Tag: life

Remember When There Were No “TIPS” Jars?

I don’t remember exactly where I was the first time I saw one – a plastic container placed next to a cash register, with “TIPS” enscrawled in black magic marker.  A Dunkin’ Donuts or Subway or the dreaded Starbucks perhaps.  “The gall of these people!” I said to myself.  These cashiers…I mean, these baristas…trying to expand the tip zone like the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War.  Well, I never signed on to that treaty!  See if I care!  And proudly I accepted and kept my three pennies of change.

At the time, I did not think the trend would catch on.  But soon after that I saw a tip jar at the supermarket.  I was picking up Yodels for the week and noticed the plastic container in front of a young man bagging groceries.  So not only had they stopped making new episodes of Sex in the City, but they had spun off the bagging function of the supermarket cashier, so that the cashier could focus more on making small talk with customers and co-workers, and the bagger, or bagging-agent, or comestible transport administrator, could focus more on piling five-gallon containers of laundry detergent atop cartons of eggs.

“Perhaps I’ve been wrong about this tip jar phenomenon,” I said to myself.  “Perhaps the tip jar is this person’s sole source of income.”  And for a moment my mind was changed about the tip jar.  I still didn’t leave a tip, but I at least thought about it.

Unless you’ve been in a coma and without an Internet connection for the last ten years, you know that these tip jars are everywhere now.  Convenience stores, delicatessins…even the guy who sold me fireworks out of the trunk of his car had a little plastic container with “TIPS” written in several different languages.  And I would had left money in the tip jar at the library had the funds not already been earmarked for late fees on Ivanhoe, which I was supposed to read in 11th grade.

I thought back to when I had first started going to the diner with my friends, during high school, and had first confronted that labyrinthine branch of etiquette known as tipping.  I remembered the arguments over my friend’s “no change” rule, which meant that he never left change on the table, even if we only got coffee, which cost $1.50.

“But that’s a tip of, like…” I said, punching my calculator watch, “…like, 66 point 6, repeating, or point 7 if you round-up.”

“So?  Just give ‘em a dollar.  You can’t leave change,” he said.

“Says who?  What’s wrong with change?” I said.  “I love change.  I like the way it sounds when it jingles in my pocket.”  And to demonstrate, I took a few steps towards the cigarette machine, jingling the change that was in my pocket.  My friend rolled his eyes and shamed me into replacing my nickels and dimes on the table with a crisp dollar bill.

As the “TIPS” jars proliferated in the early 21st century, I suffered from more than a little insecurity.  Was I to simply accept this unilateral imposition of custom as I’d forced to accept the “bless you” custom after someone sneezes?  Were these cashiers and baggers doing me a favor by providing a receptacle for the change that must surely burden me and leaving me with more room in my pocket for receipts?  I tried to discuss these issues with someone, but my therapist fell asleep during my diner story.

The only way to solve this dilemma would be to contact the only person I knew who could help me—the same friend who had shamed me into leaving a dollar instead of change.  I arranged to meet him at a bagel shop we both enjoyed, and on my way over I was having second thoughts.  My friend probably left wads of cash in the plastic container.  What if he told me to do the same?  As I got out of the car and pressed the button on the door-locking remote repeatedly until I heard the confirmation honk, I reminded myself that I was not bound by anything he said.

The line was long and I saw that my friend the tipping expert was at the front of it.  He was passed a tray with a bagel, a large chocolate chip cookie, and a Yoo-Hoo.  He handed the cashier a bill and was handed change in return.  And then I saw it—a plastic “TIPS” jar next to his hand, which closed over the change and went in his pocket as he walked away in search of an open table.  I blinked but I had seen correctly: my friend had ignored the “TIPS” jar.

As I approached the cashier, I thought I knew what I was going to do.  I thought I would leave no change, convinced that my rule had won out in the end.  But when the cashier handed me the change, and looked me in the eye, and smiled, and said, “Thank you for your business,” my heart melted, and I saw myself capitulating, and dropping my change as if my hand had been possessed.

“Thank you—‘preciate that,” the cashier said.

Heart pounding, mind reeling, and stomach growling, I took my tray and turned towards my friend, who had not yet seen me.  And I stood there, wavering, not sure if I could bring myself to eat with such a miser.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 26

Remember When Roommates Were Random?

I came across an article the other day, “When Roommates Were Random,” that discussed the recent trend of finding one’s college roommate on the Internet.  Apparently, the moment that high school seniors get accepted to their school of choice, or safety school if they harbored illusions about their own talents, they go onto Facebook and websites dedicated to finding the perfect college roommates.

So now an incoming freshman can match up with another freshman who is not only the same level of neatness, but also someone who keeps the same study hours, who likes the same color schemes, who feels the same way about politics, religion, and the Star Wars prequels.  If you are going to be living on campus, you can find someone who is so much like you that it is well-past midterms when you realize that the reason your roommate gets up and goes to bed at the same exact you do is because you are looking into a mirror.

The housing application I filled out before freshman year asked me two questions: Did I smoke, and was I neat?  I truthfully answered “no” to both questions.

“Great,” I thought, “now they’ll definitely match me up with someone who is just like me.”

The next thing I knew I was standing in front of the dorms on the far side of campus, my new home for the next nine months assuming I didn’t flunk out first semester, which television and movies had told me could happen.  My parents stood beside me, wondering if I was going to be as messy at college as I was at home, and when my roommate was going to show up.  The only thing we knew about him was his name, that he was from Kansas, and that he was getting to campus a few days before me..

A young man who looked exactly my age rode up on a bicycle.  He had brown hair and a healthy look about him.  A very All-American look.  He braked near a bike rack, and I walked over to him and introduced myself.  As we got to know each other, I learned that he ran cross country, and that he ran ten miles at practice every day.  He learned that I had once bought a BB gun to shoot squirrels in my backyard.  Freshman year began, and with cross country practice, the evidence I generally ever saw of my roommate was the growing pile of trash in his corner of the room.

We had been given a small gray wastebasket upon arrival where we could toss our rough drafts of papers or literature from campus groups promising to make us activists.  These wastebasket could be emptied in a larger bin on the floor, but it was all the way at the end of the hallway, and generally I would tolerate a bit more garbage in my life rather than leave my desk and computer and Internet, which I had never used before college, and which, I was discovering, had a lot of interesting things on it.  Since my roommate ran ten or twelve miles a day I figured he would be a lot more comfortable with getting out of his chair than I was, but he too didn’t seem much in a rush to empty his wastebasket.

I don’t know when exactly the garbage in my wastebasket began to peek out over the rim like an iceberg in the North Atlantic.  One day I noticed that I wasn’t so much tossing the garbage in the wastebasket as carefully balancing it atop older layers of garbage.  And that I had been doing so for some time.  I realized what I was doing and was disgusted with myself, and reached a point where I was either going to change direction and throw out the trash, or press on into unchartered territory.  Then I looked over at my roommate and saw that he was doing the same thing, but in sneakers and wrist bands.  “If he’s not doing it, then I’m not doing it either,” I said.  I wasn’t about to upset the karmic applecart in the room.

By Halloween our garbage piles had reached ghoulish proportions.  Mine was already beyond the top of my computer monitor, and by merely scanning the midsection of the mound I could review the last few weeks of my life.  It was a kind of journal, and by turning my head I could do the same with my roommate’s garbage.

I imagined that one day anthropologists would use the empty cans of Dr. Pepper to date my roommate and I and make groundbreaking conclusions about how males aged 18-to-21 lived at the turn of the second millennium.  They would note the matching sets of Nutty Bar wrappers at isolevels of garbage, and conclude that humans were much more do the same thing and conclude that my roommate and I had been eating Nutty Bars at around the same time (assuming a constant rate of Nutty Bar consumption), and the discovery of only one box of Nutty Bars, peeking out from a sub-pile of orientation materials and promissory notes, would lead them to conclude that we had shared the Nutty Bars, giving birth to a new theory of altruism between males aged 18-to-21.  As I let a crumpled napkin flutter down atop the pile, I swelled with pride at my contribution to science.

By Thanksgiving our efforts at balancing in the air were no longer having an effect, and the goal had tacitly become one of containment on the ground.  Our respective monuments had reached a critical mass where the peak could go no higher, and any new additions tumbled down the mountainside to a final resting place by my feet and chair legs.  The ground pile, being shorter, spread in area more quickly.  It was ivy spreading across the floor, around our chair legs, into the bedrooms.  I considered entering it in a student-run art show, but I let the entry form get buried under a family of Little Debbie’s wrappers.

We were too superstitious to clean up the garbage during finals.  That December morning we were both returning to our respective homes for the colossal holiday break, we stood before our respective piles, holding our luggage, and I could tell my roommate was thinking the same thing I was: Is it sanitary to let this garbage dump sit around all break?  For a moment we almost did something about it.  But I think we realized that the thing that had brought us together in the truest tradition of dormitory life—a world-class indifference to filth—we wanted to continue into spring semester.

So we left the room as it was, shook hands, and went off to spend a few weeks in the care of people who would pick up after us.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 11

Remember When Cough Syrup Wasn’t a Controlled Substance?

In my home there is a bottle of cough syrup from a leading brand.  On one side of the box there is a warning:  “PARENTS:  Learn more about teen medicine abuse” with a website that teens can visit just in case they don’t know what they are missing.

When I was a kid my parents had to practically hypnotize me in order to get me to take cough syrup.  To this day, the phrase “down the hatch” makes my stomach churn and heart beat faster.  I could not stand the taste of cough syrup.  It was like the folks at Tylenol or Robitussin went out of their way to make the taste as bad as possible.  Living with a cough was a far, far better alternative than drinking that vile potion.

My father’s technique was to pour the medicine in a spoon without me knowing, and then approach me from the side, and say, “Open up Mark!” and the spoon would be in my mouth before I knew what was happening.  It was a like a sucker punch, but with cough syrup.  The stuff was still gross but I have to admit the technique worked a lot better than my mother’s, which was to try to persuade me about how much better I was going to feel after taking the medicine.

Never in a million years would I have thought that kids would one day be spending their allowances on cough syrup when they didn’t even have a cough.  I lived through Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign.  I co-wrote and starred in an anti-drug video in the fifth grade that was filmed in the high school’s A/V room, for which I was awarded a Golden Globe and a bright green t-shirt with the famous slogan on the front.  So I know all about drugs.  At least, I thought I did.

How did they discover that drinking cough syrup got you high?  Someone must have had one wicked cough.  I can just see it now – a boy lays in bed, and coughs.

“Wow, honey,” his mother says from the next room, “it sounds like your cough is much better.  None of that deep chunky coughing you had going on earlier.  A shallow cough, almost as if you were coughing on purpose.  Can you imag—”

“Hey lady, just get me more cough syrup quick!  Gyah!  Uh-huh uh-huh!”

But even if it got you high, the taste is still there.  That horrible, horrible taste.  I suppose you could mix it in with something sweet, like orange soda.  Which was exactly what I did with some friends in college.

Yes, at some point a cappella groups and ultimate frisbee ran out of entertainment value, and we needed to intensify our liberal arts education.  Someone had heard that if you drank a whole bottle of Robitussin, you would hallucinate.  And somehow the promise of hallucinations motivated me as an adult in a way that the promise of no more coughing had failed to do as a child.

We bought our bottles at the local store, with cash, and retreated to the fraternity house, where there was an unlimited quantity of orange soda and an unlimited tolerance for stupidity.  We each took four plastic cups of orange soda, and divided the bottle among those four cups, so that each cup was five parts orange soda and one part disgusting Robitussin cough syrup.

Still I was afraid to try it.  I had caught a whiff of the syrup when making my concoction and my stomach put up its “no vacancy” sign, the product of years of conditioning.  So one of my friends employed the basest kind of peer pressure there is: he picked up one of my cups, approached me from the side, said “Hey Mark open up!” and poured it down my throat before I knew what was happening.

For a second I thought I was going to make it.  But the stomach wasn’t fooled by the orange soda, and I was running for the bathroom like it was a pre-requisite for my major.  The throes of nausea came in waves, and the only hallucinating I did that night was in thinking that I was seeing the toilet for the last time before sunrise.  From that moment on I swore off cough syrup for good; not for medicinal purposes, and not for recreational purposes.  I have been clean ever since.

But apparently there are teenagers who have a greater tolerance for the flavor of cough syrup.  I guess they want to hallucinate so badly that they can will their taste buds and stomachs to cooperate.  No wonder it’s a national epidemic.  With something as readily available and reasonably inexpensive as cough syrup, it’s easy to see how teenagers would be hallucinating a lot more.

On the other hand, I’m sure they cough a lot less.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 18

Remember Liner Notes?

One might be quick to say that an mp3, mp4, or mp79, or some other digital music file, is the equivalent of an old-time audio cassette (“tape”), or compact disc (“CD”).  And one would be wrong, because the computer file lacks something that tapes and CDs always had—and not just a $17 price tag, or price tag at all.  A purchaser of tapes or CDs got something other than two good songs, maybe one halfway decent song, and a bunch of drek.  Tapes and CDs came with liner notes, and liner notes made the price tag totally worth it.

Liner notes were glossy booklets that contained notes about the artists and the production of the album, photographs of the artists performing live and smoking cigarettes, and sometimes the lyrics to the songs.  Knowing all of the words to a song was like knowing a secret incantation, that when said would release the demons that gave the band members their talent and ability to play with sweaty strings of hair in their faces.  I was never more impressed than when I saw a good friend sing along perfectly to “Back off B*tch [Explicit]” off of Use Your Illusion: Disc 1 from Guns ‘n’ Roses.  He must have studied the liner notes for hours to catch each nuance of the piece.   

But what I remember the most about liner notes—more than the lyrics, more than the photographs, more than the artwork, more than even the music itself—was the smell.  That clean, sterile, plasticky, glossy smell that told my twelve-year-old brain that good times lay ahead.  That smell would hit me the moment I pried open the jewel case, even though I never knew why it was called a jewel case, and that it certainly did not contain any jewels, unless you bought a CD by the artist known as Jewel, which I never did, and even if I did would never admit.  Even now, years after I had to throw out all my jewel cases in the Great Scolding of 2005, I can close my eyes and imagine the smell of liner notes.

One time a friend caught me smelling the liner notes of one of his CDs.  He had gotten up to go to the bathroom and I thought he was going to be gone longer than he was.  When he returned I had my snout in the middle of the booklet to his copy of Metallica’s black album, which we just called Metallica Metallica. 

“Hey man, what are you doing?”

“Um, nothing.”

“Were you…smelling my Metallica Metallica liner notes?”

“What?  Smelling your liner notes?  No, man.  That would be weird.  I was just taking a closer look.  Oh, wow, you know I never knew that Lars Ulrich uses Zildjian cymbals.  The print on these things is so tiny!”

As my nose became accustomed to the smell, my eyes would drink in the images.  And drinking is an apt metaphor.  Because no matter how many assemblies they made sit through in school, where adults used every approach short of mass hypnosis to persuade us that drinking and doing drugs was not cool, the photographs and original artwork of the liner notes told a different story.

The other day I was my parents’ home, cleaning out that week’s “mystery box from high school,” when I came across my collection of liner notes, stripped of their jewel cases but otherwise in perfect working order.  I removed the hardened rubber band and flipped through the liner notes one by one, stopping every now and again to explore a particular booklet, and all the while breathing in the essence of ‘80s, ‘90s, and today.  And I rolled around on the floor, reliving the magic, my mother walked in and said, “Did you know that the original liner notes came with records.”  She paused and smiled.  “Remember those?

Thanks to Patrick Champ for the topic.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 10

Remember When Life Wasn’t Consumed by Facebook?

Have you ever been working really hard on something, and have someone who sees you working say to you at the peak of your frenzy, “You know, no one ever said on their death-bed that they wished they spent more time at work”?  That may be true, but will anyone ever say on their death-bed, “I wish I had spent more time on Facebook”?

I have a ritual before I sign on to the Big FB.  I say to myself, “Now, we’re just going in for three things:  Wish happy birthday to absolutely anyone whose birthday prompt arises, re-poke any pokers, and RSVP to your brother-in-law’s ‘Second Annual Weekend at the Chicken Farm,’ and that is it.  Got it?  All right, we’re going in…”

But the moment I sign in my plan goes out the Microsoft Windows.  I am grabbed, wrapped up in Facebook’s tentacles, entranced by the songs of its sirens.  There’s no way to stop it.  One moment I’m checking out the birthday quadrant, and the next moment I’m looking at ultrasounds of someone’s deviated septum.  I retrace my steps, and I see how I went astray:

“All right, I signed in, and saw that it was so-and-so’s birthday, but there were those pictures of such-and-such’s new baby, and so I had to look at those pictures, and right underneath that update was an update from so-and-so about how he scored tickets to see Hall & Oates, and then, I saw that 43 of my other friends are fans of Hall & Oates, and one of their profiles I didn’t recognize, so I clicked on it and found that it was a complete stranger, but after looking at her other profile pictures I discovered that she is someone who I went to high school with, but has remarried, and so I check on her husband’s page, even though I don’t know him, and what do you know he likes a certain band, which is cool, even though I’ve never heard of that band.  So I clicked on the link of some dude who commented on a photo of the husband of that girl I went to high school with….”

The recursion is maddening.  I’m not sure if recursion is the correct word to use, but the point is I can’t retrace my steps.  I get disgusted with myself and sign off Facebook in a huff.  And then two minutes later I realized that I forgot to do on Facebook what I had initially meant to do.  So I sign back on, and the cycle of wasted time and self-disgust begins anew.

I’ve heard reports that the average Facebook user spends six hours a day on Facebook.  If you could put time in a bottle, how many bottles would that be, worldwide?  Does it make a difference if you use plastic bottles?  It certainly does if you’re an environmentalist.  But most non-environmentalists only care that the bottle not contain any BPA, whatever that is.

Six hours a day for every person on Facebook.  This cannot be as disheartening as it sounds.  Perhaps many Facebook users live in places where there is not that much to do, and going on Facebook actually increases the productivity of their regional economy.  But for most people, I imagine, Facebook is taking time that could be put to far more productive use, like helping in the community, spending time with family, or writing a blog.

Maybe companies will figure out a way to have employees do their work on Facebook.  I’ve alluded before to the possibility of suing people on Facebook.  Perhaps meetings and projects could be done with fan pages.  Products could be ordered and memos sent.  Even those little office birthday parties…well, we know Facebook has got the birthday thing down.

But what would those people who work on Facebook do to waste time?  They could not very well waste time on Facebook, because Facebook would be their job.  By definition, you can’t waste time at work by working.  The Facebook  workers would have to sign off, and turn off the monitor or shut the laptop, and pick up a stack of paper, and start filing.

And at 5 o’clock, the Facebook workers would put on their coats and hats, and go to a cafe, where they would meet real people, and talk face to face.  They would sip their coffee and nod, and smile, and make all of the tones and gestures that give spoken language its vitality.  And after they drain their cups, and catch-up on each others’ lives, these Facebook workers would sit back and reminisce about the days when people socialized over Facebook.

Do you stick to the grocery list when shopping at Facebook?  Or do you find yourself wandering the aisles as time ceases to exist?

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 28

Remember When You Had Never Heard of a Debt Ceiling?

Two days ago, when I started procrastinating over writing this post, it seemed like everywhere I turned I was hearing about the United States’ debt ceiling, and whether Congress would raise it or subject the country to a lot of letters from collection agents.  For weeks now I’ve been picturing the Representatives and Senators walking around stooped, the ceiling of the Capitol Building pressing down on them like that Floor 7 ½ in Being John Malkovich.

I do not know any stories about the debt ceiling.  But I do know a story about a ceiling.

When I was around ten years old, slime was a popular toy.  Not the kind of slime you find on week-old turkey cold cuts, or the kind that rained on anyone who said “I don’t know” on You Can’t Do That On Television, but the kind that was pliable and sticky for maximum destruction.

The slime would stick to any solid matter it touched.  One morning my mother came downstairs to see me cutting clumps of my own hair out after a particularly educational experiement with the slime’s adhesiveness.  Another time the slime led to a hasty farewell to our family’s cherished VCR.  But the most memorable experience was how my brother discovered the slime’s aerial properties.

My brother and I took an annual trip to Florida to see our paternal grandparents.  They lived near Fort Lauderdale in a senior community that had a swimming pool and a lot of women named Rose.  Of course we loved our grandparents and savored every game of Po-Ke-No and story about the Great Depression.  But the best thing about spending a week with grandma and grandpa was that we went out for ice cream every night.

In that year of the slime, my brother brought a specimen onto the plane.  Had he done that today I am sure the full body scans would have detected the item, and my eight-year-old brother would have been interrogated for hours in a small room.  But in those days the only thing the airlines cared about was that we not kick the seat in front of us.

My grandparents’ house, like most houses in Florida, had a ceiling.  I never noticed it that much until my brother tossed his smuggled slime up in the air hard, so it stuck to the pebbled white ceiling.  We could not reach it, even after stacking the hassocks atop one another, and our 78-year-old grandfather had to get up on a ladder and pry the slime off.  He was not pleased, and asked that my brother not do again.

Not two hours later, the slime was again stuck on the ceiling.  My brother was fully engaged in brinksmanship.  Again our grandfather had get on the ladder, again he had to pry the slime off his white ceiling that now had two greenish stains, and again he scolded my brother.

“If you throw that slime on the ceiling again,” he said, “we’re not taking you out for ice cream for the rest of the week.”  From his face we knew this threat was serious.  My brother loved ice cream even more than mischief, and to even hint that the nightly ritual could be compromised was like threatening to remove one his limbs.

So he was good for the rest of our time there.  Mostly good.  He still splashed the wrinkled octagenarians at the community pool with his cannonballs in defiance of the large sign that said, “No Cannonballs.”  And he still gave my grandmother a near-coronary by getting a little too friendly with the neighborhood lizards.  But the green slime from Long Island remained in its clear plastic egg, and we got our ice cream every night during that vacation.

Finally the time came to take our leave of our grandparents, and fly home to the land of snow and homework.  We packed our suitcases, stuffed our still-damp bathing suits into plastic bags from Publix, strategically placed the porcelain ashtrays with palm trees on them that we’d gotten as souvenirs, even though no one we knew smoked.  And in the deepening afternoon, as we were about to get in the car for the airport, my brother took out his plastic egg of green slime, removed the contents, and tossed the slime up onto the ceiling, where it stuck as faithfully as ever.  And my brother shot my poor old grandfather a look that said, “What do I have to lose now?”

I just read that a tentative deal to raise the debt ceiling has been reached among the great compromisers on Capitol Hill, who say they can save $4 trillion by switching to paperless sex scandals.  Clearly there is some connection between that deal and my story about my brother throwing the slime on my grandparents’ ceiling: the gaming, the line between real and empty threats, the intergenerational battles.  And someone is wearing a smirk that says, “What do I have to lose now?”

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 13

Remember When People Read Only Physical Books?

These are dark days for the physicality of books.  Sales of physical books are falling further and further beneath the sales of the light and snappy e-books.  Brick and mortar bookstores are closing across the nation.  Wood and straw bookstores have been blown down by the Big Bad Wolf.   Depressing news indeed.

The first book I ever remember reading was Make Way for Ducklings.  It was a big, dark green hardcover with a gold seal on the front.  I used to take it to bed with me, and hold it under the covers.  That was my habit with all my favorite books growing up, and it was not until I was sleeping with Introduction to Statistical Mechanics in 11th grade that my parents felt the need to intervene.

I was always very careful about my books.  I had certain rules.  A college classmate once wanted to borrow my copy of Utopia.  I agreed to let her take temporary possession, but only upon her following my rules.

“Don’t open the book any wider than absolutely necessary, so that the spine does not crack.”

“Okay.”

“And try not to hold the book too much.  Unless you are actually reading it, the book should lie flat on a hard surface, not too close to an open window, in case of rain, and not too close to a radiator.  Heat can ruin the laminated cover.”

“Okay.”

“And if you absolutely must carry the book somewhere, hold it in your hand, but only if you can refrain from bending it.  A lot of people have that tendency, I’ve noticed, during periods of stress or excitement.  If you feel like you are entering one of those periods of stress or excitement, put the book inside of a backpack or satchel, but be very careful.  Place it in the bag so that the spine is down and parallel with the ground, so that the corners do not get smushed by the sides of the bag.”

“Um, okay.”

“The best and safest place for a book,” I continued, “is a boofshelf.  But bookshelves have their own pitfalls.  For example, if there are too many books on one shelf, do not try to squeeze the book in between a small space.  Otherwise the friction from the adjacent books as you try to squeeze it in will cause the book’s front and back covers to fold over, and once that happens…” I shuddered.  “Just be careful, all right?”

She gave me the book back the next day.  “I just couldn’t handle all the rules.  I’m going to the bookstore now.”  I caught her reading Utopia at the dining hall the next day, with the cover folded over.  I shielded my eyes and ran out the door, appetite lost for the evening.

I was not a fan of the Kindle when it first came out.  I remember telling my mother how stupid the device sounded.

“I mean, who wants to read a book on an electronic device?  You don’t even get to turn the pages.”

“Oh, I think it sounds really cool.  How much is it?”

“$349.”

“Well,” my mother said, “I’ll split it with you if you want one.”

And that how I ended up with a Kindle for $349.  And I admit, it was pretty cool for a while.  I downloaded hundreds of free books—Dickens, Tolstoy, Shakespeare—and marvelled at the library I held in my hand.

“Look, Dad,” I said to my father, “this Kindle holds hundreds and hundreds of books!”

“How many of them have you read?”

“That’s not the point.”

But in the end he was right.  I found that reading from the Kindle did not yield the same satisfaction as reading from a physical book.  Percentages and locations were sterile metrics compared to page numbers.  And somehow I couldn’t shake the feeling that because the book really wasn’t there, but was just a temporary arrangement of electrons, that I was not really reading the book, and that when I shut the Kindle off for the night, and the words disappeared from the screen, the meaning would disappear from my brain as well.

So I’m back to reading physical books.  Sure, they’re heavier, and more expensive, and take up space that certain household members believe would be better spent on vases and bowls of plastic fruit.  But in this crazy and forgetful world, physical books assure that knowledge, meaning, and beauty are eternal.  Just so long as the spine is uncracked.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 21

Remember Telephone Books?

I was reading The Information, by James Gleick, and came across this passage on page 194:

“[Telephone books] went obsolete, effectively, at the turn of the twenty-first century.  American telephone companies were officially phasing them out by 2010; in New York, the end of automatic delivery of telephone directories was estimated to save 5,000 tons of paper.”

What are small children going to sit on when they are too big for high-chairs, but too small to reach the dinner table by sitting on a regular chair?  Copies of the The Information?  Whatever the effects are, this intelligence reminded me of a story, as told to me by a friend.  This is what he said:

“I always thought it was so nice of the telephone company to distribute free copies of the telephone book to the doorstep of each house.  Every summer these yellow directories would magically appear, as if to say, ‘Your telephone company loves you.’

“On delivery day, I could see the books in front of every home.  But the homeowners, for some reason, were not always that anxious to adopt the books, and often left them out there for a day or two.  I smelled opportunity, and one year I went out and stole every copy of the telephone book that had been delivered in our neighborhood.

“Under cover of night I went door to door, grabbing the yellow tome before the homeowner awoke or dog started barking.  It was tedious work. I could not carry more than two or three under each arm, and so had to make frequent trips back to my house.  I stored the telephone books in my closet, and when I was done there was not much room for my clothes.

“I remember exactly how the telephone books looked in my closet.  Five-foot stacks that shoved my pants and shirts aside.  The pristine spines glowed like bars of gold with advertisements for personal injury lawyers.  I thought about the thousands of names and addresses and telephone numbers of people I would never know.  I thought about all of the pizzerias and locksmiths and hardware stores and roofers and orthodontists that were nestled in next to my old sneakers and a stop sign I stole over spring break.  I thought about all of the trees that had been cut down to make these telephone books, and that by stealing them I was saving the trees, in a way.

“But what I did not think about was how I was going to keep these stacks of books a secret during a time when I still lived with my parents and did not do my own laundry.  I guess I should have thought about that. 

“I would later tell my mother, upon questioning, that I did not know why I stole the telephone books.  Grown-ups always got annoyed when kids said they did not know why they did something bad.  But in my case it was true; I really did not know.  It just seemed like the thing to do.  The phone books were free of charge, in the open, not nailed down, and easy to spot in the dark.  In the summer, when there was nothing to do, this was something to do that did not entail hopping fences.

“With a little less MTV and a little more foresight, I might have told my mother that I was helping train my neighbors for a time when telephone books would no longer be distributed.  I was doing them a favor!  But instead I gave my stock answer: I looked at the ground and said, ‘I don’t know.’  I thought about that answer as I returned the telephone books to each and every neighbor that night.”

Had my friend continued I’m sure he would have concluded his tale by saying that he learned a valuable lesson; that no amount of midnight mischief is worth depriving one’s neighbors of their means of communication.  But at that moment his cell phone rang.  He picked it up and said, “Hello?…Really?  The Verizon guy just left the modem sitting on their stoop?…I’ll be right there,” and then left, pleading a prior engagement.

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 20

Remember When We Didn’t Have Piles of Chargers and Power Cords?

When I was a kid there was a power outlet next to my bed.  I had no need for power strips or outlet multipliers because I only had two devices to plug in: my alarm clock, and a reading lamp that I used to heat up the thermometer whenever I wanted to play sick, just like Elliot did when he wanted to stay home with E.T.

Today, I can’t take two steps in my house without stepping on a power charger or cord.  A charger for my Kindle, a charger for my laptop, a charger for my digital camera, a charger for my old digital camera (a Canon ELPH that cost me $500 in 2002 and which now gets the cold shoulder from every current operating system), a charger for the portable external hard drive, a charger for the electrical drill I’m forced to use whenever a blind needs hanging or a neighbor needs a root canal, a charger for the digital camcorder, a charger for the digital speakers, a charger for the steam mop, a charger of unknown chargee—so far behind the buffet that reaching it is not worth the health insurance deductible—and, last but by no means least, a charger of the purest white for my beloved iPhone.

These chargers and power cords congregate in a giant knot by the outlet.  My wife dislikes these piles and is always trying to find ways to hide them.

“Mark,” she asks, “what are we doing about that pile of phone chargers in the corner of the living room?”

“What pile? What chargers?”

She pointed to the pile of black wires. If the scene had been out of a movie I probably would have chuckled and then mentally scolded the owner of the house for creating a fire hazard.  But I was not in a movie and I didn’t chuckle.  This was my life and it wasn’t funny.  I explained that we couldn’t just move the wires because they were hooked up to things that could not be moved.

“Now, explain to me again how the modem affects where we can move the phone.  We have cell phones.  What do we even bother with a land line anyway?”

I told her that the only way that would be possible would be to put something in front of it the entire time, because to move the wires was not reasonably practicable.  That would end the discussion.

“Well, smart guy, I guess you’re going to have to stand in front of it the entire time.”

And that’s how I found myself standing in one spot for hours on end, like one of the guards at Buckingham Palace, except instead of a busby on my head there was a bowl of Tostitos in my arms, containing at its center a smaller bowl filled with salsa.  Our guests come by me and dip some chips.  I was amused at how often they succumbed to the pressure to talk to me.  Most of them I did not know me that well, and struggled with the awkwardness.  A few gave up.

Then there was the time that I tried to unplug my cell phone and ended up unplugging the Tivo, ruining my wife’s taping of The Real Housewives of New Jersey.  “That’s my favorite one,” she said.  “I can’t believe I’m going to miss it now.”  I suggested she put an ad on Craig’s List for someone who taped that episode.

“It’s not a tape.  I’ve told you this like a million times.  What are you, stuck in the 80s?”

Eventually, the cords and chargers end up in a closet or in the basement.  Deep down I know that the exiled cords and chargers will never be used again, but I am too scared to throw any one of them out.  To throw out the charger is to throw out the device itself.

I spend at least 12 hours a week untangling the wires for all of the power cords in the living room.  There must be a way to monetize that skill.  People should want to line up and pay $5 a head to watch me untangle power cords and cell phone chargers.

I suppose, though, that I should not complain about the mess of chargers when the devices do so much.  Instant communication, instant information, instant access, instant video, instant gratification—a small unsightly pile of tangled black plastic wires and domestic strife is a small price to pay for such wonders.

Do you have a knotty pile of cords and chargers in your home?  How do you cope?

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 6

Growing Old With Derek Jeter

The cover of the June 26th issue of the New York Times Magazine featured a candle that looked just like Yankees’ shortstop Derek Jeter, holding a bat as if waiting for the next pitch from, perhaps, a candle that looked like Tim Wakefield.  The Jeter candle was lit, and navy blue rivulets of melting wax ran from the hat down the pin-striped uniform into the butter cream frosting.

The story, titled “For Derek Jeter, on His 37th Birthday,” was about how the Yankees’ captain, who turned 37 on June 26, has been in a type of hitting slump known as “aging.”  The fancy scientific reason the beloved Yankees’ captain has not been as productive behind the bat, whether made of ash or candle wax, is because of age-related degradation in his fast-twitch muscles.  Jeter now, apparently, requires a full half-second to decide whether to swing at a 90 m.p.h. pitch, rather than the mere quarter-second required in his 20s and early 30s.

I wonder how my fast-twitch muscles are faring these days.  I notice that I am not squashing bugs as quickly as I used to.  When driving, I do not swerve around roadkill as deftly as I once did.  And it now takes me a full two seconds to change the channel whenever that annoying commercial for Progressive Insurance with Flo comes on, whereas I used to change it almost instantaneously.

I remember when my parents turned 37.  I noticed that my father was taking a few extra seconds to pull the car over to the side of the road to yell at me for tormenting my brother with the business end of a seat belt.  And when I went to the supermarket with my mother, I could swap the Cheerios with Fruity Pebbles before she could turn her head.  I felt bad taking advantage of my parents’ aging, but Mariano Rivera would have done the same thing.

All around me I see evidence of age-related degradation of fast-twitch muscles.  Insurance adjusters taking a few minutes longer to reject my claim.  Cops taking a few extra seconds to flip on their lights when I go flying by them at roughly the same speed as a major league pitch.  Even the worker at the deli I frequent—he couldn’t have been a day over 32—did not react quickly enough to my direction of no onions when making my sandwich, leaving me to pick them out myself.

When I was younger I was always very fast at tying my shoes.  If I was inside watching television and heard, say, the ice cream man coming down the block, I would have my sneakers on and tied inside of 15 seconds, faster than it took my mother to say that I wasn’t getting any ice cream until I scraped the Silly Putty off the ceiling.

Just the other day I was lying in bed and heard the sound of the garbage truck coming down the block, and I realized, with a panic, that I’d forgotten to put out the paper garbage.  Naturally terrified at the prospect of going another two weeks with a mountain of Penny Savers and empty boxes of Count Chocula overflowing the blue bin in my garage, I leaped out of bed and ran downstairs.  I didn’t care if my hair was sticking out in several different directions, and  I didn’t care if my neighbors saw me in my Spider Man pajama pants.  But I didn’t dare go barefoot; that’s a good way to get a splinter.

I tied my sneakers as fast as I could, but something was missing.  Like the unnamed scout observed about Derek Jeter, my hands were slower, and my feet were slower.   I now know that a hundredth of a second separates not only a line drive to center field and foul tip into the stands, but also an empty blue recycling bin and a full one.  As I dove in vain towards the departing truck, I heard the sanitation worker say, “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”

So to Derek Jeter, I say: Happy birthday, hope you get your 3,000th hit, and invest in some Velcro cleats.

Have you noticed any degradation in your fast-twitch muscles or in the fast-twitch muscles of the people around you? 

Posted on by Mark Kaplowitz 9