Potty mouths

The other day I was running late to meet a friend, and she called to ask where I was.

"I just left my apartment," I said, while sitting on my couch, jamming on my shoe.

"You just left?" she asked, annoyed. "Where are you?"

"Um, I just passed the Safeway."

For some reason, people like to know the precise location of the person on the other end of the cell phone call. Unfortunately, that person always seems to lie. I'm not just talking about myself. The other day, I saw a guy emerge from the Dupont Circle metro and say he was "three blocks" from the zoo. This is a bad strategy. How is he going to explain his pace of fifteen minutes per block when he gets to the zoo 45 minutes later? At least my lie was only one block long.

Another disturbing cell phone trend I have noticed: People who talk on their phones in public bathrooms. Surely the echoey acoustics and water sounds are a give-away. The other day when I was in the Busboys and Poets bathroom, I overheard a woman having an intense cell-phone conversation with her depressed friend. I needed to flush, but it felt rude.

Last summer, I accidentally joined in such a conversation. My band was getting ready to play a show, and I couldn't find the woman's restroom. I had only a few minutes before sound-check, so I ducked into the men's bathroom, assuming I'd be safe because the club wasn't open to the public yet. I ducked into a stall, and the guy in the adjacent one said "Hello?"

"Hello!" I said brightly, trying to mask my guilt.

Then the guy proceeded to make plans with his friend to meet up later. I hightailed it out of there, hands unwashed.

Toiletry packaging and its discontents

When I go to the Safeway in search of hand soap, I usually buy the cheap store brand: A dumpy bottle filled with bile-yellow liquid. Oh, Safeway tries to be stylish, affixing pictures of fish and coral to the back of the bottle. But the color of the soap makes the serene sea seem more like an environmental disaster.

Last week, I splurged and bought fancy, “Method,” hand wash. The crystalline blue soap not only looks gorgeous in its teardrop-shaped bottle, it also fits perfectly in the porcelain protuberance above my sink. The designers of my closet-sized bathroom, by the way, did not see it fit to install a sink cabinet or towel hooks, but they did not skimp on soap-holding implements. My sink has two depressions to hold bar soap, and they primarily collect water for mold colonies. Above the sink are two soap-holders that jut out of the wall and serve as auxiliary Petri dishes.

So I was really excited to find that the Method soap bottle fit perfectly in the bar-soap-holder. What a wise purchase! Unfortunately, Method and my relationship went downhill from there. It took me fifteen minutes of twisting the top around before I coaxed it into dispensing soap. But instead of the Safeway soap’s gentle squirts, Method ejaculates soap, sometimes several feet.

It adds excitement to my morning routine and sometimes results in last-minute wardrobe changes. But overall, Method was a disappointment.

However, in the toiletry-container-innovation department, I cannot speak highly enough of the one-handed, flip-top toothpaste bottle. Such an improvement over the tube and screw top! Unfortunately, its oval-shaped footprint does not match the bar-soap depression, and it topples off the sink with some regularity. Thankfully, the toothpaste has yet to land in the toilet, which is more than I can say for my cellphone.

Vittles and bits

Last night, I went to a board-game party. This morning, I attended a board-game brunch. This rash of board-game-playing could relate to rainy weather, but I suspect that when D.C. gets its allotted 48 hours of spring, my friends will just move the Scrabble game to Dupont Circle.

I'll be there under duress, as I hate Scrabble. True story: The other day at my friend's house, I scrutinized the word she had just spelled. "What's a Doog?" I asked. That's "Dog," Sadie. I also suck at Boggle. In Boggle, you try to find words in a random letter grid. All last night, other people discovered words like "Yurt" and "Vittles," while my answers drew from a "See Spot Run" vocabulary.

I do like a few board games: Taboo, for instance, because people who are not good at thinking of words on demand actually have an advantage here. In everyday life, I often find myself saying, "Pass the, um, the condiment that's bad for your cholesterol?" A perfect Taboo clue!

We just couldn't get it up

I have a bone to pick with the Smithsonian Institute. No, it's not over their American Indian gift shop museum, or the fact they have ignored my proposal for replacing that dull merry-go-round on the mall with something more exciting. It’s because they refuse to give me a little red kite.

Smithsonian officials were happy to give the kites to every little kid who toddled through the Kite Festival a few Sundays ago. The sky around the Washington Monument was speckled with hundreds of them. But they would not give one to me. "These are for the children," the lady said.

I can appreciate the government's concern, about giving me a kite. We ill-adjusted single people might use them for drug running and contraception. Still, I wanted a kite, so I knew what I had to do: Borrow someone's kid.

The first parents I asked were not too keen on the idea, as was evidenced by their briskly striding away from me. The second pair laughed at me nervously before edging away. While I was busy alarming families, my two friends managed to persuade a festival volunteer to slip them one when the kite-police weren't looking.

Ah, sweet success! We tied on the string, launched the kite and it flapped around about ten feel in front of us before diving into the ground. All over the mall, grade schoolers were successfully tossing their kites into the air and flying them into trees, but we couldn't get ours high enough even to tangle up with another kite.

This reminds me of the time I tried to learn to ski, and little kids zipped by me as I planted my face repeatedly into the snow. There they had an unfair advantage, with their low centers-of-gravity and bendy bones. But I couldn't figure out how they were all flying kites better than we were.

Finally one of the dads came over and pointed out that we had tied the string to the wrong side. He was so nice, to come help us out. I wonder if he'll let me borrow his kid for some alpine drug running.

Why I'm not wife material

Married men live about 10 years longer than single ones, and I think I know why. It's because males*, when left to their own devices, refuse to seek necessary medical attention. Consider my friend "Mit": Yesterday, he woke up with the left side of his face no longer matching the right side. One cheek had swollen to about twice its usual size, making Mit his own Trimspa before-and-after picture.

Now, if this had happened to me, I wouldn't even bother brushing my hair before hailing a doctors-office-bound taxi. But Mit felt that it would be more prudent to take a "wait and see" approach. Perhaps his face was just trying out new fluid-retention techniques, or maybe the other side would puff up to match in a day or so. No need to panic.

My dad is the same way. One time he broke his toe while body-surfing. At least, that was my diagnosis, on the basis of the toe's new orientation, pointing 90 degrees away from its brethren. But my dad felt that it wasn't all that out-of-the-ordinary.

To be fair, I do tend to overreact in the face of medical issues. About a year ago, I twisted my ankle at kickball practice, and the next day I woke up and couldn't walk on it. So I hopped out of my apartment, hailed a taxi, and made it to GW Hospital in record time. Then, I waited in the ER for many hours while people with heart attacks and open wounds hogged all the doctors' time. When they finally called my name, my ankle didn't even hurt that much anymore, but to justify a morning spent watching Fox News and reading Golfweek (emergency rooms are like Republican spa vacations), I got myself an air cast and some crutches--which I used for all of a day.**

So, perhaps women such as myself are partially responsible for the nation's health-care crisis, but we also live longer, which makes us responsible for the social security crisis as well. I now realize that Mit is doing his patriotic duty by not getting his swollen-face-situation checked out. But if it doesn't get better soon, I might just have to take a picture and post it online.

* I have to say that I am kicking myself for making wild generalizations about gender differences, but celebrating individuals for their non-gender-bound uniqueness is not very funny, so I will stereotype away.
** That morning inspired a City Paper story where I reviewed the entertainment options at every hospital in DC.