Lola's Update

I called a friend to find out if anyone at Lola's would be upset at me for posting pictures of the Lola's bathrooms and came away with this important information:

Even though the floor of the men's room has nicer tile than the ladies room, it turns out that licking the floor behind the toilet of the men's room is not a reliable method of suicide.

So, if you're seeking death by way of licking the floor behind a toilet, you might consider starting with the ladies room instead.

And look! They also have framed graffiti in the men's room:


This was the first time I've encountered an actual male in the men's bathroom, and coincidentally or not so coincidentally the first time I've had a men's room tour guide.

My guide, Joe, had just been complementing my friend and me on our lack of makeup. So when he took the opportunity to ask if certain body parts were real I said, "People who don't wear much makeup generally sport their own body parts."

I don't actually know if that's true or untrue for most women. The only thing of which I'm certain is that all my body parts are mine.

Here's the problem with a blog...

If you want to write about anything even remotely interesting, you might have to worry your mom and dad. My mom and dad, for instance, did not know that someone died of smoke inhalation looking down the crater of the very same volcano I had looked down a couple days before.

My dad claims to want to know if I was giving the jail portion of my dating advice from personal experience, but my guess is that he only thinks he wants to know this.

Most parents would probably prefer not to know when their daughter accidentally board airplanes with knives and other implements of destruction or whether their daughter unknowingly chats with heroin addicts.

The latest thing my parents would probably rather not know is that a gunshot was fired through the front window of KPFT a mere 12 hours or so after I had the kids there to volunteer. Here's my sweet pea taking a pledge while my son looks on, not that I was proud of her or anything:


Just, y'know, a public service announcement: among all the other good, decent human beings, there are kids in that building folks! Not a great place for target practice.

But that's not what I came to tell you about. I came to talk about the draft.

Oh no, wait!!!!!! I didn't come to talk about the draft. I came to tell you about my summer and the fact that mine's over. I will now be able to return to writing about preschoolers and their bodily functions.

I meant to do something productive with my summer, like write a book or learn Hebrew or something. But I forgot. I did manage to bring my kids to a fair number of museums and some live music too. I went to Buffalo. I testified in court that a friend of mine actually does feed her daughter.

And, of course, I took pictures of bathrooms, mostly bar bathrooms and lots of them. Even though they didn't win one of my bathroom awards, I figure they're still worth a look.

Here's the bathroom at Lola's. The thing about Lola's is that one Lola's drink can be as strong as three drinks anywhere else, so that by the time you hit the restroom, it's cleanliness doesn't seem quite so urgent:



Not bad, is it? The floor is ugly, and the ceiling might be even worse, but look: they've got the graffiti framed!What more could you want from a place that serves $1.50 drinks until 11:00 p.m.?

Dating - The One Year of Divorce Anniversary Edition

If the countless hours I've spent with girlfriends this summer over-analyzing the nuances of each date any of us have ever been on doesn't qualify me as an expert, perhaps the handful of actual dates I've been on over the past the year will. I'm sure there have been a good four or five, maybe more depending on how one defines the word date.

I haven't consulted ole' Webster on what exactly constitutes a date. But I think a traditional date might go something like this:

Guy contacts girl to set up date in hopes of eventually convincing girl to remove all her clothing. We'll just say this happens by phone, though it could just as easily be by email, text message, or smoke signals. Guy feels anxiety and fear of rejection, or so I've been told numerous times over the years.

Girl agrees to date for some reason she can't quite fathom. Girl wonders if this will be the father to her children and whether she will eventually be interested in removing all her clothing. Girl spends the hours or days between phone call and date dissecting every part of the call with any and every available girlfriend. Girl attempts to discover and inspect all hidden subliminal meaning from the words, "Would Italian food be okay?"

Girl considers excuses for canceling date and runs them past her girlfriends for validity. Girl wonders if there will be alcohol available on the date to help dissipate awkwardness and anxiety...or no wait, maybe it's the guy that wonders that. It might be both.

Somewhere between 24 hours and thirty minutes before the date, girl realizes she has nothing to wear. Girl considers canceling date due to lack of appropriate clothing.

Girl and guy go out to eat, they have a nice time or have a boring time. Guy says he'll call girl. Girl doesn't believe him.

Guy attempts to determine optimum number of days or hours to wait before calling girl in order to increase chance that girl will take off all her clothing as soon as possible. Or, guy calls at a random time using the time in between to look cool as a cucumber or to pursue others in case girl never takes off all her clothing, or because he hasn't given girl another thought.

Girl spends next three days over-analyzing the meal with girlfriends. Girl tries to determine whether the words "I like alfredo sauce better than marinara" means guy was secretly turned off by a zit on her ankle. Girl tries to determine whether guy's attempt to kiss her or lack of attempt to kiss her means he was secretly planning never to call her again.

Girl decides to wash her hands of the entire situation, vowing never to give the guy another spare thought just at the exact moment the guy picks up the phone to call her.

Or something like that. I'm sure I have some of the details wrong or that they vary and I for one have never had Italian food on a date. (Or a zit on my ankle for that matter.)

This much I've figured out for certain: "fun" relationships have been mis-named. As far as I can tell, it goes like this:

• If two people enter into a relationship they enjoy, are having fun, and the relationship has some chance of lasting a good, long time, it is considered "serious."
• On the other hand, if both people enter into a relationship already certain that it can't or won't work out and that one or more hearts have a strong chance of breaking into little tiny pieces, then the relationship is considered "fun."

I'm not sure who invented this rule, perhaps the same person who decided men get to look more handsome once their hair begins to gray while women just end up looking old.

I've received my share of dating advice, some of it in the form of encouragement to try online dating. I figure it makes sense to try, but I've chickened out each and every time I start to click.

Finally I decided that an obscure, starter dating site would be the way to go. As a person hesitant about dating, my experiment worked quite well. In fact, it worked SO well that almost every last man who emailed me through the site was Turkish. I'm not talking American of Turkish descent. I'm talking living on the soil of the country of Turkey. I don't know how many miles there are between Istanbul and Houston, but I'm thinking I'm relatively safe.

My dad gave my girlfriends and me some dating advice not long ago, although at the time he thought he was giving my daughter advice on how to get her cousin to accompany us to a museum:

Dad - How do you get a dog to come?
Cassie - You call him?
Dad - Right! You call him!
How do you get a cat to come?
Cassie - (confused look, while probably thinking something along the lines of "You don't")
Dad - (using her silence to support his argument)
Right! You ignore him!
And you've got to figure out if you're dealing with a dog or a cat.

Without further explanation my daughter promptly began ignoring her cousin. Not many moments thereafter he jumped into the car as if going to the museum had been his idea in the first place. For what it's worth, I've also found it interesting to think about whether I'm playing the part of a cat or a dog when over-analyzing dates. Not that it makes any difference of course, but a little introspection never hurt anyone.

This is some totally unsolicited dating advice I once gave to a friend who will remain unnamed. I'll also refrain from mentioning whether I know this to be true from personal experience:

If you find yourself saying to yourself or anyone else, "Oh good! He DID have a good excuse for not calling me! He was in jail!" it's time to (at a minimum) reevaluate your stake in the relationship.

I mean, not that any of it matters. It's not like my girlfriends or me actually follow any of our own advice much less each other's, but if we did...

well, I'm not exactly sure where we'd be with men, but our collective emotional health would probably be right up there with the best of them.

Kissin' Cousins

Here are nine very simple words put together in an incredibly confusing manner:

"a child of a first cousin of one's parent"

That's second cousin to you and me. Did you ever wonder who your second cousin was? No? Don't worry, my friend Beth and I wondered for you. I had only two hours sleep last night, so I was perhaps more easily baffled than usual. But Beth got a good, solid night's sleep and she was every bit as confused as I was.

We started by scratching out this illustration to help us think:


It turned out the paper was way too small though, so we had to get a bigger sheet:

It's not pretty, but by substituting names of people we actually know, not only did we attain a vague sense of the relationship, but we got to have conversations such as this one:

"So here's Grammy. You see? That would be like...
That would be like...
Well that would be...
Grammy!"

And this one, also between me and my daughter:

"Is that me?"
"This one?"
"Yes. That's you."
"This one?"
"Yes. The one that that says 'You are here'"
"It's me?"
"Yes."
"Why do I have short hair?"

In conclusion and apropos of nothing, here's an illustration of the surprises of parenthood summed up in 15 seconds: