the feinswog story

Have I ever told you the Feinswog story?

First, you should know that my last name is Feinswog. It's a name that probably started out as a perfectly normal name in... oh... let's say Eastern Europe somewhere... and mutated into it's current form at Ellis Island. I'm sure it went something like this:

Ellis Island Guy: What's this name here?
Ancestor Feinswog: *incomprehensible garbled sound*
EIG: What?
AF: *igs*
EIG: What?
AF: Feins*incomprehensible*
EIG: Feins-What? Feinswhat? What? ahhaahah JOE! hey Joe! I'm gonna call these guys Feinswog! haha! Great name. Good luck with that...
AF: *puzzled*
*stamp*
EIG: Go on in.

Do you have any idea how many times I have spelled Feinswog? It's almost a poem to me:

F as in Frank
E - I
N as in Nancy
S as in Sam
W - O - G
No, G. G! G as in... Gary?

(I learned this "poem" from my mom, who I don't recall ever having a word to go with G, so I always fumble at the end...)

I digress.

You would think that having been married twice I would have found a better name to have on hand for waiting lists in Asian restaurants. But, no, I kept Feinswog both times, and I'm glad I have, because since I'm the only Laurie Feinswog in the world, recreating my resume is just a google away.

I'm also glad I kept it because without it, I wouldn't have the following great story...

Between 18 and 19 years ago (it was right before my son was born, so I can be fairly specific) I was still living in Seattle, I was extremely pregnant, and my mom was out visiting helping me nest for real. While I was folding tiny little socks and little bitty hats, the phone rang. I answered it, and the man on the other end said:

Hi, my name is Lee Feinswog. Any time I'm in a new place, I look up Feinswog in the phone book...

He followed his little pre-packaged schpiel with a question about how we're related. Since I know absolutely nothing about my father's family, I held up the phone and yelled to my geographically convenient mother, "MOM!!! It's for you!"

My mom and Lee talked briefly about how my father's father and Lee's grandfather (I may have this wrong) were... cousins? I don't remember. It's not an essential part of the story. ANYway, they hang up and my mom and I went back to folding teeny tiny little clothes. Squee!

Several months later, I had birthed a baby boy, packed up my hubby and house and hightailed it to Houston. A few weeks later, my mom came down again, and in the midst of putting away more teeny tiny little clothes (Squee!) the phone rings:

Hi, my name is Lee Feinswog. Any time I'm in a new place, I look up Feinswog in the phone book...

"MOM!!!"

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Years pass.

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.

Seriously. Like 4 years later, the brother of one of my friends came in from Baton Rouge with his buddies to watch, of all things, a hockey game. Houston has professional hockey. Baton Rouge does not. You live in Louisiana and you want to see professional hockey... Obviously. You go to Houston.

Whatever.

Anyway, Carol and I went to the game with the guys, and afterward we went out for drinks, and somehow in a conversation with one of Paul's friends, I mentioned how old I was (30) and the guy said, "No way! You're not 30!"*

Me: "yes, really, I am."
guy: "NO WAY!"
Me: "seriously. I'm 30."

So I show him my driver's license and he looks at it and says,

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.
.

wait for it...

.
.
.

"Hey, do you know Lee Feinswog?"

*laugh track*

The reason I bring this up now is that in the intervening 14 years, I have done the, "Hi, my name is Laurie Feinswog, and whenever I'm on the web I google Feinswog and..." thing, and Lee and I have subsequently become as much as Facebook friends. But what I'm building up to is that next week Lee Feinswog (who is, by the way, a sportswriter in Louisiana, and clearly a favorite of Baton Rouge hockey fans) is coming to Houston, and after nearly 20 years, we're going to have lunch...


*I have an age thing, I know, but it's not my fault. That picture in the corner was taken last week. I'm trying to get a goddamn beer, but no one will serve me...

iNesting

Ok, so this is how it happened.

First, my blackberry keypad started dying. I've had it for over 2 years, and it's given me a lot of love, so I'm not holding a grudge, but I had to start thinking about a new phone, and the big question... iPhone? Should I? (yes, of course I should. why did I even ask?)

Second, I started downloading free apps for the iPhone I bought - before I got it, yes. It was like the nesting you do when you're pregnant. Basically I was buying the iPhone that was in the mail little phone booties - and I noticed all the twitter apps.

Third, a work friend announced that she was going to start twittering if it killed her.

You see where this is going, right?

So, I apparently started twittering before getting my iPhone so I WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO DO ON IT RIGHT AWAY.

I am spoiling that phone...

you wanna see my id?

As if to prove a point, my friend and I were at Cafe Express last week, and ordered a bottle of wine. The check out girl, who I admit was a few olives short of a salad bar, actually asked us both for ID. We are 42 and 40.

Ta da!

passover seder in a bottle

Among other things I collect, I have a bathroom cabinet filled with aromatherapy shower gels. I can't help myself. I like how they smell, and I like using them in the shower. If I walk into a Bath and Body Works sale, I willfully suspend my critical consumer thinking and will buy 5 for $25 without calculating that "on sale" still means that 10oz of what is mostly water and sodium laurel sulfate is costing me $5.

What's worse is that when I go on these consumer splurges, in an addled frenzy I will sometimes buy smells I know nothing about simply because of attractive packaging, or a nice sounding name. I have not yet learned that olfactory products should not be purchased based on visual or aural clues.

So, last night I cracked open a new bottle of "lemon grass sage" shower gel. I guess I bought it because I like lemon, but was aware that without smelling it in the store, I could be in for a completely kitcheny experience. I was hoping more for "Joy" than "thai food", but I was definitely prepared for something that didn't belong in the bathroom.

It smelled like neither end of that spectrum. It had no recognizable lemon scent at all, and the scent it did have was just dancing around the edges of my cortex, teasing me into trying to place it.

It didn't smell bath-y and it didn't smell kitchen-y. It smelled fresh. It smelled green. It smelled... fresh and green. Like lawn, only not really. That was the best I could do. And on top of the elusive smell, it triggered an elusive memory. It was an old memory, and it compelled an action, though I wasn't quite sure what that was, either.

I spent an extra 10 minutes dawdling in the shower trying to figure it out. As I was rinsing out my conditioner it finally hit me. Parsley. It smelled like parsley. And what I was wanting to do was dip something in salt water and sing Dayanu...

Next time I'll pick up the complementary Matzoh and Charoses bath beads.

the sky is falling

Speaking of fear...

I see this ad on late night TV and it makes me want to scream. Can someone introduce statistics to the American people?

I'm going to hermetically seal my teenager. Much safer.

aging, coolness, and high school reunions

A friend of mine sent me mail recently asking me if it was ok that she sent my info to our high school reunion committee who had listed me as being "lost." (note: we're not lost if we run away of our own accord...) She added that it might be fun to go back to see how bad all the men look.

It's our 25th.

Although I'd be within my rights to say that I missed my 10th because I was in the middle of a divorce, the fact is, I hated high school, and I liked only the smallest minority of people I went to school with. I have had no desire to go back at all. But, when it was pointed out to me that the men look bad these days, it occurred to me that it really might be fun. I was a short, chubby, baby-faced kid in high school. I was not cute, attractive, sexy... nothing. I did not have a boyfriend, I was not invited and did not go to any dances/proms/whatever. I was smart, and I was a smart ass, but between "clever" and "sexy", "clever" comes in a distant 2nd in high school. "Clever" had no buying power. I was pubescently impoverished.

I think I've written before about getting older, and being outspoken about every candle I add to my cake. But when I think about it, I have always only thought of it from a single perspective: I have always looked young, and I am borderline annoyed with people looking at me and seeing something cute, little, and vaguely elfin (if still chubby), and not taking the things I have to say seriously. I have always been rather indignant that I do not get credit for the years of my experience, so getting older to me just gives me more leverage to say, "Hey, I actually know what I'm talking about, so listen to me. Give me the respect I've earned."

But there's much more to it. I enjoy aging for quite another reason that is far less graceful. I enjoy aging because as I age I look much younger compared to many of my high school compatriots. It's revenge-based pleasure. Schadenfreude. Between not going into the sun whenever I can help it, and still being rather chubby, my face has been left mostly unlined. I have been genetically blessed with long blonde hair, which I do not blow dry or treat chemically, so it's still pretty darn silky. I don't wear makeup, which, at the age of 42, means that until a few years ago, I still got carded at bars.

In fact, I could sum up this whole feeling I'm trying to describe with the following graphs. For those of you in the know, this would be much cooler with, say, MATLAB. (...and yes, this is how I think, and why I sometimes have a hard time explaining things to people who aren't "visual".)

Let's start by making a sort of heuristic graph of the probability of being carded over time for me and the people I resented in high school. We are assuming, for the sake of righteous argument, that the cliques I was not a part of in high school grew up to be the kind of people who spent too much time in the sun and now look ancient. Work with me.


Then, we take a look at, say, the "coolness" of being carded over time. I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that it is totally, negatively cool to be carded when you're young and don't have legal ID, and way way cool to be carded when you're old. This isn't tricky science.

To make this all make sense, we multiply these two functions to see how cool I was over time, compared to how cool the people I hated in high school were.

And, voila. Sure, those kids were all cool when they were kids, and I was getting my self-esteem beaten to a pulp. But, I accumulated so many more cool points (the area under the respective graphs) in my 20s and 30s that I have now kicked their collected asses.

So, that said, I'm still probably not going to the reunion. But I feel good about it...

addendum

Executive Privilege
"Balanced" news
18 months of presidential campaign
Really stupid people (although these guys were entertaining)
Credit industry
Mosquitoes
Not having a ceiling fan in my bedroom
That in the last 30 years the Internet has been invented, cell phones, cable modems, wireless internet, ipods, iphones, TVs are wide screen and hi def, and yet somehow "good car mileage" still is in the 30 mpg range, which, if I recall, is about the same as it was, oh, 30 years ago. I realize combustion is limited by a fairly strict set of laws and efficiencies, but... c'mon guys. Even the hybrids aren't that impressive.
Oil dependence (or did I just say that?)
My post-40 deteriorating eye-sight

maybe next time a quick post on the things i like...

angry

I have always tried to make these posts more than just a daily journal of my life, although it's always been a little bent that way. I prefer my writing to be entertaining and to make people laugh, if not be downright laughable. But I find that everything I want to write about, everything that I think about lately, just really pisses me off, and when I start writing it takes about a paragraph until I'm patently unfunny and deep in a rant.

So, today I will embrace my anger and see if that helps...

Things that make me angry - an abbreviated list:

Bush
Cheney
War in Iraq
The administration's treatment of the men and women serving in our armed forces
Guantanamo
Any kind of Czar
Plame-gate
The fact that we can't stop calling things "xxx-gate", as if "Watergate" were some sort of controversy about reservoir tampering, and not the name of a hotel.
The disintegration of the 4th estate
The dismantling of democracy by the corporate oligarchy
Big Dick Cheney
Congress
Big Oil
Big Pharma
Agribusiness
AT&T
Big Religion
Lack of national health care
Cost of a college education (HOLY SHIT!! How is it possible that it costs more than I make a year to send a child to school?)
The fact that as a society we have divested ourselves of the responsibility of protecting education, health care, and the media from market forces and keeping them as part of the public trust
Have I mentioned "You don't know Dick" Cheney?
Alberto Gonzales
Rudy Guiliani
The concept of "God Bless America" - I have never had a need to postulate a god, but if there were one, I'm pretty damn sure his globe wouldn't show big pink and blue and green blobs of political entities.
Global warming deniers
The death of accountability
The language of non-accountability
Bill O'Reilly
Greed
People who "pray" for financial success
Technical support
Voice menus
Abstinence-only sex education
Intolerance
Gay bashing
Reality TV
The "it's cool to be mean" culture of American Idol
Whipped news media
Fear-based politics
Integration of Church and State
Comcast advertising
The remake of The Producers

I know that some of this is redundant, but it probably reflects only a small fraction of the things I think about that I'm never more than hair's breadth away from launching into a rant about.

So, there it is. I'm angry at, oh, everything. I can probably still be funny, but I needed to get this off my chest.

am I back?

I need to start writing again. I have been, oh, a little busy with other things, but I always feel better when I write, so I'm going to try to get back on the horse.

here I go.