Mark: “Do you want this flax seed meal that’s in the Amazon cart?”

Me: “Ooh.  I don’t know.  I think so.”

“It sounds weird.”

“I was just planning to put it in our morning oatmeal.”

“Okay.  Why do we want flax seeds again?”

“They’re a high source of omega 3’s.  The highest source.”

“And why do we want omega 3’s?”

“They’re the youth nutrient.”

“The youth nutrient?’

“They’re good brain food.”

“Okay.” Cautious nod.  “I’ll buy the flax seed meal.”

Okay, maybe it’s not funny if you can’t see his face.

Our friend, Robert, is a bridge pro.  Like, yes, there are bridge pros.  Bridge isn’t like poker; there’s not a lot of money to be made just by playing and winning.  So bridge pros make their living by teaching lessons.  It turns out that the best way to teach a lesson is to take your client to a tournament and just play plenty of hands (except they’re called “boards”), criticizing their play and getting them a lot of tourney level experience.

This week Robert had a couple of clients who were interested in hiring on a full team of six.  Which meant Robert needed several of his bridge playing buddies to round out the team, including Mark.  In exchange for Mark’s bridge-playing services, we are getting a hotel room for the week, gratis, and Mark is getting to play one of his favorite games at a competitive level.  It’s a nice life.

All week long Mark has been trying to get me interested in playing bridge.  I’ve written before about my near-dangerous love of gaming, and I have to admit, it feels weird to be traveling for a tournament—any tournament—and not playing in it.  But I’ve tried bridge.  A few times.  And while I finally get how to bid and respond, I’m weak on rebidding and overcalling, and very weak on actually playing the hand.

See, bridge is actually two games: the game of bidding, where you and your partner use a very bare vocabulary (1 Club, 2 Diamonds, etc.) to communicate about your hands and how many tricks you think you can take.  And the game of cards, which is a trick-taking game similar to hearts or spades.

You would think that first game was fairly simple, but I am here to tell you it is Not.  Imagine this conversation if you will.

“Do you play Jacoby No Trump?”

“No, Minorwood.”

“What about Drury?”

“I like Drury with weak twos.  You play Stayman?”

“Stayman!  Well, yeah.  Duh.”

I tend to treat this talk the same way I treat Programmer-ese; I just zone out a bit and listen for the emotional content.

I can’t play any of these strategies (called “conventions”).  Mark keeps insisting that if I just read these three bridge tomes, I could know everything, and we could play together, and oh!  The fun we’d have!  But here’s the problem.  I Don’t Want to read the bridge books.  Not even a little bit.

“I Don’t Want to read the bridge books,” I finally told him in no uncertain terms.

“Ok.  I get it,” he said, and turned his mind to other ways to sway me.

He thought of one last night.  “In bridge,” he said, “there’s bullying.”

“Bullying?”

“Yeah.  First there’s pre-empting.  That’s where you know your opponents can make a good contract, so you jump the bidding up to say, 3 Spades.  You have Spades, but maybe not enough for 3.  But by jumping to the 3-level, you take away all the room they needed to talk.  Now they have to make a guess about where to end up.  Maybe they guess wrong.”

“Ok.  I get that”

“Then there’s the psych.”

“Psych?”

“That’s where you just flat out lie.  You don’t have anything, but you say, oh, 3 Hearts.  You don’t have hearts.  Maybe your opponents are the ones with the hearts fit, but how will they ever find out now?”

“But what if your partner gets fooled by the psych?”

“Yeah, well.  That’s the problem with the psych.”

“Ok.”  I thought about it.  “So there’s bullying.  I like that.”

I think he finally got me.  We played a couple of hours of bridge tonight, and I have to admit I liked it.  It doesn’t have any dragons or zombies in it, so that is a serious minus.  But we won a lot, so that is a serious plus.

You have no idea how happy I was to see the thing arrive. A couple of months back Atlanta had some flooding. Some fairly serious flooding. And one of the casualties of that flooding was a big water pipe at my curb.

Emergency services hustled out and dug up the pipe, leaving behind what Mark and I have come to call, affectionately enough, the Hole. The Hole was vast and impressive, and seemed destined to be a permanent feature of our landscape.

It’s not that the city government wasn’t concerned. A few days after the flooding, a pair of orange cones appeared flanking the Hole. About another week later, the Hole was strewn all about with plastic orange fencing. A month after that, a missive arrived requesting our permission for city workers to enter our property in order to fix the Hole.

We signed the form and sent it back with enthusiasm. About a month after that, the workers arrived, porta-potty in tow, and began the various and sundry tasks associated with filling in the Hole.

So far their usual M.O. is to work about six hours, then leave for a week.  Although their last visit was on December 23rd, so we’ve just hit the three mark week.  The rest of the time they leave the digger there for the neighborhood boys to admire, which is a lovely public service.

Now, I don’t mean to sound too sour about it.  I am happy that the Hole is getting fixed.  And I have faith that eventually the digger and porta-potty will return from whence they came.  It just kind of boggles my mind that they can leave what must be a fifty thousand dollar vehicle sitting around on my lawn for three weeks.  I mean, don’t they need it for anything?

But in the meantime, I’m going to swipe an idea from my pal Kelly and use this hundredth post to solicit questions from the audience. Anything you want to ask me about, I’ll do my best to answer in the next post. Questions about writing welcome, questions about anything else welcome as well. I sort of doubt I have many lurkers, except maybe my Dad, but if I do, this would be a great time to delurk!

See you on the flip side,

Jane

When 2000 rolled around it was, if you’ll recall, a big damn deal. I’m talking pomp and circumstance, and dancing in the streets. Remember… hee hee… Y2K? I was just twenty-two, spending a good chunk of my time resenting my awesome job at a newspaper because they expected me to spend so much more time on it than I’d ever had to spend on college.

And then here it was: 2000. A big freakin’ number that said clearly that we were moving forward into the future, that this was a Day to Be Marked. It never honestly occurred to me that I’d even be seeing New Years Eve 2010. I mean, I expected to, but only in the way that you expect to die someday. It was a length of time I really couldn’t envision.

But here I am. And I’m a different me. In evidence of which, I offer these pictures.

These are the shoes I wore on New Year’s Eve 2000. I wore them around downtown Fort Worth, in the midst of a rockin’, rollin’ Texas-style celebration. They hurt my feet, my toes nearly froze off, and I spent all night worried that I’d scrape through that thin sheen of blue to reveal the papier mache or whatever was underneath.

And here are the shoes I wore this year:

I wore them in my living room, while Mark and I watched a Burn Notice marathon, then switched to the Times Square ball drop for the last five minutes. We toasted with half a can of Coke apiece, kissed, spoke of our undying love and fidelity, and then got back to Burn Notice. Full disclosure: I was also wearing socks at the time.

So what those shoes are saying, I guess, is that things change–sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better, and often for both.

That’s how my life has been, but much more on the better side than the worse. I’ve got a decade less of life to run with here in 2010, not to mention fertility and facial elasticity. But I’ve also got a husband and a life I love. And I think (I hope) I’m more a bit wiser now, a bit more generous, more patient.

What I’m not, and what I would have expected to be by now, is finished.

I’m not finished figuring out how to be the person I want to be. How to be disciplined, and courageous, and stylish, and organized. Nor am I established in my career. By any measure, I’m farther along than when this millennium started, but I am not there.

And because I’m 2010 me, and not 2000 me, I’m old enough to know that maybe you never really get finished. Maybe it’s all really about the journey

Or maybe that’s malarkey, but here are a few things I know:

1. The 2010 me likes comfortable shoes and doesn’t care who knows it.
2. Burn Notice is very, very good.
3. The optimism I felt at the beginning of 2000 is nothing like the optimism I have now. And I think that’s because I’ve got the right companion for 2010.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Mark: “You know what? Maybe we should start bringing plastic cups with us when we travel.”

“Why would we start bringing plastic cups with us when we travel?”

“Because then we wouldn’t have to use the glasses in the hotel rooms.”

“Oh, right, because of that thing I read. That they don’t really wash them, just swab them out with the cleaning rag.”

“Right. We could bring plastic cups, and then we could use those instead.”

“Sounds great.” (Pause.) “You know, maybe what we should really do is start keeping a sleeve of plastic cups in the car. Then they could be called into service on any number of occasions.”

“That sounds really good.”

Then we high fived. Ok, we didn’t. This isn’t even a verbatim transcript; I added in a little bit of the dreaded DAE (dialogue as exposition) to catch you up on our previous marital conversations. But I think it’s pretty clear that any days we had as a young, hip couple are officially in the past.

Lest you think this isn’t impressive enough, here is the view of the side lawn.

Maybe it’s just me, but something about this year’s decor seems… I dunno, subdued. What happened to the rest of the Peanuts cast? I swear there used to be more of them out here. And why does the Abominable Snowman have electric boobs? I really can’t say.

At least this drummer boy border is new — and a worthy addition, I think.

Yes, I know, I know. Some might find this annoying. But me, I can’t help but admire someone who isn’t afraid to dream big.

So Merry Christmas, Mr. Insanely Overdecorated Lawn Man. Your power bill is large, but your heart is ginormous.

I was sitting in the Borders cafe, which was pretty crowded. A group of medical students had taken the table next to the wall, the one with easy outlet access. Another woman had taken the table next to theirs, and since she had no plug of her own, she had stretched her laptop cord across the aisle to their outlet.

Eventually a bookstore employee arrived. She tried to bring humor to the situation. “Uh oh, the cord police are here,” she said. “We can’t have cords stretched across the aisles.” Then she asked the two parties to switch places.

You would have thought she asked them to strip naked, such was the stink they caused. The woman with the laptop immediately started yelling. The medical students joined in the ruckus. The laptop lady began to mimic the bookseller’s request in a high-pitched, silly voice.

The bookseller tried to keep her cool, but a little irritation was starting to creep into her voice. I could scarcely blame her.

Finally, the patrons agreed to change places. And in the inevitable shuffling of bags, it was revealed that one of the medical students had brought in a bag of McDonald’s takeout to eat while studying.

“You can’t have food from other places,” the bookseller told him. Whereupon he insisted that he’d done so several times before and never had a problem. Dude, seriously? I mean, if you sneak in a little baggie of nuts I’m not going to judge you. But McDonald’s? For real?

At last, the switching of places was done. The Micky D’s was banished to the medical student’s backpack. The bookseller left. And the woman with the laptop continued to loudly grouse about her, calling her, among other things, a “fuckin’ bitch.”

I don’t get it.

Senseless rudeness always get me down. Inattentive rudeness, everyone’s guilty of that from time to time. Rudeness through misunderstanding, that happens too. But plain ol’ I’m-pissed-so-I’m-going-to-make-you-feel-bad rudeness? Blows my mind.

Besides that, your relationship with an establishment you frequent is just that, a relationship. It involves give and take. The baristas and booksellers owe me decent service; I owe them the occasional purchase. And we both owe each other basic good manners and civility.

And there is one thing that guides my behavior when push comes to shove, when cord issues or cleanliness or noise threatens to create a conflict: It is more their place than mine.

I don’t go into your home and object to the standards you’ve set for it, and I don’t do it in your place of business either. If there’s a rule I can’t live with, I am free to go elsewhere. I’m certainly not going to pitch a fit because I can’t have things my way.

I wish I could make the people in the cafe understand that way of thinking, but I can’t. All I can do is what I did: track down the bookseller in the back of the store and tell her that I’ve always appreciated her pleasantness and that I was sorry she was treated that way. Which leaves me feeling a little good, a little ineffectual. Maybe Miss Manners could have done a better job.

The spread of wifi seems to be really accelerating. Just last month Borders bit the bullet and started providing free wifi to compete with Barnes and Noble. Things are cutthroat in that cafe now; you can’t get an outlet to save your life.

Meanwhile, Google is busy making plans for netbooks running its new Chrome OS, an operating system that is fast, cheap, and simple to use — because all it is, basically, is an access portal to the internet. Which means the spread of wifi is a very, very good thing for them.

Are we heading toward a whole new world? Or is it really true that the more things change, the more things stay the same? I don’t really know, but it kind of blows my mind that my kids will grow up more pluggged into the global community than I could ever have dreamed of in my youth.

Actually, it kind of blows my mind that I’m sitting on a plane blogging, using words like “the global community” to talk to that community while I drink my free half-a-coke and the captain warns us about turbulence.

But that’s life here on the bleeding edge.