Things I Love #5: Letters

I'm back.

School started last week, so there's been a lot of "starting school" going on, and not a whole lot of blogging. I think a fun game would be to see whether being in school eventually "takes over my life", and if so, to guess when that's going to happen. Actually, that sounds like a terrible idea. But in any case, I'm back, at least for now.

One of the things we did in class yesterday was sit in silence for an hour and write letters to our future selves. I was initially confused, but after I realized what was going on, I immediately got excited. I thought to myself, holy crap, we're getting paid to do what?? Then I remembered I wasn't actually being paid. But it was okay, because they gave us free envelopes, and as much free paper as we wanted, and that was kind of like "compensation."

And the truth is that I would write letters any day, even without compensation. Letters are basically one of the best things that can happen to a person, right up there with accidental dates and no lines at Starbucks. They can be as powerful as a very powerful man's fist, or as sweet as any number of sugar-filled foods.

Also, you can read letters as many times as you like, whereas if you asked someone to tell you something over and over, they probably wouldn't do it. And the next time you tried to talk to them, they would probably pretend not to see or hear you.

Which is why it saddens me greatly that letters have gone out of style.

I'm not saying that email, and other technological replacements for letters, are bad. I happen to think they are perfectly complementary.

In the olden days, for example, I would send a letter and then sit around for days, or even weeks, waiting for a reply. Today I can write a letter, go the post office and mail it, then pull out my web-browsing phone in the post office and send my friend an email, tweet, or both to let them know that a letter is on its way.

Once I get home, I can send the friend a PDF of the letter, which I would have digitally scanned beforehand; it's only polite to give people a preview so they're prepared when it arrives. Then I can call them, my yet-unsuspecting and somehow plural friend, and tell them to check their email.

Finally, a few weeks later, I can meet up with them in person and, over lunch or coffee, casually work the letter into conversation. There are many ways to do this naturally. For example: "Interesting you should bring that up. As I mentioned on page four of my last letter, it's a complete toss-up between Helen Keller and the war on terror for biggest urban legend. And we just have to live with that."

As you can probably guess, the only thing more magical than writing letters is receiving them. So the next time you're bored in class, or bored on the job, try tracking down some free paper and writing to someone. The letter doesn't have to be to me; it could be to a friend, or a lover, or yourself. Just as long as it gets mailed to my address, I won't mind.

Things I Laugh At #4: Out-of-Placement

Well, it's basically a miracle that seeing two turkeys walking down a street somehow managed not to ruin my entire day.

If one of them had been a chicken or something I would have lost it though.

Right now here is my dilemma: there is really nothing to say about this situation. I can't even bring myself to attempt some sort of cute little comment about how it's not even Thanksgiving yet, which is what I imagine such a situation generally calls for, even though jokes about Thanksgiving are never funny. And that particular joke (the turkey joke) is so morbid that it not only makes me actively not laugh, it makes me enraged.

Or, "It enrages me," as a normal person would say.

Unfortunately, this does not end with turkeys. Day to day, one encounters plenty of other things that feel desperately out of place: trapezoid-reared moms shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch, honest Americans drinking beer at the White House, New York bus stop ads telling boys to eat broccoli and respect women (what?).

A while ago, I took a business trip to Arkansas with a German co-worker. We both arrived in suits -- mine mall-quality but presentable, his devastatingly European -- and discovered that everyone we were meeting with was in jeans. The head guy even wore a plaid shirt. If you think we thought they looked ridiculous, we didn't. We thought we looked ridiculous, because we did, and they knew we knew, too.

Luckily, I was too busy marveling at how out-of-place my German co-worker seemed -- before that trip, I don't think he even believed in "Arkansas" -- to worry about myself.

And I say this is lucky, because the only thing worse than seeing something out of place is realizing that you yourself is what's out of place. If you've ever had the misfortune of going to a Great Gatsby-themed party, you know what I'm talking about. Amidst all the fake pearls and suggestively shaped hats, you find yourself horribly indecisive about whether to laugh and laugh uncontrollably or just shoot yourself summarily between the eyes.

If anyone at the party has actually read Great Gatsby, chances are you are better off with the latter.

And what kills me (ha - but I should know better) is that these problems have such an easy fix. Books should stay in the library; beer should stay in Germany; Germans should stay out of Arkansas. Everyone should stay out of Abercrombie and Fitch.

Boys should respect women, obviously. And broccoli has nothing to do with it. Are you retarded?

Finally, turkeys should spend less time on the street, and more time in my freezer. This is as close to a Thanksgiving joke as I will allow myself to get. At least until Thanksgiving.

"Oho, something about cranberry sauce! Oho, it's can-shaped!" No, seriously. This is why I'm done.

Things I Love #4: Hybrids

Because I am disastrously poor, one of my new resolutions is to go to the supermarket with a completely open mind and simply buy whatever is on sale, then take it home and eat it.  This is the kind of thinking that resulted in a dinner tonight of banana-pepperoni-cream cheese sandwiches.

Before you tell me we're not friends anymore: 1) the cream cheese was the fancy whipped kind, with chives, and 2) if I had put a piece of candy on top, I would have covered the entire food pyramid in one meal.  Efficiency is another new resolution of mine.

And it was actually quite alright, so, you know, put that in your pipe, as they say.

While eating my hybrid marvel, I got to thinking about all the other forms of hybrids that I love in life.  I love driving hybrid cars, as long as they are SUVs.  I love having Parallels on my Mac and knowing that I will never use it.  I love looking at the hybrid couples who pass me on the street, and if they have been hugging each other very tight, I love looking at their beautiful hybrid offspring, too.

It's tempting to think that maybe hybrid things are just better than individual things.  For example, goldendoodles.  Golden retrievers are kind of dumb, and poodles are just out-of-this-world unacceptable.  But somehow when you mash the two together, the result is adorable.  And I never use that word, but seriously, when you see one of these creatures, you just want to squeeze it so tight that it goes flat.  And then buy some 3-D glasses and look at it so hard that it becomes 3-D again.

But maybe society, myself included, has become too dependent on hybrids.  When did it stop being okay to eat plain vanilla ice cream, or to have only one academic degree?  What was so bad about gas-only cars?  I'm joking, people.  All you Green-Teamers need to reach back and remove the plastic bottle, because you are taking yourselves way too seriously.

I have always thought that one should be able to go up to the counter at Dunkin Donuts and ask for a doughnut -- to literally just look the person in the eye and say, "I'd like a doughnut."  But you can't do that.  The doughnut person would probably strike you.  Instead you have to say, "I want that doughnut over there, the one glazed with milk of magnesia -- no, not the one with the bruise-colored sprinkles, the one with the boullion cube in the center."

I was actually thinking about opening a one-doughnut doughnut shop.  The shop would sell only one flavor, which would be called "plain flavor."  And maybe if it was a hit, I could stop being poor, and maybe even consider a hybrid degree, not to mention a nicer meal.

But until then, my third new resolution will be to start simplifying wherever I can.  Which I guess means either bananas or straight pepperoni for dinner tomorrow.  Or straight whipped cream cheese, though really, if it came to that, even I probably wouldn't stand for being my friend.

Things I Laugh At #3: Reborn Agains

Let me start this by saying that I am a giant fan of "people", and also of "friendship."  But just as there comes a time in every civilization when it is no longer safe to leave your front door unlocked, so too does every social networking site reach a point where it is no longer safe to accept every online friendship that comes your way, especially those offered by people you don't know in the dimension of Real Life.

Until recently, the creepiest friend request I'd come across was from a man who was apparently trying to befriend every female on Facebook who shared my first name.  Flattering, perhaps, in the creepy way that people asking to keep your hair clippings after you get a haircut is flattering (don't ask).

But then, last week, I came across something potentially even creepier: a friend request from a girl I don't know, who has a perfectly lovely face, a perfectly non-sociopathic profile, and a Religious Views section that reads: Born Again :)

That emoticon is not mine, obviously.  (The colon before is mine)

Why a Religious Views section even exists on Facebook is itself an issue, which one of these days I will take up with Mark Zuckerberg, who has always been most tolerant of my unsolicited advice on how his site should function (viz., "Hey, Mark, maybe you could fix something so that I can see everyone's profile." "Haha, yeah." "Yeah?" "Haha, yeah, no. What's wrong with you?")

But setting that aside for now, I mostly have to wonder: is it possible to refer to oneself as a Born Again anything and keep a straight face?  Call me childish, but whenever I hear the words, the first thing I imagine is a businessman in a nice suit and tie grabbing a poor, unsuspecting female stranger on the street, somehow crouching and diving really quick-like into her uterus, and then -- still in the middle of the sidewalk -- squeezing out of her poor, unsuspecting birth canal with all the difficulty of the last squeeze on an empty tube of toothpaste.

And the woman is all, WTF?  And the man's suit when he comes out is covered in Spaghetti-Os, like Lois in the indie short Steel Vaginas.

I also have to laugh at people who are "born again" because, how far are they going to take this?  Do their ages also reset, so that at 34 they're actually turning two, and they can tell all the people who go to their birthday parties, "I'm teething and it's such a bore, so don't mind me if I cry a little in my cake"?  This is obviously not a real question, because no one would actually do this.  But my point is: they would do it if they took rebirth as seriously as they claim to.  Neither Jesus nor his other-colored counterparts are interested in halfway faith, especially from those who effed up enough the first time around to need the second chance.

As for me, unless I get born again soon as an all-trusting, all-loving soul from the middle of a cornfield, I'm keeping my front door locked and my friends limited to those I know I can believe in.