Sunday, October 03, 2004
The Glamorous Life
It’s been a fine weekend. Here’s a brief recap, for those of you who couldn’t join me:
* Our friends had their annual sukkot party, celebrating a lovely old holiday that happens every year about this time, the Festival of Tabernacles. I do like the word “tabernacle” so this one always rated quite high in my book. We ate a huge smoked brisket, a smoked turkey, and all manner of accompanying foodstuffs including a chocolate cake, chocolate pudding, and six boxes of krispy kremes of various sizes. It was a profoundly relaxing afternoon, as evidenced by my falling asleep on the couch in the living room for about half an hour in the middle of everything. The essential mystery of the event was provided by the label on the cream cheese I got, special hand-made stuff from a Marin county fromagerie - the packaging specified that there was “no gum” in it. I guess other cheeses have gum in them, which is why so many parents are having to teach their kids not to blow bagel bubbles. If you ask me, that’s just one more thing kids shouldn’t blow.
* Last night we netflix’d a very interesting movie - Spring Summer Autumn Winter… Spring. Though you might believe this to be the story of a year-long training program for a hopeful member of the olympic trampoline team, in fact it was an exceptionally beautifully-told story of a young boy growing up in a tiny monastary floating in a lake in Korea: what he learns - or doesn’t, how he incorporates teaching and experience into his life, how the cycles repeat and reinforce each other even as the seasons change within a year but repeat themselves as time’s river broadens. It was also one of the quietest movies I’ve ever seen, with less dialogue than a lot of mime. It’s not a movie to see when you’re tired, but if you’re ready to look into some of the bigger epicycles in life, I recommend it.
* It appears that a lot of road repair work has been done in our neighborhood in the past few weeks. Around here, all the intersections have street names carved into the edges of the curb. These small geographic hints are pretty handy for alert pedestrians, but it’s fair to say that the people who install them are not always at the top of their mental game. Hence, I noticed this weekend that the main drag hereabouts, Geary Boulevard, has a carved legend at the corner with 18th Avenue that reads, “Geary Bla.” I’ve had the Geary Bla’s before, and while they aren’t pretty, you can usually get over them. I guess the workers saw that there was an “a” in the word “boulevard” and figured on using that vowel in the abbreviation. Sure, there’s three other vowels in that word that precede the “a,” but those get used altogether too often. And, honestly, it’s nice to catch a little “a” on the streets every so often.
The other side of this story is that a local thoroughfare was recently repaved, as a result of which all the intersections had to be repainted. They originally had the standard thick white “limit” line and the word “STOP” painted with familiar stencilled block letters… but when the area got repaved they took some kind of inch-thick permanent paint-tape and made small weak inch-thick limit lines with it, and then tried to spell out “STOP” with small strips of the same tape with the “S” built out of five little white segments. Then they must have run low on tape because instead of using five strips to make an “S”, they started using just three, making the zig-zag “S” shape popularized on certain ornaments worn by the Nazi Schutzstaffel (or “SS"). Finally, it looks like they just ran out of brainpower and wound up making their last three-strip zigzag “S” backwards, so it looked like a big “Z” in front of the word “TOP.” “ZTOP.” And the tragedy, really, is that they covered it over and repainted it properly before we had a chance to add another “Z” to the front - doing, if you will, the Street-Paint Boogie. Life can be so cruel sometimes.
* And, looking ahead: just in case the week brings you unexpected challenges, you can always send encoded distress calls like these. No office is complete without this poster up on the breakroom wall. Or without a jello-based slip-n-slide and a shiny set of corporate lawndarts. Which is to say, no office is complete. Which is, simply, not news. So I might as well just shut up about it already. Here’s hoping your week fires a warning shot before anything serious happens....
