August 6th, 2009

Manning the Table

As you may know I am a huge fan of the Netflix “Watch Instantly.” A few days ago, for no reason other than I kept seeing the DVD cover on the site, I watched a flick that came out last year called The Visitor. It was, in my opinion, an excellent film that deals with the way immigrants have been treated in this country since 9/11. It was not a comedy by any means, but there was a brief scene, that I think was supposed to be mildly humorous, that had me doubled-over with laughter for a full five minutes.

I laughed for the reason we most often laugh at movies. (Well, other than because a guy gets punched in the crotch by a child and goes cross-eyed and says “Mommy” in a falsetto voice before falling to the ground, of course!) I laughed because the cast and crew captured an unusual event that, I know, really happens in real life. And they played it out, pitch-perfectly, to the way it goes down in real life.

At about 1:05:00 a stuffy white guy is coerced into watching an artsy girl’s table at a craft fair while she goes off to get something to eat. It’s taken a step further when some women approach and begin looking at the various pieces of beaded jewelry before him and, obviously unsure of what to do, the man just begins looking at the objects too. After a few seconds he says quietly, to no one in particular, “It’s all handmade.”

Steph has been peddling her sewn items and cards at semi-annual events like “The Handmade Market” and “The Rock & Shop” for many years now and, in that time, I have, on occasion, been that guy. And I’ve seen male friends who’ve been grabbed and stuck behind tables and have become that guy. Across crowded aisles, I’ve seen the bewildered expressions on the faces of guys I’ve never even met and therefore shouldn’t know well enough to know if they have become that guy or not and known that they have become that guy as well and we’ve looked into each other’s blank eyes for but a second and we’ve both known that we were the hollow men, we were the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas…!

Not that it’s all that bad.

I am happy to help out and be supportive. And the collage-based stuff Steph creates is wonderful. She slices into some pretty fabric here and hacks apart some found materials there and massacres something brightly-colored over there and then takes a needle and thread and puts it back together, and then splays it all out, complete with tasteful ornamentation, on a frilly table cloth which completes a set-up that a fairly standard guy with interests that don’t stray far from the fairly-standard-guy-interest collection — such as myself — feels totally out of place in front of. After I’ve relieved Steph so she can take a well-deserved break, all I can do is try to smile in a way that invites the all-female clientele to stop and make purchases, yet ask me absolutely no questions about how certain things were made, or in some cases, what, precisely, they are. I can hope that they saw the woman’s name on the front of the table or that they simply get that I’m just watching the table, or, if they are misunderstanding the situation and they believe that I composed these chainsaw-orgies of whimsical patterns, that they don’t think the fact that I’m a guy is creepy and weird. I can also say quietly, to no one in particular, “It’s all handmade.”

These gender-based feelings of awkwardness are nowhere near as bad as, say, stepping into a Victoria Secret retail store, which I believe can cause the aforementioned fairly standard guy’s body to become so tense that he could swallow a lump of coal and, minutes later, excrete a diamond that would then magically teleport itself far, far away from that Victoria Secret retail store.

I’d say these gender-based feelings of awkwardness are more on par with going to a fabric store and purchasing the supplies needed to make a dress. I actually did this a few years ago. I decided I’d like to know how a clothing pattern worked and how to use a sewing machine, and the best way to acquire this information seemed to be to make Steph a dress as a Christmas present. (Incidentally, Steph still has and wears the dress that I gave her…which was actually my second attempt at dressmaking as I bungled the first one pretty badly…which means I had to go to the fabric store twice…which means my views on fabric stores are based on more than just one occurrence.) I walked in to the purveyor of clothes-making goods’ and did what any novice in any field must do: I slowly and clumsily gathered each item on a carefully-written list. Many times I had to consult cat-centricly-sweatered employees, with my shaky garment-related vocabulary, to find a proper zipper or needle. Something about most of the answers I got made me completely understand women’s complaints about going to hardware stores and auto repair places.

Perhaps another, more universal example of something that could cause similar gender-based feelings of awkwardness would be accompanying a female companion while they do some serious clothes shopping. I can’t really remember. It’s been a long time since Steph suggested that I go with her while she is clothes shopping, because my absolute favorite thing to do while clothes shopping is to whine about how much I hate clothes shopping. It might just be worth tagging along and assisting with the selection of a few outfits though. Someday your other option might be standing uncomfortably behind a table and saying quietly, to no one in particular, “It’s all handmade.”

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December 19th, 2008

Total Freak-call

Kate came home for the holidays last weekend, so we’ve been eating a lot of old-fashioned family meals around the table. As I predicted earlier this month, the dialogue among this post-graduate set has been absolutely dizzying. For example, I’m not sure where I fall on the issue that Kate enjoys bringing up at dinnertime: her bowel movements. Will this latest journey home leave her having too many, or not enough? Despite her ever-present desire to discuss this matter, I just can’t seem to decide what I think.

Excluding bodily functions, I’ve always found the subjects that the fam chooses to settle on during meals to be interesting. Sometimes it’s family history. Other times it’s engineering processes. Other times it’s politics. And just as interesting is the means by which conversations travel from topic to topic. A couple of nights ago, my family took the stream of conciousness and diverted it into the rapids of my repressed memories, reminding me of a particularly embarrasing detail from my past.

It started with a comment about our dog’s weird eyes. (Lilly’s right iris wanders off to the side of her head. I’m not sure if canines can have lazy eyes, but if so, she probably does.) Kate made a joke about how we needed to get her a pair of those thick, plastic glasses with a patch over one lens, the type they have very young children wear to try to correct their vision early on. Steph chimed in about how her sister had to wear them, and that, in a lame attempt to make something really bizarre and uncomfortable seem “exciting” and “not horrible and freakish” for all involved, the patch had Mickey Mouse on it.

Now, even though I do wear glasses now, there was never anything wrong with my eyes while I was growing up. Like a woman in the beginning stages of labor for a second child though, sitting through this was slowly reminding me of something I’d gone through before — something bad. The whole “lame attempt to make something really bizarre and uncomfortable seem ‘exciting’ and ‘not horrible and freakish’ for all involved.” Seemed familiar….

Then it came back to me.

No, there was never anything wrong with my eyes while I was growing up, but my mouth was a disaster area. Not only did my amply-sized permanent teeth decide to come in well before my head was even close to full-grown, they all decided to come in on the same day — my 10th birthday I believe it was — resulting in a 12-tooth pile-up growing out of my gums. To fix it all, not only did I have to have braces (two rounds of them) but for almost the entire year of 1992, I had to wear the large and very unnatural jaw-aligning device known as headgear.

I managed to make it through this ordeal without ever being seen in the face-hugging plastic contraption at school. (My orthodontist — perhaps privy to stories of patients who were forced to wear headgear to middle school and eventually gave in to post-traumatic stress and climbed clocktowers with machine guns, their perfect teeth making their maniacal smiles extra chilling — told me to wait until the second I left for the busstop and then to take it off, and conversly to put it back on the second I got home. For the “no school” plan to work I had to sleep with it on too, which meant I couldn’t really roll over on to my stomach or even on to my side. This was a small price to play for flying under the bully-radar.) So it could have been worse, but the fact that I had to don headgear at all had me convinced I was a dweeb.

It actually feels good to get this out there. Back when I had to wear this get-up, the fact that I did was a level-10 family secret. Such information was not to extend beyond the walls of the house. At this point, it’s just one of the things that made me who I am. I probably would have told more people about it along the way, but I honestly think that I buried it in my subconscious. Until now, Mom, Dad, Kate, Kevin, and Steph (who I revealed this to when I briefly remembered it years ago) were the only people who knew about my sordid “oral history.”

As for how the medical professionals tried to make the steel wires making giant curves out of my mouth and attaching tightly to mounting brackets wrapped around the side of my face via a support piece behind my neck “fun?” Well, there were college-team-themed slip covers for the fabric portion of the support.

And this is how my dental check-ups during this phase typically went:

Dental hygentist (after fitting me with the contraption and adjusting it to the proper tension, speaking with that special kind of enthusiasm that is obviously inversly proportionate to what your foreseeable future is going to be like): “Ok bud, check out these wraps we have for your ’gear!!! Do you like State or Carolina!!?!!”

Me: “I vill dethroy you.” (It is very difficult to talk properly with headgear on.)

Dental hygenist: “Oh, you’re a Duke fan!!?!! We’ve got some super-cool Duke wraps!!! Goooo Blue Devils!!!”

Me: “You vill svend the west of your rife in ak-gony.”

Dental hygentist: “Can’t really understand you there, sport!!! Just to review we’ve got Duke, State, and Carolina!!!”

Me “….”

Dental hygentist: “….”

Me: “Caw-wolina.”

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October 31st, 2008

Beer of the Unknown

Happy Halloween everyone! Do you all have big plans tonight? Big spooky plans?

You all better not have big spooky plans because we moved the Halloween Party at our house to tomorrow night to accommodate all the “really important” and “serious” and “non-celebratory” things everyone claimed they had up, like “working” and “visiting an ailing relative.” Who’s ever heard of a Halloween Party the day after Halloween? The costumes will seem ridiculous! The jack-o-lanterns will be wilting into abstraction! The candy will be on sale for like 80% of…. Nevermind. You all are geniuses.

Tonight Steph and I will probably be cleaning up in preparation for tomorrow, and…handing out candy to trick-or-treaters? Do kids still trick-or-treat? On one hand, I hope so, because this is the first Halloween that I’ve had a front door that faces a neighborhood street with a small porch in front of it with a light I can leave on, letting dressed-up children know it is cool for them to come up and ask for candy and that I will make a big deal about their costumes and let them take a handful of fun-size Snickers (not just one) as 90% of the adults in my childhood did. Oh yes, I will pay it forward. On the other hand, I kind of hope kids don’t trick-or-treat anymore ’cause: more candy for me.

October 31 is an important date in Steph-and-I lore, as on this day in 1999 we made the transition from two people who constantly hung around in each other’s dorm rooms and walked each other to class and ate virtually every meal together, to two people who constantly hung around in each other’s dorm rooms and walked each other to class and ate virtually every meal together and kissed on the mouth. So much to say about those days, but I’ll save it for another time. All I’ll tell you is that Halloween was on a Sunday that particular year and that we went to a costume party on Friday night — Steph as a 1920s flapper, me as a straightjacketed mental patient — and that we walked home from the party together, both sort of knowing this thing we had was going somewhere, and that it was pretty chilly out and that I took off my straightjacket and wrapped it around her! I’m sorry, but that kind of quirky, endearing shit is only supposed to happen in movies. This is the one moment we have that is like this, so I never miss an opportunity to share it. Steph and I used to mark our “dating anniversary” with presents and fancy dinners (Applebee’s), but now that we have a “for real anniversary” two weeks before, we’ve whittled it down to making sworn statements that we comprehend the significance of this particular day while we are on our way to various Halloween festivities. I’m grateful for this, because Steph’s birthday is two weeks later in November and then we’ve got Christmas right after. A guy could injure his brain trying to come up with all those gift ideas in a row.

Overshadowing all the candy and costumes and acquisitions of true love, however, is my unbearable curiosity about how the beer is going to turn out. If you’ve been keeping up with Witchger Projects you know that my neighbor Jerry and I made a batch of Pumpkin Spice Ale, and our plan is to serve it at the day-after-Halloween party.

I was completely clueless as to what was going on throughout the entire brewing process, but Jerry seemed to understand it, plus he was already in possession of all the necessary tools and equipment, so I have reason to be optimistic about it.

Homebrewing requires a lot of patient waiting, as you let the yeast do its job and just sort of keep an eye on it and not let the container get too gunky or hot, and it’s killing me. I want to know how my beer is going to taste. Now.

After spending several evenings in my kitchen, pacing the floor in front of my fermenting container, I decided that just because our very first beer wasn’t even ready to drink yet, that didn’t mean it wasn’t time to take things to the next level.

We call our fake brewery “Sheffield Brewing Company” because we live on Sheffield Road. I sat down with pen and paper and Adobe Illustrator and made us some graphics. The one thing that kept coming up when I looked “Sheffield” up online was the English town by that name, and its mention in Canterbury Tales. Something vaguely medieval seemed appropriate for a brewing company, so here’s what I came up with:

The logotype.

The (probably too illustrative) mark.

The combination of the logotype and mark.

The logo with a (playing-it-safe) slogan.

A layout for the Pumpkin Spice Ale, which can be turned into signage for the keg and labels for the bottles.

Ironically, I spent far more time designing this stuff than I did actually brewing beer, but I figure an elaborate visual identity can only improve our beverages. (“Geez, this stuff is bitter! I can’t stand it. Wait, look at all those boxes with words in them. These people clearly know how to make good beer. I will keep drinking ’til I acquire a taste for it.” “There are large chunks of malt floating in my glass! Wait, does this packaging make use of the classical typeface Janson? Ok, this stuff is actually pretty good.” “Dear God, this has the exact same odor and consistency as motor oil! Wait, is that a 3-point stroke around that logo? Bob and Jerry: please accept the key to the city.”)

Of course I hope our ale doesn’t need the aesthetic enhancement. 24 hours from now, we’ll find out! I’m clinging to the edge of my seat. Most suspenseful Halloween ever.

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