going meta

I’ve heard lots of people talk about writer’s block. Mostly they’re people who haven’t written very much. They sit down at the keyboard and discover that words never just spill out, one after the other.

“I have so many ideas,” they say. “It’s just a matter of getting them on paper.”

Sometimes they’re poor souls who’ve have set the bar too high. They’ve read Nabokov. Or Burroughs (perhaps they've gone so far as to put in a bid on his cabin on Lone Star Lake). Or even Bukowski (Bukowski made it look easy).

Possibly they’ve even taken in one too many Garfield cartoons or posted a successful series of LOLcat captions.

Writing, to them, is a hat-trick.

“I can do that,” they tell themselves. “I tell great stories. Funny stories.”

They sit at the keyboard, wiggling their fingers to loosen up. “You know, great writers say you should just type anything that comes into your head for the first 20 minutes. All of the sudden, you’ll find that you’re writing something. Something good.”

But no words come. “I have writer’s block,” they tell you the next time you run into them. As if it’s a medical condition. As if a high-fiber diet would help.

I don’t have writer’s block. Of this I’m certain. Over the past few months, I’ve written any number of first paragraphs, first pages, and anecdotes. At work, I’ve written impenetrable book chapters and conference papers, prose a reviewer will march through on a flight to O’Hare, thinking all the while, “Jesus. How long is this paper anyway? I thought there was a ten page limit. How can she fit all these words in ten pages? Are there two pages numbered 6?”

So the problem has nothing to do with words. I’m gassy with words. Gassy, I tell you. As gassy as Big Fatty.

Light a match and my word-bag will catch fire and burn for hours.

It’s not words. And it’s not ideas. I’ve had ideas. I’ve made lists. I’ve been blogging for almost 4 years now; I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve.

A few weeks ago, to get a fresh start, I started a list of my ex-bosses. The winter holidays are a fine time for a bit of workplace hilarity. I wrote “Bosses” on the notepad I keep next to my computer and underlined it twice. Then I wrote:

1. Raydeen (the Hose Monster)
2. Big Bird
3. Bill
4. Kiltman
5. The Walrus

This list stopped abruptly when I reached the name of a boss who genuinely hated me (for no reason I could discern). During what turned out to be our final encounter, I gave him a presentation about my work—an ordinary kind of research talk, questions I was trying to answer, results, future work—in short, nothing I could pinpoint as at all provocative. But it was. His face turned bright red and he balled his fists, accusing me afterward—with HR as his witness—of being verbally aggressive. I was baffled. Verbally aggressive? I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of that before.

A few hours later, I stood outside where the cell phone reception was good, and told Sara about the incident. It was June, warm for Seattle, and the air was soft and mild. The entire afternoon had acquired a mild hallucinatory quality and my initial reaction had evolved into a fragile sense of bemusement. The building had more or less emptied out when I spotted my boss heading for his car. He squinted at me as I stood atop a grassy berm, cell phone in hand. Then he looked away very quickly. I had the strong sense he thought I was going to shoot him.

He spent the rest of the summer trying very hard to fire me.

A misogynist, I decided. I updated my resume.

Six months later, he had accumulated (in no particular order) breasts, cheekbones, a feminine jawline, and had begun plucking his eyebrows and shaving his legs. His Adam's apple was gone. Not long afterward, he changed his first name in the corporate phone book.

That kind of pathos and irony will stop you in your tracks. I crumpled up the half-written list of ex-bosses and started a fresh first paragraph.

A couple of times I got far enough to call Mark into the room.

“Would you listen to me read something aloud?” I asked him. “Just a few paragraphs so you can tell me if they’re okay.”

Poor Mark. What’s he going to do? Richard Ford reads his daily output aloud to his wife. Nabokov did that too. The wives typed up longhand drafts, probably fixing minor problems—discontinuities in the narrative arc, for example, or inadequate character development—as they went. Fixed comma faults too. That sort of thing. Problems great and small.

Mind you: I’m not comparing myself to these literary masters, nor Mark to their wives. For one thing, Mark looks funny in a housedress, and for another, I doubt any of them ever made lists of their ex-bosses. I’m just saying, I can fall back on historical precedent when I call Mark into the room to hear me declaim the initial paragraphs of an embryonic blog post.

This time, I started off:

I don’t remember why we called him the Troutman.

I cleared my throat, arched my eyebrows (both at the same time—I don’t have the facial dexterity to lift one eyebrow, then the other), and shifted into my reading voice, the timbre of which makes Lumpy yowl in protest.

The Troutman didn’t look like a trout, nor was he very manly. He was short and pink and not in the least bit scaly.

I stumbled over the first sentence. It was supposed to be funny, but when I read it aloud, I could tell it had no resonance. Maybe the word “trout” was too far from the word “manly”; perhaps both words were too far from the initial “Troutman.” I looked up at Mark. He was doing his best to follow along. Lumpy continued to yowl.

I read on.

Nonetheless, we called him the Troutman, and the name stuck. People who didn’t even know him—people who just knew us, and hadn’t met him—referred to him as the Troutman. After awhile, he more or less lost his real name, the way people do when they have catchy nicknames. His old name might’ve been George or Jeff or perhaps Larry: it was a perfectly normal, unembarrassing name. A name anyone—any man, anyway—could wear without discomfort.

But he lost that name and became the Troutman.

I had the intention of telling a story about a particular evening’s escapade. I looked at Mark. His thumb was keeping his place in the trade paperback he was reading. I could tell he longed to return to it. Okay. I was taking too long with the setting. Noted. I started reading again.

The Troutman’s most salient characteristic was his diet. His diet was dramatic, essentially because it was entirely without drama. He didn’t like sauces, and he didn’t care for spices. Nor did he like vegetables or condiments, although he would eat a few kinds of fruit (berries, mostly) with only minor complaint.

The tone, the tone was all wrong. “Perhaps I should delete that paragraph.” I said.

“Keep reading.” Mark said.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like okra or peas. You could understand something like that. Okra has a snot-like quality that calls attention to itself. “Hey! Look at me! I’m slimy! Cut me and I’ll ooze a mucous-like substance!” Okra is only good when it’s battered and deep-fried. When it’s not, it’s like a wounded slug. And peas are just hard to eat. I get that. It’s probably why English people like them mushy. When they’re not mushy, they roll around and collide with other items on your plate, like rogue ball bearings.

Mushy peas, indeed. Trite. I couldn’t continue reading the thing to Mark. I’d stolen the troutman bit, and the rest of it was lame. The next paragraph started in on food allergies. That wouldn’t work either. Someone would comment on how peanut vapors on a Southwest Flight to Sacramento had killed an innocent sixth grader who’d been on a class trip to learn about the inner workings of state government. I’d feel like a heartless shitheel by the time the commenters were through with me.

“That’s all?” Mark asked.

“That’s all for right now.” I’d already decided to abandon the text. The evening in question had been wild for me, emotionally wild. It was while Mark was still drinking, and had involved a fracas at a Senegalese place down in the Mission popular with the hip goateed multimedia crowd. Someone had cut in front of us in line, and Mark had made a scene. It didn't work; the line-cutters kept their stolen place in line, and Mark had stalked off, angry and humiliated, while the rest of us had settled into a glum dinner at an Indian restaurant several blocks away on Valencia.

The Troutman didn’t sulk. He just said he wasn’t very hungry and ordered a bowl of plain rice. He poked at it, moving the grains around in the bowl, while the rest of us ate dinner.

The centerpiece of the blog post was to be a short list of official Troutman foodstuffs. But as I made the list, I found that by not visiting it for a few years, the list had slowly evaporated. There was the plain chicken breast. There was the pepperoni pizza. And then there were about four other things. What were they?

Were olives on or off the list? Surely they were off. Weren’t they? Would it be funnier if he ate olives?

Then there was a second Troutman incident that involved a refrigerator in Memphis that was empty except for a box of Double-Bubble chewing gum about the size and shape of an organic chemistry textbook and a case of Big Red soda. By the time of the incident, the Troutman himself was no longer in the picture. This was simply a matter of Troutman food artifacts. The refrigerator’s owner and I split a can of Big Red. It was undrinkably sweet, vile, but not particularly funny.

I think they drink Big Red in the South. They drink it unironically, and with considerable gusto.

Is it funny to only have two items in the refrigerator? Yes, I decided. Two items in the refrigerator is funny. I thought back to a man I went out with before I met Mark. The only thing he had in his refrigerator was a bottle of Almaden Chablis. Not a bottle. A jug. A jug with a handle. I’d check on it (or its successor) each time I visited his apartment in West LA.

I weighed the story. Funny? Not funny?

Where would I go with it? Into an uncharted territory of eating disorders? I pictured Nicole Richie with those spooky pug-like eyes.

The Troutman didn’t look at all like Nicole Richie. I felt a growing twinge of guilt: the Troutman was the invention—and the ex-boyfriend—of a close friend, and really seemed like hers to write about. Or if not hers, surely her daughter’s. Her daughter had once threatened to write a book, The Peculiar Eating Habits of My Mother’s Boyfriends.

Idea poaching. I was guilty of idea poaching.

Poached eggs, incidentally, were not one of the missing items on the Troutman’s list of 6 acceptable foods. Nor was mayonnaise.

Without the list—and against a murky backdrop of guilt—the verdict seemed obvious. The Troutman was not my character around which to build a narrative.

It’s odd that this business of loyalty should come up unbidden. The first post I’d started was an attempt to rationalize why I liked Twitter better than Facebook; in my last blog post, I’d even intimated that this would be the topic of my next blog post. I’d finally—with considerable hectoring—signed up for Facebook, the mother of all social media sites. I’d avoided it for several years.

“Facebook,” I’d explain to anyone who would listen, “is too literal for me.”

Then I’d realize that I’d insulted whomever I was talking to, because it seems that over the last few years, everyone has become consumed with Facebook.

It reminds me of that phase in 1990s when it was unsafe to say anything bad about anti-depressants for fear that the person you were talking to had been taking them with some measure of success.

I’d say something snarky about an antidepressant—Placebocil, say—and they’d say, “I’m taking Placebocil myself now. It really helps.” Then they’d give me a hurt look.

That’s what was happening with Facebook.

But this time it was worse, because then Twitter would enter the conversation. I’d explain that I was using Twitter instead of Facebook.

“Oh,” they’d say, “It figures that you’d like Twitter. I mean, do you even know all those people who’re following you?”

And then I’d admit that I didn’t know all of them.

They’d respond smugly, “Well, I use Facebook to keep in touch with my friends.” Meaning, of course, that I’d like Facebook better if I had any real friends. That there’s a reason that one has FOLLOWERS on Twitter and FRIENDS on Facebook.

Eventually I was worn down. I signed up for Facebook and stopped calling it MyFace.

From the start, Facebook and I didn’t mesh well. I’d tried to play along and signed up using my real name. But then it asked for my birthdate and gender. Frankly, I think that if my friends don’t know what gender I’m presenting as these days, or roughly what my age is, they’re not particularly close friends and we might as well go back to Twitter.

So I left those questions blank. No gender. No birthdate.

Facebook would not allow me to continue. It was the surly bouncer asking for my ID. You can’t just say, “For godsakes. Do I really look underage to you?”

So I checked male, and invented a new birthday: July 7, 1977. Call me superstitious, but I think all those 7s might bring me some good luck. In any event, it seems to be good luck to be 32 again.

“Why do you care if someone knows your birthday?” one of my RL friends asked me. She’s a big Facebook proponent. “I love it that I get birthday wishes from everybody.”

When I signed up for Yahoo mail (long ago), I used my real gender and birth date. The targeted advertising got worse and worse as I aged along with the service. Now every time I look at my Yahoo mail, I’m confronted with products addressing the woes of incontinence and incipient jowls, and with offers to train me to re-enter the workforce. No jet skis, hotties, or consumer electronics for me. Not even erectile dysfunction remedies.

The future—as seen through Yahoo’s targeted advertising—is so bleak that I want to shoot myself every time I open my mailbox. There is no way I’ll ever reveal my actual demographic profile again.

I must say, re-inventing my age and gender for Facebook has worked out well. I now see advertising that implies that women with impossibly large breasts—breasts so large that these women must fall forward into their keyboards—are googling my name night and day.

Sometimes I am offered credit cards with interest rates that reflect my new fast-paced lifestyle. I’m 32. Why would I worry if my credit card has a 29% interest rate? I have plenty of time to declare bankruptcy and start all over again. The targeted advertising attracted by my new age and gender is, if not practical, much cheerier and more interesting than the advertising I'd been getting with my real age and gender.

But much of the time, Facebook itself is as I'd feared: a combination high school reunion and noisy cocktail party with celery, cream cheese, and raisin hors d'oeuvres. I don’t seem to be able to follow any of these flattened out conversations, and despite Facebook’s promise of earnest personal revelations and no holds barred honesty, I don’t actually recognize these people who have friended me.

That’s not quite right. I do recognize them. We’re all using our best pictures, us at our prettiest and most physically active. It’s as if we’re on Match.com or eHarmony. Our talk has been censored, fit for anyone to read. Friends of friends, whom I genuinely don’t recognize and don’t know, are making comments on the posts too. There are countless in-jokes that I don’t understand.

People are coming and going, on their way to other continents, new lovers, and indeed, to other planets. Everyone is purposeful, efficient, and on the move.

A few of my friends have tried to spice it up. They’ve worked at adding mirth to the party. But all these juxtaposed conversations confuse me. Where do I go to have fun? There’s my wall (a seemingly anatomical concept which makes me squeamish--the word "wall" is perilously close to a medical concept), my friends’ walls (even more squeamish-making), their friends’ walls (don't look!), interest groups, fan pages, photo albums, and profiles.

Wait! I just found my brother’s sixth grade yearbook. Someone else is playing a weird game that automatically posts pictures of cute baby animals in distress.

I scan through the feed, quickly close the browser, and restore my earbuds back to my ears. I'll be listening to podcasts instead, thanks.

When I was a little kid-4 or 5-I had an imaginary friend named Pat. Because Pat was invisible (one of the many virtues of being imaginary), Pat’s gender and personality were endlessly malleable. If we were going to color in my coloring books, Pat would be a she, so she wouldn’t wreck my crayons by peeling off the paper or hiding them in her butt crack. On the other hand, if I wanted to sit on the curb and pop a roll of caps one by one with a hammer, Pat would become a he.

At the first sign of disloyalty, I’d get rid of Pat. I’d send him—or her—straight into the fireplace.

“What happened to Pat?” one of my parents would ask. I could tell they were humoring me. Or perhaps they were laughing at me. It’s rough being four.

“I put him in the fireplace,” I’d say. Case closed. It’s Southern California; there’s no fire in the fireplace, so why wouldn’t it be the perfect place to stow imaginary friends in disgrace?

When I got bored, Pat could be reanimated in a snap. Instant friend! Pat! C’mon Pat. Let’s color between the lines. C’mon Pat. Let’s play with matches in the canyon. Maybe we’ll see a rattlesnake or a bunny. C’mon Pat. Let’s mix a bunch of condiments together in the kitchen and see if they’ll turn into a cake.

Yeah, I could trot next door and look for my real flesh-and-blood friend Kathleen Phillips, a tall athletic redhead from a military family. Her father was 4-star general, and Kathleen had inherited his tendency toward command and control. Given half a chance, she’d boss me around, drink my Kool-aid, tear the paper off my crayons, and turn the channel to The Three Stooges. Pat, on the other hand, would always do my bidding with enthusiasm.

And unlike my flesh-and-blood friends, Pat didn’t play with dolls. Pat was like me: Pat was afraid of dolls. Or if not afraid, felt better if they weren’t around.

Pat offered no objection when I took my Barbie, taped her in a shoebox, and put her in the garage. Pat knew that Barbie might come to life in the night and harm both of us; Pat watched the Twilight Zone and kept track of important sources of danger like that.

Are my Facebook friends imaginary, grown up versions of Pat? Not really. Nor do they seem to switch genders willy-nilly like I do. Many are friends I would be absolutely delighted to see in Real Life.

I wouldn’t turn off all the lights and pull the shades if I heard them ring the front doorbell.

Perhaps the way they most resemble Pat is that it’s possible to unfriend them at the drop of a hat. I can stuff them in the fireplace and resuscitate our two-dimensional relationship whenever I please.

I was pondering this when I heard Geoff Nunberg’s Fresh Air piece about the words of the decade. He observed that when we use the verb ‘unfriend’, we might be getting exactly what we deserve. He said:

[Unfriending] is not a bad choice to stand in for the rise of social networks: it works the same bizarro alterations on the structure of an ordinary word that the social sites do on the structure of ordinary personal relationships.

We’re at the end of the Aughts—at the bottom of the ninth inning of the first decade of the new century—and our friendships have devolved into directed graphs. It’s hard to get beyond the fact that friending always takes a direct object: “I friended Geoff Nunberg,” which is very different than saying, “Geoff Nunberg friended me.” Being friends with someone implies reciprocity. Friending someone doesn’t.

Meh.

Geoff’s very often right. If I weren’t so afraid he’d think the less of me, I’d have friended him already.

Now that I’ve told you about my three false beginnings for this post—a catalog of my ex-bosses, a poached story starring the Troutman, and a brief polemic about dipping my toes into Facebook and friending—I can reveal what I’ve decided to write about.

What’s this post actually about? It’s about the real word of the decade.

And that’s meta.

Meta. As in: I’m going meta on yo’ ass. I couldn’t have said this in 1999. But now I can.

See you in 2010.

What are you doing?

By now we’ve all heard just a little too much about Twitter.

Questionable wisdom, breaking news, hot gossip, and vicious rumors are served up continuously in easy-to-swallow 140 character doses.

What is Andy Dick doing? What does Anderson Cooper think? What did Oprah eat? And where’s my remote control?

Let’s chalk up the phenomenon to the death of the global attention span. Time to click on the x, close the application, and go on home.

Even though its promoters (who are legion and rabid) have credited Twitter with all kinds of feats great and small—from promoting democracy in Iran to improving customer service on kitchen appliances in Poughkeepsie—it’s really not all that.

Here’s the secret: there’s something icky about Twitter.

The kids have sniffed it and turned away. Sensible people try it for a week and abandon it, baffled. Corporations, carnival barkers, and ambitious spammers are drawn to it like voracious meat bees to a hamburger patty at a Labor Day picnic.

So I should’ve known better. And at first I did.

I started off slowly and with all due skepticism sometime in 2007: a few tweets lamenting my commute on 101; several documenting workplace HVAC anomalies; and a couple more rhapsodizing the crunchy goodness of Cocoa Puffs. Then some random salvos from a conference or two. A few non sequiturs and literary allusions dribbled forth. And of course I resorted to a bit of harmless name dropping just to demonstrate that even if I’m a consummate nobody, I do rub elbows with the important nerd elite.

Bob Kahn says that the Internet is still pretty fragile, I wrote in June, 2008.

See what I mean about the name-dropping? Utterly shameless, except that you probably have no idea who Bob Kahn is. Some people credit Bob with inventing the Internet even before Al Gore did.

The view of Cape Cod evokes Spalding Gray & the neuroses specific to a happy WASP childhood, I burbled later during that same Woods Hole boondoggle.

What would Charo do? I asked on August 21rst, 2008, apropos of nothing.

My tweets were sparse—maybe a tweet per month—and tentative.

Then I went quiet for six months.

Unfortunately, the next time I tweeted—a seemingly innocuous tweet to the effect that I was heading to the cold & soggy mothership in Redmond—the habit took hold. There was nothing special about the tweet; but I had crossed over an invisible threshold, a one-way portal.

Tweeting is like smoking. The first time you try it, you get the twirlies and it’s all you can do to keep your lunch down. So you try it in secret a few more times. It’s still not pretty, but you stop feeling like you’re going to toss your cookies. After awhile, you can do it at parties, striking an awkward pose with a cocktail in the other hand to loosen you up. Replace that cigarette with an iPhone and you’re ready to tweet.

Yes, it gets easier, but it seldom gets better. An amateur smoker lights the filter end of her cigarette. She takes a hard drag; an ember falls; and she sets fire to her lap. She blows smoke in her date’s face.

And an amateur Tweep twitpics cute photos of the cat. Or chirps about a yummy sandwich.

There is little more embarrassing than being unable to sustain a proper vice.

But then, without knowing when or how it happened, an amateur becomes a pro. A smoker lights the next cigarette off the butt of the last one, inhaling as smoothly as if she’d been born with a Winston affixed to her lip.

And when Twitter takes hold, a Tweep issues a steady stream of connected tweets all day long. Good morning, Tweeps, she says upon awakening. Have you made coffee for me yet? And she brackets the day’s tweets with a Good night, all y’all. If I go to bed right now, I’ll get 5.5 hours’ sleep.

Sure, neither smoking nor tweeting is a pretty habit, but there’s something to be said for doing it right.

And that’s more or less what happened to me. It took awhile, but Twitter caught me unaware and became an ugly, ugly habit, dictating who I hung out with and what I did in my spare time.

You wonder why I haven’t blogged in the last two months? All my efforts have gone into Twitter. It’s like scouring grout. Time-consuming. Unfulfilling. Thankless. Compulsive. Soul-destroying. And utterly engrossing.

Some days are fine. Topics arise organically out of what I'm actually doing: Say you just had your teeth cleaned. How long would you wait before you had your lunch? I mean, hypothetically.

A witty conversation about flossing might ensue. One of my so-called followers might offer to meet me for lunch. I might learn something new about dental hygiene.

Other days are bleaker. It’s not that nothing's happening; it’s just that the real events of the day aren’t suitable fodder for consumption by the @1nOnlyMrFamous or Mlle. @Sharkdoctor. So I'm forced to come up with preposterous tweets like restaurant names (The Bacon Grotto) or non-events (I’m procrastinating as fast as I can) and darkish photos of port-a-potties (When I take a walk late at night, I realize just how many portapotties there are in the neighborhood).

They ring hollow. They have no hook.

Then about three or four months ago, I turned another corner in a devastating direction. I started taking my followers’ actions personally.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to delete you from my Twitter list,” Sara told me.

“Oh, no. Of course I don’t mind.” My heart was beating just a little faster. “Did I say something offensive?”

“No, no, no. You just post too much. I open my Twitter page, and all I see is you,” she said.

Of course I did mind. I minded a lot. I felt rejected. But I knew what she meant; I’ve had the same feeling. I open my twitter feed and all I see are the tweets from a few tweeps who will remain nameless (I'm certain they know who they are). The infrequent tweeters are lost under the musings of those with twitterrhea.

I mentioned this problem to Gene. “Why don’t you use Tweetdeck?” he asked and proceeded to show me the application and his own complicated strategy for sorting his friends from his foes.

“Hey! That’s pretty cool,” I said to him, but to myself I thought, Wait a minute here. That app takes up THE ENTIRE SCREEN. Does Gene have a Twitter habit too?

I know without asking that the answer was yes. Gene has fallen down the Twitter hole.

It’s a sharper descent than you'd think.

Right after Sara gave me the ol’ heave-ho, I’d become frustrated with Gene (his own tweets seeming to me to have been posted automatically by an ambitious bot interested only in promoting his recent blog posts) and I had unfollowed him. Unfollow. It’s one click. Much, much easier than letting a ringing phone go to voice mail or routing someone’s email into the dead letter box.

Gene wrote me not long after that asking me if I’d deleted him by accident.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him what had happened (beyond a lame explanation that involved words like app and bot).

Reader, I re-followed him.

I had apparently taken Sara’s rejection rather too hard to successfully unfollow a friend myself.

But wait. It gets worse. When the pretty and popular @Princess_Holly told her numerous followers that @JackGrayCNN was hilarious, I felt a twinge that I first incorrectly ascribed to gas.

He’s hilarious? HILARIOUS?

She didn’t say that he works for Anderson Cooper and so might have a scoop on breaking news: a twister in Eunice, Missouri or a kitten flu outbreak in Shoelace, Arkansas. Nor did she say that he’s young and attractive (judging by his profile photo he is). Nor did she say he's a hip Manhattanite, and we all do hang on to the pronouncements of hip Manhattanites.

No. She said he’s hilarious. And @Princess_Holly is the indisputable queen of the Twitters.

It's not gas. It's jealousy. I’m so jealous that my vision clouds from an uncontrollable surge of adrenalin.

Hilarious.

@Princess_Holly herself is exuberant. Tweets flow from her iPhone all day. I can’t believe she has time to do much else. She tweets while she’s driving (WTF? School starts and traffic goes to shit), while she’s eating (Yum! I love pizza!), while she’s shopping (Someone in the Apple store could use some iDeoderant. Big time! Gag!), while she’s working (Triscuit party in my office in 15 minutes! by my "office" I, of course, mean "belly"), and while she’s watching TV (Kevin on Top Chef reminds me of Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. That's all).

My first impulse was to control my jealousy. I played along with @Princess_Holly’s directive to follow @JackGrayCNN for awhile. He’s mighty darned funny, I told myself. Shoot. The guy has over 500,000 followers. He’s got to be funny.

Then I grew critical. Okay, fella. I’m waiting for that belly laugh, that ROTFLMAO guffaw.

Breakfast always tastes better with mint chocolate chip ice cream, he tweets.

I’m still waiting. I’m a harsh judge when I’m jealous.

Interested to hear what Chris Brown has to say for himself. His interview with Larry King @kingsthings starts momentarily on CNN, @JackGrayCNN tweets.

Oh, for godssake. It’s not even a scoop. Even my detested satellite TV provider can give me that much information. Chris Brown. Larry King.

News at 11. He might as well have tweeted news at 11.

“SUSPENDERS,” I shout with Tourette’s-like conviction at my Twitter stream. “Larry King wears SUSPENDERS.”

@JackGrayCNN sends a link to a video of a Saint Patrick's Day news story about a leprechaun sighting in Mobile, Alabama. On September 2nd a leprechaun story just doesn’t have that swing. I feel vaguely embarrassed as I watch the neighborhood interviews.

As everybody else’s tweets roll by, my mood makes a gradual transition from jealousy to dejection.

I probably just don’t get it. Maybe I’ve been out of the pop culture mainstream for too long.

I vigorously click on @JackGrayCNN’s unfollow button.

Better yet, I tell myself, not only will I unfollow him; I’ll block him. Then he can’t follow me either.

If you want to feel better about yourself, I’ve found that it helps (just a tiny bit, I admit) to BLOCK a celebrity with a large number of followers.

Take that, @aplusk. BLOCK. Now Ashton Kutcher can NEVER follow me. Never, never, never. Take that, @aplusk! Take that! You can’t read my brilliant tweets. You can’t even see who I follow. Ha!

And this behavior seems to be emblematic of what’s wrong with me. I’m taking Twitter way too seriously. Whatever hole it’s filling in my life should be investigated because it is sure to be both deep and wide. I mean, I'm in worse shape than those people who post forty tweets per day. I’m worse.

Much worse.

I came to this stunning realization the other day. There I was, in the midst of a gaggle (a goggle?) of my co-workers at the Dodgers-Giants game. Chandu, who had just carefully wiped his hands off after eating garlic fries and a crabmeat sandwich in rapid succession, was sitting on top of his copy of The Wall Street Journal to keep his nice trousers clean. Doug was wearing a fancy Giants cap I had never noticed him wearing before. Rama was watching the game intently too, as if he really cared about what was happening and who was winning. The interns were at the other end of our group, in a tight knot, drinking beers and perhaps even whooping and shouting.

Despite any apparent incongruity between them and the other fans in the centerfield bleachers, they all seemed to be having the time of their lives.

Mark and I were not having the time of our lives. We huddled at the end of the row as the evening fog swirled around us. We could feel the crowd’s intensity grow as darkness descended and the Giants’ score slipped. And slipped.

I was at the ball game. THE BALL GAME. A game involving projectiles, dangerous-looking fans, and super-sized players hopped up on human growth hormone. I was at the ball game why?

Yes: why?

As I typed I've gotta start taking steroids. They really seem to work into the Twitter input window, it became absolutely clear to me that I was at the baseball game simply to have something to tweet about.

As the score slipped further, the crowd’s mood seemed to change. In the course of an inning or two, it had gone from sweetly rambunctious to belligerent. The guy right behind us began to heckle Manny Ramirez, #99, evidently one of the Dodgers’ star players.

The crowd was receptive. On the heckler’s first try, which in some way impugned Manny Ramirez’s masculinity, he got a big laugh.

Manny Ramirez did not look like a drag queen to me, as the heckler’s yell implied. Not at all.

I aimed my Blackberry's camera at a cotton candy vendor old enough to be a Walmart greeter. I caught a vast span of the heckler’s nose in the photo instead.

“Drat.” I muttered. The vendor, spry for his age, had scampered further up the bleachers. I shot a photo of some miffed-looking fans across the aisle.

The guy behind us yelled about Manny Ramirez again.

Another laugh, although this time it was more half-hearted.

The guy behind us roared louder, this time adding something vulgar about Mr. Ramirez's use of a feminine hygiene product. He was reaching. You could tell he was running out of jibes.

Manny Ramirez and tampons. I winced. The heckler might’ve gone too far. The heckler’s fans, such as they were, got quieter.

The corners of Mark’s mouth were turned down. The shouting six inches from the back of his head was beginning to get to him.

I twitpic'd the miffed-looking fans across the aisle.

The heckler’s cries became less specific, less organized, but even louder.

What happened next confuses me slightly, because I was looking at my Twitter stream rather than attending to the game.

Something happened on the field, something exciting. One of those baseball things. A run, perhaps. Maybe two runs. The guy continued to yell into the back of our heads. He’d given up the femininity theme, but he was still awfully darned loud. I was typing frantically on the Blackberry’s chicklet keys.

All of the sudden, Mark turned around and roared at the guy behind us, “Would you SHUT THE FUCK UP! You’re screaming in my ear.”

On second inspection Mr. Loud Voice did not appear to be a thug, but rather a sloppy-drunk twenty-something guy who probably had a day job developing firmware or writing reference manuals for routers. He must’ve outweighed Mark by a good seventy-five pounds of hard fat and sinew.

He yelled back, “You’re in the fucking bleachers at a baseball game, not at the opera! Get a fucking grip, dude!”

I started to sweat in spite of the chill foggy air. Now this was something to tweet about!

Another play. The crowd stood up. The crowd sat down.

We continued to stand.

I knew what was happening by now. Mark and I have been together for a long time. Something very much like this, you can be certain, has happened before.

Now the heckler was pissed off. If we had been in a normal situation, he would’ve just been indignant, perhaps miffed. But we were at a sporting event and the air was full of testosterone, Miller Genuine Draft, and garlic fries.

“WOULD YOU FUCKING SIT DOWN!” the heckler screamed.

A small look of satisfaction crept across Mark’s face, “IF YOU FUCKING SHUT UP.”

The heckler shifted on the bleachers to see around us and continued to yell.

Mark and I standing together don’t make much of a wall. Really we don’t. No matter how much we call ourselves lard-asses, we’re actually both quite small. Many of the fans in the bleachers were bigger than both of us together.

I envisioned Dodgers and Giants fans uniting in a lynch mob to snuff the effete snobs who’d had the nerve to tell them to quit yelling in the bleachers at a ball game.

I was becoming too nervous to tweet.

“Maybe we should leave now,” I said to Mark, “It doesn’t look like anything’s going to change score-wise.”

The score was 9 to 1 in favor of the Dodgers. Giants fans streamed out of the ballpark, heading for the Muni stop.

I couldn’t resist. One last tweet: Eighth inning. I'm rooting for the seagulls now. Dodgers up 9 to 1. Everybody's leaving except those too drunk to walk.

“Okay. Put your phone away. Let’s go,” Mark said. He looked slightly relieved.

“Let’s leave this guy to his screaming. I’m cold.” I said.

Muni was jammed. We were on an N bus, which doesn't make the closest approach to our house, but instead dumped us at Duboce Park. But I was relieved to be away from the baseball game, away from the big dangerous baseball fans, back in my own neighborhood.

Why is it that every time I ride MUNI, the first thing I do when I get home is wash my hands? I tweeted after we got home, having learned exactly NOTHING from the experience.

Nothing. My group went to a baseball game and all I got were 16 entirely mediocre tweets.

I scrolled back through my baseball game tweets. I had told @meganwinget the thought of a moist bacon bra even now makes me urp up those garlic fries in advance of actually eating them. And I had told @leroyfishhead GO ROIDS! The score is now 6-1. I bet neither of them will ask me to do a toast at their respective weddings. The game proved to be nothing but a non-constructive distraction from basic tweeting.

What’s worse, through that entire traumatic misspent evening, I only gained one follower, @drunkjournalcom, who dropped me shortly afterward like the ugly girl in a round of speed dating.

And this brings me back to the crux of the problem: I pay way too much attention to the ebb and flow of my followers.

Want to break my heart? Drop me. Unfollow me. It’ll work every time.

When my followers number goes down, I’m crushed, and I immediately expand the list to figure out who might have dropped me. I’m praying that it’s a spammer—I don’t work too hard to eliminate the spammers when they sign up to follow me because the boost they give to my numbers feels so good—or a stranger, and not someone who knows me. Then I speculate on what I’ve said recently that has moved someone to unsubscribe.

I know I can be offensive.

I follow a headline service called @BreakingNews. It’s mostly good for keeping up on obits and natural disasters, stories where the headline tells you all you need to know. I’m old enough that I don’t want to know the cause of death (it could happen to me!) and neurotic enough that I don’t want to know the particulars of the disaster (it could happen to me!).

Just the fact, ma’am. I just want one fact.

That way, I can be the first to know. And even though I seldom retweet the items, subscribing to a news feed makes me feel so current.

Right after Michael Jackson’s death hit the Twitter feed, I had the temerity to tweet that for the last two decades he’d been the product of clever taxidermy. Several followers disappeared right away. Then I started reading the tsunami of tweets that were appearing in my Twitter window.

Michael Jackson was apparently a vital part of many Tweeps’ childhoods. Now they were openly weeping over the loss. An important cultural icon of my generation was gone. Tweeps were Moon Walking. Tweeps were playing Thriller. Tweeps were dancing to Beat It. Tweeps were singing Billie Jean.

Who knew?

I erased a half-written tweet and deleted the one I’d already posted.

Shoot. There goes my ‘how are you related to Michael’ cheap shot.

But it’s probably worse to be boring than offensive.

Then I recoil in horror as I ponder that particular nugget and realize what it means.

Did they delete me because I’m BORING?

Oh no!

Of course! It’s much worse to be BORING than OFFENSIVE. Truman Capote knew that. Andy Warhol knew that. Even that poor anorexic pedophile Michael Jackson knew that.

Instantly, I scroll back through my tweets.

OMG. OMG.

I break out in a sweat. Every neurosis I have nurtured for these many years has been brought to the surface.

I need to say something interesting RIGHT NOW.

Or…

Maybe I should give up and join Facebook instead. You don’t have to be interesting on Facebook. You can just join and connect.

I can join Facebook and admit to myself why I was not invited to my own high school reunion (this in spite of the fact that at the time of the reunion, if you searched for Rolling Hills High School reunion, the very first hit on Google was—and is—my blog).

I’ll just sit quietly and wait for invites from my high school friends, from junior high frenemies, from my 4th grade BFF Susie Pendleton (who recited A.A. Milne’s poem Disobedience with me in front of Mrs. Savage's class) and from Cheryl Parana (whose mother had carpeted their house with stunning white shag that needed to be raked, an exotic care regimen that I instantly appreciated). Surely some of these people—people who would quickly dispense with me on Twitter, people who wouldn’t stop for a chat if we met late at night at Safeway—would friend me on Facebook.

They’d friend me. Ah, that sounds much less threatening than follow. Friend.

In Facebook, no-one cares if you’re boring. You just have to be friendly.

If I promise not to say anything, will you be my friend?

roommates, part 2

I’ve never liked to live alone.

In spite of this, I’ve told friends things like: “Oh, you really don’t want him to move in with you. Right now you’ve got the best of both worlds. You’ve got a boyfriend, but the TiVo has all your programs on it. And you only see him when you want to.”

Hypocrite. I’m a giant hypocrite.

The last (and perhaps the only) time I lived alone was my stint in the Leon Capri Apartments, a two-story apartment court in Pasadena that was so depressing that every visitor I had over would ask me when I was going to move.

They’d look around at the studio apartment, its ugly day beds ill-camouflaged by brown-and-orange plaid covers. They’d squint at the 1960s-era kitchen table and the noisy, aging window air conditioning unit. They’d note the perpetually dripping bathtub faucet that had left a hard water stain the color of dried blood. They’d wince at the coughs of the tubercular old man downstairs; he kept the drapes open so you could look in on him on your way up to my place, check on his steady downward progress. There he’d be, watching The Price is Right from his Barcalounger, just coughing his fool head off. Then they’d peek out my curtains at the useless swimming pool—that peculiar vestige of Southern California glamour—a kidney-shaped pool perpetually in shadow and unheated, too cold to swim in and littered with palm tree residue.

Then they’d waggle their heads back and forth skeptically: “So how much do you pay for this place anyway? You found another place yet?”

I was seeing a much older man, N., at the time. He lived around the corner in a larger, more modern, apartment building with his wife. He had talked me into renting the studio apartment; he was even with me when I first looked at it on impulse. I was living in the back of my car, an orange Opel station wagon crammed full of most of my earthly possessions, save four heavy boxes of vinyl records. Those would warp in the October heat if I kept them in the back of my car. As it was, the LPs were disappearing one-by-one, in order of desirability, from another friend’s living room.

N. and I had driven by The Leon Capri Apartments on a Friday at lunch. There was a sign on the front lawn. VACANCY. Furn. Studio Apt.

N. swung his Rabbit to the curb and we got out.

He went in with me to look at the place. There wasn’t much to see. It was small; it was dingy; the furniture was particle board with wood-grained plastic veneer.

He flushed the toilet. It worked.

“This looks fine,” N. said without much confidence in his voice. “It’s fine for you anyway. It’s not too big. You’re like a small animal. You don’t need much space.”

I filled out an application.

“When can I move in?” I asked Chip, the building’s manager, a short gay man with a bad toupee and numerous flesh-colored bandages that protected injuries that he’d been careful to attribute to the many repairs he’d been making on the apartments.

“Any time you want to, darlin’.”

“You mean I could move in today?”

“Yes. You could move in today.”

“You could move in today.” N. nudged me. He winked. “She’ll take it.”

“I’ll take it,” I said. If I took it, I could stop looking for apartments. I hated looking for apartments. This was before Craigslist, and looking for apartments involved circling cryptic two- and three-line classified ads in The Pasadena Star News and wondering what ‘limited kitchen access’ meant.

No ads. No calls. No driving around. I could start unloading my Opel this very afternoon. I could sleep here tonight.

I wrote a check—it felt like a large check, the largest check I’d ever written—to The Leon Capri Apartments and handed it to Chip. He handed me the key to Apartment 24.

Less than a week after I had moved in, N. claimed that the apartment was so depressing that it made him impotent.

“You should move,” he said.

I didn’t move right away. Instead I slept. A lot. Normally I have insomnia that puts Sandra Tsing Loh’s insomnia to shame, but the Leon Capri Apartments acted like a barbiturate on me.

There’s a lot you don’t notice when you’re asleep.

I never bothered to install a phone in Apartment 24. Instead I made infrequent phone calls from a phone booth at the grocery store across the street. Chip had forgotten to give me the key to the mailbox. I could see through the slot that I had mail, but there was no way to retrieve it.

Once in awhile a friend would drop by.

“You should call before you come over. What if I’m not at home? Or what if I’m asleep?” I’d say.

“You don’t have a phone,” they would tell me.

“Oh.” I’d say. “Oh. Right.”

I’d slept through most of the winter in the Leon Capri Apartments. Hibernated really. I stopped seeing N. Friends worried about me.

One day I heard through the Caltech grapevine that a Deadhead named Tom was looking for a roommate for his apartment on California Boulevard, close to Pie and Burger. That he’d asked his last roommate, a purported meth dealer, to move on. Tom’s name was on one of the most coveted rental agreements in Pasadena: he was the official occupant of a flat in one of two neighboring fourplexes in a nice neighborhood near Caltech.

Eight apartments with the cheapest rent in town.

Everybody who was anybody had lived in those apartments. Steve, aka Mailbro, a postman with the Caltech beat. Martha, the welfare queen, whose kids lived with her mother in another city. Mike, the guy who lived in his van in the backyard. Dave, whose tortoise-shell cat was a cantaloupe-eating vegetarian. A lady lawyer who clicked around the bare hardwood floors downstairs in her high heels. Two Mexican guys who were prone to violent domestic disputes: a Telemundo/telenovela-ready couple.

It was a colorful cast of characters, a WB sitcom. The minute I laid eyes on the place, I knew it was home.

Goodbye, Leon Capri. Those cropped pants do make your butt look big.

Tom had blue eyes, Grateful Dead posters that he’d tacked to the living room wall, and two black cats named Yin and Yang. He was a vegetarian. A devotee of zen poets like Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.

But none of that mattered.

I renamed the black cats Fishbreath and Fuzzface and moved in.

Tom was my new roommate.

I threw my stuff—a scratched Teflon pot with a tight-fitting lid; a dented cookie sheet; a large square of foam rubber (my bed); several large pieces of velvet (the bedspread); some miscellaneous sheets and towels; a floor pillow; and four Xerox paper boxes that I’d been using as a bureau— back into the Opel and moved out of Apartment 24 and across town. It only took one trip.

I moved out with as little ceremony and as much stealth as possible. I felt defeated by the Leon Capri Apartments. Done in by the details. Humiliated by the coffee table that’d gouged my leg. Debilitated by a relentless case of food poisoning that I’d weathered in the depressing little bathroom. Even my ironic love affair with N. had faded, overpowered by Apartment 24’s bad mojo.

I slunk by Chip and Marty’s apartment with two Xerox boxes stacked in my arms.

“Moving out?” Chip asked.

“Yeah. I guess I am.” I said.

“You should’ve given notice on the first. You’re late with your rent.”

“It’s not the first today?” I feigned ignorance; it was already five days into March.

“You won’t get this month’s rent back. You should’ve told us you were moving out.” Chip said. He wasn’t actually surprised I was moving, nor was he unkind. No-one lived in the Leon Capri Apartments for very long. I’d paid my last month’s rent when I moved in; it was almost 30 days’ notice. Close enough.

I thought of the sad first-floor apartment Chip and Marty shared, littered with spent prescription bottles, TV Guides, and movie magazines. I was anxious to end our impromptu interview.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I don’t care about this month’s rent.”

I was tempted to lie and to tell him I was moving out of state, simply because I’d been busted trying to sneak out. The truth was, I’d never given notice on an apartment before, and I couldn’t summon up the nerve. It was like I was rejecting Chip himself, his bad wig, his legitimate prescriptions, his bandaid-covered boo-boos, and every other gloomy detail of his life in the Leon Capri Apartments.

In the end I wrote down my new address on a scrap of paper so the mysterious property owner in South San Gabriel could mail me back my damage deposit. It arrived not long after, minus fifty dollars for “cleaning the oven.”

“I never even turned on the oven,” I explained to my new roommate Tom, indignant that my last landlord had confused me with someone whose oven needed anything beyond a quick dusting. “I just stored a few things in there. It wasn’t dirty.”

Tom agreed with me that it was outrageous.

The new apartment was, in my mind, gorgeous. I saw the high curved ceilings, the 19th century moldings, the burnished hardwood floors. My room had windows on three sides, windows facing west, south, and east. Even the closet had its own tiny south-facing window. A glass-paned door led to a shared balcony that looked like it hadn’t been used in many years. The neighbors’ ancient Siamese cat looked across the balcony at me and let loose a plaintive wail.

I stashed my Xerox boxes in the closet; made up my foam rubber bed and covered it with the velvet remnants; and threw the floor pillow on—where else?—the floor. I fetched my remaining records from Holliston House; bought a new turntable and pre-amp from Bill Gross and a $19 floor lamp from the unfortunately-named “Lamps R Us”. Done. Done and Done.

It looked a lot like home to me.

Really I’d fallen in love with my new digs. I failed to notice the numerous roaches in the kitchen scurrying hither and yon, busy and happy with their own ecological niche in the apartment. Didn’t mind that the ancient refrigerator needed to be propped closed with a folding chair. Didn’t quite see the long-term implications of the mountain of recycling—stacks of empty six-packs and old newspapers—that had amassed in a narrow hallway, rendering it impassable.

I could even ignore the poster of Jerry Garcia staring down reproachfully at the two sad couches in the living room.

“Be careful!” Tom said the first time I lowered myself onto the off-green couch, “That part is broken.”

Indeed I could see that a stack of books was holding up the middle and there was a suspicious sag to the cushion I was about to sit on.

“You’ll hit the floor if you sit there,” he said. “It’s much better to sit at the other end.”

I moved a pizza box with a single congealed slice of cheese pizza still in it and sat down. Jerry Garcia scowled vaguely over my shoulder at some imagined audience. Or perhaps he was scowling at me; perhaps I had moved his piece of cold pizza.

“They were going to throw both of these couches out. I had Mike help me get them up the stairs,” Tom said.

I felt a flea bite my ankle.

Tom plucked another flea off of his leg and pinched it between two fingers. He disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a glass of soapy water which he set on the floor by his feet.

“You just drown them in soapy water,” he said.

“Oh.” I said. “Okay.”

“They’re kind of hard to catch at first, but you can get good at it.” Tom drowned a second flea in the glass.

“Do the cats need flea collars?” I said.

“Pesticides aren’t good for them. I feed them yeast and garlic tablets instead. You can get them at Trader Joe’s; you just chop them up and mix them in the cat food.”

“Does that work?” I asked.

The glass was already dotted with tiny black flea carcasses. Tom had been drowning them steadily as we talked.

“You should’ve seen how many there used to be,” he said. “Before I started putting garlic in the cat food.”

We sat companionably in the living room reading copies of the LA Reader and exterminating fleas. The living room window was open and a gentle breeze rippled Jerry’s edges and tickled the top of the pizza; a discarded part of the newspaper fluttered into the corner of the room. I felt my depression lifting.

I was so happy to have a roommate again.

The rent on my new flat was indeed breathtakingly cheap, $115/month for my half of the two bedroom upper floor apartment. There was a banana tree growing on the front lawn and a magnificent persimmon tree on the side of the house. In the fall, sparrows would perch on each persimmon, which were by then just sweet bags of orange goo, and they’d tweet and eat, tweet and eat, tweet and eat. Birdsongs filled the apartment.

The building had been condemned several years before I’d moved in and was in a state of genteel decline. The landlords, a corporation in the Valley, were waiting to tear the place down, so they did no repairs.

The rumor about the building’s disposition changed weekly. Sometimes the owners were waiting for the permit that would allow them to tear it down; other times they were waiting for the permit to build the condos. Still other times, they were stalled out, pending undelivered financing for their project. Still other times, they were waiting for nothing at all and we expected to be awakened the next morning by a wrecking ball and the sound of heavy equipment, scraping our beloved building down to splinters and rubble.

It wouldn’t have taken much to knock the place down; the rats could’ve stopped holding hands and the place would’ve fallen in on itself. Already a railing was missing from the back stairs, making them a treacherous proposition at night. A leak in the roof had so badly discolored and softened the ceiling in the back bedroom that a poke with the broomstick brought down a shower of plaster. The building no longer had trustworthy heat (a wall heater threw a giant line of flames into the living room) and the construction had long predated air conditioning.

Tellingly, we wrote our checks to “California Street Condos,” a name which we rightly interpreted as threatening. Our corporate overlords were so oblivious that they didn’t even know that they wanted to tear down lovely old apartments on California Boulevard, not California Street.

We alternated months for paying the rent. Tom paid one month; I paid the next. Toward the end of our tenure in the building, it turned out that we were only paying rent every other month—my months—but that was years later, and it was an effective cost-saving strategy. The landlords did not seem to care that one month they’d get a compulsively on-time check written with a triple-aught Rapid-o-graph in my small slanty hand, and the next they’d get nothing.

While Tom and I lived there, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

We even supped together on occasion, moving us perilously close to being an actual household.

I wasn’t a vegetarian, but I also wasn’t a cook, so Tom’s gloppy cashew sauce, adapted from the Moosewood Cookbook, poured over steamed vegetables and brown rice seemed like an exquisite culinary endeavor compared with the 29-cent canned pilchard from Trader Joe’s that was the staple of my own diet. I usually shared the pilchard with one or both of the cats, who would clamor around my feet as I opened the can and mixed in plain yogurt and diced avocado. The cats would gladly eat part of my dinner as long as I didn’t go to the trouble of seasoning it with cayenne.

As for Tom, he alternated between macrobiotic fare and delivered pizzas (and the occasional In-And-Out burger, I seem to recall). A Vietnamese woman dating a mutual friend asked me why Tom didn’t eat meat.

“Oh, he’s a vegetarian,” I said, aware that I hadn’t explained anything.

“I thought it was because he was poor,” she said, skeptical and somewhat convinced of my naïveté. “Is he poor?”

“I don’t know,” I said. And in truth I didn’t know what motivated his mostly consistent vegetarianism. It’s not a question I would ask of a roommate.

A few months after I moved in, out of the blue Tom said, “Don’t use my spoons.”

“Don’t use your spoons,” I echoed dutifully, unsure of what lay behind this edict. “Okay. I won’t use your spoons.”

Spoons? It probably didn’t have anything to do with eating meat. You don’t eat meat with a spoon. There is no beef-flavored ice cream, no chicken pudding. Perhaps he thought I’d use them to shoot up. Or perhaps he thought I’d use them to shoot up and eat venison sorbet afterward. As mysterious as the new rule seemed, it was a relatively simple one to follow.

“Should I get some dishes of my own?” I asked.

“No. No,” he said. “There isn’t room.”

So I complied as literally as I could. Puzzled, I left several cheap spoons, borrowed from the Dabney House dining room, in the drawer.

And he was right. There wasn’t room for any other kitchen supplies. Tom was an early proponent of recycle and reuse, a philosophy that I couldn’t disagree with. Hundreds of Molly’s Natural Yogurt containers were stacked in the cabinets. Glass jars were at the ready. Plastic tableware had been reclaimed, along with disposable chopsticks.

The canonical Mr. Natural comic, “Mr. Natural Does the Dishes”, had been hung above the sink well before I moved in. The comic—hung in dorms and communal kitchens everywhere—is a story without words that shows Mr. Natural gamely washing a veritable mountain of dishes. A mountain! He applies elbow grease and washes and washes until there is nary a mac-and-cheese encrusted pot in the sink.

Good for Mr. Natural!

The comic neither reflected the state of our kitchen sink (which was heaped with dirty dishes that showed no sign of being diminished by human action or act of god) nor motivated either of us to wash the dishes. I was moved to do dishes sporadically, not by disgust (I wasn’t easily disgusted), nor by duty (I seldom used many dishes, and hence felt no particular call to wash them), nor by kindness (I wasn’t particularly kind). Rather I washed them because I liked to wash dishes; it fulfilled some sort of compulsive urge. I could stand at the sink and daydream with no fear of interruption.

But much of the time, the apartment teetered between unhygienic and downright filthy, and the level of clutter vacillated between simple disorder and out-and-out anarchy.

Once I noticed that a houseguest had demurely slipped off to the Caltech campus to take a shower in the student houses.

“You could’ve used our shower,” I told her, somewhat defensively. “It works. The water pressure is actually good, better than you’d expect.”

“I was going over to campus anyway, so I thought I’d take a shower,” she said.

I could tell she was lying.

When I looked in the shower later that evening, I noticed that one of the giant outdoor cockroaches (as opposed to the faster, sleeker, and more petite kitchen cockroaches) had become trapped in the tub. The sides were somehow too steep and too slick for him to climb, although he tried again and again, failing before he’d gotten all the way up the side. I wondered whether it was the roach himself, or the futility of his endeavor, that had driven my friend a half mile to Caltech to use another, more public, shower.

It didn’t turn out well, of course.

Why “of course” you might ask.

We’d lived there together for quite awhile—several years at least—by the time Tom moved out. Together we’d battled forces of man and nature: the 14-year-old squatters that’d moved in downstairs when the attorney moved out; the fleas and roaches and rats; several stalkers I’d absentmindedly accumulated; the negligent landlords in the Valley; and our own non-admirable tendencies (which this blog post will leave to the reader’s vivid imagination).

Tom’s girlfriend Trish had finally taken Madame l’ Fishbreath to be spayed after numerous litters of kittens born as the result of an incestuous relationship between the original two litter mates. Tuna-toes, Meatloaf, and all the kittens who’d followed, needed care, catfood, and ultimately new homes. We were perpetually looking for friends and co-workers who would give a kitten a good home.

Tom even decided that the kittens were better adopted in pairs, so once we’d enlist someone to take one kitten, we’d persuade them into taking two.

In other words, we’d weathered innumerable crises together.

I don’t have any desire to turn over those last few months in my mind. They were traumatic, almost as traumatic as a break-up, and in the end, the events had little to do with me.

Mark had moved in.

There is a physics to roommates. I’m sure you knew that already.

Two roommates, oppositely charged, will bond together. Four roommates can yield an “us against them” chemistry that’s almost fun: the Oscar Madisons versus the Felix Ungers. The Kramdens versus the Nortons. Different pairs bond and re-bond.

But three, three’s unstable. Of course there’s Jack, Chrissy, and Janet. Right. And you remember what happened to Chrissy. She got too big for her britches and was exiled to Fresno. That’s right. Fresno. Then there’s Wilbur, Mr. Ed, and Carol, another troubled roommate triangle. Remember: only Wilbur could hear Mr. Ed talk.

Where there’s three, there’s trouble.

Remember these plots?
Wilbur pleads with Ed to stick to being a horse, especially when Ed wants to go to college to become a doctor.
Ed answers a hard question regarding chess on a radio game show and ends up winning Wilbur a new color TV set.
Carol attempts to publish Ed’s memoirs.
A neighbor who happens to be a builder needs an architect. Ed comes up with an idea that go-go music might just help Wilbur get that job.

See? Three leads to nothing but tension. Tension and go-go music.

Tom moved out. We haven’t spoken since. There were no fisticuffs, although some were threatened.

The building was torn down soon after that. The promised condos were built. They were on the market for a long time without selling, but now they’re just part of the California Boulevard landscape. I’d imagine no-one even remembers those two ramshackle four-flats.

Except the ghosts of so many roommates, and their roommates, and roommates beyond.

roommates

I hadn’t had a real roommate in an awfully long time.

I was at a conference that was held at Asilomar down in Monterey. Asilomar is owned by the government and ends up being something like a Best Western crossed with NIST. But it’s in a beautiful setting—on the sand dunes by an unspoiled stretch of coastline.

The clerk at the registration desk warned me that I had a roommate. She told me my roommate’s name and waited for a reaction. But I was prepared: that’s the way facilities like this work. You either come in with a roommate (which I didn’t), or you’re assigned one (I was). I didn’t really recognize her name, but I didn’t NOT recognize her name either; it sounded vaguely familiar.

Because Monterey’s a short drive from San Francisco—2 hours if you’re not worried about speeding tickets—I didn’t pack carefully. Instead, I just threw stuff into the car as I thought of it. My swell new red overnight bag with a change of clothes. A black grocery bag with some apples and a camera. A plastic bag with some wool socks and a t-shirt. My big lumpy briefcase. My clogs. An extra sweatshirt. An extra bottle of Snapple. Another extra sweatshirt. Some miscellaneous power cords and chargers. Books, papers, magazines, half-finished crossword puzzles. My favorite pen. Flip flops. Did I remember the Tums?

Soon the back of my little white Honda looked like I was planning to hold a mobile garage sale. Or like I was homeless and living out of my car.

I put one more sweatshirt in the backseat. Maybe I’d be moved to run into the surf. If that were the case, I’d most certainly need dry clothes. Never mind the fact that I haven’t done that since I was 21 years old and on acid.

I’m better off flying: I’m more apt to pack a realistic amount of stuff. And I’m more apt to put it in a single suitcase.

Transferring all that crap from the back of the car to my room in Willows Lodge was no mean feat. If I’d have been able to put it in a shopping cart, my look would’ve been complete.

When I opened the door to the room, I knew right away that my roommate-to-be and I had lucked out. The curtains were wide open – we’d scored a room with an unobstructed ocean view. The sun glinted off the whitecaps. Beautiful.

My roommate wasn’t there yet. I dropped my numerous bags onto the floor in an ambiguous (but thoughtfully out-of-the-way) heap and looked around. Two beds. A great big king-sized bed and an itty-bitty single bed. The great big bed afforded the better view: you could see the broad expanse of Pacific Ocean when you woke up. The small bed was set at an angle to look out onto the other low slung Asilomar bungalows.

I decided not to deploy any of my belongings until she arrived. Surely my roommate and I would have the obvious discussion about who would take which bed. We’d laugh about the hilarious “after you, Alphonse” way we were both being too polite to take the obviously much larger bed with the fabulous ocean view.

I’d say, “Oh, I’m so much smaller. I’ll take the little bed.”

And she’d say, “I feel awful doing that. Are you sure you don’t want the big bed?”

And I’d say, “You must! I insist!”

And she’d say, “Thank you so much! I adore looking out at the waves.”

That’s not what happened. I left the room and dutifully went off to a conference session. I wasn’t giving my talk until the second day, but I thought I might get a sense of the audience. Besides, it was a little cold and windy for walk-taking—it was a better day for lying on a great big bed and looking out a picture window at the wind-whipped ocean.

When I returned to the room at the afternoon break, I discovered that my roommate had arrived. She was sitting on the unmade king-sized bed, facing away from the ocean, propped up on all the pillows, reading. Her toiletries were on the counter by the sink. Her bags were on both chairs by the little coffee table. She’d made herself at home. There was to be no “after you, Alphonse” discussion after all.

I was mildly surprised.

She looked up from her novel and introduced herself. A flicker of annoyance crossed her face when I asked her where she was from. Clearly I was supposed to have recognized her name, especially since her job title was President.

My mind works slowly. It wasn’t until the second day that I remembered the gossip I’d heard about her. It had to do with her divorce from someone whose name was actually a household word (at least in geek circles). Right. It was a bitter divorce if you believed those rumors. She’d gotten everything. Her ex-husband was destitute.

Oh, right.

The conference proceeded as most conferences do. My roommate and I were reasonably careful around one another: we neither became BFFs nor attempted to poison one another’s toothpaste. I doubt she put sand into my contact lens case, and I don’t remember spitting into her hair rinse. We negotiated nothing. She set an early lights-out hour and I made my way around the room in the dark using my flashlight as if I were a cat burglar. I scrabbled through my heaped belongings looking for my sweatpants and t-shirt by dim blue LED light.

In true passive-aggressive fashion, I took a sleeping pill at bedtime, and passed the nighttime hours snoring with profound vigor, my mp3 player's earbuds snugly in my ears.

On the last day, when I returned to the room at checkout time to gather up my things, she had already left. All her stuff was gone. The bathmat lay crumpled on the bathroom floor, still damp from her morning shower. She had left a single crisp dollar on the bedside table for the maids.

A one dollar tip.

Roommates.

I didn’t share a room while I was growing up. My brother and I each had our own rooms, and as a substantially older sister, I was able to enforce my own share of arbitrary rules about my bedroom. For example, my brother was not to touch the beads that hung in my doorway, beads that I believed lent my room a sophisticated opium den-like aura. I was especially sensitive to the idea that he might chew on them, since he was a late-teether. He might even pull them down. If he looked at them too long, I pounced.

But really I had nothing to worry about. As a toddler, my brother was placid and easy to intimidate.

So I was completely unprepared for college roommates.

My first college roommate was a guy who’d been to boarding school. He was mature and had excellent study habits; he went to bed by 10pm and was wide awake for his 8am chem lab. A sober fellow, tall with a neatly trimmed beard, the kind of roommate you’d want for your son. I’ve googled him, and he’s still a solid citizen, a doctor, the head of a blood bank at a major university’s teaching hospital.

We’ll call him Bob.

I don’t know what Bob made of me; it didn’t occur to me at the time that he might be the least bit disturbed by a female roommate.

Rooming together wasn’t his idea.

He’d left campus on the night of room choice, and he’d entrusted me with his proxy to pick him a room and a roommate.

For fairness sake, room choice went by seniority, then by card draw, aces high like in poker.

We were freshmen. Single rooms were out of the question. It’d be a matter of picking a roommate and choosing which double the two of us would live in.

There were only three girls, which theoretically gave me only two choices for a roommate. Then one of the girls, the precocious one among us, a pretty blonde girl, decided she’d shack up with her boyfriend RIGHT AWAY.

That left one other girl. One other girl. Not much of a choice. I probably would’ve gone with that, but this remaindered girl was a social leper. She was a smart girl—I think she’d been on the team that won the Putnam and was planning to be a math major—but she was also a scary girl, an outcast. A girl so loud and annoying that even at Caltech (which at the time had a gender ration of 10:1) she was shunned. And I did not have an open mind: I could not envision myself rooming with this girl. I knew it. (What I did not understand was that I had universal sympathy, and I probably would’ve been able to get myself a single if I’d just said something).

My turn to draw came around. I drew a Queen of Spades for Bob and three of hearts for me.

I chose Bob a good room, a big room with a sleeping porch and no immediate neighbors. The upperclassman who was running the show asked me who Bob’s roommate was going to be. Roommate? Right! I was supposed to pick him a roommate. I looked around at the other freshmen and panicked.

“Me.” I said.

“You? Does Bob know that?”

“No.” I said, “But I’m sure he won’t mind. He told me to pick someone for him. And I did. Me.”

Indeed if Bob was unhappy with this whole arrangement, he hid his displeasure well. Looking back, I’m sure he was just good-natured and his temperament had been shaped by an adolescence spent at East Coast boarding schools. He’d probably dealt with any number of undesirable roommates already and wasn’t about to get upset by something this minor.

My parents, on the other hand, surprised me with the vehemence of their displeasure. I was too naïve to realize that they’d be unhappy with this set up; I somehow thought they’d congratulate me on my ingenuity. I’d turned my unlucky three of hearts—a card so low that I would’ve surely been left with the worst room in the house, a tiny double painted a depressing shade of olive drab with military-style metal bunk beds overlooking the driveway where the dumpsters were emptied at 6am two mornings a week—into a Queen of Spades and a big desirable room with a sleeping porch. And my roommate was an absolute peach, a guy three years my senior who could help me with my physics homework and who didn’t turn every weeknight into an occasion for drunken revelries.

We were not to be roommates for long.

My parents threatened to intervene. Fortuitously, before they did, the lovely blonde girl dumped her hastily-chosen freshman BF, and she and I were thrown together into the tiny olive-drab double with bunk beds. Sure enough, the dumpsters were emptied at 6am two mornings a week. It was noisy and depressing and my roommate was not much better at the physics qualifier problems than I was.

She’d already picked the top bunk. That left me with the bottom bunk, and she had the temerity to entertain gentleman callers in our room. Naturally I was supposed to find some other place to hang out during the naughty part of the visit, but she’d have her guests sleep over, and the mattress would sag down low invading the depressing cave-like space offered by the lower bunk.

There’s something about lower bunks anyway that connotes younger siblings, and sleepers too inept or too fearful to sleep high in the air. The daring, the skillful, the free-spirited sleep in top bunks; the fraidy-cats, the clumsy, and the weak sleep in lower bunks.

“Don’t touch my stereo when I’m not here,” my new roommate warned me.

“I won’t,” I said, looking around for something of mine I could ask her not to touch. There wasn’t anything cool enough. Nothing to protect. What, don’t touch my manual typewriter? Even my stuff betrayed my lack of promise as a roommate.

“And don’t play my records. Especially not on your stereo,” she added. She had a shelf-foot of LPs, good ones, cool ones. Allman Brothers and Mothers of Invention. She had a real turntable too. A stereo with components. A separate receiver and power amp. Speakers with real wood cabinets.

I still had my geeky kid stereo, the moral equivalent of a close-the-top-to-play record player. I’d loved my stereo when I lived at home, but now here I was, embarrassed by the thing. Of course I wouldn’t be so stupid and thoughtless as to play her copy of In Memory of Elizabeth Reed on it. I knew that the way I weighted the needle arm with a penny so it still tracked the grooves would spoil her pristine LPs.

Soon after that, I dragged home a discarded mustard-and-white striped rug to cover our cold cement floor. She wrinkled her pretty nose at what I saw as my newfound resourcefulness. The next day, one of her gentlemen callers burned a hole in the rug with a fumbled Winston.

“It was old anyway,” I said. I felt miserable. Before the wrinkled nose and the burn hole, I’d thought it was a pretty nifty rug; I’d never furnished anything with found household goods before.

By winter term, we had singles.

To be continued...

Earpods

One hot summer day some years ago, I went to visit my friends Alan and Hana. I’d pulled my hair back into a tight ponytail, just to feel the breeze on my neck during the bike ride over.

When I got there, Hana’s eight-year-old niece studied me briefly and said, “You shouldn’t wear your hair that way. Your ears are too big.”

What she’d said had merit: my ears are indeed unusually large, and the ponytail had exposed them for casual inspection by eight year olds. Too large in some absolute sense? It would be hard to say. Too large for someone my size? Very likely. They’re some big ears.

I think someone—her mother, perhaps—admonished her to not say such a thing.

“No. She’s right,” I said. “I shouldn’t wear my hair like this.”

It wasn’t exactly one of those adorable ‘kids say the darnedest things’ moments. Nothing adorable about some snotty eight-year-old giving you personal grooming tips. But it was a turning point, one in which I decided that my ears required some sort of persistent cover. Camouflage even.

If the eyes are windows onto the soul, what are the ears?

I believe the ghost in Hamlet alludes to the porches of his ears, so perhaps my ears are the verandas onto my soul; my ears do have a certain deck-like quality (minus the Adirondack chairs), especially since they protrude on the sides.

But for Shakespeare, the dead King’s ears are only incidental—they’re just a place to pour in the poison, a literary device to move the story forward. The only writer I can think of who waxes rhapsodic over ears is Haruki Murakami. The women in his stories often have exquisite shell-like ears, delicate in form, unspeakably lovely. Inspirational ears. Mystical ears. Erotic ears.

“I’ve been told my ears are my best feature,” they say in their Match.com profiles. And for them, that’d be an understatement.

“My ears inspire poets. They drive the emo-inclined to the brink of Cure-like weepy poesy.”

“My closest friends spread out their checkered tablecloths and have picnics on the porches of my ears.”

“Six demure Latinas celebrate their Quinceañeras on the wisteria-entwined plump pillows of my earlobes.”

Given the scope and reach of the Internet, I’m sure there’s even porn devoted wholly to ears. There’s got to be. Ear Porn. You’ll have to look for it yourself on XTube; I’m scared of what I might find.

Why, you might ask, am I so focused on my ears today? Now that I’ve learned to keep them in an undisclosed location on the side of my head (yes—I keep them both on one side, much like a flounder’s eyes), you might think there’d be no particular reason to dwell on them.

But that’s not so.

When I was younger and less self-conscious, I flirted with the idea of piercing my ears. But even back then, piercing both lobes seemed too ordinary. My BFF Carol and I decided we’d each pierce one lobe in a gesture of friendship and solidarity; besides, that way we could split the cost. Irony played a role too: her research involved earrings in the Late Bronze Age Aegean.

It was a lovely theory and a sensible plan. It was cost-effective, social, and required only minimal effort. Did we do it? Of course not!

I googled Carol recently to see whether she’d gone ahead without me. A photo reveals that both of her ears are pierced. And a quick look in the mirror reveals that neither of mine is. Not with an ordinary dainty hole in the lobe. Nor with the hardware store assortment of studs, clips, and rings that are so common now. Nor with the 0 gauge plugs or 4 gauge steel claws that make me so squeamish when I see someone with them down in the Castro. Come to think of it, I’m probably the last adult in San Francisco with nary a body modification.

But none of this has anything to do with why I’m obsessing about my ears.

It’s the earbuds.

You heard me: earbuds. Oh. Maybe you’ll have to shout to tell me if you heard me: I’m wearing my earbuds. I never thought I’d be one of those people who walk around plugged into a portable music player, oblivious to what’s going on around them.

What makes matters worse is that I’m not even listening to music like most of the students one encounters on every college campus, wandering to the dining hall or to their afternoon class in Eastmost Hall. Instead I’m listening to podcasts. I don’t subscribe to just two or three podcasts; I listen to an extensive network of natterers, some of them broadcasting in twos and threes, using conversation to fill the time, others monologuing from the barest of notes. Many of them know each other and cross the porous podcast boundaries the way Petticoat Junction characters would sometimes show up in Green Acres.

It drives Mark crazy.

“I’m competing with your friends in the plastic box,” he says, annoyed that I’m listening to strangers, and am unavailable to him when he shouts at me from another room.

I switch off the player, leaving the earbuds dangling from my ears.

“I can hear you.” I tell him. “I can hear you! I’ve turned it off. Now say what you want to say!”

“I don’t want to talk to you now. I just want to be able to talk to you.”

“It’s more fun to do the dishes when I’m listening to podcasts,” I whine.

“I think you like your friends in the plastic box better than you like me and Lumpy.”

“That’s so not true!” I switch the mp3 player back on so I can return to Michael and Kevin on the QCast Connection or Walt and Holly on We’re Mean Because You’re Stupid. “You know it’s not true.”

But I don’t just listen to podcasts while I’m doing the dishes or taking out the garbage. I listen to them other times too. When I’m gardening. When I’m cooking. When I’m walking to the store. When I’m driving. When I’m shopping.

I most certainly crossed a line though when I started wearing the earbuds to bed. I can’t help it, really. The podcasts help me sleep. In fact, they’ve helped me conquer a period of almost profound insomnia, insomnia that would not yield to benzodiazepines or Nyquil. There are a couple of podcasters who are almost preternaturally boring—they narrate their lives, right down to the time they spend snuggling with their partners, cleaning their apartments, clipping coupons, installing software, or eating macaroni and cheese—and if even they let me down, there’s always that old standby, NPR.

A little Terry Gross or a dose of Archer goes a long way to curing even the most intractable sleeplessness.

In fact, I have a special pair of earbuds that I wear at night. They don’t stay in my ears very well, but if I sleep on my side, they don’t dig in and cause injuries like my daytime earbuds do. Instead they fall out harmlessly and get tangled in the bedding.

If I wake up in the middle of the night, instead of dwelling on something unfortunate that happened during the day, I start up the player again, click-click-click-click, until I find the place in the podcast where I finally drifted off to sleep. Something that put me to sleep once is very apt to put me to sleep twice, a third time, and a fourth. Often I’ll listen to the same five minutes of rambling talk over and over again all night long.

The problem is, the cat hears the clicking. Even the single click that’s the minimum interaction necessary to start the podcast playing again is enough to alert Lumpy that I’m awake and perhaps might be persuaded to replenish the kitty buffet in the kitchen.

He meows quietly when he hears the click. He knows that if he wakes Mark up, he’ll get locked in the garage until morning; it’s the current feline behavior modification strategy. But Lumpy also knows that I’m too softhearted—and too nearsighted—to hustle him downstairs and into the garage for a timeout.

So, in his quietest possible kitty-voice, he says, “Cathy? Cathy? You awake?”

Click. Click. I’m clicking through the menus on my mp3 player, trying to settle on something fresh to listen to. Something that’ll send me back to blissful sleep. Click. Click.

And now there’s a second set of meows that means something like, “Quiet now. Let’s sneak into the kitchen and check out my food bowls. Oh! Don’t make too much noise. You’ll wake him and he’ll lock us in the garage.”

Click. Click. I’m trying to fast-forward through the portion of the podcast that I was listening to before I fell asleep. Click. “Shit!” I mutter. Fast forward is non-linear on my player, and it advances increasingly fast: 1-2-3-4-5-6 seconds. 20-30-40-50-60 seconds. 2-3-4-5 minutes. 1-2-3 hours. Whoops. Because there is no 2 hour mark for most podcasts—even the most marathon talkers of the bunch seldom go beyond 1 hour—I’m sent to the beginning of the next podcast. And that means backing up and starting all over again.

Click. Click. Click.

The cat is increasingly restive. All of this clicking confirms that I’m actually awake. His sweet quiet little meows stop, and he starts a second game, hunt the earpod cords, which are tangled among the sheets and lead to the player which is under my pillow. He grabs the cord with his sharp claws and attempts to chomp down on it.

“Lumpy! Damn it! Stop!” By now, all three of us are wide awake. Lumpy is meowing extra loud at the injustice of being yelled at. I jam the earbuds back in my ears and click-click-click the volume button on the player until it’s loud enough to drown out the cat. It’s doubtful any of us will be getting any more sleep.

Except—at about 7:15, a few minutes before I should be getting up and at ‘em, I fall into a deep sleep. And I don’t wake up again until 8:30. An episode of Pod is My Co-Pilot is playing full blast and I wonder how I could’ve slept through it thusfar.

When I get out of bed, I swap my nighttime earbuds for my daytime ones. These fit a good deal better—they don’t keep falling off—but they interrupt the solid curtain of hair and only serve to emphasize that my ears have been built to a different scale than my other features.

The funny thing about all of these pairs of earbuds is how long the cords are. My mp3 player is tiny and the cords are long, long, long, and oddly prone to complicated tangles and unfathomable knots. I’ll take out the earbuds for a few seconds—say, to pull a sweatshirt over my head—and when I go to replace them in my ears, the cords will have snarled into the worst knot possible.

“How did this happen?” I ask Mark as I try to unsnarl the cords.

The cords have become mysteriously braided with the Honda’s seat belt and looped around the gear shift. They have slipped between the steering wheel and the steering column. The player itself is clipped to something too. But what? It is nowhere in sight. I start frisking my pockets and following the cords with my fingers, hoping to find their point of origin.

Mark is angry, but he’s trying to be patient. He eventually locates the recalcitrant mp3 player and starts to untangle the cords himself.

“Drive,” he orders me.

It surprises me how often the cord tangles itself around something that has nothing to do with me, nor with my mp3 player, nor with podosphere in general. I’ll get up to de-plane, groggy from hours of minimal oxygen, and the cord will be insidiously snagged on the armrest of my airplane seat. Or I’ll bend down to feed the cat (a motion undertaken many thousands of times each day), and the cord will snake itself around poor Lumpy’s neck. Or the cord will have threaded through my clothing during the course of a day in a way that seems at first blush to be topologically impossible. Or I’ll be trying to proceed through airport security in a calm and well-organized way, and the cord will be doing its level best to wrap around my knee and trip me as I slide my shoes back on.

It’s never ending.

I’m sure that all of the Mac-ophiles would attribute most (if not all) of these problems to the fact that my mp3 player is an off-brand, a Sansa, the Radio Shack special, instead of the real-deal iPod. In fact, most of the podcasters seem to fetishize their iPods and iPhones (if not the entire Apple brand) and attribute to them magical life-changing properties.

“If you had an iPod, the clicking wouldn’t wake up the cat.”

“If you had iCords, they wouldn’t try to mate with your seatbelt.”

“If you had an iPhone, you’d be hip in spite of the fact that both of your ears are in an undisclosed location on the side of your head.”

But I’m afraid that in addition to having very large ears, I’m also a cheapskate. A stubborn cheapskate. I just don’t want to pay extra for my player to support Apple’s doubtlessly pricey advertising campaigns. And I like John Hodgman much better than the snarky hip Mac dude anyway.

Most recently Mark has suggested that I simply have the earbuds permanently implanted in my ears.

It’s not a bad idea. I’ve got the ears for it.

list five new bands

Last night my old roommate Steve said that legacy music is crowding out anything new, that new bands don’t stand a chance in our content-saturated world.

I didn’t know what to say. Silently I tried to list five new bands—bands that’d appeared on the scene in the last five years—and I couldn’t do it.

I felt so out of it.

Oh, I can conjure up a pop music princess or two—foxy little Miley Cyrus comes to mind—and rappers with clever names and sidearms. There’s 50 Cent and Eminem. Then there’s Amy Winehouse, who in spite of her obvious talent is best known for her tats and her ability to make a spectacle of herself. How about Gnarls Barkley—that’s two people, almost a band, although I wouldn’t be able to pick out a Gnarls Barkley tune from the shuffle on the average iPod Touch.

What I mean is, even if I can scrape together the names, I don’t actually spend much time listening to their music and probably won't be able to come up with a song. And I think Steve was referring to a rather more specific genre of music, one in which there’d be a bass player and a guitarist and perhaps a drummer or two.

You know: a band.

The four of us were sitting together at Steve and Kathy’s dining room table, me and my three old Mentor Street roommates. Steve, Kathy, Chris, and I. Here it was, the waning hours of 2008 and we were talking about music. Just like we did almost every evening those decades ago when we were roommates.

Music was the backbone of our lives back then.

I remember falling asleep in my room on a rainy Pasadena night long ago. Steve was playing his guitar in our dining room. He was singing too. He had a pleasant, reedy voice and he could play the guitar very well. The rain was pattering on the roof and on my windows, which were just two pieces of glass that slid in a wooden track. Every so often raindrops would sputter in where the panes of glass met.

It’s hard to feel any more secure or happier than that. I was 20 years old.

We’re quite a bit older now, graying even, but I had a suspicion that Steve—or Kathy or Chris—could name five new-ish bands if they wanted to, without even straining. Five bands Steve had discovered through MySpace, or had seen serendipitously at some club in San Francisco.

Even the newer bands that crossed my mind weren’t new enough. I knew Steve and Kathy had just seen the Mermen, a band I think I like too, but they don’t count as new. Haven’t they been around since the late 1980s?

It’s not just the bands. I can’t name very many local clubs, although there are at least a dozen within walking distance from our house.

Chris has an excuse. He books real acts for a well-known cultural venue in LA and has done so since we were roommates. He’s familiar with other genres. With classical music. With avant garde. With Celtic music. I recall, with no small amount of gratitude, the tickets he’d pull for me, tickets for great seats. Tickets for sold-out shows.

Wasn’t it because of Chris that over the course of three consecutive evenings in the early 1980s I’d seen Lou Reed, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen in concert? Didn’t we fly up to San Francisco together to go to a Hot Tuna show, killing time in the iconographic bar at LAX while we waited for our much-delayed flight, drinking pina coladas because Warren Zevon happened to use that drink as a prop in Werewolves of London?

Because the Chronicle’s Pink Section, the one with the entertainment listings, has three crossword puzzles, a cryptogram, a jumbo Sudoku, a jumble, and a number puzzle, I sometimes remember to check who is playing where and to read the reviews of a show or two. The problem is, I save the puzzles, so usually by the time I get around to paging through the Pink Section, the bands have played and moved on to the next city on their tour.

But even the Pink Section names don’t leap to the tip of my tongue. The occasional brush with a publicity flyer or a club ad isn’t enough to fix the names securely in my mind.

Yeah, I remember a few local acts, the ones that offer a mnemonic, the bands I’ve seen performing on floats at the Pride parade. Mandonna ("The All-Male, All-Live Tribute to the Queen of Pop") or The Cinnamon Girls (an all-bear Neil Young cover band that Yoram took me to see at The Eagle). Or Three Day Stubble, a bizarre geek band that’s been around for a quarter of a century.

Not new.

When I was a little kid, I was amazed that my parents didn’t seem to listen to music. In our undisturbed living room, they’d parked a big mid-century hi-fi in a Danish modern teak cabinet. The centerpiece of the hi-fi was a reel-to-reel tape deck, which even then wasn’t that common. There was probably a turntable involved with this setup too, because my folks owned five or six stereo albums. Nat King Cole. Tony Bennett. Mantovani. A tape of Lenny Bruce live at the Hungry i, which was the only thing I’d even tried to listen to.

My parents never listened to the records or the tapes. Nor did I, because I had my own record player upstairs, a Decca, that I played monaural Beatles records on, over and over, until they developed skips and pops that I associate with the Beatles to this day.

Hel—you can I’m feel—down and I do appreciate—round. Just like that.

Later, when I was in college, I helped my parents pick out some new stereo components for the den. A Pioneer turntable. A receiver. Some speakers. I even lent them some records, the Simon and Garfunkel albums that I’d bought in junior high, but had decided were pretentious and embarrassing by the time I got to high school. But they really needed something to play on the stereo. Something. Something was better than nothing.

I didn’t expect them to listen to the Ramones or develop a taste for the Jim Carroll Band.

Not only did I leave my Simon and Garfunkel at home; I also left the Mamas and Papas and Buffalo Springfield, all the recordings I thought they’d find palatable at their advanced age. Melodic things. Stuff I’d abandoned, but nothing unspeakably horrible. They could develop their musical sensibilities.

I came home to find my mom listening to KNX News Radio (“All news, all the time”) using the new receiver. I was appalled.

“You got this new stereo and you’re listening to AM radio?” I asked, incredulous. “AM RADIO?”

AM radio. Not music, just newsmen with smooth unaccented homogenous voices. Unimaginable.

I’m loath to admit to Steve, Kathy, and Chris that I’m that unimaginable person now with no musical taste.

I can keep up with the conversation about what Steve’s calling ‘legacy bands’. It’s not that I’ve listened to any of them recently; it’s just that I can remember some of the music.

“I never saw the Rolling Stones,” I offer, unsure of whether that’s good or bad.

In the hierarchy of musical experiences, there are some things that are unambiguously good: say, seeing Nirvana play in a small club in Seattle. Catching the New York Dolls at Max’s Kansas City. And there are other things that you just know you want to have expunged from your musical permanent record: anything to do with David Lee Roth. Bob Dylan in the late 1970s, when he was in his Jews for Jesus phase. And there are some things that I’m just not sure about.

“I’ve seen the Stones—“ Chris stops to count. “Four times. The last time wasn’t worth it. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were old and just a parody of themselves. But the first time was in 1975. They were just incredible.”

As long as we stick to the far distant past, I can dredge up some comparable experiences. But no-one wants to hear another joke about Keith Richards being the work of a particularly talented and ambitious embalmer. I’m tempted to talk about the time Rock Howard and I saw the Monkees at Disneyland: a show that’s so bad it’s good.

No-one says much about that sacred cow of bands, the Grateful Dead, even though they figured prominently in our lives at Mentor House. Deadheads would camp out in the living room when the Dead were in town, running up thousand dollar phone bills and leaving wafting clouds of patchouli hovering over our beanbag chair. One winter we decamped to San Bernardino, Bakersfield, Sacramento, following the band northward through the center of California and keeping a cold virus alive among us for the entire season. We thrilled to the knowledge that the band had the same rhinovirus we did.

“That liver transplant guy,” Chris says now, referring to Phil Lesh.

Like David Lee Roth, Phil Lesh falls into the unambiguously bad musical experiences. We all dutifully chime in something about Phil Lesh. That Phil’s side projects had always been lame. Someone remembers the name of an unlistenable song he recorded in 1974.

We still refer to him as Phil, as if he were someone’s older brother’s best friend whose dubious musical taste was some kind of inside joke. That somebody’d snort every time the name was mentioned.

Phil. Snort. Phil. Snort.

Have you ever noticed that most peoples’ musical taste is enmired in whatever they listened to in college? Whatever they blasted out their dorm windows on sunny afternoons when their classmates were basking on the lawn?

That’s what I’m afraid of.

You can find these people everywhere: the biker whose bell-bottoms date back to the 1970s listening to the Doobie Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the juke box. “Play Free Bird” they yell at the cover band playing at the neighborhood dive bar. “Play Free Bird!” And you almost expect them to hold up their lit cigarette lighters as if they had been transported in time and space back to the Inglewood Forum.

Oh, most people are more discreet than that, but if you catch the distant jangle of their cell phone ring tone, it’ll give them away every time.

“Isn’t that Smoke on the Water?” you ask a co-worker suspiciously.

Marcia’s phone plays Hey Jude. I can hear strains of Beatle coming from her purse.

I still have a sagging shelf of vinyl records: Allman Brothers, Clash, Dead Kennedys, Jimmy Cliff, the Doors, the Cramps. Utterly predictable. The bursar must’ve issued the darned things on registration day.

I never bothered to convert the vinyl to CDs, so my tiny CD collection is a testament to how little I’ve expanded my musical repertoire in recent years. Stereo Total and Shonen Knife. Beck. The Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I might as well have been in a musical coma for the last decade or two.

How could that be? My MP3 player is my constant companion. Whenever I walk alone or drive alone, I’ve got those dorky ill-fitting ear buds jammed into my ears. The music files are, of course, invisible, since there’s no album covers or jewel cases on my shelves to represent them, just a couple of folders in my file system (and who besides me rummages through peoples’ file systems?).

Fooled you!

I’m not listening to music at all. Rather I’m one of those people who listen to a chaotic, ever-expanding collection of podcast subscriptions. Amateur natterers and small-time philosophizers. Chroniclers of the local bars and Chick-a-fils (or is that Chick-fil-As?). But they seldom play music. And when they do, I fast forward through it to get back to the words, because these podcasters seem to have execrable taste in music. One of them plays Barbara Streisand on purpose, for godssakes. I didn’t know anyone actually listened to Barbara Streisand. I thought she was like Stairway to Heaven—iconic and seriously dreadful.

You’d be better off with Lawrence Welk, his accordion and bubble machine, and his band full of “fine family men”.

When I admit to my friends that I don’t listen to music very often, Mark usually adds, “You can blame it on me. It’s because I can’t stand the music you listen to.”

It’s true that he can’t abide by my taste in music, as stuck in the past as it is. He gets cranky when I put X on the car CD player when we’re on road trips.

“It’s not your fault,” I tell him. “Don’t you think I could put it on my earPod? You wouldn’t have to listen to it then.”

I mean, I could even listen to the soundtrack from Bye Bye Birdie on my MP3 player, and no-one’d be the wiser.

For one term in college I lived across the hall from this guy named Ed Bielecki. Like my parents, he had a reel-to-reel tape deck. But unlike my parents, he used it, and used it often. He played theme songs, hit singles, and commercial jingles in heavy rotation—Gilligan’s Island, the Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction. He’d turn up the volume. And sometimes he’d leave, and leave the tape deck running. He locked his door and left.

Cause we gotta little ol' convoy,
rockin' through the night
Yeah we gotta little ol' convoy,
ain't she a beautiful sight?
Come on an' join our convoy,
ain't nothin' gonna git in our way
We're gonna roll this truckin' convoy,
cross the USA
Convoy... Convoy...

It must’ve been a tape loop. It’d repeat for hours. I banged on his wall with a metal cookie sheet, but he couldn’t hear it. The music was just too loud.

The mate was a mighty sailing man,
The skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.

I wonder if he still listens to the same music he listened to in college. Or has he moved on? There’ve been plenty of jingles and theme songs between then and now. Maybe he’s full of secret regrets.

It’s late now. Steve, Kathy, Chris, and I have been drinking from two bottles of single-malt scotch.

“I didn’t like Stairway to Heaven even back then,” Steve says.

“I didn’t either,” I say.

election day stunner

Election day was stunning in many ways.

I need not comment on our President-Elect: I went down to Castro and Market on election night and felt the buoyancy of the human spirit. What lies ahead—after the initial euphoria of having elected the intellectual, thoughtful, and sentient candidate wears off—remains to be seen.

In fact, I feel a little sorry for incoming POTUS 44, but I am relieved beyond measure to entrust the failing economy, the disintegrating environment, and several unnecessary wars to him. If anyone can take care of this mess, Barack Obama can. His will be a presidency consumed by repairing the rampant damage wrought by Dubya's eight-year-long frat party.

Dubya's one of those party boys who, instead of vacuuming the cigarette ashes out of the rug and cleaning the stalactites of pizza cheese out of the oven, burns down the house when he moves out.

Hey, if you're not going to get the deposit back, might as well do some real damage.

Party hearty, Dubya!

Nor need I comment on Prop 8. It is shocking that so many voted to incorporate blatant discrimination into California's constitution, but others have reminded us that this fight has just begun. We should never be cowed by this vertiginous blending of church and state, by sanctimonious homophobia.

And Sarah Palin? Her willful ignorance and wanton assault on the English language have been dispatched back to Alaska. Mooses, on your guard! Wolves, run and hide! I can only hope that she's as appealing in the rearview mirror as she was when she was in the news cycle's headlights. She will, at least, be well-dressed for her return.

But really the most stunning thing about election day was our refrigerator's reaction: the election killed our refrigerator.

I'm not sure whether it was exposure to CNN's feckless holography, the mildly unfunny Comedy Central election coverage, or the implicit threat of Ms. Palin at the helm that killed our largest of large appliances.

All I know is, the day before the election, our refrigerator kept things cold. The day after, not so much. Or at all. To cool down the refrigerator, you'd have to cool down the house and leave the refrigerator door open.

It's funny: I would've thought that I'd hardly miss the refrigerator. As cerealtarians, we really only need enough refrigeration to keep the milk cold. The average hotel mini-bar refrigerator would surely suffice for us. Just remove the Jack Daniels and Gordon's Gin miniatures, and it would be good to go. I thought I'd never miss that hulking Frigidaire Gallery Series Side-by-Side. Not me.

But I do miss the refrigerator. I miss it a lot.

Actually I don't miss it. And that's part of the problem. It's still in the kitchen. Big as day and twice as ugly as a Jagermeister hangover. A hulk of an appliance.

Damn you, Refrigerator! Damn you!

How did they even get that thing in the house? This Frigidaire Gallery Series Side-by-Side is BIG. And I have to admit, upon closer inspection, it's none-too-appealing either. I've left it uncleaned for too many years. There are bits of onion skin everywhere. Evidence of past condiment spills. Remnants of vegetables gone to liquid and soy milk turned solid. Traces of leftovers lubricate the removable—and presumably washable—shelves.

Okay. This is not the first refrigerator to give up the ghost. This is a problem that can be solved with the gleeful application of money. We're still working; we have money.

What kind of bait do you use to catch a large appliance? A fistful of major cards, that's what!

Last time I had to buy a refrigerator, the whole affair was reasonably simple. Refrigerators belonged to two species: the side-by-side kind that you bought if you were a breeder living in the suburbs or the kind everybody else had with the refrigerator compartment below and the freezer above. Because people had learned their lesson from the excesses of the 1970's color palette (Harvest Gold or Avocado Green, anyone?), the only appliance color that made sense in those days was white. Because Signature Gourmet Coffeemakers are offered in Black, I could extrapolate that now refrigerators must be available in black too. That was the extent of my refrigerator knowledge.

And where did you go to buy a major appliance in those simpler times? Sears. Anyone with a modicum of sense hauled their sorry butt down to Sears, plunked down their Sears Credit Card, and said, "I need a refrigerator right away. It's an emergency. That one will be fine."

Oh, sure, there'd be the usual delivery snafus, but unless you went wild and got a refrigerator with an automatic ice maker, there wasn't much to it. A couple of beefy dudes would haul an impossibly large white box up your staircase, around a corner, and into your kitchen. Some molding would be knocked off and some walls dinged. Then they'd plug it in. It'd get cold and that'd be that. Done and done.

Of course I've conveniently forgotten a past trauma or two.

Like the time that we discovered that the warmth of the old refrigerator's coils had attracted a nest of extra-large cockroaches (Texans call them water bugs). The brown bugs were numerous and athletic, even vigorous. This was in Pasadena in the mid-1980s, when Van Halen was Van Halen and roaches were roaches and you didn't have to pay to get rid of an old dead refrigerator. You'd just leave it on the sidewalk and little kids would come around and use the thing as a fort or something. You'd hope they had the great good sense not to close one of their number inside. If they did, well, it was Darwinian.

Anyway, we had lived for many months with a blissful lack of awareness of our roach roommates. They were quiet and by-and-large invisible during the daytime, comfortably ensconced in the back of our refrigerator. But then the fridge stopped working and we'd arranged to replace it. We were hefting the broken refrigerator down our narrow front staircase (actually Mark and a friend were hefting; I was watching and offering helpful comments) when, to our horror, a broad river of roaches came boiling out of the back of the refrigerator and up over the top of it.

Really. A literal river of roaches. They were big. They were brown. They were legion. And there's not much you can do about zillions of roaches climbing all over you when you're carrying something heavy down a steep flight of stairs.

I still shudder when I think about it.

But that was many years ago in a place far away.

Because we're more sophisticated now, and because there's no Sears in San Francisco, we actually started with the idea that we'd shop for the fridge locally. I can't recall how I found House of Louie, but I do remember that it sounded appealing, not at all like an appliance store, but rather like a cheap Chinese restaurant, the kind that still uses lots of MSG. A place that serves good wonton soup and pressed duck. The reviews in Yelp were comforting; they reassured me that even though House of Louie had a reputation for only serving Chinese-speaking customers, that reputation was wholly undeserved:

"I am an old white guy, and they took GREAT care of me. I will go back next time I need something. So there!"

Recommendations don't get much more convincing than that. To House of Louie we went.

House of Louie is just what you'd expect in San Francisco. A modest urine-soaked storefront South of Market, and a showroom packed with $8,000 Bosch, Viking, and SubZero refrigerators. A young Chinese couple conversed with the salesman in rapid Cantonese. We wandered, pulling open refrigerator doors and checking out specs and price tags. The salespeople ignored us.

The thing about refrigerators is that the price tags and specs are inside the things. So you investigate them one by one. There's some suspense. You pull open the heavy door—and—will it be an $800 refrigerator, a $2,500 refrigerator, or an $8,000 refrigerator? They all look the same inside except for the price.

I mean, how creative can you get when you design a refrigerator?

Nonetheless, after I had opened and closed every refrigerator door in the showroom several times, I was ill-convinced of House of Louie's ability to provide me with a satisfying refrigerator buying experience.

But now that I'd seen a large number of refrigerators in the flesh, I could retreat to the comfort of online shopping. No-one was stopping me from going to the virtual Sears that has set up shop in my very own living room.

And this is where trouble began.

We are in America, and what we have is choice. Choice! Lots of choice! A surfeit of choice! Did you know that Sears has more than 1135 kinds of refrigerators in 7 basic styles?

I moused here. Clicked there. Answered a questionnaire. Watched some videos. Did a couple of side-by-side comparisons. Checked specs.

French doors. Bottom freezers (is that like walking in an ice storm with your pants off?). Water dispensers on the outside. Water dispensers on the inside. Ice dispensers. Is that a skating rink I see in the lower compartment of that SubZero?

And yes: in the end I made a spreadsheet. One with prices, dimensions, makes, capacities, model numbers, and notes.

You learn a lot of things when you put refrigerators into spreadsheets. One is that it's still pretty hard to tell them apart. They're all almost the same. The more research I did, the more confused I became about what to buy.

Virtual Sears had defeated me. I returned once again to a local appliance store, ABC Appliance this time. Every Yelp reviewer loved this place. Loved it!

Good old Abe from ABC Appliance has been running this business for over 50 years! says Andrew W.

Good old Abe! I felt better already, much less overwhelmed. Here I could buy a refrigerator. It would be homey. They would invite me in for pie. I'd become a close personal friend. Good old Abe.

So I called them.

"Hi," I said, "I'm looking to buy a refrigerator. Mine's broken."

"What brand are you interested in?"

I didn't know. I'd seen an LG at House of Louie, and I liked the design of its handles. They were nice. Sleek. LG sounded modern. And cheap too. But House of Louie had only one LG refrigerator available, a floor model, pre-broken. So LG was the first brand that I asked after.

"We don't carry LG," the voice on the other end of the phone growled at me.

"Um. Okay. Why not?" I asked.

"Because they break down all the time. And when they break down, you wanna know where the parts come from?"

"Where?"

"Korea. That's where! It takes forever. That's why we don't carry LG."

"Well, what brands do you recommend then?" There was a slight tremor in my voice. I was daunted by this guy.

"GE is good. And KitchenAid."

I sorted my spreadsheet by make. GE. "Can you give me a price on a GE refrigerator?"

He sighed. "Which one. I gotta know which one, lady. There are a lot of them."

"Oh, I have a model number right here. P-F-S-S…"

"I don't have time for this right now. Call me back tomorrow," he said. And then hung up.

Even though I'd been rebuffed, I felt pleased: he'd let me in on a bit of arcane appliance knowledge. GE. I'd buy a GE refrigerator. And Mom had recommended GE too—both Abe and Mom thought GE refrigerators were reliable. You don't get much more authoritative recommendations than that. Consumer Reports, eat your Nader-esque heart out!

I was refortified. I'd call my local Sears and apply the Safeway wine buying algorithm (you buy the bottle with the largest discount whose original price is between $10 and $20. In other words, you'd buy the $13 bottle of wine with the $5.50 discount rather than the $10 bottle of wine with the $3 discount, even thought the second is cheaper than the first). It's an algorithm that sometimes results in bringing skunky bottle of wine to a dinner party, but at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you got a great deal on it.

Refrigerators aren't exactly like wine (for example, wine isn't available in stainless steel, and refrigerators don't have tiny bubbles). But it still seemed like a good strategy.

And using the Safeway wine algorithm, the choice was dead-simple. By my reckoning, I wanted the GE GFSL6KEXLS, a monster of a fridge. French doors. 25.8 cubic feet of refrigerated space. It was a GREAT deal. At $1,445 it was practically free.

I called the Sears at the Tanforan Mall and told the salesguy my story, how I was without a fridge, and how I needed one by Thanksgiving. It felt almost as compelling as that story that they tell on TV Xmas specials. You know, a holiday weekend is approaching. All the hotels are full, even the skanky Holiday Inn with bedbugs. This nice pregnant lady and her boyfriend need a place to stay. And it turns out all happy and stuff, with a certain amount of singing and incense burning.

"And I want the delivery guys to take away the old unit." I said after I’d procured the GFSL6KEXLS.

"Okay, ma'am. I've checked that box," said my new BFF.

Simple. As simple as that. You just check a box, and the old dead refrigerator just disappears.

"Is delivery next Wednesday all right?" he asked.

I assured him that it was, that it was more than all right: it was perfect. That'd I'd be home and waiting.

"You'll get an email that will act as your receipt. Anything else I can do for you today?"

"No thank you," I said. "You've been incredibly helpful. Really you have!"

"Thank you for shopping at Sears," he said. It even sounded sincere.

Ha-ha! I did it! Score! I gave myself an imaginary high-five. I bought a refrigerator. I navigated an unimaginably complicated purchasing process, one in which I had to choose among 1135 options. I bought a major appliance!

I was indeed pleased with myself.

That euphoria lasted more than 24 hours; it lasted until the email from "Support Representative" appeared . In fact, it even lasted a little bit longer than that.

I scanned the delivery order. "***PLEASE NOTE," I read aloud. "Sears is unable to install to LP (liquid propane.)"

"Ha!" I said to Mark. "Good thing we don't have liquid propane!"

My glee was short-lived. "Hey. Wait a minute. You know what it says here? The merchandise is scheduled to be delivered to the delivery address on 11/29/08. What's with that? 11/29 is a long time from now."

Mark goes, "You better call them then. Didn't you say it was coming next Wednesday?"

My mood darkened as I prepared to call my Support Representative. Her name was Pravina P. and her phone number was 1-800-349-4358. But Pravina P. didn’t say to call her if I had any questions; rather I was to call 1-800-732-7477 if I had any questions. And in the next paragraph, Pravina P. somewhat ominously added that if I had any questions about the scheduled installation, I was to call 1-800-326-8738 ext. 4389.

This soup of unrelated 800 numbers confused me. Which one should I call?

Surely there had been a mistake. Maybe they didn't like delivering large heavy appliances to San Francisco, a city of steep hills and switchback streets. Maybe I'd gotten a homophobe who had voted yes on Prop 8 and recognized my Castro zip code. Maybe I shouldn't have revealed the number of stairs from the street to the kitchen. Or said anything about Mr. Roper, our territorial neighbor who chases delivery trucks off of the easement we use as a driveway.

The 800 number that I’d chosen at random had a voice recognition system.

"Which department may I connect you with?" a preternaturally cheerful voice asked.

"LARGE APPLIANCES." I said, loud and clear. I don't think of myself as a mumbler, but in cases like this, I take out all of the stops.

"I hear that you said MEN'S JEANS. If you did not say MEN'S JEANS, please press 1 for more options."

I pressed 1.

"Which department may I connect you with?" the voice was forgiving. The voice was going to give me another chance.

"LARGE APPLIANCES." I said it a little bit louder and a little bit clearer this time.

"I hear that you said MATERNITY. If you did not say MATERNITY, please press 1 for more options."

I pressed 1.

"Which department may I connect you with?" the voice said pleasantly, as if our past interaction had never occurred.

"FUCK YOU." I said very distinctly.

"Connecting you with a customer service representative," the voice said, unperturbed.

And I told my whole sad story to a customer service representative. I said that I was certain there was a simple clerical error at the root of this misunderstanding, that I had been promised a delivery date of Wednesday the 19th of November.

The customer service representative was cooperative. We agreed that I certainly did need a refrigerator sooner rather than later, and that the 19th was a perfectly reasonable delivery date.
"I'll change the date, ma'am. Expect a call the night before to reconfirm your address and finalize the installation details," said my newest friend.

"That was easy," I said to Mark after I'd hung up. "No problem. It was evidently just a clerical error. Got it changed back to the 19th."

But on Tuesday, the Sears installation guy who called Mark told him he'd be out to plumb in our new refrigerator on the 18th. He said that he'd be out even though it looked like our refrigerator wouldn't be delivered until the 29th. It never hurts to be ready for the arrival of a new refrigerator.

Mark called me as soon as he’d hung up.

"The 29th?" I said. "The 29th? You heard me talking to the guy. I'm sure he said the 19th."

How much of our lives is spent in abject frustration while we navigate labyrinthine customer service systems? These Sears reps had learned to mumble their names so they never had to speak to the same frustrated customer twice in a row. Should it have surprised me that no-one was able to do anything about the revised delivery date? I went back and forth through cycles within cycles of transfers to among the three service departments; they tossed me among reps in an afternoon-long game of hot potato.

"The computer won't let me change it, ma'am" said one of the reps; this seemed to be the story they were converging on. Were they prison labor? I couldn't find it in my heart to abuse them or to ask for a manager. We were playing by Lord of the Flies rules: there were no managers at 1-800-349-4358. Eventually I gave up and called the Sears store I'd called in the first place.

This time I reached Brandy. I liked Brandy right away; Brandy was a sympathetic listener and a sensible girl.

Brandy, you're a fine girl/What a good wife you would be/But my life, my lover, my lady/Is the sea.

Brandy was not a nay-sayer, not by any means; Brandy was a woman of action. Brandy was not going to let me spend Thanksgiving without a new refrigerator in my kitchen.

She said, "You know what I recommend? I recommend you cancel this order and buy another refrigerator."

I was afraid it would come to that. "I don't know," I said pathetically.

"I can help you do that," she said.

"Aw, let me try to change the delivery date one more time," I said.

"I can transfer you. But you call me back if you need to buy a different refrigerator," my new friend Brandy told me. With that, she transferred my call.

"Which department may I connect you with?" the preternaturally cheerful voice asked.

"Arrrrggghhhh!" I hung up the phone. Hard. I couldn’t go through this again. I'd been on the phone all afternoon.

My mother is an expert in dealing with situations like this. I asked her what to do.

And so I found myself calling GE. "Is there anything you want to tell me about model GFSL6KEXLS?" I asked a cheerful GE consumer helpline representative. "Anything at all?"

Yes, in fact, there was. I had ordered an imaginary refrigerator. "It'll be a month or more before you get one of those," the rep told me. She agreed with Brandy; Brandy is a girl who knows her stuff. "I suggest you buy a different refrigerator," the GE rep said sunnily.

The next day I was talking with my neighbor Evert.

"Where did you buy your refrigerator, Evert?" I asked him.

"Cherin's." he said, "But that was ages ago."

"Well, we need a refrigerator. Like, right away."

"Everyone goes to Cherin's. Just don't let them talk you into a SubZero," he said.

Cherin's. Why didn't I think of that? I'd walked by that place countless times and although it never looked particularly inviting, appliance stores rarely appear to be the kind of place that you'd spend idle hours browsing.

I walked out of Cherin's several hours later and several thousand dollars poorer, with a delivery promised for Thursday. Done and done. I was afraid to congratulate myself this time.

Now I had three refrigerators. Big ones. Two new ones; one old one. Two hypothetical ones; one actual one that was beginning to smell pretty rank. I could weld them together and they’d be as large as the average graduate student apartment. Perhaps I could rent them out.

In case you're wondering, last Thursday I got my happy ending. I waved an unsentimental goodbye to the smelly old nonfunctioning refrigerator. A big snappy new stainless steel beast with a heart of ice is in place in our kitchen, just waiting for a midnight Safeway run. Soon I’ll have put the magnets and photos back on the non-stainless side panel; Alicia Tam will once again be the queen of my kitchen and American Express will be the official sponsor. Aging photos of Susie, Beth Ann, and Nephew Dave in his Boy Scout uniform with his pre-orthodonture teeth will go up too.

And come January, we'll have a guy in the White House who I wouldn't mind having a beer with.

Hey, he can even come over and drink it at my place. The new fridge has room for a couple of six packs of next to the bottles of Cristal. Maybe there'll be some weddings again by then.