I was listening to a podcast on awkwardness (Sketchplanations: “The Awkwardness Vortex”) and one of the examples they cited was the situation where two people are walking towards each other and each steps the same direction to get out of the way, then each corrects (in the same direction), etc. and you end up doing this weird little hall dance and (often) might end up anxious/feeling like you’ve missed the cues, etc.
There is at least one not-dissimilar (to me, anyway) situation where, because of a social convention, the result is not awkward, and in fact, sorta fun.
You know the thing where two people say the exact same thing at the same time, and whoever’s quicker says “jinx” (or “1,2,3,4,5 jinx” as I learned it) and [“You owe me a Coke,” or “You can’t speak until I say your name to release you”, or it’s just funny and we laugh]?
That (at least in my experience) ends up being far from being awkward — it’s cute and funny and you might even think how cool it is that you and whoever-it-is are on the same wavelength.
So, here’s my proposal: when that meet-face-to-face-and-can’t-get-out-of-each-others’-way thing happens, both people try to say “meety-meety” before the other can. Whoever says “meety-meety” *last* (the Slow Meety) must freeze in place, exactly as they are, while the Quick Meety gets to take whichever path they want around the slower one.
At this point, the Quick Meety should make the most of it with some form of ridiculousness: good choices might be using a walk from The Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks or by turning around and walking the next couple of feet backwards (so they’re facing the same direction as the slower Meety, or they can skip in a circle around Slow Meety, or whatever. (Slow Meety can’t move, remember, so they have to just stand there trying not to laugh).
Once Quick Meety is past the junction, the game is over and *hopefully* neither person is awkward and both are laughing.
The longer I own and love a thing, the more its initial cost is amortized. When I feel the thing has more than paid for itself, I often say “this [whatever] owes me no money!”
This afternoon (in a rare, unorganized, and somewhat peripatetic fit of cleaning), I decided the leather sofa needed feeding (was going to say that it “needs the lotion,” but that is super creepy), and once I’d well-oiled the sofa I figured I might as well use the still-damp cloth to feed my leather jacket.
That got me thinking about why — and when — I’d gotten the jacket in the first place. It had to have been around 1999-2000ish, when I went to San Francisco to see Larry (who had driven down from Portland, where he lived). After he picked me up, I wanted to go immediately to FLAX Art & Design (cannot resist an art store), and (stupidly) I’d left my suitcase and backpack in his truck (either in the bed, which would have been dumb, or in the unlocked truck, which would have been just about as dumb, honestly). In said suitcase I had (amongst other things) a leather jacket, a necessary layer for coolish San Francisco evenings.
(In case that wasn’t enough foreshadowing) Larry’s truck did get broken into and my suitcase and backpack were stolen while I was looking at pens. Boo.
We were staying near Chinatown, so that evening we wandered up Grant. Upon seeing a leather store, I decided to see if there might be something inexpensive that I could make work. Much to my delight, there was! A black leather jacket in an XXL that would have fit me perfectly if my arms had been about 6″ longer than they were (/are. My arms haven’t grown since then.)
Cheap too! It was $35 or $40 because of the big (probably permanent) “Going Out of Business Sale,” and I figured I could just turn under the sleeves for the rest of the vacation so it became mine (and glad I was to have it, as the nights were indeed chilly).
When I got home, I took the jacket to my tailor (Lee’s in Durham), who worked miracles on the regular for me, as nothing off the rack ever fit me correctly.
And work a miracle she did, by cutting the sleeves to the right length and turning the excess inside out and making a cuff! The one issue is that she still needed a small amount of black leather to go *inside* the sleeves so that the lining didn’t poke out from the sleeve bottom.
As it turned out, a gentleman had brought her some leather pants to hem and told her that she could keep the scraps, which my tailor cleverly turned into the 2″ of sleeve lining she needed. You’d think the coat had originally come with cuffs wouldn’t you?
For comparison, here (someone else’s version of the same jacket, albeit in a smaller size), unaltered:
So, yeah, I’ve had my $50 leather jacket (including the cost of the tailoring — she didn’t even charge me for the leather!) for a quarter of a century. And the jacket?
It’s sort of magic. I’ve taken it on most major trips I’ve taken (when is a leather jacket not perfect for travel?) and worn it nearly every chilly fall day. It still looks fantastic (IMHO) and (somehow, miraculously) has been flattering on my at every weight from 125 pounds to 200.
Floof: Pomeranian, American Eskimo, Shar-Pei, Havanese, Keeshsond, Coton de Tulear, Samoyed, Bichon Frise, Chow, Havanese, Pekingese, Old English Sheepdog
Tonight Adrian Likins and I went ice skating (this was probably my 10th time in total…and the first time in [umpteen] years)! Outdoors (this was a first for both of us)! I only went kaboom once (and it was a sideways kaboom, so no broken tailbones or noses, just a biggish bruise on my hand)!
They had turned the Red Hat Amphitheater into an outdoor rink. It was cute and festive and had Christmas lights and decorations and so forth (and hot cocoa and maybe boozy drinks(?), though I did not partake of either). It was fairly crowded, but not so much that most multi-person pileups couldn’t be avoided (thankfully).
The other skaters came in the following categories:
really good skaters who had dragged their partner out and were now dragging them around the rink (some of them were backskating. This is fancy.)
ice hockey players (seriously, you could just tell)
folks (both children and full-grown adults) who were using the “walkers” for ice skating. I tried one for one lap and decided that it was letting me do things “wrong” and was probably unhelpful in the long run. Also they were sort of scary: poor skaters going too fast with a big plastic snowplow-looking thing in front of them have great potential to knock down several people at once.
Northerners … didn’t necessarily have their own skates but were cruising around in the rentals like folks on a Sunday promenade through Central Park.
groups. Usually of four, sometimes of five or six. Unfortunately several of said groups decided that skating (very poorly and slowly) while holding hands (thereby blocking 1/2 the rink width) was a good idea. It wasn’t. It was just as annoying as the folks who walk however-many-abreast on city sidewalks and down airport concourses, but with an added element of danger for everyone around them. Luckily this did not last long (the fact that I was saying “danger danger danger” as I was coming up behind them and trying to figure out what to do — can’t go around ‘cause they are holding onto the railing at one end and stuck out all the way to the middle! Can’t stop because I haven’t learned that yet! — may or may not have helped to persuade them to cease.
folks like me and Adrian (though putting him in the same category as me seems unfair… as you can see from the videos, his roller skating skills definitely transferred)
Huge bonus: Thanks to the single-most helpful piece of ice-skating instruction1 I have ever received, I became Not Terrible! Not good, mind you (or even consistently competent), but enough improvement that random folks who knew what they were doing2 said “you’re doing great” as they passed. In all fairness this also may have been in response to what I am fairly sure was a constant stream of (intended to be) sotto voce “ayyyyyyyiiii” and “danger! Danger” and “so hard! So hard!” and “uh-oh. Uh-oh!” and “good girl, keep it up. Not dead yet,” etc., but I am choosing to see it as unasked-for compliments on my improving skills. (Seriously, I improved more in this single session than I had in any of the other times I’ve been skating – and none of those in the past 12 years!)
1 Also technically the only piece of ice skating instruction I have ever received, but who’s counting? I had wobbled to a wall and ended up next to the Very Nice Supervisor of the Thing. I think he said “Having fun?” and I said “Trying not to die.” He reassured me that falling on ice was less ouchy than falling on concrete (as you would if you were roller skating), and then asked me if I wanted to know “the trick.” (Always, BTW).
He told me to:
point one foot straight forwards
then put the other foot flat on the ice (*not* digging in your toe!) at a 65-ish degree angle with the back of the blade of one skate kinda near the back of the blade of the other
then push/slide the angled skate back, while keeping your weight on the front, gliding foot.
He also suggested doing just one side until I got the hang of that before adding the other (weight transfer is a bitch! [my opinion, not a quote], and wise advice indeed).
Between that and some random reel I caught within the past week or so (long before I found out this thing in Raleigh was happening) that explained that when you start to lose your balance think “hands to knees” to lower your center of mass (temptation is to flail and arch, which takes your feet out from under you) and a quick reread of “Things I have Learned About Roller Skating”, which reminded me that Your Feet Do Not Need To Hold Onto Your Skates: They Are Attached so I wasn’t trying to grab the skates with my toes, which *eliminated* the horrible arch-of-foot cramp that I get with roller skates and ski boots (this is a particularly amazing learning as the hard boots of ice skates and skis seem to exacerbate the cramping tendencies). Oh! And that post also reminded me to pre-moleskin my delicate-as-a-f^@&!$%-flower**-feet, so no blisters!!
2 (big clue: brought own skates. Second big clue: not flailing. Third big clue: *avoiding* rather than causing accidents — and sometimes even helping prevent a fall with a quick steadying hand thing!3
3 Adrian does this when we’re roller- or ice-skating. I won’t even know he’s there, but then a hand on the small of my back prevents me from landing on my posterior. I love that.
(If you’re wondering whether I wrote all ^^^^this down to help me remember it for next time…well, yeah.).
One thing that really delights me[1] is being “seen.”
When someone notices my little quirks, habits, mannerisms or things that make me happy and comments on them — or better yet, acts on them — it makes me feel special. In fact, it was one of the first things I found fascinating about Adrian: not long after we met he observed that I “do a thing” when I meet someone new, whereby I use a relatively consistent system (an “algorithm,” if you will) to figure out how the new person and I are connected. I knew I could nearly always find a connection, but I hadn’t realized that I had a method for doing so.
My definition of good exceptional service (at a restaurant, on a plane, at a hotel, etc.) is a combination of two things that (at first) may seem contradictory: it should be both unnoticeable and it should make me feel “seen.”
The example I always use for the unnoticable part was the casual bar/restaurant at my Dad’s club in Charlotte, where at lunch a basket of individually wrapped packages of crackers (melba toast, saltines, captain’s wafers) was served along with the meal. I love melba toast2 and would usually eat several packages3, yet not once do I remember seeing any of cracker detritus on the table — and that includes the (numerous) crumbs! They were all whisked away, silently and immediately, without a fuss (as it should be).
The other component of exceptional service happens when people whose job is ostensibly to perform a specific service (serve the food, check me into the hotel, ring up groceries, etc.) do more than that, and *see* me: an employee at a restaurant that, upon learning that I’ll buy cupcakes just to get the icing, *gives* me a tub of icing, or a random hospital employee who walks me to the elevators for parking when it’s clear that I’m not only lost, but also so directionally challenged that any verbal directions would be, uh, lost on me.
Back in August, Adrian and I had dinner at minibar, a molecular gastronomy restaurant owned by José Andrés (who you may also know as the founder of World Central Kitchen). The overall experience was delightful — even in early exchanges about dietary preferences4 I felt like they were *glad* to be making me happy.
The meal itself was stunning — 26 courses, each plated and served at once to all 12 guests (the restaurant does two seatings of 12 guests every night) along with a narrative about the dish. As is common with molecular gastronomy many of the dishes seemed to be one thing but were actually another entirely: the butterflies in the first image were actually made of beets!
Minibar is also known for its drinks and is next door to barmini, José Andrés’ molecular gastronomy-inspired craft cocktail bar; however, like many upscale cocktail bars these days, most of the cocktails are based on brown liquor5, which I’m not a huge fan of.
Ok, enough backstory — this is where things get spectacular. Each pair of guests had someone who was sort of like their concierge. I’m sure there’s a proper restaurant term for their role, but I don’t know what that is, so I’ll just tell you that ours was Rita, and she was fabulous. When the time came to take our drink order, I hesitated as I’d seen the ones listed and, though they looked interesting, they were, like barmini’s drinks, very brown-spirit based. I asked Rita if she’d mind if I told her what sorts of drinks I’m fond of and maybe they could surprise me? Rita seemed delighted by the challenge and asked what I liked, to which I replied “vodka-y and sweet.” After clarifying that fruity-sweet was my favorite sweet, Rita briefly vanished, only to return with a great big smile as a tray was brought out with my drink-to-be6…
My drink was vodka, mango juice, and a little vanilla whisked with liquid nitrogen until it made a sorbetto. The sorbetto was rolled into little canelles, which were placed into a coupe glass with a tiki pattern on the stem, then topped with cava.
Alongside the presentation was a wee tiki-styled vase containing a demitasse spoon, for stirring my drink as my sorbetto melted.
When Adrian tasted a sip, he asked if they’d sampled my DNA or something, as they’d nailed The Best Drink for Gina so thoroughly. The way Rita absolutely aced the drink order was both: (a) overall indicative of our experience at Minibar and (b) a great example of someone making me feel “seen.”
As it turned out, though, the most delightful bit was yet to come.
Yesterday I received a FedEx box, which contained the letter below7 and three packs of Peeps:
OH WOW. Mind absolutely blown. POOF!
Also note that she sent this letter with the peeps (meaning I hadn’t yet sent her my address), which also means she went to this site, followed the link to my store, and found my address there!
Ok, there are a lot of things that really delight me, but that’s also kinda delightful, right? :-). Feeling like I’ve been seen is definitely a consistent Gina-delighter, though. ↩︎
Though I never buy it. Note to self: look for melba toast at store. ↩︎
I feel I should add that it was a messy affair, as melba toast are crumbly, but to be honest, that is putting too much responsibility on the toasts. I am the crumb-maker, not the toasts. Accountability and all that. ↩︎
Wherein I explained my version of “too spicy” is Old El Paso mild salsa and was reassured it would be no trouble to modify the dishes so my face didn’t get burned off. (And it apparently wasn’t: nothing was “too spicy” for me. :-) ↩︎
Whisky, whiskey, bourbon, scotch, gin (which isn’t brown but often tastes of floor cleaner, so I lump it in there) ↩︎
This would have been a video save for the fact that my version of WordPress seems not to allow it. Harrumph. ↩︎
Or, “way more than you wanted to know about primates”
TIL:
When I first was exposed to taxonomy stuff (7th grade), monkeys had tails (and were the New World things) and apes didn’t (and were the Old World ones). They were sort of sister groups under the land of Primate, which also included humans (but we were, of course, special). All the lemurs and so forth were “prosimians” and/or “lesser primates” (if I remember correctly).
We don’t believe this anymore (Advances in SCIENCE!)
Now we believe that the land of Primate has is divided into:
Strepsirrhini — lemurs, galagos, and lorisids (Slow Loris – SQUEE!
Haplorhines — basically tarsiers (and I haven’t figured out why they got their own category), and
Simians — monkeys and “apes”2. The Simians are divided into two parvorders (“parvorder” is another thing that didn’t exist in the 7th grade) — see footnotes …the names of the two suborders are kinda cool!
Platyrrhini3 (New World monkeys) and
Catarrhini4, which consists of the family Cercopithecidae (Old World monkeys in the stricter sense) and the superfamily Hominoidea (apes – including humans!5).
All Catarrhini3 (including humans) lost the enzyme α-Galactosidase **that is present in all other mammal lineages** sometime after the split from platyrrhini.
The wikipedia page about α-Galactosidase was correct in its self-assessment: “This article may be too technical for most readers to understand.”
If someone can explain what exactly all the Catarrhines can’t do because of the missing enzyme, I’d be delighted (my gut says it’s why we don’t eat bamboo or trees and has something to do with cellulose being Not Food, but who knows?)
(But wait — one more impressive factoid!)
Somehow (somewhere) in these many wikipedia pages that I was reading I ran across the fact that one of the suborders of primates (Haplorrhini, which includes humans) has a non-functional version of L-Gulonolactone oxidase (GULO), which is an enzyme that somehow helps critters enzymatically synthesize Vitamin C. Turns out that in a parallel fashion some bats and all guinea pigs also lost their functioning GULO.
This is the bit where I internally tied together some previously unconnected info and was delighted with myself.
Turning to Adrian, I said: “Weird thing: guinea pigs also have the a non-functional version of the GULO enzyme that humans do. I wonder if guinea pigs get scurvy?”
Turning quickly to the Googs, I typed “do guinea get s…” and before even finishing my query I got my results: YES! Guinea pigs can and do get scurvy. I was delighted by this (not that guinea pigs can get scurvy, that’s sad, but that I remembered that Vit C deficiency causes scurvy, etc. etc.)
Break from the ever-evolving (see what I did there?) world of taxonomy for some Slow Loris action:
1 It’s not the reading. I like reading. But I like knowing even more, so I end up re-reading and flipping back between eleventy-three open tabs trying to cross-reference things to ensure I really understand them. Then I feel the need to share all my new, nifty info. Adrian is Deep In YouTube land with headphones on, so you’re the Lucky Winner of this newly won knowledge. 2 Platyrrhini = flat noses… nose holes (ok, nostrils) point out to the sides 3 from Ancient Greek katà = down; rhin = nose, Catarrhini = down nosed monkeys = nose holes point down. 4 Other distinguishing characteristics include that Catarrhines have flat nails and never have prehensile tails (tho they can have regular, non-prehensile tails, for, you know, decorative purposes). Also something about tubular ear bones and dentition. 5 But (according to Wikipedia: “Apes (collectively Hominoidea /hɒmɪˈnɔɪdi.ə/) are a clade of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (though they were more widespread in Africa, most of Asia, and Europe in prehistory), which together with its sister group Cercopithecidae form the catarrhine clade, cladistically making them monkeys.”)
My interpretation of this (which may very well be wrong, and if someone knows for sure, please correct me) is that on the basis of shared characteristics, apes are “monkeys” (/simians); however, in real world usage people still tend to say that Apes and Monkeys aren’t the same (and, well, people are Very Very Different, of course. ;-)
tl;dr:
People are monkeys
Everything I thought I knew about taxonomy is wrong
Wikipedia can be a Dangerous Place if it’s getting late and you’ve gotten curious
Adrian and I went to an event out in Holly Springs that promised hot air balloons and lasers, both things that I thoroughly approve of. There were roughly a zillion folks there and traffic control was…well… somewhat lacking. Thankfully I’d ponied up for the VIP parking, which means that most of our time was spent sitting in the car waiting to get to the lot rather than walking in the much-too-hot-for-Gina sun with the lawn chairs, camera, etc.
Two of the balloons were scary clowns (why?!!) and there were fewer than 10 balloons total, but it was kinda cool when they took turns lighting up (“flaring”). (Trivia: Adrian did some research and discovered that the fuel they use for the night display is actually different than the normal fuel they use for going up!up!)
Not long after we started dating, Adrian and I went to the balloon festival in Statesville, which is HUGE (and we took a balloon ride too!), so I have to admit that I had pretty high expectations.
Once the lasers started, though, things got more interesting. I’d brought my tripod and an 18-300 lens, so I started messing around with some longer exposures. I am pleased with the results:
tl;dr: terribly made product; worse customer experience
Ed note: This is the review I attempted to post (three times!) on their website at https://weareplufl.com/products/hugl-cooling-body-pillow. I even mailed it to the customer service rep who I had been working with during this process in case it had gotten “lost.” However, despite my efforts, my review has gone unpublished (which is also extremely dishonest, IMHO). So, I’m doing what I said I would and publishing it here, even though this is not the sort of content I enjoy publishing.
Review below:
I really should write a long review that details my terrible experience, but I’m just ready to be done with anything having to do with Hugl or Plufl (makers of “the world’s first human dog bed”). The bullet-point version:
The grommets on the cover had (a) sharp edges and (b) pulled away from the fabric tabs
It was not comfortable at all — look at the angles of peoples’ heads and necks in the photos on their website: your head should align with your spine, but the Hugl is so overstuffed that it forces your head up at a crick-inducing angle
Uncomfortable and defective? Yeah, I decided to return the product. I was assuming that since it was defective (pilling cover with grommets that were pulling away from the fabric) they’d cover return shipping. Nope. They were willing to charge me **$60** so that I could return my defective product.
I said I’d pay the return shipping (as I knew I could ship it more cheaply than $60) and only then did they offer to send me a new cover.
I pointed out that a new cover wasn’t likely to help unless they’d changed the design….
And (again) only then did Hugl say they had changed the cover, because they’d received significant other complaints.
IOW: they told me there had been problems with the cover I had issues with only after I’d said I didn’t want a new cover. IMHO, they should have replied to my first email and said “Oh, we’re so sorry. Yes, the pilling is a known issue. Let us send you one of our new and improved covers free of charge.”
Despite the fact that they’d (theoretically) fixed the Hugl cover at this point, by now I was fed up with the runaround (it had taken five email exchanges just to get this far!), dishonesty, and admittedly inferior product, so I said “no thank you. I don’t appreciate the way Hugl/Plufl runs, and I just want to return this product. I will pay my own return shipping fee to do so.”
I packed and sent the thing back. HUGL received my (tracked) return on April 12. I did not receive my refund until May 1. Almost three weeks to issue a credit for an item that they had received (and even acknowledged they received)
I’ve left out many of the smaller (yet equally frustrating) details (like being charged $60 return shipping when shipping via UPS was half that), but the bottom line is that if I am paying $150+ (or $199 at the current price, which is “on sale”) for a “luxury” product, I expect to:
be able to return said product free of charge if it is defective
be TOLD that the defect I have noted is a known issue and offered a replacement free of charge when I first start the return process
receive a refund within 2 business days (4 maximum) of my return being received
I expect this review may vanish from the site (ed note: or it’ll never show up at all), so I’m also posting it on my social networks and website. I enjoy supporting smaller retailers and businesses that are trying to think outside the box; however, this experience has been closer to backing a Kickstarter that failed than purchasing from a legitimate enterprise. At least with Kickstarter you know you’re taking a gamble.
PS Were there any question about the legitimacy of this Plufl/Hugl, check out their shipping and returns policy: https://weareplufl.com/pages/shipping-duties-and-return-information(ed note: this page was blank until recently. There are policies there now, but as you can see from my experience they are not following them.)
More thoughts after the fact
The company should have raised alarm bells for me from the start. This is a screenshot of one of the graphics on the Hugl page:
Notice any issues here? What does it say about a company’s commitment to quality when they don’t even bother to size website graphics correctly so they are not blurry?
Two of the balloons were scary clowns (why?!!) and there were fewer than 10 balloons total, but it was kinda cool when they took turns lighting up (“flaring”). (Trivia: Adrian did some research and discovered that the fuel they use for the night display is actually different than the normal fuel they use for going up!up!)
Realm of the Lint Queen 