Jehovah's Witlesses

'Tis the season to be accosted. Greenpeace can get fairly aggressive on the hike-and-bike trail, which is tiresome as I really have to be sure not to go over my hour for lunch, and I'm not going to give anybody any money, but when someone calls wheedlingly out to me, "Come on, you like trees, don't you?" it's hard to walk stonily past without feeling like a Republican.

I do indeed like trees. In fact, I might never get a live Christmas tree again, now that Jim's not making that call. Fresh flowers I don't mind, but I've always been troubled by the concept of sacrificing a tree's life just for a few weeks' holiday decor. Never mind the mess, the needles that will carpet the back of my car for as long as I own it, the cats' unfortunate tendency to attempt to mask the piney smell with more pungent aromas of their own. No, the worst part is taking all the lights and ornaments down on January 6th and hauling the poor forlorn husk to the curb. I can't even look it in the eye, and wouldn't be able to even if trees HAD eyes, which (unless you're a big Lillian Vernon shopper) they generally don't.

But the City of Austin has a nice program where they at least recycle your discarded trees by grinding them into mulch. You can leave your tree at the curb and they'll pick it up on your regular garbage day, but if it's over six feet tall, you're supposed to saw it in half. Do I look like a lumberjack to you?! So instead, I shoved it into the back of the Isuzu Behemoth which my amazing friend Diane is selling to me on ridiculously easy terms, to help me out through the divorce - Diane is a GOOD FRIEND - and took it to the temporary Christmas tree recycling drop-off at Zilker Park.

Have I mentioned that I love Austin, love it, love it, love it, love it? This morning's experience reminded me that I haven't said so for a while. The dropoff point at Zilker Park presumably had at least a few city employees, but was largely staffed by volunteers. It was extremely well-organized and efficient, with staffers directing traffic into separate lanes and hurrying to unload and haul away trees. And it was bitter cold out, for Austin - just under 20 degrees at the time I went - and, my gosh, they were so nice. Bundled up in coats, hats, and gloves, they bustled competently through their work, smiling and thanking me for bringing the tree in. And as I drove away, the person directing traffic out of the lot gave me a big, bright smile and a cheery wave. I felt as if I'd had a booster shot of holiday cheer to last me through the rest of this cold winter. The scent of pine needles in my car probably helped, too.

Worse yet than Greenpeace, on the hike-and-bike trail, is the short-shorts guy. I write this hesitantly, afraid that perhaps I know him from somewhere and am being inexcusably rude for not responding to his repeated salutations; but if (as I suspect) we've never met, he's kind of a creep. I avoid eye contact with him now, and I have my iPod and earbuds as a legitimate enough excuse for not hearing anything anyone happens to say to me, but he gives it a good try anyway, addressing me two or three times whenever he sees me, and sometimes turning after we pass and calling after me. I've changed my walking route, and may change my lunch hour as well.

And worse yet than the short-shorts guy are Jehovah's Witnesses. Jim came by today to use the Behemoth to move another large installment of his stuff out of my house. Staggering under a heavy armload of his belongings, I found myself face-to-face with a woman and her small daughter. She seemed taken aback. "Is this your mother?" she asked Katie, who explained later that the woman had stopped by and talked to her once before while I was at work.

Katie responded that yes, I was, and the woman asked her, surprised, "Are you moving?"

"My husband is moving out," I told her shortly.

Now, here's where Jehovah's Witnesses are different from you and me. Solicitors of any other product, however noxious, would probably gather from my reply and the fact that my arms were uncomfortably full that, perhaps, now was not an ideal time.

She, however, introduced herself, and attempted to hand me some literature.

But she had a little girl with her, so I smiled, and said pleasantly, "Thank you, but we're not interested," and got back to the business of loading up the Behemoth. And I guess I have to give her credit for not pressing the matter further.

Beth's rating for the week:
Diane: 8 million bajillion stars
Greenpeace: 2 stars
Guy in short-shorts: 1 star, with an option for a possible future restraining order
Jehovah's Witnesses: 0 stars, and a $50 gift certificate to Specs

Party!

Another weekend, another first-grader's birthday party.

It's at Little Stacy Park, maybe half a mile from my house; but Anna doesn't want to walk. There's nothing more volatile than a six-year-old's temper in 90-degree heat. So we drive. At least we drive the flowery froggy Flying Spaghetti Monster-mobile, so we can still pass ourselves off as real Travis Heights residents.

The other moms look a lot like me: some older, some younger, but pretty much dressed about the same, only most of them have tattoos. These are the middle class of Travis Heights. Many of them have known each other for years, and most are actively involved with the PTA, which I'm not. They welcome me very politely, but I'm a stranger in their midst. They split up into small conversational groups, none of which I join, and chitchat about their kids, about early childhood learning patterns, about preschools, about waiting lists, about where to get the best coffee (Jo's), about their yoga classes and how to take a holistic approach to mental and physical wellness, and the challenge of finding inner peace when you have a house full of screaming toddlers.

Twenty small children line up to play Pin* the Tail on the Donkey, and all but three or four of them hit exactly the right spot. "I swear I blindfolded them," says the hostess mom, defensively, but I don't believe it. She's very cute. You can tell she's crazy about kids.

The destruction of the pinata was unusually orderly. This is a ritual which almost always involves a few near concussions. But these Travis Heights moms, I tell you what, they're on the ball, monitoring and controlling the line of kids and herding them back when they got too close. Cleverly, the hostess mom had put only a symbolic amount of candy in the actual pinata, and instead passed out pre-filled goody bags once the pinata was broken. These people know what they're doing.

Still, small children are small children, and towards the end of the hour-and-a-half party time, a few of the littler ones were melting down in fairly socially unpleasant ways, seizing toys, hitting each other, and generally behaving like nasty little sniveling brats. Kids do that, which is why most sane people try to avoid having more than two or three, tops. And I'm once again reminded of one of my favorite stories. It was Anna's fifth birthday, and Katie volunteered to fill out the invitations. She's fifteen now, and a born party animal. She filled out five or six invitations with "Time: 2PM 'til ???" before we caught and stopped her.

I got home before 5pm, thank God. I don't do well even with Austin small talk. ("So where do you work?" asked one of the moms at one point. "Oh, I'd really rather not say," I responded. She probably thought I was in marketing.) There are probably another sixteen kids at least in Anna's class. I hope most of them had their birthdays over the summer.

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*Tape

...Wait, What?

The things you hear at work. My!

"My software skills just aren't up-to-date," sighed a coworker who had, inexplicably, stopped into Robbie's cube to chat with the two of us today. We'd never really spoken to him before. He works in the IT branch of our section. "I had to learn Access, SQL, all kinds of things. If I hadn't, they might have let me go.

"That's what happened to Tuck," he went on. "He didn't have very good skills, so they found some silly pretext to fire him on. It was really sad. Tuck was the last person who worked here I felt really close to."

Here Robbie and I had to refrain from looking at each other, because Tuck is the guy who became obsessed with our former cube neighbor Audrey, sent her an agonized four-page work email about how she was the first woman he'd ever cared for since his high school girlfriend had cravenly dumped him 30 years before, and made remarks indicating he might be a danger to himself and to others; and in the course of the ensuing formal investigation, went transportational and made death threats against the division head, which led to the long string of bored security guards we had cooling their heels near our work area for several months. This was a pretext?

Our coworker went on at some length. I hate to discourage friendliness, but my mumbled hints at really needing to get back to my desk to check on a project were going unnoticed, and for reasons I won't get into, the only way out of Robbie's cube was over the wall. We murmured politely and looked at the floor and smiled. Awkward!

He told us about where he went to school, his childhood, and where he was born. "I was the result of a broken condom!" he informed us cheerfully.

Robbie and I once again did not look at each other.

Eventually we did escape - or were released, I should say; we didn't go over the wall. I wonder what Robbie will do in a week and a half, when he finds himself suddenly working among lots of normal people. Will he be able to adapt? What if there isn't anyone ridiculous there? He'll be off balance.

What if they have a sensible business strategy there? How will he cope? As I was getting ready to leave, I heard someone in my neighbor's cubicle expressing frustration over a project we've been working on. Management wants immediate action, but have little idea exactly what that action should be. (Of course I'm aware that mindset is not at all unique to my agency, because if it were, there'd be no such thing as Dilbert.)

"Which direction we're going in is going to determine a lot of which direction we go," remarked the woman in my neighbor's cube. I wrote it down right away. You never know when the agency might decide to hold a competition to come up with a new motto.

I'd split the prize money with Robbie.

Going Out

Forget Sudoku. If you want to get some serious mental exercise, try explaining the Austin art scene to a bunch of small-town Texans.

My sister Margie's in a new band, which is playing tonight at L_M_N_L, and she insists I have to go, though frankly the last time I was there I had a bit of a negative experience.

Margie's new band is called Palette, or Pallet, or Palate. "What kind?" I asked her, since she told me the name over the phone. "Color palette, or moving pallet, or hard palate?"

"It could be any of those!" she enthused. "It's multi-purpose!"

They'd better get somebody with really bad handwriting to do their flyers.

Anyway, at lunch with district contacts from a few small Texas towns last week, I was trying to explain Margie's musical activities. "What kind of band does she play in," one of the guys asked, "country?"

"No, no," I said, "it's sort of an art band. They play at art openings and stuff."

"Oh, so it's classical?" he asked.

"No, no, it's kind of avant-garde," I said, and realized this didn't clarify anything. "It's weird. Not like a regular genre."

"Hippie music?" suggested the Carl Sagan of Laredo.

"Well, maybe," I said. "Hippie-punk-alternative-retro. They wear big papier-mache masks. They play at the Art Car parade."

Silence.

"The scene - they're all a bunch of chain-smoking vegetarians," I went on.

At least Carl immediately understood what I meant.

Margie says L_M_N_L, which had been gutted the last time I was there, and was once more just a largish, high-ceilinged room, has platforms and levels and cubbies all built into it again, but in a completely different configuration. I'm glad. It was sort of dull without all the exploring and crawling around.

And it means that, if need be, there are a lot more places to hide.

Dating

When's the last time you asked somebody for a date?

It is, of course, an unbearably awkward experience. There's the phone number scrawled on a yellow sticky-note, under the name of a relative stranger with whom you know you have at least a few things in common. I dread the phone anyway, so that makes the whole ordeal that much worse.

But if you gotta, you gotta, right? So I pick up the phone and call. The person on the other end appears to be very glad to hear from me, but is on the other line with work right now, and will call back tomorrow. Fine with me! I'm just glad to get off the phone. Oh, but wait. Don't you need my number?

"The number you're calling from? Actually, it's on my phone."

Huh huh, oh yeah, I guess it is, I'm such an idiot. Is any of this actually worth it?

And it is, of course, because I get off the phone and tell Anna, "Okay, I set up your play date with your friend for Saturday," and she shouts "Hooray!" and hugs me tight, and bounces joyfully around the room for about seven minutes.

What can I say, I'll do anything for love...