TKM

“Into each life some rain must fall,” sings Ella Fitzgerald. “But someday the sun will shine.” Readers, that sunny day came for me when le domestique and I laid eyes on this:

Our joy was irrepressible, for we knew we had found the perfect kickoff offering for our White Elephant Consensual Re-gift Spectacular 2007. And now we would like to pass our sunshine on to you!

For your consideration, we have a dynamic mixed-media (foam and plastic) artwork. And it is a clock also! Which tells real time! And you may think the colorful googly-eyed sea creatures are purely decorative, but they sway to and fro in a happy ticktock motion for your entertainment, making telling time funner than ever! See, look, here I’m making it move with my finger, but you can make it move all by itself with a single AA battery.

May we share our good fortune with you? Just be the first person to say, “Heck yes, I want it!” in comments to this here post, privately send me your address (will not be sold to predatory lenders), and I’ll ship it to you gratis, postage paid and everything!

What do you gotta do in exchange? Just offer a similarly desirable white elephant re-gift on your own blog, paying the weirdness—or just unwantedness—forward. Christmas can go on forever—and without the really lame mall music!

C’mon, you know you want it, and if you’re fortunate enough to be a parental unit, you can blame your desire for it on your child. No one on the Interweb will be the wiser when you instead set it lovingly on your own bedside table.

Do not hesitate! Tell me you want it now!

Please.

“It’s the thought that counts” is a wonderful and even truthful mantra, but I don’t think that means we have to store hideous, inappropriate, or just plain weird gifts in perpetuity.

In fact, unburdening ourselves of gifts that didn’t quite click eradicates visual reminders that maybe our friends and family members don’t know us as well as we’d hoped—if at all. That’s where you, dear blog readers, come in.

That which works not at all for me may be just what you wanted—even if you had no idea you wanted it—and I’m all about finding good homes for outcasts.

So with the orgiastic gift-giving season upon us, I’m throwing a white elephant party for all my friends, both online and IRL. Here’s how you can participate:

I’ll shortly be kicking off festivities by posting a white elephant gift on this here blog.

• To claim it, just be the first to say “I’ll take it!” in comments (and, of course, privately e-mail your address to me). I’ll cheerfully send my offering to you, even picking up the shipping cost! All that is requested in return is that you offer a white elephant gift of your own on your blog. (Don’t feel left out if you don’t have a blog—I’d be happy to host your offering.)

• To offer an item of your own, just post a pic and description and maybe even a funny story about receiving said item. Don’t limit yourself to this holiday season, either; go crazy and post the weirdest, whitest elephant you’ve ever been gifted in your whole life. Heck, list more than one if you’d like. You’re only limited by the number of “interesting” gifts you’ve received—and whatever you’re willing to pay to ship them out of your life. If you want to post an item before claiming one for yourself, go for it! And feel free to announce your participation in comments here to begin driving shoppers to your site.

• Catch all the white elephant sightings! Rumor has it they may be popping up here, here, here, here, here, here, and other fine blog locations to be announced. And, of course, you’ll want to start haunting the site of whichever lucky soul claims my soon to be posted gift—just click the link from their winning comment and follow that blog!

Stay tuned for consensual re-gifting fun! Whatever I list will assuredly be more desirable than this:

So, le domestique and I were visiting friends over the weekend. J. is a programming whiz, and his lovely wife, S., is a dang cool designer. Together, they’re a force to be reckoned with—they and their two dozen or so domains—and they’ve been selling us on the idea of colonizing the Internet’s rapidly diminishing unsettled territories since way before we felt we had anything at all to say to anyone we don’t know IRL.

In fact, I remember distinctly the queasy feeling I got when S. told us, back in the late ’90s, that she was keeping an online journal, right there out in the open for any fifidoodle, retro_babe, or mva1966 to read. And it wasn’t as though she were limiting herself to benign topics like her favorite ice cream (currently Breyer’s “No Sugar Added” Double Churn Chocolate Fudge Brownie) and what color she should paint her toenails (any color, so long as the product is nontoxic and the manufacturer doesn’t test its wares on animals): She laid herself bare, writing about mental health, relationships, alternative religious beliefs, and anything else she might have written about in a corporeal journal, one more properly tucked away between her mattress and box spring. I remember, too, feeling unsettled when she told us she had met a guy named J. online and that they were planning to meet in person.

He could be an ax murderer!

(In truth, axes aren’t particularly popular with murderers. In 2005, 55% of homicides were committed with handguns, with another 16% involving other kinds of guns. The next most popular weapons were knives, claiming 14% of U.S. murder victims, followed by your blunt objects. The humble ax doesn’t even get its own category, falling namelessly within the 11% “other” camp. But I suppose “He could be a gun murderer,” statistical probabilities and poor grammar aside, lacks a certain rhetorical urgency.)

Since then, of course, that theoretical ax murderer has become one of my very favorite people. And I don’t just say that because he’s hosting me on his server and made things right again when the import of my Blogger archives delivered text and images in a slightly more free-spirited order than I might have preferred. And, seriously, when I try to picture J. wielding an ax, it makes me giggle.

Almost a decade into our friendship, and after demurring on countless occasions when the idea of my writing and the Internet crossed paths, I was finally the one to propose going all domain and shit with my blog. “Hey, guys,” I said casually, “I was thinking about buying Neurotranscendence.com.” After a few jokes about the certainty of its availability—I had already checked; hell, I could buy .net, .org, .tv, and just about any other permutation I’d like, except, I’m told, .edu, which is still a protected appendant—the S. and J. machine fired up the GHz and allocated all available resources toward realizing sites for me and le domestique both. The domains were procured, housed, and in the process of propagating by the time we went out for dinner. After dinner, S. tackled design issues (up to and including my sitting for a photo shoot and le domestique finding the appropriate raw image of a spork with which to craft her header), and the sites—quite independently of us, with S. and J. tag-teaming on various computers to work their respective mad skills on one site as each tackled the other, replete with intermittent assistance from their 2-year-old—began to look like destinations. And though le domestique and I admonished them to stop tweaking and debugging as we left their home, we arrived at our own after an hour’s drive to find that the sites had been improved in the interim.

I’ve spent much of the remainder of the holiday weekend rereading my archived content so as to accurately categorize entries that will likely never be read again; if I’m going to have categories, by Jiminy, they’re going to be populated. And readers, I know that it’s incumbent on me to make Neurotranscendence 2.0 compelling enough not only to reward those who click through but to make it worth your while to maybe even bookmark it or, in rarer cases, to update my URL in your blogroll, wherein many of you have been kind enough to include me. (Don’t for a moment think that such kindness goes unnoticed.)

And so, readers who have clicked through, I want to tell you a secret, a secret that, together with every secret revealed in every post from here on out, my Blogspot visitors will never know:

My name is Teresa.

Re name change, full disclosure: While not the sole intent of such action, author’s use of real name, in lieu of “Scout,” may prove beneficial in differentiating herself from her dog, Scout, in future posts.

In a recent post blogger Weese bemoaned the fact that she had not yet procured a 2007 calendar and therefore could make no plans for her future. Though she gamely shrugged off her plight, I sensed her pain, the note of desperation that told me she was simply too overwhelmed by the myriad choices—even among the culled post–New Year’s Day, 50%-off herd—to select just the right calendar to see her through to 2008. Being a giver at heart, I combed through the more than 6,000 titles available at Calendars.com and hand-picked my top 10 choices to see Weese through the coming year. In ascending order:

10. They beg for your fries, they poop on your car, they remind you of dental appointments.

9. Take that, Anne Geddes. You aren’t the only photographer who can make perfectly nice babies really unappealing to look at.

8. Cold, dead fish. Month after glorious month.

7. Bimbos and guns. Somebody pinch me.

6. Gimme an M! Gimme an O! Gimme an N! Gimme a D-A-Y!

5. Bimbos and cold, dead fish. Somebody pinch me again.

4. Call me sentimental, but unbagged dog poop reminds me of a simpler time. Please note typo at bottom.

3. For those who like their chickens on the flashy, Vegas showgirl side.

2. A dream is a wish your heart makes.

1. Nuns are funny!

When did my hands get this old?

*Click to enlarge for big, gnarly fun!

In my last entry I freely admitted that I suck for failing to discuss with my EEG tech, “Misty,” the immediate dangers of greenhouse gasses, despite Al Gore’s well-reasoned entreaties to help spread the word. Then Friday morning I bore witness to the awfulness that is this billboard at fourfour.

I want to be part of the solution. Really, I do. Which is why I now realize I can no longer keep silent about a social ill that has recently seeped into my consciousness: Insulair™ Coffee Cups To Go!

OK, this just pisses me off. I understand that we’re a go-go society, that we have meetings to catch and deadlines to meet, that the habit of drinking a cup of coffee while skimming the morning paper died when I Love Lucy went off the air. I get it.

I also came to understand long ago that coffee mugs don’t travel well. This when my mother, apparently after years of psychic torture, let slip a whiff of displeasure at my father’s habit of microwaving a cup of Yuban instant for the road then driving to their destination at a steady crawl of 10 miles an hour to avoid spillage. One night as Dad watched the carousel turn round and round, waiting for the ding of doneness, my mother hissed at me through gritted teeth, “He knows we’re late for bowling.”

Finally, I understand all too well that a daily Starbucks stop can get pricey. I’ve lately been weighing the financial pros and cons of taking mass transit to work. I save $70 per month in payroll parking deductions, plus another $40 or more in gas for my relatively fuel-efficient coupe. But subtract $52 for my monthly Metro pass and another $50 in Starbucks expenses (because I can’t bring food or drink on the bus and the coffee brewed at my workplace is soul-destroyingly weak) and I’m saving a grand total of eight bucks. Plus that whole ozone thingy, which brings me back to my point.

Travel mugs, people! They’re nice. They keep our coffee warmer longer. Hell, I’ve been known to drink from mine all morning, break for lunch, and revisit it afterward—only to find my coffee still retaining heat! (My partner thinks I’m courting bacterial distress since I drink my brew with milk, but so far, so good.)

I can understand why folks who buy their morning fix at the coffee house might balk at the idea of carrying a travel mug to and from work—though Starbucks’ll hit you with a 10-cent cup-saver discount if you do! But thinking back to the days when I wasn’t considered too damaged to drive and was decanting a home brew strong enough to slough my stomach lining, I can’t imagine a circumstance under which I would have wanted faux café cups—unless maybe I knew my property was being eyed for the next city landfill and I naïvely thought there were sweet, sweet profits to be made.

Given that most regular readers of my blog are far better people than I when it comes to thinking globally, I know I’m hitting the wrong demographic here, just as Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is likely to be seen overwhelmingly by greenish Democratics for whom the 2000 election decision was at least as bitter a defeat as it was for Gore himself. But what surprises me most about faux café cups is that it’s not just the environmentally insensitive big-box stores selling these things: I saw Insulair™ 10-packs this week at Whole Foods, right next to the Planet green cleaning products.

Before we start a letter-writing campaign to ask Whole Foods to stop carrying Insulair™ Coffee Cups To Go! let’s give the product literature a chance to make its case:

“Drink Through Dome Lid provides leak-resistant secure fit.”

My Cup™ has a secure lid too, vacuum-sealed even. (On a copyediting note, they could afford a hyphen in “leak-resistant” but not “Drink Through”?)

“Triple Wall Cup for extra strength and sturdiness to-go.”

My Cup™ is sturdy, so sturdy that it doesn’t have to be thrown away after one use. (“To-go” doesn’t even need a hyphen here and they still deprived “Triple Wall” of one.)

“Channels of Air provide insulation to keep drinks hot and protect hands.”

I’ve never known air to keep anything hot.

“Paper Construction creates a true coffee house experience, and it’s disposable.”

Well, I’m all for disposable coffee house experiences, but I think we’re putting a lot of pressure on these cups if we’re looking to them to provide plushy seats and pretentious patrons too. They do come with Wi-Fi, right?

“Tapered Base easily fits into car cup holders.”

This is listed under “patented features.” Does My Cup™ know it’s in violation of a patent?

“No cup sleeve to get in the way!”

I never knew cup sleeves to be a pox on humanity. At any rate, My Cup™ doesn’t have or need one either.

Only one reason remains why coffee drinkers may prefer the Insulair™ Coffee Cups To Go! to My Cup™: infantilization. The classic paper-and-plastic assemblage we’ve been sucking on since the dawn of the latter coffee house boom of the ’90s has become as comforting to us as a mother’s teat, a bona fide adult sippy cup. No wonder we can’t let go.

Step away from the seductive Drink Through Dome Lid. Liberate yourselves from the culture of disposability. The young sippy-cup sippers of the world thank you in advance for your efforts.

Whew! That really took a load off my conscience. Now back to my regularly scheduled programming of tiresome self-obsession.

I was feeling sad Thursday afternoon, sad enough that I broke a hard and fast personal rule by going out for a post-lunch coffee. I avoid p.m. caffeine and sugar during the week since both substances wreak havoc with my sleep rhythms—so much as a scoop of ice cream will have me staring at the ceiling and drumming my fingers on the headboard hours after lights-out. So the Thursday afternoon coffee was a devil-may-care treat.

I’ve heard about decaffeinated coffee, but here’s the thing: If I could drink coffee all the damn day long—say, if it didn’t keep me up all night—I would, and I don’t think the increased acid intake would do my stomach any favors. Since my stomach still bears the scars of ibuprofen abuse from my dark days as a waiter with plantar fasciitis—chronic inflammation of the tendon that traverses the bottom of the foot that causes excruciating pain with every step—having taken 2400 milligrams per shift for more than two years, I probably shouldn’t push my luck.

Besides, a November 2005 article in New Scientist reported a study wherein decaffeinated-coffee drinkers showed elevated bad-cholesterol levels, compared with control groups of caffeinated-coffee drinkers and non-coffee drinkers showing no appreciable difference in cholesterol. It would appear that the robusta beans found in decaffeinated coffee, used because they retain more flavor through the decaffeination process, also produce more fatty acids than arabica beans, your standard source for regular coffee. In other words, real coffee is healthier, dammit. *smirk*

Fascinating facts about decaffeinated coffee:
The decaffeination process was originated in Germany in 1903. When the inventor had his business confiscated during World War I by the Alien Property Custodian, he lost the rights to the name Kaffee HAG, under which he had been marketing his successful product. He reestablished his invention under the name Sanka, combining the French words “sans caffeine.” And it is from Sanka’s packaging that orange became the international color of decaf.

I was an impressionable 16-year-old when the “coffee achievers” commercial hit the air in 1984. Who were the coffee achievers? David Bowie, Heart, Kurt Vonnegut, the Cinncinati Bengals, and Cicely Tyson. At least those were the folks who appeared in montage, while a confident male and a tranquil female held forth:

Male: “You are the new American society: the movers, and the shakers. You are the new coffee generation.”
Female: “Because coffee is the calm moment that lets you think, coffee gives you the time to dream it, then you’re ready to do it. No other drink does that like coffee.”
Male: “Join the coffee achievers!”

Oh, and Electric Light Orchestra’s “Hold on Tight (to Your Dreams)” served as the soundtrack. This PSA was sponsored by the National Coffee Association.

American coffee was a pretty weak brew in the pre-Starbucks era. We’ve since moved on to become espresso achievers.

It was at Starbucks that I sought solace Thursday. The coffee supplied at my workplace is watery and unsatisfying—just like our accountants like it—so us editorial staffers tend to buy coffee on the boulevard. (Most mornings I bring a thermos of extra-strong from home, but it was long since gone.) And I was mighty glad to have been beckoned from my office to Starbucks that afternoon; otherwise I wouldn’t have heard a suited businessman ask, after having waited for his sissy beverage, by his estimate, a full five minutes, “Has the mocha gone on break?”

Though I’ve left my retail and waiting days behind, I reflexively sigh on behalf of service workers dealing with asswipes. I remember their pain. I remember laughing disingenuously when asked by diners whether the kitchen had caught their chicken yet. I remember customers exclaiming upon my approach, “Oh, we thought you’d gone home!” a passive-aggressive way of saying, You’re a crap waiter. I’ve been called worse, like when I was walking down a boulevard in West Hollywood and a guy yelled from a passing convertible, “Oh, my God, you’re our favorite waitress!” In that moment I willed my heart to stop beating.

My friend J—to whom I apologize for this entry since she’s given up the elixir of the gods (among other beverages) for Lent—used to be a Starbucks barista. I asked her if she ever took revenge on unpleasant customers and she replied that when people were mean to her she made their drinks decaf. Having read a harrowing scene in “Trainspotting” in which a pub waitress manages to sneak urine, excrement, and menstrual blood into the food and drink of a particularly disagreeable patron, I found J’s payback positively innocent, even charitable: Assholes don’t need stimulants.

Coffee is one of the few things I can experience daily and still look forward to every time, probably because it was an acquired taste. I like to theorize that the longer it takes to love something, the longer the love will remain. It’s possible that I’m especially fond of this theory because few people like me the first time we meet, but for my part the maxim especially holds true for music: An album I respond to instantly is likely to peak and fade quickly; a slow-grower stands a far greater chance of becoming a lifelong favorite.

My first taste of coffee came at the age of four, in my grandmother’s kitchen. I wanted some of what all the adults were having, so she poured a little bit into a juice glass with an equal amount of milk and plenty of sugar. I took a sip and promptly made a face, or so I’m told.

I wonder how we ever get past our first cup of coffee or shot of bourbon or taste of tofu to discover their peculiar pleasures. How do relationships that begin badly gain the experience and traction necessary to engender love? Whatever magic happens there, my everlasting gratitude, as both a consumer of peculiar pleasures and as a bit of an acquired taste myself—or so I’m told.

My partner mentioned the mascots of the Turin Olympics in her blog and I realized that I’d seen neither hide nor hair of them despite a fair amount of Olympic viewing. Thinking back to the Los Angeles Games in ’84, Sam the eagle was everywhere—couldn’t get away from the freakin’ jingoistic bird—but this Turinese pair Neve and Gliz I wouldn’t recognize were they to jovially greet me in the middle of a well-lit piazza.

At first glance, and even several glances later, Neve and Gliz look like they would be quite at home on a marshmallow package, such is the mystery of their white heads and decided lack of edge. It’s only in reading about them that we discover their true nature: Per the official ’06 Games site, Neve is a “soft, friendly, and elegant snowball,” while Gliz is a “lively and playful ice cube.” Could they be related to the Wonder Twins? “Form of: an elegant snowball!”

I far prefer Neve and Gliz’s Paralympic friend, Aster the handicapable snowflake.

Aw, give ’em a break, you might say. Maybe the Turinese were so busy pulling together those opening ceremonies—constructing the fake ice-skating cows, disembodying all those shapely legs for the upside-down laterally bifurcated chorus line, learning how to set skaters on fire just so without immolating them—that they hadn’t any time left to create mascots. Except that the choosing of the official mascots, according to the site, commenced in May 2003 with 237 submissions. Wow! There were 236 proposals suckier than Neve and Gliz? Actually, to be fair, there were 236 rejected proposals; hard to say whether they were kicked because they were sucky or because they failed to adhere to the Olympic criteria for mascots: “They must be appreciated and usable all over the world considering different cultural contexts; they must express the values of the Olympic Movement, of participation, loyalty, respect and brotherhood; they must be easy to use commercially and be flexible for a variety of two- and three-dimensional applications.” Bearing all this in mind, Neve and Gliz seem like a gimme: Marshmallows are internationally appreciable and culturally inoffensive. Marshmallows are incredibly virtuous, embodying the very essence of the Olympic Games. And, finally, they’re way marketable—everybody loves marshmallows!

Olympic mascots have always seemed like a bit of an afterthought, never achieving the visibility of those shameless shills for college and professional sports franchises. We’re only likely to see Olympic mascots if we live in the host city, or are Olympic pin collectors, or make a concerted effort to look them up—as I did this morning at Olympic.org. Remember Magique, the snow imp of Albertville ’92? How about Hidy and Howdy, the ’88 Calgary polar bears? You may remember Izzy from Atlanta’s 1996 Games, but only because he was the most confoundingly unappealing official mascot ever. (Schuss, the 1968 Grenoble Games’ little skier with the tumorously large and oddly inexpressive head, while less appealing, was technically an “unofficial” mascot, with official mascots first coming into play four years later in Munich.)

By the way, I haven’t seen the film Munich yet, so naturally I’m wondering, Did Waldi the dachshund, mascot of the 1972 Games, make it into the movie?

Izzy, which Olympic.org describes as an “amorphous, abstract fantasy figure,” was so unlovable from the get-go he began to morph immediately following his debut at the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Games, where he wrested the torch from Barcelona’s Cobi, a reasonably charming cartoon dog. Says Olympic.org of Izzy, “Over time he grew a mouth where only lips had existed, he added stars in his eyes, bulked up and gained muscles in his previously spindly legs, and eventually sprouted a nose.” No wonder Izzy won the mascot gig—clearly the big freak had supernatural powers. (It’s worth noting that I was briefly acquainted with the media voice of Izzy, and he was a lesbian.)

We have Izzy to blame, I think, for the proliferation of mascots. Since the Atlanta Games no host country has chosen but a single entity to represent their Games. Hate one mascot? How about three? Or four? Sure, a couple of previous Games had offered up pairs of mascots—the aforementioned Hidy and Howdy, plus Lillehammer ’94’s Haakon and Kristin—but those early aberrations were more likely nods to gender equality than any attempt to hedge bets. The real bet-hedging began in 1998 at Nagano with the introduction of Sukki, Nokki, Lekki, and Tsukki—because one snow owl is never enough. Olympic.org reports that the snow owls were slow to grow on people but that halfway through the games “all of Japan fell madly in love with them.” (Anyone who doubts the mad love of the Japanese need only consider the strange case of Hello Kitty.)

Nagano’s originally intended mascot was a weasel named Snowple. His withdrawal remains unexplained, but I like to think he resigned in order to pursue other interests. The weasel’s agent probably reminded him that Olympic mascots are notorious flame-outs, nothing but fodder for VH1’s Where Are They Now?

Sydney rang in the new millennium with Olly the kookaburra, Syd the platypus, and Millie the echidna, and though few people knew what an echidna was, the trio was cutish, winsome even, mascots you wouldn’t mind being stuck in an elevator with.

And our luck held through 2002, when Salt Lake City gave us Powder the snowshoe hare, Copper the coyote, and Coal the black bear—a happy little wildlife triptych anyone could get behind. Things were looking up in the realm of Olympic mascots.

But those four years of relative mascot fat were to be followed by a mandated minimum four years of lean, commencing with the arrival of Phevos and Athena, the ancient doll–inspired icons of the Athens Games. Of them the official 2004 Games site says, “Phevos and Athena are two children, simple and joyful, full of vitality and creativity, perhaps mischievous and hence lovable.” (I am perhaps mischievous, and I’m not sure it necessarily follows that I am hence lovable.) With P’s and A’s distorted faces, stumpy arms, and tremendous feet, less appealing mascots may seem impossible to imagine. They’re sort of Izzy times two. Neve and Gliz are admittedly a mild improvement over the Athenian kinderblobs, but they’re still squarely in the years of lean.

So, following these four years of prophesied lean, 2008 should bring great things, right? Oh, so wrong. Behold the Friendlies, the five official doll (Argh! Enough with the dolls!) mascots of the Beijing Games, unveiled in November 2005: Beibei the fish, Jingjing the panda, Huanhuan the Olympic flame, Yingying the Tibetan antelope, and Nini the swallow. They were chosen from a staggering 662 entries. Gawdelpus. Less appealing mascots than P and A are not only possible, they’ve foisted their scary-ass selves upon us. Avert your eyes. Save yourself.

I did something titillating this week: In choosing an investment strategy for my new 401(k) online I clicked “aggressive” and “submit” in quick succession, before I had a chance to change my mind. I’m not typically an aggressive person, so you’ll understand why my adrenaline has been pumping ever since.

Full disclosure: There is currently just $103.84 in my new 401(k), which has been accruing for only one pay cycle. The smallish company I work for was acquired by a slightly larger company in the fall. On a scale in which Microsoft is a whale and your local copy store is plankton, think of us as a black crappie being swallowed whole by a chilipepper rockfish. I know that’s probably not very helpful, but I’m pleased to have worked “black crappie” into a blog entry.

I had a 401(k) with my old company, but that company and its retirement plan no longer exist as distinct entities, so my old 401(k) is on hold, probably lounging on a beach along the Mexican Riviera sipping daiquiris, blowing all those tens of dollars it made during these last five robust years in the stock market. I haven’t yet decided what to do with that balance; my father-in-law suggested that I roll it over into an IRA so that I can exercise greater personal investment freedom, but this is a man who subscribes to “Equinox Investments Newsletter of Undervalued Small Cap Stocks,” someone whose wealth fluctuates daily in increments equal to my total net worth.

Even if I’m not an informed investor, I’ve always been a prudent saver. My entrepreneurial life started in the 4th grade, when I brought a pair of Ker-Knockers to school. Actually, they were a no-name Tijuana version of the brand-name Ker-Knockers, a toy you may remember as a pair of solid, oversize marbles suspended on even lengths of cord that were joined at the opposite end by a hard plastic ring. The goal was to bounce the marbles together until they achieved an even rhythm, then accelerate the pace to get them to swing farther and higher until the marbles traveled full 180-degree arcs to meet both over and under the hand in rapid succession. In addition to making an awful racket, a feature kids love, these were unbelievably irresponsible toys to give a child, making them that much more attractive.

We got a lot of attention, my knockoff Ker-Knockers and I, and kids kept asking me where I got them. “At the swap meet,” I said. “Could you get me a pair?” a girl a thousand times more popular than me asked. Of course I could, and I quoted her a price of 75 cents, a 50% markup over my 50-cent cost. I took several prepaid orders that day, and come the following swap-meet Sunday I raided my Pringles can for an additional—somewhat greasy—$6 in seed money to buy a dozen extra units. I sold out almost immediately, and my success continued for several weeks until my market saturation reached critical mass—in this case the time at which there were enough children swinging hard plastic projectiles that the principal started asking questions. All fingers pointed toward me, after which I was called into his office and forced out of business.

I became a chocolatier next, following a candy-making demonstration in my 7th-grade home economics class. Intrigued, I rode my bike to the store owned by the ladies who had given the presentation, and there I bought a pound of confectioners’ chocolate and a candy mold. Immediately recognizing the lunchtime sales potential, I invested in more molds and chocolate, plus packaging materials, carefully tracking my expenses. Eventually I was netting about ten bucks a day. I didn’t really account for my labor, but a 7th grader with low academic expectations and no extracurricular obligations has nothing but time on her hands. My chocolate business grew until the principal again took note. I never bought his claim that parents were complaining to him about their kids using lunch money to buy chocolate instead of cafeteria food, but cease and desist I did.

At 13 I began my career as a bowling scorekeeper. My parents were big-time bowlers, so I had logged enough time at the lanes to understand how the game is scored, and I had a fairly quick head for numbers, probably as a result of my schoolyard profit analyses over the years. I charged the going rate, a buck a head, so with two five-member teams to a pair of lanes, I netted $10 for two and a half hours’ work. Four dollars an hour was more than minimum wage at the time, and I was too young to get a real job, so I figured I was doing OK—if you don’t factor in all the second-hand smoke.

At 15 I agitated for a job at the drive-thru dairy my brother had worked for when he was 15. I thought it would be cool, wearing jeans and tees to work, running out to the cars in line to find out what folks needed, and having their order ready just as they pulled up. But the owner didn’t hire girls.

At 16 I talked my way into part-time work at my favorite used record store, and I do mean talked—I basically pestered the owner into giving me a day a week. When a full-time job opened up a few months later at another record store, I mentioned it to him. Recognizing an opportunity to unload me he said he’d act as my reference and talk me up, exaggerating my experience. I got that job, and I spent the next nine years working in music stores, the last seven of them as the head buyer for a store that opened with the crazy idea of selling no vinyl or cassettes, only CDs. It took off, and I watched my little 900-square-foot store grow sixfold. Over time I realized that, unlike the thrill of childhood capitalism, growing someone else’s business was a hollow victory.

At 25 I decided it was time to try that whole college thing.

Post-college I still work for the man, of course, start-up capital being what it is today. Six dollars will no longer get a girl’s entrepreneurial foot in the door. But “the man” tells me that even when I don’t have much in my Pringles can, wise investments will secure my future. So I went to the Merrill Lynch seminar my company arranged and listened to our liaison. And just when my head was spinning from all the qualifiers, caveats, and disclosures, he brought up the Merrill Lynch GoalManager, a program in which a person like him puts together diversified collections of stocks and bonds so that a person like me doesn’t have to bother learning about them. What a person like me does have to do is decide what level of risk she’s comfortable with. Financially? None. No risk. I’m totally willing to skydive, but not with money in my pockets. But I’m young, he says, and isn’t it sweet of him to think so? Personal wealth management is one of the few areas in which a person just this side of 40 is still considered fresh and dynamic, in terms of assets, anyway. With 30 years to go before retirement, he says, I should invest aggressively. And it is true that I don’t want to be labeled a conservative, not even a fiscal one, because that’s just a slippery slope.

So, aggressive I am, with every penny of my $103.84. Not even nervous about it. Nope. Though we’ll see, when it comes time to roll over my existing 401(k), whether I’ll be as bullish as all that.

I can’t get enough of Intervention, a reality program on A&E about addiction and recovery that’s now in its second season. Here’s the setup: We’re introduced to one or two individuals addicted to anything from heroin to video games (really, video games, one of the most harrowing segments I’ve seen on the show; the guy reminded me of Tom Hanks’ character in the made-for-TV movie Mazes and Monsters, stumbling through the hedgerows in his robe at the end of the film, his link to reality severed, perhaps irrevocably). Viewers follow the addicts’ lives for a week or so, getting a voyeuristic taste of what their world has become in the service of the monkey. While the subjects have willingly signed on for a documentary about addiction, what we know and they don’t is that their friends and family members are conspiring to stage an intervention. We meet these folks in parallel fashion, so as the subjects tell their tales, their loved ones muse over how they were star athletes, good students, beautiful, happy, talented girls and boys until…

In the final third of the hour-long show each subject is lured to an intervention, which they greet with emotions ranging from passive resignation to angry denial. Enter the show’s unassuming and very unglamorous intervention facilitators, Jeff Van Vonderan, who calls to mind a junior high principal, and Candy Finnegan, who to me seems a bit more like a therapist than Jeff does, probably owing to her no-nonsense haircut and implacable demeanor—not that Jeff seems any more excitable than she. They’ve each clearly grown comfortable with the idea that their subjects may hate them, though the addicts generally reserve their most white-hot burning hate for one or both of their parents.

The show becomes especially riveting here: Will the subject accept treatment—the immediate commencement of which is contingent only upon a nod or a sigh as the producers of the show have already arranged flights and airport transportation and family members have taken the liberty of prepacking the addicts’ bags—or will they blow this taco stand to go score some smack from a guy named “Rat”? Most accept treatment, and most of them in turn complete their programs to become productive, happy members of society, brought back into the family fold, returned custody of their child, or dog. We see “after” video of them at the end, accompanied by upbeat music, and they talk briefly about their lives post-recovery. The ones who don’t make it, who quit the program, who relapse, they get postscript text on a screen. The text is nonjudgmental, but the bleak nature of their future echoes in the void of strummy music. At them we shake our heads, thinking that of course we would have taken Jeff or Candy up on their offer of deluxe accommodations in a secular Taos retreat. We would go toward the light. Those of us who have never endured rehab may even romanticize it a bit, bypassing the horrors of withdrawal and going straight for the fellowship, imagining how nice it might be to take a few months off work to hang out with friends, enjoy trust-building activities, learn therapeutic crafts, and be regarded as a hero in the end, the prodigal son or daughter returned.

That’s what I really romanticize: the return. To think that a coalition of the willing could love me enough to save me from myself, no matter what kind of hell I’ve put them through. Oh, to have run with the devil, only to return safely home where all is forgiven and the future can be nothing but brighter for the journey. I’ve never raced the devil. I’ve never put my family through hell. When her phone rings at 3 a.m., my mother never wonders whether it’s the hospital or the morgue calling about her youngest child. So I suppose I identify not with the addicts of Intervention but with the brothers and sisters who have tried all their lives to do everything right, to see their efforts rewarded only with ambivalence by parents preoccupied with all the antics of the wayward child. That, and a peripheral role in a television show starring same.