Travel and Work and Travel

I've been travelling a little this month, and meant to write about my two separate trips separately, but I got back from one, went back to work the next day, and then left for the other two days later. I spent the two days between a conference trip to Providence, Rhode Island (which I have only ever visited for another conference four years ago) and a personal trip to Greenville, South Carolina (which I've never visited before this trip) catching up on the work I missed in Rhode Island, and was too tired to write in between.

I went to Rhode Island with four coworkers, but other than my friend Meghan and I meeting up for some things the five of us mostly stayed with our own friends and colleagues, and didn't overlap much. On our first morning there, Meghan and I went to the same restaurant for breakfast that we ate at our first morning there last time, Brickway on Wickenden. While there, I spotted an intriguing sign:



"The grilled muffin...," I began, asking our server for clarification. "What is that?"

"They take a muffin, slice it in half, butter the halves, and throw it on the grill."

"I would like the blueberry."



I've never heard of a grilled muffin before that moment, but it was amazing. Crunchy on the outside, and butter-soaked and almost soggy on the inside.

After breakfast, Meghan got coffee while I marveled at their cold brew set up:



which, according to the man at the coffee place, takes 24 hours to brew a single pot. We also went to the Providence Pride Festival:





where the Providence Pride Festival stole ten dollars from me. When we were walking up to the entrance, all of the signs said it was either a dollar (for regular admission) or five dollars (for alcohol area admission and discounts from some vendors) to get in. Meghan wasn't carrying cash, so I offered to pay hers. I only had a twenty, so I offered it to the lady at the gate and told her it was for both of us.

"Admission for two? That's ten dollars each."

None of the signs said ten dollars each for any form of admission, and when we got to the other end of the festival they were charging either one or five dollars. I hope my (stolen) money is going to a good cause.

It was interesting to walk through a Pride Festival in a city, and state, that actually embraces and celebrates their LGBTQ+ community. There were banners on the lightpoles, signs everywhere, unvandalized posters, and they even lit the state capitol building in rainbow lights at night:



Compared to Tennessee, it could almost make one think about moving until one remembers that the northeast is an icy horrorscape of wintry snow for several months a year.

After breakfast, shopping, and Pride festing, we met up with my friend Stacy, and Meghan took us on a walking tour of Brown University, which is very fancy:



and has a bear:





The next morning, the conference had a 5K, which was not timed but was still fun and in which I did not come in last:







That night I had an excellent dinner with my friend Sonja, who I haven't seen since college, and the next night I convinced a group of people to go have dinner at Umelt, a restaurant that specializes in grilled cheese:



and dankness:



I had the special Pride grilled cheese, which was a regular grilled cheese with a lot of food coloring:



During the extra long lunch hour one of the other days Meghan and I walked to the Rhode Island School of Design bookstore, because I wanted a t-shirt for their very interestingly named sports teams:





and then when the conference was over and we had a whole morning before flying out I went and did some sightseeing:













and then we flew home, I went to work for two days, and then got up last Saturday morning and drove to Greenville, South Carolina, to see a play and visit my friends Mike and Sandy. Sandy and I see each other every few years, but this is the first time that Mike and I have seen each other in person since 2006:



That's us last weekend, not us in 2006, outside of Mike's theatre.

Since I was only in town for an overnight, I didn't see much beyond downtown, a few walking paths, and the park by our hotel, but Greenville seemed very pretty:















and the walking paths were wonderful, early in the morning before it got really hot and humid:













We also went out for drinks after the play, and my screwdriver came with a slice of orange so wide and with such a thick rind that we all kind of stared at it and tried to figure out if it was really an orange or some other, larger citrus fruit:



I thought it might be a blood orange, but that makes no sense in a drink made with regular orange juice, and it didn't occur to any of us to taste it, because it seemed vaguely frightening.

Except for the terrible construction traffic outside of Asheville, it was a wonderful weekend, and I'm supposed to go back in December to see another play, at Mike's theatre.

I might take a day off from work and actually spend more than a night there.

Book 26: Fashion Victims

I must have read an article somewhere about Alison Matthews David's Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present, because I can't imagine how it would have ended up on my Amazon wish list otherwise. It did, though, and my parents bought it for me for my birthday or Christmas this year. A lot of books come into my house at that time of year, so I can't always remember which holiday I got one for, but I know it was from mom and dad, so thanks! I got around to reading it, finally (much more quickly than some books that are from a few Christmases ago and still hanging around the house waiting for their chance), and it was very entertaining.

David's book explores the dangers associated with clothing, both in wearing it and in production of it, from the beginning of the industrial age to the present. It only briefly mentions the dangers to animals, with a few mentions of European beavers being hunted almost to extinction for hatmaking purposes or turtles being hunted for their shells, and focuses instead on the dangers to people, most often to women. Rather than go through the more common paths of corsets and foot-binding, it looks instead at things like mercury in felt hats, toxic dyes, highly flammable fabrics (apparently it was just a thing for a while that nightgowns and ballgowns were made of fabric that burst into flames as soon as it got near a candle), explosive plastic hair accessories, and all the ways in which these things were deadly to the (mostly female) wearers and to the laborers who worked to produce them.

David doesn't shy away from the more gruesome aspects of her reporting, describing rotting jawbones and death by fire in vivid detail. She also paints a very clear picture of the ways in which known dangers were downplayed or suppressed entirely because they could damage business interests or, more disturbingly, because they were only a danger to women, and considered less important. Overall, David takes what could have been a dry, academic read and keeps it conversational, and as an added bonus provides a lot of illustrations to make the clothes come alive. This was a really good read, but I feel like the idea of dangers being ignored because fashion was considered more of a women's concern could have been elaborated on more. The idea was intriguing, but there didn't seem to be a lot of evidence to back it up.



Lois Lane? You had trouble with fashion once?



There's the charming, totally sane Lois Lane that we all know and love, and here she is in the story in question:



Our story begins with Lois attending a Broadway performance of "Hamilton". No, it's not the Hamilton you're thinking of, because this story was published in 1970 as the backup feature of the same issue where Lois dies and marries Satan on Lana's birthday. No sooner does Lois go backstage to congratulate the actor on his performance than he casually mentions that, oh yeah, his wig is cursed.





As Lois' life goes, this is pretty normal, actually, right up until the moment the curse takes effect:



Yup, he's dead. Intrigued, Lois decides to investigate the wig shop:



which is apparently in Ye Olde Towne section of Metropolis. The wig shoppe owner and Lois laugh about the alleged curse, and Lois buys a Marie Antoinette wig for the masquerade ball that night just to prove that there isn't really a curse. Upon arriving at the ball, Lois barely has time to get inside before the curse strikes!



Lois is almost bludgeoned by a watermelon, just like Marie Antoinette.

Wait, that's not how Marie Antoinette died? Well, what killed her, then?





Who knew that guillotines were made out of razor sharp serving trays? Panicked but still suspicious, Lois returns to the wig shoppe and picks out the Joan of Arc wig. Uncertain of its historical accuracy, she takes it to the Metropolis Museum to compare:



and immediately is almost burned alive:





She manages to save herself, but decides that the curse is real and the wigs are deadly.

Inexplicably, she then decides to return to the wig shoppe and buy another wig. What are you doing, Lois? Do you want to die?

It doesn't really matter, because the wig shoppe wants to kill her:



and they decide the best way to do so is by using this Byzantine scheme to convince her that a magic wig can give her super powers:



and then running her over with a truck. Their plan goes slightly awry:



because it's not Lois at all:



Not only that, but the wig shoppe owner isn't who we think he is, either:



Yes, the whole thing was a setup. Supergirl happened to overhear the criminals plotting after the fire at the museum, and swooped in to save Lois.

Probably because, as we learned above, dangerous fashion is a female problem.

Books 22-25: I might only read 52 books this year

We're halfway through the year, and I'm right at 25 books at the beginning of this month. This suggests that I might only read 52 books this year, which has long been my goal but is going to fall somewhat short of my totals for past years. I guess we'll see how it goes, but in the meantime, here are the books I've finished since the last time I posted an update (and promised to post more often):

22) Everybody was talking about the Netflix show "13 Reasons Why" for a while, but I don't have Netflix, so I picked up the book the show is based on. If you don't know already, it's the story of a set of 13 cassette tapes recorded by high school student Hannah Baker just before he death by suicide. Each tape is about a specific person, and explains why and how Hannah feels that person contributed to her suicide. As the book opens, Clay receives the tapes, and is horrified to discover that the girl he had a crush on is someone he didn't know at all, the same way he didn't really know the other twelve people, either. The tapes come with a warning that if they are not passed on, a second set will be released to the world, and Clay listens, as did the people before him and, presumably, the people after him will.

As a book, this was an interesting concept, because Hannah, in framing her entire story only as the placing of blame, is a classic unreliable narrator. Is what we're hearing the whole truth, or only the truth as seen through the lens of how the events fueled Hannah's depression and isolation? I'll be the first to agree that high school is a terrible place filled with terrible people, and that teenagers as individuals may be ok sometimes but as a group are heartless, soulless monsters, but my feeling after reading this wasn't sympathy for Hannah. Listening to these tapes is emotionally devastating for Clay, and Hannah did that to him on purpose. She flings accusations that cannot be answered, because she flings them from beyond the grave, blaming others for damaging her while inflicting a good bit of psychological damage herself. Hannah, in death, becomes the same sort of person she blamed in life.

I don't know if people watching the show have the same takeaway. I assume Hannah is a sympathetic character there, and she should be. Terrible things happen to her. At the same time, though, the book skirts toward suggesting she's also a bit of a selfish villain through Clay's reactions and thoughts, but never quite gets all the way to that idea, and I doubt the show does either. Then again, I'm judging without watching it, so I could be totally wrong.

23) I wanted to read Paul Tremblay's Disappearance at Devil's Rock because I really enjoyed his previous book, A Head Full of Ghosts. I enjoyed this one, too, but not quite as much as that one.

This tells the story of the disappearance of Tommy Sanderson, who snuck out into the woods with friends at a sleepover and then vanished into the night. The remaining boys' story doesn't quite make sense, and on the same night that Tommy disappears his mother, Elizabeth, sees a fleeting specter of him in her house, crying out for her before vanishing. As the search for Tommy intensifies, pages from his diary start turning up in Elizabeth's living room, hinting at strange activities in the woods, and meetings with mysterious strangers at Devil's Rock, deep in the forest. Kate, Elizabeth's daughter, and several neighbors report seeing shadowed faces peering in their windows at night, or running into the woods at the edges of their yards, and it becomes clear that much more happened in the woods the night Tommy disappeared than his friends have let on, and that it may have been too late to save him even before he vanished.

This was interesting, but something about the pacing seemed off to me. Overall, it was still a good read.

24) Jennifer McMahon's Island of Lost Girls opens with Rhonda, parked at a gas station and watching a scene so bizarre that she doesn't recognize it as a crime until it's over: a person in a rabbit costume invites a toddler from the car next to Rhonda's into his own, and drives away, initiating a statewide manhunt and casting suspicion on Rhonda herself for not acting. Trying to clear her name, Rhonda undertakes an investigation of her own, but as she gets closer to figuring out what happened to little Ernie she also finds herself getting closer to discovering what happened to Lizzie, her friend from childhood who also vanished long ago. Is there a link between the two? If so, what? And how are Rhonda's memories of another person in a rabbit suit long ago tied to the whole thing?

This was a fast read. It was interesting, but tied up very quickly.

25) During the "Real Housewives of Atlanta" four part reunion, Andy, Kandi, and Porsha revealed the shocking truth that viewers had wondered about and argued over all season: Phaedra, the attorney who has always presented herself as an upstanding churchgoer who had no idea her convicted felon husband was involved in any crimes at all and would never hurt anyone because it wasn't the proper, Godly thing to do, was the one who started the rumor that Kandi and her husband drug and rape women in a sex dungeon. In the course of shrieking, crying, and attacking Phaedra for this, Kandi happened to mention that anyone who had ever read Angela Stanton's book about Phaedra would have known she was dirty, and like any good viewer I immediately searched Amazon for the book: Lies of a Real Housewife. Apparently I wasn't the only one, because the book climbed several thousand places on Amazon's sales chart in under a week.

Was this the best book in the world? Oh, absolutely not. The grammar is terrible. On the other hand, it was highly entertaining. It tells the (allegedly) true story of Stanton's troubled background, relocation to Atlanta, and how she fell into a ring of criminals run by Phaedra. Moving through check fraud, bank fraud, auto theft, identity theft, and title fraud, Stanton ends up in prison and Phaedra ends up married to Apollo to keep him from testifying against her. When Stanton gets out and becomes an author, writing about the women she met behind bars, she is shocked to find Phaedra still acting against her while selling an image of herself on television that's nothing like the woman Angela knows, and she wrote this book to get back at her.

After finishing, I'm not sure how much of it is true, but I also note that Phaedra hasn't sued Angela, so maybe there's something to this after all.

The Tangled Web We Weave Out of Dumpster Fire Neckties

There's a running joke at work, and on my Facebook, about the ways that people who contact me manage to misspell or mispronounce my name. You name the medium (phone, fax, email, hand-written note, etc.) and at least one person a week will refer to me as Jole, Jule, Troll, Charles, Joyle, or some other previously unimagined variation on the theme of "Joel", but there's one version that comes up most often: at least a hundred people in the last decade have referred to me as Jewel. In my head, I tend to hear it the same way Bette Davis hisses it in "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" whenever she screeches about Jewel Mayhew.

I get called Jewel so often, usually in conjunction with some sad butchery of my last name, that last summer someone sent me this shirt:



They forgot to add a note, though, or the seller didn't let them, so I posted it on Facebook with a thank you message, and then a funny thing happened: two different friends said, "You're welcome."

Odd, right?

Neither one of them contradicted the other. Neither said, "You didn't buy that! I did!" This left a few options in my mind: maybe the one who bought it didn't feel like arguing, or maybe the two of them went in as a pair to buy it for me, or, unlikely but logical, neither one of them actually bought me that shirt. It's the only thing that makes sense to me, but I didn't want to force the issue, and just let it go.

Another running theme at work, especially for the last year, has been the use of dumpster fire memes. I have posted photos of dumpster fires on my Facebook page so many times in the past year that my friend Jocelyn bought me a dumpster fire Christmas ornament, and also I was asked to stop posting them in relationship to workplace issues. This wasn't a written rule or a reprimand, just a strongly worded suggestion.

A few weeks ago I was seething about something unrelated, as I sometimes do, and I started thinking about the unofficial, unwritten rules of our workplace, "No pictures of dumpster fires, Joel. Wear a tie every day, Joel.", and suddenly a lightbulb went on over my head: What if the two rules contradicted each other? If both rules were in the same place at the same time, what would happen? Would one trump the other? Would I have to take off the tie, or would I be allowed to present the dumpster fire to the world?

Determined to find out, I went online to Zazzle and designed and ordered my own dumpster fire tie, using some artwork I found online:



A funny thing happened the night that it came in the mail, though. I was super excited to wear it, and was going to Facebook to post about it, but when Facebook opened the first thing at the top of the page was a Facebook memory of one year ago: the Jewel Kiammer shirt photo. I looked at it, and immediately remembered how two friends took credit for sending me that, and thought, "Could that happen again?" I decided to perform a little experiment, and posted a note on Facebook that I'd received a lovely tie without a note, and did not know who sent it to me. I then texted several friends to ask, "Did you send me a tie?" Since they didn't send me a tie, they all answered, "No."

Except that one of them, my friend Meghan, said, "Yes."

I was immediately skeptical, because I bought this tie for myself, and asked Meghan what was on it. Meghan sidestepped the question by pointing out that part of showing my gratitude should include a Facebook post of my gift with a nice thank you note. I promised to post such a thing, but mentioned again that I did not believe she had sent me this particular gift. Meghan mentioned that my skepticism hurt, so I apologized, thanked her for my gift (which I bought for myself), and promised to tag her in the morning.

During the night, six other friends took credit for my tie. Some of them were clearly joking, but Meghan was holding firm to her story.

Prior to posting in the morning, I offered Meghan the chance to retract her statement, but she did not. I posted a lovely thank you note to Meghan, regarding the tie I purchased for myself. When we got to work, I told her again that I did not believe she had purchased this tie, and not only did she insist that she did, but she told other people in the office that she did. Meghan was all in on claiming to have purchased the tie that I purchased and lied about. I couldn't tell the truth without revealing my lie, but I still gave her repeated chances to retract hers.

Meghan stuck to her story, and I looked like a terribly ungrateful person who couldn't just take a nice gift and be happy.

Around noon I asked Meghan again if she wanted to confess, and texted her a screencap of the order confirmation email, claiming a friend had sent it to me. I carefully cropped it to remove the header that was addressed to me, the person who had placed the order. Meghan responded by claiming that it could be photoshopped, or someone could have logged in and gone through the entire process of ordering to take that photo without actually paying. I posted the cropped order confirmation to the Facebook thread, and Meghan continued to claim that she had ordered me the tie.

I again invited her to confess, and she again stuck to her story.

This left me in a difficult position. Should I go ahead and reveal that I ordered the tie myself, exposing Meghan as a fraud, or was I, as a friend, now obligated to support my friend by covering for her lie? I met some friends for dinner on Sunday and explained my dilemma, and they were unanimous in their answer:

"Dump her out, Joel."

So here I am, dumping out both Meghan and myself, but I did give her another chance on the way to lunch today to confess before I wrote this. She says that she meant it as a joke, but once she started she was just in too deep and couldn't figure out how to get out.

There's probably a moral in there somewhere.

Or this whole thing could just be a long, messy dumpster fire.