Twelve Days of Christmas

I always hated this song when I was growing up. Redundancy, birds, inanity, birds, too many people, and birds being primary reasons. But Brian has fixed that! This Christmas we present the Twelve Days of Axis and Allies©. Full of things Brian loves! Like tanks! And paratroopers! And artillery, mounted troops, and infantry! He doesn't actually love the boats, (except submarines because, y'know, Marines) but they're better than leaping lords, right? I mean, why are the lords leaping? Paratroopers make so much more sense.

  A very Merry Christmas to you all!

Out of the Bottle

I bought a container of apple juice because I wanted apple juice. It seemed the logical course of action. I asked Brian at the store if he wanted two containers or one. He said one was fine, since I'd probably be the only one drinking it. That reason alone is enough to merit two containers, but I stuck with one.

I put the apple juice in the fridge because I wanted cold apple juice. I knew I'd have to wait for an hour or so, but it would be worth it for cold apple juice. I turned my impatience to good use and began preparing for the epicurean experience so soon at hand.

I drank a half glass of tepid water to quench the dry part of thirst so that no part of drinking the juice would be wasted on sheer hydration. I washed and dried a tall, wide-mouth tumbler and set it on the counter to cool. The glass is a most important part of the drink. The wide mouth maintains appropriate air flow, allowing enough space for the aroma to dissipate slightly but not so much that you can't catch the sharp smell right before the first taste. The glass must be just cooler than room temperature. Anything less makes the drink too cold to hold, and anything more makes the exterior air condense too quickly against the side.

I examined my available ice cubes. I love keeping pebbled ice on hand, but it's a sin to use it in apple juice. It melts too quickly and not only forms the most unsightly visible separation in the glass, but dilutes the quality of the juice before you can reach halfway. Ice in juice is a risky venture to begin with and disrupting the balance of flavor in apple juice is a higher possibility than with most juices. But the ice gives the juice that shock of cold that brings the snap of autumn into the drink and makes it beautiful.

I selected my ice cubes. Three of the half-moon shaped ones that my freezer makes automatically. They can't be chipped or stuck together or else the equilibrium of internal temperature gets thrown off. And at long last, I withdrew the container from the fridge and poured myself a glass.

Nothing could be more perfect. I paused to relish the culmination of my studied labor as Brian joined me in the kitchen, staring at my glass of juice.

"Isn't it beautiful?" I said, eyes fixed on my gorgeous glass of juice.

"You're ridiculous."

Not the response one expects from a work of art, but we'll let it go. I recapped the juice and, turning, replaced it in the fridge. The door closed as I returned to face my delectable—empty cup.

Brian drank my juice. 

Brian drank my juice.

Brian drank my juice.

In a single moment behind my back, Brian downed the entire glass of my perfect juice. He swallowed it whole. And then laughed about it! Why would you do that to me!?! Do you have any idea what you've DONE??? Not only have you deprived me of everything I've been looking forward to for the last ninety minutes, but you've made me use italics, boldface, a full-cap word, and excessive punctuation eight times in the last nine sentences trying to express the distress I suffered at your hands. 

Furthermore! You ruined my cup of juice! The ice has shocked; the glass is gathering condensation; and the cubes are sticking together. And! You drank my juice! You drank it! That's sixteen ounces of ice-cold perfection that I will never have! 

In the shattered wake of my disappointment, I tossed out the ice cubes, dried the outside of the glass, selected three fresh cubes, and glared Brian away from the kitchen counter. Minimum distance, buddy. Keep your hands where I can see them and don't make any sudden movements. I poured a new glass and put the juice back in the fridge again. At least he got the juice-stealing out of his system and now I can enjoy a lovely cup of juice. 

Nope! Too slow! Did you seriously just drink my second glass of apple juice? What is wrong with you, child!?! Thirty-two! That's thirty-two ounces of apple juice! Gone! Gone! Gone in six seconds! How do you imbibe that much ice-cold apple juice that fast? You know the bottle only has sixty-four ounces, right? That's half. Half the bottle gone. If you'd wanted half my juice, why didn't you buy two bottles? You're the one who said buy one bottle and you wouldn't drink any! You lied. 

You know what? Just. Never mind. I hope you get indigestion laughing yourself to fits after inhaling thirty-two ounces of my juice. And I have to refresh the glass a second time. New ice cubes. Dry off the condensation. Pour myself a third glass and—!@#$% What are you, a juice ninja!?! 

Screw it. I'm drinking the rest straight out of the bottle. It's barely even cold.

Lies of Omission

While living in Japan, I was invited to hike Mt. Fuji with my host mother's friend. Having never done so before, and being of a somewhat adventurous mind, I agreed. In the week before, the topic came up in conversation regularly since my fellow teachers often asked what my plans were for the weekend. I asked people if they had ever hiked it before and what they knew about it. Most everyone had never hiked it themselves, but they said things like

"I hear the view is very beautiful."
"I understand the hike can be difficult. Maybe you should wear good boots."
"I have never gone myself, but I think you will have a good time."

Or even more informative things like

"Isn't it in Yamanashi prefecture?"
"You can see a beautiful lake from the top."
"You can see Fuji-san from Chiba on a nice day."

Thank you, Encyclopedia Britannica. 

With a pack on my back and new hiking boots strapped to my feet, I joined my party for the ride to Fuji-san. I was just as excited as everyone else at the outset, and even two hours in when a third of the party fell ill to altitude sickness, I was still having a marvelous time. I grew up in a canyon and loved hiking as a young adult. Tokyo had afforded me little opportunity to climb anything more than stairs, though there were lots of those. So hiking Fuji-san was a remarkable opportunity and I treated it as such. 

The first two hours of the hike are through what one considers normal mountain terrain. There are scrubby trees, rocks, birds, and insects. It was a beautiful, peaceful retreat from the never-ending life and noise of Japan's capital. If I had been with my childhood friend, I'd have thought I was home. 

In the second two hours, the terrain suddenly dropped away and you are surrounded by almost nothing. No vegetation. No birds. No insects. Just the rocks and topsoil, the hikers above you, the hikers around you, and a diminishing view of the trees below. And it didn't take long for that view to disappear. 

We halted for the day at an inn where we would overnight before ascending the rest of the mountain. I didn't know it at the time, but would soon realize that the inn was strategically located on one of the last bits of firm rock available to stand on. The last two hours of the hike are a seemingly interminable set of short switchbacks in straight volcanic topsoil. No more rocks. I've never missed rocks so much in my life as I did in the last two hours of that hike. Without them to stand on and hold dirt in place, it's a wonder we made progress at all. I would take one step, my feet would get sucked into the earth, and I'd fight to make forward movement. It was about a hundred times worse than trying to run on dry sand.

There is one thing to be said for what I was told about hiking Fuji-san. The view is exquisite. I won't ruin it with words. I tried to take pictures, but even those don't do it justice. If you ever want to feel close to heaven, hike Mt. Fuji. But I won't lie to you: It's hard and it ends with a public bath.

Yup. You read that right. Nobody told me, but it's standard operating procedure for everyone to hike Fuji-san and then go to a public bath together. The bath part, by the way, is not worth the view. Who knew that just two years after my first (and I had thought my last) communal shower, I'd be surprised into another naked social with a bunch of Asians. And this one was worse. I didn't think it could be worse, but it was so much worse. 

See, in China, with all those random cousins and nobody speaking English, we'd been left to take up a couple of stalls on the far side of the room and just silently acknowledge that this was clearly awkward for us. But that's not how it goes in Japan. No, no. In Japan, it's a public bath, not a communal shower.

The Japanese are so much more polite and organized about everything. From the moment you walk in, the attendant bows to you and asks, Please may I take your shoes? then bows again to give you slippers, a stool, a hand towel, and a robe. A robe! There's something China needs to learn about. But just because they're polite about it, doesn't mean this is an activity I ought to be participating in! 

For the second time in my life, there I was, standing, shoeless, in a locker room while an entire party of Asians awaited my nude arrival. Again, thankfully, this was not a coed experience, but that was very, very small comfort. Once again, everyone was undressed and through to the bath room while I was still staring at an open locker contemplating an escape. Only this time, there was just me, no Bath House Buddy. 

I went through with it. If I hadn't been so annoyed at being somehow tricked into it, I would have thought it rather nice. I stepped into a wonderfully aesthetically designed room where an artistically shaped deep pool took up the right hand side of the room while several spigots positioned at five-feet intervals lined the C shaped section to the left. The faucets were set about three feet off the ground. Now I knew what the stool was for. You sat below the shower head and washed yourself thoroughly before joining your party in a long heart-to-heart in the bath. 

I tried to take as long as possible cleaning myself and pondering ways to get out of the sitting and talking portion. Nothing feasible came to mind. After half an hour, I resigned myself to my fate and joined the ladies who were eagerly waiting to practice their English with me. So not the place to do this, ladies. So much worse. And for the record, buying me lunch afterwards does not make it better.

When I returned to work on Monday, everyone was so curious to ask me about Fuji-san, only this time they all seemed remarkably better informed about the subject. They all had things like this to say now

"You made it to the top? Are your legs ok? Well they won't be tomorrow."
"It's a volcano, you know. It's supposed to erupt any day now. I wouldn't hike it myself . . . "
"The terrain is really difficult. Not really fit for normal hiking. You must be in really good shape."
"A man who hikes Fuji-san once is an adventurer; a man who hikes Fuji-san twice is a fool."
"That must have been so difficult! But at least you enjoyed the onsen (public bath) after, right?"

I hate you all, you friggin' liars.

The Problem with Movies

The problem with movies is that it seems to be the only creative frame of reference for anyone attempting to imagine a concept or incident outside their sphere of experience. So when I say things like, "I have nested dreams," or "I've learned to control one or two things about my dreams," the only thing people have to relate to (unless they dream like I do) is their time spent watching a movie. In this case, it's always the same movie: Inception.

My dreams are not like Inception. If the way I dreamed were to be turned into a movie, nobody would go to it and everyone who did go would hate it. Hate it.

I have always had vivid, intense dreams. More often than not, something whimsical and clearly fantastic happens in them so that there is never a question of whether I am awake or asleep. If Tinkerbell arrives while I'm pulling weeds at my parents' house and hands me a Mickey Mouse alarm clock that dispenses pixie dust and proceeds to tell me that I'm wanted on Mount Olympus for a dinner honoring Mercury, then I am reasonably certain that I'm dreaming. When I continue, in that situation, to shake pixie dust on my head and lift off the ground to fly over the world, then I know I'm dreaming. (Actual dream, by the way.)

But starting when I was about ten, the simplicity of determining what was dream and what was real became, well, difficult. It began with a nightmare. I have a few scattered mental images of what that nightmare was about, but don't remember it in its entirety. This is deliberate. That dream was one of the most traumatizing nightmares of my entire life, and it took me two years of devising and employing mental exercises in order to paper over the memories and eventually forget the dream. This lengthy endeavor opened the door to a simple thought: that the possibility existed for me to have some measure of control over what goes on in my head. If I could, through persistence and practice, eliminate the memory of a dream and coach myself away from dreaming about it again, then perhaps I could instigate some changes in the dreams themselves.

The possibility may exist, but taking advantage of it is something else entirely. After years of practice I have very, very limited "control" over some of the things that happen. It also seems that my dream-mind prefers that my conscious mind not interfere and so devises new ways to trick my conscious mind into thinking that I'm not really dreaming. This last point is what leads to "nested" dreams.

Here. Imagine, if you will, this scenario:

You work a schedule that prevents you from sleeping with your spouse at night together in your bed and instead has you returning home to kiss your spouse goodbye for the day as you prepare to sleep for the next eight hours and your spouse departs for a day at work. You find it easier to sleep on the couch and comfortably curl up there and listen for the front door to announce to you that your spouse has indeed quitted the house and you are alone. More than anything, you're waiting to hear the deadbolt click into place so that you can rest a little easier knowing burglars will first have to pick the lock or bypass the deadbolt in some other fashion.

Waiting seems interminable and you hear a sound, but it's not the deadbolt locking. You get up to investigate and at the top of the stairs see that your spouse is crouching at the front door trying to stare out the lock on the door handle. "We have a peephole, sweetheart," you proceed to say. Spouse leaps from his position and bounds up the stairs to tell you he thinks there's a felon walking down the street. Naturally, you call the police and are engaged in answering the dispatcher's questions when a sudden noises startles you and you wake to find you're on the couch, waiting to hear if the deadbolt has fastened.

It was a dream. And from the sounds of it, your spouse has left for work. You don't remember hearing the deadbolt fasten, but that is more indicative of you falling asleep before your spouse reached the front door than of him forgetting to lock the door. You check your phone to see if Spouse has texted you. He hasn't. But a moment later your phone lights up and . . . it's someone from work. They're wondering if you can cover a shift for them tomorrow. You want to yell at them for waking you up after you've just got off a grave, but that won't help matters much. Just as you go to text them back, you realize that the sound of the clock ticking has vanished. You know this to be a sign that you're not awake anymore. You look for more signs. You can't hear yourself breathe. The texture of the blanket is wrong. When you get up, the carpet doesn't feel like carpet. This must be a dream.

You fight out of the dream and are once again on the couch, phone in hand, Spouse presumably out the door. You check the phone, for real this time, and there are no new messages. You should probably just put the phone away and go to sleep, but you like to know that Spouse makes it to work without getting in a traffic accident. So you roll over, put your arm over your eyes, and get ready to doze—

Something isn't right again. You're used to the feel of your arm on your eyelids and the real feeling of it is missing. You lift it off and turn over. Things are still not right. The blanket is supposed to smell like the dryer sheets and it doesn't smell like anything. And there's a rustling sound that doesn't match anything you can see. 

You fight awake again. Are you awake? There's someone at the door. You can hear them knocking. But you're not sure you're awake. Things seem right. The sun has moved. The clock is ticking. You smell the blankets. . . . They still don't smell. You rub your eyes. Your left eye doesn't stab painfully the way it's supposed to (souvenir of the most absurd paper-cut accident ever). Clearly you're not really awake. 

But now it's a fight between your conscious and subconscious minds. The subconscious fights to convince you you're awake when you're really asleep. The conscious fights to wake you out of a false state of wakefulness. 

This, this backing and forthing and testing and trying and never being sure is how I spend most of my nights. 

Well, say some, in Inception they have those totems to help them tell if they're dreaming. Not so simple. There's never any one reliable factor that indicates conclusively to me that I'm awake or dreaming. I have to add things up and make sure analytically that things fit together. It's the only way.

Well, say others, in Inception if you die in the dream world you wake up! Not that simple. I once dreamed that I was being shot in the head every hour on the hour. I didn't wake up.

Well, they say, in Inception they blah blah blah blah . . . .

Wait. This must be a dream. 

How Do You Spell That?

Antenna. A-N-T-E-N-N-A. Antenna.
Facilitate. F-A-C-I-L-I-T-A-T-E. Facilitate.
Thorough. T-H-O-R-O-U-G-H. Thorough.

I never mind that people ask me to spell things. To be completely honest, I hardly even notice. It's an involuntary reaction. When someone asks, "How do you spell . . . ?" I automatically respond. I never think between the query and the response. I just spell.

I've never known how these situations arise so often. Every job I've had since I first started working has been filled with momentary orthographical queries. And it's not those open situations where five people are standing around and one aimlessly asks, "Hey! Does anyone know how to spell 'chromosome'?" No, it's usually a quiet aside directed specifically at me. I'm not sure how people get the impression that I'm a walking, talking dictionary or that maybe I'm the Ken Jennings of spelling bees. Most people don't even know what my major is. And I never go around correcting people's grammar or, certainly, not their spelling. Yet there's this persistent phenomenon that wherever I go, people ask me to spell things.

I don't even always know the answer. Plenty of times I have to go look it up and get back to you. "Receive" gets me almost every time. And "reversible" used to give me a head turn. I have tricks to remember the tricky ones. Reversible? Ends with and "ible" cause if you reversed the word the "i" would still look right. Opposable? Ends with an "able" cause opposability makes your thumb able to face your fingers. Occasion? Always two "c"s and one "s" cause an occasion never calls for two "s"s. Judgment? No "e" cause there is no "judge" in judgment. 

But those aren't things anyone ever knows. I don't sit there and tell them why I know it's spelled P-R-E-V-A-R-I-C-A-T-E. I don't tell people I spend my spare time looking up the history of the word "effervescent" or ponder the usage of "vet" as a verb. So why do they ask me to spell stuff all the time? For all they know, I might tell them something completely wrong. I am not a certified spelling expert! And your computer comes equipped with spellcheck in almost every program! It's not always right. But most people don't know that! Common experience leads people to rely on computers much more than the coworker on graves who has had very little sleep. Yet there I am spelling "inebriated" at four in the morning. 

Now, I must reiterate that it doesn't bother me that people seem to think my life is an impromptu spelling bee. I merely find it curious that such a specific behavior is so universal among the people with whom I associate. The reason for it is just mysterious to me. It's as though a balloon artist traveled to Antarctica and, without telling anyone his occupation, was handed a kit and asked to make a balloon penguin. How do they know!?! Beats me. No matter. I'm going to embrace it. In fact, I'm thinking of having a business card made up:

Maile

Orthographist

And the back side will read

I lost every spelling bee I ever entered.

Happy Birthday

My sister was just what every little sister should be. She wanted to do the things I did. She wanted to be where I was. She wanted to follow me where I went. There's nothing wrong with that. But I was a typical older sister and didn't want my four-years-my-junior little sister tagging along with me everywhere. 

On my best friend's eighth birthday she had a party at her house. I was invited and my sister wanted to come too. I did not want her to be there. My mother was understanding, but she reminded me that it would be very difficult for my sister to understand that she just shouldn't go with me to the birthday party. Mother agreed to distract my sister while I slipped out the front door and walked down the street. I remember reaching the corner of our property and hearing my little sister call for me from the upstairs window. It had taken her only that long to discover my absence and realize her abandonment. She may not remember this incident, but her calls for me to come back and let her come with me still echo in my memory.

My sister was just what every little sister should be. She idolized me for years until she grew wiser and realized that I was a very flawed person. This realization took her a very long time and in the meantime, I was often pestered by my little sister standing at my elbow doing everything I did. I found this especially irksome because I had a vastly different view of and relationship with my older sister. There are three of us girls and I fall in the middle, two years younger than the older and four years older than the younger. I wanted to be nothing like my older sister and took every opportunity to prove that I was different, that I was not her. (This also was a mistake, but one for another time.) I thought my younger sister should take strides towards being her own person, being different than I. To this end, I took to ignoring her when she became too tiresome.

We lived in a small home and shared bedrooms until I was well into my teens. This left very little room for a quiet moment alone. I would sneak into the attic and crawl among the stored blankets and winter clothing whenever I wanted time to myself. Usually I spent the time reading and avoiding chores. Inevitably, my sister followed me, thus defeating my seclusion. She talked to me. She brought dolls for us to play together. She brought a book she couldn't even read yet and sat quietly next to me. She never read her own pages; she just carefully watched me out of the corner or her eye, waiting to turn her page when I turned mine. I just ignored her.

My sister was just what every little sister should be. She learned, over time, that her constant attention irritated me, and that she could gain more of my time by making planned attacks instead of a sustained barrage. She noticed, too, that I spent much of my evenings writing in my journal, and later in life, writing simply because I liked to write. My sister also learned that I was most vulnerable to her pleas at the end of the day after school, chores, and living with four siblings had worn down my snarky responses.

I don't remember when my sister began leaving notes on my pillow, but she can't have been very old, probably around four. Sometimes there was an impetus for her note: I had yelled at her that day for touching my stuff; I had gotten in trouble for something and spent part of the afternoon crying; I had refused to let her play with an electronic game our older sister got for Christmas. Whatever the reason, my sister would address the issue of the day and hope that I wasn't sad anymore, or wasn't mad at her anymore, or would maybe let her play with the game tomorrow. When there wasn't an occasion for a note, I received a masterfully crafted card, or drawing, or popup piece of art always addressed to me and always signed LOVE. Sometimes she put her name. Sometimes she just wrote I LOVE YOU. She probably doesn't know until now, but I kept them.

My sister is everything a sister should be. She is a remarkably accomplished, beautiful young woman who has lived a better life than I have. She began dancing when she was ten and has never stopped since. She has won trophies and championships for her talent, skill, poise, and hard work. She has turned around and shared her knowledge through teaching. She has traveled abroad on a university medical study team and presented her research at nationally renowned conferences. She put herself through a bachelor of science university degree, an Emergency Medical Technician certification, and is now in paramedic school.

Even more than all that, my sister is still a loving, caring, and purely good person. I am more proud of her than of almost anyone I have ever known or ever met. I'm sorry I was such a terrible older sister.

Happy Birthday, my one and only Little Sister.

The Office

I noticed it the first time I watched the finale, but I didn't say anything at the time. In the first place, I was watching alone, and there was nobody to comment to in the room. In the second place, I expected the internet would notice the error and would say something. And in the third place, I don't believe in commenting at televisions in the delusion that what I say will in any way influence the events being portrayed by actors on my screen.

But it's been a while and I've never heard it mentioned and now I have to say, has nobody else noticed that Oscar folded that paper crane wrong?

It's the most distracting thing in the world to me and I have not been able to get over it. My writing doesn't usually demand lengthy research, but for this post I have spent hours exploring possibilities and trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for two seconds of an old tv episode.

Here is the fundamental problem: the fold Oscar makes in the one shot of him folding, before he holds up a perfectly completed paper crane, is the wrong base fold to get a paper crane. You literally cannot get a paper crane out of the fold he is making. And the fold the he does make would put a completely unnecessary crease in the paper.

For the first time on my blog, I have pictures! Because there's no way to explain this impossibility without them. These two photos are of what is called a waterbomb base, one of the two most common base folds in origami. I've been folding origami since I was five, so I recognize the base folds when I see them.

The other most common base fold is called a square base and looks like this.

Detailed differences between the two are not important right now, but do you see that they're visually different? Here is a screenshot from the episode showing Oscar "folding" origami.

Clearly the waterbomb, right? That's the problem. The paper crane he holds up in the next shot comes from the square base, not the waterbomb. There is no way to get a crane out of the waterbomb unless you unfold it, start with a square, and proceed like a normal person to fold the crane the right way.

In the short shot, Oscar proceeds to firmly crease the fold he's just made. Out of curiosity, and in an attempt to see if it were possible, I started a crane using the base Oscar has. Not being an applied physicist, I was not certain how the crane would be affected by the fold that Oscar makes. To be as methodical as possible, I also only folded the fold Oscar did in the show and then unfolded and started from the beginning.

I folded it four times with that crease and ended up with a completely erroneous crease in one of these four places: the base of the neck/tail, or the base of either wing. Oscar's crane doesn't suffer from unnecessary creases. I went through several more attempts to make sense out of the folding as seen on tv, but all I did was further vindicate my original position.

Oscar's line at this point is "But, seriously, you made a nine-year documentary and you couldn't once show me doing my origami."

IT'S CAUSE YOU CAN'T FOLD ORIGAMI, OSCAR!!!

Deep breath. Exhale. I'm fine.

The puzzling thing to me is that someone clearly made a paper crane. Oscar's holding one in the shot. And Oscar's folding a waterbomb base in the previous shot. So clearly someone somewhere on that set knows at least a little about folding paper! So why the incongruity? 

I can think of only two reasonable explanations. 1) They were originally going to have him fold something besides a crane. Something that, naturally, gets folded from the waterbomb base. But then someone decided it'd be better to hold up a crane than a frog and the animal was changed without the base fold shot being redone. Or 2) The one guy who knew how to fold the crane was a mildly disgruntled employee and deliberately misguided the folding in order to get his own back at the producers.

To be honest, I'm leaning more towards option 2. Thanks, dude. You kept me awake at least sixteen different nights over the last year and a half puzzling about your stupid folding. I hope you're happy. 

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

This is a poem by Rudyard Kipling that Brian found and showed to me and now I want to share it. Copybooks were blank notebooks used to practice penmanship and other skills (like spelling) by repeatedly copying in the blank space a phrase or traditional saying printed at the top of the page. The printed phrases were referred to as "copybook headings."

A couple quick notes that may help: "Spirit" is used to describe the hippie idea of doing whatever you want. Stilton is a type of blue cheese. "Feminian Sandstones" is a term coined by Kipling, most likely to make another ancient-sounding reference to materialism or other worldly values. 

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." 

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! 

~ Rudyard Kipling, 1919

Conversation Champion

A pregnant friend invited me to go visit a pregnant neighbor with her. Having never been pregnant, I contributed nothing to the hour of ensuing conversation except obligatory nods, smiles, and "I see"s. I was thinking about leaves (like on trees) when suddenly Neighbor mentioned how odd she thought it was that she and baby had been tested for strep.

"I thought that was a throat disease!" she said with slightly widened eyes. "Weird, right?"

I chimed in before my brain-to-mouth filter had received adequate warning to engage, and contributed what little I knew about strep. I actually found it fascinating that strep was a chain-like form of bacteria and that, though strep throat was one of the more common manifestations of streptococcus, the bacteria could, in fact, cause a number of other problems. I found it, therefore, no surprise that Neighbor had been tested for strep, though it was news to me that such was the standard operating procedure. But, I speculated, strep could very likely cause complications with a fetus, and wasn't strep related to meningitis? I seemed to remember having read that somewhere. Yes, now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure streptococcus could cause meningitis. And pink-eye. That's another one that people don't often realize is a streptococcus family of infection. Of course, pink-eye, as far as I'm aware, has never killed anyone. But, oh! Wasn't there a necrotizing form of strep? I thought I remembered there being a branch of the family that ate fle—

Neighbor was staring at me with mouth agape.

What in heaven's name was I talking about? Was I just about to tell a woman—a pregnant woman I just met—about flesh-eating bacteria? These two women have been talking for an hour and twenty minutes and have both managed to make it that long without entering a dissertation on the many branches of streptococcus. Can I really not contribute something remotely normal to such an established conversation?

I should have said something about leaves.

It's All About the Presentation

With Brian having nasal surgery this weekend, (more on that another day) I seized the obvious opportunity to try my hand at cooking a new but hearty meal. My culinary skills have vastly improved from the days I've mentioned before but I realize I've a lot yet to learn. 

Brian approved my suggestion for a dinner of roast beef and mashed potatoes and further accompanied me to the store to select the roast and pick up some onions. Brian thinks everything is better with onions. He's only partially wrong. But that's another topic entirely.

I called my mother, who supplied me with excellent instructions for fixing the meal in my slow cooker and all things looked successful four hours later when I taste-tested the broth and poked the meat to see if it was bleeding. It wasn't and the broth needed only a little more seasoning. I was pleased. 

The upcoming faux pas portion of this endeavor may have escaped into general ignorance but for two things: Brian's sister's fiancé arrived immediately following the error and Brian was still laughing, and then Brian's mother visited within the next couple days and he found it amusing enough to tell her. So now I figure the rest of my social world may as well be included.

I cooked what turned out to be a rather good roast, particularly considering that it was my first roast. My mother, however, never measures anything when she cooks and always gives me approximate proportions in her instructions. She had directed me to fill the slow cooker "about half way" with liquid for the broth. This I did, but I ended up with it filled a little more than three-quarters with the broth. By the time I added the potatoes, onions, and carrots a couple hours later, the broth fully engulfed the two roast rumps. This was not ultimately a problem except that to me the entire concoction looked very deceptively like soup.

A short aside: It has been easily fifteen years or more since my own mother has cooked this same meal for me, so I literally did not recall how she served it. I remembered only that she used to cook cabbage in hers, and I always hated the taste of boiled cabbage. It was such an awful thing to include in an otherwise delicious meal. The cabbage had this horrible habit of half floating in the broth bowl and dripping everywhere. Any attempt to eat it ultimately soaked the rice in your rice bowl and no amount of rice and beef in the same mouthful negated how terrible cabbage tasted.

How lovely, now, to be in charge of what goes into my broth! Cabbage was banned. Carrots were delicious. Potatoes an absolute necessity. And onions by request. I'm fine with that. I pulled out the roast, sliced it on a cutting board, and placed it in a deep bowl over which I ladled generous amounts of broth and vegetables. I set the bowl in front of my rather groggy recovering handsome and returned to the kitchen to fix the peas he wanted as a side and wait expectantly for the feedback that would come after a bite or two.

Silence reigned. 

Not only was there no feedback, but I wasn't even hearing the scrape of the spoon against the bowl. I stopped and looked at Brian who was staring deeply with furrowed brows at the bowl before him. I asked if everything was all right. He turned to me and just stared with a puzzled smile beginning to creep across his face. He stood up and carried the bowl back to the kitchen. He hadn't even tasted it yet! What could possibly be wrong?

"Sweetheart, you're so strange. It's roast beef! It's not a soup."

For heaven's sake, if it's not supposed to be served as a soup it oughn't to be cooked as a soup! Whose fault is that? Certainly not mine. I've been racking my brains since then for experiences to reference on how this meal is normally served. But now for the life of me, I cannot remember how my mother served roast beef. I know there was rice . . .

Question Yourself

I had the great good fortune to grow up in what aging generations call "a simpler time." Part of this simpler time existed in the convention of schoolchildren being allowed to safely walk home from the bus stop without concern of kidnapping or injury. This practice was a defining part of my life, though it would take me several years to realize it.

I grew up in a small canyon where the daily operating procedure of the bus driver was to drop the children off at the mouth of the canyon and wait to ensure that they all made it across the train tracks safely before she drove away. Parents usually lined their cars up along the side of the main road to wait for their children and pick up carpools. Most of the time parents would offer rides to stragglers even if the vehicles were full, but even then it was certainly not uncommon for more than a dozen children to be left to walk home unaccompanied. As one of the families who lived nearer the mouth of the canyon, my siblings and I were more often than not some of the walkers.

There were many aspects of the trek home that deeply influenced my life: the love I gained for mountain air, the joy of solitude, the appreciation for the beauty of autumn. But the single longest-lasting impact from the hundreds if not thousands of times I walked home was destined, strangely enough, to be a mathematical calculation.

I never knew the measurement of the distance from the bus stop to my driveway, but lengthy experience taught me that the range could be traversed in thirty minutes, give or take a few. A brisk walk could bring you home in as few as twenty, but rarely were we undertaking to hurry home to chores. This time lapse remained more or less constant over the years from first grade through high school, when, even after I transferred schools and my mother shuttled us home from a different city, we were nearly always deposited at the mouth of the canyon and told to walk home. I'm sure it was the most peaceful half hour my mother got to enjoy all day.

I was seven when I first asked my mother how long the road was that we traipsed every day. Let me spare a moment here to say that I had implicit faith in my mother for years. She was a former teacher and had the habit of answering us honestly except for when she answered us sardonically, a practice I had not yet learned to recognize. So when I asked her how long the road was, I believed her entirely when she shrugged and said, "I dunno. Probably a tenth of a mile."

This distance calculation became my sole frame of reference for all distances ever mentioned. It was my only experience with miles. People talked about miles all the time, but it's impossible for a seven-year-old to really picture that. Now I knew. A mile was ten walks home.

The first difficulty I encountered came the following spring when our third-grade teacher started a track and field focus in P.E. She announced that for P.E. that day we were all going to run a mile and a half, which she knew was one and a half times around the school's north field. I thought she was crazy. A mile was ten walks home. Ten of them! One walk home took me half an hour. Now she wants us to run fifteen of them? How long did she think P.E. lasted? Was it even legal for her to make us run for seven hours? The bus leaves in just two!

I began outlining an escape plan all the way to the north field and then stared at it more puzzled than ever. Though the field was certainly large, to circumambulate it one and a half times would certainly not take seven hours. Not unless we walked really, really slow. My explanation for this conundrum was that my teacher had been misinformed about the distance and I should certainly not bring it up to her because who the heck wants to spend the next seven hours marching around this blasted field? Not I. I ran the requisite length in about twenty-five minutes and learned that day that I had a mild form of asthma. See? School teaches you all kinds of things.

That was only the most overt problem I had with understanding distance. I learned at some point that a mile broke down into five thousand two hundred eighty feet. One tenth of that was five hundred twenty-eight feet. It took the average child (see I knew I was average because other children walked home with me and it took us all the same time) thirty minutes to cover five hundred twenty-eight feet. Therefore, per my completely accurate calculations, football fields were either impossible or sports people didn't know what a yard was. My money was on the latter.

I learned about the history of the marathon in fifth grade. People actually run marathons today? What a barbaric tradition! That's twenty-six miles! You know the guy who ran the first marathon died, right? And for good reason! That's two hundred sixty walks home! People were doing that in four hours! How were they not all dead? Running a marathon should have the same population effect as the black plague!

My understanding of miles continued far, far longer than it should have. It was not until I was nineteen and regularly driving myself home that I truly began to question the answer my mother had given me twelve years before. One day I simply reset the odometer as I crossed the tracks and then glanced down at it when I reached home. I stared at it for a minute and walked into the house to find my dad.

"Dad," I said, "you might want to check the odometer on the Toyota. It says the drive home from the tracks is a mile."

Lesson: When it's your mental math versus precise Japanese mechanics, the Japanese win every time. Learn to question yourself.

Everyone's a Critic

I suffer regularly from the delusion that I could, given time and practice, learn to be musically inclined. This has been a lifelong delusion and one which still surfaces from time to time. I'm not terrible with music. I'm just no, say, Lindsey Stirling. This never really bothers me, and to be entirely honest, despite the knowledge that I will most likely never be Lindsey Stirling, Itzhak Perlman, Vivaldi, or anything remotely close to a fantastic musician, I continue trying to learn to play the violin.

Almost everyone who learns that at the prize, young age of twenty-two I decided to take up the study of a string instrument tells me how awesome they think my decision is and tends to be, in conversation, demeanor, and support very encouraging. Almost everyone.

I must preface the revelation of those who are not supportive of my musical endeavors by saying that I do not regularly count my cats as people. Not ever. They are not my "children." They are not replacements for regular human interaction. If I had to abandon my home with my handsome and flee, I would be sad to leave the cats behind, but I would if my life depended on it.

I also do not bother, normally, with what my cats do and do not hate. Don't like the discount cat food? Deal with it. Eat it or starve, buddy. Don't like me squirting you in the face with water? Don't jump on the table and steal my sausages. Don't like Brian showing more attention to me than to you when he gets home? Deal with it. I'm his wife. You're a cat. Go lick yourself.

That being said, my cats hate my violin aspirations. Oddly enough, it took me a little while to fully realize this.

I began, as I said, learning the violin when I was twenty-two, a full year or more before I met Brian and two years before we moved into a condo, he left to Afghanistan, and I picked up three kittens for company. In those two years I practiced regularly, often on campus but frequently at home. The latter situation led me to purchasing a mute to prevent my neighbors from storming my home with pitchforks to break all my fingers and demand the destruction of my fiddle. The mute worked very well in this role. To date I've never had any comments from my neighbors. As far as I'm aware, they may not even know I moved in.

But, for those of you unacquainted with string instruments, a mute does not entirely block the sound that is scraped painstakingly from the bowels of the apparatus. The fiddle still sounds exactly as it would otherwise, just quieter. I'm fine with this, since it means that only I or anyone in the same room with me has to endure the horrible scratching and scraping that makes up my violin practice sessions. Even Brian didn't consider leaving me when he returned from Afghanistan to my daily rite of fiddle noise-making. He did, however, comment one day about three weeks into this routine.

"I don't think the cats like your playing."

He said it very matter-of-factly but chuckled, and initially I thought he was joking. I laughed along but didn't think much more of it and kept playing. A few minutes later, Brian laughed some more and said, "They really don't like your playing."

This merited investigation, so I and my fiddle came into the living room to see what the cats were up to. I had previously sequestered myself in the most isolated part of our rather small condominium to reduce the intrusion of my playing on the rest of the house. Even with the mute, the fiddle being right next to my ear keeps me from hearing a great many things going on elsewhere, and I credit this as the reason I hadn't noticed all three of my cats crowded at the bottom of the stairs near the front door yowling for all they were worth.

There are many unusual points about this situation. First, the three cats do not usually congregate all three of them together in any one location peacefully. The social dynamics between them are imbalanced in such a way that any two will occasionally sleep together but it is truly rare for all three to be assembled in harmony. This made me think that the cats were fighting at the base of the stairs, which is also unusual because the cats only go to the bottom of the stairs for three reasons: to access the litter box, to greet us when we return home, or to escape our vengeful squirts when they misbehave. At this precise moment, none of them were using the litter box, Brian and I were already home, and nobody was being squirted with water. Therefore, the cats should not have been at the bottom of the stairs.

Yet there they were. One, two, three. All by the front door. All looking miserable and crouching as close to the floor as they possibly could. I looked down the stairs and the cats just looked mournfully up at me as though asking me if the time of punishment was over and they could return to good graces. I was puzzled. I asked Brian what made him think they didn't like my playing.

"They all start yowling as soon as you start playing. Then they stop when you stop."

I thought he was making this up. I walked back into the living room and played the passage I had previously been working on. The moment my bow touched the strings, my already inharmonious normal noise was expounded upon with cacophonous howling that echoed sharply up the stairs. I stopped. So did the cats. Brian laughed.

"Maybe," I said, "they just don't like Suzuki music." I put bow to string again and dashed off several bars from a jig I was studying. The yowling resumed punctuated with terrible yelps whenever I reached a particularly high note. I didn't know cats could yelp. Brian laughed more.

"Maybe Christmas music?" I tried an upbeat French traditional carol. The cats communicated categorically their very strong feelings that Jesus's birth should not be heralded by a violin. Ever.

"Maybe something calmer?" I scraped away at the few phrases of Silent Night that I knew. The cats loudly begged for silence now.

"Let's try something I'm really good at." This reduced me to playing several variations of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, the only piece I had practiced enough to be able to play without hesitations, scratches, or squeaks. The cats cried more than ever and began scratching at the front door, as though their fears of the outdoors paled in comparison with the certain doom of remaining indoors with a violin-playing Maile.

Having exhausted my repertoire of pieces, I stood rather amazed in the middle of the living room with my fiddle tucked under my arm. I really found it quite incredible that these three ridiculous creatures could take such vehement objection to my musical efforts. I bet Itzhak Perlman never had to put up with this crap.

My prolonged silence had led the cats to believe that deliverance had come. They crept to the top of the stairs and poked their noses cartoon-like one by one around the corner. It seems that not only had I been practicing routinely enough for them to hate my playing, but they had also learned what detestable object produced the terrible din. Their survey of the scene halted abruptly the moment their eyes landed on the fiddle under my arm. Immediately, their ears flattened and they crouched in anticipation of the fiddle moving from its relatively safe location held firm by my elbow.

I glared at all three of them. In a flash I whipped my fiddle to my chin and dashed off several bars of the jig. They were just as quick as I and bolted, yowling all the way, to the bottom of the stairs before I was two bow strokes in.

I will, however, not be bested by three silly felines. I stood deliberately at the top of the stairs and boldly played every single piece I knew by heart. It was probably my best performance to date. This drove them to take the heretofore unprecedented action of cramming one by one into the litter box, the furthest physical location they could possibly be from the fiddling and a location not designed to accommodate three cats at once. Take that, fuzzy-faced jerks.

Our squirt bottles have gotten considerably less usage since that day. If ever I think the cats are being excessively irritating or deliberately rebellious, I just pull out my fiddle. Minor infractions merit Suzuki. Christmas carols are for excessive conditions. And for particularly irksome days, I keep an Irish jig.

Turns out they're fine with me learning guitar, though.

Down with Toast!

Bad days always started with toast for breakfast. After first being ordered to wake up (and being already awake) by a bossy older sister, then having to wait for the bathroom because one was the second to youngest, and finally making it downstairs after dressing in a cold, dark bedroom, there was nothing worse than discovering that breakfast was toast. Toast + anything = terrible. It's like multiplying by zero. You get zero. Every time.

Toast and peanut butter? Terrible. Toast and scrambled eggs? Terrible. Toast and cream tuna? Terrible. Toast and poached eggs? The most terrible of all terrible things that could ever possibly be terrible. The very worst days of growing up dawned with poached eggs on toast. Whose genius plan was it to cook bread and then slosh a sopping wet slimy egg onto the crispy bread thereby fully negating the action of toasting it? Someone who hates children, I imagine. Probably one of the Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang villains.

Brian and his family disagree with this stance. Brian's loving but curt assessment came out as, "You're crazy." Followed by long, confused stares from him, his mother, his sister, his other sister, and their cat. This summation of my insanity was the termination of an incident I refer to as The Toast Misconception. Brian offered to make everyone omelettes and asked if I would like one since he was making one for everyone else. I knew he was making one for everyone else, having been present when he asked everyone else, but nobody had verified the presence of rice to go with the eggs. Eggs cannot be served without rice, so I asked, "Is there rice?"

Brian: "What?"
Maile: "Is there rice?"
Brian: ". . . "
Maile: *Questioning stare*
Brian: "What?"
Maile: "Rice. Is there rice?"
Brian: "What do you need rice for? I'm asking if you want an omelette."
Maile: "I know. But you need rice for an omelette."
Brian: "What kind of crazy omelettes are you making? I'm putting eggs in the omelettes."
Maile: "I know how omelettes are made. But, what, you just going to eat the omelettes with nothing?"
Brian: "No. We have toast."

The conversation by then had attracted the attention of the family at hand (but not the cat yet) who all paused here to nod along in silent support of Brian. I had to shake my head. This would not stand. Gone were the days of my childhood where I had to suffer through toast being served at a meal because a sibling had failed in the all-important duty of cooking rice. I was twenty-three, by heaven! I no longer wore rice-bowl bangs, and I certainly! no longer ate eggs with toast. Ever.

I carefully explained to Brian that eggs, as a protein, begged a balanced and delicious staple on the side. That side must be rice. Rice is delectable, palate-cleansing, warm, wonderful, fulfilling, and in short everything that a standard egg-accompaniment should be. Toast, by contrast, was terrible.

The words were no sooner out of my mouth but I was bombarded with speculations against my taste, rearing, well-being, and sanity. I held firm then; I continue to hold firm six years later. Eggs with toast is an affront to humanity. Toast has this terrible way of cutting the roof of one's mouth and leaving crumbs everywhere─everywhere! One never eats a bite of toast without having to follow up with a vacuum cleaner. And it's practically impossible to take a bite of eggs and toast at the same time. What is the use of having the toast with the eggs if the only way to consume it is with alternate bites or the ever-hopeful attempt of nipping off a corner of toast and holding it lightly in one's mouth in the hopes that it doesn't get saturated before the forkful of eggs can arrive too?

Toast dries out the whole meal. Why do you think they keep inventing stuff to put on toast? Because it's absolutely no good alone! They sell the bread in stores next to the stuff to put on it to make it better. Whenever people make toast, it's never just toast. Nobody wanting some toast just goes and pulls the toast straight from the toaster and sits down to consume it warmly, comfortably, lovingly all by itself. It is forever slathered in butter, jam, peanut spread, Nutella, cheese, mayonnaise, mustard, salad dressing, anything, anything! to change the texture from that of crusted flour to one more palatable. It's so dry that people have to dream up how to make a meal excessively moist to compensate for the square of compact sand they're serving along with the main course.

People are constantly inconvenienced by the nature of toast without ever giving it much thought. How often has one desisted from enjoying a salad because the crunchy purpose of the toasted bread cubes has been lost in the tossed depths of the lettuce mix? 

Why not just serve rice? Rice is sublime. Subtle and unassuming but surprising. Rice is friendly. It never attacks the inside of your mouth with razor-sharp edges or inflicts wounds down your throat should you accidentally swallow a portion just a little too large. Rice fits nicely and neatly in the tidiest and most artistic of piles in the corner of one's plate without crashing unceremoniously down the slope into the center or requiring quarantine on a separate plate. Rice is mild enough to accompany any flavor of dish but bold enough to carry its own when included as an ingredient. It keeps its texture over time even when swimming in soup or thrown in with fajitas. 

Rice is so remarkable an entire nation estimated a man's wealth in how much rice his arable land could produce. Who ever introduced King Henry V as the master of a thousand bakeries? Nobody. That's who. Just remember. The punishing phrase has always been, "Glass of water, crust of bread." Not, "Glass of water, bowl of rice."

I have embarked on a quest and my quest is this: to enlighten the Western world to the marvel of rice. A rice cooker in every home. Rice as a side in every restaurant. Rice served as the staple in cafeterias. Onigiri as the standard for lunches instead of sandwiches. Rice crackers for snacks. Mochi for desserts. No more burnt toast setting off smoke alarms. No more sad mornings full of drenched bread under waterlogged eggs. And absolutely no strange stares from handsome husbands when an innocent wife queries, "Rice?" There will be no need. Because everyone will know not to offer eggs without rice.

There will likely be resistance, but I'm not doing away with toast altogether. We'll throw bread crumbs at weddings. There will still be plenty of day-old bakery goods to throw to ducks in the park. I'll need operatives to help deal with the toaster-factory hired stooges. Rice-aware nutrition operatives to properly introduce rice to cafeteria menus. Rice-minded marketing operatives to present rice as the next All American main dish. Rice-creative artist operatives to take rice from its fettered repetitive appearance only in sushi bars to the fundamental key in haute cuisine. And a small core of rice-loyal assassins to remove the toast-indoctrinated rabble-rousers. 

Then when I ask Brian to fix breakfast and he smirks and says, "Poached eggs on toast?" I'll just put my finger to my ear and say, "Take 'im down, boys."

Pew!

Forward the Rice Revolution.

Tiny Confession

In 2004 I lied to a couple of friends. There. I've never worried about it or even remembered it except from time to time, and I'm sure they've long since forgotten and certainly don't care, but there's also a lesson to be learned here.

We were hiking in the Yellow Mountains in China when we came to a rest stop in the form of a small landing at the base of one cliff and on the edge of another. I think we were waiting for someone to catch up to us, but in any case four of us stopped on the landing. We were soon joined by three foreigners ─ one female and two males ─ one of whom was very tall and, according to my friends, very good-looking. To be honest, I didn't see it, but I've always had different taste in men.

My friends took up whispering among themselves about how fine this guy looked and so on and so forth and sooner or later one of them dared the other (doesn't this show how young we were?) to talk to him. Before anyone could act on the dare, however, we overheard them speaking and immediately realized they were French, or at least of a French-speaking nation. My friends turned in unison and stared at me.

Let me paint you a little self portrait. I started studying French at the age of 13 and continued through university until they no longer offered courses in the study of the language itself. At the time, I had studied French for five years and traveled to that beautiful country twice. My friends knew I spoke French because I had used it on occasion before to pretend that none of us spoke English ─ a very useful escape in some places in China.

So as the obvious bridge between this English speaking dare and its French speaking goal, the girls asked me to talk to him. This is where I should have told them something I knew all along. You see, I have yet to meet someone who speaks French who does not also speak English.

Our conversation lasted about ten minutes during which I found that two of them were a couple (the tall one was single), the tall one was roughly the same age as my friends ─ mid twenties, they were all from Paris, they spoke fluent English, and they had been traveling in China for fun for about two weeks. The girl was a journalist and I don't remember what the boys were but they were just here on vacation. I answered their questions about us being from America and living here for five months to teach English in the capital city of the province.

From time to time throughout the conversation I would throw my friends a scrap or two, but as they spent the entire time standing six feet away and making rather silly fools of themselves, I was certainly not inclined to help them out much. Ladies. You were standing six feet away. He could hear everything you said. Even if he hadn't understood a single word, he'd still have known you were batting your eyelashes at him.

Whoever it was we had been waiting for arrived and onward we hiked. My friends drilled me for the conversation details and the most essential question of all: Did I tell him they thought he was hot?

I lied to my friends. I said he said thank you but he was in a relationship.