To Be Or Gnat To Be

Two weeks ago I woke up one morning to a gnat infestation in my kitchen. They were buzzing around the kitchen. I checked all around the kitchen for where they might be coming from. The counters were clean and the dishes washed. I had no idea where the gnats were coming from. They had even made it upstairs to the master bathroom. They were so thick I couldn't drink my morning glass of grapefruit juice without a critter diving into share it.

I set out on an eradication program. I hum up some flystrips over the sink. And I put out a Cheerwine bottle with just a little grapefruit juice in the bottom. The gnats would fly into the bottle and drown in the juice. Over a few days most of the gnats fell to their doom, but I never quite figured out where they had come from.

Then just a few days ago we got our first fruit shipment. When I was a kid we had two grapefruit trees in our backyard. Winter mornings I would tip-toe across the frost on the ground to pick a grapefruit from the tree. I became quite addicted to my morning citrus.

So when citrus season starts in December, we order boxes of fruit. The first one came as a mixture of tangerines, oranges, and pink grapefruit. I put some in the refrigerator and then I took the rest down to the coldest place in the house, the closet in the basement underneath the entry stairs. When I opened the door I caught a whiff of rotting fruit and noticed four grapefruit from a month ago I had forgotten about. I gingerly carried the bag to the trash. I finally knew what had caused the gnats to roost. There are still a few lingering around, but now I treat them as uninvited pets. I've even given them names. Here are a few:

Gnat King Cole
Gnatalie Portman
Gnatty Boh
The Gnatural
Gnat Lauer
Gnatcho Cheese
Gnatman: The Dark Gnat
Gnat Masterson
Gnattering Nabobs of Negativity
Gnatsy Boys
Donovan McGnat

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Name some gnats.

Body Hair and Zits

One of my favorite comics strips is the teen-angst documentary that is Zits. Today they seem to be stealing my last blogpost and raising the "EEWWWW!" level to 11.


I hope you all finished breakfast before reading the funnies this morning.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

or
Wax On, Wax Off

I am not a hirsute man. I will never make the centerfold of Bear Magazine (btw, possibly NSFW, ymmv), but as I grow older, past the point where the phrase “middle-aged” is unavoidable, issues with hair seem to be growing. Or not growing, as the case may be. For the better part of a decade I had been in plausible denial about the widening bald spot on the back of my head. My hairdresser knew better than to show me the trim in the back and I just avoided looking into parallel mirrors. Unfortunately, I recently changed to a less discrete stylist and a recent rash of candid group photos with me facing away from the lens have made the scales fall from eyes. That salad bowl sized display of cranial skin will never get smaller. I can live with that. I wear ball caps in the summer and hoodies in cold weather. I refuse to go the combover route and just take comfort knowing that I still have more hair than my celebrity doppelganger, Ron Howard.

It’s hair in other areas that is my concern. Years ago I was in a meeting next to a goblinesque-looking man with ear hair so long that it could have been braided into a pony tail. I vowed never to become That Guy. After a few painful lessons in the difficulty of plucking nasal hair, I learned that personal hair trimmers are reasonably priced and can be purchased discretely at most BigBoxOfChineseCrap stores. I even find the soft buzz of the spinning blades relaxing.

Unlike Stephen Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I’m actually fairly proud of my soft dewy mane of chest hair that took several decades to fill in. But a few weeks ago my wife questioned if I would be interested in going to her nail salon to have my back waxed. An inquiry like that is similar to being offered a breath mint. You really shouldn’t refuse even if you don’t think you need it. I made some vague affirmative answer and let it go.

I attributed at least part of her interest in having my back shorn to the marketing skills of the nail tech industry. A decade ago, nobody went to a separate nail salon, but a generation of industrious semi-skilled Vietnamese immigrants have made the stand-alone nail salon as ubiquitous in strip malls as the dry cleaner and the tanning booth place. My wife has latched onto these places as a weekly social activity where she can be pampered and discretely brush up her rusty Vietnamese. As an aside, when the techs at these salons speak in their native tongue and start tittering, they are laughing AT you, not with you, so tip well and don’t be too annoying.

New Years Eve afternoon I was in my man-cave watching the alma mater getting thrashed on the Blue Field of Boise, writing my year end Best Of blogpost, and engaging in other nominally masculine behavior when the phone rang. My wife was at her latest salon (she skips around every few months) and said that there was no waiting for the waxing room. I put my testicles in escrow and went down to join her. Sure enough, the place was nearly empty. My wife was sitting in some sort enormous captains chair that looked it had been lifted from the Hello Kitty themed cockpit of an H. R. Giger spaceship. She had her toes up on blocks getting pedicured and was holding court with the bored techs.

I was led back to the closet sized waxing room by a woman who was a matronly cross between Linda Hunt and Dr. Ruth. She had me take off my shirt and sit in a rolling office chair backwards. The wax was heated nearly to point of scalding and the actually ripping of the wax was done quickly and relatively painlessly. The Velcro separating sound got louder the further down my back she went. I got briefly nervous just how far south she was expected to get me smooth, but to my relief she stopped at the small of my back.

The whole process took just a few minutes. My wife invited me to stick around for more girl talk, but I begged off explaining that I had the second half of an ass-kicking on DVR to get through at home. Truthfully, in my newly denuded state I was just a little self-conscious about hanging around and getting asked to show it off.

My only concern with crossing the hair removal Rubicon is just how quickly and uncomfortably the back fuzz is going to grow back in. I’m hoping to limit the procedure to a semi-annual event like a good dental cleaning. However, I must confess that I find the thought of sitting in a giant barcalounger while young women caress and fondle my feet slightly exciting. Maybe in the spring I’ll go in for a much needed pedicure and get my toes painted a nice manly shade of black or dark green.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Share your personal grooming tale. Go ahead, it’s just us.

Update 1/6/08: The comic strip Zits takes this topic to another level.

Hillary The Hippie

The GOP Media Meme Manipulation Machine aka The Dirty Tricks Squad is masterful at defining their opponents in the most unflattering light possible. They take a grain of caricature and transmogrify it into a mental shorthand in the minds of the voters. It doesn’t matter how disingenuous the cheap shot, all it has to do is resonate in the mind of the public. Just ask Internet Al the Serial Liar or Jean-Paul Kerry the Flip Flopper. Let me introduce their next work of genius: Hillary the Hippie.

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, recently co-sponsored a rather piddly one million dollar earmark for a museum in upstate New York. This is the type of petty penny-ante pork barrel stuff that a junior senator is supposed to support. Except the museum is in Bethel, New York, the real site of the Woodstock concert, which makes it The Hippie Museum. That piece of routine home district bone-throwing will prove to be a strategic error for the Clinton campaign on par with riding in a tank while wearing an Elmer Fudd helmet or windsurfing off Nantucket Sound in a hundred dollar farmer john. Just check out the first salvo in this McCain commercial:



As Joel Achenbach explains in the Washington Post, the Woodstock connection is mostly incidental. The museum is an ancillary piece of the much larger Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. And by “center for the arts”, they mean an outdoor concert pavilion designed to cash in on the lucrative summer shed tour business. It competes with Saratoga Springs for shows that hit places like Wolf Trap, Nissan Pavilion, and Merriweather Post. Bob Dylan played there this summer. So did Dave Brubeck, Brad Paisley, and the Boston Pops. The concession stand sells ginger and garlic hummus. It’s a place for sipping six dollar Heinekens, not rolling fatties from a nickel bag.

In short, it’s a tourism development project with a gift shop attached. The museum portion is strictly to bring in some daytime gawkers between shows and sell some tchotchkes to aging Baby Boomers who may or may not have been at the original Woodstock, depending on the clarity of their memory and quality of their weed. Check out the online preview if you doubt me.

That this vistors center with a few exhibit halls has been exaggerated into a monument to Free Love and Brown Acid is no accident. By rhetorically turning it into some budget-busting tribute to the counter-culture, the Right Wing Echosphere can confabulate Hillary the Unreformed 60s Activist with Hillary the Free-Spending Liberal into Hillary the Hippie. Just mentioning the Hippie Museum will invoke all the subliminal baggage the eventual Republican nominee needs to paint Clinton as a wild-eyed, drug-crazed, tax-and-spend radical.

Whether that image is true or not doesn’t matter. If it’s a portrait they can make stick, it will become true, and everything she says, does, or promises will be filtered through that perspective. People have tried to pin an image on Hillary before. There has been Hillary the Ashtray Throwing Housewife, Hillary the Health Care Harpy, Hillary the Carpetbagger. While all these previous views appeal to those who already hate Hillary (which is a not insignificant bipartisan percentage of the electorate), they don’t put that cynical spot of doubt in the mind of the fencesitter.

However, Hillary the Hippie could have legs. Unshaven hippie legs turned into pantsuit-wearing politician legs. Expect to be deluged with every Sixties era snapshot of Hillary the Opposition Research teams can unearth. The bigger the glasses and the longer the hair, the better. Once Hillary the Hippie becomes a talk show staple punchline, the swiftboaters can relax and let the mainstream media do the rest of the dirty work. By this time next year, the Halloween stores will be filled with latex Hillary masks bundled with peace symbols, fringe vests, and love beads. Check out my poorly photoshopped mock-up. It’ll be the most terrifying costume of the 2008 election.



BlatantCommentWhoring™: Which Hillary do you see?

Pick A Weird Habit Meme

Trusty Getto tagged me with a meme about weird habits. I have to list five of mine and then tag five more people. This meme is spreading like wildfire. I think mostly because it is pretty easy and people like to tell embarrassing things about themselves on their blogs. In fact if the similar posts I’ve seen are representative, OCD is a common symptom of bloggers.

Like all these memes I tend to overthink them. A habit is something more than a routine. I walk my dog every morning, but that’s so his whimpering doesn’t annoy my wife so much that the dog and I have to look for a new home. Weird I think means something unusual enough to scare people. Drinking grapefruit juice for breakfast is a habit, but no one is going to think it’s weird. Well let’s give it a try.

1. I don’t sneeze like a person. I sneeze like a cat. I will build up and then sneeze 5 or 6 times in a row real quickly. Until coworkers get used to it, they always think I’m having some sort of attack. That’s more of a medical condition than a habit.
2. I “Mooooo” every time I pass cows outstanding in their field. It’s actually a family tradition. My dad does and you do turn into your parents. I like scaring my kid with that fact.
3. I have to pee as the very last thing I do before I go to bed. Even if I went just fifteen minutes earlier. I just can’t sleep without a totally completely empty bladder. That’s both the most OCD and the biggest TMI thing I know about me. You happy?
4. I don’t like closed or locked doors. I nearly beat up my college roommate once for locking me out as a gag and giving me a panic attack. I think this stems from the time in kindergarten when the school bus dropped me off and the neighbor that was supposed to babysit never showed up and I just sat outside my locked house for over an hour crying. This is more of a phobia than a habit, but when else am I going to get to air out a childhood trauma like this. P.S. My dog hates closed doors too.
5. I’m a chronic nose-picker. That’s not even weird. You know you do it too. Everybody does . Even the President does it.

That's me looking for buried treasure in the Fremont Street Bridge troll when I was in Seattle. For more detail click here.

So out of five things, I’m not sure any of them are both weird and a habit. I must not be very good at this. Now comes the tagging part. You know I hate this. Especially since, like the last guy on the block to sell Amway, everybody else already knows about it. I tag Kontan, Courtney, Mooselet, Plain Jane, and one volunteer. Remember that memes are like voodoo dolls. They can only work if you believe in them. So don't worry about any hexes if you blow it off. But tell us weird stuff about yourself anyways.

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