Plumbing The Depths of Irony
So if you find yourself at the Plumbing Supply Store (because Home Depot doesn't carry any parts for one piece toilets) and you ask for a gasket and flapper for an American Standard toilet and the old man behind the counter asks, "Which one?" and you say, "Aren't they all the same . . . I mean, they're called American Standard," then you are setting the old man up for some excellent plumbing humor, as I found out when he said, "That's what they call themselves, but they don't mean it . . . did you bring the broken parts?" and I had to admit-- sheepishly-- that I did not, and the actual plumbers behind me in line were all laughing now at my naivete in trusting a brand name . . . but the old guy did come through in the clutch, with the right part, and now we have a working toilet again, but it has cost me my plumbing innocence and my faith in advertising.
Miracles On Top of More Miracles
All week, I had the nagging feeling that I was missing something-- but I couldn't put my finger on what it was-- and then Thursday morning when I went to the track, to do some intervals, I noticed a pair of blue Crocs near the soccer net and I realized what it was I had been missing, the lacuna in my life, for days and days-- my blue Crocs!-- I had worn them to soccer Sunday morning, changed into my cleats, and then left them there . . . and they were still there, unharmed-- four days later! a miracle!-- so maybe everything does happen for a reason, and the reason I went running Thursday morning was so I could be reunited with my hideously ugly blue Crocs and now the universe is back in order (aside from all that stuff in the middle East).
Yet Another Miracle
In preparation for summer, Catherine depilated my back and shoulder hair with Veet hair removal cream and then I used my beard trimmer to tame my chest and leg hair, and now-- miracle of all miracles-- I can dry myself off with just one towel (instead of the usual three towel routine that I used to practice).
Bomp Chukka Bomp . . . A Bicycle?
The music in the Canadian documentary series How It's Made is decidedly pornographic sounding, and-- oddly-- this fits the content of this wonderfully mindless "educational" show . . . as there is no end to the thrusting, riveting, pounding, compressing, and generally pneumatic action that goes into the manufacture of the featured articles . . . and the camera lingers on these activities for an extensively graphic and gratuitous amount of time, so that you can truly enjoy the rhythm and the motion of the machines, while you zone out to the cheesy techno riffs and beats.
You Get The Ads You Deserve
The final lesson in Michael J. Sandel's book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets is that although a "fire hydrant with a KFC logo still delivers water to douse the flames" and "children can learn math by counting Tootsie Rolls" and fans still root for their home team in Bank of America Stadium, that doesn't mean that markets don't leave their mark . . . when ads appear in schools they undermine the purpose of education: critical thinking; when a person gets a tattooed body ad it demeans them; product placement corrupts the integrity of art . . . when everything is for sale it leads to the "skyboxification" of American life . . . we live and work and play in separate realms and this is not good for democracy . . . and so I am discontinuing my line of tampons with Sentence of Dave emblazoned on the penetrator, and instead I will try to allow my sentences to penetrate people's consciousness the old fashioned way.
Spearguns Aren't As Dangerous As You Think!
If you were wondering if it's okay to allow your children to play with spearguns, the answer is: go for it! . . . because even if your kid shoots himself right through the skull, he very may well survive, as Yasser Lopez did . . . so don't deny your children the fun and good times of spear-fishing . . . and I am definitely going to give my parents a piece of my mind, because every Christmas I put a spear-gun on the top of my list, and Santa never delivered one.
Costa Chica!
In contrast to the all-encompassing logic of yesterday's post, today I will give some exceedingly specific and local advice: if you live in the New Brunswick area, and you like authentic Mexican food, then try Costa Chica Mexican Restaurant and Pizzeria . . . it's right in the middle of the barrio, on Handy Street, and everything we ate there was delicious . . . excellent chips, salsa, and fresh guacamole; tender and spicy marinated pork in the tacos pastor; great verde sauce; spicy chicken mole (although the chicken was on the bone, not a breast, but still super-delicious) and we had some kind of weird sweet tamale for dessert, which was also tasty . . . the place was loud and crowded, the waitress spoke a little English, and the chairs are especially festive and brightly colored.
All Encompassing Logic
Some people believe Everything Happens For A Reason, but other people are annoyed by this philosophy-- so if you'd like, you can buy a t-shirt with Everything Happens For No Reason emblazoned on it-- but logically, both these statements are identical . . . if everything happens for a reason, then nothing that happens has any greater reason than anything else . . . the fact that you spilled your coffee and the fact that thirty volcanoes erupt simultaneously on your birthday are both equivalent-- in fact, if everything happens for a reason, then everything is already determined and laid out in some sort of clockwork pattern and the universe is deterministic . . . and if everything happens for no reason, that doesn't mean that things are random and meaningless, because it's statistically impossible for every single thing to happen without reason, so it must mean that the universe was set rolling and now it's just proceeding like a column of dominoes, one event knocking into another in a chain reaction, without individual meaning . . . but possibly in some master pattern . . . so really the only interesting variant of these statements is Some Things Happen For A Reason, and Some Things Are Totally Random because that means there's something out there that can control things, and this thing occasionally takes an interest in the affairs of the universe and occasionally falls asleep at the wheel . . .
Into The Wild With Condoms
Cheryl Strayed's new memoir Wild: From Lost To Found On the Pacific Coast Trail is the female version of Into the Wild, John Krakauer's story of Christopher McCandless (a.k.a Alexander Supertramp) . . . both hikers change their names to something apropos and both Strayed and Supertramp escape their lives in the wilderness . . . and both find that the wilderness is no place to escape-- Strayed thinks she will reflect on her mother's death, her own divorce, and her flirtation with heroin addiction . . . but all she ends up thinking about is her boots, her heavy pack, rattlesnakes, and bears . . . luckily, her story ends happily, and there is some romance along the way-- my only complaint is that Wild drags on some at the end , Krakauer tells McCandless's more epic and more tragic tale concisely, but the books are still complementary and good reads for the summer if you like to get outdoors and hike (and I am still wondering if my prediction will come true about my wife's book club).
If You're Rich, You Can Shoot A Walrus
Michael Sandel examines the inevitable corruption of ethics in a society where market mentality is pervasive in his new book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets . . . and while you may have heard that hunters can pay 150,000 to shoot a black rhino in South Africa-- and that this seemingly vile practice has actually increased the endangered rhino's population manifold, because now it's worth it for South Africans to protect the creatures from poachers-- you may not have heard that you can pay an Inuit guide six grand and he will will allow you to shoot a walrus . . . the Inuits have a walrus quota and the Canadian government allows them to sell the rights to shoot the walruses to "hunters" . . . though it is hardly a hunt-- journalist C.J. Chivers describes this practice as "a long boat ride to shoot a very large beanbag chair," and if these anecdotes disgust you and you can't stand the fact that everything has a price on it, then perhaps you should move to Finland, where they want to preserve the moral rectitude of a speeding ticket-- they don't want the wealthy to view a ticket as a simple fee to be paid for the right to drive fast, they want the ticket to be viewed as a fine that is levied because you did something dangerous and wrong-- so when you show up in Helsinki traffic court, your ticket is a percentage of your salary, and so Nokia executive Anssi Vanjoki-- who earns seven million dollars a year-- was fined 217,000 dollars for driving 80kilometers per hour in a 40 km/h zone.
Commencement Anxiety
The high school where I teach holds their graduation ceremony down in Trenton, at the Sun National Bank Center, and every year I forget how long a drive it is to get there and how much traffic piles up around the arena . . . this year I actually did an illegal u-turn over a grass divider when I realized that was the way to avoid the long line of cars trying to make a left off of Hamilton Street . . . but though I ineptly timed my trip to the arena, once I got into my robe and sat down to listen to the names of seven hundred and fifty graduates, I improved: as the enunciators started their arduous task, I took a few samples, made some back of the envelope calculations-- without an envelope!-- and added my figure to the current time posted on the large red digital clock hanging from the arena ceiling . . . 46 minutes plus 12:04 . . . and I announced to the students around me that the reading of the names would be done at exactly ten of one . . . and forty-six minutes later, the last of the students lined up at the foot of the stage, waiting to be called, and I started getting nervous . . . it looked like I might be right . . . my palms started to sweat . . . one of my students said, "I think you're going to hit it on the nose" and the other students in my vicinity starting saying things like "Hurry up" and "Come on" and, though there was nothing on the line, I really, really wanted my prediction to come true . . . but, alas, there must have been some small flaw in my calculations, because the last student was announced at 12:51 . . . but the kids were nice about it and one consoled me: "That was still a really good guess."
It's Not Like I'm Trying To Be A Gymnast
I Neglect My Family for the Good of the Blog
My wife had the audacity to suggest that I ought to have gone grocery shopping yesterday afternoon, instead of taking my paddleboard out for a spin, because we had recently discussed the grocery list and the house was lacking in several basic items . . . and if she would have told me to go shopping, I would have done so without complaint, but there's no chance that I would take initiative and do something like that on my own, especially since the kids were at their respective after school programs and I had the opportunity to paddle around on the river . . . and think of what I would have missed if I went to the grocery store instead of the river yesterday: some of my best real-time content ever.
Urban Paddle-boarding Emergency! (A Ridiculous Riparian Adventure)
I took my stand-up paddleboard out on the Raritan this afternoon-- it's a dirty river, but the boat launch is only a couple hundred yards from my house, so despite the dead seagulls, I try to enjoy it as best I can-- and while when I paddleboard on the ocean, I hope to see dolphins and other beautiful sea life, I don't expect much on the river . . . however, today proved to be very, very different: three minutes after I shoved off from the dock, three fire trucks and an ambulance raced into the park, followed by several other vehicles; one of the fire trucks backed a small boat into the water, loaded with firemen, and they zipped past me and headed towards the nearby Donald Goodkind Bridge . . . and there were emergency vehicles up on the bridge, lights flashing, and a number of people looking down into the water . . . so I yelled to one of the firemen "What's going on?" and he told me that someone jumped off the bridge, apparently following in the footsteps of Detective Vin Markazian-- who leapt to his death off the same bridge in Season 1 of The Sopranos-- so once I found out this information, I kept paddling towards the scene, of course, despite the fact that I had to battle the wake of several boats, because when do you get to see an emergency situation on a stand-up paddleboard?-- and then a boat chugged past me headed the opposite direction, towards the way I came, so I turned and followed it: it was a small fishing skiff with a tiki hut and several corny flags flying that said things like COLD BEER and THE BAR IS OPEN and GONE FISHING . . . but it turns out this unlikely vessel fished the man out of the water, and delivered him to the dock, where he was taken into the ambulance waiting at the foot of the boat launch . . . and I find this slightly sad (and a little ironic) that whoever decided to end their life didn't have a more regal delivery from the murky waters of the Raritan, but I guess that's what you get when you jump off a bridge in Jersey . . . it's no Viking funeral, but it could have been worse . . . he could have been dragged in by a curious dude on a stand-up paddleboard (and I later found out that the man survived, and was actually treading water when the "Good Samaritan" boat rescued him).
There Is More Than One Female Singer Hailing From Canada
A few days ago the Final Jeopardy! answer was "THE BESTSELLING ALBUM OF ALL TIME BY A FEMALE IS A 20 MILLION SELLER BY THIS WOMAN WHO STARTED SINGING AT AGE 8 IN ONTARIO" and I confidently yelled "Who is Celine Dion!"-- pleased that I knew she was from Canada-- and all three Jeopardy contestants also wrote down "Who is Celine Dion?" but we were unanimously wrong . . . the answer is Shania Twain, and so once again, I realize Canada is more deserving of my attention and care.
Motivation
Running before work is risky, because if you get tired or injured miles from home, you've still got to get back in time to teach first period (I realized this Friday morning when I was three miles away from my house and my knee started to hurt . . . why I didn't realize it sooner and stay closer to home is a testament to my stupidity).
I Am A Coward When It Comes To Loud Noises
Blowing up a balloon is kind of scary . . . there's no pressure meter to tell you when to stop.
The Times They Are a-Chargin
I carry cash, and associate this with being a man-- a man should have some green in his wallet, so he can pay quickly and fluidly, without a lot of mucking around . . . because if the shit goes down, you're going to need cash, and a man should be ready for when the shit goes down . . . my wife, on the other hand, rarely carries a lot of cash, and uses her credit card for the bulk of her purchases, and I associate this behavior with females (Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble cry "Charge it!" when they race off on a shopping spree) but I am beginning to realize that transactions these days are actually faster and cleaner if you use a credit card . . . and so it's the women who are quicker on the draw now, but despite this knowledge, I can't seem to switch over (especially for a cup of coffee at WaWa; I'll use my credit card for larger purchases, but can't pull the trigger for smaller items).
My Dog Gets Treats But My Children Do Not
My dog bolted one time and learned his lesson . . . so last weekend when he popped loose from his collar, next to a busy road, and I told him to "stay," he did; he sat calmly and waited for me to reattach the leash-- it's wonderful, you tell him something once and he actually listens . . . on the other hand-- and this happened in the same day, making the contrast all the more apparent-- my children and I were planning on going on a family bike-ride, but they were too impatient to wait for me-- though I am clearly part of the family-- and while I was in the house getting a water bottle, they took off on their bikes, crossed the street they are not allowed to cross, and then got into a furious race with each other, all through the park-- never looking behind to see if their dad was accompanying them-- and when I finally found them, fifteen minutes later and a mile and a half away, they were still racing, weaving in and out, and Ian cut Alex off and Alex crashed and scraped his elbow, knee, and hand, and some woman stopped to tend to him, but I put an end to that and told him to get on his bike and ride home-- injured or not-- and so the dog has been earning treats left and right, but my kids have lost them for the week.
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