Limbo

Last night I met a friend in Union Square. We were going to a rock show at McCaren Pool in Williamsburg. He was still dressed for work.

“I forgot to think about my lack of rock attire this morning,” he said as we approached the venue. He was wearing a dress shirt and tie.

He was self-conscious, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. Yes the crowd consisted mainly of hipsters in street clothes. But it was dark and we were outside. There were a few other people who looked as though they too had come straight from office jobs.

He was in limbo, my friend, in a state of mind resting halfway between the serious and fun parts of the day.

Limbo is the most uncomfortable state of all. Just like on the dance floor. Not so natural.

Take the first part of this week. My head was transitioning out of laid-back, no alarm summer state into getting up early and thinking about work school year one. Unsettled and antsy.

But when I got up this morning and headed off to the subway I felt, for the first time in days, a little more settled. There were some boring meetings in the a.m. and then another in the p.m. But then we were done at 3.

Not so bad, I thought as I walked home. And just like that my limbo state of mind started to dissipate.

Two months of freedom are over for another ten.

But then again so is the limbo.

Little grimy crabs

They came with one of the courses my date and I shared at a Japanese place in Gramercy last night.

"These are all the rage these days," he said as he took a bite.

The course itself was a sort of fried crab popover. The plate was adorned with spinach leaves in a sweet brown sauce. Then on the side of the plate there were these tiny crabs.

"You eat 'em whole," he said.

I'm from Maryland. I cannot refuse a crab product. Still, these looked nasty. I mean, soft shell crabs are one thing. They're heaven-sent, if you ask me. And I've seen a look not unlike the one I had on the faces of others who've never tried soft shells as they've eyed them for the first time.

"Go ahead," I always say, "You won't regret it."

And they never do.

But I didn't have a good feeling about these suckers. Still I forced myself to take a deep breath. I went in for the kill.

Sure enough, my Maryland-bred instincts had not led me astray: the mini crabs were hard, sandy, and tasteless.

I looked around at my posh Manhattan surroundings, my adult home, and for a moment felt very much in touch with my roots. But then I looked back at my date, a nice guy looking to make a good impression.

I smiled.

"Fabulous," I said.

Television

In my new apartment there's a flat screen TV equipped with cable and a DVR recorder.

This is a big deal for me. In my old place I had an old TV that I never, ever turned on.

There was no cable. Once, when my Dad visited years ago, he insisted I go out and buy rabbit ears so that he could get decent reception for a final four game. They remained there for years and served as a conversation piece at parties.

“Are those … rabbit ears?”

“Why, yes. They are.”

“Wow. Do you read by candlelight at night?”

Sunday night when I got back from the beach I decided I wanted to watch “Welcome to the Parker,” the fabulous new show on Bravo that everyone's talking about. My brother had stayed in my place a week prior and set the DVR to record it.

There was one problem, though: I had to figure out how to use the remote control.

This is no simple task in the age we live in. I stared at it for a good five minutes feeling helpless and dumb.

But assistance in the form of an instruction booklet sat nearby. Things still didn’t gel right away. There was a snag getting the ordering of the ‘Power’ and ‘System Power’ buttons straight. I got lost in the nether regions of the 1000s channels.

By last night, though, I was able to program my DVR in under 5 minutes.

This morning I woke up and watched last night’s Daily Show over breakfast. I deleted it when I was done because that’s what you do, see. You delete recorded shows when done to make room for new ones.

And they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Sunny Came Home

They were playing “Sunny Came Home” in the nail salon yesterday. I always loved this song. It’s positive and a little tough.

I had had to make a hard call earlier in the day. And, as so often happens with these things, as soon as I made it the universe seemed to open up and embrace the decision. I got more writing done than I had in a few days, when other things had been pulling at my psyche. A great weekend plan came together.

It reminded me of a similar situation I was in a few months ago when, as soon as a big and tough choice was made, stuff in my life came together to support it.

Choosing well can mean not necessarily mean choosing easy. But it can force you to really look, and really see. And that, I think, is pretty awesome.

Wilmington airport

In Wilmington airport Thursday morning there was a cinnamon sticky bun flavored coffee. This struck me. I mean, French Vanilla or Hazelnut, sure. Old hat. But cinnamon sticky bun had quite the exacting air to it.

Over the entrance to the airport is a sign that reads 'Welcome to Southeastern North Carolina.' Three years ago, when passing through this airport, I ran into one of my first roommates from the city.

He now lives in Los Angeles where he is a big producer. His family was renting a beach house on the coast of North Carolina. He had flown in from Los Angeles for a few days to visit.

Little airports like this can tell a lot about the world we live in. There's cinnamon sticky bun flavored coffee. There are Hollywood hotshots visiting family in podunk towns.

There's the glass case that displays a grisly assortment of contraband items on aircraft. One would expect to see tweezers and nail scissors in this case. After all there are still people who forget that they cannot take these things.

They were there, in one corner. But there was also a collection of more, shall we say, obvious items, such as pistols, brass knuckles, various daggers and clubs.

"Are you serious?" my brother said when we first arrived at the airport, "You can't take those!?"

Due to the way the ferries run between the island in North Carolina where we were staying and the mainland, I had about an hour and a half to kill in this airport before my flight home took off Thursday morning. I wasn't looking forward to it. Talk about a boring airport to be stuck in, I thought.

But once there, cinnamon sticky bun coffee in hand, the place began to grow on me. Sort of like an old house with exposed beams, this tiny little airport had a soul to it that isn't so easy to find in mega-modern strip mall airports.

So I hung there for that time, and got into it. And then, a few hours later, I was back home.

Golf

This morning I played for the first time in a year. At the beginning of last summer I had gotten it into my bonnet that I would learn how. I did a clinic at Chelsea Piers. The guy I was dating at the time and I made some trips to the Par 3 in Wainscott.

By late August, when I visited my Dad and stepmom in North Carolina, I was able to hold my own for 9 holes. Hold my own being a term, mind you, subject to much interpretation, but not make a complete stinking shame out of myself all the same.

Then a year went by when I got busy with writing and another boyfriend and an apartment purchase and a move and all of a sudden a year had gone by and I was in North Carolina once again and I realized that it had been one calendar year since I last played a round of golf.

Last night my Dad took me to the driving range before dinner so we could get a little practice in before this morning’s round. This was after an afternoon during which everyone else napped and I rode my bike and went to the beach. I was sapped. Balls were going here, there, and everywhere but not exactly where they were supposed to go. I had a bad feeling about our morning round.

But then I got a good night’s sleep. I had a piece of sourdough toast with Bing cherry jam. I realized that the worst case scenario for this golf game in reality was not bad at all.

I had after all originally taken up golf for occasions such as this: days with the family wherein I’d prefer to be playing a sport over having the same arguments that tend to surface, or rehashing the same themes. Because the one undeniable thing that everf family has is a history. This is neither bad nor good but really ultimately what it is and along with it there does tend to be some historic things that resurface.

So I took up golf. And this morning, while there were moments of frustration and more than a handful of bad shots, there were also four hours in the sun with my family where for the most part we laughed and got along well.

Hole in one.

Color Blind

My Dad does not have good eyesight. A few years back we were in Costa Rica on vacation when he backed up into a coke truck.

“Where’d that come from?” he said.

“They’re easy to miss,” my stepbrother quipped.

At the time my Dad was weeks shy from getting laser surgery on his left eye. It is an eye that has been plagued by both glaucoma and cataracts.

Even prior to these ailments my Dad’s eyesight was far from perfect. He’s color blind. A childhood memory is my Dad coming downstairs first thing in the morning holding up ties and shirts and asking us if they matched.

“No,” we would all say.

The clash of colors would be immediately clear to my visual mother. She would send him back upstairs while yelling out what he should wear instead. Or she would just put down whatever she was doing at the moment to go upstairs and lay his clothes out herself.

The clash of colors would be evident to me, now a bit of a fashion buff but in those days most definitely not. It would even strike my brother, then not a design-conscious person, now not a design-conscious person, and, my guess is, when hell freezes over, still not one.

But my Dad never saw it.

Thus it was with a touch of joy that I watched my Dad emerge from his room this morning in our beach house in North Carolina wearing a pink and purple tie-dye shirt with ‘Wesleyan’ printed on front (my brother’s alma mater) along with orange and brown flowered surf shorts.

My stepmother laughed out loud. My brother and I looked at each other, smiled, and said nothing.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Announcements

For a solid hour Friday morning I could not get through a sentence. This is because I was in an airport. I was headed to Wilmington, North Carolina, along with my brother and his longtime girlfriend. I had not seen them for a while. We had a lot to catch up on.

But as we sat at the gate at 7:15 a.m., waiting to hear our boarding call, coffee in hand, minds just beginning to function, we literally could not get through a sentence without getting interrupted by another announcement.

There would be an announcement for a flight that was boarding. It would end. We would say two words, and then there would be an announcement from TSA about airport security. It would end. We would nervously begin our sentence again, only to be interrupted yet again, by another flight announcement. We laughed at it. it was funny, for sure, but there was hostility beneath them giggles.

Once on the place something in a Times headline made me want to tell my brother’s girlfriend a story. I turned to her, began, and then they began the in-flight security announcement. I stopped speaking. The announcement stopped. I began to speak again and amazingly, the announcement began as well.

Welcome to the communication age.

The ring game

When my friends and I picked up dinner at the Fish Farm in Amagansett we were starving. We'd been at the beach all day and then at happy hour at Cyril's.

The guys in the group hauled the large metal pot to the car. Inside were four steamed lobsters, fours mesh bags of steamed clams and mussels, four ears of corn, and a half dozen steamed potatoes.

The car immediately took on the smell of a clam bake.

"Yum," we said.

Back at the house we spread everything out on a platter. When we realized we had no lobster crackers someone fetched a set of hedge clippers. Small obstacles were not going to get in between our late summer feast and us.

A couple hours later we were sated and ready to move on to the next venue of the evening, Murf's, a bar in Sag Harbor renown for its ring game. In this game participants take a metal ring suspended from the ceiling with fishing wire off its hook on the wall. The object of the game is then to stand in the middle of the bar and release the ring so that it swings back onto the hook.

This is an interesting game. The first time I played it last summer I kept aiming the ring at the hook and missing wildly. Then a man came up next to me and said, "Just let go."

I was confused.

"If you just let go of the ring," he explained as he took it from my hand, held it, let go without the slightest bit of effort, and then watched it land perfectly on the hook, "it goes onto the hook."

Why do so many great secrets of life boil down to these three words?

There were a host of things I was considering writing about for today's blog. Ideas build up when I go a few days without blogging. There was the fact that the clam bake smell in the car, so enticing when we were hungry, quickly grew noxious when we re-entered the car to go to Murf's a few hours later. We screamed and raced to roll the windows down.

There was the reading I dragged a friend to Thursday night and how, just when I thought she was going to shoot me because the first two writers were so boring, a funny and totally memorable one got up to round off the night.

There was the joy of chasing down the Heeb sandwich at Russ and Daughters that I read about in Time Out first thing on a weekday morning.

There was my friend stopping someone with MD plates in the Hamptons to ask them about his blood sugar levels.

"It was 163!" my friend yelled through his open window.

"I don't know Route 163," the good doc said, and drove away.

There was so much, in fact, that I was feeling stressed about how to compress it into one blog.

But then I thought about the ring game at Murf's.

Voila.

Flying pigs

A few years back my brother and I were waiting in line at Port Authority. We were on our way to Jersey to visit my Mom.

About ten feet away a vendor was selling plastic pigs with wings attached. They had strings on top and batteries inside. They could be hung from the ceiling and, once the switch on their side was flipped, would appear to be flying.

My brother bought one. On the bus ride out to my mom’s he turned to me.

“Early birthday gift,” he said. He handed the pig over.

I often think about that moment, about how calm he was and about how quickly time can elapse between impetuous action and reasoned response.

For years the flying pig sat, in its box, in my closet. Once I considered incorporating it in a lesson plan but then, at the last moment, decided not to.

When I was packing up my old apartment prior to moving I came across the flying pig. It ended up in one of the garbage bags.

Monday night after BINGO my friend and I were headed home when we impetuously decided to have a final round in what turned out to be a lesbian bar.

And there they were, hanging above the bar: dozens of flying pigs identical to the one I had only recently left behind in the trash bin of 12th street.

Last night my brother came in from LA with his girlfriend. In his honor we had a family dinner at my mom’s place in Jersey.

While we were having cocktails, one of my aunts told a story about how in her twenties she used to play harp and sing at weddings. She says the day she knew her career in entertainment was over was when she shared the stage with a chimp on rollerskates.

"They were all the rage at weddings in the 70’s," she explained.

There wasn’t a definitive throughline from flying plastic pigs to chimps on rollerskates at 70's weddings. Yet I saw one.

It went back to something my friend said the other night at the lesbian bar in the moment after we realized what kind of bar it was.

"It's good sometimes," he said, "Just to enjoy the experience of life. Don't you think?"

What's in a name?

I played BINGO with my friend the other night. On the back of his board someone had written 'Liz was here.'

I have preset ideas of how a person with a certain name is going to be. Take a guy named Jesse, for instance. Have you ever met a Jesse who worked as an investment banker? The two I know are rock 'n rollers.

Max's are interesting. Ladies with androgynous names like Regan and Taran are over achievers, athletic, and cool. Missy's and Marnie's? Watch your P's and Q's, boys.

Of course there are exceptions. My two friends named Tiffany are accomplished and independent. They don't vibe with the antiquated feminine tone of the name. But, they are, in their pursuits of interesting life paths and their fearless way of going about them, a lot like each other. And this in turn leads one to believe that old school Tiffany is so old school that it has now in fact become new school.

Have studies been done on the patterns of namings? I suppose there is a logic to it, a way of looking at what kinds of parents choose what kinds of names and how that in the end affects the generalized personality traits of people with those names.

It could all be quite scientific, ultimately. And then again maybe not.

Leak

I was at the register at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble yesterday when I felt a drop of water on my head.

I slapped at it. It's in your mind, I thought. Then it happened again.

I looked up. There was a leak coming out of the light fixture above the register. I looked at the woman behind the counter.

"There's a leak," I said. I pointed it out.

She handed me the credit card receipt to sign and said nothing.

I signed and then felt another drop. I handed her the slip.

"There's a leak," I said. This time my tone had a question mark at the end of it.

She shrugged.

"I know," she said.

I took my books and left. Back out on the street I thought about the exchange. How odd. She knew and apparently did not plan on doing anything about it.

But as the afternoon wore on, I began to see the logic in her approach. It's not like there were any books directly under the leak. No merchandise was being harmed.

Really only jaded urban customers were getting small pricks, little wakeup calls to the unpredictability of life. A life that, once you think about it, is full of leaks. We're constantly trying to repare them. And then, just as we do, a new one always seems to spring up.

Perhaps every once in a while it isn't such a bad idea to let one go.

AC

Prior to the dinner when my mom told me I should think about writing a will (see previous entry) she and I were in my new place. She pointed out that one of the air conditioners does not work.

In reality I'm not a big AC person. I prefer open windows in the summertime. Between this and having been away a lot since moving in I had not noticed the non-functioning AC.

But I should have caught it on the walk-through.

"Is it really not working?" I said and poked it.

You can only imagine what my Jewish mother had to say about this.

The contractor was there while my mom and I were having the discussion.

"Yes," he said, "It's never worked properly."

I was unimagineably thrilled that he waited until my mom was around to announce this.

She frowned. Mentally I added the price of a new air conditioner to the long list of costs for my new place.

The contractor came back yesterday in order to put one last plate on the wall. I gave him his check.

Then, as he was preparing to leave, the contractor got an idea regarding the AC.

"Let's switch the bad one with the one in the loft," he said, "That way the main room will be cool and the air will travel up into the second level space."

The plan took about twenty minutes to excecute. Twenty minutes of hauling two dirty metallic boxes out of walls, of having important papers laying mere feet away come perilously close to getting doused with built up condensation, twenty minutes of nearly herniating several discs moving said units up and down the loft stairs.

But then it was done. My apartment felt cooler instantly. And, miraculously, In the city of New York, a contractor had done something for free.

Intestate

My mom can be a little quirky.

I was away at college my freshman year when Sunny, the golden retriever I had for fourteen years, died in her sleep. My mom called to tell me. I cried.

Then my mom said, "I took pictures."

"Excuse me?"

"Of Sunny. After she died. Because you loved her so much."

"You took pictures of the dead dog?"

"I didn't know what to do."

I thanked my mom for the sentiment but said I was pretty sure I wouldn't be interested in seeing the pictures once they were developed.

A month or so later I was home from school and saw a stack of newly developed photos on the counter. I began flipping through them. There were Thanksgiving pictures, summer pictures, party pictures, and then there they were: pictures of my late dog Sunny.

It didn't click at first. Well now that's a strange position Sunny's in, I thought. Why would anyone take a picture of her while she was sleeping? Then I remembered.

Oh no, I thought. I stuck the picture at the bottom of the pile. But there was another photo of deceased Sunny from a second angle. Then there was another. And another. Four pictures in total of my dead dog.

Last night my mom took me to a fancy dinner to celebrate my birthday. After we ordered the first course she announced that she thought it was high time I write a will.

Haaaaaaapy birthday.

"What would happen if I got hit by a bus tomorrow?" I asked.

"You'd be intestate. We'd all fight over your apartment and other holdings."

Which got me to thinking about how in a way the word intestate sums up being single in one's thirties. There are different forces pulling at you. Settle down, it's safer. Stay free, it's more fun. Live here, live there. Do this, do that. Throw it up in the air and see where it lands.

I might just remain intestate for a little while. I think it suits me. Then again I might give in to the haranguing of a certain pint-sized Jewess with the same last name as me and write that will.

Choices.

Birthday

I once said that every time August the 8th came around I would listen to The Sugarcubes' "Birthday."

I had it on cassette tape. But then I kept forgetting to do it, misplaced the tape, found it, and then forgot to do it again. Now it's been a few years since I've listened to it. And it's already August the 9th. Listening to it is mute for another 364 days.

Such is life.

But remembering that I once said I would do it made me think about the transient nature of birthdays. For periods of my life they were marked with animal-shaped cakes and theme parties, then by late nights in bars, then group dinners to the hottest new restaurant and then, more recently, by a newfound ambivalence, a need to be quiet about it.

For all the transience, though, there are constants. There's a new digit added on every year. There's a tune I'm pretty much guaranteed to hear.

And there's something beautiful, really, about honoring another year of experience and all I got from it. It isn't always how I look at aging it our wrinkle-obsessed corner of the globe, but getting wiser is every bit as much a part of a birthday as everything else.

Which brings me to the final constant: the people I do end up seeing and connecting with on my birthday year in year out. Days like birthdays tend to weed out the transients from the constants.

But the constants, they're the real gift.

Full circle

Life has a funny way of coming full circle.

(I once swore to a friend I would never begin a blog entry with the words “Life has a funny way…" Never say never, I always say.)

It seems to happen right when I’m looking for a nod from the smog ridden skies above.

Tuesday night a friend organized an outing to a new, Texas-style barbecue restaurant. It's a fabulous place where slabs of meat are served on waxy pieces of paper, heaping sides of bourbon mashed sweet potatoes and mac 'n cheese are scooped into cups, and dessert is massive cupcakes with Reeses Pieces sprinkled on top.

But the interesting thing, for me, was that this place just so happened to be across the street from a restaurant where I went a month ago. It was on a night that started something that just so happened to have reached a, I suppose you could say, point of consideration, that very day.

Pure coincidence.

Or so they say.

One call cancel

Even in this age of automation, certain processes remain antiquated.

Sunday my friend got her purse stolen in East Hampton.

This alone is a jaw-dropper. But then she had to go about tallying and canceling everything that had been in the purse. I went through the process a few years back when my wallet got stolen. It was a massive pain but it was also during the summertime. I had time to do it. My friend had to call in sick to work.

She canceled her credit cards. She went to the DMV to get a new license. She explained to the parking lot guard in Atlantic Beach that the pass she paid $270 for was stolen and she needs another.

She discovered, in the process, a host of fun facts such as that the prompt one needs to enter for a lost or stolen card is last on the menu for most credit card companies. Or that often one can get disconnected midway through a conversation with a credit card company employee about the lost or stolen card.

All of which got me to thinking about how useful a one-stop service for these types of situations could be. The credit bureaus have all of this information on file anyway. Why don’t they have a service wherein, when one gets a purse or wallet stolen, they call it and for a fee of say, fifty dollars, get all their credit and bank cards canceled?

In fact such a service not already existing is a little strange.

Perhaps that's a good thing, though. If there are things such as this that obviously could help people and haven't yet been tapped, just think.

What else is there?

To sir with love

I had the best celebrity sighting ever yesterday in Amagansett. If you were sitting in front of me right now I’d make you guess.

I’d say, “Very very famous musician.” From that you would then, through a series of yes-no questions, narrow it down to Rock ‘n roll, British, and over 50. Then you would guess Elton John and I would say no. Then you would guess Mick Jagger and I would say no.

And then you would just know.

Right?

But then again maybe you wouldn’t.

So I would push my disbelief aside and throw another hint your way.

And then, really, you would know.

Dreams

Every once in a while I get a flash midway through the afternoon of a dream I had the night before.

For the most part, though, I don’t remember my dreams.

I’ve always been in awe of people who roll into breakfast and recount long detailed dreams as if reading from a book.

Friday morning all I could remember was that I dreamt about a variety of things. I could not, as usual, remember any of them.

Then at breakfast something uncanny happened. A woman in the house I was staying in was talking about unconscious things people in share houses do that may or may not piss other people off. The example she pointed to was how sometimes people walk through a house more loudly than they realize they are doing. And then suddenly I remembered my dream from the night before. I was walking through a loft with my shoes off and someone else in the loft told me to walk more quietly.

Now one would think that given my dream and the comment of my breakfast companion that the day before someone had been making a lot of noise while walking around our house.

But this had not been the case. Not in the slightest.

Which leaves one to wonder about the subterranean connectivity of it all.

That is if you believe in such things.

Stop here

The days I head out to the beach always devolve into a mad rush. It's the combination of putting a multi-use weekend bag together by a train-departure dictated deadline and the need to, in addition, get all weekend errands done by that time.

Yesterday was no exception. I decided to go out a day early. As soon as I did I remembered all I had to do before leaving town. It had, after all, only been a few days since I returned from Virginia.

There was a stack of laundry to tackle and some boxes in my now stressfully messy bedroom to unpack. I needed a pedicure. I had to coordinate with a messenger coming from my former lawyer’s office who had a refund check (see ‘Pennies from heaven’ for details) for me. Finally my phone charger had chosen that morning to break. The phone was almost dead. There would be no where to replace it out east and a weekend out there without a cell phone means already difficult to make connections would now be impossible.

However as the day ticked on and I raced through my things to do list, it became more and more apparent that I would not have time to go to the Sprint store in Union Square.

The phone, as if reading my stress level, began to beep ominously as it neared death. Battery Low, Recharge Soon, it read. If only I could, you pint-sized Jewish mother you, I thought.

At 3 p.m. I was done with everything and had to be out the door in no less than five minutes. Well, I thought, this weekend will just end up being a social experiment of sorts.

I told the cab driver to take me to Grand Central and then added, on a whim, that on the off chance we saw a Sprint store en route I would ask him to let me out early.

I live on 21st street and 3rd avenue. Grand Central is on 42nd between Park and Madison. The driver took me up third. It was 3:25. I had to be in Grand Central by 3:30. We were on 41st street and 3rd avenue when I looked out the window and wouldn’t you know it, there was a Sprint store on the corner.

“Stop here,” I said.

A half hour later I was sitting on a train out to the beach, phone charging at my side.

Contractors

Every time I’ve had work done on an apartment it's stretched out for roughly twice the time as that initially projected by the contractor.

The first time I did a renovation was on the bathroom of my old place on 12th street. The workers broke ground on September the 10th, 2001. The next day the world changed. This combined with the fact that I lived below 14th street made what was supposed to be a weeklong job a month-long one.

The work I’m having done on my new place consists of a paint job, installation of a flat screen TV into the wall of the living room, and the fitting of sconces into the bedroom wall. It was supposed to take three days. That was two weeks ago.

The paint job and installation of the sconces happened relatively quickly. But then there was a hold up with the electrician coming back to put the flat screen TV in the wall.

He finally showed up this week. Then, just as the TV got mounted and I began to see the light at the end of the paint can and wire-ridden tunnel, the head contractor informed me that he needed to order a wire to complete the TV hookup. The complication stems from my desire to have the DVD player and cable box on the other side of the wall as the TV.

However, as with most difficulties in life, there was a silver lining: I got to change my mind. About the color of the closet doors in the living room. About getting the steps to one of the terraces painted. I even found something the painter had, due to the way they close on one another, neglected to paint on a closet door in the bedroom, and had him fix it.

Strangely, even big inconveniences can work out, in the end. Just as long as these contractors finish in the next week.

Medallion Guarantee

Recently I had to submit some paperwork having to do with a mutual fund in my savings account.

I called the mutual fund a few weeks ago, asked them when I needed to do, did it, and mailed everything in. Then I got everything back in the mail yesterday along with a note saying that in fact my signature would need to be accompanied by a Medallion Guarantee stamp from my bank.

A notary I had heard of, but a Medallion Guarantee? What would they think of next?

I added it to my list of things to do for the day and along with it a mental note of aggravation. What if my bank doesn't have a 'Medallion Guarantee'? Why isn't a notary good enough? More importantly, why does it seem like, when it comes to financial institutions, things are much, much more complicated than they need to be.

I was pleasantly surprised then when I entered my bank, told them what I needed, was told they could do it, and was out of there in under ten minutes.

In addition, there was a note of kismet to the proceedings.

As he was looking over the document I needed the stamp on, the bank employee smiled and looked up at me.

"I just shredded some of your files this morning," he said.

Exactly what a girl wants to hear when she enters a bank.

"Don't worry," he continued, reading my expression, "It was from an account you opened here a long time ago. We go through old files and shred them once a month. It's just a funny coincidence that I happened to have had yours in my hands this morning."

Medallion Guarantee or not, at least we're not always a number.

Out of the Box

Monday morning I saw an Amtrak cop at Union Station in DC riding around inside the station on a Segueway. This struck me as wrong for several reasons. None objective enough, however, to intellectually defend.

And really what's the harm in a cop stepping out of the box from time to time? Sometimes it's not until one steps out of the box that he or she can truly understand.

Take for instance my current experience with guitar lessons. Back in the day when I was a rock 'n roller I used to come up with all sorts of wacked-out chord progressions and rhythms. I was self-taught. It was all a big experiment.

Since it's been a few years and I never felt like my technical skills were up to snuff anyway, I signed up for guitar lessons this summer. Just for fun. And interestingly enough for the first few weeks of class I was a bit of a thorn in the side of the teacher when it came to falling in line with traditional rhythms and progressions.

"Did you take Beginner 1 & 2?" she asked last week.

Well, no. But I did put out two albums...

Perhaps the lesson then is that it may be easy to step out of the box when you're in it but once you're out of it, it's pretty difficult to get back in.

Which begs the question of whether or not our friend the Amtrak cop will ever be able to walk the beat again.