Collarbone High

#12: Old Vine, March 8

2010-03-30T04:05:00.005-04:00

I'm a bit of a marketing geek, so I'm fascinated by the study of consumer behavior. It's a subject I think about a lot as I walk around my neighborhood, which is oversaturated with restaurants. How do people choose? Why did that crowd of salarymen pass up a bunch of izakayas in favor of an identical izakaya? How did the well-dressed couple decide between overpriced French, overpriced Italian and overpriced Korean? How does a tiny sushi shop in a basement on a side street draw customers? Why is Zest still in business?

So how did Teri and I choose Old Vine for happy hour? In this case, it wasn't some intangible combination of ambience, decor, reputation, or any of the other hundreds of factors that drive consumer behavior. We chose Old Vine because it was open. Specifically, it was 5:30 p.m., and most restaurants in this neighborhood are closed from 2 to 6. Old Vine opens at 5. Sometimes choices are made for you.

Old Vine boasts of having one of the most extensive wine lists in Tokyo, but for an after-work drink, we were more intrigued by the 500 yen glasses of champagne. The waiter brought small dishes of salami (about three bites apiece) meant to offset the 500 yen table charge. I can't drink on an empty stomach, so I ordered some bread and a dish of crab, scallops and mushrooms in white wine sauce. (I hate mushrooms, but Teri likes them, so we split the dish oddly.)

I feel too uninformed to write much about this place, because we didn't sample the wine nor the teppanyaki menu, which is somewhat like attempting to review a steakhouse after having a soda and pretzels at the bar. All I can say is, the sparkling wine was good, it was cheap, and Old Vine is a 90-second walk from my apartment. All of these are good things.

http://oldvine.jp/old_vine/

#11: Homework's, Feb. 25

2010-03-30T01:18:00.005-04:00

I enjoy life in Tokyo for a lot of reasons, ranging from the major, life-altering ones (unlike in D.C., no one has been fatally shot on the street in front of my house) to the extremely minor (wide availability of iced jasmine tea). Another one on the minor end of that scale: minimal chance of encountering American cheese.

I have to explain here that I LOATHE American cheese. Not merely in the way I dislike, say, cauliflower, which I don't eat but don't actively hate. No, my abhorrence of American cheese rises to the level that I can't think about it without feeling queasy. And I simply cannot take the chance that I might eat it by accident. I won't eat any dish that lists "cheese" as an ingredient unless the waitstaff can assure me it's not American. I once sent back an omelette because both cheddar and American were options, and I thought the cheese looked suspiciously shiny. I will not eat it in a box; I will not eat it with a fox.

Most Japanese cooks either feel the same way, or see no need to import slick, oily slices of plasticine "cheese product" when there's already so much good cheese available here. In nearly three years, I'd never come face to face with my culinary nemesis. And so I've let my guard down, ordering food without interrogating waiters and biting into sandwiches without first whipping out a jewelers' glass to examine the cheese for telltale sheen.

I didn't think I needed to exercise such caution at the Hiro-o branch of Homework's, a popular burger and sandwich chain, because American cheese wasn't even on the menu. But one bite into my bacon cheeseburger, I knew the awful truth: this cheddar wasn't cheddar. It was too pale, too slick, too reminiscent of the McDonald's bacon, egg and cheese biscuit I ate for breakfast every single day when I was 19. (My American cheese aversion didn't kick in until age 23, the same day my McDonald's aversion kicked in, both courtesy of a terrible Filet-O-Fish.)

And here we enter the Discourse On The Differences Between American And Japanese Culture.

In America, I would have rejected this burger on the spot. I hate sending food back, and I'd like to think I'm never a bitch about it, but I would have politely explained that the cheese wasn't what I'd ordered and asked for a new burger with a non-orange cheese, partly so there would be no chance of a second mixup and partly because even if cheese #2 WAS cheddar, my brain would nettle me with taunts of "It's American, it looks American" and I wouldn't be able to eat it without gagging.

But in Japan, I just don't feel right doing that. Part of it is the language barrier -- I can order food fine, but I don't speak well enough to engage in a lengthy argument over varieties of cheese. Part of it is that I already feel I'm causing hassle for the staff by my mere presence, with my first-grade-level reading skills and my general ineptitude at understanding spoken Japanese, and I'm loath to cause any more by sending back food.

And there are two bigger factors, that microcosmically represent my entire viewpoint on my life in Japan.

One: I don't want to be that gaijin. I'm grateful to Japan for allowing me to live here, because: they don't have to. America? Has to put up with me. I'm a citizen. I have a God-given birthright to live in America, no matter how horribly or even criminally I behave. (Not that I behave criminally, but I could.) Japan doesn't; they could deport me. Not for sending back a hamburger, obviously. But I feel a responsibility to my adopted home, to fit in as best I can, and to behave like a Japanese citizen, not like an obnoxious American throwing my weight around. It's part of the bargain, you know? You let me live here; I don't get into fistfights in fast-food restaurants.

Two: This is sort of Broken Windows Theory, but: Japan begets Japan-ness. My first time at a movie theater here, I tried a handful of caramel corn and had some leftover kernels, and I was stumped on what to do with them. In the States, I'd have thrown them on the floor along with the spilled sodas and Milk Duds and god knows what else was on the floor. But this theater was sparkling clean; I didn't feel right throwing them on the floor. So I put them in my pocket.

Similarly, service people here are unfailingly polite. They may be saying rude things about me behind my back (or even to my face, I wouldn't know) but -- always nice. I, in turn, am compelled to also be polite.

I was always dismayed, in the States, how quickly so many transactions went to hell. Sometimes it's purely bad customer service, but usually it's a chain reaction of things: the traffic is bad so customer #1 is a jerk so the waitress is upset and then rude to customer #2 who is then annoyed and therefore rude to the barista and so on. It's a roundabout way of saying that in the States, I often feel comfortable being confrontational because the entire transaction has been a confrontation. You ignored me for five minutes and threw my change at me, so I feel entitled to throw a fit about the cheese being wrong. But when I've been offered Ritz-Carlton-level service at a diner, I'd feel like a jerk making a scene over cheese.

So I scraped off the cheese with a fork. The burger wasn't bad. (Again with the tartar sauce.) I'll go back. Non-orange cheese next time.

http://www.homeworks-1.com/

#10: Chinese Cafe 8, Feb. 20

2010-03-24T02:27:00.002-04:00

My expectations for Chinese Cafe 8 were high, not only because my friends love it (the food AND the giant gold penis hanging from the ceiling) but because I had to sit through "Avatar" before dinner. By the 120-minute mark, I was starving, and wishing the movie would hurry up and get to the ending we all saw coming so I could eat already.

Adding to my anticipation: the promise of Peking duck. I'd never eaten this, primarily because of the requirement in many stateside restaurants that the dish be ordered in advance. To me, Chinese food is not something you plan to eat; it's a meal of last resort, when the cupboards are bare, the nearest takeout joint requires shirt and shoes for entry, and you just had pizza for lunch. It's what bubbles up from the bottom of a dwindling pool of options.

There's no such requirement at Chinese Cafe 8, a crowded, lively place popular with tourists (thanks to that golden schlong) next to Roppongi Hills. A window between dining room and kitchen displays row after row of ducks on spits, reassuring fellow procrastinators that no matter how last-second our dining decision was, we won't be denied our duck.

We ordered a bottle of apricot wine for the table and what turned out to be way too many appetizers -- salmon dumplings, spicy beef, fried rice, a hot pot. I was already getting full when a chef wheeled the glistening duck to our table, held it up for our drool/approval, then deftly sliced it. He somehow managed to wedge the platter of duck onto our crowded table along with plates of its traditional accompaniments: steamed pancakes; sauces, including hoisin and a honey sauce; vegetable sticks; and crispy chunks of fried wonton.

From my first bite of duck, I regretted the appetizers. Don't get me wrong -- they were fine -- but I wanted to go 20 minutes back in time to when I had an empty stomach, the better to fill it with slice after slice of crisp, juicy duck. This was doubly true when it became apparent that, despite our best efforts, we weren't going to finish it. Wikipedia (which is never wrong, it's on the Internet!) informs me that traditionally, the leftovers are sent home with the diner. But doggy bags are outlawed in Japan, so we had to abandon everything we couldn't cram into our bulging bellies.

Did I mention the duck is only around $40, and can easily feed three or four people? I should. This is a great place to take a group. The staff is used to accommodating large, loud groups of gaijin, the duck is a delectable, filling bargain, the booze is cheap and the sprawling menu has something for just about everyone. Also there's a giant gold penis. I really can't stress that enough.

http://www.chinesecafe8.com/

#9: Bistro Lyon, Feb. 13

2010-03-04T04:03:00.003-05:00

Another busy Saturday, another meal in the Omotesando-eki food court. (I said I was going to try new restaurants, not new locations.)

Bistro Lyon's big business appears to be huge filled crepes, but I wanted a smaller meal. I was just about to order quiche when I saw a sign advertising croque monsieur and changed my order in mid-sentence. (I was sorely disappointed recently to find out that my favorite croque monsieur in Tokyo is no more. Cafe Hana, in Nishi-azabu, is no longer serving food, only drinks and cake. I'm bummed that I'll never again taste that peppery sauce, but Sarah put things in perspective: "They're serving cake? How is that bad news?")

Big mistake. I got the worst excuse for a croque monsieur ever -- about eight bites of sandwich filled with tough, stringy meat that I think might have been pastrami. It definitely wasn't ham, unless it was ham that had been cooked to the texture of leather. The flavorless cheese didn't help to offset the awful meat, either.

It's a good motto for life: when in doubt, order the quiche.

#8: La Gorda, Jan. 25

2010-02-04T01:29:00.002-05:00

Another Metropolis find, La Gorda is a Cuban restaurant tucked away on a side street in Roppongi that has so many awesome-looking eateries, I could spend the entire year dining only on that street and still not hit all of them.

I was lured in by the siren song of roasted chicken, a dish I crave constantly but rarely find. (Add to my list of things I miss about the States: rotisserie chicken in grocery stores.) Metropolis specifically mentioned this chicken -- along with lamb kebabs and ropa vieja -- and La Gorda's menu touted it as the restaurant's specialty, marinated for hours in the chef's special sauce.

I ordered a quarter chicken and settled in with a book, visions of Boston Market dancing in my head. (And my mouth.) I was surprised when my order came out barely three minutes later; surprised again that the chicken portion was smaller than I'd been picturing; and surprised most of all that the entree came with two sides that hadn't been listed on the English menu -- black beans and rice, and a colorful salad with carrots, red peppers, Romaine lettuce and purple cabbage. The cost for this meal? 1,000 yen -- an unheard-of bargain at dinner. Lunch sets in this neighborhood usually cost around that much and include a side or two, but at dinner, the prices go way up and the sets are abandoned.

For 1,900 yen, I could have gotten half a chicken, or a whole one for 3,700. At first, I wished I'd gotten the half, but the beans and rice were filling, and midway through the meal I knew I'd gotten the right portion. The chicken itself was a bit of a disappointment -- the white meat was somewhat on the dry side, surprising given the long marinating process. The crispy, tangy skin was delicious, though. I could have made a meal out of that! Not a healthy meal, mind you, but if you served me a half pound of that skin, I wouldn't complain. (This reminded me of a former boyfriend who'd grumble every time I ordered French onion soup. He knew I had little interest in the broth, and zero interest in the onions or the soggy crouton. "Why don't you just ask for a big glob of melted cheese?" he'd say. "That's all you really want." It was true. "Can I have half a chicken worth of skin?")

La Gorda also offers your typical rum drinks -- mojito, pina colada -- and a couple of beers. I'd planned to get a pina colada but was distracted by the handwritten sign outside offering "hot rum." It was cold out, and the thought of a delicious mug of hot buttered rum, the brown sugar melting in my mouth, was irresistable. I hesitated for a second before ordering it, with one side of my brain arguing that the sign didn't say anything about "buttered." It just said "hot rum." But the other side said that was ridiculous; of course they wouldn't just serve a big glass of heated Havana Club.

Yeah. It was just a big glass of heated Havana Club. About 12 ounces, in fact, served in a soda glass that was too hot to hold for most of my meal. That wasn't much of a problem, because once I realized I could smell the pure rum from six feet away, I had no intention of drinking it. I called for some water and spent the meal praying that the women smoking at the bar wouldn't ignite my neglected drink. The lesson here is clear: never pass up a chance to drink a pina colada.

http://www.lagorda.co.jp/

#7: Marvelous Cream, Jan. 18

2010-02-02T05:28:00.003-05:00

Speaking of things that wouldn't fly in the States: a photo of this storefront would end up on FAILblog, and deservedly so.

Oh, get your minds out of the gutter: it's ice cream. And it really is marvelous.

Marvelous Cream is similar to Cold Stone Creamery, in that its staff chops up ingredients on a marble slab to blend with your ice cream. It's different in that the portion sizes are manageable, so you don't waddle out feeling like you just ingested 8,000 calories worth of butterfat and Oreos.

I ended up here not because I felt a need to expand my ice cream horizons, but to kill time between "(500) Days of Summer" and "The Young Victoria" on MLK Day. Most of that time was spent translating the katakana menu, but I was able to read it, albeit slowly, and I settled on a combination involving raspberries and raspberry macarons. Heavenly, especially the bites with macaron chunks.

Marvelous Cream is a chain based in Japan (I went to the Hibiya Chanter location) that's also expanded to Singapore. I'd have to make more visits (many more visits ... raspberry macarons ...) to say for sure, but I think I prefer it to Cold Stone, which is inexplicably popular in Japan, with lines stretching out the door even in winter.

http://www.marvelouscream.com/

#6: GARB Pintino, Jan. 12

2010-02-01T03:49:00.003-05:00

GARB Pintino is one of the reasons I started this project. It's next to my doctor's office, so I'm always walking past it and thinking its patio looks inviting and intending to try it, but never getting around to it. My underlying goal this year is to stop intending to do things and actually do them. So after my latest doctor visit, I decided to move this place out of the "I should eat there sometime" column.

The patio that looked so enticing in the summer was open despite the rain and the chill, thanks to thick plastic sheeting and heaters, but I chose to sit inside because the padded benches looked cozier and I wanted to be far away from the weather.

The lunch menu offered half a dozen sets for around 1,000 yen, but my choices were limited to the dishes whose kanji I could read. (I'm kind of surprised that GARB -- sitting across the street from the entrance to Tokyo Tower -- didn't have an English menu, because it seems like an ideal spot for tourists.) I picked strips of whitefish in a delicate tempura batter flavored with wasabi, and loved it. My only complaint was that the tomato sauce accompanying a side of grilled zucchini spilled onto the fish, which masked and ruined the flavor.

Lunch sets are the best way to eat cheap in Tokyo, and this one was no exception -- it also included a huge salad, a post-meal cup of tea or coffee and two delicious rolls. The waitress didn't seem to mind my lingering over a book, and even offered me more rolls.

I'd like to come back here for dinner, when the patio is open, and with someone who can understand the menu better than me. I don't think there's any hope for understanding the restaurant's odd name, though.

GARB Pintino: http://www.garb94.com/pintino/

#5: ZipZap, Jan. 10

2010-01-29T08:22:00.004-05:00

Bad name, good burgers.

This project would be so easy if I wrote only four words about each restaurant.

Speaking of the project, I've given it a name: Project Palette. (Bravo network, if you'd like to buy this concept from me, give me a call.)

We hit ZipZap for brunch the day after the '90s party (which also included several hours of food at Zest, which doesn't merit a mention in PP because I've been there far too many times) and we were all starving by the time we arrived and persuaded someone to take our order.

Now, brunch means different things to different people. Some people want lunch, but with an excuse to order a mimosa. Others want a huge meal, thinking it needs to make up for the two they're missing. To me, though, the best brunch is simply breakfast eaten at a more civilized time of day. So I was a little underwhelmed that ZipZap's brunch menu included only burgers and sandwiches. Even when I'm not starting my day until well after noon, I still need to ease into the day -- some eggs, some pastries, maybe a little smoked salmon. And tea. Lots and lots of tea.

One bite in, though, my mouth silenced any of my brain's lingering objections to greeting the day with hamburger. Although I'd been tempted by sandwiches (especially the turkey sandwich, a creature not native to Japan and rarely spotted on Tokyo menus), I picked the smaller 150 gram burger and splurged on two kinds of cheese -- cheddar and monterey jack -- as well as housemade bacon. The burgers come with lettuce, tomato, a "house sauce" that tasted a bit like barbecue sauce (or maybe more like Arby-Q sauce), and ... tartar sauce? This wasn't the first time I've encountered tartar sauce on a burger here. I'm not sure why the Japanese think tartar sauce belongs on a burger. Maybe they don't understand why we think it doesn't. I ordered mine without sauce, and it came with the house sauce but without the tartar, and that worked out OK.

This was a downright delicious burger, the kind of food I can't stop eating even when I'm full, then past full, and knowing I'll regret my binge later but unable to resist the tactile sensations of tasting, biting, chewing.

Ryoko ordered the turkey sandwich I'd rejected, and I didn't regret my choice. The sandwich lacked any dressing and looked very dry. Reva's tuna melt was intriguing -- served open face on two rolls, with a different cheese on each side -- but not enough to make me turn my back on the burger.

I wish two things were different about ZipZap (OK, maybe three. What's up with that name?).

One, although lots of restaurants have irritating Web sites (too much hey-I-just-learned-Flash and too little information), this one takes the prize for its sound effects. It was apparently designed by the same person on the Star Trek team who thought that in the 24th century, humans would like their doors to beep and whoosh every time they opened.

Two, I wish the location was easier to find (and that the map on said Web site gave better directions). I followed Ryoko there, and I'm not sure I can find it again. Maybe that's just as well, though; there are lots of great burgers in Tokyo, and I need to keep moving on, trying new ones.

ZipZap: http://www.zip-zap.jp/

#4: J-Pop Cafe, Jan. 9

2010-01-20T00:50:00.004-05:00

I didn't eat much at J-Pop Cafe -- we were there for a '90s party, so our food choice was limited to what was on the party plan menu. Unlike a lot of party plans, though, we didn't run out of food, and the space was cool. It's on the top floor of a building in Shibuya, under a big dome and surrounded by windows. I'm told some of the scenes in "Babel" were shot here. That movie keeps getting pushed to the bottom of my Blockbuster queue.

J-Pop cafe: http://www.j-popcafe.com/

#3: Pasta Ricotta, Jan. 9

2010-01-15T00:09:00.002-05:00

I don't have much to say about Pasta Ricotta, except that the Pasta Genovese, with shrimp and a white fish I couldn't identify, was tasty and filling.

I have a lot to say about the place I found it -- a food court of sorts in the Omotesando train station.

One thing that amazes me about Tokyo is that, densely packed though it is, there's probably another 30 percent of the city underground. Not just subway tunnels, but entire malls. This is smart growth at its finest -- not only do you not need a car, but you could buy just about anything without ever leaving the station.

This was my first experience with a Japanese food court, so I hung back a bit to see how it worked. Pretty much like an American one -- restaurants on the perimeter, tables in the middle, every shopper for herself. I was ordered and given what I assumed was a buzzer, then snagged the only available seat at a counter. I'd also asked for water, and the staffer said something I didn't understand and pointed toward an enclosed seating area. I guessed at first that he meant I could buy it there, but I discovered instead that, at the door, was a built-in water dispenser with dozens of cups.

It's hard to imagine this in the States. Sure, small restaurants have a "help yourself" water pitcher, and some fast-food places give free water from their soda machines (although they usually charge for the cup). It just seems likely that, on a Saturday afternoon, the cups would have long since been swiped by teenagers, or a mom would have given her toddler the whole lot to play with.

I got my water, waited a few minutes, and sure enough, the pager buzzed and I collected my lunch. While I ate I people-watched, and also tried to answer the question of what I should do with my (actual glassware) dishes when I finished. I saw a woman nearby abandon her table -- and within seconds, a uniformed woman swooped in, took the empty tray and wiped the table. I then saw that there were small signs on each table with directions: leave this side up if you're coming back, the other side up if you're finished. Over and over again, I watched this play out with precision. No "finished" table sat untouched for more than 30 seconds, and I gained huge respect for the woman who was somehow spotting and clearing these tables in a crowded dining hall crammed with shoppers and shopping bags.

Again, it's hard to imagine this working at your average stateside mall. It's rare enough to see anyone cleaning in the food court, let alone with the efficiency of a private butler. And while no one seemed rushed, they didn't linger, either; instead, everyone seemed innately aware that the place was crowded, people were waiting for tables, and they ate quickly, cleared out quickly, and the dishes were whisked away equally quickly. I can't picture those table signs -- made of paper -- lasting one day in your typical American mall. They'd be shredded, stuffed into handbags, made into elaborate towers involving various foods, dishes and salt shakers. (I may have been partly responsible for some spectacular towers o' tableware at Denny's back in the day. Possibly some salt shakers stuck upside down in benches at Burger King. And definitely occupying one table for four hours while my friends and I ate our "two slices of pepperoni and a small drink for $2.50" from Pizza Plus while casually vandalizing the planters.)

What was missing from this scene? No straw wrappers being shot through the air. No abandoned stacks of 900 napkins and 50 packets of Taco Bell hot sauce. No ice cream cone turned upside down and left on a seat. Nobody hanging out, harassing passers-by, mashing their food into a repulsive mush, littering, loitering.

What there is, instead, is a code. This is how things are done. Everyone knows it. And everyone follows it.

Call it a conformist culture if you want, but it sure is nice to sit down without worrying there might be a melting ice cream cone on your chair.

#2: Lauderdale, Jan. 3

2010-01-14T03:51:00.002-05:00

I read about Lauderdale in Metropolis, and what piqued my interest was not yet another restaurant in Roppongi, but the fact that this place actually serves breakfast. Not just weekend brunch, but honest-to-god breakfast -- we're talking pancakes and croissants here -- and on weekdays. Aside from McDonald's and chain coffee shops, it's rare to find a restaurant in this part of Tokyo that even opens before 11.

It's also rare to find me out of my house before 11, so my first meal at Lauderdale was Sunday brunch, served until the civilized hour of 4 p.m. The French-influenced, rustic-looking restaurant is in a part of Roppongi Hills I usually avoid -- Keyakizaka-dori -- because Tiffany and Escada aren't part of my everyday wardrobe. But I liked this place so much, it might tempt me to venture out on weekday mornings at the ungodly hour of 10 a.m.

I had the Floridian omelette, filled a generous portion of smoked salmon, dill and lime. The combination sounds odd, but everyone at the table agreed: it was somehow just perfect. My favorite dish, though, was the roasted chicken breast atop creamy mashed potatoes with a hint of rosemary. Brunch comes with two sides as well as a huge bread basket with enough rolls for each of us to have three, and we were impressed with the generosity of the beverages. Tea came in a three-cup pot, and the waiter tried to refill Ryoko's hot water -- something I've never seen here. Kanako's coffee, too, was refilled over and over. Alas, the impressive menu of cocktails doesn't include free refills.

Lauderdale's specialty is souffles. The gruyere and mushroom sounds delightful, except for the mushroom part. We shared an apple-cinnamon souffle, and it was just the right amount -- no way could I have eaten a whole one. It was airy and tasty, with a sugar-crusted rim where it met the ramekin.

Everyone else was eager to go back for dinner, when the menu is dominated by mussels and duck confit, but I'm more a breakfast person. Not that I wouldn't go at night. It's just that I think I'm going to be spending a lot of mornings here, especially once it's warm enough to sit out on the patio.

Lauderdale: http://www.lauderdale.co.jp/index.html

#1: Worldstar Cafe, Jan. 2

2010-01-13T23:14:00.004-05:00

I found Worldstar by accident, thanks to a sudden whim to explore a new street. I'd ventured out into the surreally silent Roppongi (the neighborhood adjoining mine, and Tokyo's nightlife district) to make a Don Quijote run, and as I approached Roppongi Crossing, a small parallel street beckoned to me. I'd only ventured a few feet down this street -- to drink at the Travel Cafe and, embarrassingly, to eat at Outback -- and I thought, why not. It was a nice day, I had no place to be, and thanks to the holidays, I had the streets to myself.

The street itself proved uninteresting (and not parallel as I'd thought, although I found a good shortcut to Food Magazine supermarket). Worldstar was about the only place open, and as I passed, two bored waiters standing on the porch waved me in. But I didn't want to eat -- I wanted to explore. And to buy cat litter.

An hour later I was back, and the waiters were astonished. "You came back!" they said, clearly delighted that their sales pitch had worked, and that they had a customer. (Everything in Tokyo pretty much shuts down until Jan. 5.)

As it was late afternoon, only the set lunch menu was available. I had a grilled chicken thigh in mustard sauce and thin rounds of homemade bread with a tasty red spread. The meat wasn't the highest quality -- I found a few chunks of gristle -- but it was tasty, and the Irish coffee from the full bar warmed me up. (And, until 2 a.m., kept me up.) I missed out on Worldstar's best features, though -- a water bar with high-end waters (yes, really) from all over the world, a tapas menu, and an extensive wine bar in the back room. They're open until 8 a.m. (yep, that's until, not from), making this a great place to wait out the first train.

Worldstar: http://www.worldstarcafe.com/eng.html

the restaurant project

2010-01-13T23:02:00.003-05:00

Wow, over a year since I blogged. Pathetic! Anyway, for anyone still reading, I'm revving it back up this year as part of a New Year's resolution to try new restaurants. I wanted to track my progress, and I realized, I already have a handy place to do that. So Collarbone High is born again! I'm trying not to turn it into a food blog, because there are already hundreds of bloggers who write about food far better than I ever could. Instead, I'll just do a brief write-up of each new place I try, and I'll aim -- but not promise -- to write about other topics as well.

I abandoned the blog before because I was having a hard time striking the right tone. I realized what the problem was when my friend Tim told me he missed my stories about coping with life in Tokyo. And therein lies the snag -- after a little over two years here, I don't have to cope with Japan anymore. I just live here. Occasionally a comical misunderstanding or language-barrier snafu will arise, but those occasions are getting fewer and farther between. I no longer have the "gee whiz Japan is weird!" naivete that entertained people reading in the States. I don't want to write an expat blog, either, or to pepper my posts with references to people, places and Japanese terms that would make sense only to my friends in Japan. So I kind of got stuck. But the restaurant project has given me a focus and a new reason to write. It's good to be back!

mini milestones, and a big one coming up

2008-10-23T09:33:00.003-04:00

Two weeks from Sunday will be one year since I moved to Japan. I promise to write a long, deep post about the past year, what I've done and learned, etc. In the meantime, to tide you over, two amusing anecdotes:

1) Last week Sarah, Jon and I went to Tokyo Disney. Or, rather, we tried to. By the time we arrived at 10:30, the park was already at capacity for the day, so we went to Disney Sea instead. Sea is more about the experience than the rides -- there's nothing in that park that compares to Space Mountain, or even the Matterhorn -- and I'm more about the rides. (Space Mountain! Matterhorn!) It was fun nonetheless -- a bit odd to hear Mickey Mouse speaking Japanese, but still fun. Japan and Disney are a match made in heaven; the Happiest Place on Earth meets the Most Inclined To Spend Ungodly Amounts Of Money On Cute Things Place on Earth. (see also: tiny dogs)

Now to the anecdote: There are two exits at the Disney subway stop, marked with signs in Japanese and English. As we surged through Minami Deguchi/South Exit, a Japanese girl, about 8 years old, tugged her mother's hand and pointed to the sign. "South! South!" she exclaimed, clearly proud to have recognized the English word. At the same time, I was saying to myself, "Minami! I recognized that kanji!"

2) Also last week, I finally made my first pilgrimage to the Shibuya outpost of Tokyu Hands, a DIY store with supplies for just about any hobby or craft you could name, plus things like luggage and bikes. I quickly realized this could easily be an 8-hour errand; six stories of amazing goodies! But I focused, got my beading supplies, and was on my way out when I was distracted by an entire floor devoted mostly to clocks. This may surprise people who've been in my apartment in Tokyo, which has NO clocks except the one on the microwave, but I LOVE clocks. I don't know why -- I barely use them, preferring my cell phone -- I just do. Then I saw a wall of posters, including an amazing, '50s-era map of Tokyo, with its major streets named "Avenue A," "19th Street," etc., just like New York City, during the occupation. I instantly thought the map would make a great going-away gift for Allison, one of my fave reporters, who just left for Italy.

There have been a lot of times in the past year when I wasn't able to buy something because I just didn't know how to communicate what I wanted. But I stood back, I did some mental vocabulary review, and I realized, I can make this purchase. So I found the nearest staffer and said, in Japanese, that I'd like to buy that map of Tokyo, on the wall over there, with a frame.

For the first time EVER, there was no hesitation on the part of the Japanese half of the conversation. She didn't look at me as though I was speaking Greek; she didn't say "sumimasen?"; she didn't repeat the request back to me in English; she didn't call a co-worker to come translate. She just went to the posters drawer, pulled out the map I'd asked for and said "Kono wa?" (this one?) I said yes, she asked if I wanted a white frame or a black frame, I said white, she asked me to wait while she framed it. And I had. The whole. Conversation. In Japanese. Without having to apologize, or explain that I only speak a little Japanese. It's like I actually can maybe sort of communicate, or something.

Thrilled with my purchase, and pumped about my conversation (Nihongo wa dekimasu, bitches!) I headed home, and decided to treat myself to the salami/proscuitto plate at my neighborhood pasta joint. It came, and my first thought upon seeing it was, I'm glad they brought chopsticks with this, because the basket on the table only has forks, and proscuitto is damn near impossible to cut with a fork. So I scooped up a hunk of delectable-looking ham.

Or, started to, but something immediately went wrong. The top chopstick shattered, and pieces flew everywhere. I was baffled -- what the hell just happened? -- but then, as I picked a sliver out of my hair, I realized ...

... that they were actually breadsticks.

Utensil identification FAIL.

(As Stacy helpfully pointed out to me later, what kind of jerk makes breadsticks that look exactly like chopsticks? In Japan?)

year-round insanity

2008-09-11T22:04:00.003-04:00

One of the many cool things about Tokyo is that nearly every restaurant employs guys who zip around on little motorbikes, delivering food to anyone too busy/lazy/cold/hot/etc. to go get it themselves. You can get just about anything delivered here: curry, sushi, pork cutlets. Even booze!

Even this:

The skeptics among you may be thinking, yeah, this has been on the Internet for a while. It's totally Photoshopped. Funny, but fake.

Let me restore your faith, o cynics: this is NOT Photoshopped. This was in my mailbox when I got home from work last night. (And my 'Shop skills are nowhere near this good.) This is the Four Seasons pizza from the oddly named Strawberry Cones (the name makes me want ice cream, or maybe crepes, but not pizza).

Let's take a look at what we have here, shall we?

Clockwise from top left, this culinary masterpiece has four topping sections:

Sweet corn, in what appears to be curry or barbecue sauce
Tuna with potato, tomato, onion, garlic and parsley, crisscrossed with mayonnaise
Salmon and broccoli with "gratin sauce"
5-cheese margherita

The toppings aren't that noteworthy -- pretty typical for Japanese pizza, especially the corn and the mayo. (Why must they ruin all food by squirting mayo all over it?)

The part that takes the cake, er, pie, is the crust. Note the artful arrangement of the extras. Each section gets two. First, the yellow globs (I think, based on my previous experiences with Japanese pizza, that these are mozzarella; this topping does not hold up well, as the globs get cold and congeal quickly.) Not in the mood for rubbery cheese balls? Well, you're in luck, because the other half of the crust is topped with ... pigs in a blanket!

All this can be yours for only $25!!!!!*

* For a medium. Large pizza is $35.

i sort of need that toe, thanks

2008-08-22T23:58:00.002-04:00

Yesterday morning I managed to bash my left pinky toe into my coffee table. I hoped the combination of ibuprofen, wine and sleep would banish the pain by today, but it still Hurts. So. Much. If I did a "Things I Hate Right Now" list*, this would be number 1.

The pain's not really the problem, although I can't say I enjoy it. The bigger issue is that my primary mode of transportation is through the courtesy of my two feet. So impairing my ability to walk is the equivalent of wrecking my car.

* I've thought many times about creating this list, but I'm always reminded of the C&H strip where Calvin starts a list of "A million things that really bug me" and Hobbes says "How about excessively negative people?"

nihongo wa sukoshi shika dekimasen

2008-08-21T08:37:00.002-04:00

("I can only speak a little Japanese.")

I thought it would never happen, but Tuesday night I finished Book I of Japanese for Busy People -- the equivalent of finishing a year of college-level study. Up next: Book II, which will prove to be a bit more of a challenge because parts of the book, including the dictionary, are written in kana; and starting the daunting challenge of learning to read and write kanji, the alphabet consisting of thousands of Chinese characters. I'm working from a book called "Easy Kanji," which is a ridiculous oxymoron. It's from the same series as the "Easy Hiragana" book I mocked in an earlier post, but I have to admit, that book, and its companion, "Easy Katakana," did teach me those alphabets. So I was kind of superstitious about sticking with the same series for kanji. But I've already realized -- I'm going to need a LOT more books. Muzukashii desu! (It's difficult.)

photos from my korea vacation

2008-08-18T06:43:00.002-04:00

I'm leaning toward posting pics on Facebook rather than on Flickr these days, because Flickr allows only a few uploads per month unless you pay for a premium account. This album is accessible even to people who aren't on Facebook:

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=37486&l=2a87f&id=720561445

Enjoy!

gain a fortune, lose a kettle

2008-08-01T09:09:00.004-04:00

I started this morning the way I've started every work day this decade: put the kettle on to make tea; check e-mail while I wait for the water to boil.

The e-mail held the news I've been waiting nine months to hear: my house is sold. I've been afraid to even mention that it was under contract -- I know all too well that real estate contracts can fall through right up until closing. But it's done: all the i's are dotted, the t's crossed, every one of the 10,000 documents required to transfer a house is signed, by some guy named Carlos (the buyer) and by Mary Ellen (acting as me, through the magic of a power of attorney).

I'm 99 percent ecstatic about the sale. I wanted to sell for a lot of reasons:

1) My infernal ARM was due to adjust in November (yes, I'm one of those people who took out a hybrid ARM with the intention of flipping the house before the interest rate went up, thereby contributing heavily to the mortgage crisis. You're welcome.)

2) The mortgate, along with the various expenses of maintaining an empty house, were eating up a lot of the disposable income that was supposed to be one of the perks of working in Japan.

3) Most importantly, I didn't want to move back to that house. One big thing I learned from living there is, I am not handy, and I'm not a person who gets any pleasure from yardwork or gardening. I grew to hate the huge yard, which always needed to be mowed, or raked, or sprayed for ants, or have a giant nest of angry bees removed. I think my happiest moment in packing up the house was when I pushed my flimsy snow shovel into the trash bin and vowed that, as God is my witness, I'll never shovel again. On top of that, after living car-free in Tokyo, I can't imagine ever going back to a lifestyle that doesn't let me walk to nightlife, grocery stores and public transportation. It was a cute house and I'm glad I owned it, but next time around, I'll be looking for something very different.

The 1 percent is a bit of unavoidable melancholy that I always feel when I have to give up something that's been a part of who I am. (I think my bitterest tears were shed for my 1976 cobalt blue Corolla, with the rotting floorboards and the sticking carburator that stranded me on so many cold winter nights.) The melancholy is mixed with a soupcon of fear -- I literally can't go home again. I've cut my last physical tie to D.C., as well as giving up my biggest adult achievement and my primary source of equity.

But the fear yields something else: freedom. With that chain unbound, the world is my playground -- when my contract at Stripes ends, I can live anywhere I want. (Anywhere with gainful employment, that is.) Into the great wide open, and all.

Wait a minute, you're saying. Was there a kettle in this story? Was there a point to this story?

Yes, and yes. Getting there.

So, I read the e-mail. I did cartwheels. (Mentally.) I let out a breath I've been holding for nine months as the housing market descended to lows even Dante couldn't conceive. Then I put my last Earl Greyer teabag into a cup and picked up the kettle.

I should mention here that the kettle is, I believe, older than me. It's a sturdy old Pyrex percolator that my mom made her breakfast tea with, my whole life, until she got a bigger one and gave me the old one.

Ah, here it is, and it appears these were made between 1952 and 1960. Damn, it's older than I realized:

Just as I started to pour, the kettle broke in half. Just under the metal band -- suddenly I was holding the handle and the lid, and the bottom of the kettle was on the stovetop, and boiling water was everywhere. I got lucky -- most of the water ended up on the counter and the floor, although some of it did splash me, and I have a pretty nasty burn on my stomach. But it's small.

Somehow, though, the loss of the kettle hit me much harder than the loss of the house. Part of it was the shock -- the house has been under contract since May. (Also, physical pain played a role.)

I didn't mean to turn the kettle into a metaphor, but I just now did, in my mind. Because even though I'm sad to lose my heirloom (I maybe cried a little bit), I'm also excited to shop for a new kettle. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was eyeing jewel-toned OXO kettles at FrancFrancFranc, an awesome housewares shop. I coveted them, but turned away because I had a perfectly good kettle at home. And now, out of the loss, comes freedom, to buy a new one. So it's just like the house. And that's enough of this tortured analogy. Good night.

better late than never

2008-06-15T05:36:00.002-04:00

Now that I finally have Internet (hooray!) I've gotten around to posting photos from cherry blossom season on Flickr, as well as some exterior shots of my apartment. I'll try to post interior shots later this week, but first I need to clean. :(

To see them, use the link at right, or find me on flickr -- username brechtgirldc.

those were some weird earthquakes

2008-05-08T02:27:00.002-04:00

When I got home from work last night I was puzzled by a rythmic clacking sound coming from my bedroom. The culprit turned out to be the jewelry rack hanging on the bedroom door; the necklaces were gently swaying, and the sound was the noise they made as they hit the door. Clack, clack, clack.

I'm used to these tiny earthquakes by now -- another time, I noticed one only because I saw the reflection in my bedroom mirror rippling. But I noticed this one lasted longer than usual. Aftershocks, I thought, and then I felt an odd buzzing in my right ear -- kind of like a mosquito, but (for once) there were no bugs around. (I have a slight mosquito problem in my apartment.)

Something was definitely afoot with the earth's crust.

I sat down on my brand-new, super-comfy sofa to flip through a magazine while I waited for sleep to come -- and about half an hour later, the shaking started in earnest. (That turned out to be the 6.2 quake that hit at 1:43.)

Living atop four constantly clashing tectonic plates doesn't bother me: most of the resulting earthquakes are too small to feel. Even the bigger ones, I only really notice if I'm in bed, and they just feel like someone grabbed the bed frame and rolled it back and forth. (True story: my first quake happened when I was living at Hardy Barracks, and my first thought was that the people in the room next to me were slamming their headboard against the wall.) Obviously
I'm hoping the fates and the plates will postpone the Kobe-level, city-leveling quake that Tokyo is overdue for, until I'm done living here. But I don't waste time worrying about the possibility. If it happens it happens, and there's nothing I can do to prevent it.

Last night's quake was the worst one I've experienced. The shaking seemed to go on and on -- I estimated it at 3 or 4 minutes, but co-workers said it probably was more like 1. At one point I wondered if I should be in a doorway (the safest place to be, so you're not struck by falling debris), but it ended just after I had that thought. I think. The ear-buzz returned during the second quake -- I think the shaking played havoc with my inner-ear balance -- so I had a hard time gauging whether I was actually moving or just felt like I was. (Kind of like getting off the Spider at an amusement park, and you stagger drunkenly for a few seconds because you feel like you're still spinning.)

Nothing fell, though, and I dozed off and slept through the other quakes. (Reuters says there were five.) So I'm looking on the whole thing as establishing my expat cred -- now I have a "big quake" under my belt.

free Internet! (with $12 sandwich)

2008-04-21T03:48:00.002-04:00

I'm posting this from the iGooogle Art Cafe in Roppongi Hills, a fancy-schmany mall in Tokyo. What's the art cafe? Well, as I posted on Facebook, I'm not entirely sure. It appeared overnight --a little cafe in the Mori Tower with glass display cases and a tiny laptop on each table. It seems like it would have taken a lot of time and money to set up -- but it's only here for two weeks.

I guess it's an art exhibit of sorts -- the name gave it away, and there's a list of famous Japanese artists outside. But when Sarah and I tried to look at the art yesterday, we were told we couldn't just walk around looking at it. The only thing we could do was order food and use the Internet. Apparently the art is just supposed to be ignored.

You know where you won't find any info on this cafe? On Google.

(Also? The default search engine is MSN Live, which cracks me up. You'd think if Google spent all the money to plaster its name and logo all over this place, not to mention creating sodas, an entree and a dessert based on its colors, they'd take the extra 30 seconds to set up Google as the search engine, no?)

So I came back today, and ordered a ham sandwich and tea so I could check e-mail on the seven-inch-wide keyboard and ignore the art, which is what all the Japanese patrons are doing. (I can report there is a giant orange Converse sneaker that appears to be made of plush in one of the display cases.)

This place is SO Japanese. Allow me to elaborate:

1) No fooling, a ham sandwich and a cup of tea cost 1,200 yen. (I'm overlooking that in favor of the exciting news that I ordered the food in Japanese, and even asked and understood what kind of cheese was on it.)

2) Like all electronics in this country, the laptops are miniature. They're about the size of a sheet of copier paper. I've made an estimated 600,000 typos while writing this due to the teensy keys.

3) The staff is super-over-helpful-genki-OK! I was hoping to maybe watch Top Chef on YouTube, but five IT guys and four waitresses are hovering around the customers, in case we somehow need help checking e-mail or are incapable of pouring our own tea, so it seems like that might be frowned upon.

4) Just, in general, WTF? Why does it even exist? Like a lot of things in Tokyo, I enjoy it and use it, but I can't say I understand it.

i'm starting to understand why mothra seems plausible

2008-04-18T00:54:00.003-04:00

In addition to the giant crows that terrorize Tokyo, this city has the biggest earthworms I've ever seen. For serious, they're a foot long! That ain't right.

i swear the post office is toying with me

2008-04-17T07:16:00.003-04:00

One of the perks of my job is having an APO address, which pretty much functions just like a stateside address, except for the odd Web site that can't handle military addresses (why do you hate America, Paypal?). The only downside is that the military postal system can be wildly unpredictable. Mail can take three days to arrive from the States, or it can take four months. You just never know.

That makes subscribing to weekly magazines a bit dicey, but I can pretty much count on Entertainment Weekly showing up every Tuesday to feed my pop-culture cravings.

Which issue of EW will show up is more of a crapshoot.

I almost always get a magazine, but they arrive in no apparent order. This week I got the March 21 issue, on the heels of the April 11 issue. The week before that, Feb. 15. But March 28 showed up right on time.

I'm convinced someone in the MPS is hoarding the magazines, and doling out one a week, at random. There's no other logical explanation. Not that that's a logical explanation, but knowing DOD, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

Getting the magazines late hammers home the lightning-swift pace of American pop culture. The copy I got this week is only three weeks old, but it's already as out-of-date as a 1996 copy of Time in a dentist's waiting room.

It's also a reminder that with every passing week, I slip a little bit further behind the cultural curve. This weekend I watched "There Will Be Blood" and "Enchanted" -- movies I would have seen on their opening weekends back home. I finally understand the finer points of using "I drink your milkshake!" as a catchphrase, but I also know it's long since passe. (Thanks to Ken-Jen for cluing me in to that.)

Pop culture -- especially TV -- is one of the things I truly feel deprived of here. On the flip side, not having to keep up with 20 shows has freed up a lot of spare time that I now spend doing things like "studying Japanese" (I'm finally learning some verbs! Hooray for complete sentences!) and "interacting with other humans."

i hear that all the time

2008-04-01T21:26:00.002-04:00

Last night, I was standing in the "vinegar" section of the super-expensive Meidi-ya supermarket, wondering why they had blueberry and raspberry vinegar but not the balsamic vinegar I wanted, and whether it was in fact right in front of me and I couldn't read it, when a Japanese woman approached me and said, in careful English:

"Excuse me, do you speak Laotian?"

I do not, so a typical Japanese Apology Standoff ensued, in which I apologized profusely for not speaking an obscure Asian language and she apologized profusely for having bothered me, for asking me a question, and for asking a question to which the answer was 'no.' This part took place in Japanese, and then she moved into a conversation in Japanese, so I had to backtrack and explain that I speak only a little Japanese. So she moved her apology back into her careful English, and explained:

"All gaijin kind of look the same to me."

rehab takes way longer than i thought

2008-03-24T09:11:00.003-04:00

One of the great things about karaoke -- aside from the opportunity to make a drunken fool of yourself -- is finally figuring out those pesky lyrics that you've never quite been able to understand. (For the record, in "Baby Got Back," the line after "So ladies if the butt is round" is "and you want a triple-X throwdown." I'd always been kind of vague on that. Also? That's my juhachi-ban now. I totally rock that song, which I proved Saturday night after Teri issued her own -- non-X-rated -- throwdown by saying "No one can sing that song, it's too fast." NEVER challenge my ability to talk fast!)

And sometimes, you have that "Kiss This Guy" moment when you realize you've been singing the wrong words for years. That happened to me playing Rock Band last week -- the Clash are singing "should I cool it or should I blow," not "should I commit or should I blow" -- although I think my version makes more sense.

Saturday I was humbled again. I'd always thought, in "Rehab," that Amy Winehouse was saying she ain't got SEVENTEEN days, which -- c'mon, Amy, you can't spare two weeks and change to get yourself together? That's about the time you go between shampoos, right? But it turns out she ain't got SEVENTY days. So, OK, I can see her point. I mean, who does?

i had the power to go home, all along

2008-03-13T05:14:00.005-04:00

One central fact of my life in Tokyo: doing Japanese things is convenient but hard. Doing American things is easy but inconvenient, because that usually involves trekking to base.

If you were to locate Yokota AB and Nishi-azabu (my 'hood) on a Tokyo map, you'd think, "Hey, that's not far at all." You'd be both right and wrong. If I was, say, a general, or Will Smith, and I could ride to base in a helicopter, it'd be a short hop. But for mere mortals unable to waste thousands of tax dollars, there are two choices: drive, or take the train.

The choice is pretty easy for me, because I don't have a driver's license. Or a car. Or any freakin' clue how to drive on the left.

Lucky for me, though: if you're going to rely on any train system, make it Tokyo's. Like almost everything in Japan, it's ruthlessly efficient. (D.C. Metro officials, take note: even though Tokyo's system involves several interwoven systems run by different companies, and is about 9,000 times more complex than any transit system in the States, it's rare for a train to be late, and "escalator outages at the following stations" is an unknown phrase. [The Japanese equivalent, I mean.])

So, yesterday I needed to do an "American thing" -- go to the doctor. I headed for Yokota, which is a time-consuming but not terribly hard trip. (Downsides: it involves four different trains, and at the last transfer the trains don't run very often. So the trip can take an hour or it can take 90 minutes, depending on the wait at Tachikawa.)

Or it can take four hours, when fate and gaijin ignorance collide:

I left Yokota last night with plenty of trains still running, and an assurance from the kickass hyperdia.com (thanks Dubees!) that the dreaded outdoor Tachikawa layover would be only a couple of minutes. That was welcome news, because the temperatures were "mid-winter" and I was dressed for "late spring."

Somewhere between Tachikawa and Shinjuku, my trip -- no pun intended -- started to go off the rails. An accident forced my train to hold at Shinjuku for over an hour -- and as Wednesday turned into Thursday, Tokyo's subway system bade the city goodnight, tucked its head under its wing, and settled into its nightly five-hour slumber. (A gripe: you'd think a city the size of Tokyo would run trains all night, but noooo.) By the time my train limped into the Yotsuya station at 1:15 a.m., my transfer trains had long since stopped running, and I was stranded.

Oh yeah, and I had no yen on me, except a handful of change, so calling a cab was out.

My immediate plan was to find an ATM, pay a giant fee, and withdraw some money, so my heart sank when I emerged from the station and discovered the surrounding area is almost vacant. Also? Japanese ATMs don't much care for them foreign-looking bank cards.

I started working my way down my narrow list of options. The Family Mart ATM rejected my card, as did the Circle K ATM. I passed a hotel (I wasn't sure if it was an actual hotel or a love hotel, but it was bitter cold and I was getting kinda desperate, so I tried it), but at that hour you needed a room key to open the front door. Freezing, exhausted and panicky, I tried the absolute last option: a 7-Eleven down the block.

My card was once again rejected at the ATM, and I broke down in tears, which alarmed the Japanese workers. One of them spoke a little English, and he anxiously offered to help.

(Aside: people back home often ask me if I speak Japanese. The answer: I'm learning, slowly. Mostly from a course called "Japanese for Busy People," which is geared toward people in Japan on business, so most of what I've learned is along the lines of "The meeting is at 3 p.m. Monday" and "I'm going to the Kyoto branch next week." We spend a lot of time making up sentences about the activities of fictional American businessman Mr. Smith, and his associates. Last week, the exercise "State who went where, and with whom" proved too tempting for me, and now Sumisu-san's having an affair with his secretary. It makes the lessons a lot more fun.

Anyway, I can communicate a little, but JBP hasn't prepared me for understanding the subway announcements that would have told me about the hourlong delay, or for trying to explain that I do HAVE money, I just can't access it, and I'm not just some insane airhead gaijin who can't hail a taxi and doesn't know how the trains work. I had a whole plan! But there was an accident! I don't think I adequately got that point across.)

SOOOO, the 7-Eleven guy's way of helping was to CALL THE POLICE to come help me. I was horrified, because there's all kinds of potential for something to go wrong there, and baffled, because how are the police possibly going to solve the problem? Bust open the ATM with a battering ram? Lend me 2,000 yen? Drive me home in a squad car? I felt like one of those morons who calls 911 to ask what time it is -- I had a problem, yes, but not one that needed to involve law enforcement.

So the police came, and at that point, I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability. WAIT, wait, sorry, that's a very funny Ron White routine. Let me start over. So the police came, and called a translator, who ...

(WARNING: anticlimactic ending ahead)

... informed me that taxis in Tokyo take credit cards.

yep, that sounds about right

2008-02-05T09:48:00.000-05:00

The green sentences below came from Sharon's blog; she's talking about her 2-year-old.

If you replace "crying and yelling" with "gesturing and apologizing," this PERFECTLY describes my Japanese.

Each word was work and we worked awhile for her to get them down. When something came along and it was a word she knew, she used it and everyone cheered and then we went back to communicating with crying and yelling.

even cash registers need copy editors

2008-01-31T07:41:00.000-05:00

The commissary just installed self-checkout lanes, which have to be the greatest invention since ... whatever cool thing was invented just before them. I'm squarely in their target demographic: extremely impatient, with a degree of computer literacy and no desire to unnecessarily interact with other humans. I also have a knack for picking the worst possible line, like the time the old woman in front of me at King Soopers paid her $67 grocery bill in dimes and nickels ("$63.35, $63.40, $63.45 ... oh dear, I lost count, I need to start over ...").

So I'm excited by the commissary's leap into the 20th century. I do, however, wish the software vendor had run the produce lookup menu past an editor:

At the top left: "Aplles".

It's possible that this is the only typo in the entire produce menu (this page of the menu covers anise through avocados). But as any editor will tell you -- where there's one mistake like this, there's usually more. And worse. Because you have to wonder, if the programmers couldn't be bothered to run spellcheck before shipping this software to the Defense Department, did they bother to ... debug? Beta test?

And yes, I'm totally going to start buying random produce so I can look for more typos on other menu pages. Because I'm an editing geek, and that's what we do.

Something like the opposite

2008-01-04T05:46:00.000-05:00

It's not every day that you take a job in another country. Or a job that was vacated by one of your best friends. Or both. But if you do, you should know -- you'll end up living a slightly surreal, Trekkian Mirror Universe of that person's life.

This is how the word "coincidence" gets misused -- it's not a coincidence that Stacy moved from Japan to the States as I was moving from the States to Japan. It's exactly by design, because I moved to Japan to replace Stacy. (Except I can never replace Stacy. She's irreplaceable. to the left, to the left ...)

But it is a little odd.

Stacy recently wrote a great post about feeling her life in Japan slipping away. It almost blew my mind to read, because I'm going through the same thing in reverse. Even though I miss my friends in the States, and my TiVo, it's astonishing how quickly I've gotten sucked into my new life in Japan. I feel strangely disconnected from things that mattered so much two months ago. I'm no longer part of our D.C. office; I'm part of the Tokyo office now, and the people in D.C., who I worked with for six years, are "them." My house, my car -- those seem like memories of things that belonged to someone else. And in a way they did.

I started to write that I'm a different person now, but that's a bit much with the hyperbole. I'm ... not sure how to explain it. I can't find the word. I'm living outside my comfort zone, and loving it. I eat different food now. I live without a car, and don't miss it at all. I spend my spare time learning kana instead of watching TV, and it's exactly what I want to be doing. (So I'm totally dismayed that Stacy says she's already forgetting kana -- am I putting all this effort into something I'm going to forget two months after going back to the States? Yes, probably.)

I mass e-mailed my family the other day about my adventures in apartment hunting, and someone wrote back "you must feel so far from home." But I don't, at all -- this IS my home now. Of course there are things about the States I miss (chicken biscuits), but there's more than enough awesome things here (lack of open-container laws) to make up for those things.

To my Mirror twin: enjoy life on the flip side, and thanks for leaving those Q-tips in our desk. Gotta love that they're individually wrapped! God bless Japanese overpackaging.

Things I can say in Japanese now:
Whose cell phone is this?

Things I can't say, but need to:
Do you have any boots ...
... in black?
... in my size?
... for less than $600?

the list: didn't hear it, didn't miss it

2007-12-27T05:59:00.000-05:00

Proudly announcing the debut of a new feature on CH: "the list," a top 5, or 10, or however many, of whatever I feel like listing. Will appear sporadically, kind of like my posts.

Since I don't have access to American radio, and Japanese stores prefer tasteful orchestral renditions of classic carols, I made it through the whole Christmas season without hearing:

1) Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer -- I thought this was hiliarious when I was 10. Not so much in subsequent years.
2) Do They Know It's Christmas -- No, and they probably don't care, since Christianity isn't their primary religion. "Tonight thank God it's them instead of you." Awesome.
3) Marshmallow World -- I just don't like marshmallows. Or thinking about marshmallows.
4) The Barking Dogs' rendition of Jingle Bells -- enough said.
5) Any version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, including the original, the Jeff Foxworthy version, the annual AP story about how much those gifts would cost and the one that goes "A beer, in a tree."

I did kind of miss the Chipmunks song, though.

An open letter to the authors of 'Easy Hiragana'

2007-12-12T01:15:00.000-05:00

Dear authors of “Easy Hiragana”:

First, let me congratulate you for coming up with an appealing title for your book; I doubt “Ridiculously Difficult Hiragana” would have sold as well. I look forward to upcoming titles in your series, including “Easy Gourmet Cooking” and “Easy Space Shuttle Launches.”

I applaud your strategy for teaching the Japanese phonetic alphabet to English-speakers. The exercises, which involve writing everyday words, are designed to teach the kana characters while building vocabulary – an excellent two-pronged approach.

I do, however, have a minor quibble with your choice of “everyday words.” On an average day in Japan, I’m far more likely to need to say “Tuesday” or “eggs” – neither of which is taught in your book – than “chrysanthemum” or “prime minister.” In the final lesson, we were taught to write “atomic energy” and “electric car,” objects that WHY IN THE HELL WOULD I EVER NEED TO DISCUSS IN JAPANESE and that would be better classified as “futuristic” rather than “everyday.” Perhaps at some point in my expat life I will want to say “George Clooney drives an electric car,” but I can’t really think why. Also I don’t know the word for drive.

I eagerly moved on to the section on sample conversations, hoping to learn sentences that I can use every day in Tokyo, such as “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese,” “It costs how much?” and “I don’t like food that has eyes.”

You got off to a good start. The very first conversation opened with “Where are you going?” – always useful – but you quickly went off the rails. Of all the potential logical answers – “I’m going to work,” “to Shibuya,” “to buy a Gucci sweater for my dog” – you chose “I’m going to the police station.”

Out of concern for your well-being, I have to ask: what kind of crime-plagued municipality do you live in that an everyday answer to the question “where are you going?” is “to the police station”? Is your bicycle stolen on a daily basis? Do you reside in pre-Batman Gotham City? Does that maybe explain the whole electric car thing? Are you actually George Clooney, writing under a Japanese pseudonym?

I can think of only two scenarios where “I’m going to the police station” would be useful:

1) You are a police officer, so this sentence is the equivalent of “I’m going to the office.”
2) The person asking “Where are you going?” has just mugged you.

Neither scenario requires the ability to say “atomic energy.”

Just something to keep in mind as you write the next edition of “Easy Hiragana.”

Arigato gozaimasu!

Things I learned walking around Tokyo today

2007-11-26T03:57:00.000-05:00

1) The Japanese are ingenious

People's exhibit a: I stumbled across a way-too-hip furniture store in Omote-sando (think Ikea, but less practical and more expensive). It's not a great place to put a furniture store, because the retail spaces are tiny. There's simply no space to display dozens of chairs and sofas. How to solve? A window full of tiny models. Yup, each piece was carefully re-created in miniature, about six inches high. Awesome! (unless you'd like to actually, I don't know, SIT on the furniture before buying it. Then you have a wee problem.)

Check out the marshmallow sofa.

Exhibit b: There's many things I love about buying clothes, and a few things I hate. One thing in the second category is finding other people's makeup on the shirt I want to buy. And nothing attracts big slicks of foundation like dry-clean only clothes, so once you've shelled out for the shirt, you have to pony up for cleaning before you can even wear it. Can the Japanese defeat this pesky plague? Of course they can! At the Gap, they give you a little "face-cover" (which, to be honest, looks a bit like a Klan hood) made of Kleenex-y material that you put over your head when you try on clothes. You keep your makeup; they keep their clothes from being ruined. Everyone wins, unless you somehow suffocate.

2) The Japanese are tiny
Size I wear at Gap, in the States: XS. Size I wear in Japan: at least a M. I'm not quite sure -- I gave up in horror when I couldn't even button a size S dress around my waist.

3) Demolition is fascinating in any culture
I couldn't help stopping to watch workmen dismantle a building piece-by-piece in the bustling heart of a shopping district. I thought I was being a tacky gaijin gawker -- until I saw a dozen Japanese people filming it with their cell phone cameras.

4) I can read a word!
A lot of signs in Tokyo are in English -- and a lot aren't. I've resigned myself to not ever really knowing what's going on. But today, for the first time, I looked at a sign written in kana and my brain didn't say "random jumble of kana and kanji that makes no sense to me.." It said, "No. Gi. Za. Ka. Oh my god. I know those characters! Nogizaka!"

(Full disclosure: At the time of this epiphany I was standing in the Nogizaka train station, so you don't have to be Elliot Stabler to deduce that the sign above the train station might say the name of the station. But still. I read it!)

Excuses, excuses

2007-11-22T05:05:00.000-05:00

I got on the plane completely determined to become a regular blogger once I landed in Tokyo -- after all, now I have something interesting to talk about!

Total posts since I got here: zero.

Here's what's up: right now I'm living in government housing, and have no Internet access. I can post at work, or I can drag my laptop up to Roppongi Hills and try to find a hotspot. But I obviously can't upload photos at work, and I've written some posts on my laptop but have no way to put them online.

I meet Saturday with my realtor to start looking at apartments, so fingers crossed, this no-interwebs situation will be resolved soon. Otherwise I will go crazy.

10,000 miles in 27 days

2007-10-16T18:22:00.000-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, we will be taxiing for a few minutes, so please remain in your seat with your seat belt securely fastened* until the aircraft has arrived at the gate.

For those of you who call Denver/Rapid City/Washington D.C. home -- on behalf of the flight crew, welcome home. For you rootless transients who move every few years and don't really call anyplace home anymore -- um, you qualify for a free upgrade to United Economy Plus.

Portable electronic devices may now be turned on.

*The line about keeping seat belts fastened is probably the third-most-ignored instruction in the history of aviation. The top two:
#2: "Please take a moment to review the card in the seat pocket in front of you, which describes the safety features of this aircraft."
#1: "Maybe a hydrogen-filled blimp isn't such a good idea."

Packing for Tokyo 101: Pop quiz, hotshot

2007-10-15T17:13:00.001-04:00

No. 2 pencils only. You will have three hours to complete this section.

Step 1: Gather every item of clothing you own.

Step 2: Assign each item to one of the following categories:

1) Goodwill: I don't want this anymore. Why do I even own this?

2) Take on the plane: I'll need this within 30 days of arriving.

3) First shipment: I don't need this right away, but I'll need it within three months, I think.

4) Second shipment: I'll need this at some point in the next three years.

5) Storage: I want to keep this, but I don't need it in Japan.

Categories 1 and 2 are fairly easy. (You'll have access to laundry, if that helps -- you can pack for a week and then wash everything four times.)

Category 3 is pretty much everything else you wear day-to-day, so again, not too hard.

4 and 5 are the toughies. Putting the Patrick Roy jersey in category 5 was a no-brainer, but asking yourself what clothes you need for three years is asking what your foreseeable future will be, and who knows? Will I need an evening gown? A suit? The white go-go boots that make such a great Halloween costume when paired with this mod dress? If I take the boots, do I need to take the white lipstick too?

And then there are the more existential questions: What kind of person do I want to be for the next three years? Do I want to keep dressing like a quasi-professional, or should I just live in jeans and CafePress T-shirts? Do I need 8 pairs of black slacks? (In D.C., the answer is no -- you should have at least 10 pairs.) Do these pants look exactly like ones that Stacy has, and is it creepy to take over Stacy's job AND dress just like her? (Moot point, it turns out, because the pants don't fit, but it's still a good question.)

Finished? Good. Now repeat this process for EVERYTHING YOU OWN.

Sayonara D.C., konichiwa Tokyo!

2007-10-05T22:05:00.000-04:00

FAQ questions about my impending move to Tokyo ...

I heard you're moving to Japan, is that true?
Um, yes, see above.

WHY??
Because it's freakin' TOKYO, that's why. Not good enough? OK, here goes: I love Tokyo. I've always wanted to be an expat. And the perks are great. In short -- this is a dream come true.

When?
Not sure of the exact dates yet, but most likely Nov. 9 is my get-on-the-plane date.

Why so fast?
I'm filling a vacant job in Tokyo; like any job, they'd like the new person to start as soon as possible. When you look at it that way, five weeks isn't unreasonable. But it IS a short amount of time to get everything together.

So you're still working for Stars & Stripes?
Yes

But didn't you have some fancy-schmancy job in D.C.?
Yep, I was the assistant managing editor. Still am, for a few more weeks. And it made me really unhappy. I enjoy editing; I don't enjoy writing evals and making schedules and sitting in meetings. I'm not suited to management -- I dread confrontation, I have no interest in being a mentor or a coach. I just want people to do the damn work, and do it well, and not have to play mind games to coax them to do that. At first I was excited about the AME job: "my name is on the masthead!" But I've come to realize that being on the masthead means exactly one thing: I get a lot of spam.

Did you get, like, demoted or something?
On an org chart, yes -- I took a job two pay levels below mine But they key difference is -- I asked for the new job, interviewed for it, sweated it out just like any other candidate. I wasn't pushed out. I pulled the rip cord and bailed out.

Are you selling your house?
Yes. Unless Brian says no. Let's say, 90 percent yes.

Why do you all care so much about my house? You want to buy it?

Are you taking your car?
Nope -- it would be useless in Japan, because they drive on the left. I'll sell it to Carfax before I go.

You must have a lot to pack, huh?
I have NOTHING to pack.

The good news is, the Army is handling that for me. They just show up, pack up everything, and take it away to be shipped.

The bad news is, the Army is handling that for me -- so there are sure to be a few snafus.

How long will you be there?
My contract is for three years. The general opinion is that's horibly unfair, but here's how it works: the military spends a lot of money to ship me overseas;in return, I have to agree to work off the debt. This is exactly how military academies work -- we give you four years of college free, you give us four years in uniform. It's also exactly how human traffickings rings work, except I was led to believe our way involves less prostiution.

So, within the first year, if I leave I have to reimburse the cost of my move, plus move myself back to the States. Between one and three years, the move costs are forgiven, but I have to pay for the return move. After three years, I can come home on their dime, or extend my stay.

Are you living on a base?
Thank GOD no -- what's the point of moving to Tokyo and then living exactly like you do at Minot AFB? I'll be in base housing for a while, but I should be able to move onto the economy soon.

I'll have access to the base commissaries and exchanges, and I can attend festivals there, shop, hang out with people who speak English.

Aren't you scared to live in Tokyo?
A little bit. I worry about not being able to communicate, and about getting lost. But I have lots of people there to help me, so no, not freaked. Mildly freaked.

Can I come visit you?
Of course! I'd love that. But give me a while -- I'll be living in an MWR hotel until I find an apartment, so that's not condiucive to guests. And I need to figure out the city myself first before I start playing tour guide. But then -- by all means, come see me!

I'll update this list as more come up.

I suppose I should finish this story

2007-08-18T12:27:00.000-04:00

It's been almost two months since Syracuse and I faced down the copper room, but the following takes place between 12 p.m. and 6 a.m., two days later.

It's just after midnight; I'm in the freezing lobby of Friendship Animal Hospital. I'm flipping through People, which seems the wrong thing to be doing, when my cat is wheezing and gasping for air, but I can't just sit here doing nothing for one more minute.

For the past two days I've been waiting for the other shoe to fall; when I wake up, when I come home from work, I go looking for her, and I'm not entirely expecting her to be alive. She's not, really; she's huddled in a corner of the basement, refusing food, refusing water, urinating on herself. She slept in the bathtub Monday night; sometime Tuesday she came down to the basement. I don't know if she went all in one trip or if she went a few feet at a time, which is all she seems capable of. It breaks my heart to think of her dragging herself down two stories over the course of 10 hours.

I try everything -- baby food, KFC, Wheat Thins, Hawaiian bread -- all her favorites. She turns away with reproachful disdain. The cardiologist has told me to hide her medicines in treats, but she rejects them, so three times a day I pry open her jaw and force the pills down. She fights it a little, but she's mostly resigned -- this is just one more indignity she's suffering. I call the vet again, and again, and get the same answer: give her 72 hours, until the Lasix kicks in, and she'll be fine.

Wednesday night starts out much the same, but she suddenly becomes restless, moving every couple of minutes, and her breathing becomes labored. I call the Annapolis emergency vet and get a series of unhelpful answers: they can't say if that's bad unless they see the cat. They can't say whether I should bring her in. They don't know of a closer ER. I give up. I find an ER in Northwest. I pick Cuse up to crate her and nearly fling her into the air; she's lost at least three pounds.

At the ER I move away from the front desk to avoid a German shepherd and the next client accidentally cuts in front of me. Her cat has a sore food. In my mind I go ballistic -- she's wasting time on a SORE FOOT when Syracuse is DYING -- but I say nothing, it's not her fault. The receptionist takes one look at the increasingly pathetic Syracuse and bumps her to the top of the triage list. I am vindicated in this pointless war of mine, but there's no thrill in victory. I don't want to be at the top of the list. I want my cat to be OK. In a corner a man and a woman pace and fret; their dog has been in the OR a long time now. The other patients avoid their eyes, then give them sympathetic glances when they look away. I talk to the owner of the cat with the sore foot. I read the magazine. I feel bad for the couple with the dog.

The vet finally comes out and he looks like Keith from "Scrubs," or maybe I only think that because he's wearing navy scrubs. He's kind and calm, and wants to keep Syracuse overnight. He's given her IV Lasix and an oxygen tent, and he thinks she'll be fine. OK. I ask what fine means, if she'll go back to being a normal cat.

I am expecting him to say yes. I'm expecting that in the morning I'll take her home, the IV will have done the trick, and I'll give her heart meds for the next eight years or so. Since the crisis begins, this is what I've thought will happen. I'm calm and unemotional; this is a hurdle, and an expensive one, but it's worth it to have my cat back. I hand over my credit card without flinching (outwardly).

He says yes, she'll probably go back to being a normal cat, and he says best-case scenario, she'll live another three to six months.

A sledgehammer hits me between the eyes and the tears come hard and fast. My brain cannot absorb the idea; my tongue cannot form the word. MONTHS. Months? "Six months," Tom Cruise says in my brain, "It's nothing. It's a hockey season."

My cat will be dead in less time than it takes to award the Stanley Cup.

Keith takes me back to see her; I'm shocked to see she's in a cage. It makes sense -- where else would they put the animals? I guess I was expecting something like the preemie incubator my sister slept in for the first six weeks of her life. I slip my hand under the oyxgen tent and scratch her head; she doesn't react. I tell her I love her, and I'll be back for her in the morning.

I walk back through the icy lobby; nobody there will meet my eyes. The couple with the dog in surgery give me a sympathetic look and then turn away. I'm the one everybody pities now.

As I shoot across Rock Creek Park I think about the vet's last question to me: If she arrests, should they rescuciate her? I told him yes. But as I wind across Military Road I rethink it; how many times will we relive this night? Even if her lungs clear, her heart will fail before the end of the year. I can't put her through this again, and I can't keep her alive in pain just to prolong the inevitable and put off my grief. I think about calling, withdrawing my consent to rescucitate, but I hesitate; I don't want to make this decision at 3 a.m.

Three hours later, there is no decision to make. The woman on the phone is polite but detached; she's made this call too many times. Syracuse isn't breathing, her heart isn't beating. The vet asks if they should intubate; I picture the intubations I've seen on ER and say no. She says Syracuse didn't suffer; I wonder wildly if they would say that even if she did. The woman is eager to get past the emotional part and on to the logistics: do I want to see the body (no), do I want her cremated (yes), do I want the cremains (no). She says, in what I'm sure she thinks is a reassuring way, that I don't need to come in, they'll send me a bill. I'll be thrilled to receive an invoice for shoveling my pet into a furnace, I'm sure.

Farewell, little Syracuse. You brought me a lot of joy and I hope I gave you a good life.

The copper room

2007-06-19T20:11:00.000-04:00

2 p.m. Monday: I am bored. And frantic. And bored. To distract myself, I look across into the other room. The walls are painted peach, with a darker accent wall. I imagine the paint color is called dried apricot, or maybe copper pot. The large copper lamp, obviously expensive, casts a warm glow. The sofa is black, leather, maybe even Italian leather. It's a nice room, far nicer than any other room in this building.

I will give anything not to go into that room.

I am standing in the room across the hall, a utilitarian room with white walls, a paper towel dispenser and two phone jacks. I am leaning on the surgical steel table. My right arm is resting atop 11 pounds of cat, my fingers urgently scratching her head.

She is purring. She is panting. She is suffocating.

The copper room is too nice. Too soothing. This is the room where you wait and hope, and hope in vain. This is where the word "humane" becomes a horrible, hostile word. This is where you play God. This is where you choke on a sob as you nod. This is where you decide if you want to say your goodbyes and then leave before the end comes, or if you want to see this life all the way through.

I don't know the answer. I stayed with Zach until the end. I changed my mind just as the poison slid into his vein. I realized it was too late. I realized that believing in death with dignity is one thing; carrying out that belief is quite another. A second later his long and complicated life was over and I gasped and sobbed "I'm so sorry" as the finality of my decision sank in. He purred til the end. That was the worst part -- that cat loved and trusted me even though I'd only had him for a month.

I've had Syracuse for seven years. Since she was eight weeks old. And I cannot kill her today.

Two days ago she was fine. Now she is lying motionless in the base of her carrier, purring not in happiness but in distress. She is soaked with urine. I cleaned her up as best I could with paper towels, but they didn't help much. Other than her hindquarters, she is an ideal patient today. And it's breaking my heart, because she can't even summon the energy to hiss.

One week ago I finally crossed "Syracuse vet" off my to-do list. Distemper shot? Check. Claws clipped? Check (long overdue) Anything else? Well, she's been pulling out clumps of fur lately. The vet was reassuring; it's probably allergies. The weather -- downpours followed by long dry spells -- has bred pollen galore. The vet said he's seeing worse allergies than usual this spring and based on my Zyrtec use this year, I agreed. He said he could give her oral prednisone or pills. I thought back on the time I discovered her pill stash -- a week's worth of antibiotics that she hid under her tongue, pretended to swallow and then spit out behind the dryer -- and I chose shot.

It was such an innocuous conversation. Neither of us had any idea that in the next few seconds we would trigger a ticking time bomb.

The prenisone stopped the fur-pulling.

It also triggered heart failure.

5 p.m.: I have been sent to the Annapolis Mall (excuse me, the Westfield Shoppingtowne at Annapolis, which just rolls off the tongue) to "get a cup of coffee" while the cardiologist does an ultrasound. I have been here for two hours. This is what I have learned today: men's polos are 1/2 off at The Gap. Red Robin's burgers are mediocre. There are people in this world whose profession is "cat cardiologist." None of these people work in D.C.

I am sitting in the food court, flipping through Glamour and pointedly wiping the ice cream off my arm. I am directing angry thoughts at the parents of the child pounding his spoon onto his ice cream four feet from me. They are ignoring me, or perhaps they are not telepathic. I have turned the volume on my ringer all the way up and all four of us jump when it rings.

The medical term is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy -- the left ventricle of her heart is twice the size it should be. The defect has been lurking there for years, waiting for the perfect stressor to kill my cat.

The prednisone was just the excuse it needed. Her heart stopped pumping fluid properly, so the fluid filled her lungs and chest cavity. She is struggling to breathe.

The doctor is wonderful (side note: every vet I've worked with has been a far more thorough, caring and compassionate doctor than any doctor I, as a human, have had. I can't help but wonder if this is because pets don't have HMOs). He assures me that no one could have known about the defect without a chest X-ray, that I am not to blame for pushing for the prednisone. (And, he emphasizes, neither is my vet.) He compares it to high school football players who drop dead doing wind sprints because nobody tests a 17-year-old for heart disease. He says that in a roundabout way the prednisone fiasco is a good thing, because we caught it early. Otherwise she might have just dropped dead a few months from now. He says she's responding well to treatment and she doesn't need to be admitted.

He wants to recheck her in four months. That means he thinks she'll be around in four months.

Monday, 9 p.m.: She's not out of the woods yet. She's still not eating, and she's lethargic. The doctor says the first 72 hours will be the worst. She's on four medications; she'll be on some of them for the rest of her life. One drug is taking care of the fluid in the lungs, but the heart defect cannot be repaired. I am now the owner of a chronically ill animal.

But we dodged the copper room. And I will take a defective cat over a euthanized one any day.

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

2007-02-17T21:25:00.000-05:00

(That's Chinese for Happy New Year.)

I'm on the road again, this time in Singapore, to visit my friend Priscilla and her boyfriend, Keith, and to see more of Chinese New Year than the paper lanterns in D.C.'s meager Chinatown.

Yesterday was a fantastic day. We rode the MRT, Singapore's super-efficient subway, to Chinatown, where we met up with my friend Wes. By bizarre coincidence, Wes and his family, who live in Denver, are in Singapore right now too.

This is no two-block stretch hosting Benetton and Fuddrucker's. No, Singapore does Chinatown right, and yesterday -- NY Eve -- was its heyday. The streets were lined with vendors selling traditional CNY foods, decorations, silk cushion covers and bags, candy in bizarre flavors (cuttlefish, anyone?) and pigs made of every conceivable material, especially jade. (It's the Year of the Golden Pig, which only happens every few decades. The golden year means extra prosperity.) Thousands of Singaporeans thronged the area to do last-minute shopping, and the mood was festive and excited. We sampled Singapore's national dish -- steamed chicken and rice -- at a corner cafe and spent a few h0urs checking out the stalls and buying decorations meant to bring luck. And at lunch, I pondered the surreal concept of having lunch with one friend from Denver and one from D.C. -- and doing it on the other side of the world.

Then we headed for Clarke Quay, a former boat area along the river that's recently been revitalized into hipster central. It's gorgeous. Candy-colored restaurants and bars line the river, and the lucky riverside eateries have booths lining the riverbank and covered with huge domes to shield diners from the sudden showers that spring up. River taxis cruise up and down. A little further back, the inland restaurants -- protected from the rain by sky-high mushroom-like pods that light up at night -- provide chic and comfy outdoor seating and compete to out-hip each other. The hands-down winner in that category is Clinic, a restaurant with a hospital theme: the wall behind the host stand has lockers like a morgue, the outdoor chairs are made from hospital beds and diners eat in golden wheelchairs. We skipped that. Instead, we drank the evening away at Wine Garage, talking and people-watching, then had dinner at the Pump Room.

Just before midnight, we made our way back to Keith and Priscilla's eighth-story (or storey, as they spell it here) apartment, and watched the fireworks out the window.

On tap for today: the zoo, where I'm looking forward to seeing a lion dance.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Join the club

2006-12-10T18:06:00.000-05:00

Today I'm welcoming two new blogs to my link list: Red Panda Zone, written by my friend Sadie, and Beat Incomplete, in which Tim attempts to blog about the song "Like A Virgin" EVERY SINGLE DAY. So far, so good. Check 'em out!

you can call me braceface

2006-12-10T16:48:00.000-05:00

Rarely do I follow (because, rarely can I afford to follow) advice from the fashion mags, but I will take as gospel their rule on retro trends: if you wore it the first time, you're too old to wear it now. The downside of this rule is that I'm not crazy about being labeled "too old" for anything. Well, OK, I don't mind being too old to have my birthday party at McDonald's, and occasionally it can be a good excuse to get out of an unpleasant-sounding evening ("I'm too old to go to a GWAR show, but thanks for asking"), but I'm irked every time I see an ad for Gardasil and realize, I'm too old to be vaccinated against cervical cancer. Or read the subtitle on my friend Mary Ellen's column: "Career advice for twentysomethings." (God bless the person at the Post who took "advice for the under-30 crowd" off Carolyn Hax's column.)

The upside of that rule, of course, is that I have a perfectly valid reason not to fall victim to the hideous leggings virus that has infected America. (I've also spotted legwarmers on mannequins, but not on actual people. There seems to be an unspoken but ironclad stand being taken by the American public against allowing calf-enlarging tubes in cloying patterns to be forced upon us again.)

But I am making one exception, and sporting something I wore in the late '80s: braces.

A lot of things consipred to undo the painful orthodontia I was subjected to 20 years ago: my orthodontist's refusal to give me retainers because I was moving away; the sudden and inconvenient appearance of the wisdom teeth that he said would never be a problem; a bad genetic combination of wide teeth and a narrow jaw; age and time and loss of bone density and myriad other problems best described by people with DDS affixed to their names. And over the past two decades I slowly went from having straight teeth to not-so-straight teeth to an overbite and some crowding to teeth overlapping each other at weird angles to crossbites in two spots and constant headaches from TMJ caused by chewing on the right all the time.

A lot's changed since my first attempt at perfect teeth. Impressions now take about 30 seconds to set, down from 20 minutes. (I'm guessing that change was demanded by hygienists who were tired of being puked on [guilty].) The dental community woke up to the fact that wraparound bands, in addition to requiring four hours of sheer torture to apply, rotted peoples' teeth -- apparently not being able to brush anything but the tips for half a decade will do that. And some brilliant, blessed genius got the idea that maybe, just maybe, there was a less painful and obvious way to move teeth. A way that involved clear plastic trays, instead of bands and brackets and wires and rubber bands that shoot across the room when you try to talk to a cute guy.

So no, I don't have old-school braces. I have Invisalign. If you've ever had retainers, or used a night tooth-whitening system, you pretty much know how the trays (they're called aligners) look -- clear, hard plastic custom-molded to fit precisely onto my teeth. The magic is that they don't fit precisely -- they're a few millimeters off, so my teeth get pushed to fit into them. And every two weeks, after my teeth have moved enought to precisely fit into the aligner, I switch to a new one that pushes them a bit more.

I wear them all the time, except to eat. After six days, I've noticed a tiny bit of movement in my bottom teeth, along with a few unexpected benefits:
* Oral hygiene. I'm a sporadic flosser at best, and I've definitely been guilty of falling into bed exhausted without brushing my teeth. But now that popping my aligners onto unclean teeth means trapping the plaque and sugar and god knows what else on them for hours, I've become obsessive about brushing, flossing, mouthwash. And since I'm already doing all that every night, I might as well take off my makeup, too, and do a skin-care routine ...

* Weight loss. Of course I can snack. I just have to go to the bathroom, take out the aligners, clean them, eat the snack, go back to the bathroom, brush and floss, and put the aligners back in.

Needless to say, I haven't eaten between meals all week.

* Bad habits broken. For years I've tried to break my habit of picking and biting my cuticles, and worse, my lips. Nothing has worked -- until I snapped plastic trays over my teeth. I can't bite -- the trays get in the way. In six days, I'm about 90 percent cured of the habit. Invisalign: more effective than hypnosis!

In other news, today I've learned: Christmas trees were meant to be placed in their stand by two people. With an infinite amount of patience. Or one person with nine hands. Cats do not contribute anything to the process, except a pathetic meow when the tree topples onto them.

Next I'll trash a Motel 6

2006-11-15T14:34:00.000-05:00

Saturday night, 7:30 p.m.: I mention to Cory that I'm heading to New York in the morning. She says, "You're really living the rock-star lifestyle lately."

Fast-forward 12 hours: I'm perched on a plastic chair at the Greyhound terminal that is called Union Station, but is not really in Union Station, it's about two blocks away, and they are the longest blocks in the world when the weather is bad, which it always is when I go to New York. Bloomberg should ban me from crossing any bridge onto Manhattan. I'm soaked from head to toe from the walk in the rain. I'm eating breakfast from the restaurant in the terminal, which used to be a Hardee's but at some point became a generic Greyhound cafeteria that sells a variety of food that sounds better than it actually is, and an astonishing lineup of packaged junk food. My breakfast consists of:

1) Greasy bacon and a just-barely-edible egg on a stale, greasy biscuit.

2) Lukewarm tea, from a Styrofoam cup. The cashier accidentally gave my tea to another customer, who brought it back, and the cashier threw it in the trash, and I said the tea was supposed to be mine, and she pondered the situation for a few seconds and said, "You know what? I'm going to make you a new one." That totally should be their slogan. Greyhound Food Service: We Don't Give You Food We Fished Out Of The Trash.

So I'm eating my hey-it's-food biscuit and drinking my not-from-the-garbage tea and hoping my jeans dry very soon and I remember Cory's comment, and I laugh and laugh. Out loud.

Which, in a Greyhound terminal, looks not out of place in the slightest.

Requiem for my curls

2006-11-11T14:43:00.000-05:00

Of all the odd things that have ever happened to me -- and there've been quite a few -- one of the strangest happened in the aftermath of an ill-advised super-short haircut. I hated it instantly, and avoided mirrors until it started growing back.

At long last it was long enough to risk a trim, and not having learned my lesson about hasty hair decisions, I went to a mall salon whose only virtue was being close to the place I was housesitting. The stylist chatted away about the great lunch she'd just had, which included two margaritas.

So when she said "You have naturally curly hair!" I thought it was just the tequila talking.
Cause I wouldn't have spent a big chunk of the '80s with spiral-perm tubes piled on my head like Medusa's snakes if I had natural curls.

But a few weeks later, I couldn't deny it: she may have been drunk, and unable to cut straight, but she was right about the curls -- and all this happened just as every third woman in the country started wearing The Rachel.

So for a decade now, I've been plagued by curls that really aren't. There's a handful of ringlets, in odd spots, but most of my tresses are just ill-defined kinks and frizz. And that was BEFORE I moved from bone-dry Colorado to humidity-drenched D.C., where I found myself with two equally unfashionable options: spend an hour flat-ironing my hair every day, only to have my efforts mostly undone as soon as I stepped outside, or look like Roseanne Roseannadanna.

I'm sure you can guess which one I chose.

And then: light at the end of the tunnel. I met my friend Rachel for dinner during a downpour. I showed up looking like a Fraggle. Rachel showed up with sleek, shiny, perfectly straight hair -- exactly the way mine looked every day. For five seconds.

Her secret? Japanese straightening.

I've had my hair straightened before, and it never really took. If possible, it looked worse. But this is different -- special chemicals, not just perm solution, and at the step in a perm where the stylist puts in rollers, in Japanese straightening, the stylist straightens the hair with a tiny ceramic iron, in tiny sections, rather than just combing the solution through.

As you might guess, this is not cheap. Was it worth it to be rid of my curls? Oh yeah, you betcha.

Four hours and a few hundred dollars later, I'm back to being a straight-haired girl. It's been a week now, and I can't say enough how much I love my hair. It's super-soft, and shiny, and looks like I spent hours in a stylist's chair on a movie set, when really all I did was wash and comb it. I've spent maybe five minutes styling it all week. And it lasts until the hair grows back in, so I'm in the clear for a year.

Whoever invented this: arigato!

Uneasy lies the head that wears the plastic crown

2006-11-02T17:36:00.000-05:00

Like straight-leg jeans and red wine, Halloween is something I usually like more in the abstract. I love the IDEA of dressing up in a clever yet sexy costume and going to parties with spiked cider and good candy (no hard, bland peanut butter things in orange and black waxed paper), but the cleverest costume I've ever had was devil horns with a blue dress -- an idea I stole from someone else -- and the party thing depends on someone actually HAVING said party.

So I usually find myself marking All Hallow's Eve by buying way too much good candy and hoping in vain for trick or treaters.

Tuesday, Melissa brought in a handful of 40-cent plastic tiaras, so half the women in the newsroom spent the day with tiaras shoved at odd angles into our hair. I really enjoyed mine, because the added height solved the problem of people not being able to see if I'm at my desk, and who hasn't wanted to be a princess?

I went out for a walk at lunch and quickly noticed I was getting a lot of second glances. At first I thought, these boots were TOTALLY worth $150. Then I remembered I was wearing a Barbie-Corvette-pink plastic tiara.

I suppose in other cities, this would be unremarkable. In New York, it's probably the least weird thing happening on any street at any given moment. In San Francisco, they're everyday attire (for the men, anyway). But D.C. is not really a city given to whimsy.

If you ever find yourself in that situation, tell yourself this: Tiaras are not for shrinking violets. You can't wear one while looking at the sidewalk and shrinking into your coat. Throw your shoulders back, look the world in the eye and work it.

Otherwise, you'll look ridiculous.

My laugh for the day

2006-11-02T17:07:00.000-05:00

The brilliant Fuggers at Go Fug Yourself, whose level of snarkiness I can only pray to someday attain, have outdone themselves:

http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/go_fug_yourself/2006/11/the_fug_house.html

Yes, you're in the right place

2006-10-15T09:34:00.001-04:00

I got bored with the black. Redesign time!

The obligatory Mark Foley post

2006-10-15T08:02:00.000-04:00

I've been issued a summons by the blogosphere PD for failing to write about the October Surprise of the century. It's apparently required by law for everyone with a blog. So:

First off, the disclaimers: what Foley did was a horrible abuse of trust and power, and my deepest sympathies go out to his victims (and they are victims, whether they think they are or not).

The media has been all over this story, and rightfully so (note to my colleagues: THIS is our role in society. Not Jen-Brad-Angie, or round-the-clock coverage of missing girls who happen to be pretty, white and wealthy, or water-skiing squirrels. We're the watchdogs, and we bring people like Foley into the harsh light of truth and demand accountability, when we're not distracted by Anna Nicole Smith.) But the cynic in me has to ask an uncomfortable question:

Would the story be getting so much play if the pages had been girls?

Obviously, I can't speak for any of the many people at any publication who make news decisions. I can only observe that I heard a few comments, the first day, along the lines of "Oh, I didn't realize the page was male," said in a way that implied "Whoa, this is way bigger than I thought."

Next question: Would the GOP have reacted the same way if the pages had been girls?

And: would the Washington Times have turned so fiercely on Hastert, demanding his resigntation, if the pages had been girls? This is, after all, a paper whose editor in chief once lamented that Bob Packwood had been forced to resign, when all he did was "kissed a couple of women who might have otherwise gone unkissed."

On the one hand, it's strictly an academic point. The pages weren't girls, and plenty of lawmakers from both parties have been forced out -- either by Congress or by their constituents -- for inappropriate sexual conduct. But it goes to a deeper question about the values of the people who brought Foley's behavior to light and the people who forced him out.

If those people feel Foley was wrong because he was taking advantage of an underage person -- any person -- who was in a clearly subordinate position to him, then bravo. You exposed a pedophile and took him down.

But if those people's biggest problem with Foley's conduct is that it involved people of the same sex, that's not only homophobic. It's also misogynistic, because if it's somehow worse that boys were involved, then it has to be better if it had been girls. That's the way rating scales work.

Pedophilia is pedophilia, and rape is rape. There's no sliding scale that traumatizes female victims less.

To the comment boards!

Elitists R Us

2006-10-14T16:23:00.000-04:00

One aftereffect of my Big Adventure this summer -- along with my obsession with using chopsticks -- arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Seems my trans-Pacific flights had piqued the interest of Northwest Airlines' frequent-flier gods, who bumped me up to Silver Elite status.

My membership in frequent-flier clubs has always been a bit of a reach -- I don't fly that often, and most of my Northwest miles came from a promotion cooked up by marketing execs on a coke bender, wherein you could get 40,000 miles if you switched your long distance plan to Sprint. (Shortly after I signed up, the promotion came to the attention of sober officials at Northwest, who promptly ended it, because who gives out that kind of miles?) But since there are no sporadic-flier clubs, I do the FF thing. (Technically, due to some courtesy title confusion, my mom does the FF thing. But I digress.)

So it came about that I'm spending a sunny but cold Saturday afternoon in Minneapolis, sipping premium tea and noshing snickerdoodles in front of a fireplace, nestled into a leather chair chronicling my adventures in high society courtesy of free Wi-Fi. Yes, I have gained access to the WorldClubs lounge. No longer must I walk past these frosted-glass doors with their "Members Only" signs and wonder how the other half lives. I'm living it.

(I was going to write "in front of a roaring fire," until I realized that a: that's a tired cliche, and b: it's not roaring at all. It's either a gas fire enclosed in what looks like a flat-panel TV screen, or it's a flat-panel TV screen showing an endless video loop of a fire.)

And I got bumped to first class for my flight to Rapid City.

Oh, but there's always a catch, and here it is: my Silver Elite status -- the preboarding privileges, the free upgrades to first class, the lounge access -- is only good until February, unless I make two more flights before the end of the year.

Denver for Thanksgiving will be one. The other? I don't care. I'll fly anywhere. I'll fly to Baltimore, for pete's sake, and take MARC back home. (According to DCist, United at one time really did operate a scheduled flight between D.C. and Baltimore. Why on earth anyone would spend an hour in a security line instead of driving 35 miles is a mystery. Maybe they were trying to get elite qualifying segments.)

All I know is, I MUST figure out how to keep my Silver Elite card. I'm never going back!

Literally and figuratively, my workplace is falling apart

2006-10-02T18:21:00.000-04:00

Literally: An unknown substance (water? urine? liquid nitrogen?) gushed through the library ceiling, frying a computer and two printers and forcing the librarians to evacuate. On the upside, some quick-thinking soul rescued the editorial fax machine, which stopped working in, oh, I'll be generous and say mid-2002.

Figuratively: For years I've been plotting to usurp my boss. And suddenly, it happened, although I don't think him taking a job in a different office qualifies as a coup on my part. I exchanged many, many e-mails with co-workers about what would be different with me in charge. And then, two weird things happened.

One, I found myself in charge. And I started freaking out. There's no one to backstop me now. The difference between order and chaos, success and failure, is me. Some moments, I feel ready. Other moments, I long for a job that involves nothing more complicated than filing.

Two, I made an astonishing discovery. After clashing with my boss repeatedly on every conceivable topic, I thought I'd be thrilled to see him go. But no: I realized he'd become my nemesis. And I need a nemesis. What would Holmes be without Moriarty? Superman without Lex Luthor? Seinfeld without Newman? How could this have happened? (Chuck Klosterman explains the nemesis thing far more eloquently here.)

Or, to botch another analogy, he's the Benson to my Stabler. And if you think I have that analogy backward, on account of genders, you don't know my bawling-over-"Beaches" boss. That might be the better analogy. We disagreed, often and sometimes volatilely, over tactics, ideologies, etc., but we made each other better. And I find myself kinda missing him. Unlike Benson, whom I don't miss at the moment.

(And, like Stabler, I'd really enjoy grabbing a few people by the lapels and shoving them into walls when talking just doesn't do the trick. Unlike Stabler, I'm fazed by the possibility of civil litigation.)

P.S. You think I'm joking about the urine thing? I wish I were. Sewage has leaked through our ceiling several times. Also used water from an improperly sealed shower. Yes, there's a shower on the floor above ours. No, I don't know why.

Nice try, dude

2006-09-15T17:26:00.000-04:00

Stopped by the Ghetto Giant on the way home from work last night (it's a crummy, neglected store, hence the nickname; near, but different from, the Bang-Bang Giant, which had a recent shooting). I got in a line where the woman in front was just finishing paying; behind her was a woman with a teenage girl. I got behind them.

A guy carrying takeout containers came up behind me and said "Excuse me" (not polite excuse me, but you-made-me-miss-my-train-you-left-side-escalator-standing-jerk excuse me) and got in front of me. I assumed he was with the woman and the girl, and they'd decided once they got in line to get takeout and he ran back for it. So I let him through.

Then he tried to go around the woman. (Note: I would NOT have messed with this woman. Her motto probably is "large and in charge.") She put her hands on her hips, blocked him and said, with much sassy head-bobbing, "I don't THINK so."

Me: Is he with you?

Her: HELL no.

I gave him the shrug/upturned palms/raised eyebrows that are the international symbol for "What the hell?", and pointed behind me.

Shamed -- and rightfully so -- he slunk away to a different line. With no cutting, this time.

finally! photos!

2006-09-09T11:07:00.000-04:00

It's by no means all my trip photos (I've gotta spring for the premium flickr site), but here are a few Australia pics to whet your appetite:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16115534@N00/

update on trip photos

2006-09-06T13:06:00.000-04:00

I FINALLY uploaded my photos into my laptop, and I have some great ones, including a shot of the Sydney Opera House that's postcard-worthy.

I totally intended to put them all in Flickr, caption them, e-mail them to people, etc. I did!

Cross my heart, my DSL has been down all week. As soon as Verizon gets the problem fixed, photos are my first priority.

perspective, thanks to a packed train

2006-09-06T12:35:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been frustrated at work -- I feel like I'm carrying the whole paper on my shoulders some days. I'm constantly fixing misspelled headlines, glaring factual errors, horrid cutline writing, and a whole lot of Journalism 101 stuff that the editors I supervise should be catching, or not committing in the first place. Plus I'm stumbling onto duplicated stories, outdated stories, etc., mostly through dumb luck, and I start my week writing corrections for the problems that occured on my days off. I feel like I'm juggling a thousand balls and if I drop one, they'll all come tumbling down. I should be able to hand these balls off to the copy editors, but not only can a lot of them not juggle, but they're throwing more balls into the mix.

Anyway.

This morning, I was struggling to stay upright on a lurching, crowded train when I realized -- courtesy of a waft of cheap whiskey -- that the guy standing next to me was drunk. And from the looks of his nose (Karl Malden had nothing on this guy), being soused at 9 a.m. is probably an everyday occurence for him.

Perspective point one: I may have to remind my desk way too often to use spellcheck, but at least I don't supervise anyone who routinely shows up to work staggering drunk.

Perspective point two, courtesy of Stacy: I have my up and down days, but at least I don't hate my job so much that the only way to get through the day is to consume a box of Boone's Farm for breakfast.

If the neighbors want animals ...

2006-07-18T12:47:00.000-04:00

... I have ground bees, they're welcome to those.

I'd never heard of ground bees, until Friday, when an exterminator came to tackle my ant problem. He informed me that a huge nest of angry yellow jackets is living in underground tunnels next to my back porch.

Suddenly, living at Hardy Barracks seems like a fun option.

Idiot neighbors abound

2006-07-15T17:03:00.000-04:00

Clearing up some misconceptions on my part: the puppy turned out to be a) female and b) barking all the time because she was tied on a four-foot leash and largely ignored. I made friends with her by petting her. She seemed starved for attention, and I had a new friend.

Until two Saturdays ago.

I got up early and started mowing the lawn, and as I did I made two unpleasant discoveries. First, the neighbors' idea of what to do with the puppy on a 90-degree day was to tie her to the side steps, on the aforementioned way-too-short leash. They did give her food and water, thank goodness, but once the sun moved overhead, she wasn't in the shade anymore and couldn't get to shade. She just lay sadly on the porch, panting.

The second discovery was that their defenseless-animal-acquiring spree hadn't ended with the puppy -- they also got a kitten. You can imagine my joy.

Around 11 a.m. I watered my new azaleas, and offered the puppy a drink from the hose -- she shrank back in terror as though she thought I would hit her with it. I'll take Very Bad Signs for $200, Alex.

Around 1 p.m. I decided I would call the Humane Society if the puppy was still outside. I looked out to confirm that she was (and she was), and as I watched, one of the kids opened the door and the kitten made a break for it, probably realizing its life was heading downhill fast. The kid chased the kitten, grabbed it by the neck -- not the scruff of the neck, but underneath, in a choke hold, and threw it into the house. The poor cat flew about seven feet.

I was on the phone within seconds.

A few minutes after that I went to get something out of my car, and the other kid was preparing to walk the puppy on the four-foot leash. I'm no dog expert, but even I know that's not going to work. The puppy lit up when she saw me, and lunged for me, tail wagging. It broke my heart to walk back into my house and leave her there.

And that was the last time I saw her, or the kitten. I called a few days ago for an update and they told me the neighbors had surrendered both animals.

I was surprised -- that seems a bit drastic -- but apparently, faced with the choice of caring for the animals or giving them up, they chose to give them up.

The whole episode really pisses me off. Why get the animals in the first place? Animal control officer has got to be one of the most frustrating jobs there is. People adopt animals for stupid reasons, they refuse to take basic care of them, and they give them up for stupid reasons.

The scary thing is, a lot of those people also have kids.

Speaking of people who shouldn't have kids, Stacy has started a brilliant project to chronicle the misadventures of her neighbor, who recently (and frighteningly) became a father. Check out http://idiotneighbor.blogspot.com, which is way more fun than this post.

8 a.m., EDT

2006-06-24T22:47:00.000-04:00

My next-door neighbors got a puppy while I was gone. He's a cute little thing, black, appears to be mixed breed. His hobbies include barking as well as barking, and in his spare time he enjoys barking.

If there's a master list somewhere of People Who Need A Dog Like They Need A Hole In The Head, surely these neighbors are near the top.

And on the other side of my house, Mr. King and I have a difference of opinion on the correct time of day to use a weed-whacker, with me being firmly in the Not At 7 a.m. camp.

Delayed reaction, or Russell Crowe is my neighbor

2006-06-23T14:44:00.000-04:00

I wrote this while I was in Sydney, but never got around to posting it. I'm too lazy to write anything today, so I'll just toss you some leftovers:

When I was about 8, my parents announced their intention to spend their tax refund on a trip to Australia to see my mom’s longtime pen pal, Sandy, who lives in Melbourne. I was day-before-my-birthday-look-at-all-those-presents excited for it.

Then I came home one day to find our hideous striped sofa replaced by a hideous loveseat-recliner combo, and, to add insult to aesthetic injury, that the tax refund had been spent on the rust-and-orange horror.

I’ve been bitter about it ever since.

This week, I’m exorcising that childhood demon, as well as crossing off number 3 on my all-time Places To Visit list.

Upon arriving in Australia, my first action was that of any traveler setting foot in a land she’d waited two decades to see: laundry.

See, it turns out, there’s a few drawbacks to life in the lap of luxury – namely, you can’t do anything for yourself. Want to quickly spot-iron a shirt? You can’t! Housekeeping will be happy to take care of that for you, ma’am. (For $10.) Coin-op laundry is for the hoi polloi at Super 8. So the hoi polloi arrived in Sydney with no clean pants.

That chore out of the way, surely I headed into the outback or something, right? Uh, no, actually, I took a nap. Red-eye flights are great if you can sleep on planes. I can’t. Especially after eating a meal that was half a notch above MRE quality and that made me violently ill sometime in the netherworld of plane-night. A flight attendant gave me two red caplets in a blister pack with kanji and the word “forte.” That means “strong” in French, but Koreans have a habit of attaching random Western words to their advertising (the slogan for a popular Samsung cell phone is “Digital exciting”). Feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland, I took the pills, and they did help. Sort of.

Reason number 876 I’m glad I’m not a celebrity is that I tend to fall apart when I travel. Not mentally, but appearance-wise, I start out dressing for comfort and minimal stripping at security, and steadily deteriorate from there, getting grubbier and stringier-haired until I arrive looking like I slept in a dumpster. I’d be a regular fixture on worst-dressed and “don’t” lists.

My point is that I arrived in Sydney disheveled, exhausted, cold and nauseated, and Down Under was starting to feel like more of a hassle than an adventure. So: shower; sleep; get maintenance guy to fix heat in room. He’s the one who told me about Russell Crowe.

I took Lonely Planet’s advice and paid a little more for a room with a harbor view, and it was 100 percent worth it. As I write this, I’m looking out over downtown Sydney, and the harbor, and even in winter it’s breathtaking. Directly across from me is Finger Wharf, and at the end of the wharf is an apartment building whose penthouse is home to Gladiator Man himself. (And lest you think the maintenance guy was pulling my leg, LP also mentions this fact, as did this morning’s Sun-Herald, which breathlessly reported that Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughan had tea there last week.) The penthouse is almost level with my room. I could make obscene gestures to him, but I’m not gonna. He probably couldn’t throw a cell phone (or mobile, as Aussies call them) this far, but I’m not taking any chances.

Wow, this post is really starting to ramble. Last topic, I promise.

I had an excellent dinner at the café adjoining the historic State Theater, and my stomach finally settled down. And then I watched “An Inconvenient Truth” at the Sydney Film Festival.

Holy. Cow. If you don’t get sick to your stomach seeing the disappearance of Lake Chad, or the rapid melting of Greenland, or the horrific projections of rising sea levels and subsequent flooding, then you’re … Bush, I guess.

Watch it. I’m serious. And remember it next time you vote.

It was interesting to watch a movie that inherently is about American politics surrounded by non-Americans. Hundreds of people packed the theater; I couldn’t tell how much that had to do with their interest in seeing a documentary starring an increasingly jowly former U.S. vice president, and how much had to do with it being a film festival selection, but I can’t imagine any showing at the Landmark E Street drawing that crowd. The Aussies laughed heartily when Gore took a jab at the current administration, and roared in angry disapproval when he mentioned that only two advanced nations haven’t signed the Kyoto Protocol – that would be, of course, the U.S. and Australia. Everyone heartily applauded the movie, and exited griping about John Howard.

Russell Crowe, Al Gore and bad airplane food, all in one post – where else but TFA are you gonna get that?

You guys ever hear of this thing called soccer?

2006-06-13T06:59:00.000-04:00

Sydney is CRAZY today over football, as they call it. Last night, Australia's team scored its first World Cup victory in 32 years by beating Japan. Crazy thing is, that doesn't even send them to the second round of the playoffs -- I think they still have to play Brazil to move on, or hope Brazil ties or loses to another team. I don't really understand the terminology I've been hearing all around me today.

Last night I wanted to find a good place to watch the match, which started at 11 p.m. (of course, what better time to start a sporting event?), so I took the bus into the city and ended up at Circular Quay (pronounced key), which is sort of equivalent in DC to Union Station. Actually, it's probably equivalent in every U.S. city to Union Station -- they all seem to have one. Anyway, some firm had set up a giant TV screen and about 3,000 people jammed a square to watch the game. I watched for a while, but nothing happened, and I thought, see, this confirms what Americans think -- this is the second-most boring sport in the world. (Cricket being the first.)

Also it's winter here, and though the days have been warm, it gets darn cold after the sun goes down. So I went home.

Turns out, after I left, Japan scored, and then Australia scored three goals in the last 8 minutes to win. I'm kicking myself now for having left, and missed the crazy celebrating downtown, but who knew soccer could be interesting?

Today is my last day in Sydney -- I'm so sad! I've been trying to cram in as much as possible, both to get a good feel for the city and to write a travel article on how to see Sydney in two days. This morning I took the train to Bondi Beach, which surprisingly was only two stops away. The weather was gorgeous -- it must have been 70 degrees, but I don't know because I can never remember how to convert C to F. I rolled up my pant legs, waded in the surf and asked a hunky lifeguard to take my picture. Just as he did, a huge wave came up behind me and soaked me from the waist down. I sunned myself on some nearby rocks like a lizard for a while, trying to dry off, and realized going to the beach first thing had been a mistake -- I didn't want to leave. I finally dragged myself away, still looking like I'd declined to use the public toilets and paid a heavy price, but my pants eventually dried. After about 6 hours.

I had a vague plan to go to the zoo today, but since most of my time in Melbourne will be about animals -- I'm going to the aquarium and to an island where you can pet kangaroos, see koalas and watch a penguin parade -- I instead took a ferry across Sydney Harbor to a harborside shopping/dining/deck complex and just soaked up the sun. Yesterday was my big tourist day -- I went to the Opera House, took a bus tour of the city, etc. I'll write about all that later. Oh yeah, and I have a couple of posts I put on my laptop but haven't been able to get online to post yet -- Sydney isn't quite down with the WiFi revolution yet. (I don't have my laptop with me now, or I'd post them.)

Also today I picked up the gorgeous opal ring I bought yesterday. I'll post a picture, when I can recharge my camera battery.

I gotta plug my camera for a minute. It has a weird super-futuristic battery that makes the camera very small but also very expensive. I was reluctant, but the guy at the store talked me into it, and now I'm so glad. My last camera needed new AA batteries about every other day. I've been using this one for four weeks and the battery just started dying today. Fujifim Finepix. I highly recommend it.

Australians seem to have latched onto America's worst music. Everyplace I've gone, they've been playing '80s pop -- even the Queen Victoria Building, a super-upscale, sedate shopping center, had "Thriller" on its Muzak today. And there's no thought to matching song theme with store theme -- I ate in a steakhouse tonight that was playing disco. Huh?

Last night, for dinner, I wandered into a place advertising kangaroo pizza. Awesome! I was way psyched to try it, but they bait-switched me -- the pizza was gone, so instead I had panfried dory (the kind of fish Ellen DeGeneres voiced in "Finding Nemo). It was delish, but still I'm sad about the kangaroo pizza.

My Internet cafe hour is almost up, so I'll try to resume the blog tomorrow ...

Day 12: Hooray for happy accidents

2006-06-08T07:55:00.000-04:00

My arrival in Korea was not auspicious -- I was supposed to be staying at the military-owned Dragon Hill Lodge, but despite three conversations in D.C. that went like "Are you sure I have lodging in Korea?" "Yes, definitely," they didn't have a reservation for me.

Tragically, the mixup has forced me to stay instead at the five-star Grand Hyatt Seoul. I'm in no mood to cast blame right now, mostly because I'm lounging in a fluffy robe and slippers on the pristine white down comforter blanketing the most comfortable bed ever.

I am never coming home, btw.

I've spent the past two days touring bases in Korea -- cool for me, but not too exciting for anybody reading this. Tomorrow, though, I get to tour the DMZ. So I should have more to write tomorrow. If I bother to get out of bed.

Day 11: Now live from Korea

2006-06-06T20:35:00.000-04:00

First off I have to issue a clarification -- I spoke too soon regarding chopsticks. I tried to use them Monday at lunch with a Navy commander and failed miserably. (After boasting to everyone at the table that I'd mastered them.) And then I got to Korea yesterday, where they use thin metal chopsticks that cause hand cramps.

Before I start on Korea, I have to backtrack to Tokyo because I CAN'T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO MENTION THE TOKYO ROCKABILLY CLUB!! Of all the craziness at Yoyogi Park, these guys were my favorite.

Picture: a half-dozen Japanese guys, with pompadours, sunglasses and outfits swiped from the T-birds' dressing room on the "Grease" set, strutting their coolest greaser moves as Japanese rockabilly blares from a very bad boombox. They also did some American songs, including a re-creation of the "Greased Lightning" dance number.

And they do this every Sunday.

You can see why I'm stunned I forgot to mention it. And why I totally want to live in Tokyo now.

Day 8: I've mastered chopsticks!

2006-06-04T19:51:00.000-04:00

My inability to use chopsticks (hashi) has been a source of great amusement to my co-workers here. People kept trying to explain, and while I understood what they said, I couldn't put it into practice. It was like driving a stick shift -- I knew on paper how to do it, but the execution was disastrous.

And then, yesterday, we stopped for tapas and drinks, and suddenly I got them in the right position and everything people had told me just clicked. Bring on the sticky rice!

That triumph was just one small piece of an amazing day. Stacy, Sid, Geoffrey and a New Zealander named Mark took me to Yoyogi Park, where the goth teens and the harajuku girls hang out on Sundays. I'm hoping to have better Internet access in Korea, so I can post photos, because words simply cannot do justice to the bizarreness that is Yoyogi Park on a Sunday. People were roller-skating, playing soccer and frisbee, praticing martial arts, and walking little dogs. (Everyone here has little dogs.) Also they have a bunch of bands playing, all set up about 50 feet apart, so it's hard to tell what music is coming from what band. Some of them were quite good, especially the group wearing yellow Tony Orlando and Dawn costumes. And we passed an Australian guy who apparently had been bribed/cajoled/forced into singing with a Japanese band and was begging passing English-speakers to take over for him. (We left him in his misery.)

Then we had the aforementioned tapas and drinks. I got shochu (a kind of flavorless alcohol, kind of like vodka) in passionfruit juice. Yummy! I'm not accustomed to being drunk at 3 p.m., but hey, it's vacation, right?! (sort of)

Next up: Kiddy Land, a five-story tower of the strangest toys imaginable. Yes, I got some souvenirs. :)

After an hour or so of that, Mark was hungry again, so we headed to Shibuya for Indian food. And then Sid took me to Loft, a super-cool department store (thanks for the tip, Sharon!) where I bought the most awesome clock ever which absolutely will not fit in my luggage. I guess I'll just mail it to myself.

Mark's an interesting guy. He's lived in Japan for eight years, but has learned about as much Japanese as I have. He re-enlisted in the Australian military last year, and somehow left them with the impression he was fluent. So now he has a year to learn Japanese. He's taking lessons from Sarah, who I'll write about later (I have a lot to catch y'all up on!)

I'm off to Yokosuka Naval Base today ... I'll try to post tonight.

Totally lost track of days now

2006-06-02T23:51:00.000-04:00

Hey blogosphere! Sorry I haven't posted in a while; too busy having crazy adventures.

I'm off to sample Japanese Denny's, and then to a baseball game, but I'll catch you up on the past couple of days tonight. Promise.

I haven't had a chance to upload my photos yet; it didn't occur to me not everyplace has Wi-Fi. I should have guessed that a place that has the word "Barracks" in its name wouldn't, though.

Day, um, 4? -- I could get used to this

2006-06-01T03:31:00.000-04:00

This morning I enjoyed a traditional Japanese breakfast of ... Burger King.

Let me back up and explain ... one of the points of my trip (believe it or not, I really am here to work) is to see some of the bases we cover. So last night I rode with Stacy to Yokota Air Base, and got a first-hand look at her atrocious commute (housing for married DOD cvilians is at Yokota, about a 90-minute drive from our office). Geoffrey grilled steaks for dinner, and it almost felt like we were back at their former apartment in Arlington. Except for the crazy Japanese show on the TV.

I was put up in another DOD-owned hotel, Kanto Lodge. Unlike Hardy Barracks, which has a free continental breakfast, Kanto didn't offer food, so I had to forage on the base. At first I was supremely annoyed -- I didn't fly 15 hours to eat crummy American food -- but then I told myself that since I never eat BK at home, I could consider it foreign and exotic.

In the morning, Stacy took me on a tour of the base, which really is a self-contained small city, and then I met the base's public affairs officer.

I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do -- I never meet people for work! Two days of meetings, that I understood perfectly. But it went fine (I think).

Irony: back home, I have to get up at 6 for work, and it takes a tremendous amount of willpower -- I'm always still tired and craving more sleep. Today, when I could have slept until noon, I was wide awake at 5:45, just like I have been every day so far.

It doesn't help that the sun comes up insanely early in Japan. I woke up at 4:45 my first night and it was broad daylight out.

So, I don't really have any adventures to report, but it was nice to relax last night. And to go to bed before midnight.

So much for sleep

2006-05-30T23:18:00.000-04:00

I absolutely planned to go to bed after dinner last night -- until I found out it was also karaoke night.

Now, you just cannot go to Tokyo and not do karaoke. It's illegal. Or should be. So, even though I was about to fall face-first on the (very clean) pavement, I lumbered to the karaoke place. This was just like "Lost In Translation" -- you rent a room for 2 hours, and you get your own machine with thousands of songs, and all you can drink.

This was the source of much of my pre-trip stress -- what song would I sing? And would I horrify everyone with my lack of singing ability?

The second worry was a bit ameliorated on my first night here, when Tim asked anxiously "Are you a good singer?", and was visibly relieved when I said no. The first worry was exacerbated by the excessive songbook, and by the promise that Tony would stun us all with his rendition of "My Way."

The upshot: Tony did stun us (dude can flat-out sing); Sid did the Hammer dance; and my musical muse -- at least for the night -- was:

(I cannot escape this woman)

Britney.

Yeah, that's right. Stacy and I rocked "Toxic." You got a problem with that?

And did I go to bed after that? Oh no. Instead we headed to expat bar Geronimo, which is something like a rite of passage for Americans in Tokyo (at least Americans affiliated with Stripes). We were greeted by a paper sign on the door that said "Due to recent events, all professional rugby players are banned from Geronimo." (Now that sounds like a fun night. Too bad I missed it.)

Geronimo wasn't the coolest bar in the universe, but it does have a great view of Tokyo, and a wall of plaques with the names of people who've drunk a huge number of shots (I variously heard 17 and 19) in one sitting. Many of them are former Stripes employees.

Still not done ... we stopped at McDonald's on the way back to Hardy Barracks.

So at 1 a.m., I finally slept.

My new Japanese word of the day: juhachi-ban. It means "number 18", but it also means your karaoke song. I've gotta find a better juhachi-ban.

Day 2.75 -- jet lagged now

2006-05-30T04:20:00.000-04:00

I am going to collapse.

But first I'm going out with all my Far East colleagues for a night of izikaya and all you can drink.

Day 2.5 -- still no jet lag!

2006-05-29T18:48:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a blast -- I had no work to do here, so Sam took me sight-seeing. We went to a shrine in Akasuka where you buy a fortune based on your age for 100 yen (about a dollar). Mine was good, but Sam's, not so much -- the last line was "Marriage and employment must be stopped." There are wires nearby where you tie bad fortunes, to wish them away, so Sam tied his. I kept mine. (I'll post photos on Flickr tomorrow.)

Then we went to investigate the orange Eiffel Tower, which is called Tokyo Tower (clever!). It's actually a very organized (and kitschy) tourist attraction -- for 700 yen you can take an elevator to the top (if you've ever ridden up the actual Eiffel Tower, you'd be amazed at how smooth and non-scary this ride is). There's an observation deck, where I got a sense of just how crowded Tokyo really is -- in many spots there's not a visible patch of ground, just an insanely dense and chaotic mass of buildings going every which way, as though they just built wherever they could find square footage. I wasn't able to see Mount Fuji -- too overcast -- but I did get a good look at the city.

Halfway down the tower are five floors of attractions, including a minor amusement park with rides for kids; a wax museum (admission was extra, so we skipped it); a Guinness Book of Records museum (bizarre, and we saw a kid getting his picture taken holding the shoe of the world's tallest man. The shoe was about two feet long. The best part was the ads, which were only in Japanese, so we were left to try to guess why the pictured items were record holders -- longest-eared dog? largest sport coat? gorilla with a TV where its face should be? -- because we also skipped that); a cool-looking restaurant with low tables and surrounded by curtains of rice strings; and a cafe that looked like a diner in the States.

We passed up the diner for a crepe stand outside -- the crepes were HUGE and yummy. I got ice cream and blueberry sauce, but if I'd been so inclined I could have gotten tuna with pizza sauce or scrambled eggs and curry. But I was not so inclined.

By the time we got back to Hardy Barracks the reporters were starting to arrive from all over Japan and Korea, and a bunch of us went to dinner at a place called Pizzakaya (if you read the last post, you learned the Japanese word izikaya; this is a play on words. It's really just a very good pizza place). We skipped the Japanese favorite of corn and mayonnaise and had more American choices like pepperoni and four cheese. Awesome pizza. Then we went to a tiny bar called The Cavern, which had framboise (yay!) and really does look like a cavern inside, minus the stalactites and stalagmites. The place could hold about 20 people. It was really laid-back and a good time.

Went to bed around midnight; woke up at 6. I'm amazed I'm functioning. We'll see how well I hold up in the day of meetings that is before me.

My Japanese word for the day: sumimasen (excuse me).

Konichiwa from Tokyo

2006-05-28T22:01:00.000-04:00

I'm really here! It doesn't quite seem real yet ... or maybe that's just the jet lag talking.

The 15-hour flight was not the worst I've ever taken -- that would be the 10-hour flight from Frankfurt to Chicago with a broken tailbone -- and the food (remember food on planes?) wasn't half bad. And just around the time I started to think "I have to get off this plane, or I'm gonna pull a Jack Bauer," I saw on the little "you are here" screen that the plane was approaching the northernmost islands, so I didn't have to hijack it.

It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that the Japanese run the world's most efficient airport. Narita is spotless, the escalators and moving sidewalks are space-age smooth, I cleared quarantine, immigration and customs in 10 minutes, and my luggage was already on the carousel when I got to it. Airport managers of the world, take note ...

I walked out of the airport expecting to see something out of "Lost In Translation." But Narita is about 40 miles from downtown Tokyo, and the surrounding area looks nothing like Tokyo. Lined with trees and noise-abatement walls, the Kanto Expressway looks for all the world like any highway in Virginia -- except everyone's driving on the left. Then we drove through an industrial area containing the headquarters of nearly every electronic and automobile I've owned. We also passed two random, ginormous Ferris wheels (one, I was told, is the world's largest) and the Eiffel Tower (it's a radio tower, but it looks just like the one in Paris. Except it's orange.)

And then we were downtown, and that really does look like Tokyo. (Because, duh, it is.) I was surprised to see how many signs are in English -- it's very trendy here to use English, so it's pretty easy to figure out what most businesses are. (The fluency of the sign writers, however, varies wildly. One colleague saw a T-shirt that said "You broke my arm." My new mission in Tokyo is to find and purchase that shirt.)

I unpacked, did a little B&E of Stripes' Tokyo office -- which was empty -- and realized I had no idea where my co-workers were or how to contact them (my cell doesn't work here, and I'm quickly realizing how addicted to it I am), so I wandered back toward Hardy Barracks (a military owned housing/lodging/crash pad for drunken troops where I'm staying, and which conveniently is across a parking lot from the Tokyo office, so for the next 10 days I have a 15-second commute) thinking "I have nothing to do." Followed by, "You're in Tokyo. There are 10 million things to do on this block."

And then co-workers Tim and Sam spotted me, and rescued me from an evening of wandering around Tokyo lost.

Our plan was to eat dinner at a Brazilian restaurant, but the 90-minute wait deterred us, so instead we went to a place called Tangu, whose orange vinyl booths reminded me of a 70s-era generic IHOP. It's actually an izikaya -- a diner-like place that serves small plates of Japanese food. (Like tapas, but Japanese.) They thoughtfully provided an English menu with many (hopefully) inexact translations -- we passed on the "nuggets of chicken gristle," "big eyes tuna sashimi," "abdomen meat of bonito" and "delicately fried squid liver and all." What we did have: gozya (potstickers), shrimp with mayonnaise sauce, fried rice with crab meat, white asparagus, yakitori (chicken on skewers), and other things I couldn't begin to spell or describe. Tons of fun. Then we went to a bar in Shibuya called BYG, that boasts an amazing selection of music on vinyl and CD, and takes requests. I discovered umeshu -- plum wine that goes down nice and sweet. (This morning I discovered my head was stapled to the pillow.) We drank til midnight, telling stories about other nights of drinking (most of which ended in injuries).

And then I slept -- for the first time in 37 hours.

This is the thanks I get?

2006-05-26T19:24:00.000-04:00

Before I leave, I've gotta clear one thing up.

Last week, I put myself on the line to defend the increasing indefensible Britney Spears. I probably was the only person in the blogosphere even remotely on her side in the wake of Babygate Part XXIV.

And what do I get in return?

This.

Your honor, I can no longer provide an adequate defense. I hereby withdraw.

Sayonara!

2006-05-26T19:13:00.000-04:00

There are only so many calamities that one can have in the tiny, congressional representation-deprived, not-quite-diamond that is the District of Columbia. So I'm taking my act on the road -- to Japan, South Korea and Australia -- where language barriers, currency conversion and jet lag no doubt will ensure that hilarity will ensue. And if those don't do the trick, there's always karaoke.

I'll be posting as often as I can, and uploading my photos on Flickr; links to come.

Living up to low expectations

2006-05-24T16:26:00.000-04:00

In a recent post, Stacy described me as "the calamity-prone goddess of D.C."

Yesterday I went out of my way to prove her right. At least the calamity part.

When I opened my front door last night, I heard a motor running. I thought at first my neighbor was mowing, but it got louder as I moved into the house. I followed the sound upstairs, slightly alarmed but mostly curious as to what the heck it could be.

As I climbed the stairs, I noticed it was a lot warmer upstairs than downstairs. Not just in a "heat rises" kind of way, but about 20 degrees warmer.

I followed the noise into the bathroom, where I discovered that the hook that so neatly held my hair dryer on the side of the vanity had fallen off, and improbably, somehow the hair dryer had gotten switched on as it plummeted to the floor.

I guess it had been on for hours, because it was about 90 degrees in the bathroom.

What I learned yesterday -- you can heat your house with hair dryers! Provided you don't mind the electric bills and the very real possibility of finding your home replaced by a pile of ashes.

I learn something new every day; it's not necessarily useful.

It's not blue

2006-05-22T13:22:00.000-04:00

This morning, a guy in a suit offered me his seat on the train. (In five years of daily commuting, this has never happened.)

Maybe he's just old-school. Or maybe he's on board with John Kelly's attempt to return chivalry to Metro.

But, considering I was mistaken for an expectant mother last week while buying a shower gift at Babies 'R Expensive, I'm gonna dig out my "8-Minute Abs" video the minute I get home.

Sympathy for the she-devil

2006-05-21T14:04:00.000-04:00

I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but ... I kinda feel sorry for Britney Spears right now.

Brit's back in the tabloids for nearly dropping Sean Preston while trying to fight her way through crowds of paparazzi in New York, her latest would-be-comical-if-it-didn't-involve-a-baby mishap.

I'm not even about to defend her for driving with the baby on her lap ... or not knowing how to use a car seat ... or marrying a loser ... or her entire career. (Although Nickel Creek's cover of "Toxic" is wicked cool.)

But ... as a fellow klutz, I can see myself being in this position. Not the being-chased-by-photogs part, but I manage to fall quite a bit on my own, even when not surrounded by a crazed mob. And if I was holding a baby during one of my clumsy spells, yeah, I can see potential catastrophe.

(Mental picture: Sharon reading this post in horror, yelling, "And I let that woman hold Harper! Never again!")

Being a trifle clumsy doesn't make her a bad mom.

Being pregnant again by KFed, however, does.

An open letter to people at my gym

2006-05-20T17:13:00.000-04:00

Dear people who use/hang out at my gym:

1) Why do you work out in street clothes? I don't get it. It's not that you're wearing T-shirts and shorts that could do double duty as workout clothes; half of you are in sweaters and Timberlands. Were you just wandering through the mall and decided "Eh, I didn't really find anything I wanted at Old Navy, I guess I'll hit the gym to make my trip worthwhile"? The other day, I saw a woman wearing:
* extremely low-rise capri jeans
* five belts (none of which helped to hold up the jeans)
* at least 30 bracelets
* a tank top
* kitten-heel sandals
* granny panties that came up six inches above the top of her jeans

I wanted to ask her the two obvious questions:
a) Why would you wear that to run on a treadmill?
b) Why would you wear that?

I'm not saying you've gotta be in head-to-toe Foot Locker. I'm just saying it's a little weird to lift weights in a dress shirt and tie, is all.

2) As hangouts go, the gym is kinda lame, don't you agree? Everybody's all sweaty and looks bad, the lighting is garish, and at $45 a month, the cover's kinda steep. So if all you want to do is hook up, maybe the food court would be more fun. The seats there are more comfortable than the leg extension machines you're slouched on, and you won't get in fights every two minutes when people kick you off the equipment. No, really. I mean it. Leave. Now.

3) It's ludicruous that the gym doesn't provide towels, I hear ya, but pop in Target and buy a hand towel, would you? Having to wipe pools of your sweat off the equipment is just nasty.

And a few words for the management:
1) Buy some more increment weights. There's, what, two five-pound weights in the whole gym? And they're always in some bizarrely obscure spot -- yesterday I found them stacked like Jenga pieces on a scale. If tiny Bowie Athletic Club can afford increment weights for each machine, surely a huge fitness chain whose name rhymes with 'rallies' can spring for some.

2) Do something about #2 and #3 above. You maybe wouldn't have to lock people into decade-long contracts if they actually liked the gym.

3) What the heck do the trainers do? I've never seen them actually training anybody. I have seen them ignore people using equipment the wrong way, refusing to follow basic gym etiquette and overexerting themselves to the point of collapse. Worth mentioning, no?

I bring this up because I have a confession -- I cheated on you, Bally's. It started out innocently enough -- I was running an errand in Greenbelt and yes, we had a date that night, but there was a huge accident on Route 1 and since you close ridiculously early, I couldn't get there on time. So I went to Beltway Plaza, thinking the gym there was a Bally's, but no, it was Gold's Gym. (Maybe it used to be Bally's? I could have sworn it was a Bally's, but I was pretty emphatically proved wrong.) But I really wanted to work out. I needed it, Bally's, and you couldn't give it to me, so I got it from someone else. (Actually, I said to the guy at the desk, "Look, here's the situation -- I'm an idiot. I thought this was my gym. Can I get a one-day pass?")

And, oh, Gold's gave me what I wanted. There must have been 10 trainers on the floor, just talking to people and encouraging them (yes, believe it or not, just regular people who pay the membership fee. Talking to them!). It's actually open useful hours. And oh yeah, they have towels.

And so I sneaked in an illicit week at Gold's, thrilled by the clandestine nature of it all. The trainers showed me machines you never told me existed. (And for some reason, I burn more calories on their treadmills than on yours.)

I'm back, of course, because my free pass expired. But my eyes have been opened. I know I can do better. And once my crazy-long contract is up, you better believe I will.

You talkin' to ME? Well, are you?

2006-05-17T23:00:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the brilliance that is Stacy, I've enabled the comments feature so that anyone can comment, not just people with Blogger accounts. Cause how elitist is that?

So, bring it.

Finally, a little something for the shoplifters

2006-05-17T22:46:00.000-04:00

I hit H&M tonight after work; no reason, really, except that my gym plans were put on hold after I fell this morning while walking across F Street and hurt my ankle. I wasn't too injured to shop, though. And while standing in line for the fitting room (a very long line -- might I suggest not blocking half your fitting room doors with racks of rejected try-ons?) I noticed one of those absurd things that I so enjoy finding.

When you go into the fitting room, the attendant hangs a color-coded tag on the door to indicate how many items you have. Completely normal, but here's the weird thing -- the white tags have the number 0 on them.

Zero.

"Um, items? I didn't have any. I just, uh, came in to sit down for a minute. Cause it's kind of hot in here, specially when you're wearing five shirts and three pairs of pants."

Much as I love Gallery Place at 2 a.m. ...

2006-05-11T17:05:00.000-04:00

DCist is beta testing possibly the best-ever use of text messaging (aside from whiling away the time in church). LastCall promises info on D.C. weather, movie times and concert listings, and lets you make restaurant reservations through Open Table -- all very cool. But I'm most excited about the feature that tells you Metro times. You just text METRO [NAME OF STATION], and you get the next train times, in both directions, from any station.

Oh, the possibilities! No more skidding, breathlessly, onto the platform only to see taillights fading into the tunnel! No more sinking of my heart as my bleary eyes take in the words "4 Rd Glenmont 17"! No more three-level sprint between the platforms at Fort Totten in a transit "Deal Or No Deal" (7 minutes til the next Red Line train? I'll take my chances on what's on the lower-level platform, Howie. Sorry, the Green Line train just left. Now let's watch as our contestant sprints up the escalator, weaves around plodders on the main level, and does another escaltor sprint before her 7 minutes are up!)

202-299-7949: it's already programmed into my phone.

Stupid cell phone tricks

2006-05-08T20:09:00.000-04:00

I was walking down the escalator at Metro Center today when my phone rang. I'm not one of those people who stomps around D.C. with my phone glued to my ear, but I guessed -- correctly, it turns out -- that it was Debra answering the question I'd just left a message asking her, so I fished my phone out of my purse and promptly fumbled it. In an unbelievable sequence of events, the phone bounced down three steps, hit its edge on the edge of a step, flipped itself open, cartwheeled down two more steps and landed on its back, with the display screen cheerfully counting away the call time.

Damage: none, except maybe to Debra's ear.

LG camera phones are built Ford tough.

And I'm sure this story is being told at the dinner tables tonight of everyone who watched me chase the phone down the escalator.