memories of funny things we said in the past

i was editing my facebook profile and found a old list of quotes i had there...i tried to add one and it wouldn't save, so i thought i'd save them all here - they uncharacteristically for this blog have capital letters, but i wanted to preserve them:


"Fart is not the f-word." --Owen & Finn, 11/06.08

"London is the opposite of Copenhagen." --Sabin, Munich, 22/5.08

"The fanny pack is like a modern chastity belt." --Megan, Munich, 22/5.08

"Can't you hear I'm screaming in myself?" --Sabin, Munich, 21/5.08

"He didn't even have the decency to pick a leaf..." - Richard, Batangas, 8/8.07

"Say things that are not true in the name of humor." - Monica, Batangas, 8/8.07

"I was in Hawaii and became friendly with the Canadian Navy." - Christell, 31/10.07, Hornbæk

"I taught myself to swim. I'm no good at it." --Richard, 15/2.07

"You can always recover in a Starbucks--from heat stroke or a hangover or whatever. It will fix you. Thank god they're everywhere..." --me, thessaloniki, 28/7.07

“Work hard, laugh when you can and don’t dwell on things you can’t change.” - Land Girls by the BBC

30 days of lists: day 16

my sister was driving our old toyota and she had a 6-year-old sabin in the car. she was supposed to be headed for ikea, where we were to meet, but then the muffler partially fell off and started dragging and leaving a rather alarming trail of sparks. not knowing the greater copenhagen area, she had no idea where she was, so, on the phone with me and trying to explain, she looked around and said, "we're by the side of the road, right in front of a pizza place and a florist." which could be pretty much anywhere in denmark. it turned out that she wasn't that far from ikea, but it wasn't the ikea we were aiming for.

she once licked spilled limoncello off a table at a restaurant in the philippines. as one does. you should always lick up spilled limoncello. that stuff shouldn't be wasted.

funny memory

when my dad was in the state legislature in the late 1970s, to point out the absurdity of some or other republican bill, he tacked on an amendment to make the fence post the state tree of south dakota.

what are you gonna remember?

as i've mentioned before, the primary guiding philosophy i use in life (prior to my new one of writing is the new praying) is what are you gonna remember? in pretty much any decision-making situation, i ask myself that question. i'll also ask you that question if you're ever trying to make a decision in my presence.

well, this evening, when i was totally in the zone, sewing on a new quick fleece-backed quilt for sabin's new and improved big girl bedroom, a particular memory kept popping unbidden into my head. and so i thought i'd share it with all of you. because it's a good one.

i've written before about being in a typhoon in the philippines, but several stories happened during that storm. we were in batangas (south of manila) for a workshop and were a group of about 30 people, working very hard during the day and relaxing very hard when we weren't working. one evening, despite the rain, we ventured out for dinner. it had been raining all day, an unbelievable amount of rain. i understood, seeing that rain, at long last what they meant by it raining in sheets. i tried to capture it in the picture above, but it didn't really do it justice.

we got ready for dinner and ran for the bus. my sister used a very environmentally conscious rain hat which she had made from a lush bag - lush being pretty environmentally conscious themselves. we had a nice dinner, some karaoke and a few beers. san miguel light and san miguel extra dry were our beers of choice in the philippines. very refreshing, as my red-eyed sister illustrates (these were taken before i got the "big" camera).

it was very dark and still pouring down rain when we piled back into the bus to go back to our hotel. my sister decided to stick her head out the open window to holler something at someone, as she is prone to doing at times (she has the occasional issue remembering to use her indoor voice), especially after a refreshing malt beverage or two. when she pulled her head back in, off into the rain-soaked darkness on the OUTSIDE of the bus flew one of her giant diamond earrings, which she'd received as a pushing present (thank you, spud, for that phrase) for her second son. very strangely, at exactly that moment, i was reading a text message on my mobile phone from her ex-husband, asking me to have her call as soon as she could about that second child's visit to the EAR doctor!

naturally, losing an item so precious and laden with meaning in such an impossible setting at the same moment she learned her child needed ear surgery was very traumatic and she became understandably hysterical very upset. we screamed to the bus driver not to move the bus and acquired a flashlight and went out to look for the lost earring. bearing in mind that it was midnight, pitch black and a typhoon was raging, it seemed pretty much a long shot that it would ever be found. then, one of the guys said, "i'll find it, i've got snake eyes." and he proceeded to leave the bus, walk straight out into the darkness and nonchalantly pick up the earring.

he said afterwards that he got a clear picture of it in his head and knew exactly where it was. pretty cool, don't you think?

secret 7 - barbie girl

once upon a time many years ago, i had a very good friend that i hung out with all the time. she worked at the same newspaper i did and was in charge of all the kids who had paper routes, so i used to tease her about whether she'd done her paper route that day. i actually used to tease her about a lot of things. because she could take it and she could tease back.

we had a lot of great times together. we ran the hash. we had sloth weekends where we did nothing but play nintendo all weekend. we played cards into the wee hours of the night. we had a game called "drink two" where you had to name who sang a song first when it came on the radio and if you did it, the others all had to take two drinks of their drink (i was rubbish at that game). we watched star trek: next generation marathons and real world marathons on MTV. one sloth weekend, my sister and her friend went to target and came back with presents for everyone. they brought me something sparkly and they brought michellea a pork sandwich.

back then, i had a little bit of a thing about barbie. i collected the christmas barbies and other collectible editions of barbie (hmm, maybe that should have been my secret--oh well, consider it a little bonus extra secret, because the real secret is coming up and it's a doozy). these, i had on shelves in my living room. well, michellea wasn't really a barbie girl. and in fact, on one or other sloth weekend, she let it slip that she was kinda freaked out by dolls in general (a bit like i feel about clowns) and that all those barbies staring down from the shelves above the t.v. were kinda freaking her out. i surely laughed maniacally at the time.

well, college ended and we all went our separate ways, moving to other states, but staying in touch. in those days, via telephone, where we could actually have three-way calls due to the miracle of mid-90s technology.

i always kept the doll thing in the back of my mind and then, when a friend was visiting from germany, i told him of the plan i'd been brewing. i would cut up a barbie doll and put the pieces into identical envelopes and send them to michellea from all over the world. i'd send a couple home with him for him to mail from germany. i'd distribute the others to other friends and ask them to send them from places that michellea wouldn't suspect of me. i'd save the envelope with the head myself and send it after a few weeks with a note, revealing it was me and go down in the annals of practical jokedom. it was a genius level practical joke.

so my german friend used his pocket knife to chop up a barbie (it hurt me a little bit to cut up barbie, but it was also cathartic in a way). we carefully placed the pieces of her in identical little manila envelopes and i printed address labels and addressed them. my friend took several of the envelopes and i distrubted the rest to other friends to send from random postmarks.

in those days pre-9/11, my sister actually got a guy who sat next to her on a flight to denver to take one of them and mail it from his home in colorado. he thought it was a hilarious story and thought it would be a riot to take part in it. another friend was going to the bahamas and she took a couple along with her to mail along her journey.

michellea was working at a big university, running a residence hall. the bits of barbie began to trickle in. and she, of course, thought it must be someone in her hall--there was a guy who was a bit delusional and fancying himself the new jesus and he headed her list of suspects. my sister and i were also on her suspect list (she knew us well) and i remember that michellea called me and we had a three-way call with my sister, wherein i remember strongly denying the whole thing, tho' i had to use the mute button to laugh uproariously. then, sadly, the unabomber, who hadn't been caught or active for some time struck somewhere or other and then the bits of barbie began to seem a bit frightening. we heard that michellea's mom wanted her to call the police. so we called her& right away and told her it was us and that it was just a practical joke. by then, i had sent the head, revealing the trick.

michellea never did get all of the pieces of barbie, some were lost in the mail. she kept them in a shoe box for quite awhile thereafter. and she had to admit, unabomber aside, that it was a pretty good practical joke. the only thing is is that she's not yet paid me back for it. so i'm still on guard.

wherein she explains that alarming cheek licking thing

yesterday, in a fit of pique over a few things going wrong--standing at the baggage carrousel 'til the last bag came and the huge group of australian pharmacists (two of which sat next to me on the plane and were just lovely) had all wandered off into the copenhagen night and still not having my bag, followed immediately by some totally badly-raised arrogant asshole queue-jumping dane cutting ahead in the line at the DSB counter (and yes maybe i HAVE given up commas as well as capital letters)--i may have mentioned in the middle of a comment that was just a titch rant-y on one of my favorite new blogs a desire to lick the cheeks of certain parties. which may or may not have caused a bit of alarm on the part of those parties and an admonition to:

1. stop swearing on their blog. 
2. let them use any damn word they wanted (including rad, despite its obvious fall from use sometime around 1988, tho' usage possibly hung on in places like fargo into 1989) or they would take away my crown(!?!) WTF!?!
3. keep my tongue within range of licking only the inside of my own cheeks.

this made me realize that i should probably explain the cheek licking thing.

but first, a small diversion (like you didn't see that coming). one of the beauties of new friends (in the blogosphere or in real life) is that you can revive all of your old habits/jokes and they seem new again. so you can once again say, "lemme think about it, no." (with no pause between "it" and "no") to people and they find it hilarious once again (b/c let's face it, your old friends know ALL about it and think it's a bit lame of you to keep saying it).

it's the same with the licking thing.

the licking thing began at a party many years ago (let's just say early 90s and leave it at that). it was someone's older sister's party and so we didn't really know most of the people there all that well. but we (being my friend K (it was her sister's party) and me) wanted to have a bit of fun and be remembered, so we cooked up a scheme wherein we would go up to someone we didn't know very well (say a kind of cute boy) and stand beside him, one on each side. we would then, with a glance, both go in for the lick. on his cheeks.

it's rather surprising to suddenly have two girls you don't know very well simultaneously lick your cheeks, but once people got over the shock and wiped off the spit, they had to admit they actually rather liked it.

of course, eventually, you get known for this and then one day, to your dismay, the person you're about to lick dodges the lick at the exact moment when it's too late to pull back and you accidentally lick your friend, who in turn licks you simultaneously--on the tongue, leaving you a bit scarred and unable to play the licking game anymore for a number of years. tho' the cute boy who just dodged the lick is pretty into the whole idea and would like the two of you to demonstrate again. which you do not oblige, seeing as you are sputtering and spitting and generally washing your tongue off with beer.

however, you do, on your own, occasionally use a quick lick of the cheek to disarm people during a boring moment at a party or when husband is being all serious and needs to lighten up a bit. it's a totally affectionate gesture, you see. tho' husband has developed a 6th sense about it (or maybe knows when you get the look on your face that means you're about to go in for the lick) and is pretty good at dodging it. it matters less that the lick is dodged when you are going in for it alone.

and that's the story of the alarming cheek licking thing. 

just call me snow white

once upon a time a very, very long time ago, this little girl was dropped off to attend a week of bible school at a church in the little town where she grew up. now her family did not attend this church, but bible school was thought to be for anyone (thankfully very little of it stuck, except for a strange ability to, when pressed, remember the order of the books of the new testament). plus her parents thought, hey, free babysitting and a week of peace without the kid!

so her mother dropped her off outside the side door of the unfamiliar church, and despite her being quite small and never having been there before, just sent the child in without accompanying her. the child has a very clear memory of the crunch of the wheels of the stationwagon driving away on that little gravel road beside the church and how daunting that unknown door seemed. said child eventually plucked up the courage to go in and some people talked to her, inevitably asking her her name. feeling a bit shy and out of place and perhaps even having a vague feeling of having been abandoned out in the woods as well as having a healthy imagination, she informed them that she was called snow white.

she was pretty steadfast about the snow white thing and it took those people 'til mid-week to figure out who she really was. i guess someone finally spotted her mother, who didn't appear to be accompanied by seven dwarves, picking her up.

and they all lived happily ever after, but she still really hates going in alone to a new place full of new people who already know each other. and the man who owned the local pharmacy teased her about it for years afterwards, as he apparently found it such a sweet and amusing story. she got so she really hated to run into him. if he were still alive, she's sure he'd still remind her of it if she ran into him when she was back visiting that little town. some things you just don't live down.

what are you gonna remember?

yesterday, in doing a bit of tidying up in preparation for today's arrival of the cleaner, i came across the picture above. it's husband as a boy of about 5 together with his mother (and a large radio and a very small peugeot) having lunch by the side of the road somewhere in norway. i love many things about the photo--especially that it naturally has that lomo feel to it--all i did was scan, no effects were applied whatsoever. husband is just so cute and so is that car. all husband remembers about it was that it was in norway, otherwise, it's a roadside stop for lunch like any of a hundred others he had as a child.

many years ago, during college, i attended a wedding of a work colleague. a bunch of us from the newspaper sat together and to be honest, it was a rather lame and not very happening wedding. so we decided to move on to a nearby bar. i was hemming and hawing about whether to go along or go home and one of the guys said, "come on, what are you gonna remember?" and he was right, was i going to remember going out and having fun with friends or was i going to remember going home to bed? it was just a line tossed off in a moment, but it has resonated with me ever since.

you might even say it's become a bit of a life philosophy. i have used it countless times when people were about to wander off rather than participating in some fun activity. or when they couldn't decide what they wanted to do. or when they thought about going to bed early. because aren't the things we remember things where we were active and present and participating and stayed up late? we don't remember an evening in front of the television, we remember an evening of dancing or playing cards or having a great conversation over good food. let's face it, you don't know whether you're alive or dead when you're watching t.v. (thanks barbara kingsolver).

i think of some of the times when i said "what are you gonna remember" and the things that i'm certain the people involved remember...

like the time that richard sang bohemian rhapsody in batangas while a typhoon raged just outside:

paying the singer extra to stay on (and on and on) so we could keep dancing at the sofitel in manila:

that time my very tall colleague went to hobbit house -- where all of the wait staff are little people:

the sight of this guy (actually, all 3 are guys) at the amazing show (a transvestite variety show in manila):

my sister licking spilled limoncello off the table:

those ridiculous shots where you take a picture of yourselves shaking your head and going "lalala":

apparently most of the times i said, "what are you gonna remember," we were in manila.

i'm not going to be in manila this weekend, but i hope to do something that i'll remember. what are you going to remember?

in a somnambulant state

one fine day back in macedonia, the gang was just hanging out when this guy showed up. this guy we knew from home in arizona. now this was a bit of a surprise, since you don't really expect people to just drop by when you're in a balkan backwater. but L was that kind of guy. a bit of an idiot savant, without really being an idiot--he'd actually gotten a perfect score on the LSAT and was traveling around for a year before he was slated to start at Columbia Law on a full scholarship. and no one gets a scholarship for law school, so this gives you an idea of how bright this guy is. however, smart as he was, he had no practical skills whatsoever. it often amazed us that he managed to dress himself in the morning and we found it even more amazing that he had managed to make his way to skopje all by himself.

the only picture i could find of L, sadly not the most flattering, but you get the idea.

as his stories unfolded, we noticed that most of them began with, "i almost got beat up by these guys..." and we were even more amazed that he'd been traveling by himself in europe for several months. the boy was lucky to have arrived on our doorstep(s) in one piece.

he was the kind of person who got lost frequently. my apartment was on a large, main busy street towards the center of skopje and it was only a few blocks from the US Embassy. it was, if you were strolling at a leisurely pace, a ten minute walk. L called me one day from the embassy and said he would stop by. two hours later, he still hadn't shown up. i was busy with other things and didn't really think much about how much time had gone by. finally, he did show up and he said he'd gotten lost. getting to my apartment was a matter of taking a right out of the embassy, taking another right at a clearly-marked street, walking a couple of blocks, reaching the big, main road, where you could actually SEE my apartment building. and i might add that he had made this journey on more than one occasion previously. but that's how he was, he could get lost inside a cardboard box.

he was one of these people who was inadvertently hilarious in telling stories. often because he didn't tell them in a normal order. he had decided to go to bulgaria one week, just to check it out. we worried a bit about whether we'd see him again, but figured that he'd survived thus far and so we hoped for the best. he got back and the first thing he said was, "i peed my pants on the bulgarian-macedonian border." we looked at him incredulously, knowing there had to be quite a story behind that punchline.

it seemed that in his months of travels, he'd been carrying his passport around in the front pocket of his jeans, to avoid having it lifted from his back pocket. you might imagine that it was a bit worse for the wear. that was back before 9/11 and the page with the picture was just laminated and the little square of the picture was actually in there, sandwiched between the layers. well, months of hanging out in his front pocket had loosened the plastic from the page and his passport had the appearance of having been tampered with. he had dark, long curly hair and had initially been perceived by border guards, to be someone who might tamper with a passport. thus, they stopped him at the border and treated him rather rudely, pushing him with a night stick and getting in his face when he didn't understand that they weren't allowing him to pass through to macedonia.

this apparently scared him so much that he peed his pants, right then and there in the border station. well, it didn't help him and he had to return to sophia and go to the embassy for a new passport. i never did ask whether he had to get back on the bus in wet jeans or if he had a change of clothes with him. we advised him that he might want to build up the story a little bit in the next telling, rather than jumping straight to the bit about peeing his pants.

he was hanging out with us for several months and finally my friend dmitry (the one i threw up on on the plane if you recall) had to ask L, who was crashing at his place, to leave because his landlady was starting to get suspicious that they were a couple and dmitry couldn't take that. i have to admit that i lost touch with L after that and i do wonder where he is today and what he's doing. he's probably making his way through life in that charmingly somnambulant state of his.

wherein i end up on seinfeld...(not on, on...)

in taking off this morning on my last trip of the year, i began to reflect on memorable flights. these commuting flights to oslo haven't been particularly memorable, but it's difficult to have much drama worthy of preserving in memory on a flight that's less than an hour. and frankly, when you're on the same flight nearly weekly, it's best if it becomes anonymous and just blends in. to an extent, you want your flights to be drama free and fade away in memory. but there are always some that stand out.

the first one that comes to mind was years ago, leaving reno for phoenix on an america west flight. there was a huge thunderstorm rolling in and i'm sure we were the last flight let out of there that day. i'm still not sure why they even allowed us to leave. the flight was full of bowlers. yes, bowlers. big, tough-looking ones. there is a huge professional bowling stadium in reno, where thousands of spectators can watch big old texans with pot bellies bowl professionally. i say that because i was very nearly strangled by the one seated next to me. it was an extremely rough take-off and i was in the last row. my friend was across the aisle and i turned to her amidst the bumps and said, "this is ok with me, i know i'm going to die in a plane crash." big old strong middle-aged bowler man next to me was none to pleased to hear this statement. "what?" he growled, clenching his fists. my friend, supportive as always, laughed hysterically. of course, we made it. i think we may have actually been struck by lightning a couple of times, but we made it.

my first inter-continental flight--from JFK to moscow. i'd originated the trip in phoenix and was so excited getting on my plane there, to think i was likely the only one boarding that plane who would end up in moscow. i was so excited, i didn't sleep that much. i remember being totally amazed at the -70 temperatures outside over the north sea when we were at altitude. now, i realize that's normal. i still look back fondly on the sense of excitement and good butterflies i had in my stomach on that journey.

on a flight back from busan a few years ago, i had a stopover in beijing. around 25 swedish families who had been in china collecting their precious adopted babies got on the plane. around 25 swedish families who had been in china collecting their precious adopted babies got on the plane. i thought that warranted repeating. that meant 25 sets of new parents, 25 12-18 month olds with whom they did not share a language, nor an intimacy that enabled them to know what to do to serve that baby's needs. and because it was before our company travel policy changed, i was in monkey class, right in the middle of them. 9 hours of pure, unadulterated hell. screaming babies. nervous, worried, panicky, frazzled parents who didn't know what to do. aside from feeling pretty sorry for myself, i actually felt sorry for them. no parent wants their child to be screaming on a plane (or anywhere, for that matter). i'm sure they will all remember that flight as well. i hope things have gotten better for all of them.

frankfurt-skopje on palair macedonian. they had pretty shiny red planes. they're not in existence anymore. it was the days ('95) when people were still allowed to smoke on the plane, and since it was the balkans, i think smoking may have even been mandatory. and smoke they did. aside from one child who was also on the flight, i was the only person not smoking. and when they served us some strange hunk of something that may once have been fish, doused in oil, i very nearly got sick. i think the only reason i didn't get sick was that i had already been sick on the previous flight...

we had originated in phoenix, headed for frankfurt, i don't actually remember if we landed somewhere else in the US first, but that would make sense. my fellow students and i were in the very last row. we had a good flight, lots of laughter, playing cards and drinking some wine and a few beers. but only a few. they served breakfast and suddenly, in the middle of it, i felt really awful. it came on me so fast that i was still reaching for the airsick bag when i threw up. right on my friend dmitri's leg. he was a relatively new friend--we'd met in a summer macedonian course and i was absolutely mortified to have thrown up on him. however, he was totally cool and his only comment was, "you don't chew your food very well." it could have been a real friendship ender, but thankfully it was not and we went on to have a laughter-filled three weeks together and i managed not to throw up on him on the way home.

i had a colleague who i traveled with a lot in my last job. we had great fun every time we flew together. after the dinner, we'd ask for a refill of the wine, pick a movie, count to three and start the movie simultaneously on each our own screen and thereby watch the same movie together. but the most memorable flight we had was from chennai to frankfurt. the flight was delayed and delayed and we sat in the lounge for ages (at least there was a lounge). finally, they let us on the plane and they were doing the usual routine...handing out the little toiletry bags, coming around with the champagne...and then the power went. completely. it was an old 747. eventually, the little lights on the floor that should light up in an emergency did come on. the captain came on and informed us that they were trying to locate a blown fuse. and they say the germans have no humor. after nearly an hour, they got the power back on. we stayed in good spirits by switching over to gin and tonics. finally, we left for frankfurt a good three hours late and when we got there, had long missed our gate opening, so they parked us way out on the tarmac. and someone forgot to order stairs, so we waited another 45 minutes once we were on the ground. the stewardesses were very happy when that flight was over. we had missed our connection to copenhagen, but ended up on a flight together with environmental skeptic bjørn lomborg. i hadn't realized he was gay before seeing him in person. not that there's anything wrong with that....

don't mess with a typhoon

once upon an august in the south china sea, there was a typhoon. there was also a group of 30 people who were working very hard in the delightful surroundings of the club punta fuego in batangas, philippines. the sheets of rain outside made it easier for them to stay inside and work diligently. but three days into the workshop, they were ready to let off a bit of steam.

so they went for a late-night dip in the infinity pool. it may have been raining, but it was 30 degrees C outside, so a little rain didn't matter.

accompanying them on this swim was a lovely bottle of limoncello. the delightful lemony goodness made them laugh a lot and left them feeling a bit daring and invincible. there was a small group who had been in phuket together at another workshop and they had fond memories of an afternoon spent playing in the waves of the andaman sea. but this was the south china sea and they were on the edge of a typhoon. and it was very, very dark.

however, the now smaller group of three (of the fond memories) decided to brave the steps down to the beach, where the waves were pounding in. the water was warm and wild and they laughed and laughed and shouted into the wind. it made them feel very alive, being there in that place, experiencing that storm up close. the waves were so wild that they were soon covered in sand and their towels, which had been left on the stairs were swept away. one of the three, uncomfortable with all of the sand that had filled his swimming trunks, took them off. and it was only discovered some time later that they too were swept away. along with his glasses. eventually, they began to feel they had sand in places it shouldn't be (ears, for example) and it began to seem dangerous and foolhardy, so the trio made their way back to the bungalows. one of them now stark naked and without his keycard.

however, he was unbothered by this, as he was sure that the door to his bungalow was open on the inside and he had only to knock on his neighbor's door (who was also at our workshop and not a complete stranger) and he would be let into his own room and saved the embarrassment of going down to the front desk for a new keycard without a stitch of clothing on. so, the other two went on towards their bungalows and left him standing at his neighbor's door.

the next morning, the neighbor told his side of the story...how he answered his door in the middle of the night, only to find his fifty-something neighbor standing there buck naked and wanting to come in. as he said, "he didn't even have the decency to pick a leaf." as it turned out the door between the rooms wasn't open, so the two gentlemen spent the night together (there were two beds, so it isn't as racy as it sounds). and much, much, much laughter was had by all.

and luckily, the naked (now clothed) gentleman headed for his flight and even managed to get on it, rather than falling asleep in a chair and having to wait to the next day (like that other time in phuket), but that's another story for another day.

to this day, the occasional stray piece of sand still comes out of my ears.