Caustically Optimistic

Sex, Money, Drugs, and not a Republican in Sight

I was hiking yesterday and talking to Emily on the phone (I’m one of those people) and we were talking about collecting things and how we don’t collect things. We’re not bric-a-brac people; we don’t need knick-knacks because our dust can find homes of its own. I used to avidly collect things because I was given them and when I moved from Connecticut all of it found its way to my mother’s attic. I proudly affirmed that I don’t collect anything but had this rebutted for me when I got home. Apparently, I do have a few collections.

So, in the finest tradition of Emily's friends I will use her ideas as a writing prompt; collections I collect:

1. Reusable Grocery Bags – I never remember my bag when I’m at one of those trendy, granola grocers like Trader Joe’s and buy a new one. A smart person would run out and grab the bag that is IN THE TRUNK OF THE CAR but they always have a new, clever bag that I can drop money on or I can just use their paper bag.

2. To-Do Lists – I have a neat stack of them sitting right next to my computer and Bobble-Head Jesus – who is either bobbling his head disapprovingly or swaying with the music. Many of these things I have done, others I will do and most of it I will try and pawn off on someone else. It must be more annoying to people who have expected me to do something to know that I made a good-faith effort by writing it down, looked at it and did something else as opposed to merely forgetting or doing the Christian thing and blowing you off.

3. Ironing – I have this beautiful basket that someone left here that I have decided to keep it. They never notice it because it is artfully filled with things that should be ironed or steamed so I can wear them to work but I will keep cycling through the same six outfits until I get bored with something or more likely rip, stain or soil it. Ironing is on one of those to-do lists.

4. Ill-Fitting Clothing – Since I keep losing and gaining weight I have a few nice and soon-to-be out of style clothing items that is either too fat to wear or not fat enough. This is usually neatly packed away but this weekend I threw it all over the house to determine what needed to be shuffled around the clothing that needs to be ironed but won’t.

5. Your Stuff – I have a full crate of it. I think the crate is yours, too – at least that is what I will tell the milkman from El Paso if he spots me with it and questions me. I will put returning your stuff on my to-do list.

This does not include the crazy ideas bouncing around my brain. Example: my plan to “refinish” Bubbe - grab her by the ankles, shake vigorously, cut off the excess, save for later- or how to solve the four-drivers in a two-car garage dilemma for when I move home – get Mini Coopers and stack them. This also doesn’t include the compendium of quotes about Election 2008 being collected by the Nedenia and I to include, “The Oval Office is not a consolation prize for prisoners of loveless marriages,” or our companion piece, Britney Watch 2008 – Sex, Money, Drugs, and not a Republican in Sight.

Stay tuned: Farewell Twenties, Hello Thirties! schedule coming soon.

Game on, suckers.

I was talking to Rachel about Haterade (Gatorade for haters). While we discussed flavors and marketing of Haterade, how everything I am drinking is Haterade and our favorite flavors of Haterade - mango being her favorite flavor, the unidentifiable ‘red’ flavor being mine - I sat back and said to myself, “Self, you are thirty years old. This is a ridiculous conversation to be having.”

Thirty year olds fulfill their responsibilities and do not sit around the house in dorm pants, drinking Haterade and listening to the Beastie Boys. Thirty year olds worry about retirements and mortgages. Thirty year olds go to brunch with married friends and willingly hold babies. Thirty year olds are going to use that six hundred dollar ‘tax rebate’ toward a washer/dryer set and not a new pair of sunglasses.

Then I catch myself and realize that I have fifteen days – about two weeks - until I am thirty years old.

“Are we there yet?”

“Almost – but not yet.”

Game on, suckers.

Dreamy Draw

Today my co-worker whose unseemly violation was detailed in our previous installment and I went hiking with other friends of hers in the Dreamy Draw Park section of the Phoenix Mountain Preserve.

If only it were that simple; as you know nothing is ever simple when I am involved in the process.

On Saturday my co-worker called to let me know where we would be hiking the next day and I dutifully wrote something else down. She said we were going to, “Dreamy Draw,” and I wrote down, “Jimmy Jaw.” She also noted that it could be found on the City of Phoenix’s Parks and Recreation website, which it is – safely nestled between Camelback and the Rio Salado Habitat. Try as you might, Google all night – you won’t find Jimmy Jaw. It doesn’t exist.

I really should call my co-worker, ‘my friend,’ but that would decrease her coolness exponentially, probably by some factor derived from using the word exponentially in sentences. Never you mind that she is the captain of the Team Trivia team I am on, never you mind!

Her directions could not have been better, Phoenix is famous for hiding things in plain sight but there was no hiding the Dreamy Draw Park or parking. I arrived there early and circled for parking and noticed – with some trepidation – that people were there dressed in suits and ties. Was I in the wrong place? What were people doing hiking dressed for success? Was this black tie? I hate being under dressed; you spend the entire time self conscious and more uncomfortable than you would have been in your Dockers that fit just fine in college. Luckily, those people were lost and I was the one in the right place.

The strange thing about this hike was the environment of the hike. Phoenix has been unreasonably wet recently and the mountain was green. It was covered in grass and other plants were either healthy looking or just plain there – poppies for instance. I am used to rainy weather from growing up in Germany. I am used to trees, grass and flowers – but my Phoenician counterparts were not used to seeing all of this around them. It made for a beautiful hike and made the cacti look a little out of place encircled by all the greenery.

My co-worker is full of energy at work. She is amazingly dynamic. She was the same way on the trail. I thought she was going to kill us. For the first part I was doing fine and in the second part I was relieved for the rest at a part of one of the mountains they referred to as, “the saddle.” When we got to the third part I wanted to lie down and die and by the fourth part I was glad we were going downhill. I figured that if I started to roll I could bounce myself of a few choice boulders and end up reasonably close to my car.

I thought I was the only one having any difficulty and I am admittedly out of shape, and perhaps even a little proud of this situation, but certainly surprised that I was having trouble with the hike. On the fourth piece of our trek one of my coworker’s friends expressed amazement that she was bounding up the mountain while we secretly begged for death. These people are not lazy, fat-lards, like me. These people run marathons and half-marathons. These people do not look upon a 'fun run' as an example of oxymoron - they look upon it as a Saturday morning well spent! These people need help; send them money.

When I visited Jeremy in Texas the first time, summers ago, we went hiking twice a day and I was never this tired. That was during the summer. That was before I was used to the desert. I was worn out before we were finished and in all my years of volks marches in Germany and hiking other places I have never wanted to stop.

I was surprised when I received a text message from Chaos Bean that I had been hiking for over two hours – two and a half by the time we were finished. I never do anything in a two-hour sprint, beyond sitting in airplanes or cars and even then I fill my time with some manner of activity. It was little wonder I was tired, I had exhausted not only my physical reserve but also my attention span.

How do you cap such an experience? Do you go home and take a shower? Share a granola bar or some other healthy snack? Curse Tom for making things like this look glamorous, worthwhile and fun? Do you go to a Mexican Restaurant and eat a burrito the size of a corpulent Chihuahua?

Fear not, I did none of these things. I had the burrito the size of a corpulent Chihuahua but I let my co-worker cut a piece off to try it and slyly spread around cheese and salsa in my dish to make it seem like I had not eaten the whole thing. I also distracted attention from this by trying to describe religious art I have become interested in or babbling about other things that make little/no sense.

It will be a long time before I haul my portliness onto a mountain again – at least a week – and I have a lot of sloth to squeeze in that time to make up for all that regrettable exercise. Indeed my couch and Ronald McDonald are calling me right now and I must, must obey my master.

mo money, mo problems

A friend of mine suffered a tragedy this week. I have great difficultly writing about this because what happened to her is violation of her person and an attack on her peace of mind. What happened to her has happened to me; maybe even some of you.

Someone stole her iPod out of her classroom.

Certainly, she should have kept it with her. She should not have taken it to work in the first place, perhaps. Maybe she should have locked it up or not left her classroom unlocked. Possibly, we shouldn’t blame the victim. Conceivably, we should feel safe in our own homes and classrooms. Perchance, we should be able to depend on the decency of our fellow humans not to take from us what is truly precious.

If you don’t have an iPod you don’t know. It becomes a part of you and an expression of who you are. While it holds your music, videos, photos, address book and calendar; it embraces and cherishes who you are. The iPod is a truly beautiful thing that you cannot appreciate until you have one yourself.

My iPod has been my companion on my trips around the country, making the airplane less communal and the Jetta less solitary. Without my iPod I wouldn’t have anyone to go to the gym with. Without my iPod I wouldn’t have anyone to sing with, abruptly in public places – off key and inappropriately – and I wouldn’t have a dance partner whenever I decided I needed to bust a move to complement my vocal styling.

No one else is constantly willing to go on a trip, get up before God has had his coffee and go to the gym, or make life a music video like an iPod will. I have had more iPods than I have had serious girlfriends – in fact I think that I have had more iPods than I have had anything except debate partners where I have topped out at twelve (disciples should always come in even dozens).

What is most discordant about this whole story is that the friend who was victimized is not the lardy, detestable, curmudgeon teacher – that’s me and she better not forget it – but the popular, au courant teacher adored by staff and student alike. This is akin to taking Mother Theresa’s sandals or breaking Gandhi’s glasses. It is debased, human treachery at its worst. This is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion – an analogy I do not make lightly as we work at a junior high school – this violation of our sainted colleague is without foundation, pretext or defense.

Tomorrow, I am going to the scary gas station and I am going to buy a lottery ticket. I am going to pray that the ticket win so that I might use the winnings to right wrongs in the world; this is one wrong I would right.

I realize that others close to me have bigger fish to fry. I realize that I have bigger fish to fry. I could list them and work on solutions, and indeed I do. However, replacing the iPod is one small thing that can be done that would make the world a much better place.

If an iPod in my care has died, moved on or been taken from me by the cruel, cruel world a new one has always found its way to me. I hope that my friend’s luck, my friend’s iPod karma is the same and that a new one wanders into her life in the same way stray dogs and cats gravitate to crazy old people who are lonely.

If that were to happen then I would believe in justice again, in the goodness of other people. Until such time, however, I will be morose thinking of my inspirational fellow teacher.

trouble never came in a more appealing package

Every time I hear Senator McCain say, “my friends,” it reminds me of when I was in collegiate debate because we would refer to our opponents as “our friends;” it alternately causes me the trepidation that he’s summoning the other zombies to eat me.

There was one tournament, now in antiquity, where my debate partner nearly incapacitated himself before the tournament causing me to spend the night in the hospital with him and not get any sleep before competing - a tried and true recipe for disaster.

I rose to speak after a particular team from Wyoming – you know, that team – and I looked at them after thanking my partner and said, “and I’d like to thank our friends from…no, you’re not our friends. I don’t particularly like you. No one does.”

Unfortunately I said this in front of a judge from the Harvard of Nebraska who always voted for me and she nodded in agreement instead of chiding me for this comment. Melissa was auspiciously placed in the gallery to give me dirty looks to encourage me not to be incorrigible. I used to think she went to watch Nathan and I debate because she enjoyed it but after years of judging debate I now know the truth – our coach sent Melissa there to give her a complete and honest account of every half baked idea, offensive comment and ill-stated controversial truth. No one goes to debate rounds for fun.

Had I said it in front of the Philosophy Factory she would have voted against me, in fact she never voted for me. This is a grievance I will take to the grave; I will hold onto this grudge like an old lover. Of course it took me a while to realize that “Susan laughs with me, the Philosophy Factory laughs at me.”

A good example of this was when talking about emerging terrorist threats in the area of the world where you find the former soviet Islamic republics, around India, east or Iran and I opined that I didn’t know where the next threat would come from, exactly, but that, “it would come from a country: small, unstable and ending in –stan*.” She laughed but apparently it was because I was so incredibly clever. I was right, however, and probably could have won that round if I hadn’t been saddled with this guy who believed that Mount Rushmore was a naturally occurring phenomenon and Canada was going to be the fifty-first state.

I will end this because it is getting late and who knows what I might say without rest to give me discretion or Melissa to reprove? I had more to say but I was just seriously insulted on the telephone – be glad you’re in iPhone, phone or I’d have thrown you at my assistant – and if I don’t stop writing now I might say something that will plead for an e-mail from the Philosophy Factory or Melissa with a vigorous admonishment and a much-deserved dressing down.

*Don’t tell Dejafoo that I called him unstable (or that I called ‘it’ small)

caustically optimistic gathers hope

I’ve brought my page where I would discuss serious issues back, if you need background on this post you’d find it here., also, be sure to check out this

I’ve been making signs for rallies, placing phone calls, and knocking on doors while volunteering with Obama for America. I even had the opportunity to work at Senator Obama’s rally here in Phoenix with Governor Napolitano, Caroline Kennedy and a member of the House of Representatives from Arizona. I didn’t catch the representative’s name because everyone thought his appearance meant the Senator was coming on and everyone was screaming.

At the rally I helped by screening people for items the Secret Service and event coordinators were trying to keep out and help people avoid hassles. I was also supposed to be on the look out for Ron Paul supporters trying to sneak in banners and other paraphernalia – they have a penchant for exercising their freedom of speech at the expense of other’s freedoms. For a while I agreed with Val that it was admirable that a public relations campaign was being run on poster board and bed sheets but the more I see Ron Paul people tearing down other people’s signs or posting theirs over other people’s the less respect I have for that movement.

Another thing I did at the rally was helping people who needed to sit in ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) seating find their places. This was an intensely easy job. People with limited ranges of movement usually come in wheelchair and blind people come with people to help them find the away around. Deaf people are not that easy to move around.

I teach people every day who speak no English and I can get them to learn and do well. I figured that I could help three deaf people find their seats in a coliseum. Wrong, wrong, wrong! What should have taken five minutes took half an hour. I traversed the bowels of the coliseum looking for their seats, talking to the too many cooks in the kitchen and going on a few goose chases before one of them recognized the translator from another event (really, how many can their be?) and relinquishing them to her custody.

Before I left them they passed me a note telling me I was clueless and unhelpful. I would have liked to have known they had paper and pen a long time before being reminded that I’m useless. I had been, ineptly, using the text feature on my iPhone to communicate with them because my knowledge of American Sign Language starts and ends with the New Jersey State Bird. No, I did not regale them with this knowledge.

The rally itself was even more inspiring than watching on television and I got a few great pictures. I had hoped that Caroline Kennedy would speak more but the weight of her symbolism was as palpable as Obama’s own energy and gravitas. What impressed me the most was the rally being light on bashing Bush/Cheney or Republicans.

***

Two days later I was back at the Obama for America office to volunteer again. This time I would be canvassing neighborhoods for the Senator. I was given a list of people’s doors to knock on and a tutorial on how to canvass before being sent on my way.

Unfortunately, most people were not home and I spent my evening traversing a small knot of Phoenix leaving pamphlets on people’s doors. Everyone I did get to speak to had voted early and had voted for Senator Obama – or told me that and that was exciting. Being bitten by someone’s dog and little kids throwing rocks at me because I didn’t have stickers like the Clinton people.

When I returned the office I made phone calls with Casey before we went to get something to eat – my favorite activity – and while she called enthusiastic Obama supporters I seemed to zero in on every Clinton supporter who wanted to say something foul and hang up.

On Saturday I canvassed again and in a testament to how much I believe in Senator Obama and how we can change America I put my social anxiety in the trunk of the car so I could drive around Phoenix with someone I had never met before and knock on people’s doors to talk to them about Senator Obama.

Saturday was more fruitful. We met supporters who were grateful that we were canvassing, old ladies hugged us and one even misted as she said, “I never thought white people would come to my door to ask me to vote for a black man.” But, Senator Obama’s race is not why anyone was supporting him but the power of that symbol or the rightful pride people take in it cannot be ignored either. The Clinton supporters we encountered were polite as were the McCain supporters we were misdirected to.

I think it was a good use of my time, rock dents and dog bites not withstanding.