Two Screen Couples

This past weekend I volunteered at a charity event for a friend of mine, who is the Director of Development at a school for children with learning disabilities. We were working the Auction Checkout Room, which meant we pretty much did nothing until the end of the night when people were ready to leave, and then we had to get our shit together in a hurry. Once we realized that we really had nothing to do for a couple of hours, most of us decided to peruse the expensive auction items and grab a drink or two from the open bar.

An extremely prepared husband and wife team, however, had different plans. As soon as the downtime was announced, the guy turned to all of us and said, "Wanna watch a DVD? I got Ratatouille!" He was greeted with pretty much universal polite nodding. Assuming he just had a laptop, I was shocked to see him pull out an entire mini-entertainment system from his bag. It had a DVD player, mini speakers, and TWO SCREENS! From that point on, he and his wife watched Ratatouille right next to each other on separate screens. It was very bizarre. It was as if they were both in entirely different worlds - there was no side conversation, no shared laughter, nothing. The screens had taken them to their own personal theaters, and watching Ratatouille seemed more of an assignment they had to complete than anything else. While I understand that just one of those small screens wouldn't be ideal to share, there is something off-putting about two people sitting next to each other almost pretending that they're not. Other than the fact that the husband carries this with him, ready to bust out at any sign of an entertainment lapse, it was the separation between the couple that disturbed me the most. Even though they were watching the same thing, it really felt like they weren't at all.

BaeRating: C-

The North Park Garage Bus

Anyone who has ever ridden the CTA on a regular basis knows the looming dread of the North Park Garage bus. There is no worse feeling on a 5 degree Chicago morning than peeking out from behind your saliva dampened scarf, spotting a distant bus on the horizon, carefully removing your transit card from your wallet with frozen fingers, and slowly picking your way to the curb through snowy footprints - only to have that bus fly by you, oblivious to your pain, flashing its NORTH PARK GARAGE title for all to see. The North Park Garage Bus Fakeout is one of the all-time transportation slaps in the face, far worse than its flamboyant brother, the Yellow Cab Hiding Passenger Fakeout, often referred to as The Shadow Passenger. Occasionally you'll even have a cruel bus driver that will slow down a bit as he nears the stop, only to slam on the gas as you jostle for position at the curb, street debris drifting up into your startled eyes.

I don't know the exact role of these buses - evidently they are deemed extraneous and are on their way to a CTA home base. I do know, however, that they stand as a show of power from the CTA itself, a reminder that your timely arrival to work is solely up to them, and they can be as capricious with that responsibility as they so choose.

BaeRating as an Event That Can Happen to You: F
BaeRating as an Impressive Sign of CTA Power: A

The Horseshoe & The Fishbowl

We have a new Upper School Division Director (re: principal) at my school this year, and he has already made numerous changes, mostly good, to the way we do things. From a teacher's perspective, one of the most welcome changes has been his tightening up of our faculty meetings. When you get upwards of thirty teachers in a room for a discussion, the focus can go from amiable announcement to snide commentary to unbridled disgust in the span of about fifteen minutes. Remember this is a group of people who were involved in every class discussion in college, no matter if they had something to add or not, "piggybacking on Gordon's hypothesis" or "clearing up what Professor Rispad was getting at there". This is a group of people that kept everyone after class so that they could "bring some closure to our discussion" when all you wanted was to catch the end of the Cubs game with a Blimpie sub. For the most part, these are the people you hated. That said, there is nothing more interminable than a faculty meeting without a clear agenda, as you soon find yourself a spectator to a vicious argument about the appropriate time of day for a fire drill and at least one of the opponents has taken his shoes off.

Now, however, we have a set agenda. And it is released well before the meeting, so people can wrap their minds around its constraints. We also have a fairly set end time, which allows the back-of-the-meeting creepers (like myself on occasion) to get their things together guiltlessly when the hour is near, thus prompting our Division Director to check the clock and acknowledge that it's time to wrap things up. It's a godsend really.

The downside is that he's from Vermont, and by his own admission, a little crunchy granola. We have time for "appreciations" that people offer for one another at the start of each meeting - nerdy name, but actually kind of a nice touch - and he has also instituted The Horseshoe meeting format, doing away with our old Speaker/Lecture Hall structure. Gotta tell you - not a big fan. The Horseshoe, by its nature, leaves everyone very exposed. Being a back-of-the-meeting creeper is no longer an option unless you want to really stand out. Also, since our group is so large, the chasm between opposite sides of the 'Shoe can be so vast that it actually makes conversation more difficult. We also tried something called The Fishbowl once, which was actually a circle within the 'Shoe, and you couldn't talk unless you entered The Fishbowl, and the idea was to rotate in and out when you had something to say. Needless to say this was very confusing and resulted in about 5 of the 40 people actually dipping a toe in the bowl for discussion. We have not attempted The Fishbowl since.

Horseshoe BaeRating: B-
Fishbowl BaeRating: D+

Alice the Mole

Everybody knows a kid that has a favorite stuffed animal that they always carry around with them. Maybe you were one of those kids at some point. I know I had a favorite stuffed panda named Barry (although it was probably Beary in my head at the time, I prefer to remember him as a Barry), and later a favorite stuffed seal named Freddy, who was the frontman for a stuffed animal band that I managed - Freddy & the Burgers.

Ever since my daughter Jane was born, my wife and I have been trying to provide her with optimum candidates to be that Favorite Stuffed Animal. The Hobbes to her Calvin. I think I was always concerned that she would wind up with a unnaturally pink Winnie the Pooh doll as her favorite, or worse, a creepy blinking plastic baby. In an effort to offset this danger, we would acquire stuffed animals that we deemed sufficiently cute, sturdy, and of a reasonable size, and place them with her in her car seat, stroller, or the like. Sadly, none of them took. Not the gray Ugly Doll, not the blue-black octopus, not the awesome giraffe, nothing. In fact, one of the first things she latched on to was a creepy blinking plastic baby, whose origin is unclear, and whom she named Dolly and scribbled with pen on its head, so that it looked even more upsetting. To counteract Dolly, I bought a less unsettling and softer doll that she successfully adopted as her favorite and named Baby Jane. Unfortunately it acquired an unexplained stain on its face that is there to this day. As far as animals went, Jane settled on a litter of different stuffed dogs (Seiko, Allie, Puffy, Tuffy, Allie's Mom, a cat named Tiger) as her favorites, which she would rotate in for car trips and such. At home, she would usually sit them all down together as a general assembly of sorts that would make decisions on what to play that day, and she would occasionally teach them school lessons. They were also known to be placed randomly around the house with makeshift blankets draped over them (napkins, magazines, DVDs, etc) for "naptime". They are still an active body.

When my second daughter Lucy was born, we felt it was time to give it another shot. As her first real Christmas present, we bought her a stuffed mole named Alice. I'm generally not crazy about the pre-assigned names, but in this case it seemed right. Alice the Mole is a Granimal, which is a line of hand-stitched animals from a French company called Latitude Enfant, and it's pretty awesome. It's cute, it's soft, it's sturdy, it's a little weird, and it's of a reasonable size. What more could you ask for? Anyway, Lucy has totally taken to it. She has a tendency to gnaw on its head and grip its mole nose, which I think is a really good sign. Jane has accepted Alice as Lucy's property and has tried to help us with our plan, placing Alice back on Lucy's lap whenever she is dropped. Will it stand the test of time as Lucy realizes she has options in the stuffed friend world? Watch the video and judge for yourself. (Warning: It's fairly uneventful.)

BaeRating: A

My Computer Shipping Experience

So I ordered a new laptop computer last week from Apple. I went the online route because The Apple Store scares me, and I wanted to pick and choose my features without being harangued by a goateed fast-talker. Also I've found that when you make major purchases online, there is a feeling that once you've clicked the Checkout button everything is beyond your control, as if you're at the mercy of the Moirae themselves and you can only just sit and track the thread of your life on FedEx.com. Which is what I did. Constantly.

The monitoring of an online purchase can consume your life - waiting for it to be shipped within the estimated time frame, praying for the carrier to be notified so that you can have an actual tracking number, some tangible proof that the item is on its way to you, refreshing the tracking page and charting the order's course through the country. Of course my computer was shipped on the very last day of the 'Shipping Estimate', torturing me daily with its depressing lack of progress. I could not have been more excited when it shipped, though - I found myself inhaling the scent of my new computer sac in anticipation (which of course arrived a week before the computer itself). I was a little taken aback when I saw that the item had been shipped from Shanghai, CN - my first thought was that it was a town in Connecticut, convincing myself for a moment that I had read somewhere that there was an Apple facility in Shanghai, Connecticut. It's the new Silicon Valley, right? When I reasoned that CN probably stood for China, I was deeply concerned about shipping time, but the next morning we're in Anchorage, Alaska battling nightstalkers, and later that night Indianapolis, Indiana chilling with Joseph Addai, and the next morning nestled safely in my arms in Chicago. Which is pretty amazing, right? The delivery estimate on FedEx was Thursday, but I got it on Tuesday morning! Which means it left Shanghai Monday morning and only took a day to get to me. Shanghai to Anchorage to Indianapolis to Chicago. A buddy of mine has a bootleg copy of that Steely Dan tour, by the way.

Anyway, despite the length of the shipping preparation, the actual tracking of the item could not have been more of a riveting whirlwind tour of the world. It was like an episode of Alias with my MacBook as the surprise villain! It's always a bit anticlimactic once that big purchase arrives, of course. You realize that your life is still continuing, that you have to run and get lunch before the cafeteria closes, that you're late for a faculty meeting, that your daughters need to eat dinner. Crap like that.

But the thrill of the chase remains.

BaeRating: A-