I. The In-Laws
We received a voicemail from Chris’s parents not long ago. Chris had left his cell phone charger at work so during his vacation, he kept his cell phone off and called into it daily to check messages.
On New Year’s Day, I got a message on my cell phone from Chris’s father, which consisted of, “Hi, we’ve been trying to reach Chris all night but his phone keeps going straight to voicemail so I hope everything’s okay and nothing’s happened. Give us a call. Just wanted to wish you a happy new year’s day. We’re going to bed soon, so we’ll talk to you later.”
Translation:
- We are worried. Call us immediately.
- Nothing important, just saying Happy New Year’s.
- We are going to bed now. Don’t call us.
II. My parents
An email received from my father while he was on vacation:
hi JANE, wE stay one night in Taihiti; three nights in Moorea and now in Bora Bora. Weather does not complete coorporated. But still can survive. We see lots of fish? The famous so call bunglerow water house. We sleep over the glass window if we like see fish or snorking in back to se them. That is new. We are safe and will be back Taihiti tommorrow tostay couple more night before back to LA? We did see Santa last night in here ( party); To dark. I am going qick talk to you. Hope you have fun time. Please say hello to Chris. Dad
Translation:
- Hey, I think my caps lock is on.
- Man, I thought this weather was going to be better.
- Our bungalow has a glass bottomed floor, through which we can see many fish, or we can snorkel out back. This is pretty cool.
- I am not quite clear on where all the keyboard keys are located; thus I will sometimes end sentences with a question mark, giving my email an unintended uncertain tone.
- There was a Christmas party here last night. Someone dressed up as Santa.
- It’s too dark to see now, so I have to go. Please translate this message to Chris.
My memories of the holiday season, 2007-2008:
- Chris playing video games. Not the one where he has to yell, “Spawn on me!” but the one where he yells, “This server sucks! Switch to a new one!”
- Our front hallway gradually filling up with empty Amazon boxes, eventually spilling over into the living room so that we were unable to reach the front door.
- Miss de Mina searching her beds and all the other usual places, rejecting toys she encountered until she located the chickie, thus showing she knows what she wants, if we ever doubted it.
- Stanley (we suspect) dragging his stinky bunny into the pink snuggle sack and leaving it carefully tucked in for us to discover the next day.
- Paco attempting to trick me into treating him by hiding in his bedroom until I came upstairs, and then doing his “I made a poo on the paper” dance, regardless of whether there was actual poo on the paper or not.
- John Pinette hilariously performing at the Comedy Connection on New Year’s Eve, leading me to, on the one hand, fear that he’s going to die early from his weight, and on the other hand, hope he doesn’t lose weight because most of his humor is based on that.
- Christmas at the in-laws, including celebrating my brother-in-law’s birthday and Chris’s birthday. Guess which one they forgot to invite me to.
- Knitting for limited amounts of time, due to hands that were in pain from shoveling too much snow, thus resulting in a lovely sweater perfect for a small baby with half an arm.
- Playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii in coooperative mode, which meant that Chris did all the actual work and kindly let me believe that I was assisting by capturing falling gems, even though most of the time my Wii remote was off the TV screen.
- My mother and father, having successfully flown to California and Bora Bora, returning home to Boston only to get lost trying to get from the baggage claim area to the outside of the building where we were waiting to pick them up.
- Zingermans. More to follow on that later.
- Work. Work. Work. More work.
I have suffered a disastrous technological setback this weekend.
Toward the end of last week, I noticed that my work laptop had begun acting a bit strange–freezing at odd moments and taking longer than usual to open applications. So I asked Chris to check if my computer had somehow picked up a virus.
He ran a disk scan, and then the computer refused to boot up. From what I understood, apparently I had some bad sectors and one of them, unfortunately, happened to be in the area which Windows needed to access to start up.
Which meant, essentially, that Chris had to reinstall Windows, which consequently wiped out my hard drive and all my work documents.
This is the third time Chris has had to wipe out my laptop, but the other two times, the problem was related to using my very old keyboard with the docked laptop. Both times we backed up all my documents in advance and then sent the computer back to the manufacturer for repair. This time, though, the computer went from sluggish to dead in about 30 seconds, and everything was gone.
Chris ran a file recovery program on the laptop and was able to recover a bunch of files. This means that I am currently going through a folder of 10,000 jpgs to delete the pictures I don’t want to save. This is made more difficult because of those 10,000 jpgs, perhaps 1% are actually work-related and the other 99% are primarily Windows icons/graphics and internet cached images.
The average guy would have a lot of porn images in this folder to sort through, and here I am specifically thinking of one of Chris’s friends.
All anyone would have learned about me, though, is that I have an unhealthy obsession with houses and lawn care products.
I used to look young for my age, but now I look as though I’ve spent too much time at Market Basket. In other words, I look as though my mother had abandoned me at an early age among the aisles of the supermarket, thus forcing me to forage for my own survival in a world where time no longer exists, where old people push and shove you relentlessly, and where half the stuff on sale is inexplicably unavailable.
About a month ago I went to Market Basket because they had Dairy Ease on sale. Dairy Ease is basically the same as Lactaid (milk with added lactase to help digest the lactose), only much, much tastier. The regular price of Dairy Ease is nearly five dollars, and Market Basket was advertising it at two for five dollars.
This is an incredible deal, so I went to two different Market Baskets during the sale week, specifically to buy Dairy Ease. The first Market Basket, in Ashland, had no Dairy Ease. I asked for and received a rain check for it. Then I hit the Market Basket in Woburn, where I found many Dairy Ease cartons, but only one of those was fat-free. I only like fat-free milk, so I bought the one lonely carton at the sale price and figured I’d just go later to a Market Basket to use my rain check.
My rain check is about to expire, so I went to the Market Basket in Burlington today. Some of you may remember this particular Market Basket as the tenth circle of Hell. Although this branch of the supermarket is conveniently located near my doctor’s office, it is rather inconveniently always filled with old people trudging through the aisles.
I don’t dislike old people, but I can’t stand seeing them, because they remind me of what I am becoming. I’ll let you in on a secret — they were YOUNG when they first walked through the Market Basket doors, and now they’ve been trapped in the Market Basket for days, wandering around in an attempt to find something on their shopping lists which was either moved to a different aisle with no explanation, or was simply missing from the shelf with nary a sticker or empty spot to prove it ever existed.
Other people in the store aren’t even trying to finish their shopping. They’ve just been standing in line at the checkout counters…FOREVER.
Today I was one of the unfortunate shoppers looking for particular items. In this case, I was looking for asparagus, which had been advertised in a sale beginning yesterday, and my Dairy Ease. Apparently sale items aren’t necessarily items the store wants to get rid of, because Market Basket didn’t have any. They didn’t even have a spot that said “Asparagus” over it.
After walking around and around the produce section and ducking the old guy who tried to strike up a conversation with me about the weight measures (I had no feelings on the weight measures, was my official stance), I finally gave up and asked someone where the asparagus was located.
I found out that asparagus “didn’t come in today.” Apparently asparagus gets days off like all the other hard-working vegetables.
Of course, there were also no cartons of Dairy Ease, and no stickers marked Dairy Ease, and no blank spots where Dairy Ease might once have been. For all I knew, Dairy Ease had chosen to stay home today as well, but I still spent too much time wandering up and down the dairy aisle, in case somehow I just wasn’t seeing it.
My rain check was about to expire, and I had no Dairy Ease. Which was just as well, because it turns out that using rain checks at Market Basket is an extremely rare and delicate situation, much like attempting to lure a unicorn with Paris Hilton as bait.
I had a rain check for bananas, and I figured I might as well use it. When I handed the rain check to the cashier, she looked at it curiously, and then called for a manager.
The manager looked at the rain check curiously. This did not bode well.
Two men were now in line behind me, having arrived as my groceries finished scanning. Poor men; they thought this line would be a FAST one.
The manager asked for the bananas. The bagger, an elderly gentlemen who looked like he’d seen it all, reached out a hand, grabbed the bananas, and slung them onto the check-out counter. I was impressed — this guy was a primo bagger — he knew what he’d bagged and where.
The manager said to me, “But the bananas are 49 cents a pound.”
I said, “Yes, but I’m supposed to get it at this price,” and I pointed to the rain check.
She re-weighed the bananas. “You don’t have five pounds,” she said.
“Right, I have less than five pounds. The amount on the rain check is the MAXIMUM I can purchase, so I can get anything up to five pounds.”
Dubiously, she voided the original banana purchase, and re-entered the new bananas. She started walking away, and I had to call her back because what she had done was weigh the bananas and charge me one dollar a pound.
Which means that the bananas, which originally cost me about $2.33, now were being charged to me at $4.75.
“Wait,” I said to the manager. “Is 4.75 the weight? That’s not the right price.”
She eyed the rain check again.
The bagger said, “It’s 3 pounds for the dollar.”
The manager looked confused.
I tried to explain. “I bought 4.75 pounds of bananas, so I’m supposed to get three pounds for a dollar which is, which is,” and here I blanked out. My father would have been so embarrassed of me.
The bagger said, “Thirty-three or thirty-four cents a pound.” This bagger should have been on the management track. So what if he was approximately twenty years older than the other employees? This guy understood MATH.
“Right!” I said. “So it’s supposed to be 4.75 times point 33.”
The manager voided out the $4.75. She did something, and the correct amount of about $1.56 popped up.
“Well, I don’t know, but I gave it to you anyway,” she said begrudgingly, as though I was pulling a fast one over her.
She left.
I tried to pay.
The cashier couldn’t get the cash register to get to the correct screen so she could run my credit card.
I was becoming afraid that the men in line behind me were going to come after me in the parking lot and beat me over the head with a loaf of French bread.
The cashier had to call back the manager, who had evidently forgotten to key out of her screen.
I had saved a grand total of 77 cents, and all I wanted for Christmas was my time back.
Last week my cousins came for a visit. Now that I have become old, I rely upon them to tell me the latest news — what’s hot, what’s not, and are my jeans from 1995 really back in style now? (Answer: Yes. Whoopee!)
Cousin Terry arrived with her new Sonicare toothbrush, and she told me that Costco was selling two Sonicare brushes in one pack.
“They even have a coupon this week,” she added.
“My dentist said we should try these,” I said. “Are they any good?”
“So far it seems pretty good,” Terry said. “It comes with three brushes, two handles, and a charger. I gave the extra toothbrush to my mother and she bought her own charger so she could use it. But you and Chris could share the charger that comes with the Costco pack.”
“Yeah, actually Chris wanted us to share the toothbrush handle and just swap the brushes off each time,” I said. “But I don’t know that I want to do that every morning and night.”
After the cousins had departed, I told Chris about the Costco package.
“We don’t need two handles,” he said immediately. “We can just put our own brush on the handle and take turns.”
“Is your company going to pay for me to go on your business trips with you so that I can brush my teeth while you’re gone?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, and we went to Costco and bought the Sonicare package.
The handles needed to be charged for 24 hours, so I put one handle into the charger and waited. The next day, I switched the handles. Experimentally, I pushed the power button on the charged toothbrush. A loud grinding noise came from the brush, and I hurriedly shut it off. It wasn’t supposed to be that loud, was it?
I turned on the power to the other handle, and an even worse noise rattled out. Okay, maybe both handles needed to be charged some more.
While I waited, I IM’d cousin Terry.
“Are these toothbrushes supposed to be so loud?” I typed.
“They’re not loud,” she typed back. “I can hear it when it’s in my mouth, but someone standing next to you can’t hear it.”
Earlier tonight I tested out the toothbrush again. I carefully placed a blob of toothpaste onto the brush, and turned it on.
The loud grinding noise started up again, and the toothbrush began to vibrate vigorously in my hand, so vigorously that the toothpaste leapt off the brush and fell into the sink. This didn’t seem right.
I contemplated the naked toothbrush for a few seconds and then shut it off so that I could reapply the toothpaste. This time I made sure to press the paste into the bristles of the brush.
I turned the brush on again, and gingerly brought it toward my mouth. The directions for the toothbrush had said the initial vibrations would start out gentle and gradually increase to the maximum, recommended pressure, but I already felt like my teeth were being jackhammered out of my mouth.
Grimly, I hung on to the brush and kept going, switching sides of my mouth every time the toothbrush beeped to let me know that 30 seconds had passed. Every time I changed angles, toothpaste would ricochet off my teeth and spray the air around me.
I had known for a while now that two minutes is the recommended amount of time to brush, but I had never really grasped how long two minutes actually is until tonight. Because I was too afraid to pause my toothbrush, I just kept brushing until the toothbrush suddenly stopped vibrating and automatically shut off after the two minutes had ended.
My teeth actually felt cleaner than they usually do after a brushing. But the rest of me? I had long trails of toothpaste swimming down my mouth because I hadn’t taken time out to spit, and there was toothpaste on the sink, the mirror, my forehead, and even a long streak down the side of my hair. Teeth: clean. Rest of me: not so much.
Briiinnng! BRiiinnnnng!
“Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Yeah, Mom, what’s up?”
“Where will we eat for Thanksgiving?”
“Well, I never heard back from you about any of my emails, so nowhere. It’s too late now!”
“Should we go to Minado or Chinatown?’
“I don’t know.”
“Chinatown is good but so far away. Maybe Minado. Or Chinatown?”
“I don’t care…neither one has turkey, and I wanted to eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day.”
“Minado will have turkey, maybe.”
“TURKEY SUSHI?!? Well, I guess if we don’t know what time Auntie will arrive, Minado’s better so we can just show up to the restaurant when they arrive. They’re going to hit traffic.”
“We still have to make reservations, even at Minado. Can you call and make reservations? Twelve people. Six o’ clock! Then we bring the kids to dinner and they go home to your house after dinner.”
“Why can’t you call and make the reservations? And why six? That’s so late! What will all the kids do at your house the whole afternoon?”
“I don’t know, just something.”
“Why not 5:30?”
“Well, we don’t know what time Auntie will arrive, so can you call? Twelve people, six o’ clock?”
“Why don’t you want to call?”
“You speak English better!”
“But they don’t! You can talk to them! They’re Asian!”
“No, they’re not Asian. They’re Korean.”
“KOREAN IS ASIAN, MOM!!”
“Well, anyway you speak better.”
“Fine!”
(A few minutes later)
“Hello?”
“Hi Dad. Just tell Mom the reservations at Minado are all set. Twelve people, six o’ clock.”
“Six! Why so late? What we gonna do all day?”
“That’s what I asked Mom!”
“You better talk her.”
“Hello?”
“Hi Mom, the reservations are all set. Twelve people, six o’ clock, under the name Jane. And by the way, they don’t speak English that well, either.”
“Six? I thought you were going to book 5:30?”
“You never agreed to 5:30!!”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”
“NO. DO YOU WANT ME TO CALL THEM BACK?”
“Well, I guess forget it, just do six. Wait, Daddy want to talk to you again.”
“Jane.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“My send button gone, only can forward! I push forward but nothing happen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Earthlink so stupid, no send button!”
“Are you trying to write an email?”
“Yes, I ty to send Alice my schedule to confirm trip.”
“Maybe you should send it to me, too, so I know when I’m supposed to drive you to the airport.”
“Okay, fine, but not working. I keep pushing forward and nothing show up, I try to forward Mom but she doesn’t get it.”
“Did you try sending it to another address?”
“I push forward, nothing happen.”
“I mean, try emailing it to me.”
“But I’m still writing message, not final yet.”
“JUST SEND ME ANYTHING, just write test on it.”
“Okay…to Jane…now no send button.”
“Are you using Microsoft Outlook or webmail?”
“What you mean?”
“Outlook — are you using Outlook? Or what URL, web site, are you looking at?”
“HTML.”
“You mean http? But what’s the web site?”
“Just html!”
“Okay, how are you writing the email?”
“Microsoft.”
“THAT’S WHAT I ALREADY ASKED YOU. Microsoft Outlook. So what’s wrong?”
“I see file, edit, view, insert, format, tools, action…usually action show send, but now only forward!”
“You don’t see a bunch of buttons like Send, Accounts…”
“No, I have file, edit, view, insert…”
“Okay, listen. I think you must have hit something and removed the toolbar. Right click to the side of where it says Help…”
“I didn’t change anything! I didn’t touch anything! I have no bar.”
“Well, something happened! Try right-clicking in the blue bar, where it says file, edit, view…”
“One second, Mom using computer. I let you talk her.”
“Mom?”
“Font, bold, italics…”
“What are you doing, Mom?”
“Oh, I thought maybe try right-clicking, but it just gives me font, bold, italics…”
“Where are you right-clicking, Mom?”
“In the box.”
“Okay. Do you see something that says “tools”?
“Yes, then Actions, and usually Action have Send but now it’s not there.”
“Go to tools, and hit customize. Then click on the tab that says toolbars.”
“Tools, customize. Font, bold, italics…”
“What did you do? You want the tab that says toolbars. Did you go to Tools, and then pick Customize?”
“Of course! Tools, customize…oh, you want toolbars?”
“YES. Do you see something that says standard?”
“OH, that need to be checked off?”
“YES.”
“Oh, now it’s all back!”
“Dad must have hit something. He said he didn’t, but this doesn’t change on its own.”
(In background, “I change nothing!”)
“Mom, you know why we want you and Dad to live with us? It’s for our own benefit, so we don’t get ULCERS trying to talk to you on the phone.”
Chris and I recently applied for life insurance through SBLI, after receiving preliminary estimates on how much it would cost to be insured for 25 years.
Chris’s final quote arrived a week or two ago, but we didn’t hear anything about mine. We had been concerned because I have a mental health history, but the woman who had given Chris the preliminary quotes had said that I would probably be fine since the major health issues I’d had occurred 11 years ago.
But now I was beginning to worry that they wouldn’t cover me at all.
“Don’t worry,” Chris said. “They’ll cover you, but we’ll probably just have to pay a higher premium.”
It turned out he was wrong.
Today I received a letter from SBLI that said, “We regret to inform you that after careful consideration, we cannot extend an offer for life insurance to you at this time.”
The reason was listed as “mental health history.”
They went on to add that “The results of our underwriting review are not meant to cause you undue anxiety. Our decision is not necessarily based on your current state of health but rather is influenced by predictive factors that may have an impact on longevity. We are guided by our experience with large groups of people in the same risk classification.”
Okay, if you don’t want to cause me undue anxiety, how about not sending a letter that basically says, “You might feel fine now, but pretty soon you’ll be dead.”
I bought tickets to the New York Comedy Festival pretty much as soon as tickets were released. I bought tickets to see Janeane Garofalo and Louis CK. Then the Janeane Garofalo show was canceled, because she was cast on 24.
So then we reserved seats to see Bill Burr at Caroline’s. A day or two later, that was also canceled, and no reason was given. PETER MARTIN, I’m waiting for you to find out the scoop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
At that point, I was feeling frustrated. No replacement had been announced for Bill Burr, and I couldn’t quite work out the timing to meet up with my friend while still seeing the Louis CK show and getting enough time off work. And of course, Young Frankenstein had been sold out for possibly years, so there was no chance of seeing that, either.
Then Chris’s surgery got scheduled for the morning of the Louis CK show. So I sold off my Louis CK tickets and decided our trip to NY was simply cursed.
A week after I sold the Louis CK tickets, I found out that Caroline’s had finally announced who would replace Bill Burr. John Pinette.
JOHN PINETTE!!! We love John Pinette!! I had just bought tickets to see his New Year’s show in Boston! I could have seen him again in New York!
And I found two tickets to Young Frankenstein on craigslist. Right amount of money, right day…but I told myself it was just as well we had canceled the trip to NY because we probably would have been murdered by the ticket scalper.
But today, my anal retentiveness has finally paid off.
As soon as they were released, I bought tickets to see David Sedaris at Symphony Hall.
And tonight…tonight…we will be seeing David Sedaris at a sold-out show. And me being me, seeing him will be just that much more enjoyable, knowing it’s a sold-out show. Yes, I am the Chosen One.
Naturally, Chris’s response to my jubilation was to say, “Hey, we should sell the tickets and make a bundle of money.”
As the years tick by and we watch our friends becoming increasingly wrapped up with their offspring, I find myself fearing the time when I will have to admit that I am an old fogey. Some of you will think, and rightly so, that in some ways I have always been an old fogey, but the old fogeyness to which I am referring is not my natural inclination to yell at the neighbor kids to “keep it down,” but the kind which other people manage to avoid simply by having children who will grow up and one day tell their parent, in all seriousness, that “you are totally uncool.”
Since I will have no children to provide these kinds of helpful hints, I only have myself to keep an eagle eye on my fading coolness. So in an effort to stave off impending decrepitude, I did the only thing possible. Yes, dear readers, today I watched High School Musical.
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Chris and I were on the road to his parents’ house when his cell phone rang.
“Must be your parents,” I said. Without exception, his parents call us every time we’re driving to their house, as if they secretly suspect we’ve found a more exciting place to visit along the way. This has never happened, but mostly because there are no exciting places on these particular roads.
Chris glanced quickly at the phone. “No, it’s a 617 area code.”
“Hello?” he said into the phone.
He paused.
“One minute,” he said, and handed the phone to me.
I didn’t know who would be calling me on his cell, and I could tell Chris was wondering if I’d given out his number instead of mine as a contact number for something strange I had signed up for. Because I do that, and quite frequently.
“Hello?” I said.
“Jane, it’s John Shumacher and I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you,” a man’s voice said.
“Who are you?” I asked. This may have been a bit impolite, but I do not like talking on the phone and I wanted to make this conversation as brief as possible.
“I’m sorry, it’s just been crazy here lately,” he said. “Do you know who I am?”
“No,” I said firmly. By now I’d had a chance to think about the past couple of weeks, and whether I’d left messages for anyone, and I had come to the conclusion that I did not know a John Shumacher.
“I’m Matt’s middle school math teacher,” I thought I heard him say.
The only thing I could think to say was, “We don’t have any children.”
He said again, “I’m John Shumacher?” as if that would change anything.
I said again, “But we don’t have kids.” Then it hit me. This was a wrong number! Thank god, because I was beginning to suspect that I’d had an illegitimate child and actually forgotten about it.
“I think you have the wrong number,” I told him.
“Is this – “ and he rattled off Chris’s cell phone number.
“Yes,” I said.
“So I assume you’re not the Murphys?”
“DEFINITELY not,” I said quickly. I wondered if I should spell my last name for him, just for emphasis, but opted against it.
He apologized and hung up. I hung up, having never been more relieved to receive a wrong number.
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