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Catch It If You Can.

Author: July 17, 2023 2 Comments

A couple of weeks ago a story about a woman whose dog Daisy has found a hundred and fifty-five frisbee golf discs in the park where they walk regularly got my attention. First of all I know frisbee golf discs are, well, they’re not expensive, but a basic set will set you back about twenty bucks, so I wondered who was throwing away all these frisbees. And that wasn’t nearly as weird as the time I found a lone bocce ball in the park. Again, not too expensive–although a cheap bocce ball set can cost about twice as much as a frisbee golf set–but I couldn’t figure out why someone would just leave it.

It also reminded me that I have a couple of frisbees in my office. They were ones that I’d found so they were free. In both cases I found them walking in to work. They were sitting on a wall next to a building and when I first passed by I just left them. After a couple of days, though, when they hadn’t been moved, I thought, hey, why not take ’em? I was going to take them home to the dogs but they’ve got their own frisbees and I also thought maybe I could get some of my coworkers to join me in taking a break to go outside and throw a frisbee.

I tried posting messages to a social media site we all used but no one noticed, or if they did no one said anything. Then I put the frisbees up on the wall of my cubicle, hoping someone, anyone, would see them and suggest we put them to good use. Or that people would just take them, which may have been why their original owner left them out.

Lately, though, we’ve had to clean out the entire office. It’s not just my cubicle. The decision was made that all personal items in the office have to go.

It’s made the office a depressing place. I’m not sure what the reasoning was. Maybe it’s because so many people are only coming in on a part-time basis so empty cubicles are supposed to be free and open to everyone, but we have more empty cubicles than people. If someone wants to brighten up the cubicle they use on a regular basis with a few personal items what’s the harm? And personal items are great for starting conversations, or just making the office feel like a welcoming place. We’re people, not machines.

So I’ve put the frisbees in a file cabinet. They’re out of sight so they won’t violate any policy of personal items on display but I think it’s a good idea to keep them handy.

Adventures In Busing.

Cold As Ice.

Author: July 15, 2023 4 Comments

An ICEE, the blend of slushy ice and syrup or soda more commonly sold as a Slurpee at 7-11s, was a summertime reward. If my friend Dale and I were good while our mothers shopped at Kmart we’d stop at the ICEE stand, with its spinning bubbles of frozen blend and big happy polar bear slurping a cold drink instead of devouring a seal or going extinct because of climate change. ICEEs came in two flavors: cherry and Coke. For some reason blue raspberry wasn’t available around here. Once I tried the Coke flavor and, while refreshing, it was still just frozen Coke. The rest of the time I went with cherry.

Before it was handed to me I always planned to hold it long enough for the ice to melt so I could stir it all together, and I always plunged right in, poking perfectly round holes in the scarlet frosty mound with my straw, searching for the sweet spots which were unevenly distributed but so wonderfully sweet. Finally I’d end up with pinkish water and ice and I’d tip the cup up, not wanting any tangy drop to go to waste.

When I saw ICEE cereal, with that same big friendly polar bear, in a store with no ICEE machines, I had to try it. I’d been working without a break. If I couldn’t have an actual ICEE this, however different, would be my reward. The box even promised, “Cools your mouth as you eat!” Did this mean it also had mint flavor? I was eager to find out.

The cereal was, as advertised, blue, red, and blended spheres, although not as brightly colored as pictured. They were like an anemic version of Captain Crunch’s Oops! All Berries! with a limited palette. The red ones had a distinct cherry tang while the blue ones were just sweet, until that bitter aftertaste set in. Wait, bitter? It was as though there’d been a sugar shortage so they could only mostly cover up the flavor of the pasty wheat base. I hoped adding milk would even out the flavor.

It didn’t. But at least it didn’t heighten the bitter aftertaste which was mild enough that it could be overcome by taking the next bite. Then the cold set in.

It’s difficult to describe the cold. It wasn’t mint, which offers a pleasant tingling sensation as well as coolness and its own distinct flavor. This felt more like they’d somehow managed to slip in a sliver of dry ice and instead of dissipating it spread. It had the added effect of bringing the bitterness forward. By the time I scooped up the last bite—I’d paid three bucks for this cereal, dammit, I wasn’t going to let anything go to waste, gobbling it up as fast as I could to get it over with—that was all there was.

ICEE cereal was supposed to take me back to one of the best parts of the summers of my youth, getting rewarded for being good, but instead it was one of the worst things: a punishment when I hadn’t done anything wrong. Like their polar bear mascot, who looks so sweet and happy, the truth was cold and bitterness, although no one will be sorry when the cereal goes extinct.

But at least they didn’t include a Coke flavor.

American Graffiti.

The Storyteller.

Author: July 14, 2023 5 Comments

When I heard that the novelist Milan Kundera had died the first thing I thought of was the time I met his wife. It was partly a chance encounter. I was in Paris and I’d gotten his home address from a writers’ directory. After a lot of wandering and checking the map—his street was short and narrow, almost an alley—I found his apartment building. There was an intercom next to the door and someone had just pressed the buzzer and gone in so I could see a courtyard, but I stood there, realizing I didn’t have any plan beyond just finding his home. After a few minutes a dark-haired woman came out and I said, “Pardon, je ne parle Francais. Parlez vous Anglais?” And she said, “Yes, I do.” We both laughed and I said, “I’m looking for Mr. Kundera. I’m a great fan of his work and I was hoping to meet him.” She softened a bit and said, “I’m so sorry. He’s out of the country right now. I’d invite you in but I have to go as well. Do you have a note or something I could give him?” She probably saw I was holding a copy of his novel Life Is Elsewhere, fitting, since he was elsewhere. I didn’t have anything but I said, “Could you please just tell him a young poet came to pay his respects?”

I realize now that she might have been politely saying, “My husband doesn’t get a lot of stalkers but I’m seriously thinking about calling the police.” But I still took the hint and, after saying it was nice to have met her, I went to explore the rest of Paris as it should be explored: without any plan.

At home I wrote him a letter saying I was that young poet and I was sorry to have missed him. I don’t think I apologized for showing up unannounced at his home, but I did say I’d read all his novels except his latest one, Immortality. About a month later I got a package from him: a copy of Immortality, inscribed to me with a message and a weird picture of a hand. Why a hand? In my edition of Life Is Elsewhere, translated from Czech, there was a forward by Kundera about how the translator had gone back and redone his original translation, making it better. Kundera said he was grateful and added, “I offer him my hand as a friend.” It was his own personal signature and he was offering me his hand as well. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Of course I sat down and read Immortality immediately, enjoying all its rambling strangeness. There’s a character in it named Mr. Kundera and he talks about how he’s writing a novel. Someone asks him what the title of his novel will be and he says, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” When the other person says, “I think someone’s already written that,” Mr. Kundera replies “I did! But it should be the title of the novel I’m writing now.”

I’d always approached Kundera as A Very Serious Writer, a preeminent example of postmodern fiction, who wove deep philosophy—Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre—into his work. But I’d never thought of him as funny until then. I went back and reread all his other books. I’d always understood that, as a postmodern author, he played with fiction and the power of stories to make anything happen. Stories can shape history, or even invent things that never happened, and everyone is a character. Parts of Immortality imagine what Goethe is up to in Heaven. I realized what I’d been missing when I reread The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting which includes a story about his own life when he was labelled a dissident in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. He had a set of astrology books that he kept on his desk where friends could see them and he even told them he’d been an assistant to a French astrologer—which wasn’t true. As a dissident he couldn’t get work as a writer but based on his “experience” an editor gave him a job writing an astrology column under a pseudonym. Then a high-ranking government official contacted the editor, discreetly, and asked if the astrologer could—just for fun, you understand, because it wasn’t something any rational person took seriously, you know—do some horoscopes for him. Kundera said he wondered how many government decisions his “horoscopes” influenced.

It’s a funny story but the first time around I was too busy trying to understand the meaning in the context of people who fly when they dance in a circle. What I realized the second time around—weight replaced by lightness–was that there was a deep vein of humor running through all his work. Hey, his first novel is called The Joke and while it’s not exactly funny he did understand the power—and danger—of satire. Life Is Elsewhere is a tragicomedy that pokes fun at the pretentiousness and naivete of young poets and as I write that now my twenty-year old self feels attacked. But also amused.

Back at college I was taking an Eighteenth Century Literature class and one day, sitting in the student lounge, one of my classmates and I got into a discussion of how much the novels of Henry Fielding, Swift, even Samuel Johnson, and especially Laurence Sterne, resembled postmodern novels, with rambling, sometimes bizarre plots, and asides where the authors directly address the reader.

“The difference,” my classmate said, “is postmodern novels just aren’t funny!”

I proceeded to open up a whole can of Kundera right there. Humor is subjective thing, but I pointed out several scenes from his books I thought were pretty funny, ending with the short story “Symposium” and a young doctor who sneaks out to the garden at night. He hears someone he thinks is a woman he thinks is in love with him. When he says, “I knew you’d come,” he’s greeted by the voice of an older male doctor who replies, “Yes, I prefer peeing outside.”

The classmate faded away into the wallpaper and I was sitting by myself when I heard a heavily accented voice say, “That was quite the speech.”

I looked over and immediately recognized the gray hair, the heavy brow, the strong chin from his author photos. It was Milan Kundera, sitting right across from me! He must have known I couldn’t speak Czech so he spoke French which I couldn’t speak either but understood anyway.

“You know,” he went on, “all these critics, they focus on my characters, their relationships, philosophy in my work. Sometimes I think I know how Kafka would have felt if he’d known Max Brod turned him into some kind of ascetic who suffered for his art, rather than a person who just loved telling stories.”

Completely stumped I came out with the most irrelevant question I could think of. “So what brought you here?”

“A plane. A smart young man like you should know you can’t drive to Indiana from France.”

Hail & Farewell., Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.

Morning Haze.

Author: July 10, 2023 6 Comments

Source: WKRN Weather app

The forecast this morning said it would be foggy and I thought, of course it will. Somehow I’d completely lost track of what day it was until this morning when I remembered I’d have to drive to work for the first time in two weeks, and even after showering, getting dressed, and having some coffee, I felt hazy. Outside looked hazy too. Heavy rains overnight had chilled the air but left it humid. Still when I stepped out and looked up there was a clear half moon almost directly overhead.

By the time I set off for work any fog had burned away, and while I was glad I didn’t have to worry about it obscuring the view I wished there were some somewhere. I like fog. It’s comforting the way it’s there but not there, a cloud close up. It seems so tangible but as you approach it disappears. I remember once when my family went on a long road trip to Maine and we drove through thick fog, slowly, seeing only the lights of other cars as they passed us.

I also remember when we’d just moved to a new house and one summer afternoon, after a thunderstorm, fog closed in over the whole neighborhood. My new friend Tony, who lived at the bottom of the hill, came up to my house and we played in my driveway. Because the new house was on a hill it had a long view and I could see miles away where cranes were putting up buildings, a whole new development. They were barely visible through the fog, and somehow, though it seems impossible now, I thought I could hear the sounds of machinery, of gears grinding. Tony said, “A cloud fell. They’re trying to put it back up.”

Maybe he was kidding, or maybe that’s what he really thought. I don’t know. I don’t even really care. I still like that idea that fog is just a fallen cloud, that it’s a way we can touch the sky.

Adventures In Busing.

A Tale Of Two Lights.

Author: July 8, 2023 4 Comments

My wife said we should get a birdbath so I found one that has a solar-powered light in its stem. This doesn’t really help the birds, who are mostly asleep by the time it comes on. It’s activated by darkness. The light has a warm, steady, orange glow that doesn’t really illuminate anything beyond itself, but that’s fine. Light pollution is a problem and I’m glad when I go out at night and it’s there, a beacon. It glows all night, which I learned one morning when I had to take a dog out at about five a.m., just before dawn, and even with the sky beginning to lighten the stem was still glowing.

We have a second solar-powered light down by the driveway. It’s very different, though. For one thing it’s motion-activated and only comes on for thirty seconds. But it burns very brightly—so bright, in fact, that if it stayed on continuously I doubt it would last more than an hour or two. But it does its job of providing illumination when we need it.

There’s a metaphor, or maybe a synecdoche—for all I know there could even be a metonym—in that, but I prefer to leave it to others to decide if there’s any significance in it. I don’t want to set one light above the other. They both absorb solar energy and use it at night. And they’re both useful in their own way.

They also remind me of an expression I heard a lot as a kid. When someone called an idea stupid they’d say, “That makes as much sense as a solar-powered flashlight.”

Those people never heard of batteries, apparently.  

American Graffiti.

Are You There, Judy?

Author: July 7, 2023 6 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

It’s taken me almost forty years but I’ve finally read Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Blume was part of a trinity of authors whose books I read most growing up. The other two were Beverly Cleary and Betsy Byars. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that all three happened to be women and, at first, I didn’t specifically look for books by them. We’d get the Weekly Reader that had brief book descriptions or watch the PBS show Cover To Cover, and if a book sounded interesting to me I’d go to the library and look for it. We also had a lot of books by Cleary, Byars, and Blume around the house, and my friends passed them around.

As I said maybe it was a coincidence that most of the books I was reading were written by women and Blume, like the others, was just as good at writing from a boy’s perspective as she was at writing from a girl’s perspective. After I read Tales Of A Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge—which focused on a boy named Peter Hatcher—I went on to Otherwise Known As Sheila The Great, which is, obviously, about a girl named Sheila.

Somewhere in there I also read Freckle Juice, which is a much lighter story, and it didn’t even stick with me that it was one of Blume’s books but, looking back, I realize it deals with one of her major themes: the wild, often inexplicable things kids will do to fit in.

Then, in fifth grade, and specifically starting to look for Judy Blume books, I picked up Blubber, which was a book that challenged me in a lot of ways. It wasn’t a conventional narrative but more anecdotal, which felt like it was really capturing the way my own young mind worked, focusing intensely on whatever was happening in the moment. It’s also a book that deals, often brutally, with bullying, but is unusual in that its narrator is one of the bullies. Jill, the protagonist, doesn’t want to single out her classmate Linda but, under the influence of the most popular girl in her class, she doesn’t resist, either, until the end. Blubber doesn’t have a clear moral message, but that’s what makes it such a great book: it asks readers to draw their own conclusions about group power dynamics and how quickly those can shift as Jill goes from bullying to being the one bullied. I ended up rereading it several times because it spoke to me in a way few other books did. Then there was the ending—seemingly happy, but without a tidy resolution.

It also had the words “damn” and “ass” in it and, hard as it is to believe now, those were shocking words to encounter in a young adult novel, but they also added to the realism, the sense that Judy Blume wasn’t condescending; she understood what kids are like.

At the beginning of sixth grade I found Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret on the shelf of my English classroom. Hey, another Judy Blume novel. I started reading it and was really enjoying it up until Margaret and her friends talk about whether they’ve had their periods.

I thought I knew what a period was: the dot at the end of a sentence. Or a vague measure, as in a “period of time”. What Margaret and her friends were talking about was something different, something I didn’t understand, though I had a vague idea that it was important to girls. So I asked a girl. Beth and I sat at the same table in English class and, not really aware of what I was doing, I just asked her, “Can you tell me what a period is?”

She stared at me with piercing, pale blue eyes. Then laughed. Then ran to another table and hissed, “Chris doesn’t know what a period is!” More laughter.

It would be oversimplifying to say I became a class joke. Most of the girls in my class, even Beth, laughed about it for a few days then dropped it. Most of the guys did too. But a few, their own little gang, thought it was funny to catch me alone, on the playground, or just sitting by myself drawing or reading, and surround me.

“Hey Chris, do you know what a period is? Do you know what a…pussy is? Do you know what a dick is? Do you know if you’ve got one?” And then they’d laugh menacingly.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew what they were talking about. I just didn’t want to talk about it. Looking back I wonder what would have happened if I’d laughed back at them and said something like, “If you’re so smart why don’t you tell me?” That might have worked or it might not. Eventually most of them left me alone but one kid, Tommy, kept bugging me, and didn’t stop until I started hitting back and the teachers kept us separated.

It was through that experience that I reread Blubbler, and I wish I’d finished Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret too. I wish I hadn’t felt so humiliated I couldn’t pick up the book for years. Obviously menstruation isn’t something I ever had to deal with personally, but my ignorance shouldn’t have been turned into a joke. And aside from that I could relate to Margaret struggling to fit in with her friends, to fit in anywhere, while also wanting to be herself. That I could understand, even at the time. The years between ten and thirteen were difficult—not that other years haven’t been, but one of the advantages of getting older is experience provides a context for our experiences. Judy Blume’s books helped me put into words, or at least process, changes I’d never been through before, and would, thankfully, never have to go through again. They made me feel less alone while they also allowed me to draw my own conclusions.

The Weekly Essay

Solo, So High.

Author: July 3, 2023 6 Comments

A story popped up in my feed about a guy who, because he waited eighteen hours for a flight, got to be the only passenger on a plane. Never mind the details of how it happened or even what he did on his, if not exactly solo, then at least solitary flight. I think this is one of those What Would You Do? scenarios that no one ever thinks of because it’s such a completely bonkers thing to even imagine, let alone something that really happens. So what would you do if you were the only passenger on a flight?
I think most people would say they’d want to see the cockpit and maybe talk to the pilots, maybe even try their hand at flying the plane, doing some barrel rolls. Not me. I’d want to hang with the flight attendants.
That’s not a joke. I’m not putting down pilots. Flying a plane is an amazing feat, but flight attendants are to airlines what nurses are to hospitals. The doctor may get you through surgery but think about who’s bringing you meals and changing your bedpans at 20,000 feet. Pilots face the weather but flight attendants face the passengers who can be the scariest part of a flight.
Every flight I’ve ever been on has in some way been made nicer by flight attendants. There was the time I was on a flight with serious turbulence. I had my nails dug into the armrests and my face was whiter than a 1200 thread-count king size sheet from Macy’s. A flight attendant put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Hey, it’s fine.” I felt better after that. Then there was the time I was on a mostly—but not entirely—empty Tuesday morning flight and the attendants made a comedy routine out of the safety talk. “Should the cabin suddenly lose pressure stop screaming and let go of the person next to you long enough to put the oxygen mask over your face.”
There are also a hundred things flight attendants do that most of us never see that make a flight more enjoyable. How do we repay them? By heaping abuse on them and turning them into a stupid SNL joke. If you are or ever have been a flight attendant I want you to know, seriously, how much I appreciate you.
If I were the only passenger on a flight I’d want the attendants to sit down, put their seats back, and let me bring them drinks and as many bags of nuts as they wanted. And with all their experiences dealing with people I’d bet they’d have some great stories to tell.

Adventures In Busing.

Taste Bud.

Author: July 1, 2023 4 Comments

Source: Business Insider

As much as I try to avoid advertising I’ve spent entirely too much time thinking about McDonald’s lately and why Grimace’s birthday is being celebrated. Of all the corporate mascots out there Grimace seems like one of the weirdest and it led me down a rabbit hole of advertising history. Even as a kid the whole idea of McDonaldland didn’t make sense, mainly because McDonald’s is a restaurant, although what McDonald’s serves resembles the food you’d get at a real restaurant the same way the automated backing track on an ’80’s synthesizer resembles a Chopin nocturne played by Vladimir Horowitz.

The point is McDonald’s never was a theme park. Sure, they’ve got their PlayPlace playgrounds, but those are a convenience that give kids a chance to exercise a bit and forever associate McDonald’s with big plastic slides that smell like urine and vomit. They don’t make McDonald’s a destination for the same reason people don’t go to King’s Island just for the free drink refills.

I do remember some of my friends having birthdays at McDonald’s but it was kind of sad and confusing. We ate our cheeseburgers and then…what? It was back to his house because you can’t stick candles in a milkshake. I also remember Ronald McDonald making “live” appearances at various McDonald’s franchises. It seems like they’ve de-emphasized him, though, because of the whole clowns-are-creepy issue. Admittedly there have been Grimace horror parodies, as well as the “Special Tribute To Grimace”, for as long as there has been an internet, and Grimace was probably nightmare-fuel even before that–it just wasn’t as widely shared.

In fact it’s well-documented that the original four-armed Grimace terrified children.

Source: Etsy, currently selling for $10

As far as the other McDonaldland characters no one really remembers Mayor McCheese or Birdie, and the Hamburglar is controversial. There’s also Captain Crook whom I wouldn’t even know about if we hadn’t gotten a 1977 glass from McDonald’s with his picture on it, and I’m somewhat dismayed to know that if we still had that glass it would be worth about $8, but that’s another story. For a really deep cut there are the Fry Kids, which bear a passing resemblance to but lack the charisma of the Sesame Street Yip-Yip Martians.

So in spite of, or because of, his dark origins Grimace is really the only McDonaldland character with broad enough appeal to be worth celebrating, although it’s surprising they’ve even bothered given that the media landscape is so saturated with characters vying for our attention it’s hard to imagine a purple blob who originally had four arms and was a villain but who then morphed into a more benign figure whose sole purpose is still to sell hamburgers drawing that much interest.

And yet Grimace’s birthday, and the accompanying shake, has gotten a lot of attention, although I think a friend of mine put it best when he told me, “The biggest disappointment is they don’t taste like grape. They’re just purple vanilla. I won’t be sad when they’re gone and I don’t know what the big deal is even after having about a dozen so far.”

American Graffiti.

A Post-Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Author: June 30, 2023 6 Comments

Summer’s more than half over. That’s what I discovered when, for no reason I can explain, I suddenly stopped and asked myself, When exactly is midsummer? And myself replied, Why are you asking me? You’ve been asking yourself this question every summer, usually around this time, since you were eight, but now you’ve got the internet and you can just look up the answer. Although when you were a kid you could have asked an adult. Sure, some of them might not have known, and some would have thought it was funny to give you an answer like “The thirty-eighth of Cunegonde.” And don’t you feel stupid for not finding out you could ask questions like this at the reference desk in the library until your senior year of college so you spent a lot of time trying to find information on your own?

This is why I don’t talk to myself as much as I used to.

Even though I did wonder when exactly midsummer was when I was a kid most of the time I was too immersed in the joy of summer to stick with the question long enough to ever stop to ask anyone. Besides I didn’t want to waste time worrying about when summer would slip into its downhill slide. That time would come soon enough. I remember the summer morning when I was nine or ten and I woke up and heard neighbors shooting off fireworks. Fireworks were supposed to be for the fourth of July, I thought, so why were they having a breakfast snap, crackle, and pop that had nothing to do with cereal in their driveway? Then I went downstairs and saw the newspaper on the kitchen table and realized it was the third of July—the entire month of June was gone and I hadn’t even noticed. Also that was the previous day’s newspaper, although I’d walk around most of that day still thinking it was the third.

Also when I was a kid seasons seemed very arbitrary. Then I grew up and learned more about how the world worked and came to understand that seasons are completely arbitrary. When I was a kid summer started when school ended, and most of the time that was sometime in late May, but, according to the meteorological calendar, summer this year started June 1st, with midsummer falling on June 24th. Of course when I was a kid autumn didn’t start when school started, which was usually in late August. Summer vacation might be over but as long as the weather was warm and humid we were still in summer. Depending on the weather I wouldn’t think of it as autumn until sometime in early winter.

We’ve had a very mild, at times almost cold, summer this year, with it only just now starting to get really hot. I wear jeans and a hoodie in the house because I’m cold-blooded and we keep the air conditioning pretty well cranked up most of the time, but when I step out into the sunshine and still keep the hoodie on because it’s a bit cool that, to me, is just not summer. In fact it’s been so cool for most of June that one morning, when it should have been sweltering but was actually chilly, I yelled up at the sky, “You could turn down the air conditioning a little!” I knew it wouldn’t change anything, of course, and I even wondered why I was doing it, but I know better than to ask myself questions like that.

The Weekly Essay

Not A Highwayman.

Author: June 26, 2023 2 Comments

Source: Google Maps

I hate driving on highways. I know they’re faster and more convenient but I get nervous about the high-speed merging and changing lanes when I’m just in the passenger seat. I can do it but I don’t care for it, and I accept that most long distance trips are going to take a little longer. The routes I take also tend to be more scenic so there’s that, and I appreciate that Google Maps has a nice “Avoid: Highways” function because apparently I’m not the only one who’d rather take a slow ride, take it easy.

It’s also hilarious to me that no matter where you’re going there’s a “Walk” option. This is not a pedestrian-friendly area. And by “This” I mean pretty much all of Nashville.

Source: Google Maps

I had to run an errand to a place I’ve never been to before—an area I’m just not all that familiar with, in fact, but I thought I had the directions down and I set out with a pretty good idea of where I was going. Except it turned out I didn’t have a good enough idea of where I was going. I pulled over into parking areas a few times to check my directions—I’m not going to look at directions while I’m driving because I don’t want to die in a fiery ball of twisted metal, and also I’d prefer to avoid wrecking the car. Where Google Maps was leading me just didn’t seem right—it was taking me south when my destination was north. I briefly tried Siri on my phone which literally led me around in circles because Siri doesn’t know that two wrongs don’t make a right or that three rights make a left.

Finally I gritted my teeth, focused my attention, and took the highway, which, surprisingly, was pretty free of other cars. Once I got to where I was going I could see the downtown skyline and that was all I needed to map out the area in my head and take the scenic route back.

The worst part of all this is the only reason I had to make the trip is because an item I’d ordered online was sent to the wrong store. I thought I’d save the shipping costs by having it sent to the store nearest me but for some reason their system looked at my location and said, “Oh no, we’ll send this as far away as we can get.” And while it was in transit three different customer service people told me, “Oh, sorry, this was our mistake. We’ll change the delivery address.”

Once it was delivered a fourth customer service person told me, “Oh, sorry, once it’s delivered that’s where it stays. Hey, did you know if you’d sent this to your home you’d have gotten free shipping?”

Source: gifer.com

Adventures In Busing.

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