doubting thom

In conjunction with our trip to the salon yesterday afternoon for my hair cut, Jeff and I indulged in an evening of shopping downtown. We arrived in town early, so decided we’d go to Borders beforehand. On the way to Borders from where we parked, we passed by the Gap. Jeff suggested, and I concurred–since I’ve told him in the past that I’m not much of a fan of the Gap–that he would go later, while I was at my appointment.

When we left Borders and walked to the Grooming Lounge, I told Jeff that he could go on and I’d call him on the mobile when I was finished. He said that he’d come in for a bit first. I think he really just wanted his complimentary espresso. As we sat waiting for my appointment, though, I told him that if he waited for me there, I would go with him to the Gap afterwards. He did, and I did.

And now I have to publicly retract the negative things I’ve thought or said about that chain. We arrived to find they were having a terrific winter sale (some prices in the store were lower even than the ones on the online sales site). By the time we left, probably an hour later, I’d found a number of things I liked and ended up outspending Jeff by about $10. I bought two pair of khakis (one black and one “air force gray”), two nice long wool scarves (here’s one, in “cloud” and “sunshine”), two cute wool and wool-cotton knit winter caps (which I now tend to call, perhaps incorrectly, “toques.” As a kid, we called them “toboggans,” but in college I was told that this must be either a regionalism or a familyism, since a toboggan is only a sled. Yet now I see “toboggan hat” used on a number of Internet shopping sites, at least for the wool hats with pom-pons on the end. So, what do you call the wool close-fitting caps worn in winter, like the one in the picture?), two pair of funky striped socks, two pair of nice boxer briefs in olive and charcoal, and two heavy wool baseball caps in heather gray and olive.

Ok, there is one thing for which I’m still not too happy with the Gap. While I was originally drafting this entry, I logged onto gap.com to see what they called those wool caps (only to find out now that they call them simply “caps” and “hats”) and that new browser window froze when I clicked on the Gap’s Winter Sale link. I moved back to the first browser window and quickly copied the text I’d put in the field for this entry–just in case. A moment later I was feeling self-congratulatory, because the browser crashed. I opened a new blog entry screen and hit Ctrl-V. Nada. Somehow, though, even though I’d copied the text, it was gone anyway when the Gap page crashed the browser. So I had to recreate this entry, which was obviously much better the first time.

For Christmas, Jeff gave me a gift certificate for a haircut at the Grooming Lounge; he had been there previously and had written positively of the experience and I had expressed interest in checking it out as well. With shaggy hair badly in need of a trim, I made an appointment for yesterday afternoon, and Jeff accompanied me downtown (where we also did some shopping, about which I’ll blog in subsequent entries).

It was an interesting, indulgent experience. A trip to the Grooming Lounge includes offers of choices of beverage from espresso to root beer. And the haircut itself includes a shampoo, conditioning and scalp massage beforehand; a hot face towel to relax the skin post-shampoo; and a shoulder massage after.

I remarked to Jeff as we left, though, about how “straight” the place felt, almost but not quite unsettlingly so (if that makes sense); he agreed, but noted that it had had a different feel the times he’d been there (during my visit, all the staff cutting hair were men, whereas Jeff has had his hair cut there by women). I think the shop actually aims for that feel–they boast that they’ve been featured in GQ and Playboy, for example, and the web site tenders an invitation to stop by to “watch some ESPN,” while the interior of dark wood feels like a cigar bar. When we arrived, there was a game of some sort on one of the TV screens in the waiting area, but the sound was off; rather, an emjoyable and eclectic selection of music, from the Doors to Frank Sinatra, played softly. Near the end of my appointment, though, the sound to the game was turned up and it became the topic of conversation among the staff and a few visitors; I kept expecting Michael, my–um, what do you call the person who cuts your hair at a place like this? “Stylist” seems too foofy yet “barber” feels too lowbrow. Ah, his card gives the answer.–“grooming expert” to ask me what I thought of the game or whom I was for, and frankly I had no idea what sport was even on, much less which teams were involved. He did ask me if I play golf, though, but fortunately didn’t ask me any questions about the “little woman.”

The experience overall, though, was a satisfying one, and it was very nice to be pampered like that. Michael spent really quite a lot of time on the haircut (I was in the chair close to an hour), which I think turned out well; Jeff seems to like it, at least.

Here’s a little warning for Metro riders in the DC area: don’t put your cell phone near your farecard. As I noted yesterday, Jeff and I went downtown on New Year’s Eve to meet his college friends for dinner. After we entered the Metro at Pentagon City, I put my $4.00 farecard in my jacket pocket. When we arrived at the Dupont Circle station, the farecard was rejected at the turnstile. The station attendant checked it out, told me that the card had been completely erased, and asked if I’d had it near my cellphone. Indeed, my cellphone was in the same pocket as I had placed the farecard en route; apparently, though this information doesn’t seem to be printed on the card itself, their vending machines or any official WMATA source that I’ve been able to discover (nor does a general Google search turn up any information), a cell phone can completely erase the information on a Metro farecard’s magnetic strip. And this must happen frequently enough for the station attendants to make this the first question they ask when your card turns up erased.

A few weeks ago, my State Department ID badge, which also has a magnetic strip, stopped working as well and it was discovered to have been erased. I’m now wondering whether my cell phone–which I often wear in a pocket on my messenger bag in such a way that it rests on my chest, where my ID card dangles on a lanyard around my neck–was responsible for this too.

It’s just as I feared would happen. While my TiVo wasn’t wearing a housecoat when I got home this evening, and had not in fact recorded Jerry Springer, it had done something just as bad: it had recorded two episodes of Maury and one of The View.

While I apparently have their TiVo, somewhere in middle America a frumpy housewife in curlers and her disheveled, stained t-shirt wearing, unemployed husband (I keep picturing Onslow from Keeping Up Appearances) are sitting in front of the TiVo in their trailer, while enjoying a couple of Budweisers, and wondering why it keeps recording Sex in the City, Will and Grace and the Biography channel special on Judy Garland.

Who better to be part of one of my experiences of synchronicity than Brian Greene. Two days ago I wrote about him, then a day later the New York Times published an op-ed he authored about the nature of time.

One of the most interesting points he makes is that with a more scientific understanding of time (as opposed to our more intuitive but inherently subjective experience of it), it’s perhaps even possible “in moments of loss [to take] comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.” How zen, and how beautiful.

In high school I was a math whiz and have continued to be fascinated by mathematics and contemporary physics, though in college I made a decision not to pursue them formally, going down the social sciences road instead. Sometimes, though, I wish I’d taken that other path, for the sheer intellectual joy for their work that so many mathematicians and physicists seem to express. On the other hand, in some parallel universe, Thom-2 did (and Brian Greene-2 is blogging about him).

Jeff already has written about what we did, with whom and where for New Year’s Eve. I’ll admit that with New Year’s Eve being his and my reunion after a week apart over Christmas, I was kind of hoping for a quiet evening alone together. However, I also wanted to support Jeff’s meet-up with his college friends, who were in town only through the next morning, making New Year’s Eve really his only opportunity to get together with them here in DC. And he and I did get to spend a wonderful lazy afternoon together, as I was able to get home at 2:30 when our office closed surprisingly early for the day.

Dinner was wonderful. I love Ethiopian food, but just don’t go out for it much; this was probably the first time in more than a year. Much of the rest of the evening, though, was smoky, crowded and loud, and the lines for the bar were so long that Jeff and I only got to drink one extremely overpriced (and only average in taste) appletini (cf. here and here), missing out on a champagne toast altogether. I also felt a little like I was intruding upon their get-together, a sort of fifth wheel.

The actual turning of the new year itself at midnight was also a little anticlimactic. One of our number having heard that there would be fireworks over the Mall (though neither Jeff nor I had heard or read anything of it locally), we left the bar at 11:45 in order to try to get to a good vantage point for the display. So at midnight the five of us were walking down a random DC street, and Jeff and I were able to give each other only the merest pecks to welcome in the new year together. Still, the sky was clear, the air was fresh and brisk and we were together, which was what I most wanted.

And, truth be told, I’m not really a big New Year’s Eve celebrator or New Year’s Day resolutionist anyway. In terms of my own soul-searching and intuitive sense of the cycles of the year, I tend to be in tune more with the old Celtic calendar, with its year turning occurring on Samhain at the end of October. Still, I did feel something significant and symbolic in ending one calendar year and beginning another hand-in-hand with Jeff, regardless of where we were or what we were doing at the time.

So it’s clich

In less than 8 hours, Jeff is due home via red-eye flight from California.

I’ve missed him and can’t wait to see him again; we’ve been apart since last Wednesday. I’ll be picking him up at National Airport–assuming his flight is on time–at 8:30 in the morning then, alas, dropping him off at home before continuing on to work myself (while he still has the day, indeed the rest of the week, off). I did pick up a couple of bottles of bubbly on Tuesday, though, for a proper New Year’s Eve celebration with him Wednesday night.

And I’m looking forward to having Thursday off from work and spending all day together with him, making up for lost time.

Strangely and a little alarmingly, though perhaps due to my Appalachian mountain heritage, the Trisha Yearwood country song “She’s in Love with the Boy” keeps running through my head tonight when I think about him coming home. It is at least alternating with “My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada” from Avenue Q (“I love her, I miss her, I can’t wait to kiss her.”), perhaps due to my queer sensibility… that, or the fact that I’m simply just a very strange person.

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[Update: 09:20] Well, I should have known better than to assume anything. Poor Jeff got stuck in Detroit this morning several hours longer than he was supposed to, and that was after his flight from SFO got to DTW 15 minutes early. The plane from DTW to DCA required unscheduled maintenance and the necessary part wasn’t even there; when I last spoke to him at 8:20, it was just arriving and was being installed. The web site, though, now says that there has been an aircraft change due to maintenance, and at least has continually been updated with new information; for the past ten minutes, though, it has read that the flight left the gate at 9:12 but has not yet taken off from DTW, and the flight now has an estimated 10:37 arrival at DCA. In the meantime I came on in to work and will go pick him up from here.

[Update: 09:25] The flight is in the air, according to Northwest’s web site, and the expected arrival is 10:31. Soon, soon.

[Update: 11:45] He’s home, hoorah, hooray! I just got back to the office after leaving to pick him up about an hour ago, taking him home and giving him a, um, warm welcome. Skyrockets in flight…

When PBS ran the NOVA “The Elegant Universe” series a few months ago, I missed the first episode but managed to TiVo the second. Since then I’d been waiting for the programs to be re-run, and tonight TiVo picked them up for me.

In addition to my longtime fascination with quantum theory, chaos theory and astrophysics, there’s also just something about the series narrator and expert on superstring theory, Columbia University mathematics and physics professor Brian Greene, that I’ve always found really adorable and intriguing.

Recently, though, I was stunned to discover that he and I were undergraduates together, both part of the class of 1984. I pulled out my senior yearbook, and there he was. A number of his bios mention that he performed in musical theater in college (and that even now he takes acting classes and performs in community theater); I’m trying to recall now if I ever saw him in a show at Harvard. Perhaps I’ll see him at our 20th reunion this coming year.

Even before I bought my iPod earlier this month, I’d already ripped about half of my CD collection to MP3s. Since then, I’ve been slowly ripping the other half to AACs (and re-ripping some of the others to AACs as well). A few weeks earlier, though, while starting to clean out some closet space for Jeff to hang his clothes, I had come across my nigh-forgotten collection of P.D.Q. Bach CDs. Yet now I can’t find them anywhere in the condo, while for the past two weeks I’ve been craving listening to them again.

By the way, you can listen to Peter Shickele’s segment on the “Seriously Funny” episode of WNYC’s Soundcheck recorded on December 22nd.

“Virginia, fairest Virginia. ’Tis for her I sing this song.
They called her ‘Virgin’ for short, but not for long.

— “Virgo” from Twelve Quite Heavenly Songs (Arie Proprie Zodicale), S. 16°, by P.D.Q. Bach