Disliking Sweets

There are people out there who don't like sweet stuff. I find this very odd since I love sweets, but I also take some small amount of comfort in it. I find it comforting when I encounter something that I and several other people like, say a trashy detective novel, and then a bunch of other people I know and respect say terrible things about the book I like. I think, you know what...there are people in the world who don't even like candy, how could I expect everyone to like this trashy novel? 

Idiot Rules

The guy who runs the front desk in my building at work won't let us take our bikes up in the passenger elevator. It's nice because I've become privy to the secret lives of the others in my building by talking to the freight elevator crew each day. Though on weekends the freight elevator shuts down, and if I head into work I'm forced into a confrontation with the front desk guy when I try to bring my bike upstairs. I try not to let stupid things like these arguments bother me, but there's something different about this. Perhaps it's that bikes and commuting are involved, two issues where I have strong opinions. But I think it's more petty than that. It infuriates me that this one guy refuses to ever break the rules, even when they're very stupid rules. And even more than that, it means that if I decide to break the rules and walk past him while he shouts at me--then I have to be the jerk. I guess that should make me empathize with him for following the idiotic rules. 

Celebrity Sighting?

I'm not good with faces. Or names for that matter. It's the perfect storm. But sometimes I'll be working out at the gym or walking down the street and think I see a celebrity, but I'm never all that sure since they look smaller, skinnier, and older. So I'll try to stare through my sunglasses or over my shoulder, but the person always notices me looking and I turn away as quick as I can. But then a moment later I'm back to looking again. Not that I'd ever walk up or ask for an autograph or anything, I just want to know if John Stamos is working out at my gym. If it's not him, then it's a pretty depressing state that I'm staring at a guy who kind of looks like John Stamos. 

Early Morning Emails

You have a co-worker who sends an email every time they go in especially early to work. You know who I'm talking about. It's the guy who sends a blanket email to everyone at your office at 7am with some mundane fact no one needed to know. We get it guy, you're at work early. We're all impressed, but we're still all going to look at our watches when you leave at 4pm today. 

The Most Annoying Facebook Habits, in Order

These are the most annoying things that people do on Facebook, in order: 


1. Update their status, "Everything happens for a reason!" or something in that vein. Really? Just tell us what's going on. We're all interested in your misery; it makes us feel better about ourselves. 
2. Saying anything political. Chances are a lot of people don't agree with you; and Uncle Jeff, no one cares how much you love your candidate. 
3. Putting up ultrasound photos of your unborn child. Way, way too personal. This is the only move that gets an automatic "unfriend" from me. 
4. When I'm stalking someone on Facebook and accidentally "Like" their photo. I hope they don't get updates on their phone. 
5. Any social reader that makes me join it to read an article or watch a video. Guys who join those things, you know it posts to your feed every time you watch a video, right? We can all see what you're watching. 

The Blind Barber

The place where I get my haircut gives me a glass of bourbon while I'm getting a trim. It's the best idea ever. Not just because it turns what is otherwise a rather dull experience for me into something enjoyable, but because I always tell them I like my hair after they're done. Then a couple hours later after a shower and a cup of coffee, I realize that they left it way too long. Instead of going back into get it fixed, I just live with my mullet for a month and schedule another haircut way earlier than I normally would have. It's good business for them. 

Drive-in Convenience

I love not having to own a car though it is at times, of course, massively inconvenient. Take for example the other weekend where I wanted to get out of town and go for a bike ride. I purchased a train ticket for myself and stuffed my $5 bike permit in my pocket and boarded the train 10 minutes before it left the station. An early-on meant I was able to take over the part of the train with fold-down seats and jam my bike into a corner. In the next ten minutes exactly every single seat on the train filled up, and then as soon as we left the station about 15 more people walked into my car from the adjoining one. And there I stood next to my bike, taking up four full seats. When I say it's inconvenient not to have a car, I mostly mean so for other people. 

Dollar Math

When I can't find a fee-free ATM I'll go to a grocery store and buy a pack of gum with my debit card and get cash back. Between the $2 ATM fee and the $4 my bank charges me for using an unlicensed ATM, it's like I got a free pack of gum and saved another $5. Today the clerk gave me a $50 bill and said she didn't have anything smaller for my cash back. I'm not used to dealing with $50s or ever doing dollar math in these higher denominations. And apparently neither was the guy at the coffee shop. He gave me $12 in change for my coffee, then when I told him I'd paid in a $50 he gave me another $20. It took me a few hours to realize I'd been charged $18 for my coffee. 

Oppressive Heat Wave

We are in the midst of an oppressive heat wave and it's all anyone is talking about. Every winter it gets cold and every summer it gets hot. Knowing this does little to take the shock out when it happens. When I come back into air conditioning from being outside people will breathlessly ask, "You went out! How is it?" And I'll say, "It's not that bad." Because it's not; I was very warm but I didn't see anyone collapsed on the sidewalk from heat exhaustion and none of the stores I'd passed had been looted. When intense heat arrives people behave as if the heat is caused by some kind of radioactive substance and people are melting Raiders-of-The-Lost-Arc-style the moment they step outside. 

The Kitchen Experience

I go to a Mexican restaurant once in a while where you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the tables. I appreciate that the experience makes me feel like I'm part of the Rat Pack back in the golden days of Vegas. The chefs are polite and slide out of your way while they say hello, but it ruins it a bit knowing that everyone else walks through. It's not the exclusivity point that ruins it; it's the knowing that every yahoo off the street, no matter what they were doing five minutes earlier, is also walking through the kitchen where my food is being prepared. I understand that the delivery guys all hangout in there too, but I prefer to be left imagining that the kitchen looks like a bright shining crystal palace where a fairy princess would live. I don't need to see how the sausage is made. 

Getting Away From It All

The mentality of seeing someone else in the backcountry when you're exploring solo is an odd one. When I used to go fly fishing if I saw anyone else on the stretch of river I was fishing I'd think, "No! This river is ruined! Overrun with tourists!" Now when I go biking by myself and see some other solo rider way out in the woods I'm thrilled to make contact. I was puzzling it out while riding along the other day, and my theory on my own feelings is that it all falls back on being lost versus knowing just where you are and what you're doing. Riding along an extensive network of trails entirely new to you, you're grasping for straws--not even sure you'll be able to find the parking lot by the time you're exhausted. But a river is quite different. As long as you stay on the water you'll always be able to find you way back. Plus there's the psychology of the limited space and resources on a river versus the wide open spaces of bike trails. Neither of them are mine to give away or own, but there's a different sense of privacy in the places we go to get away.

Relationship Surprise

My girlfriend will sometimes hide behind a door in our darkened bedroom and then jump out and yell in my face when I enter the room. When I jump back in surprise she acts like it's some kind of triumph for her, but the fact is that if someone doesn't react in surprise from someone jumping at them in a darkened room, it's because they've died of fright. It's human nature to jump back when someone leaps at you, especially when you think you're walking into your bedroom and fumbling for the light switch. If I ever jump out and try to scare her and she stands stoically, unsurprised, then I'll know she's either a robot or an alien, and I'm sure our relationship will take a hard left turn. 

Fire Factor

I came home today to a sign on my apartment building's door and another in the elevator that says, "Attention Residents: The standpipe in this structure is out of service while the new standpipe is being installed." This is the first sign I've ever seen posted in the elevator or on the front door, so it would seem that it's of some importance. I thought it may mean that we wouldn't have any water, but the water worked fine. So I looked up "standpipe" online and it turns out that a standpipe is what the fire department uses to put out fires in apartment buildings, so yes, it is rather important. What the sign is really saying is "Attention Residents: Please don't start this building on fire today." 

Work Pictures

One of my first copywriting jobs was writing short bios for everyone who worked at my gear shop. I asked all of them to bring in pictures so that we could hang them on the employee wall next to their bios. My friend Zack's photo was of him deep in concentration, his face pressed against a rock and hand on a tiny hold while he bouldered. Until you looked closer at the black-and-white photo and noticed a Pabst Blue Ribbon can, seemingly defying gravity, and sticking straight out of the wall. Only the careful observers would note that Zack's concentration was so pure that a fly had landed on his face unmolested. And only the most astute would realize that we'd actually turned the photo 90 degrees, and that Zack was actually lying face down on the rock asleep and not actually climbing.

College Rooming

During a summer internship in college I left town and rented my room out to some guy I found though the online student listings. He was obsessed with his car, a new Mitsubishi Gallant, and he'd just told me and my roommates he was saving up for a neon license plate holder for it. So, basically, not someone too like minded. But he had cash so I let him take the room and left my friends, his new roommates, to sort it out. I never saw him again, but he lives on the lore. The guy who ate all of his meals laying on his bed and would stare at any women who visited our house. The man who would race his car on the back road by our house but lost to every single challenger. The same guy who hugged my friend's new boss when they randomly encountered him on the street years later. I'm not sure where the legends end and the stories begin, but I am thrilled I could be a catalyst for such memories.

Okay to Eat

A lot of food goes bad in my fridge while it's waiting for me to eat it. Sometimes it's an expensive block of cheese and more often things like carrots or celery. I buy this stuff thinking I'll change my diet and start eating healthier food if I keep it around, but it always ends up in the trash after I rediscover it in the back of my fridge four months after buying it. The other day I bought a piece of corn to add to my dinner, and when I got it home I found about half of it covered in a mysterious pink color. I have no idea what it was, but in general it's a bad idea to vegetables that are an unnatural color. So I treated it like I would a big hunk of cheese that had grown some mold, and I sliced off all the pink then cooked and ate it. What I need is a guide for what kinds of food are okay to slice off the nasty parts and still eat. I'm thinking about taking a piece of bread from my fridge right now and tearing off all the mold. It'd look like a piece of Swiss cheese, though I suspect it won't kill me if I toast it.

Cat Allergies

I like cats, in theory. I've never been able to get close enough to one for any extended amount of time to find out if they have any kind of personality. I have bad allergies. Cats are one of the only domestic animals that a lot of people really hate. Sure, some people also dislike dogs, but they're not so vocal about it because dogs are so well loved that they don't want to come across as soulless jerks. And based on casual surveys, it seems to me that about half of the people I know are allergic to cats. So just why are so many people allergic to cats? It doesn't make any sense, until you consider the possibility that cats are imbued with this quality that makes them allergic as a form of self-defense. By that logic, it would be like me having a bunch of poison ivy as a houseplant. Except instead of having half of the world allergic to it, 99% of them would have to suffer its unpleasant effects when they visited my house.

For the Love of Garlic

I love garlic, but last night I overdid it. I ate an entire heirloom-tomato-sized bulb of cooked garlic in the course of about an hour. It was delicious, but I could tell I overdid it because the next morning my toothpaste tasted like garlic. I could smell my breath no matter how much mouthwash I used, and I'm pretty sure I could pick up the tepid smell of cooked garlic on my skin. In an effort to get rid of the smell, I went to the gym in the afternoon and ran for a bit to work up a sweat and then I sat in the steam room for about 20 minutes. Usually the steam room smells like eucalyptus. When I left it smelled like someone had used the room to cook a world-record size dish of broccoli rabe with garlic. Though I'm still glad I got the recipe for cooking my own bulbs of garlic at home.

Visiting the Water Park

I used to go to a water park once a summer with my family. They had a lot of waterslides and go karts, but their oldest attraction was a zipline that lacked any safety features. You'd just sit on the edge of the platform and hold on until you hit the end when you'd get flung into the pool below you. My first experience on the zipline, the five kids in front of me in line fell off the zipline the moment they left the edge. Sitting at the back of the line, you couldn't see that they were landing somewhat safely in a pool. Watching one after another fall to an uncertain crash landing was really exciting but filled me with a minor amount of dread. When I got to the front of the line and took a seat on the edge, I noticed that the pool extended well below me, and when the attendant handed me the zipline I handed it back to him and just jumped. I'm pretty sure this is exactly the kind of thing Helen Keller was talking about when she said, "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Communications Among Cultures

I've been working with a woman in the South while doing my small part to plan my wedding. She's very nice and very helpful, but she prefers to communicate over the phone instead of by email. The first time she called me, I answered twice and she hung up right away. The poor woman couldn't understand anything I was saying and assumed that she had the wrong number. I've since changed my phone number, and today she sent me an email (for the first time) saying that she'd called my old number a couple times and left messages, but someone named Rosalio called back to say she had the wrong number. We got on the phone finally and proceeded to go down my list and hammer out a few important details. At the end we recapped and everything was perfect. Then her assistant sent me the updated invoice and everything was wrong. The issue isn't one of competence, it's a linguistic divide that we're having trouble bridging. At this point I just hope we have the date right.

French People

People in France have a reputation for being jerks. Most of the French people I've encountered have been very pleasant. But I can see how people get the impression that the French are jerks. There's a certain confidence in the way they behave that some may mistakenly interpret as arrogance. I was discussing it with a friend the other day, and a man we'd met and spent some time with there came up. We agreed that he didn't posses that air of confidence, he was a simple jerk no matter what yardstick you used for comparison. It's nice to be able to agree that some people are just idiots free from any prejudice.

Water Pressure

Something happened to my shower head and what used to be great water pressure became a meek trickle that made it impossible to wash shampoo out of your hair. I tried fixing it to no avail and assumed that the cheapskates in my building had lowered our water pressure to save money on the monthly bill. In my frustration to fix it, I ripped the entire shower head off, and wow, what power. It was like get hit with a sandblaster. Granted, you couldn't control where the water sprayed so within moments my small bathroom was an inch deep in water, but those few moments were glorious.

Email Auto Populate

I'm terrified of the auto populate function in email addresses. I've come too close to sending out sensitive material to the wrong people on many occasions, and once I even made the mistake and sent an email with photos of my girlfriend to my company's entire marketing department. That incident culminated in an rather embarrassing day in the office with lots of nice "congratulations" emails, but I know more of the large marketing staff thought I was a serious weirdo. The only mass emails you're allowed to send at work are pictures of your newborn kids, which is really unfair to those of us who don't have kids.

Being Recognized

It's not often that I run into strangers who read this email. It's happened a few times, but it always comes up in the course of a conversation about what I do for a living. Only once has a stranger approached and asked me if I'm the guy who writes LiquidAstronaut.com. I told her I did and we engaged in an awkward conversation about how she recognized me through mutual friends. I was moving the next day, and about an hour after bumping into her I headed to a bar across the street I'd always meant to visit but never did during my time in the neighborhood. I racked up the pool table and knocked the balls around by myself for ten minutes, and then she walked in. She stopped to say hi, and I invited her to play pool. With great reluctance she did, lamenting that she's terrible at the game. She proceeded to beat me three games in a row. Sometimes I cherish anonymity.

The Internal Conversation

There's a non-stop conversation with myself taking place in my head. Sometimes I move my lips, and when I think I'm alone I'll often catch audible whispers. The most inconvenient is when I walk into the restroom and work having a conversation with myself at audible levels and then I discover someone else is already in the restroom. The best exit I've found is to begin humming as if I was singing a song to myself instead of just chatting away. And when someone's locked in the stall and they've overheard me, then it's like a race to use the restroom, wash my hands, and leave before the person comes out and sees me. In those cases I'll also wrap up my internal conversation as quickly as possible without being rude.

Police Work

I interned at a small town newspaper in the rural Midwest right out of college. One day while I was sitting in the newsroom a call came over the police scanner: A guy carrying a handgun had been chased by the cops into a home. The house was near our offices, so we arrived just as police pulled up and set up a perimeter, maybe 10 minutes after the call had come in. We spent another half-hour waiting for the SWAT team, then about another hour as they decided to shoot a gas canister in. When the smoke cleared and the suspect still wasn't there, they decided to go in. Half an hour later, they went in and found the gun on the floor and the back door of the home swinging open. They scheduled a hasty press conference in the alley behind the home, and we stood next to a dumpster while they urged caution and told us they would continue searching the neighborhood. We returned to the office to write the story and didn't hear until several hours later that they caught the guy. He'd been sitting at the bottom of the dumpster where they'd held the press conference. Two weeks later the police sent up a helicopter to look for an old man who'd gone missing at the mall. He was found a couple hours later sitting on a bench in the mall.

That's How I Was Raised

I walked all over a suburb of Ft Lauderdale in Florida the other day and listened to nothing on my headphones but Hall & Oates---the classic, super smooth yacht-rock duo. It's one of those strange combinations that so ideal it's impossible to ignore. Every time I looked down during my walk I was surprised to see shorts and tennis shoes instead of white pants and loafers. No matter how much time I spend in this region of the country, I doubt I'll ever see it differently. Whenever I see a once very modern house that's now a few years old, I'll describe it as a "Miami house." I have no idea why, especially  considering that South Beach has such well preserved examples of Art Deco architecture. Perhaps it is this mentality that people are trying to describe when they say something idiotic and then defend it by saying, "That's how I was raised."

My Screaming Kids at Home

I'm one of those annoying people that shows up for flights three hours early. If I leave my house and only have two hours to spare I get sweaty and nervous and look at my watch every few minutes. My friend Nate on the other hand plays it fast and loose. The last time he came out to visit me the counterperson wasn't going to let him into the airport because the plane was taking off in a few minutes. He told the lady his kid had been screaming when he left, and she let him through and he made the flight. Now, Nate doesn't have kids, but I commend him for using that excuse. Why should people with kids get all the breaks?

Reasons to Call in Sick

In sixth grade health class I did not yet understand the meaning of a hangover. We had a test on substance abuse and one of the questions was whether it would be acceptable to call in sick the day after a night of heavy drinking if you were throwing up and had a headache. I said it was and my answer was deemed incorrect. I raised my hand to argue the point in class. If you were throwing up and incapable of going to work, what did it matter how you got sick? It's not like you're forbidden to call in sick after shaking some obviously sick guy's hand and then putting your hand in your mouth moments after. I was pretty good at arguing in middle school, but that was one I lost. Though, knowing several health teachers now, I bet my health class teacher secretely agreed with me back then.

Camp Phone Calls

I used to volunteer a week each summer at a local camp that I attended as a child. During one of my weeks I had some duties to attend back at my real job, so I sought a small office in the mess hall. I walked in carrying my laptop and flipped on the lights and there was a camper in there. He looked at me and said into the phone, "Gotta go mom," then hung up and walked out. I jumped at seeing him and apologized and backed out of the room. I'd walked about ten feet before thinking, "Wait a minute..." Kids are forbidden from calling home without approval, but this one bold kid had found the only unattended land line in the camp and had been using it to dial home. I went back and he was already gone. Thank god, I hate dealing with disciplinary things at camp.