(Not) Meeting In The Middle

A friend and co-worker, M, stopped by my office today. He always dresses well but looked especially dapper today. His accessories really caught my eye.

“I like that,” I said, pointing to the patterned, pale orange tie that stood out in a good way against the medium blue shirt he wore.

M fingered the tie, gave it a little toss and said, “Really? This was picked out for me, like most of what I wear.”

He explained that he used to choose his own clothes.  M thought he did a pretty good job at it, too, until first a woman he dated, and then the woman he later married, each informed him otherwise.

M embraced this sartorial feedback, as many men do.  They see it as helpful counsel from a loved one who has their best interests at heart. Others, by contrast, take it as personal affront should you happen to observe, neutrally, that the height of their waistband had gotten stuck somewhere around 1992 levels and perhaps should be lowered. (I never would have married anyone who reacted that way but I hear it happens. Ahem.)

While discussions about fashion with a mate can be tough, M and I agreed that dressing for a first date is harder. Initial impressions matter, so you want to look good. But looking too good can set the appearance bar so high you’ll need a pole to vault over it.

The key is to strike a balance. On the spectrum of done-uppedness, you want to land somewhere in between “state dinner” and “pig sloppin’.”

M and his wife met at a wedding. She looked perfect, he told me. And she must have recognized the danger because she answered the door for their second date in sweats, a ponytail, and no makeup. In short, she walked up to the bar and knocked it right off. Once it hit the mat, she was free to pick it up and replace it at a consistently attainable notch in the middle.

In getting ready for tonight I tried to start at the middle. I auditioned a few candidates for the first date attire role and picked a brown and white-flecked sweater dress.  It projected confidence in its ability to segue smoothly from office to outing.

I dedicated a little extra time in styling The Mane.  The result looked better than usual but not so good that anyone would suspect salon involvement.

For makeup, I didn’t deviate from my standard “five minute face” rule, which allows me that amount of time, total, to complete whatever cosmetic assault I plan to launch.

More time than that wouldn’t have helped me today, anyway. Thirty hours after the gum graft, the left side of my face looked better—like I was storing only four acorns instead of five--but still not quite normal. It didn’t bother me. I figured a date's reaction to that, and the fact that I’m on the Sunrise Assisting Living Diet, would tell me a lot.

I never got to find out. My date canceled at 5:30. He’s sick and didn’t think that was an ideal state for a first meeting. He’s right. It’s much better to show up with one puffy cheek and Frankengums.

Uncomfortably Numb

 At 11:10 this morning, the periodontist's technician called me back to the room to start my gum graft.  (Back story here.)

The doctor came in a couple minutes later to prepare the local anesthetic.  As he pulled back the needle to administer the first shot, he said, "This will feel like a very short pinprick."  I grunted to signal my understanding.

Before he administered the second, he said, "This one'll sting more.  It'll feel kind of like a bad splinter."

I don't know why he felt the need to forecast my level of discomfort as if it were the weather.  I'd have preferred to play pain roulette.  Perhaps he just wanted to make sure I had the right amount of trepidation going in to each shot.  After all, you don't want to get caught with only "affectionate pinch" levels of dread in a situation that requires something more like "convenience store stabbing." 

After a few minutes the numbing agent did its job, leaving the periodontist to do his.

He resumed the play-by-play, which remained as informative as it was welcome.  

As I heard the sound of metal against tooth, he said, “What I’m doing right now is not unlike some things a hygienist does.” Um, thanks for that.  “So think of me as a hygienist with a really deep voice.”

I could tell he’d delivered this line before and thought it crushed, probably because an audience consisting entirely of open-mouthed hostages tends to be restrained in its criticism.  No doubt he’s in great demand on the mortuary stand-up circuit.

"Now I'm going to borrow some cells from your palate."  

He made it sound benign, like a library transaction.  Based on the explanation he’d given during the initial consultation, I knew this deal was more like loaning money to a relative: once it left, you’d never see it again.  My palate understood this, too, and seemed reluctant to bid the tissue farewell.  Because I couldn’t feel anything, I relied on my other working senses for information.

My eyes tracked the doctor's hand as he put an implement in my mouth and moved it back and forth in small strokes across my palate, the way you’d take a butter knife to scrape the char off a piece of burnt toast.  On seeing this I took my eyes off the assignment. 

My taste buds took their place and reported the singular, slightly metallic, taste of blood. I fired them, too.  

On the upside, at least my nose hadn’t detected singed flesh or anything beyond the garden variety, antiseptic smell of a dental practice.

An hour and a half and $2,500 later, the first of three gum grafts was complete. Two more and my sinking teeth just might be back to sea level. 

From the periodontist’s office I went to the polls. The left side of my face had begun to swell, as the doctor told me it might. By the time I reached the front of the line, I looked like a squirrel in the throes of hibernation prep.  A drooling squirrel.

I hope the swelling and drooling abate soon. Thanks to my recent decision to cash in a Groupon for personalized matchmaking services (detailed in "Love Stinks...and Splats"), I have a first date tomorrow night.

Election Day: It's a real kick in the teeth

Regular readers of Splatospheric know that Tuesdays and I get along about as well as Madonna and Lady Gaga.  (See here and here.)  And tomorrow’s not looking so good for a truce. 

It’s Election Day, an occasion that gets in our face and reminds us just how polarized our country is right now.  I, for one, don’t need the reminder.  The three month barrage of breathtakingly hyperbolic campaign ads from both sides has made it impossible to ignore. 

I’d rather have my eyeballs plucked out by a mob of demented chickens than be subjected to one more of these stupid one-sided ads.  Unfortunately, finding demented chickens on short notice is harder than you might think, so I went with the best available alternative to put me out of my electoral misery tomorrow: I scheduled oral surgery.  

The periodontist gave me a series of prescriptions to fill before the procedure and instructions to start taking one of them—methylprednisolone—today. 

Most medicines go by a nickname for retail purposes. I can’t find one on or in the package, so I’m going to go ahead and give it one.  Hereafter, my methylprednisolone shall be known as “Mulligan.” (If I follow the directions for today’s dosage, I’ll end up taking more Mulligans than Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.)

The box of pills came with two pages of single-spaced literature printed in a font called "Lillputian." As I’ve mentioned before, I have a policy of ignoring fine print.  But I made an exception this time because everyone knows that two names are synonymous with “steroids”: “Barry Bonds” and “Mulligan.”  I can’t afford to have any blemishes on my record when I make a run for swimming gold in the 2016 Olympics.

Page two of the drug literature contained the all-important list of precautions. Number five on the list reads as follows:

“Psychic derangements may appear when corticosteroids are used, ranging from euphoria, insomnia, mood swings, personality changes, and severe depression, to frank psychotic manifestations.”

I’d been worried about encountering long lines at the polls if I followed my plan to vote after my gum graft tomorrow.  But now I see that I’ve mapped it out perfectly.  Nothing will launch me to the front of the queue faster than showing up drooling and exhibiting frank psychotic manifestations.

Moving Day

[On Day 4 of NaBloPoMo, I'm coming in a cool 3 minutes under the wire. My dear friends and dinner guests, M and K, are to blame for all objectionable content, grammatical goofs and that horrific song "Gangnam Style."]

Parkinsons Disease touches most people’s lives somehow, even if indirectly. 

The nasty hand of PD reached out and smacked our family in 2007, when Papa Yank was diagnosed with it.

Last year at about this time, the Parkinsons Foundation of the National Capitol Area held the first annual Moving Day walk at Nationals Park to help raise research funds for, and awareness of, PD.  I joined a team at the last minute and participated in the two-mile walk.

This year, our clan formed a team which we named the D@mn Yanks.   From our immediate family, twelve of fifteen Yanks signed up to support of Papa Yank. (The other three live in Georgia, so they couldn’t make the event but did send the single largest donation, along with and all kinds of good vibes.) 

Our walkers for the second annual Moving Day ranged in age from seven to seventy.  A couple days before the event, my thirteen year-old nephew, a budding track star, asked, “Can I run the two miles?”

“It’s not a race, honey,” I said. I explained that we were walking to support his grandfather and all the other people PD affects, so our pace didn’t matter.

We arrived ridiculously ahead of schedule for the walk this morning. (The phrase "Early is on time and on time is late" is a strand of the Yank DNA.)  After checking in, we still had about an hour to kill so we strolled over to an area called the “Movement Pavilion.”  

Research consistently demonstrates that exercise helps in managing PD, and this section housed a series of stations designed to illustrate specific types of movement.  We went through all of them—ropes, tai chi, balancing—and then reached the rowing machines.

Mom and Dad sat down at adjacent machines.  I don't think they'd ever taken up tandem boating, unless you count singing rounds of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while en route to the Outer Banks when we were kids.  My sister, Suzi, and I watched them, reminding us that a couple that rows together…cracks up their kids.

[Here we are, the D@mn Yanks and a presidential mascot, seeking solace in the company of fellow fatheads, apparently.]

We dried our eyes, corralled the herd of Yanks, and started the walk.  The sun shone and everyone smiled, but my memory reminded me that not every Yank family walk has been so uneventful or filled with so much merriment.

For example, while I was visiting Suzi and her family in Richmond a couple years ago, she and I decided to take a stroll through the neighborhood.  Along the way we encountered her neighbor’s teenaged daughter, who happened to be walking a beagle and a mid-sized mutt. The dogs seemed a bit agitated and the girl overwhelmed as the pooches stretched their leashes to their limits.

“Are you okay?” Suzi asked the girl.

Arm fully extended, she pleaded, “Can you help me?”  Suzi and I promised to send for help and turned around, heading in the direction of home.  The beagle had a different plan for us. He jerked the leash out of the girl’s hand, ran up to me, and chomped me in the rear. 

It took me a second to realize what had happened. I was reluctant to admit that I’d been attacked by a beagle because I assumed most people, on hearing that a dog had bitten a lawyer, would immediately send contributions to the dog's legal defense fund.

But the area where he’d struck hurt (and the wind blew through my yoga pants in an unfamiliar way) so I said to my sister, as casually as I could manage, “You know how that dog jumped up on me? Well, I think he bit me.” 

 She whirled around. “What? Let me see!”  I refused.  Being bit by Snoopy was one thing, a family mooning was another altogether.  I felt less compunction about mooning strangers so I went to an urgent care clinic, had the wound examined, and left with a tetanus shot and some antibiotics.

Today’s PD walk with the family, by contrast, was far less dramatic and even offered some comedy.  For a while we walked next to a team called the “Movers and Shakers.”  I won’t say whether they did more of the former or the latter, but I can tell you they had fun the whole way.

The last bit of our two mile walk took the D@mn Yanks into Nats Stadium itself.  This gave my father, a lifelong baseball diehard, an unparalleled opportunity to stroll the warning track, admire the beauty of a 402 foot shot over the center field fence from a totally different vantage point, and pose next to an ad that read, “For The Love of Beer.”   

Like I said to my nephew, Moving Day wasn’t a race.  When it ended, my breath wasn’t shallow and I wasn’t sweating.  But it certainly lived up to its name because it moved me deeply.  Being surrounded by so many people united in purpose made my heart soar in a way no marathon ever did.  And in one important way it was very much like a race: Moving Day is all about winning.

Hallow-what?!

The East Coast is blaming Hurricane Sandy for pretty much everything this week.  She deserves it, with one exception: It’s not her fault that thousands of people in the D.C. area banked on Halloween being canceled, unplugged their willpower and prematurely pillaged their candy stashes. 

When the holiday went on just as it always had in the D.C. area, some people found themselves staring down the very real possibility that they’d run out of treats.  Most people in such a situation turn the home upside down in search of something, anything, that might appease the costumed masses enough to keep them from coating the house with a layer of egg yolk.

Even the most disciplined among us could land in this jam, including my mother.  She’s one of the most prepared, organized people I’ve ever met but she got caught empty-handed a couple times when we were kids. 

She’s cool under pressure so she didn’t panic or hand out random household inventory.  Instead, she turned to my sister, Lynne.  Lynne trick-or-treated with the rest of us but couldn’t enjoy the spoils of her efforts because she has juvenile diabetes.   Things looked up for her when Mom ran out of treats, though.  

On those rare occasions, our mother would belly up to the bargaining table—or pillow case, in this instance—and buy Lynne’s Halloween loot.  (Knowing my sister, she probably developed a multi-tiered pricing structure involving a premium for Snickers, Milky Ways and Reese’s Cups.) The transaction met everyone’s needs.

My brother, L, is every bit as organized as my mom and found himself in the same pickle back in 2001.  He was 26 at the time, living in Scottsdale and playing professional baseball in the Arizona Fall League.  I flew out to see him in early October that year and stayed in the apartment he shared with Mike, a laid-back outfielder from California who reminded me of Shaggy from “Scooby Doo.” 

While visiting, I tried to pick up a few things for Mike and L, knowing that getting by on a minor league paycheck couldn’t be easy.  One day I went to a grocery store called Albertsons and bought them bread, eggs, milk and some other staples. Just before checking out, I tossed a container of store-baked chocolate chip and M&M cookies into the basket to satisfy my sweet tooth.  

Mike and L appreciated all the groceries but they fell in love with the cookies.  Before I headed home I made two more trips to Albertsons to replenish their stock.

A few weeks after I left, my brother and Mike were chilling at their apartment on a warm evening when they heard a knock at the door.  Mike opened it.

“Trick or treat!” yelled four kids in costume.

My brother looked up from his post on the couch, stunned and horrified that he’d forgotten Halloween. 

By contrast, whiffing on the holiday didn’t seem to faze Mike at all.  (Nothing did, as far as I could tell.  I’m convinced his heart wouldn’t beat more than 50 times per minute even if he were in the throes of electrocution. )

He looked at the kids, shrugged and said, “Dudes, we don’t have any candy.”

“What else do you have?” asked the group spokesperson, who probably landed the role because he had the only mouth that wasn’t obstructed by a mask. 

L and Mike had nothing, not even access to a diabetic who might be willing to unload a few Kit-Kats for the right price.

At that point, Mike and L should’ve opted for the trick and tried to wow the kids by turning a double play in the living room.  But that didn’t occur to them.  Instead, Mike stood at the door and made small talk while my brother desperately scanned their place for treats and found only Windex and canned tuna.  

The spokesperson, meanwhile, was casing out the joint.  He looked past Mike, and said, “We’ll take those,” pointing at the lone item on the kitchen table.  There, sat Mike and L’s last container of Albertson’s cookies.  Only four chocolate chip and M&M goodies remained inside.     

My brother was about to turn them over when Mike put a hand on his arm.

“No way, dude. Not the cookies.”  The Shaggy demeanor had vanished, and in its place was Joe Pesci from Goodfellas.  

L soon found himself mediating absurd negotiations between Mike and the kids. A threat of retaliation by toilet paper almost ended the talks but eventually a settlement was reached: the kids got half a cookie each and Mike kept two.

This story, like Hurricane Sandy, teaches us the importance of being prepared. It also reminds us that you can take away a man’s dignity, his self-respect, and even his hair, but you’d better think twice before taking away his Albertson’s cookies.     

Splat-ter of the Week: Cafe del Soul

A mere two days into NaBloPoMo, it's already time for Splat-ter of the Week. And not a moment too soon, because coming up with last night's content was as easy as extracting the truth from a politician.

And with that, we'll try not to mention politics again in this post. 

To find this week's splat-ter we had to go all the way to Marin County, California, home of an organic fast food establishment called Cafe Del Soul.

As most people know, restaurants generally have to meet stringent food handling, storage and cleanliness requirements to protect the patrons who eat there.  A local government unit like the Board of Health then polices for infractions by conducting random inspections.  And every now and then, a restaurant comes clean, so to speak, and turns itself in.

And so it was that Cafe del Soul confessed this week.  A sign posted at the entrance a few days ago informed patrons that the restaurant had a little pest problem: It was infested by German cockroaches.  The eatery went a step further and reported the issue, which it detected in May, to local health authorities.

We appreciate the honesty but have to wonder about a couple things.  First, why mention the German thing? Does cockroach nationality play a prominent role in deciding where to eat? We, for one, have a hard time picturing customers seeing the sign, turning around, and muttering, "Oh no, not the German cockroaches. If only they'd been infested by less ambitious ambitious ones, like the French..."

Second, it's great that the company confessed, but we haven't figured out why it took them the full length of the Major League Baseball season to do it. (There's probably a good reason, but what with it being NaBloPoMo, we have about 30 minutes for investigative journalism.)

Third, the joint is still open. Even more surprising, people don't seem to mind the sign because they're still eating there.  Could be that we missed it when German cockroaches got added to the Paleo diet.

Regardless, we invite Cafe del Soul to step up and get its golden pancake, sans German cockroaches because those are extra. (We're pretty proud of ourselves for writing a whole post about cockroaches without making a single joke about politicians. It wasn't easy.)

Welcome to NaBloPoMo!

Hurricane Sandy didn't stop the mailman in my neighborhood.  He showed up as scheduled both Monday and Tuesday (which is more than I can say for my electricity).  The mailman's work ethic is especially admirable given that my mailbox's contents wouldn't justify a trip to my house when it's sunny and 75.

Tucked in the Tuesday mail stack amid the campaign flotsam and jetsam -- I get both since I vote in a swing state--was one worthy piece of correspondence: a postcard from Food & Friends advertising a Thanksgiving pie sale.

The proceeds help feed almost 2,900 children and adults in the D.C. area who suffer from devastating illnesses like cancer and HIV/AIDS.  The chance to cross an item off the Thanksgiving cooking list while supporting a charity appeals to the philanthropic multi-tasker in all of us, so F&F seems to have come up with a winning formula.

F&F's flavor roster, on the other hand, concerns me.

If I think of the pie flavor lineup in terms of a relay, the first three legs -- pumpkin, apple and pecan--have proven track records. No one stresses about how they'll perform in the clutch holiday meal situation.  Good relay strategists understand the importance of assigning the last leg to the team member who can bring it all home.

For this critical role in the pie flavor medley, F&F selected Almond Amaretto Brownie. And not just any Almond Amaretto Brownie, but "US Airways" Almond Amaretto Brownie. Huh?

I understand that dire financial straits can spur a business to diversify its portfolio, but since when are airlines in the pie making business? The last time I looked their core food competency consisted of packaged peanuts.

Three plausible explanations for F&F's baffling choice come to mind:
1. Nothing says "Thanksgiving" more vividly than airports and tasteless food.
2.  F&F wanted to give real meaning to the term "anchor."
3.  F&F hopes to reach a specific market segment.  The plane pie may be targeting people who use baked goods at this time of year to send a certain message to their relatives, namely, "I hate your guts."  This last scenario seems the most likely.  After all, it's about time somebody stepped into this market and gave fruitcake a little competition.

Speaking of holiday challenges, November is National Novel Writing Month, when writers are encouraged to crank out an entire novel in a thirty day period.  "NaNoWriMo" (can't blame 'em for cutting it short-they're gonna need all the extra letters they can get this month) spawned a blogging equivalent, "NaBloPoMo." NaBloPoMo invites bloggers to post something on their blogs every day.   Splatospheric is going to participate, not just because the challenge is more manageable, but because it's fun to say "NaBloPoMo." NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo, NaBloPoMo.

So beware: over the next 30 days, a few posts just might splat. You can curse me for those if you want, but whatever you do, please don't send me a US Airways pie.