That and a Pink Plastic Skull Will Buy Me a Cup of Coffee

Back in the days when a dime could buy you a cup of coffee, an old saying was, “that and a dime will buy you a cup of coffee.” And whatever the “that” was, was in fact useless since you still needed the dime for the coffee.

Today a dime won’t buy me a cup of coffee, but I have something better; a pink plastic kitchen sink scrub brush.

Last year the baby shower invites came hot and heavy in the mail. I played my share of baby shower games, ate the required chicken salads, and watched the unwrapping of baby presents.

At one shower I finally won on the Baby Bingo game. So up to the prize table I went. I had been eyeing a bottle of wine sitting on that table early on, but at this late stage of the game it was gone.

What was left on the table was an assortment of scented candles. I go out of my way to buy unscented candles since the phony candle aromas make me sick. One time I left a pine-scented candle outside for a week in order to air out the cheap men’s cologne smell it was emitting in the house. That didn’t work and it still got tossed in the trash.

Next to the candles on the prize table were the bath oils. Since I prefer a shower over the one or two baths I may take a year, the oils didn’t call out to me either.

Only one prize spoke to me. A hot pink plastic kitchen scrub brush with jet black bristles jutting out of the back of its skull head. Not that common of a sight at my local grocery store, and maybe a little crazy, but still useful. So I walked back to my table clutching my new gift.

The skull buys me coffee.

Soon after I won my brush, the grandmother-to-be made an announcement. She bet her son (the dad-to-be) that no one would pick this demented kitchen utensil. So she bought it and decided to award a special prize to the person that dared to pick a skull brush for their kitchen sink.

The special extra prize was a gift card to Starbucks.

I always knew that my strangeness would garner an appropriate recognition someday. That and a cup of coffee.

Elegy on a Gym Class

Gym teachers hated me.

I was a tall, slender kid that at first glance gym teachers assumed would have some athletic ability. At every turn, I would sorely disappoint each and every one of them.

On the basketball court, I got knocked down by the opposing team. Sometime my glasses flew across the floor. No penalty. This kid counts for nothing. No faith, no foul.

Later during a free throw test, long after the series of basketball games were over, I managed to get every free throw in the basket. Where was I during all those games she said? Getting knocked around by all the other real players.

The 50 meter dash during sixth grade. I had a strategy. At this point I had already spent a few years reading Greek and Roman mythology from books I checked out from the library. Since I was odd and impressionable, I was not just going to run, I was going to fly like the gods in those stories. Unfortunately the time I spent trying to fly between my running steps, cost me too much time. I came in dead last. The teacher said he thought a kid like me should have been much quicker. Yea, if only that kid would have concentrated on running and not flying.

High school swim class – diving. The teacher explained the proper diving technique. I processed that info and followed every step resulting in a perfect dive. This was the first time that I ever attempted to dive off a diving board. She was stunned at my ability and she made me dive again. This time it was an arm-flinging, belly-flopping mess. So the teacher and I gave up on me on the spot. I never had a chance at getting a perfect dive again.

I lived the zero incentive program. All belief in me was zero. But aren’t I too old to still keep whining over all my lost chances?

Besides, I’ve got to get going or I’ll be late for my interval training class. By my seventh decade, I should be able to kick some butt on the competitive circuit. Retribution at last.

My Sacred Cow

Government spending could use a buzz cut. The next time I hear about federal funds providing a grant to study shrimp on treadmills, I may run screaming down the street. Federal money gets thrown around just so money can get spent. Is this the way we really want to stimulate the economy? Do something that matters.

Instead, throw that money at the libraries.

I ran across an article in a newspaper about the Geek the Library program. Then I found out more about it online – http://geekthelibrary.org/.

This website brings together people that value the library, encourages them to express why they value it, and asks them to pass on the message.

The world’s in an economic mess. Library funding is often on the cutting board. A nearby county library did close due to budget cuts. Libraries are fighting for their lives.

A large, well-regarded library by me nearly closed down due to cuts in funding. At the last moment before closing, a community movement succeeded to keep it open.

This might be where the Geek the Library program comes in.

This program highlights the incredible benefits libraries offer to society:

• See how much money a family can save by borrowing material from a library instead of buying the items.
• Think outside the book (although books are a big enough draw for me to go there). Libraries house DVDs, music CDs, audiobooks, and free computers to write letters or search online. You can even get a pass to go to a museum.
• Discover the job search resources. Ironically, the worse the economy gets, the more people use the library. People research companies on the Internet, write resumes, and email them out.

Personally, I love to go just to wander about the shelves. I discover books that I have never heard of or books that I forgot about wanting to read.

If I had to choose the lesser of two evils, I would sooner cut funding to public schools than libraries. Schools need an overhaul so that they work for all children before more money gets thrown at them.

The library is a terrific basis for self education. Empower yourself. A library is a true leveler of society; only death can do better.

Maintaining libraries is not a waste; it can only improve society. Let the shrimp buy a health club membership.

I Geek Isabel Allende, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Chinua Achebe, Carson McCullers, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, D.H. Lawrence, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Pirsig, Muriel Barbery, Thornton Wilder, and others (some undiscovered yet by me).

Starbucks in the 1950s

I should have taken my typewriter from 1954 into a Starbucks and started typing. Would the coffee house staff and patrons complain?

I frequently purge my house of junk. If I don’t use it, it takes up space and energy to move it around, it gets tossed. My minimalist point of view wants to edit out extra stuff in each room.

But I have my regrets over my search and destroy junk-finding missions.

I miss my old Royal typewriter which I gave away to the Vietnam Veterans charity truck last year.

My mother bought this typewriter. I don’t know if anyone at the Vietnam Veterans donation site felt the urge to pick it up or not. It may still be lingering around there somewhere. I should have at least taken some pictures of it since I miss it a little bit. I had to search online to find a proper image of the thing to post to this blog.

It had green keys and came with a carrying case. It even had two extra ribbons, top side black, bottom side red, just in case you wanted a pop of color in your document. The long, slender typeface arms rose up from the machine after you vigorously hit the keys. The instruction manual was still intact.

I miss this heap of metal.  Not that I typed on it, I just pulled it out every now and then to look at it.

I put it on Craigslist with no success. No one wanted it for even the rock-bottom price of $10.

Every time I visit a Starbucks at least one person has a laptop in front of them. They may use the coffee shop as a temporary office. Or they may be exploring online sites, emailing friends and enemies, or blogging. Gentle tap, tap, tap on the keyboard, muted lights and colors flying across the screen and over the laptop owner’s faces.

For a retro switch, why didn’t I think of bringing in my old typewriter instead of a laptop? The owner’s manual hyped it as a portable typewriter because of its nifty carrying case. Would the formerly friendly barista throw me out the door when I started up my noisemaker?

I could see it all now. Walk into the store carrying the 20 pound monster, order a coffee, grab a table, set it up, open the case. With a dramatic flourish, pull out a piece of paper and start cranking it into the roller barrel. Loudly flap down the bar that secures the paper onto the barrel. Then start typing.

This 1950s model is energy efficient, it needs no electricity, a green machine in both color and politics.  No glow off of any screen, just a cascade of good old manual machine noise and smell.

Ah, typing when it was practically a sport. You needed some amount of strength and endurance in those fingers to keep those keys clanking up and down. Don’t forget about the return carriage, it also carried some weight (and you needed to carry it after every single line of type).

The sound and the fury! Clackity, clackity, clank, DING. I will never know you again.

A Summer to Love

Today is a perfect summer day. Perfect as in the weather. The humidity is gone. The sky is blue with a few puffy clouds, the sun is not pounding down hot. Last I checked the temperature was 74 degrees. I could live this way for the rest of my life. Let me find a land that has this kind of weather and I may move there.

But then again, how would I know how good this day was if I didn’t have the hot, unbearable summer days or the freezing snows of winter? This day would be so common that my love for it would be weaker.

Emily Dickinson preferred to live in a land with both snow and sun. She liked to study the life and death cycle of the four seasons. Least she forgot that the body will not always be warmed by the sun.

So I will love this day and may look forward to a sweltering tomorrow. And an icy day a few months down the road.

The Emily Dickinson of Tao

The Tao Te Ching, a work of art as far removed from New England in location and language as can possibly be, is well-known to Western society nonetheless.

Chapter 47 of the Tao reminds me of Emily Dickinson:

Without opening your door,

you can know the whole world.

Without looking out your window,

you can understand the way of the Tao.

The more knowledge you seek,

the less you will understand.

The Master understands without leaving,

sees clearly without looking,

accomplishes much without doing anything.

Others have linked Emily Dickinson with Eastern religion and this passage from the Tao seems to prove the point and fits her well. She kept to her small room, but she explored metaphysical depths in her poetry.

Dickinson probably never heard of the Tao or read much about Eastern beliefs (outside of an exposure to transcendentalism), but she traveled that path. And she did it without wandering much past her New England garden.

The Foot-Touched Moon

Nearly 42 years ago, NASA sucked out some of the romance between the earth and its moon. Never again would a person be able to gaze up at the night sky and moondream in the same way. Unless of course you don’t believe that any moon landings actually took place.  Then keep dreaming away.

The gravitational pull between the earth and the moon was not enough, we had to possess this nearby heavenly body and put our machines, our experiments, our footprint on it.

The moon couldn’t be missed by the human eye since there were human eyes. Telescopes allowed us to snoop more intimately on our neighbor. The man in the moon was not found. The green cheese theory could not be proved.

Many people swear that the moon brings out the crazy in people like nothing else. If your workplace gets outlandish phone calls, check the calendar and check out the phase of the moon. Blame the full moon.

Police forces find eerie parallels between the phases of the moon and certain kinds of criminal behavior; different phase of the moon, different crimes being committed.  Hospitals draw conclusions between the kinds of injuries that come into emergency rooms and the moon.

Now that we are eyeing Mars, the moon seems less exotic.  A trip to the moon lasts a few days, a trip to Mars could take years.  The moon may become too common, too accessible. When NASA leaves the space program and private enterprises takes over, will the future see a Trump Tower on the moon?

In “The Man Who Was Thursday,”  G. K. Chesterton wrote, ”But even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.”

Perhaps romance is dead. Yet the light and dark sides of the moon reflect human nature. Humankind can’t help but view the universe in an egocentric way. Cartoon mice and rocks in space; our eyes want to see it anthropomorphically.

No Car With Zip Car

I’d like to kick a couple of cars to the curb. Car ownership is a major financial drain. The insurance costs, standard and unexpected maintenance, and the escalating cost of gas make me cringe when I look over the bills. I noticed that some cities offer car rental by the hour. I visited zipcar.com and discovered an alternative way to drive. Europeans already have a history of this kind of car sharing, ZipCar only started in the U.S. about 10 years ago.

Why own two cars or even one when you can rent one cheaper? After adding up the high cost of car ownership, and considering that a car sits on the street or driveway for many hours or days at a time, renting can make sense.

I’d love a better public transit system where I can ride to the downtown museums, restaurants, or sports arenas and not worry about parking fees or parking availability. I’d love to step off efficient public transit and walk right up to the front door of my destination and not walk too far on those cold, snowy winter nights. If there were other options out there, I’d give up my multiple car household and scale back to one.

But as long as I’m married to my husband, this won’t happen. We own four cars. Or I should say I own one car and my husband owns three. He drives an old model sportscar,  a rusty truck from the mid ’90s, and a four-year old sedan.

I drive a 10 year old car which fits my personality. My main car-shopping priorities: buy a car that starts up when I turn the key and gets me to the places I want to go. I don’t care about the newest design or a luxury brand name.

When I brought up the topic of renting a car by the hour, my husband was completely against it. But I said we could rent a truck for those shopping trips to Lowes. We could rent a sportscar if we feel a desire to drive fast and stylish (that would never be my desire, but just saying if it was). We can rent a second sedan if we both have to drive long distances in separate directions.

This won’t happen. My husband loves the ownership factor. His cars, his decision to drive what and when he wants. Rental is not part of his mindset. No surprise there, he is a child of the Motor City after all.

Also no surprise, Detroit doesn’t offer the rent by the hour car service. We live to drive. I’m just the oddball in the mix.

Take the History Protest Outside

I don’t get the passion.

Recently, students in Tuscon, Arizona, protested at a school board meeting. The board members were considering the elimination of a Mexican-American history class that was offered as an alternative to U.S. history. The students took over the meeting and prevented the vote from happening.

Some board members opposed the continuation of this history class because they believed it promoted resentment between races or classes of people.  Or were these people misguided conservatives that refused to celebrate diversity?

I don’t have a problem with a basic educational curriculum. Cut the frills, teach basics, don’t underestimate the abilities of students. Most of all, provide students with the ability to learn outside the classroom.

Learning should not only take place between the months of September and June, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. What is stopping these kids from learning Mexican-American history, or any other subject, on their own?

Protest by expanding knowledge:

• Create a community reading program. Select a book, advertise a community reading challenge, and form reading groups at various locations around the city: libraries, schools, homes, etc.
• Challenge both friends and enemies to read about controversial historical interpretations. Share different viewpoints and perhaps discover common ground or a healthy disagreement.
• Start an after school club devoted to any subject you wish to study in greater depth.
• Temper that mainstream history class with self education.

When did someone place a quota on the number of books we can read, a quota on the kind of information that we can access? Shut up, study, and never stop. That’s the best way to protest limitations.

Anti-Union: Sour Grapes and Other Whines

Union worker pay and benefits, are they too rich? That is open to debate. I say the union mentality is the biggest force working against the union itself. Seven ways I’ve seen unions go astray:

1. At the state level, work is slow, travel is long: a state-employed repairman traveled 300 miles north of his home near Detroit in order to change a light bulb in a state building. He was next on the list to do this work and the only one allowed to do it.
2. At one of the Big Three automakers: during an afternoon shift of an auto plant, some workers would sneak out shortly after punching in and go home while others would punch them out. They each took turns sneaking out.
3. At one of the Big Three automakers: workers meet only their quota of parts for their shift. They never exceed quota. Once the parts are produced, they go to their cars and sleep the rest of the shift. If a manager expects more work out of his employees, next time they make sure the machinery gets broken which creates a standstill thereby not even meeting the quota.
4. At a small automotive parts factory: a small union shop, paid union dues that contributed to the Big Three union worker wages when they went on strike. The Big Three workers stayed home on strike and got close to full pay for their non-effort. When the small union factory workers wanted to go on strike they expected reciprocation. The lower-tier union employees were told that during a strike at their small shop, they would get no strike pay. Some workers are more equal than others.
5. At a public sector job: told by another employee that when done with your work, be quiet, don’t look for more work and don’t tell management. Look busy. It ended up that looking busy is more work than being busy.
6. At a public sector job: your college degree brings up the expectations of management and makes it unfair for regular workers to get ahead.
7. At college, mid 1970′s: 19 year old college student boasts that her job as a grocery store cashier allowed her to buy a car cash. The grocery store union was strong at the time and she made twice as much as the average college student. She couldn’t believe her good fortune and felt that she made more money with less effort. The other struggling students couldn’t believe their poor fortune.

The union spin is that they protect the working class. The reality is, unions protect union labor first and foremost; protect them to the point of stagnating the work process. More than anything else, do away with the union mentality; it’s too much bad public relations for unions.