Shower Thoughts

You may start to think I'm a little obsessed with showers, but in fact I'm a little obsessed with everything.

Showers are a small protected space in the day. The requirements are simple as is the activity. You walk into the shower and a few minutes later you walk out warm, wet, happy, and cleaner. The act of washing is simple and repetitive. It requires very little thought, which clears the way for everything else. Showers put the lie to any notion that I am a single unified self. There are multitudes inside me.

Take this morning. I have been playing a lot of music and it is common for me to sing in the bathroom and shower. This morning I was singing "Summertime", the same verse over and over, but a jazzy scat version with lots of embellishment and some pushing of the harmony. As with much bathroom singing I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it and part of my mind started wandering to think about what it would be like to give a regular short weekly concert, maybe a half hour or so, at a very nice concert venue at Colorado State University. I would love to do this, but the University is quite closed off. I've pursued ways to work with the music school, but there are roadblocks and nothing has panned out. It would be really nice to bring in other musicians I have been playing with for this little non-existent concert. Oooh, for a long time I have thought it would be nice to find a reasonably accomplished tabla player to improvise with -- and flute/tabla music starts running through my head in along with "Summertime".

All this is going through my head as I am singing, taking off my robe, adjusting water temperature, and climbing in to the shower. After a minute enjoying the warm water, I stop singing. For the rest of the shower, and even now, "Summertime" is still floating through my head. It is a little musical background to everything else I am thinking and doing, but my mind moves over to thinking about this multi-processing going on and how I find it an interesting story, maybe I should write it up. Meanwhile I'm rinsing my little mesh body scrubber, washing my hair and starting to lather up. The lack of musical venues for me is running through my head as I re-imagine various schemes that I may or may not work on to secure spots and I'm idly thinking of pieces for these little short concerts. This is at the same time, I'm observing this mix of events and "Summertime" is still there, with variations, running through my head.

Is it any wonder that sometimes after having been in the shower for five minutes, I honestly cannot remember whether I have washed my hair or not?

Humor? You be the Judge!

Looking back through my posts, I don't think readers can actually get a sense for who I am as a person. For example, my posts are pretty completely humorless. I think this is more an artifact of the act of writing than a reflection of personality. Apparently I am not a comic writer. I like to believe I'm actually pretty funny, though my humor tends toward puns, the completely stupid, and shaggy dog stories.

As a change of pace I give you two original jokes. I have told each of these numerous times (as anyone in my family will attest). The first has occasionally elicited a small smile. Even I cannot tell the second one properly and I can honestly say no one has ever laughed at it. I throw these out into the universe in the hopes they can find a small home outside my imagination.

At a small Turkish restaurant in Chicago two men often come in for lunch. This is completely unexceptional except that they insist on receiving their bill written on rocks. I mean actual stones. They are good customers and the waiters humor them. Whenever the men come in, the busboy is sent out to find rocks on which to write each of their tabs. However, in the middle of a city there is a limited supply of rocks with flat surfaces suitable for writing. One day the men come in and the busboy can only find one. Since the men pay separately, the waiter has no idea what will happen. He writes both their receipts on the single rock and presents it to the pair. To his joy, they pay without complaint. After they leave, the waiter shouts in joy. "I've done it. I've billed two Kurds with one stone."

Knowing the success of food marketing campaigns that popularize unfamiliar foods (Avocados, Filberts renamed Hazelnuts, Yogurt...) a businessman decides to move the Garbanzo Bean into the mainstream. He buys large quantities of the beans, processing facilities, and a large marketing workforce. One area of interest is the entertainment field so the businessman questions one of of his salesmen. "Do you know how Garbanzos are doing?" The response: "I don't know. Hummus, a few bars."

The hardest social problem I know

As humans, many of our problems are social. I want to share what I consider to be one of the most difficult problems I ever encountered as a parent. If you find a person who has humanely (or even inhumanely) solved this, I think you are in the presence of true social genius. The problem:

Get a junior high or high school girl to ride a bicycle to school wearing a bike helmet.

Many of us have found a way to get the girl on the bike, but I know of no way to get a helmet on that girl. Having perfect hair is just too important.

I also believe that these same girls show us the true limits of human endurance. Go to a cold climate and observe junior high students. Beanpole girls with negative body fat will have bare legs and light jackets at twenty below. They must be part hummingbird to have a metabolism that can heat a body in those conditions.

Mangled Alphabet

There are times when it is important to have the correct spelling of a spoken word. Because many English letters are difficult to distinguish when they are spoken (c, g, z), it is common to distinguish them by using a word. There is a standard word alphabet for this: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo...

But suppose your desire is not to be understood, but to be obscure. For example, the Internal Revenue Service calls to track down your offshore bank account. You don't want to be convicted of perjury, but you don't really want to be helpful either.

Here is a mangled alphabet for your pleasure. Just imagine being on the phone and saying "My name is Jim, J as in jalapeno, i as in ingenue, m as in mnemonic. What do you mean repeat myself, don't you speak English?".

The alphabet is a combination of spellings that do not match sounds, sounds that say a letter that is not the one of interest, accents on a misleading syllable, and obscure words that distract from the task at hand. With some letters I found it hard to be truly misleading. Suggestions are welcome.

A - Aoife (EE-feh) Irish female name
B - byssus (BIS-uhs)
C - cent (sent)
D - Django (JANG-oh) Django Reinhardt jazz great
E - elephant (EL-uh-fuhnt)
F - feign (feyn)
G - gnostic (NOS-tik)
H - honor (ON-er)
I - ingenue (AN-zhuh-noo)
J - jalapeno (hah-luh-PEYN-yoh)
K - knife (nahyf)
L - llano (YAH-naw)
M - mnemonic (ni-MON-ik)
N - nigeria (nahy-JEER-ee-uh)
O - opossum (POS-uhm)
P - phrenology (fri-NOL-uh-jee)
Q - quran (koo-RAHN)
R - Rhone (rohn)
S - sent
T - tsar (zahr)
U - umbilical (uhm-BIL-i-kuhl)
V - verisimilitude (ver-uh-si-MIL-i-tood)
W - whole (hohl)
X - Xerox (ZEE-rox)
Y - Ysolde (ee-ZAWL-duh)
Z - zakat (zuh-KHAT)