The Nose Doesn't Want to Know

Smearing expensive goo on your face on a nightly basis is, I suppose, just a natural part of growing older. What I can't understand is why the manufacturer thought this goo should have a smell of any kind. Sure, my moisturizer is only "lightly" scented. But any scent is kind of overwhelming when you apply it to your face, which, last time I checked, is where your nose is.

It's not nearly as overwhelming as my first roommate in college, about whom I was reminiscing to some coworkers today. "I scheduled it so my first class every day was at noon, downstairs, in a classroom on the first floor of my dorm," I was telling them. Wasn't that clever? So it was unfortunate that my randomly assigned roommate turned out to be a pathologically perky morning person with a major aerosol addiction.

After her 6 a.m. shower came clouds of baby-powder-scented aerosol deodorant, faux-Giorgio perfume in a spray can, and - because this was 1986 - at least two cubic liters of Aquanet. Forget about sleeping - I couldn't breathe. The windows in Jester didn't open, but it's probably just as well. After a few weeks I might have been tempted to jump. Thank God nobody ever lit a match.

But the weirdest thing - oh, my God, I said, as I remembered this detail - was that as she got dressed, she'd dump a sizable mound of baby powder into her panties. I guess she didn't quite feel fresh without it. And one of my coworkers asked, "Didn't she leave a little trail everywhere she went?"

"Or little poofs in the air behind her," suggested another, "like fairy dust!"

Do you know, I used to worry a lot about fitting in at my current job. But I think I've succeeded in bringing them down to my level at last.

I stopped by to visit another coworker this afternoon. I used to talk to her all the time when she worked in the gift shop off the lobby, and I'd drop in whenever I passed by. Since she moved to cubicle-land, I never see her. So I came by to talk and admire her new digs. After we'd been chatting for a while, her phone rang, and I busied myself in admiring the many group photos she has on her wall. One surprised me. Standing directly behind her in the shot was someone from my old work section - an old-school state employee of the first order, who, very shortly after Robbie and I started working there, confronted us in the hallway, demanded to know the date of a particular volcanic eruption, and, when we gazed in helpless bewilderment at one another, exclaimed "And you call yourselves geographers?!" and walked off.

What could he be doing in a group photo with my gift-shop-tending coworker? It seemed unlikely that they would move in the same circles. Or on the same planet. "What's this photo from?" I asked her as soon as she was off the phone.

"Oh, that's the Hispanic Activities Council," she said.

I looked again. Sure enough, everyone in the picture, besides the geography aficionado, was Hispanic. "I used to know that guy," I told her, and related the volcano story.

She laughed. "He's kind of strange," she said, "but he always comes to all the meetings. He never talks though."

"Why," I began, and paused, not knowing if this would be an indelicate question. One tries to be politically sensitive. "Why is he on the Hispanic Activities Council?" I asked.

"I have no idea," she said. "I think he just likes Mexican food."

The cubicles in my old division are less than half the size of the ones we have now, so I can testify with some degree of authority that many of my former coworkers were very fond of Mexican food indeed. The sad thing is, our work campus is being demolished in a year or two to put up condos, and the developer (as a deal to get my agency out of its 10,000-year proprietary lease on the prime real estate where it sits) is building us a new high-rise towards the rear of the property. This edifice will house all the workers who currently occupy three buildings sprawled out over a 10- or 12-acre spread, so space will be limited, cubicle size will be standardized, and we won't have the nice big offices we have now, that's for sure. "It's gonna suck," sighed my coworker, "you'll be smelling everybody's lunch, one way or another."

I just hope they don't put my work group on the same floor with my old section. Time to pick up a pallet of baby powder at the wholesale warehouse, or maybe just smear lots of moisturizer under my nose.

Why Yes, I Do Call Myself a Geographer

And suddenly I'm eight years old all over again.

I remember the name of the elementary school in Ann Arbor where I went to the first half of third grade. I used to walk there every day, it was just at the end of my street, whatever that was. But Google-Map the name of the elementary school, and look at the surrounding street names until one sounds sort of familiar, and drag the little street-view guy to about where you sort of maybe remember starting off from, 32 years ago, and... bam.

I didn't remember what the house looked like, but I do remember the railed-in patio above the family room, which is what that sunroom on the right is. My parents rented this house; the owner was a gourmet chef, and had a locally-produced cooking show that was filmed in the kitchen. It was a nice kitchen. Mom loved it.

I remember a little powder room directly off the kitchen, wallpapered in New Yorker covers. It had a laundry chute to the basement. So did all the upstairs bedrooms. My room was blue...

The house was furnished; I thought the grand old wooden hall tree in the entryway was a throne. It didn't suit my stepfather's taste, which runs to Hobbit Post-Modern. (Or perhaps Post-Apocalyptic.) Our regular coffee table was a slice of a knot from a redwood tree, wild and beautiful and (from the perspective of a small child in close quarters) perhaps needlessly jagged. The Coopers had antiques. I think this is about the cutest house I have ever seen. When we left it, my parents bought an A-frame on two acres of land in Ypsilanti, where all the furniture fit right in - though Mom always complained the exterior doors didn't fit quite right, and it used to give her nightmares.

The washer and dryer here were in the basement, where all the laundry chutes led. Oooh, but the basement was scary. It had a looming shadowy cistern, and was dark and dank and stone-walled, as required by Federal law. Wooden treads led down from the kitchen, just behind the powder room.

And I remember the detached garage, and that it had a clubhouse built up near the ceiling in the back of it, accessible by a ladder. (The family we were renting from had boys just a little older than me.) And I made best friends with a girl named Jenny who went to my school and lived a couple of blocks away, because we were exactly alike: we both lived in rented houses, both had clubhouses in the garage, and both of us had stepfathers who used to joke about selling us to gypsies. (Does anybody say that anymore?) Our parents were friends. Later, when we moved to Ypsilanti, and Jenny's family moved somewhere or other on the shores of Lake Huron, we'd still get together every couple of months. Jenny's mom had a baby girl - Whitney - and thus ruined our perfect symmetry, until my own mom got pregnant a couple of years later, and my sister Jessica was born. But by then we were in San Antonio, and I don't know where Jenny's family went.

One morning on our way to school together, I remember, we got distracted by a full-sized igloo in a neighbor's yard. (This was Ann Arbor, remember - you think school was called on account of a couple measly feet of snow?!) We were entranced, and stopped to play, just for a minute, and lost ourselves in fun. The igloo was just packed snow, but the architects had made windows by pressing and steaming up part with their breath until it turned to clear ice. I have no idea how long had passed before Jenny and I suddenly looked at each other and said "Oh shit!" (or the eight-year-old equivalent thereof). We had completely forgotten about school!

It really blows my mind how I could see something like that, on my computer screen at work - I only took an idle look, in a slow moment - and so much comes rushing back. All the changes and losses of the intervening years gone - Mom making chicken marengo or boeuf bourguignon in that kitchen - she was a great fan of Julia Child and used to watch her program religiously. Looking at that picture I can almost smell her cooking.

It's been a rough spring, this year. Funny to stumble across a simple image like that and feel it all blur away.

Leave It

As we were at dinner tonight, at Dick's Last Resort on the Riverwalk (don't ask), this song came on:

Naturally it's on my iPod, now. But I wanted to share this with you.

My junior year at UT, I lived in a vegetarian, clothing-optional housing co-op on West Campus, so you can just imagine what that was like. One of the guys fronted a Celtic band. One very ambitious night, he told us, when he and his bandmates were in an alcoholically- and herbally-enhanced state of mind, they decided to cover this song.

They were not, from what he said, overly successful. Or they were about half successful. They got the words and the rhythm down pat, he said. But the actual notes were all over the place.

I happen to think this is an excellent metaphor for life, especially in San Antonio, plus I'm extremely tired from being verbally and emotionally abused and made to wear a silly hat, then spending two hours in a parking garage. But it's still a great song. Enjoy!

Ork Ork Ork

We've been watching old "Mork and Mindys" lately.

I don't know why I say old ones, as if there were a new one; though there probably eventually will be, what with the ongoing trend of remaking favorites from decades past into new TV series or movies. Which reminds me! I never did see the new Get Smart. But I think Zooey Deschanel might have made a better 99.

Anyway, they're fun to watch, and not just because whenever they show the outdoor shot of the house I am reminded of my friend Billy. The overall premise is an interesting snapshot of its time: Mindy's dad is totally freaked out that she has a guy move in with her, and keeps on being freaked out even when she reveals that Mork comes from another planet and sleeps hanging upside down in the closet.

That might actually constitute reasonable cause for freaking out, even in Boulder, I guess. But Mindy's dad doesn't really care about that. He's still freaking out because they are living together, unmarried. Various early plot devices (I haven't got very far into the series yet) center around old high school friends of Mindy's trying to steal her "boyfriend," and the difficulty she has getting dates when guys find out there's a man on the premises. Does it ever even occur to her to tell anybody they're just roommates? That's legitimate enough. Why doesn't she just tell her suitors Mork is gay? He wears rainbow suspenders, for God's sake. She shouldn't even have to say anything.

That said, it's actually a reasonably funny show, and I can remember how completely off-the-wall it was for its time. Remember, this was an era when we were all supposed to believe that ring-around-the-collar was the worst social calamity that could ever befall you, and that Sara Tucker put big globs of Cool Whip on her pies at what was supposed to be a good restaurant.*

It's kind of weird how badly Robin Williams cheesed out as he got older, though. Did he have to? Do we all have to? Sometimes it looks that way, but then I remember that I know lots of older people who didn't: my maternal grandmother, for one, I always thought was very cool, except for a brief period in the early nineties when she really liked Dan Quayle. But nobody's perfect.

As I recall - and we haven't gotten there yet - Mork and Mindy did eventually hook up, and have a baby in the form of Jonathan Winters. And if that doesn't teach you about the perils of living together before marriage, I'd like to know what does?

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*100% stolen from Dave Barry, who was also well ahead of his time.

Musings to Clean Your Clock By

The other night, Margie and two of her band friends and I were discussing where the phrase "to clean your clock" comes from. None of us knew - and I suppose it's only my own fault that Wikipedia still doesn't have an entry on it - but we did determine that "Music to Clean Your Clock By" would be a great album name.

Also, the band name du jour is "Snotty Literati." I know you were wondering.

Out of curiosity, how many things in your life do you look back on that make you go "Unnngh"? One, or two, or five or twenty? I think I have six or seven: horrible things that never quite fade, and every time you remember that this particular something or set of somethings happened (somethings, of course, that I did), you go "unnngh."

Here's one: I was, I think, 10 or 11, and riding the schoolbus was a nightmare. No, it really was. Mine was one of the last stops, and by the time the bus arrived it was pretty completely full. Nobody wants to let you be the third person in the seat. There was that one small seat in the back, and the person sitting in it used to scrunch down where he wasn't visible from the front. So the bus driver, impatient, would say, "There's an empty seat in the back!" and you knew perfectly well there wasn't, because this had happened several times now; but you had to walk back there anyway because the driver told you to; and as you got close, the kid sitting there would pop up - again - and the whole bus would laugh at you for falling for that one. Again. You dumbass!

So to get out of the ordeal, I started hiding when the bus was pulling up - in the culvert, or around the side of the house, or behind the air conditioning unit. My parents had to drive me to school every day. I told them the bus driver was deliberately skipping the stop where I was waiting.

So they called the school, and some big stink ensued, and I'm sure something happened to the bus driver - he was also a science teacher, by the way, but I was never in his class - and I got in huge trouble at home and had to go back to riding the bus, where the driver was distinctly chilly to me for the rest of the year.

Unnngh!

Of course, that one is long enough ago, and comparatively minor enough (though I'm sure it entailed some unpleasantness for the bus driver at the time) that I can write about it; not that much of an unnngh, now. But I have plenty of others much fresher and unnnghier. So I'm kind of wondering why I have so little empathy for my son, who just did himself up a treat, mate.

"Does life always suck?" he asked me, so I said, "No, only sometimes, and then it gets better... And then it sucks again. And then it gets better. And then..."

I don't know, you just try to distract yourself by hanging out with friendly people and coming up with funny band names, right? And thank every star in the sky you don't have to ride the schoolbus anymore.

Two Stories

The company I used to work for in Austin is gradually shutting down. They've transferred a bunch of people to another state and laid a lot more off. But they're not closing down altogether, and my former manager, through the departure of several others at his level, has gained a great deal more power, prestige, and influence.

This is his story.

Twelve years or so ago, my supervisor left the company to work for an independent consultant, so her boss, the division director, set out to hire a replacement. She posted the position, screened applications, and conducted interviews. When she had narrowed her choices down to four or five people - all internal candidates - she called a staff meeting to get everyone's input as to which one would be the best fit for our group. One of us - a good friend of mine - was traveling that week, so he was piped in by speakerphone. The rest of us sat around the conference table and discussed the applicants as our director reviewed their qualifications, projecting each one's badge photo on the screen at the end of the room.

None of us really knew any of the candidates, but when the director got to a particular one, my friend on the speakerphone piped up. "Oh, I've worked with him before!" he said. "He's very good, knows his stuff, and he's a really nice guy. I think he'd be great for the job!"

"What do the rest of you think?" asked the director, but we all shrugged. We knew his name and his face - it was a small enough company, no one would have been completely unfamiliar - but we didn't know anything about him. Still, if our coworker could recommend him so strongly, we certainly had no objection. So he was hired.

Several months later, my friend and I were at lunch. "Do you know," he told me, "that day when we had that meeting and decided to hire Bob? Well, I thought she was talking about somebody else."

This is my friend's story.

We were working a conference out of town, and at the end of a long day, we hung out on his hotel room balcony drinking Coronas and talking. After it got dark we went inside and watched Austin Powers on TV. My friend leaned back on one bed, and I lay on my stomach on the other. And after a while, Coronas being Coronas, you know, he got up to use the restroom.

And left the door open.

"Oh dear," I remember thinking at the time, "this can't be good," though at least the bathroom was around the corner, and not in direct line of sight. Still, when he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, it turned out I was right. Though I don't mean to complain, because it could have been much worse. He did have on underwear.

"Well!" I said brightly, "just look at the time." Or something like that. The next time I saw him back at the office, a week or so later, he apologized, and said he hoped he hadn't made me uncomfortable, and I said oh no, really, no big deal, don't worry about it. And that was that. But our friendship was never really quite the same, and fizzled out pretty shortly thereafter.

I think the moral of both of these stories is that life is random, unpredictable, and weird, so always be sure you have on clean underwear.