This week's Friday 5 is a delightful callback to one of my childhood favorites, Mel Brooks's Get Smart.
If you didn't pick up on that before, you know now!
What did you most recently spray out of a can?
Dry shampoo. I like having bangs but after about a day they get really piece-y, so I sometimes touch them up between washes.
What’s your favorite food (or food product) that’s sprayed from a can?
None of them? The options are either cheese or whipped cream, as far as I can tell, and I don't care for either of this. I guess the cheese wins by a slight margin, as a "whiz with" is a Philadelphia favorite.
When did you last spray-paint something?
Probably when I was helping touch up a metal trash can when I worked at Lost River Caverns a million years ago.
What’s something that’s not sprayed from a can but would be pretty cool if it were?
Pancakes! Too tired to make breakfast? Just spray out some pancakes! Got a case of the munchies? Even the most chemically impaired person in the world can manage a spray can. Want to get a perfect circle every time? Just make sure the nozzle's clean and that your aim's straight.
What’s conceptually the oddest thing sprayed from a can?
Honestly, dry shampoo. It's up there with dry cleaning in terms of how counter-intuitive the concept is.
We hit the road early the next morning, while Theophanes's brother and his girlfriend and her nieces were still asleep. First order of business: a picture of this thrift store sign, which caught my eye even on the delirious and sleep-deprived drive up in the middle of the night. Unless Mildred Wymen was really into Stephen King? Orthography is hard!
Then breakfast at a greasy spoon and we were off to Concord!
I was originally going to bus down from Maine to Boston, but Theophanes volunteered to drive and do Boda Borg with me and my hostess with the mostess in Boston, Diana. I broached the subject of stopping by Walden Pond on the drive down, since it wasn't too out of the way and I didn't know when I'd be in New England again. (I mean, I'm sure I will be—I just don't know when.) She puzzled it over in the GPS and agreed, since it wasn't ridiculously out of the way. It just would have been a little far for a day trip from the cabin.
It's really hip these days, at least among the people I like and admire, to hate on Thoreau and Walden. And I guess I get it—he was only able to stay at the cabin as long as he did because of the good graces of other people and he was an obnoxious houseguest to boot, he's maybe (even inadvertently) the foundation of modern American libertarianism, he was kind of a pompous ass, etc. etc.—but for a weird, thoughtful kid in high school to read about this dude being weird and thoughtful by himself in the woods was reassuring. Even as I drink tea and continue to use a doormat.
I was surprised to see so many parents of very small children trying to do the educational, dutiful thing and go through the assorted signs and the replica cabin and whatever tourist center is also on-site (we didn't visit it, though). Maybe I'm underestimating kids, but I don't think a 6-year-old is going to be super interested in, or at least appreciative of, someone living by themselves in the woods. I'm pretty sure they just want to go swimming in the damn lake.
I have to admit, sometimes a cabin out in the woods sounds like the most appealing thing I can imagine. We peeked inside and it was easy to imagine me holing up in such a space for the rest of my days. Maybe in a place a little bigger, only because I'm less stingy than Thoreau when it comes to books worth holding on to.
It was then very weird to see that the plot of land where he went to live simply, away from people and society, so filled with people. In addition to all of the signage and statuary and sites associated with Thoreau, the pond itself is now a local swimming hole. The sound of people talking and laughing and splashing in the water was the background sound for most of the trip. Incongruous, but at the same time, maybe it's better that such a spot be appreciated by the general public rather than forgotten.
(I still did my best to get this picture of the lake without any people in the shot, though.)
There were also these assorted illustrations from some kind of Walden ABCs book where I'm not sure if it's actually for kids, or a kids' book for adults (a la Go the Fuck to Sleep), along the assorted paths. This was by far the reach-iest one of them all:
and I, when we saw the first one ("C" or something), started speculating as to what they'd do for the trickier letters. I thought "X" would be for "fox," but no. "Z" either was or should have been "zephyr." I was right, though, that "Q" would of course be "quiet."
If the pond and the museum-type stuff was relatively packed and full of people, the site of the actual cabin was mercifully quiet. Theophanes pointed out that many of the trees in the area were fairly young, so one wonders what happened to the patch of forest between when Thoreau was here and when the site was discovered in 1945. (Or perhaps it was never actually discovered; perhaps that's just a random spot along the lake that they decided to declare Thoreau's Cabin in order to give visitors something concrete to experience.)
People also left little stacks of stones next to the cabin. For me, this is something people do in Korea (maybe East Asia?). I saw this all the time, especially in temples; from my understanding, it's part of a folk Buddhist tradition that has to do with making wishes or requests. (Do ones this small still count as cairns?) For example, here are some I saw by Cheonjiyeon falls in Jeju in July, 2012:
And an anonymous Korean woman building one at Bulguksa in Gyeongju, January, 2010:
And yet maybe last year or two years ago, my crunchy granola friends started sharing articles like this one, as if making those tiny towers had suddenly become a widespread Thing in the US as well. It was certainly a Thing at Walden, anyway, and I left my own, because it's a way for me to connect my time in Korea with the places I visit elsewhere.
Other people left messages or drawings on stones, which I hadn't seen in Korea. (Though at temples, you can buy a roof tile for X amount of won and leave a message on it.)
The weather was warm enough that by the time we were back at the lake I was regretting leaving my bathing suit in the car; Theophanes as if reading my mind, said, apropos of nothing, "I'm going to take off my shoes and dip my feet in." I followed suit. The rocky shore of the lake made the barefoot journey less than appealing, but the payoff was worth it. The water was ice cold and stung pleasantly at the myriad mosquito bites I had acquired at the wedding (open-toed shoes and a knee-length dress means lunchtime for bugs). We stood in silence for a while and watched some small fish come and dart around our ankles. I splashed some of the water on my arms and face and filled up a tiny pocket of my heart with the experience to draw on later, when I feel like garbage. I also picked up a white piece of something (quartz? marble? I'm a bad junior geologist, guys!) as a souvenir.
When we used to visit Emerald Lake State Park as a family, I (and maybe my brother?) would always want to take home a rock or two from the bottom of the lake. Teacher Dad, a former Boy Scout and adherent to the "leave it better than you found it" ethos, would always make us put them back: "What if everyone took one? There'd be nothing left!" (I totally managed to get one out with me once, still, when I was maybe eight.)
The thought crossed my mind as I washed the grime off the rock and dried it with my shirt: "What if everyone took one?" I'm an adult now, and that means I get to violate Boy Scout prescriptions on nature preservation whenever I want!
Diana had been anticipating watching the eclipse with us (this was the day of the eclipse), but we ended up spending it at Walden instead, which I'm kind of okay with. Spending a significant astronomical event at a site that's personally meaningful is a pretty okay way to spend it, in the end.
Another friend from the wedding, Walter, wanted to meet up in Boston once he knew that's where I was going, but he couldn't make it out in time for Boda Borg, so it ended up being just me, Diana, and Theophanes. This was probably for the best—they say "up to five" in the groups, but anything more than three people would have been cramped, really. It was my and Theophanes's first escape room and I suppose we did OK, although the first room we picked was obnoxious and we couldn't get it. Fortunately, it seemed to be way harder than many of the other rooms, and we still managed to solve a few puzzles and pick up a few stamps.
Before Boda Borg was Vietnamese food and introductions. Afterwards was boba tea and farewells. Theophanes was off to her mother in Rindge, not super far from Boston (certainly closer than the Maine cabin). and I spent the rest of the evening with Diana watching The French Revolution episode of The Supersizers Eat and talking about stuff. I left most of a six-pack of Yuengling (I am trash and love my regional PA trash beer that would be prohibitively expensive and thus pointless to acquire here) and the last of my roadtrip music (Black Masala, Gangstagrass, and I think also Galactic?) in exchange for an autographed stand-up album. Before we hit the hay, I solidified plans with people the next day: lunch with Diana and Walter, then later meeting up with a blogger buddy before the long flight home.
What’s something you enjoy that contains garlic? Um, literally everything?
One of my culinarily-inclined friends here grew up with sound advice from her mother: "There's never enough garlic in recipes. You should always double however much garlic they recommend, and then that's enough." This piece of advice served my friend well until she tried a recipe from her garlic-loving mother that she didn't realized was already calibrated to have an appropriate amount of garlic. Yowza.
What’s something you enjoy that contains ginger? Probably a few things. Yujacha (Korean lemon honey tea) springs to mind. Ginger is a flavor I tolerate because it turns up in cuisine that I like (Korean), but on its own ginger is awful and I hate it. What’s something you enjoy that contains cloves? I'm sure I've had mulled wine or hot toddies or hot buttered rum with cloves at some point. No complaints. It's a cozy flavor.
What’s something you enjoy that contains cinnamon? There's a scene in the short-lived, maybe-underrated show "Welcome to Sweden" (starring Amy Poehler's little brother, with cameos from Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell) where baby Poehler turns down a kanelbulle and tries to explain to his Swedish girlfriend's family that he doesn't like cinnamon.
"How can you not like cinnamon?" they ask each other, bewildered, in Swedish baby Poehler can't understand. "It's just a spice. It's not like Hitler."
That moment was too real.
(The rest of the show relied on gags about how hard Swedish is to learn and fell flat for me then and there, because if you're a native English speaker, Swedish isn't that hard.) What’s something you enjoy that contains celery? If you put it in a chili or a stew, I'll eat it, but on its own celery is one of the more disappointing vegetables.
I first heard of The Power thanks to the half-dozen book bloggers I follow. A while ago, I started using GoodReads' "to-read" function as a storehouse for all of the books I heard about that sounded really cool but that I would otherwise forget after a couple days, and dumped The Power in there. Then the universe aligned: a book club buddy picked The Power off my GoodReads TBR to send to me in a New Year's book club exchange, and then my feminist science fiction club decided on it for February's book.
(Fun fact: today is the birthday one of the founding members of said feminist science fiction book club! Good job getting older, my dude!)
Image courtesy Penguin
The Power posits that if you give women the ability to produce electricity out of nowhere, thereby making them all walking weapons, within less than a decade you'll see an entire global culture shift. That's really the point that the book turns on, and how much you enjoy the book is probably based on how much you buy into Alderman's thesis. Less central to the story is that it's pure power (hah, hah) that drives sexual objectification and sexual entitlement. Still, if you disagree with Alderman's implied stance on this, there will be moments of characterization that fall flat for you.
Speaking of characterization, this is another book with an ensemble cast, a total of five major perspective characters (plus asides here and there). I'm not entirely convinced that all of those characters were entirely necessary to the story. And while Alderman included a graceful nod to the complexities of biological sex with how inconsistently the physiological source of the power manifests (i.e. some men have semi-developed skeins, and some women don't have skeins as developed as other women), the absence of any trans characters or an examination of what this development would mean for them is notable.
Despite these small bumps, the important thing about The Power is that it's just damn good hard(ish) sci-fi. I'm a perpetual Slowpoke about reading the new hot thing in books (unless the stars align and I get an early crack it at it thanks to NetGalley), so I suspect most of my readers (hi, Mom) will have already read this if they were going to read it at all, but nonetheless I want my opinion to go on the record: this is good.
Since the cabin was about two hours from Old Orchard Beach, we hit the road relatively early for bagels and other goodies at Aaron's aunt's house. Everyone else had made plans amongst themselves; Theophanes and I had decided yesterday to visit the International Cryptozoology Museum. One of my Hamilton friend's boyfriend has been there before: "It's just, like, two rooms of stuff, and this guy following you around, telling you how Bigfoot is real. One of the display is, like, a GI Joe doll standing next to a stuffed beaver to show how large giant beavers are supposed to be." He laughed and shakes his head; Theophanes and I looked at each other like YESSSSSS. That is definitely what we're doing next.
Her GPS didn't have an updated address for the International Cryptozoology Museum, which unbeknownst to us had moved to some old warehouse unit behind the Greyhound station, so we had a nice little wander around downtown Portland.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] That's a long fellow you've got there![/caption]
It was a cozy little wander full of graffiti and politically-minded stickers.
I felt at home here; I could imagine myself in Portland (if I ever wanted to leave Stockholm). As I texted my friend back in Austin: "The dream of the 90s is alive in Portland ME, too."
For our one and only actual stop in downtown, we visited The Green Hand and despite the incredibly temptation I resisted the urge to buy books. Still, I wanted to get something, so I bought a little High Priestess pin and a ton of postcards.
They very conveniently had a poster by the register with directions to the new location of The International Cryptozoology Museum, so we realized our mistake and (after a fight with the parking garage) were able to rectify it.
We had a little trouble finding the museum once we were on the warehouse campus—we literally walked right past it and didn't see it until we turned around—but we were still there before closing. It was everything I love in a tourist trap: weird and kind of grubby but incredibly enthusiastic. It's situated in a weird place; it splits the warehouse room with a fried chicken restaurant, so we had to walk through another place to find the entrance. (It has its own door, too, but on the other side of the building.) We watched the little introductory video by the founder first (Loren Coleman, no doubt the "creepy dude" mentioned earlier), then I paid for our tickets and we explored.
The first floor is a riot of assorted mounted weirdnesses—this is the "hoax" section, which the video explains is included because the founder wants you "to be critical and skeptical." It includes Fiji mermaids and Jackalopes and so on.
And bits about assorted species once considered mythical that turned out to be real: mountain gorillas, etc.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] The infamous GI Joe (actually an Indiana Jones action figure) and beaver.[/caption]
Upstairs is dedicated to hominids and the founder's little shrine to himself and assorted cryptid kitsch.
The museum It reminded me, a little, of The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA, in that these are both vanity-ish projects that are kind of the crystallized, refined essence of what makes their founders tick. Only The Museum of Jurassic Technology isn't really self-aggrandizing about it and is much more about "here's this stuff I like!" The International Cryptozoology Museum is a little more, "Here's me, and here's the stuff that made me famous." Anything that made him famous: an overhead LED light that was used on a camping trip when he potentially saw Bigfoot, the computer Coleman used to write his first book on cryptozoology, that sort of thing. A wall-mounted TV plays a video of his appearance on some show or other (but we didn't stay long enough to find out if it loops).
They have a photo op set up, and naturally we availed ourselves of it.
I spend my last remaining pocket change on a postcard in the gift shop and we decided to try to the deep-fried PB & J food truck we saw while we were trying to find the museum.
Everything sounded really good, or at least really interesting; I settled on a sort of sample platter that's half a regular (deep-fried) PB & J and half something called a S'More: no peanut butter or jelly, but fluff and something vaguely Nutella ish. We chatted for a little bit with another customer, who was maybe itching to talk to people and so when he heard me give my name for the order opened up with a story about a woman he knew who was named, for real, "Katherine Katherine." We talked about unusual names and doping in sports and NASCAR and then our sandwiches were ready, so we took our leave and give them a try.
The cook in the truck helpfully pointed out which sample was which; I decided to start with the s'more sandwich since the PB & J seemed to be the flagship standard. The s'more one was an absolute delight; the PB & J less so, if only because the jelly seemed to have more or less evaporated with the heat of the deep fryer, so it was essentially a warm peanut butter sandwich with powdered sugar on top.
But the s'mores one was SO DAMN GOOD.
Hunger sated, we headed back to the car to decide what our next stop for the day would be. Theophanes had a couple suggestions, and we eventually decided on Fort McClary because it was the closest one to us. It was still an hour away, about, but we had time.
Some people from your childhood, if you meet them again as adults it's weird and you have nothing in common with them anymore and you struggle to understand why you were ever friends to begin with. Maybe sometimes you kept an inseparable circle of BFFs. Visiting Theophanes with is somewhere in the middle. Thanks to Facebook, we've more or less kept tabs on each other, though we never interact one-on-one. But in person it's fine, and it's not weird, and it's like: here's this person who's known you, if not always very deeply, forever. We drove a lot and what could have been long, uncomfortable car rides with a virtual stranger are perfectly comfortable. Silences occur and are natural, but most of the time there was easygoing conversation.
We poked around Fort McClary without paying the "suggested donation" because we're rebels. This is all you need to know about Fort McClary:
"During the Civil War, plans were drawn for large masonry forts on major rivers, but advancement in weapons caused them to become obsolete before construction was completed. The huge granite slabs on this site remain where they lay when work stopped."
We alternately poked around for pictures, enjoyed a view together, or stopped and shot the breeze. We quite possibly scared a couple of dudes away when the subject turned to birth control and periods. I watched the boats in the water and thought about Murder, She Wrote and drank in the smell of the ocean.
Somebody had it in for Sir William Pepperrell!
RIP Granite Wall
It's a small and unremarkable park, but it does have a lovely view. I can understand why someone would be honored by a memorial bench here.
We decided to leave when the sun started to go down, since we still had a long drive back to the cabin. By the time we get home, Theophanes's brother, girlfriend, and her nieces are already there. We knew that they were going to be staying overnight that night, so it wasn't not much of a surprise; we just didn't know what time they'd be arriving. For it being such a small cabin, though, it didn't feel cramped with all of those people. Theophanes and I are beat (we did a lot of walking), but we hung around and chatted a little bit about our plans tomorrow: driving to Boston, Walden, Boda Borg. Neither Theophanes nor her family were really familiar with the concept of escape rooms, so I explained.
"I hope they let you out if you can't solve the puzzle," the girlfriend joked.
We needed an early start the next day, though, and we were seriously bushed from our adventures. We didn't talk for long until we said our goodnights and collapsed into bed.
#GirlBoss! Lean in! #Hustle! Girl power! The future is female! // Katy Belcher
Hey, you! Do you want to be your own boss and never sleep again ever? Do you want a life with ~meaning~? Quit your day job and take your Etsy to the next level! Because work that's all about your special snowflake interests and hobbies is inherently more praiseworthy and of higher moral standing than a boring job working for other people!
These days I wipe my ass with $100 bills, but I started out as a mere peon just like you! I have plenty of heartwarming stories about making negative income on my shop and eating cup noodle and I will periodically pull one out to remind you that I'm a relateable, real person. See, if the secrets I'm going to sell you for $250 / month worked for me, they'll work for anybody!
It'll be hard work though, which I'll tell you to make it sound like my hype project will DEFINITELY propel you to success. If you just work hard and bootstraps yourself, you'll be successful! And if you're not, you either did something wrong or you don't want it hard enough!
I might even drop a couple of f-bombs throughout my otherwise bland PR hype to make it seem like I'm more unique than I actually am, and to give the impression that I'm "keeping it real." Or I might not and opt for the more saccharine mode. It depends: am I targeting hip young Millenials or am I targeting frustrated (possibly single?) mothers? Either way I'm probably targeting women. I guess it makes sense that women would want to opt out of a workplace culture where they get paid, on average, less money to put up with, on average, more bullshit. Which puts them in the perfect emotionally vulnerable spot to buy my expertise!
The one thing I won't own up to is that I sell items that are light on resources and often easily replicable (digital downloads, printable art, raw supplies), or that maybe I outsource to printers or drop ship my stuff. Maybe I'm even straight up reselling off of Alibaba. But never mind that! Surely the tips that work for my store that's based on bulk orders of inexpensive things that I can print again and again also apply to your store full of painstakingly handcrafted one-of-a-kind artisan goods. And try not to think about the fact the course costs $250 a month, and that earlier I boasted of 800 monthly subscribers. That's nothing to worry your pretty little head about.
How good are you at word games, and what’s a word game you really enjoy?
I'd like to think that I'm pretty good at these, but I haven't played any except Scrabble, and every time I've played Scrabble I've come somewhere in the middle because someone aggressively outmaneuvered me to get to, or to block, the bonus tiles.
How good are you at trivia games, and what’s your strongest category?
It depends on the game. Like, a copy of Trivial Pursuit from thirty years ago (and I suspect that might be how old my parents' copy of Trivial Pursuit is!) is not going to be my strong suit. Of course, there is something of a horseshoe effect with these things: there was a burger joint/diner near my college that included a handful of Trivial Pursuit: Boomer Edition cards at each table and out of my peers, I tended to clean up when it came to the arts and entertainment category, at least, just because of my movie and music taste.
But Best Chemist Friend and I were a two-woman trivia team for a while and consistently did well enough to win prizes, if not actual first place, until we got other people to join us, so I think that says it all. I don't know what my best category would be, but without a doubt my weakest category is sports.
How good are you at spot-the-difference or what’s-wrong-with-this-picture games?
Considering that the only ones I've played are the super obvious ones in Highlights for Children, I don't think I can really judge my ability based on my past experience.
How good are you at memory games, and have you ever played Simon?
Of course I've played Simon! But what does it mean to be good at Simon? I don't have enough data to really say.
Otherwise I play a lot of memory with my students. Confession: in the interest of making the activity maximally educational, I deliberately throw the game whenever we play.
What’s your favorite party game of all time?
I have a couple!
Since I have an astonishing memory for song lyrics, I always really liked playing Encore!. (My copy is still at my parents' house, now that I stop to think about it. The things that slip your memory when you're packing to move out!) I'm also preternaturally good at Tri-Bond, though I guess it's up in the air whether that counts as a party game? The same could be said for the aggressive and competitive Munchkinseries.
Thanks to Wil Wheaton's Tabletop series, I've found and fallen in love with Dixit.Apples to Apples is always a good time and I confess to getting a kick out of Cards Against Humanity, though when I've played with others there has always been the house rule that you're allowed to discard anything you feel is beyond the realm of good taste, no questions asked.
A new favorite I've encountered in Sweden is Orangino, which is maybe the most Swedish party game ever developed. The whole point of the game is to determine how well others know you, and how well you can gauge other people's perception of you. The game consists of cards with different personality traits and descriptions; you rate yourself (from 1 to 4) in secret, while everyone else does too, and people get points for matching your rating. There's no English version as far as I can tell, which is a shame because as dorky and feel-goody as it sounds, it's also a lot of fun! (Maybe a future translation project?)
That's a long fellow you've got there![/caption]
The infamous GI Joe (actually an Indiana Jones action figure) and beaver.[/caption]
