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(No) Crash–

I would like to take a moment and issue a note of solid gratitude to the motorists of Massachusetts for managing to go five solid days without hitting my car. I applaud your attentive vehicular operation and all-around roadway decision skills — my dinged and scratched VW Jetta is grateful for the respite, as well. Let’s see if we can go another 5 days without me calling an insurance company and/or the local police.

My boss came into work a little bit late today after being held up in traffic on Route 2. “It was a car fire,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you in the office.” She paused. “I hate to say this, but I saw the car fire and I thought of you.”

I nodded. “These things do happen in threes,” I admitted. “And a car fire would be the logical progression.”

I’m beginning to detest owning a car… but then again, if I didn’t own a car, I wouldn’t be able to commute to my near-dream job. And as Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

Nietzsche also said “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Presumably, Nietzsche has never been in a car fire.

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By Meredith – May 20, 2010

The Real World, Mars Edition

In Moscow, six men from Russia, Europe, and China are preparing to be locked up in an isolated and confined space for the next 520 days during with they will conduct countless scientific experiments. It sounds like some wacky, Soviet-style reality TV show plot, but no, this is a simulation that will test how humans would cope with the mental and physical demands of what is now a wholly theoretical space mission to Mars (here). Sort of putting the cart before the horse, but whatever, this sounds like a good time.

What would you do in the days before you were to be locked up in a mock spacecraft with five strangers of the same gender for the next 520 days? Me, I would roll around in a grassy field and bask in the sun, like a dog. Then I’d go on a chocolate, cheese, and unoaked chardonnay binge. After some flagrantly quality time with Mr. P, I’d smoke a pack of cigarettes, since there’s no opportunity for me to get addicted. Finally, I’d go to some type of a major league sporting event in order to nurse loathing for the common man and his crude, hollow pursuits — a Jets home game would be perfect. Only then would I be ready for the Mars endurance experiment.

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By Meredith – May 19, 2010

The Hit and Run

Last week I blogged about how I almost got in a car accident. Several days later, I actually got in a car accident when a redhead in a red Jetta gently rear-ended me on Route 2. So I blogged about that car accident. Then, last Saturday, guess what happened? Yes, another car accident! There seems to be a psychic facet to my blogging. Perhaps I should apply these newfound superpowers by discussing imminent world peace and miraculous stock market rebounds, but I feel a moral obligation to blog about my second car accident because it involves the police and a contrite SUV owner.

Though I was clearly not at fault for the first car accident, Mr. P seemed convinced that I did something to trigger the rear-end collision. Such is any husband’s confidence in his wife’s driving abilities. “Did you brake suddenly?” he asked.

“No, I wasn’t moving,” I said.

“Did you start to move and then stop?”

“No, I was stopped for about a minute.”

“But the cars in front of you were moving, and you didn’t start moving when you should of?”

“No, darling. Nothing moved except that girl’s Jetta into the back of my Jetta!”

I escaped any such scrutiny for the second accident, because when it happened we were in New Hampshire, hiking on the Greeley Ponds trail as our car waited patiently for us at the trailhead. It was a cloudy Saturday in the White Mountains with spats of drizzle and wind gusts, so we choose the mostly-flat trek to the ponds as an appetizer to our historic Bondcliff hike the next day. Despite the weather, we were pensively merry as we skipped through the woods and reminisced about some of our more notable hikes — our ill-prepared tramp to Mt. Garfield, the spectacular sky that greeted us on Mt. Moosilauke, the agonizing wall-like trail on which we ascended Mt Hancock. We discussed our favorite hikes (Carrigan, Madison, Bond) and our least favorite hikes (Cabot in torrential rain and Owl’s Head— fuck you, mountain.)

A short, older man approached us on the trail, and I flashed him a genial smile and a “Hello!” He returned the greeting, and then asked “Is that your Volkswagen Jetta parked by the trailhead?”

Panic pounded in my brain. I mean, there’s no possible good reason why he’d be asking this. He proceeded to explain that a black Jeep had backed up into my car, struck the front bumper, and simply drove away. “There’s not too much damage,” he said. “Just some scratches and a small dent in the fender.”

The panic blossomed into full-tilt rage fueled by powerlessness and confusion. Such was my state of mind that I barely heard this wonderful, wonderful man as he proceeded to explain that he got the license plate number of the Jeep and left it on my windshield. I should have dropped to my knees and thanked him for his supreme civic manners, but my mind fought to really make sense of the situation, and I barely thanked him before we hurried the 1 mile back to the trailhead.

We tried to call the cops from the parking lot, but T-Mobile didn’t feel like letting us, so we drove into the town of Lincoln and found the Police Department. We were a little nervous barging into the police department to report the accident, but we shouldn’t have been, because the minute the policeman heard that we were reporting a hit-and-run and that we had a license plate number and witness, he was positively radiant. This was excitement! It turns out that vehicular hit and runs (called “Conduct After Accident” in New Hampshire) is a misdemeanor and an arrest-worthy offense. He issued a regional BOL (a “be on the lookout”) for the Jeep and assured us that he’d find the guy — “He’s probably going home right now, thinking about his dinner, but we’ll get him.”

All this excitement! Of course, the next day after the police tracked down the driver of the Jeep that hit my car, he claimed he didn’t even realize he hit my car. And since he was driving a Jeep Patriot — a veritable tank– I actually believe the guy. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a middle-aged dentist with a really swank suburban Boston address, and he’s terribly, terribly contrite about the whole incident. So while I could press to have this guy arrested and charged with Conduct After Accident, as long as he’s paying to have my car fixed, I can’t be that sadistic.

So that was my second accident in 1 weeks time. They say things happen in 3s, so I’ll hold off getting my car repaired for at least another week…

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By Meredith – May 18, 2010

Bondcliff 4265′

It’s over. We won.

Having attained the summit of Bondcliff this morning via an 18 mile hike in the windy sunshine, Mr. P and I have finished our dogged years-long quest to hike all 48 mountains in the White Mountain 4000 Footers (here).

Where’s the champagne?!? Oh, we already drank it on Bondcliff. Fuck yeah we did.

And so our 4 1/2 year long journey came to an end. 48 mountains. Hundreds of miles spent trudging through the forest, sometimes deep in conversation, sometimes with me practicing my French on a captive native audience, sometimes enjoying the resolute silence of the trees. Thousands of rock slabs, rock slides, rock steps, and rock piles. Scores of energy bars. Dozens of brook crossings — only one unsuccessful. A couple of moose. No hypothermia or skeleton injuries. More laughs than tears, but more sweat than anything.

So when we reached the summit of Bondcliff, we were so ready to unloosen the cork from the champagne bottle. We were celebrating the accomplishment of a long-term goal, but we were also celebrating that we were no longer beholden to The List. Now we can choose hikes because they are scenic, or because a hiking group is going, or because we did the hike before and we want to do it again. No more choosing our hikes based on a somewhat arbitrary criteria that involves a mountain of a certain altitude. Maybe we can even go hiking in Maine for a change. There’s fourteen 4000 Footers in Maine…





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By Meredith – May 16, 2010

The Accident

Teach me to go blogging about near-miss car accidents. Tempting fate, really, as I haven’t been in a car accident since I was a 16 year-old neoteric motorist and I backed up into some dumb bitch housewife in the parking lot of the King of Prussia mall. Then again, there was that decade of non-driving between the ages of 22-32 during which there was a spate of almost-collisions between my body and cars, my bike and cars, and my body and bikes. Life is dangerous, but why dwell on it?

I was on Route 2 West, headed to work after an invigorating morning at the gym where I was coerced into taking the 7:30am spinning class at my gym, which is tucked in the suburbs amid an upscale office park of global headquarters for various multi-national conglomerates. The median age of gym-goers is around 45, with the young corporate hotties intent on ideal physique balanced by the aging entrenched C-level folk intent on living forever. Normally I find a stationary bike in the corner and pour over the New York Times, but an ardently amiable acquaintance from the locker room insisted that I try out the morning spinning class. I’m totally jaded when it comes to spinning — I’ve spun with the best, so it’s hard for me to be impressed with a shrill woman in her 20s, wailing motivational epithets to a room full of aging, flappy upper-middle class white people while Salt n Pepa’s “Push It” blares at ear-bleeding decibels. For this, I give up a morning with Paul Krugman?

I was listening to Howard Stern on Sirius. Ever since college, I’ve gone through phases where for months at a time I’ll be a devout listener until Howard’s puerile immaturity starts to peeve me and I begin to wonder why I’m wasting my allotted time in this world listening to an egomaniac pontificate about his scatological and sexual obsessions. But Howard Stern has matured in recent years; his show is scads funnier now that he’s not hemmed in by the FCC, and his material seems more deliberate, more honed. Also…no Stuttering John! Ha-ha-hallelujah.

Route 2 is a highway peppered with traffic lights as it passes through Concord. I was stopped at a traffic light, fiddling with my touchscreen radio to find some music while Howard went to commercial, when my car gave a solid shook, not unlike when I throw it into 3rd gear instead of 1st gear and it disapprovingly stalls. I glance at my dashboard, wondering why I stalled, and see that I didn’t stall at all. In fact, my Jetta was very gently rear-ended… by another Jetta, no less.

As I said, I’ve never been in a car accident, so I didn’t know what to do. I jumped out of the car and examined my bumper. There was no structural damage, but I spied a scratch. The other driver, a young redhead in her early 20s, was saying “I don’t know what happened, it just started moving!” I ignored her; we were, after all, standing on a highway and traffic was zooming all around us. “Let’s pull over at that gas station,” I said, jumping in my car, memorizing her license plate number, and calling Mr. P all at once. It’s not easy to drive stick shift and talk on the phone at the same time. “Someone hit my car, what do I do?” I cried. He ordered me to get a whole slew of personal information– address, phone number, insurance, VIN, driver’s license number… I hung on him to shift into second gear.

Turns out, the girl who hit me was an old pro at this. She handed me a piece of paper with all her information on it. “Can I have your driver’s license number?” I asked her, and she looked at me like I was crazy.

“You don’t need that!” she exclaimed, jumping into her 2005 red Jetta and waving. A redhead in a red Jetta. She looked pretty wild. I bet she was texting when she hit me.

Later that day, the insurance company sent an appraiser to examine my bumper. He found a single scratch and valued the repairs at $250. I probably wouldn’t care except… the car only has 8k miles. I want to preserve its newness as long as possible.

(“May all your accidents be that small!” a wise woman remarked…)

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By Meredith – May 14, 2010

LOLPat(riot)s

Found here… good if you need a laugh, or a loud smile.

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By Meredith – May 14, 2010

Don’t Ask, Tell, or Let the Souffle Fall

On Monday, President Obama announced current US solicitor general Elena Kagan as his pick to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (here), setting off the usual storm of partisan commentary that rages whenever Obama does anything more substantive than play a game of basketball. And as the media debates whether Kagan is an activist elitist liberal academic radical or a cautious centrist pragmatist, secondary prurient speculation seethes about Kagan’s sexuality — perhaps as a proxy wrangle for Kagan’s rather obscure judicial opinions. Kagan may have a thin paper trail, but she’s 50, unmarried, opposed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as “a moral injustice in the first order” (here), and damningly has played softball as an adult (“I fully expect the White House to push back and claim Kagan never played softball and that it’s a smear to insinuate she did,” said Chris Barron, founder of the conservative gay group GOProud, here). And of course, there’s Kagan’s hair, which in some pictures appears to be the practical career-woman crop and in other pictures looks like an earnest dyke haircut.

But the impact of Kagan’s sexuality on her performance as a Supreme Court Justice is neither here nor there; since the media is grasping at straws to prove sapphic tendencies, it’s obvious that Kagan has kept her private life — whether homo-, hetero-, or asexual — firmly private. Clarence Thomas had a proclivity for  inter-office improprieties, yet he’s ruled consistently like the conservative nut we knew he’d be back when he was nominated.

Meanwhile, as bloggers painstakingly analyze Kagan’s fashion choices for clues (pearl necklaces=straight, bulky blazers=gay), another member of the Obama Administration totally outed himself in today’s New York Times… in the Dining Section. Yes, White House Pastry Chef Bill Yosses is gay (here): “A gay chef is no longer news, but it is still rare for those who work in the White House to speak publicly about being gay.”

The fact that there’s a gay man working in the White House kitchen is a potential powder keg of controversy for Obama. Nevermind that Yosses was appointed pastry chef by Laura Bush in 2007, it is Michelle Obama who continues to knowingly allow a homosexual to be in charge of the White House desserts. Not only is the stomach a direct route to a man’s heart, it’s also a pathway into his brain. What better way for the gays to infilitrate and influence the policies of this government than through puff pastry and tiramisu? No wonder Obama’s appointing a lesbian to the Supreme Court… he’s been eating gay cheesecake.

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By Meredith – May 12, 2010

Sunday Salutations

Mostly-crappy weekend weather had me taking multiple trips to the yoga studio to milk my $50 unlimited month-long membership before it expires. I’ve attended 8 classes so far, meaning I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth since the going per-class rate in the Boston area is $14-17. But I’ll pass on the $105 monthly membership because driving to this Davis Square yoga studio has become the bane of my existence. For now, I’ll continue to poach introductory “new student” offers at area studios — hopefully ones with better parking.

On Sunday, I wasn’t the only person looking for a sheltered place to do Sun Salutations. The 9:30am class was already packed by 9:15am. Three times I moved my mat to eek out a few inches of free space so someone could unfurl her mat. I felt very un-Zen for irkly noting that the front of my mat was centimeters away from the back of a mat upon which a tall, hairy man in baggy gym shorts fought to touch his knees. I know I’m progressing in yoga because it wasn’t the prospect of catching glimpses of his fleshy, woolly body parts that bothered me — I’m so focused on my body and my breath that I hardly notice my classmates. Unless, of course, I get kicked in the head during three-legged dog pose.

I don’t get distracted during class, but before class, I totally check out my fellow yogis. My stealthy gaping probably stems from my own cluelessness about how to occupy myself before the instructor takes command. Many people lay down on their mats with their legs either in bound angle pose or full-out savanasa, but I can’t bring myself to do this when my morning energy is jangling like a slot machine. Some people are stretching or even doing pose sequences, which is sort of like snacking on bacon before a roast ham dinner.

I can’t help but to assign some meaning to a person’s choosen pre-class activity: What does it say about you and what you’re looking to get out of the yoga experience? Are you gung-ho about flexibility and muscle tone? Or is yoga your time to redress stress? Once I sat kitty-corner to a woman who was taking advantage of being barefoot and idle by peeling dead skin off the ball of her foot with a serene, blissed out look on her face. Obviously, her mind was on a higher plane.

This may well be my last class at the fancy Davis Square yoga studio. I sit cross-legged, my spine drinking in one last slouch, my palms planted behind my hips. I watch the women tip-toeing around the studio, looking for vacancies.

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By Meredith – May 10, 2010

The Toilet Toiled

Today our landlord Sasha installed a new toilet in our apartment. A few weeks ago, Mr. P had mentioned to him that our former toilet required near-daily plunging to deal with clogs resulting from wholly normal toilet usage. “And so he said we’re getting a new toilet,” Mr. P told me.

“Huh,” I said. In our two years of living here, we’ve never complained about anything; I hadn’t realized that Sasha was so attentive. “Next time you talk to him, could you mention that the refrigerator makes excessive humming sounds? And the stair runners are starting to fray at the edges? And I have to pull down the shades two or three times before they stay down?”

The truth is, Sasha is the most fabulous landlord I’ve ever had. His vigilant maintenance has made our apartment extremely livable. Our rent is dirt cheap and, after the initial year-long lease ended, we enjoy a friendly month-to-month agreement. He supported our efforts to start a vegetable garden in the backyard by allowing us to turn a huge swath of grass into a patch of dirt. Most of my previous landlords have been greedy, neglectful misers who think of their apartment solely as a cash-generating investment. Sasha, however, bears consideration to the fact that his rental property is also someone’s home.

Sasha is an immigrant from Croatia in his 70s who works as a carpenter (non-retired) and speaks rough English. When we initially rented the apartment, we dealt with Sasha’s son, who placed an ad on Craigslist and probably feared that his father would succumb to internet scum. The apartment was vacant when we looked at it; Sasha undertook extensive upgrades after the previous tenants moved out, replacing the floors and installing new windows. His son was eager to get new people to move in. “The longer the place stays empty, the more work my dad’s going to do on it,” he told us. “It just has to end.”

So I can understand why Sasha suddenly jumped on the idea of a new toilet; our complaint about the constant clogs gave him a reason to complete another property upgrade. Our old toilet was one of those 5-gallon toilets that I think the government made illegal because it so flagrantly consumed water. When flushed, it would sustain an endless swirl as water poured into the bowl, swelling to an alarming height before abating with a cranky gurgle. This toilet really toiled.

Still, one can grow accustomed to a commode, and I felt sort of sad this morning as I “said goodbye” to the old toilet. We left for the day so Sasha could install the new loo — a process that I wasn’t the least bit curious about — and returned this evening to find a stark-white porcelain potty in our bathroom. After being outside for four hours, I was eager to get acquainted with the new toilet. My initial impression is that though the paucity of water in the bowl made me uncomfortable, it flushes beautifully. We’ll see how it holds up under more vulgar conditions.

The old toilet is sitting outside next to the house (see below), waiting for this week’s trash collection. (This brings to mind another story about a toilet sitting on a lawn, but I’ll save that for another day.)

Goodbye Old Friend

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By Meredith – May 9, 2010

You Named Your Baby What?

Brie? Like, the French cheese? Pronounced /bree/ and spelled “B-R-I-E”?

No shit. You really named your baby “Brie.” That’s something I’d name a cat. I knew a dog once named Cheddar. I find it endearing to name pets after foodstuffs. People… not so much.

That has got to be one of the most aspirational White Trash baby names of all time. It rivals Crystal, Angel, and Sabrina for that touch of “I’m gonna name my baby something fancy!”

Maybe Brie will meet a guy named Colby Jack at the bowling alley, and they’ll have a bunch of little cracker babies.

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By Meredith – May 8, 2010