June 2008 Archives

This dude cooked authentic Indian food in our tiny dorm room just about every night, because the cafeteria usually had non-Indian fare. For a while, this was cool. I love experiencing new culture and new things. But then I discovered two things: one, certain spices are expelled from the body via sweat glands and not the usual digestive process; two, if a person eats foods containing those spices, and goes an entire semester without washing his bedsheets, the smell -- nay, the odor -- becomes overwhelming. There needs to be a better word for "Gross" when you're talking about The Ol' 56er, as I derisively called him. Suffice it to say, this odor made pungent look for a stronger word to describe itself.

So much so that to this day, the very scent of Indian cuisine makes me throw up in my mouth. The scent brings me back to days in 1997 or 1998, the smell of our dorm room, and I throw up in my mouth. Bad times.

I've had a personal embargo on Indian Food for 121 months, or 10 years and 1 month, or over a decade, depending on your preference in timekeeping. But some recent acts of diplomacy have convinced me that the best thing for domestic tranquility is to lift the sanctions, to lift the embargo, and to go eat Indian food at an authentic Indian restaurant.

In the winter, I don't allow Mother Nature to dictate my social life. Blizzards have never kept me from The Awesomeness. So why would massive wind destruction be any different? It wouldn't. You bet.

***

Grabbing my bag, I tiptoed around the cubicles, listening for the voice of the office manager so I knew where not to walk. It was like Neo trying to get away from the dude in the suit in The Matrix, only without all the weird dialogue. Amazingly, I managed to make it to the door and out of the building. When I got outside, however, I saw something absolutely terrifying. The clouds to the northwest were 50 feet above the ground. I wish I'd taken a photo, because the sky was three shades of dark gray, with a darker region in the center funneling toward the ground. Unfortunately, my thoughts were occupied with wondering if I had a clean set of boxers in my car.

It was about this time that I had an internal monologue that I don't exactly remember, but it went something like, "Hey, get the hell back inside! You bet!" So I ran back into the building, and steadied myself for the safety lecture that I knew was coming from our office manager for sneaking out. I would take this lecture, because it was better than the certain death that awaited me if I tried to drive into the teeth of that storm.

On Thursday, I spent the better portion of the day at a training session. As anyone who knows me is aware, I struggle to sit still for that long without doing SOMETHING to stay awake. I'm a hands-on guy; watching someone else demonstrate best practices bores me to the verge of sleep. I needed something, anything, to get my mind rolling at 100 MPH. Lucky for me, there was lunch, because inside the plastic tray was a moist toilette.

Now I know what you're saying. You shouldn't use a moist toilette on your face because the chemicals will make you blind, no matter how refreshing it might seem. Well, don't worry, you. I'm talking about the packaging, specifically, the art deco wrapper.

Before you say it out loud and disturb everyone around you with your musings about how I've lost my mind, I'll say it (or type it) for you...

On Tuesday, Omaha's complete smoking ban unexpectedly went into effect when a state judge signed papers striking down the exemptions in the previous law. The partial ban held that if an establishment served food, smoking was banned. If there was no kitchen, or if the establishment had Keno, smoking was OK. These labyrinthine-esque exemptions led to lots of confusion, apparently. Or so I'm told. Anyway, the state agreed with the confused people, ruled the exemptions unconstitutional, and struck them down.

Wednesday, Dick Herculanum and I headed out to the bars to test this newfound smoke-free paradise. Calls to Continental Frutiger and Gilby Clarke went unreturned; we already knew what his answer would be, so we didn't bother calling Cliff Glypha. Now, the Omaha Police were allowing a grace period through the weekend, so that all barowners had time to learn of the new law since it came so unexpectedly. So we were curious who would enforce it, and who would play dumb.

Before we headed to the bar, we met at an ice cream parlor in Dundee for a local graphic design social happy hour. I don't know about anyone else, but ice cream is way better than beer. And I like beer a lot, as you well know. So imagine how much I love ice cream.

As we sat at tables on the sidewalk, we observed as a local TV crew went into the bar across the street. This particular bar, the loathsome Beer and Loathing in Dundee, is considering mounting a counter-attack on the judges' ruling, and no doubt the TV news crew wanted a juicy soundbite for the news. Whether or not you think smoking in bars is OK or not, a statewide ban for Nebraska takes effect in 11 months, so what are they really gaining? It will take two months to get a hearing, so even if they win, they get what, nine extra months of smoking before having to ban it again? They'll spend a fortune in legal fees for a short-term victory. Genius, those guys.

The other day, I was listening to Huey Lewis and the News' "Sports" in my car, and of course, I was singing along. You might say I was conducting my own private concert, and if you said that, you would be correct. And I was in fine voice, if I do say so myself. But that's not the point.

At the end of "You Crack Me Up", there's a guitar solo that leads into the fade out at the end of the track. I was humming along because I'm an incredible dork, and at one point, I instinctively made the sound of garbled tape. And at that point I remembered a classic story. After the jump, that story.

Apparently we were supposed to get bad weather on Wednesday night. Like usual, I paid only passing interest to the forecast, and after work I headed out to run some errands. The skies looked bright and sunny to the south; dark but nothing out of the ordinary to the north. Just some rain, I figured.

About 6:30, I arrived at the third of my errand destinations and as I was walking into the store, a harried customer had an ominous warning for me. "I wouldn't go in there if I were you..." she uttered, whisking her kids behind her. Now, what a curious thing to say. Was there a masked man holding up the store? Did someone let a righteous fart inside?

I had one foot inside the door when the tornado sirens blared. Strange, I thought, but then I had another thought: so THAT'S what the lady was talking about. If I went into the store, they wouldn't let me leave because of the warning. I stopped in my tracks, turned around, and headed for my car. The glowstick headbands I was about to purchase could wait for another time. I wasn't about to spend a portion of my evening locked in a stockroom, not even for those sweet headbands.

When I got into my car, the skies were still fairly sunny to the south. But off to the north was a different story: dark, scary clouds that were lowering. Nice.

Recently, I've noticed a trend -- I've stopped instinctively reaching to change the channel on my XM when U2 comes on. Which wouldn't be all that strange, necessarily, considering I used to count them as one of my favorite bands. Except for the little fact that for a number of years in the recent past, I hated on U2. HATED. I even relegated them to the Coldplay dustbin, removing any and all traces of their music from my iTunes.

Here's the thing: my first CD was Achtung Baby. I've been a fan for a long time. But somewhere around 2004 they just got too damn popular and my natural sense of rebelling against popularity kicked in. Before you get carried away, I'm not one of those people who likes indie bands and then turns on them when they hit it big for selling out. I just hate liking the same thing as everyone else.

You wouldn't have caught me dead at their concert in Omaha a couple of years ago. Cliff Glypha waited in line and paid top dollar for seats, and I openly mocked him. But here's the thing I didn't mention at the time: I paid decent coin for seats in the mid-nineties to see them at Cyclone Stadium. That's right...a hypocrite, I am.

The circus has changed a lot since the last time I went. Granted, it was 1988 when I last attended, but I don't remember the circus trying to be hip back then. It tried -- and succeeded -- at being a circus. Elephants, acrobats, trained tigers, and clowns. Its a formula but it bloody works.

Saturday night, I went to the latest incarnation of Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey's Circus, and it was bizarre. So lets start with the good, and go down from there.

The cotton candy was decent, and the fact that it came with a complimentary sweet orange clown hat made it borderline dominant. I had not eaten cotton candy since at least the last time I went to the circus, which means its been about 20 years. It was everything I remembered it being, namely, interesting textures, bland flavors and stickiness. Lots of stickiness. Also tasty. And delicious.

Now for the sorta-bad. The circus is for the kids, so if I thought it dragged on too long and was horribly boring in parts, imagine what kids with their typical short attention spans thought. Actually, if the sparse crowd was any indication, that question has an answer. Although, to be fair, the shitty economy might have had something to do with the attendance. Who knows. What I do know is that my Civic gets 40 MPG, and I pretty much flip the Finger Of Indifference at gas prices at the moment. Doesn't make me misty for The Colorado one iota, I can promise you that. But I know gas prices are hurting a lot of folks, so that might be why the attendance was so sparse.

On Friday, the wise Continental Frutiger advised me against letting people into our hotel room, because he knew what would happen. Namely, that our room would be trashed. Of course, since the room wasn't in our name and was being paid for by the Nebraska chapter, one of the ladies simply went down to the front desk and got another key. They opened the room up and partied anyway, without us.

I wasn't pissed that they went behind our back to get the room open; I was pissed at the ease with which they usurped my ability to be ornery and keep them out. I was always going to let them in eventually, I just wanted it to be on my terms and not because they called and asked me to do it.

I always figured the last night party would be in our rooms; that's why we got adjoining rooms, after all. What I didn't count on was half the conference showing up, or on 75 people being in the rooms at one time.

Friday night at the design leadership retreat, there was a reception at the Joslyn Art Musuem, which is where portions of the Frank Spaceman story took place. After that, we went to the bars. And after that, we headed to the hotel for the after-party.

Now, the Embassy Suites is an atrium-style hotel, which means sound travels better than you'd like it to. This posed some problems, as there were several parties. The first one that Continental Frutiger, Dick Herculanum and I hit was in room 727, and we were only there 10 minutes before the off-duty cop at the hotel busted it up. 

The 40 or 50 people in that room dispersed, most of them to room 535 -- which was the Nebraska Ladies' room. It was adjoined to our room, 534 -- the Nebraska Guys' room. The ladies immediately began calling my phone, wanting me to unlock the room for them so the party could swell. I refused.

 

The po-pos were on the hunt for parties to bust up, and I wasn't about to open my room up for that. I mean, they seemed to be EVERYWHERE. On the way from 727 to wherever we were going next, one of them yelled at me for having an open container. We headed to 524, where Jacksonville was throwing a party. This room had a nice, small crowd (read: quiet) which meant the chances of being busted up were small. Within five minutes, there were 40 people in the room and it was just as noisy as the last party. A game of quarters started up, and that was the final straw for the neighbors, apparently. It turns out bouncing quarters on a wooden table into glasses is pretty loud in a hotel room. Who knew? 

Hotel security came and busted up the party shortly thereafter, and as were leaving, Continental looked at me, I looked at him, and we had the same unspoken idea:

"This is a really nice jacket," Continental Frutiger commented. The jacket was hanging, unattended, on the back of a barstool at Finnigan's in downtown Pittsburgh, its owner on the other side of the bar. When Continental removed the jacket from its resting place on that barstool, we discovered its owner was none other than Frank Spaceman. How did we know this? Because his nametag was also hanging there, on the barstool, obscured under his jacket.

We were in Pittsburgh for the national leadership retreat on design, a retreat for the leaders of the largest professional organization for design. At the time, Frank Spaceman was a national board member, so if he wasn't familiar to everyone in attendance, at the very least his name was. That's what made it so funny: everyone knew Continental wasn't Frank Spaceman, despite his insistence to the contrary.

You see, Continental had Frank's nametag on too, and he was telling people he was Frank Spaceman. Smartly, at least from a comedic standpoint, he posed for photos with people, asking them to be in a photo not with Frank, but with Frank's jacket. As in, "Hey, come be in a photo with Frank Spaceman's Jacket!" And being designers, many happily obliged. And being designers, there were many cameras around to capture the shenanigans.