Moving tips

When the movers have their hands full with heavy things, help them keep cool by spraying cool water into their eyes.

The last thing to do when you leave your old apartment is to place a bowl of potato salad on the kitchen counter for the next tenant as a "Welcome!" It's good karma.

When tipping your movers, it's a mark of distinction if the quarters are freshly minted (current year).

Christopher Hitchens on graffiti

I missed this when it first appeared on slate.com, but found it published in The Best American Magazine Writing 2008: Christopher Hitchens on the subject of bathroom graffiti, inspired by the 2007 "wide stance" incident of Senator Larry Craig.

The graffiti in cottages [British gay slang for public bathrooms] was all part of the fun: On the toilet wall at Paddington Station was written: "I am 9 inches long and two inches thick. Interested?" Underneath, in different handwriting: "Fascinated, dear, but how big is your dick?"

(Link)

Nose Down, Eyes Up by Merrill Markoe

Gil, who converses with his dogs, has a problem with Dink, the dog who can't remember the difference between "inside" and "outside."

...the other dogs all ran out into the yard. Only Dink stopped and came over to consult with me for a minute.

"Right now: Are we inside or outside?" she asked.

"You're inside," I said.

"Oh, good," she said, as she began to squat and pee.

"NOOO," I said, picking her up and quickly carrying her outside, where I deposited her on the lawn. "Pee outside."

"Right. Right. Got it," she said as she squatted on the grass.

Later:

"Okay. I have one other question about being here," said Dink. "Should I pee in the outside where the trees are or the outside where the stove is?"

"The stove is inside," I sighed.

"Right, right, I knew that," said Dink. "I got confused for a second because I always pee wherever there are rugs."

"Yes, but that is always wrong," I said. "Rugs are inside."

"When did that start?" said Dink.

-- from the novel Nose Down, Eyes Up, by Merrill Markoe

What's his problem?

I like the flavor of coconut; I have a box of coconut cookies in the pantry right now. Unfortunately, this week they've furnished the office bathroom with coconut-scented hand soap. It took me a moment to identify it, but this is bad news. I get back to my desk and while my mind is occupied with whatever's on the computer screen, one of my hands tends to move up to my nose and I inhale. It smells really good. Now whenever my boss glides silently past my cube, he's apt to find me sniffing my hands.

My magnetism

First time: I was the first one to board the Greyhound bus for the 90 mile trip. I had about 60 seats to choose from, and I took an aisle seat about five rows back. After a while a second passenger came up the steps into the bus, a nondescript man who had 59 seats to choose from. He chose the one directly in front of me and reclined.

Second time: I rented a huge Ford Explorer SUV to run errands and get some large items at Target. I drove into the Target parking lot on a Sunday morning; the lot was completely empty. I parked about three spaces away from the store. I got out and had opened the SUV's doors on both sides while trying to figure out how to lower the back seat for loading big stuff. A second car drove into the lot and parked next to me, inches from my open doors, when they had 300 spaces available.

Third time: I like to do these things in threes, but I don't have a third one yet, so... kids! Don't do drugs!

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Trip

I started watching Jon and Kate Plus Eight on The Learning Channel earlier this year. In various episodes I watched that family travel from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, California, Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, and New York, and I realized that any one of those four-year-old kids have accrued more frequent-flyer miles than I'll ever have.

The last time I traveled for a vacation was September 1997: We hadn't heard of Monica Lewinsky yet, Princess Diana had just died, and America was learning to fall in love with a band called Chumbawamba. After that, I fell into a rut.

When I was a kid my family went on vacations all over the place, and in 1974 we visited Washington DC. I decided to go there again by myself. Last week I landed at Reagan airport around 8:30 on a Thursday morning and rode the subway into the city. The commuters all looked just as bored as a trainload of Chicago commuters, in contrast to bug-eyed me, on my first trip in years.

Thirty-five years ago, as we remember it, our family had free, unescorted access to most of the Capitol building. Inside, we had climbed marble steps that were so old they had depressions worn into the areas used most often. In 2009, the Capitol has a newly completed underground Visitor Center with lots of great exhibits, but visitor access to the actual Capitol is limited to a short walking tour and any tourist caught away from supervision is removed by security. This is all understandable.

One of the dozens of exhibits in the Capitol Visitor Center was about Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress. Her first term started in 1917 and she voted against the US joining in World War I. After her first term ended in 1919, she didn't win a second term until 1941, and after the Pearl Harbor attack in December of that year, she was the only member of Congress to vote against the US entering World War II. An exhibit photo shows her after that vote waiting in a phone booth until she could get a police escort to safely get her out of the Capitol. Well, she was consistent.

The best part of the trip was visiting the Newseum, a one-year-old institution devoted to the accomplishments of journalism. In addition to exhibits on all aspects of print and electronic news, the place has several slabs of the Berlin Wall (1961 - 1989) and a twisted lengthy piece of the radio tower that slid down from its position on top of the World Trade Center in 2001. The Berlin Wall presentation included an interesting note on how East Germans used television and radio as a means of "intellectual escape" when the wall prevented them from going west.

Another Newseum exhibit open for this year only covers the FBI's most newsworthy cases. It includes a poem written in Arabic on a legal pad by Saddam Hussein, as a gift to an FBI agent. He had grown to trust (and apparently like) the Arabic-speaking agent who was assigned to establish a rapport and gather information on what Saddam really knew once he was captured.

I also toured the headquarters of National Public Radio. Our little tour group got to see various studios, lots of employee cubicles and computer equipment, and NPR host Scott Simon in a glass-walled room recording an interview (for later broadcast) with a professor speaking from London. Many thanks to Alan the tour guide for his depth of knowledge and restraint in not making a direct solicitation for donations even as NPR had major layoffs in Los Angeles.

The most crowded spots were the Lincoln Memorial and the National Air and Space Museum, so if you ever go there but dislike crowds, you might try those things as early in the day as possible.

On Saturday, April 4 the city had its annual Cherry Blossom Festival parade down Constitution Avenue; it was the peak week for this year's blossoms. While I skipped the parade, I did see some of its participants. I came down to my hotel's lobby at 7:30 that morning, hearing a pronounced clattering sound around the corner. I found a group of children in cherry-blossom-pink sweatshirts, all wearing tap shoes and testing them on the linoleum floor.

Later that day I noticed that the Navy and Army had set up recruiting booths near the parade route but I assumed they did that every Saturday. I couldn't imagine they assembled downtown just once a year to snag the demographic interested in both (1) the peak of the cherry blossom season and (2) serving their country in a military capacity.

Tom Waits on Disneyland

While cleaning out my closet, I found this magazine with an article that quotes Tom Waits. He had just finished recording something for a CD of songs from Disney movies.

Tom Waits traces his mordant version of "Heigh-Ho (The Dwarves Marching Song)" to a trip to Disneyland with his kids. "It was a living hell. They hit you up for 30 bucks to go in there and the whole thing is like a Ralph Steadman drawing. I spent an hour trying to get out of there, and we were jammed in like lemmings. I think my version of 'Heigh-Ho' came from that.

"Part of exploring these songs now," Waits observes, "it's like, what did they represent to you when you were young, and how did it change? For me, that [original] 'Heigh-Ho' with the whistling and all... the dwarves are going to work in the mines, they don't know who they're working for, it doesn't matter, they just love working... which is like the people who work at Disneyland. 'We don't get much, we wear these little uniforms, but that's okay, we like to work.'

"This is more of what it is really like, with the jackhammers and piledrivers and machinery. So it seems to me like we got something that could almost be a new ride at the park," Waits muses. "The 'Heigh-Ho' ride: They put you in there and chain you to a machine you don't understand and make you work for eight hours straight. And at the end you're paid absolutely nothing. That's the ride."

-- From page 31 of the January 1989 issue of Musician magazine, article by Mark Rowland.

Technology is not that hard to understand

My friend Joe was working in a bank in the early 1980s when they were introducing Automated Teller Machines. Part of his job was to show inexperienced customers how to use the ATM. He was showing a tiny elderly woman how to withdraw money by first inserting her card, then pushing the buttons, etc., and at the end of the transaction she said, "...and then the man inside the machine pushes the money out the front."

Joe said, "No, actually the machine does that automatically; that's the whole point of having the machine."

"No, I can see the man there inside the machine," she said.

Joe leaned down to the level of the tiny woman and looked where she was pointing, through a horizontal slot in the ATM. He could see a bank employee refilling the machine with new bills. "OK," Joe said, "there's a man there now, but..."

Mission of love accomplished

It looks like my initiative to raise awareness of Valentine's Day was successful. I hadn't seen enough publicity about the holiday and worked to promote it in all mainstream media and businesses. Everyone but the local funeral home cooperated. (Wait 'til next year!)

My parents have been married 48 years and because of this, my dad has never had to prepare meals or wash clothes. Likewise, my mom has never had to understand investing or the economy as my dad does. I trust that they will never experiment with switching roles because if they did they'd be broke, starving, and naked in about an hour and a half.

At dinner with O, she noted that her grandparents will celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary this year. She lamented the fact that, at her age, if she ever got married she'd have to live until age 102 to have a 65th anniversary. That's too long though; you don't want to be married 65 years. Call it quits at 50 years, and after that party, pull off the ring, claim irreconcilable differences, and hit the singles' bars.

A message to immigrants, perhaps

"Way I see it is, if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us."
-- A man in Oklahoma shares his thoughts with Mark Slouka, as recounted in his editorial, Harper's Magazine, Feb. 2009.

Notes to self

Remember:
Johnette Napolitano - Lead singer of Concrete Blonde
Janet Napolitano - Governor of Arizona and Barack Obama's nominee for secretary of Homeland Security

In the search for a macho bar soap, do not buy any more Irish Spring MoistureBlast with HydroBeads because it smells like bubble gum.

Overheard at the office: "All married couples have problems sooner or later. It's normal. But it's no reason to consider getting all mixed up in an office romance. If every married person cheated on their spouse by sleeping with a co-worker, the whole US economy would go down the tubes... Wait."

Worst use of an exclamation point

"View your electric bill online!" -- Seen on the back of an envelope from Com Ed.

Minutes of lost productivity

After overhearing this at work I froze at my desk and my eyes lost their focus for a full minute: "I haven't shaved my legs in so long they look like Christmas trees!"

Dear Mister Answer Man

Dear Mister Answer Man,
I was sweeping and mopping my floors this weekend. On the stereo at the time I was playing music from James Bond movies. Somehow this seemed inappropriate and I felt foolish doing household chores with this soundtrack. Is this a normal feeling to have?
Jerry in Lombard

Dear Jerry,
Your discomfort is understandable. The process may work better if you picture silhouettes of naked women doing gymnastics in slow motion while wielding brooms and mops.

Hot and sweaty but only along my right side

1985 - I got custody of Grandpa's car when he lost the ability to drive. It was a 1974 Buick, a huge rectangle of a car, light blue.

I was night manager of a business that was open until 9 pm, so I had to lock up after the employees were all signed out for the night. We worked one night in December that was unusually cold, and after I locked the offices and got out to the snowy parking lot, there were only two cars remaining, mine and the one Nicole and Nell came in. Their car wouldn't start and I lacked jumper cables.

Nicole and Nell were a matched pair as far as their weights, around 240 pounds apiece. When they asked for a ride home, it was not a tough question because the Buick could easily carry all of us and a couple more, if needed. Nicole and Nell were right there beside me, purses in hand, when we found that my car's back doors were frozen shut on both sides.

My eyes shifted from them to the front seat as I made some mental calculations of what would be feasible, and they started to laugh. Both front doors still worked and the three of us got in on the front seat. I was built like a blade of grass and found that if I reached to the right, I still could get both hands on the steering wheel. They lived on the west side so it was a lengthy ride across town and we could not stop laughing.

Remembering anecdotes of the worst incidents involving the local cops, we could've been pulled over by an officer curious to know what a skinny white boy was doing with two full-figured African-American women in such high spirits, and why they felt the need to share the front seat with me in a massive sedan on the rough side of town long after dark. No problem, and I had forgotten about it for years until I started remembering cars I used to have.

And that's why Chicago is known as the City of Decorum

The sign on the CTA bus yesterday had many of the usual prohibitions, plus one that caught my eye:

NO SMOKING
NO OPEN FOOD OR DRINK
NO RADIOS
NO WEAPONS

All the rules are illustrated with a little symbol covered by a red diagonal line. The "NO WEAPONS" rule has a handgun covered by the red slash.

So here's the scenario imagined by the Chicago Transit Authority: A citizen is about to get on the bus when he sees the sign, a friendly reminder. Suddenly he remembers he's carrying a Luger. Sensitive to the potential embarrassment of discovery, the citizen discreetly retreats and returns home to put his gun safely away before going out.

Emotional intelligence

A friend got some bad news recently, and I tried to be as supportive as I could be, because she had been so sympathetic to me during a bad situation years ago. I was shocked by her bad news, and needed to tell her, above all, that she still had friends ready to be there for her. I was searching for the right words, and eventually found them, I think, but in my desperation I nearly blurted out something like

Everywhere you look, everywhere you go (there's a heart), there's a heart, a hand to hold onto. Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, there's a face of somebody who needs you. Everywhere you look, when you're lost out there and you're all alone, a light is waiting to carry you home, everywhere you look, everywhere you look.

This would've been a mistake, to rely on the theme from Full House in a time of condolence.

For future reference, I need some independent confirmation on whether I'm being a good person to lean on in a troubled time. I got a book called Emotional Intelligence, which should help someone like me, who feels a little clueless. I was struck by the cover, which shows the face of a young woman looking off to the side. How flattering it must be, to be chosen as the Face of Emotional Intelligence! That woman must get a lot of friends coming to her for empathy and understanding.

Actually, the woman on that book cover looks like my downstairs neighbor. I should go tell her my problems next time I see her on the stairwell; I bet she'd be a good listener.

Think Muppetly, act locally

It was his sixth birthday and he was getting a party with a Muppet theme, per his wishes. He had one additional request.

"I don't think we should eat meat at my birthday party."

"Why, are you a vegetarian?"

"No, but the Muppets are animals."

Chicken was served. (It was good enough for the Swedish chef.)

Favorite train encounters, summer '08

1. I saw my favorite Chicago online diarist, Mimi Smartypants, and her redoubtable four-year-old daughter Nora standing in my usual spot on the platform waiting for the same train as me. I had never met Mimi although I've read her site every week for at least five years. I discreetly did a double-take, only three times, and didn't approach them. Not a fan of the awkward. When the train came, I took a different car than theirs so I wouldn't be tempted to spy. Then, remembering all the entertaining posts Mimi has written about Nora, I imagined them performing a song-and-dance number to unanimous acclaim in the aisle of their train car, something like "Me and My Shadow," with straw hats and canes, Nora's accessories in the tiny kid size.

2. The little girl standing right next to me in the train was crying as she talked to her parents on her cell phone; she looked like Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine. She had gotten on the wrong train and was surrounded by people twice her height, not knowing where she was going. She shut her tears off and got advice from her parents on how to get on the correct train and hung up. I asked if she needed any help but she was OK, just waiting for the train to stop so she could get on one going south. I said I had made the same mistake last year (true) and it was really embarrassing. She nodded along with my story and we had nothing else to say; then she got off and immediately disappeared in a crowd of grownups. I had never imagined that a mundane trainload of tired commuters could look so alien and menacing to a kid.

3. I've had enough of people seeking attention on the train just for the sake of attention (Link). So when a guy on the train last Memorial Day started moaning, I first looked to see if he was ill. He appeared healthy, about 20 years old, and was listening to a radio with earphones. He was moaning tunelessly, fairly loud, with the music. In the past I've ignored this kind of thing but this time I faced him and stared into the side of his head. He turned to me and explained that he was singing "God Bless America" along with the radio station; it was playing the song for the holiday. I smiled and nodded, not knowing whether the guy was serious. He appeared embarrassed and got off at the next stop. Did I ruin a patriotic holiday for a young citizen? Or did he get the attention he wanted? I still don't know.