doubting thom

Because of ongoing difficulties with the Saab, and my reluctance to drive it for great distances, I’d been borrowing Craig’s car to visit my mother on weekends. Last week, however, I decided to rent a car, so early in the week I reserved a compact car from Thrifty.com; Thrifty, along with many car rental companies, maintains a location just south of National Airport, not far from my home.

Friday evening Jeff and I went over to the rental facility to pick up the car. The man behind the counter pulled up my record and after a few minutes asked me if I’d like to upgrade to an Intermediate or Full-Size. I told him I would not. He then continued to enter my information, and a few minutes later told me that he didn’t have any cars, only minivans, to which he’d upgrade me for the same price as the compact. At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to use a minivan, thinking it was likely that they got horrendous gas mileage on the order of an SUV (a co-worker has since told me he thought it probably would have performed nearly as well as a car), but then I agreed to take the minivan. Then he quoted me a price two and a half what the original reservation had been. When I protested, he said that it was because of the insurance; I told him I already had insurance and didn’t need any additional coverage. But by then my frustration took over and I told him just to hand back my driver’s license and credit card and to forget the whole transaction.

To be fair, I didn’t really want to go home for the weekend. I was tired and stressed, felt like I needed to clean and organize the condo in preparation for today’s appraisal, and would have spent four hours driving there and four back, just to have a little over 24 hours there.

Before I left, I asked the guy why they even took reservations, if such were essentially meaningless (and I’m wondering now why he asked me if I wanted to upgrade to an intermediate or full-size, if they didn’t have any of those, either; if I’d said yes, would he then have offered me the minivan at the same price as that upgrade, or for the original compact?). He said that other drivers don’t always return their cars on time. But you’d think that a company and facility that deals with the kind of volume that they must would have formulae to account for that fact, and to have the extra cars to cover for those that they can estimate won’t be returned.

So this coming weekend I’m in the same boat, but will make reservations at multiple rental car companies all along the same stretch of road–excepting Thrifty–in the hopes that one of them will come through. With any luck, I’ll have my Prius before I have to deal with the rental car companies too many more times.

$500 down, and I’m now on my way to Prius ownership: I just placed an order for a fully-loaded Prius in “Millenium Silver Metallic” with gray/burgundy interior. Jeff and I went by the Alexandria Toyota dealership this evening for an appointment with one of the salesmen with whom I’d emailed on Monday, after having seen his name in their ad in the Blade, Washington’s gay weekly.

Within 5 minutes of arriving at the dealership and meeting the salesman, we were outside looking at a sleek new Prius in “Driftwood Pearl” (a light metallic gold, basically); just a few minutes later, after a quick rundown of the various systems, I was in the driver’s seat and heading down Route 1. Jeff was very quiet in the back, even when I asked him how he was, whether the seating was comfortable, etc.; I was worried for a bit that he didn’t like the car. After the 30-minute test drive, we were seated at the salesman’s desk preparing the minimal paperwork for my pre-order. When the saleman left to make a photocopy of my driver’s license, Jeff asked “Was it just me, or were you drooling over the car as well?” Turns out he loved it, too, and had been so quiet just because he was so engrossed in the car’s cool technology and features.

Part of the coolness is that you don’t even have to put a key in an ignition slot; as long as you have the key fob on you, the doors and hatchback will unlock once you’re within 3 feet of the car, and the car itself starts with just a press of a Power button (imprinted with the same power icon you find on a computer or monitor). To put the car into drive, you merely step on the brake and lightly push a small dashboard-mounted lever to the left. To put the car in park, you push a button marked “P” just above the lever.

The speedomer, odometer, gear indicator and fuel gauge are digital, deeply recessed into the top of the dashboard at the base of the windshield for an almost heads-up display. The wow feature that is most readily apparent, though, is the systems monitor display, a good-sized LCD display panel that controls the audio system, the voice-activated DVD navigation system, the Bluetooth phone integration, the climate system, and also can show a continually updated display of the usage of the hybrid system and various statistics.

The ride was smooth and extraordinarily quiet (whenever the gas engine cuts out for battery power only, like at stoplights or going downhill, the car is eerily quiet; the initial impulse is to assume the engine has stalled and to look for the key to turn to restart it), and pickup from stoplights and while passing was more than sufficient, even when starting from a battery-only condition at a full stop; the interior is spacious and comfortable; and there’s lots of cargo space.

The salesman said that they’ve taken orders for just over 60 Priuses, and they’re expecting the first large shipment sometime in November; he said my car could be in as early as that shipment, and more than likely before the end of December at the latest. So before Christmas I may finally have a new car. Happy New Year, indeed.

After we concluded the paperwork, the salesman asked how I’d heard about the car and the dealership, and why I’d emailed him specifically. I told him I’d been following the Prius for some time, and noted that I knew someone (hi, Gene) who already drove an earlier model Prius and who had ordered a new one from that same dealership, and then I told him that I’d contacted him specifically because of the Blade ad. He said that they’d only just placed their first ad in that paper a couple of weeks ago, and already had gotten a lot of response from it. So it looks like after giving up one gay car in the Saab convertible, I’m just moving to what may turn out to be another.

The cutest thing in the brochure is the “Complimentary Roadside Assistance” offered by Toyota. Jeff and I simultaneously mused that the response might go something like, “Thank you for calling Toyota Roadside Assistance. We’re so sorry to hear that you have a flat tire. But may we say that your hair looks marvelous?”

When looking at the GLCensus web site earlier today, after receiving an email about their partnership with Nielsen to conduct a three-day survey of GLBT TV viewership habits, I came across an interesting study from this summer that I’d missed at its original release.

According to the study, which asked respondents first if they belong to a religion and second if they consider themselves to be practicing, the more embracing a given religion or denomination is of GLBT issues the higher the percentage of practicing GLBT members of that religion, unsurprisingly. Of the top ten religions named, Catholicism was the specific religion claimed by the highest percentage of GLBT members, at 17.6%. Filling out the top ten, with between 4.3% and 2.3%, were Methodist, MCC, Episcopalian, Jewish, Baptist, Lutheran, Unitarian, Pagan and Presbyterian. However, 30.3%–more than any other single response–said they had no religious preference at all, while 6%–more than any except Catholicism–considered themselves to be atheists.

The highest percentages of those practicing their respective religion, however, came from Pagans at 84.6%, MCC at 79.4%, Unitarian at 66.7%, Episcopal at 57.6% and Jewish at 47.5%. And Catholics were the lowest among the top ten, with only 29.5% considering themselves to be practicing.

Back in July, I posted about my invitation to be a Nielsen household for a week. This weekend I received another phone call from Nielsen asking me if I would be willing to participate for another week, starting November 20; this time they specifically are interested in my experiences as a PVR (TiVo) owner, and are sending a diary designed to make it easier to note the things I record as well as watch during the week.

Then today I got an email from GLCensus Partners asking me to participate in a special three-day initiative in partnership with Nielsen to measure the television viewership habits of the GLBT community, beginning the end of this week.

For someone who six months ago watched almost no TV at all, I’m now apparently an important influence on the television-watching possibilities of the American public. Mwa-ha-ha-ha!

The paperwork is done and on its way back to the loan agent, so the process is underway: by the end of November, I should have a new mortgage for 15 rather than 30 years, a lower, fixed interest rate, and some cash in hand. The condo tentatively has been appraised at almost 75% more than I paid for it six years ago this month; an official appraisal will be done in the next couple of weeks as part of the refinance.

And Wednesday night I have an appointment at the local Toyota dealer to test-drive a new Prius; assuming I like it as much as I fully expect, I plan to place an order for one that night. Since my boss ordered one two weeks ago and was told it “probably” would be here before the end of 2003, I don’t expect I’ll be seeing mine before late December or January.

Similarly, the new heat pump has a ship date of six weeks from now. There were no right-handed units in stock, and the contractor says that basically the company has to build one. Since that puts me into mid-December before the unit is shipped here, and then an installation date has to be set afterwards, let’s hope for a very mild late autumn.

Ok, I admit the title is an obscure play on words on several levels. “Pied” is meant to evoke the concept of dance from the French word pied, “foot,” while “piper” is from the name of the dance troupe–“George Piper Dances”–we saw Tuesday night. And, just as the Pied Piper of fable mesmerized and enchanted the children of Hamlin, George Piper Dances enchanted the audience with a dance piece called Mesmerics. Got it?

The first piece the troupe performed, William Forsythe’s Steptext from 1984, was described in the program as “a spellbinding exercise in deconstructed classicism. Enormously challenging for its four-person cast, Steptext is a powerful display of dance at its very limits.” The piece didn’t look “enormously challenging” to me, though admittedly where dance is concerned looks can be deceiving. It was complex, but it left me completely cold. The only thing I did find interesting was how any interaction between opposite-sex partners was organic and fluid, while that between same-sex dancers felt tense and conflicted, almost confrontational, with gestures giving a strong impression of “back off, buddy.”

Pieces two and three, though, Christopher Wheeldon’s Mesmerics and Russell Maliphant’s Torsion respectively, were just amazing. The former really lived up to its name; a series of repeated and restructured movements set to the similarly repetitive music of Philip Glass and involving the entire five-person troupe was compelling and hypnotic.

And Torsion was, as the program described, “a spectacular example of strength and balance work, with an intuitive understanding of coordination. Created in 2002, Torsion is a graceful, compelling, atmospheric and technically brilliant example of dance drawn to its ultimate expression.” Performed as a male duet by the two principals, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, the piece moved seamlessly and with the appearance of effortlessness from simple individual movements to complex feats of balance and strength, with the two dancers sharing and alternating the roles of balancer and balanced, holder and held. Beautiful, evocative and inspiring, truly; I kept catching myself holding my breath in awe.

The three pieces were interspersed with personal video clips–with a home movie feel–taken by the two charming and disarming men around the world as they discussed their work, their surroundings and their lives while meeting with choreographers, rehearsing (allowing themselves to be seen occasionally as klutzy and graceless as the rest of us), joking, sightseeing and even, in one case, stripping down and bathing (and, William Trevitt, you’re a gorgeous man).