my email on Friday, to tell me he could play on Sunday and to ask me to schedule a court. So I did and told him what time to be there. (He neither confirmed nor denied this was a good time for him.)I showed up at the scheduled time and waited. I'd never seen him before and had no idea what he looked like, and none of the people I talked to had any idea who he was. Most people have to either win their way into the Silver League (like I did) or have some proven qualifications to get in. But it was a complete mystery where this guy came from. From the looks of the two matches he did play, he didn't appear to be qualified. He'd lost both of them badly.

I was hoping, indeed counting on it, that I would beat him to avoid getting last place for the third straight session. Ever since my amazing run of 12 straight victories to win the Bronze League last fall, I'd been in a slump. The Silver League offers much tougher opponents, and although I was fairly competitive in most of my matches, I had an overall record of 2-15 so far.

In the first session I went 0-4, which should have sent me back down to the Bronze League, but since they didn't have enough people to fill out the Silver, I got to stay. The same thing happened after the second session, when I went 2-5 but still got last place because the other two guys who went 2-5 beat me. (In a fluke of epic proportions, both my wins were against the top two players.) So far, in my third Bronze League session, I was 0-6 and playing to avoid the cellar three times in a row.

But I was confident that, whoever he was, I would take the mystery guy.

After keeping me waiting in suspense as to his true identity, he finally showed up about five minutes late. He walked up to the guy at the counter and said in a tiny voice, "Tim?" (Like the guy at the counter would be opponent.) Two things struck me about him immediately:

1.) He looked to be about seventeen years old.
2.) He had a glassy vacant look that made me wonder if he was high.

During warm-ups it became apparent that he had no business being in the Silver League. Part of me resented that he was even allowed to play in it, since I'd had to win my way into it. Another part of me was thrilled with the prospect of an easy, unambiguous smack down. After the season I'd had, I really needed a win like that.

But the actual match didn't start off according to plan. Although he didn't move well and his shots didn't have much power, he got everything back. His style was so different from what I was used to that I got impatient and made lots of stupid errors. We had some long games and points, but his consistency, my erratic play, and a few questionable calls on his part gave him a big 4-0 lead to start off the set.

Despite my slow start, I was still 100% sure that I would beat him. I don't know why, but I just refused to believe that he could beat me. I was still on track to a 6-4, 6-0 victory. With that plan in mind, I won the next three games easily, only losing two out of 14 points. At 3-4, we had a long deuce game. At one point I hit a shot down the line that landed at his feet. He put his hand up, indicating that it was wide. I thought the shot looked in by a good six inches, so I walked up to the net and I asked him to clarify, "Did you call that shot out?"

He immediately changed the call and said it was in, then mumbled that he didn't feel well. He said "4-4" and started to throw me the balls for my serve, but I told him that I hadn't won the game yet. I'd only won that point, and we were still at deuce. After a few more points I won the game, and then won the next game easily to go up 5-4. By this time he was hardly moving around the court at all.

At the changeover I asked him, "Are you OK? You don't look so good." He didn't answer me, but just kept that stoic, drugged-out look on his face. I repeated the question four or five times. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him. His behavior was so bizarre I entertained the thought that maybe he was autistic.

I would have suggested we stop playing, but I was one game away from winning the set, and I'd be damned if he was going to take that away from me. The next game was ugly. He could hardly get his serve over the net, and when he did and I returned it, he wouldn't even try to hit it back. When I won the set, 6-4, it was obvious he couldn't play anymore. I walked up to the net and asked him if he wanted to continue. He said he wanted to stop.

If I were playing anyone else, I would have suggested we reschedule the second set for another time when he felt better. But it had taken so long to schedule this match, and I knew he had three other matches to schedule, I wanted to be done with him. It was like playing tennis with a zombie: no fun and a little frightening.

He said I could write 6-0 for the second set when I recorded our match result, but that didn't feel right. So I treated it like a "retirement", which is what the pros do when someone can't continue a match due to illness or injury. I wrote "6-4, ret."

Even though I won, it was a profoundly disappointing victory. I never got to really prove that I was a better tennis player. I was annoyed at my opponent for being so out of it, being so uncommunicative, not giving any effort during the warm-ups, winning the first four games, and then just giving up once I started to turn things around. Lest I come across as an asshole, I don't believe for a minute he was actually sick. I think he was just out of shape (or maybe on drugs) and couldn't handle the strain of a real match.

Afterward, I saw him in the parking lot smoking a cigarette. That douchenozzle had no business being in the Silver League.

Pangaea

2009-04-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

Reference Question of the Day

Student: Do you have any maps of the world from 3,000 - 4,000 years ago?
Me: Um, yeah, we have some historical atlases.

[I show her some maps of Europe, North Africa, and the world from 1,000 BC.]

Student: No, I mean, like, when all the land was together.
Me: Oh, you mean Pangaea. When there was only one continent, before they all split apart?
Student: Yeah.
Me: That's called Pangaea and it's millions of years old. You won't find that on a world map from this time period.
Student: But I don't believe the Earth is older than 10,000 years.

Then you don't believe in Pangaea!

B3DOP

2009-04-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

I remember an episode of The New Twilight Zone that I saw over 20 years ago where this man begins to notice that people around him are using the wrong words for things. For example, a colleague asks if he wants to go get some dinosaur, and he responds, "Dinosaur? Don't you mean lunch?" As the episode progresses, he gets more and more confused by the words people are using. It's not gibberish the people are speaking, they're using English words, but the words take on completely different meanings. The episode ends with him sitting down with his son's picture book to relearn the meanings of so many basic words.

That's a little what it's been like for me since I've started learning the Cyrillic alphabet. Many of the symbols look like things from our Latin alphabet, but they make completely different sounds. So when I'm reading Cyrillic, I have to re-train myself that H makes the "N" sound, P makes the "R" sound, and B makes the "V" sound. And it's not like the H, P, and B sounds don't exist in Cyrillic, they're just represented by X, a table-lookin' thing, and a symbol that looks like a lower-case b with a flag on it, respectively.

I'm learning Cyrillic because I'm trying to learn Russian, and I'm learning Russian because, well, because of a girl. My new girlfriend is a native speaker of Russian, and since I'm all about linguistics and languages and learning new things, I thought this would be a great opportunity to take on this challenge. Every few years I get engrossed in a new hobby or project that bores and annoys those around me, whether it's German or poker or beer or tennis or blogging. So my latest such project is learning Russian/Cyrillic.

Cyrillic was invented, sorta, by two Byzantine monk/brothers named Cyril and Methodius. (Dude, I am totally naming my next cat Methodius.) They used a mishmash of symbols and sounds from Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, which is why there's just enough resemblance to my own alphabet to fuck me up.

There are 33 characters in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. About five of them (A, K, M, O, T) share the same sound as their Latin counterparts. Six others (B, E, H, P, C, Y) look like Latin letters, but have different sounds. Some resemble Latin letters that have been written by a Kindergartner or a stroke patient: A backwards 'R', a backwards 'N' or a rounded backwards 'E'. The symbol for the number three (3) also makes an appearance, as the 'z' sound.Other symbols allow various levels of comparison with our alphabet. There's a squarish 'U' with a tail, two squarish 'W's (one with a tail, one without), an upside-down lower-case 'h', and an 'I' joined to an 'O' with a horizontal line that makes them look like Siamese twins. And then there are the symbols that don't resemble anything in our alphabet: a Space Invaders spaceship, a table, an 'O' with a vertical line through it, a double-sided K that's often described as a bug.

As if this isn't confusing enough, the written script differs from the printed one. The letter for the 'D' sound, for example, looks like a Space Invaders spaceship in printed form. The handwritten script looks like a capital 'D,' but the lowercase is written like a 'g'. The 'G' sound, meanwhile, is represented by a sorta r-lookin' symbol, but in handwritten script looks like a T (capital) or a backwards s (lowercase.)
If you write out the name Rita in Russian, it looks like Puma. But if it's printed in a book, it looks like: P[backwards N]TA.

It may sound like I'm complaining, but I love the challenge. There's a real sense of power in uncovering the meaning behind these symbols, like getting my Lone Ranger decoder ring to figure out the secret message on the back of a cereal box. What once was gobbledegooky gibberish actually has meaning to me now. It's been over thirty years since I learned the alphabet, and now I once again get to experience that sense of discovery, frustration, and accomplishment as I slowly sound out a word on the page. I'm learning to read and write all over again.

I'm usually pretty good at guessing the right consonant symbols, but the vowels drive me nuts. There are eleven vowels in Cyrillic, and Russian has the impudence (like English) to pronounce the same vowel in different ways depending on the word (or even placement within the word.) The O is constantly (but not always) being pronounced like an "ah." So that pivo is pronounced 'piva,' for example. (Or rather, 'piva' is written pivo. It's a chicken-and-egg question.) One of the most common vowels in Russian is a sound that doesn't exist in English, and it's a bitch to pronounce. I always have to scrunch up my face and repeat it like six times before I get it right. (If I get it right.)

Every day I pick a new word to try to write out in Cyrillic. The first word I wrote was "vodka." That's been followed by the Russian words for "thank you", "nonsense", "beer", "chocolate," "tennis", "kiss me", "please", and "repeat." (This has lead to my first Russian conversation with Margaret: Kiss me. Thank you. Please repeat.) I've found myself sitting in meetings and trying to figure out how to transcribe English words on my handout into Cyrillic.

I've checked out a bunch of books and CDs from the library. Some are more helpful than others. Some books, like Russian for Dummies, turn me off by saying things like, "We're not going to teach you a lot of boring grammar rules." Boring grammar rules!? But that's the best part!!

The title I've selected for his blog entry (B3DOP) is my attempt to represent a Cyrillic word in Latin script. Except for the 'D', all the letters look close enough to resemble a Russian word. The word is pronounced vzdor, and it means "nonsense." But I'm slowly starting to makes sense out of it.

Capitalist Paintbrush

2009-04-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

On my commute to work this morning I saw it again. The Sherwin Williams truck. It always gets my dander up. It features the disgusting image of a can of paint turned upside down covering the entire planet, with the slogan "Cover The Earth."

Short of using racial or minority epithets, I can't think of a more offensive way to advertise your product.

"Hey," it says, "We're Sherwin Williams Paint, and we want to cover the entire world with our product! Wouldn't that be awesome?!"

No, it wouldn't. Seriously, what's more depressing than the prospect of the entire world covered in paint? Trees, rocks, flowers, beaches, mountains, pizza, mushrooms, kittens, your mother-- let's paint it all!!

Just who exactly is this logo for? I could totally see executives of the company sitting in their underground lair and getting off on the image of the entire world covered in their paint. It will all be ours! Bwahahahahaaaaa!! But is that the message you want to convey to the general public? Maybe you want to keep your goal of world domination under your hat there, fellas.

Because of their stupid, extremely offensive logo, I will never, ever buy SWP. The good thing about capitalism (when it works, anyway) is that I can vote with my wallet. If a company pisses me off, I will never give them any of my business, if I can help it.

I had to add that disclaimer, if I can help it, because capitalism does have a fundamental flaw.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I love capitalism. It's not perfect, but it's the best, most realistic economic system that we've been able to implement so far. The thing that makes it great is that it's driven by competition. (Something about "harnessing greed" too.) I do think that competition is one of the best human motivators. Without it, people get complacent and lazy. The best companies survive because they are good at what they do (for the most part.)

But ultimately, each company's goal is to eliminate the competition. That's where capitalism's huge flaw comes in. If left to their own devices, every company that gains an advantage would grow so big as to squeeze out all the competition. No competition = no more capitalism. If left unchecked, capitalism would eat itself.

People love to think of corporations as evil. I do it myself. But corporations are neither good nor evil. They're just entities that exist to make money. Calling a corporation evil because it tries to maximize profits or eliminate the competition is like calling an owl evil because it eats cute little marmosets.

The only way we can prevent the marmoset from getting eaten is to contain the owl. It's the same way with companies. We need government regulations in place to contain them, to make sure they don't eat all the cute marmosets or poop on our homes. (This applies to both owls and corporations.)

I'm no economist, so I'm mostly talking out of my ass here. I like to throw around words like competition and regulation and monopoly and marmoset, but I don't have all the answers. I know that Sherwin Williams isn't unique in their wet dream to cover the world in their sticky colorful paint. (Are we really talking about paint here?) I'm sure the folks at McDonald's have a similar dream that one day their food will be the only thing that feeds the world. I'm sure Wal-Mart has a dream of being the only shopping option for thousands of small towns. (Oops, I guess that one came true.)

But SWP does have the audacity to put a truly tasteless idea on all their goddam trucks. And for that, I will exercise my capitalist option to avoid their product. At least until they get their paint all over my marmoset-skin wallet.

Judging

2009-03-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

My college has a "livestock judging team" that travels around the country competing in...well, I guess you'd call them competitions. They compete with kids from other schools to see how well they can judge the livestock. And then they're judged for it. And there are winners and losers-- students who are good at judging livestock and those who aren't so good at it.

If not for the livestock aspect, I think I'd do pretty well at a judging competition. I'm very competitive and I love judging things: People, situations, inanimate objects, the weather. I'm all about judging.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One of my hobbies is reading advice columns. (I recently put links to some of my favorites on this here blog.) I like to read about people's problems and judge them for it.

But it's not just about judging. I also like to ask myself what I would do in a given dilemma, or if it's the kind of situation I could ever imagine myself in. This helps me to define my own values. I've realized, for example, that I'm very rule-oriented and favor keeping your promises. So in most disputes I side with the person who kept a previously agreed-upon commitment (unless the extenuating circumstances are extreme.)

For an open-minded liberal, I can get pretty judgmental. I believe in the motto, "Live and Let Live," and would never want to step on other people's rights to live as they want-- as long as they're not directly hurting other people-- but that doesn't mean I can't judge some things as stupid, annoying, or icky.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Which brings me to the latest installment of my Half-Read Book Reviews. (See here and here for earlier reviews.) Right now I'm in the middle of One Big Happy Family: 18 Writers Talk About Polyamory, Open Adoption, Mixed Marriage, Househusbandry, Single Motherhood, and Other Realities of Truly Modern Love.

The title pretty much says it all. I like the idea that there's lots of different ways to make up a family, I'm just not that crazy about all the examples in the book. Sometimes I think I'm much more amenable to "alternative" lifestyles in theory than I am in practice.

For example, I have nothing against the idea of polyamory or open marriage if it's truly what everyone involved wants. Hey, what could be hotter than happy swingers!? But the essay about it in this book, "And Then We Were Poly" by Jenny Block, doesn't really paint an appealing picture. She wanted-- needed-- to have sex with people other than her husband, so she talked him into an open marriage. Or rather, she had a good friend of hers seduce him. He has only indulged in the open marriage once, while she continued to seek out new partners. Sometimes this "hurts him," but he doesn't want to be "that guy," so he says he's happy with the arrangement. Reading between the lines, it seems that he's only agreeing to this arrangement to appease her.

So while it seems like polyamory could work in theory, I'm not convinced that, in Block's case, it's what everyone really wants. Much of her tone seems to be defensive: There's nothing wrong with us! My husband is happy! And hey, monogamous couples break up just as much as poly ones! Maybe she has to be defensive because she encounters so much judgment from other people. Or maybe the woman doth protest too much.

Dan Savage, one of my favorite writers and my absolutely favorite advice columnist, writes about his experience with open adoption. The birth mother of his son, a homeless drifter by choice, maintains infrequent contact with the boy she bore, who's being raised by Savage and his husband. One of the things I love about Savage's column is how he's not afraid to get all judgmental on his advice seekers-- in clever, snarky, and funny ways. This essay is pretty maudlin, though, as he talks about how hard it is, as a parent, for his son to have such a flaky, unreliable "mother." He gives the impression that he's had second thoughts about the whole open adoption process. This seems like another case of something that could work in theory, but not so much here.

The other article that raised my judgmental fur was called "Daddy Donoring" by Antonio Caya. It's about a guy who donates his sperm (the "old-fashioned way," which I always approve of) to a lesbian ex-girlfriend so that she can have a baby. He views it merely as doing a friend a favor; he doesn't want any of the emotional, financial, or legal responsibilities of fatherhood. He's a sperm donor and nothing more.

Okay, in theory I don't have a problem with this. I mean, yes, it's very hard for a single woman to raise a child on her own, and it's not ideal for the child, but neither is divorce or death or disease but these things happen all the time. If a single woman wants to have a child on her own, and can support that child financially, I won't stand in the way of that decision, as the Quakers say.

But here's what I find incredibly stupid: Caya tells everyone about it. Mr. I'm-Just-Spermman-And-Nothing-Else tells all his friends and family what he's doing. He makes a big announcement at a family dinner. He tells his new girlfriend. When he tells his mom, she gets in touch with the mother of his NotChild and plays the role of grandma. This does not seem consistent at all with his plan to have no relationship with this child. If it's not his child, then why is his mother playing grandma? If it's merely a sperm donation, then why is he making such a big deal out of it? This just doesn't seem consistent with his wish to remain completely free of this child.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Aside from some other articles that I thought were simply not very well written , I haven't had many other judgmental impulses (so far) while reading the book. To show how open-minded I am, I don't have any problems with stories about prison marriages, interracial babies, international relationships, large adoptive families, marriages with large discrepancies in age/economic status, or fake-marrying your gay best friend so he doesn't get deported.

See, there are lots of ways to make a happy family.

Left-Leaning Timicitis

2009-03-21T09:50:00.000-07:00

I told someone a few weeks ago, "I'm generally pretty healthy. I never get sick." Soon after that my case of Left-Leaning Timicitis started. That's what I get for saying stuff.

It started with two separate pains on two (seemingly) unrelated parts of my body. I went to the doctor, who prescribed some antibiotics to see if that would clear one up one, or maybe even both, of the tender areas.

Instead, two days after I started the antibiotics, a new third (and seemingly unrelated) area of my body started to get tender and swollenish. Incidentally, all three problem areas were on the left side of my body, which seemed like a weird coincidence. I called the dial-a-nurse to make sure the latest one wasn't an allergic reaction to the meds, but she assured me it wasn't. I decided to give it through the weekend to see if anything improved.

Neither of my three conditions improved by Monday, so I called the doctor's office again. I wanted to ask my doctor (actually she's my doctor's Physician's Assistant (PA)), if she thought I needed to come in again or if she wanted to just prescribe something else. I left a message with her assistant and waited for her response.

By lunchtime, one of my pains had become worrisome enough that I decided I would just go ahead and make an appointment anyway. So I called my health network to make an appointment. After navigating the phone tree through several people, I got a hold of someone who I think maybe works in my PA's building. I told her I was waiting to hear back from my PA, but I wanted to go ahead and make an appointment in the meantime. Then she asked the question that I hate, "What would you like to see the doctor about?"

I hate talking about my symptoms over the phone. Especially when I'm at work sitting at the Reference Desk in the middle of the library. I just said, "I was on some medications, but they're not working, so I want to see the doctor again." I hoped she would get the hint and drop it, but instead she followed up with, "and what were you taking the medications for?"

I sighed, and said softly, "I was having abdominal pains." I didn't feel the need to tell her about all of my ailments, just one should suffice. "Abdominal pains!?!?" She asked, as if I'd said my arm had just been torn off by a wheat thresher. "You were having abdominal pains and they didn't tell you to come in?"

"No, I was waiting to hear from the doctor."

"They really should have told you to come in. Did you tell the person this morning you were having abdominal pains?" Why was she mad at me?

"Look," I said, "It's the same thing I had last week. These are not new abdominal pains. I was on antibiotics and waiting to see if they would fix it. They haven't, so now I want to see the doctor about what to do next."

This calmed her down enough to put me on hold. A few seconds later I heard the sound of a phone ringing and my PA's assistant answered. "Um," I stammered, "I was trying to make an appointment to see my PA. They put me on hold."

The PA's assistant (Physician's Assistant's Assistant? PAA?) apologized for not getting back to me yet, but explained that she was on her lunch break. I didn't mean to interrupt her lunch break, I just wanted to schedule a fucking appointment! Can't anyone else there do that? (The PAA hadn't had to schedule my other appointments with the PA.) The PAA relayed to me that the PA had lots of theories about what could be wrong with me, and I needed to schedule some tests. Okay, I said, let's schedule those.

She confirmed my work and home phone numbers and then asked for my insurance information. "Um," I said, "Could I give you all that info when I come in?" She got snippy and said, "Sir, I need this information to make the appointment."

"I'm at work right now," I said. I just wanted to come in and talk to an actual medical professional, not a nurse over the phone. Why was that so complicated? She seemed to understand and her tone softened. She agreed to schedule an appointment with my PA.

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The next morning I took time off work to see the PA, the third time in the past month. I had so many symptoms, and so many of them new, I felt like a hypochondriac as I listed everything out. "I also have this pain....Oh, and I don't know if this means anything, but..."

In the time since I'd talked to her PAA over the phone, I'd investigated a bunch of conditions they wanted to test me for. (Don't tell a librarian they might have Blahtosis if you don't want them to look it up in three medical encyclopedias and two consumer health websites.) I kept saying things like, I know that some of the symptoms for Blahtosis include blah and blah..., but I only have a this and that. There was no clear indication of what was wrong with me, and this was complicated by the fact that I seemed to have three entirely unrelated ailments.

Why am I never a textbook case? Just once I'd like to be a normal patient with clear symptoms.

My PA ordered a bunch of tests, including a urine and blood sample, a CT scan and an ultrasound. I decided to take the entire day off work to get all of these tests in.

Little did I know, I would need the entire day. I spent the day with lots of medical personnel. Some of them were polite and competent. Some were impolite but competent. And some of them, the worst kind of all, were impolite and incompetent. In these situations I always wonder how much of that incompetence is really because of the individual, and how much of it is because they are hog-tied by the system-- maybe they have to observed certain procedures and protocols that limits their ability to act competently.

My PA is very friendly and nice, but I fear that she might be in over her head with all of my weird symptoms. When I asked her if I could get all my tests done that day, so I wouldn't have to take more time off work, she designated my tests as "stat", which means they would schedule them that day. So that was nice.
The phlebotomist who took my blood samples was gruff, and didn't really seem to care that the little compartment where I left my two(!) urine samples already had someone else's sample sitting there. When I told her that I didn't think another sample would fit in there, and maybe she should tell someone about it, she was uninterested. But otherwise she appeared to do her job well.
The lady who made the "cocktail" (as she called it) that I had to drink before my CT scan was very friendly. She answered all my questions and apologized that I had to wait an hour and a half for the cocktail (barium?) to work its way through my system before they could scan me. She explained everything they were going to do, and also put an IV in my arm.
The other people who helped with the CT scan were nice, but they were clearly overbooked that day. I showed up after my ultrasound at about 1:00, and waited in a small room that had the feel of a bus station with about a dozen people. They didn't even give me my "cocktail" until 2:00, so my scan couldn't go til 3:30. After my scan, around 4:00, I had to wait there with my IV in until a radiologist could analyze the results. It wasn't til around 5:00 when they took out my IV (which had been in my arm for three hours) and I could go home.

I hadn't eaten since 9:00 that morning, so when I got home I devoured half a chocolate-cream pie that was leftover from the weekend. I'm not proud.

After all that, the tests revealed nothing.

A few days later my blood tests came back, so my PAA called to let me know the results. Of all the health personnel I've dealt with, my PAA (Physician's Assistant's Assistant) is clearly the most useless. She's obviously reading the results off a report, but she has no idea what she's saying. If I try to ask a follow-up question, she says things like, "I don't know, my crystal ball is broken." Alrighty then! Thanks for your help!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
All of my tests came back negative. I supposed it's good to know I don't have (among other things) diverticulitis, kidney stones, or mono. Interestingly, the test was "suggestive of past mono." Apparently, I've had it before. I have no idea when that might have been, since I wasn't aware of it at the time.

But what the hell is wrong with me? Although none of them are unbearable, all of my symptoms are still there, so the PA suggests that I consult a surgeon, since one of my ailments may be hernia-related. Surgery makes me nervous, so I asked her if I could try a gastrointestinal specialist or urologist first. I'd even consider an endocrinologist. I'm just not ready to turn to someone whose first option is to cut into me.

In my more paranoid moments I wonder if I'm ground zero for some new unknown pandemic. Is this the start of the Timbonic Plague? Is that what I'll go down in history for?

Thirty Homes

2009-03-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

I've often said that I want to live in a Jimmy Buffett song. This applies to many of his songs, but the one I most often think of is called "I Have Found Me a Home:"

You can have the rest
of everything I own
'cause I have found me a home.

I have had me lots of homes in my life, but none of them have ever made me feel like I'm in that song.

I recently told a friend of mine that I'd had "something like thirty addresses in my life." I wanted to be more precise about it, so I sat down this weekend and listed out all the places I've lived. Just having a list on a notepad didn't satisfy me, so I turned to my favorite recording mechanism, a spreadsheet.

I created a spreadsheet of all the different homes I've had in my life. (Click on image for full-size spreadsheet.) There are differing criteria on what constitutes a "home," but my spreadsheet tallied exactly 30 locations.

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The first eleven are places I lived with my family as a dependent, although the definition of my family changed quite a bit over those eighteen years. Except for a three-month stint in a hotel in Caracas, Venezuela, all of these homes were houses. The first seven locations I lived in with my parents and all four siblings. Then, one by one, my brothers and sisters graduated high school and went off to college, never to return (at least not to live.)

The one place I think of as the "house I grew up in", we lived in for five years when I was in the first through sixth grades.

The house was out of our family for 26 years until my sister bought it last year. Now it's back in the family and we had SchreiberFest there last year. I'm still yet to live in one dwelling longer (five years) than I lived there, the house on Westwind Place.

When I was twelve we moved to North Carolina, but by then it was only my parents and youngest older sister. Eventually my sister moved back to Indiana, and then my parents got divorced, and my subsequent moving with and between mom and dad led to homes #9 through #11. Between North Carolina and the divorce, I attended seven different schools in three years. (Maybe my next spreadsheet should be all the schools I've attended.)

After I graduated high school I moved back to Indiana to live with my sister and her new husband and go to college. In the half year I lived with them, they bought a house, so I moved again.

At 19, I moved into my own apartment, a depressing little downtown one-room (not one bedroom, but one room) hovel with an uneven floor that sloped down. A prostitute lived above me and a loud married couple lived behind me. I remember the husband screaming once, as he stormed out on his motorcycle, "I WILL SEE YOU IN HELL, BITCH!!" They didn't have a phone, so they would ask to use mine on occasion.

That was my very first home away from family, and since then I've found much better places to call home. I've had 17 homes in the past 18 years. I include three host families in that number, which may be a stretch, but I did have my own bed and received mail there, so I count it. I've had at least 20 roommates, housemates, or bedmates.

My final tally of thirty homes includes 13 houses (4 rentals), 12 apartments, three host families, one dorm and one hotel.

I've lived in twelve cities in seven states and four countries.

But I've never lived in a Jimmy Buffett song. (I've visited a few of them maybe, but I've never received mail there.)

Facebooking

2009-03-01T11:06:00.000-08:00

When I first signed up for Facebook a year ago, I didn't get it. I knew it was a social networking site where you try to collect friends, but what did you do with it? It just felt like another place I had to log onto and visit on a regular basis. Another login and password to remember. For a long time I had about six Facebook friends and never did anything with it.

Then my wife moved out and I found myself seeking out every social opportunity I could. A good friend from high school found me on Facebook and friended me. We got in touch and I ended up visiting him in North Carolina last May.

Then I started meeting more people, and the question, "Are you on Facebook" became part of the conversation with new acquaintances. I'd make a new friend and then look them up on Facebook to find out more about them. Or I would think about old friends and wonder, "Hey, are they on Facebook?"

You can't discount the nostalgia factor on Facebook. It's never been so easy to track down old friends you've forgotten about, or have them track you down. But this leads to interesting discoveries about your changing values. In grade school and high school, I never thought about things like liberals or conservatives, so it's interesting to see where all of my friends ended up on the political scale. Who knew that the nerdy, quirky guy you knew in English class is now a Republican? Or that your best friend from Catholic grade school is an atheist?

Like with any technology, there's a learning curve to Facebook. It's a great way to try to express myself in clever ways, but I'm still trying to learn all the protocols and features. When my marriage ended, I wanted to surreptitiously remove my relationship status from my profile. I didn't want to list myself as single, I just wanted to delete the category altogether. So I did that, but then an update was sent out to all my friends, "Tim is no longer listed as married" with a little broken heart icon. Arrgh, that's exactly what I didn't want to announce! It's like trying to slip out of a meeting unnoticed and tripping over the power cord to the PA system, bringing the entire meeting to a stop and having everyone look right at you.

As the months have passed, I've become more active on Facebook and collected more "friends." The neat thing about it is how it's such an unlikely collection of relationships I've had throughout my life. Family members, friends from grade school, high school, college, grad school, and current friends "hang out" together with the guys I got drunk with last week. There's never been a place before where I could interact with all these disparate people at the same time. It's bizarre.

I don't have very many "friends" there. Unlike most people on Facebook, I don't have a network of hundreds of people. Whether that means I'm too selective or just not very popular, I try to keep it down to a manageable number. I currently have about 38, and that's about enough for me not to get overwhelmed.

Being the geeky demographics/statistics junkie that I am, here's a breakdown of my Facebook friends, divided into different categories based on how I know them:

Library school friends (8). This is the largest single category, probably because librarians are such big technology dorks and I still come into contact with them at professional meetings.
People I knew in high school (6). The nostalgia factor. I've only seen one of these people in person in the past 19 years. Four of them are guys from the wrestling team.
New local friends I've made in the past year (not tennis- or drinking-related) (4).
Guys I've gotten drunk with in the past year (3).
People I play tennis with (3).
Undergrad college friends (3).
Spouses (and friends) of friends (3).
Ex-girlfriends and women I've dated (am dating) (3).
Best friend from fourth grade (haven't seen since junior high) (1)
Best friend from junior high (haven't seen since high school) (1)
Family member (brother) (1)
Someone I met once at a party (1)
Someone I've never met in person. She lives in another country, discovered my blog last year and we started a correspondence (1).

So there you have it: a lifetime of relationships listed out on a single Web 2.0 page. Of course there are many, many holes; lots of people I've forgotten about or who just don't have a Facebook page (i.e. the vast majority of my huge family). And this list is constantly in flux as I meet or discover more people on Facebook.

What would you call a Facebook fan-- a Facebookie? I guess that's what I've become.

The Importance of Having Earnest Money

2009-02-19T19:12:00.000-08:00

According to the testimonial in the video I saw at my home buyer's seminar, "Buying a house makes you feel good." Yeah, so does a bong hit (so I've heard), and it doesn't cost $150,000.

The seminar program is sponsored by a mortgage insurance company, so there's lots of propagandist testimonials about how awesome it is to own a home. There's also lots of testimonials about how anyone can do it. It takes a lot of work and dedication-- and help from mortgage insurance!-- but even people with bad credit or not much savings can realize this dream.

Much of the vocabulary associated with home buying sounds like stuff you'd read in a Dan Savage sex advice column: flipping, packing, concessions, predatory behavior, balloon payments, closing costs. Some random notes/comments about the class:

Buying a house makes you a somebody, not a nobody.
Seller concessions are "gimmicky." Don't fall for them.
The guy in the video kept mentioning my "counselor" and that I should discuss home buying decisions with them. I took this to mean I have to get a therapist before I buy a house.
The entire video only had one line about what to consider when you're house hunting. Something about proximity to churches and schools. Then they went right back to talking about...financing! I didn't learn one new thing I should ask about when I'm looking at a house.
The lady narrating the second video was thoroughly disgusted by predatory lenders. To help us feel the danger of predatory lenders, a song very similar to the theme from Jaws played in the background. But different enough that they wouldn't have to pay royalties to Steven Spielberg.
They never said how much I could get if I sell my kidney for a down payment. But I was dying to ask.
All the people looking for homes in the videos were women or minorities. The only white males in the video were home inspectors or shady lenders.

So I might not have been the target audience for this seminar. Still it got me thinking about the home buying process, and I got a free pen out of it. And I love free pens. I also got a certificate with my name on it, although they spelled my last name wrong. I hope someone doesn't turn down my offer to buy their home because my name is spelled wrong on the certificate I got for attending a home buyer's seminar at the local community college. That would suck.

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I'm really happy for the people in the video who realized their dream of owning a home, but I don't know if it's for me. My heart's just not in it right now.

I looked at six open houses one day last month. This past Sunday I looked at another four. I may have the credit and income to buy a house, but I'm not sure I have the dedication and enthusiasm.

People in my family have been pressuring me to buy a home. My oldest brother would give me an hour and a half Powerpoint presentation on it if I let him. The guy's a broken record: Buy a house, buy a house, buy a house. Oh, and get a dog, too.

Hey, I get it. This is the best time in the history of everything to buy a house. I understand the financial advantages of putting money into a house rather than "throwing it away" on rent. And I have every intention of owning a home one day. I don't plan to rent forever. I have to grow up sometime.

But there are other considerations in life besides financial ones. I just got divorced in the past year. My nest egg (for a down payment) has been cut in half. Do I really want to take on all the responsibilities of home ownership by myself? And looking for a house, for me, feels like it should be a social activity. It's something you do as a family, or at least as a couple. You have to have someone to argue with about whether a fireplace is more important than a porch. And my cat just won't get into that argument with me.

I know that single people buy houses all the time, and I don't have a problem with that. I may be one of them soon. But so far, I just haven't found the right house-- one that ignites my passion the way, say, a pizza does. I'll keep looking, though. Because I like feeling good.

No Pages For Any Age

2009-02-07T19:25:00.000-08:00

Pages For All Ages just closed. It was very sudden and mysterious. One day a sign was put up saying they were closed for inventory. No mention of when they would reopen. Every time I drove through the parking lot on my way to the grocery store, there would be a car stopped in front of their entrance, the driver standing there reading the sign on the door. Then a few days later a new sign came up, "It is with great sadness that we announce the closing of Pages for All Ages Bookstore Inc. after serving the Champaign-Urbana-Savoy area for over 20 years."

It's like someone who you know, not intimately but a neighbor you see a few times a month, and you hear that they just dropped dead. Then you find out that they were sick for a long time, but you didn't even know it.

I live right across the street from the store. In fact, when I give people directions to my place, I start with, "Do you know where Pages For All Ages is?" I guess now I'm going to have to say, "Do you know where Pages For All Ages used to be?"

I'm a librarian, so it should go without saying that I love books and bookstores. Just being around all those pristine pages of fresh knowledge, discussion, and storytelling excites me, even though I know I'll never get to read half the things I want to. (At any given time I'm usually in the middle of two to four books, but I have about 20 on my mental list of things to read. I'm a slow reader, and the truth is I don't read as often as a I could. Sometimes I think I like the idea of reading more than the actual practice. So I will never catch up with my list.)

But I have a dirty little secret. Although I love books, I don't own very many. I only have one bookshelf that is half full.

And most of the things on it are books people have given or lent me. I'm not a big book buyer. Since I rarely read something more than once, I prefer to get them from the library.

So although I like to hang out in bookstores, and I loved living across the street from the area's largest independent bookstore, I will have to take some of the blame for Pages closing. I just didn't buy enough. Whenever I did need a book, CD, or greeting card, Pages was the first place I'd go. It was great being able to walk across the street when I needed to buy a last-minute gift for someone.

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The Last Purchase

The last time I was in Pages was three weeks ago. I needed a last-minute birthday gift for my sister-in-law, Jill, so I ran into the store on my way to her party. I was looking for a book on how to make sushi, which is what she said she wanted. But they didn't have anything, which is probably why they closed.

So while I was browsing the shelves trying to find anything my sister-in-law would want, this jumped out at my from the Staff Picks shelf: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia.

My other sister-in-law, Susie, had been trying to get me to read this book a while. Every time I talked to her she asked me if I'd read it yet. Her insistence that I have to read the book was only eclipsed by her husband, my brother Rick, trying to talk me into buying a house.

Despite Susie's insistence that I read it, I was hesitant. The premise just didn't seem that interesting. It sounded all spiritual and new-agey, and I'm not really into that kind of thing. Susie had recommended those kinds of things to me before and it had not turned out well. Plus it seemed like a girl thing, so I didn't think it would speak to me.

But what I could do was use Susie's recommendation to help me buy a gift for Jill. Need a gift for one sister-in-law? Why not buy the book that the other one recommended?

I had no way of knowing at the time, but that book was last thing I ever bought at Page for All Ages.

I gave it to Jill as birthday present, who fortunately had not read it yet. She finished it in about a week and then loaned it to me, talking it up. It's about divorce. And traveling. And there's a little new-agey stuff, but not too much.

So with two sisters-in-law getting on my case about reading it, I finally opened it up.

It's really good.

Or, at least the first 52 pages are. That's as far as I've gotten, but I really like what I've read so far.

The book is divided into 108 short sections, each one representing a different prayer bead on a special prayer necklace used by Hindus and Buddhists. I love numbers and short anecdotes, so this really appeals to me.

The premise is that Liz Gilbert went through a horrible divorce, a turbulent affair, a crushing depression, and then decided to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia to find herself (my words.) Although she left her husband, much like my wife did, I can forgive her because she's such a good writer. (And she at least had the decency to suffer crippling depression as a result.) Her voice, insights, and sense of humor really appeal to me. It reminds me of my own writing, if I were much more talented and spiritual. And there's enough doubt, rationality, and smartassedness to balance out the new-agey stuff.

It's a great read that I highly recommend. At least the first 52 pages. After that, you're on your own.

Goodbye, Katya

2009-01-06T15:21:00.000-08:00

The call came at 11:30 this morning. The vet asked me, "How is she doing?"

"Not good," I said. I listed her problems. She could hardly walk, she wasn't eating, she'd been giving distressed mews all night, she was hiding in corners, and she had this nervous tick where she jumped when there was a sudden sound.

"Yeah, I don't think there's anything more we can do for her. Do you want to do this today?"

"Yes, this afternoon, if possible. I think she's in a lot of pain."

"Why don't you bring her in right now?"

So that was it. No more delays, no more stalling. I gave her a quick bowl of milk-- her last meal-- as the tears started. After two months of preparing for this, I still wasn't ready for it.

How do you put a loved one into the cat carrier for the last time, knowing that it's a hearse? She counts on you, trusts you to take care of her, and you are leading her off to her death. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

She died today.

--------------------------------

Katya has been my most stable companion over the past eight years. She's seen me through library school, two relationships, a new job, four moves, a new kitten, a marriage and divorce, and countless other adventures. She's endured numerous pet names, including: sweetheart baby kitty, potato bug kitty, little boo, squeakerbot, sweetness, snurfler, boocat, furbot, and lil' squeaker.

I never thought I could feel this way about a cat. She was the gentlest, sweetest feline I've ever known. She never bit, growled, scratched or hissed. Even when I was trying to force a pill down her, she would resist with all her might, but she would never resort to violence. All she ever wanted was a warm lap, a hand to rub against, and a hard brushing. Sometimes I thought she was the Jesus kitty because she was so full of love and patience.

She loved lap time and demanded affection several times a day. She had a high-pitched, squeaky meow that she only used to ask for love. At night she would sleep on the pillow next to me. In the mornings she stood on the bed and squeaked (squoke?) at me while I got dressed. She had chronic problems with eyesnot, so every morning we played a game where she would try to rub up against my nice work clothes and deposit her eyesnot onto them. She sat on my lap when I ate breakfast and headbutted my chin. In the evenings she cuddled on my lap or on my chest (if I was lying down) while I watched TV.

I will miss her terribly.
-----------------

Our Life in Pictures

Katya came into my life in November, 2000. She was already six years old and living in a house with four cats and two dogs-- the lowest cat in the pecking order. Her owner, someone I volunteered with at Ten Thousand Villages, thought she would be better off in a one-pet home. So I took her.

I have no idea of Katya's history before we met. She never talked about it. But she's always been afraid of strangers. The first three days in my apartment she hid behind the couch. She eventually came out, but still preferred to avoid strangers and stand under things.

Slowly she became more comfortable with her surroundings

and warmed up to me.

When I started library school, she moved with me to my new cheap student apartment. She got freaked out occasionally

and would have to hide behind stuff.

For ten horrible days in May 2003, she was lost. She was strictly an indoor cat, but my stupid, careless, moronic roommate left the window open and she jumped out of it. I posted notices all over the neighborhood. Have you seen this cat?

It turned out she was hiding under the neighbor's porch. Even so, I couldn't catch her after three days of camping out in their yard. On the day I graduated from library school, two days after I'd been offered my first professional job, the neighbors caught her in a raccoon trap. It was one of the best weekends of my life: I was done with school, I had a job, and my cat was back. The first night after our reunion, Katya rubbed up against me so much I couldn't sleep. I didn't mind.

The next week I moved out of that apartment and away from the moron idiot roommate. I started working full-time and thought that maybe Katya would like a companion while I was at work. By accident, a new kitten came into our lives. She would become Hermione Krustybutt Psychokitten Kitty.

Katya patiently tolerated this new addition to our family.

And let Hermy tag along

and hide with her behind the bed.

In October of 2003, another lap entered Katya's life.

Sometimes she didn't even wait for an available lap before she settled in.

When Hermione the psychokitty was all grown up,

we moved again.

We were happy in our new house.

I was often blessed with two cats fighting over my lap.

Me and the new lap got married. Katya enjoyed our new marital bedding

and shared with Hermione the pet bed that we got as a wedding present.

We celebrated Xmas 2005 as a family. Katya tolerated a little seasonal flair

and some Xmas love.

Meanwhile, she was getting older.

We moved again. In her last home, Katya continued to play with Pink Bunny and hang out with my shoes.

In March of 2008, my wife moved out. We were down to a one-lap family. Katya's age started showing.

That same month the health problems that would eventually kill her became known to me. Most of those have been documented on this blog already. But throughout all of her illness, she continued to be the same affectionate, loving kitty who demanded lap time.

Near the end she was very frail. These are the last pictures taken of her:

Goodbye, Katya. You were the Best Cat Ever.

1994-2009

Kitty IV

2009-01-02T14:35:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the fourth installment of my Dying Cat series of posts. However, the IV in my title does not necessarily refer to the next sequence after Kitties I, II, and III.

The IV stands for intravenous, which how my poor sweetheart baby kitty is getting rehydrated as I type. Katya's at the kitty hospital being stuck with needles so that she can get some emergency fluids into her. She'll be there all weekend.

I've never done anything like this before. And neither has Katya. We've both learned a lot about veterinary care over the past two months.

On the estimate the vet's office gave me, which is $312 for the entire weekend, the treatment is called "Fluid Therapy." That's funny, because when I think of the kind of "fluid therapy" I use on myself, it usually involves lots of alcohol. And it has the opposite effect of hydrating myself.

Katya's taken a turn for the worse. On top of all the problems she's had recently, now she's peeing on the carpet, walking funny, and has trouble jumping up onto the bed. The vet I saw today, the fourth different one I've talked to in the past month, doesn't expect her to live through the next month. Today I learned that she's dangerously, severely, painfully dehydrated, which has also led to extreme constipation. Even if we can rehydrate her, that only buys her a few more weeks.

The vet gave me two options: put her to sleep now or do the emergency IV fluid therapy. Since I'm not ready to say goodbye to her (Katya, not the vet), I decided to make her comfortable. She'll feel better after she gets some fluids into her and gets (may God save my soul) two enemas to relieve the constipation. And yes, I'm well aware of the line I've just crossed by blogging about my cat's enema. At least I didn't use the phrase "impacted fecal matter." Until now.

I've already crossed all kinds of lines as a neurotic pet owner. When I dropped Katya off at the vet for her weekend stay, I gave the vet tech her favorite blanket, her heat pad, her Pink Bunny, and detailed instructions about how each one can comfort her best.

Then I asked sheepishly, "I don't suppose you have visiting hours?" Sure, the vet tech said, you can just call and tell us when you want to come by. "Can I tell you right now when I plan to come by?" So I made an appointment to visit my cat in the hospital tomorrow morning at 11:00. Like I said, I've never done anything like this before.

I know that someday, and this day may be soon, I will have to play God. I will have to decide when my cat dies. It's a gut-wrenching decision, and I'm not ready to make it yet. And if I can control at least one thing, it's that she's not going to die from dehydration.

She's going to die in a murder-suicide pact with her sister.

Nine Lives?

2008-12-14T18:51:00.001-08:00

I may have to re-think the narrative that my cat is dying. Maybe she's just using up one of her nine lives.

Less than two weeks ago I was about ready to have her put down. Since then she has walked away from death's door and shown much improvement.

Katya's latest weigh-in showed that she hasn't lost any weight in the past two weeks. She's still hovering at four and a half pounds, but she's stopped her rapid decline to nothingness. That's the first time since this whole crisis began that she's maintained her weight for any period of time.

Since her abscessed tooth cleared up she's been a much more functional pet. She's eating more or less regularly and her behavior is as sweet as it's ever been. She talks. She walks. She sleeps. She eats. She cuddles. She loves.

Although she's eating, I can't get her to eat any cat food. The only things she'll eat are canned tuna, turkey lunch meat cut into small squares, and meat off of my plate, such as de-breaded chicken from a Chinese Sweet & Sour dish or sausage off a pizza. (I don't usually feed her this kind of stuff, but at this point I'll feed her anything she shows an interest in.)

The vet told me that I have one of the greatest challenges facing any pet owner: trying to feed a sick old cat when there's another cat in the house who will swoop in and eat anything I put out.

Here is what the corner of my kitchen has looked like for the past two months:

This doesn't really give the whole picture, so let me arrange it in a group portrait:

These are the different foods I've tried to throw at Katya to get her to gain weight. Included in the portrait are Whisker Lickins, 9 Lives wet, Fancy Feast wet, turkey lunch meat, Paws wet, Meow Mix Market Select,Whiskas pouches, baby food, tuna cans, and Fancy Feast dry. Once there's some resolution with Katya, I will probably donate most of this food to the pet shelter.

Despite all my efforts, she has lost weight dramatically. That is, until the last two weeks. (Hermione, meanwhile, has been ballooning up thanks to all the new food.)

We still don't know what caused the weight loss to begin with, but at least her will to live has returned.

And while I'm posting pictures of my kitchen, here's the current state of my beer bottle collection:

Wow, I can't believe how much it's grown since September.

But I had a good excuse: My cat was dying.

Maybe.

Procrastinating Consumer

2008-12-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

Have you heard about the 270-pound man who was trampled to death a few weeks ago?

No, he wasn't working the rodeo. It wasn't cattle that trampled him.

It was shoppers. At a Wal-Mart. On Black Friday.

Two thousand of them broke through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart and stormed the poor security guard who was trying to keep them back. I'm trying to wrap my head around it-- trying to understand how it's possible to put your foot down on top of another human being and just keep going. To feel the squish of his body under you. It's clearly not floor you're walking on. It's a human being. Didn't they notice? And it wasn't just one individual who did this, but enough of them to stomp out a life. Do the people who killed him even know what they did?

I doubt that any of those shoppers woke up that morning thinking, "I'm gonna kill a guy today." Let's give the tramplers the benefit of the doubt. Some of them had been waiting in line all night long. They were restless. They were grumpy. Maybe the people who actually walked on him had no choice. The crowd probably moved as one, people pushing from behind, jostling from the sides. The tramplers may have been locked in position and had no choice but to walk on top of the security guard.

As Lenny on the Simpsons said, "We're going to give the word 'mob' a bad name."

I understand that some people really look forward to the day after Thanksgiving as the "busiest shopping day of the year." That it's the busiest day is actually an urban myth, but the day does have the cultural significance of a Super Bowl for consumerism. Shoppers really get into it. So much so they will trample anyone who stands between them and a few hundred bucks off a flat-screen TV.

For me, being forced to participate in Black Friday would be one of the circles of my own personal hell. I really can't understand people who get excited about this kind of thing. It's like making an event out of scrubbing your toilet. I hate shopping. I hate crowds. I hate traffic.

On occasion I do like to buy stuff, but I'm really not a very good consumer.

When it comes to buying stuff, I procrastinate. I'll consider something for months, sometimes even years, before I finally get the inspiration to actually buy it. The reason that I blog about so many of my purchases is that I don't do it very often. I thought about buying a new car, and even printed out some pages from Consumer Reports, a full year before I bought my Prius. The new vacuum I bought last January was for my new apartment, which I had moved into five months earlier. (I've had this post in my Blogger queue since then, so for the past year I've even been procrastinating about writing about procrastination.)

If I go to the store with a list of five things to buy, I might end up buying two. The other things I look at and think, "Eh, I don't really need that" or "that can wait til later." It's the opposite of the Impulse Buy. It's the Impulse No-Buy.

So it's really hard for me to imagine why people would put themselves in a position to trample a guy to death on the way to buying something. They weren't hungry and clamoring for food. They weren't being oppressed and demanding civil rights. They weren't trying to get on the last helicopter out of Hanoi. Hell, they weren't even waiting to get exclusive concert tickets.

They wanted to buy shit. The same shit you can buy any other time of the year.

Restless Charity Syndrome

2008-12-03T20:10:00.000-08:00

This is the time of year when my college does its Combined Charities Campaign and I have to decide which charities I'll donate to over the next year.

There's a booklet that lists hundreds of eligible charities. It's funny to me all the different ways you can define "charity" by flipping through the book.

There's the traditional sense of giving to those less fortunate than you. Organizations that fight against hunger, disease, homelessness, and child abuse, for example, are pretty straightforward. I don't think there's much controversy about donating money to help starving abused homeless children with AIDS.

And then there are the partisan charities. Organizations that diametrically oppose each other. For example, I could contribute to gay rights organizations or Christian organizations (ahem, the Mormon Church) that fight against those rights. Planned Parenthood vs. Catholic Charities. Is it really "charity" that I'm doing if someone else is funneling just as much money into stopping my cause?

There are charities that support jazz, dance, art centers, zoos, gardens, museums, even public radio and TV. I don't have a problem with supporting these things, but it's hard for me to call a donation to public radio "charity." For me, it's more like supporting something that I enjoy.

I usually select four or five charities and have a set amount deducted from each paycheck to go to them. I take this all very seriously and spend quite a while flipping through the booklet trying to find the best balance for my donation dollar. I don't want to give it all to one cause, or even one type of cause. So I'll usually pick one environmental cause, one civil/human rights cause, one housing cause, and one international cause.

While I was looking at my options, scanning things about AIDS, cancer, animal rights, hunger, conservation, adoption, autism, and food banks, one cause jumped out at me: restless leg syndrome.

Are you kidding me?

For all I know, it may be a serious and debilitating condition, but of all the hundreds of ways to donate my money, you want me to consider something that sounds like an affliction from a Monty Python skit?

Oh, Restless Leg Syndrome, do you have any idea what you're up against?

Stinky Cat

2008-11-30T16:08:00.000-08:00

A quick inventory of my cat, Katya:

Her kidneys are failing
She's losing weight
She has arthritis in her hips
Her intestines are inflamed
She's puking a lot
She no longer eats anything but tuna, and that only in small portions
Her weight loss is getting more and more dramatic
She's getting pooptail.
She has an abscessed tooth
She's leaking something out of her mouth that smells like death
She's 14 years old
She's still the Best Cat Ever

In her prime she weighed over nine pounds. In March of this year she weighed in at just below seven pounds, a pound lighter than her last checkup, so the vet did some blood tests. Her kidneys were starting to fail. But this is normal in older cats and they can live a long time with substandard kidneys.

In October she had another checkup. She weighed in at just under six pounds. She'd lost another pound since March. The vet was concerned and did blood work and gave her an x-ray. It didn't provide any conclusive answers, but they did find arthritis in her hips and feared intestinal swelling. The doctor gave me some pills to help combat that.

I gave her the pills every day, which was torture for both her and me. She didn't want to swallow them, and I hated the person I had to be to get them down her. Even so, it only worked about half the time.

I put her on a weight gain regimen. I bought her half a dozen different types of cat food, then added cans of tuna and baby food. I threw every type of nutrient at her. She would eat something for a while, then decide she didn't like it. This phase was accompanied by frequent cases of puking, diarrhea and poop tail. (Hermione, my other cat, was puking because she was eating too much. She was catching all the nutrients I threw at Katya. Katya's sickness turned Hermy into a bulimic kitty.)

At her next weigh-in, Katya was down to five and a half pounds. She'd lost another half a pound in three weeks, despite my efforts to overfeed her. Because of the problems with the pills, the vet gave her a shot and told me to bring her back in a week for another weigh-in.

A week later, she'd lost another third of a pound. She was 5.15 pounds. I decided to take her with me to Indiana for Thanksgiving. I rode with my brother and his family for the three-hour car ride, holding her on my lap. At my sister's house, I put her in my niece's room, where she disappeared. I checked on her just before dinner and couldn't find her in the room. I thought my nephew and nieces had let the door open, so I initiated a panicked search of the entire upstairs. On my fifth sweep of my niece's room I noticed a hole in the fabric under the box springs. She had climbed up in there to hide.

Several hours later I coaxed her out and she ate some leftover turkey. That night she puked four times and wouldn't touch the turkey anymore. She ate a little bit of tuna, but not much.

Sometime over the next two days I noticed two things: she smelled awful and her face was misshapen. She looked like she had the mumps on one side of her face. She reminded me of Glenn Quagmire on Family Guy:
And she smelled rancid. I could only describe the smell as death, even though I don't know what that's supposed to smell like. I tried giving her some squirts of a pet spray bath that my sister had, but the bottle was old and that made it even worse. Now she reeked of alcohol, perfume, and death.

Right as we were about to leave to go home, I felt her face and noticed there was a lump on her chin. That's what made her face look weird. The smell was almost unbearable on the way home. I noticed she was leaking a yellow liquid from her mouth, and when I dabbed it with a tissue, I realized that's where the smell was coming from.

When I got home on Saturday afternoon, I went straight to the pet emergency room to have Katya's face looked at. I was bracing myself for The End. She weighed in at under five pounds. The ER vet suggested doing a biopsy of her jaw, and I agreed. But when she got a better look, the vet said it was just an abscessed tooth. That could be taken care of with antibiotics.

Now I have to give her antibiotics, which is in liquid form rather than pills. As I tried to jam her mouth open to shoot the medicine into her mouth, I wondered if the abscessed tooth was caused by me trying to pill her a few weeks ago. Did I make things worse?

Although the growth and smell are not as serious as I thought, having a sore, painful tooth is still yet another impediment to eating. And she's still wasting away with each new weigh-in. The vet had mentioned the possibility of intestinal lymphoma. If she's wasting away because she has cancer, why did I pay $100 to treat this abscessed tooth?

Because I don't want her to die looking like Quagmire and smelling like rancid pus.

----------------
In other news, I woke up this morning with a bad cold/flu. I must have caught something from my nieces. Kids are always carrying germs they pick up in school. I had to postpone a Silver League tennis match I had scheduled this afternoon. I've felt like shit all day.

When I checked Katya's face a little while ago, it seemed less misshapen than before. And I don't think she stinks as much, although it's hard to tell with my nose stuffed up.

Now if I could just get her to eat.

Memoir Juggling

2008-11-16T08:31:00.000-08:00

I got a notice from the public library that a book I ordered was in.

So, like I do several times a day, I scribbled a note to remind myself to pick it up.

This is what I wrote:

It says: pick up Loose Girl at CPL.

After I read what I'd written, I put "Loose Girl" in quotes in case I got in an accident on the way to the library and the note was found on my body. I don't want to give the coroner the impression that I troll the public library for women.

Loose Girl is a memoir about a promiscuous teenager who was in high school about the same time I was, in the 1980's. While she was having lots of sex, and not particularly enjoying it, I was having absolutely no sex (with other people), and also not particularly enjoying it. So it's nice to see all the different ways people can not enjoy their teenage experience.

It's one of three memoirs I'm reading right now. I have one on my night table for bedtime reading, one that I read during breakfast and lunch, and one that I'm listening to during my commute. The other two are Running With Scissors, about a boy whose mother had him live with her psychiatrist's crazy family, and Failure, which recounts an entire life in terms of its failures. It's a good book to read while going through a divorce.

As you can probably guess, I love memoirs. It's not only the kind of writing I like to do myself, but I'm also really interested in people's stories. I don't much care for people, but I love their stories.

The challenge to reading three memoirs at once is that I often mix up the stories. Which one had the distant, alcoholic dad? Which one had the crazy mother who abandoned them? (Oh, wait, I think they all did.) Whose mother was the poet? Which one snacked on dog food? Which one tried to be gay but couldn't do it? Which one stole cocaine from their dad's dresser?

Mixing all of these stories up makes for one huge-ass amazing tale of dysfunction.

Get Your Shush On

2008-11-13T19:39:00.000-08:00

Every time I have to ask someone to be quiet in the library, another piece of my soul dies.

Shushing people is the only part of my job I hate, and I do it an average of 3-4 times a day. We have a Quiet Study Area right near my desk. I know that not everyone needs a quiet area to study (especially Millenials who grew multitasking to music, TV, computers, and cell phones all at the same time), but this is the only place on campus where people who do need quiet place can find it. Unfortunately, the building has terrible (or great, depending on your perspective) acoustics and you can hear conversations from the other side of the building.

So several times a day I have to deliver "the speech:" Sound carries really well in this building, and this is a quiet study area [make sweeping hand gesture to indicate said area], so if you could try to use your inside voice that would be great. Thanks! I say this with a smile. Most people are embarrassed and apologize. They didn't realize they were being so loud. Some get pissy about it, or ignore me, and the second time I ask them to quiet down I'm not as nice. The third time I suggest they go to another building, where they don't have to worry about being quiet.

I suppose I am the right person for this job. Even when I was a student, I had no compunction about asking someone in a computer lab next to me to turn down their headphones. Why should I have to listen to their music? I was also the annoying neighbor who would ask people to turn their music down. I didn't ruin the occasional party or anything like that, but if someone played loud music every day, at all hours of the day, I wasn't shy about getting on them. I once had a neighbor in an apartment building who turned her music up in the middle of the afternoon so loud I couldn't hear my TV. When I pounded on her door, loudly so that she would hear it, and then asked her to turn it down, she asked me not to pound on her door because her baby was sleeping.

So I'm very good at asking people to be quiet, even if I don't like it. What I really hate are those rare occasions when someone brings a baby or toddler into the library. Lots of times the kid is fine. At first. But it's impossible for a child that age to spend any significant time in a library and not have a meltdown. And I cringe whenever it happens. My experience has been that parents of small children are the least understanding about the quiet zone.

One lady told me that she had to kill four hours before her ride came. So she came into the library to use the computers. With her baby. Who eventually started crying. She couldn't go outside, because it was too cold. When I suggested that maybe she go to a computer lab in a different building, she looked at me as if I had told her she should just eat her baby. We hate you breeders, so leave! I understand how hard it can be to raise a child and go to school. Child care is an unrelenting responsibility and I sympathize. This is why I always hate to approach parents with loud children. But this particular lady wasn't studying, she was on her MySpace page. Her response was, "He's just a baby, he doesn't understand." Yes, but you should.

Every year there's a new group of regulars in the library that I have to keep a tight (sound-dampening) lid on. This year it's a bunch of international students who gather at a big table. Especially when there's a lot of them, they get excited and the noise level increases. I've given them "the speech" a dozen times already, and they understand it and try to abide by it. But they forget. It's to the point now that all I have to do is walk past their table and they quiet down. Sometimes all I need to do is look over at them and they will start shushing each other.

When people are clearly just passing through or on their way out, I don't hassle them about the noise. One phenomenon I've noticed is that people always get louder when they take their leave. Saying goodbye always ratchets up the volume. They may get louder, but I know it will be gone soon and I don't stress about it.

But sometimes they linger. They'll be standing there, about to leave, having a loud conversation. They inch toward the door. And talk some more. Even louder. I consider saying something. I wait for the conversation to finish. But it doesn't finish. It keeps going. Every time the cadence of their speech appears to be wrapping up, it starts again.

Finally, I get up from my desk to approach them, and then they leave.

And it's once again quiet and calm in the library.

Order is restored to the universe.

Until the next time I have to get my shush on.

Voter #249

2008-11-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

I yelled at John McCain in my bathroom this morning.

It's okay-- he couldn't hear me. The only ones who could hear me, my cats, just rubbed up against me in a gesture of comfort and sympathy. Or maybe they just wanted to be fed.

On the radio they played a soundbite of McCain repeating his cutesy line about Obama "already measuring the drapes in the White House."

Aside from the fact that Obama has shown no public interest in interior decorating that I know of, Obama has been very clear in his public speeches about not getting ahead of himself. He's still using language like, "If I'm elected...", not "When I'm elected..." like so many other politicians do. At one campaign event, the crowd started to get on him about it, and he replied, "I'm superstitious."

That's one thing that I love about him. Because I'm superstitious too, and it's refreshing to see a politician with the same cautious and humble sense of optimism that I live my life with.

So, Senator McCain, I can assure you he is NOT measuring the drapes, or ordering cable, or filling out change-of-address forms at the post office. He knows that the race isn't over until election day.

So, please, old man who refers to his opponent as "that one", STFU already about the drapes.

------------------

When I fed my ballot into the machine this morning, I was voter #249 in my precinct. Considering I had to stand in line for 45 minutes, that seemed awfully low. This is my third presidential election in Champaign-Urbana, and I've never had to wait more than 10 minutes before. Usually I just walk right up to the table and vote.

It made me 30 minutes late for work. I really think Election Day should be a national holiday. I know long lines and a high turnout are good for Democrats, but think of all the people who can't vote today because of work, especially in precincts where the lines are 3-4 hours long.

I'm stoically optimistic that Obama will stay away from the tape measure until the votes are counted.

Slothfest

2008-11-02T21:37:00.000-08:00

The biggest Timicist holiday of the year goes by many names: Pluggathon, Slugfest, Couch Potatotopia, Slackerday. Not being a very devout Timicist, it's the only one of the holidays that I've consistently celebrated over the past six years.

It's a day dedicated to getting in touch with your inner sloth and not doing any work. In a perfect world every weekend would be like this, but there always seem to be chores and niggling little items that I need to accomplish before I can do fun stuff.

On Slackerday, I don't do any of it. I get out of bed and plop myself down on the couch and let myself be entertained for an entire day. It's the one day of the year when I actually clear out the Netflix DVDs sitting on my TV.

Here's what I did today:

9:00 am : Woke up and put on my Slacker t-shirt, the official uniform of Slugfest.
9:00 - 8:07: Since we switched from Daylight Savings to standard time at 2:00 am, I changed all the clocks in the house back to 8:00 am. Some people may consider this a chore, thus violating the spirit of Slugfest, but for me synchronizing all the clocks in the house is a fun leisure activity. Besides, it's my holiday and I get to make the rules: Synchronizing clocks is not work.
8:00 - 8:30: Ate breakfast and watched last Thursday's episode of The Office on TiVo.
8:30 - 9:00: Watched 30 Rock
9:00 - 10:15: Watched a Netflix DVD: The God Who Wasn't There.
10:15 - 12:00: Ate mid-morning snack and watched Netflix DVD, Click.
12:00 - 3:00: Football. Watched Bears game.
12:30: Ate lunch-- leftovers from Indian restaurant from night before. (Leftovers are an essential component to Slugfest. All meals should be heated up leftovers.)
1:30: Showered during halftime of the game. Traditionally, showers are considered work and discouraged on Pluggathon, but I was feeling pretty gross and really needed to wash the Indian food residue off my greasy face.
2:00 - 3:45: While watching football, I organized and cleaned out a bunch of files on my hard drive. This may be another activity that other people would consider "work" but I'm a librarian and organizing stuff is more like play for me.
3:45 - 5:45: Watched Netflix DVD, Capote.
6:00 - 6:30: Watched Simpsons on TiVo and ate dinner-- Another helping on Indian leftovers followed by an orgasmically good Ghirardelli (or was it Godiva?) carmel dark chocolate bar that I bought just for this occasion.
6:30 - 7:30: Watched the last of The Daily Show and Colbert Report from last week (TiVo.)
7:30 - 10:00: More NFL football. Watched the Colts game.

On paper it was a great day. I didn't do anything I didn't want to do, both the Bears and the Colts won, and I accomplished something in organizing my computer files.

Aside from the morning, where I started off the day watching TV and saw two Netflix, it wasn't much different than most Sundays. But I had kind of a crappy antisocial feeling as I went to bed. I realized that I hadn't communicated with another person all day long.

So I guess I can add HermitDay to the list of names for this holiday.

Sick Kitty

2008-10-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

I dropped off my primary cat, Katya, at the vet and left her all day with mean evil strangers. In our eight-year relationship, this is the first time I've ever left her at the vet. She mewed in the carrier the whole way there.

I hope she will forgive me.

She's been losing weight and the vet is concerned. She's lost about 2 pounds over the last year, which is about 25% of her weight. She was having kidney problems, but the vet doesn't think that would account for such a dramatic weight loss. He thinks it's something else.

So she's getting some kitty ex-rays today.

If the ex-rays don't turn up anything, we may have to consider exploratory surgery, which would not only be expensive, but also risky in a cat her age (she's 14.) I'm not enthusiastic about that.

Since she's so furry, I hadn't noticed the weight loss. And she doesn't seem to act sick, whatever that means in a cat. But ever since I found out about this last week, I have noticed slight changes in her behavior. Is she walking more gingerly than usual, or did I imagine it? She has been more affectionate the past few months, but I thought that was because she only has one primary lapgiver now. Are sick cats more affectionate?

Because of her kidney thing, she's supposed to be drinking more water to compensate for it. But I haven't noticed an increase in the amount of water she's drinking. The vet recommended a cat fountain, because studies show that cats are more likely to drink from running water than a stagnant dish.

So this weekend I spent $50 on a zen-like contraption that runs water through a spigot and shoots it into a bowl. It's become another background noise in my apartment-- the sound of water running 24/7. I was convinced my cats would love it and imagined them running to it and licking the urine-like stream of flowing water.

Instead, Hermione, my auxiliary cat, was afraid of it at first. Katya just ignored it. It's hard to know whether they're using it or not, since the bowl is so big it's hard to see a difference in the water level, and they don't usually drink in front of an audience.

I also started buying them wet food in an effort to get Katya's weight up. The vet doesn't think her weight-loss could be accounted for by her not liking her regular food, but I'm still in denial that there's anything seriously wrong. She goes bonkers for wet food, and even if it doesn't help her gain weight, I can at least make her happy during this crisis.

DemoCrap-hics

2008-10-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

After the 2000 presidential election Ralph Nader tried to argue that he had taken just as many votes away from George Bush as he did from Al Gore.

I thought that this was a patently absurd claim. Why would someone who likes a conservative evangelical pro-business cowboy end up going with the liberal consumer advocate from the Green Party?

Why indeed. As much as I like to pigeonhole people into nice orderly stereotypes, there will always be individuals who insist on having complicated and unpredictable reasons for supporting something.

There are gay Republicans. Feminist porn stars. Jewish holocaust deniers. Black supporters of the confederate flag. Some of these people may have more rational justification than others, but I'm learning that whatever weird contradictory demographic you can think of, there's someone out there who belongs to it.

What made me come to this conclusion was listening to a story on This American Life yesterday about a group of life-long Democrats who are campaigning for McCain in Pennsylvania. These are not moderate fair-whether Democrats, but people who appear to be passionate about Democratic ideals. They said they'd never voted Republican in their life. And it's not like they were simply being racist (like the union members in a following story who told campaigners outright, "I will never vote for a n***er for president.") One of them was black, and even set off my gaydar when I heard him talk. A gay black Democrat supporting McCain? Seriously, WTF?

And they weren't just content to vote for McCain, they were campaigning for him. Hard. One guy had taken a week off from work in New York to travel to Pennsylvania and go door to door talking up McCain. It wasn't just their support for McCain that confused me, but their fervor about it.

My only explanation is that they were disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters who worked up such a hatred for Obama during the primaries that they're putting all their energy into getting him defeated in the general election. People interviewed said as much, saying that the Democratic party threw Hillary under the bus and they didn't trust Obama. That's all well and good, but why would you put all your energy into undermining the very issues that your candidate (Clinton) supports? There's really no rational explanation for that. Then again, people are complicated and there are always conflicting motivations that, if you could dig deep enough, there must be a logical explanation for. Even if the explanation is that they're schizophrenic.

Anyway, this got me wondering if there are any demographic groups that don't exist. The world is a big place (6+ billion people) and the sheer numbers alone make almost every combination possible. From what I've seen so far, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lesbian libertarian Mormon Kucinich supporter out there.

Here's one that occurred to me, though: Is there anyone out there who is an enthusiastic, passionate supporter of both Obama and McCain? Someone who's undecided, not because they're lukewarm about the candidates, but because they can't decide between two such fantastic choices?

I'd like to meet that person. And write a dissertation on them.

Political Plumbing

2008-10-16T07:02:00.000-07:00

So I watched the debate last night and had this thought: Somewhere in Ohio a poor plumber is about to be descended upon by a media circus. Perhaps they already got to him, but I'm trying to avoid any more political news this morning.

I probably should have written "poor plumber" in quotes, because as far as I could make out, Joe the Plumber is not poor. John McCain tried to use him as a poster child for Obama's tax policies, but as far as I could make out from the debate last night, Joe's family is not about to go hungry.

It's always difficult to read between the lines in these kinds of debates, but it appeared to me that McCain was knocking Obama because Joe the Plumber would have to pay more in taxes if the latter gets elected. Obama has made it abundantly clear in his three debates that the only people who are in danger of increased taxes under his plan are people who make more than $250,000 a year. So, reading between the lines, I assumed that Joe makes more than that. I think they even hinted that Joe owns his own business. McCain even alluded to this when he mocked Obama's plan with a statement like, "Sorry, Joe, you make too much money."

Is McCain really trying to garner pity from blue-collar Americans by using what is essentially a businessman who makes a quarter million dollars a year out to be a poor victim of Obama's tax policy? Nice touch that the guy's a plumber, setting up the image that he's just a working class Joe. Never mind that he's in the top 5% income bracket.

You know what I say to that? (If all of my assumptions above are correct.) Fuck Joe the Plumber. Why the hell are we arguing about his economic welfare when 1/3 of America's children don't have adequate health insurance? When the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has grown steadily over the past 30 years? Let's have Joe pay his dues to the country that has given him so much economic prosperity.

Unless I'm wrong about his economic status. In which case I go on record as saying, "Oops, sorry, my bad."

Bronze League Champion!

2008-10-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

My "championship" match in the Bronze league tonight was perhaps the greatest anti-climax in the history of Bronze league championships. I have no way of knowing whether that's true, but that's how I imagine it to be.

I beat my opponent 6-0, 6-2, in the my most lopsided match of the year. I hardly broke a sweat. This was supposed to be my toughest competition in a league where I keep squeaking out victories in tense tiebreakers (four of them in the previous five matches.)

The match was tense for the first three games, but after I won three close deuce games in a row, he kind of folded and I ran away with the first set. It turns out that positive thinking is helping me on the tennis court. I tell myself, "You're the one who wins deuce games, you're the one who wins deuce games..." and I do.

In the second set he won the first two games, but I broke his serve to make it 2-1. In the next game, on my serve, he went up 40-0 and looked like he was going to take a 3-1 lead. But bolstered by the confidence of winning nine straight league matches, I told myself, "You're going to come back and win this game, and that will break his spirit." And I did exactly that. I won five straight points, tied it up and 2-2, and after that he seemed to give up. I won the next four games pretty easily.

I was almost embarrassed by the ease of my victory. I know he didn't play very well, but I don't know how much my game affected his play. (I served really well. In fact, I got an ace in the last game, which I never do.) After a match I usually tell my opponents, "Good game" or "You really ran me around out there" or "We had some great points." But I didn't know what to say to him. I wanted to say that I was shocked that it wasn't closer, but that might have been rubbing it in.
I am a champion! I feel like announcing it to everyone I know. I want to wear a t-shirt that says, "Ask me about the Bronze league!"

It's not exactly like the birth of a child or winning a Nobel prize, but after the year I've had, it's nice to know there is one area of my life where I'm a winner.

Faith in Government & Magnet Politics

2008-10-12T20:33:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin recently told a crowd of supporters that she doesn't put her faith in government, she puts her faith in "you."

That's very nice of her, but I'd rather that someone seeking the job of running the government would at least believe in it.

I'm so tired of Republicans taking control of our federal government just so that they can self-fulfill the prophecy that government can't help you solve your problems. Well, of course it's not going to help if the people running the show don't even believe in it.

How would it look if I were applying for a job as a college president and I announced to the hiring committee that I didn't believe in education? I believe in you to educate yourselves! How far do you think I would get with that attitude?

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Obama Car Magnet Update

I finally received my Obama/Biden car magnet last week.

But putting it on my car was not so simple. It turns out that my Prius does not have any metal on its hind parts that a magnet will stick to. So I would have to put it on the side. But where?

Since then the magnet has traveled all over my car, starting at the back left side near the gas hole, then to the back seat door, then the driver's side door, then the front passenger side, and now I think it's on the back passenger side.

The problem is, I want to put it in a place where it does the most good. When I had it on the driver's side I realized that people could only see it when they were passing me. If this was someone who was impatient and had to wait behind me on the highway until I could get over to the right lane, they might be pissed at me for holding them up. Then they see my Obama sticker and think negative thoughts about him. "That damn Obama supporter held me up on the highway! I ain't voting for him!" It would probably also play into their stereotype of the Obama supporter as a liberal latte-drinking wuss who's too high on grass to drive fast on the highway.

So I moved the magnet over to the passenger side, where the only people who see it are drivers who I pass. They will associate Obama with a reckless fast-driving maniac. To them my political magnet shows that I have poor impulse control and I'm just swept up in the Obamamania with no regard for the rule of law. The other disadvantage of using the passenger side is that I get passed more often than I pass (owing to the fact that I geek-out about my mileage now that I have a Prius.) Which means fewer people see the magnet on that side.

What a dilemma.

Socking My Drawers

2008-10-06T19:24:00.000-07:00

I've re-arranged my bedroom four times over the past six weeks. Mostly this just involved moving or shifting my bed, but the last time I moved the dressers around to give the space an entirely new orientation.

I have two dressers in the room. The big one is the main repository for my clothes. From the second, smaller, crappy one, I only use the top drawer. It holds my white athletic socks. Not the formal work socks or the black casual athletic socks. Just the white ones. You wouldn't think I'd need an entire drawer just for white athletic socks, but I do. Ever since the unfortunate blister incident of last January I've taken my sock situation very seriously. (According to my ex, the blister incident was a catalyst for the dissolution of my marriage, but that's another story.) I have six different kinds of white athletic socks which are worn in various combinations depending on season, level of tennis activity, and leisure needs.

The second, smaller, crappy dresser used to be reserved for some of my ex-wife's things, and when she moved out I moved my white socks into it. In the most recent moving-around it has been recruited to sit in front of the window, where the cats perch on top of it to watch "kitty TV."

Here is why I call it the "crappy" dresser. The drawers don't fit well, so when you open the top drawer too far it makes a sudden jump down as if it's going to fall. It hangs there precariously like Indiana Jones hanging off the edge of a cliff. All of the contents of the drawer slide forward which upsets the delicate arrangement of my socks. It also rubs itself in some wrong way so that sawdust and wood shavings collect when you open the drawer.

The other day I opened the drawer to get out my tennis socks for a match I had in about 20 minutes. The drawer made like it was going to fall, so I reacted instinctively with my lightning-quick hands to catch it. Only it didn't fall and my hand cracked against it. My right hand. It opened a cut between my index finger and middle finger and the area started to swell. Fuckity Fuck Fuck Fuck! That's one of my playing-tennis hands, I thought. And I only have two. Godfuckingdammit!! Twenty minutes before a match.

I washed out the cut, put some antibacterial ointment on it, patched it up with a band-aid, and hoped the swelling wouldn't affect my tennis too much. During the warm-ups I tried about three different band-aid options before I found one I liked. Then I went out and won my seventh straight match of the indoor season. I played another tiebreak and won (7-0), bringing my consecutive tiebreak winning streak to eight. (I thought of putting a counter on my website for this, but then I'm afraid I'll jinx it.) Today, two days later, the cut is healing but there's a black and blue (and yellowing) blotch between my knuckles.

So that's it for the dresser. My ex's former dresser has hurt me for the last time. It's dead to me. I plan to replace it as soon as I have some time to go furniture shopping. My other dresser is too full anyway, and it might be nice to spread out my clothes over two whole dressers.

So if anyone's looking to get rid of a competent dresser, I'm in the market for one.

Must be good with socks.

Reference Desk Deja Vu

2008-09-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

I had a student come up to the desk a few weeks ago because he was looking for a book. I looked it up on the catalog, wrote down the call number for him, and pointed him in the right direction. I might have even walked him up to the stacks to show him where the book would be located. At any rate, he found what he was looking for. Transaction successful.

A few days later I had another request for the same book. This is not so unusual since multiple students will often be looking for the same book that their instructor recommended. I repeated the reference process. Catalog, call number, right-direction pointing. Another successful transaction.

Last week another student asked again for the same book. I took a good look at him. I recognized him as the same guy who'd asked for it before, and then I realized that it was him who had asked for it both previous times. This wasn't a case of several students looking for the same book, but of one student looking for the same book again and again. So I said, "Didn't you ask for it twice already last week?" He nodded his head.

I'm happy to pad my reference statistics, but it didn't feel very educational for me to keep looking up this guy's book for him. He told me he needed the book for his (remedial) reading class. I don't know why he doesn't just check it out instead of seeking it out in the stacks twice a week.

So I said, "Why don't I show you how to look it up, so you can do it yourself from now on? Do you remember when I visited your class and showed you how to use our catalog?" (I visited all the reading classes, so I know he completed the training.) He nodded absently. For the third time in two weeks I took him through the motions of finding the catalog and looking up a book. He stared off into the library and didn't pay attention. Finally I said to him (in a friendly voice), "I'm happy to help you find stuff, but if you're going to need this book so often you really should know how to look it up. That's why you're in college."

In the end, I just wrote down the call number on a slip of paper and said, "Keep that slip of paper and you can use that to find the book next time."

I'm reminded of the famous quote by the great statesmen, W: "Is our children learning?"

Indeed.

I Don't Sleep, Then I Rock

2008-09-23T20:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick summary of my preparation and performance in my latest tennis league match:

I don't sleep well
I don't sleep well again
I'm exhausted
I can't nap
I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock.

I think I'm going to have to re-evaluate the image I have of myself as a choker on the tennis court. Over the past month I have been involved in five tiebreaks and I have won them all. I have fought off countless break points, set points, and match points. I am clutch. I win when it counts. Yay me.

In my latest league match I avenged the drubbing I received (6-1, 6-0) three weeks ago at the Labor Day Tournament. I'd never beaten this particular opponent, although I've come close many times.

I'd slept horribly the two nights leading up to the match and I felt exhausted. I tried to nap for an hour before the match but I only got about 20 minutes of actual sleep. I was just hoping I would have enough adrenaline to get me through two hours of intense tennis. I think the lack of sleep might have actually helped me, because I made a concentrated effort to conserve energy on the court. I had to win with strategy instead of energy.

The first set was very close. I won the first two games, then he won three, then we went back and forth. Early on I figured out a strategy that worked really well for me. Because I have a weak serve, this particular guys stands ridiculously close to the service line on my serve. It's as if he's taunting me to try to hit a hard deep serve. A few times I was able to brush him back, but occasionally it unnerved me. So while I was standing back about to return his serve, I had a brilliant thought: Why don't I do the same thing to him? I moved up really far on his second serve, and he double-faulted. I did the same thing on the next point, with the same result. I'd rattled him. The rest of the match I changed my position constantly on his serve, moving up and back randomly. This really got in his head and he didn't serve well at all.

I had the chance to win the first set at 5-4 and again at 6-5, but he battled back to tie it. So we went to a tiebreak in the first set. The old Tim might have thought, "Okay, here is where I choke." But since I'd won so many tiebreaks lately, I told myself, "You can win this. You're the guy who wins tiebreaks." I came out to a quick 4-1 lead, and then had four set points at 6-2. Then I lost two points and thought, "Uh-oh, this would be a huge choke if I lost now." But I won the next point to take the set.

In the second set he fell apart. I started playing more like Old Tim, a defensive style where I just barely get the shots back, and he kept missing everything. He was frustrated and angry and let it get to him. I won the first four games easily. (About this time I could smell victory and thoughts started popping into my head about how I would blog about this, my greatest tennis triumph so far. I know it was completely premature and I'm lucky it didn't bite me in the ass.) In the fifth game, he was serving and we had a long game that went to deuce several times. But every time he had a game point, I would battle back to tie it. I kept telling myself, "You win this game and it will completely break his spirit." And I did win it.

Up 5-0 and serving for the match, now it was my turn to choke. We had another deuce game, and I blew one match point before he won the game. Then he won the next two games and I started getting nervous. It was 5-3 and I knew he was capable of winning six games in a row against me if he got hot. I had to get over this psychological hump and end it. In the next game I went up 40-0 and I said to myself, "Okay, let's see you handle three match points." He won one point, then I hit a nice cross-court forehand that he lunged at but missed. I won, 7-6(4), 6-3.

I was very happy. I'm having a great start to my "junior year" of tennis (it's my third season.) I'm currently 3-0 and tied for first place in the Bronze league. Two years ago I was in the basement of the beginner's league. Last year I won the beginner's league to move into Bronze league, where I was solidly middle of the pack, going 4-3 and then 3-4. Now I'm in a position to think about winning the league.

I've come a long way. At this rate I'm only about 40 years away from playing at the Wimbledon.

Art and Food

2008-09-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I bought some new posters to fill some empty spaces on my walls. I put one in a frame and hung it on my wall:

And the other one is still sitting on a chair in the corner, but I admire it every time I walk from the living room to places beyond:

These works of "stationary art" complement my pair of furry "moving art" pieces:

Which are sometimes so inaccessible that I have to crawl under the bed to admire them:

Up until a few weeks ago, this is what the corner of my kitchen counter top looked like:

This is a small sample of some of the more exotic beer bottles that I've emptied over the past few months. I know it makes my apartment look like a dorm room, but it's nice to have some tangible reminder of what I did with my summer.

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Bachelor Feed, Part Two: Return of the Crockpot

Then last week I discovered that I have two cookbooks left in my apartment. One of them happens to be a guide to "feasting with your slow cooker." I checked in my cupboards and discovered, to my amazement, that I own a slow cooker!

A "slow cooker" is apparently a lamer name for what I know as a "crockpot." A crockpot is something you throw a bunch of ingredients into and then let it cook all day and make your house smell like food. What a brilliant invention.

I decided I would try it out, so I selected a recipe (Lemon Garlic Chicken) and bought the ingredients at the grocery. I also bought measuring cups, measuring spoons, and a salt and pepper shaker-- all things that I've lived without for the past six months.

I am currently slow cooking (crockpotting?) my Lemon Garlic Chicken:

It smells as good as it looks.

Wordle

2008-09-11T12:51:00.001-07:00

This is a word soup of my last few blog entries, compliments of Wordle. A whole lot of tennis & politics, with a dash of food thrown in.

Bachelor Feed

2008-09-08T19:28:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I had an inspiration: Maybe I'll cook!

So I went to the kitchen to look up some ideas in the cookbooks that live in the microwave stand. Only they weren't there. All that was left were two useless books-- one of them was a thin book on sauces, about the size of a kid's picture book. What the hell am I going to do with a book on sauces?

You see, Rebecca took all the cookbooks when she moved out. She even took the few cookbooks I owned before we got married, like the illustrated Help, My Apartment Has a Kitchen! book for beginners. I can't really complain, though. I never showed any interest in cooking when we lived together, so she probably didn't think I'd want them. At the time when she packed all the cookbooks up, I didn't argue with her. And to be fair, she left a whole lot more stuff than she took. Plus, it's been six months since she moved out and I'm just now discovering that I'm missing those books? I believe the statute of limitations for complaining about this has passed.

On a similar note, I didn't notice until this weekend that there are no salt and pepper shakers in the house. There's a large store of both salt and pepper hiding among the spices, but no shakers. How pathetic is it to have not noticed that for six months?

There was a time, before I got married, when I used to cook. Not a lot, and not often, but there have been times when I'd pick out a recipe, buy all the ingrediants at the store, come home and prepare a dinner. Despite the sense of accomplishment from doing something like that, it never really seemed worth all the work. You could get something just as good at a restaurant, and really, after buying all the ingredients, it's just as expensive as eating out.

So, if I don't cook, what have I been eating the past six months? Good question. Somehow I've survived, and even managed to lose some weight, then gain some weight, then lose it back again. I eat out a lot, have lots of leftovers from eating out, eat lots of sandwiches and frozen foods. (I've averaged at least one frozen pizza a week since the time I was 19 years old.)

But I often eat what I'll call Liberal Bachelor Feed. This includes pita chips with hummus, crackers with cheese, or blue-corn tortillas with salsa. Maybe I'll have a pickle or yogurt on the side. That's my entire dinner. It's quick, easy, and there are no dishes to clean. I can eat it easily in front of the TV, and since there's no meat involved, the cats leave me alone.

Instead of cooking last Saturday, I went to the store with the intention of finding "something new." I found a tub of guacamole, a pre-made Greek Salad from the deli, a tub of cut-up melons, and (wait for it) sushi! I'm not a big sushi eater. I've had it maybe half a dozen times in my life. I don't eat the raw fish, but things like California rolls, which have pre-cooked imitation crab meat with avocado and cucumber wrapped in seaweed and rice are pretty good. Since I was buying from a grocery store, I figured the California rolls would be the safest option. It actually wasn't bad, and I was proud of myself for eating something new.

The next day I planned to have tortilla chips dipped in guacamole, but when I tried the pre-made guacamole, it was nasty and I couldn't eat it. Instead, I had the Greek Salad and "cooked" a frozen pizza. Yum.

I Suck, Then Suck It Up

2008-08-31T18:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick summary of my performance in the Champaign Park District Labor Day weekend tennis tournament today:

I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck.
I Don't Completely Suck.
I Suck It Up.
I Hurt All Over.

The good news is my rib/back injury seems to be healed. I played a total of about four hours of singles tennis today, and the only part of my body that doesn't hurt right now is my ribs/back area.

It has been exactly two weeks since I decided to take a hiatus from tennis, load up on drugs, and let my injury heal. I played one match on Thursday evening, but other than that, I hadn't played in two weeks. So I wasn't in the greatest shape when I took the court this morning.

My first match was against a guy who I'd played many times before. I'd never beat him, but I'd won the first set against him three times. He hadn't played much this summer, and I was playing 3-5 times a week before my injury, so I thought this might be my chance to get him.

It wasn't.

The first game we played lasted about 20 minutes because we kept going to deuce. But he pulled it out, and that seemed to open the floodgates of my suckitude. I don't really understand what happened, but he rolled over me, 6-1, 6-0. We played a relatively long time, because we had lots of long points and deuce games. But in the end, the score was the most lopsided one we'd ever had, by far. It was frustrating, demoralizing, and put me in a negative stupor that made me focus on everything that's wrong with my life.

An hour later I played in the "consolation finals", since there were only four guys in our bracket. This was at noon, under an unrelenting midday sun. I came out strong to a 4-1 lead and thought, "Alright, maybe I don't suck after all." But then my opponent started to figure some things out and took the next three games. We went back and forth, but I managed to squeak out a 7-5 victory in the first set. Feeling rejuvenated after taking the first set, I won the first two games of the second set.

Then I hit a brick wall. The sun, the heat, and the match I'd played earlier had all drained my energy. The sun was brutal and there was no where I could go to get away from it. It was like a heavy leaden blanket draped all around me. I stopped running to the ball, I stopped setting up my shots properly, I couldn't do anything but take half-assed swings at the ball.

Every once in a while I would get enough of a semi-burst of energy to win a point. But I lost four straight games and couldn't see any way that I could win the match. I was down 2-4, and I didn't really care anymore. I lived only for the few seconds when we would change sides and I could get a swallow of Gatorade. I needed a respite from the murderous sun, but there was no shade on the court. I might play two good points after the change-over, but then my throat and lips would dry up and all I could think about was getting to my Gatorade bottle again.

By some miracle I managed to suck it up and win two games to tie it at 4-4 in the second set. But when he won the next game to go up 5-4, I did something I've never done before. I threw a game. To win the set, I would have had to have won three games in a row, and I knew that I didn't have it in me. I decided I would rather just go to the third set, where we only play a 10-point tiebreaker. I might have it in me to win that. So I let him win the next game, and thus the set. I don't know if throwing the game was sleazy or "gamesmanship" or what, but I was dying out there and just wanted it to end.

In the tiebreaker, we alternated the first six points, so we were tied when we switched sides 3-3. I noticed some cramping in my legs as I tried to run for shots. He won four of the next five to take a 7-4 lead, and was still leading (7-5) when we switched sides again. I was so dead on my feet at this point that even walking over to the other side of the court was torture, so I dreaded the change-overs. I wondered how long I could push myself before I would pass out from sun stroke. I tied it up at 8-8, then he had match point at 9-8. He blew it, and we had yet another change-over at 9-9. He had three match points in the game: at 9-8, 10-9, and 11-10. But everytime I fought back to tie it up. Finally, at 12-11, I had match point. I was determined not to have to go through another change-over, so I had to win the next point. I served, came into the net, and smashed an overhead away from him to win the match, 7-5, 4-6, 1-0 (13-11).

After I hit the winning point, I fell onto my back and lay on the court. It was probably an obnoxious and melodramatic act, but I couldn't help myself. I got up, shook myself off, and shook my opponent's hand. He left the court immediately, but I sat there for about ten minutes trying to get up enough energy to walk over to the shade of the pavilion next to the courts. My Gatorade bottle was empty, and I was parched.

Somehow, I made it to the pavilion, and then to the car, and then home. Every muscle in my body screamed in pain. I took some painkillers, laid on the couch, and drank liquids. The tournament director called to say he forgot to give me my medal for winning the consolation finals. (Apparently three out of the four participants in this tournament get a medal.)

Now, I hurt all over. I loaded up on drugs, but they still couldn't relieve the mind-splitting headache that came on in the evening. I suppose it feels good to have won, but I still don't know how I did it. I certainly didn't enjoy the last two sets of tennis, even if I did win.

Midday summer tournament tennis is no fun.

Tim Does Politics

2008-08-30T16:46:00.000-07:00

I only blog about politics when I want my older brother Dan to post a comment on my blog. He's an angry anti-war liberal into social justice and evidence that the mainstream media is failing to do its job. He would never write a 1,000-word blog entry on his latest tennis accomplishments or about taking drugs with his cat.

So like a child trying to get attention from their parents by engaging in their parents' hobbies, I will try to win my big brother's love by blogging about how awesome Barack Obama is.

A week ago, on a lonely Saturday night, I was surfing the web and found that I could get an Obama/Biden car magnet if I donated $25 to the campaign. I'd already given money to Obama during the primaries, but since I drive a Prius and the general election is heating up, I thought it was my duty to announce to other drivers who I support for president. My problem was that I didn't want to put a traditional bumper sticker on my car that would be there forever, like campaign herpes. ("Dukakis/Bentson '88!")

But a car magnet would be perfect! I could put it on during the election and then take it off after the election, returning the respect and dignity to my car that it deserves. So I signed up and donated some money.

Of course, I made the mistake of giving them one of my email addresses, 'cause I thought they might actually have useful info to send me every now and then. As Bush would say, I guess I "misunderestimated" the amount of mail a major political campaign would send out. Since last Saturday I have received messages from the following people, in this order: Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama (again), Jon Carson (National Field Director), Joe Biden (again), David Plouffe (Campaign Manager), Barack Obama (again), Joe Biden (again), Michelle Obama (again), and three messages from "Obama for America." If you're counting, that's 13 messages in a week.

I have not, however, received my car magnet yet.

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So I was watching Obama's speech the other night at the Democratic convention, and I got swept up in the excitement, along with a lot of other people. Here you have this historic candidate, with a pedigree and life experiences completely unlike any president in history of our country, after a historic primary, who represents hope and a drastic alternative to the current administration. I saw the diverse crowd and the enthusiasm in the stadium, and I thought, "How can the Republicans possibly respond to this?" What are they going to say? "Hey, we have another rich old white man running to serve the primary interests of other rich white men! It's worked the last 233 years, why not four more? Change: Let's wait a little more!" Woo-hoo!

Of course that's not what they're saying. The Republican strategy seems to be, "He's got no experience! He's just an empty shirt! Hope with no plan!" (Forget for a moment that their whole strategy is discrediting Obama instead of lifting up McCain.) We already heard a lot of these arguments during the primary, which I think is bogus. Look over the course of his life and tell me he's all flash and no substance. If any president over the past 50 years had no substance when he was elected, it was George W. Bush. He had a resume, but it was a list of failures. Obama has excelled at everything he's done. And look at his varied life experiences. It would be impossible to have done all he's done and not have learned a thing or two.

I had all of these thoughts before McCain announced his running mate. When I found out that he's selected a relatively obscure arch-conservative woman, at first I thought it was a master stroke. How can the Republicans respond to Obama's historic run? They'll use a woman as a running mate! But then I found out more about Palin, I realized this was another example of Republicans not "getting" affirmative action. No wonder they're so bad at it: They see it as selecting any minority, regardless of credentials. "Hey, you want a woman? We got a woman!!"

If you want to know more about Palin, here's an amusing video someone sent me:

Submission

2008-08-22T13:40:00.000-07:00

I just mailed off something I wrote to This American Life, one of my favorite radio shows. David Sedaris got his start writing for them, so this is my first tentative attempt at trying to live the life of a literary rock star.

The piece I mailed off was something that I first wrote in 2000 about an experience I had in 1999. Inspired by an English teacher friend, who read something of mine and encouraged me to put my stuff out there, I dusted it off and revised it for the radio show. Then I sat on it for nine months while I dealt with other personal issues in my life.

I mailed it an hour and a half ago, but I haven't heard anything back from them yet. (Joke courtesy of my brother Dan, personal telephone call, one hour ago.) But I'm out there, ready for my first rejection letter!

Doped Up

2008-08-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

I've spent a good portion of the past two days waiting for health care. In doctor's offices, at the pharmacy, at the vet.

But now I'm good and doped up, and the cat is stumbling around the apartment.

I hurt my ribs/back at Schreibefest two weeks ago. I blame my nine-year-old niece, who was my tubing partner and demanded to go fast, so fast that we bounced up and down on the tube about a hundred times, enough to pulverize my delicate thorax. It was fun, but afterwards I noticed my ribs hurt.

Since then I've played tennis five times, and each time my back hurts worse and my play suffers. I have no backhand, because turning my body from left to right causes excruciating pain. So after trying to heal my injury through denial, I'm taking a new track: modern medicine. The worst part of the healing process is not the pain, but the fact that I have to give up tennis for a week or two. This during the last part of my vacation, when I have so much free time, and the weather has been absolutely perfect lately. That's torture.

I made an appointment to see a doctor, and after waiting an hour and a half, got some good advice and a prescription for a muscle relaxant. I don't care about the pain, I just want to heal as quickly as possible. There's a tennis tournament over Labor Day that I really want to play in. Then I had to get a blood test (unrelated to the injury) and had to wait about an hour for that. When I swung by the pharmacy to pick up my muscle relaxant, a little after 6:30 pm, they didn't have my prescription ready. They said it would be 15-20 minutes. So I left, ran an errand, and came back 15 minutes later. Sorry, they still hadn't started on my prescription yet because there was a problem with my account (I wasn't in their system.) They had tried to page me but I wasn't there. So this time I waited in-house for them to finish, which took an additional half hour. By the time I finally got my drugs, I was starving and frustrated and just wanted to go home and take drugs.

The muscle relaxant really knocks me out, so I can't really go anywhere while I'm on it. Luckily, these are the last two days of my vacation and I have most of my errands done. So I can take two days to drug up and let my back heal. My last errand was to take my cat, Hermione, to the vet this morning:

This is what she looks like when she's alert. But lately she's been giving the vet fits during her annual checkup. She howls, spits, hisses bites, claws, and poops in her carrier. It's no fun for any of us, and so this time we decided to give her some tranquilizers before her checkup.

I was surprised how easy it was to slip the pill into her mouth and get her to swallow it. By the time I drove her in to the vet, she was grouchy but subdued. I could even see the medicine taking effect, as her eyes glazed over. We had to wait half an hour at the vet, where all she could muster was a weak growl when I tried to pet her. She woke the hell up, though, when the vet opened up her cat carrier. It was just as bad as before: screaming, cursing, lashing out, pooping. It's embarrassing. I always wonder if they blame the owner when something like this happens. Did I not raise her right? Am I a bad kittydaddy?

After I got her home, cleaned the poop out of her tail, wiped off the carrier, and put the poop-stained towels from the carrier in the washing machine, I was ready for some drugs of my own. I took my muscle relaxant and will now veg out for the next two days, watching TV and movies and playing online until I get too dizzy, which is happening as I type. Fun! (If you notice any typos in this post, it's from the drugs. Really.)

Meanwhile, Hermy is stumbling around the house like a drunken sailor. She changes her perch every three minutes, and keeps missing when she tries to jump up on things. It's hilarious.

This is her, eyes glazed over, trying to hang out at my feet. She'll sleep it off, and be ready for more mischief soon.

Happy Anniversary

2008-08-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first anniversary of when I bought my beautiful Prius, Smuggy.

We've been through a lot in the past year: the honeymoon phase, characterized by that new car smell and 46 MPG; the long, dark, windy winter months where we were lucky to break 40 MPG; two license plate crises; spring road trips where we averaged over 50 MPG; and now the old familiar love that comes from knowing how to push all of your lover's buttons.

To celebrate our anniversary, I bought Smuggy a new set of windshield wipers yesterday. It's the car equivalent of buying your girlfriend a new necklace. Then this morning I took Smuggy to a carwash and sprung for the deluxe premium service.

Nothing's too good for my sweet ride.

Family! Family! Family!

2008-08-03T19:47:00.000-07:00

I spent this past weekend with my family. Twenty-four of us (13 adults and 11 children) swarmed around a very large house and yard that now belongs to my sister to celebrate the 12th annual Schreiberfest.

The house that hosted this year's reunion, in Fort Wayne, IN, was designed and built by my father 30 years ago. Our family lived there for five years in the late 70's/early 80's, and then sold it when our dad got a new job in North Carolina. The house had been out of our family for 26 years until my sister bought it this spring.

So of course we had to have Schreiberfest here, in the house where all my siblings went to high school and where I lived from first to sixth grade.

The back yard is still huge, but the previous owners added a pool and my sister put a trampoline in the corner.

We hung out on the back porch,

played in the pool,

listened to nostalgic records from the 70s & 80s,

played a bean-bag tossing game called "cornhole" and then made crude jokes about our cornholes,

and took the five dogs in attendance on group walks:

We also had dinner in the formal dining room (while the kids ate in the kitchen),

sat around the family room and told family stories that we'd all heard 20 times before,

drank beer,

and made custom t-shirts for the kids:

My only priority all weekend was to challenge my oldest brother to a tennis match. We were all ready to go Friday morning, but the courts were locked and my sister couldn't remember the combination.

While they fumbled with the lock, I grumbled impatiently.

But eventually we figured out how to get in and I got to show off my color-coordinated Rafa outfit and matching tennis skillz:

I was up 5-4 in the first set, but then he put his older brother hex on me and won eight games in a row. He beat me 7-5, 6-1.

The activity that we do the most at Schreiberfest, though, is taking pictures. We take them, show them to each other, and even take pictures of us looking at pictures,

or pictures of us taking pictures

while we shape the kids into poses

or pose ourselves:

My family rocks.

Email Eulogy

2008-07-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

My email has six months to live.

The community network that hosts my personal email account is discontinuing their email service at the end of this year. This is a bummer for many reasons. First of all, because it was a small, non-profit organization, I was able to get a very simple email address: tim@domainname.org. I love having such a short and simple handle. It's my name and it's my address. There's no way I could join one of the big free web-based mail systems and snatch the same thing. It will have to be something like tim_statboy2571 or some other ridiculously long handle. (In fact, gmail requires at least six characters, so my three-letter name isn't even theoretically possible.)

I still have the first message I ever sent with this address. It was on October 14, 2002, and I sent it to my (then) girlfriend. I know it was the first message because the first line read: "This is my very first message from my new email address!"

Ever the anal, archiving librarian, I've saved most of my electronic correspondence in various folders over the past six years. It's an archive of my life, as presented to various people through letters, notes, invitations, flirtations, and arguments.

There are currently 30 folders in my email account. Whenever I start emailing with someone who I think is going to be a significant correspondent, I will create a new folder for that person. Some of these folders never really get going and the correspondence sputters out after only 4 or 5 messages. (That's the risk of premature foldering.) Some of them were very active for a time, but have died out for various reasons. I continue to build on the "active" folders, which range in size from 6 to 309 messages. The 309-message folder is for a friend of mine from library school, and we have been emailing each other since the beginning of this account. Most of my active "friends" folders range in size from 71 to 128 messages. Some are old friends who I just don't write very often, and some are ones I've made in the last year who I correspond with a lot.

I also have thematic folders that don't refer to a certain person, but an activity or event. For example, all my tennis correspondence has its own folder ("tennis", currently 271 messages), or messages from my family planning our annual reunion ("sfest", 107), or when I applied for jobs ("jobsearch," 40). I even have one for family arguments that have flared up over the years, titled "feud" (116.)

There's a generic "saved-messages" folder (201) that came with the account, and I put stuff in there that doesn't really warrant its own folder. Sometimes the things in there are in limbo-- waiting to see if there are enough messages on a certain topic to create a new folder.

But the granddaddy of all my folders, the one that dwarfs all the others and is larger than the next six largest folders combined, is the one titled "rebecca." It has 1,162 messages in it. We met online, and although we lived in the same city, she was traveling and doing research, off and on, for the first three months of our courtship. The first month alone we logged 128 messages to each other. In the second month we set a record of 11 messages exchanged in one day, and logged another 133 for the month. From there, our monthly message count declined, as we moved in together, got engaged, got married, and then broke-up. But all four and a half years of our relationship are chronicled through our emails.

All four of the women I've loved have their own folders, since I've been in contact with each of them over the past six years (two of them while we were together, and two of them during the post-breakup friendship.) My most recent ex-girlfriend, the one who received the very first message from this account (see above), got up to 99 messages, but we haven't had any contact in five years. My first girlfriend has exactly 100 in her folder, but that could increase since we're still in contact. Girlfriend #2's folder stopped at 59, ever since she abruptly cut off contact with me about four years ago.

Anyway, this thrilling discussion of the demographics of my email folders aside, the main point I wanted to make is that there is a lot of personal history in this email account. I can go back to almost any date over the past six years and get a slice of what was going on in my life, as presented to this or that person.

Ten years ago I had a transatlantic relationship with a German girl who was living in Poland for a year (girlfriend #2.) We emailed each other almost every day, and at the end of the year I printed out our email correspondence to keep for posterity. The stack of printouts is about three inches high, and every once in a while I will go back and read it. The sweet talk, the discussions, the reports of our everyday comings and goings, the fights, the drama, and the countdowns until we see each other again. It's all there, and it tells a great story.

A few years ago I started going through the "rebecca" folder and copying all the messages into a text program, so that I could save them for family history. This file tells a lot of the story of How Wet Met. I hadn't worked on this project for over a year, and now, with the news of my email account dying, I'll have to make a decision to either give it up or finish it. I don't plan to copy all 1162 messages, but probably the first few months of messages are worth keeping. They do tell a story, even if the story ultimately doesn't have a happy ending.

As for the other 29 folders in my email account, I will hate to see them go. But there's no way I can save all of them, or even if I should. I will need to find a new email address, probably through gmail, and will start the process of saving messages all over again. It's what I do.

Erony

2008-07-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

In my inbox at work I received an email with the following subject line: Don't Pursue Happiness - Create It... With A Great New Career!

Well, someone really likes to punctuate. It's not often you see a dash, elipsis, and exclamation point in one subject line. So I opened it and read about this "great new career." It's a "Company" that seeks "Representatives." (No name for the company, just "Company.") There are exactly four qualifications for this job:

1. Good work ethic.
2. Basic computer skills
3. Excellent comunitaction skills
4. Be well-orginized and hard-working.

Excellent comunitaction skills?

I believe that is the very definition of irony.

Payoff

2008-07-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

I just paid off my student loan. With a purring cat on my lap.

Actually, I scheduled the last payment. They won't take it out of my account until next Monday. I hadn't planned to pay it off this early, but I also hadn't planned on a lot of things that happened this year.

The nest egg that Rebecca and I had been saving for a house was just sitting there, split in half, but still enough to finish off my student loan. And since I'm in no position to buy a house right now, I figured I could at least kill my student debt in one fell swoop. I'm not sure what a "fell swoop" is, but I know a lot of people use them to accomplish something all at once.

I scheduled the payment online through my student loan website. Hermione, my secondary cat, was sitting on my lap as I did it, looking up and me and purring. She clearly approves of paying off one's debts.

Best Tennis Ever

2008-07-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I spent 7.5 hours watching the most amazing tennis match of my young tennis career.

On Monday I imitated the "instant classic" with my own epic tennis battle-- on a much, much, much smaller scale.

I woke up Sunday morning excited about the Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. After two weeks of having to TiVo every big match at Wimbledon and then hearing who won from various people before I got a chance to watch them, I was determined to watch this match live.

There were so many different ways to dissect this exciting match-up that I couldn't decided who to root for. Should I go for the guy who's been ranked #1 in the world for four and half years (Federer), who has won this particular tournament five straight times and was going for a record six straight, who has made it to an amazing 17 consecutive grand slam semifinals, and who is chasing the record of 14 overall grand slam titles (he's currently at 12)? Or the younger Nadal, who has been ranked #2 to Federer for three years, despite having a winning record against the champ, who himself has won the French Open four straight times (at the expense of Federer), the last time a month ago when he shellacked his rival 6-1, 6-3, 6-0 in the finals?

And that's just the tip of the drama iceberg.

I didn't know who to root for, and I didn't really care. I was happy to be watching the match in real time. After the first of three rain delays and interruptions, the match started, and I found myself rooting for Federer. I'm not sure why this was, but the sports fan's heart wants what it wants, and I wanted Federer to win.

Over the next 7.5 hours I watched some great tennis, punctuated by rain delays that allowed me to do laundry, vacuum, eat lunch, and do other chores. Almost my whole day was taken up by the match, which I don't think has ever happened with a sporting event before. The match had everything that makes a great sports contest: two likable but competitive opponenets, amazingly hard-fought points, beautiful shots and displays of athleticism, a comeback, a choke or two, close scores, the tennis equivalent of overtime, and an outcome that was not determined until the very end. There were times when points would go three or four shots beyond amazing. I mean, one amazing "get" was followed by another two or three. It kept me on the edge of the couch, and I told my cat, who slept nearby, "Katya, you are missing an awesome match!" She shrugged and shifted her position.

In the end, Nadal unseated the five-time champ, 6-4, 6-4, 6-7(5), 6-7(8), 9-7. As someone who loves scores and numbers, I'm impressed with the score alone. I didn't care who won, it was such a great match. Each of them was gracious in victory and defeat, respectively. Both cried, but for different reasons. John McEnroe, who was calling the match, thanked both of them for giving us (the fans) such a great display. McEnroe even hugged Federer, and both of them started to tear up. I almost did, too, when I saw Nadal run up into the stands after the match to hug his family.

I've seen some headlines that say things like Nadal "stunned" Federer. That's misleading. It implies that Federer was a heavy favorite who got upset. Not true. Nadal's been gaining on him recently, and since Federer is about five years older, it was inevitable that Nadal would surpass him at some point (if any of the other upstarts like Djokovic didn't do it first.) The question was only when and how. And the "how" was as awesome as a tennis fan could hope for. This rivalry win continue, no doubt, but it feels like this was a watershed moment for Nadal; a usurpation of the crown.

--------------------------------
Inspired by the Wimbledon final, Monday evening I met a new tennis opponent for a friendly match in the humid heat of Urbana. I wore my new sleeveless Rafa shirt so I could intimidate my opponent with my bulging muscles, just like Rafa's. I'd played this guy once before, in my tennis league, and beat him 6-2, 6-4, so I wasn't afraid of him. But this time it was much closer. We played the first set to a 6-6 tie, and then I won the tiebreaker, 7-3. Tough set.

It was easily my sweatiest match of the year, since it was so humid. Despite my headband and cap, the sweat was rolling into my eyes and flying onto my glasses. In the second set we traded games to 3-3, but then I finally took two in a row to go up 5-3. I served for the set, and was up 40-0 when I totally choked. I had four match points in that game, but lost them all. He came back to win the game and two more to go up 6-5. I felt like I didn't have any energy left, but then it was his time to choke. He had set point at 6-5, but I battled back to win the game and force a second tiebreaker.

I must have had a second wind, because I came out to a quick 4-0 lead. I stayed ahead and had match point at 6-4. It was my fifth match point of the evening. I hit a shot to his backhand and come up to the net. He tried a pretty good passing shot, but I got to it in time and was ready to hit a winning volley. The ball hit the cord and bounced over my racket onto the court. Dammit! Now I felt like maybe fate was against me. I was 0-for-5 on match points.

But I put away the next point to win it, 7-6(3), 7-6(5). I was happy that it was over, because I don't think I could have gone another set. The match lasted two hours.

Two sweaty, athletic, fun, victorious hours.

ALA: The Haul

2008-07-06T17:36:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on my trip. This year's ALA brought 22,000 people (mostly librarians) to Anaheim, home of Disneyland. It was not my favorite ALA location. Our hotel room was crappy and Disney music was everywhere. Most of the food options were located in "Downtown Disney," which didn't have any bars. How can it be the "magic kingdom" if there's no alcohol? What makes Goofy goofy?

The ALA meetings themselves left me uninspired. One of the meetings I attended was in the Disneyland Hotel, so I have a pen and pad of paper with the mouse-ears logo on them. I spent a lot of time in the exhibit hall picking up free stuff. Here's the haul:

29 pens
9 bags
4 pads of paper
2 key chains
2 packages of bookmarks
1 stress ball. (I actually got two stress balls, but I gave the first one away to a cute girl on the street who was wearing an Atheist t-shirt in a parody of the Athletics, the Oakland baseball team. She was handing out literature for what appeared to be some kind of cult. I listened politely to her spiel, and then asked her if she'd like a stress ball. Not that I have anything against atheists, but it seems that if anyone needs a stress ball, it's someone wearing an Atheist t-shirt handing out propaganda.)
1 small chip clip (I assume it's for chips, but I really have no idea. It was from the FDIC, so maybe it's supposed to be a huge money clip.)
1 CD-Rom by the FDIC on teaching people how to be money smart. Ironic that this was right next to Disneyland.
1 CD Repair kit that I had to leave in the hotel room because there wasn't space for it in my luggage
various pamphlets, handouts, and promotional materials

Spooning Kitties

2008-07-01T14:51:00.001-07:00

Cuddling: It's not just a human thing.

Swag Party

2008-06-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

I'm going to the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference this weekend. It'll be right across the street from Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. I have this image of ten thousand librarians walking around Anaheim in Mickey Mouse ears.

The official conference logo has a somewhat different image:

Which I think is really misleading, since Anaheim is about 20 miles from any beach, and I don't know how people are going to get much surfing in, what with all the seminars on issues like Aligning Financial Decisions With Strategic Directions and Cataloging Cultural Objects in Libraries. (I am not making those up.)

I mock, but all professions have geeky seminars that sound excruciatingly boring to outsiders. There are sessions that I'll get excited about attending, but I haven't find them in the program yet. I'll probably do that on the plane.

This will be my third ALA conference. The first one I attended was in Chicago in 2005, then I went to New Orleans in 2006. I skipped it last year. The thing I really love about these conferences is seeing old friends from library school and getting free stuff.

Swag, it's called, which is an acronym for Stuff We All Get. Walking around the exhibit hall, vendors practically throw the stuff at you: bags, mugs, notepads, stress balls, folders, books, bobble-head dolls, bookmarks, and pens. Oh, the pens. I love pens and collect as many different ones as I can-- from banks, hotels, conferences. Whatever entity wants to promote itself on a writing implement, I'm happy to take it. I'll probably come home from ALA with about two dozen new ones. The pen that I use to balance my checkbook was one that I found at ALA three years ago. The fineness of the writing tip is the perfect size for writing in the small money ledger. And it's lasted three years. Not bad for a cheap piece of swag.

In Chicago, I got to the convention hall early on the first morning so that I could secure a Jane Austen bobble-head doll for Rebecca. (She had seen it in the conference program and had to have it.) The following year I waited in line to see Neil Gaiman, one of Rebecca's favorite authors, and get a free signed copy of his latest book.

This year I guess I won't be waiting in any lines for wife-related swag. That will just leave more room for my army of pens.

My Purpose

2008-06-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been thinking about getting a purpose.

I was inspired to do this by an Avenue Q song that I listened to on my way home from a weekend of debauchery in North Carolina.

For an anal retentive librarian-type like myself, there is one obvious choice: I can organize things. I found my calling as an organizer when I was in library school and suddenly realized one day that I was coordinating four different groups at one time: I was captain of my bowling team, in charge of a weekly German table, scheduling a group of drinking library students, and something else that I can't remember right now (probably due to the drinking I did with the librarians.)

With all due modesty, I'm a kick-ass organizer. I was a groomzilla for my wedding, doing most of the planning and making sure everything went off without a hitch (except the hitching between bride and groom.) I had guest spreadsheets, catering binders, a wedding website with a weather prediction table, and a computer mock-up of the wedding site to figure out the arrangement of tables and chairs. I remember telling other people about all the stuff I was doing in preparation for my own wedding, and they asked if they could hire me for theirs. When we moved last summer, many of my helpers commented on how smoothly everything went; how organized we were. I was on top of it.

But with great organizing power comes great organizing responsibility. I think my purpose is to use this power for good, to organize something great. But what? I need a cause-- something to organize.

One such cause fell into my lap a few weeks ago: My mixed doubles tennis team needed a captain. Okay, so it's not exactly starting up a soup kitchen or mentoring disadvantaged youth, but it's a start. I saw an organizational need and I stepped up.

This particular job has been the most challenging of my organizational endeavors. Mostly this is due to the league coordinator, who does not share my passion for organizing, but whom I must depend on to get certain things done. Last week I created a spreadsheet with my team members on it, with each date we play, their availability, and when they are scheduled. It is a work of organizational beauty, with X's and S's and a counter letting me know how many times each person is scheduled. I'm dying to show it to the world, or at least my team, but I cannot do that until the league coordinator takes care of complications with the roster. (Some of the people on my team may get moved to another team.)

I currently have 81 messages in my personal email inbox, most of them league-related. And that doesn't count the dozens of messages that I've already saved to my "tennis" folder. One lady, who appears to have been pushed to the edge by league infractions and our late-responding league coordinator, sent ten (10) messages over the weekend.

But I will prevail. I must hone my skills for my next great organizational challenge, whatever it may be. Perhaps leading an army of cats...

The Fatted Calf of a Humble Literary Rock Star

2008-06-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

Last night I met David Sedaris. Well, "met" might be an overstatement. We talked for about five minutes while he signed a book for me. In hindsight, it should be one of the highlights of my life, but I was too tongue-tied to really get much out of the meeting. And I doubt I made much of an impression on him. But he was impressed with my shoe size. So I've got that going for me.

For those of you who don't know, David Sedaris is the most excellent awesomest writer ever. Or at least, my favorite writer at this point in my life. He's the author I use as a model when I fantasize about being a famous writer. You know, while I avoid all the actual writing I plan to do and blog about stupid shit.

So last night Sedaris gave a reading at an Indianapolis book store to promote his latest book. I was one of hundreds of people who showed up, like literary groupies, to hear this rock star author perform. I went with my friend Jim, and we had to wait in line for over an hour to get into the tent they had set up just outside the store. (The store itself was a small room, but since Sedaris insists on having all his readings at a bookstore, they had to set up a tent to accommodate all his fans. I appreciate his sentiment, but it was a logistical nightmare.)

The reading itself was a bit of a disappointment. He only read one real longish essay, the thing for which he is famous, and a few other shorter items that I'd already heard before. He read some items from his diary, many of which were funny, but commenting on current events is something more the purview of The Daily Show, and not something that I drove two hours to hear. He also read some bad "man walks into a bar" jokes he found on the "interweb," as he calls it. Again, it was entertaining, but not what has made him famous. I would have liked to hear a few more humorous, touching, and poignant essays on his crazy family and entertaining history.

Oh, well. After he spoke, he said he would stick around to sign books for as long as people were there. I knew the line for the signing would be gargantuan, and I was getting a bad headache from hunger and having stood in line for so long. So Jim and I left to go get dinner. I really wanted to get my book signed, but I'm not very patient and I absolutely hate waiting in lines and large crowds. I decided that if after a nice leisurely dinner, Sedaris was still there signing books, I'd get in line.

Hah. How naive of me. Jim and I went to a brew pub and had a great dinner. An hour and a half later we went back to the bookstore. Sedaris was still there! Excellent! But there was still a long line. At least you could actually see his table from the end of the line, but it was moving very slowly. The cool thing about David Sedaris is that he doesn't just sign a book and send you away. He has a conversation with each person. He'll ask you something about yourself and then writes something in your book that's personal. This just makes him the coolest famous person I've ever met. Also, I think, the only famous person I've ever "met."

We were at the end of the line, but it was taking forever, so Jim and I went across the street to have another beer. After a leisure beer and conversation I went back to the bookstore to check on the line. The line had moved from the tent to inside the bookstore. I got in the end of the line and waited. And waited. And waited. I had plenty of time to plan (er, obsess about) what I wanted to say to him. When the line got short enough, I tried to pay attention to what he was saying to people. One group of fans brought him some dinner from a restaurant they'd been at, which I thought was really cool. Damn! Why didn't I think of that?!?

When only about a half dozen people were left, he showed us all his calves. During the reading he told us about his "best" physical feature, his very muscular calves. During a conversation with one of the book signees, he pulled his pants up to his knees and reached up on a shelf to show us his calves. They were impressive!

After an hour of standing at the end of the line, around midnight, I was up. With a thumping chest, I told him how much I enjoyed his writing and how I wanted to write like him. He asked me what I write, and whether I'd been published. This would have been a great opportunity to tell him about it, but talking about my own writing wasn't in the script I'd worked out over the last hour, so I froze. Instead, I told him about the plight of being a small man (like him) and getting called "ma'am" on the phone all the time. (Something he'd written about before.) He asked me a bunch of questions about my size (height, waist size, shoe size) and we commiserated about being small men. For comparison, he's taller than me, has about the same waist size, but a smaller shoe size. He raised his eyebrows at this last bit of information. I was sheepish and changed the topic.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask him, but he'd spent the last four hours signing books, and I didn't want to keep him too long. Today, I think of all the perfectly witty ways I could have responded to his questions, but last night I was too tired, star-struck and tongue-tied to make an impression.

Here's how he signed my copy of his book: To Tim, I look forward to reading your book.

He's so cool.

Do Something!

2008-06-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

I went to a movie last week, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It was about a guy who's girlfriend dumps him, and to get over her, he goes on vacation. By a coincidence that only exists in the movies, his ex is staying the the same hotel with her new lover. The movie is filled with entertaining episodes of his pathetic plight.

The funniest part of the movie is the musician who's diddling the protagonist's ex-girlfriend. He's your typical empty-headed musician (with a strong Cockney accent, because that's funnier) who's thinks he's changing the world with his vapid lyrics. There's a music video in the movie of his big hit, "Do Something." While he's exhorting his audience to "do something" about all the bad things in the world, he holds up signs (a la Bob Dylan) with a pithy saying that are supposed to blow your mind:

Fight Back Against Violence
Don't Consume-- Buy Green
Get Angry-- Feed the Poor
False Untruths Kill
and my personal favorite, Sodomize Intolerance

It's fun satire.

Epic Illustrated Vacation Blog Post

2008-05-28T08:36:00.000-07:00

I wanted it to be my "re-bachelor party," but that never really came together. It was more like a test to see how bad I can abuse my body over a long weekend.

I spent a lot of time in the car, wearing my dorky middle-aged-lady shades that fit over my glasses:

I drove for 13 hours the first day, and visited my dad and his wife in their new house:

It's way too much house for two people, and they can't afford it, but to each his own overly extravagant, unnecessarily huge domicile.

Then I hopped back into Smuggy (with his new license plate)

and drove another 3 hours to the coast. On the way, I set a new record for the most miles on a tank of gas: 520. It was the first time I topped 500 miles. I did it again on the way home, getting 506. Overall, I averaged about 51 MPG for the trip. Much better than I expected from mostly highway driving.

I visited my old high school friend, Lee, who lives in Wilmington. Here's Smuggy posing in front of his place:

It's a nice old house that he's renovating. I got to stay in the "love shack", a room off the kitchen with red walls and a pink ceiling. (No picture available.) The Love Shack didn't live up to its name, however, since the only 'love' I got while I was there was when Lee's cat snuggled up next to me.

We spent every evening in a bar/music club listening to visiting bands play at a music festival. I drank way too much and was out till 5 am three nights in a row. (Picture not available.) For a librarian who goes to bed at 9:30 on school nights, this was quite a shock to my system. Here's me at 11:30 the next morning, hungover and on the way to breakfast/lunch, and Lee showing his concern for my condition:

The rest of the weekend was a blur. One interesting thing is that North Carolina, being a tobacco state, has not banned smoking in bars or even restaurants yet. It was the first time in years I walked into a restaurant and was asked, "Smoking or non-smoking?" In my everyday life, I am very much anti-smoking, but since I was on vacation I was able to suspend my intolerance, and even indulged myself. My average is about one cigarette every three years. I smoked two cigarettes this weekend, so I'm good for the next six years.

On Saturday night, Lee had to go to a wedding so I was on my own. I walked around downtown Wilmington for several hours, looking for a suitable bar that was relatively quiet where I could have a beer and watch the NBA playoffs. I finally found one, with four people in it, and I saddled up to the bar. I've heard stories of people who meet lots of friends in bars, but I never knew quite how that worked. Apparently, it's really easy. It took about two minutes for the guy two stools over to strike up a conversation with me, and soon we were talking about sports, different cities, movies, etc. Then two girls came in and wanted to play the bar's Wii. I had no idea you could play Wii in a bar, but here you could. I said I liked to play Wii, so the four of us played Wii bowling. At one point in the second game, one of the girls said she'd buy me a shot if I could get a 200. Thanks to the beer in my system, I got a 202. So we all did a shot called a Jaegerbomb, which got me really messed up right before I left to meet Lee back at the music fest.

At "Lee-thirty" (a time Lee invented that's something like 3:37 am), we went to a beach house where a party was supposed to be. When we got there, it was dark and people were sleeping on the floor in the living room. They yelled at us when we turned the lights on. I peed in the ocean (definitely no picture available) and then we left to go back to Lee's place. So my journey of 800 miles and 16 hours toward the ocean culminated with me peeing in it and then turning back. I guess it's true what they say about the journey being more important than the destination.

The next morning I decided I had to escape this lifestyle while I still had a functioning liver. So I went back to my dad's and the next day drove back to the Midwest.

In the mountains of West Virginia, I got gas, which reset my MPG gauge. The next 50 miles or so were mostly downhill, so I got some awesome mileage. I was so excited that I took out my camera and got some pictures (Do not try this at home, especially if you live in the curvy highway mountains of WV):

Holy shit, 73.6 miles per gallon! Look how happy I am:

By the grace of the highway gods, I made it home in one piece. Although coming home to an empty apartment was a little depressing, it was good to see the cats and be back in my own space. I plopped down on the couch and was immediately perched upon by Katya:

It's good to be loved.

Marital Settlement Agreement

2008-05-20T14:11:00.001-07:00

Rebecca and I divided up the last of our 'assets' today. She will apply for a divorce in September, after we've been separated six months.

Sorry, I can't think of anything clever or funny to add to that. I'll return to being clever soon.

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Update: At least Blogger is excited to hear this news. When I clicked on the Publish Post button, Blogger said, "Your blog post published successfully!" It's nice to get that kind of enthusiastic affirmation.

The Wet Spot

2008-05-15T19:49:00.000-07:00

You live with someone for seven years and you think you know them. But you don't. Not even if they have a simple, walnut-sized brain.

My primary cat, Katya, loves ice. I discovered this a few weeks ago when I was having a drink with ice in it and the phone rang. I got up to answer the phone, and when I came back, her nose was buried deep in the glass, her tongue flicking all over my ice.

She loves the ice so much that I've taken to putting ice cubes in her water bowl, which induces her to drink more. She needs to drink more because her kidneys are getting bad, and apparently water helps that. So it always pleases me to see her drinking. Rebecca and I used to call this "exercising her will to live." And if ice cubes can facilitate that, then I'm happy to use them.

When I had mean evil strangers (my mom and her husband) stay in the apartment for three days last weekend, Katya mostly hid under the bed and didn't do very much exercising of her will to live. So when they left on Monday, she finally came out from hiding and gorged on ice-chilled water.

Then she horked all of it back up, in four different spots, on the carpet. It got to the point that I was following her around with a rag, wiping up the cat puke as quickly as she produced it. At least it was mostly water, which made it clear or odorless. She had also left a "horkage event" on top of the bed spread, which I soaked up as best as I could.

When I pulled back the sheets to go to bed that night, I noticed that the watery vomit had soaked all the way through the bed spread to the sheets below. It was a relatively small wet spot, on the other side of the bed, so I was able to avoid it. But still, this is not the kind of "wet spot" that a swingin' bachelor expects to find in his bed.

Mistakes, Atlases, Umbrellas

2008-05-11T19:42:00.000-07:00

Three short, unrelated work items in the life of an academic librarian:

A few weeks ago I noticed a young lady taking down all of the rods hanging on the walls in the library. The rods are used to hang up pictures and art whenever we have a show. I asked the young lady if she was taking down the pictures from the latest show? Yes, she was. Then I told her that, actually, the rods stay on the walls. If you're taking down a show, you take the pictures off the rods, not the entire rod off the wall. I was polite when I said this. She got really angry and said, "But I've already taken down all the rods already!" Indeed, she had. There was a huge pile of about 30 rods sitting on a table. "Who can put them back on the wall?" She asked.

This struck me as a strange question. I realize she was probably embarrassed and upset to learn that she'd just wasted a lot of time taking down the rods. Someone probably told her, "Go take down the pictures from the library" and she was just following directions. But still. Her question sounded a lot to me like, "Who's going to fix my mistake?" To which I would answer, "Well, you!" I didn't say this, however-- I just stared at her, nonplussed. I was hoping the solution would occur to her eventually. She left in a huff.

Not to sound like a crotchety old fart, but why would she expect someone else to clean up her mess?

The atlas stand near my desk displays two map books: a world atlas that shows all the countries of the world and a North American road atlas that shows all the states, plus Canada & Mexico. Every few days I try to change which page the atlases are open to. I randomly open a page to a country or state that hasn't been displayed in a while. If I leave it alone, someone will invariably come along and change the pages back to the United States and Illinois, respectively.

It seems that the students of this East Central Illinois community college are only interested in looking at their own country and their own state. Perhaps there is a practical reason for this. Since they live here, those are the pages that they most often need to consult. But as a map lover, it's disheartening to see all the countries of the world, and all the states of the country, constantly reverting back to the US and IL.

An APB was sent out to all departments last week because a student lost an umbrella "with sentimental value." The student really wants the umbrella back, so we're all being asked to look for it.

There are a lot of objects I can think of that could have sentimental value. A ring, a pen, a picture, a shirt, a button off the coat of your grandfather's civil war jacket, a cat, or even a rock. But an umbrella? I can't think of a more impractical thing to attach sentiment to. It's like being sentimentally attached to a tire on your car. Not all four-- just one of them.

Umbrellas are one of the most commonly lost items. Check any lost-and-found box, and you'll always find an umbrella or two. In fact, when I was a poor student and worked in the public library, I never owned an umbrella. Whenever I needed one, I would just take my pick from the many umbrellas left in the lost-and-found box.

There's a clear reason why umbrellas get lost so much. Umbrellas are not part of your everyday routine. It's not something that you have with you every day, so you tend to forget about it on the days that you have it.

Anyway, it seems to me that if you have an umbrella with sentimental value, you should leave it at home. If you want to take it out for a spin every now and then, use it in the shower.

Pins and Needles

2008-05-09T07:13:00.000-07:00

Readers of the Timbecca blog may remember the dilemma I had when I attended the state high school wrestling tournament in February. I watched every round of the two-day tournament, but had to miss the grand finale, the championships, on Saturday night.

So I ordered a DVD of the final round and have been waiting patiently for the past 12 weeks for it to arrive in the mail. Meanwhile, I've been avoiding all the state wrestling websites because I didn't want to know what happened until I watched the DVD. I want to experience the competition in real time. In this, I have been successful, and I still don't know who the state champions are.

When I paid my $40 cash to the high school girl sitting at the table at the state tournament, she told me it would take "8 to 10 weeks" for me to receive my DVD. She also gave me a generic receipt and a card that had the name of the company responsible for the DVDs on it. So last week I emailed the guy at the company, and asked if I was still on the list of people to receive the DVD.

He responded that I was indeed on the list, but that production had been held up because of a lack of "sponsorship funding." I don't understand this. I paid $40 for a product. What does sponsorship funding have to do with it? And how long am I supposed to wait for this "sponsorship funding" to appear? What if it never comes? Will he refund my money? He ended by thanking me for my "patience and understand." [sic]

I would go to the IHSAA website (the people who run high school sports in the state) and complain, but I'm afraid to go to their wrestling page, because I know they always congratulate and list the state champions there. And I don't want to know who that is until I've watched the video.

The irony of all of this is that the reason I missed the finals to begin with was to go with Rebecca to a Valentine's-related event that she really wanted me to go to. It was a few weeks after she first told me she was thinking of leaving me ("ground zero," I like to call it) and I gave up going to the finals, an event I'd been waiting for all year, in order to try to save my marriage. It didn't work.

Evil Namesake

2008-05-08T19:51:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, when I'm alone, and I'm sure no one is watching, I'll go onto the internets, and, as surreptitiously as I can ... I ... I google myself.

Admit it-- you've done it, too.

There are many other Tim Schreibers out there, and believe it or not, they're much more active online than I am, so it's hard to find things that actually point back to me. There's a musician with my name, and he gets lots of online press. There's also a German kid with a website.

But today I discovered a new, dark member of my namesake club, an agent of sleeze who uses my good name for evil and destruction.

That's right: he's a right-wing Republican blogger. In the vein of Ann Coulter, he uses faulty logic, gratuitous insults, and cruel schadenfreude to rail against the liberals in congress, immigrants who can't speak English, hippies, hybrids, and the global warming scam. He also comes across as a real asshole in his business dealings with people. Apparently, every clerk who rings up the wrong price at the register is out to get him, and he likes to browbeat powerless employees at his health insurance company. He also rails against rich CEOs and greedy capitalists, which seems inconsistent to me, since his politics only support those kinds of people.

I usually like to avoid politics on my blog, since my brother does enough political blogging for the both of us. Plus, I'm too much of a "navel-gazer" (as my sister-in-law says) to write about things beyond myself. But it really bothers me that, merely by having my name and being himself, this other Tim is dragging my good name through the slime like that.

Eeegh, I need a shower.

How Many Passwords Must a Man Write Down?

2008-05-04T20:38:00.000-07:00

Have you ever counted up all the different passwords you have in your life? I've been wondering what would happen to me if I ever get selective (or total) amnesia and forget all of my passwords. Would I be able to function at all?

I have passwords for my work email, work network login, two personal email accounts, two different blogs, three to six different social networking sites (depending on how you define them), three separate bank accounts, a work circulation system, four different listservs, and personal web accounts at the American Library Association, the USTA, Netflix, Ebay, Vonage, CA Security, TiVo, Chase, TurboTax, Papa Johns, Salon letters, and Flickr.

If you throw in my various PINs, such as two bank cards, work voicemail, home voicemail, cell phone voicemail, and two separate library card accounts, that amounts to 33 separate logins. And that's just the ones that I can remember off the top of my head.

Of course, I don't have 33 separate passwords. My most important accounts, like my email accounts and my work network login, have their own unique password. But my secondary-level passwords get multiple use. There's no reason, for example, why I can't use the same password for Netflix that I use for Vonage or TiVo. So I might have about 5 or 6 different passwords that I rotate around. I will often have one password for an entire category, so that, for example, all my social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, and Goodreads) have the same password.

The logins that I use everyday are easy to remember, but there are other ones that I will never, ever take the time to memorize. For example, my Papa John's password is one of those randomly assigned combination of letters and numbers that I can't change. So when I order a pizza, which I do every few months or so, I have to log into my email account and find the saved message from Papa John's that tells me what my password is. That's two logins (and about $20) for one pizza order. (I did once use the phrase "biteme" as a password for pizza site that wouldn't let me view their menu without logging in first. That's how I stick it to the man.)

I'm sure, if given enough time, I could think of some clever insight about passwords and life in the 21st century that wouldn't just make me sound like a whiny Luddite, but I've got nothing right now. All my creative energy has been taken up thinking up clever, secure passwords.