observations from the road

chad and i just went to a wedding near seattle WA, followed by a 60th birthday party in orange county, CA. here are some things i gleaned along the way:

• french manicures on toes look very, very tacky.
• i feel sorry for anyone trying to learn english who might have tried to understand the t-shirt that read, "TO QUIT, DOESN'T EXIST." i don't even know where to begin with that doozy.
  
• sleeping masks and earplugs RULE.
• when i was a philosophy major in college, i learned about The Problem of Other Minds. this is when you cannot fathom that what other people think and feel is as real to them as what you think and feel is to you, followed by a crisis of adjudication. The Problem of Other Minds is what makes families impatient with each other, and it is what makes people cut in lines in, say, airports or other places of commerce and what makes, say, contemporary art seem really weird.
  
• it turns out i like tiny dogs! who knew?
• crowds of people in airports SUCK. they stink, they wear stupid t-shirts, they don't do anything right. and while i'm sure all those 40-something white guys in dockers with blackberries on their belts have mothers who love them, en masse they present a very unpleasant and politically suspect front--one suspects they suffer from The Problem of Other Minds (see above), mostly because they are always only surrounded by people who look like them.
  
• chad and i are both good at giving toasts.
• some others, not so much
  
• almost 100% of the time when i tell someone i live in the ROC, they say something about the winter/cold and how can i stand it, etc., etc. it was mystifying and, frankly, infuriating me, because i couldn't figure out a.) how it is possible that everyone else lives in perfectly physically comfortable conditions all of the time and how they have become so coddled as to be intolerant of any variation from these; b.) why it isn't totally inappropriate to immediately dis (sp?) where someone lives; c.) how they can assume that every other human feels the same way they do (see above); d.) how thoughts of winter sports, soup, and fireplaces don't occur to anyone (see c.). and so, to do everyone a favor upon these occasions, i decided to try to think of something despicable about where they live, like traffic, republicans, hippies, prohibitive real estate costs, smog, heat, bible belt, intense structural racism, etc., etc., and explain that i could not *possibly* live under those conditions, and then we all seem to understand each other. a triumph! i should be a diplomat.