Special delivery

Jan 12

Posted by P-Dawg in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

I’m starting a new job in a little over a week, but until then, I have some time during the weekdays.  This means that I can go places when not everyone else is there.  Markets and stores are much less crowded at 10am on a Tuesday than pretty much any other time I used to be able to go.  Two days ago was a perfect example; mid-day, I took a trip out to the bank, the post office, and then the drycleaners before coming home, and none of them were crowded.  It was great, but that’s not why I’m writing.  Nay, friends, I’m writing because my middle stop was a little out of the ordinary.

As I pulled into the parking lot for the post office, I smiled at the number of empty spaces.  I settled on one just a few spaces away from the entrance, which was good since I was going to be carrying a box into the establishment.  I walked in and got in line, which was mercifully short – only three parties ahead of me and one was already being helped.  Directly in front of me was a woman who had a baby in a carseat with her.  The baby was small, and when the woman saw me smiling at the kid, she implored him to say hi to me (which he refused).  I asked how old he was, and she said, “Almost three months.”  I was thinking about when my kids were that small when I heard a pretty loud crash behind me.  If you had frozen time and asked me to predict what caused that sound without looking, my best guess would have been that one of the “Line starts here” stanchions had fallen over.  I would have been wrong.  I turned around and saw the front of a car partially inside the post office.  I shook my head a little and looked more closely.  Indeed, a car had run into the building and broken the lower panes of the window through which it entered.  Next to it was an uprooted parking sign that had a Q-tip-esque mound of dirt attached to where it had once been firmly in the ground.  Part of the car (a piece of fender maybe) was inside the post office, a good five feet from the window.  My first coherent thought was something like, “Well that’s interesting.”

Other people were not as calm.  Some ran outside immediately to see if the driver was hurt (which is a better reaction to have, I’d say).  A group magically appeared around the car, assessing the situation.  The woman at the front of the line kept asking, “Do we need to dial 911?  Do we need to dial 911?”  A woman near the door finally told her that it had been done already and that the lady who was driving the car was shaken up but fine.  “She hit the gas instead of the brake,” she explained.  “That’s an important distinction not to fuck up,” I said inside my head.

The lady with the baby and I made eye contact.  We both made “big eyes” to intimate “wow” to each other, but she immediately turned more distracted.  She took a step away from the carseat on the ground, walked back to it, left again, and returned again.  “You ok?” I asked.  “I just remembered that I’m parked next to that spot,” she said.  “Oh yeah,” I thought, “I guess it’s good that I parked a few more down.”  “Will you watch him for a second?” she asked me while pointing to the carseat.   “Of course,” I said, and she left me – a complete and total stranger – with her almost three-month old baby.  She came back less than a minute later and said that her car was somehow spared.  “The police and ambulance are on their way,” she said, but she still looked really nervous.  “I’m sure she’ll be ok,” I said reassuringly.  “Oh, no, it’s just that I hope their cars don’t block me in.  Maybe I should leave now so that doesn’t happen.”  We collectively decided that since she was now next in line, she’d take her chances and stay where she was.  Only one of the three postal workers was helping customers at that moment, since the other two were getting information from the driver, telling people what happened, etc.

Just a few minutes later, a male postal worker resumed his post and waved me over.  “You don’t see that every day,” I said, figuring that that was the most appropriate quip.  I was wrong again.  “Well, four or five times actually,” he said.  “Really?  All here?”  He nodded.  “Why?” I asked, not really expecting him to have an answer.  “The parking lot comes right up to the side of the building, and people push the wrong pedal,” he said matter-of-factly. I let it go, but I couldn’t imagine that enough people make that exact error in that exact location to have him witness four or five cars drive into his place of work.  Shows what I know.

I walked past the crowd to my car, backed out of the spot very slowly (by pushing the correct pedals, might I add), and headed over to pick up my drycleaning.  Thinking about what had just happened, I wondered if it was some kind of cosmic balance thing: oh sure, you can go run errands when it’s less crowded, but be careful – that’s when the highest incidence of pedal confusion happens.

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That’s bullshit: sequence edition

Jan 5

Posted by P-Dawg in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Some of my kids’ books are great, and some are less than stellar.  I know my standards are probably too high, yet I’m still pleasantly surprised by some of the books strewn about their play area.  Susan Boynton’s books, for example, are almost all awesome, and if you’re a parent of a kid anywhere close to the age range of mine, you’re probably nodding in agreement.  They’re illustrated well, the meter of the verse is usually pretty solid, and there are sometimes little twists that make me smile (or even laugh out loud once – I know, that’s some serious shit right there).

But I don’t expect too much from the less ambitious ones.  If it’s something like “Baby’s First Words,” they should be able to correctly put a picture of a shoe under the word “shoe,” and that’s not normally a problem.  Actually, now that I think about it a little more, there is one small book of colors that has a mostly green apple on the page that’s supposed to illustrate “Red.”  I think that’s some minor bullshit right there, but I have a new one that gets my goat a wee bit more.

“Numbers” is a small board book with a whopping six pages.  Hard to mess that up, right?  Page one shows a picture of a teddy bear, the number 1, and the words, “One teddy bear.”  Pretty easy formula to follow, you might expect.  Two shoes are on the page that faces that one, also with the appropriate text.  Turn the page, and you’ll find three cupcakes and four cars waiting for you.  So far so good, eh?  But here’s where things go awry.  The first time I turned the page, I was reading the book aloud to my kids.  As I was saying, “Five fingers” and pointing to the splayed hand on the page, I couldn’t help but notice a foot waiting for me on the subsequent page.  I actually had time to think to myself, “Nah, that can’t be right.”  Sure enough, I moved over to the final page of the book and read aloud, “FIVE toes.”  Yep, you read that right.  The six-page book of numbers goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5.  Why the hell would they do that?  It’s not like they needed to find something inextricably tied to the number six (like fingers are to five), because that’s not the case with three cupcakes, four cars, or…any of the others, actually.  So it could’ve been six of anything - flowers, blueberries, rattles, babies, or virtually anything not R-rated.  It’s like someone said, “Ya know, we had such a good feeling about 5 being fingers that maybe we should just try to replicate that success instead of pushing ourselves to find a good pairing for number 6.”  Ok, sure, that could make a tiny bit of sense…if it weren’t a fucking counting book with only six pages.  My kids are going to think that the number 5 follows the number 5 unless I step in and stop the nonsense myself.  I really have no idea how it got published with what I consider to be a giant flaw, but I know one thing: that’s bullshit.

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Degrees

Dec 27

Posted by P-Dawg in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Some years ago, I lived in a tiny apartment in Santa Barbara with my lovely wife née fiancée née girlfriend.  The main room was big enough for an ugly couch, a particle board wardrobe used as a hall closet of sorts, a coffee table, and a table we used as a television stand.   That last item came in handy when I bought a t.v. that I saw on sale at Circuit City.  It wasn’t anything fancy by any means, but it was bigger (and newer) than the one we’d been using up to that point. 

The t.v.’s brand was Apex, which was close enough to Acme that it made me laugh on several occasions.  That wasn’t the best thing about it though; nay, the best thing had to do with its volume.  If I ever wanted to get a laugh out of fellow blogger MC Squared (who lived next door to us at the time), all I had to do was turn the volume from 0 to 1  Level 1 was louder than it should’ve been.  Way louder in fact.  I think 0.5 would’ve still been too loud if it existed, and 0.25 probably close to right.  “Come on!” MC Squared would yell while cracking up.  “That’s 1? How can that be 1?  That’s impossible!”  It got him every single time, and I can’t blame him.  As I mentioned, the place was really small, so volume control actually mattered.  My lovely wife would often go to bed before me, and if I were watching t.v. or playing video games with MC Squared, sometimes 1 was actually too loud.  I tried putting a rolled up towel against the speaker a couple of times, but it didn’t make much of a difference; the power of volume level 1 would not be denied.  In the end, I’d play games on mute occasionally or just be ready with the mute button if the show I was watching looked like it was about to break out into a gunfight.  Still, it was pretty ridiculous to have to take those measures because my television was incapable of having just a wee bit of volume.

I thought about that old t.v. this morning while in the shower.  I realize that might sound a little strange, but please allow me to explain.  You see, the shower in the master bathroom of our new house has interesting controls.  There are two handles, and each only turns one quarter of a turn.  That 90-degree turn makes it go from nothing to full hot (or full cold).  I’m used to two to four twists of a knob to get the water flowing, so this feels strange.  In my mind, a quarter turn should get a trickle going, not be the most extreme turn possible.  In any case, I usually turn the hot on and leave the cold alone.  I like hot showers, and it’s almost always the right temperature for me without touching the cold handle.  Every so often though, it’s a little too hot and I want to take it down a notch.  Today was one of those days, and here’s why I thought of my old t.v.: I barely touched the frickin’ cold handle before it was already colder than I wanted.  I tried moving it back just a smidgen, but I guess I went too far and turned the cold off completely again.  I tried once more but was met with the cold water equivalent to volume level 1.  In the end, I did a little tap-tap-tap to make incremental movements to just slightly cool the water.  I was eventually successful after a few trial and error runs, but I felt a little silly having to resort to those measures.  I checked, and the shower handles were not made by Apex, Pinnacle, Summit, Zenith, or any other synonym of Acme. 

Yes, I realize that it’s probably easy to fix that problem, but that’s not my point.  My point is that I can’t be alone in wanting things that don’t only go from 0 to 60, so why would they be made that way?  Do they make microwaves that are unable to heat under a minute?  Are there bowling alleys that only carry 6 and 16 pound balls?  Do steakhouses only offer “rare” and “burnt” as cooking options?  One thing is for sure: I’m hungry after thinking about steak.  Peace out.

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Isn’t that special?

Dec 20

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Let’s talk about the word “special” for a moment, shall we?  I’m not talking about it in the context of “special needs,” mind you.  (But now that I think about that term, it keeps sounding more and more demeaning.  “Oh everybody has needs, but his needs are super duper special!”)  I’m talking about the noun form of it.  We’re used to seeing that noun most often in two distinct realms: television and dining.

When there’s a t.v. “special,” it’s usually fairly true to the meaning of the word.  That it, it’s a not-regularly-scheduled program that should have increased value to the audience because of its rarity.  It’s special compared to the normal crap that the station airs, right?  So I have no problem with that usage.

Let’s say you’re out at a restaurant and the server comes over to greet you.  What often happens next?  He or she tells you the “specials.”  For the most part, I think these fit the bill as well.  The swordfish entree isn’t on their menu but they’re making it tonight, so it’s special.  Fine.  That said, there’s a place down the street from my old office that my buddy Rob and I went to a handful of times that always had the same “special.”  It quickly became a running gag, and we’d have to try to keep a straight face as the server said the same thing verbatim as we’d heard every other time in there.  In fact, if we drove past that restaurant, it was likely that one of us would say to the other, “Hey, I wonder if they’re serving their lightly dusted sanddabs with blah blah blah mustard something.” “Ooh, they just ran out,” the other might reply.  Good times.

That brings us to lunch specials, specifically the kinds that have no right using that word.  I’ve been to countless places that have the same “specials” on their printed menus or even on giant banners that never get taken down.  If you have them every single day for people to order, that’s not a special; that’s just a menu item.  I thought about this because I was eating lunch a couple of days ago at a Mexican place recommended to me by that same buddy Rob.  I studied the giant glossy banner announcing the “lunch specials” and saw that they each came with rice and beans.  I ordered the carne asada burrito “special” because that’s what I do to compare manzanas to manzanas, then took a seat.  A few minutes later, the guy nodded to me and I walked up to take my tray of food.  I looked and saw only a wrapped up burrito on the plate.  “Excuse me,” I said, “but I thought the special came with rice and beans.”  Without missing a beat, he replied, “They’re inside the burrito.”  He said it as if it should’ve been obvious.  “Oh that makes sense,” I said sarcastically, but he missed my tone completely and smiled as though he fully answered my question.  Awesome.

So that’s what caused me to analyze the word in detail and write this post.  (And in case you were wondering, the burrito itself was pretty good, but nothing special.)

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Job hunting and the apparent scarcity of optimism

Dec 15

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As I walked out of the drama classroom one morning during my senior year of high school, I noticed that the weather had changed during the preceding 50 minutes.  “Cool, it’s raining,” I said aloud.   “You’re an optimist,” I heard someone say.  I looked, and it was my friend Pam.  “Everyone else who came out was upset about the rain, but you said it was cool,” she reasoned.  “Maybe I just like the rain more than other people,” I countered.  She accepted that as a possibility, but said that I was still an optimist because I didn’t immediately jump to be upset by the change in the weather and its repercussions.  I thought (and still think) that she was giving me too much credit, but the question remains: is optimism so scarce that even glimpses of it stand out as rarities?  My experiences over the past couple of weeks have told me that the answer is a resounding yes.

As of a few days before Thanksgiving, I am looking for a new job.  Even though my boss views it as some kind of unpaid, immediate, temporary yet indefinite furlough that will end sometime soon and restore order to things, I see it as being laid off.  My first reaction (once the initial stupification wore off) was to hit the ground running and go get something else as quickly as possible.  I started calling and emailing the contacts I had made over the past several years and got to work (trying to find work).  I couldn’t imagine another course of action, but apparently others can since I was commended for the way I jumped into the daunting task.   In an email to a few friends, I wrote that this was also an opportunity for me to really think about what I wanted to do and possibly find something better and/or closer to home.  I was met again with warm responses lauding me for my optimism and attitude.  While it felt good to read those emails from some of my closest friends in the world, I couldn’t shake my follow-up question: “Well what else would I do?”

It was just one day later that I was sitting in traffic on the way to “my” office.  As many of you know (or should know by now), I like looking at bumper stickers and license plate frames.  Going zero miles-per-hour in front of me was a car with this frame: “If you feel sad – Don’t.  Be awesome instead.”  I saw that and said aloud in my car, “Fuck yeah!”  Of course I know it’s not that easy, but I love that mindset.  I don’t see any value in dwelling on frustrations when I can proactively try to change things, and trying to be awesome might just be the best way to go about that.  Not just good, better, or even great.  Awesome.  “You got it, stranger’s car!” I thought to myself, and I readied myself for the task ahead of me.

I began sending out cover letters and applications to a wide range of job openings.  During that process, something occurred to me.  For the first time in my life, I wasn’t selling myself as the bright, young professional with a ton of potential who employers should snag now before he lands somewhere else.  Instead, based on the level of the positions I was seeking, I had to be the confident, experienced professional who can bring the lessons he learned from his past successes to help grow their companies.  I’d never played that role before, and though it felt a bit artificial, I got behind it and adopted an extra level of fake confidence to accompany that persona.

Here’s the thing: it’s a super shitty time to be looking for a job.  I’ve received very little feedback to date, and though I’ve had two good interviews so far for a company that’s bringing me back tomorrow, I know that there are 25+ jobs that haven’t even acknowledged my application.  So I press on because, again, “Well what else would I do?”  I’ve told clients in the past that my philosophy is to be simultaneously as prepared and as flexible as possible.  Now it’s time to prove that I actually operate in that manner.  In the meantime, I’ll do what I would ask of anyone else in a trying situation: work hard, be honest with myself and others, and be confident that those things will pay off in the end.  I acknowledge the craptastic situation I’m in, and it is definitely frustrating to be met with so much silence, but I’m trying to be awesome instead.  That’s as good as any place to start, right?

 

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Word to the wise

Nov 23

Posted by P-Dawg in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Sorry I haven’t been here for a while, and this is going to be extremely brief, but it’s important.  I have wisdom to impart, so pay attention:

If you’re going to Target, don’t wear a red shirt.

That is all.

Chewing the fat

Nov 1

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I’ve been trying to bring my lunch to work a little more often in an effort to save some money and eat more healthfully. With that in mind, I spent extra time staring at the pre-made lunchy stuff at Trader Joe’s recently. Their salads are good, but I was getting a little tired of them. I had previously bought a Thai chicken noodle thing with peanut dressing that was spicy and tasty, so I grabbed another one of those. Then I saw something new (to me at least): “Cajun Style Blackened Chicken Breast with Fettuccine.” That sounded awesome, so I tossed it into the cart and moved on to the rest of the market.

When I got home, I looked again at the Cajun meal and heaved a disappointed sigh. “Honey, I missed one important word when I got this chicken thing.” “What’s that, ‘mustard?’” she asked (fully knowing how that would ruin an otherwise tasty-sounding dish to me). “Nope: alfredo,” I said. “Ah, yeah, that’s an important word.” I asked if she wanted to split it with me since it was probably going to be heavier and a lot less healthy than I had planned. She picked up the package, looked at the back, and said, “You’re on your own. It’s 100% of your daily saturated fat.” Technically, it was listed as two servings each constituting 50% of my recommended daily allowance, but it only looked like enough food for one person.

I took it to work and told myself I wouldn’t eat the whole thing, because if I did, I would likely be a little disgusted with myself. As it was warming in the microwave, it smelled delicious. I brought it over to my desk and took my first bite. Not only was it very good, but it was also wonderfully nostalgic for me. Immediately, I pictured myself sitting outside a place called “Cafe Orleans” in Santa Barbara, eating my favorite dish there, “Creamy Penne Pasta Pontalba.” (It wasn’t just the alliteration that made me enjoy ordering it, though I’m sure that part helped a bit.) I got that dish every time I went there, and I also ordered it to go more times than I can remember. Oh yeah, and it was twice the size of the TJ’s meal in front of me. I felt retroactively disgusted by how much fat I must have eaten back then. Even though it came with a little side salad and raspberry vinaigrette, I don’t think that canceled out the “more fat than two people need” aspect of the pasta and cream sauce. In any case, I managed to eat the chicken out of my TJ’s lunch and just a little of the pasta (the part with the least amount of cream sauce on it) before making myself toss the rest. My mission of non-gluttony was accomplished.

So what’s the big deal, right? It was one meal and it tasted good, so what’s the real harm as long as I don’t make a habit out of it? Well, that’s exactly the same rationale I’m using right now as I strongly consider getting a McRib sandwich for lunch sometime this week. I don’t know what the recommended daily allowance is for random pieces of meat forced into an unsightly shape and slathered with barbecue sauce, but I think I might exceed that.

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Limited options

Oct 20

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I was sitting in my car with my lovely wife when another vehicle drove by us. It was a very pretty and new-looking Mercedes wagon with a woman in her 50s or 60s behind the wheel. As is often the case, I managed to read the license plate before it was out of sight. Ahem: “L8 4POLO.” If you ask me, there are really only two possible reactions to seeing that plate:
1. “My word, Beatrice, you are simply hilarious. It’s no wonder that your social calendar is the talk of the club.”
2. “Are you fucking serious?”

I’ll let you guess which one my wife said.

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The impossible dream

Oct 8

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I’m going to write a statement that will make total sense to a third of you while the remaining folks say, “What the fuck does that mean?”  (There was no need for that filthy language – shame on you.)  Here goes: I wish I had a ghost like in Mario Kart.

Fine, I’ll explain.  Back in college, my friends and I played Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64 system roughly…all the time.  We each had our preferred characters to play as (mine was the princess named Peach, naturally), an array of verbal assaults, and a ton of nonsense to spout during the races.  (If the sentence, “Shtoop Shtoop hit a surprise box on the Mooms before he could fie-ay the red on his butt” means something to you, then you probably lived with me during my senior year.)  In any case, the game had a few modes, one of which was called Time Trials.

The Time Trials mode is pretty straightforward.  You race by yourself and try to get the best time on record.  Here’s where the cool part comes in: the second time you race, there’s a transparent version of your character doing a reply of your first race.  You don’t have to wonder if you’re on pace to beat your other time, because you can see that other version of you either ahead of or behind you.  From that point on, every time you race, your fastest time is riding along with you in “ghost” form.

So why do I want one of these in real life?  There are a couple of reasons, naturally.  The first has to do with going to the bathroom.  I literally mean “traveling to the bathroom,” rather than anything more graphic.  At work, I go to the bathroom a handful of times each day.  Being who I am, it was only a matter of time before I started counting the number of steps I took to get there.  My standard pace is about 57 steps, but depending on the urgency, I can get there in far fewer than that.  In fact, I ran once with the longest, most loping strides I could manage (at the request of my boss) and made it in 29.  I would love – LOVE – to have a transparent version of myself replaying an old trip to the bathroom accompanying me as I walked there.  I currently don’t time my trips there and back, so the ghost would add a whole new level to my self-entertainment.   The only catch is that the ghost would have to be invisible to everyone but me, lest they freak the fuck out.

The other reason I’d like to have a ghost involves driving.  This isn’t exactly the same thing, so it’s a modified version of the one in Mario Kart.  When I leave work, I typically go one of two ways (though there is a lesser-used third option).  It’s always a last-second decision for me.  If the on-ramp looks busier than normal and the street is moving, I may stay the course and meet up with the freeway a couple of miles down the road.  If both are backed up, I have to guess which might be the lesser of two evils.  (Speaking of which, if you’re thinking, “Why not check Sigalert or traffic on Google Maps to make your decision?” you might not be from L.A.  Every option is shitty, just one might be a little less shitty.)  What I would like the ability to do is simple: at the moment of truth in which I either turn onto the freeway or stay on the city street, I’d like to have a ghost version of my car take the other route.  Maybe I’d see it later on the freeway and realize that there wouldn’t have been any difference, but most likely, I’d wait until I pulled into my driveway to see if the ghost had arrived yet or not.  If I took the all-freeway route for a week and was consistently getting home after my ghost, then I would change the way I go home (unless it looked especially bad).  It would give me important data plus a missing extra level of fun.  It’s kinda like the Gwyneth Paltrow movie “Sliding Doors,” except not nearly as crappy.

So there you go – I’m pining for something that is impossible according to everything we know about time, space, and matter.  One thing’s for certain though: I just spent way too much time watching recordings of other people playing Mario Kart on YouTube.  One friend still has the old Nintendo 64, and I think it might be time Peach to come out of retirement. Shtoop shtoop, everyone, shtoop shtoop.

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Him and her

Sep 22

Posted by P-Dawg in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

I was talking to my mom on the phone while driving into work when something occurred to me and struck me as odd. We may refer to the “cleaning lady” or even the “nail lady,” but it’s always the “pool man” and “alarm guy.” Why do the women get the lofty and noble title of “lady” but it would sound absurd to mention the “pool lord”?

I ask this somewhat facetiously because I think I know the answer. The problem lies with my geographical region. I’ll explain: in other parts of the country, the male/female pairings are pretty easy. Boys and girls go together, as do men and women, and…guys and gals. We don’t use “gals” in Los Angeles, but we still need something that goes with “guys.” More often than not, people use “guys and girls,” opting for the lower age group (and probably giving plenty of Sociology majors something to write their theses about). “Guys and women” sounds pretty odd, but I think that’s just as off as using “girls” where “gals” rightfully belongs.

So when it comes to naming people who do jobs for others, we get confused by the missing female option. “Cleaning girl” or “cleaning boy” has a distinct air of child labor mixed with a bit of plantation owner.   “Woman” may have sounded odd when the person it was describing was more in “gal” range.  Somehow “lady” was an alternative that got added to the mix and stuck.  That’s my theory at least, based on nothing but my own west-coastian ruminations.  But for all I know, in rural Alabama a couple might refer to their “alarm viceroy.”

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