raspberry red

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.
--Mark Twain

If Mr. Clemens' pronouncement is true, then I am destined to be remembered forever.

A customer appeared in front of me at the café yesterday, materializing out of a long line of faceless people. I felt instant and inexplicable attraction, so of course I just stood there, silent except to read his purchase total. My mind screamed, "Say something!" but came up a blank. He wore an interesting green t-shirt that I could have asked about, but instead I chose just to blush furiously. I don't even think I looked him in the eye, let alone smiled.

When he left, I finally snapped out of it. I turned to one of my co-workers and said, "Wow. I thought that guy was so cute, and I didn't say a single word to him." I find my behavior especially mystifying since, generally speaking, I can talk to anyone. On Saturday, in fact, I chatted up a fellow Red Sox fan for 10 minutes while his girlfriend glared on. And I inevitably end up flirting with the guy who has stopped by for a wedding cake tasting. I thought, "Why couldn't green shirt have come in earlier, when Jen and I were reading aloud from her Sextrology book?" (Which book, by the way, is shockingly accurate. Check it out, people!) At least then I would have made some sort of impression.

"Do you want me to go get him back for you?" Greg offers. "Yeah, sure. That sounds like a perfect solution," I reply, turning back to the line of customers. (Readers, in case my word choice doesn't make this clear, I employed a sarcastic tone.)

Five minutes later I look up to see green shirt standing in front of me with Greg by his side. "Did I forget to pay for something?" he asks.

"Oh my G-d" is all that I can manage. My eyes are wide with shock, and I am likely the color of the fruit on the Red, White & Blue tart on the counter in front of me.

Open-mouthed, I turn to Greg. "I can't believe you did this." Greg shrugs and backs away. Green shirt extends his hand. "I'm Mike." I think I shake his hand; I am pretty sure that I don't give him my name in return. The man who is next in line begins to shift impatiently. Green shirt smiles. "I live right around the corner. I'll be back in again."

And with that, he leaves. Strike two for sopheathene.

My male co-workers spend the rest of the evening (1) restraining me from killing Greg and (2) assuring me that guys find that sort of thing flattering, but I figure green shirt's interest would be considerably more piqued if I had actually managed to talk to him instead of seeming to have sent an emissary, as if I'm in high school.

Green shirt, if you are out there, I can be a scintillating conversationalist. And that's just the beginning of my charms! I promise!

Sigh.

i'm taking my lemons . . .

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
--Michel de Montaigne

As mentioned in a previous post, I recently made the brave decision to purchase a car, a white 1991 Volvo 240. Brave, I say, because I haven't had the best luck with cars in the past, to understate the case. I refer you most recently to the case of Nausikaa. And before that, there was the boosted Oldsmo-buick (TM seth). And these are just the most egregious examples of my car-tastrophes.

My first car was a grey 1981 Honda Accord, the car on which I learned to drive stick shift. My dad would take me on the Southwest Freeway in Houston in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday mornings so that I could experience switching between all five gears. I listened to mix tapes made for me by my first love in that car. During my junior and senior years at St. John's, each morning I picked up the Bick twins in that car. Yet all these idyllic memories came crashing to a halt one morning when the car did. In 1997 I was living in Monteverde, Costa Rica, and my brother totalled my precious vehicle. My mom remarked that for first time since I left she was happy that a good half-continent separated my brother and me.

After a year interregnum came the grey 1985 Nissan Maxima, a hand-me-down from my aunt. This car was, when purchased, quite the fancy ride: leather seats and a state of the art electrical system, as part of which an excessively perky woman's voice would, for instance, inform you if a door had not been properly shut. By the time the car got to me, however, some of the wires had gotten crossed, because the woman began to lie. I would be driving on the highway and all of the sudden hear, "The trunk is open." Panicking, I would pull off to the side of the road only to discover that no such thing was the case. Plus, the transmission featured quite possibly the most annoying problem ever to plague a moving vehicle. At speeds faster than 55 mph, any deceleration caused the engine to jump into third gear and stay there until the car came to a complete stop; so if I had to use the brake at all while on an interstate (a not-unheard-of occurrence), I would inevitably also have to (again) pull off to the emergency lane, stop, and then accelerate again. Annoying, and very unsafe.

Then there was the 1986 Buick LeSabre (a.k.a. the Oldsmo-buick), a hand-me-down from my grandparents, jacked by the youthful cretin in Austin and when returned, driven into the ground by my brother until his fancy new engineering job allowed him to trade up for a black 2003 P.T. Cruiser. And before Nausikaa was exposed to the cruel realities of the big, bad District of Columbia, she was improbably burgled on the insular St. Mary's School campus. Despite 24-hour security, Nausikaa had the dubious distinction of being the only car-sualty (I really need to stop with these awful puns!) during my three years there when her front passenger-side window was broken and her CD/radio faceplate was stolen.

And now there is Fenno, named for a character in Julia Glass's 2002 novel Three Junes, which I was reading at the time I bought the car. A gay Scot living in New York, Fenno owns a bookstore and learns to be a caregiver for his dying neighbor and his own dysfunctional family. In naming it, I decided that I needed a car that would take care of me. And I plan to return the favor, as I recently purchased a club.

Fenno has already experienced his own travails, failing the incredibly exacting Virginia state inspection twice already. After the first go-round, I had three different mechanics in Raleigh look at him, all of which declared him in great shape but in need of some fine tuning. A thousand dollars later, however, and I was in no mood for "fine tuning," so I held my breath and submitted him for inspection again. This time, a tiny bulb (the reverse light) proved to the catch. And according to my Arlington-area mechanics, only a $150 diagnostic test could possibly unravel the mysteries of the electrical system. So I thanked them for never touching my car again and collected poor, disgraced Fenno, assuring him that this was not his fault. My officemate, an avid conspiracy theorist, blames the boondoggle of the state inspection system, while my mother believes I could sort it all out if I would just take a man along with me (her theory being that "mechanics are sexist"). I prefer to handle the situation in my own, inimitable way. I am formulating a plan, which currently consists of sitting around and wishing the problem would go away, since I have no money to do anything else. So stay turned for the further adventures of me and Fenno!

11: The number of years I have been a licensed driver.

5: The number of cars I have owned.

2: The number of cars I have had stolen from me.

0: The number of cars I have owned that have been manufactured in the same decade that it is.

wild wonderful wacky women

Okay. We're going to give you the full-tilt, unashamed, totally impassioned plea here.

Please make women's history a quiet cause of your own. Share it with your daughters, your nieces, and the girls living down the street. Share it with your sons and nephews. It will make the boys better men. And it will make the girls whole.

Women are still too often seen as self-obsessed, shallow, and dependent. Girls see hundreds of images of models daily. Where are the female entrepreneurs, CEO's, physicists, software developers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, and Nobel Prize winners?

So you're ten and female you have been patiently waiting for the world to give you some sign. The only sign you get says, "Be pretty, happy, helpful, kind, and thin."

That's in this country. And that's today.

Barbara Jordan, the great Constitutional lawyer and Congresswoman, never imagined becoming a lawyer until she saw a black woman lawyer at a high school career day. You can change a life, too. All by yourself.
--National Women's History Project

Well, National Women's History Month was March, so I'm a little behind. However, I believe that there is never a wrong time to tout the accomplishments of heretofore unsung women. So, y'all, these are two of my newest heroes.

Dr. Nora Volkow, Director, National Institute on Drug Abuse. A psychiatric researcher, Dr. Volkow has been deemed "obsessed with obsessions," as she investigates the exact physiology behind addiction. This article--which made the rounds in the office yesterday--focuses on her attempts to show exactly how the brains of addicts and non-addicts differ. Sounding the death knoll for the misguided and ineffectual "Just Say No" strategy, she notes, "If you can conceptualize [addiction] as a brain disease rather than a moral weakness or lack of willpower, you can more easily bring resources to bear." And her studies have implications beyond just drug addiction: she looks into dopamine functionality as it relates to a variety of cognitive pleasure mechanisms, like attraction to junk food in the obese. But there's more! Not only is she a courageous anti-"drug war"-rior, she is the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky! She grew up in the house in Mexico City in which he was assassinated! (As many of you know, I am a bit of a Slavophile and in awe of the fact that Frida Kahlo was Trotsky's lover during the time he spent in her country until he died in 1940.) Plus, she loves Bach and the novels of Haruki Murakami. I sense an obsession of my own coming on, á la dogooderlawyer with Ethan Nadelmann.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, U.S. Army surgeon during the Civil War and first female Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Dr. Walker is one of the posthumously eponymous patron saints of DC's Whitman-Walker Clinic, where I have recently begun to volunteer. Abolitionist, the second woman to graduate from medical school in the States, married to another doctor but kept her own name, chose pants and a man's coat as her standard dress: she was feminist before such a concept existed. Andrew Johnson awarded her the Medal of Honor in 1965, but it was rescinded in 1917, when Congress revised the requirements to include "actual combat with the enemy" (as a woman, she couldn't receive a commission but she served near Union front lines as an unpaid volunteer). Dr. Walker refused to give up her medal (a federal crime) and wore it until her death in 1919. However, Jimmy Carter reinstated the medal in 1977. After the war, she was an advocate for many women's issues, including suffrage and dress reform, calling women's clothing "immodest and inconvenient." Sadly, the stamp issued in her honor by the U.S. Postal Service in 1982 featured her in a frilly dress and a mane of curls. Also, she may have been a spy for the Union Army and certainly had a ship named for her during WWII.

Thus endeth, for today, the history lesson of the disenfranchised. Tune in next week as I begin part one of my series on underappreciated sports, starting with rollerskating!

opening day

"There are Opening Day pitchers and pitchers who start on Opening Day."--Roger Lee Craig, New York Mets pitcher (1962-1963) and San Francisco Giants Manager (1986-1992)

Yesterday, Roy Oswalt, Curt Schilling, and Tom Glavine all proved they belong to the former category, as their stellar performances lifted their respective teams--and my three favorite teams!--to Opening Day wins. My boy Roy, in particular, deserves a shout out for his eight-inning shut out of the Florida Marlins. Take that, Dontrelle and your 2005 Cy Young award speculation! There's a new sheriff in town, and he drives a tractor.

So it was Astros 1, Marlins 0; Red Sox 7, Rangers 5; and Mets 3, Nationals 2. And while most of us had to work yesterday, some lucky few were actually able to attend opening day, my parents included. While for reasons unknown they missed much of the excitement at Minute Maid--including the unveiling of the NL pennant, the standing ovation for the unfortunately-seemingly-permanently injured Bagwell, and the throwing of the first pitch by Nolan Ryan--they did sit alarmingly close to the field (between the "N" in "Houston" and the "A" in "Astros" in the lettering on the top of the dugout, according to my father), and so I offer these pictures of Morgan "Moishe" Ensberg, the once and future honorary Jew--who also shares my birthday--from my mom's camera. It's not an autographed baseball, but I'll take it!



In other Opening Day news, Kevin Millar wore an Orioles uniform and didn't play first base, although I am sure he is still running as slo-o-o-o-o-ow as molasses. And unfortunately &%$#*@ A-Rod began to atone for last year's playoff debacle with a grand slam, leading the MFY to a 15-2 victory over Oakland. Plus, Roger "The Rocket" "Benedict Arnold" Clemens was at it again, schmoozing the Sox in Arlington in yet another mercenary tour de force. Roger, you're making it really hard to defend you to dogooderlawyer. Throw me a frickin' bone here! Just sit tight and wait for May 1, for the love of G-d!

The most memorable moment of Opening Day, however, was Mike Piazza, former Met and greatest offensive catcher in the game right now, hitting a home run in his first at-bat for the San Diego Padres. You can bet the Mets brass heard that one all the way at Shea Stadium! Go, Mikey!

I love for this (TM meggiefreshh)!