Do You Hear What I Hear (Two)

For about a six-month period on my morning commute, there was a girl in her early twenties who would talk the bus driver's ear off for the entire half-hour ride downtown.  From what I could gather (because of course I was listening ... how could you avoid it), she and the driver had previously butted heads and then mended fences, and now were absolute besties.

I know this not because he brought her homemade jerky or regaled her with stories about how he traveled to Mexico every year solely to buy cheap T-shirts, but because one morning they compared prison time. He also cautioned her that, although it warmed up her apartment quite nicely, she couldn't simply leave the oven door open all night long for extra heat during the winter.

But my favorite tale was the one she told from her childhood, when her dog got hit by a car.  According to the girl, her mother completely flipped out and crawled into bed, hugging the dead dog, and animal control had to come and take it away.

Now, this is one of those disturbing gems that makes your own life seem infinitely more normal by comparison, but what really stuck with me was the girl's final commentary on the situation.  After some commiserating about pets and our attachment to them, she stated very seriously, "Yeah, I don't see myself curling up with anything dead."

She then added,  "Animal or human."

Words to live by.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

So I've been MIA for about two weeks, and for that I apologize.  Heavy workload + vacation to help retain sanity after heavy workload = burnout narrowly avoided but replaced by apathy.

Today's word: eavesdrop.  Definition: To listen secretly to the private conversations of others.

I'm going to come right out and say it.  I am a HUGE eavesdropper.  I don't know if this stems from riding the bus and being surrounded by ridiculous conversations, or whether I'm just curious about others' lives, or whether I just get an enormous kick out of people in general.  

Whatever the case, rest assured that if you're on your cell phone or engaged in a heated discussion and either of these things is at an audible level, I'm going to be listening.  Not only will I turn down my iPod, but if the exchange is good enough, I will most likely take out a paper and pen and write it down so I can laugh about it later.  I firmly believe that if you keep your ears open and your yapper shut, you will be endlessly entertained.

There are several unwritten rules to eavesdropping.  Actually, I almost hate to call it that, because the way people talk on their phones these days, it's like they genuinely want everyone within earshot involved in their conversation.  

Rule #1:  Never look like you're listening.  This means leaving your headphones in, even if you've silenced the music in favor of hearing the chatter around you.  It also means never reacting to what is said.  See Rule #2.

Rule #2:  Never laugh out loud.  I have been reduced to tears on the bus because I'm trying so desperately not to burst out laughing.  This is paramount because of Rule #3.

Rule #3:  Never make eye contact.  Typically, the most amusing incidents are ones in which you do NOT want to be involved, even remotely.  Acknowledging that you're listening and have passed judgment on the situation is inviting yourself into the chaos.  Thus, I would highly recommend not turning and looking if there's something going on behind you, unless you want to be called out and become a new target for craziness.

I have so many hilarious eavesdropping tales, but so few of them are repeatable in mixed company.  I'm adding the disclaimer that I'm not making any of these up ... I'm simply repeating them ... so I can't be held responsible for the language or the content.  

Today's story, overheard in the bathroom at Macy's about three years ago, just before Christmas.  The woman across from me was in the stall on her phone, and I stayed in my stall much longer than necessary out of sheer joy.  Her end of the conversation went like this:

"Don't you take that ham out.  Don't take that ham out! . . . .We gon' cook it up.  You don't want ham, you go shop for yourself.  You go buy cheez whiz when you get paid . . . Cain't shop for himself . . . never have no mutherfuckin' money . . . . Shit.  Do your own shopping. . . . .Girl, I'm just playin' wit choo! . . . .I gotta go, they holdin' a pair of shoes for me downstairs."

And . . . scene.  I'll have another one tomorrow.

Stop, Duck, and Roll

I just have to share this, because it truly was one of those gifts from above that I will treasure always.  The other morning I was waiting at the bus stop, and I saw this group of ducks fly overhead.  There are always tons of them hanging around the pond at the nursing home nearby, presumably plotting their escape from this soon-to-be frigid wasteland.

So a few of them come in for a landing on the grass right in front of me, except the lawn slopes downward pretty steeply.  And one of the ducks apparently misjudged the incline, because instead of gliding in gracefully, he crashed.  This isn't the funny part.  The funny part is that after crashing, he rolled, about three or four times, down the hill, and all I saw were these two little orange duck feet splayed in the air, going end over end.

And then, when he finally skidded to a stop and righted himself, I swear he looked around to see who was watching . . . and saw me, doubled over laughing.

I wanted to say, "Dude, how could you screw that up?  Landing is like your only job in this world.  Fly, land, quack, swim, eat, poop on unfortunate people and objects, and look good stuffed.  We don't ask much from your species.  Hell, we didn't even make Donald wear pants!" 

But I think it was Mother Nature's way of saying, "Eh, we don't always get it right, either."  I find that reassuring.  I'll try to remember it the next time I have my own crash landing on the ice.  That duck will hopefully be long gone by then, but if he's not, I hope to look up from my crumpled heap and see him giving me mad webbed props from across the street.

Sole Train

So I'm having a bit of an obsession right now with Golden Grahams.  The cereal, not some funky new street drug.  I can't seem to eat enough of them, and I put away about three bowls a day over the weekend.  I do this pretty often with food, just get on a kick and consume something constantly until that undefinable moment when my tastes swing from "Hell, yes!" to "Never again."

The worst time was when I got a quesadilla maker for Christmas. For about four months, that was all I ate every night after work.  Of course I haven't even been able to look at the thing since, but it was fun while it lasted.  Oh, quesadilla maker, don't feel sad.  It's not you, it's me.

I wonder if I'm able to get in these habits simply because I live alone. If I'd felt I needed to justify my dietary patterns to anyone, I might have made an effort to include some variety, or at least felt a twinge of shame at the monotony.  As it is, there's no one to judge me for anything I happen to do.  Eat cookies for supper?  So what.  Fry an egg at 2 a.m.?  Try to stop me. Make brownies and cut out the very middle piece?  Suck it, I'll do what I want.

I once had this conversation with my sister, who also lives alone:

Sister: "Would you judge me if I told you I made a cake yesterday and it's almost gone already?"

Me: "No."

Sister: "How about if I never even put the slices on plates and instead just ate it right out of the pan?"

Me:  "Of course not."

Sister: "What if told you I just left the pan by the side of my bed with a fork in it?"

I say, your house, your rules.  And it doesn't just apply to food.  Does anyone ever close their bathroom door when they live alone?  Or get dressed immediately after a shower?  Or not have the TV, radio, and computer on while talking on the phone? .... they do?  Well, as Bobby Brown so eloquently put it, that's my prerogative.  If I want to keep the thermostat at 75 or stay up till 4 a.m. watching old movies, who's going to complain?  That's the beauty of independence.

I have a sneaking suspicion that my friends with kids secretly hate me for this.  Since I have yet to find that special someone to start a brood with, I have the luxuries of sleeping till noon on Saturdays, discretionary income, and the freedom that comes with virtually no major responsibilities.  Does that make me spoiled or selfish?  Perhaps if I'd turned down several serious marriage offers in favor of carefree living. In reality, my lifestyle isn't decadent or somehow less valuable because I'm single ... it's just different.  I'm working with what I have at the moment, and I'm good with that.

On the downside, you have to learn to keep yourself pretty entertained.  This might have been a problem for me before I lived in Japan for a year -- not so anymore. With almost no one to talk to or anything in English to read, I was forced to be creative.  When I wasn't killing cockroaches or avoiding my topless old lady neighbor, I spent my evenings trying to decipher crazy gameshows on TV and attempting to bake banana bread in my rice cooker. When that failed to amuse, I once resorted to choreographing a routine to the theme song from "Shaft." 

I soon decided that the equation for a tolerable single existence is this:  happiness = the amount of time spent dancing in your living room ... in your underwear.

I honestly don't remember the last time I was bored.  I can't stand hearing someone whining about not having anything to do, because there's always something to do.  What they're really saying is, "There's nothing I want to do."  Did I want to learn the katakana alphabet, or how to whistle the Himi High School song, or every single line in "The Naked Gun," or all the lyrics after "He's a bad mother --shut your mouth?"  No.  But I did it, and now I own it.  Forever.

Sometimes, you gotta make do with what you have.  You gotta find that happy place to escape to in your own head.  You gotta shake what your momma gave you. And you gotta do it to music, alone, wearing as little as possible. Preferably eating a bowl of Golden Grahams.

You Had Me at Space Vampires

It's been awhile since I've posted, so let's start this one out with some real honesty. I have a confession to make. I'm not sure when it started or how it evolved, but I've developed a real addiction ... to really bad movies. No, not XXX movies. I'm not even talking Sci-Fi Channel "original" bad, because they're in a class of their own. I'm referring to action-packed, formulaic, laughable one-liner, villian-with-an-iffy-foreign-accent flicks. More than that, I seem to be fascinated with what I call "afternoon wasters," the ones on TNT or TBS that catch your eye on Sunday at 1:00 ... and suddenly your day is gone along with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos.

I don't consider myself to have bad taste in movies, but my DVD collection does resemble that of a teenage boy. I'm not against chick flicks, per se. I think most women watch them for the same kind of escapism guys get from seeing things blow up. They both know it probably isn't going to happen, but isn't it damn fun to imagine?

As I've examined my preferences lately, I've come to identify a sort of rating system for the awesomeness of terrible action movies. And by "terrible" I mean not even close to high art, but a hell of a ride. Here are a few just to get you started:

If the movie is set in some sort of future dystopia, perhaps after a cataclysmic event, 1 point.
If it involves assembling a team of people, each with special skills, to fix something/rescue someone, 1 point.
If someone on the team is a computer whiz who can hack the Pentagon while eating various forms of junk food and saving everyone's ass, 1 point. 
If one person on that team is secretly working for the government/enemy/is a robot, 2 points. 

If the team has to go someplace dangerous to accomplish the task (space/deep sea/a cave), 1 point. 
If they have to go someplace ridiculous (an ancient pyramid, into the earth's core), 2 points. 
If they go to the Arctic/Alaska, that's a whole new category.

If the team encounters monsters or aliens, 2 points.
If, at any time, the audience gets to view things through the eyes of a creature, as in "snake vision" or "Predator vision," 3 points. 
If the team must fight nature itself, 1 point. 
If what they encounter is supernatural or paranormal, 2 points. 
If they find out it's the result of genetic experiments, 3 points.
If whatever it is USED to be human and/or the team starts turning into them, 4 points.

If the movie stars Coolio, 5 points, because that's a guarantee you're going to witness something truly awful.

This is just a rough framework, but I think it generally holds true. However, I'm open to suggestions from other bad movie lovers out there.

Hilarity Ensues

So it's 12:30 am, and I can't get to sleep. Why? The woman who lives in the apartment above me has been laughing loudly and hysterically for the past 15 minutes. I can't tell if she's on the phone or if someone is tickling her funny bone in person (or tickling anything else, frankly) but something has gotten her going.

Not that I'm complaining. It's preferable to the evening when, off and on for the better part of an hour, I heard what resembled the sweet sounds of romance, accompanied by the frenzied repetition of "John! John! John!" Usually I'm a supporter, albeit reluctantly, of those who are fortunate enough to be bumpin' uglies, since at least someone in my building is getting some. But that night I found myself very close to pounding on the ceiling and yelling, "John, whatever you're doing to her, STOP IT!"

Tonight, however, I've been trying to remember when exactly I laughed that hard. I generally find many things amusing, but rarely do I engage in the kind of hearty, uncontrollable guffaws now drifting down from above. The last time I remember really losing it was a couple months ago, when I was driving home from a friend's house at about 11:00 on a Friday night. I stopped at a light and happened to glance to my right, where someone in an eagle costume was waiting on the curb.

I did a triple-take, because although I hadn't been drinking, I suspected that perhaps I was hallucinating in some fashion. No, it was a person in a full-out, mascot-like bald eagle getup, complete with a huge head, which apparently was difficult to see out of, since he had to keep stopping and looking down to check where his large, taloned feet were landing in the crosswalk.

I looked beyond him, expected a group of kids to be following in his wake, maybe a team of sorts or a theater group, out for some fun after a game or a show. Nope. All alone.

He passed in front of my car and reached the other side of the street, where he simply stood, flapping his gigantic wings and swiveling his head frantically, as if he had migrated this far and now wasn't sure which way to go. Then, from the opposite direction came a tiny, beat-up car that screeched up next to him. He leaned in toward the window and there was a slight commotion ... then he disappeared into the back seat and the car sped away, complete with its endangered cargo.

All this happened in the span of a red light. I blinked several times, still unsure of what I had witnessed. By the time I got my turn arrow, I was laughing. I laughed so hard all the way to my apartment building that I nearly threw up in the parking lot. Because not only were those 30 seconds one of the most bizarre, delightful gifts I've ever received from the universe, but I knew how completely crazy I would sound when I re-told the story. Who would believe me?

I still don't know what happened on the corner of Silver Lake and 37th that night. Was it a prank? Was it a drunken dare? Did some kid piss off his friends, who then left him at Walgreens to fend for his feathery self? Or was it simply a very patriotic prostitute? Take your pick. I'll take the memory -- if all goes well, it might just replace my recollection of "John! John! John!"

If an Idiot Slips in the Parking Lot . . .

and no one is there to see her fall, is it still hilarious? Answer: Yes. Yes, it is. I've managed to make a fool of myself a couple times recently, and here's what's surprising. I'm actually super disappointed that nobody was there to witness it.

The first time was just before Christmas, when I cut through the parking lot of the nursing home across the street on my way to the bus. I usually step over a large snowbank and into the lot, then stomp the snow off my boots and continue on. Now, I don't know if I was in too much of a hurry, or if I failed to anticipate the steadily increasing size of the snowbank, or if the bag of coats I was donating threw me off. But somewhere between the stepping and the stomping I lost my balance. And I fell. But it wasn't a clean fall.

I took several stumbling jumps, staggering around as if I could somehow conquer gravity and regain control, fully realizing that it was already too late to recover. I finally resigned myself to the fact that I was 175 lbs. of disaster in an inevitable downward spiral, wheeled around and crashed to the pavement, skidding a fair distance before grinding to a cold, hard halt. And the worst thing was that afterward, all I really wanted to do was lie there and groan, but I had to get up and catch my bus.

I bruised my hip and cut my finger, but in the end nothing was really injured but my pride. Oddly, one of my first thoughts upon landing wasn't "I hope nobody saw that." Instead, it was "Did anybody SEE that?!" Because it was spectacular. I immediately got the giggles as I limped away, thinking of how awesome it would be to have video of it. I take comfort in the fact that several elderly people in wheelchairs may have been peering out their windows, witnessing evidence that they are not the only ones who periodically take a spill.

The second foolish thing happened just last week, when I was shopping. I was on a quest to find some new lotion and, as we all do, popped open the cap on one of the bottles to smell it. Because let's face it, if it smells like medicine or decaying roses, you're never going to slather it on. I couldn't quite get a whiff, so I decided to give the bottle a little squeeze.

SPLAT! It exploded right in my face. I had lotion everywhere. I mean on my coat, in my hair, dripping off my nose. Of course I looked around to see who had the privilege of viewing this grand spectacle, since I was standing near the pharmacy and was sure I would draw some stares . . . no one. So I was left to fish a kleenex out of my pocket and swab myself down, goofy and all alone.

What I'm lamenting is this: If I'm going to do something super embarrassing, it seems a shame to waste it on myself. There should be at least one other person there who can relate the tale to their family over dinner or tuck that memory away for a rainy, unamusing day. Otherwise, it's just me, taking a quick, silent bow in celebration of my own stupidity. Which is okay, too, I guess.

No Shame

Well, here it is a new year, and I reapply myself with more determination to actually keeping this blog updated regularly. First topic of 2009? The fact that there are very few situations in this world in which a person should have no shame. By that I mean they shouldn't care what other people think about them. I will name two.

First: How you look when it's 25 below outside. I was online earlier this weekend ordering some new (warmer) boots and gloves, and I found myself trying to mentally coordinate them with my other articles of winter clothing. After several unsuccessful minutes, I finally realized that nothing I have matches. It was all purchased out of necessity, at different times in different years, and together amounts to a mishmash of down, knit, fleece, and Goretex that can be combined in an infinite number of ways for maximum comfort but minimum fashion.

Why is it that the warmest coats are never quite the most stylish? Do I need to look like a walrus just to keep my core temp above 90? And why do the best scarves and earmuffs and facemasks make us all look like frosty criminals? I will guarantee you that I run across at least one person each day who's bundled up like the unibomber . . . but who cares!! When you're standing outside stamping your feet, bouncing up and down, occasionally dancing and swearing up a storm just to avoid losing any toes, you don't care about others judging you. You just want to survive. You should have no shame.

[As a sidenote, in the interest of full disclosure, I also have no shame in moving very quickly from building to building if I must venture outside in cold weather. I go nowhere slowly when it drops below freezing. I'm not kidding, I would leave my grandmother in the dust if it meant getting inside a few seconds faster.]

Second: Last week, I was about 30 feet from my bus stop when the bus, earlier than usual, blew right by me. Without thinking, I took off sprinting after it for another full block (to no avail) and yelling "Hey! Hey! Hey!" I do this inadvertently, the yelling. I know the driver can't hear me, but I want the universe to know that I filed a protest. Here's the thing, though -- when I run for the bus, I RUN FOR THE BUS. I mean full-out, crazy-person, arm-flailing, track and field running. And from experience, I know that watching someone do this from inside the bus is one of the funniest things in the world.

But what's even funnier is watching someone who needs to run but doesn't want anyone to know they're in a hurry. They sort of hop-shuffle along, like, "What? Late? Not me! No, this is my normal, everyday, extremely frenzied walk, and I'll thank you to look away now while I dive toward a moving vehicle." When they do finally step on, sweating and wheezing slightly, they try to pretend it was all part of the plan. Wake up, shower, dress, jog in dress shoes, go to work.

I once watched a woman sprint four blocks to catch our bus at the next stop, and when she got on I noticed she was wearing heels. I almost started clapping. Seriously, I think we should, as a society, start applauding people who accomplish stuff like this. And not a sarcastic Brubaker effort, but sincere, appreciative applause. Because not only did they work their ass off to get their day back on track, but they didn't care that you shook with silent laughter as they did it. And that's nothing to be ashamed of.