Tag: personal essays

Remember When Drinking Was a Novelty?

Remember when drinking was a novelty?

I do.

For every person who has decided to let alcohol be a part of their lives, there was that magical time when drinking was a new experience. Maybe it was when they chugged a beer in twenty seconds at a New Year’s Eve party and basked in the accolades until upstaged by a Naval recruit who did it in eight.  Maybe it was when they pilfered wine coolers at a family event and drank them behind a tree while their parents had the police looking for them.  Maybe it was when they went out on their 21st birthday and drank so much they had to do their senior year of college from the couch. No matter what the specific details were, those early bouts with drink are usually swathed in a combination of wonder, adventure, and projectile vomiting.

As the years pass and the empty cans and bottles form a larger and larger share of the recycling bin, the novelty of drinking wears off. It goes from being something to celebrate special occasions to something to cope with the stress of putting the dishes away. But once in a while we are reminded of what those early days were like. I was so reminded this past weekend while riding the Long Island Rail Road.

The Long Island Rail Road is a commuter train that during the week shuttles people between their jobs in New York and their homes on Long Island, and during the weekend shuttles their young adult children between the bars in New York and their parents’ homes on Long Island. It runs fairly regularly during waking hours, but its late-night schedule can be stroke-inducing. For the line that I take when I’m visiting the Big Apple, there is a gap between 1:16 a.m. and 2:53 a.m. And if you do not make that 1:16, you are in for a very, very long night.

I failed to make the 1:16 this past weekend. The 2:53 train is occupied almost entirely by people who are college-aged or just beyond it, dressed to the nines and doing figure-eights in the narrow aisle. Among a single-file of four people walking by, the third person is not so much walking as being shuffled along like a scene from Weekend at Bernie’s. People are shouting to each other about how “wasted” they are and are discussing economic policy without supporting data. Young women show little compunction about walking barefoot while still inside the borough of Manhattan.

Early on in our trek east someone warns of a low wave of water flowing along the floor and I pick up my feet just in time. Evidently something in the rest room had overflowed. The waves keep coming during the ride. When the train stops at a station, the water flows east. When the train leaves a station, the water flows west. It is like the tide coming in and going out. I’m about to take out my fishing pole. But the fish do not look appetizing.

I am getting a good workout from keeping my feet elevated. The next exercise gadget should be a device that sends commuter train toilet water rushing under your feet for an hour. Not even squats yield that kind of burn. I start to wonder what could make this ride any worse. And then I get my answer.

Two stops before my destination, we hear on the intercom that “a passenger needs medical assistance” and that our train is “being held until emergency personnel can arrive.” I wonder what the EMS code is for “screaming they are going to die when they are really just drunk.” It takes half an hour for the emergency personnel to arrive, and during that half an hour I hear “FML” – in both short and long form – being said into cell phones and across the aisle.

It is well past 4 a.m. when I disembark at my stop, and I know that even brunch is out of the question. As I swing from the luggage racks like monkey bars to avoid the river of dreams, I take one last look around me. I see the red eyes, the bloated food-smeared faces, the stained jackets, the chia pets, the bare feet…and I marvel at the modern world’s only rite of passage.

Thanks to the merry passengers of car no. 7163 for the topic.

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Remember When People Passed Notes in Class?

Remember when people passed notes in class?

I do.

In third grade I conspired with some classmates to make another classmate believe he was being stalked by a ghost. I wrote notes in a squiggly lettering that said things like “Your parents don’t love you” and “Courdoroy pants are in your future.” We would leave the notes on his chair when he got up to sharpen his pencil. He was looking worried by the second note. I was pleased at how smoothly the plan was going. When lunchtime approached and we were forming two gender-based lines, a classmate and co-conspirator put his hand on my shoulder and said, “It’s over.  He knows.”

“He knows? Who told him?” I was ready to kill this person who had the temerity to ruin my plan.  But it turned out to be a kid who was much larger than I, and I decided that for the sake of everyone’s education I would not press the matter further.

When I was fourth grade I passed a note to a nearby classmate named Charles, saying “Charles is a big oaf.” Señora Goldfarb, our Spanish teacher, caught me and made me write it in Spanish a thousand times. After a few hundred I started getting tired and making mistakes, and as punishment I was not permitted to participate in the Cinco de Mayo celebration, where every student was responsible for making his parents buy an authentic Spanish dish for the class.

In high school there was a girl named Gretchen who passed notes by folding them into the little triangle, which everyone called a football.  She would flick the football in the direction of her intended audience. Gretchen had bad aim and a few times the note landed near Mr. Mauser, our math teacher.  Whenever this happened Mr. Mauser would pick up the football and ask who it belonged to, and when Gretchen confessed he would ask her whether the football formed an isoceles or equilateral triangle.  If she was right she got the football flicked back to her.  If she was wrong he opened the note and read it. Gretchen soon became the go-to sophomore on triangles.

I don’t know whether today’s students still pass notes, but I’m sure many are electing to text their cruel missives.  No teachers to avoid, and no fellow students to recruit.  No one would know if you were passing a note or checking your stock portfolio.  Until someone accidentally texted the teacher.

Thanks to Toni Calabrese for the topic.

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Remember When You Could Go To the Supermarket Without Being Offered Something You Didn’t Want?

Remember when you could go to the supermarket without being offered to enter a contest, or asked to make a donation, or join a mailing list, or solicited with anything other than the items you went there to buy?

I do.

My childhood memories of going to the supermarket are sepia-toned.  Mostly I remember buying a lot of cereal, and begging for cookies and soda to no avail. One time I found a $20 bill on the floor in the produce section and did not tell anyone.

But today it seems like every time I walk through those automatic doors I’m bombarded by people trying to get me to enter a contest or make a donation when all I really want to do is get my Mojito Mix and Vanilla Wafers and get out of there.

The other day I went to the supermarket and as the automatic doors opened a man in a shirt and tie greeted me. I assumed he was the greeter – perhaps placed through some community outreach program – and greeted him back. Then he held out a stack of green slips and a pen and asked me if I wanted to enter to win a shopping spree. I entertained a short mental film of myself running through the aisles, like a contestant on that game show Supermarket Sweep, going for the whole roast turkeys and then the medicine aisle. I shook my head and walked on, and felt bad about rebuffing him until I got to the free samples of cheese.

Another time I was greeted by a pair of high schoolers selling candy bars to fund a class on the causes of obesity. I told them that I’d sold my collection of Garbage Pail Kids to pay my property taxes and teenagers still did not seem to know anything beyond a bunch of acronyms.  And they were like, “OMG!”  And I was like, “TTYL.”

But the most memorable supermarket solicitor was a woman taking donations to pay her Verizon bill. No clipboard, no costume, no gimmick.  Just standing there with a sign that said, “I can’t make any cell phone calls. Please help. God bless.” Somehow that one touched my heart. I handed over the few dollars I had on me, and instead of snacking on Vanilla Wafers I spent the evening appreciating what I had.

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Remember When URLs Did Not Change?

Remember when a website’s URL never changed?

I do.

Actually, I don’t.  URLs change all the time, and this one is going to change to “schlabadoo.com” later tonight, March 17, 2011, just as soon as I finish scrubbing the chicken burger grease off the grill pan.  If you need to reprogram your reader or something, just drop the “wordpress” and one of the dots that flank it. You will still be able to go to “schlabadoo.wordpress.com” and be automatically directed to the new address.  And if you’ve decided to stop reading this blog altogether, the address change will furnish you with a tidy excuse in case we run into each other at the supermarket.

So keep your fingers crossed that I don’t screw anything up!  And, as always, thanks for reading.

Mark

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Remember When You Weren’t Offered A Rewards Card at Every Store?

Remember when you weren’t offered a rewards card at every store you went to?

I do.

In the beginning supermarkets offered discounts through coupons, which required clipping and a fair amount of chutzpah at the check out line.  Then one day, a supermarket executive says, “Hey, if we’re going to offer discounts, we may as well track our customers’ purchases so we know exactly how many Tombstone pizzas or Cottonelle moist wipes they consume in a week.”

And an intern asks, “But how will you accomplish that?”

And the executive replies, “Don’t they teach you anything at that fancy Ivy League school?  We will track their purchases with plastic.  Plastic is the answer to all our problems.”

And the intern, stinging, asks, “But what will you call this piece of plastic?”

And the executive leans back in his chair, and laces his hands behind his head, and looks out the large window of his corner office at a brilliant Manhattan sunset, and exhales through his nose.  “We will call it a ‘rewards card,’” he says, “so that the customers think they are being rewarded.”

I remember that supermarkets were the first to offer rewards cards.  Then electronic stores climbed aboard.  Then liquor stores.  Then Panera.  Funeral homes will probably be next, offering a rewards card that can be affixed to a toe.

My wallet is thick enough to give me back problems solely because of rewards cards.  And most of my rewards cards are in my sock drawer.  I keep them there so that no one will steal them and get discounts under my name.  Unfortunately, this arrangement carries the risk that I will go to a store without its rewards card.

There is nothing more devastating than shopping at a store and waiting on the check out line and getting to the cashier and getting excited because the next time you walk through the doors of your home will be with a 36-pack of Coors Light and two boxes of Yodels, and then realizing you left your rewards card next to the argyles.  I was involved in one such incident.

“Sir, do you have a rewards card?” asks the cashier, who looks like the guitarist from Phish.

“Oh, uh, yes,” I say, making a show of looking for the card.  “Yes, I think it’s here somewhere.  I know I’ve got one…” I’m expecting him to say, “Oh that’s all right,” and just swipe the “cashier’s” rewards card that should be attached to the scanner by a piece of twine.  But it’s not there, and he’s not saying anything.  And the people behind me are getting impatient.

A woman offers her card.  “Oh, no,” I say, wondering how much protest is appropriate before I save three dollars under the name of this kind stranger.  I even put up one hand while using the other hand to fish around in a pocket I know is empty.

“No, really,” she says, “It’s all – “

“Well, okay,” I say.  The woman offers her card to the cashier.

“Um,” says the cashier, “I’m really not supposed to do this.”

I’m an adult buying Puffins and getting red tape from someone who probably takes cigarette breaks to watch Lord of the Rings on his cell phone. He repeats that he’s “not supposed to do this” and, after some pleading from everyone on the line and my sworn affidavit that I’ll never do it again, he lets me use the kind woman’s rewards card.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I cared about the discount that much.  Had coupons still been the dominant discount vehicle I would have paid top dollar for my Puffins without batting an eye.  Perhaps I’ve been wrong about these rewards cards.  Perhaps their purpose is not just to track the consuming practices of an unsuspecting public.

Perhaps rewards cards are meant to bring impatient strangers closer together.

Thanks to Jennifer Albright for the topic.

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Remember When Memory Was Not the Hottest Topic Around?

Remember when memory was not the hottest topic around?

I do.

A few months ago I saw a segment on 60 Minutes about people who remember the details of every day of their lives, such as what they had for dinner and whether it was a night to put out the regular garbage or the paper garbage.  And yesterday I read a review of a book on the U.S. Memory Championship, where mental athletes compete to see who can recite the most digits of pi and the most items off of the dollar menu at McDonald’s.

The whole world knows about these people and their high-powered memories. But what the world probably does not know is that I was the memory champion of my college fraternity. The primary data I had to recall was which actors had been in movies with Kevin Bacon, and where certain brothers were last seen wearing pants. But there was one incident where my mnemonic powers came in especially handy.

It was believed at that time that one of the best ways to extend the warm embrace of brotherhood was to make the pledges get the brothers food from the dining hall. At college, food was purchased with cards instead of cash to train us for life in the real world. And it came to pass that one day during my pledge term, one of the brothers handed me his ID card with an instruction to toilet paper the dining hall and then bring back a turkey club.

In those days the students’ social security numbers were written their ID cards, something that now sounds like my parents telling me about the days when no one locked their doors. On the walk to the dining hall I memorized the brother’s social security number. Like a modern memory champ, I used the expert technique of rubbing my temples and imagining the digits involved in lewd acts with other ASCII characters. By the time I had returned with the sandwich, I knew that brother’s social security number better than I knew the casts of JFK and Flatliners.

It was nearing the end of the semester and was time to register for the next round of classes to sleep through. Registration was easy; it was all done by computer. And to make sure that students signed up for only their own classes, a social security number was required. In a stunning display of perfect recall, I used Brother Turkey Club’s social security number to sign him up for a series of classes that I thought he would find interesting. It was always possible to go back into the system and change the classes, and so the prank would come to its hilarious denouement when the brother signed in to the system to sign up for his classes.

My anticipated punchline, however, had been based upon the assumption that Brother Turkey Club would remember to sign up for classes. That assumption turned out to be wrong. A week into the following semseter, when I was a brother myself and could send my own pledges for turkey clubs, even though I did not care for turkey clubs, I overheard the victim of my prank talking about how he was stuck taking organic chemistry, advanced Hebrew, and a seminar on gender issues and amphibians. Word soon got out—as it usually does when alochol is mixed with speech—that I had been the mystery registrar, and how I had performed my feat. The brotherhood was impressed. I still get requests to recite that brother’s social security number, and the numbers roll off my tongue as easy as pi.

I am still waiting for a call from 60 Minutes.

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Remember Your First Answering Machine?

Remember your first answering machine?

I do.

In the days when I was still watching new episodes of Thundercats, if someone called and no one was home, or if someone was home but was in the shower and did not hear the phone ring, or if they did hear it ring but were afraid of getting electrocuted by picking up the phone with a wet hand, then the phone just rang and rang until the caller got tired of hearing the phone ring and went off to do something more productive with his or her life.

Close your eyes for a moment and try to imagine what it was like not being able to record a message with your voice on it. Imagine the inconvenience. Imagine the missed opportunities. Imagine the bliss.

Answering machines were marketed upon the assumption that you wanted to receive telephone calls. But not all calls are wanted. If you don’t pick up your phone and the caller leaves a message, you have no recourse. When you don’t return the call or do what was asked, the caller can say, “Well, what you mean you didn’t return the 500 fake birds and tree branches we ordered for my baby shower? I left you a message.”  You can run, but you can’t hide.

Before answering machines, however, you could let the phone ring, and ring and ring and ring, and with each ring sense that the caller was getting tired, like a boxer hanging against the ropes in the tenth round, and would eventually go away. And when the phone stopped ringing, that was it. You could continue watching the Flintstones Meet the Jetsons or whatever, safely insulated from any constructive knowledge that you were supposed to call someone back or perhaps even do something for someone.

And then one day it all ended. They invented these machines upon which you would record a message.  I remember my band director’s answering machine played a steel drum band version of the theme from “Peanuts” that I heard about fifteen times when I tried to tell him that I was going to miss the Memorial Day parade because my cat was stuck behind the dryer.

My father’s greeting was robot-style. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave your name, tel-e-phone number, and brief mes-sage after the tone. Here is the tone.” And true to his word there would be a tone.

My grandparents called leaving messages “talking into the machine” and they would shout into it as if the answering machine was hard of hearing, just like all of their neighbors at Westwood 21 in Ft. Lauderdale.

People today are so used to leaving messages that they speak onto the digital medium just as if they were talking to me in person. That is why I have no trouble ignoring them.

Thanks to Maria for the topic. She does a great treatment of it here.

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Remember Audio Cassette Tapes?

Remember when people listened to music on cassette tapes?

I do.

The first cassette tape I ever bought was the album Appetite For Destruction by Guns ‘N’ Roses. I had never heard their music. But my friend said the band was cool and I did whatever my friends told me. After a few weeks of saving my allowance, the plastic Hess truck finally had the eight dollars I needed to buy the album in that innocent time when recorded profanity had to be bought in person.

I barely had the tape out of the cellophane when I realized that my family’s sole cassette player belonged to my father, and that this cassette player was in his car. Driving myself was not an option, as I had poor motor skills and was in the fifth grade. Listening to tunes like “Nightrain” (Wake up late/Honey put on your clothes/And take your credit card/To the liquor store), “My Michelle” (Your Daddy works in porno/Now that Mommy’s not around/She used to love her heroin/But now she’s underground), and “It’s So Easy” (Cars are crashin’ every night/I drink and drive/Everything in sight) with my father in the car next to me was a little uncomfortable at first, but soon he was whistling along just like he did to Roy Orbison.

One of the things I remember most about cassettes was making mix tapes. A mix tape was a recording of assorted songs on a blank tape, usually of different artists, and frequently made for a member of the opposite sex, or, if you were me, made just for yourself. The main character in the film High Fidelity lists a number of rules for making mix tapes. I, however, had only one rule: Arrange the songs so that I would not have to flip over the tape in the middle of a song.

With only this one rule to obey, the mood of my mix tapes was a little erratic. For example, one of my mixes started out with “Dead Souls” by Nine Inch Nails, then “Come On Eileen” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, then Metallica’s “Blackened,” and then “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper. Another one of my mix tapes opened with “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, then the main theme from “The Marriage of Figaro” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, then jumped to “Hammer Smashed Face” by Cannibal Corpse, and finally “V’Shomru” by Cantor Joseph Kanefsky. That mix was for my grandmother.

The other thing that stands out in my memory about cassettes was how they would get caught in the spokes of the tape player. I’d be pacing back and forth across the campus green, listening to The White Album over and over again instead of doing my Spanish homework, when all of a sudden Paul McCartney’s vocals on “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road” would be replaced by a loud crunching sound, and then there would be no sound but my own profanity.

Oh the humanity! I felt as if it were my arm that had been caught in the spokes, although because of the size difference only the end of my sleeve would get wound up. Try as I might to unwind the tangled tape and restore my beloved music, it almost never worked again, and even when it did the tape never sounded right. On some of the tracks it sounded like Paul was just screaming.

I no longer use cassette tapes, and even my compact discs are being featured on Antiques Roadshow. I now carry thousands of songs on my telephone. It takes seconds to arrange them in a mix, and I don’t have to flip over the phone unless I feel like drawing attention to myself. The only thing missing is the sound of cassette tape getting mauled by tape player spokes.

But I’m sure they’ve got an app for that.

Thanks to Jessica Buttram and Maria for the topic.

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Remember When You Could Bring Lip Gloss On An Airplane?

On the occasion of my 50th post I would like to thank you all for reading, and especially those of you who took the time to comment.  For the first few months of this operation the only person reading my posts was my mother, which was a little awkward since she does not have a computer.  I would have to print the post and mail it to her along with a self-addressed stamped envelope for comments.

Blogging is easier when the only reader is your mother.  But it is not nearly as fun.  You all have made this worthwhile, and I hope that you’ve found at least one or two things here that did not put you to sleep or make you ill.  As long as someone’s still reading, I’ll keep posting.

And on that note…

Remember when you could carry things like lip gloss, hand moisturizer, and water on an airplane without incident?

I do.

When I was a kid and my parents felt like putting me on a plane, the only items I ever carried on were paperback novels, Esquire magazine, and, just once, the Etch-A-Sketch Animator, which interfered with radar and necessitated an emergency landing in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I did not know that lip gloss and hand moisturizer even existed, and I would not have believed that people would one day pay for bottled water.

And then I got married. My wife carries around a CVS in her pocketbook, and engages in what I call “guerilla moisturizing.” Sometimes when I’m not looking she’ll apply some Neutrogena to my hands and say, “Rub it in.”

The other day we were at the airport, flying somewhere. We walk up to the security line and start placing into the gray plastic bins our shoes, belts, wallets, keys, cell phones, iPods, magazines, fuzzy dice, tongue scrapers, Texas Chainsaw Massacre bobble head dolls, Smucker’s jars containing embryonic aliens, and chewing gum.

Three items in my wife’s pocketbook catch my eye: a plastic bottle of lip gloss, a plastic bottle of hand moisturizer, and a plastic bottle of water. I consider telling her that these items might be a problem, but elect to remain silent. You learn certain things when you are married, and I know that it will be better for me if I let someone else tell her she can’t take something on the plane.

I’m directed to stand in this apparatus that looks like an upright magnetic resonance machine. Obviously I’m either going to travel through time, or be subjected to a full body scan. There is a whirring noise and I close my eyes. When I re-open them I am still in my own time, but they catch me trying to smuggle an ATM receipt onto the plane. After a TSA worker pats me down and then buys me drinks, I re-don my shoes, belt, et al.

I’m ready to graduate to the Food Court/Hudson News phase of air travel, but my wife has been detained by a TSA worker who does not look as nice as the one who patted me down. “Do you have a re-sealable plastic bag?” my wife asks me, as if I was supposed to have packed one.  I reply that, alas, I do not.

Spread out before her are the lip gloss, hand moisturizer, and bottled water. “They’re saying I have to put these things in a re-sealable plastic bag. I have to go through security again.” I ask my wife why she doesn’t just throw out the water. “Are you kidding? I paid three dollars for this!” The humorless TSA worker starts leading my wife back into the pre-security area. The chivalric thing to do would be to follow her, but chivalry is no match for Cinnabon.

A few minutes later I’m stuffing my face and wondering where my wife has gone. I see her standing just before the conveyor belt, chugging her water. I wonder if she’s going to start applying all her hand moisturizer, perhaps offering it to the passengers around her. “Excuse me,” she would say, “but I can’t take this on the plane, and your hands look dry.” Then she goes through the time warp again, and I’m about to breathe a sigh of relief, but she is detained again, this time by a different TSA worker.

I’m halfway through Steig Larsson’s “The Girl Who Tried To Bring Moisturizer On A Plane” when my wife gets through security. She tells me that she had to take a taxi to a local convenience store to buy Ziploc bags. I tell her how unfair it all is, how making her go through security three times is a waste of valuable resources, and inconveniences people for no gain. I put my arm around her and she smiles a little.

But let’s see her try to moisturize me now without my hearing the plastic bag.

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Remember When Airplane Meals Were Included With the Price of the Ticket?

Remember when meals on an airplane were included with the price of the ticket?

I do.

I don’t recall the airplane meals being anything like what I would normally consider food. But still I liked them and looked forward to them. Airline food had a special taste and consistency that I could enjoy back in the days when my digestive system could still hit a curve ball.

If the flight was long enough to be considered meal-worthy, the “steward” or “stewardess” (the ancient names for flight attendants) would serve each passenger breakfast, lunch, or dinner, depending on the time of day. My favorite meal was dinner, followed by a distant lunch and an even more distant breakfast. Lunch was just some turkey with a squeezable packet of Hellman’s, and breakfast was allegedly “eggs” and “sausage” but no laboratory could confirm this. But dinner was always great, and the main reason was because of the dessert.

Dessert was the crown jewel of the plastic divider plates, and carrot cake was the dominant dessert. I was on a flight to Florida to see my grandparents and eat ice cream every day when I had my first taste of airplane carrot cake. I went down the aisle of the plane, asking people if they were going to eat their carrot cake, or if they were going to finish their carrot cake if they had already started on it but looked like they might be full.

The most memorable airplane experience was when I flew to Vancouver Island the summer before my senior year of high school to spend two weeks studying killer whales and whether they preferred cable or satellite. The in-flight desert was a Table Talk apple pie. I wolfed mine down and then asked my classmates if they were going to eat theirs. Word spread quickly throughout the Boeing 747 that I was willing to eat unwanted Table Talk apple pie, free of charge, and the white and red boxes were piling up on my fold down tray. I was only halfway done when they announced that we were landing and had to put the tray tables back in their upright positions and that our Captain had turned on the “no-gluttony” sign.

Those days are over. Today, the flight attendants go down the aisle asking if anyone wants to purchase food. I don’t know if they sell dessert because I am too cheap to find out. I’m sure that some economics professor could prove to me on the back of a napkin that tickets would just be more expensive if the meals were included, and that this pricing model is really more efficient because people who don’t want meals can elect to forgo them and thereby reduce their flying costs. Of course, the professor would have to bring the napkin because I won’t pay for that, either.

Soon you’ll have to pay extra for a seat. The passengers will be standing on the plane as it taxis towards the runway, and the flight attendants will go down the aisle, asking three passengers at a time whether they would like to purchase a seat for the flight. Most people will decline the offer, because they will refuse to pay for something that used to be included. I know this because I will be one of them.

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