Umami

Umami--have you heard of it? According to my Yahoo! newsfeed, umami--Japanese for "savory" or "meaty"--is the fifth taste. You know how you were always told that there are 4 tastes--sweet, salty, bitter, sour? Well, now there's a fifth. And by the way, if you haven't heard by now, there are 8, not 9, planets. You know how you were always told that your genes came solely from your two parents? Well, that's been debunked as well.

Just kidding. But I can just imagine the headlines, "Recent scientific studies suggest that offspring receive their genetic makeup from not two, but three, DNA contributors." I know this sounds ludicrous, but I feel like every time science teachers drilled numbers into our heads (5 kingdoms of living species, 3 states of matter, etc.) they were just begging to be disproved.

The Old Days (A Tribute to Stolen Internet)

I'm sayin' goodbye to nights of cruising my neighborhood, laptop in lap, in search of stolen internet. Sayin' goodbye to wandering around my front yard, cocking my laptop, now to the right, now to the left, hoping to catch that elusive wireless signal. Yes, that's right--Fyfer Place has officially purchased its very own internet connection.

In Support of More Martial Arts Analogies

"I balanced a salad bowl on my thumb," my coffeehouse coworker, Jessie, announced to me the other day.

Obviously, her feat rendered me speechless. However, once I recovered from my shock, I informed her that this is the black belt test of barista-hood.

Jackpot! I believe I've just discovered a veritable motherload of analogy possibilities. Martial arts has a whole rainbow of belt colors. And there are different levels of black belts.

On Monday I announced to my students that we were in the home stretch--the 4th quarter, the bottom of the 9th--of the semester. Unfortunately--despite the motherload of possibilities--martial arts gets very little love in the sports analogy arena. Maybe I should start calling their final exam the Test for the Black Belt in College Algebra.

All I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned from Mao

With two weeks left in the semester, I was just informed that I must give eleven more quizzes to my students by the end of the semester. Eleven. This translates into more than one quiz per day. This also translates into grading approximately 650 quizzes in next two weeks. Hence, my days will be spent hunched over sometimes incoherent, often incorrect scribblings with a red-ink pen.

In my initial frustration over my boss’s impossible expectations, I was sorely tempted to create a few quiz scores ex nihilo. But I was quickly dissuaded from this tactic by a) ethics, b) the knowledge that successfully forging relatively accurate, imaginary grades would be difficult, and c) Chinese history.

The first two reasons are rather transparent, but the third might take some explaining. In the late 1950’s, Chairman Mao Zedong of China began an ill-fated initiative called the Great Leap Forward. He formed citizens into agricultural collectives that reported to the government. The goal was to use the government’s monopoly on agriculture to finance nationwide industrialization. Unfortunately, the production quotas for the collectives were impossibly high. However, to save face each cadre would lie to his superior, stating that production quotas had not only been met, but exceeded. Such “success” led to increased production quotas and, predictably, the same lies. As a result of this lying epidemic, China reported phenomenal harvests for a while, only to have millions die of starvation a couple years later when people couldn’t subsist on imaginary grain.

Lesson learned: Forging numbers = starvation. Not exactly, but it could if I lost my job.

IMAgiNiff

On Thanksgiving, I played a board game called Imaginiff with my family. The game gives you a hypothetical situation and asks you to guess—among six options--what a person’s most likely response to the situation would be. So, you spend the game wondering whether your father would really confess to accidentally running over the neighbor’s cat; or whether he would rather, as you suspect, place the smashed cat on the cul-de-sac and say nothing. You also start to ask yourself questions you’ve never asked yourself before—questions like, “If I were a condiment, what kind of condiment would I most likely be?”

As I was puttering about my house today, circumstances inspired me to design my own Imaginiff card:

IMAgiNiff… (Naomi)___

Had Mormons come to the front door. What would he/she most likely do?

1. Welcome them in and offer them tea

2. Explain to them that he/she had a Mormon roommate in college and already knows a lot about Mormonism

3. Take this as an opportunity to discuss the possibility of acquiring some holy underwear

4. Show them his/her collection of Mormon Tabernacle Choir CDs

5. Convert

6. Hide

The Melting Pot

The US is the Melting Pot of the World. I maintain that my neighborhood is the Melting Pot of the US--at least demographically. My next-door neighbors, Bob and Wanda, are homebound octogenarians; on the other side, are guys I fondly refer to as "the college frat boys," whose hobbies include leaving their red gym shorts hanging on the front porch banister and practicing their frat boy band music loud enough to rattle the walls of my house.

Behind me are the Villa Capri apartments, their whimsical name belying their utilitarian function. They are home mostly to Chinese and Taiwanese, who gladly live in cinder block if it means cheap rent.

Then there are the Mexicans (I think they really are Mexican, not just generic Latin American). They live down the street, and I only notice them when I hear the music blaring during their weekly Sunday gatherings, presumably the only day they have off.

Me? I'm a white, middle-class working female. I am what everyone is melting into.

Saturday Night at Fyfer Place, Episode 1

On Saturday night my roommate, Ingrid, and I were watching Planet Earth, a BBC documentary series on the “last frontiers of nature.” As we view footage of Iguassu Falls, a massive waterfall in Brazil, Ingrid blurts out, “If I could be anything, I would be a water molecule.”

I look at her quizzically.

She continues, “You could have all the sensations…the sensation of falling, of flying…”

“Ingrid,” I say, somewhat pedantically, “Water molecules aren’t sentient.”

“Then I want to be a sentient water molecule.”

Later, as the camera pans out over an ice-covered lake in Siberia containing one-third of the earth’s freshwater, Ingrid retracts her desire to be a sentient water molecule.

As a sidenote, what I learned from watching Planet Earth was that I have a vast store of latent scientific knowledge. How did I know that the Amazon river dolphin is blind before the man with the British accent told me? I also knew that the giant salamander has poor eyesight…maybe I have a thing for blind animals.

Who do you crush on?

So, yesterday I found out some bad news. Apparently, my favorite single male author is now married and living in Colorado. The plan was for him to marry me and for us to grow old together in China, but apparently he didn't get the memo.

In the past couple years, I've developed crushes on three single male writers, two of whom are now married and one who has been deemed too dangerous to get involved with. He has issues with women, which he repeatedly brings up in his writings. So, I don't think it's going to work out with any of them.

Some girls crush on famous guys with cute butts; I crush on famous guys who write well.

"Hello. You've reached emergency services. Please hold while we repair our vehicle."

A couple days ago, I saw an ambulance being pulled by a tow truck.

Think about it.

The Awkward Phase Conversation

When I was eight, I had a tooth pulled. Sitting in the school lobby, waiting for my mom to pick me up to go to the dentist, my little second grade mind couldn’t see past that day. Getting my tooth pulled was pretty much the worst thing imaginable. I didn’t think I’d survive.

When I have kids, I intend to sit them down when they’re twelve or so and have the Awkward Phase conversation with them. There will be a male and female version, but they’re pretty similar; I’m still working on the male one. The female version goes like this, “You’re awkward right now, and you’re going to continue to be that way for the next few years. Don’t worry. All your peers are awkward just like you. Even the pretty girls—the skinny blonde girls with the trendy clothes--are awkward. It may seem like they escaped, but their dye jobs and thick make-up are a thin veneer for their stumbling speech and body image problems.

“It may not seem like things will ever change, but trust me, they will. I too was once awkward. So was your dad. So was every person who ever survived to adulthood.

“And it’s okay that you feel unattractive. Your legs are gangly, your mouth full of metal, and your face covered in acne. That’s good reason to be self-conscious. But one day, you’ll wake up and make it the whole day without tripping over your own feet, or getting apple stuck in your braces, or using acne medication. You won’t notice at first. But gradually, you’ll have more self-confidence. You’ll stop saying “like” and “uh” every other word and saying everything like it’s a question? A boy might even ask you out. Then another one. Slowly you’ll realize you’re out of the Awkward Phase. That’s all it is. It’s just a phase.”

I survived the tooth extraction, and I survived adolescence. But things would have been so much easier if someone had mapped things out beforehand. There is life after the dentist office and there is life after the Awkward Phase.

The Consummation of Friendship

Would that we had always been friends and didn't have to go through the awkward "get to know you" phase requisite in all relationships. So ran the sentiments of a friend of mine. They resonated in my mind, as previously unarticulated truths are wont to do.

These sentiments brought clarity in an unusual arena. I have avoidance issues with going to the hair salon. I only go when my roots scream, "Everyone is looking at us!" I hate making small talk, and I have nothing in common with hair stylists except that we both live in the same town and we both hope my dye job turns out. But now I think it's more than that.

A few weeks ago, I arrived for what I knew would be a torturously long dye session. After 3 hours comparing (or rather, contrasting) post-high school lives with my hair stylist, her giving me a chronology of her tattoeings and me confessing awkwardly that I'm a math teacher, we were ready to consummate our "get to know you" conversation by becoming friends. Instead, I left. I left with red hair and a renewed appreciation for my college degree, but with no new friends.

Maybe my aversion for the hair salon boils down to my disappointment with these pseudo-relationships I develop with each new hair stylist? Many people always go to the same stylist, thereby involving themselves in a long-term relationship. I think my problem might be my one-night stand habit with hair stylists.

Job Possibility

A week ago, a friend introduced me to the Martingale betting strategy, and I think it might just be the solution to my malingering career conundrum.

Here's how the strategy works: Let's say we're playing roulette. The first bet I place is $1. If I win, I quit; if I lose, the next time I bet $2. Then if I win, I quit, and my net gain is $1. If I lose, the next time I bet $4. Then if I win, I quit, and my net gain is $1; if I lose, the next time I bet $8. Each time I bet, I bet $1 above my cumulative losses.

Think about it. Given infinite money (and if I'm betting in $1 increments, $2000 is effectively infinite money), regardless of the odds that I'm working with, I'm guaranteed to win $1 eventually.

And that's just each iteration! So, given $2000 and infinite time (and thus infinite iterations of $1 wins), I could win an infinite amount of money. Thus nullifying my need to find a career.

But as my friend wisely pointed out, many things are possible given $2000 and infinite time.