Yoosta Be A Yooper

 

I yoosta be a Yooper, but that was a long time ago, and occasionally I find myself wondering, just how much Yooper is still left in me?

For example, I can’t recall the last time I used the phrase “you’se guys!” That in itself is a major cause for concern.

Luckily, a rather large snowstorm just rolled through the Twin Cities, and now I feel a little better. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This morning I was at work, monitoring the weather radar online, along with probably everybody else in the company. The Great Storm was coming. According to the online chatter, we’d be lucky to make it out of this one alive. Two inches of snow? Four? Six? It didn’t matter!! There’s nowhere else to put the snow! We were going to be buried! Mass extinction was inevitable!

The radar showed a giant blob the size of Nebraska slowly making its way northeast, on the collision course with the Twin Cities. I found this to be rather interesting, and I decided that while the online chatter was probably overblown, the storm still wasn’t something to ignore. I quickly made the decision to leave work early, before the commute home bogged down too badly. (During storms in the Twin Cities, the two preferred methods of driving are Going Way Too Slow And Then Into The Ditch, along with Going Way Too Fast And Then Into The Ditch.)

And so, just as the snow was beginning to come down somewhat heavily, I was on my way. The drive home turned out to not be very bad at all, and I arrived safely, feeling smug and satisfied with my decision.

Shortly after, however, I began to feel the nagging doubts about how much Yooper I still had in me. I mean, I left work early because I was afraid of snow!!! No Yooper does that! And that wasn’t even the worst part! I’d been watching the weather radar! In the U.P., there’s no point in ever looking at the radar. The giant blob the size of Nebraska is always there, from October through May!!!

I glanced out the window and realized that it looked like a typical U.P. winter day. And here I was, running scared!

I decided to redeem myself as best I could.

An hour or so after dinner, while the rest of the Twin Cities was holed up indoors, I put on my boots, hat, and gloves, and stepped outside. (Actually, I put on more than that.) Whoa! Things had gotten worse! The snow was moving horizontally now, and the accumulation was pretty impressive. In fact, it was looking like a worse than average February U.P. day!

Perfect.

And so, striving for some form of redemption, I went for a walk in a snowstorm for no reason, and it was fantastic. It was cold and windy and snowy and blustery and miserable and just perfect. Nobody was out and about. I had the great outdoors to myself. I was pleased to see no other tracks where I was walking, which was where the sidewalk was supposed to be. It reminded me of trekking to the bus stop when I was a kid. I turned around and walked backwards to get out of the wind. I hadn’t executed that move in several decades. As the snow continued to whip around, I began to feel better about myself.

After a while, I turned around ta go back. Dere was snow down my neck, but I didn’t really care. A little snow never hurt nobody. I kept goin’, thinking that it’d been a long time since I had pasty for supper. A couple’a cars drove by, but I don’t think they saw me. I wondered if Mr. Norm was still on WCCY, and when the last time I had Baroni’s spaghetti was. It was pretty tough going there for a while, but I soon got useta it.

‘Bout tirty minutes later, I got back home. I took off my swampers, mittens, and chook, and put them by the register to dry. I wanted a cup’a coffee, but it was too late. That caffeine stuff keeps me awake, you know, and I do hafta work tomorrow.

Anyways, I think I proved a little somethin’ tonight. You’se guys, I think I still got a little Yooper left in me!

Get Rich Quick Scheme

So I figured out how to get rich! And better yet, since I’m desperate for any sort of attention, I’m going to share my idea with you!

As with most get-rich-quick stories, this one begins at Kwik Trip. (Source: Bureau of Imaginary Statistics) I was checking out, and my total came to $8.07. This didn’t seem like a worthy enough amount to break out a credit card for, so I paid with a ten-dollar bill.

Now here’s where things get interesting: The cashier proceeded to give me two dollars in change! Immediately, my mind started spinning, and before I’d left the building, I realized that I’d hit the mother lode. (If I was a cartoon character, my eyes would have turned into dollar signs.)



 

Here’s my line of thinking: People are lazy, and cashiers are people, so cashiers are thus lazy. (Source: Associative Property Of Laziness) Now, as more and more people begin to pay for goods with credit cards, cashiers will have to handle cash much less, and when they do, especially to make change, it will become more and more of an annoyance to them. Thus, over time, they will be more likely to take short cuts, such as giving somebody $2.00 back instead of $1.93, since they're too lazy to count out ninety-three cents in change.

So my plan now is to pay for everything with cash and force the cashiers to make change. This will be a huge annoyance to them, and over time they’ll begin to cut bigger and bigger corners in my favor just to save themselves some work. Think about it! I saved seven cents today, but that’s just the beginning! Cashiers are only going to get lazier! That number is bound to go up! Pretty soon I’ll pay for a $9.99 purchase with a ten and get back a full dollar! Or even a five! It’s foolproof! Hooray for the growing culture of laziness and entitlement in this great land!

Of course, in order for this to work I have to buy lots of stuff, perhaps stuff I don’t even use, such as deodorant. And I’m not really making money on the deal, just paying less. So, in retrospect, I guess it’s more of a go-broke-slower scheme than a get-rich-quick scheme.

But what the heck, I’ll do it anyway. It’s fun watching cashiers get annoyed when they have to count out change!

Memory Prioritization (or: Huh?)

In my last entry, I took a swipe at Toby Keith, insinuating that he often sacrifices quality for quantity in terms of his music. What I mean by this is that he cranks out an album a year like clockwork, but with only two or three good songs on each. The rest are - and how can I put this delicately? - basically steaming piles of ineptitude.

But this isn’t really about Toby Keith. It’s about how my brain uses a terrible prioritization algorithm when determining what I should remember. I’ll get to that soon.

Anyway, after making fun of Mr. Keith, I began to browse some of his older albums on iTunes, as his earlier work doesn’t suffer nearly as much as his current stuff. As I did, I came across the song “Jacky Don Tucker”. This was on one of his albums I owned a long time ago. I hadn’t heard it in probably over a decade – it wasn’t a single, so they never play it on the radio – but it didn’t stop the following from rushing into my head:

“Jacky Don Tucker was my daddy’s little brother, and at seventeen he jumped the fence…”

Whoa. I was remembering the lyrics.

“He joined a rock 'n' roll band, put a tattoo on his hand, my Granny said he never had a lick of sense…”

Yup. My brain had stored the lyrics away for safekeeping, just in case an important situation ever arose where I'd need them. ("If you can sing "Jacky Don Tucker" I'll give you a million dollars!")

“By the time he turned seven started stealin' watermelons, playin' house with the girl next door…”

Now, this wouldn’t be a big deal as long as I’m also able to remember important information. However, when somebody introduces themselves to me, their name floats off into the ether as soon as it rolls off their lips, and I'm left calling them “Ace” or “Sport." This can get awkward, especially if it’s Santa.

“Drinkin' muscadine wine by the time he was nine, sneakin' out and smokin' cigarettes under the porch”

Obviously, my brain has no idea how to prioritize. For some reason, it believes song lyrics are incredibly crucial pieces of information that need to be stored away in the heavily-guarded, Fort Knox portion of my memory. Other information, however, such as my zip code, the dates of birth of my immediate family, and why I became a Detroit Lions fan, have long-since been discarded, presumably to make room for more song lyrics.

I can only presume that this extends beyond music, and that it’s also only going to get worse. Assume for a moment that I have a finite amount of memory to work with, and that it’s already been maxed out. As I continue to learn, how will my brain prioritize what to throw away in order to make room for the new stuff? Will it be something useless, or something important? Could I one day be asked for my social security number and fail to remember it, all because my brain decided that the opening monologue from the Gunsmoke radio program was more important? (“Around Dodge City and in the territory on west, there's just one way to handle the killers and the spoilers, and that's with a U.S. Marshal and the smell of gunsmoke…”)

Could I one day forget where I live, just because my brain decided it needed to hold onto a few random facts about the NES game Super Techmo Bowl? (I.E. You could only rush for 4092 yards during the season with any given player before the game stopped counting.)  

The scary thing is, if this is already happening, where am I going to be 10 years from now? Imagine if I have kids! (“Hey there, Sport!”) Heck, what about 30 years from now? My best guess is that I’ll be the guy wandering around town singing obscure jingles from his childhood but who forgot to put on pants.

Maybe there are methods to train one’s brain to remember important information. However, that sounds like a lot of work, so I think I’ll just let things run their natural course. In a worse case scenario, I won’t be able to remember where I parked my car, even if I’m inside of it, but I’ll still be able to sing “Jacky Don Tucker” in its entirety.

“He was a melon stealin', cop-a-feelin', daredevil fool
 A do-it-anywayin', playin' hooky from school
 A water tower poet class of '73, he'd say by God you better know it if you're runnin' with me
'Cause I'm skinny dippin' finger flippin' son of a gun,
Play by the rules, you're gonna miss all the fun”

I guess that's not all bad.

In Like A Lamb

Apparently, my New Year’s resolution was to be terrible at blogging in a timely manner.

Blogging is an interesting business. You’re constantly in the need for new material, less you become the owner of a blog last updated two years ago, but at the same time, you don’t want to be constantly putting out sub-par material, just for the sake of having something new out there to your name. (Unless you’re Toby Keith, of course, but I’m not going to get into that, although maybe I should…)

For the most part, my blogging is largely reactive. I’ll just be hanging around, minding my own business, when something will happen that stimulates my brain and makes me want to write about it. (“Hey! That cashier just bruised my apples! I’ll have to blog about this, and soon!”)

If I ever sit down and try to force myself to come up with something, rarely are the results satisfactory.

Now, you’d think that January would be prime blogging season, wouldn’t you? It’s cold and dark and dreary, so what else is there to do? Plus, there are all kinds of topics to be written about, such as:

The polar vortex
New Year’s Resolutions
Giving up on New Year’s Resolutions almost immediately after making them
Boy are the Pistons terrible this year

However, these are all current events, which I usually shy away from. That’s what everybody’s been talking about non-stop for the last few weeks, so why would they want to read about it here?

So that leaves me with no choice but to wait for something to happen that I want to write about, and since it’s cold and dark and dreary in the Twin Cities, and nothing is happening besides hibernation and the occasional warming up of cars, my brain has basically shut down.

And so begins the new year. We’ll see how it goes…

Pondering Santa

When it comes to Santa, there have always been several big questions that, when viewed with a critical eye, can call into question his entire existence. The most obvious one is: How on earth is he able to make all of those deliveries in a single night? I mean, sure, maybe he takes Mrs. Claus along so he can use the sleigh pool lane, but how much time would that actually buy him, anyway?

Another big question is how much does it cost to run his entire operation in a location as remote as the North Pole? Heating alone must be murder! How can he possibly afford it, considering he has no known source of income? Did he at some point win Powerball? Or does he just cook the books with devious accounting tricks that would make a crooked politician blush? Or does he supplement his income by occasionally going through Dad’s wallet once he’s finished dropping off presents?

Now, while these big questions are fun to think about, if you look beyond them and start getting into more of the nitty-gritty details, things get equally as interesting.

For example, Santa works one day a year. During the other 364, does he fly around in his sleigh just to keep in practice? Or does he spend the first quarter of his delivery run knocking off the rust, during which time he’s constantly slamming on the brakes, tailgating geese, drifting between lanes as he fiddles with the radio, accidentally peeling out on roofs, and even causing property damage. (“Hey! Who put that chimney there?”)

I also wonder about his bathroom breaks on Christmas Eve. Does he ever use the facilities at any of the houses he’s delivering presents to? (“Honey, are you in the bathroom?” “No.” “Then who’s saying ‘ho, ho, ho’ in there?”) It would seem tacky to do so, but time is of the essence in his profession, and perhaps certain liberties must be taken. Or maybe he uses public restrooms, which means that he could conceivably be the guy at Citgo who hands the bathroom key off to you? (“Oh great, I have to go in after him!?”) Or does he just risk getting arrested when nature calls and finds the nearest clump of trees?

All right, enough potty humor. On to more important things! Santa has a lot of deliveries to make, and judging by the U.S. Postal Service, this isn’t a business where you can expect flawless execution. (Come to think of it, maybe Santa’s fiscal model is taken directly from the USPS.) Anyway, does St. Nick ever screw up? Has he ever switched packages by mistake and given say, long underwear to a boy in Florida, while an old man in northern Minnesota gets action figures? (“Hey! I already have the Green Ranger!”) Or perhaps little Susie once received a pipe for Christmas? (“Yay! Now I can pretend I’m Grandpa!”) I mean, Santa’s getting old. He can’t be flawless, can he?

The list goes on:

Is naughty and nice measured on an absolute scale? Or is it relative to each person being considered? (“He still gave a lot of wedgies this year, but nowhere near as many as last. We’ll upgrade him to Nice!”)

How often does Santa rotate the runners on his sleigh? Does he carry extras in case he has a blowout on Christmas Eve? Or does he have AAA?

Is Mrs. Claus annoyed that Santa refuses to retire? (“Why do we still have to live up here? It’s impossible to get a tan!”)

Does Santa watch movies that include depictions of him, such as “The Santa Claus” or “Miracle on 34^th Street”? Does he ever mutter things such as, “Outrageous! I act nothing like this bozo!” Has he ever sued for defamation? Maybe that’s where he gets his money from…

“He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake…” Wait, does Santa work for the NSA? Or vice-versa? Now I’m creeped out.

On Current Meteorological Conditions And Macho Posturing

As anybody who lives in the Twin Cities will attest to, recently the weather’s been cold.

On second thought, the word “cold” doesn’t really accurately describe the magnitude of the plummet the temperature has taken. No, what’s really needed is truckload of compound adjectives, so let’s try it again:

As anybody who lives in the Twin Cities will attest to, recently the weather’s been bone-chilling, gas-line-freezing, shoulder-hunching, black-ice-forming, teeth-chattering, nose-running, eye-watering, huddle-by-a-fire-if-you-have-one-and-if-you-don’t-then-just-set-any-old-thing-ablaze-and-huddle-by-that cold.

Ah, much better.

Anyway, now that we’ve firmly established the meteorological conditions of the past few weeks, it’s time to move on to an anecdote.

I was at a Kwik Trip pumping gas when I noticed that one of my fellow patrons had elected to sit inside of her car while her tank was filling. This struck me as a good idea, mainly because I was pretty certain that my eyebrows were going to freeze and fall off at any moment. However, one thing stood in my way: I’m a guy, and in the unwritten guy rulebook it’s stated that you have to stand outside and tough out the weather when you’re pumping gas, lest you admit to the entire world that you’re a huge weenie – albeit one who would probably be a lot warmer and have full functionality of his fingers.

And so, fully ready to sacrifice my eyebrows, I toughed it out.

Fast-forward to the next occasion when I had to get gas. This time it was even colder. After stepping out of my car and basically turning into an instant Klondike bar, I decided that I had no problem admitting to the world that I was a huge weenie. Yup, I was going to wait in the car as my tank was filling, guy rulebook be darned. But then I saw a guy pumping gas a stall over, and he was standing outside tall and proud, completely toughing it out. He wasn’t even bundled up, and he didn’t even seem to be showing any signs of discomfort.

Feeling ashamed, I abandoned my plan to turn into a giant weenie. An unspoken challenge had been placed before me by the other guy, and I couldn’t just ignore it. If he could tough it out, then so could I! Plus, if I were to give up and wait in my warm car, he would then have every right to come over, steal my lunch money, and give me a noogie, and he'd be totally justified in doing so.

And so, I toughed it out yet again.

That’s just how guys operate. At least the stupid ones.

It reminds me of the time I was training for a half-marathon. The schedule called for a relatively short run of two miles or so. However, as soon as I began, a guy got on the treadmill next to me and also began to run. I watched him out of the corner of my eyes suspiciously.

When I hit two miles, I didn’t stop. This was because the guy next to me was still running. We’d started at just about the same time, and I wasn’t going to let him win! So I kept running, throwing the training schedule to the wind. Whether the guy next to me knew it or not, he was in for a battle! I was going to outlast him or get thrown off that treadmill trying!

And so, scoring major points for stupidity and competitions that may not actually be competitions, I outlasted him and emerged victorious.

Am I proud of myself? Not really.

But do I regret my decisions? Also, not really.

The unwritten guy rulebook is a very powerful thing, and sometimes I’m simply torn between logic and macho posturing. Maybe someday, something will tip it one way or the other. Perhaps it will hinge on if my eyebrows ever grow back.

Traffic Report

After much careful consideration and rational deliberation - which may or may not have included charts and graphs - I’ve come to the conclusion that the Twin Cities traffic report is a bunch of hogwash. (That’s a technical term for malarkey.) I think I always sort of knew, but this week it became abundantly clear in light of the snowstorm that blew into town.

But let me back up. Ever since I’ve moved to the Twin Cities, the traffic report has never once changed. The exact same four or five bad stretches are noted, with no variation, to the point where I wonder if they’re always replaying the same report from 1983, just to see how long they can go before somebody catches on.

Now, how helpful is that? Every day I’m told that 94 is jammed going into the Lowry Hill tunnel. Well, duh. Everybody who’s ever driven that stretch at rush hour knows it’s going to happen, so why even report it in the first place? Shouldn’t the traffic report tell you something that’s out of the ordinary? (“Miraculously, nobody is driving in the left lane ten miles an hour below the speed limit! It's like somebody Photoshopped real life!”)

In addition, I'm always told what highways are bad, but never how to avoid them. That’s sort of like telling somebody they’re on fire and refusing to dump water on them. I can see when I’m stuck in traffic! I know it because that’s when I’m driving two miles an hour, cursing like a sailor, and wishing that the country music played on the radio wasn’t so horrible these days. I don’t need any help with that! What I want is a way out, like the secret tunnel Homer got to use when he was a Stonecutter. But does the traffic report help me out? Nope!

That leads up to this week, when a storm dumped a fairly large amount of snow on the area, which basically paralyzed all traffic to the point where it was about as productive as Congress. That afternoon, as I was sitting on the freeway, a sea of brake lights stretched out in front of me, the traffic report came on. Aha! I though. This should finally be different!

But it wasn’t. It was exactly the same as usual.

Now how does that work? Not one car in entire metro is going over twenty-five, and the traffic report still doesn’t change? It they wanted to be honest, they should have just said: “Don’t even bother getting into your car. It will be faster to walk. Or crawl. Or wait for an earthquake to displace you.”

So I’ve given up on traffic reports. But that’s just fine, because there are traffic apps that can be used instead, which boast the added bonus of making you an even worse driver, since you’ll be too preoccupied checking on an accident to watch the road, which is when you’ll discover that the accident is actually you, since you were too busy playing on your phone to notice that you rear-ended a semi.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I need to start working from home. Or become a Stonecutter. Suggestion on how I can accomplish either would be appreciated.