Bathroom Queue Ponderings

As I was standing in line for the restrooms at the end of the last Nashville Preds game, a few thoughts crossed my mind. In an effort to put a toe over the line into "too much information" land, I thought I would share those thoughts here.

1. It is great to be a woman at a sporting event. For once, the guys restroom line is as long or longer than the girls. Ha, ha!

2. Seriously, what are women doing in those stalls that it takes them so long to come out again? The mind reels. Especially since they come out of the stalls and then primp in the mirror for another five minutes. Our lines may be shorter but the time per person is extremely inefficient. Hurry up!

3. In Taiwan (where I lived for six months), they really know how to queue up for the restrooms. Each person stands in front of a specific stall door, thereby eliminating most of the line that usually bottlenecks the entrance to the restroom. It makes the line look a lot shorter to people entering the restroom, making your restroom visit less discouraging (at least initially). Queueing in front of a specific stall also eliminates those moments of indecision when two stall doors open and you're not sure which one to go for first. On the negative side of this restroom strategy, if you pick the wrong door to stand in front of it could be really annoying. I keep meaning to try and organize it sometime, but I think the people in the restroom might be totally freaked out by it. On the plus side, the line might actually get shorter as people flee from my freakiness!

I was trying to find a link to a study I once read about where "scientists" measured the amount of time women took in the restroom vs. men. It was at least twice as long for women. Instead, I found this link to a research project someone at the University of Chicago Law School was doing on men's vs. women's restrooms. Since it's topical, I thought I would include the link here.

Wax Me 16

One of my hesitancies about getting my bushy eyebrows waxed in the first place was that I worried they would be waxed unevenly, making me look like some kind of a freak (as if my own plucking was perfectly symmetrical or as if having two furry catepillars above my eyes didn't make me look like a freak!). And I must admit that I usually come home, look in the mirror, and do some additional grooming after I get them waxed. This last waxing, however, I looked in the mirror and noticed that my right eyebrow was much more arched than the other one, making me look like I was raising one eyebrow in a sarcastic manner.

This immediately took me back to my teenage years, when raising one eyebrow sarcasticly was something that happened many, many times a day. My friends and I would practice single eyebrow raising in the mirror, and see if we could raise our left eyebrows as effectively as our right ones (ambidextrous eyebrows?). I remember someone even giving me this compliment once: "You can really raise that one eyebrow really high! Wow!" Obviously, my eyebrow-lift exercises were paying off!

Of course, I fixed the left eyebrow so that it looked similarly sarcastic, thereby neutralizing the right one. And then, just for kicks, I tried to raise just one of them sarcastically. I'm not that good at it any more, but my left eyebrow is definitely the stronger of the two. Maybe some more exercises are in order. Just in case.

Waste as Art

All of us have probably seen art made out of garbage at some point in our lives (if you haven't, you might need to get out and visit a contemporary art gallery a little more often). Although it sometimes make you feel like you're being tricked by people cleverer than you into believing anything is art, a lot of garbage-as-art can really be beautiful, emotional, and overwhelming in its meaning.

One of my recently discovered trash artists is Chris Jordan. His series on consumerism and waste is really powerful. Check out his photographs here. Be sure to read his artist statements because I think they give even more meaning to the photos (as a good artist statment should!). His series on waste not only makes me even more driven to be a good recycler, but also makes me reconsider the long list of things I want to buy.

Behold! The Chex Mix!

It is writ, "Man shall not live by chex mix alone." How fortunate, then, that I am a woman! Every Christmas season brings about the mixing of the chex and it seems that I spend the next 48 hours, post-mix, pretending that chex mix is the only food in the entire house.

Chex mix for breakfast? Why not! It's got cereal in it! Chex mix for lunch? Sure! It's fast and easy and portable! Chex mix for dinner? Of course! Those nuts give you a lot of protein to keep you full while you sleep!

Because I love it so much, I thought I would share my recipe here. It's actually my mother-in-law's recipe, but I kind of suspect that she got it off of a chex box. What she did do is double or triple the recipe so that you have a LOT of chex mix at the end of it all.

Ingredients:
-- 2 large boxes of Chex cereal (corn and rice)
-- 1 bag of pretzels (Synder butter or other pretzel you like)
-- 2 10-ounce containers of deluxe mixed nuts
-- 1 or 2 packages of garlic mini-chips (in the Deli section at Kroger's)
-- 8 ounces or so of some sort of cracker (this year I used Musso's Deli Dippers Snacksticks -- in the Deli section at Kroger's, but I've also used those pretzel thins)
-- 18 Tbs of salted butter
-- 8 Tbs of Worchester sauce
-- 6 tsp seasoned salt
-- 4 tsp garlic powder
-- 3 tsp onion powder

Instructions:
-- Heat oven to 220 degrees.
-- Layer all ingredients in 9 x 12 casserole dishes (I have to use three casserole dishes for this recipe) or other glass baking dishes
-- Melt butter in the microwave and mix all the seasonings into the melted butter
-- Pour butter/seasonings mix over the dry ingredients in the dishes (stir butter-sauce while pouring or all seasonings will sink to the bottom)
-- Using a large spatula, gently and thoroughly flip ingredients in the dishes, spreading the butter sauce around
-- Put pans in the oven for 15 minutes. When timer goes off, pull pans out and flip ingredients in the pans
-- Put pans in for another 15 minutes. Stir again.
-- Put pans in for another 15 minutes. Stir again.
-- Put pans in for another 15 minutes.
-- Turn off oven. Stir ingredients one last time. Let cool/sit in oven overnight.
-- Transfer to a tupperware in the morning.

The secret is in the mixing! I usually not only stir each baking dish but also swap the chex mix from one dish to another. The more thoroughly you mix it, the more consistent the flavor is as you eat it.

Enjoy! You will have a very large quantity to share or to pig out on all by yourself!

Anti "Happy Holidays"

Apparently, I'm not alone in my feelings. A recent poll released by Gallup states:

Most Americans think the trend toward saying "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" at Christmastime is a change for the worse. But is it therefore a bad marketing decision for retailers to greet customers this way? Gallup finds some evidence of a consumer backlash, as 32% of Americans say it bothers them when stores use "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" in their displays at this time of year instead of "Merry Christmas."

While the generic greetings bother a third of the public, there is almost unanimous public tolerance for the phrase, "Merry Christmas." Only 3% of national adults say it bothers them when stores specifically refer to the Christian holiday in their displays, rather than "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings."

(These results are based on telephone interviews with a randomly selected national sample of 1,013 adults, aged 18 and older, conducted Dec. 5-8, 2005.)

I am not sure if you need a subscription to Gallup to read the rest of the article, but I'm including the link anyway.

"Merry Christmas" is the new rebellion

After working in a secular environment for years, being conditioned to never say "Merry Christmas" for fear of offending someone, it has been weird to work in a Christian environment (like I do now) where the reverse is true. People fully embrace "Merry Christmas" and some people are offended if you don't use it in giving your December well-wishes.

Since I've always preferred "Merry Christmas" anyway ("Happy Holidays" is fine, but "Season's Greetings" sounds like a phrase that was created in 1928, and seems so old-timey and irrelevant now), I've been happy with this transition back to my original holiday greeting, but I still catch myself saying "Merry Christmas" guiltily, as if I'm getting away with something by being non-generic.

Maybe I've sunk into a false sense of security, living in a place with a higher Christian population than I'm accustomed to. It seems like you're less likely to get busted using "Merry Christmas" in Nashville than up in Michigan. I feel like "Merry Christmas" is just more the norm down here. I noticed last December when I visited this area that everyone said "Merry Christmas" to me (as opposed to "Happy Holidays") -- waitresses at Shoney's, clerks at the mall, sweet gentlemen holding the door open for me, even the skycap at the airport. I even had a life-long Nashville resident tell me that he had never thought of a Christmas Tree as a Christian symbol (I was talking about the difficulty of buying "holiday" cards for a secular corporation and how anything that had any type of Christmas ornament, symbol, or reference was taboo).

And I guess that I just don't buy the idea anymore that people are so easily offended by "Merry Christmas." I know I wouldn't be offended by someone wishing me a "Happy Chanukkah" or "Happy Kwanza" or "Happy Winter Solstice" or "Happy Boxing Day" or "Merry Festivus"! Seriously, try me!

Boring Boredey Bored

The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.
--Phillip Lopate

Although I do not consider myself someone who has a hard time relaxing (based on all the weekends where it seems I don't do much of anything), the Friday after Thanksgiving was one of the most boring days in recent history.

Les was working and I was home all by myself, with nothing at all to do for the day except "whatever I wanted to do." You would think this would be a fantastic thing; it certainly seemed to be something that I had been longing for for months. Yet, after sleeping in as late as I could, I found myself pacing nervously around the apartment. What to do? What to do?

Chores were out -- this was supposed to be a vacation day, a "day off," after all.

Shopping was out -- one of the worst days of the year to do it, and I'm not a big shopper anyway.

And I felt too distracted to concentrate on a book or a movie.

Too many options, and I couldn't select just one!

In the end, I watched a movie (Saved) that we had had out from Blockbuster's mail order for four months, just so I could check "Watch Saved and send it back to Blockbuster" off of my To Do List (I knew I could slip a chore in there somehow!). I went and got the mail. I paged through a magazine (backwards, the way I always look at magazines). I took a shower.

At last, Les came home around 4:30 and I could cook dinner and do whatever he wanted to do. You'd think that after six months living by myself in TN, I could thoroughly entertain myself for six hours one Friday. Guess not.

What happens if . . .

Here's a photo of what might happen if you try to scootchy-scootch in front of me!
Consider yourself warned!