« Posts under True Life Stories

Have a Very Flammable Christmas

December 17, 2010 / posted in True Life Stories / Comments Off

You know those Christmas lights that you always hear about burning down houses? Yeah, we have those hanging up in our house.

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They’re called Santa Lights, and my grandparents got them when my father was just a tyke. For years after that, the Santa Lights lit the family Christmas trees; now they sit wrapped around one of our windows. We turn them on when we’re cold and want to heat the entire room. Somehow, despite this gigantic thermal production, the Santa Lights never set a Christmas tree on fire. They even operate with one light burnt out! I guess you could say that they’re good-quality.

It’s great how they made things back then. Not only does the documentation state that the Santa Lights are suitable for “use on AC or DC current” — who’s wired for DC anymore? Heck, who was still wired for DC back then? — but they come in a great-looking package, complete with extra 15¢ lights:

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We have a lot of other great retro decorations as well. There’s the paper stocking that hangs on the bedroom door, complete with fun-loving holiday elves:

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There’s the Christmas Tree skirt, which frankly isn’t particularly dramatic but has somehow held up for years (also: totally flammable too!):

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And then there’s the highlight, the glass ornaments. I was never allowed to put these on a tree when I was little — on the few occasions we had trees — because they’re breakable. (Don’t worry, we had unbreakable ornaments too!) Some of these ornaments are painted, others are just shiny, but they’re all great:

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Growing up, these would come out every Christmas, old friends I was excited to see again; always these, never new decorations. We were a Christmas equipment-keeping type of family. Decorations went away into a big black leather duffel, dusty from its long life in closets playing the role of storage rather than that of carriage, that came out only at Christmas. But, most of all, we saved wrapping paper.

Those ads on TV, where the kids would open their presents with abandon? Yeah, I was jealous of those. I longed for the unrestrained exhilaration of the TV giftees, ripping their wrapping paper asunder, their faces changing from eager anticipation to beaming joy as the ragged, torn paper was thrown aside and the wonderful box within revealed. We carefully released the tape that held our presents shut, delicately unfolded the paper, setting it aside carefully — and, equally carefully, removing the bow and the tag! — before we looked at the goodie contained therein.

After we’d opened the bounty Santa had brought, there was always clean-up. The wrapping paper, painstakingly set aside during the opening of the presents, would be folded and packed away; the bows put in one bag, the ribbon in another, the tags in a third (if you were smart, you’d kept three separate piles as you opened your presents); and all of it would be put in a closet, to sit safely away and appear again come wrapping-time next year.

Of course, in many ways our pack-rattiness was convenient. Sure, paper got creased and patterns faded; sure, the stickum on the bottom of bows dried out and the little loop of scotch tape you used to fix the bow on made it bounce like a spring over the present; but you already had all of the cards you needed made up. To Mom, from Wade? There! From Grandma, to Wade? Ditto! Even Santa had cards made up from him to provide for anonymous gifts.

And, of course, it was fun because all of these old friends could come out year after year. Hello wrapping paper that I liked last year; hello gift bag I wish I’d gotten; hello tag that was on the best gift of all, I hope you’ve got something good for me this year too!

Now we’ve inherited all of our Christmas goodies, passed down from grandparents to parents to, finally, our little household. And it really is exciting to see everything again, and it really does make this place feel like home. I love it. But we don’t re-use our wrapping paper anymore, no siree. This year, I get to tear my gifts open with abandon, because we make some new traditions here too.








Me vs. Breakfast

August 28, 2010 / posted in Food, True Life Stories, Uncategorized / Comments Off

Every once in a while I feel inexplicably compelled to confess to something that’s bound to make all six of the people who read this blog hate me. Today’s just such a day; today I will confess to hating breakfast for dinner.

I realize that not wanting to have pancakes and syrup instead of, say, Chicken Cordon Bleu is equivalent in its anti-American-ness to say, something like stating “that Nikita Khruschev, he sure was a frood with a lot of good ideas,” or hating Law & Order. But there are things that are right and things that are wrong, and, just like it’s wrong to wear denim on denim (ed. note: not anymore!); one of those is having breakfast for dinner.

I’ve always felt this way. There’s a legend, when I was about 9, of a time when I was left with a family friend’s teenaged boy and girl; I asked them for dinner, and out came a bowl of Rice Krispies. Naturally, I broke into tears and was inconsolable until I was allowed to play in front of the TV with my new Space Shuttle toy (broke its landing gear on the deep-pile orange shag carpet, by the way).

When my friends — or, worse, the national media — suggest breakfast for dinner, they get to see me look dejected and throw in a gag for drama’s sake. Sorry to deprive you of all of that delicious syrup, but it just sounds so… awful. Don’t you want some savory in the evening?

Although, I’ll allow, butter and bacon both are good at any meal.








Mountaineer

April 6, 2010 / posted in True Life Stories, Uncategorized / Comments Off

When I was in junior high, we got a little vacation place in West Virginia, near Hedgesville. We’d go on three-day weekends, sometimes on regular weekends, if my parents needed a break. There was nothing out there but rolling hills, country diners, and tall, thin, dense pine trees over gray ground. And quiet. The next cabin over must’ve been only 150 feet away but you couldn’t even see it or hear it through those trees. If you looked sharp you could see the deer go through the gully: spot the white salt lick first, then the dun deer, then the fawns behind it.

It says something about the economy of West Virginia that a pretty reasonably middle-class family from Baltimore could afford a vacation place there — the only response I’ve ever gotten to revealing my hometown out there is “wow, that’s a rough place.” (And “is that your accent or are you mentally handicapped — ed.) So I could  understand how somebody working there would go down into a coal mine.

And coal mining really does permeate the state. Our backyard held the c-shaped trace of an old open pit mine, and every hike brought you past another half-dozen. Maybe it’s hard to understand for Westerners: mining out here means a scenic tunnel entrance in the side of a rugged hill; mining in West Virginia seems more often to mean a pit in the ground or, these days, the top of a mountain chopped clean off. I never saw one of those except from an airplane. All for coal for us and money for them.








Shalom, I’m a Measuring Jew

March 24, 2010 / posted in True Life Stories, Uncategorized / Comments Off

My wife, the lovely DJ L’il Bit, was standing next to me in the kitchen one day, and telling me about one of her friends: “she likes to measure out everything, she’s a thorough person, you know the type, she’s a measuring Jew.” All this as I was pouring my breakfast cereal into a one-cup measure so that I could, you know, have the calories advertised on the side of the box. Little did I know that there was a whole class of people like me.

It’s not that I deny my label. You might even describe me, and the Jewish people I know, as either “rather messy” or “excessively specific.” I think of myself as tending towards the former but that might just be a little bit of that old self-doubt creeping through. There’s some evidence. Like, the measuring of the cereal. Like, the measuring of everything else.

Getting an iPhone just made it worse: now I have a tool to track everything I do, at my side all the time. It’s like giving miniature roses to the residents of my old neighborhood. I track the normal stuff, like my tasks and time and all my clients. I’m tracking my mileage — hey, it’s a good tax write-off! I track my weight. Since I want to lose that fat on my midsection, I track my workouts too. I track if I take my vitamins and if I fix my own lunch or eat out and things like that. It’s all very… existentially rewarding. Who doesn’t want to quantify their own performance and enjoyment?








My Martini Glasses Are My Love

November 3, 2009 / posted in True Life Stories / 2 Comments

I may be predisposed to a bit of “hoarding”:http://www.aetv.com/hoarders/. Not that I collect empty yogurt containers or save used tissues; I just often find myself inclined to keep, you know, bowls that people gave me twelve years ago, or maybe I forget to throw away the stub of the movie ticket for “Exit Wounds”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0242445/.[1] One time, Mrs. DJ L’il Bit said this thing that helps me out, whenever I’m struggling to decide to throw something away or not: “that decorative peeler is not your mother’s love.”
It’s not that I’m hopeless when it comes to keeping the place nice; I know how annoying it can be to have a house full of clutter, I “lived next to one for years”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/003498.html. And I like to color-code everything. And I always put everything back in the place I found it. Exactly in the same place. Every time. So, you know, it’s pretty orderly around here. But that saying of Mrs. DJ L’il Bit still comes in handy — it’s easy, simple, and oh so correct. “That shot glass is not your memories of your trip to Southeast Asia.” “That t-shirt is not your college experience.” Etcetera.
But then there are the martini glasses. From Ikea. They _are_ my love. Literally. And I’m about to sell them in a garage sale. They’ve been replaced.
Mrs. DJ. L’il Bit and I had been dating for just about two and a half months when we both needed to run to Ikea. There’s nothing like browsing through Ikea, asking yourself if you need a round cutting board, or a corkboard made for kids, or another duvet cover, or a frosted plastic lamp in this year’s shape, or a fern. (Since I like to keep stuff, the answer is: no, I don’t need it.)
Anyway, one thing about Mrs. DJ L’il Bit: she likes her hard liquor. Not that I can complain, since I’ve been known to enjoy a scotch,[2] and I’m very picky about my gin. Put the two of us together, and we drink a lot of martinis. Starting from our very first dates, we’d really have a couple each every evening we hung out together, at least at her place; at mine, well, see, I didn’t have martini glasses.
So there I was, at Ikea, standing in front of a big display of martini glasses, trying to decide if I needed to buy them. It wasn’t the expense so much; it was that I have plenty of stuff, and if the martini glasses were going to come into the house, well, then something might have to leave. Thus I’d better really want those martini glasses. Would I keep the current girlfriend, DJ L’il Bit, for long enough to justify getting the new glasses? Or would we move on, and I find myself drinking more wine, or even soda, with the next girl?
That’s when the future Mrs. DJ L’il Bit appeared by my side, having finished looking at the kitchen goodies that she needed — probably silicone spatulas and plates with elephants on them. The future Mrs. DJ L’il Bit, she said to me: “so, deciding if you’ll keep me long enough to buy those glasses?”
She always did get right to the point.
And I did buy the martini glasses. Not because she called me on it; because I’d already decided that, yes, I would probably keep her long enough to justify having them in my home. Because, you know, I was completely falling for her.
You see, then, that the martini glasses — they *were* my love. I bought them because I was ready to make a bet on us. So it’s funny that, since I bet right, now they’re headed for the garage sale, replaced by fancy new martini glasses off of our registry. Which I rather suppose are our love too.
fn1. Which I really did see in the theaters.
fn2. One ice cube, please.















Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Hangers-On?

June 25, 2009 / posted in True Life Stories / No Comments

I have this vision that Michael Jackson has spent the last few years surrounded by people who had no interest other than diverting as much of his money as possible towards their own support. Despite all the schadenfreude I felt over the King of Pop’s many scandals, I also always felt sorry for him, robbed as he was of any pretense towards a normal life at any time. All of which is a little weird since he wasn’t just King of Pop, he was King of the Whole World while I was in Elementary School.
I distinctly remember walking into handwriting class during first grade, seeing Matt and Walker and Tyson standing there in their oh-so-cool Michael Jackson mesh t-shirts. Even though it was years before _Bad_ came out, I knew these three were bad, and I wished I was. Weeks later, when clothes shopping with my parents,[1] I saw a red Michael Jackson t-shirt with black mesh, and I somehow talked my parents — who wouldn’t know from Andrew Jackson — into buying it. Of course, I never felt cool enough to wear it, and it just sat in my closet, next to the lederhosen.[2]
In fourth grade our gym teacher, Tom Lamonica[3] told us we’d be doing an exhibition for some sort of assembly that parents would be at. We’d been doing a lot of calisthenics, so I thought: sit-up contests? Rope climbing? No; Tyson was going to teach us all a breakdancing routine that we’d do to some Michael Jackson. Now, Mr. Lamonica was stern, uncompromising, loud, ramrod-straight, and generally made gym class hurt, so I have no idea how a troublemaker like Tyson would get involved in some vast conspiracy with him. However, a few weeks later, there we were doing our breakdancing routine in front of a good couple of dozen parents, wearing our blue cotton gym uniforms with the elastic waistbands that made the short shorts puff right out.
I was probably awful. But it was fun! And, by Junior High, there were new kings out there anyway. But none like Michael Jackson. I hope nothing ever outsells Thriller, because he was king of everything, him and his “Diana-from-V”:http://media.photobucket.com/image/v%20diana/maribola00/dianaV.jpg jacket, his mesh shirts, his moonwalk that I could never do. It’s a pity that all that got us was some some bodyguards and assistants living large for a decade.
fn1. Hey, I was 5 or 6!
fn2. This is true.
fn3. I believe he was Daryle’s cousin, which never quite made sense since Daryle was from California fruit country and Tom was from Maryland horse country, but…















And I Am Become Old

April 27, 2009 / posted in Food, True Life Stories / 4 Comments

Growing up, we were always big on the family meal. Breakfast was in a nook behind our kitchen, at a yellow and white Formica table that just fit in the corner next to the basement stairs. When I was young, I would read the cereal boxes while my parents read their newspapers; I learned every ingredient and every serving suggestion and solved every puzzle on the back. While we weren’t a sugary-cereal household, my mom and I did have our own breakfast indulgence: back in the days before most people used skim milk, we’d pour whole milk on our cereal and then top it off with some half-and-half.
Of course, that was when I was young. Sometime in elementary school the selection changed: next to our varied flakes and occasional Life cereal appeared this small box, filled with something very dense: “Alpen”:http://ow.ly/4c6Z muesli. Instead of a bowl full of “Corn Bran”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrRE0Mvunvo, Alpen meant a couple of tablespoons of tan dust with oats in it, and my mother’s new skim milk on the top. Later, my father came back from a conference in Sweden, bringing a nifty viking ship model I liked to play with, and a reprehensible habit of putting his muesli on plain, unsweetened yogurt. The yogurt’s sour smell seemed to take over the whole sink when I washed the breakfast dishes, even more so when my mother picked up the yogurt habit too.
Alpen disappeared, and it was a while before “Mueslix”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNnHWVO9cx4[1] came on the scene, but somehow my parents persisted in ruining even something delicious like Cracklin’ Oat Bran by putting it on yogurt. I vowed that I would never ruin my cereal thus,[2] and even stuck with whole milk into college.
So it is somewhat to my shock that I find myself having cereal with yogurt several mornings every week. I deceive myself that it’s not cereal with yogurt but instead a parfait, some special mixture of yogurt, honey, and granola; but let’s face it, I eat cereal with yogurt. The dollop of honey makes it nothing but sweetened cereal with yogurt. Worse, the cereal is either Grape Nuts or Kashi GoLean Crunch.
This is not what I thought adult meant. But it sure is tasty.
fn1. Is that Max von Sydow?
fn2. It’s not that I don’t like yogurt — I love it — or that I have a problem with plain yogurt — I eat it — just the yogurt/cereal combo always bothered me.















Dot Nostalgia

September 4, 2007 / posted in True Life Stories / 3 Comments

It is a complete coincidence that Junior’s vet is around the corner from my dot-com. But, when I picked him up from his Labor Day summer camp boarding adventure this morning, and drove past the big pink stucco building that “my dot-com”:http://web.archive.org/web/20010721233028/http://persistx.com/ was in — and the Washington Mutual, and the Indian restaurant, and the really good Italian restaurant — of course I thought about mornings of XML programming and afternoons of I-swear-to-god-it’s-client-research visits to teen dating sites. And of course I convinced the AIG to grab lunch with me at the “Palisades Garden Cafe”:http://www.yelp.com/biz/FUsBxw0-Dk62-fiE_S5cNg.
My first job was serious about their 8:30am start time, because so many of our clients were on the East Coast and, by 8:30, that was half of their day already gone. My last job had a putative 8am start time, but they never gave me trouble for showing up at 9 and working an hour late. Maybe it was because I did the work of two people. There wasn’t any start time at BigButtons, but, then, there were only three of us there at the beginning so I couldn’t much slip in late. And that meant breakfast.
Palisades Garden Cafe had incredible donuts, which I loved back when I could eat donuts and other delectable pastries. I’d start my days with a donut and some tea mixed with the office manager’s ever-present stash of “Coffee Bean vanilla powder”:http://coffeebean.com/French-Deluxe-Vanilla–P156C75.aspx?Page=1.
And then it was Palisades Garden Cafe again at lunch. If I felt like I could splurge a bit,[1] I’d go for the turkeyburger, which was rich and delicious. I was young, so, if I felt cheap, I could go for the hamburger combo instead and not balloon up. Usually I’d have lunch on the Cafe’s patio, listening to the roar of the automatic car wash across the street and reading my LA Times. Since the Palisades Garden Cafe was right next door to the office, I never managed to take my full hour on those days.
Soon enough I traded lunches in the sun and options for my own shot at the start-up label. No more donuts, of course, and while nobody enforced an early start time, every night was a late night. And there was no sitting in the sun for a 45-minute break in the middle of the day, burger keeping me company as I pored over the front page. Sometimes I think maybe it’s time to bring that back now. The summer sun sure clears the mind, some days.
fn1. My two roommates at the time were working on starting a business, so my steady salary went to buying groceries for our whole three-male household. This did cut into my “lunch budget”:http://www.kayndaves.com/. My generosity always ends me up broke.















Goodbye, Mr. Lakin

March 18, 2007 / posted in Otherwise Uncategorized, True Life Stories / No Comments

I think I need to write more “nice stories”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/001483.html about High School, because I keep on bringing up “bad”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/000610.html “news”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/002709.html. It’s even worse since I seem to be writing crap these days — I’m not sure I have the tools to make what I write meaningful. But it should be. So, if you could do me a favor and pretend the following had been written in such a way as to make you care, I’d appreciate it.
Brooks Lakin, one of my favorite teachers, “passed away on March 8.”:http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bal-md.ob.lakin12mar12,0,1191368.story?coll=bal-news-obituaries. His death is an incredible loss to both his past students and the students he’ll never be able to teach. I think I “already told the most relevant story about him”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/001483.html, but the main point bears repeating:
After taking AP History with Mr. Lakin, no class ever seemed impossible again.
This was true through college and through grad school. After Mr. Lakin, I believed — I had proven to myself — that I could do any volume of work, and that I could think fast and well enough, to succeed in any academic endeavor.
Mr. Lakin’s classroom was in the old part of the Upper School, with no air conditioning and flat, characterless ’50s-style windows, but even on the hottest summer days, when we kept the shades down and the lights off so that it would be as cool as possible, it was never a low-energy place. The _Sun_ article linked above describes him as “courtly and quiet,” but the fact is that Mr. Lakin had a booming voice — sort of a Western Maryland version of Gene Hackman in Hoosiers — and he never hesitated to use it. His big, wooden desk sat at the front of his narrow classroom, with more heavy wooden tables in a u-shape around it; we sat behind the tables, and he on the corner of his desk. When he spoke, his voice would ring off the close walls and fill the room; none of us could ever compete, even when we would argue with each other. Whatever he said, it always made everyone think; whatever he asked, we, again, had to think to answer. It was learning.
Mr. Lakin had a bald, round head, with little glinting eyes and a hint of a combover in his blond hair, atop a big barrel chest — always dressed in a vertically-striped shirt — which itself sat atop polyester pants and leather shoes that were of the same style that everyone’s grandfathers wore to work in faceless corporations. But he was no relic, except perhaps of some era when the educational system reached for excellence: he expected encyclopedic learning and agile thought.
What he built was smart people. He treated us like adults, so we thought and performed like adults. I learned an immense amount in that class — so much that I got a 5 on the AP History test and never studied. I even learned how to work smart, not hard, because otherwise the work for that class would’ve taken hours. Up until a few years ago, I even used the same note-taking style that I perfected in his class, because it simply worked for everything that came along (I only dumped the style because nobody else could decipher it, and I was tired of re-typing notes for co-workers).
Mr. Lakin also taught teamwork, because there was no way you could pass his class alone. Everyone studied together, everyone shared notes, we’d even sit around and throw out ideas of essays he’d expect us to write, then strategize around what the answers would be.
Obviously, I’m sad today. I’d always imagined that I’d some day come back to visit “Park”:http://www.parkschool.net/ and get a chance to say hi to Mr. Lakin. He helped me grow, and I miss those days in his class. I guess it’s too late, but I’ll say it anyway: thanks, Mr. Lakin. You did your job the best it could possibly be done, for 40 years, and I was lucky to have been exposed to that excellence.















What, Me Win?

March 7, 2007 / posted in True Life Stories / No Comments

I’m not a big winner — in fact, given my average luck I’m surprised that I ever try anything risky. The only thing I can ever remember winning (apart from the odd board game, which victories I of course attribute entirely to my skill) is a raffle at a company picnic.
It’s actually good that I won that raffle, because I wasn’t doing so well at the picnic. When interning at a petroleum company, it’s generally required that you be pretty manly. Most readers of this periodical probably know that “manly” isn’t one of my strongest suits.[1] I think I spent the first 45 minutes of the picnic trying to prove my manliness by getting the barbecue lit. Not only did I fail at that, but I didn’t even pour on the lighter fluid. Some might say I failed _because_ I didn’t pour on the lighter fluid, but those would be the ones who like burgers that taste like lighter fluid. Anyway, I should’ve anticipated that a bunch of people who work for an oil company would like their dinner to taste like a distillate of their product, but instead I lit nothing and then stood by as a big guy from exploration sprayed a whole can of lighter fluid on the pile of charcoal and lit the thing with a medium-sized fireball and the distinctive smell of solvent.
Not only did I screw up the barbecue by not lighting the grill, I also managed to win the raffle over a bunch of guys who had been there longer than, oh, say, three weeks. Only my boss congratulated me for having the ticket that won the logo-adorned Mini Mag-Lite that was my prize. That flashlight is still in my office, awaiting the night that an earthquake knocks out the power and it can lead me to safety (my batteries will probably be dead).
Saying that I generally lost at other games of luck, however, is no exaggeration. I learned about board game strategy quickly, because I could never count on a lucky roll of the dice to save my bacon. As a youth, I spent an uncommon amount of time in Monopoly Jail. Later, in my early teens, I played a lot of Risk, but never launched an attack with even odds because I could never win with just a 50-50 shot. In my poker phase, my lack of luck paid off for me — I never had to learn to play tight, since I never thought I could draw to an inside straight. If anything, I folded too many straights, figuring my opponent had a full house. Trips to Vegas ended with me losing a couple of hundred dollars, pretty reliably.
Except one time I did break even. This was because I won $150 on the first day. Actually, I won $150 in the first five minutes after I got to my hotel. Dropped off at the luxurious Frontier casino, I waited in line quietly to check in. When I finally reached the head of the line, two very self-important women pushed ahead, impatiently, complaining of their rush.[2] I was too entranced by all of the flashing lights to really put up a fight, so they checked in, and I dropped a dollar in the nearest slot machine while I waited. Of course it lost, but I had saved up a handful of Sacagewea dollars just for the slots and thought now was as good a time as any to play them. So I put in another dollar, pulled, and the flashing lights and bells went off and I grabbed for a little bucket.[3] Befitting their self-described busyness, the two women didn’t notice, but the lady checking me in said “must be karma for having them cut in front of you!” I thought it would do for karma, and I ended up the weekend up $25.[4] The clerk was right — that was the universe making the big picture even, not my own personal good luck.
It’s ok, though, not being lucky. As Pasteur said, “luck favors the prepared mind”; since I’m only moderately lazy, I’m intermittently prepared. And I did win that Mag-Lite once. That’ll do, pig, that’ll do.
fn1. One college girlfriend did refer to me as “the most stereotypical _guy_ she ever dated.” That alone makes her my favorite ex, although it may say more about her than about me. She did date that sailor, however, so maybe there’s hope for me.
fn2. If anything — really, anything at all — about these women had actually been important or rushed, they would’ve stayed somewhere other than the New Frontier.
fn3. I got a Luxor bucket. Explain that.
fn4. Do the math.















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