M. Giant's
Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks


Wednesday, April 30, 2003  

Reader Mail Slot, Episode XII

Today marks the twelfth installment of my one and only regular monthly feature, the Reader Mail Slot. Some folks might call that a year. And to think I started this off with completely made-up e-mails. Now I only use real e-mails with completely made-up answers.

The one thing I’ve learned is that you can never tell what people are going to respond to. I thought the horror story about Trash finding bug parts in her pudding container would trigger a avalanche of missives. Which it did, but it was an avalanche of one. Zen Viking offered:

1. Insects are good for you. Excellent source of formic acid (well, ants are, anyway). Plenty of world cuisines make use of various larvae and bugs. Trash is just ahead of her time, as usual. Just wait: "Amazonian grubworm with chili-lime salsa" can't be more than two or three menus in Chino Latino's future.

I can’t comment on Chino Latino’s future, because I’m not in it.

2. Think carefully. FREE CRATE OF PUDDING. What could be wrong with that?

3. No, think more carefully. Nobody says you got to eat the stuff. Heh heh heh heh.

I can only assume this is a reference to a story ZV once told me about his stepfather filling (or attempting to fill or planning to fill) somebody’s Volkswagen with rich, creamy Jell-O™ pudding back in college. I’m sketchy on the details, but I think that the execution called for the use of a cement mixer.

4. And anyhow, it's probably one of the larger consumer product-healthcare-food conglomerates, right? They might send a crate of pudding, or a set of 4 wet-traction radial tires, or a new DVD-ROM drive. If she bought the pudding at Wal-Mart, you may never need to shop again. Ever.

It is indeed a sizable conglomerate, so I was kind of hoping for a goodly chunk of Asia. What we got instead was a three-dollar gift certificate and a request to mail them the “foreign matter” so they could pursue it further.

Mail the foreign matter? Doesn’t the US Postal Service have rules against this kind of thing? Or do they have special “bug fragment” envelopes with special “mail-a-bug” shipping rates?

In any case, Trash had already thrown away the “foreign matter,” and the surrounding non-foreign matter, and the cup containing the foreign and non-foreign matter, and the papers the cup had been sitting on, and the furniture the papers had been sitting on. And then we moved to a different city. All we can do now is use our three-dollar gift certificate to buy more pudding, and mail them the bug we find in that.

Learn from my mistakes, people. I love to hear from people who have already done that. Like Sayer here, who writes on behalf of herself and a friend:

Having read your blog frequently of late, it was with great trepidation that I recently washed my beloved new scarf. Suffice it to say I learned a great deal from the death of your scarf. It did not die in vain.

Sayer and her scarf "Spiffy"

I’m happy that Sayer was able to avoid my grief and heartache. What really pleases me, however, is that her scarf is apparently now sentient and able to co-sign e-mails. I’d ask how she did it, but then I’d have something around my neck that is capable of getting pissed off at me when I shut it in the car door. That kind of stress I don’t need.

I also expected that my complimentary post about the exemplary customer service available from the IRS would trigger a firestorm of e-mail from pissed-off taxpayers. But apparently the pissed-off taxpayers, if there are any, are too busy complaining directly to the IRS to bother with me. Which left me with this from Sundara:

I just had to tell you that I had the same experience with an IRS customer service person on the phone a couple years ago. The woman was fabulous. I've never dealt with anyone on any sort of customer service phone line with any company that was as kind, thoughtful, polite and helpful as the IRS woman. But my positive IRS experiences don't stop there. Two years ago, I got a random check for several hundred dollars from the IRS. It was the same year that everyone was getting their $300 "refund" from the government, so I was pretty confused, as I had gotten that check a week or two previously. So I called up the IRS and apparently, I can't add. I'm still not sure what I did, but I grossly underestimated the amount of my refund. The IRS noticed, fixed the error, and sent me a check for what they owed me. How great is that? And then, ‘cause I still can't add, I did it again this year. They noticed, let me know, and I just got a check for another several hundred dollars. I LOVE the IRS. Love them.

In my entry, I mentioned that I screw up the taxes somehow every year, but that hasn’t always been the case. Trash used to be the one who messed up. She miscalculated the amount of our return two or three years in a row, and the government sent us a bigger check than we expected. It figures that my mistakes end up costing us time and money, while hers are a decent source of income.

The shortfall in responses to posts about entomophagia and income tax was made up for by more innocuous topics. One of them was softball, which prompted a tip from Gwynn:

As! Seen! On! TV!
http://hit-a-lot.com/

I always hated chasing after the balls myself. Of course, this may sort of defeat the purpose of going outside and seeing nature and blah-ti-blah, but you know, I had to share.

Okay, here’s what worries me about the kid at the Hit-A-Lot site. He’s got a bat. He’s got a batting helmet. He’s got batting gloves. He’s got a pristine baseball uniform, complete with pants. I never had uniform pants. Where’s his team? He’s swinging away in full regalia, but he doesn’t have anyone to pitch balls to him or catch whatever he hits or misses. This tells me that he either a) has alienated the rest of his team so thoroughly that they make him go off to a far corner of the park and play by himself on game days, b) lives in a sports-geek version of the fantasy world inhabited by people who don orange flight suits to play Rogue Squadron II on the GameCube, or c) killed his teammates and sold off their organs on the black market to buy all his fancy gear. And I’m supposed to want to emulate this person? I’d much rather emulate Julie:

I'm a big slowpitch softball geek—I play on two teams. Neither one is very good, but we have a lot of fun.

Wow, I never thought about playing on two teams. If I’d done that when I was a kid, one of my teams probably would have won once in a while. Like, when it played the other one of my teams.

The biggest reaction, though, was to a link that was practically a throwaway line earlier this week about neti pots. Here’s what one of the Two Bobs had to say:

E GAHDS!

So far, so good.

If you're going to do a write up and drop links to sites on nose enemas, do us all a favor and -- I don't know -- WARN us or something. It wasn't good enough for you to coyly drop that crap on neti pots into your entry, was it? You had to make us WANT to Google it. And then find there's actually a friggin market for this practice. And that there are even infomercials for the practice. AN INFOMERCIAL! In which the bodacious young woman fills a neti pot and proceeds to douche out her nose with a saline solution. So there she was, smiling demurely—think of those pissing cherubs in medieval gardens—as a fountain of snot water blew through her nasal cavities. It was sick. Sick, I tell you.

When you say “sick,” do you really mean “hot?” Some people might be into that, you know. Judging from some of the Google hits I get, I would be surprised if nobody was. In fact, I should drop the subject lest I become the top site on Google searches for neti pot porn. Especially now that I’ve just used that phrase.

And you're gonna have to answer for this emotional scarring you've caused. Mark me.

Sounds like I already have. Emotionally, I mean.

Here’s the thing about why I write this blog. I want to be able to make you examine your very existence, search your life for meaning. Or even, once in a while, just make you think about something in a way you’ve never thought about it before. Failing that, I want to get a couple of cheap laughs. Failing that, I’ll settle for inflicting some emotional scars.

To that end, here’s a link to the infomercial that the Bob included in his e-mail. If it doesn’t work, just go to the Nutraceutic home page and navigate from there. And if that doesn’t work, count yourself fortunate. Neti pot porn isn’t for everyone.

Be sure to come back next month, when the second year of the Reader Mail Slot kicks off with your feedback regarding topics I just know you won’t be able to resist commenting on. Or perhaps you will.

posted by M. Giant 3:47 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, April 29, 2003  

Lawn Nazi

My first job, if you don’t count the paper route, which I don’t because it was two blocks once a week and it wasn’t a real newspaper anyway, was as a lawn waterer. The summer before my sophomore year of high school, I would go to this condominium subdivision at the other end of town and lay out sprinklers and soaker hoses outside a couple of dozen residential hives. It was less than ideal because I had to schlep out there and back two or three times a day, and my parents and my older sister got tired of driving me there after the first few weeks. Four and a half miles one way on a bicycle to water somebody else’s grass got pretty old in a hurry. I won’t say it was uphill both ways, but it was against the wind both ways. And there was the time my wheel came off a third of the way home and I had to carry the bike the rest of the way. This was some time before I first read about cell phones in Discover magazine, so calling for a rescue was out of the question. Aside from difficulties like that, I would have to be honest and say that the job really kind of sucked. And I sucked at it. I didn’t care if anyone’s grass was green. I didn’t particularly care if anyone’s grass was wet. I just wanted to get there, get back, and get paid. At the end of the summer, I could put “groundskeeper” on all the fast-food job applications I filled out, and I had a couple of hundred bucks which I used to get my bike fixed so I could park it in the garage forever when I got my license a year later. Oh, yeah, and there was all that character I built.

What a difference a couple of decades can make. Now I go to a job that I spend all day at, and instead of being a slave to other people’s lawns, I’m a slave to my own.

It’s now sixteen days since I scattered enough grass seed on the back yard to make it look like ground zero for some kind of botanical airburst. I’ve watered the area at least twice a day ever since, except for the days we were out of town. And that’s only because it rained those days. In fact, we even cut short our Easter visit to the relatives because the Monday forecast called for sun.

The first week and a half wasn’t encouraging; the neighbors frequently gave me quizzical looks as I hosed down the dirt. But I persevered; we hadn’t had a lot of terribly warm weather yet, and at this time last year I hadn’t even seeded yet. There was still time. Then on Thursday I saw the first fragile little shoots rising from a couple of spots where my rake hadn’t quite removed all the lawn debris. Little green blades were poking through bits of acorn, bark, and gray dust I’d failed to clear away. I figured that if this dry, barely organic slurry could nourish anything, some quality topsoil sprinkled over the yard would allow my grass to grow to rainforest height by Mother’s Day. Friday evening, I picked up a few bags of said topsoil and spread it around by hand. Not that that stopped the quizzical looks. I also administered a belated dose of Lawn Starter. Why not? The lawn hadn’t actually started yet.

The weekend was like a time-lapse nature film, only slowed down a little bit. And with some guy scampering around with hoses and sprinklers. As of this writing, my backyard is the home of waves and waves of shiny new green grass, some of it two inches high. The troughs between the waves are still jet-black dirt with maybe a blade of grass every square inch or so, but I’m concentrating on the waves right now. Green waves! Nature’s glory! That’s why I’m spending twenty minutes every morning before work holding a spray nozzle in my frozen wet claw and trying to keep the muddy hose from touching my khakis.

Now I have to water twice as much, because I’m also running a little experiment in the front yard. The front yard has always been everything the back yard isn’t: sunny, green and lush. Especially when the weeds arrive, it fills in quite nicely. Except this year there are some serious bald patches. I blame our lawn-care company, whom we fired after last summer’s lackluster performance. We dropped over three hundred dollars on those bozos and not only did our lawn get overrun by weeds, not only did our grass turn yellowish-brown, we could tell they weren’t even trying by the way Lake Harriet completely failed to glow in the dark from our lawn’s chemical runoff. Slackers.

So this spring I decided to try some of that lawn repair mix that has grass seed, mulch, and fertilizer all mixed together like granola in teal cotton candy. I’ve seen it on other people’s lawns as I drove past, and always thought that something that ugly was sure to work. It’s easy to think that when you’re driving past it and instantly forgetting about it. But when one walks out of one’s front door every day and sees sections of one’s yard covered in what looks like radioactive fungus, one wonders if it’s really worth it. Especially now that one knows it doesn’t work. I mean, two weeks of watering has only flattened the radioactive fungus and produced a few strands of grass in anemic little patches that look like my chin the summer I was riding my bike twenty miles a day. I think the best I can hope for is that the teal food coloring will leach into the soil and camouflage it while I wait for the weeds to come back and do their job.

Fortunately, there were still numerous bald patches that I hadn’t dosed. So on Friday night I covered those with plain old loose grass seed, which I have been busily rinsing into the street ever since. We’ll see how that works out. I can only hope they’ll take root before water erosion washes the rest of the yard out entirely. If nothing else, maybe the seed from my yard will make it to the park and make up for the ones Trash and I killed last week.

You know, it wasn’t that long ago that my definition of yard work was “bringing an ashtray outside before the guests start smoking on the deck.” Now, reading back through this entry, and thinking about the money I’ve spent during the last couple of weeks on dirt (Dirt! I paid an hour’s wage for dirt!) and seed and fertilizer and sprinklers and a crap-ass bamboo rake that fell completely apart in twenty-four hours and a cunning little spigot-splitter device that allows me to water the front and the back at the same time, I wonder if I’m turning into someone’s dad. Not my dad, mind you, because our lawn always ended up looking good despite his being fairly relaxed about the damage us kids and the dog must have done to it. I mean, he did install that automatic underground sprinkler system by himself that one time, but I think that was just because he found himself with a free Saturday on his hands.

Anyway, I think I’m just putting off my ending here because I don’t have one. If the only thing more boring than a boring blog entry is watching grass grow, a boring blog entry about watching grass grow must constitute some kind of pan-dimensional tesseract of tedium. I’d promise to keep you posted on my lawn’s progress, but I’d like you to come back. Maybe I’ll just promise to tell you when it dies.

posted by M. Giant 3:22 PM 0 comments

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Monday, April 28, 2003  

Allergy Whiz

Over recent years, the more I became aware of the prevalence of allergies in the population, the more I appreciated not having any. I’m glad I got to enjoy it for a while.

I should have known they were coming. Both my dad and his dad got allergies after they were thirty. In Grandpa’s case, his environmental resistance went south after an occasion on which he mixed up a potent, home-brewed weedkiller recipe—equal parts DDT, jet fuel, mercury, and water from the cooling tower of a nearby nuclear power plant—and carried it in a five-gallon bucket that sloshed over and soaked the leg of his pants as he walked. This was before anybody knew how dangerous that stuff was, of course. I guess he figured he’d get rid of that black nightshade in the south forty if it was the last thing he did—and it nearly was. He recovered, and lived a long and healthy life after that, but he continued to present allergy-like symptoms when doused in deadly chemicals for the rest of his life.

When my dad was a few years older than I am now, he got sick when he was out of town on business, and he got a shot of some bad penicillin. I guess it was moldy or something. He instantly contracted serum sickness and swelled to a size that required him to be flown home in a cargo plane. He also recovered, but now he’s off all forms of penicillin for good and will cross the street to avoid a tablet of Erythromycin.

I envy them both. I don’t have a history that sounds like an origin story from Marvel Comics. All I have is a nose that feels like somebody buffed it with thirty-grit sandpaper and then detonated a tiny frag grenade in it.

There are several factors at work here, all of which tie into the fact that it’s spring. I have two cats who are doffing their winter coats, and one of them thinks my face is his closet. I’m spending an unaccustomed amount of time outside trying to get grass to grow on the uncooperative cookie sheet that is my back yard, and all the raking and bagging and gathering and trimming is kicking up enough dust and pollen to construct an allergen Golem.

I know, I know. I’m thirty-three years old, and I should suck it up. Other people have lived with allergies all their lives and you don’t see them standing out on a ledge (unless it’s to get away from the pollen and cat dander inside). But that’s exactly my point. I’m not a mature allergy sufferer who has made my uneasy peace with the world’s microscopic spikies and the suffering they cause me; I’ve only been doing this for a year. So I’m going to kick and scream and bitch about it like the one-year-old infant I am in this department.

Here’s something I’ve learned: allergies are worse than a cold. If you have a cold, you can take a couple of days off work, sleep sixteen hours a day, and marinate your brain in buzz-inducing cough medicine. If your allergies are acting up, too bad. When was the last time you heard of somebody being laid up with hay fever? I’d like to think that the social contract gives more leeway to sick people because…well, because they’re sick, dammit, and they’re going to get better, and their symptoms affect their whole bodies. Whereas those of us who can’t hold our histamines have woes that are confined to one small area—the nasal area, in this case, and if I just wait for them to go away I won’t be going to work until June. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the real reason is more insidious: allergies, unlike cold and flu and SARS, are not contagious. The social contract can be a self-serving, cold-hearted bastard when it wants to be.

I wouldn’t even mind being at work if I didn’t have to be awake the whole time. If I could take a nap, that would at least be a temporary break from the cycle I’m currently trapped in: the nose itches, which causes a sneeze, which causes post-nasal drip, which requires me to blow it, which triggers another itch, and repeat until I look like a drunk Michael Jackson.

So it’s clear what I need to do. I’ve made a plan of escalating measures, each step of which I will implement only if the previous step fails to work.

Step 1: Complain until nobody wants to be around me any more. Done and done.

Step 2: Dip more assertively into the huge stash of (entirely legal) allergy medicine that Girl Detective dropped on me last spring. I’ve been taking a Claritin a day, but the only satisfaction I’m getting there is from the sugar coating on the outside of the pill. Mmm, tasty.

Step 3: Buy a neti pot.

Step 4: Shrink-wrap myself until July 4. I think I still have that chemical suit lying around somewhere…

Step 5: Shrink-wrap the cats. Remember the coffee filters.

Step 6: Go to the doctor and see if I can’t get my upper respiratory system replaced.

Step 7: Use the neti pot (shudder).

I can tell things are getting bad when I’m actually considering the idea of pouring saltwater up my nose. Do you suppose I could get anesthetized for that?

Better yet, do you suppose I could get anesthetized until summer? Thanks, that’d be great.

posted by M. Giant 3:21 PM 0 comments

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Friday, April 25, 2003  

Briefest of Champions

I think I’ve discovered the secret to creating a winning Pub-Quiz team: draft someone’s mom or dad.

I’m not just saying that because parents know everything. Most people have been at least partly disabused of the notion of their progenitors’ omniscience by the time they’re old enough to be let into a bar. But parents are handy to have on your team when, say, a history round comes up, because they were around for more of it.

Our standard Pub-Quiz team roster is myself, Trash, Dirt, Banana, and Shitpixie. But the Quiz conflicted with Dirt’s pool league on Wednesday night, so Banana roped her mom into filling Dirt’s seat.

That sounds a lot naughtier than I meant it to.

Banana’s mom demonstrated her usefulness early on with a question about Korean history. Now, we’re just a bunch of ignorant Gen-Xers who don’t know anything about the Korean War aside from what we learned from reruns of M*A*S*H. But since Banana’s mom was not only there, but also in possession of the correct answer, we were in first place at the end of the second round. And the end of the third round, with a commanding lead of three points.

By this time, we were discussing whether we wanted to hold on to first place or deliberately slide to second to get the better prize. You might think that such a debate might constitute a jinx. You would be correct.

Here’s the thing about the picture round: there’s absolutely no way to practice or study for it. The Quizmaster gets these photos out of magazines or newspapers or celebrity yearbook sites or whatever, scans them into his computer, and distorts them beyond all recognition. Those photos—actually, now that I think of it, some of them are caricatures, which makes it even harder—are arranged in ten postage-stamp-sized, poorly photocopied pictures on a single sheet of computer paper. Then we have to un-distort them in our heads and identify the mentally un-distorted image we’ve just envisaged. It’s ridiculously hard. For instance, he distorted a shot of Celine Dion to make her look like Joan Rivers (which, admittedly, couldn’t have been that hard), then distorted that so we’d all say, “oh, that’s a distorted picture of Joan Rivers.” Bastard. We always blow the picture round. It is ever our undoing. We got three out of ten the other night. Most of the teams didn’t do much better, but unfortunately the teams who did were also the teams that were right behind us. The debate was no longer whether we would choose first or second place, but whether we were going to be able to claw our way back up to third.

As it happens, we did, thanks to a perfect score in the “real names of famous people” round (Quick, who is Declan McManus? Reginald Dwight? Calvin Broadus? Eithne Ni Bhraonain?). But with only the music round left, we still weren’t able to catch up to two of the teams that had passed us. We would have gotten second place if any of us had been able to identify the Prodigy song “Smack My Bitch Up” from the six seconds we heard of it. I have to say, Banana’s mom let us down on that score. Parents are supposed to know from “Smack My Bitch Up,” aren’t they? How else do they sing their babies to sleep?

In the end, the team that won was the team that’s won four of the five previous quizzes—including the ones where we took second. The group of savants known as Scotland Forever took home yet another batch of ugly little trophies that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole if you paid me. The Heavy Gang, whom we had briefly deposed from their perennial second-place perch, reclaimed their position and were rewarded with skanky bottles of some nasty-ass mead that’s probably swarming with SARS. As we grudgingly applauded their paltry achievements, we noticed something about them that we never had before.

Their members comprised a wide range of ages.

Dirt’s pool night is going to be on Wednesdays pretty permanently, as it turns out. As will Banana’s mom’s Pub Quiz night.

* * *
This week also represents the end of an era for the Kieran’s Pub Quiz. Our friend Bitter, who has been the Quiz’s hostess and scorekeeper for the two-and-a-half years since its inception, is leaving Kieran’s to go to another job. The Kieran’s crowd will miss her. We won’t, though, because we still get to hang with her.

And don’t get any ideas about favoritism on her part being behind our past successes. Need I tell you about the time that a team consisting of myself, Bitter’s then-boyfriend, and some random moron who wandered in from the front room came in second-to-last? No, I didn’t think so.

posted by M. Giant 3:44 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, April 24, 2003  

Putting the “Soft” in “Softball”

Trash and I live about a block away from a pretty nice park. It occupies two city blocks and it contains a basketball court, playground equipment, a kiddie pool, and the community center where we vote every once in a while. It also has a few baseball diamonds, complete with backstops. Trash and I brought our new balls, our new gloves, and her weenie new bat to one of them last night so she could practice hitting.

As we walked down to the park, Trash tossing a ball high in the air as I covered my head in panic, it occurred to me that it’s kind of a shame we don’t use the park more. I mean, we drive past it nearly every day, our tax dollars support it, and here we are coming up on a decade in the neighborhood and we’ve spent hardly any time there. I was glad that was finally changing.

Trash swung her bat while I threw maybe a half-dozen pitches at the dirt three feet in front of the plate before we got kicked out.

A park employee came out of the aforementioned community center and explained, very nicely and apologetically, that the section of the park we were on was off-limits. It seems that poor drainage had been slowly turning the park into a shallow pond over the past few years, so the whole lot had been re-leveled and re-seeded and now, if the Park Police caught any citizens trying to actually use the facility we’d paid to fix, we’d be subject to an eighty-five-dollar fine. This is the case until autumn.

How many times are we going to have to pay for this park, anyway? Am I going to have to start attending neighborhood council meetings now?

Trash and I are lucky enough to live in an area whose park density is just slightly less than that of Manhattan, so we were able to go to another park that’s only five blocks away in a different direction. Trash took her position in front of the backstop and I started throwing my horrible pitches in her general direction.

Once again, the wisdom of buying a six-pack of softballs became apparent. Because as it turns out, Trash can still hit. With one ball, we would have been stuck in a tedious routine:

1. I throw a pitch. 2. It rolls to a stop. 3. Trash walks halfway to where I’m standing (which is halfway between home plate and the pitcher’s mound) picks up the ball, and tosses it back to me. 4. I drop it. 5. I chase it across the grass. 6. I pick it up. 7. I throw a pitch. 8. It casts a tiny shadow on Trash’s shoulder as it soars over her head. 9. She walks back to pick it up, then taps it with her bat to lob it back to me, but it rolls up the third base line instead. 10. I chase it. 11. I throw a pitch. 12. She breaks into a run, chases it down, leaps into the air, and hits it at the apex of her jump. 11. I get in the car to go get it. 12. Repeat until suicidal.

The six-ball system offered us much greater flexibility, because we could run after several balls at a time instead of just one. This is why teams practice together, I think. With more people covering the field, it tends to minimize the chasing.

This is also why God invented batting cages, which I suspect is where Trash will be doing more of her batting practice in the future. Waiting to swing at the one good pitch out of twenty wasn’t going to do her much good, but we’re a little worried that if I keep pitching to her, she’s going to lose her ability to know when not to swing. And that’s a very important skill in softball. I should know; when I played, it was the only one I had.

After a while we swapped places so she could practice catching hit balls. When I used to play as a kid, I could never understand how my coaches could hit balls in a specific direction or at a specific height when I was lucky to hit the ball at all. Now I know that it’s not as hard as it seems when you’re a grown-up using a bat that’s lighter than an expensive steak. I hit Trash a few hot grounders and made her chase a few fly balls in between fouling into the backstop and whiffing entirely. I can only imagine how well I would have done at this if it were an activity I’d attempted to engage in since my early teens. Most of the balls that did go into the field tended towards trajectories that were within forty-five degrees of where Trash was standing. And the ones that didn’t? Well, running is practice too.

Obviously neither of us is in any danger of going pro, especially me. But that’s so beside the point that the point looks like a line from where it is. We’re getting a little exercise and some fresh air. We have an excuse to be outside, because as everyone knows, grown-ups always need an excuse to be outside (which is why barbecue grills were invented). We spend time together. We enjoy each other’s company. We have fun.

At least until she fires me for sucking so bad.

posted by M. Giant 3:40 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, April 23, 2003  

Play Ball

Trash has joined her company’s softball team. Their first practice is Saturday morning, and they’ll be having games (or “meets,” as Trash charmingly called them) every Thursday night.

Trash hasn’t played softball in at least ten years.

Obviously a couple hours of shagging flies on Saturday morning isn’t going to get her chops back in shape. So she has to do a little practicing on her own time. But if there’s a way to practice softball skills by yourself, I don’t know what it is. So I’ve been enlisted to practice with her.

I have also not played softball in at least ten years.

Last night, we went to Target and stocked up on the stuff we need. Picking out the right glove was a little tricky for both of us, especially given the selection at Target. Trash had trouble because her hands are too small for an ordinary softball glove. A number of the baseball gloves would have worked—for baseball. But all the softball gloves she tried on either flopped to the ground when she lowered her arm or wouldn’t fit over the fingers of a fourth-grader. Or made her hand too big.

“It’s supposed to make your hand bigger,” I explained. “That’s a good thing.”

“Yeah, but this big?”

“Bigger than a softball, ideally.”

“What about this one?” she asked, reaching for a child’s baseball glove the size of a silver dollar.

My options were even more limited because not only do I have tiny little woman-hands, the one I wear my softball glove on has its thumb installed on the wrong side. I tried on every southpaw glove in the store, and chose the half of them that was least uncomfortable. Trash, oddly enough, ended up with a “youth” size of the same model because that one was at least small enough that she could keep it on her hand by gnarling up her fingers inside of it.

We didn’t have time to go to a real sporting goods store, okay? Don’t even start.

Trash also picked out a 22-oz. aluminum bat. I didn’t think to heft it myself until we were already in the checkout line, and I couldn’t “heft” it even then. Unless by “heft” you mean the motion you use to lift one of those little plastic swords that bartenders sometimes spear maraschino cherries with. It was like swinging five empty soda cans welded together end-to-end. With the pop tabs taken off.

“You need a heavier bat than this,” I said.

“Really?”

“You use a heavier pool cue than this.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“You’re rusty. You’re not five. I’m going back and getting you a real bat.”

“Okay, but the very next size up.”

I ran back, and now Trash is the proud owner of a mighty cudgel that will smite an incoming projectile with all twenty-three of its ounces. I hope that kind of power doesn’t go to her head.

What have I forgotten? Oh, yeah, an actual softball. Don’t worry, we didn’t go to the park and mime throwing the ball around. Trash had it covered.

“Why do we need six balls?” I asked. We never had more than one or two in the garage at one time when I was growing up, and that was with three kids who played the game at one time or another.

“For when we lose them,” Trash answered reasonably. I could have pointed out that we haven’t yet burned through the one can of tennis balls we bought two years ago, but I let it go in order to address the more urgent fact that she was about to buy a bat that would probably get dented when dropped on grass.

Later, when we were taking frequent breaks from playing catch in the driveway with our stiff, creaky new mitts in order to repeatedly retrieve the first ball from the yard, the neighbors’ yard, the space under the deck, the garage, the trees, the power lines, the neighbors’ garage, and the neighbors’ dog, I had to admit she might have had a point.

Because we’re both rusty. I don’t want to use the phrase “throw like a girl” to describe my form, because it’s sexist and outdated. Trash, for instance, can still throw an underhand pitch with surprising velocity for someone who hasn’t done it during this millennium. However, I will say that when people use that sexist and outdated phrase, they’re talking about the way I throw. I could complain more about that expression, but I really don’t want people to start using the phrase “throw like M. Giant” either. So I’ll just shut up about that now.

Tonight we’re going to go to the park so she can practice hitting. Since there will be only the two of us, I imagine there will be a great deal more ball-chasing than ball-hitting. Especially if I don’t learn how to pitch in the next hour or so.

I’ll keep you posted on how spring training goes from here. I’d say it’s a success thus far; neither of us has been seriously injured yet.

posted by M. Giant 3:15 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, April 22, 2003  

Don’t Make Me Come Back There

You know how when you become an adult you find it easier to do things that seemed really hard as a kid? Like reach tall shelves, or pay rent, or refrain from putting your head through the drywall when no dessert is forthcoming?

This past weekend, I did something I’d never done before. Something I couldn’t imagine doing when I saw my parents do it. I drove from the Twin Cities to Nevada, Missouri in one day.

My parents used to do this several times a year, with the three of us kids in the car. Now they do it several times a year without us. Something tells me we’re all happier that way.

My dad comes from the area around Nevada (it’s pronounced “Ne-VAY-da” in this context). My mom comes from the greater Pittsburg, Kansas area, just across the state line. Most of the members of my extended family are still there. Ergo, most of our summers and significant school breaks during the seventies and eighties included at least one twelve-plus-hour odyssey to what my junior-high self waggishly called “Central America.”

Imagine two adults and three ill-behaved children crammed into a Delta 88 or an Oldsmobile Starfire hatchback for six hundred-odd miles. These days, people insist they need an H2 just to get one kid to soccer practice three blocks away, but it was a different time then. On the other hand, if my dad hadn’t gotten a promotion that came with the use of a new Suburban before we hit puberty, some of us wouldn’t have lived to see an H2.

So, yeah, part of the reason it seems easier for me is because it is easier now. Some of those factors are external. My parents had to contend with a national 55 mph speed limit back in the day. And when I say “had to contend with,” I really mean “obeyed.” With today’s speed limits of 65 and 70 (depending on the state), the difference really adds up over several hundred miles. Especially with my radar detector, which handily alerts me when I need to drop back behind the sound barrier.

Also, I-35 wasn’t the unbroken corridor it is now, which meant they had to get off the freeway at Bethany and bumble around on one-lane wheelruts for the last couple hundred miles or so. Now that the interstate is an unbroken corridor from Lake Superior to the Rio Grande, I can just hit the cruise control in Burnsville and settle back for a nap.

And some factors are internal. For instance, Trash and I have become seasoned road-trippers who can do more in one five-minute gas station stop than most people can do in a weekend. We travel light, which means no distracting spells of groping around in the backseat for the crimping iron. Trash can just reach back and grab whatever either one of us needs, because it’s sure to be on top. And, most of all, that backseat is unoccupied by three small, shrill-voiced news anchors giving us up-to-the-minute bulletins on who exactly is touching whom.

Seriously, I don’t know how my parents did it. Over the years, conditioning played a part—my sisters could fall asleep before we were out of the driveway, and I got into the habit of peeing every time we stopped whether I had to or not (sometimes I even got out of the car)—but it still couldn’t have been easy. Between the constant whining, fighting, stopping, throwing up into the food cooler, stopping, disputes over whose turn it was to sit in the front seat, disputes over which of the vehicle’s two cassette tapes* we were going to listen to, stopping, disputes over whether it had really been necessary to throw up into the food cooler, crying fits over fast food, and the time I held my younger sister’s head out the window until her tongue dried out, I can’t believe how many of those trips they survived. Because somehow, they survived every one of them. And kept doing it.

I figured that when I grew up, I wouldn’t be doing that to myself on a regular basis. And I don’t. Trash and I have only been down a few times since we got married—and two of those times, we rode with my parents. The issue of unauthorized touching takes on a completely different meaning in those circumstances, let me tell you.

But this weekend, I learned something kind of shocking: a drive that took a family of five over twelve hours in 1978, can now be done in less than eight hours by a determined childless couple with a fuzzbuster. We could have done it faster if we hadn’t timed things so we landed in a few Kansas-City-holiday-Friday-afternoon-road-construction traffic jams and gotten stuck behind people who stopped in the middle of the road to retrieve mattresses that had flown out of their pickup beds.

No, I’m not kidding about that last part.

Back when the earth could do a one-eighty in the time it took to get from point A to point B, a trip had to be a week long to make the drive worth it. When Trash and I have a week, we go somewhere we’ve never been. When we have four days we go somewhere we’ve never been, because flying to Austin takes less time than driving halfway there (Unless you do it the way we do. Shut up). But we were able to get to southern Missouri and back in three days, with a visit to Kansas and a stopover in Iowa on the way back. Now that I know it’s not as hard as I thought, maybe we’ll be making the trip more often.

Or maybe I’ll just feel guiltier about not making the trip more often.



* These two.

posted by M. Giant 3:18 PM 0 comments

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Monday, April 21, 2003  

This Is Not My Beautiful Cat

Strat was a stray when we took him in. A feral, violent beast of the streets, it took two tranquilizer darts to take him down—a dose that would have killed a rhino. We locked him into kitty-sized five-point restraints, hosed the blood and viscera off of him, and took a two-week vacation to let him acclimate himself to his new surroundings. During that time, he killed all my houseplants, the TV, and a hapless neighbor child in the course of working off his feline PTSD-related rage. Now he’s a happy, friendly housecat. And he never even tries to get outside.

Okay, none of that is true except the first sentence. And the second-to-last. The last sentence is the least true of all.

Strat’s escapes fall into three categories. Category One is when we’re sitting out on the front stoop, talking or hanging out or whatever with nothing between the cat and freedom but an unlatched storm door. And, you know, us. After some effort, Strat is frequently able to nose the door open and come dashing out to join the group, meowing triumphantly. Then he rubs himself on the concrete steps and eats some grass so he can deposit a nice chlorophyll-and-bile stain on our carpet later on.

Category Two is the opportunistic escape, in which he sneaks out the door while multiple people are going in and out. This works for him because not everybody has been conditioned to watch out for cat escapes every time they open the door, like we’ve been. On one of these occasions, several of us were hauling all of the band equipment out of the basement. When we got home six hours later, retrieving the cat from outdoors necessitated an extension ladder.

And then there’s Category Three, the most maddening and nerve-wracking. The front door doesn’t always latch properly if we don’t lock it. Given enough time, Strat is sometimes able to pry it open using his claws or his nose and pull a Steve McQueen without anybody realizing he’s left until someone notices that there’s still food in his bowl.

Which cues the embarrassing interludes of wandering around the neighborhood with a flashlight and a can of Pounce™, stage-whispering Strat’s name and looking all over for a flash of white fur. The worst of these occasions was one night when Trash came home late, and we realized later—at about 2:30 a.m., in fact—that we were short one cat. We gave up the search after an hour, hoping he’d come back on his own; sure enough, when I went out to have another look at 6:00 a.m., he was there in the front yard demanding to know why I hadn’t let him in sooner.

We had another minor Category Three last week. I was working in the yard, using both front and back doors, and I think Strat got out the front while I was in the back. On this occasion, we realized he had as much as an hour’s head start. I grabbed the MagLite™—it wasn’t fully dark yet, but I wanted something to clock him on the head with, if necessary—and headed back out, just in time to see a snowy blur vanish behind the house two doors down.

Normally Strat will come to me if I spot him outside, or at least wait for me to come to him. Sometimes he’ll wait underneath the deck and force me to flush him out with a rake, but the principle generally holds true. I figured I’d round the corner of the neighbor’s house and there he’d be, waiting for me to pick him up so he could pretend to be all indignant about it. But he was gone.

Okay, not entirely gone. I though saw a white flash streaking behind our garage, but I would have had to hop too many fences to get directly to him. So I went back out to the street, walked around to our garage, and the neighbor’s garage, and ascertained that he was—wait for it—gone.

This is pretty unusual behavior for Strat, even when he’s in escape mode, so I began to suspect that I had misread the situation. When I saw a white cat dash for the neighbor’s back door, I stopped being suspicious and became fairly sure.

See, the neighbors have a white cat as well. His name is Fievel, and he is the wussiest cat I’ve ever met. He’s been known to try to flee from his own whiskers. We once saw him chasing a squirrel at a fast walk, and the squirrel was hardly bothering to stay ahead of him. Apparently Fievel thought I’d been stalking him, trying to sneak up on him so I could dash out his circus-peanut-sized brain with my flashlight. Which I was, but only because I thought he was someone else.

I followed Fievel into the neighbor’s screened-in back porch, where he was taking their paint off with panicked howls at the back door and trying to jam himself through the airtight weather seal. I had to make totally sure it wasn’t my cat—I mean, I was pretty sure it wasn’t, but this one had the advantage of being right there in front of me, a claim my cat couldn’t make—so I picked him up. A cat in hand, you know. In terms of weight, this was more easily done than hefting Strat off the ground, but Strat has a reasonable expectation that when I pick him up, it’s not so I can eat him. Fievel had no such assurance. This was the first time I’d ever been able to get close enough to talk to him, let alone pick him up. I’ll never get to do it again, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it this time if he hadn’t been cornered. He screamed as though I were pulling his legs off, and when I put him down he tried to leap over the back door. Honestly, I don’t know why any creature should live in that kind of fear when it possesses a vertical of that caliber.

The neighbors weren’t home to let him in, so I left him to his panic attack and resumed tracking down the other white cat. He made it easy for me. Some feline yowling from a couple houses away led me to where Strat was locked in a motionless (but not soundless) staredown with another neighborhood cat of equal size. They crouched threateningly, their noses six inches apart, comparing lung capacities. I could tell Strat wasn’t really that up for the fight, because when I picked him up he put up less resistance than he does when I’m taking him out of the cat carrier. The other cat shrugged and went on his way. Apparently the animal kingdom doesn't buy into that whole "ha, ha, you got rescued, you're so lame" theory of conflict resolution.

Later I went and found the other cat and clocked it with my MagLite. It seemed a waste to have carried it around for nothing.

posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, April 17, 2003  

Hot Potato

There’s a semi-regular ritual in my life that happens once every couple of years or so. It’s happening again this year. I’m used to it, but this is going to be the first one that you guys are around for.

The company I work for got sold again.

There are probably companies where getting sold would prompt a panic throughout the veal pens, especially in the current economy. Here, people just go “meh” and get back to work. I started with “this” company nearly nine years ago. Since then, we’ve changed hands so many times that anybody trying to dust us for prints would be utterly confounded. We’ve had more owners than Microsoft.

It’s always the same procedure, although there have been some minor changes. It used to be that rumors would fly around the office for weeks, even months before a sale. Now nobody cares enough. We just get a notice to go to an all-office meeting, and everybody knows what that means, but we go anyway just to see who’s buying us and how much of us they’re buying. Then, later, we all go to these follow-up meetings where the executives from our new parent company (although, given the length of our previous associations, it might be more appropriate to use the term foster-parent company) talk to us in encouraging and soothing tones, as if they expect us to take the news with all the equanimity of third-class passengers on the Titanic. Instead they get people who are checking their watches after ten minutes and asking desperately probing questions like, “Will we get casual Fridays back?” These are supposed to be short meetings, but some of them end up consuming a fairly high percentage of the period that we’re owned by the company in question. Sometimes I think we should take down the illuminated sign on the front of the building and replace it with a giant LCD screen.

The good part is that I still get treated like an eight-and-a-half-year employee, because it’s not like I’m the one who left. Whether our site gets sold (which has happened), or our division gets sold (which has also happened), or the entire company we belong to gets sold (which, believe it or not, has also happened), the “same-desk” rule applies and I have all the benefits of a veteran. Plus we get all that corporate logo swag all the time. Several people in our office haven’t had to buy a coffee mug since 1994.

On the downside, this one job is taking up more and more space on my résumé. Now I’ll have to update it to read “Company E, formerly Company D, formerly Company C, formerly Company B, formerly Company A.” If nothing else, that’ll demonstrate some staying power on my part. I’m not a job-jumper; I simply outlast my employers.

Normally I don’t talk about work here, because it’s even more boring than the stuff I do talk about. Which is why today’s entry is so short. Also, I wanted to finish writing it before we got sold again.

posted by M. Giant 3:44 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, April 16, 2003  

My Grass is Ass Part II

So after I raked all the leaves and sticks and acorn fragments and neighbors’ dog’s tennis balls off the back yard, how did my new(ish) grass look? You know, the grass that I planted last year and assiduously nurtured until I had a lush carpet so green that it looked exactly the same through night-vision goggles?

Well, as it turns out, I kind of spiked the ball on the twenty-yard line there. I seeded at the end of May, got some sparse green stubble in mid-June, and figured the hard part was over. I decided to let nature take care of the rest. By August, I figured out that nature is a slack-ass. And when the snow melted, the only evidence that I’d ever put a single seed on the muddy ground was here.

This year, I’m doing it differently. Obviously I’m seeding quite a bit earlier. I read that that’s a good idea, because it gives the seeds time to get settled in and germinate before they have to start baking in the summer heat. Also, the tree in the backyard hasn’t sprouted its leaves yet, so the seeds will get plenty of sunlight before they start roasting. I just hope the snow we’re supposed to get this weekend doesn’t kill them outright.

This is the state I live in. Working outside in a T-shirt one Sunday, firing up the snowblower the next.

In any case, I’m back on my water-twice-a-day schedule. Except I get to skip today, because it’s been raining since last night and all of my grass seeds are getting plenty of water without my help. Or they’re simply riding a runoff stream to where they’ll eventually become a lush green carpet behind the neighbors’ garage.

I was going to skip watering last night, too. The forecast said it was going to rain any minute. Then the sun came out. I figured I might as well take ten minutes or so to hose down my barren plot. Coincidentally, that was the exact amount of time that the sun was out. Shortly thereafter, free water from the sky was landing on top of the water I’d bought from the city. Nature is a puckish slack-ass, apparently.

But another advantage of seeding early is that if this batch gets frozen, drowned, or rinsed clean away, it won’t be too late to try again. Last year my seeds became seedlings in two weeks. I could wait four weeks for these to pop up and still be ahead of last week’s schedule.

But, you know, here’s a question. All homeowners want healthy, green grass on their lawns. Why? It’s not like healthy grass is a neutral color or something. Paint a bedroom that color and see how it looks with your furniture. But for some reason, it looks perfectly normal and pleasant surrounding houses of every hue. I’m not sure how to explain that, but I just thought I’d bring it up. If for no other reason than to preemptively make myself feel better if this year’s grass crop fails as badly as last year’s and I’m left with that grim spread of naked dirt again.

After all, black goes with everything.

posted by M. Giant 3:24 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, April 15, 2003  

Fire! Fire! Fire!

Last week it was finally warm enough to boot up my chiminea for the first time this season. That’s kind of an odd statement, I realize; it makes it sound like it was so cold that flames would freeze solid, which was actually only true for a couple of months. But still, even when the temperature gets up to a relatively balmy thirty or forty or even fifty degrees, one feels a little silly acting all Jack London in the back yard, twenty feet away from a insulated, [usually] warm house. Also, until last week it got dark too soon to build a decent fire. We had maybe an hour of daylight left when we got home from work, and maybe half that when we got out of bed on the weekends.

But last Thursday, I finally got around to lighting a fire so I could burn our Christmas tree that’s been lying next to the deck, simultaneously drying out and silently mocking me for three months.

There is a right way and a wrong way to burn a Christmas tree, apparently. When my dad was about my age, he did it the wrong way. This method involves feeding the tree into an indoor fireplace horizontally, on the theory that as the fire consumes one end of the tree, it’ll make room for the other. Alas, fire is not a wood chipper, and in a matter of seconds, my dad was standing in the living room holding one end of a Christmas tree that was one-third in and two-thirds-out of the fireplace, yet entirely ablaze. Mom still tells us we’re all lucky to be alive.

So I used this rare opportunity to learn from my father’s mistakes, and fed the tree to the chiminea one dismembered branch at a time. The yellow, desiccated needles of each section caught instantly, sending a roar and a blast of heat out the front opening, and a mushroom-shaped column of flame out the top of the chimney. Trying to burn that thing in one piece would have been like trying to light just one end of a seven-foot-long match head. Fortunately, I’m smarter than that. As you will soon see.

So Thursday night, when it got dark, there was nothing left of the Christmas tree but a couple of smoldering logs in the chiminea. I washed the encrusted dirt, ash, pine needles, tree sap, and blood off my hands and congratulated myself on a job well done.

Then on Sunday, I had myself another little fire. The next-door neighbors have this ancient oak tree whose branches hang over our yard and shed twigs on it like a black cat on a white couch. I collected the bigger ones, raked the smaller ones into a pile along with the residual leaf-fall from the winter, and sat down to start feeding refuse into my little incinerator a couple of handfuls at a time. Eventually, the half-burned leaves started clogging up the combustion process, so I stirred the fire down to a low simmer, then went to work on the front yard for a few minutes while my ashes settled down to a more manageable level.

When I came back around the house, the flames had not only returned; they’d escaped. The pile of leaves I’d scraped onto the stone patio was pretty much black and quite a bit shorter, although it was still burning in several places. Including the part that the head of my plastic garden rake had been resting in. More on that in a minute. There was too much fire to stamp out, but the garden hose took care of it in a second or two. If the leaves had been on the grass, I probably would have been on the ten o’clock news that night. And on the Darwin Awards website the following month.

Seriously, what kind of idiot goes off and leaves a fire burning next to a big pile of dry leaves? Don’t tell me it could have been worse. I know it could have been worse. My Aim N Flame was on the ground next to the pile of burning leaves, and when I picked it up it was warm. That thing was practically brand new. If it had exploded, there would have enough butane in there to take out the whole ZIP code, I bet. Yes, it could have been a lot worse. It could hardly have been better. Suddenly my dad’s stunt with the Christmas tree didn’t seem so dumb; at least he didn’t just poke the crown into the fireplace and leave us kids watching TV in the living room.

Really, the worst thing that happened was some scorch marks on my patio that’ll probably scrub off. And my rake was ruined. But even that’s not all bad.

See, I think the paper adhesive label ignited first. And between that and the burning leaves, the actual plastic rake head got hot enough to catch fire. Most of one edge was totally consumed. When I picked it up it looked like a dragon had taken a bite out of it. Waving it around to blow out the fire only sent sizzling droplets of molten plastic in every direction. How is this good, you ask?

You know how some horror movies have that scene where the enraged peasants stream from the village, carrying pitchforks and torches? Who decides who gets what? And it you decide yourself, how do you choose between being able to skewer somebody with an agricultural implement and being able to see where you’re going? Well, I don’t have to worry about that any more. Now that I’ve figured out how to light an agricultural implement on fire, I can have it both ways and still be able to keep one hand free to hold my sandwich. Next time I have to storm a mad scientist’s laboratory, I’m going to be set.

Also, my house didn’t burn down, so that goes in the plus column as well.

posted by M. Giant 3:25 PM 0 comments

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Monday, April 14, 2003  

Palm Sunday, Part II

I hate blog entries that begin with the phrase, “so there we were.”

So there we were, in the lobby of a church we’d never been inside before. We were about to lead a parade of people we didn’t know into a church full of people we didn’t know. And as for what they expected of us, we didn’t know that either. Maybe we were just expected to walk in and sit down, or maybe we were supposed to do something at the front of the church, and maybe that something would involve stone knives and blood gutters. That wasn’t a chance we were prepared to take, but we also didn’t want to speak up and explain that, really, we’d just wandered in off the street, and if y’all could please line up behind somebody else, that’d be swell, thanks. No, somebody else I said. Dammit.

Trash and I both became aware of what poor weapons the palm fronds in our hands would make.

We began trying to communicate telepathically, and I think the adrenaline in our systems boosted the signal somehow. We had a plan, and we put it in motion.

The column of the faithful was poised to enter, with us at its head. The doors opened.

We whirled and made a break for the exit door. We started running as soon as we hit the sidewalk and didn’t stop until we were in the car. There was a horror-movie moment when the car didn’t start for a second, but it quickly turned over and we were on our way, a screaming mob of furious palm-wavers receding in the rearview mirror.

Or maybe it was just a very confused procession of people who thought they were supposed to march into the church.

Actually, we didn’t look in the mirror, and if they were screaming they were doing it very quietly, but we didn’t go straight home. We drove around randomly for several minutes, running stop signs and crowding yellow lights in order to shake off any possible pursuers.

For days, weeks, months afterward, any time we drove past that church, we’d speed up and duck down, as if we were fugitives. Even if it was 3:00 a.m. on a Wednesday.

When Trash’s stepsister got married there a couple of years ago, we were almost afraid to go back. But it was on a Saturday evening, and I think the statute of limitations had expired by then.

I’m not sure, though. Does anybody know what the statute of limitations is on ditching a church procession?

In any case, the first time we walked into the church was several years after we were expected to. And we were glad to see that in the intervening period, all of the stone knives and blood gutters had been removed. For the duration of the ceremony, at least.

posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments

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Friday, April 11, 2003  

Palm Sunday

This weekend is Palm Sunday, which on the Christian calendar commemorates the day Jesus pulled a Beatles-at-JFK. Then, five days later, we commemorate the day he got crucified. And people say today’s fans are fickle.

I don’t normally post on Sundays, and this week is no different. But I wanted to make this a Sunday-centric entry anyway, and I think I’ve figured out how to do that. As you’ll soon see. In any case, Palm Sunday always reminds me of another Palm Sunday several years ago. Although we didn’t know it was Palm Sunday until it was too late.

For us, it was just another Sunday morning. Believe it or not, we were driving around the neighorhood looking for a new church. We had done no research or prep work whatsoever on this project, mind you. We just got in the car and drove around, occasionally stopping and wandering into random buidings that seemed particularly pointy on top. The first few were already in session, so we kept wandering until we stumbled on a church about six blocks from our house which appeared to be between services. Or at least, so we determined by the number of people milling about in the lobby. Everyone seemed to know each other, so we tried to be onubtrusive. We ambled in, took up a position near the inner door, and waited to be allowed into the sanctuary.

Someone affiliated with the church—a deacon or some such—began moving through the crowd handing out palms. Trash registered some confusion. “It’s Palm Sunday,” I reminded her, as if I had remembered that fact before a frond had been thrust into my hand by a stranger. “They did this at my church every year when I was growing up.”

I was only partially right.

So we’re standing there, holding our palm fronds, waiting to taste-test this new (to us) house of worship, when the deacon or some such comes back up to us.

“Okay,” she says, “now, you’re going to be leading the procession up the center aisle and [spots before my eyes and panicked blood rushing in my ears drowning whatever else she might have had to say after that].”

Leading? Procession? What were these palm fronds laced with, anyway?

Trash and I pasted frozen smiles on our faces and tried to nod. It required bending at the waist, but we managed it. The deacon moved along.

That was when we peeked through the doors to the sanctuary. Which, we now saw, was already full. Most of the congragation was sitting in there already, waiting for the pal procession to come in and kick things off. A procession led by us.

Trash and I conferenced furiously in desperate whispers, bugging our eyes out until they slapped against each others’ cheekbones. Even assuming we’d be able to find the center aisle on the first attempt, even assuming we could get away with it, did we have any right to try? Basically we’d wandered in off the street and been handed, almost literally, something that was probably some kind of special honor within the parish community, bringing up the lead of what was likely a noble and grand tradition here. We had no business doing that. But on the other hand, it was too late to back out gracefully. How were we going to get out of this?

I’ll tell you on Monday.

posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, April 10, 2003  

Taxing My Patience

Trash and I did our taxes back in February.

That’s not entirely accurate. Trash did the taxes, sitting at my computer and finding and installing the proper software and plugging in the appropriate numbers and data and so forth while I turned the bedroom upside down looking for last year’s Form 3497/D, Schedule SDFKGHS349300LD0, with Attachment ð because I couldn’t remember where I put it last year. This always happens. Every year I screw something up on the taxes, and it not only throws a wrench in that year’s preparation work, it also comes back to bite us in the ass the following year. I should probably make an H&R Block-based joke about myself here, but that’s too obvious even for me.

But anyway, Trash once again overcame the obstacles I’d thrown in her way, got it all figured out, and did whatever she needed to do to file our taxes electronically. Then all we had to do was sign a form, mail it in, and sit back and wait to receive e-mail confirmation that our return had been…returned.

We signed. We mailed. We sat. We waited.

I guess that makes it sound like we camped out on the front step for six weeks, staring at the mailbox with the cordless phone between us, but that’s not accurate either. We got on with our lives, content knowing we’d done what needed to be done. We worked, we slept, we ate, we did married-people stuff, we did just-started-dating stuff, we hung out, we went places, we watched TV and read books.

At some point, all those Internet banner ads for tax-prep services started getting to me a little bit. Six weeks ago, they made me feel all smug. “My taxes are done,” I’d said a few weeks ago. Now I was saying, “My taxes are done. Right?” Because we never did get any confirmation that what we’d done had been received or acknowledged in any official way. It’s bad enough to have gone through the work and stress of putting the return together. It’s worse to have had to pay in this year, to the tune of two figures. Having some administrative error, on our end or theirs, get in the way of the thing getting processed on time would be intolerable. The last thing we need is to get busted for tax evasion. That’s what they got Capone for, you know.

So, a couple of weeks ago I started doing some calling. If things had gotten bollixed up somewhere along the line, I wanted to leave us enough time to get it corrected. Let’s just say it’s a good thing I started a couple of weeks ago.

Actually, no, let’s not just say that. If you want to check on your return, there are so many numbers to call that dialing them feels like you’re calculating orbit trajectories on a pocket calculator. Then you’re dropped head-first into one of a thousand labyrinthine, overlapping, automated phone mazes. And those will only help you if you’re checking on the status of a refund. And then you have to know the exact amount of your refund, which I didn’t—all I knew off the top of my head was that it was a negative number. And they don’t recognize those. It’s like they want us to be late with our payment. If you’re trying to make sure your payment got in, you’re out of luck until the goons from the Treasury Department bust your door down.

It took me a week and I had to lie to several automated phone mazes. I’m not proud of myself for that. But I eventually got through to a real person. And what a person.

Listen, lots of humor writers before me have gotten tons of mileage out of making fun of IRS employees. These uptight, impotent, bald, anal-retentive bureaucrats are ripe for calumny. And so are the men who work there. But that’s not going to stop me from saying that the IRS employee I talked to was awesome.

I hate calling people about stuff on the phone, because I can never express my position well enough to get through to the soul-dead drones at the other end of the phone who consider me beneath contempt because I’m even raising the question in the first place. But Anne at the IRS gave me some of the best customer service I’ve ever gotten over the phone. She was pleasant, she listened to me, she took me seriously, didn’t rush me off the phone, and my issue seemed just as important to her as it was to me. Her sunny, helpful attitude was so contrary to what I’d expected that my judgment was momentarily impaired.

“Now, your tax status is Married, filing jointly?” she asked me at one point.

“Yes, but my wife and I have an understanding,” I said.

Anne wasn’t able to give me an answer right away, but she promised to call me back by today at the latest. I know what that meant. It meant I’d be calling next Monday saying, “Anne, what happened?” and they’d say, “who are you?” and I’d say, “Nooooooo!” and then I’d wake up on the morning of April 16th at Camp X-Ray.

Except that Anne called me back yesterday. She’d resolved the issue—our return was in the system, but it was stuck in a technological roundabout like the Griswolds in European Vacation (“Look, kids! Big Ben! Parliament!”). It was entirely their fault and she was really sorry, but it wasn’t’ going to affect us in any way. I offered to send a backup check, just to be safe, but she nixed that idea. Even if it didn’t get processed by the fifteenth, she was personally going to make certain that we wouldn’t be on the hook for any late fees or crunchy beatings from repressed G-men. Then I asked her if it was too late for us to amend our return in order to tip her.

That’s right. I’m actually happy with the IRS right now. Anne succeeded where Push, Nevada failed.

* * *

Of course, it’s against the rules to talk about taxes without a little token bitching about what they’re paying for. In the spirit of that, we bring you…

* * *

“Patriot” Act, my ass. From a single, 880-word article in yesterday’s New York Times, emphasis mine:

“The Patriot Act has been an extremely useful tool, a demonstrated success, and we don't want that to expire on us," a senior [Justice] department official said on condition of anonymity.

Another senior official who also demanded anonymity said the department had held discussions with Congressional Republicans about how that might best be accomplished…

…An aide who demanded anonymity said of the “lone wolf” bill: "We support this bill as it is and that's how we want to see it passed.”

Do I really need to add anything else?

posted by M. Giant 4:29 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, April 09, 2003  

E is for Eh

So, back in the day, there was this part of Downtown Minneapolis called Block E. I never got to know it in its old incarnation; it was leveled before I started spending any significant time downtown. But apparently it was quite the wretched hive of scum and villainy. It was the place where you could find more iniquities per square inch than anywhere else in the entire state, outside of the capitol building in St. Paul. Dive bars, hookers, adult bookstores, opium dens, crime, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, you name it, it was there. It was Travis Bickle’s Times Square, compressed into a single city block and carted twelve hundred miles to the west.

But like I said, it was leveled in the eighties. The whole block was converted to a parking lot, and those who looked upon its destruction were turned to pillars of salt.

Over the next decade-and-a-half or so, different redevelopment plans were thrown out and shot down. A car lot. A casino. A missile silo. A temporary outdoor concert venue (that one actually happened a bunch of times, once under Smashing Pumpkins). Some seemed destined to become reality, only to be shot down all the harder. In the meantime, the parking lot sat there, a giant slice of prime real estate just waiting for someone to come do something, anything with it so people on Hennepin Avenue wouldn’t have to look at the Target Center any more.

Finally, some developers and the city agreed on a plan that includes more family-friendly establishments, like a Hard Rock Cafe, a movie theater, and a huge video arcade. It’s Giuliani’s Times Square, compressed into a single city block and carted twelve hundred miles to the west.

After the David Sedaris thing the other night, the group of us agreed to head over to one of the new establishments at the clean, sparkly, sanitized Block E. Specifically, we went to the restaurant that is attached to the video arcade. It was the first time I’d ever been inside a permanent structure on Block E. Unless you count the bus shelter that used to be there, which, if you’ve ever been inside a bus “shelter” in Minneapolis in January, you won’t. They were checking IDs at the door. Okay, it’s an arcade, but it’s Saturday night and they’re selling alcohol. Go ahead and card me. I kind of wish you hadn’t stuck the adhesive part of my wristband to my arm hair, but people are starving in Africa, after all.

Then, from our table, we witnessed a dramatic scene in which a young man in an advanced stage of inebriation was either dragging his equally inebriated girlfriend out the door with an arm wrapped around her naked midriff like a vaudeville hook, or using the arm to try to steady her as she struggled forth on the violently pitching deck of her personal space, or using the girlfriend as a battering ram to open the door. Our group, as well as the dozen-odd people waiting in line to get into the place, watched through the glass walls of the vestibule, ready to intervene if their animated discussion escalated past the verbal. After a minute or two, they seemed to reach a détente, and regained entry—on the condition they both stopped drinking.

Later, a bartender/host announced a tattoo contest. Let me explain something: this place is so huge that the host appears on closed-circuit video monitors posted throughout the two sprawling floors of the “arcade.” It’s like watching MTV Spring Break coverage but you know the VJ is less then a hundred yards away, even if you can’t see him. Anyway, the contestants came up to show their tats to the camera. But one female hopeful was only able to show hers to the people directly in front of her. However, the camera did capture the view from the back as she dropped her pants.

Drunken displays and bare asses. It’s like Block E never left.

Shortly thereafter, however, we did.

posted by M. Giant 3:21 PM 0 comments

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Tuesday, April 08, 2003  

Me Talk Funny One Day

I don’t claim to be David Sedaris. I don’t claim to be as funny as David Sedaris, or as good a writer as David Sedaris, or blessed with the ability to be poignant and hilarious at the same time like David Sedaris frequently is. However, there is one thing I can claim to have in common with David Sedaris, and that is that we were both inside the Historic State Theater on Saturday night.

Of course, he was on stage and I was up in the balcony, but I don’t think we need to split hairs.

He read a few of his stories and some excerpts from his diary, then opened the floor to questions. Somehow the issue of the war and its media coverage came up. David commented on the press conference where reporters asked Jessica Lynch’s parents probing, incisive questions like “how did you feel when you found out your daughter was alive?” He just knew it was killing those reporters not to have gotten that moment on tape, as if without the video archive, it never happened. But no doubt every reporter in the world was going to be present for Jessica’s release from the hospital. Can you imagine? Seeing her parents for the first time, after what she’s been through, after the emotional roller coaster they’ve endured on her behalf? Don’t the American people have a right to see that?

“I really want her to go up to her parents and shake their hands,” David said. “And then not go home with them: ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna get a ride with my friends, here. I’ll see you later.’”

The thing about David Sedaris is that some people love him and some people don’t get him at all. And whenever opinion is polarized about something like that, a few of the people on the positive end of the continuum are bound to come off a little kooky. Like a woman in the left half of the main floor. We could all tell she was going to be trouble before she got her third word out. It did take her about two minutes to get those three words out, so I suppose our prognosticating wasn’t as impressive as it sounds.

“I…just…wanted…to thank you…for coming…for being here…ever since…‘Little…elf……little …elf’…thank you…………..for saying…………………………

“………..

“It means…so much….”

“Thank y—ahem” David Sedaris said, because she was off again. Going on much in the previous vein. I couldn’t hear what exactly she was saying any more, because the other 2,149 people in the audience were beginning to shift uncomfortably. As the minutes ticked past, the hapless subject of this star-struck filibuster stood frozen behind his podium, transfixed by the crystalline spear of pure awkwardness that had nailed his squirming guts to the back wall of the stage.

A more hostile, less understanding group of people might have succumbed to the lowest urges of mob psychology, hissing or booing or possibly hollering, “Put a cork in it, Actor’s Studio.” But this is Minnesota.

Instead, we the audience took pity on our host, and on our rogue element, and most especially ourselves, by breaking into spontaneous applause. That was the ideal way to get out of the situation, because the crazy lady got to feel good about having said her piece, and the rest of us got to get out of there before Daylight Savings Time took effect. The only loser was David Sedaris, who maybe got a potential story stolen out from under him. And perhaps also you, who would have read that story and laughed and laughed. Sorry. But then, you got to read my version of it. Just read it again, and laugh this time, and we’ll call it even.

David Sedaris was surprisingly gracious for a guy who’s sold millions of copies of books in which he largely claims to be a self-absorbed little prick. “For those of you who couldn’t hear her,” he explained to the 2,149 people who had just rescued him from his public nightmare, “she was just saying some very nice things, and thanking me for coming. But really, my agent sets these things up. They tell me where to go, and I go there.”

No, I can’t claim to be David Sedaris. I wouldn’t mind having his job for a while, though. He has audiences who rescue him from interminable encounters with randoms. The rest of us just have to put up with them.

posted by M. Giant 3:14 PM 0 comments

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Monday, April 07, 2003  

Up the Alley

Went out last night and had a great time with the guys, but boy, is my ass sore today.

I haven’t been bowling for months, so I was pretty rusty. That’s also why my right glute is so worn out from the unaccustomed exertion. I never feel the burn back there when I’m throwing a sixteen-pound marble sixty feet, but I always get the charley horse the next morning.

Even though I hadn’t stepped inside the alley this year, the waiter spotted me on the way in and offered to bring me a Leine’s. So I guess you can go home again.

One thing has changed, though; I finally have a bag to carry my bowling ball in. It’s not an actual bowling-ball bag; it’s a small duffel bag. It’s part of a set Trash’s mom gave us for Christmas this past year. Obviously, it’s not bowling-ball-shaped or –sized, but I can zip my ball in it and carry it in and out of the alley so it doesn’t look like I’m stealing a ball. Because as we all know, all you need to prove a ball is yours is a bag to carry it in. It’s still a little awkward-looking though. The bag is about equal to the ball in circumference, but twice as long. So what I should really do is steal a ball from the alley to fill it out properly.

Now that I don’t have to buy a bowling ball bag, I can use the money to buy bowling shoes instead. Which I might have to. In a cruel joke, somebody appears to have taken all but one of the pairs of size 10½ bowling shoes clean out of the alley. That means I had the option of rattling around in a size-eleven pair of hollowed-out surfboards, or binding my feet geisha-like into size-ten ball-bearing cases. I went with the size-elevens. Sure, my feet filled them about as well as my ball fills the duffel bag, but now I had a perfect excuse for my bowling.

Because, as it turns out, I still can’t bowl.

I spent months trying to get my hook under control. I practiced keeping my thumb pointed forward, keeping my swing straight. I succeeded too well. Now I couldn’t bowl with a curve if you threatened to stuff me down the ball return. I could throw the ball on a horizontal arc past my shoulder, rotate my wrist on the release, and go into a breakdancer’s backspin for the follow-through, and the trajectory of my ball would be straighter than the boards it traveled on. Believe me, I tried. It was a little awkward when I only had the ten-pin standing, and had to practically bowl from the lane on my right to knock it down.

But it was a good time, because this was a supportive group of guys. No wagering, no trash-talking, just everyone wanting to do their best and see everyone else doing their best, with sincere cheers and high-fives all around with every strike and Hail-Mary spare pickup. All that camaraderie and male bonding made it easy to see why bowling leagues are always springing up like furry colonies in the refrigerator. It’s hard to hope that the guy next to you chokes when he’s drinking out of the same pitcher of beer.

And if the guy next to you is me, it’s also entirely unnecessary.

posted by M. Giant 3:16 PM 0 comments

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Friday, April 04, 2003  

Leno

I heard a radio commercial today that briefly caught my interest. It seems Jay Leno is going to be doing a live standup show here in Minnesota.

Let me just say right now that I’m not a fan of the Tonight Show host. On the other hand, I do have dim memories of a very funny young comedian from the eighties named Jay Leno. Maybe that’s the guy who will be playing the main room at the casino. That guy might actually be worth seeing. And let’s face it, when is any of us ever going to get a chance to see that guy again? The guy who hasn’t had every edge sanded off by network executives and focus groups and censors and joke writers who weren’t funny enough to get gigs on Just Shoot Me? Maybe Jay was inspired by Jerry Seinfeld in Comedian to go out and tour the country and actually take risks. Of course, Comedian showed Jerry bombing at one gig. Even getting to see Jerry Seinfeld bomb live and in person must be a rare and magical experience. But for sheer, once-in-this-century bizarritude, it wouldn’t come close to seeing Jay Leno kill in person.

All this went through my head as the announcer opened the pitch. Then it fled the second the commercial got to the first audio clip of Jay himself.

“Saw that joke coming,” Jay “quipped.” End of Jay clip.

Those four words were enough to remind me of every Leno monologue I’ve ever seen him do since 1992. Not that there’s been a lot of those. I got so tired of listening to myself think “saw that joke coming” that I considered deafening myself. I did get a few breaks though. Sometimes I would think, “I would have seen that coming, but I thought it was too lame to actually come. And yet come it did.” Who thought to splice that phrase—that one, Leno-damning phrase—so early into the spot? Someone who secretly wants people to stay home? A competing casino? David Letterman?

The announcer went on to say that Jay was returning to standup, where he got his start. Thanks, I knew that already. That cued another Jay audio clip:

“This fixation on me has gotta stop!” Surge of raucous laughter, led by Kevin Eubanks.

Way ahead of you there, Jay.

The announcer went on, then yielded the floor to another Jay clip:

“Here’s something.”

And the announcer blathered something about Jay’s observational humor blah blah blah. Okay, I’m all for observational humor, as should be thunderingly apparent by now, but our example of Jay’s special brand is “Here’s something”? No follow-up, just weak, blunt segue? Did that become his catchphrase when I wasn’t looking? And if it did, do you think he’s happy about it?

The final Jay clip was one I couldn’t fully decipher, highlighting the fact that he’s funniest when you can’t hear what he’s saying. But I’m pretty sure it was some self-deprecating comment about his monologue not being funny, which is exactly the kind of thing you want to include in a commercial designed to get people to come out and laugh at a monologue. I’m thinking the commercial’s producers just taped one episode of The Tonight Show at random and pasted in the least enticing snippets of Leno-ese they could find. Or maybe NBC wouldn’t give them permission to use any actual jokes from the show. Or maybe they just figured that if they found one funny thing Jay had said, they’d just have to find four more, and they’d like to sell some tickets in advance. In any case, the spot was alarmingly effective; it completely talked me out of doing something I might have otherwise done.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Jay wanted to do what Jerry had done, but in Jay’s own way. That is to say, wrong. Jerry played actual comedy clubs instead of huge Native American casinos, and I don’t think he took out radio ads for his shows, and he came up with his own material and polished it on the road just like real working comedians do. In Jay’s case, he’s done the opposite—except possibly for that last part. And I say “possibly” in the sense that his studio audience might “possibly” laugh if there weren’t a neon sign and an army of grips signaling them to do it.

I remember an episode of The Tonight Show from years ago when Jerry Seinfeld was a guest. He was telling Jay about his new summer replacement series, The Seinfeld Chronicles. “It’s my own show,” Jerry told Jay, pointedly referring to Jay’s guest host status at the time (I said it was years ago). Jay laughed good-naturedly, then asked a few questions until Jerry was forced to admit that his show hadn’t actually been picked up for the regular season. “Ah, a bird in hand,” Jay said triumphantly. That was the last time I saw Jay get the upper hand on Jerry, although obviously things worked out pretty well for both of them in the long run. Now it seems like Jay’s trying to catch up with Jerry, but it’s Jerry who’s going to have the last laugh.

Argh, I can’t believe I just said that. That’s something Jay Leno would say.

posted by M. Giant 3:22 PM 0 comments

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Thursday, April 03, 2003  

Hot in Therre

My schedule, my dad’s schedule, and the proper parts finally converged last weekend in a way that allowed us to finish installing our new (used) oven. You’d think, after nearly two months of being without a fully functioning oven, living off what scraps we can scrape together out of the microwave, toaster oven, stove, and credit card, that we’d be anxious to christen our new kitchen appliance the moment it was up and running.

Ew, not like that. Also, ow.

Except we didn’t. We’d been living without an oven for so long that we’d almost forgotten what to use one for. We’d just “enjoyed” a batch of unevenly cooked biscuits from the toaster oven that very morning, in fact. We’d even gotten used to walking past the gaping metal hole in one wall of our kitchen, where I was storing the tools we were using for the project because we’d be wrapping it up “any day now.” Not that that last part was so hard, because our old oven was so ugly that nailing a dead badger to the wall in its place would have been an improvement.

But anyway, my dad came over on Sunday with the part he needed and we got the new oven up and running in an hour or so. The hardest part was figuring out how to fit together the puzzle of metal rods that constitute the adjustable broiling rack and motorized rotisserie spit. But once we got that out of the way, we had a brand new (to us), clean, shiny oven that actually fits the current décor of our kitchen rather than looking like the anachronistic eyesore that our old oven was.

Last night, I fired it up for the first time.

It’s not really accurate to say we never use our oven. It’s more true to say we are always using our oven, because if nothing’s baking in it, we’re using it for storage. We have more stuff than space in our kitchen, and even though we quit getting new kitchen stuff and started buying new kitchen space a while ago, the ratio is still askew. That means we use the oven to store the overspill of cookie sheets and casserole pans between meals. I hope you’re not too shocked to hear that.

Anyway, before I put Trash and my head-sized potatoes in the oven, I took those items out of the oven and set them aside. Then I popped our foil-wrapped starch bombs in our shiny new oven, set the timer, and went off to do something else.

You can probably tell what direction this is taking based on that last sentence.

Ten minutes later, two rooms away, I picked up a whiff of hot plastic. Oops.

I went into the kitchen, where the smell of heated petrochemicals bordered on toxic. I’d forgotten the casserole pan in the broiler section of the oven. The casserole pan with the plastic lid. The lid whose edges were still neatly clamped around the top of the pan, but whose top had melted into a navy-blue puddle with a big hole in the middle. The letters embossed on what used to be the top of the lid were now so distorted they were illegible, but I imagine they included something along the theme of “Do not use lid in oven.” Again, oops.

But it’s not a tragedy, even on the pettiest of domestic scales. None of the plastic dripped into the actual oven, imparting our brand-new appliance with an inexpugnable aroma of a chemical factory. Once the lid cooled, it peeled neatly off the glass pan, leaving the latter in perfect condition. And the potatoes turned out just fine.

So our new oven has been well and truly christened. Not only have I cooked something in it, I ruined something in it at the same time. It’s part of the family now.

posted by M. Giant 3:20 PM 0 comments

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Wednesday, April 02, 2003  

Urban Myth Ground Zero

Stop reading right now.

I’m not kidding.

Just stop.

No? Okay. I warned you.

There was a bug in my wife’s pudding this morning.

It’s still not too late to stop, you know.

Neither of us likes to get up early enough to eat a decent breakfast at home, so we tend to enjoy the most important meal of the day when we get to our respective desks in the morning. I’ll usually have a granola bar or two, and Trash has a little container of yogurt. Today she felt like supplementing it with a single-serving pudding cup (whose brand name I won’t mention pending possible litigation) because some days, one extruded plastic blister full of sweetened goo isn't enough.

So she got her plastic spoon and her pudding cup and she peeled the layer of laminated foil off the top, settling into enjoy a few minutes of smooth, creamy, chocolatey goodness. The advantage of mass-produced, store-bought pudding is that it’s so thoroughly mixed that you know you won’t find any lumps. But generally it isn’t mixed enough to render crunchy insect remains as smooth and creamy as their pudding medium. That’s pretty much the one thing to be grateful for in this situation.

And it’s not a situation where the bug saw an opportunity and leaped in, as once happened to me with an unattended can of root beer and a tremendous june bug that I nearly had to unhinge my jaw to spit out. One second Trash was holding a factory-sealed container, and the next she was looking at a dairy snack garnished with chitin.

She called me, in something of a state. She explained the situation.

“We’re rich!” I crowed.

“Shut up,” she snapped

You know how they say the only worse thing than finding a worm in your apple is finding half a worm? Trash couldn’t tell whether her uninvited breakfast guest was present in his entirety or not, since that would have involved carefully using pointed tweezers to fish out all the legs, antennae, bug guts, and bits of exoskeleton. Then she would have had to reassemble them on her desk, using pudding as the only available glue. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t convince her over the phone to perform this little experiment. Girls don’t like yucky stuff, I guess.

She wasn’t even able to tell what kind of bug it was. Now we’re going to have to throw away the other five containers in the six-pack, because who knows whether our little friend was a tiny creature who only contaminated one cup, or a beetle the size of a fist who is now scattered in pudding all over the Midwest?

I told you to stop reading.

Trash was already paranoid about accidentally eating bugs. I mean, even more than most non-Fear Factor contestants are. We had a small aphid problem in our kitchen a few years ago. Now that we store our sugar and flour in airtight plastic containers they’ve gone away, but Trash still won’t eat a bowl of cereal if the box has been out of her sight since she opened it. Now she’ll never eat pudding again. She’ll probably never eat chocolate again. She probably won’t eat anything at all for the rest of the week.

She immediately e-mailed the company, of course. If she’d had a scanner in her office, she probably would have dumped the contents out onto the platen as proof. To their credit, the company responded promptly, sincerely, and apologetically, letting her know they would get back to her soon with a more complete response. I imagine messages like that kick over quite the anthill of activity at food packaging companies. If you’ll pardon the expression. They’ve promised to make it up to her. I just hope they don’t try to make it up to her with a free crate of pudding. In the meantime, she has to hold on to the evidence.

Which means that tucked away in a dark corner of her office is an open pudding cup that contains all or part of a dismembered representative of the insect-American community. Trash is working very hard not to think about it. Perhaps now you are too.

If you’re thinking you might stop reading now, don’t bother. It’s way too late.

Bon appetit!

posted by M. Giant 3:22 PM 0 comments

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