Life as a low-taster

I have discovered the hard truth after all these years. I have resigned myself to the fact that I am, apparently, a low-taster.

The dawn of this new realization struck the other day when I poured half & half into my coffee and noticed that it was suspiciously thick. It was early, I wasn't paying a lot of attention, but I could have sworn that I even saw a lump dive from the bottle into my brew.

So I turn to my husband, trusted confidant in all things, for a second opinion. He's sitting there at the kitchen table, innocently reading the Sunday paper, when I thrust this half-full bottle under his nose. "Taste this, is it bad? I think it might be a little off. I just can't tell, what do you think?" And he obligingly takes the bottle from me, as if he hasn't lived this exact scenario several times a year throughout the eleven years of our acquaintance, and takes a mincing little sip. And as usual, his response is something like "Eewwechhhh" while he recoils in disgust. I shrug my shoulders--hmm, who knew?--pour the rest down the drain, and head back to the frige to search out something else for my coffee.

A few nights later, we were out for a lovely dinner together, just the two of us, at one of those pretentious new American restaurants with bite sized portions plated by earnest chefs who bring the food to your table with a formal introduction worthy of a head of state. But not pretentious because the restaurant plays hip-hop and is BYOB. Or maybe just a new kind of avant-garde pretentious.

Anyway, over course number 6, as I was biting into a mushroom (which I dislike, but when it's one of only two things on a teeny weeny plate, you feel obliged to eat it) the pieces all started coming together. All these years, I've been disgusted by relatively inoffensive flavors, like mushrooms, and oysters, and so on, mystified by the rest of my family's affection for them. Mushrooms, to me, have always been one big slimy mess, no taste, just slime--where's the pleasure in that?

There is, it seems, a whole world of delicate little flavors out there that my klutzy tastebuds just can't discern. So if you have me over for dinner, and I reach for the salt, I don't mean to offend. I'm just a low-taster.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've currently got scratches all over my face, the result of plowing headlong into a tree as I was walking to work. Eyes riveted on the sidewalk, my face did an impressive tango with some branches.

What had caught my eye, moments before the tree incident, was a graffito there on the sidewalk.

There's been a lot of graffiti around the neighborhood this winter. I guess the graffiti season has been extended this year due to warmer than usual weather. Which is, in itself, pretty lame. I mean, come on, graffiti dudes--it's hard to take you seriously when you can't be troubled to ply your art if it's a wee too chilly outside. "Well," graffiti dude must say to himself, "I COULD head out and do some tagging, but the wind is awfully biting today. I think I'd really rather curl up with a book and eat some Fritos."

The green gate in front of our house is, apparently, an irresistible canvas. A couple of times a month, my husband heads out to the sidewalk, jaw set with grim determination, paint can in hand, to swab away the latest tag. This ritual cleansing of the mean streets of Chicago, though, has recently lost a little of its urgency. There are plenty of those surly and menacing gang tags on other streets, but as clear as we could figure, the last one we found on our gate read "Joni loves Chachi."

My best theory, really, is that the graffiti amateur responsible for tagging our block spends his afternoons watching 1980's sitcom reruns and PBS until the weather warms up. Back on the block, when he's not reminding us of the glory days of "Happy Days", he's leaving socially responsible messages. Hence the "Smiling Rules!" that caught my eye on the sidewalk this morning. Or my favorite, on the garage behind our house: "Crack Kills!"

Our gate is currently once again clean, and it's cold outside once more. But no doubt our optimistic, enthusiastic graffiti guy will soon be back with more exclamation marks to remind us of global warming or that we should vote in the next election. It's all just a little unnerving.

Your blue jeans, thee, and me

As I was pouring myself a lukewarm bath last night, I found myself reflecting on what makes a marriage work.

I had suspected that my vision of a hot bubbly bath, Vogue in one hand, wine in the other, was not destined to be when I walked into the steaming bathroom moments earlier to find my husband cheerfully sudsing up in the shower while the bathtub was running full throttle, a pair of limp blue jeans floating there in the tub.

The backstory: I will be brief. My dear spouse, who attacks all projects with awe-inspiring conviction, has recently turned his attentions to the proper way to care for small batch indigo dyed blue jeans. The procedure is thus: the jeans, soiled beyond respectability, are given a nice healthy soak in the bathtub, wrapped up in a big fluffy towel, and transported lovingly to the washer, where they are sent through the spin cycle to wrest some of that moisture from them. The next step is only for the truly hard core: the wet jeans are then donned, in order that they dry by that meager warmth emanating from the human body to just the proper fit, and the wearer sits at the kitchen table on the piano stool (so as not to dye the kitchen chairs blue with his damp blue behind) and reads the newspaper while the jeans slowly dry.

So it is really no surprise then that, despite having a hot water heater large enough to provide hot showers for god and his entire heavenly choir, there was really only enough left to sit down in a warmish little puddle by the time I got there. To set the record entirely straight, he sincerely offered to boil up a kettle of water on the stove to warm up my bath for me while I enjoyed my tepid puddle, which I, in a fit of pique, declined.

I suppose that this is the way of good marriages--there are moments when those endearing idiosyncracies and quirky obsessions of your spouse cross the line from charming to every so slightly irritating. And when a pair of indigo 501s gets a trip to the spa while you march off to bed, it seems at the moment to be veering off toward the latter. But come morning, the system resets, and he's once again his old charming self.

Are you afraid of heights?

It's one of those longstanding family jokes. Somewhere, sometime, long long ago, some public speaker asked someone if they were afraid of heights. Maybe it was even one of us, who knows, or maybe we were just in the audience. The poor soul, of course, answered no, why do you ask, to which the zippy speaker fell over himself with glee to announce, well, by golly, it appears that your zipper is...

This occurred to me yesterday as I was sitting in the meeting, face to face with one of these zipppers that had fallen victim to the forces of gravity. As my mind wandered, as it does about every 7 1/2 minutes in this sort of meeting, I tried to mentally will that zipper to its proper fully upright and locked position. Because once you've noticed something like that, no matter how hard you try to maintain eye contact and NOT LOOK DOWN, you just can't help yourself. Or at least I can't. But perhaps I'm just weak of will.

"OK, he's crossed his legs in a rather unusual way, so he's seen it and is modestly covering the offending zipper so that I don't have to keep averting my eyes."

"Just glance down that way, right, that's the way, you'll see it, come on, come ON, just look DOWN!"

"All you'd have to do is scoot your chair up to the table, sort of hunch over like you're stretching your back a bit, and just quickly, zip, up it goes!"

"Zip it Zip it Zip it Zip it Zip Zip Zip!"

The worst part is, you know that the poor dude is going to be a bit embarrassed when he finally, in a private moment, realizes that he's not been fully zipped and immediately will begin to wonder how long had it been that way, who had noticed, how embarrassing, why didn't anyone tell me?

To which I say, happy to. You just tell me what is the proper way to advise a person --not a relative, not a spouse, but someone that you don't share intimacies with and never wish to-- that their zipper is hanging out below the equator. Morsel of food on the cheek, fine, that's a softball. But what if there's something poking out of their nose, or peeking out from between their front teeth. So, dialing Miss Manners, do tell me what to do...