bork bork bork

6/29/99

Got up early! It wasn’t my fault. I was punching the snooze button over and over this morning because I was up so late last night. I was reading, and just when I started to go to sleep I kept hearing noises, it was just one of those paranoid nights. Eventually I turned on the light and read again for a while, and didn’t go to sleep until 3:30 or so. I’m trying to stop that.

And this morning I was busily sleeping in when I heard a faint, tapping knock on my door. Was that a knock? Over and over, 2 or three timid knocks. Tried to determine whether it was the side door or the front. Let’s see...the side door bell is broken, so the person would have to knock, and the front door they’d be ringing, so it must be the side door. If it’s the side door, it’s nobody I want to talk to, because everyone I know uses the front. But what if it’s the landlord, what if he sees my car in the back? What if he just walks in? Wouldn’t put it past him, he’s kind of psychotic....

Finally I got up. Uh oh—the laundry basket’s in the other bedroom, and I can’t get there without being visible to the side door. And I’m naked. I dragged on one of John’s old dress shirts and a pair of boxers.

Guess what? Nobody at the door. It was the neighbor across the way, repairing his shed.

So I was up at 9 this morning. And I was cold! The heat broke with last night’s storm. My basement also flooded last night—the carpet is saturated in the north corners. Great—lovely musty smell and I have students coming today. I lit a few lavender candles around the basement and then got to work upstairs, since it was finally cool enough to walk around up there. I packed and cleaned, washed dishes, started a pile of afghans and blankets to take to the laundromat later. And I might even take them tonight!

I cleaned out the trunk of my car, sorting which bottles can be returned to which grocery store. This is a large pain. In Michigan we have a 10 cent deposit on bottles and cans from carbonated beverages. You get charged an extra 60 cents when you buy a six-pack of soda or beer, then you take the bottles back to the store when you’re done and get the money back. I, like most people, end up with a huge stack of recyclables that all have to go in at once. That’s totally cool with me; it feels great to get 10 bucks off the grocery bill.

Too bad about the beer I drink, though. I drink a lot of specialty and microbrewed beers, which you can’t get at a typical grocery store. So when I go to return the bottles to the local Kroger, they don’t take them. I have to make a trip to Goodrich’s to return my fancy bottles. I have to go to Kroger to return my Kroger-brand diet soda cans. Big pain. I’ve had a couple dozen empty beer bottles rattling around in my trunk for several weeks.

God, am I a bad person or what? I had a couple of students here today, and one told me a few details about the fight she had with her mom last night.

Basically, she told her [Catholic] mother that she’d rather be Wiccan. And she’s studying, as much as a vampire-obsessed, Backstreet Boys-loving teenager can. Her mother blames it on the web—all those porn sites and vampyre sites are a bad influence. (I wasn’t sure where porn came in, but that’s what the kid told me.) I gave her a brief version of my Religion-in-Moderation lecture, and basically told her not to tell her mother things like that, at least not until she’s 18 and legally old enough to practice whatever she wants.

My student’s not allowed to get on the Internet anymore, at least temporarily. About halfway through the lesson she wanted to show me her webpage, so I used it as a bribe to get her to play for a while, and at the end of the lesson I let her get on my computer and show it to me. Then she checked her e-mail. And answered her e-mail.

I was a little dazed—I was noodling on my euphonium, playing around with multi-phonics and thinking about when I was her age and we thought it was so cool that we could type a letter in our 8th grade computer class and print that letter at the other middle school. And then the screen door opened...her mother’s shadow blocked the sunlight as she trudged down the steps. Agh! I met her mom on the stairs (still holding my horn—how official!) while my student quickly closed all the windows on the screen and stood up.

I didn’t realize it was going to be such a covert thing. I’m aiding and abetting a 13 year old.

Betsy: “...so there’s this phone booth out in the Mojave Desert, and they thought the phone was off the hook, and these two guys who’d never met decided to drive out into the desert and hang up the phone....”

John: “uh huhhhh....”

Betsy: “...but it turned out the phone was already on the hook, it was just broken. And they both wrote about it in their journals and then they were the Yahoo site of the Week, and they were on some radio show in, like, Sweden, or someplace....”

John: “Da Mo-Ya-Ve Desert, jah!”

Betsy: “What?”

John: in exactly the same tone, as if saying it for the first time: “Da Mo-Ya-Ve Desert, jah!”

Betsy: “...So then they tried to get the phone company to fix the phone, and someone else is taking calls there this week, so the phone’s been fixed—“

John: “Doooo...doo doo, doo doooo, da dit! da dooo...”

Betsy: thinking “This fuck’s not listening to a damn word I’m saying.”

Betsy: “....”

John: “dooooo...da dit! da doooo....”

Betsy: begins to recognize the theme song from The Muppets’ Swedish Chef.

John: “Bork! Bork! Bork!”

Betsy: “Smartass.”

Confused? The Mojave phone booth is now famous. It’s right here. Turns out it wasn’t a Swedish radio show, but if I’d been right in the first place then I never would have gotten the Swedish Chef serenade.