A Misanthrope At The Airport

Let me begin by saying that I accept full responsibility for the series of events that landed me in the Port Columbus International Airport (Columbus, OH) for 8 hours yesterday. Lest the good people of Columbus take the following observations of their airport the wrong way, I encourage you all the consider the source of these observations. To wit:

* I am a procrastinator, and bought my plane ticket to my brother’s graduation last minute. Also,
* I am broke, so I bought the tickets on a discount airfare website,which booked the tickets on two different airlines
* I am stupid, and went to JFK instead of LaGuardia on my way to St. Louis, consequently missed my flight, which resulted in various re-bookings, expensive new ticket purchases, and cancellations of previous itineraries, which, to make a long story short, meant that yesterday from 9:15 a.m. to 5:10 p.m., I was stuck in the airport of Columbus, Ohio and feeling particularly spiteful and misanthropic.

So, before anyone takes offense at my spiteful tales of Port Columbus International, please remember that I am a self-proclaimed meanie who is unpunctual, mentally addled and has no money, and that making fun of the people around me is my only source of joy.

But I digress.

When one sees a full work day stretching before them at a U.S. airport, there are a few options of how to spend the day.
a.) you can spend money – get drunk at the airport bar, buy the latest Secret to Success type book and some souvenir magnets, etc.
b.) you can read.
c.) you can walk around and marvel at the special kind of tacky that is Airport Commerce.

I realize that more fun-loving types who are apt to make lemonade when life hands them lemons etc. might choose to hop in a taxi and visit one of Columbus’ fine art galleries or take a stroll along the riverfront, but for the reasons listed above, this is simply not an option for a person of my termperment, and I chose instead to wander the airport feeling sorry for myself and taking inventory of the ways in which airports in general and airport commerce in particular are terrible.

My first venture was into the Broad and High shop, which had the usual airport merchandise. There was a special – 50% off luggage sets, the type designed for people who prefer to carry 7 small-to-medium sized bags with matching print rather than one large suitcase or duffel bag. The hand luggage sets were available in black and white floral, tastefull brown and tan checks, and – for the fun, young-at-heart yet monied travelers – pink with white polka dots! Hooray! I don’t think I have ever seen someone carrying one of these luggage sets in real life. But didn’t the evil woman who was going to marry the Dad in the Parent Trap movie bring this kind of luggage on the camping trip, thus tipping us off that she was frivolous, selfish, and not to be trusted? That aside, the luggage sets were 50% off, so, I don’t know, maybe the connotations would be worth it.

Also available at Broad and High was a line of costume jewelry (”Cool Jewels for a Cool World”) which featured rhinestone crucifix earrings for a cool $7.99. These were beside two of my favorite items in the entire airport: the wooden roses and the career coffee mugs. Roses first. They were pretty much exactly what they sound like. Roses carved from wood. Remarkably lifelike, even to this jaded and angry airport observer. Available in a wide range of colors, for $29.99 a dozen. Then there was the career coffee mug rack, where you buy gifts for people you barely know, clearly hate, but for some reason feel compelled to buy a souvenir mug inscribed with some witticism about their chosen career. Examples? Of course:

Insurance Agent – “Proud to be a risk covering, property protecting, policy issuing, no claims bonus INSURANCE AGENT!”
(They forgot “gerund loving,” but ok.)

Domestic Diva - “Just because I’m a family raising, meal cooking, homemaking phenomenon doens’t mean I’m a DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE!”

Corrections Officer – “Just because I’m in Prison Services doesn’t mean I DON’T GET OUT once in a while!”

After spending about 7 minutes in Broad and High being bombarded with shit I don’t need, I realized that by spending such a large amount of time in an airport I had planted myself squarely in that most coveted of demographic/consumer groups – Americans With Disposable Income. You can tell a lot about a group of people by what other people try to sell them. Looking closely at the merchandise for a particular group can tell you a lot about what those people need. For example, if you watch Grey’s Anatomy you will quickly realize from the advertisements that you are in the company of a group of women, let’s say 25-55 years of age, and that what this group needs is Crystal Light, cellulite reducing creams, Match.com, and eye wrinkle serum. In other words, health, beauty, love, and youth.

It became clear within the first hour at the PCIA Town Center Shops that one of the things that Americans With Disposable Income need most are Puns/Plays on Words.

Broad and High, for example, is the store of a fictional character named Sue Venir, a cartoon woman who is even at this moment “travelling the globe to bring you great designs at great prices.” Posters around B&H show Sue to be a slender yet busty gal with impressively sculpted arms, which are displayed as she flexes, holding several shopping bags in each arm. Sue wears a tasteful red sundress and enormous matching hat (presumably she is just back from scouring the Kentucky Derby to bring us back great gift items at excellent prices), along with classic pearls and oversized sunglasses. She is a paragon of style, taste, and wordplay.

Having had quite enough of Sue and her somehow very disturbing coffee mugs, I wandered into the airport Bath and Body Works to ask them how the liquid ban had affected their business. It seemed to me a miracle that they had not already gone under, since the whole purpose of the store is to sell liquids to people about to board planes. But I found a bustling center of commerce that had adapted quite smoothly to the new liquid-free-carry-on world (they ship for free to anywhere in the US, and focus heavily on selling travel-size [less than 3.0 oz] versions of their products, and provide customers with free quart size ziplock bags to bring their new loot onto their flights). In addition to Puns, they were also catering to two of the Disposable Income crowd’s most pressing needs: Time, and Relaxation.

The Relaxation, of course, took the form of lavendar-vanilla scented linen sprays, soothing gardenia body butters, and a line of cosmetic bags with the following commands emblazoned on them: “CHILL out,” “Calm,” and “good NIGHT” (irregular capitalization from the originals). Time is a little harder to bottle, but they have done it, with products like “Just a Minute” a hand-scrub that boasts that after just one minute of vigorous exfoliation, your hands “will look they spent all day at a spa.” There are also several products that double task, allowing you to disinfect your hands while reinvigorating your spirit, condition your hair while rejuvinating your soul, and even a lip balm that purports to freshen your breath, allowing you to substitute a nice lip conditioning for that pesky tooth brushing that takes up so much time. But most impressive, to my mind, were the puns. Favorites included “Bring Up The Rear” booty-firming potion and “Be More Pacific” a shower gel that smells like a beach. The geniuses behind this word fun should really look into writing headlines at the NY Post.

There was also an up-market line of products made from BBW’s exclusive marine complex, including a Coral Facial Polish which, in case there were any concerned marine biologists about to cause a scene, noted “no coral was harvested or utilized in the making of this product.” (Insert collective sigh of relief from eco-minded BBW shoppers with poorly developed senses of irony here.)

I left BBW, marching past “First Class Seats,” large massage chairs parked in the middle of the shopping area which exhort weary, time-pressed travellers to “RELAX IN A HURRY” by getting an electric massage in front of curious passers-by. At 3 minutes for $1 and 15 minutes for $5, you need only get over the anxiety around being massaged by a chair as busy people walk by and stare at you, and you can be granted both Time and Relaxation at once.

Tempted by the chairs (the 3 minute option being well within my allotted airport funds) but unable to stomach the idea of being so relaxed in such a public spot, I headed outside for some cigarette smoking.

The designated smoking area is truly the highlight of PCIA, and I say this with much sincerity and admiration. The smoking area is located across the street from the entrance, and the good smokers of Columbus endured their exile with minimal bitching. The area is equipped with three comfortable benches and two large ashtrays. But most importantly, there were lighters everywhere. Anyone who has tried to have a cigarette at an airport in the last year will appreciate this for the manifestation of kindness that it is. The kind-hearted smokers of Ohio, knowing they are about to have their lighters confiscated at security, leave them behind, allowing those of us stranded at the airport all day to venture out, have a smoke, and not have to walk around all stressed out, hunting for other smokers to ask for their lighter, only to find that the stranger’s lighter was also left at the previous airport, and awkwardly lighting our cigarette from theirs, a gesture that is somehow un poco too intimate a transaction for two complete strangers. No, no, not in Columbus. There you will find a pile of lighters distributed on the benches of the designated smoking area, providing not only much-needed fire but also a great up-beat conversation starter, should you choose to interact with your fellow exiles.

Returning to the interior in a much nicer mood, I noticed that the Port Columbus International Airport is in fact a very pleasant building. It is large and open, with very modern construction, all done up in white and very pale grays, with lots of glass. There are huge columnar spaces with skylights at the top that make it feel very breezy and the natural light is really just a treat. Also, in front of the main entrance is a large crystal obelisk, about 4 feet tall, on loan from the Columbus Ohio Art Museum. The obelisk is a piece by America sculptor Christopher Ries, and is called “Afterglow.” It catches the lovely natural light from the skylight and creates a pleasant prismatic rainbow effect.

The floor tile is also worth noting. It is white, but has flecks of colored glass embedded throughout, giving the floor a very playful feel. Adding to the playful fun atmosphere of the airport interior are Kids Color Columbus posters, 18×24 enlargements of children’s drawings of interesting sites in the city, accompanied by charming write-ups of the zoo, the jazz festival, etc. written by 8-10 year olds. Even I cannot hate that. There is also a police officer who rides a bicycle slowly up and down the ticketing area, picking up speed when foot traffic allows. What a place.

I ventured to Heritage Books, this time not to make fun of the merchandise, but with a mind to actually buy something. Specifically, I was hoping for a notebook. Heritage delivered. This is also a pretty big deal – I have had considerable trouble getting blank notebooks at other airport bookshops in the past. For example, the international departures terminal at JFK has no notebooks for sale. In the entire terminal! In addition, the very nice cashier pointed out that I need not buy a commemorative Columbus Ohio pen ($3.99) but that I could in fact purchase a $0.99 Papermate instead. Good people.

Next I visit the Nutcracker Suite, a shop that sells primarily bulk candy. I realize that I am fully pun-saturated when I find myself mentally congratulating Nutcracker Suite management for the restraint they showed in not dubbing their store Nutcracker Sweet. The sign outside the shop announced that they sell Candy, Ice Cream, Balloons, Souvenirs and Necessities. Intrigued by the “necessities,” I go inside. I find the following items, which are demonstrably not candy, ice crea, balloons, or souvenirs, and therefore must fall into the Necessities category: an Art Deco Box ($125), small plates decorated like Easter eggs (on sale for $8), and an enormous Chocolate Octopus, which may not have been for sale as it was truly enormous and a price tag was no visible.

I move on, sitting down near the First Rate Seats, ogling those souls daring enough to sit down and get their public electronic quick and relaxing massage. (To discourage loiterers who only want to sit in the cushy chairs without paying for the massage, the chairs have pressure-activated recordings that shout “THANK YOU FOR VISITING FIRST CLASS SEATS. PLEASE DEPOSIT CASH OR CREDIT CARD,” repeatedly as soon as anyone sits down. I scribble down information from my trips to B&H, Heritage, Nutcracker, and BBW in my notebook, not wanting to forget the rhinestone crucifix earrings or the troubling mugs. I notice that in the several hours I have spent at the airport thus far, I have only heard 2 voice recordings reminding me that the Dept of Homeland Security has declared the nation to be at Threat Level Midnight, I mean, Orange, and am also pleased with this. (It should be noted though that I spent a considerable amount of time in the designated smoking area and thus my announcement tally may be considerably off.)

I ready myself to go through the security gates and see what treasures await me within the concourse. (There will be a live massuese who gives back rubs in a specially designed chair for $19 for 15 minutes, and I will watch enviously as fellow passengers indulge and RELAX IN A HURRY at her pleasant station, which is located in the middle of the concourse but surrounded by soothing New Age instrumental music.) Cell phone transferred from pocket to purse. Liquids in plastic bag. Flip-flops ready to be removed. Boarding pass and photo identification out for inspection. And then I remember. The callus shaver. That’s right, during my trip I purchased, at the Dollar General store in Quincy, Illinois, a brand new callus shaver. For those of you not in the know, a callus shaver is a little device for scraping calluses off of feet and is absolutely essential for preserving youth and beauty. Used correctly, it may even produce feet that look as though “they have spent all day in a spa.” It is a small tool with a small razor embedded in a little round holder, attached to a handle. While it would be of no use to an assailant, unless you were able to convince your victim to sit still while you scrape them with it for a while, I am sure that it is prohibited by TSA regulations. I do not have checked luggage and so have no option but to continue to conceal the scraper in my backpack.

Now I am overtaken by a fit of paranoia, sure that my behavior is betraying my nervousness and that my deceit is visible to the trained security checkpoint personnel the moment they look into my beady little eyes. Furthermore, I have a notebook full of scribbling that would certainly make me look like a madman. There are coffemug jokes and lists like “art deco box, easter egg plates, chocolate octopus” scrawled on the pages of my fresh steno, which while they are clearly material for a very humorous blog post, admittedly look more like the “notes” from an asylum escapee. Along with notes about the bike-riding police officer and the frequency of the TSA announcements, the notebook is sure to peg me as a pedicure-tool-wielding terrorist, should anyone take the time to look carefully through my things.

So distressed I am by the imagined interrogations I am about to undergo, I barely notice the Security Checkpoint Booties that are for sale in a vending machine midway through the queue maze, which, for the bargain price of one dollar will keep your feet germ free while the TSA x-rays your strappy sandals. Perhaps distracted by the woman behind me who is making a big stink about not having placed her mascara into her liquids bag (fool!), the x-ray operator does not notice my callus scraper, and I continue to the gate with my brand new pedicure tool safely buried in my bag.

A scant few hours later I was back in New York, relaxed and positively giddy with pun enundation. P.S. my feet look great and callus-free.

“A society is generally as lax as its language,” or Vocabula to phonelesscord: Ohhh Snap!

To supplement my paltry salary at my (rewarding!  remember, it’s rewarding!) nonprofit job, I edit college and grad school admissions essays for an online company.  As part of this service, I rewrite essays, reorganizing them and revising them for style/concision, etc.  For the most part, this is fun work.  It is fun to go in with an objective eye and organize an essay so the client’s undergraduate research as Such And Such Biochem lab, or that eye-opening volunteer project she undertook the summer after sophomore year, or whatever, sounds really important.    And it’s fun to correct for style, and make things more concise, because, well, because I am a nerd and I like it.

 The part of this job that makes me cranky and sometimes resentful of the education system and of the lazy students who would rather pay a couple hundred dollars to a website than carefully proofread their own essay, is correcting for grammar.  I don’t mean the trickier stuff - structuring long sentences with lots of subordinate clauses, using semicolons - that’s fun.  I’m talking about misusing “its” and “it’s.”  I mean using the word “literally” for emphasis.   (Did he “literally explode with rage”?  I doubt it.  I literally doubt it.)  I correct these things, and avoid the temptation to write my clients a note asking how, if they are as detail-oriented, intellectually curious, capable, motivated, and all-around snazzy as they insist throughout the essay, did they manage to get through all of high school and college without learning that ”accept” and “except” are very different words.

This leaves me feeling very much like a crotchety old lady who should just chill out and watch a sit-com.

 So I was overjoyed to read an article in the Wall Street Journal last week about a man who is even more of a crotchety old grammar-and-usage nerd than myself.  And he has a website!  The slogan of this nit-picking and very fun site?  The stern, “A society is generally as lax as its language.”  I like this.  This makes me feel like my prowling through essays for subject-verb agreement is part of some larger, more significant societal crusade.

Vocabula Review, which is both a website and paper publication, includes regular columns with great titles like Bethumped with Words, Grumbling About Grammar, and Top Twenty Dimwitticisms.  Is anyone else getting excited about this?

And then the website promptly burst my self-important bubble, when the first article I read was about a grammatical crime of which I am guilty.  Damn!  Just when I thought I was a good-guy.  The article begins,

“ When someone says we need an epicene pronoun, what do they mean?

Since when has they been third-person singular? That’s what he or she means. The epicene pronoun is a gender-neutral device for referring in the third person to the generic human being, without falling back on the discredited universal masculine or stumbling forward over the incipient singular they. “

Insert sheepish face here.  Yes, only moments ago I wrote, “… avoid the temptation to write my clients a note asking how, if they are as detail-oriented …. blahblahablah … did they manage to get through all of high school and college without learning that ”accept” and “except” are very different words.”

In other words, the article opened with a massive oooooooh snap! that seemed to be directed right at me.

Obviously there is a lesson here about being judgmental, self-righteous, and cantankerous, but this post isn’t about life lessons, it’s about grammar and usage!  So, onward.

The article goes on to suggest that, instead of the awkward “s/he” or the incorrect “they,” we just invent a third person, singular, gender-neutral (epicene, if you will) pronoun.  He suggests :

For he/she: esh, hesh, heesh, shehe

For him/her: rim, mer, hmer, hrim

For his/her: ris, ser, hris, hser

Yup, they sound funny.  But witty Vocabulist Michael Berger has this to say in these new pronouns’ defense:

“Granted, a person might find the proposed candidates a bit odd and unfamiliar, but esh would get used to them, and ris vocabulary would be fully up to date with ris attitudes and social practices. A bit of an awkward start and a learning curve is a small price to pay to enable rim to refer to people individually as human beings per se.”

Polyester Pantsuits & Audacious Rodents: thoughts on my hometown(s?)

A transplant from Kansas City to New York, I sometimes become aware of my divided loyalties.  Which one is really my city – the place where I’m from or the place where I live?  I don’t often think about it, and what little Midwest/Northeast tension exists in my psyche is usually easily resolved by joining a Facebook group called “Blue Voters From Red States,” and then making a dumb joke about being a country girl in the big city. 

But this month two occasions have prompted me to think more deeply about the being-a-transplanted-New-Yorker phenomenon.  New York City inspires such loyalty (at least it has in all the transplants I know), probably because we have to tell ourselves that we have a great reason for paying $1000 per month to live in a tiny apartment that inevitably has a vermin infestation of some kind, which is a 40 minute train ride to work and employs a super who is either crazy or absent, and a homeless man threw a stick at us the other day and domestic beers cost $6 at happy hour.  And also, of course, because living in New York (even with mice who have attended desert training camps in trap-evasion) is actually so wonderful. 

For whatever reason, that NYC loyalty comes with a scathing condescension for people who, by chance or by choice, do not live here.  Today a co-worker and native New Yorker asked me where I was from.

              “Kansas City,” I replied.

            “Oh really?” she sounded surprised, “it doesn’t show.”

            “Uhm, thanks.” 

Thanks I guess, because I think I know what she meant.  She meant, “Oh, how funny, you’re not a rube.  You don’t have dirt under you fingernails or bring livestock animals to the office.  You’re well educated and have progressive politics.  You don’t say ‘aw shucks,’ hate gay people, eat beef jerky for breakfast, assume all Asians are from China, drive a dilapidated pick-up truck with a gun-rack on top, have the Ten Commandments posted in your cubicle, or have any preserved animal carcasses mounted on the walls in your home.”  That’s what she meant, right?  Actually, no.  She had far more insidious slander in mind: 

              “I’m working with this woman on a project and she’s just so Midwestern – she’s always wearing bright pink polyester pantsuits.” 

I wasn’t even aware of that stereotype.  It’s almost worse than what I thought the people of my homeland were being accused of.  My personal style may not be the height of taste and elegance, but a wearer of pink polyester ensembles I am not.  I spent most of my life in the Midwest, and never saw a “bright pink polyester pantsuit” in person. 

The second was a line in an essay in the New Yorker by my favorite famous KC-NYC-transplant, Calvin Trillin.  Calvin Trillin went to high school at Southwest, just a few blocks from where I grew up.  He went to college at Yale and then moved to
New York.  I sometimes like to flatter myself and think that we are somehow on the same trajectory – that because I too hail from that hotbed of literary talent known as Zipcode 64112, left the Midwest for an Ivy and wound up in the big apple, that I will someday be writing witty commentary and essays in prestigious national magazines.  (For now I suppose I shall have to content myself with this blog.) 

In any case, I love Trillin’s writing style.  It has a certain sensibility that I find familiar.  And I like sitting on the train in New York and reading the New Yorker and finding references to places in my hometown and feeling in the loop.  I love Trillin’s downhome (to me) references, like: 

“I am not averse to wearing a sports coat that costs five twenty-five. My basic position on clothing was formed in high school, in Kansas City, where my male classmates and I considered an intense interest in expensive clothing to be not exactly frivolous—after all, most of what we did was frivolous—but, well, sort of la-di-da.”

I happen to agree with the sentiment (is this why we are being accused of polyester pantsuits?) but the point is, I don’t often get this hometown-insiderness-feeling reading magazines in a city where people often talk about “the Upper West Side before it was cool” and go on rants about how some ancient coffeeshop I’ve never heard of is closing.  So I love reading Calvin, I really do.  But a few weeks ago in the NYer Style Issue, in an overwhelmingly funny article about a used clothing store in Nova Scotia, my friend Calvin wrote something that really stuck in my craw. 

“One of my high-school classmates had a phrase for someone who wore spiffy and expensive clothes—a “suave dog,” with the “suave” pronounced as if it rhymed with “wave.” (We didn’t have a lot of opportunity to hear words like that spoken out loud.) Even now, many decades later, the sight of a dandy at, say, a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan catapults into my mind the phrase “suave dog”—or “swayve dog,” really, since it comes complete with the Southwest High School pronunciation.”

 I guess, the part that gets to me is the “We didn’t have a lot of opportunity to hear words like that spoken out loud.”  I mean, really?  I just don’t really believe that of my erudite role model Mr. Trillin.  That line, to me, smacks of fake hickness, of playing up one’s down-home quotient, while winking at your condescending New York audience.  And I know something about playing up the bumpkin factor, having just written the phrase “stuck in my craw.”  (If the irony was lost on you, “stuck in my craw” is not something I, or any Midwesterner I know, would ever say.) 

Trillin is usually so very good about talking about Kansas City correctly – that is, identifying that it is in fact Midwestern, but that the people who live there there cannot be summed up with that one word.  In an interview with Salon.com, he says of his roots:

“It’s true that when you talk about being from Kansas City — and I’ve been reluctant to give up being from Kansas City — people assume that you’re a Methodist. But you’re not necessarily a Methodist…

My father was very Midwestern — and Jewish. He can speak Yiddish, but he did sound like Harry Truman, and he did say, “haven’t had so much fun since the hogs ate my little sister.” That was just the way he was. ”

So I guess I don’t really have that big a bone to pick with Calvin Trillin.  Maybe over the weekend I’ll be really la-di-da and buy myself a brand new hot pink pantsuit.