This is the third year of Suburban Kibble: stories too good to keep to myself.
10/4/00 Time is relative. There are these posters all over town that say,
9/20/00 Not quite suburban. From reading a cornerstone in Cambridge, England,
there used to be a mayor in the 1870's named John Death, Esquire. Talk about a tough
name to live up to. . .
9/10/00 Egosurfing. While looking for my own name on the web, I found
this. I've got a lemur,
I've got a lemur. . .
5/5/00 Conversational snippet. "They put a warning on irons now. . .do not iron
clothes while you are wearing them."
5/4/00 Geeky again. I happened to look down at the odometer on my car. It read
11010 and I actually translated that to 26 decimal before going, "Oh. Never mind."
5/1/00 Avoid . . .the gym. I had occasion to try on my interview suit and found that
it [and my other good jacket] no longer fit. Unlike my usual reason for outgrowing my
clothes, this was because I outgrew them in the shoulders. This is what I get for
actually going to the gym more than once a month. I always thought that was one of those
things that only happened to other people. Avoid any enterprise that requires the
buying of new clothes.
4/24/00 Err, no. There was a store in a mall near here called
"Velvet Pixies." In a
burst of self-delusion, I was hoping it had to do with
these guys or
these guys.
No, it was a bad case of girly-girl central.
4/11/00 I found a website in a way the person did not expect. She wasn't, from the looks of things, expecting
to be found by the Google search phrase, "Vampire squid from hell".
3/20 to 4/1 I'm sure there was kibble, but I was moving so it's lost to the
mists of time.
3/14/00 I passed the headquarters of the Association of Retarded Citizens. And I
wondered, "How many of them actually vote? "
3/9/00 Socially Awkward. "Where's the shooting range?" [spoken by a woman entering
a strip club] I was taking a class in riflery. A woman came in late and said,
"You wouldn't believe what just happened to me." Turns out that 20 W. 20th, in New York
City, has two entrances. One leads to the basement where the shooting range is.
The other entrance leads to the "VIP"[ vixens in pelts?] club. She'd said to the doorman
at the Wrong entrance, "Is this 20 W. 20th?" After she looked inside, she said. . . that.
And then, well, the doorman escorted her all the way to the range to make sure she
could find it.
3/7/00 Elevator Fears. I went up the elevator in my friend's building. Normally I'm
not scared of elevators. On the other hand, normally they don't smell like burnt
motor oil and ozone.
2/23/00 Buying in Bulk. I saw a bakery with chocolate chip cookies that looked really
good. So I went in and asked the price. "$.25, or three for a dollar." I figured I must have
heard wrong, so I bought one. No, it was really $.25 . At those prices, it doesn't really
matter, but still. . .
1/17/00 Cold Snap. It was colder here than Alaska, colder than Minnesota. I'm bizarrely
proud of having enough winter-warrior clothes for Antarctica, so I put all of them on. The
big jacket, the wool socks, the boots, the scarf, the thick thick sweater, and [after 2 days
with wind chill below -30] the long underwear. Which I hadn't worn since college. When I wore
34 waist jeans and was 40 pounds lighter. I thought "Hey,
I haven't been a mezzo-soprano since puberty," and decided to wear them anyway.
1/14/00 What department are you in? I got the same email message 5 times in
a row today. I've occasionally double-posted in my life, but never five times. It was from
our IS department.
1/7/00 Sugar-O's. On a whim, I bought some Spaghetti-O's. Hadn't had them since
I was a child. They seemed oddly sweet. Sure enough, after water, tomatos and pasta, the
fourth ingredient was. . .corn syrup. Ahead of dehydrated cheese and butter. That's just
sick.
Leftovers:
Tricky. At a wedding, after the ceremony the hymn we were supposed to sing was
Handel's Messiah. Sight reading. There's only one lyric: "Hallelulah". And it goes into a
four part fugue, I think, which means that everybody's singing the same part at different
times. This is like trying to do one of those jigsaw puzzles where all the pieces are white.
Obviously I didn't start drinking early enough.
You know how they always show clocks at 10:10 in ads, because it's aesthetically pleasing?
My clock battery actually died at 10:10. Weird.
Thick-necked. My girlfriend's mother told me that "thick-necked" is a phrase for an ignorant,
stubborn yokel. I take an 18" collar. Whoops. . .
Stupid Money. The Royal Canadian Mint has taken the award for Stupidest Money away from the
US "Crazy Jackson" $20 bill. The Sept. 1999 "Millenium" quarter had a
picture
on it that was literally done by a 10-year-old. That's legal tender.
1999 is here.
1998 is here.
"October 2000
Fire prevention week"
Sigh.
"I've done that."