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.

.
.
.

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.

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.

more important things

I don't care what they stand for, Citizens for More Important Things has the best name in the world. How jealous am I that someone else came up with something so simple, meaningful, and easy to remember, yet with enough Monty Python in it to make me actually laugh out loud while reading the NYT.

It's almost a shame that CMIT (which, I suppose could be pronounced ComMIT, if they wanted a decent acronym to go with the great name) is a single issue group. Their sole purpose was to stop Seattle from imposing a tax to pay a gazillion dollars for a new stadium for the Supersonics. Why? Because they thought that the money could be better spent on, say, healthcare.

Fair enough. The site has an actual list of "more important things," but I think they could do better. Some of you are particularly fond of sports, and that's ok, but seriously, what do you think public tax money could be better spent on? Really. For the sake of "more important things." Do we not all have a sense of where tax money should be spent? Tax money. Money paid by people who may more than one wage earner per family making bare minimum wage in several jobs to support a family of 4. I'm thinkin' that basketball may not be their primary concern, but feel free to argue.

catalog season

For most of my life, the whole "getting ready for the holidays" thing coincided with activities like pulling out another sweater box, or buying a new ice scraper for my car. I lived in NJ, upstate NY, and Washington State before I settled in Houston. The stacks of store catalogs that pile up inside my in my mailbox used to have multitudes of uses, from brushing snow off the windshield of my car, to wadding up as fire kindling, to cutting into long triangles and rolling around a toothpick with a dab of glue and making paper beads for garlands, to, well, actually shopping.

My northern European blood means that if I were a plant, I'd be better suited for "hardiness" zone 6 or 7. Houston is a 9. Because direct sunlight and temps in the 90s pose a somewhat hostile environment for me, this is supposed to be *my* time of year. Dammit. According to someone who claims to be a friend, I'm whiter than a Kabuki mime, so I generally welcome winter as the only time I get to have pink cheeks without them being pre-cancerous. Don't get me wrong. I don't think I could handle being Minnesota-cold -- (that'd be, like, zone 3 or 4) -- but this is Houston, for god's sake. It's not like we have to shovel snow or waddle around in Eskimo-worthy down garments. However, it does get cold enough to put away my short sleeved wardrobe and pull out my few remaining sweaters for a couple of months. The temps are often worthy of an extra blanket and most houses are equipped with some sort of heating system. That makes me happy.

I do miss real winter a little, but I've lived in Houston for 16 years now, and have also learned to appreciate not having to start my car well before I need to go anywhere, so I’m getting over it. But I would like to be able to count on a little seasonal change. Just because I don't get snow, it doesn't mean I can't get a little relief from summer, right? I mean, it's the middle of November...

...I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO SPRAY FOR MOSQUITOES!!!

entropy monkeys

So, I have a newish dog who has separation anxiety. That means that I can't leave him alone in the house because... well... experience tells me so. It's a long story, but it ended with him eating my kitchen door. Anyway, now every time I leave the house I have to leave the dogs in the garage. Then, when I come home I have a new pile of debris that I have to clean up, figure out where it came from, and determine whether or not I have to replace it... like the shredded pile of dryer sheets...

The last time I came home, I found a little pile of tiny "barrel full o' monkeys" monkeys. I have NO idea where they came from, but for a half a second I could only imagine that Wyle E chewed up some red plastic and vomited up the monkeys whole, violating every law of entropy of the universe.

It was very weird... but now I have a little pile of tiny monkeys... cool.

guilty pleasures

Oh god help me. It's 5am, I have not slept (thanks to nine solid hours of ambien improved sleep last night and a cup of coffee at 4pm yesterday) and as some weird companionship to my insomnia, I have the tv on in the other room. I'm not really listening to it, but in the last 12 minutes the running infomercial has penetrated my subconscious and has set of a string of synaptic activity going that almost has me running to my wallet to pull out my credit card.

What is it for? What could possible cause me to consider, in my current financially depressed state, 4 easy monthly payments of only 29.99?

A collection of 70's music.

Yes. I am going all pavlov over Mac Davis and Cher.

That's the night that the lights went out in Georgia.
Billy, don't be a hero.
Whoa ho ho it's magic.
Love will keep us together.
Gypsies, tramps and thieves.
We had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun.
They called him Wildfire.
They called him Wii eye eye eye eye eye wi-iiild fire....

This collection is not sold in stores.

Hurry.

frequent flyer

My son just called. He's getting on his plane to come visit for Thanksgiving, and wanted to remind me that I shouldn't call him in the meanwhile because his phone's off. I really hadn't intended to. I'm pretty sure I can save whatever burning questions I have for him for 2 more hours. Anyway, his call reminded me that I have to go to the airport early to trade in an old, unused ticket for a new one for his trip over Christmas. The kids of divorce travel a lot. There have been summers when he's boarded 12 different planes...

Thinking about *that* reminded me of a story from about 5 years ago. Zack would have been 10 and was still living with me. We were headed home from my mom's house, and when we sat down on the plane (carry-ons full of chicken soup and brisket, no doubt) the guy sitting next to Zack starts telling him that we're going to have a movie, and that the screen is the little box in the overhead that pops out and isn't that cool? Zack, who at this point was flying alone at least once a month to New Mexico to visit his father and who was therefore way too jaded for a 10 year old, elbows me and says, "He thinks I'm stupid." Then the guy says "hey they'll show you the cockpit if you ask after the flight, it's pretty cool..." and Zack rolls his eyes at me. I'm not sure what maternal instinct it was, but I tried to defend him by showing off for him. I said, somewhat sophisticatedly, "Actually, he probably has more frequent flyer miles than you do." The guy said, "I doubt it. I'm a pilot."

D'oh.

technology overkill

That's it. I quit. I refuse to participate in a society that produces a toothbrush with an onboard computer chip. It's DENTAL FREAKIN' HYGIENE FOLKS! It's not rocket science!!! The hardest part of dental hygiene is remembering how to spell "hygiene" for gods sake!

Brush. Up down up down up down. Don't forget the teeth in back. Floss. Use toothpaste with fluoride. (Especially now that we drink bottled water...) When your toothbrush bristles look more like a troll doll than a toothbrush, buy a new one. End of story.

What in that list could possibly require a computer?

Next thing you know they'll be putting batteries into four-bladed disposable razors...

it's over

Ok. The "storm" has passed. I'm back home. There's a big pecan branch in my walkway which fell precisely between my roof and my fence. There are lots of little branches that fell pretty much everywhere. There are a couple of big big big trees down around my neighborhood, particularly at a bend in the street where it looks like the wind must have gotten really pissed off at being blocked. That's it.

I've moved all my furniture back to under the windows, creating once again a harbor for lost dog toys and wads of doghair. I've stacked my cans of Progresso soup under my cabinet since they don't really fit, and have rescued the garbage cans from my garage.

It all almost feels normal.

Tho' I suppose it was too much to hope for to have my New York Times delivered. A Sunday puzzle would make me very happy....

boring

hurry up and be done with it already.

Jeez. I realize this is probably not the right attitude to have, and surely I'll pay for it in another lifetime, (or even this one, just later), but I'm bored with waiting for the storm, and just wish it would hurry up and get here. I mean, since I actually got stressed enough to start popping anxiety meds again *before* the damn storm started, I should have at least a little anxiety now that it's supposed to be here.

My mom called earlier and asked me if my friend's house was a well-built house. I told her that no, they didn't opt for the brick house option, and took the entry-level stick house. yeesh.

Nuts. I just looked at the weather map. The storm has totally veered to the west. We're probably not going to get anything at all. The only thing that could happen bad is that it could still stall out and we could get just tons of rain. That would suck for my house.

Meanwhile, with little to do, and not a lot of anxiety, I'm trying to rally some enthusiasm for going looting. I passed the store The Great Indoors on my way here, and I could use a lamp.

hurricane central

Well, not really. I'm just holed up with some friends and another of their friends. Basically it's 4 geeks and a wireless network. I have learned how to play a new solitaire game (Russian solitaire) and have introduced my dogs to a whole new house. It's much bigger here, so they can build up a lot more speed as they race around the dining room table.

Most of the food I brought is for them. I also brought... and this is vaguely embarrassing... several meals worth of Jenny Craig food. Even though I feel totally empowered to eat whatever the fuck I want as a temporary refugee, I just didn't have anything bad for me lying around the house. Sorry state of affairs.

I took the dogs for a walk (I realize this is boring and journally, but I'm tired of solitaire...) and the wind had actually picked up enough oomph to blow my hat off. I think it was mostly bad aerodynamics because it still feels pretty calm out here, but the pictures show us under the edge of the storm, so it's *something*...

So, any aerodynamicists out there want to answer a question for me while I'm thinking about it? My house is in a very old neighborhood among very old pecan and cottonwood trees. In fact, I have a historically registered cottonwood tree right in front of my garage. (I'm sure the house was built after the tree, so I have no idea what rocket scientist put the garage door right behind it...) A lot of my fears about staying at my place was of big pieces of dead cottonwood tree turning into projectiles. My imagination sometimes gets the best of me, and the images so reminiscent of EMT training manuals of me with a big piece of tree branch sticking through my ribs were keeping me from sleeping, so I left.

Now I'm out here in the 'burbs. The biggest trees they have here were planted with the subdivision within the last decade. As I drove out I was thinking, "Whoa, that's cool. Nothing big to fall down on us." But then I also thought, "hm, also nothing to cut the energy of the wind, either..." I've taken enough physics classes, and have learned enough about hydrodynamics in both my diffie Q and stellar interiors classes to know about different kinds of flows, but most of my thinking on this subject feels instinctive, not equation-based. Does anyone know if having a little grove of trees around your house would serve to diffuse the wind energy by turning laminar flow into chaotic? I mean, yeah, trees fall down go boom, but might they prevent the wind from building up enough steam to take the roof off my house?

that's it for now. I'm going back to solitaire...

update

A couple of things.

1) I have now, in violation of my diet, snarfed down a healthy portion of ice cream under the guise of cleaning out the freezer before the electricity goes. To be honest, though, it's fat free and made with Splenda, so it wasn't a huge splurge, and I got brain freeze before I could finish it, so my guilt level is almost non-existent.

2) the thing I most wanted to post last time was my ultimate point regarding the traffic jams. Katrina exposed how our country's emergency planning didn't consider the plight of the poor and immobile. Rita, I'm afraid, will expose how our country's emergency planning doesn't consider the weakness of a highly mobile citizenry. Basically, after 4 years of supposedly improving our country's defense and reaction to catastrophe, I think you can best sum it up as being catastrophic. All we're talking about is efficient and effective evacuation. Evacuation, for whatever the reason, is part of the most basic infrastructure of catastrophe planning.

3) I'm actually pretty impressed with Bill White, our mayor, who seems to be handling himself extremely well.

I will say that the final word has not come down as to the fate of the travelers on the highways. It may be that the promised gas tanks sent up and down the highway will actually get the stranded vehicles back on the road in time to escape the storm. The traffic may also clear out in time for those vehicles to get to safe ground before Nature uses them to play dice. If they're in the clear, then the evacuation was effective, just inconvenient. And quite frankly, in a catastrophe, I think we should be willing to put up with good enough.

Those are just my thoughts at the moment.

ah, nap...

ok, I've had a nap and I feel way more human. I've spent all day flipping between the news and the weather channel (and sleep) and I have noticed a spectacular phenomenon.

First, all the highways are packed with angry, overheating people occupying puttering, overheating cars. Many of these people have started their journeys 10-12-14 hours ago. They're running out of gas. They're suffering from heat stroke. There are people who have taken other people's lives in their hands by transporting medically needy people themselves and getting stuck in traffic.

The news is reporting all this with a ferocity. After all, this is the era of 24hr news, and if you've only got 2 hours of actual news it leaves the devil's workshop with an awful lot of "idle hand" raw material. Anyway, the horrors of traffic is all the news folk can talk about. Except for one thing. And that seems to be - "LEAVE NOW!"

The news people are whipping Houstonians into a panicked frenzy about the "must do" action of leaving town. Yes, I understand the risks of staying, but I'm just afraid that by encouraging people who are not in surge areas or areas prone to flooding to leave, you're packing the freeways with people who might get stuck on them in cars that Nature will use like a 5 year old child discovering the joys of collision for the first time.

"The road conditions are terrible, people are only moving 10 miles in 10 hours. EVERYONE LEAVE!"

Mind boggling.

'rita

mmm... tequila and lime juice. That's pretty much the only way I want to have a rita right now. Unfortunately it looks like I'm going to have a bigger, less alcoholic, one shoved down my throat.

Hurricane Rita, like everything in Texas, is looking like it's putting Katrina to shame. With any luck, the damage to the city will not be as Texas sized, but Galveston will surely get its ass kicked.

What am I doing? I'm pretty much stuck sticking it out. I've been wavering for a day about leaving. So far I've made the right decision. The three major hurricane evacuation routes, I-10, 45, and 290, are multi-laned parking lots. The medians are the resting places for those cars who have overheated (from the strain of moving at less than 3 miles an hour - this is not one of those made up numbers, 9 hours, 24 miles) or have run out of gas.

I am packed. I have the dog stuff packed. I do not have the car packed because I don't even have the vaguest idea of how to do that. However, I'm not ready to go yet. Until I see cars moving on I45 at a pace that would get me to Dallas in less than 8 hours, I'm not going. I cannot afford to be on the highway in a 2 seater convertible with 2 dogs on drugs in the heat, keeping my a/c off to conserve gas... If in 5 hours the traffic drops because they've opened the southbound lanes of these highways to northbound traffic, then I will leave.

I feel like shit. I need sleep. I need my mother to stop calling me preventing me from getting any and telling me to do things that are more dangerous than staying still. I'm just very tired.