More Nonsense on Trucks

On I-275. Slightly unsettling?

Odd English Phrases I Have Found

Shopping at Sur La Table, I came across this device. It's a Japenese vegetable slicer. The whole contraption is weird enough, but it was the writing on the package that made it wonderful.

That's right, it helps you in cooking fast, joyful beautiful sharp edged!

Next, a guided tour of a nativity scene outside of a Hyde Park church. Where to begin? With the creation of the cosmos, naturally.

I think I like this depiction of the beginning of time. It's not at all messy or confusing, it's just a nice display of blinking LED lights. And the writer is so upbeat about the cosmos. The style is sustained throughout the whole site, even in the more grim pieces of the religious past. Like this.

If you don't mind, please proceed to the brutal and tortured death of Jesus Christ... Thank you! Have a nice day!

I skipped the crucifixion scene and got a latte instead.

Common Betta Fish Illness or Character From the Disney's The Little Mermaid?

1. Dropsy

2. Flotsam

3. Septicimia

4. Velvet

5. Aquata

6. Jetsam

7. Pop Eye

8. Flounder

9. Scuttle

10. Ick

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Betta Fish Disease: 1,3,4,7,10

Character from The Little Mermaid: 2,5,6,8,9

Flow

Existential advice on my commute?

The Catch

My high school pals got married to each other this year. The fateful bouquet throwing moment arrives and behold, it’s sailing right at me. That primal thinking kicks in, my pulse quickens, and I have a choice to make. I take a generous step to my right and watch the sequins fly. A decision without hesitation.

Later that summer, one of the higher ranked tennis players on the men’s professional tour launches an autographed ball into the stands. I watch, along with a hundred other people lingering after the match, as it eclipses the sun, arcs back to earth and rockets directly at the seats in front of me. A group of women, vocal supporters for this guy, squawk and angle themselves for the catch. Another decision, another second of instinctual thought. I reach over them, both arms outstretched, and catch it clean out of the air, inches above their fingers. I pull the ball to my chest, heart thumping.

Was it greedy? What is the etiquette of an autographed-ball-catching scenario? Every woman for herself, I’ve decided. Gut responses are moments of extreme honesty. What am I willing to reach for? Am I a generous person who would let the other, more devoted fans take home a souvenir? Do I want the bouquet, that precious symbol of optimism? Nope.

Two Solutions to Your Insect Problem

A can of Raid is next to godliness.

I came home to ants. They found the honey in the cupboard. Assholes. I took the food out of the cupboard and spread a nice layer of some toxic carcinogen ant barrier spray. They twitched a little, then stopped being ants and became little black specks in my cupboard. I wiped them away and put the food back, except the honey. I put that in a ziploc bag and dumped it into the bottom drawer.

Anthropomorphism.

Ivan the Terrible lives in my skylight. I don't know anything about the historical figure he is named for. Wasn't he a Viking or a Druid or something? The Ivan I know is just as terrible, if not more so. He's built a web in the corner of the bathroom skylight, content to shrink into the corner where plastic meets plaster during the day. At night, he is a splayed sillhouette just barely visible against the black backdrop of sky.

He's growing, he's stronger every day in his arachnid penthouse, too high to be swatted down, too far for a can of Raid. He's a silent menace. Like all spiders, he could bungee down on me at any moment, a hundred spider feet, landing on my head or in my towel. He is perfectly positioned for an arial strike.

But maybe this isn't the horror story I've made it out to be. Maybe at night when the house is silent he's just watching the trees swing under the stars, content in his hammock. A kind-hearted monster.

Not likely.

Our Trash is Your Novel

The dark truth about used bookstores, at least the one where I used to work, is that they throw away books. Piles of books. Heaping trash cans full of books. They don’t highlight that in the job description. The English major applying for a bookseller position thinks it will be all philosophical discussions with guys who wear dark-framed glasses and pronounce Goethe all German-like and guttural. We think it will be sexy, to a degree. We are mistaken.

I found myself hoisting a trash can out the back door and rolling it across a scorching parking lot one August afternoon. I felt guilty, sympathetic to the authors and their craft, as I began tossing books one at a time into the dumpster. Like a good English major, I learned to treat books not as words but voices and authors. Friends, even. The book I was throwing away was a thing that someone believed in. Someone agonized over those words, researched and poured their lives into them. Maybe that someone had a cocktail party to celebrate their book’s publication in their tiny Manhattan apartment.

Halfway through the first batch, with two more bulging cans to go and sweat already rolling down my back, the throwing became easier. I was able to set aside my misgivings and scoop them up three and four at a time. My sympathy was melting. So was my makeup. At the bottom of the pile, the last book to meet its end was a children’s picture book. It was a Dora the Explorer book, the kind with little buttons that play noises for certain parts of the story. The kind of book that booksellers and parents everywhere hate. I still felt a little remorse tossing Dora into the trash so I decided to give her one last play. I pushed a button, and a cartoonish child’s voice cried out,

“I need your help!”

Sorry Dora.