Even I know not to tell the wife

So on Memorial Day, my husband went to the store.

He was gone a couple of hours. When he got back, he apologized for taking so long, and explained that he had to drive to the nearby amusement park, and there was a parade going on which held up traffic. We had a brief discussion of how it was nice to live in a place with a parade, and where the route went, and so forth.

Then something occurred to me. Why did he drive to the amusement park? This was our conversation, editied for humor:

Him: Oh, just giving someone a ride.

Me: Who needed a ride?

Him: Oh, this girl. She works there.

Me: Really? Huh. Doing what now?

Him: She's a lifeguard.

Me: I didn't know you knew any lifeguards.

Him: I don't. We both were at the library, and she didn't realize it would be closed because of Memorial Day because she's from Columbia, so I offered to give her a ride back to her job at the park.

Me: So, you're telling me that it took you so long at the store because you needed to "give a ride" [yes, I used finger-quotes] to a young, female, Columbian lifeguard that you just met? And now you're telling your wife about it?

Him (slowly it occurs to him that he might be in deep shit): Uh, yyyeah.

Me: You are an idiot.

I don't know what is more pathetic - that he assumed (correctly, I have to admit) that I wouldn't get jealous, or that my biggest concern was making fun of him mercilessly for pulling such a bone-headed move as to tell his wife that he gave a ride to some chick.

Insert Proust Reference Here

Today I had my own little temps perdu* moment. I was sifting through a pile of fill in my backyard, removing large chunks of asphalt, which I then put in a dumpster. I know, I have the most glamorous weekends.

Anyway, since no one else was around, I found the most convenient way to do this was to sit down. At first, I was sitting on the ground, but as I got further into the pile, I ended up sitting on a big pile of dirt.

Somehow, I found it way too satisfying. I found myself humming and pawing through the dirt and saying things like "Lookit you, spider! You're a big one! You've got big eyes! Okay, you go over here," and so on.

Oh yes. My own little flashback was not brought on by a cookie and tea, but by sitting on a dirt pile.

Although I will undoubtedly betray my redneck roots by telling you this, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing on dirt piles as a kid. Not in the dirt, mind you, but on large piles of it.

I lived out in the mountains until I was in second grade. During that time, there was always a very large pile of dirt somewhere. It would be too tedious to explain why there were piles of dirt everywhere - just take my word for it.

I know. What can possibly be so fun about a pile of dirt? At the time, they were practically the center of my outdoor recreation universe. Now, trying to describe the vast array of activities that I did on the dirt, it sounds like the most boring idea in the world, even for an only child with an overactive imagination.

One exciting thing I did, though, is when my cousins** were around, and if it was very dry, we would slide down the sandier slopes on our butts, kind of like sledding, only with no snow and no sled. (This should be in the White Trash Olympics). That worked until I accidentally rolled over mid-slide and my shirt slid up and scraped the hell out of my entire front. Ow. I was maybe four when that happened.

The point is, even though it is the most boring and pathetic sounding thing in the world, I had a great time on dirt piles as a kid, even by myself.

Luckily, it is too late for anyone to call child protective services.

* Aren't I a pretentious bastard? I didn't even read the book!

** These particular cousins' names are: Lester, Adam, Seth, and Sam. Yes, I am related to a guy named Lester. Two, if you count his dad. He is my Uncle. Uncle Lester. Yup. Sometimes, I would feed the pigs and goats at his farm, or get chased by an angry goose. Yup. See, I wasn't kidding about the redneck thing. You thought I was exaggerating, didn't you? You wish.

And the winner is...

I'd like to nominate the pants I'm wearing today to the "Worst Pants - Business Casual" category of the Pants-ies Award.

Seriously, they totally suck. I bought them at a large, national retailer (who shall remain nameless, but the syllables of the store name are "get" and "tar"). I always buy clothes there, even though they immediately get wrinkley, or shrink, or stretch, or in the case of these amazing pants, all three.

Somehow, they have managed to stretch from perfectly-fitting, fashionable, wide leg trousers into ultra-baggy old lady slacks in the course of one day, to the point where it now appears that I am wearing "tapered" style pants. Maybe I should peg the cuffs and call it a day.

Also, they are made of a linen blend which not only wrinkles instantly, but cannot be dried in a dryer, giving them the worst qualities of both fabrics they are composed of.

The final insult: they itch.

Anyway, I am counting the minutes until I can go home and change into one of my many contenders for the "Worst Pants - Pajamas" category.

I'd like to thank the members of the Academy for their support. Thank you very much.

Arrgh.

The building I work in is owned by a progressive-minded rich liberal. This is her first foray into commercial real estate, and she wanted to create a certain “vibe” in the building by renting half the offices to non-profits and the rest to us workin’ joes. Whatever, fine.

She also has very little idea about what it’s like to work for a living, so she has done a lot of things, like fill the hallways with paintings by local artists, that normal people who actually need money would never do. Frankly, I never gave it much thought. Until now.

We just got a memo from one of the other tenants. On behalf of the owner, she commissioned a $750 painting to commemorate the opening of the building. The tenant wants to give it to the owner as a “gift” on behalf of the tenants (otherwise, it would be the property of the “company” that runs the building, which, let's remember, the landlord owns). In the memo, she says that if every employee in the building would pitch in a mere $20, she could cover the cost of the painting, which, let’s all be clear, has already been bought and paid for by the landlord.

Okay, so let’s recap.

What the hell was she smoking to think that I would be willing to part with $20 to give to my landlord? WTF?!? We already pay rent! (well, I don’t, but still.)

And why, Why, WHY, are we giving the landlord a painting she already bought?!?

Stupid rich hippies. I hate them. I hate them all.

This just in.

According to a public service announcement I heard a few days ago, made by a DJ who had a mature news-caster type voice, about an upcoming blood drive:

"People wishing to donate blood must be 18 years or older, weigh at least 110 pounds, and be in good health, so no heroin addicts or crack whores."

Yup.

With Apologies to David Sedaris

Welcome, folks, to my newest series, where I lovingly explore my memories of working at Santa’s Workshop, in North Pole, New York.

For those of you who don’t know, this is the very first amusement park in the U.S., founded in 1949. It's located near Lake Placid, New York. I worked there as part of the daily entertainment troupe the summer I was 17. By then, the park had fallen on tough times. Money was tight. Corners were cut. The patriarch of the family that owned the place was very old, and everyone knew it would probably be sold soon after he died.

Nevertheless, we soldiered on, with big, mostly fake smiles. Plus, let’s be honest. I was a teenager, working with other teenagers. I didn’t give a crap about any of that. I had a pretty damn fun time, despite the bleak horizon. So let’s take a look, shall we, at what the park was like when I was 17.

*************************

The entirety of the Santa’s Workshop experience can be boiled down into one feature: the North Pole itself. Oh yes, there is an actual pole made of ice, frozen all year round, located right outside Santa’s house. Every morning, the pole would be covered in frost from the frozen dew of the previous night. It was kind of pretty, if you think things like popsicles are pretty. Then, as the day wore on, visitors would make their way to the pole. Little fingernails would trace patterns and names in the frost. Little hands, already covered in maple syrup or candy remnants, would make handprints. Little tongues would inevitably lick the frost from the increasingly unhygienic surface.

By about 10:30 in the morning, the sun would hit the pole, turning whatever was left of the gritty frost into a slick, shiny, melting surface, the sharp edges of fingernail scrapings starting to wear down, the handprints dissolving, the tongue marks all disappearing into a thin ooze which coated the ice. Undaunted, children would continue to lick and touch the pole, all day long, some of them encouraged by parents, who apparently thought that ingesting the frozen bacteria of hundreds of dirty, wet hands was a great photo opportunity.

Everything in the park was like that. It looked great from a distance, but up close, the decay was more than evident. Aside from the occasional coat of paint, the park hadn’t changed much in fifty years. To add to the slightly nightmarish quality, every once in a while the sound equipment that piped holiday music throughout the park would overheat, causing the 1950’s-style jangles to start slowing down, until the music was about half as fast and twice as low as it should have been.

Try playing your favorite Burl Ives on half speed on a record player, you’ll see what I mean. Now picture yourself in a brightly colored wonderland, where every surface has been coated in untold layers of cheap high-gloss enamel, surrounded by pimply, sweating teenagers in stinky, fraying costumes. I ask you: what could better capture the Christmas Spirit?

With Apologies to David Sedaris, Part 2

We now rejoin our program, "A Look Back at Santa's Workshop", already in progress:

One little-used park attraction was Elmer’s wishing well. This was a fake wishing well that people tossed coins into. The money, what little there was, went to Toys for Tots or some other Christmas-related charity. Over the well, set into the gabled roof, was a little door. Inside was an “interactive” and “animatronic” puppet shaped like a little elf. I put these words in quotes because, on a regular basis, it was neither. The idea was that an employee would sit in the PA booth, several hundred feet away and down a hill, and operate the puppet electronically. When someone donated a coin, the employee was supposed to pop open the door, and say “Thank You!” into a microphone, while simultaneously operating the controls that made the mouth open and close and the eyes move around. The delighted child would then start up a conversation with this technical marvel, and the employee, who could see the visitors from the booth, would amaze the customer by complimenting the kid’s blue hat or whatever.

At this point, I’m not even going to attempt to use sarcasm to describe how infrequently this system actually worked. The electronic system was decades old and failed frequently. Some typical outcomes:

1. The door wouldn’t open, so this disembodied voice would just kind of emanate from the roof of the well. This either scared the crap out of people, or was lost in the crowd noise and ignored.
2. The microphone/speaker wouldn’t work, so the employee couldn’t hear the people, or the elf would appear and soundlessly move its mouth and roll its eyes at the customers for a while before the door would close again without explanation.
3. The mouth would get stuck open mid-word, a scene that has been immortalized many times by the Simpsons, in basically every episode where they go to an amusement park. Funny in a cartoon, not so funny in person. More depressing, really.
4. To see the well from the booth, the employee had to practically stick their head out the window, and it was so far away it was impossible to see any details worth mentioning in conversation. For instance, “I see you have all your limbs,” does not make for lighthearted banter.
5. The employee in the booth also had to make periodic announcements, keep the music in the park from slipping to nightmare mode, and do the voice for Tannenbaum, the talking tree (same deal), not to mention go to the bathroom and eat lunch. This means that people were often knocking on the little door for ages, looking for the damn talking elf, while their kids stood in the hot sun, whining and/or crying, until they finally gave up and stormed away, swearing under their breath about how it cost friggin’ 18 bucks plus tax (plus tax!) for them to each (each!) get in, and for what? Jesus!

***************************

The park also had a few rickety rides, a puppet theater, a reindeer stable, and of course Santa’s House, where you could go in and visit Santa and get your picture taken, etc., etc. There were three Santas hired that year, and they each worked three days a week. If you do the math, you quickly realize that there was more than one Santa working on any given day. The extra Santa manned the reindeer barn, an important job which required him to sit in a chair outside the barn. To distinguish him from the Real Santa, he wore a green outfit and a different hat. His story was that he was Santa’s cousin Jimbo or something. Obviously that fooled practically no one but the very youngest. I felt kinda bad for the kids who were old enough to not be sure about Santa. Here they are, their parents drove them hours and hours with the promise of meeting the real Santa, at his workshop at the north pole, not like that guy at the mall, putting all their fears to rest, don’t you listen to what Brendon up the street says, Santa is Real. And after they do see Santa, here’s this other guy, practically the same guy they just met, sitting around the reindeer barn, sweating. You could just see in their face they weren’t buying it.

***************************

Well, wasn’t that fun! I bet you aren’t depressed at all now! Anyway, next time, I’ll tell you all about the ins and outs of my actual job, where I frequently dressed as a reindeer and danced around. Will the hilarity never end? Tune in and see!

When a lady's heart turns to sod

Ah, spring. C’mon, everyone, let’s all take a deep breath and enjoy the fresh air. Ahhhhh. Okay, back to work.

Since I work in the landscape design field, I get a lot of questions about yard work at this time of year. The questions from my colleagues all assume that I have a great big garden full of plants, just like they do. I hate getting into these conversations, because they turn into the type of conversation where the other person gets a horrified look on their face, and you can tell they just want to back away slowly until they are no longer in the same room with me.

This is because we bought a house at the end of last summer, so this is the first opportunity we’ve had to do any work on the yard. And while I totally love our house, it is definitely a fixer-upper. So, conversations tend to go like this:

Co-worker: We spent the weekend planting daisies and tending our precious, precious vegetable plot. What’d you do?

Me: My husband and his friend broke up 500 square feet of asphalt with a jackhammer, and then my dad came over to remove this lean-to which the previous owners used to shelter their ski-doos. We used the extra lumber to keep the barn from falling over. Maybe next week we’ll rent a dumpster to get rid of the debris.

Co-worker: [slowly nods and backs away]

The other type of conversation I have is with people who don’t work in the field. These people confuse “landscape planner” with “master gardener”. I mean, yeah, I know a little bit about gardening, but most of my experience with gardening came from the summer internship I had where I tried to keep a crew of developmentally-disabled adults from pulling up all of the plants in the Ithaca Commons.*

These conversations tend to make me nervous, because people have highly specific questions. Since I don’t really work with plants on a daily basis, my knowledge in that area gets a little rusty. And then, all of a sudden, it’s like I’m taking a pop quiz: Shit! This lady’s asking me about her tansy problem. What the hell is tansy again? Aack! This leaves three possible scenarios:

• I know the answer (this almost never happens, except for this weekend when I successfully identified some Artemisia for my mom).
• I sort of know the answer and give a good bluff, and am then filled with anxiety that I told them wrong and all their plants will die and they will think I’m dumb.
• I have no friggin’ clue. In this case, I say something like, “Really, I do more city planning type stuff… you know, like zoning.” This leads people to think I actually might not be sure what job it is I do, and they think I’m dumb.

Anyway, I would love to discuss this further, but I have to make some calls about a dumpster.

* Ask me about the time someone put bubble bath in the fountain! That was the day I traded in my dignity. Good times.

Bring back the scat!

Singing, that is!*

Seriously though, this is an issue near and dear to my heart which I feel needs to be seriously addressed. Recently, on a certain nostalgia-based, talking head montage program on a certain used-to-show-adult-contemporary-music-videos channel, certain c-list celebrities were making fun of scat singing, and Bobby McFerrin in particular.

Ignoring for the moment the total wrongness of making fun of such a talented musician (yes, he just happens to be one of my favorite musicians in the world, but let's not forget he won ten grammies), the reigning opinion seemed to be that scat’s place in the musical pantheon was equal to yodeling, or accordion playing.

Of course, it’s easy to have misconceptions about scat when there’s so much bad singing out there. But, you ask, how can I tell good scat from bad? Relax, it’s easy. Just use my patented Awful Scat Recognition Formula (ASRF).

To tell if a scat singer is bad, count the number of times he or she uses the following words in a song:

1. Skibby
2. Dwee
3. Skwee/Skwiddly

If the singer any one of these words more than once in a song, they are in trouble. If two of the words are used, they are bad singers who have no right to use scat. If they use all three, they are the scat equivalent of Kenny G and should be shot on sight.

With this easy-to-use system, you should be enjoying scat in no time. And remember, scat’s not just for jazz anymore. Like folk and blues? Try a little soulful tune, by Taj Mahal. Want some heavy Beatles influence with your scat? Try 1941, by my personal favorite, Harry Nilsson. Remember, there’s no end to the fun with scat!

* Because scat also means poop! Ha ha, poopy!