Leezer

I’ve been told that when I’m annoyed, there’s no way I can hide it.  My clenched jaw muscles twitch.  That,  and I have a marvelous stink-eye.   I’ve tried to act cheery when I’m peeved, but the effort is transparent- or so I’m told.

We’re selling our house.  People seem to like the house, and although it’s been on the market for only 36 hours, there has been a lot of traffic through it.  We hired an agent precisely so that we wouldn’t have to show the house ourselves and to handle the marketing and negotiating matters.   If it were up to me to market and sell my house, I would conjure up about as much charisma as Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?

This afternoon our agent held an open house from one o’clock to four o’clock.  At about 5:30 my husband washed his car in the driveway while I helped my daughter with her bath.  A realtor pulled over and asked my husband if she could show our house to her clients (who were with her).  My husband said they could take a look inside, but not before he warned me they were coming in.  “Tell them to make an appointment,” I said, following our realtor’s instructions.   ”What’s the big deal?” was his reply.   On the heels of that group came another, after which my husband explained, “How could I say no to the second group while the first group was already in the house?”   I wouldn’t have let them in as a matter of principle even if it meant losing a possible sale.  I’m quite inflexible when it comes to manners and courtesy.  

Clearly, a realtor bothering us without first contacting our agent isn’t the crime of the century, but it is annoying.  So the two groups walked through our house and I refused to make small-talk.   It’s too bad, I thought, that there isn’t a naked man snoring away in the t.v. room or that our spare bedroom isn’t filled with S&M paraphernalia - an even exchange for the imposition.

I began to imagine following ways in which I might make the interlopers uncomfortable:

• Sit on a metal folding chair in the basement, fully clothed in a marching band uniform, playing Baby I’m Amazed by Paul McCartney and Wings on the trombone;
• Followthe lookie-loos through the house lobbing Q-Tips at the backs of their heads;
• Play a Megadeath CD at full volume while sitting at the kitchen table staring at a stack of cinnamon toast two feet high;
• Walk through the house with impunity, turning at right-angles with military precision while wearing nothing but a monocle, a top hat, and a “Peaches and Herb” T-Shirt;
• Armpit farts;
• Ask the “guests” if they’d like to look through my high school year books, explaining that everything has been down hill since then.

I didn’t do any of these things.  Instead, I just let my jaw muscles twitch.

Here’s some dialogue from that happy little play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, by Edward Albee:

George: …You can sit around with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me to pieces all night, and that’s perfectly OK, that’s all right…
Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!
George: I CANNOT STAND IT!
Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!

Georgia:  Mom, let’s play “Think of an Animal.”

Me:  O.K., You go.

Georgia: I’m thinking of an animal that’s blackish-gray.

Me:  Racoon.

Georgia:  No, it has a pouch.

Me:  Kangaroo?

Georgia:  No.  It’s kind of fat and has a funny nose and the female has pink by the mons pubis.

Me:  The what?

Last year I wrote about the Proust Questionnaire, which appears in the back of every issue of Vanity Fair magazine. It is loosely based upon a questionnaire Marcel Proust was invited to complete at a party when he was 13 and then again when he was 20.  The questions are rather lame and tend to illicit responses concerning the sources of happiness and regret.  I’m rather bored with the questionnaire, so I’ve developed a much more interesting list of queries which hopefully, will produce a broader discussion than the one developed by Prousts’s party hosts.   I invite you to cut and paste the following queries into the comments and tell me what you’re thinking:

1. You can spend a whole day as a member of the opposite sex.  What do you do?  Try to throw a fast ball over 60 mph.  Then I’d probably play with myself.
2. Someone guarantees you $1 million to pick one of two pills and ingest it.   One of them is a placebo and the other will make asparagus grow from your scalp (and you can’t ever cut it and it will never fall out).  Do you take the money and select a pill?  No.  I’m vain and not too interested in money.
3. You can invite any three people, dead or alive, to dinner.  Who are they?  Joshua Chamberlain, Martin Luther, and Cicero.
4. What do you think happens when we die?  An unimaginably beautiful homecoming.
5. What types of people do you most admire?  People who overcome profound adversity;  athletes who remain humble despite their talent; artists who are willing to endure poverty to pursue their chosen methods of expression.
6. Favorite smells?  My daughter’s hair, puppies,  the way Hawaii smells when you step off the plane, bacon, camp fires, new car leather, Laura Mercier Eau De Lune perfume.
7. Have you ever made a Faustian Bargain ?  Law school loans in the six-figures.  I paid them off, every dollar.
8. If you could go back in time and change one decision you made, what would it be?  I can’t think of one. I’ve always made decisions I thought best at the time.  
9. Should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame.  It depends.  If the Hall of Fame can think of a test and consistently apply it, I’d be happy either way.
10. What is your most marked characteristic?  Probably my sense of humor.
11. Your best friend’s spouse is having an affair.  Your friend doesn’t know. Do you tell him or her?  No. But I’d confront the philandering spouse.
12. Nature or nurture?  60% nature, 40% nurture.
13. What was the worst day of your life?  July 18, 1998.
14. The best? November 8, 2000.
15. Are people basically good or not? Despite some aberrations, most people are good.

 I love lists.  I make mental lists all the time, even when I don’t need a list for anything. Here are a few from yesterday:

Words that attorneys use too frequently:

• specious
• arbitrary
• dilatory
• paucity
• extensive
• implausible
• retaliatory

People who could play me in a movie about my life:

• Lisa Kudrow
• Helen Hunt
• Tom Petty
• The least attractive of Nicole Kidman’s sisters

Things I’ve overheard that maintenance guy who stands outside my office talking real loud in his Midwestern accent say over the past two days:

• “If someone is pointin a gun at ya, you should charge em cause it freaks em out.”
• “We used to party but now he’s too good for us, I guess.”
• “but life would be boring if we were all the same” [upon hearing of Anna Nicole Smith's death]
• “I knew this gal who raised chickens and wouldn’t tell her kids when she butchered em cause they were pets.”
• “I can’t get drunk on Coors.”

Colors I can’t stand

• cadet blue
• teal blue
• cobalt blue
• peacock blue
• baby blue
• burgundy

Colors I love:

• tangerine orange
• salmon pink
• butter yellow
• coral red
• off-white
• navy blue

What my office smells like this morning:

• scalded milk
• hairspray
• Lysol

On this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus signed a contract with Spain to sail to Asia and bring back spices.

Most people know that Christopher Columbus did not discover America but found the West Indies.  Of course, he didn’t know at the time that he hadn’t discovered America - he felt pretty good about the fact he had discovered something, but King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain insisted that the place he found wasn’t America because there weren’t any Wall Marts and gas was too affordable.   Chris shrugged and said, “o.k. you’ve got a point.”

 Anywhoo, Chris’s voyage to Asia was a bit more successful.  Although he initially set out to bring home spices (he presented Ferdinand and Isabella with a fantastic chipotle-garlic rub for the grill), he also happened upon those annoying tubes of woven straw that you stick your thumbs into then pull and you can’t get your thumbs out.   He brought home two tons of the thumb tubes and distributed them to all the peoples of that country.  For two years no one was able to do anything that required the use of their thumbs, until someone figured out that merely pushing the thumbs together, thereby relaxing the taut tube-device so that one thumb could be removed, seemed to do the trick.  Once word spread, commerce resumed and Spain was once again a successful seafaring nation.  

Also on this day in 1986 the Netherlands signed a peace treaty with the Isles of Scilly, ending 335 years of war.  The conflict began when Scilly’s then Prime Minister made a rather catty remark about the Dutch wooden footwear.   A stand-off ensued, until eventually the world forgot about the conflict, not so much because the world was unaware of what started it, but because the world really doesn’t know where in the hell the Isles of Scilly are to begin with.

Yesterday while I was in the ladies’ room of the West Seattle Taco Time, I noticed a lone green candy Dot on the floor of my stall.   It inspired me to write a little poem about it:

Oh, Dante’s lip

Poseidon’s knees

you sit and stare, demand that I freeze

you torment and haunt me

bait and smother

oh lowly Dot, would that another

tread so blithely on your marrow

that when, to die, a missing sparrow

fall fall fall, not from thy nest

that thy mother shall beat her breast, and proclaim, proclaim

tacos are the best!

While today’s school children are routinely educated  on the historical injustices surrounding race in this country - Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the like  - noticeably absent from our children’s’ syllabi is another form of prejudice not often discussed in polite society.   While the spectre of which I speak should not be equated with the tragedies of racial injustices, the horrors should not be overlooked.  I am referring to the “Pumkin Head Laws” of the late Ottoman Empire.

Pumpkin Head Laws, while too extensive to catalogue here, generally prevented those whose heads were shaped like enormous  jack-o-lanterns from running for public office, from riding public transportation, even from marrying.  There were no strict criteria with which to determine whether one’s head was a “Pumpkin Head.”  Rather, a man known as “Suds” McGregson, oldest son of the McGregson Dynasty of the First Ottoman empire, developed a template out of papyrus used to measure the heads of everyone in his kingdom.  This template was similar to the opening into which one’s carry-on luggage must travel on the security conveyor belt in any airport.  If the bag is too big, it must be checked.   “Suds” mandated that all males must be measured when they reached the age of majority, which at that time was 12.  Females were exempted from the Pumpkin Head Laws, as they were not seen as “people,” but merely the chattels of their fathers, husbands, or brothers.  Those males whose heads were larger than the rather crudely crafted papyrus template were made to live far away from the kingdom and were not permitted an audience with any member thereof, even with a female of low birth.

Tomorrow - military conscription of Pumpkin Heads.

Three years of law school doesn’t fill your brain with information.  The opposite is true.  It is a three year-long process with one objective: to empty out the human brain.  Subsequent to the emptying-out, nothing can enter unless put through an exacting logical process.  It is the process that one learns in law school.  All assumptions are removed, and one must learn to go through life with an empty head and a white heart.  Every piece of presumably factual information becomes an documentary or testamentary evidence that may become an assumption only after a foundation nas been laid.

 Here’s a rather exaggerated example of what the three years are like:

Professor:  What’s your name?

Me:  Lisa

Professor:  How do you know?

Me:  That’s what my mother calls me.

Professor:  So that’s what she calls you.  Why then, does that mean it’s your name?

Me:  Well, it’s also the name on my birth certificate.

Professor:  Certificate?  What makes this document a certificate?

Me:  The document bears a stamp representing to be the stamp of the clerk of the county in which I was born.

Professor.  You used the term, “representing.”  Is that clerk in this room?  Can she speak to your assertion that she stamped this document? 

And so it goes for three years and for ever after, walking through life accepting nothing at face value and treating hearsay and speculation as fantasy.

 So imagine my distrust of the phenomenon that has become of www.Wikipedia.org.  This on-line encyclopedia is a compendium of the world’s knowledge to which any dumbsh** can contribute.  There are a bunch of people at wikipedia that collect this information, and without  putting the information through any foundational tests, publishes it online. 

Some colleges and universities have adopted standards prohibiting the use of reference information obtained through Wikipedia.   For example, suppose a student wanted to research the early life of Gaius Julius Caesar.  What that person will find is that not much is known of Caesar’s early life:

“Although of impeccable aristocratic patrician stock, the Julii Caesares had not historically been especially politically influential, having produced only three consuls. Caesar’s father, also called Gaius Julius Caesar, perhaps through the influence of his prominent brother-in-law Gaius Marius, reached the rank of praetor, the second highest of the Republic’s elected magistracies, and governed the province of Asia.^[5] His mother, Aurelia Cotta, came from an influential family which had produced several consuls. They lived in a modest house in the Subura, a lower class neighborhood of Rome,^[6] where Marcus Antonius Gnipho, an orator and grammarian who originally came from Gaul, was employed as Caesar’s tutor.^[7] Caesar had two sisters, both called Julia. Little else is recorded of Caesar’s childhood. Suetonius and Plutarch’s biographies of him both begin abruptly in Caesar’s teens: the opening paragraphs of both appear to be lost.^[8]“

Curiously, this statement then appears:

“In 85 BC Caesar’s father died suddenly while putting on his shoes one morning,^[10] and at sixteen, Caesar was the head of the family.”

Do the Wikipedia editors, to the extent this describes what they do, think it not odd to assert that the father of the world’s most notorious militiary leader, in fact, bent over one morning and died putting his shoes on?  Isn’t this a bit like divining that his father didn’t like apples, or that he tended to be a little paunchy around the abdomen?  How do we know? 

 Wikipedia comes in handy for many purposes.  The other day, I listened to a program on NPR concerning the Geneva Convention and the proposal concerning the capture of prisoners.  There was talk of waterboarding.  On wikipedia,   I found a definition that seems to make sense.  Good times. 

But I’m not sure I’d use Wikipedia as a cited reference, for example, in a doctoral thesis.  Foundational problems there.  Perhaps it doesn’t really matter how the father of Gaius Julius Caesar died.  But what if someone really needed to know?  Perhaps they should ask Jeeves.