Wednesday miscellany

1. According to an email in my spam folder, nir tsalach wants to be my friend on Windows Live. Poor nir. He probably doesn't have a lot of friends, not least because who even knew Windows was a place to be friends? Despite my sadness at his plight, he will have to carry on without me.

2. I keep hearing a radio announcement about a concert in which the band is described as "one of Philadelphia’s funkiest performers of laid back, alternative hip-hop blues." Are we therefore to understand that there are numerous performers of laid back, alternative hip-hop blues? Perhaps all of whom are in Philadelphia? This surprises me.

3. God bless the very young checker at Trader Joe's who scanned my wine, glanced at me, glanced at me again and asked to see my ID. As I've said before, they must be instructed to card people who look younger than 60, but, I admit it, being carded by people who could be my children thrills me a bit.

4. In honor of imminent Valentine's Day, a student group has festooned the school with paper hearts upon which are written affirmative statements. "You're a great friend." "I love having you around." "I love the way your mind works." "You just GET it." "I love your eyes and that messed-up tooth MAKES your smile." "I would totally kiss you." The one at eye-level on the faculty room door says, "You look nice today." Aww. I walk around all smiley. Grazie studenti.

5. I am on board with the month of letters project. It is more satisfying than I even imagined. True, I am sending far briefer correspondence than is my usual wont, but on the bright side, more people are hearing from me. If you sit down and write seven letters right now, you can catch up and join us. Hot tip: buy more stamps.

Janitorial-2

I'll bet you thought I was kidding about the hoses. Ha! Joke's on you. Why would I hold back when I have no doubt that you are enthralled by my detailed accounts of outdoor chores? Truthfully, I am positively assailed by doubts that you care about this du tout, but isn't blogging really just the author talking to herself? (a thing I do in actuality with increasing/alarming frequency. I find that I cannot make it through a grocery store visit without accompanying myself with persistent, audible narration. Surely this is worrisome?) And I find the sidewalk outside my house to be terribly compelling, so it is a hot topic of conversation with myself. I'm not even kidding. You have no idea how much time I spend thinking and muttering about my corner of the urban landscape. Shall I tell you why?

Peeing. That's why. And no. It's not dogs. It's dudes.

There is an absolutely unbelievable amount of urine that is dispensed by passing men in the corner by my garage door. Sometimes, after particularly copious amounts of beer have been consumed, one imagines, the quantity is sufficient to create seepage into the garage proper. The degree to which this disgusts and infuriates me cannot be overstated. I have lived on fairly significant urban thoroughfares since 1992 and never before have any of my dwellings been mistaken for a more than usually commodious urinal. The pee is always in the same corner and it happens with baffling frequency. Would you pee on a house? Of course you wouldn't.

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure this out and the best theory I can come up with is that between the bar two blocks away and my garage, there is no other deep-set corner. There are a great many doorways (but peeing in a doorway is even worse and maybe the urinators have standards? Once someone opened our front gate and came in to pee in the [nicely swept] entryway. I exploded with fiery indignation and have only recently been pieced back together.) and numerous garages. However, those garages are flush with the wall of their building and even with the sidewalk. Meanwhile, my garage is set back from the sidewalk by about three feet (which makes backing out without killing people a special challenge, but that's another story altogether) creating: Pee Corner.

MEN OF SAN FRANCISCO: HEAR ME NOW. THERE IS A SPECIALIZED PEE RECEPTACLE AT THE BAR. PROBABLY NEAR THE BACK. IN A SPECIAL LITTLE ROOM EXCLUSIVELY FOR PEOPLE WITH PENISES. IT IS NOT AGAINST THE WALL UNDER MY BEDROOM WINDOW.

Previously, my upstairs neighbor used to occasionally take it upon himself to hose down the sidewalk, the front stairs,and the gritty garage doors. But he moved (with his relentlessly noisy children. Goodbye, relentlessly noisy children) and took his hose with him. There is a hose in the back, but it must be about 300 feet long; I once tried to follow it from the faucet to the other end, but it is buried very deeply in the wilds of the thorny spider farm that we call the back yard, so I gave up. This means that in every pee incident (or in one extra special occasion on Christmas Eve eve, vomit) I am obliged to employ the bucket and broom method (actually, I don't have a bucket, so I go up to the kitchen, empty out my recycling bin, fill it with water from the back stair spigot and return to the grisly sidewalk and makeshift my way to a cleaner tomorrow). I should note that there is a mystery broom in the alley that I use for these bio-hazard jobs; my blue-handled broom undertakes the more dignified sweeping tasks for which it was raised.

All this has changed. "Why?: you ask, "Have the men of San Francisco suddenly decided to comport themselves in a civilized manner?" Well, no. Would that it were so. Instead, I have been presented with a hose by my thoughtful Home-Depot-frequenting friend. And it works too. I happen to know because, returning home very drowsily about midnight on Sunday, I pulled into the driveway only to have the beam of my headlights illuminate a glistening fresh swath of newly voided urine. I'll bet the hose would work on the actual pee-perpetrator too, but I've never caught one in the act.

I suppose that people's homes are peed upon in the country, as well, but presumably by woodland creatures or livestock, which seems, if not actually appealing, at least more forgivable. I think that when I opted for city life, I was hoping for urbane more than merely urban. Alas, what a difference an e makes.

Janitorial-1

At my old apartment building, my landlord was around all the time. He liked to keep busy. He may have been a bit overly present, in fact, seeing as how he didn't live in the building. However,as a result of his constant puttering, things were tidy without my thinking much about it. Not so, the new building. For one thing, it is run by a management company who didn't even come back to take their "For Rent" sign down after the available unit had long since been occupied. Clearly, they couldn't care less about the state of our front stairs (or the terrifying back yard, which is another story). For another thing, the exterior bits of the property are basically filthy. The back stairs are covered year-round by various plant matter from the neighboring yard, which is at a higher elevation--the better for showering leaves down upon us in every gust of wind (of which there are a great many). The sidewalk in front of the building, the entryway, and front stairs, are blasted daily with dirt and detritus that, once it has blown into the corner by the garage or into the gated passageway, is trapped there forever. In short (as though it were not far, far too late for that), there is a lot of sweeping required. There were two options: A) ignore the need for sweeping (because it is not, technically, MY responsibility) and live in squalor or B) be my father's daughter and, if sweeping is clearly required, just do the damn sweeping.

I chose B. I have found that it is surprisingly satisfying to sweep. It is fairly easy and yet makes a marked and immediate difference (unlike vacuuming for instance, which I know makes a difference, but one that I can not easily detect without crouching on the floor to admire up-close its post-vacuuming hairlessness [I shed like mad]). Besides, with the sweeping, I get to feel all Civic Minded and Neighborly. Once, in a particularly leafy, windy time, I even swept the sidewalk in front of the neighboring building. I expect to get a cookie in the afterlife.

I keep my broom just inside my garage door for easy sidewalk access. One day, upon returning from work, I found that the broom had been moved to a far less convenient corner and, perhaps even more mysteriously, that about two inches of its previously relatively pristine bristles had been stained black. I was very puzzled, since the garage is locked and I am the only one who has access to it, but I thought maybe I had done some sleep-sweeping or something. Who knows? Better not to dwell. Fast forward a few weeks. I was home sick and I heard someone open my garage. When I went to investigate, I found that the plumbers were working to deal with some kind of back-up in the drain in my neighbor's garage. I left them to it.

During the time of my fairly lengthy indisposition, the trash/dirt collection in the walkway became very condemned-building-esque, such that entering the building became a rather hopeless, depressing affair. Pulling the car into the driveway after work one night, I told myself that the gritty urban despair vibe had gone on long enough and that I might as well just sweep the entryway while I was already down there. And [cue ominous organ music]...the broom was gone! Gone, I tell you! The plumbers were clearly the culprits. They must have come on more than one occasion--the first time they used my poor broom to sweep drain sludge (egads!) and then put it in the Wrong Place. The second time, they either utterly destroyed it with further drain sludge and took it away for disposal OR they had grown so fond of it, they simply couldn't bear to part with it. In either case: vexing.

I called the management company to tell them my sad story and ask for restitution. They asked me to put it in writing and specify the amount of the reimbursement. This meant I had to purchase a new broom before I could send the letter and last week I found that I had no time to purchase a broom. I did try on Friday, but the brooms available at the hardware store I visited were strangely enormous and unless they came with Fantasia-style enchantments, seemed that they would quickly exhaust the sweeper. Particularly if the sweeper had no upper-body strength to speak of. Finally, finally on Saturday afternoon I went to a different hardware store, bought a broom of reasonable size, and returned home to address the now entirely deplorable entryway (seriously. The Blog Bully told me that he had noticed it in passing one day and considered going home to fetch his own broom to deal with it). As I was sweeping, my neighbors came downstairs and were quite surprised and grateful to find me cleaning a common area. I said that I was happy to do it and, indeed, would have done it sooner had it not been for the rascally plumbers who had stolen my broom from my own garage. "Who stole it?" asked the neighbor. "The plumbers, I think." I said. "Well, that's weird because there's a broom in our garage and we have no idea where it came from." "Does it have a blue handle?" "It has a blue handle."

And that, readers, is how I came to own two brooms, the more recent of which I can neither return nor can I, ethically, request reimbursement for it now that the other has been found.

On the bright side, the walkway is looking good.

Tomorrow: hoses!

Message from the past

I noticed today that I have eight unpublished drafts languishing around here, so I took a look at them to see if they were worth publishing now. It is now my rather unfortunate duty to report that on May 5, 2005, I titled a post "Vive les bivalves!" and then wrote nothing else. This is a great mystery to me.

Nevertheless, even having no idea what prompted this rallying cry, I would not want to leave anyone out. Therefore, if you are, say, a clam, I belatedly congratulate you and enthusiastically wish you well.

On correspondence

Earlier in my life I was a very committed letter-writer. Partially this is because I am old and my need to correspond predated email; partially it is because I like to write and it's nice to have an audience (to wit: this blog); and partially, even now when I feverishly check my email all day (just in case, just in case, just in case),I still believe that there is something truly joyful about receiving personal correspondence by post. I am notoriously (and only very slightly apologetically) sentimental. It means something to me to see my friend's handwriting and to know that the paper now in my hands was previously in his hands. Even that the paper had to make a physical journey to link the two of us strikes me as poetic. I have mentioned this before--here and here, for instance, always a bit wistfully.

Imagine then, my surprise and pleasure in finding I am not alone. This week I have been pointed in the direction of Letters of Note, a curated collection of correspondence by persons of some celebrity. It is terribly diverting. Albert Einstein writes admiringly to Mahatma Gandhi; Babe Ruth encourages an ill child; David O. Selznick defends "damn"; Mark Twain addresses burglars; E.B. White discusses his dachshund; William Saroyan advises his young son about love. There are hundreds of letters. I think you should read some; you'll be the better for it. As for me, I can only read a few at a time because so many of them make me cry--no great feat really, as it seems rather more remarkable when things do not make me cry. Still. Proceed with caution.

Then, as though that were not enough, I came across the Letter Writers Alliance. The very small fee required for membership seems well worth spending in exchange for the warm glow of fellowship which, frankly, upon learning that such an association even exists has already begun to spread through my letter-loving heart.

Mostly though, I'm struck by how comparatively few letters I write these days and what a pity it is. I will send away for my membership card and begin to mend my ways. Perhaps you would like to do the same. I'm sure that someone you love lives elsewhere. She'd very much like to hear from you.

Addendum:
Having read this, my friend Amanda let me know about the letter a day challenge for the month of February. We're three days behind, but I'll bet we can catch up.