Sometimes, when I walk Wensley in the winter, he will stop and put his nose into the wind to smell the possibilities. I call this his “Jack London moments” because he looks like he’s feeling the call of the wild.
This is how it looks from the front.
I was in such a good mood this weekend; I had a big ole’ Christmas buzz going on. I had a really great night on Friday and then Saturday I woke up and went to the gym straight away. I took the dog for a long walk, had a nice lunch and then a friend called and asked if I could help out with a volunteer project. We met up and went to Rocky Anderson’s office to stuff envelopes for his nonprofit organization, High Road for Human Rights.
Rocky is the former mayor of Salt Lake City and is still very active in the community. I had met him briefly once before, but I’d never interacted with him. His organization is a bit broad. His stated focus is “grass-roots advocacy and organizing in the areas of human rights and global warming.” Topical issues include torture, genocide, climate change, and human trafficking. I’m sure there are critics that would say it is ineffective for an organization to tackle so many issues, but I say “good for him.” Rocky is such a nice guy; he’s the definitive organizer. I think that’s what makes it work. And he is so down to earth! He swears and everything. He really is the most adorable politician – I just wanted to pick him up and hug him.
I left his office feeling good about having helped out and enthusiastic about my community. I was, in short, drunk with Christmas spirit.
Then I remembered that I needed to get some new waterproof boots to wear snow shoeing. Until recently, when someone mentioned “snow shoes” I still pictured leather tennis rackets. But my work friends set me straight. They went a lot last year and I bought a pair of snow shoes during the end of season sales so that I could tag along this winter. But I needed some better boots to keep my feet dry and warm. Especially because my friends like to go on nights during a full moon when it’s frickin’ freezing in the canyons. I went to Smith’s Marketplace because I was driving past it when I thought of the boots. It’s a grocery store, primarily. But they do have a large clothing department, and it just so happened that they had exactly what I needed on sale.
So it was that I found myself standing at line at Smith’s, with a pair of boots in my hands, a big smile on my face, and a Christmas song in my heart. And that’s when I saw the big chenille teddy bears, hanging from a chain on a pole by the register. I remembered that I had seen a Toys for Tots box at the gym that morning and thought, “That’s nice… but weird. It’s not like I just happen to have toys in my gym bag.” Because there is that element of convenience to charity, isn’t there? I was perfectly happy to stuff envelopes for Rocky. But I wouldn’t have come up with it on my own. I needed that phone call. And I’m more than happy to buy a toy for a needy tot, but when you put the box that far away from the purchasable toys… Let’s face it. For most of us, giving is a crime of opportunity.
But now, ha ha! A snuggley toy is right above my head. I’m in line to buy something anyway. And I can drop the bear in the Toys for Tots box on the way out the door! It’s perfect!
Except for one little problem. I couldn’t reach it. I tried. I really did. I was able to grab the lowest bear by the foot, but I couldn’t lift it off the hook. I’m only 5,2″ and I’m pretty used to asking strangers in stores to reach things for me. So I decided I would just wait until I got to the front of the line and I would ask the checker to get it for me.
According to the name tag on his apron, the checker’s name was Joseph C. and he was NOT feeling the Christmas spirit. I smiled and said hello, and then asked him if he could pull down the teddy bear for me. But he didn’t move. He just stared at me with this look that said, “You have GOT to be kidding me.”
“I’m going to buy it. I am,” I said. “I just can’t reach it.”.
And still, Joseph C. didn’t move.
We were alone, so I couldn’t understand his attitude. I wasn’t holding up the line. I wasn’t sending him back into the store on a pointless quest for a rare variety of cheese. I wasn’t asking if I could pay half in food stamps and half in Swiss Francs. I was asking him to walk around the counter and lift one arm. “For fuck’s sake, I just want you to pick up a stupid teddy bear and hand it to me,” I was thinking. “Don’t act like I’m asking you to win it for me by throwing baseballs at rubber ducks. Jerkface.”
Just then a tall man was joining my line and I told Joseph C. not to worry about it. I turned to the man and asked with a smile, “Maybe you can help me…? Can you reach this white bear, here?” He was missing a key tooth and smelled like forty years of camel smoke absorbed into a single mackinaw. He smiled too wide and told me he would only get the bear for me if I “promise to have a merry Christmas.” It’s entirely possible that he was drunk on something other than the sentiments of the season.
“Um, yes. Fine. I promise.”
Joseph C. was ringing me up and I was still trying to figure out what the kid’s problem was. I mean, sure. I worked retail during the holidays when I was his age. I know how very much it sucks. But take it out on the assholes who blame you for everything from the pricing to the traffic. Not the people with simple every day requests.
I’m not short because it’s the holidays and I wanted to ruin his day. I’m short all the time!
I wanted to make him understand that I’m not the high-maintenance hospital-corners scrooge-ess that he obviously thought I was. So, quite unnecessarily, as my receipt printed I asked him the following innocent question. “Do you know where the Toys for Tots box is?”
“Look lady,” he said. “I’m supposed to be on break right now.”
“You can’t talk to me like that!” I said with my eyes. “I’m attractive!“
As I walked away from the cash register, the bear flopped over one arm, I felt deflated and ridiculous. My buzz was completely killed and I was vexed to find that such a great day could be spoiled so quickly by one callous college student. I stopped at the Toys for Tots box and gave my bear a hug. But before I sent him on his way I thought, “You know what? Fuck this. Do-over!“
I drove to my gym with the teddy on my lap. I strolled inside with my chin up and I gave the girl at the membership counter a big smile. “I’m not coming in,” I said, waving the bear by his tummy. “I just want to drop this off!” I walked behind the desk and over to the box.
“Oh that’s great,” she said. “Thanks.”
“No,” I stopped to say. “Thank YOU. Merry Christmas!”
“Um, yeah. Merry Christmas…”
And walked to my car with my buzz reclaimed.
“Take that Joeseph C.! Now that toy is going to a different tot! What was that? You wanna break? I’ll give you a break!! Screw you, you dickbag!!!“
Who said that passive / aggressive retributive actions are a pointless and ineffective way of resolving one’s problems? Because I can say with complete confidence, “Bah, humbug to YOU!”
People at my gym often behave in all sorts of peculiar manners, and I rarely get bothered by it. There is this one guy – the grunting weight thrower – who occasionally gets on my nerves. He is always there and he makes a lot of noise. It’s startling when you are trying to focus on what you are doing and someone near you throws down a 100lb weight and yells like Tarzan, making the entire gym shake.
Other than that, I get in, do my thing, and get out. Last night, however, there was this guy who was driving me completely bat-shit and I really can’t account for it. I was on the far side of the gym running on the last treadmill, which is positioned next to the mirror wall. He was on the treadmill directly in front of me and we both started at about the same time. He wasn’t making noise, making a mess, or hogging equipment. He wasn’t doing anything, really. Except that while he was running, he held on to the top of the treadmill with both hands and turned his head to stare at himself in the mirror. The whole time. I’m not kidding. I was behind him for thirty minutes and he was staring at himself for all of them.
I have no idea why it bothered me so much. I think it partly has to do with my obsession with the show The Biggest Loser and I wanted to be Gillian Michaels telling him to “Let go of the [beep] treadmill! I’m not cosigning on your sad [beep] story, so get it together!”
Maybe it bugged me that he was checking himself out because it seems sad and lame. And pointless. Did he think he could watch as his waistline melted away? Or that he could run better if he could see himself do it? So weird.
Mostly, I think it was selfish discomfort. I like to go to the gym and run with brainless guilty pleasure TV (The Girls Next Door or Most Destructive High Speed Chases, IV) playing on the sets above me and anonymous back-of-the-heads bobbing away on the machines in front of me. And for some reason, running toward his profile was interfering with that. It was distracting me. So much so, that I wanted to throw a shoe at him.
So why didn’t I just move to another spot, you ask? Well, it was kind of crowded. But I also discovered an opportunity. For my run, instead of imagining that I was running on a beach or out-cycling my old frenemy Jennifer (as is my usual strategy to pass the time), I was imagining my shoe thwacking this guy in the side of the head. I would throw the shoe that squished the dead mouse, of course. And I would watch it in slow motion as it struck my target and reverberated his plushy cheek flesh, causing sweat to fly from his hair and nose in beads. It was a beautiful thing, and my workout just flew by.
The other reason I didn’t move is that, for some reason, all the other TVs were set to Fox “News”, where “journalists” and “experts” were “discussing” their “analysis” of the health care bill and “the end of civilization as we know it”. And I only had two shoes.
While on the subject of oddities in my neighborhood, I should go ahead and post these pictures of the car from the dog park. I took these on my phone back in the fall and completely forgot about them. But it’s really too creative and awesome not to share.
I just noticed this sign at the coffee shop in my neighborhood a couple of weeks ago, but I guess it’s been there for a while. I love it. And I believe it, too. It’s a very dog friendly place. I’m sure they keep an inventory of punishment puppies on hand. Just in case.
I was standing on a plane, waiting to disembark, when this tall blonde guy in a bright blue BYU Cougars hat caught my eye. I was returning from my business trip in San Diego and I hadn’t noticed the guy, who was sitting two rows in front of me, until then. He gave me a smile and a wink. I smiled back and then looked away, out the window. He was attractive and I was, I’ll admit, fractionally flattered, despite the air of college-sophmore ”I-will-flirt-with-anything-that-moves-because-I-am-so-over-powered-by-hormones-that-they-are-shooting-out-the-ends-of-my-hair” that he distinctly had about him. “Step away from the jail bait!” the angel on my right shoulder blared into my ear through a loud-speaker. I then made a crooked cognitive connection which caused me to remember the day that someone mentioned that there was a new show on TV called “Cougar Town” and, not knowing what it was about, I had asked if it was set in Provo.
A few minutes later, I was scanning the hallway of the airport’s terminal for signs bearing a skirted figure, signaling a women’s rest-room. I walked in and, with a bag on each shoulder, made an abrupt right turn into the first open stall door that I saw. And there, in the stall, less than a foot in front of me, I saw – as if in flashes – a bright blue hat, blonde hair, long legs, feet positioned twice shoulder width apart, and (through the legs) an ample stream of piss pouring confidently into the bowl below.
I leapt backward and spun around, narrowly avoiding becoming wedged in the stall doorway by my carry on bags. Convinced that I had walked into the men’s room by mistake, and wanting badly not to be seen, I began running around in a small circle doing what I reflectively think of as my “panic dance.”
The first time I did the “panic dance” was that day in college when the crappy plastic lamp spontaneously combusted and I looked over to see a yellow flame within licking distance of the wood paneling of the apartment wall. Naturally, I ran seven laps in a tight circle because my instincts were telling me “maybe this will be helpful!” Luckily Demetria was there and she put the fire out. It just so happens that firefighting is a hobby of Demetria’s. She used to carry around a fire extinguisher “just in case” and is the only person I know who has used it on more than one occasion. She didn’t have the extinguisher on hand that day and I no longer remember how she put out the fire, as my view was blurred by the panic dance action sequence.
The panic dance I was doing in the airport bathroom might have been less of a circle. I was trying to figure out how to get out without being seen, and kept changing my mind between running out and running into a stall. I was also trying to keep the heels of my boots from hitting the tile, so as not to give myself away with my overtly feminine clacky clacks. During this time, a cute little blonde chick in her twenties had entered the restroom and, exactly as I had, turned into the first empty stall. Blue hat. Short hair. Intimidatingly aggressive piss stream. She also jumped back and joined me in the panic dance. She was shaking her hands, I was clutching my bags, and we were both running in a crazy loop trying to figure out what we were going to do, all while the BYU Co-Ed continued to loudly pour two liters of recycled root beer into the toilet bowl.
I stopped abruptly. It donned on me that there were two of us and one of him and the math sobered me. I turned and walked into the next empty stall, clacking my heels as loudly as possible, and shut the door behind me. It occurred to me that I hadn’t observed any urinals (and either did BYU, obviously) and I was 90% certain I had walked in under the ladies’ loo sign. So I shouldn’t have instantly leapt to the conclusion that I was in the wrong room. But honestly, it didn’t matter to me even if I was in the men’s room. The fact that another woman made the same mistake was all I needed to feel okay about the whole thing.
I listened as the guy left and waited to hear if he bumped into anyone or if any of the other women were going to say anything. But as far as I know, he walked out without ever realizing he had been in the women’s room. And if only he had been polite enough to close the door, it’s possible no one else would have known either.
I saw the student once more before I left the airport. We were down in baggage claim waiting for the belt to start rolling. He was talking on his cell and giving a wry smile to another cute blonde girl no closer to his age than I am. “Damn,” I thought to myself as the conveyor belt creaked to life. “That’s a guy who really wants to meet women.”
I may be the only one, but I just discovered that there is a possibility that the over-all package design / color scheme of these two products may me a little too similar.
Someone should do something about that.
What? I’m a midnight snacker.
Don’t judge me.
Before the holiday, I spent a week at a dull pharma conference. To my delight, it was held in San Diego and I took full advantage of the access to good seafood and a great Mexican restaurants in Old Town. My hotel was in the Gaslamp Quarter and once I was settled in I took a walk to explore the area. It was then that I happened to walk past an old theatre with “An Evening with John Cleese” written on the marquee. It was the perfect distraction to counter the paralyzing boredom of lectures on pharmaceuticals and I went back the next day to buy a ticket.
It was such a great performance – I’m so glad I happened to fall into it. Cleese was hilarious and completely uncensored. He showed off a gap from where he had lost a tooth and at one point pulled up his pant legs to show us what was happening to his knees, all as part of his musings on what a bitch it is to get old.
He had a screen behind him and he showed pictures of his soon to be ex-wife taking money out of an ATM machine in addition to film clips from his early career. It was facinating to hear him talk about how he got into the entertainment business, the relationships that he formed, and the origins of some of his most famous projects. In fact, it was just entertaining to hear him talk about his life.
Apparently, at one point in his life he decided to study law. He was at Cambridge and the school was hiring a new head master, but the man they wanted raised dogs and there was some school law that had been in effect since Henry the VIII that said dogs weren’t allowed at Cambridge. So one of his jurisprudence teachers wrote a by-law that stated that these particular dogs were actually cats. And then he said, “Which proved to me that the law, while being a very interesting intellectual exercise, all falls to hell when you try to apply it to real life. Take, for example, the marriage laws in California.”
Then he went on a tirade about how it was deliberate and important that all the dogs killed in A Fish Called Wanda were Yorkshire Terriers, “because as everyone knows, they aren’t proper dogs.” And I got a little uncomfortable.
One of favorite my things about the show, however, was the theatre. The Spreckels Theatre first opened in 1912. If anyone ever does a calendar on weird art adorning proscenium theatres, then the Spreckel’s should get the cover.
On the stage right side of the upper arch, there is a life size sculpture of three naked girls, who are using their sexuality to gently tease a small bear cub out of its lair. A similar sculpture is on the stage left side, only this time the three naked lovelies are riding a giant tortoise. I was so captivated by the art work that I kept expecting John Cleese to look up and say, “What the devil are those girl’s doing up there?” I took a photo with my cell phone during intermission, but the resolution is poor. Without a good close up on the expressions on the girls’ faces (and the expression on the bear cub’s face, for that matter), the mood simply isn’t captured.
I went back the next day before catching my return flight and asked the boy in the box office if he would let me in to take photos of the sculptures. I is completely against my personality to ask something embarrassing of a stranger; I’m ordinarily too shy to feel compelled to do something like that. But I really wanted to have photos to show my sister, Andrea.
I explained what I had in mind and then, taking a cue from the expression on the young man’s face which signalled that I was about to be rejected, I pulled out the tired “it’s not for me, it’s for a friend” tactic.
“My sister is a set designer and she loves these old proscenium theatres; I just want her to see how great it is.”
“I’m sorry. I just can’t let you in.”
“What if I told you that she has hypoglycemia?”
I skulked off feeling rebuffed. I took a chance and wandered outside of my nature, hoping that the universe would reward me. But no such luck. I told myself to shake it off. “So he said no. And he probably thinks you’re crazy. Or that you have a kinky thing for giant tortoises. So what? You’ll never see him again.”
Then I thought of something else John Cleese had said the night before. He was saying “the greatest aim of the average British person is to land safely in their graves without ever having seriously humiliated themselves.” And I thought, “I’ve always suspected that I should have been born British. But I always thought it was because of my intense appreciation of irony. Now the evidence is just piling up.”
