John, Helen, Irvin Friday, Nov 6 2009

1) On Wednesday night the Amazon and I had the incredible pleasure of seeing John Cleese perform a one-man show — basically a cherrypicked retrospective of his career.  I still can’t quite process the fact that he was actually there, and we saw him.  Him.  John Cleese, for the love of God.  The most remarkable thing about the show, I think, was his ability to come across as simultaneously friendly and incredibly urbane.  And although I’m sure he could give the lecture in his sleep, he managed to give an impression of talking conversationally with the audience.  He told us that his mother lived to be 101, and he seems scheduled for similar longevity; I wish I had as much energy now as he seems to have at the age of 70.

2) I have noticed recently that my new favorite phrase appears to be: “I think that ship has sailed.”  This is quite useful for sardonic/ironic effect, and is also a useful way to tell someone that he or she is an idiot without being explicit.  I am observing the departure of so many ships that I am beginning to feel a strange kinship with Helen of Troy.

3) Recently I started re-reading Irvin Yalom’s book Love’s Executioner, the classic/famous account of himself and ten psychotherapy clients and how they impacted one another in the therapy process.  My second encounter with the book has really reminded me, as if I needed reminding, that the reader brings as much to the book as the author does.  The first time I read the book, which was maybe ten years ago, I found it interesting and entertaining.  This time around, from the perspective of someone who has been in extremely demanding and intensive therapy for more than two years, my reaction is that I’m grateful this egotistical asshole isn’t my therapist.  I know people usually praise Yalom for showing the “humanity” of the therapist’s role, but I’m not sure I’m inspired by knowing that he thinks of one of his clients as “a ninny,” and that he practically wallows in his disgust for fat women — and refers to this disgust in the present tense; it’s not something he’s gotten past.  Of course I understand that therapists bring their own crap into the therapy relationship; that’s the basis for countertransference, and in some instances, it can be useful.  I also know that the clients gave their permission for their stories to be told, and so they must think that they were helped — and in many ways I’m sure they were; healing is always a hit and miss process administered by one imperfect human being to another.  Some of the book really made me wonder, though, where the therapist should ethically draw the line as far as refusing to work with clients for whom the therapist does not have a genuine and natural empathy.

One of the points he makes in the story “Fat Lady” is that he took on his fat client, Betty, even though she revolted him so much that he couldn’t look at her, because he wanted an opportunity to grow as a therapist and to work out the countertransference she brought up in him … and that he could only grow this way through the therapeutic relationship.  Well, sorry — I call bullshit on that one.  If we consider the therapist’s countertransference to be what the rest of us non-therapists experience as projection, then none of us would ever be able to work through anything outside of therapy.  I have daily opportunities to become aware of , observe, and try to wrestle honestly with my trigger points and projections — to see where my irritations, hatreds, and judgments show me to myself in ways I’d rather not see.  If Yalom really needs to have a fragile psyche at his disposal in order to work out his own stuff, then he is, I think, irresponsible.  I would never for a moment deny that therapists are challenged by and learn from their clients.  But for a therapist to take on a client he finds disgusting simply because she provides a countertransference challenge?  I can’t accept that as ethical.  Did he help her?  Yes.  But this is one story, and I wonder how many other disgusting clients he took on and didn’t help due to his own issues getting in the way of the crucial concept of unconditional positive regard from analyst to analysand.  It’s impossible to give unconditional positive regard and still find someone too disgusting to look at. 

However, one thing I did find to be interesting and useful about the book was his observations about different degrees of resistance to the therapy process.  It actually made me appreciate myself more as a therapy client; I am not guarded or defensive, I’m not in denial, and I welcome conversations and observations that make me feel painful or uncomfortable, because I recognize those experiences as points to guide me more clearly toward places where I am still wounded in ways that I need to look at.  I’m very good at recognizing that  surge of anger or irritation in me is a surefire indicator that the truth has been spoken — and in fact, I frequently verbalize that when my therapist suggests an interpretation or direction: “I don’t think that’s right, because it’s not pissing me off,” or, conversely, “That bothers me, so there’s almost certainly something there; I’ll think about that and tell you what I figure out.”  And then I go away and spend hours processing that information, and getting as close to the truth as my mind will allow, and I come back and present the next layer of information — a little deeper, a little more risky, a little scarier each time; each of those risks takes off a layer of scar tissue and gets closer to allowing that wound to breathe so it can start healing differently, rather than being buried.  At any rate, if Yalom’s book did nothing else, it showed me that most therapy clients don’t show up in quite that way from Day One, and so I gained a new gratitude for my willingness to endure the discomfort of disassembling my miswired psyche … or maybe a new gratitude for my realization that this miswiring has me stuck in ways that I don’t want to live with all my life, despite being more functional than most people I see.  I’m very grateful not to have been fooled by my functionality into thinking I’m healthy; it seems that’s something that people often get tripped up by, and they waste a lot of life, until they have a crisis and realize that functionality is a surface phenomenon, whereas life is lived elsewhere.

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Ramblings of No Particular Import Monday, Nov 2 2009

1) I don’t know where my car thinks it lives, but it was convinced that we were on Daylight Savings Time two weeks ago.  It updates via satellite signal, and there isn’t a way to manually reprogram the clock.  Now that we really are on Daylight Savings Time, it’s already old news to me.  On the other hand, my new thermostat mysteriously knew about the time change even though I didn’t tell it.  I do not understand the arbitrary opinionatedness of these computer-chip-driven items.  Note:  Thanks to Don, I now realize that I can’t tell the difference between being off DST and being on it.  I also confuse DST with DSL a lot of the time, and find that evidently I want high-speed connected daylight.

2) Last night the small weasel cat woke me up from a deep sleep at 3 AM by pressing her cold wet little nose (it’s extraordinarily damp and frigid, like an ice cube on the front of her face) against my nose, which convinced my unconscious mind that I was about to be murdered by some unholy combination of a burglar and the Abominable Snowman.

3) This cracks me up.  It’s much funnier if you actually know Spanish, partly because the Spanish itself is written for comic effect, and the guy speaking it is hilarious.

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And That Was My Day Wednesday, Oct 28 2009

1) This morning I noticed that Liu has lips.  I’m sure she’s always had them, but I have never noticed them before.  I don’t know whether this means there is something odd going on with her mouth that has suddenly caused me to become aware of her lips, or if I have merely ignored them until now.  Now that I know about them, I can’t stop thinking about how strange they are. 

2) I’m pretty sure I have a sinus infection, but I don’t want to go to the doctor to find out because I’m afraid of getting some horrible virus at the doctor’s office.  So I will wait until it goes away or I die or my head explodes in a fountain of green slime.  I won’t burden you by telling you why I think this latter result is likely.

3)  The Amazon is taking me to see John Cleese do a one-man show next week if I am not slimy or dead or destroyed by cat lips.  I can’t get too excited about it, lest I psych myself out and have expectations of the event that cannot possibly be met.  I did that once when I had a ticket to see one of my favorite authors, Robertson Davies.  I built him up in my mind to the point where I would have thought him a failure had he not raised the dead and parted the Red Sea onstage.  So I ended up not going to the event, and he died a year later, and not having gone is one of the greatest regrets of my entire life.  Therefore I am not thinking about John Cleese.

4) Today I visited the home of a lady who was getting ready for an estate sale, to clear out her dead mother’s house.  There was a pile of long fluffy things by the front door, which caught my eye.

“Would you like a boa?” the lady asked me, completely deadpan.

“Uh … what?” I replied.

“A boa.  Do you want one?”

After looking at them, I did want one; I thought it would make a great cat toy.  I was right.

5) I heard through the grapevine today that an agent where I used to work was asked to leave the company because it turned out he was holding houses open in order to find sex partners.  He would post the address of the house on Facebook, along with an explicit description of his sexual preferences and assets.  Then he would have sex in the house with whoever showed up.  He was extremely indignant when the manager took him to task about this.

“I’ll have you know that just last weekend, I refused a blow job when it was offered to me,” he said.  He also stated that he was doing the world a service, rescuing bored men from their fat wives, and that he was regularly tested for HIV, so what was the problem?  Plus, he didn’t really need to sell houses, because he was writing a memoir, and he was sure it would be made into a major motion picture.

With my luck, he’ll probably be my next editing project from the self-publishing company.

 

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Random Items in No Particular Order Monday, Oct 26 2009

1) Today I saw a Yahoo! news item titled “World’s Oldest Living Dog,” with a fetching (ha!) photo of some long-haired half-dachshund thing.  I found this to be enormously irritating.  Of course it’s a “living” dog — why would there be such a photo if it were the world’s oldest dead dog?  Wouldn’t “World’s Oldest Dog” have sufficed?  And another thing — it makes me want to scream when people refer to dachshunds as “wiener dogs,” but not as much as I want to scream when I hear them referred to as “datsuns,” which seems to be a newly-prevalent linguistic idiocy. 

2) The advent of the cold and flu season has reminded me that some people have more obnoxious-sounding coughs than others.  I don’t know what real excuse there is for coughing of the retching, throat-clearing variety, unless you have pertussis, in which case, you shouldn’t be out in public.  I think the world would be a much nicer place if people paid attention to these things, and made some small effort not to be even more disgusting than they naturally are. 

3)  I attended a pumpkin-carving party at Elissa’s on Saturday, and was so completely exhausted that I evidently gave the impression of being relaxed, and in some respects I suppose I was; since I’d pretty much lost the will to live, I also had lost much of my “oh hell, do I have to seem sociable?” party anxiety.  This latter issue, had it become problematic, would have been resolved by the party guest who chattered at me, magpie-like, all evening, to my bemusement.  I started to wonder whether I had some neon sign over my head that said: “Conversational Charity Case — Please Rescue!”  I got rather a handsome jack-o’-lantern done, which will light the way for the thousand trick-or-treaters expected at my parents’ house on Halloween.  No, really; we’ll get at least that many.

4) Today when I was doing my grocery shopping, I spied a bag of a type of toffee I really like — dark chocolate hazelnut, made locally, so it’s very fresh, and wonderfully flavorful.  It’s also very expensive, and of no nutritional value.  So I made a deal with myself that I could buy the toffee only if I contributed an amount equal to its price to the “Meals for the Homeless” program that is available to add on to the grocery bill at checkout.  This internal bargaining didn’t prevent me from purchasing the toffee I didn’t need, but the Portland Rescue Mission got six meals out of it, so I suppose there was some roundabout virtue in the whole process.

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Things I Learned This Week Saturday, Oct 24 2009

1) If you misread “tablespoons” as “teaspoons” in a cake recipe, you end up with a pretty flat cake.  You can try to save it by putting the 1/8th-inch layers together with redcurrant jelly and icing it with whipped cream, but it will still be flat.  You can then serve a piece to your very polite SO, who will smile and nod and pretend to like it, but you’ll still know it’s … questionable at best.  Then you’ll have to look at it sitting in your refrigerator (where you’ll have to keep it, because you iced it with whipped cream) and wonder what the hell to do with it.  It seems a shame to throw it away, although when you add up the cost of the ingredients, it cost you maybe $15 to make it … less than two nice desserts would cost at a good restaurant, so why don’t you just throw the damned thing out, and move on?  Why?  Why don’t you?  You don’t know.  You just keep staring at it, and it stares flatly back.

2) If the cat runs away howling from the litterbox after visiting it, there’s a good reason. 

3) If you didn’t park under the walnut tree because you observed nuts falling from it with amazing force much in the manner of small atomic bombs, then probably you shouldn’t walk under the tree, either.

4)  There are very few people in the world who don’t respond with delight at hearing this piece played live.  Part of the fun is seeing whether the musicians will survive it, and in what condition, since every measure is full of pitfalls that only an exuberant sixteen-year-old composer could invent.

5) Half a bottle of red wine fixes nearly any recipe.  The other half, given to the cook or to the guest, would probably also fix any recipe, but in a different sense.

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Random Items in No Particular Order Saturday, Oct 17 2009

Hello, blogworld followers.  I haven’t been in evidence much because I’ve been busy and distracted by things I can’t really discuss here, and worried and stressed out by other things I also can’t discuss.  Thus, my life is shrouded in mystery, but it’s not interesting CIA-coercion mystery, or Foreign Spy mystery, or even Trying to Beat an Unfair Parking Ticket mystery.  It’s really pretty mundane mystery, but I’ll take whatever mystery I can get, because,  as you all know, I’m quite boring.

So here are some things I can write about without breaking confidences, undermining diplomacy, loosening lips, or sinking ships.

1) As I suspected she would, the Amazon put together my furniture with all the aplomb one would expect of an Amazon.  Speculation was rife in my last post that my inability to put the furniture together was due to an inherent male unwillingness to follow directions.  This, I protest, was not the case.  I can follow directions just fine, when I can understand them.  These directions were very hard to understand.  They did not involve words; they were picture directions.  I find it very hard to relate a two-dimensional picture with arrows showing me what goes where to a three-dimensional object with nothing anywhere.  I do not believe that the Amazon used these directions to assemble the furniture; I believe she simply coaxed the pieces into their proper configuration using her good looks and charm, both of which she has in spectacular abundance.  Whatever the case, I now have a nice new pavilion end table, and a nice new office chair.  I actually don’t like the office chair, but now I feel obligated to use it.

2) I cannot fathom why my next door neighbor thinks it’s a good idea to use a chainsaw outdoors in a thunderstorm; nevertheless, that’s what he is doing.

3) Last weekend, the Amazon and I went to see the Met HD broadcast of Tosca  at our local movie theater.  The Met broadcasts are a very good deal, and I recommend you go if you possibly can; it’s the best $24 you’ll ever spend.  Considering that you get at least three or four hours of entertainment that you’d spend $400 for (if you wanted a good seat) in New York, it’s hard to beat.  At any rate, we had a good time.  It wasn’t a perfectly-sung production, but it was quite good enough.  Later, I discovered that my enjoyment was partly contingent upon my ignorance of how Tosca is usually staged.  Operagoers are a strangely traditional bunch; they don’t like change.  I have been listening to opera since I was twelve, but I have rarely actually seen anything staged.  So although I know the story, and I know every note, and I know the general settings, I had no preconceived notions about how it should or shouldn’t look, and so I didn’t know that the whole thing was completely “wrong” in the eyes of many viewers because it did not conform to traditional staging.  And honestly, I don’t know why it should be such a big deal … opera is half theater, and theater is an evolving medium, or should be.  Anyone who has seen the splendid film Vanya on 42nd Street would agree, I think, that the power of theater is in the emotional lives of the characters, not in period-specific costumes and staging.  In any event, I was quite pleased to have been uneducated enough to have a good time last weekend.

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In Which I Am Intrepid Thursday, Oct 8 2009

I have been intrepid in the following ways recently.

1) Today Elissa and her almost-one-year-old came over for lunch and crawling.  This is better than lunch and baby frustrated at being strapped into places he doesn’t really want to be, which has been the theme of the past couple of lunches at our usual haunt; the kidlet is at that awkward age where he wants to be doing stuff, but it’s not safe for him to do stuff.  Hence lunch and crawling chez Rochester.  I live in a recently-built house that has ten thousand electrical outlets in the living room, and of course I don’t have any of those plastic childproofing plugs.  But did I despair?  Why, no.  I whipped out a roll of painter’s tape, which I had in the garage for no apparent reason, and childproofed those suckers in thirty seconds flat.  I was pretty impressed with myself.

2) There’s a new national regulation that requires utilities to be marked in people’s yards before a real estate post sign goes up, because somewhere back East a sign placement company put a post through the gas line and blew up the house.  However, they need a stake sign in the yard to show them where you want to put the post, or they mark up the whole yard, showing you the whole length of the gas and water lines, which is very unsightly.  It’s hard to pound those stake signs in unless you have a heavy mallet, which is something I don’t own.  So this week, I handed the signs to my clients, and told them to pound them in the yards.  I was pretty impressed with myself for having such obedient and helpful clients.

3) Two years ago I bought a beautiful end table from the Bombay Company, which was having a big sale because they were going out of business in several states, mine being one of them.  I acquired a really nice solid cherry table for about a quarter of the retail price.  The kicker is that I had to have it shipped, which means it has to be assembled.  I knew I couldn’t assemble it because I am an idiot about things like that, so it’s sat in the box in my garage ever since then.  Recently I unpacked it, examined the contents and fastenings, and confirmed that nope, there’s no way I can put this thing together without ruining it or my sanity or both.  So I told the Amazon she should do this for me the next time I see her, because I’m pretty sure she’s better at that kind of thing, and even if she’s not, she’s a lot more patient and methodical than I’ll ever be, so she’ll figure it out.  I was pretty impressed with myself for acquiring an Amazon.

And those are the ways I was intrepid.

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It may not be the best policy, but it’s easiest to keep track of Sunday, Sep 27 2009

The lovely and talented Corina gave me the Honest Scrap Award for bloggers who  consistently eviscerate themselves and display the steaming contents of their guts to a mildly horrified yet fascinated horde of onlookers.  Or maybe that’s just my interpretation of what I’m doing here.  Anywhoo, the idea is to list ten honest things about oneself, and then tag three other fearless blog writers.  I think just about everyone I know has already been tagged, but we shall see.  I’ll try to come up with ten honest things that I haven’t already confessed, or at least,  that I haven’t already harped on endlessly.

1) I tend not to like other people’s cats.  I love my own cats, but I would not adopt just any cat if it needed a home.  There are cats who are clearly “my” cats, and those are the only ones I would want to live with.  I like cats as abstract concepts, and I always like photos of them because every cat is a piece of living art,  but I often find myself indifferent to or irritated by cats who are not mine.

2) One of the strangest quirks about my physical being is that although I am not, by most people’s estimation, in good health — I have a chronic pain issue that requires suicidal amounts of ibuprofen on a daily basis, and my energy levels are always unnaturally low — I have fewer aches, pains, and problems of that kind than a lot of people I know who are my age.  I am also a lot more naturally flexible than most people my age, despite never stretching or doing anything to promote that.  On the rare occasions when I feel like trying them, I can do very complicated twisted-up yoga poses with no problem.  I don’t see the point of them, but I can do them.  I tend to take this very much for granted.  On second thought, the ibuprofen probably masks whatever aches and pains I would normally have, but doesn’t explain why I’m flexible.

3) Despite not being religious, I still cling to a superstitious belief that God is out to get me.  I don’t know why he’d really care, but it’s one of those beliefs that has nothing to do with logic.

4) Despite all my bitching about them, I have a real soft spot for these stupid illiterate authors and their stupid illiterate projects.  I actually care about them.  Which is probably why I’m able to do a job that would render most editors unconscious in five minutes flat.

5) The real reason I left my writers’ group was because I have a personal issue with one of the other members, and I realized I’m no longer getting enough out of the group to make it worth my while to address it with him.  The only real way to address it would have been to ask him to leave the group, and I didn’t want the stress of doing that, when I would have been left with something I still wouldn’t have particularly enjoyed.

6) I’ve had ongoing issues with my skin since I was seven years old; I can’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t in and out of the dermatologist’s office, usually to no avail.  I often think I’d trade this for something more life-threatening, but less visible.  If there were a bargaining table where people could go to do this kind of thing, I’d trade five years off my life not to be so obviously damaged.

7) I think James Joyce is the most overrated author in the English language.  There’s a line between genius and self-indulgent insanity, and I really think he crossed it.

8 If I were tilted just a tiny bit to the left, I would be someone who overindulges in “retail therapy.”  When I am under a lot of stress, I do find it soothing to acquire things.  But because I am who I am, I wait until I feel that way to go grocery shopping, or shopping for things I actually need.  That seems to take care of the acquisition-need, without doing me any financial harm.  I have never bought things compulsively, even when this feeling was at its worst, but I have sometimes gone to the dollar store and allowed myself $10 worth of stupid stuff I’ll never use.  This explains why I have a drawer full of straws in various fluorescent colors.

9) I like to drive aimlessly with no destination.  I’ll just drive around for an hour, and then go home, without ever stopping anywhere interesting or getting out of the car.  I particularly like to do this in heavy traffic.  I am the only person I know who isn’t bothered or stressed by driving in very heavy rush hour traffic … I honestly hardly even notice it.

10) It enrages me when I can tell that people think I’m “lucky” or that I have an “easy life” simply because I own a well-kept home and am able to take care of myself fairly well.  It’s all I can do to keep myself from bitch-slapping them and telling them that the reason I’m so “lucky” is that I have worked full-time every God-damned day of my life since I was eighteen years old– I have never had any of the fun that most people have, I have always made the self-denying responsible decisions, I have never allowed my personal limitations to be an excuse for not working, and I have gone out of my way to learn from other people’s mistakes rather than making them all myself.  It’s no easy life to continually be responsible.  It’s fucking hard, people, which you’d  know if you’d ever done it.  Perhaps not surprisingly, this very issue was at the heart of the problem I was having with the other member of the writers’ group.

I honest to gosh can’t remember who has and hasn’t already been tagged, so rather than tagging again, I will simply say that if you read this blog, you’re probably honest enough to deserve this award too, so you can lift the icon and say I gave it to you.

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Random Items in No Particular Order Saturday, Sep 26 2009

1) I left my writers’ group a couple of days ago, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I no longer have the energy to critique and edit at the level I feel to be necessary to full participation, especially now that I’m doing so much copyediting.  I didn’t realize how burned out I was until I made the decision; I feel like something mildly toxic has been cleared out of my way.  I think I’m going to join a no-audition community choir that meets once a week, just to see if I can get any movement around my horrible issues with performance and music.  I figure if it gets scary, I can just lip-synch; in a choir that large, who’ll ever know?  Even with something this simple, though, I have to figure out how to navigate it … particularly as far as which section I decide to sing in.  If I sing in the tenor section, which will be my proper range, the size and color of my voice are likely to make it stand out too much.  If I sing with the basses, even if they do a split bass line and I take the upper line, I’ll be vocally uncomfortable due to the tessitura always being at my first/second register passaggio.  This is the reason I don’t usually sing in choirs.  Nevertheless, I’ll give it a try, and see how it goes.  It seems like a very low-key thing, so I can always just drop out if it doesn’t work.

2) Today, thanks to the wonders of social networking, I saw that Mina, my last ex, got married today.  Two things struck me about this — firstly, that I am always right.  One of the reasons I was so adamant about not getting back together with her after we broke up … nearly four years ago now, what an odd thought … was that I was absolutely sure there was someone out there who was a much better match for her.  She pursued the issue for nearly a year, until I finally had to say something unintentionally cruel to get her to drop it.  I’ll never forget it as long as I live, because she heard something I hadn’t meant to say — or rather, I didn’t get to finish my thought.  We were arguing about the wisdom of getting back together, and whether I should give her yet another last chance, as I had done several times during our relationship. I was adamant that I wasn’t going to do it; my position had never changed on that since I decided to end the relationship.  I told her that I wished I’d never met her.  I remember that statement detonating between us, and her hanging up on me.  That wasn’t the full thought I had … what I had wanted to go on to say was that I wished we’d met each other about ten years after we did, when both of us had done a lot more personal work.  Mina and I never had enough really deep things in common to support the kind of relationship I want (and which I am now fortunate enough to have with the Amazon, as far as I can tell) but  we would have done each other a lot less harm if we’d collided further down our respective paths.  I was glad to have gotten through to her, but I wished I hadn’t hurt her feelings so badly in the process.  But anyway … I knew, I absolutely knew, that I wasn’t the right match for her, although in the intimacyphobic’s frantic ”wanting what you can’t have” of loss, she couldn’t see that.  And of course, I was right, as I annoyingly almost always am.

The second thing that struck me is that people who are divorced tend to look at getting remarried in a different way than people who have never been married tend to look at doing it for the first time.  It seems easier for them, somehow … like reverting to something familiar.  Whereas I, at the age of 37 and still single, feel about it more like … a disease I’m kind of proud I never got.  Well, maybe that’s too strong a metaphor.

But I do have an odd idea about marriage, which is that the people who really need the formality of it are people who probably shouldn’t be married.  I think that for many folks, the vow, that external authority, takes the place of the very hard and soul-searching work of getting up every day, assessing yourself and your partner and your life together, and consciously re-committing to it.  I tend to be suspicious of marriage, for that reason.  I hear people who are miserable together say that they are still married because they took that vow.  Well, that’s a really shitty reason, if you ask me.  A vow is only as good as the genuine intent behind it, and if that’s gone, the vow is a mockery of itself.  “Till death do us part” is a great way to fool yourself into a living hell with someone you hate, if you allow that vow to take the place of thoughtful, actual commitment.  And sometimes, commitments are no longer tenable.  It’s possible to love someone deeply, and still not be willing to deal with that person’s behavior.  It’s possible to love, and grow authentically in such different directions that you can no longer see a common goal.  Death isn’t the only way that people part; it’s the final way, but it’s certainly not the most common way.  And it bothers me to see people enslaved to a vow, rather than true to themselves. 

And for that reason, I hardly knew whether to congratulate Mina or not.  Then again, I really doubt she’s thought of the matter along these lines, which is one of the many reasons we weren’t good together.

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Thank You, Helpful UPS Man Wednesday, Sep 23 2009

I just wanted to give a public shout-out here to my UPS delivery driver, who is a paragon of common sense, as the photo below proves.  What better way to camouflage a gigantic box than to put the doormat over it?  And how very, very convenient to put the box in the garden dirt, rather than on the nice clean concrete porch right next to the garden.  All in all, this is American ingenuity at its finest.  Thank you, thank you so much, UPS.

 

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