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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
So. I have a bathroom problem.
…
Hey, where are you going? It’s not that kind of bathroom problem, ya squeamish screwjob. This one involves vitamins. And counting. Or the lack thereof.
I’ll explain. And I’ll steer well clear of any toilet-related shenanigans. Probably.
Maybe.
We’ll see.
“One is a daily multivitamin that’s apparently “FOR MEN”, which I suppose means it’s full of iron and steel and motor oil sludge and Vitamin K for ‘Kickass’ or something.”
Anyway, here’s the thing. I take two sorts of vitamins, which I keep in a medicine cabinet in the bathroom. One is a daily multivitamin that’s apparently “FOR MEN”, which I suppose means it’s full of iron and steel and motor oil sludge and Vitamin K for ‘Kickass’ or something. The other I also take daily; it’s a less-complicated — and evidently gender-neutral — supplement.
(All right, nosypants — specifically, it’s a bottle of fish oil pills for heart health.
I know, I know. At my age, I should probably be taking an entire slew of supplementary horse pills to ward off the various nightmares approaching. You probably think I should be gulping down arthritis relievers and hair ungrayers and testosterone boosts and MegaFiberMax and OsteoBoneGroBack and chewable fruit-flavored Alzheimers-B-Gone.
Also, you’re probably a smartass. Nice talk.)
Now, I take these pills every day.
Of course, that’s not “German every day”, which means “every single day at a regimented time, with utmost precision and cold efficiency”. Nor is it, say, “Japanese every day”, or “every single day, the better to maximize physical and mental capability and morph into some supercomputing sumo ninja or something”. It’s not even “North Korean every day”, namely “every single day, or they’ll throw you into a forced labor camp and I’ll bet you wish you had your precious vitamin pills now, eh, insolent pigdog, praise the Leader?”
Rather, it’s “American every day”, which is more like “most days, except on the weekends, probably, and occasionally when I forget or it’s a holiday or something and I’m busy lying on the couch in my underpants watching ‘Archer‘ reruns”.
The point is not when I take these pills, however. Nor how often, nor what flavor ice cream I’m scooping out of the tub with a spatula on lazy holiday afternoons.
(Though for the record, I’m partial to raspberry swirl.)
The point is this — when I take one of these vitamin pills, I always take the other. Without fail or exception. I may forget both, but never just one or the other. Both bottles hold the same number of pills — 200 count. And I start new bottles of each on the same day.
So why the hell do I keep running out of one before the other?
Every time I reach the bottom of one vitamin bottle, there are pills still rattling around in the other. Every time, I’m convinced it’s because i was out of sync the last time around, and kept the extra pills. And every time, I vow to fix the system, so I throw away the last handful of pills in one bottle, so as to realign to coordinated vitaminical harmony.
And every stupid time, I wind up with no pills in one bottle, and four in the other. Or two. Or nine. And I think I’ve gone nuts or sleepgulped or forgotten and kept the extra vitamins when I started the bottles.
(Because let’s face it, on the “American every day” schedule, 200 pills takes, what — three and a half years to finish? I can’t remember things that long ago. It’s not like I’m popping Geritol4Brains over here. Yet.)
But the last few times, I’ve been very careful. The bottles start out even. I make sure not to drop any pills, or accidentally swallow a two-fer, or anything like that. It’s a race from 200 to zero, and it should be a dead heat. But it’s not. It never is.
At first, I thought my wife might be taking the odd pill from me. Because she’s normal, and wouldn’t expect a thing like this to keep someone up at night.
But that doesn’t seem likely — mostly because she’s got her own stash of vitamins, which she keeps far away in the kitchen. And her multivitamin is specifically “FOR WOMEN”, according to the label, so I assume it’s pH-balanced and scented with lavender and compliments her on her slim and attractive esophagus as it slides down the hatch.
In other words, I’d be terrified to take one of her vitamins. I can only imagine she’s as insanely frightened of taking mine. She might grow hair on her testicles.
Also, she might grow testicles. I probably should have put that bit first. If she took my vitamins, she might grow testicles. And then grow hair on those. Both of which are bad, from a womanly point of view. I assume.
Ahem.
The point is, she’s probably not scarfing my multivitamins. And she’s got her own fish pills, too, which probably taste like chocolate or strawberries or a new pair of kicky heels, so there’s no need to come slumming for my fish pills in the medicine cabinet, which don’t taste like any of those things. They taste like nothing. Or occasionally, they taste like fish, which is when you really miss all those times they tasted like nothing.
(And then you wonder why the oil has to come from fish in the first place. Like, why can’t they squeegee the stuff off something tastier, like popcorn shrimp or Canadian bacon or Bar Rafaeli? I’m no nutritionologist. I’m just asking.)
It’s possible, of course, that there really aren’t 200 pills in each of these bottles to start with. I know, I know — if you can’t trust the advertising on a heavily-discounted off-brand drug store bottle of dietary supplement, then what can you trust? Still. It’s possible.
But what am I going to do, count all the pills before I start a new bottle? Please. Two hundred is a big number. It’s practically infinity, and who knows if I’d make it all the way there accurately once, much less twice. Counting that high is for other people — the accountants and fish pill sorters and door bouncers for particularly large clubs of the world.
So the problem remains unsolved. And right now, in my medicine cabinet at home, I have two nearly empty bottles. One with three multivitamins, and another with seven fish oil pills. I don’t know how it got that way. Some mysteries, I suppose humans just weren’t meant to solve.
Permalink | No CommentsI have a request. I need someone out there to start a business for me. Nothing fancy; just leave whichever dead-end soul-sucking job you’re currently in, throw together a logo or some letterhead, maybe, and make it happen. No biggie.
Here’s your business plan:
When people return from vacation — jetlagged, exhausted and full of airline peanuts — your service kicks in. You bring a van to their door, loaded with employees. The clients schlep into their house or apartment, and you follow them in. They close themselves into a bedroom and sleep the sleep that only rumpled, ragged recent tourists can muster. And you go to work.
You unpack their suitcases. You put away the travel toiletries and the souvenir gravy boats and the backup pack of neck massager batteries. You load their filthy sweaty clothes, caked with the mud of faraway exotic swampholes, into baskets — and while they slumber away, you wash it. And dry it, and fold it, and don’t use too much fabric softener or make anything itchy or inside-out the socks.
Also, don’t tri-fold the underpants. Seriously. They’re just underwear. Fold them once, and move on. You’ve got a lot of work to do, already.
“There’s probably just a box of tissues or maybe a SkyMall flyer in there. But just in case. Don’t go there.”
If the clients signed up for the “premium” service, maybe you tack on a couple of extras. Store the luggage back in the basement or wherever. Water some plants. Throw out those two bananas that they forgot to throw away that are still sitting on the kitchen counter, like a couple of squishy rotting dildos.
(Speaking of which, I wouldn’t look in those little pockets inside the suitcase lid. There’s probably just a box of tissues or maybe a SkyMall flyer in there. But just in case. Don’t go there.)
Anyway, you get the idea. Everybody knows the worst part of vacation is transitioning back to regular life; we need a company to take the hassle out of it for us. When you finally stumble home after a week or so away, fighting flight delays and lost luggage and with the office looming in the too-near future, the last thing you want to do is tidy up and start unpacking. Instead, you could fall into bed, dream the night away, and wake up to a home that looks just like it did before you started throwing cargo shorts at suitcases and cramming every book on your summer reading list into a backpack.
Only cleaner. Because let’s face it, you’re not that tidy even on a good day. Also, those bananas. Ick.
Frankly, I think it’s a grand idea. Possibly the best that mankind has ever had. If we could just get a few of those people who are spinning their wheels, wasting their lives trying to teach children or cure cancer or whatnot, onto this project, I’m sure we could tackle it in short order.
I mean, I’d do it myself. But I just got back from vacation. And I’ve got some very nasty bananas to deal with. Chop chop, entrepreneurs.
Permalink | No CommentsThe missus and I are returning from our Great Montana Migration of 2013 tomorrow. While we’re still here in Glacier National Park, I thought I’d relay some of the signs I’ve seen posted around the park for visitors, tourists and hikers.
“These bears are not like Yogi Bear or Smokey the Bear or Mike Ditka the Bear or the musical bruins of the Southern nightmare Country Bear Jamboree.”
Of course, I don’t actually read these signs all the way through. Some of them are pretty long — where by “pretty long”, I mean longer than “YIELD”. But I get the gist, pretty much. And some of the messages have been reinforced by various guides, bus drivers and Sasquatch-resembling outdoorsmen during our trip.
So here’s what some of the park signs say.
More or less.
Probably.
PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH THE BEARS
This is an area of frequent bear activity. If you are unfamiliar with this area, you may not be aware of important and fundamental details about these bears. These bears are not like Yogi Bear or Smokey the Bear or Mike Ditka the Bear or the musical bruins of the Southern nightmare Country Bear Jamboree. Rather, these bears are large, furry, unpredictable, territorial, grizzly and want nothing more than to be left alone to eat berries and sleep and poop in the woods.
On second thought, we take it back: these bears are exactly like Mike Ditka the bear.
PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH THE BEARS
DO NOT BE A DICK TO PLANTS
This side of the park gets approximately fourteen hundred feet of snow a year. The plants here live eight thousand feet above sea level, and have maybe three months to grow and flower before Mother Nature comes back and takes another big white dump on their heads.
If somebody planted your fat ass in the tundra ice, would you want people coming by stepping on you and picking your petals and letting their grubby snot-nosed children paw your leaves? No, you would not.
These plants are bad-ass enough already. Please don’t tempt them into evolving poison needles or flesh-melting pollen or some shit like that.
DO NOT BE A DICK TO PLANTS
HIKERS SHOULD ALWAYS CARRY BEAR SPRAY
If you’re hiking through these woods, you may encounter a bear. Where ‘encounter’ may mean “have your face ripped off your head by”. As a prevention to having your face or other soft tender parts forcibly removed from your body by a bear, the park recommends carrying bear spray at all times in the wilderness. As a last resort, firing this pepper spray at a charging bear should cause the bear to retreat.
We are aware that this spray is costly; ounce per ounce, it may be more expensive than Chanel No. 5. We do not recommend spraying bears with Chanel No. 5, however. It is unknown whether Chanel No. 5 will repel a bear, or simply enrage the bear as it would most unsuspecting customers spritzed in a shopping mall.
We also do not recommend preemptively spraying yourself with bear spray to ward off nearby bears. Though this may be effective, the practice will also likely ward off nearby humans, and will possibly ward your skin away from the rest of your body — in a similar fashion as Chanel No. 5.
ABSOLUTELY NO SPEEDING
The speed limit on this road is 15 miles per hour. Many park rangers live on this road, and they know the difference between 15 miles per hour and 17 miles per hour. They will enforce the speed limit under all circumstances.
Because this road is in a national park, a speeding ticket constitutes a federal offense. This means that if you exceed the posted speed limit, you may well be thrown into a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, very possibly with an ill-tempered bear as a cellmate.
Maybe the kind of bear you’re thinking of. And maybe not. Also maybe Mike Ditka. Your move, leadfoot.
DO NOT RUN FROM BEARS
Bears are predatory mammals. They are also not especially bright. If you run from a bear, it will assume that you are made of chocolate or gingerbread or some other delicious substance, and are playing “hard-to-eat”. It will chase you, and it will catch you. And then it will taste you, to see whether it was right.
Presumably, you are not made of chocolate. You may, however, still be delicious to a bear.
DO NOT RUN FROM BEARS
RESTORATION AREA — KEEP OUT
This area has been recently replanted with small trees to replace larger, older trees killed by disease, fire or accident. These seedlings are currently in a delicate state, and must not be disturbed while they recover.
If you insist on entering this area, the National Wildlife Service will dispatch rangers to hunt down your children and torment them in equivalent fashion. We will spread rumors about them in their schools, call them fat in the locker room, and crush their precious hopes and dreams. You think we won’t, but oh yes. The park is only open four months a year. We have a lot of extra ranger time on our hands. Just try us, champ.
* Ref. also nearby signage: “Plants, Do Not Be a Dick to”
HOW TO SURVIVE A BEAR ATTACK
In case of bear attack, you should calmly back away, taking care not to further upset the bear. If this is ineffective, you should speak in a clear and assertive voice to the bear, which may cause the bear to retreat. If the bear does not retreat, you should use bear spray as a last resort to repel it.
If this does not work, you’re probably screwed. But just in case, here’s some advice.
To survive an attack, you must determine the species of bear involved. The park has black bears and grizzly bears; black bears may be brown, and grizzly bears may be black. Both species are “grizzly”, compared to most humans who are not Zach Galifianakis. And both species vary widely in terms of size. These characteristics can thus not be reliably used for identification.
To identify the species of bear, note the size of the claws. Grizzly claws are 3-4 inches long, while black bear claws are only one inch in length. If the bear threatening you is a black bear, you should fight back.
(This assumes that most of your delicate and sensitive bits are safely buried under at least an inch of clothes and flesh. The park recommends wearing several layers of parkas and ’80s-style leg warmers on summer hikes, for this reason.)
If the attacking bear is a grizzly, lie on your stomach and play dead, covering your face and neck with your arms. This method is most effective in repelling an attack if your arms are at least four inches thick. You may want to eat a lot of spinach and pick up a nemesis named ‘Bluto’ before visiting the park, as a safety precaution.
If playing dead is successful, the attack should be brief before the bear gets bored and wanders off. If playing dead is not successful, the attack will also be brief, because grizzly bears are freaking enormous and have those four-inch claws we talked about, so you can at least be solaced by the fact that “playing” dead was your best acting job ever, if also your last.
OH, AND HEY — ENJOY YOUR STAY IN THE PARK!
Permalink | 1 CommentJust a short note from the road tonight; I’m still in the early part of my week’s vacation with the missus and a couple of friends in Glacier Park.
(That’s in Montana. They don’t have a lot of internets in Montana, apparently, so we have to ration. Trees, they have. And bears. And huckleberries, of all things. But not so much the internets. I’ll try to be brief.
It probably won’t work.)
As I mentioned, we’re in Glacier Park, which is not as aptly named as it perhaps could be. There are a couple of glaciers, from what I can gather — we may see these in person later on in the trip — but mostly, the park is full of big huge mountains that were forged by glaciers, way back in the past.
“It’s like being told a major league pitcher is stopping by, and then it’s just Anna Benson.”
Which is not the same thing, exactly. It’s like being told a major league pitcher is stopping by, and then it’s just Anna Benson. Or that you’ll be meeting an Olympic champion, and then the Kardashian kids show up. Not the same. At all.
I guess “Enormous Hunks of Rock That Were Scraped Against for Millions of Years by a Glacier Park” just didn’t have the right ring. And wouldn’t fit on a commemorative novelty cowboy hat, probably. Pity.
Still, the scenery is phenomenal. Lakes and mountains and hills and trees and all the other things that high-pitched lady was singing out in The Sound of Music, probably. Only without the well-trained children. Or the Nazis. So there are pluses and minuses.
Our main activity today was hiking. You might think hiking is a lot like walking, but no. I’m a walker. I walk all the time. I like walking, and — as a biped — I feel I’ve got a pretty good handle on the activity. Hiking seemed like a natural jump.
But no.
Hiking is a different animal altogether. You can’t just “walk” and pretend that you’re hiking. Hiking is related to walking, nominally, but on top of rocks and at altitude. If you want to approximate a real hiking experience, you could wrap a treadmill in extra-coarse sandpaper, set the terrain to “roller coaster”, put a heat lamp overhead and suck half the oxygen out of the room.
Two miles of that would give you a good taste of “hiking”. Then, apparently, you hike nine and a half more. I don’t know why. It’s because humans are inherently evil, I suspect, and must be punished. That’s the explanation that makes the most sense right now.
To be fair, I’m not a “hiker”. At this point, I’m not sure I’ll be much of a “walker” — or for that matter, a “not-doubled-over-in-debilitating-painer” — for the next couple of days, either. I was prepared for hiking, when I thought it was mostly just walking, but with more expensive shoes and a backpack full of trail mix. I was off by a little, and am suffering now for my error. My wife is better off, but also hurting in a lot of places. Most of them below the knees.
Our friends, by the way — who are actual hikers — called the trek “relatively straightforward”. Meanwhile, I may have lost a couple of toenails. I’m frankly afraid to check. Or to move.
So that’s our first nearly-alpine adventure. Tomorrow is whitewater rafting, which I suspect is a lot like taking a bath, only with a paddle and with slightly cooler water.
Seriously, what could possibly go wrong?
Permalink | No CommentsI try not to be rude to people.
Well, not by my definition of “rude”, at least. If other people have a concept of rudeness that includes eye rolling, snarky comments or putting one’s hands over one’s ears and shouting “LALALALALALA!!!” when another person is talking… well, then that’s probably different. Some people are just sensitive, I suppose.
The real key in avoiding being rude to people, of course, is to avoid interacting with them in the first place.
(Not all of them, naturally. That would be crazy.)
(Just most of them.)
(Like, an extremely high percentage. Multitudes, for sure.)
(Maybe I should make you a list of people not to avoid. That would probably be faster. We’ll work on that.)
But running to the other side of the street — or hiding under a desk, or playing dead in a restaurant booth — won’t work in every single instance. So I figure, when someone goes to the trouble to thwart my wily defenses, the least I can do is be nice. Show a little common courtesy. Try to hide the horror in my voice; that sort of thing.
Most of the people who penetrate my inner social sanctum are, naturally, marketers.
Let’s face it — these are people trained to get in your face. It doesn’t matter what they’re selling, or collecting for, or selling boxes of cookies in the service of. Some of them probably aren’t selling anything — they just bother people for practice, honing salesperson skills to slap on their resumes:
“* Can annoy up to 60 people per minute! See references!”
Even to these people, I try to be nice.
“If you’re selling, I’m not only not buying — I don’t speak English, someone just stole my wallet, and I gave at the office already. Twice.”
Oh, I duck them. Don’t get me wrong; I duck the everloving bejeesus out of marketers of every stripe. I screen my calls, as best I can. I don’t answer the door for anyone holding a clipboard, a sample case or promotional pamphlets. I don’t make eye contact in the mall with anyone standing within twelve feet of a sales kiosk. My goal is to be invisible, unapproachable and entirely inaccessible. If you’re selling, I’m not only not buying — I don’t speak English, someone just stole my wallet, and I gave at the office already. Twice.
But occasionally, somebody slips through. Like this afternoon, when I answered my cell phone without looking, thinking it would likely be my wife, asking about a ride home.
It was not my wife. It was a lady from the ASPCA. And she wanted money.
Now, here’s the thing. I like the ASPCA. I’ve given the ASPCA money in the past, which is probably why they’re calling me today. I’m a big fan of animals in general, so long as they’re not actively biting me or trampling me or pooping on things that I care about.
(And clearly, even those rules aren’t hard and fast.)
But in recent years, the missus and I have decided to give locally instead. The MSPCA has accumulated a fair amount of our cash — some in donations, and more for the care of our oft-broken pooch who passed away last year. So I was disinclined, just at the moment, to donate money to the ASPCA.
It’s not personal. It’s not even because of those rend-your-sackcloth-and-jump-off-a-building Sarah McLachlan commercials.
(But seriously, those are awful. For the love of Lassie, at least show an “after” picture once in a while, in the middle of all the scrawny horrors. You can actually help some of them, if we fork over the dough… right?)
So I wanted to be nice. It wasn’t this lady’s fault she’d caught me off guard, in the office on a long Monday afternoon. If I were on my game, she’d have gotten my voice mail and left me a message that I’d never listen to, and we’d both go on about our lives. I tried, hard, not to hold the fact that she was actually speaking to me against her. I just wanted to fend her off, as gently as possible, and end the call. Quickly.
She told me about all the animals out there who need help. I said I knew, agreeably, which seemed to encourage her. So clearly, that was the wrong angle to take.
She told me about all of the good work the ASPCA is doing. I tried to sound doubtful — but nice! — and she spent several minutes going over the details of their programs. Another poor tactic on my part.
She asked whether I had any animals at home. I told her that my dog died recently, thinking it might slow her down.
(Hey, nine months can be “recent”. Like, in geological terms. Or cosmology. Shut up.)
Instead, she took it as an invitation to tell me about all of her current animals, and the ones she’d adopted that had lived and loved and died with her in the last, I don’t know, seventeen hundred years, approximately. I assume she did this as some sort of commiseration with my loss; for me, it was more like sitting through the audio version of a Ken Burns documentary: “Dogs: An Exhaustively-Annotated Personal History“.
We made it through that phase — barely — and she finally got around to asking for money.
(She did that trick that most donation-seekers seem to do, noting the amount I’d given in the past and then saying what they’d like to have, even when the two are orders of magnitude apart.
I’m not sure why they do this. I don’t remember what I gave the ASPCA back whenever the hell I gave them something. Maybe I was unusually magnanimous, or drunk, or had just run through Scrooge McDuck’s treasure vault for loose change. If you leave the mystery there, it’s just possible I might think that today’s request isn’t way out of line with past giving. But when you tell me:
“It looks like last March, you gave us twenty dollars. Would you be able to join our ‘Tail Waggers Club’ this time around with a donation of just three hundred bucks a week? It’s just a teensy little bump…”
I’m convinced these are the same people who get into medicine, and warn that “you might feel a little pressure” just before they come in with the rib spreader.)
Still. I wanted to be nice. The lady was doing a job, and for a good cause, and she wasn’t being overly pushy about it. Also, she’d already gotten me out of twenty minutes of work on a Monday, and I usually have to crawl under my desk and cry for that. So I owed her something for that.
Not ‘money’, mind you. But a little kindness. Or feigned detached interest, which is what passes for kindness at 4:30 on workday afternoons.
She was halfway through her secondary spiel, waxing excitedly about all the great things my money would do if I’d just give in and fork it over already. They’d save every cat in Mississippi. Puppy mills would get outlawed by federal decree. Horses would earn liberal arts degrees, and wouldn’t have to run in muddy circles any more. Rainbows and bunnies and manna from heaven, et cetera.
It was somewhere during this bit that I lost her. Not mentally — I checked out soon after I realized I wasn’t married to the person on the other end of the line. No, I mean my signal dropped and just as she was singing the glorious praises of the organization, she heard a click. And then a pause. And then a dial tone. And I’m certain her next thought was, “Asshole!”
I nearly called her back.
It’s not as though I haven’t hung up on people before. Rude people, sure. People with causes or products or pitches I don’t care for. But this time, I was trying to be nice — hell, I was being nice — and still my phone and hamsters-in-wheels phone carrier conspired to make me look like a dick. To a telemarketer, of sorts.
Frankly, they probably had the right idea all along. I try to be nice. But maybe I should take the hint. Maybe there’s something for my cell phone that can even help train me:
“Want to be an asshole to strangers who call you? There’s an app for that.”
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