This Is Not News

I took my daughter Alex around the corner to the Hallmark store to pick out ornaments for this year. Got a cute little mark-your-kid’s-age ornament, which was nice. And Alex wanted to get the Princess Leia ornament that’s the latest in Hallmark’s numbered series of Star Wars characters. I’ve been collecting that series anyway, so normally I would be thrilled she picked this one. And mostly I am.

But for crying out loud, did Hallmark really have to put Leia in the Jabba’s prisoner outfit? I mean, I question the wisdom of using that outfit for an ornament at all. And the obsessive-compulsive collector in me is irked that it’s part of the series, especially since this is the first time they’ve repeated a character.

Then again, I suppose I may have something to answer for in that Alex immediately recognized the character in that outfit as Princess Leia. At least I haven’t let her watch Revenge of the Sith yet. (That’s gonna be rough in a couple of years when I need to explain why Episode III is off limits . . .)

So we’re out of beverages in the house, and Pattie tells me there’s a sale on Snapple at the Acme around the corner. And I do love me my Snapple. I could probably quit caffeine if not for Snapple. And chocolate. And Excedrin. But anyway. I wanted Snapple.

So Brian and I head around the corner. Cases of 24 bottles of Snapple are on sale for $9.99. But there are no cases of Lemon Iced Tea available. A sign reports that individual Snapple bottles are on sale – priced at 24 for $9.99. But who wants to purchase and transport 24 individual bottles of Snapple?

Fortunately they have plenty of cases of 12 bottles of Snapple. These are marked at, I think, $12.99 each. But surely, since the store has gone to such trouble to make 24 bottles of Snapple available for $9.99, I can purchase 2 of these 12-packs for that price?

Of course not. I want 24 single bottles, $9.99. I want two 12-packs, it’s $26.

After much back and forth with the store, they at least find me an empty milk box to carry my 24 individual bottles home in. And they didn’t even scan any of the bottles at the register! They just typed in the price!

There is some bizarre, twisted system of logic in which this makes sense, I am sure. But I think my brain would break if I tried to understand it.

Checking in on the last of my Christmas orders from Amazon, and all of a sudden it looks like they’re in overdrive. I had a few preorders set up from way back, and everything just slammed into shipping soon status. Amazon warns me they’ll get here after Christmas. (Which is mostly OK, since most of ’em aren’t gifts . . . most of them, anyway.) I’ll be interested in seeing if any of them do sneak in under the wire.

Good luck to everyone on their last minute holiday arrangements.

I get into such terrible habits when a major deadline looms, especially when writing is involved. Books, articles, and other notes pile up on the desk, a small maze of books forms near my chair, and all sorts of little things like laundry start stacking up. I cleared a major deadline this past weekend, and things should be pretty relaxed for the next month or so. The projects I’ve started scribbling in my planner will probably take up a large amount of that time, especially with Christmas shopping to worry about. But it still feels less pressured. The nice thing about coming out of this mess on the other side is that I get to clean it up. Today the top of my desk re-emerged from a long period of hiding. Some of the books are heading back to the library, others up to the shelves . . . and others to wait for me to get some new shelves, because man, I have too many books.

Meir Ribalow, who taught most of the screenwriting/film classes I took at Fordham, once told me, “I teach for free. They pay me for the grading.”

The man speaks truth.

So, at about 2:30 this morning, I was standing in the parking lot at work, appraising a very low right front tire on my car. I’ve been having odd experiences lately along these lines – tires just suddenly showing up next-to-flat after being just fine when I last saw them mere hours ago. Anyway, I was trying – with, it must be said, a great degree of futility – to pump air back into the thing for the trip home when someone said “Excuse me, sir,” right behind me, which, in a not-at-all well-lit parking lot at 2:30am, has a tendency to make one jump three feet out of one’s skin, which I then proceeded to do.

Once I was resituated (and reskinned), I saw the African-American man standing behind me with a knapsack that had seen better days. He told me his name was Chester, and he needed a ride to the Motel 6, which is halfway across Fort Smith, which I was preparing to at least attempt to leave (in the opposite direction, no less). I was just a little bit skeptical, because I could smell that he’d been drinking. For some reason he then showed me his driver’s license – an Arkansas driver’s license with a New Orleans address. Things became somewhat clearer.

I was worried about the tire – this would be an extra 10 or so miles’ round trip that it would have to endure before hitting the interstate for half an hour to take me home. All things considered, it wasn’t going to have enough air in it either way. If I couldn’t make it home, I could call my wife (who would naturally be overjoyed at having to get out of bed to come rescue me), or I could call a co-worker or two (same scenario, only I don’t have to live with them), or worst case scenario, I could hoof it back to the station and spend the night there. If I didn’t help this man, he’d be walking for an hour, and he’d be walking right past the mall, in whose parking lot the police congregate at night. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with our police, but a lone black man with alcohol on his breath, on foot…I didn’t give him good odds on reaching Motel 6 instead of the drunk tank.

I thought the air in my tire was better spent on this man than on me, so off to Motel 6 we went. It was quite a lively conversation, about how the government actually had been taking care of him but he didn’t have transportation back to his room from a friend’s house (some friend, I thought silently), and how much he likes this area. And how much he wants to go home, even though he understands full well that the geographical location he knows as home bears little resemblance to what he remembers as “home.”

We drove past the mall parking lot, where there were something like half a dozen cop cars gathered in close proximity. I’d make a crack about our tax dollars being hard at work, but the mall parking lot is a fairly central location to all points of the city – unlike the downtown police station.

Finally, I dropped Chester off, gave him half of what was left of the pizza I had delivered to me at work tonight, wished him the best of luck and told him to keep the faith. I don’t think anyone’s ever thanked me that much for five miles’ worth of driving. I could’ve felt pleased with myself, but I also know that Chester’s just one man. And I’m quite sure most people wouldn’t have taken well to how he and I were introduced – 2:30 in the morning, surprised by a man you’ve never met before. (And hey, feel absolutely free to tell me I’m nuts for giving a ride to a total stranger – who had been drinking, no less – at 2:30 in the morning. I’ll admit that this may be at least partially a result of that so-called southern hospitality that people keep claiming we have down here.) There are a lot of Chesters (and Chesterettes) out there. Some of them, I’m sure, have children, spouses, and no way to get from point A to point B.

I could feel proud of myself for helping, but it was just one guy. There are so many more like him, in the same predicament. A lot of them are here – Arkansas took in more evacuees from the Gulf Coast than any state other than Texas. As their “temporary” displacement has become rather more permanent, I’ve heard stories of the novelty of charity wearing off, and some residents feeling that the displaced have outstayed their welcome. Decreased media coverage doesn’t mean that the crisis is over – if anything, when people relax their guard like that and we stop actively helping one another, that is in fact when the crisis begins in earnest.

There’s so many of them out there. And only one of me. And at some point I have to stop letting that drive me absolutely crazy and direct that energy toward doing something about it.

For what it’s worth, whether you want to ascribe it to karma, good luck, the grace of God, or the power of vulcanized rubber, my tire got me home just fine. And I can’t help but wonder how Chester’s going to get from point A to point B tomorrow.

“Cyber Monday”

It has a name. That is so awesome.

Of course we all know that employees surf the net when they are supposed to be working. They blog, they game, they IM, and they shop.

In fact, they – or should I say, we – shop so much and with such brazen disregard for our employers’ overtaxed high speed connections that we have actually earned a cool moniker not to mention a measurable impact on the holiday shopping season.

For those of you who don’t know, Cyber Monday is the first day back day after Thanksgiving for most Americans, a day on which workers hijack company-provided net connections to shop for the goodies family members told us they could not live without over the Thanksgiving Turkey. But Cyber Monday people are the folks who decided to sleep in on Black Friday rather than trample someone’s Aunt Rose over a DVD player. Instead Cyber Monday people shove their spreadsheets to the other side of the desk and spend a good part of the day hopping from Amazon to Lands End to Old Navy.

Cyber Monday is obviously a new phenomenon but it’s growing. Retailers are starting to bank on this day nearly as much as they bank on Black Friday. Well, if there’s anything I would bet on, it’s bored office workers looking for a way to blow worktime. Seems like a a no-brainer to me.

Me, I’m a cyber person, although I did not do my shopping at work today (my employer actually tracks net usage). I’ll tackle my shopping over the next few days, most of it online, though some things will require a trip to the…mall…yuck. I hate brick and mortar shopping around the holidays. Hate the crowds, hate parking, hate food courts, everything. That’s just the way I am made, and, apparently, many people agree with me. All I can say is here’s to many more years of sleeping late on Black Friday and free shipping deals on Cyber Monday.

Of course the question remains, did anyone get any work done today?

One of the little things I enjoy about the new world of online shopping is the whole idea of targeted recommendations. I remember back in college checking out a service called Firefly that was supposed to be able to provide music and movie recs based on a profile of ratings you created. Never really got too far with that. Nowadays I have a customized “radio” station at Rhapsody – I told it ten artists I liked, it plays a lot of music by those ten and similar artists. The similar artists are the fun thing, although I had to take Alison Krauss and Union Station off the list – I’ve discovered my fondness for bluegrass is very artist-specific. On the other hand, most of these services tell me I should really like the Jayhawks, and other than “Save It for a Rainy Day” I never quite can get into them. Gonna have to try harder, I think.

At this point, the king of recommending is Amazon. It can tell you what people who bought the stuff you buy have also bought. Or browsed for. Or might also like. Or have set up lists about. And its Gold Box program is a treasure trove of tenuous connections. Apparently the books on Hinduism and Buddhism I’ve bought for my Philosophy East and West courses has Amazon thinking I might like a yoga mat or yoga brick. Although there’s probably an interesting discussion of theory, practice, and the transformation of belief systems into fads lurking in there somewhere . . .

The number of things in your house that require immediate attention and repair is directly proportional to the number of guests you’re expecting for Thanksgiving dinner.

So it’s 11:30 at night, and I’m out on my back patio grilling jerk chicken on my charcoal grill. This is not just a response to my rising gas bills, although it doesn’t hurt. I actually get a kick out of grilling, especially at night. The glow of the coals is just a neat visual, and the food tastes great. There are folks who think I’m nuts, my father-in-law included, and that a gas grill would be a lot easier to work with. But I like cooking over a fire I made myself (with help from a chimney starter) and navigating over the hot spots, moving food from the most intense heat to sear to cooler areas to finish cooking.

My fondness for charcoal is another thing I owe to watching Alton Brown and Good Eats. I don’t have the uber-grill he uses, with elevating charcoal baskets, but I have a pretty nice Weber kettle that my Mom gave me as a housewarming gift. And it smokes a pretty darn good brisket.

And if anyone’s wondering, the recipe for Jamiacan jerk paste in The Joy of Cooking is pretty good, but it ain’t kidding around in terms of heat. It’s the habanero peppers that’ll get ya every time.