Nameless here forever more

Payday. Cheesecake. Payday cheesecake. Plain old ordinary vanilla cheesecake with a topping inspired by a cake I saw once in an autumn dream. Maybe twice. How's your Chinese Dear Reader?

dŭb'əl-än-tän'drə

Ed drove me to it. The Vossist! Time out for a bit of oatmeal. Vraiment. Questioning my use of "Pedestrian"?! Google, google, google. Well, one google. Hastily, and lazily, peek at the first retrieved result. Answers.com. How very American. In the, well, I don't know which sense of that word.
pe·des·tri·an (pə-dĕs'trē-ən)
n.
A person traveling on foot; a walker.
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or made for pedestrians.
2. Going or or performed on foot.
3. Undistinguished; ordinary.

Think ambiguously Dear Reader. Think. Or not. Maybe I am just showing off my cut and paste skills. This post has become tiresome. It always was.

The Gutter

I finally cataloged the box set of the Disney Princesses Pez dispensers. I had to wait for good light for the digital photograph. Really. Silly? Really silly. I couldn't have glare from the plastic wrap. No way! I can live with not being able to see where Mulan, Pocahontas and Snow White were manufactured. I think I can. Empty metadata fields in records? Hey, I already said I think I can. Live and let live. I am not going to open the box just to see if it says China, Hungary, or Slovenia. So close and yet so far to being able to type "Full" in the cataloging status of each of these three records. An exercise in letting go. Just let go of it man! As I went to place the box of ladies on the shelf in my cubicle that is dedicated to Pez, I bumped one. Just one. Probably SpongeBob SquarePants. Could've been a Stormtrooper. They are always up to no good, and there is no way I could pick which one of them was responsible. I just didn't get that good a look. I did learn that a shelf packed with Pez dispensers will behave pretty much as if it were (subjunctive mood!) a shelf chock full of dominoes. It was a surreal slow-motion event. Yes, Dear Reader, "event." I went immediately to a happy place. I could dust the shelf. I could be grateful this was the only, I mean first, so far, time this has happened. Does that even make sense? Does anything? It was a waste of my morning break setting them up again. There has got to be some existential lesson here, doesn't there? "Yassassin. I'm not a moody guy." Google it. Might get something. Might not. And yet somehow, after all was done (I was alone, nothing was said; thought, you bet, not said though) I am left with the stray thought that Snow White looks a little trampy.

Ticket please

Arriving from the west after heading east, materialized Mo this morning. With a present for me! (I knew it had to be either Pez- or Hello Kitty-related). I was right. Not on both counts. I already have most of the Hello Kitty Pez dispensers. All the way from Hong Kong...I'll let the picture speak for itself. One note. It was Mo who first opened the cat door for me. It started with Seinfeld. Really. Long story. Sort of. Convoluted. What isn't? If you are keeping score at home Dear Reader, (wait a second, Mo is D.R., well one third of 'em,) they are Hong Kong Metro workers. I don't know if they call it that or the subway. Tube?

Benevolence

Simply a curiosity? Possible subversive elements? Propaganda? Circus sideshow? Did it even matter? Big Brother was always watching. Always.


Sometimes Little Sister as well.














For our own good.











Politely, of course.

Golden

Now I've done it Dear Reader. Now I've done it. I just finished writing an article for the Library Staff Association Newsletter about the Shanghai World Games. I felt dirty. Not for doing it, but for putting more thought and effort into that than this. ("That than this" strikes me nicely right now.) At the end of the article I gave the URL for Pedestrian Subjunctives, offering that there was, is, would be, more about this writer's adventures in Shanghai, "and other frivolities." What have I done? I have imposed some kind of non-binding deadline, or quota on myself to produce. To post. If anyone reads the article, and then comes here. Nevermind the shameless self-promotion of this here thing. So, I am going to try, really try, to follow through. No promises. No pledges. No guarantees. No quotas. No deadlines. Just filler words. I now offer to you Dear Reader, the pinnacle of my Shanghai trip. Two of my bowlers, Bobby and Tony competed as a doubles team. They bowled well. Very well. I knew they had finished ahead of their divisional opponents on the adjacent lanes. But, there were three other pairs of bowlers in the same division who were inexplicably at the other end of the bowling alley. I just could not see their scores. I did know that my guys could have finished no lower than fourth. We would have to wait for the awards ceremony. The seven pairs of competitors were led out from the staging area and aligned behind each step of the awards stand. Bobby and Tony both had family present. There were a couple other bowling coaches sitting up front on the floor with me. We all counted backwards from seven, mentally placing each doubles team on a platform. I made it to three. I turned to the families who either counted faster than me, or stopped at three as well. They won. I looked at Sue, the coach next to me, mumbled something about gold, and started crying. It was my first coaching gold medal at a World Games. The picture of Bobby and Tony says it all.

Mother

My mom is in my e-address book. I type the nickname "mom" and the the full name "Mother" along with her e-mail address appears. Lazy. Yes. I was going to write some cutesy post about it, incorporating the song by The Police. You know. From Synchronicity? Then things changed, as things do. It is the one constant I have come to rely on in life. That is to say, change. Susie and I are looking to buy a house. Fair enough. No, I am not digressing here. Bear with me. We planned to buy a house, then get married in said house on August 8 of next year. (8/8/8). Well, I qualify for a special veterans' home loan program. Oooh! Excellent. There is, was a snag. In order for Susie to be on the loan, we need to be married. So, instead of 8/8/8, we are getting married on 12/29/07. You read it here first Dear Reader. Maybe now I can get my mother to read this blog. She would make three I believe.

Eleven

There is so much that cannot be explained Dear Reader. And there is so much that can be, but should not be explained. And then there is everything, or rather, nothing else. I am probably transgressing in some small way simply by offering a clue. Just a hint.
"Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful."


And then there is this dude. He seems so very out of place in Shanghai. Maybe even more so than his works seem so very out of place on my bookshelf. But we won't go back into that whole discussion. If you don't know, or don't remember, or, who cares? Refer back to "No Free Refills."

Tattoo note of interest. (Read: abrupt change of topic). I was at the Dairy Queen yesterday. A girl, maybe three years old, was in line with her grandma. I heard "Look at his leg gramma." Gramma: "I see it." Not the words, but the tone. Almost of disgust. I was waiting for her to advise the little girl not to stare when my order was ready.

The Knack

M-M-M-M-My Sharona. It's not really a digression if it leads off, is it Dear Reader? More of a diversion. A deke. Baseball (leads off) hockey (deke)...there I went again. Which relates in some way to what I want to relate. Finally, a post about my experiences in Shanghai. During the Host Town Program prior to the start of the games, we were herded in groups of 35 or so, hither and yon, to experience a wee bit of Chinese culture and life. It was truly wonderful, and in fact takes up over an hour of Disc One. I took pictures like a madman. I would run ahead of the group to get good shots. I would linger behind to get good shots. I would leave the prescribed route to get good shots. Always, always, always, one of the volunteers would trail me, gesturing back toward the group, "Please. Please." Very polite Orwellian crowd control. Zamiatin could not have scripted it better. (My preferred spelling of Zamiatin. May or may not be that of the Library of Congress). Enough background. On with the anecdote! We were at a park where groups of people were engaged in various collective (ooooh, good word choice!) activities. Staged? Probably. Doesn't matter though. In this space at least. As we were heading back to the bus, I saw a high wall to the right of our path. Vegetation supplemented the height, and added an element of mysterious concealment. In my mind at least. I saw a sign on a big heavy securely locked door. It struck me, not the door, but the image, as a good picture. There was a certain je ne sais quoi to it. I wandered, volunteer in close pursuit, imploringly, "Please, Please..." I raised my camera, zoomed quickly, and got off a shot. That sounds NRAish. I took the picture. There. Better. Later, I asked Sophie, or maybe it was Julie, what the sign said. "Cangku zhongdi xianren moru." Duh! How silly of me. Translated, "Authorized persons only. Keep out!" Bingo.

Note: Xiaotong, a co-worker, gave me the Pinyin transliteration of the sign, not Sophie, or Julie, as, one might conclude from the way I wrote this. Assuming anyone actually reads this thing.

Post 2 of 2 on a Special Day

Sort of. Though written on Tattoo Day, not actually posted until the next day. It is done. Hello Kitty has a new home. On my leg. Splat, the artist, was closer to my age than to the college students who entered with some regularity for lip piercings, etc... By the way, his last name is Ter. Really. Legally. We chatted about Belfast, his home town, and site of the Superbowl, the bowling alley where we practiced for the 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games. He thought he knew it. At least he had heard of it. Small world. I recalled correctly that the tattooing itself was much like being scratched by a cat, slowly, and for a long time, in one place. Mmmm. Endorphins. I think. So, why Hello Kitty? Why not Hello Kitty? Sorry about that Dear Reader. To go into the whys and whatnot would lengthen this post beyond what I'd like. In a nutshell. A coconut shell. The boy. Gifts from Susie. Julie (Online Shopping). Xiao Mengqiu. PEZ. And I cannot omit Jello's Caped Crusader. I promise a picture after it heals.

Post 1 of 2 on a Special Day

OK Dear Reader, let's set the record straight, if anything can truly be straight in our curving, gently and otherwise, universe. Rather, let me apologize, first for not posting more stories of Shanghai and the Special Olympics World Summer Games, and second, for this not being one of those. Instead, this is one of these. I remember a couple of years ago half-jokingly telling Mischa, a.k.a. Ed, that I was thinking about getting another tattoo. His immediate response: "At your age Paul?" I credited him for his speedy retort, and that was the end of it, except for a couple of recountings of that particular conversation. It was, after all, quite humorous. Fast forward. Well, don't go too fast. Enjoy the journey forward. I don't know how else to put it Dear Reader, so here goes: today is tattoo day. After exhaustive, actually, quite cursory searching of online images of the cat, I settled on one. It happens to be from the box of Hello Kitty Meow-Berry Pop Tarts. Purrfect! I re-sized the image for what I wanted on my right calf, went to a tattoo parlor (?) , received a quote, and scheduled an appointment. After looking through artists' samples, I settled on one whose use of color far out-distanced the others. It was a bonus that his name is Splat.