The sea! The sea!

Low tide.  Very low tide.

Means tidepools!

I believe this is a member of the cottidae family.

Yes. It is a tree.

I'd write more, but I'm too busy reading by the fire and drinking wine.

I can see this from our bedroom.

Mmm.  Hills.

This is where I am.

Yeah, California rocks.

Airport Travel, final update

There's a big difference between a ticket that reads:

26 DEC Departing: ORD Chicago (10:04am) Arriving: SFO San Francisco (1.15pm)

and one that reads:

27 DEC Departing: ORD Chicago (10:04am) Arriving: SFO San Francisco (1:15pm)

Did you catch it?   We didn't. 

See, the plane to Chicago didn't leave the hangar when they said it would.  It showed up about half an hour later.  Not in time for us to make our connection. 

No problem, said a gate agent.  We'll get you on the next flight out of there, he said.  Just two hours later, he said.

It was only when the Wife and I were in Chicago that we realized the mistake.  The agent printed tickets for the next flight out tomorrow.  Which was the exact opposite of convenient.  Had we known we'd be stuck in fucking Chicago in the middle of a massive snowstorm, we'd have stayed the hell home and pushed the whole thing back twenty four hours while we relaxed in our own home and slept in our own goddamned bed.

Alas.

We talked to a gate agent in Chicago and explained our plight.  He was sympathetic.  "I'm sorry.  There's just no way you're getting to San Fransisco today.  Everything is booked.  Everything.  My advice?  Go talk to customer service.  They're right down the hall."

Down the hall we went.  To wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Surrounded by other people who were similarly waiting and just as S.O.L.   At least half a dozen folks had their flight to Cancun canceled - next available times out were two days later. 

There was a nice attendant walking up and down the lengthening line explaining that no, the airline would probably not be offering travel vouchers or hotel accommodations, so just be prepared for that when it's your turn at the desk.  The crowd seethes not-so-quietly.  I catch a glimpse of what I imagine a riot's beginnings must look like, when people start clumping together and venting and feeding off each others' anger and impotence.  It is not pretty.

After at least an hour, we approach the desk.  After less then a minute, she stops us.

"The plane hasn't left yet.  Go back to the terminal and ask to be put on standby."
But... The gate agent said we should...
"Go! If it doesn't work out, you come back here.  See me again."

The plane is leaving in five minutes.  Seriously.  Five fucking minutes.

I haul ass down to the gate.  The agent looks up at me.  "I remember you.  Why are you back here?"

I explain. 
"Who told you to do this?" 
'The woman at customer service.'

He shakes his head and mutters words I don't catch.  The meaning is quite clear: "Goddamned idiots." He punches at the keyboard, looking alternately hopeful and disappointed.  The other gate agent is closing things down and shutting doors.

Finally, he looks around the near-empty gate.   The next minute is a flurry of activity, wherein he barks names impatiently into the intercom.  Some people race to the desk, some never show.

He jerks his head towards the door and shoves two stubs into our hands.

Five hours later, we are in California.  More miraculously, our bags are in California.

And now, to sleep.  To those of you traveling, good luck.  To those that helped today, you have my thanks. 

Airport Travel, part 2 of ?

Shit yeah! Airplane leaving the hangar.  Supposedly we'll make our original connection.

In the meantime, college girls are repeatedly taking pictures of a man who's sprawled out on the ground trying to sleep. 

He has managed to stay that way through not only their gigglings and camera flashes, but also through the loud *CRUNCH* of an airport golf-cart clipping a nearby corner and ripping off a chunk of the plastic baseboard and wallpaper.

The golf-cart driver was completely unconcerned.  He just got out, looked at the wall, mushed at the misshapen bits, then shrugged and drove off.  Good times.

Airport Travel, part 1 (of ?)

I'd forgotten how much I love flying.

I was reminded again when our gate agent told us (at 5.30am) that our flight (ETD 6.00am) was still in the hangar.  Steering problems, he said.  Delayed for an hour and a half, he said.

Making our connection will be tricky.

The gate agent, by the way?  My new hero.  He is furious.  His world is collapsing around him - at a single gate he's got a flight with no plane (ours) and a flight with no pilot (some other poor schmucks') -  and he is desperately trying to find someone who isn't utterly incompetent.  His coping mechanism is to shout "Cock!" with alarming frequency.

It's going to be a long day, I fear.

Pants are highly overrated.

It is 8pm, Chistmas night.  I am wearing flannel pajama pants and a trenchcoat as I make a mad dash outside to take the trash to the curb.  It is the first (and last) time I leave the house today.

A neighbor hails me, "Hey, how're you doing?"

I blink.  I have not had any face-to-face contact with the outside world today.

"Um...."  I pause.  "I haven't put on real pants today, so... pretty good!"

"I'm about to go take my real pants off.  Merry Christmas!"

"Merry Christmas!"

Fitted for the feet of a giant Santa

Christmas is weird for me and the Wife.  We don't have any real traditions and neither of us much likes holiday schmaltz.  And most traditions are pretty heavy on the schmaltz.

But we're a young couple with many years of Christmas celebrations ahead of us, so we figured it was time to work on finding things we will like doing year in and year out.

Like stockings.  While both of our families hung stockings back home, we didn't really bring our own stockings with us when we moved in together.  I don't think either of us could imagine asking our parents to relinquish them.  Sure, we haven't lived at home for almost ten years now and we only see our parents a couple times a year but to suddenly call up and ask to take your Christmas stocking?  That shit's cold.

Which meant that we needed to go stocking shopping - not something people usually ever do more than once or twice in their lives I'd imagine, because frankly there are only so many uses one can find for a large, ugly sock.

The shopping expedition was a failure.  Everything was either excessively tacky, small, or massive.  Utterly without the charm and warmth one expects in a Christmas stocking.  In the end the Wife found something that really can't be called a stocking.  It is far too large for that. 

We bought a bag.  A very large bag.  A giant, red bag with a snowman on it.  Shaped like a sock.

It is our communal stocking.  I say communal because used individually it would only look sad and empty, its purpose wholly unfulfilled.  We have loaded the bag with small trinkets and tasties, blindly depositing them so as not to see the offerings made by one another.

The bag is laden.  Straining, one might say.  The snowman looks pleased.

Tomorrow we will reach in and fish around, either pulling out a gift for the other or finding a little surprise for ourselves.

But tonight is Christmas Eve.  Time for cheese sandwiches grilled on our brand new skillet and a glass of chilled white wine.

Confessions of a Crypto-Jew

When people find out I'm Jewish, they usually think I'm lying.

See, I'm a horrible Jew.  Terrible.  I eat bacon.  Correction, I fucking love bacon.  It is the candy of meats and makes everything it touches better.  This includes steak, shrimp and bourbon. 

I know more Christmas songs than I do any Jewish music, but that probably has something to do with me singing in a church choir for over eight years and never going to temple after the age of six.

I rarely remember Chanukah, let alone Passover, Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur - and if you're lucky I can tell you what each of those holidays is about.  One of them is mourning.  Or atonement.  Something like that.

And my looks?  I couldn't look less Jewish if I tried.  My favorite example of this?  I swear it's true - I once told someone I was Jewish and their immediate response - their immediate, unblinking response - was "But you look so Aryan."


There's also the whole non-belief in any concept of a deity along the lines of the Judeo-Islamic-Christian God with a capital G.  That's a big one, too.  I know, I know.  I'm going to burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.  Except Jews don't believe in hell, so... I win?


But since my mother is Jewish, I'm technically Jewish, too.  Just a very, very bad one.  Horray for matrilineal religious descent!

One of my good friends and colleagues - Anne - is also Jewish.  And she appears to have taken it upon herself to reacquaint me with Jewish traditions through the wonders of delectable food.

This is me not complaining.

Every so often, Anne and her husband inform me that another holiday has rolled around and that it is time for the Wife and I to come over and eat things.  And who are we to say no?

The most recent occasion featured latkes.  A whole group of us gathered in the kitchen to peel and grate the shit out of enough potatoes to feed the Russian army.  And when they were all peeled, they were squished and squeezed and packed together and thrown into boiling oil, whereupon they became magically delicious.  And then came salad and wine.  And more wine.  It was a good night.

Afterwards, I thought to myself, "Man.  Latkes!  So good!  We should have these more often!"

And the next week, I found that I had a surplus of mashed potatoes.  (Can you see where this is going?)  Now, I supposed that there really wasn't much difference between my mashed potatoes and the grated potato mixture we'd concocted for latkes.

That supposition was wrong. 

Operating under this idea, I joyfully told the Wife that I was going to make her some latkes for breakfast.  Middle of the week.  Latkes for breakfast.  The very definition of decadence.

So there I am.  I heat up a pan of oil and start deep-frying my little mounds of mashed potatoes, feeling immensely proud of myself.  To their credit, those mounds of potatoes dutifully sit in the oil for a good long while, promising to be little fried morsels of heaven.

And then, as mashed potatoes are wont to do when placed in liquid - boiling or otherwise - they disintegrate.  It was slow at first. 

Are the potatoes shrinking? Does that make sense?  Hm.
*poke*
What's all that stuff floating in the oil?
*poke*
Oh god, breakfast is ruined!

If there's one thing that makes me absolutely lose my shit, it's screwing up food.  That and math are two things guaran-fucking-teed to make me unreasonably upset.

Fortunately, I improvised.  Non-descript mashed potato gook in too much oil eventually turned from failed latkes into hashbrowns.  New pan.  Less oil.  All was well.

Then I served it with a side of bacon.

See? Bad Jew.

Fun with dermatology!

I need you to understand that there is a hole in my toe.

A hole.
In.
My.
Toe.

Let me put this in context for you.

I've got a spot on my left foot.  It's a small, innocuous spot, but I've watched it grow from a very faintish speck to a less faint, slightly more distinct spot over the past few years.

Apparently spots that change shape and/or color over time need to be - and pardon my use of medical jargon here - looked at by a professional.

I procrastinated for a good three years, because honestly I didn't want to drag my ass to the dermatologist for some piddly spot that's about half the size of a pencil eraser, isn't raised, doesn't hurt, and doesn't have any accompanying loss of sensation.

It is a spot on the bottom of my foot.  It doesn't get to call the shots.  That's why it got to wait around.  I had shit to do.

Last week, I gave in and finally made the appointment.

The doctor is totally unconcerned about the spot on my foot.  She mutters something about past trauma and blood staining the skin cells.  "Even from five years ago, at least?" I ask.  "I don't see why not."

Great.  This goddamned spot has now wasted my time and the doctor's. Part of me wants to get it removed just out of spite.

Then something catches doc's eye - one of the small moles on my right toes I'd shown her as comparanda.  (Yeah, I just whipped that word out.  Comparanda.  It's Latin for "other shit you might want to look at as well.")

She doesn't like it.  She's got some crazy little hand-held device that looks like an unholy blend of a magnifying glass, flashlight and cigar cutter and she's peering through it very intently at my mole before she decides she wants to biopsy the thing.

According to her, this means that she's going to take a sample of the mole and send it off to some lab where people look at gross mole-bits all day and eventually let me know whether or not it's something to worry about.

Fine by me, I say.  She has me lie back and injects some local anesthetic into my toe.

Now, out of nowhere come two nurses who fiddle around with jars and ointment and presumably sharp things and before I know it, I've got a cotton-ball wrapped around my toe and everyone's leaving.  They were the NASCAR pit crew of dermatologists.

Seriously. My appointment was at 10am and I was back in my car at 10.20.

I spent the rest of the day doing whatever it is I had planned for a Thursday, feeling none the worse for wear, as all they did was take a little sample of my mole.  Frankly, I couldn't tell they'd done much at all.


And then, sometime in the afternoon, I looked down to see that the front of my sock is soaked in fucking blood.


"Oh," thought I. "The cotton ball must have slipped off."


Wrong.  Just soaked the fuck through.

Here's when I start remembering the doctor's discussion of 'how to care for your wound.'  She must have said 'wound' at least five times.  I'd thought it a curious word choice at the time.

It wasn't.  It was quite apt.  The trails of blood I'd unwittingly left around the house were testament enough to that.

Removing the cotton business, it seemed that by "take a sample" of my mole they meant that they were going to cut it the hell off.  It is gone.  Nothing remains except a deep gauge in my goddamned toe where I used to have a mole.

I liked that mole.  We'd been together for a long time.  I wasn't expecting to have it secreted away from me.

Which brings us to today's lessons -

Number one: That local anesthetic was some powerful shit. 
Number two: The dermatologist is a friggin' liar.

Book 3, Month 4: Machine of Death

I cheated.

Machine of Death wasn't on my list, but I read it anyway.  A webcomic artist whose work I generally enjoy mentioned that the book was a colaboration between a number of interesting people so I figured, hey - I'll buy the book, support struggling web-artists, and have a fun read while I'm at it.

I accomplished two of those three goals.

The full title of the book explains everything you need to know-

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die

That's the premise behind each of the thirty stories.  There's a machine that will deliver cryptic messages about the circumstances of the user's death.  Cryptic as in, it might say - SUICIDE - but that could readily mean getting killed by someone else's suicide attempt.  Or - JANE - could leave someone avoiding people named Jane the rest of their lives, only to be run over by a bus driven by one Jane Petrowski. 

All of the stories aren't hinged on these little twists, but many of them are.  Others are a bit more nuanced explorations of what the expressed knowledge of mortality does to people, relationships, societies at large.

But really, the downfall of this book is the rampant bad writing.

Namely, I felt like I was in a creative writing class, reading through everyone's submissions following a Machine of Death prompt.  It's a decent class, I'll admit, but just about everything needs more work.  And some students clearly think that writing about sex or guns or having characters say 'fuck' makes their work intense and edgy.  It doesn't and it isn't.

If a story is less than ten pages long and I still can't force myself through it, there is something very, very wrong with your prose.

Out of the thirty stories, there were at least seven I couldn't finish and another five I wish I hadn't.

As much as I'd like to tell you to rush out and support independent writers/artists by buying the book, I won't.  But!  If you think I'm being a pretentious stick-in-the-mud who's expecting too much from a book with a dinosaur comic on the front page, I will point you to the absolutely, 100% free PDF version of the book, provided by the editors themselves. 
 
As they say, read it and if you like it enough, buy it in print to show your support.

Letters from an Unimpressed Grad Student

My Dearest Students-

The final exam is in a week. A handful of you have realized that you could really use some help and you'd quite like it if I held a review session for you.

Actually, you want me to hold "another" review session.  Because most of this past week was review, but you guys skipped out for just that reason.  I held office hours, too, but I didn't see you there, either.

So now, you want me to work around your collective exam schedules, drop my own work and come in to offer more of what you've already ignored?

Sounds great.

-Unimpressed

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

Dear Committee Member X-

You have had a formal outline of my projected dissertation plans for the past six months.  You have had a shorter, more condensed and easier-to-read version of these plans for the past two months.

So why, why on earth, did you wait until I was presenting these plans to the department at large before you decided to huffily suggest that the project was misguided and ought to change direction completely?

I would love to know how the hell that ever seemed like a good idea to you.

-Seriously Unimpressed

P.S.  The rest of the committee has no idea what you're on about.

"Ideally, I'd have you flogged."

For those curious, I had just over 25% attendance on the day before the Thanksgiving break.

-----

In Latin, just as with a number of other languages, there are variations in the acceptable spellings of words.

Sometimes words that end in 'es' will be spelled with an 'is.'  So it goes.  No big deal.  Except that it confuses the hell out of my students.

And they want to know why this happens.  Which is good.  Except the explanation is fairly complicated and won't ultimately help them read Latin much better.

In these situations, I just waggle my fingers and invoke "linguistics."  Solves everything.  At least, better than a fifteen minute explanation that requires a fairly solid understanding of Greek to actually make sense.

Anyhow.

I supplemented my magical "linguistics" explanation with some examples from English (night/nite, through/thru) and brought in some regional variations of common words as well.  Point made.  Moving on.

A student raises her hand.

"So, like, do regional variations explain why some people put extra letters at the end of words?"

This gives me slight pause.  Are we talking about the tendency of some of the British to add R's to words that end in a vowel?  Maybe.  I dare to ask, "Can you give me an example?"

"Yeah.  Like, some people say 'ideal' instead of 'idea.'  Is that a regional variant?"

And here I have another, longer pause, this one accompanied by a slow massaging of my temples.

"You do know that those are two different words, yes?"

"No...  What is 'ideal?'  I thought it was just another way of saying 'idea.' "

The next few minutes were spent explaining, in exquisite detail, the difference between ideas and ideals.

As in, "In an ideal class, you would all have brilliant ideas."
As in, "I was naive and idealistic, and you have broken me."


Not really.  Nothing broken here.  But stupefied, definitely.

This is college, right?