Scattershot

Laughing...or not

When I open the New Yorker, I'm always delighted to find anything by David Sedaris or Calvin Trillin. Last night, I found myself laughing aloud at Sedaris' latest piece, "Laugh, Kookaburra." I admire his work so much.

    Much other humor in the New Yorker, I'm embarrassed to say, often leaves me scratching my head. Maybe there is some kind of East vs. West difference in what is funny. Sometimes I'll read one of the short "humor" essays in the magazine, and I'll be simply stunned at the un-funniness of it.

    Similarly, I generally don't spend much time with the cartoons. I know, I know--the New Yorker is known for its cartoons, and, of course, I have often seen cartoons I appreciated, loved, and/or even cut out and posted on my bulletin board. But all too often, I'll look at a cartoon and think, "Huh?" Either I'll "get" it and not think it's funny, or I won't have any idea at all why it's supposed to be funny.

    Maybe that's why one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes involves Elaine not getting a New Yorker cartoon and becoming obsessed with trying to figure out what's funny about it. She even goes to the New Yorker offices, demanding an explanation, only to find that the editor didn't get it either and just "liked the kitty."

    Instead of seriously questioning my sense of humor, I prefer to imagine that there are many jokes printed because someone just "liked the kitty."

Sneezing through Vanity Fair

It's the smell. For several years now, I've refused to subscribe to Vanity Fair because it always has those little perfume samples bound into it, and they drive me crazy. Crazy. If I succumb to temptation and buy an issue at the supermarket, I'll have a sneezing fit driving home. If I add the magazine to the stack of reading material by my bed, it will smell up the bedroom and force me to open windows so I can breathe. Eventually, I'll give up and take the magazine, unread, to the recycle bin.

    I wrote to the magazine, begging them to give up the perfume samples, but I guess they chose to keep thousands of dollars in perfume ad revenue over my fifteen bucks. Sigh.

    I'm tired my friend Pat talking about things I really want to read in Vanity Fair. I'm tired of trying—hoping—to find the pieces she talks about online. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can't.

    But now I've got a plan. This weekend I'm going to buy an issue when I get groceries. Before I get in the car, I'll find the perfume pages, rip them out, and throw them away. I'll drive home with the windows open. Then, at home, I'll open the magazine and put it on the patio table, pages held down with bricks, and leave it in the bright sun for an afternoon to kill the smell. I hope. Then I'll bring it in.

    I wish Vanity Fair could appreciate the lengths I'm going to in order to read the articles. We'll see if this experiment works.....

Ambiguous headlines

When I was reading the newspaper yesterday, I saw the headline, "Bill takes a swipe at Nova Scotia." My first thought was, "What the heck does Congress have against Nova Scotia, for heaven's sake?"

    When I read on, I saw that "Bill" referred to Hurricane Bill, of course.

    I love being confused by ambiguous headlines because my misinterpretation almost always makes me laugh. Various web sites collect supposedly real ambiguous headlines. A few of my favorites:

• Iraqi head seeks arms
• Panda mating fails; veterinarian takes over
• Kids make nutritious snacks
• Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy
• Red tape holds up new bridge
• Eye drops off shelf
• Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
• Miners refuse to work after death
• Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers
• Killer sentenced to die for second time in ten years
• William Kelly, 87, was Fed Secretary

Brainstormer's high

Some people, I'm told, get runner's high. (Despite my best efforts for three years, I never came close to anything except runner's misery.)

    What I get is brainstormer's high. I got a big case of it two nights ago sitting with three other women and a bit of wine. I absolutely love the brainstorming phase of the creative process, where people toss out thoughts, fragments of ideas, half-baked notions, pieces of strategy, globs of goofiness, and you don't know where it's all going exactly, but you know that it's going somewhere and that eventually all those pieces and parts will coalesce into something that will feel right and be right and bring a lot of work but also a lot of joy.

    You hope.

    And that's the scary part of it. There's always that uncertainty involved, that moment when you take a leap of faith and decide to go for it, not knowing if it's really going to work out, but you want to try.

    I have learned over the years that not everyone can "do" this kind of creative brainstorming. Some people are wonderful at different stages of a project, but they just can't handle the open-endedness of brainstorming. They judge too quickly. They become anxious with too much freedom. They may be great at executing an idea, just not at shepherding it into shape.

    But, luckily, the women I met with night before last turned out to be great at it. What a delight to sit and be silly and let our minds go and see what direction something is going to go. I love it, adore it, thrive on it.

    And I suspect my high is much higher than any runner's high could ever be.

3:00 a.m. heebie jeebies

Five nights out of seven, I wake up at 3:00 a.m., for no reason at all. It seems to be a family trait. My dad wakes up at 3:00 a.m. My sister wakes up at 3:00 a.m. I've never asked my brothers about it, but if they wake up, I'll bet it's at 3:00 a.m., too.

    At 3:00 a.m., the world is dark, and life seems darker, too. Any worry I have doubles and triples and quadruples in size. If I have a problem, it turns into something completely unsolvable. If I have a blemish, it turns into skin cancer.  If someone has been short with me, he or she turns into a person who hates me and thinks I have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. If my hair has been looking bad, it looks worse. If sales have slowed, I'm sure my business is going to fail. If I'm having trouble with a project, I'm sure I can't write at all anymore. And so on and so on and so on. It doesn't matter that I know these issues will look far brighter in the light of day. At 3:00 a.m., they give me the heebie jeebies.

    But I've discovered, at last, something that helps. Now, before the heebie jeebies take full hold and transport me into crazyland, I tap the bed covers three times. My little cat Sophie, who is an ornery, stubborn little scamp in the daytime, comes flying onto the bed. She climbs onto my stomach and kneads for awhile, trying to find a comfy spot. Finally, she nestles on my shoulder, her face on my neck, and turns into Sweet Little Angel Cat. She purrs into my ear and lulls me back to sleep. Our little Sophie turns out to be a cure for the 3:00 a.m. heebie jeebies. 

    Now if I could just figure out a way to share her with my dad and sister.

Wedding weather

We arrived at the outdoor wedding ceremony Saturday in wind and pouring rain. The guests all huddled under a patio roof until there was no more room to fit anyone in. Luckily, the rain stopped then, and we all went out onto the lawn for the ceremony.

    It was an informal, short, sweet, and perfect ceremony for this couple, punctuated with laughter and applause from the audience. At the end, the bride said a few words about her bouquet, which she said was courtesy of her friend Shirley, who died a few months ago. As she finished, someone said, "Look!"

    There in the sky was a rainbow.

    Okay, it may be silly. It may be illogical. It may defy scientific explanation. Still, many of us there believe that rainbow was sent by Shirley. It was her way of sending the bride her love and her blessing on her special day.

The stander

A man down the street from our office has what I think must be one of the worst jobs in the world. He's a stander.

    Okay, he's not really a stander. That's just what we call him in our office. He's really a flagman for the road construction taking place on the highway. But he doesn't have a flag. He doesn't direct traffic. He doesn't do anything but stand there.

    We were so happy to learn there would be a flagman at the detour since there had been an accident the first day of the road closing, involving someone trying to enter the busy highway. The next day the flagman showed up. He stood. And stood. And stood. And stood. All day long.

    We called the construction company to complain that he was not helping. We could still not get onto the highway. Our only hope, every time we try to leave, is that traffic will clog enough to slow down and some kind soul will, eventually, stop and let us in. Otherwise there is not a prayer of entering the highway, and there is no other exit from our office complex.

    The construction manager told us that the flagman is not allowed to flag. He is not allowed to stop traffic.

    "What is he good for then?" we asked.

    "He monitors the situation," he said.

    Our complaint resulted in the company moving the flagman a few feet and giving him a sign. The sign says "Slow" on one side and "Stop" on the other. However, he holds only the "Slow" side up for traffic. I guess he's "allowed" to ask traffic to "slow" but not to "stop." The only problem is, it doesn't slow. People zoom along the highway and we sit trapped in our office complex.

    So now the stander does a little more than stand. He holds up a "Slow" sign. That's it. All day long.

    Oh, I suppose he is also "monitoring" traffic. I don't know what that means, unless it's just to watch it zoom by. We get to monitor it, too, as we sit trapped until someone takes pity on us.

Fonts

A couple of years ago my nephew and my step-son were going on and on about some, to me, obscure piece of gear they had bought for biking, skiing, climbing—I don't remember which. I rolled my eyes and said something like, "This just doesn't seem like something to get that excited about."

    My nephew responded with, "Okay...Think of it as being equivalent to you getting a great new font." The two of them laughed to think of someone being excited about, of all things, a font.

    I got it then. I do have a thing about fonts.

    I love reading books with clear, nicely proportioned fonts on a well-designed page. I sometimes don't buy a book because I open it and hate the font. I chose not to read A Prayer for Owen Meany for many years because I was so put off by the sections of the book written in all caps. (I finally gave in, and I loved the book.)

    I am annoyed by magazines that put large sections of white text on a black background just because it looks nice—and never mind that it is hard to read. I hate opening manuscripts authors have sent me to consider for publication and finding that they are printed in a font with no seriphs. (When you are reading stacks of printed text, nothing is more annoying than non-seriphed fonts.)

    I really, really despise e-mails from people who turn on the caps lock before they type.

    I am attracted to headlines like "New York Times Chooses New Font to Cope with the Great Recession." I'm fascinated with articles like a Washington Post piece about typeface designer Matthew Carter, creator of "Verdana" and many other fonts. 

   Oh, how times have changed. Many years ago I was helping a friend of mine with his campaign for public office, and he was going over the press release. This was in an era when people still typed things. (Yes, with a typewriter.) My friend, who does tend to obsess over details, objected to the amount of space between the letters and wondered if there was anything we could do about that. "It's a TYPEWRITER!!!" I remember yelling in frustration. "I can't adjust the letters in a TYPEWRITER!!!" Oh, how happy he is in today's world where he can adjust space between letters to his heart's content.

www.scattershot.typepad.com

   

Truth be told...

Is it my imagination, or has the phrase "truth be told" become a trendy thing to say? I remember noticing when an employee wrote the phrase a few years ago. Although I'd heard it before, it seemed just a bit unusual.

    Now I hear or read it every day. I heard it on the radio yesterday, and I saw it in writing three times the day before. Today I was reading a publication while I ate my lunch, and there it was in a headline. Has it become more prevalent, or have I just become more aware of it?

    I'm always fascinated by how words and phrases catch on and spread. "Not so much" is now used to dismiss things—an outfit, a movie, a boyfriend. Nearly any effort (but not a trip) is now "a journey." It's not enough to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, a husband or a wife. You must have a "soul mate."

    A friend recently told me how "incentivize" is appearing a lot. Ack. I thought she was joking.

    She was not. Now I'm hearing it all the time. And cringing all the time. I also cringe at people "having a dialogue" about that, or "utilizing" something, or deciding how something will be "at the end of the day."

    Some fad phrases are cute or charming the first ten or twelve times you hear them. Some come right out the chute being annoying. I'm tagging "incentivize" as a world class leader in the annoying category.

The dog connection

Dogs have become a part of my morning walks, even though I don't have a dog myself anymore. Most mornings I stop and chat with Susan and her little Sophie, who is always dressed in sweater and booties in the winter. I watch the man with three giant Newfoundlands, and I marvel at how they don't "walk" like other people and dogs. They stroll at a stately pace, like royalty.  

    I see the lady walking Lady, and I feel a little blip of sadness. When I moved to our town five or six years ago, Lady was always with a sweet old man who always seemed so happy to talk to someone. He often forgot who I was by the next time I talked to him, but he was always glad to see me. Then, after a couple of years, he stopped appearing, but Lady showed up with an elderly woman I assume was Jim's wife. She always seemed on a mission to have Lady do her business and get it over with, and I was never able to ask about Jim. 

    And now she has disappeared. Another woman is walking Lady in the mornings, and I doubt that any news about Jim and his wife will be good news. 

    I also nod and say hello to a man with a very nice smile, a man who walks what I'm sure must be the most well-behaved dog in the world. Every time I see the two of them, I find myself thinking, "What a lucky dog to have such a nice owner, and what a lucky owner to have such a nice dog." We have never exchanged a word other than "Hello," but I just know I'd like both of them even more if I knew them.

    But again, maybe I'm just grateful that the man and the dog see me at all. I've started noticing that about 30% of the people I pass will not speak or nod or acknowledge me in any way, even if I smile and say "Hello." I'm starting to get a complex about that. It's not as though we live in a dangerous city. Do I suddenly become invisible? Do I have a threatening look about me? (At 5'2", I doubt it, but you never know. Maybe I look meaner than I think.) Are they simply so focused they don't notice a person passing within inches of them on a narrow path? Have they not had their morning coffee? I don't know, but that rebuff is another blip in some of my mornings.

    And just when a few of these morning blips are starting to get me down, here will come a cheerful lady like the one I encountered today. She had a brisk walk, a handful of plastic bags, two energetic dogs going every which way and tangling themselves in their leashes, a big smile and a hearty "Good morning!" at 6:30 a.m.

    Her dogs were not the most well-behaved in the world, but I liked them anyway.