Trans/plant/portation

Nobody I know spends much time talking or thinking about garbage. Sure, there’s the nice abstract “I’m against landfills/I’m so green I’m Kermit” comment that comes up now and again, mostly when people have drunk a bit of locally produced wine and someone brings up Hummers, disposable diapers, or plastic shopping bags. And then there are the avid composters, which out here are more common than say, in northeast DC, where one has, on average, enough space to compost as a couple of used coffee filters and some uneaten toast crust. Although on a side note let’s recall that there have been not one, but two, compost fires in Walla Walla in the last three years, as the sun really starts cranking out the gamma rays midsummer, so while we may have space aplenty, we still need to consider safety. You hear that, compost-people?

But garbage needs its due consideration beyond knowing when one’s household garbage pick-up day is. What can’t go into the garbage? What should be recycled? What needs to be taken directly to a landfill, and how should one dispose of unused medication?

I’m not saying I know the answers to all of these (I do know that you fill up the medicine bottle with water, let the pills dissolve, and then throw it in the trash once it’s become a solid mass), but neither do my neighbors. And not even my neighbors—I’m speaking more of the endless stream of people who drive up to the recycling center across the alley from us, looking confused at the locked gate. These people intentionally put cardboard, old cans, and 13 gazillion empty wine bottles into their car, only to find the center closed. This is because the recycling center at the college is only open from 8 in the morning until noon, Monday through Friday. Certainly this is for the general public’s convenience, because who is busy then?

I presume people don’t know about garbage (and its more popular cousin, recyclables) because this is where they do something that makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever:

They see the locked, 6-foot, chain link fence, and they walk across the alley to our house, and throw their recycling in our personal bin.

This makes me lose my mind. I find it soon after, little bits of gravel and dust clinging to it as it cowers in a corner next to the non-functional air conditioner, but I lose it nonetheless.

And not only do they dump their recycling, they dump their illegal recycling. This tells me a couple of things:

1. They’re not reading the instructions on the recycling bin

2. They’re not reading the instructions on the bin because they either can’t be bothered, or they know they’re doing something wrong.

I began trying to dissuade these cardboard interlopers and trespassers in much the way I used to try to keep deer out of my vegetable garden in New York. I put down dog hair. Okay, I didn’t put dog hair on the gravel, but I’ve tried moving the bins. And when that didn’t work, I put the car right next to the bins, sacrificing space to swing the door open, and making it so that on Wednesdays, the day before pick up, I’d come nose-to-stench with the garbage bucket each time I left the house or came home. Still, they contorted themselves around the private car in the private driveway to the private recycling bin, across the alley from the space declaring itself available (if not open) for their discardement. Faced with other people’s castoff glass, which is fine to recycle at the center but not in the weekly city pickup, I’m faced with a choice I don’t want. I can pick out their glass and take their recycling to the center, 40 feet from my kitchen, or I can leave it in the bin and get chastised by the recycling crew.

All of my determent failed last week, and the bin nearly didn’t close from all of the crap stuffed inside. I fumed. Susanne fumed. I picked up my mind again, brushing it off and promising it better, brighter days. Grabbing a marker from my office upstairs, I formulated two signs, one for each bin.

FOR USE BY

RESIDENTS OF

37 MERRIAM

ONLY

Maybe that would get through to them.

Unfortunately, I put these signs on the bins the day before trash and recycling pickup, so this morning, I was met with a scrawled note from the recycling  pickup staff, telling me NO GLASS.

It’s not me, I cried to nobody. I take my glass to the recycling center! I am abiding your rules! I just don’t want to touch other people’s crap! Please don’t make me touch other people’s crap!

A squirrel on the front lawn looked at me quizzically. I hissed at it.

Hopefully the signs in big, bold letters will work for us.

If not, I’m buying locks next week. Or I’ll fit the bins with an exploding Jack in the Box. That’ll show ’em.

So I’ve been watching the Olympics in Vancouver, or as Stephen Colbert calls them, the Quadrennial Cold Weather Athletic Competition. Hopefully he won’t sue me for using his language. As an aside, I do keep trying to trademark the phrase, “I love you,” because whoa, think of the lawsuit-generated revenue! I mean, if I can’t use the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” when I may actually need that sentence someday, in dire circumstances, if that is taken away from me, then I think I should get a piece of the pie, too.

At any rate, the Olympics were tantalizingly close to us this year—just a 4-hour drive to Seattle and a couple more hours north over the border into Vancouver. But alas, they’re right smack in the middle of the semester, and even curling match tickets were $65. So we decided we’ll have to go to some other really close Olympics sometime.

Watching from home, I was a bit taken aback by the coverage of men’s figure skating. I wouldn’t call it my favorite sport, but I can see that it requires fitness, balance, endurance, and an oil tanker load of practice. In my book that counts as a sport. But then there’s the judging. In football, unless you’re committing an illegal move, block, or tackle, it doesn’t matter how you run, hold someone off, or bring them to the ground. The ball is the indicator of the action, the referees only looking to ensure the rules are followed objectively. In fact, people get very upset if they think the referees are being unfair; they’re so hawkish for signs of bias that they’ll yell obscenities even when nothing is wrong. Millions of dollars have been spent on instant replay systems just to make sure nobody’s pinkie toe broke the plane of the sideline, because surely then, the integrity of the entire NFL would come crashing down.

It would be utterly absurd for the line judge to say, call the refs and umpire over after whistling the play dead because he didn’t like the angle at which the center was holding the ball, but in figure skating, all of the athlete’s hard work is reduced to whiny judgy-ness. At least if Scott Hamilton is the Judge in Charge. Some of his comments really floored me, accusing Johnny Weir, for example, of not practicing hard enough. He’s at the Olympics, dude! How many people try to go to the Olympics and don’t make it? He had to have spent at least a little bit of time on a slab of ice!

One after another, the skaters took the ice for their short programs. With nearly every axle, lutz and salchow, Scott had a comment, usually negative. “Oh, he really had to struggle for that one,” “just barely made it,” or “that looked bad from the start,” peppered the music in the background, and made me think we were watching Snarkfest 2010 instead of the Olympics. Perhaps these are the voices he hears in his head when he skates, I can’t say. But I felt like calling Scott and telling him that you know, this stuff is recorded and/or sent out to millions of people, so maybe some of those thoughts should stay in his brain.

The intra-skater rhetoric started simmering, too, in the days of the men’s competition. After the short program, Evgeni Plushenko castigated the gold medal winner for not attempting a quad jump, which, among all the other garbage that came out of his mouth, made a little bit of sense to me; after all, a home run counts for one no matter in which inning it’s hit. Same for basketball, lacrosse, futbol, tiddlywinks, and marbles, and virtually every other game I can think of. But in skating, a pretty hard jump done late in the routine is worth more than a harder one done first, to reward the skater for doing something hard after fatigue has set in. Thus Plushenko could have done the same thing, omitting the quad jump and not fiddling around with stupid-looking spins for the last minute of his routine, but actually still making and landing some jumps at the end.

It made me wonder how these guys talk to each other behind the scenes, if they’re so audacious in front of the camera. “He’s okay but his toe loop sucks” could be something to overhear in the Olympic Village cafeteria, who knows?

Plushenko has been such a baby that now his Web site lists his latest win in Vancouver—he took second place—as a Platinum medal. Seriously. Perhaps he needs to try another jump, because that boy needs to get over himself. (Ba-da cymbal crash!) So just to put things in better perspective, here’s a site of funny faces during the competition thus far.

The people in curling have been much nicer, and the whole endeavor seems much more friendly and stereotypically Canadian to me, so I’ve been watching that ever since, eschewing the ice dancing competition.

It’s a good time, of course, for British Columbia to advertise itself as a tourist destination, and there are plenty of folks out there updating their tourism sites. One of them, apparently took a picture of me drinking tea at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC, and posted it up on the page she manages. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered or horrified, but really, my only question is why she changed my name to Erin. I do hope, however, that the image of me enjoying the Empress’ house blend tea (and hiding a chin pimple) encourages others to take high tea at their establishment. I wonder if I should have trademarked my image.

Meanwhile, I hear that the Indianapolis Colts, after their Super Bowl loss earlier this month to the New Orleans Saints, are metalsmithing a platinum World Championship trophy to commemorate the achievement.

I grew up in a place blandly referred to as “Central New Jersey,” an area of only a few counties, caught between aging farmland and boomer-driven suburbia, outposts that crept away from the two behemoth cities, matching the invisible demarcation of property values affected by those urban centers. Lower prices here, put up a development. Lower prices further away, put up a development there. So in the late 1960s, that line was Mercer County, home to the state capitol and a rather well known Ivy League university. I went to elementary school in that town, the once was national headquarters for politicians, before they moved it to its final resting place of Washington, DC.

The nuns taught me to love the sinner and hate the sin, to separate bad behavior from the innate goodness in people, and even though these messages were fraught with many contradictions and a near-constant failure of memory on the part of their congregants, I tried to buy the principles. I asked many questions, and got a lot of non-answers, such as:

“What do you mean there’s always been God? How could there be no beginning?” This was met with a “It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

“How can there be three beings but only one being?”

“It is a divine mystery, my child. You must take it on faith.”

And on, and on. There was that point my senior year in high school during which I finally figured out the grand logic, much to the chagrin of my erudite instructor, but for many years, I attempted to content myself in the not knowing.

But I did get older, and I expected better answers than I’d received from lazy-minded or otherwise resistant grownups. I could tell that there were competing schools of thought on all kinds of philosophies, although I didn’t really know how to boil them down.

As I approached 18, I asked my Mom how she voted, generally speaking. She looked at me with a curious expression, somewhere between disheartened and cautious, as if she were talking about a close friend who had The Consumption.

“We vote Republican in this house,” she told me, a little above a whisper. Maybe it was a stage whisper, though that would have been silly as we were the only two home at the time.

“Why is that,” I asked, not really surprised at her answer.

It was, she explained, because my father was a small business owner, and he steadfastly believed that the GOP was more small business friendly. And this may have been true at the time. But what interests me is that I didn’t, in all my years of grooming to be a conservative, feel a burning hatred in my heart for the Democratic Party, even if I may have laughed at a liberals joke here and there. But hey, there were a lot of inappropriate jokes in the 1980s, many revolving around who blew up where and how in the Challenger accident.

I made it to college, spending the first few weeks either not believing my good fortune, or decrying my random roommate assignment, a privileged kid who actually told my mother, to her face, on Moving In Day that Syracuse had been their choice because of its reputation as a party school. I sought the refuge of new friends, minimizing the time in my own dorm room.

One of those friends was in a new club called the Campus Crusade for Christ. She had convinced me that they were a better way of understanding God and spirituality, that there was a fantastic benefit of not having to find meaning through the priest-God conduit. I figured I would check it out.

It was not for me. It was really, really not for me. Now I’d gone from getting no answers to having answers all over the place—explanations for everything under the sun. If some question didn’t have a ready made answer, it was only for the fact that nobody had thought of the question yet. All of these answers were supposed to arm us when we went out as missionaries to convert other people to the Walk with Christ. I was beyond uncomfortable. I pulled away from the group.

One of the things that troubled me the most was that even though I was reading the Bible more than ever before, we as a group were listening to it less and less, and giving more credence to the CCC leader. And it wasn’t long before he started delving into politics. Which politicians we should vote for, which party stances for righteous, and which were the devil’s own design.

There was no more split between behavior and personhood. People themselves were good or evil, saved or under the control of satan. For me, this had gone off the rails.

But here we are, a score of years later, and many, many people buy these messages part and parcel. I am left scratching my head. Is the anti-regulation push good for small business? Not if it means the banks collapse under their own greed and the credit market tightens past the extreme most business owners can handle. But we don’t put those things together, we limit any cause and effect conversation to what bad people are doing to us. The illegals. The gay agenda. The terrorist Muslims. We stick awful names on communities to make them seem even more hell-bent on the destruction of society, even though the vast majority of undocumented workers have been here for decades and in jobs that other people won’t take, even though people under the GLBT umbrella can’t agree on what movies to list in their film festivals, much less have an actual agenda, and even though the people committing terrorist acts aren’t actually Muslims, but opportunists who are ripping off a few passages from the Quran. Let’s paint the world in hate-colored glasses, and we can see whatever we want.

There’s a Tea Party group in Walla Walla now, and they have an earnest, if not grammatically challenged Web page, filled with lots of anger-inspiring invective, as invective is designed to do. The contradictions are many, but this one is the best:

The government is distant and does not care about you.

The government is too big and too into your business.

They also spend a lot of screen space on rhetorically assuming that because the US Constitution says we have inalienable rights, that this means we have the right to “own the fruits of our individual labors.” This vague, intentionally archaic language could mean, really, any of the following:

We get to keep the Ford trucks we produce as car assembly line workers. No wonder the Big 3 are in trouble.

We own the children we have birthed ourselves, into time eternal. This almost seems pro-choice to me.

If we are landscapers, we now own the lawns we’ve groomed and the plants on them. It’s like 40 acres and a mule, all over again.

I could go on, but I’d rather see more examples in the comments.

Here’s the thing: if none of my income went to taxes, I would have no government, right? Unless they’re thinking about taxing businesses more. But I don’t suppose that’s the case. I’d just have to hope that if I have a medical emergency, I won’t need an ambulance, that if my house catches fire, I can put it out with my own hand-held extinguisher. Or that when my kid wants to go to college, some bank will give her a loan, after all those years of home schooling, since there’s no more public education. Maybe when my mother loses all of her marbles we’ll just drive her to downtown Omaha and tell her to hope for the best.

I think the political landscape has gone off the rails, or if it hasn’t, that it sure looks like it has, and I wish my Dad’s brand of conservatism were back. At least he didn’t drive around with bumperstickers on his car saying “Up Yours, Obama.”

There’s nothing like reading the newspaper of a quiet farming town to make one feel like their own tiny city is a bustling metropolis of activity. The rag in Dayton, Washington, for example, seems to have composed its crime section from the entirety of phone calls to its police office. The headlines read like some bizarre melding of David Lynch and Dave Barry:

Lotion Squirted on Car, No Suspects

Dead Skunk Still Lying on Patit Rd

Cow on Wrong Side of Fence

If I lived in Dayton, I’d be tempted to pull my own pranks and then call them in as complaints.

“Hey, those crazy kids dumped a mess of cow manure on the mayor’s truck again.” *click* And a few days afterward, I could scour the paper to see if I’d made the crime section.

My other idea is to replicate some of the news bits over here in Walla Walla, picking up as many of the details as possible so the police force won’t suspect a copycat. But maybe it would be like all of those television crime dramas, and I’d be foiled either by confessing to the drone of some low, ominous cello, or I’d like, use the wrong brand of lotion.

“We left out that the lotion used in Dayton was Avon Skin So Soft,” the detective would growl at me. “You used Aveda rosemary mint, so we knew you were just trying to fool us. The question is . . . why.”

Okay, who am I kidding? This county doesn’t have enough money to drive the plow it owns to clear 30 inches of snow from five main roads in town, they’re not going to do some molecular analysis of skin lotion.

But hey, good cops would know to use their noses.

My ruminations aside, I have learned a few lessons this week, one of which of course is not to commit crime. Okay, perhaps I learned that lesson at 7, when I stole a remarkably cute stuffed animal from a Hallmark store and my mother caught me in the parking lot and made me take it inside to tell the proprietor that I was a thief. Three or four bats of my big brown eyes and she crumbled, saying I could have the little orange donkey if I wanted it. My mother was outraged. How was I going to learn this important life lesson if I could just flirt with older women and get away with anything? And thus it was that I determined that the life lesson was to flirt with older women to get away with most anything.

It’s Friday and I’m rambling. My point is, I’ve learned a few things this week. Specifically:

1. No matter how much it annoys one, one should not attempt to remove overly long nose hair with needlenosed pliers or superiorly sharpened scissors.

2. No espresso drinks after 2PM.

3. Be careful when teaching one’s friends’ children cute little sayings. For example, teaching a child of 22 months to say, “Oh, snap!” may in fact result in the child enunciating “Oh, shit!” (Apologies to my friends’ children’s playmates’ parents.)

4. Be aware that the older the man, the more dedicated he is to his science fiction hobby, and the far less he is to his own personal hygiene. This is especially useful to remember when attempting to look for books at a local organization book sale.

5. Lots of food tastes great going down but makes one miserable later. It’s helpful to know which foods are on one’s own list, so that when out in public one can at least plan for sudden moments of abdominal pain and wincing.

I have known the little baby Akio since he was six weeks old, no bigger than a loaf of bread and cute as the dickens. As his mother is another professor at the college here, I would take him while she had class, little babysitting increments of an hour or two. Longtime readers of this blog may remember a post last May in which after several incident-free babysitting appointments, he let loose with a firestorm of explosive poo. Nonetheless, our relationship continued, and he continued to grow and learn and bond with the village around him. At eleven months now, he is an expert crab-crawler, enjoys clapping, babbling, and long walks on the beach. Okay, scratch that last item. But I’m sure he’ll enjoy that some day.

While I was happy to help out Akio and his mother last spring, she hasn’t needed my support in many months. But we still see them on a regular basis. So she was apologetic when she emailed last week to see if I could sit him for just one hour while she went to a late afternoon meeting of the faculty. Oh, no problem, I said, and to help her feel better (and enjoy her company) I told her she and the little one should stay for supper. I could throw a chicken in the oven before assuming sitting duties, and then it would be ready when she came back home with Susanne.

In the meantime, since he’s now a mobile baby, I vacuumed the carpet in the living room, put the coffee table in front of the fireplace—he has previously shown an interest in logs that are alight—laid down a soft blanket on the floor, and spread out a variety of toys and plush animals so that we could have some quality time together. I do like to be on the level of an almost one-year-old when the opportunity presents itself, after all. We would have a giggling, drooling blast, I figured.

I forgot that eleven-month-olds have big time separation anxiety. It’s been a long time since I was eleven months old, see.

All went well as I opened the door. I got a big grin and saw that there are two more teeth to count. She gave him a last-minute bit of food, we checked his diaper, and found nothing notable. The three of us sat on the floor and Akio selected a green plastic Slinky as his first toy of choice. His mom quietly exited, stage front door. I asked him questions about why the Slinky. He answered me by babbling, and then turned to look to see where his mother had gone.

Four minutes. Four minutes had elapsed. And by elapsed, I mean, the child made it all of 240 seconds.

At second 241, he started sniffling and frowning. Second 243 brought on the wailing.

I put my hand in an Eeyore puppet and tried to renew his interest in either the Skinky technology or the Christopher Robin mythology. Neither of these made the cut for him. He began crab-crawling away, toward the front door.

“Okay, okay, Akio, I know it’s rough, but we have…53 minutes left, at least. What else could we do?”

He screeched in such a way as to communicate that I could go sit and spin for all he cared.

I had to think of something. I should be smarter than this, I thought. I picked him up and for one nanosecond, he relaxed a little, happy to cling onto my shirt. One nanosecond, by the way, is over before one knows it. He was back to wailing, this time much nearer my ear.  I tried bouncing him. No avail.

And so it began that “Uncle Ev” attempted a variety of tactics for trying to soothe the baby. Singing. Touring the downstairs. Flight simulation. Bottle time. Each was met with a look of complete disgust and a furtherance of crying. My heart began to melt to see him in such despair. I rechecked his diaper, burped him, and tried to tell him a story about a baby who must journey after the loss of his parents. No, wait. That’s not a good idea. And though I’d had this thought before, I started reviewing all of the little kid stories I know that involve parental death. Bambi, Cinderella, Finding Nemo, they’re all about death and grief. What’s up with that?

The baby was still crying, inconsolable. I had to do something. At this point he was a wet mess, so I grabbed a tissue and mopped up his face. He hated me for that, but really, I wasn’t sure what would happen if tears, snot, and drool all combined into one puddle. The universe could evaporate or something. It wasn’t me, I told the little one, it was for the good of the whole fabric of space-time. He continued screaming unabated. I only hoped he could channel this stamina later in life. I looked at the clock.

We were 8 minutes in. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I needed something to distract him. Something interesting, compelling, that would be so riveting to him that the entire concept of “missing mommy” would evaporate like a fart in a stiff breeze. I didn’t have a stroller, though I wasn’t sure if I would have used it anyway, lest I annoy the entire neighborhood with his unhappiness.

I caved in and turned on the television. I knew it was wrong of me. Bad, bad uncle! This is how it starts, out of desperation. This is why that Baby Einstein crap took such hold in US households, even though it was scientifically shown to make babies stupider as a result. I flipped through the guide and found some kid’s show set in Africa, with lots of shots of lions and other safari animals.

He was entranced. I was guilty. He even let me wipe his face while he sat on my lap, mesmerized. I couldn’t believe it, and yet, I could.

I started watching the show, and then realized it had all sorts of messages I didn’t want him to see. No, no, this is too imperialist, my brain cried. It’s devoid of an understanding about race and post-colonial Africa, even as it’s preaching about conservation and wildlife protection! These issues aren’t this simple, and it’s not for Westerners to tell citizens of African nations how to balance an economic incentive with global warming and species protection concerns! No!

But oh, how he loved it. I was selling out for the price of twenty minutes of happiness.

He picked up the Slinky in my hand, starting to babble again and looking content and happy. And then I made a rookie mistake.

I put him back on the blanket so he could play. This reminded him, of course, of turning around and not seeing his mother, which made him realize, all over again, that she was GONE. G-O-N-E. Maybe forever. And here he was stuck with a stupid person, for the rest of his life, who clearly didn’t know the difference between African diaspora politics and children’s entertainment.

The wailing began anew. I tried the bottle again. He threw it back at me. I turned off the TV, figuring I’d done enough damage.

He looked a little bit like the Staypuff Marshmallow Man at the end of Ghostbusters when he realizes he is not among friends. His entire chubby face had twisted into a knot of anguish and anger. I picked him up again and showed him all the pictures of the little people we know. I put him in front of a mirror, since he likes to see himself and the room in reflection. This made him realize all the more how incredibly unhappy he was.

We went into the kitchen, and I attempted to see if tiny chunks of tofu would make his day. They did not.

Just then, the wagon man came into view, with a fresh batch of cardboard to recycle. Akio liked this. He started to settle down, crying only every few seconds, almost like a hiccup. I gave him some commentary to go along with the wagon man’s activity.

“Okay, and now he’ll throw this piece of cardboard over the fence. Ooh, look at it go, Akio. Uh, oh, he doesn’t like where it landed. I bet he squeezes behind the fence so he can pick it up and throw it again. Yup, there he goes, see? Now he’s behind the fence. Before, he was in front of the fence. In French, you say, ‘derriere la cloture,’ and ‘en face de la cloture.'”

He was tuning me out, I could tell. Heck, I wished I’d shut up, too.

He grew heavy in my arms, but I was afraid to shift him to my other side. My back began to groan, but as its version of complaining is noiseless, I ignored it.

The wagon man finished. I briefly considered throwing an egg carton and a cereal box out the window so he’d have a couple more things to throw at the recycling center. I figured I’d gone around the bend, all to keep the baby somewhat happy. We watched as once again a person important to Akio’s life left him behind. He cried.

I took him back to the couch and sat down with him, lower back pressure relieved. Ear drums, not so much. They should be home any minute, I thought, and then I worried that they’d stand around talking to all of the other 120 faculty or rather, the 75 faculty who’d gone to the meeting. I texted Susanne with my free hand.

HE REALLY MISSES MOMMY, I typed, and sent the message.

I heard Susanne’s cell phone joyfully receive the message from its location in the dining room.

I wiped his face with the 27th tissue of the afternoon.

“I’m sorry I’m teaching you to hate tissues,” I said to him. “They really are your friends.”

He was not buying any of my shit.

Finally the door opened, and my utter lack of success at entertaining Akio was made plain to his mother and my wife. She wrapped him up in her arms and began bouncing him, as only she could.

“Don’t I always come back,” she asked him. “Mommy always comes back. It’s okay.”

Behind my shoulder, Susanne petted me.

I slept like a rock that night.

Maybe it’s cheating a little bit, but here’s a re-post of a restaurant review I wrote a couple of years back (well, 18 months anyway) of a hamburger joint on Capitol Hill in DC. Once people can make it outside their homes and restaurants begin receiving supplies again, feel free to avoid this place.

So we went to check out Spike’s new burger restaurant in Capitol Hill, the Good Stuff Eatery, and the vague name should tell patrons something before they even cross the threshold. For those of you who don’t know who Spike is, I’m not talking about Spike Lee, I’m talking about the former Top Chef contestant from a couple seasons ago who always wore a hat and made it pretty far to the end. He was kind of a card, as portrayed in the show. We were curious to see how his new venture was going, and a little dumbfounded as to why he’d open up a burger joint in a town already replete with them (thinking of the fabulous local 5 Guys chain, Booeymonger, Tonic locations, etc.).

I crutched up to the street with Susanne at about 7 p.m. on a Monday evening. There was a line of about oh, 8-10 people snaking down the sidewalk. Really? I don’t think I’ve seen that in DC except for one truly amazing Mexican place in Adams Morgan, but okay. Come to find out, as we cross the street and head over, there’s actually an Ombudsman standing outside guarding the door. You can see inside the place that there’s plenty of space for us to stand inside (where we will later freeze our asses off), but he’s got us out here. Where everyone can see how “jumping” the place is, we presume. Well, clearly Spike’s got the skill of spinning his reality down pat already, giving evidence that anyone can acclimate to DC standards.

I found a chair at an unused outside table (if it’s so busy, how is it that there are free tables), and sat down, letting the others hold my place in line. About 8 minutes later (oh, counting the minutes, I later realized, would get me nowhere), we were let in to Studio 54 — I mean, to the Good Stuff Eatery. We’d had time to peruse the menu so we knew what we wanted to order. A somewhat eclectic mix of burgers, wedge salads (how strangely out of place for a burger joint), three different styles of fries (featuring the Spike™ name), some milkshake options that looked interesting, and assorted beverages. Yuengling and Blue Moon beer were on tap. We should have, however, stored our selections in long term memory, as we saw that there were 30 or so people ahead of us in line. There were a lot of lines in this place. In solidarity, the lines on my forehead decided to join in, furrowing themselves more permanently onto my face.

I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stand for this whole line, so I asked Susanne to order for me and made my way up the inaccessible stairs to get a table. Because surely with these many people here I’d need to also queue up for a table, right?

Nope. Sure there were people upstairs, but there were tables free. It had the same layout as the Cosi next door, which serves people with much more efficiency and much less fanfare from its staff. Susanne remarked that putting the tables over the frying surfaces downstairs caused the eaters upstairs to start to take on the smell and appearance of fried foods, and she had a point. But I’ll add that with the perfectly frigid temperaturs (I mean seriously, the place wasn’t warmer than 63 degrees), the lipids in the air start to harden and condense, giving everyone the appearance of waxed mannequins, as if Madame Tussaud’s had decided to move 20 blocks over to get a little closer to those other waxed celebrities, I mean, our elected members of Congress, excuse me.

So I waited upstairs for the food to arrive. And waited. And waited. And….

WAITED. No sooner than 48 minutes after we entered the place, Susanne came up with the burgers and fries. I was somewhat astounded. They better be slaughtering steer in the back alley. They better be the best burgers I’ve ever eaten, thick as my ass and juicy, layered with truffle shavings, some kind of nearly extinct mushroom, and quail eggs.

Wait for it.

I had ordered a turkey burger, thinking back to the three burgers I’d had earlier in the week. One was an undercooked beef burger from Mr. Henry’s (I mean, I don’t expect much from them, so no biggie), one was from a Wendy’s drivethrough (see above), and one was up in Baltimore for lunch at Pebble’s Diner. Surely this burger, this 48-minutes-in-preparation burger would put all of them to shame.

Mushy bun that had done its best to soak up the bloody juices from the half-cooked, thin-as-a-wafer meat (I mean, it looked a little Jennie-O to me), mushy avocado that probably would have been excellent the day before, limp and mushy lettuce, and a variety of sauces that seemed to act as a pre-stomach-acid food liquification system, which served to make the texture of the experience particularly disgusting. The fries, on the other hand, were terrific until they cooled down, and then I realized they were over-spiced. The shake was great, little hints of caramel and malt that made my tongue decide mutiny after the burger experience wasn’t really necessary.

Susanne reported that they were charging a 25-cent fee on every order for “environmental processing.” She asked the cashier what this was for. He reported that it was because you know, like, they pay someone to go through their trash to make sure nothing recyclable is being thrown out, and that’s expensive. My god THAT job has to suck nails! She found this an interesting rationale, given that practically everything they handed to us was unrecyclable plastic, and that they didn’t have a “is it for here or take out” option so that folks eating in the restaurant could get reusable utensils or napkins. And at the end of the meal, which was like a blessing from God (that it was over, I mean), a busboy took out trays and dumped everything — including two glass bottles — into the trash can. Good thing someone’s going to comb through it later looking for those bottles! That’s like letting your cat catch the fake mouse every so often so he stays motivated to keep trying. If they’re so into the environment, couldn’t they have at least a couple containers for recycling?

So, all that said, I can’t really recommend the place. If you want an $8 burger, go to a steakhouse and get one. If you want a thinner burger for a better price, stick to the places in town that know how to make them that I mentioned earlier.

Thank God he didn’t win Top Chef.

M.P.H. Highest degree earned. GS-level. Annual compensation. Party affiliation. Years to retirement. Number of overpriced caffeinated beverages consumed before noon. Washington, DC has specific metrics for success, for valuing one’s life, productivity, and family.

It was shortly after a friend moved from DC to Seattle, that Susanne received a call from him. He’d just come home from a party.

“You won’t believe it out here,” he said, almost breathless with excitement. “When someone asks, ‘what do you do,’ they don’t mean, ‘what is your occupation?’ They want to know your hobbies!”

Hobbies. Northwest hobbies happen largely outside. Hiking. Snowshoeing. Rafting or kayaking. They certainly have a lot of nouny verbs out here, that’s for sure. People, on average, seem willing and able not to string their identity and their vocation together, at least the way many folks do back on the east coast. “What do you do” there is met with, “I’m a contractor,” or “I’m at Census,” or “I’m an analyst,” which also wins the in-blog post prize for most vague job title ever, even worse than “project manager.” And these job titles are not transferrable outside the Beltway. Nobody in Walla Walla understands or gives a fig what I used to in DC, and I can try explaining it in a 25-50 word paragraph. It still isn’t comprehensible to normal people.

Out here, the vineyards and wheat fields and fish lifespan dictate that seasons still matter. Time isn’t gauged in project lifecycle terminology, it’s measured in the tiny center of the wheat chaff, or when the viticulturist-inclined farmer thinks it’s safe to remove the protective plastic sleeve from the 1- and 2-year-old grape vines. Or at the start and stop of the wine tourism season in Walla Walla, and the unofficial start and end dates of the summer, when people flock to western Idaho for good camping weather. There isn’t enough industry here to vie with the earth’s own grand calendar, to make people forget that once upon a time, it mattered to your livelihood that it was autumn or spring. Washington, DC only has one perpetual election season, after all. Even though the city is built on old farmland.

Spring, meanwhile, seems to have hit a little early, with the trees budding already and some very early greenness appearing in the wheat fields. Maybe soon the daffodils will come up, Stravinsky-like, with swooping wind instruments and a thunderous percussion. The ducks at the pond will start teaching very little babies to swim and jump into the water, only taking on flying in the mid-summer. People will talk about loving spring in the desert again. Bright’s chocolatiers will sell more ice cream than they have in months. Strolling down Main Street to get some will involve hearing a lot more people in the wine tasting rooms, and seeing many more cars from Seattle, but you still can’t call them traffic. You’ll be able to spot the visitors because as they walk they’ll talk about how quaint everything is. DC tourists marvel at the architecture and the monuments, but they usually still feel a bit wary, as if violence could break out next to them at any moment. Here in Walla Walla, it’s a pickpocket’s dream, because nobody, even the residents, ever has their guard up. And we’re only 3 miles from a maximum security prison.

A few years ago the soccer coach of the men’s team at the small liberal arts college here flippantly and quickly agreed to take the team to the prison for a game. It wasn’t until the bus of them rolled into the prison yard, the razor-lined gate locking behind them that he felt any degree of panic. There they were, 20 of them, on a dirt field, locked in with something like 100 hardened inmates. Guards with automatic rifles stood at a few towers. Maybe they were excited to watch a match, or maybe they were worried about how this could go horribly wrong. Or both.

The college team started playing what I can only imagine was the most surreal game of their lives. I’m not sure who refereed the game, or even if there were refs on the field. Kick, run, kick, run, collide. The prisoners had come to play. The college team practiced together every day, knew their teammates’ tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. Kick, pass, advance, the clock ticking up the minutes played. The score started getting lopsided, favoring the college. The coach started worrying about them running up the score, something Bill Belichick has never done in his life. Second half, still scoring. He wanted to pull his hair out. At least slow down, men. Don’t, no, don’t score again! Oh geez! Soccer games are not supposed to have scores of 20-2, or anything near that number.

Game finished, finally, and everyone was ragged, exhausted. The prison players high-fived the other team. Good game, good game, they said, walking in orderly lines. The college athletes piled back onto the bus, riding for five minutes and a series of circumstances away from the prison. I wonder how they look back on the experience, which measuring devices they use to interpret what that game was about.

After a full week of overcast skies, Susanne and I decided to venture away from the Walla Walla Valley, hoping that we could pierce the cloud layer and see the sun. Now then, there are three ways out of the city, in basically a T formation: Highway 12 runs east-west at the north of town, and Highway 125 runs due south, toward Oregon. We headed east toward the little village of Waitsburg, remembering that it has a cute, pioneer town quality and gives one a chance to take in the Blue Moutains, which were considerably more snow-capped after this weekend than before. The drive was nice enough, although we didn’t escape the clouds. Given that the east coast was caught up in yet another heavy snowfall, neither one of us was too grouchy about our own weather, depressing and blase as it was.

We were curious to see a small crowd of people waving at us as we came into town—”city center” would be an overstatement, as the downtown is two blocks long and one street wide. I smiled, thinking they looked happy and small-towny, until I saw the signs they were waving. “She regrets her abortion,” one declared. I started looking for an arrow to one of the women, a la the “I’m With Stupid” t-shirts that were popular among the geek set 20 years ago, but it did dawn on me that they meant some proverbial, collective “she.”

I was not amused. I’m coming to your town, presumably to spend dollars in one of the 9 stores you house and you’re going to alienate me with pictures of aborted fetuses? Not such a smooth move, Waitsburg.

I contemplated sharing my disappointment with the throng-ette. Susanne knew where my brain was going, and helped me ascertain that expressing my opinion would probably not make the situation any better. I turned, blinker on, and drove into downtown, because I am a good liberal who follows proper traffic laws. So there, anti-choice, sign-carrying people!

We moseyed along the main street, stopping in to a curious antique store that had old Coca-Cola bottles, snowshoes, and kitchen ware, as if someone cleaned out his grandmother’s house and opened up a store with everything he’d found, minus the linoleum, but not the kitchen sink, which sat in a corner in the back room. I suppose any copper pipe he’d stripped had already sold, because that stuff goes fast.

We happened along a creek with a Lewis & Clark sculpture in front of it. It clearly was modeled after the countless “Lewis & Clark” highway markers that dot the roadways out here, in the still-wild west. My question erupted out of my brain and through my mouth.

“I always wonder which one is which.”

As we passed the sign, I turned and saw the back, as well as my answer:

Question answered.

Finishing our short walk, still out of the sun’s light, we ambled back to the car and drove out of town. I flipped off the line of activists, figuring it would give them renewed energy to hold their signs proudly in the rain.

Last year I was still somewhat out of commission after knee surgery when Susanne’s birthday rolled around, and by “out of commission,” I really mean, “still taking sponge baths.” This year I’m mostly back to my old form—I’ve returned to a bowling league, have kept up my routine at the gym, and can squat again when I need something from a low cabinet, which is pretty much the only time I squat—so I figured cake making would go easier this time around.

I should know by now not to make assumptions regarding the ease of anything. And still, I persist in my idiocy.

For her part, Susanne had requested a Schwartzwald Kirschtorte (say that 10 times fast), a.k.a. a Black Forest cake, but she’d thrown in a couple of twists: she wanted a layer of chocolate ganache in the middle of the cake layers, instead of the usual whipped cream and cherries, and she wanted, on advice from her mother, the cherries that go atop the cake to be dipped in chocolate. In the spirit of the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, I’ll explain the level of difficulty this entailed. Now your standard Black Forest cake, with its spongy chocolate cake layers, has a rating, under the old figure skating scale, of 3.2 out of 6 total, but because it also calls for whipped cream and systematic pricking with a fork so that it will uptake the kirschwasser liquor, has a final technical difficulty of 4.1, or in the new International Judging System, 8,237 points. Because I also had to make a ganache, dip cherries previously cured in liquor, and use that liquor as the base for a homemade liquored syrup, my new difficulty rating was a 5.8, or in the IJS, let’s see. . . carry the one . . . computing . . . 13,482 points.

But I was up to the task. I was certain of this.

While the recipe called for 7″ cake pans, presumably because the Germans enjoy smaller-sized desserts, I only had one 8″ cake pan and 3 9″ pans. What was a baker to do? I went for the 9-inchers, because 9, being a greater integer than 7, must be better. I whipped up 6 eggs, my arteries screaming no at me, blending in sugar and cocoa, and arrived at a splendidly smooth batter, which, upon pouring into the pans I could see rose to a withering height of . . . three-quarters of an inch. Hmm. I crossed my fingers and hoped that the cakes would rise in the oven.

After dutifully rotating the cake pans at the halfway mark of baking, I answered the timer’s bell and saw that indeed, they had risen. They were now one inch tall. I considered marking their progress on the kitchen wall, but instead I grabbed my car keys, wallet, and phone, and headed to the grocery store, as I was now out of eggs. And I figured I should pick up some extra whipping cream just in case.

Twenty minutes later I was the proud owner of assorted dairy products, and ready for round two of cake madness. I quickly washed out the cake pans, re-buttering and flouring them, in something like double speed for this redux. I started cracking eggs again and was dismayed that I’d bought some kind of weird-shelled eggs—each insisted on leaving a little bit of itself in the bowl, so I had to fish out chips every single time.

One mixer made a new batch of chocolate cake, the other started the cream whipping process, while I melted 72 percent dark chocolate in a double boiler and made a simple syrup on another burner. Pant, pant! I was a whirlwind of confectionery! A force of baking nature!

Two more cakes popped into the oven. Chocolate was melted carefully, while the syrup boiled and oh no, started to smoke. The kitchen quickly filled with the acrid, eye-stinging fog, so I tossed the offending concoction and started again. Again. Opening the back door helped a bit, though it was mighty chilly outside.

Okay, the chocolate was ready, so I dipped cherries in the double boiler, thinking to myself that since we picked these cherries ourselves last summer, this cake was officially six months in the making. They looked cute lined up on the wax paper, drying slowly as if there weren’t a flurry of activity just a few inches away from them. I added some cream to the rest of the melted chocolate, to start the ganache portion of the program.

Finally, the layering and stacking and glazing and frosting were finished. I looked at the creation. Four hours, a dozen eggs, 20 tablespoons of butter, 3 cups of cream, 4 cakes layers, 12 ounces of dark chocolate, and many cherries later, I had this:

I was so tired and hungry from all of the cooking, I almost dropped my face into the thing and ate it all, but figured it wasn’t worth the effort to make it all over again. A few hours later, several of Susanne’s friends came over to share cake and wine in front of the fire. We oohed and ahhed over the creation and by the end of the evening, it had disappeared into our collective stomachs. Susanne enjoyed the cake but noted twice to various people, including my mother-in-law, that she only got one piece of cake out of the whole thing. So it looks like I’ll be performing again, but this time it will be the short program. A tasty, short little program.

It was with a cavalier attitude that I called up the Census in a city near me, last week, and offered generously to join their organization, should they need me. Some employee with a name straight out of a 1950s-era reading primer, like Bill or Johnny, cheerfully informed me that there was a test in a few days near me and the exam was all that was separating me from what would surely be a stellar career with the agency. So I agreed to meet up at “the Y,” even though under many other circumstances I would have presumed some kind of gay intimacy would be involved in such an encounter. But I figured this would be a G-rated rendezvous. Johnny boy told me to show up about 15 minutes before the start of the test so I could fill out some forms, which, having already worked with and for the Federal Government, did not surprise me in the least, so I calculated that I needed to arrive at 2:45.

The same flippant approach I had on the phone was with me as I left the house, at 2:43. The Y was around the corner from where I live, and I knew a route to get there that didn’t involve even a single traffic light. I walked in to the gym, my gym, and failed to see any signs directing me to the test, so I asked the receptionist where it was.

“Oh, you must mean the Y W CA, she said,” putting such an emphasis on the “W” that she raised her voice half an octave, like she were speaking of the black sheep in her family. Oh, YWCA, tsk tsk tsk. Such a promising CA until all of that nasty business happened. YMCA and I are just still torn up about it.

She asked me if I knew where it was. I shook my head.

“Well, do you know where the ishchaly is,” she asked, suddenly speaking a foreign language.

I shook my head. “The what?”

“The ishchaly,” she said. Now she looked at me like I was utterly hopeless. I went to the wrong building and I didn’t even know where the damn Ischaly was? A look crossed her face that suggested she was wondering if she should intentionally misdirect me. She gave me a street name, Birch, and from that I could figure out where this unruly child of a building was.

Three blocks and 90 seconds later, I was at the YWCA, next to a building marked, “Ice Chalet.” This reconfirmed my belief that people just don’t give a darn about French pronunciation here in the Pac Northwest.

I looked at my watch which read 2:47, and giggled.

About 15 people were seated around tables in a large room just inside the front door. The tables were set up in a large rectangle so that we could all see each other. Against the windows the Census Bureau employee was setting up all of her supplies for the exam. She seemed more than mildly frustrated. Her hair tied back in a bun, it was starting to escape, in some vaguely direct correlation to her increasing anxiety.

“I’m just not sure why everyone is here so early,” she muttered, and I saw that she had several cat scratches on her forearms. I briefly concerned myself with how many cats she had back at home.

Three people stood around her as she sorted through manilla folders and government-issue pens. Though they didn’t realize it, they had the appearance of zombies, standing aimlessly, rocking slowly on their feet, waiting for her to notice them so they could hear her screams and eat her brains.

“Okay folks,” she asked them, pencils clattering to the floor, “can you just sit down and I’ll get to you. The test doesn’t start until 3:30.”

We told her we’d all been instructed to get here a little before 3. There was some nervous laughter around the room.

Well, we were informed, we were going to take this test at 3:30. And someone in the Richland Census office was going to get an earful from Stacy the Overworked Coordinator. After a long day of no thanks, all she gets are feral cats.

More people trickled in, all before 3. We learned that the fella who’d given us all the wrong start time was named Scott. Bad, bad Scott.

I looked at my fellow Walla Wallans who’d showed up for this exam. There were a lot of retirement-age men and women, some young 20s folks, a few 30-somethings like myself. One woman sat down who looked like she was in the midst of a bad affair with crystal meth. I’m not sure if she really even knew where she was, but she’d thought to bring her ID to qualify for the application.

An older man, in the midst of filling out the Census job form, raised his hand and asked, “What if my supervisory experience is old?”

“It doesn’t matter how old it was,” said Stacy, sorting through the test forms and answer sheets.

“What if it was 50 years ago? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” His sudden laughter shot around the room like semi-automatic fire. I jumped out of my chair a little.

3:10 and we all had our I-9s and job applications to complete. The woman to my right slowly screwed her pencil into her own little sharpener. She wanted to know if she could have extra scratch paper for all the math problems on the test. Clearly no one had informed her that this was not the GRE subject test in math. She was one of those chitchatters who at least waited for eye contact before beginning their monologues. I know how to look at my hands really well, so I was safe, for the most part. The person on the other side of her was not so lucky.

The form asked if I had registered for the Selective Service. Damn it. I checked the no box, and filled in the explanations box two pages over. Hopefully Stacy wouldn’t ask me in front of everyone what “transgender” meant.

One man, near a corner of the room, tried to pick his nose on the down low. Gotta have clean nasal passages to deal with the stress of such a rigorous test as this.

A younger, cockier man said he had a question, which Stacy deferred. “I just need a little more time to get ready,” she said, laughing nervously. “I just don’t know why Scott would tell everyone to come so early, hee hee.”

Scott is trying to drive you crazy, Stacy, that’s why. Maybe you stuck Scott with one of your feral cats, and he wants payback. I’ll never know.

She passed out the test, telling us to check that our answer sheets and test booklets have the same code, A, B, C, or D. The guy who people realized 50 years ago shouldn’t supervise anyone looked alarmed suddenly. His codes didn’t match. Stop the presses! Stacy came over and said, no, sir, this code right here. He’d been trying to match up the Census form numbers. I was just impressed a 70-year-old could read 4 point font. But I wasn’t so sure he was what the Census had in mind for a long form interviewer. Nor was the woman on my right, a.k.a. Nervous Nellie.

“Everyone has these new Passports now,” she said to her table-mate. “I haven’t been out of the country in so long, I’m not sure they’d give me a passport.”

Someone needed to tell her that if prior foreign travel was the prerequisite for getting a passport, nobody would have a passport.

At 4:10 Stacy let us begin the test. Twenty-eight questions.

Seriously? Twenty-eight questions? All this for 28 questions?

The exam was broken into 5 areas, including 6 questions on math. I hoped Nervous Nellie’s 5 pages of scrap paper were enough. One math question was really tricky: add 3.17, 12.6, and 258. Ooh, those tricky, tricky decimal points! I need some scrap paper for this!

Another question asked us to match up people’s names in two columns. This reminded me of some bad database errors I’d worked on in 2004 for the National Institutes of Health. And because I’d worked with Census before, on standards for data collection, I started wondering if I wasn’t having a mini-Slumdog Millionaire moment where every test question could be answered via some prior experience I’ve had with the government. Only instead of winning 30 million rupees I’d get a $11.75 per hour job wandering around Walla Walla county, trying not to get shot for being a temporary Fed. So it was really like the same situation, totally.

I finished the test first, which doesn’t mean I was the smartest in the room, but next to “Don’t let that guy supervise anyone, ” Nervous Nellie, and Meth Face, I wasn’t surprised to be at the head of the pack. No sooner did I think that, however, than Meth Face put down her pencil. And then seemed to eye it longingly, as if it were a thick, juicy ribeye.

Stacy called 15 minutes remaining. Unlike the actual GRE, one was not permitted to leave if one finished early. So I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. At 4:35 Stacy called 5 minutes left. The last 10 had already been the longest of my life. But no way was I going to leave only to have to come back for a retest, people watching what it is.

Finally, she called the end of the test. Nervous Nellie immediately began chattering away. She turned to her weary desk-mate.

“Did you see him finish so early? So early! Just wham! Put his pencil down and took a nap! I wanted to just copy his answers but we have different test numbers.”

Those clever Census people, two steps ahead of a woman with her own pencil sharpener.

Stacy collected all of the exams and told us she just had a couple of things left to tell us. She read straight off of the Census guide for oh, four sentences or so, but then began embellishing.

“Remember, Census Bureau staff have to make a lot of follow up calls. If you don’t hear from us by March, you might not be hearing from us. We can’t call everyone back who applies for a job with us. But if we do call, be nice. If you make us laugh, we’ll be very grateful. So here’s something you could say, but don’t all say it or they’ll know I coached you.”

It took me a moment to comprehend that she was babbling, and then I heard her suggestion for making someone laugh on the phone.

“What did the one snowman say to the other snowman? ‘Smells like carrots.'” A few people chuckled obligingly. There is no way in hell I am going to tell this joke to the Census if they call me, I thought.

A man across the room raised his hand, indicating he had a question. What the hell could it be now? I just wanted to get out of here already. I had slumped down so far in my chair only the top 2 inches of my ass was actually still on the seat. Maybe I could just slither across the floor and into my car.

“Yes,” Stacy asked the man with the raised hand.

“They could also say, ‘all I see is black.'” Silence. And then he mumbled under his breath, “you know, because they have coal for eyes, see.”

I considered stabbing my ears out with my number 2 pencil.

Finally, we were dismissed. I did my best not to look disrespectful, but I was happy to breathe some non-YWCA air.

Thirty minutes later, I was on the road, headed to the bowling alley in Tri-Cities for my weekly league night. A few frames into the first game, my cell phone rang.

It was Stacy. I hadn’t checked a box indicating that I had my own transportation. I briefly considered telling her a joke, then decided against it. I thanked her for calling and answered her question, and then thought about carrots and coal.