Sweat bees down by the ol' slock ride

I've been thinking about the slock ride lately, especially last week when it was so godforsaken hot. What started it was this article in the Times (registration required, expires at some point, blah blah bliddily blah) about these two cool neo-semi-hippies that travel around sleuthing out local swimming holes (via such Dick Tracy techniques as tailing "teenagers spotted on the roadside carrying towels" -- oooh, tricky), then post the info about how to find them on their website. One of the two seems to be especially dedicated, given that he's the site's "New England correspondent" and does most of his prospecting in Vermont, where from what I hear it's only hot enough to swim for approximately nine days out of the year. Unlike Alabama, where the slock ride was and, I hope, still is, and where it's hot enough to either swim or kill yourself approximately 300 days out of the year.

That was the summer I was going through my early-teen-hardcore-religious phase, and I actually attended -- voluntarily -- Southern Baptist summer youth camp. Southern Baptist summer youth camp in Anniston, Alabama. In July. An unusual experience, representing perhaps the only extended period of enforced athleticism in my life, and the most miserable, which I guess goes without saying (see above re. July). Other than the misery of flag football in July humidity, the camp had two memorable quirks, one of which thankfully helped with the other. The first one was the extreme preponderance of sweat bees. Yankees who have no idea what I'm talking about, thank your lucky blue states, because believe it or not sweat bees are exactly what they sound like: tiny yellow bees who land on you and drink your sweat. No, I don't know why. They like the salt, I guess. All I know is that within 10 minutes of venturing outdoors at this stupid camp, you'd be covered in the little buggers. And of course, if you swatted them away you got stung. Better to just let them drink, even though it tickled. The only thing that got rid of them was washing off the sweat in quirk #2, the slock ride.

The slock ride was the swimming hole in the woods near camp. One of the best swimming holes I've ever been in, actually. Reachable only by a single-file path through the woods, it was called the slock ride because it had a smooth, sloped rock leading into the water on one side and because the camp caretaker, a beloved figure who'd been there since Nixon was young, had a slight problem with Spoonerisms. I know this sounds like the plot of some aggressively eccentric Southern coming-of-age tale, but I swear to god it's true. He called it the slock ride instead of the rock slide, so that's what the whole camp called it and had for years. (We also had chied fricken for dinner twice a week, if I recall.) It was really kind of a lazy waterfall; the stream poured down the sloped rock face and had worn down the rock over the years, making it smooth and slidable. At the end of the "slide" there was about a six or seven foot drop into a deep pool. In an Alabama summer, the coldness of that water was the closest thing to heaven that that camp had to offer. It's not listed on the swimming hole site (I checked -- maybe the Baptists won't reveal its existence to Vermont infidels), but I really hope it's still there.

The Circle of Life... or something

The other day I was walking past the park when I noticed a commotion on the sidewalk. Unlike the usual NYC commotion, it consisted of two enormous green-and-gold beetles and a small brown bird. The beetles were buzzing wildly and flopping all over the place, but they couldn't fly away for some reason. At first I couldn't figure out why they seemed to be stuck to each other at the abdomen but then it clicked: oh. They're stuck to each other at the abdomen. [They're mating, kids. Go ask mom what that means and while you're at it have her read the rest of this post before you do, OK?] And meanwhile, the industrious and completely unfazed little bird is hopping around pecking at them, trying to eat them! There's a New Yorker for you, eh? Don't mind me, you guys do what ya gotta do and maybe you'll finish before I'm done eating you alive. He was probably critiquing their technique in a genial Bronx accent between pecks. "Naw, naw, lissen, ya gotta get a little higher up on 'er, ya see, buddy, cuz that's what ya call leverage, see?"

Nature is pretty simple when you get right down to it, isn't it? Eat! Fuck! Die! Eat! Fuck! Die! Eat! Fuck! Die! All at the same time in one square foot of sidewalk. I only wish I knew what type of beetle these were; they were gorgeous and irridescent (aha! L'Oreal at work!) and about two inches long. Truly striking. I hope at least one of them lived to mate another day.

Of course, usually we don't wait for Nature to take care of things. The very next day I walked out of my building to find that one of the pretty trees growing out front was horizontal on the sidewalk with a big gash at the base of the trunk, having knocked the bus stop sign seriously askew when it fell. My super was hanging out on the stoop as he often is in the morning, so I gestured to the wrecked tree and asked, "What happened?" Being a man possessed of an admirable economy with the language, he said, "Truck." Yeah, that'll do it.

Elevator Sociology

Well, this morning I went downstairs to do laundry in our (relatively) new building in Inwood. When we decided to take the apartment, we took a chance on the building. But only a tiny chance. It's a little bit ghettoesque, a little bit rundown (altho you could tell it was a beautiful old prewar with good bones). A few scraps of painted-over grafitti, a vague smell in the elevator, apartment doors propped open for cross-ventilation and blasting music out into the corridor. The usual. But it has new owners now, and we were assured that they were fixing the place up. The real estate agent told us earnestly that the new owners were focused on getting good tenants into the building (this is New York Real Estate Agent for "Young white people are moving in!"). Not that we care; the current tenants, of all possible races, ages, sexual orientations and family structures, have been nothing but friendly and kind to us since we moved in. Friendlier than the other tenants of our previous building on the Upper West Side, in fact. It's just that, as New Yorkers of long standing, we know only too well that landlords, especially absentee landlords, only put money into buildings that they expect to get money out of. I'm sure we're paying four times as much rent as those tenants that have been here for 15 or 20 years, back when the neighborhood wasn't so up-and-coming. (Rent Stabilization laws make for strange bedfellows, but a little variety is good for a building's soul. Live in a building inhabited by nothing but yuppies, and you wind up like Edward Norton in Fight Club.)

The neighborhood is so obviously on its way up, since apartment prices have soared over the last few years, that we figured this building was a pretty safe bet. And sure enough, last month they started fixing up the exterior courtyard/entryway. Instead of just pouring a fresh layer of cement, they're installing nice red brick paving stones in decorative shapes that form a pattern. Hooray, huh? Except for the fact that we can't use the front door for the next week, which our super has duly informed us of through the traditional method of a sign posted in the elevator. And this morning I noticed that someone had scribbled something at the bottom of that sign in blue ballpoint ink: "It's turning a white building."

Damnit. It's not going to be like that, is it?

Dear Officer A-Train,

I want you to know that I feel your pain, I really do. If I were required to wear seven different heavy things on my belt, plus a leather-bound summons book stuffed in one back pocket and an orange safety vest wadded up in the other, I'd be fidgeting nonstop and pulling up my pants and shifting from leg to leg too. There's got to be a better way -- perhaps you've thought about submitting a petition to the department demanding cargo pants? I'd be happy to sign it. Or those many-pocketed khaki vests that sexy, daring combat zone photographers always wear in the movies (we'll special-order them in black for you). I sympathize with the indignity of having to clip your cell phone directly onto your belt buckle because there isn't an inch of free space anywhere else on your person.

However -- and please don't take offense, as I assure you none is meant -- it occurred to me this morning that perhaps watching the stalwart representative of the NYPD doing the belt version of the pee-pee dance for 45 blocks straight will not exactly strike fear into the hearts of the terrorists. When you're so completely preoccupied with your own midriff it must be really hard to, you know, scan the subway car for suspicious activity and suchlike. Also, I couldn't help noticing that you've chosen a holster with no snap closure on the top; I don't mind telling you, sir, that the accessibility of the gun on one hip, especially while you're busy trying to untangle the gas mask from the walkie-talkie on the other hip, makes me a little nervous. Finally, and this is of course just a suggestion from a concerned citizen, you might think about guarding a subway car that doesn't already have the conductor in it. Spread the authority out a little, you know?

Yours sincerely,
Girl in Red Tank Top with Headphones

Things I Learned at Book Club

(The first rule of Book Club is -- you do, eventually, usually, actually talk about the book. But only when the gossip runs out.)

Application of one's own saliva will stop bug bites from itching.
In related news, I am privileged to know someone who can lick her own calf.
The thing you really don't want to hear your doctor say when peering closely at your ass is "I'll have to use the cookie-cutter method."
6 out of 9 book-reading Gotham females are nervous about their moles.
Stytown: very very pretty, inexplicably confusing and obviously designed to trap the unwary.
Try a little Calvados in your white Sangria.
Nothing is grosser than skinned seals. Not even zit fetish websites.
New Zealand rules! But the Chinese food there is deep-fried and awful.
If the building is on fire, your class is probably cancelled.
Common knowledge be damned, bacon is actually meat.
Really bad-smelling cab drivers nonetheless know that there's no Rehoboth on Long Island.
I need to start paying closer attention to men's noses.
No matter how early good friends get together, they won't shut up until long after 10pm.

(For the record, the book read was Eva Luna, by Isabel Allende. Except for W., who was given The Stories of Eva Luna by mistake and will never forget the skinned seal.)

Little piles of dust

I'm now on my third night of not sleeping properly since my sweetie is out of town, and I'm of two minds about it (although both of them are a little muzzy). On the one hand it's pretty darn romantic that I can't seem to get to sleep without him in our bed next to me, on the other it's kind of annoying. I don't like the feeling of being dependent on someone else to that degree; it's just not in my nature to embrace my own needyness. And it's odd, because I sleep just fine when I'm the one out of town, vacationing with a girlfriend or in a big fluffy hotel bed on a business trip somewhere. So it's not like I'm hopelessly codependent, right? But in our own house, in our own bed, it just doesn't feel right without him, even though we only moved to this apartment a little over a month ago. Also I start to get a little scared of... something, which I never used to be. The first night he was gone I actually locked the bedroom door and took the metal bar out of the bottom of the roman shade and put it in bed with me, close at hand. Boy, writing that down makes me feel like even more of an idiot than doing it did.

R. said something a little startling night before last when we were out for sushi; he said that if L. and I ever broke up, we'd just dissolve. I don't remember what brought up that topic of conversation -- well, other than talking about break-ups, of course, but I don't remember how it got onto us specifically. "What, like into piles of dust?" I asked, surprised. "Yeah," he said, "you'd say 'This isn't working anymore', you'd shake hands and turn to walk away from each other and then, poof, little piles of dust." I'm paraphrasing, of course. At the time, it seemed like one of those goofy things he says but now, thinking back, it's sort of unsettling. All I know is that I miss my sweetie very much. Especially now that I'm about to drag my tired ass downstairs to the laundry room and I discover that he bought the jumbo 124oz bottle of detergent which weighs about 10 pounds.

This just in: "iridescent" = pink

Apparently L'Oreal, flush with multinational power, has decided that they're able to make words in the English language mean whatever they want. Unchecked corporate greed is scary in more ways than one. Just a little warning for anybody that might be thinking of dying their hair with L'Oreal Feria shade #62 - "Iridescent Light Brown"; in real English it should actually be called "Light Red Brown, Only We Don't Want to Say Red Because It's Not Orangey Red Like Real Red Hair Is But Actually Kind of Pinkish". So you can see how they would have trouble fitting that on the box, hence the quick fix of simply redefining the word "iridescent". Silly me, I thought iridescent light brown would just be a little lighter than regular light brown, maybe with highlights, especially since the model on the front of the box had no red in her hair whatsoever that I could see (and certainly no pink). Of course the model on the front of the box was also hispanic, with extravagantly chunky blonde highlights that obviously did not result from a single-process haircolor, so maybe I should have known to worry, but I just thought they were being multicultural.

Hop out of the shower after rinsing it out, and as my hair begins to dry I can't help noticing that my roots are pink. Bubblegum pink. But just the roots. That caused what I'm sure would have been an entertaining scene of panic, except that my sweet baboo is in Chicago and thus there was nobody there to see. On the bright side, Frankie Avalon immediately descended from the ceiling to serenade me with "Beauty School Dropout".

Called the L'Oreal hotline and spoke to a lady with a professionally soothing voice who unfortunately undercut her own patter of "don't worry, we're going to fix it" by trying to convince me that I should have known that "iridescent" meant pink. "It's like the shine on the surface of a pearl, it's kind of pink, right?" Only if it's a pink pearl, lady. After we got past that argument she asked, worry in her voice, if I had piled my dye-soaked hair on top of my head during the 25 minutes it takes for the color to develop. Well, yeah, I had, seeing as how that was what the instructions said to do. But no, by doing so I had increased the concentration of dye on the roots and kept air from getting to them, thus causing the color result to be more "intense" on the roots than anywhere else. For future reference, I was sternly instructed that us girls with hair longer than shoulder-length should just let it hang down our backs (and drip all over everything, staining the floor, apparently) while the dye is on. Good to know, L'Oreal! Thanks for the $10 coupon, ya nitwits!

Finally she gave me two options to try -- either jump right back in the shower before my hair was even dry and wash it with the harshest, most color-stripping shampoo I had on hand, or wait 24 hours and dye over it with regular ol' "Light Brown". So I tried the former and shampooed three times. Then I yanked my hair straight back while still wet, went to work, and called my best friend to whine and complain for 20 minutes (mandated by law for girls in these kinds of situations). She made many soothing noises and then finally said, keeping her voice carefully neutral, "Take a picture."

The anticlimax to the story, however, is that when my hair dried the second time it looked much less pink. Much less. And as the day went on and I kept ducking into the bathroom at work to stare at my hair, I began to be rather perversely fond of it. It still isn't really any color that would occur in nature, which is not normally what I shoot for when it comes to hairdye, but what the hell. I'm iridescent, dammit.

In other news, individually-packaged pieces of string cheese feel almost identical to tampons when you fish for them in your purse without looking.

The World's Largest Kielbasa

Well OK, then, if you insist...

Honestly, I was only trying to log in so I could leave a comment! Aha, so that's how they getcha. The blog explosion explained. On the other hand, maybe somebody's trying to tell me something -- I've never been able to keep a paper diary in my life no matter how many times I tried. Blogga from the heavens to soothe my troubled soul? Or one more diary to die a slow death of neglect? At least there won't be a beautiful corpse lying forgotten under the bed for this one...

And now, for posterity, some of the sample text from the template which I thought needed to be preserved:

"Treas em wankeing ont sime ploked peish rof phen sumbloat syug si phat phey gavet peish ta paat ein pheeir sumbloats. Aslu unaffoctor gef cak siructiun gill bo cak spiarshoot anet cak GurGanglo gur pwucossing pwutwam. Et tam neque pecun modut est neque nonor et imper ned libidig met, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed ut labore et dolore magna aliquam makes one wonder who would ever read this stuff?"