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Archive for the ‘humor’ Category

The short-end of being accidently fashionable

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, gym, humor, Personal, shorts, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on March 14, 2011| 1 Comment »

Once every decade or two, something I am into becomes popular. The situation is rare enough that I am still recovering from my chagrin when the local TV news used The Pogues’ “Fairy Tale of New York” as background music to an account of a dinner for the homeless a decade ago and from everyone knowing the plot of The Lord of the Rings when the movies were released. But by far my most frequent moments of unintentional trendiness and the resulting breakup of my routine revolve around exercise.

Since I’m built like a cement mixer, you might not realize by looking at me, but I have been a regular exerciser all my teen and adult years. Any day in which I don’t burn a minimum of seven hundred calories running, swimming, or cycling, I count as a slack day. I’m the sort you see doggedly jogging in a snow storm, or being unfashionably sweaty at one end of the gym. I consider exercise a necessary balance to all my hours at the keyboard, and a form of meditation besides. Unlike many people, I like exercise, and the heavier the better.

The trouble is, people are always discovering exercise. That means that the shoes I need periodically sprout velcro buckles and thick tread more suitable for a tank, or blossom in outlandish colors – anything so that their prices can double. Functional sweat tops disappear, replaced by tailored suits made of synthetic fibers that cause me to break out in a rash, and the gyms are always crowded in the first few weeks of January until the newcomers find the courage to break their New Year’s resolutions (much to everybody’s relief).

All this is superfluously annoying when all I want is ankle and arch support in my shoes, natural fabric, logo-free gear and a quiet place to sweat. But, this time, the fashionistas have gone too far. Noticing the popularity of basketball among males under twenty five, the sports stores have decided that all they need to carry for any sort of exercise is basketball shorts – baggy shorts that fall to the knees, and that generally amount to free advertising for an American team.

The least of my problems with the stores only selling basketball shorts is that I look ridiculous in them. Most of my height is in my torso, and I’m considerably below two meters tall. Wearing basketball shorts, I only look like a kid who’s growing too quickly for the length of his trousers. That’s how I feel, too.

But what I really object to is that basketball shorts are completely unsuited to strenuous exercise (and, for all I know, that includes basketball). They might be barely tolerable for the genteel weight-lifting that most of the men at the gym do, in which ten reps are followed by twenty minutes of conversation. But on the pavement or on the saddle of a bike, nothing is more unsuitable.

When I’m working up a sweat, I want my legs as unencumbered as possible. I don’t want them tangling in folds of loose fabric that bind them and prevent them moving freely. That is almost as bad as wearing sweat pants while doing strenuous exercise.

Yet because of the whims of fashion, a day is fast approaching when I won’t have the simple clothes I need to continue doing what I’ve done for decades. Within a few months, unless I abandon exercising altogether, I’ll be forced to choose between three unsatisfactory alternatives: wearing what’s easily available and feeling confined and uncomfortable; shortening a pair of shorts with one of my unsatisfactory hemming jobs (assuming that the synthetic fabric allows me to do that), or else ordering pairs of rugby shorts online and enduring the chafing of the thick material.

Probably, I’ll end up ordering the rugby shorts. But I resent having to make the extra effort simply because trendiness has touched down like a tornado in an area that I happen to frequent. My best hope is that it will move on before my present crop of shorts falls apart, and I can go back to being unfashionable for another ten years.

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Parrot wars

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, nandays, Parrots, Personal, territorial dispute, tagged , , , , , , , on November 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

For five years, my living room has been a war zone, and I have been cast in a role midway between a UN observer and one of the gods of Olympus in the Iliad, mostly watching, but intervening now and then to spirit one hero or the other out of danger.

The combatants are two male Nandays, a type of small South American parrot. One side of the room houses Ning, an elderly bird little slowed by his age, and his mate Sophie. Ning was the first parrot we bought, and is under the impression that the fact that he was here first makes him top parrot (actually, he’s only top male, but Sophie allows him his illusions).

On the other side of the room is Beau, a much younger male, who is also much bigger than Ning. Having youth and size on his side, Beau is of the firm belief that he should be dominant male, and cannot understand why Ning should have a different opinion and not wish to abdicate in the face of the inevitable.

The household also has a third male, Ram, who lives in the kitchen. But because he has a damaged foot and leans forward in compensation so that he looks smaller than he is, he is not an active participant in the territorial dispute. Probably, too, his tendency to make baby sounds helps prevent the others from seeing him as a rival. At any rate, his sole role in the dispute is to bolster Beau’s sense of security; Beau tolerates Ram in his territory apparently on the basis of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

From close observation, I could paint the boundary between Ning’s and Beau’s territories with an accuracy measured in millimeters. Should either bird cross the line, the other will dive-bomb or make other threatening gestures. Should one bird come close to the line when I carry him, he will quickly fly back from it.

Usually, the two combatants are content to scream abuse from their side of the living room. However, trouble arises because Ning is the master of psychological warfare. Like a kid in the back seat of the car who is told not to cross the invisible boundary that separates him or her from a sibling, Ning routinely sits a few centimeters over the line, daring Beau to respond.

In the past, Ning has been quite safe making this provocative gesture because the position of a tea trolley and some of Trish’s craft supplies ensured that the angle was too steep for Beau to dive bomb him. Ning would sit, just over the line, preening and making contented noises, while Beau screamed hysterically, unable to retaliate (Nandays being great cowards, whose wars consist almost entirely of feints and bluffs and almost never lead to actual contact between rivals). I don’t think I’m anthropomorphizing to say that Beau looks and sounds distinctly baffled. How could a young stud like him with everything in his favor be continually bested by that old fart across the way?:

However, after Trish died, my tidying altered the balance of power. Because of my alterations, Beau could now dive bomb Ning in the middle of the floor. During an attack, Ning shows a studied nonchalance, but his new vulnerability clearly disconcerted him, because he stopped sitting just over the boundary.

For a while, I felt guilty that my actions had overturned the established norm. Poor Ning, I thought, would have to spend his declining years subordinated to Beau in the place where he had been lord and master for so many years.

Then I noticed that Ning had discovered a new strategy. Instead of swaggering out into the middle of the floor, he now creeps along under the dining room table until he is right beneath Beau’s cage, where the angle is too steep for dive bombing. All on his own, Ning has evolved a new way to frustrate his rival.

I feel sorry for Beau, but the situation reminds me of that T-shirt that you used to see: “Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.” Ning has the psychological edge on Beau, and knows how to keep it, so all of Beau’s other advantages are meaningless. Beau considers the situation grossly unfair (if I am any judge of his attitude),but doesn’t know how to counter Ning’s taunting behavior. For his part, Ning, to judge from puffed-up feathers and happy chortling, enjoys keeping Beau off balance and upset. And why not? With next to no physical effort and no fighting, Ning manages to persuade Beau that he is still dominant male, and has no intention of giving up.

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How I use Facebook

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 18, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Like many people in the free software community, I feel vaguely guilty about using Facebook. Microsoft’s investment in the site makes me queasy, and Facebook’s privacy problems raise issues that are close to my heart. Moreover, I have no interest in games like Farmville or Mafia Wars (or, rather, I can guess all too clearly how obsessive I would be once I started), or sending virtual gifts, and I long ago exhausted the pleasure of taking meaningless quizzes. Instead, I use Facebook more as an address book with a chat channel attached to it.

You can see how I use the site through the breakdown of my list of friends. As I scan the list, most people on it fall clearly into one of eleven categories, although a few could be placed in several categories:

According to my quick tally:

  • 15% are First Nations artists, or relatives or spouses of first nations artists. The main reason I friended the artists was to see the photos of their work that they post, although some have become personal friends as well.
  • 5% are fellow writers and journalists in the computer field – usually ones who write largely about free and open source software.
  • 5% are editors, about two-thirds of which I interact with regularly and submit articles to at least once per month.
  • 12% are subject matter experts. Although some are friends, the main advantage of being connected to them on Facebook is that when I need a quote or an explanation, I can hop on line and chat quickly with them. This is easy to do, because most are logged in to Facebook during regular business hours in North America.
  • 6% are business experts I’ve met and often interviewed while writing articles. On the whole, they tend not to be on Facebook often, but Facebook is another way to reach them when necessary.
  • 29% are either members of the free software community whose expertise I might need in a story or else professionals who work in marketing, communication, technical writing, public relations, or some other field that I have dabbled in.
  • 20% are people with whom I went to school. Most of these are very light Facebook users and not accustomed to chat, so my interaction with most of them is limited largely to occasional remarks about each other’s status.
  • 4% are people in high-tech with whom I have worked in the past.
  • Less than 1% are friends who have nothing to do with work or my art interests.
  • Less than 1% are actual family members.
  • 1 person is dead (and I can’t quite bring myself to remove him)

I’ve rounded the numbers, so the total does not add up to 100%.

Even so, this breakdown gives an accurate picture of how I use Facebook. Overwhelming, for me Facebook is a tool for business and for my major pastime of studying Northwest Coast Art. That sounds like I don’t use it for socializing, but that would be deceptive, since I consider many people in these categories friends.

Apparently, though, it’s not enough that I should feel guilty about using Facebook. Now, I need to feel guilty for not using it for completely mindless purposes as well.

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The days before I travel

Posted in anticipation, Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, travel, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 7, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Maybe early toilet training is to blame (when is it not?). But, for whatever reason, I am all but useless the day before I travel.

I’m not too bad in the morning. If I get an early start and apply self-discipline, I can do a few hours’ work, if I’m lucky. But by noon a restlessness sets in, and I want to up and traveling.

Since I can’t travel yet, distractions begin to tempt me. I check my mail with increasing frequency, and visit favorite sites more often than the frequency of their updates would warrant. I wander downstairs to check for the mail. I stop to snack. I wipe a corner of the counter, and gather up the newspapers.

As these distractions multiply in frequency and number, they start turning into packing almost imperceptibly. I begin putting small items aside to pack. I get out my clothes. Then, without any conscious volition, I drag out my bags and start packing.

Never mind that if I iron and fold my clothes now, they will be too rumpled to wear on the trip. A nervous excitement has gripped me, and I’m no longer in control. I pack my socks and underwear and toiletries. I choose books to read on the trip, always putting at least one with my carry-on luggage. Even after I think I’ve finished, I keep remembering small items that I need or at least would prefer to have with me. Often, I have half a dozen after-thoughts.

When I’m done, I may still have fourteen hours or more before I leave. But I don’t care – so far as I’m concerned, I’m already on vacation. I resume my restless prowling around the townhouse, picking up books and putting them down, and starting music and stopping it after a few minutes. I may even nap – and why not? It’s not as though I’m going to manage more than a few hours’ restless sleep that night.

Possibly, I would be calmer if I traveled more often. I don’t think so, though. Even a short, mundane trip, like tomorrow’s to Calgary, leaves me crippled by anticipation. Place the blame on an over-active imagination, work that leaves me under-socialized, or early toilet training, as I said.

I certainly can’t be blamed. I’m traveling tomorrow.

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Walking is wasted on the able-bodied

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, walking, tagged , , , , , on March 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

As I write, I am several days into resuming my normal exercise routine. I’ve spent the last two weeks sidelined with a knee injury – not the first time this has happened, and probably not the last, although I hope it is. But as I shake myself clear of my Ibuprofen-induced haze, as always I am aware of an overwhelming truth:

Walking is wasted on the able-bodied.

Seriously, there is nothing like losing an ability to make you appreciate it. When you have a leg injury, your entire perspective changes. Whether you’re limping along unaided or using a cane or crutches, suddenly distances seem to increase, because you need more time to travel them. Public transit, you realize, is far less convenient than you once believed, due to the distances between stops or the need to walk up to the platform. Even going from the living room to the bed room can seem a long journey that needs to be planned; if you forget something, you are not exactly going to nip back to pick it up.

When your legs aren’t functioning properly, you feel more vulnerable, too. The vulnerability is especially strong in public, where, if you must be a cripple, you hope you can at least appear to be a sturdy one who is capable of beating wallet-snatchers off with your cane. Yet, in the safety of your home, the vulnerability is only marginally less, if, like me, you hate being dependent on someone. A few days of limping, and you can work up a fine cloud of depression at your increased helplessness.

You start to wonder if what you’re experiencing is a foretaste of old age. If so, you conclude, you are probably not strong enough to endure the experience. The line “Hope I die before I get old” becomes, not a line from the heyday of The Who, but a completely reasonable point of view.
After a few days, you have to keep reminding yourself that your condition is not permanent. A couple of weeks, and civility is stripped from you like the veneer of civilization that it is. If you can’t impress through physical activity, your hind brain insists, then you will impress through crankiness instead.

Then, just as despair threatens to win, you wake up one morning feeling strangely lightened. You are still not walking well, so you take a while to realize that the chronic pain that you’ve been living with is faded to a dull ache. Suddenly, you have something to anticipate.

A day or two later, and you are walking on your own again. You are taking short, unbalanced steps like an upright hippo probably would, but at least you are walking. Ten minutes of being upright tires you like sprinting a couple of kilometers, but at least you can do it.

When you stand, you can feel the muscles in calves and thighs shifting to propel you upright and keep your balance. From the way you hurl yourself upright, you realize that most of the effort in standing has been made recently by your arms, and that you can transfer the effort back to your legs again.

Start to walk, and you wonder how you ever took for granted the interplay of muscles that make you a bipedal ape. You can feel muscles that generally you are hardly aware of contracting and pulling against one another. The physical awareness is such a joy singing through you that it feels a like a brief return to your teens. The fact that bipedalism is the result of endless evolutionary compromises only makes it seem all the more wonderful.

Soon enough, you start to forget the marvel called walking. It becomes automatic again, and you stop thinking about it. But for the first day or two after you return to walking, you find yourself looking at all the people around you who are oblivious to this simple delight and thinking, “You ungrateful bastards. You need a week on crutches to appreciate what you have.”

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Getting a haircut

Posted in Bruce Byfield, haircut, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »

You can tell I took the day off today; I got a haircut. I take time off so seldom that, when I do, it’s usually long past time for me to do something about my hair. There comes a time when I have to ignore my small surge of apprehension about the task and just get it done.

Part of the apprehension comes from childhood haircuts. In elementary school, the barber I was taken to was a Glaswegian. In retrospect, I believe he meant well, but his roaring, incomprehensible accent frightened me. I could never understand what he was saying, and often had to guess, which made our conversations strained at the best of times.

Even worse, he knew one style: a buzz cut. As I grew older, I became deeply ashamed of such haircuts. I would wear a hood whenever the weather made it natural, and often when it didn’t.

Then, when the Glaswegian retired and I had to go to another barber, I started a slow campaign to increase the length of my hair a bit with each haircut. By Grade Nine, I had a decent length of hair, but it took many long years before I could not spend my time n the barber chair glaring balefully at the stylist in the mirror and convinced that I would be shorn to the scalp if I let my attention wander for a second.

These days, that fear is quietened to a rumble, like the ones you occasionally hear from dormant volcanoes. But, unfortunately, it’s been replaced by a morbid fascination that makes me almost as uneasy in its own way.

You see, I go so long between haircuts that the entire shape of my face changes with the length and thickness of my hair. By the time I get a cut, my hair makes my face look round and boyish.

Then, bit by bit, as the hair falls to the floor (and it’s a good thing that I’m not charged by the kilo, let me tell you), someone else emerges – a stranger with a leaner face and a higher hairline. He seems harder and older and more athletic than the person I saw in the mirror that morning, and I’m not sure that I approve of him or even like him.

In fact, as I see him emerge from under my hair, the strangest sense of dislocation sweeps over me. It is as though an alternate world version of myself is surfacing in the mirror, waiting to take me over.

As this feeling increases, I continue chatting and joking as though nothing is wrong. But I think the tension in my body betrays me, and I always slide off the chair and walk towards the cash desk with a sense of relief that I have survived the ordeal without losing my soul. And, as I leave the shop, for the next few hours, I am always glancing at my reflection, as though expecting to see the invader still there.

Of course, this dislocation would never happen if I had my hair cut more regularly. But I associate it so much with having my hair cut, I never manage to get on a shorter schedule. On some level, I don’t care to give that other self in the mirror more chances than necessary to take me over.

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How I’m going to die

Posted in Bruce Byfield, death, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »

A recent Facebook app offers to tell you how you’re going to die. Unfortunately, it is nothing more than a fortune-telling application. That seems a wasted opportunity to me – not that I expect any predictive accuracy from such a thing, but more personalized answers might tell you a bit about your character and habits.

So, in that spirit, here’s a list of the ways I might expect to die:

I will die at 64, after going on a long jog on a cold and rainy day in late October. Like I always do, I failed to notice that summer was ending and I went out dressed in only shorts and a singlet. Needless to say, I was soaked and shivering when I returned three hours later, but I no longer had the physical strength to fight the fever that sent me immediately to bed.

I will die at 78, senile and in a nursing home. The nurses thought I was cheerful enough, even if I talked too fast and was ungodly energetic for a person of my age.

I will die at 92 while on an exercise bike. I might have been all right if I had stopped when the first pains hit my chest, or called the gym attendant over. But I always was stubborn about finishing my intervals when exercising, and I still had another ninety seconds to go.

At 57, I am out for a late night walk when a couple of teenagers pull a gun on me and demand my money. Unfortunately, I am not carrying any money, and my determination not to be a victim makes me try to stand up to them verbally. The trouble is, what I really needed to do was to stand up to them physically and keep my mouth shut.

I will die at 81, of no particular cause except that every organ in my body is worn out. Since I maintained a remarkably heavy exercise program for a person of my age, I was deeply asleep at the time, dreaming of high school, and felt no pain whatsoever.

I will die in bed at the age of 109. I was smiling, because I had filled the promise I had made to myself when I was 9 of living to see Canada’s bi-centennial. Of course, there wasn’t much left of the environment by then, and the country had long ago proved ungovernable, but I was pleased all the same.

I will die at 61, choking on a piece of meat that I tried to swallow too fast. My last thought is how Earl Godwin died the same way in 11th century England, and of how at least nobody can draw a moral from my death the way they tried to do with his.

When I am 86, I am found at the keyboard of my computer, finishing my sixth novel. I was very late in publishing, but my small output of fiction enjoys minor cult status for a few decades before being forgotten then rediscovered a couple of centuries later.

I die at the age of 4,365 due to a clerical error that delayed the transfer of my consciousness to its newest artificial brain. It would have been my 134th transfer, counting clone bodies and temporary holding tanks. My last words are, “What’s next?”

Okay, maybe I am whistling past the graveyard with these scenarios. The truth is, like many people, I don’t really believe in a world without me. So, regardless of whether Death is Terry Pratchett’s skeleton or Neil Gaiman’s Goth chick, I’m going to be surprised when we finally meet.

But, should Death try to schedule an appointment, I plan on being busy with something else, no matter how old I am. And that, I think, tells more about me than any scenario I can imagine.

(With an acknowledgement to Harlan Ellison)

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Buying appliances

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, consumerism, Future Shop, Home Depot, humor, Personal, Sears, Trail Appliances, Uncategorized, Vancouver, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Our washing machine started leaking this week, like a puppy relieving itself in a corner, so we’ve been spending our spare time looking for a new washer/dryer combo. It’s a good thing that appliances last over a decade, because it will take at least that long to ease the horror from my mind. Part of the problem is that we have very precise space constraints, but most of the problem is the way that appliances are sold.

Most of the time when I’m looking for hardware, it’s a computer or a computer peripheral. Because the competition is so fierce for computer hardware, manufacturers and vendors document everything about what they’re selling on their websites. Speed, physical dimensions – you name the spec, and you can find it on every site. Consequently, you can spend a hour or two in front of your computer and arrive at the store armed with an exact idea of what you want, and get out fast.

By contrast, household appliances aren’t sold that way. For several local appliance vendors, having a web site is simply a means of announcing their existence. In one case, their site is a single page. In another, you can can learn what brands they carry, but not which models or what the prices might be, because most of their site is simply links to manufacturers. Another one doesn’t bother to give dimensions. None of them update their site with any regularity.

Consequently, if you are trying to be a conscientious consumer and shop around, you have to do a lot of old-fashioned legwork. I’m no stranger to exercise, so ordinarily I wouldn’t mind, except that the trudging around was in the service of a necessity that doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Frankly, reading washing machine stats and peering inside their drums is so mind-numbingly boring that a mentally sub-normal yak would be bored by it. Personally, boredom set in after the second or third examination – and we’ve looked at dozens in the last few days.

Then, just to make matters worse, the sellers of appliances seem strangely reluctant to take your money. Our first stop had only a couple of models on the floor. We could ask about other models, we were told, but how would we know about them if we didn’t see them? We would have to jot down the brands the store sold, then go home and do research.

Our next stop was the Sears store in Metrotown, a complex that has long had my vote for the most hideous shopping complex in the whole of Greater Vancouver. I can’t confirm that minotaurs roam its corridors freely, but if I hear any bull-like rumblings as I pass the service hallways, I’m not investigating.

But the Sears store has its own special horror, because its staff is apparently competing with each other for the fewest times they have to talk to a customer. You can see the staff scuttling low down the aisles a few over, but, by the time you learn how to get one’s attention, you would have the experience to track big game anywhere in the world. About the only thing you can say for this attitude is that it is marginally better than having the clerks dance attendance on you with unrequested information.

At Future Shop, the pricse were good, but each time we were ready to buy, we were told that the warehouse was currently out of stock and was likely to remain so for the next couple of weeks. I strongly suspect (although I cannot prove) that this was a variation on bait and switch. To be fair, we did receive a phone call saying that one of our choices was available, but, by then we had already bought.

The next stop was Home Depot. I realize that the company has built its business on do-it-yourselfers, but the staff didn’t seem to understand that plumbing is a bit beyond the average home owner. The company didn’t even a list of suggested contractors that customers might hire to get their new appliances connected. Nor did the staff see anything ridiculous in the attitude.

Finally, with madness nibbling at our brains like a glimpse of Cthulhu and the Elder Gods, we stumbled into Trail Appliances in Coquitlam. There, we were left to browse for a few minutes before an employee approached us. He was helpful, even giving us some advice we probably wouldn’t have thought of. And, wonder of wonders, the floor model that was our first choice was actually available. Within minutes, we were paying and arranging delivery.

What the other companies didn’t seem to understand was that washers and dryers are not the most glamorous of appliances. While some conscientious but anal souls might conscientiously remember to have them serviced every year, I suspect that many people are like us, and don’t think of them until they need servicing or replacement.

The result is that, when people go shopping for washers and dryers, they are usually in urgent need of a replacement. They can’t afford to spin out the process, because, if they do, they will have to find a laundromat or an obliging neighbor who will let them have the use of the machine.

What Trail Appliances offered was simply efficient service. The result? We’ve decided to replace our fridge at the same time, since it is running on borrowed time, and we’ll do so by returning to Trail again. Trail’s website is no better than any of the others – in fact it is one of the worst ones – but at least its staff understands how to treat customers. So, naturally enough, it gets our other business, too.

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Dragon crossing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, campus, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, university, tagged , , , , , , on July 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Looking back, I sometimes think that my youth was not nearly as mis-spent as it should have been. A case in point: the night I helped to erect the dragon crossing.

The idea began as a joke at the university Medieval Club. Newly moved out from my parents’ house and feeling I had missed out on the socializing at university because I was too busy commuting, I had joined as soon as the fall semester began. Loosely connected to the Society for Creative Anachronism, the club centered largely on dressing up and some moderate drinking in the pub. Punk or new age, it definitely wasn’t – but we enjoyed the thought of what we called “freaking the mundanes” by wearing costumes and doing the odd bit of impromptu theater. Probably, we weren’t nearly the novelty we imagined.

Anyway, we were talking one night about how to publicize the club more. The ideas kept getting sillier as the night wore on. Vaguely remembering something I had seen a few years before, I proposed the idea of a dragon crossing: a sign on the university ring road, with some spray-painted giant tracks going across the road nearby.

The idea wouldn’t do much for publicity, since we couldn’t admit what we had done without risking the wrath of the campus authorities. At best, it would give people a chuckle and get them thinking of things medieval.

At least, so we hoped and so we began preparations. One Club member, who had worked as a flagger on a road crew the previous summer, produced a Yield sign that she had somehow acquired (we didn’t ask how). I produced some giant stencils of foot prints, and someone else some paint.

In theory, we had everything planned. We would gather at the pub for some liquid courage, and wait until closing time, when fewer cars would be on the road to spoil our handiwork. One person would wait up the road and act as a spotter, in case campus security found us. A couple of others would dig a hole for the sign while others painted the foot prints across the road.
In practice, things went with less than Mission Impossible ease.

After the pub closed, we drove to the park next to the campus, and climbed the hill to the ring road. We even thought to turn the cars around so we could make a quick getaway if necessary (we were so proud of that detail).

The hill was steeper and, in the dark, more crowded with trees than we remembered, but with a few stumbles and moments of disorientation, we reached the road. For a long time, that was the last thing that went right.

Crouched in the scrub alder, we waited for the cars to thin out. There were far more than we expected. When we finally psyched up enough to start work, we could barely get a few minutes of work before the spotter called out a warning and we scattered like rabbits with pounding hearts.

A traffic sign, we soon found, needed a far deeper whole than any of us imagined. It also needed packed earth around the base of the post if it wasn’t going to sag.

As for the footprint templates, they would have worked a lot better if anyone had remembered to bring masking tape to hold them in position. It didn’t help, either, that cars kept running over our work before it had dried.

Eventually, the inevitable happened, and campus security surprised us by coming on us from the direction in which we had no spotter. We scattered, quickly getting lost – only to find that one of us had kept her head and, knowing the campus cop, assured him that we weren’t doing anything really destructive. But, good middle-class kids that we were, we were terrified, and called it a night.

A few days later, in the cold light of day, our efforts did not match our vision. The Dragon Crossing sign looked distinctly amateurish, the post it was on had a definite tilt to it, and the tracks were smeared with tire marks. But they made the campus paper, leaving us in paroxysms of regret at the thought that we couldn’t claim credit.

Still, someone must have noticed our efforts. A few years later, the science fiction club produced their own Mutant Crossing, with green glow-in-the-dark footprints. “Immortality is ours,” those of us still on campus murmured. But the truth is that all of us had been scared straight by our own daring, and almost getting caught, and would never again do anything wilder than wear medieval costumes on campus.

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The society around the pool

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, swimming, swimming pool, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »

One of the few services we receive for the maintenance fees in our townhouse complex is a swimming pool that opens a third of the year (I’m excluding the landscaping service that cuts the grass every week and consistently destroys the beauty of the cherry blossoms by pruning the trees down to nothing a month before they bloom). For me, it is basically a lap pool where I can enjoy an alternative exercise, but I am clearly in the minority. For almost every one else, it is place to socialize more than swim.

I don’t know why people feel compelled to gather at the pools. In theory, they could lounge on deck chairs and booze and smoke and suntan anywhere. Yet, somehow that wouldn’t be the same for them. If they are going to laze, apparently they need a body of water to laze beside. Somehow, setting up on the lawn or under a tree wouldn’t be right.

One thing is clear: They don’t need the pool to swim. On hot days, the pool is full of children and their aquatic toys, which probably outweigh the children by a ratio of two to one. Often, especially in the first days after school is out, teenagers up to the age of sixteen or so, will swim too – occasionally, clusters of boys and girls nervously flirting with each other, but, more often, all-boy gangs who play endless games of Marco Polo and never tire of jumping off the practically springless diving board.

But adults – almost never. You sometimes see a parent with a newborn, or standing in the pool near their children. Very occasionally, the local drones might stand up to their waists and toss a tennis ball back and forth. But none of these activities last for very long, and most of the time they don’t involve swimming, either. Most adults don’t even get that wet.

Yet every single one of them insists that their children learn to swim. I don’t know why – with the example they are giving, their kids will never come near the water. Presumably, the hope is that if the kids ever fall into a disused well and Lassie isn’t around to get help, then half-forgotten instincts will kick in and they will be able to tread water long enough to be rescued.

The real reason, I suspect, that the parents never swim is that going to the pool is a part-holiday from minding their children. Just as parents used to park their kids in front of the children’s section in the book store where I used to work (then go off to shop and complain if the staff didn’t watch their little darlings), the pool is a place where they can relax their guards. If their children are screaming from a gnash in their shin, or are systematically drowning a sibling – well, someone else will handle it, surely. Meanwhile, they can read their book or make calls on their cell phones or discuss sports (if they’re men) or diets and TV shows (if they’re women) in lazy, bored voices. Until it’s time for dinner, their children become strangers at the pool, and someone else’s problem.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to swim my lengths, and not making much headway against the sea of tots. When they’re under six, they don’t have much idea of sharing, so the hope that they might leave me enough space to swim if I steer clear of their play area rarely gets realized. They dash into my path, breaking my rhythm. If I change positions in the pool, after a length or two they are back in my path. I sometimes think that I swim twice as far as I actually credit myself with – and, of course, there’s no use appealing to the parents, who have disowned their kids for the duration.

The lack of courtesy used to infuriate me, especially since all I want is a quiet bit of exercise after a day of work. Nowadays, though, I try to be more philosophical. Doing my steady breast stroke, I mentally shake my head about the foibles of pool society, and look forward to the next rain day, when I’ll have the pool to myself.

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