Last night after dinner, Stuart was fighting off a cold in the bedroom and I was doing some work online when his half-paused game of San Andreas caught my eye in the living room, so I turned it on and tooled around stealing cars for a while. I don’t really like the plot-line elements of the game but it sure is fun to steal cars and then wreck them and then harass pedestrians.
Stuart was lured from his lair and decided to show me how to fly a plane. So I drove to the airport and got in a plane, and he told me how to tilt the wings just so and step on the gas and taxi down the runway and lift in the air and now put my wheels away and hey! I was flying a plane!
After flying through clouds for a few minutes I decided I wanted to see the virtual sights so I started to dip back down through the clouds and BAM, I SLAMMED INTO A BUILDING and Stuart kept yelling “hit triangle! triangle!” but of course, I couldn’t just get my pilot out by hitting triangle because my pilot was a conscientious pilot who’d strapped himself into the cockpit with a nice secure seatbelt and instead of remembering to hit triangle to get himself out of that cockpit he choked on his in-flight peanuts as fiery death consumed him, OBVIOUSLY, so triangle wasn’t helping, thanks.
Only when I’d thrown the controller into Stuart’s lap and was clinging to his teeshirt with freshly sharp manicured nails and mewling did I realize the problem, the problem that hitting triangle could never solve. “You know what?” I squeaked. “One of my actual recurring nightmares is to be asked to fly a plane that I don’t really know how to fly but I figure, hey, it’s just like driving a car except with thrust and in-flight peanuts and so I agree to fly the plane and I’m flying along with a sense of false confidence and then BAM I SLAM INTO A BUILDING.”
Stuart said, “oh.”
If I never do that in a video game every again, it will be four days and four sweat-drenched nights too soon.
I just received excellent customer service from a company but it’s a sad state of affairs in consumerism that I’m so disproportionately impressed with that, and feel like I should tell you about it. What does that say about customer service in general?
I went into Washington Mutual on my lunch break to close our joint checking/savings account there – we switched to Bank of America a few months ago because it’s the same bank my parents use in Rhode Island and there’s no WaMu up there. It’s convenient to us to be able to transfer funds back and forth with my parents when we need to, and their little Keep The Change device is sort of sweet, too.
But my experience with canceling services steeled me as I entered the bank. When I asked the guy at the welcome booth what to do to close an account, he directed me to the right place and said, “we’ll miss you!” in a friendly way. The teller asked me politely why I was leaving WaMu and on hearing my explanation, conceded that it made sense but that any time I wanted to return, I was more than welcome.
All this for a piddling checking and savings account that may never have seen five figures (although thankfully often saw four). I’m impressed! I was treated like a human being and not a nuisance or a cash cow. Well done, WaMu.
So, completely unrelated to anything because it’s not like I’m a huge musicals buff (I used to be and now I basically only like Kander and Ebb or Mel Brooks musicals) BUT:
One real drawback to NOT marrying, say, a gay man (one who likes musicals, OKAY, we’re not stereotyping here) is that your husband will simply sit in the other room shaking his head and playing GTA while you sit slightly tipsy in the dining room, cruising the web and giggling along loudly to Alan Cumming singing TWO LADIES! (diddly-dee-tee-dee).
I know my side gig isn’t much to throw ticker tape parades about, in terms of swimming with the big fish, but I just had a thrill that perhaps those of you struggling to get published and noticed will understand – my review of the bloody brilliant Moonlight Hotel was published last week, and Alan Furst’s review of it this week in the vaulted New York Times agrees with me on some of the finer points of the book, as well as its general smashing OOMPHness. Don’t look now but HEY! someone that gets paid the big bucks came to the same conclusion as I did! If you’re wondering what that horn sound is, it’s me tooting mine. After a week where career things have gotten thrown into another gear with startling centrifugal-like force, it suddenly felt very very good indeed to see that. Toot!
Exclusive tidbit not necessarily available to the gothamist readers: Moonlight Hotel made me cry almost violently on the flight to England. Without spoiling the book, there’s a moment where, after a great tragedy that Anderson threw up at us out of nowhere, the main character makes what seems like the very minor choice of where to bury a friend, and it shattered my heart – either because of the specific twinge of the cemetery choice, or because Anderson had written it so goddamned well, I’m still not sure.
Otherwise, today was quiet. I read a lot, watched some Buffy, wrote some but nothing hugely successfully, got an incredibly relaxing mani/pedi and cooked burgers on the new George Foreman to some middling success.
How much do you love the slightly manic look on Stuart’s face? So much. Hope your weekend was quiet and lovely and not too rained-out.
It’s very rare that I neglect the blog. It takes a certain level of busy or terrified or exhausted for me to not want to blog.
Friends, we have come to that. It’s not really busy or terrified or exhausted, but it’s a combination. I’ve got some irons in various fires that are moving around, switching places, and it’s making it impossible for me to think what to talk to you about. Our wonderful trip to England almost doesn’t feel like blog material – it felt a lot like going home to Rhode Island for the weekend in that it was perfectly normal, lots of quality time with family, and not really blogworthy. If you were to ask me what we did – go ahead – I’d say, “we spent a lot of time drinking wine and laughing and going for small errands in town and I went up in a tiny plane.” I got to know my parents-in-law a lot better and it’s fair to say I adore them. So boring blog content there. Family life harmonious, snooooze.
I haven’t done anything noteworthy since I’ve gotten back, either. I saw X-Men, I hung out with an old friend who was in town, I had a wonderfully restorative brunch with dear friends, and Some Really Big Stuff happened, stuff I’m not ready to talk about.
Which is the crux of the problem. There’s an elephant in our living room and I promise, when I feel like I can explain the changes around here, I will. Until then, I’m boring.
I will tell you that I had a dream last night that started with me cleaning the house with Stuart, progressed into a strange medieval village where ghost horses terrorized people, morphed into a field trip with some very precocious and darling students and me flying bareback on Pegasus as their guide, and ended by being offered a job at a brilliant academy where these students studied.
Very, very weird. Much like the past week.
