Category: Life

Radio, Wal-Mart, Censorship and other musings

Driving back to Sue’s from “Grandpa’s House” tonight I was marveling at the radio stations here in Atlanta. People my parents’ age complain that there is not a good Classic Rock station in Northeastern NC, and people my age complain that all they play on CHR is the same three songs until they are so overplayed we won’t listen to them again until they are Classic Rock.

What’s strange is that despite the huge amount of restaurants and traffic here and the presence of the world’s busiest airport, it took the multitude of good radio stations in the area for me to realize that I was not in what my uncle would refer to as “Mayberry.” What’s really amazing is that today, with an Internet connection and a Wal-Mart nearby, there’s just not that much difference between a big city and a small one.

And so we’ve reached Wal-Mart, and therefore Billy’s favorite: the rant.

The South Park re-run tonight happened to be the one skewering “Wall-Mart,” and did a pretty good job (as it tends to do, despite the way my mom and mothers in general tend to loathe it) of pointing out the downfalls of the world’s biggest corporation, employer and evil empire. We can discuss the cons of Big Box stores all night long, but they are easy enough to see and scarily hard enough to avert that I’ll avoid hypocrisy and carpal tunnel syndrome by skipping right to my point, demonstrated by my third hypothetical encounter of the night with Sam Walton’s corporate monster: this blog.

In case you’re Jerry too lazy to read it, the gist is that Wal-Mart won’t sell Green Day’s new album because the band refuses to release a censored version. I agree with the blogger that it obviously hasn’t been detrimental to Green Day’s sales (215,000 copies sold the first week). I also agree with Billie Joe Armstrong that a “young kid… making a record for the first time” should not be dictated to by Wal-Mart. And yet I strongly agree with Wal-Mart for sticking to their guns and upholding their long-standing policy of not selling uncensored music.

Again, I could write a diatribe here on the hypocrisy of Wal-Mart, which sells rifles, unrated movies with nudity and swearing, and sweatshop-produced clothing, but for some reason sees violence, swearing, and degrading ideas as inappropriate for the single, specific medium of audio recording. But again, not my point.

As a writer, a musician, and a (self-proclaimed) intelligent person (do I say “a” or “an” before a parenthetical phrase starting with a consonant but followed by the continuing sentence beginning with a vowel?) I disagree with censorship on principle. But as a Christian, an (I hope) moral person1, and a 99% reformed foul-mouth, I enjoy at least an attempt at censorship, however ineffectual (because bleeping out words so that you still hear something like mother****er2, 3 doesn’t really do anything to censor the idea).

I will stop here to somewhat expand on the idea of ineffectual censorship. There are two great Spanish-language radio stations here in Atlanta. Obviously, the censors aren’t as strict on them as they are in English (if there are any Spanish-language censors in this country). I heard a word tonight on one of those stations whose English equivalent would never make it onto the radio (at least I hope not, which is why my opinion slightly favors Wal-Mart on this particular topic).

The solution is for artists to just realize the power of words other than the four-letter ones. Upbeat, happy-sounding (realistic) Caedmon’s Call can be much more biting as a social commentary than any of the dirty-mouthed rockers in my collection. And I’d love to see a move towards cleaner music at the source. Because much as I don’t listen to the entire genre of rap because of the generally foul content, I go out of my way4 to make sure I have the original, uncensored recording of any music I do own, because that is how the artist intended it.

At least I’m consistently inconsistent.

1Went with “an” for that one. Hooray inconsistency!
2Insert Billy’s gasp here, at an almost-instance of Danny swearing on his blog.
3Better censor this guy!
4That task gets easier and easier for me every year as what I listen to is more and more “Jesus music” and less and less English.

Strange sense of Home

My friends all talk about “coming home” to Elizabeth City between semesters or to see their parents and friends. And in conversation I’ll do the same thing. But in reality, I have half a dozen places that I refer to as “home” and several more that, though it would seem strange to say out loud, feel quite the same way.

Moving around as a kid certainly had a lot to do with that. I remember my private form of rebellion at moving to Clarksdale, Mississippi in junior high was making a point (in my head at least, if not out loud) of using the phrase “going to our house“, as I just didn’t want to think of anywhere in Clarksdale as “home.” Going to Atlanta for a visit was always what meant “home.” For those two long, character-building (so my dad says) years, going home was seeing Derek Martin, Kelsey Page, and Allison Dennard at Berkmar UMC. It was having Thanksgiving at Aunt Sue’s house and quiet afternoon at Grandma Kay and Grandpa Bill’s in Dunwoody.

When our family moved to Elizabeth City, home became the tan house on the corner, even though that sentimental part of me missed the homes that Oakhurst Junior High and St. Paul’s UMC had been (a feeling that came from the people there, if not the places themselves). But despite the way my mom made sure I had familiar photographs and wallpaper, it was the fact that she and Dad and Colin were right there with me that made E.C. home.

By that time I’d already figured out that “home” didn’t mean the place where my mail was addressed. It was where I was comfortable and loved and where I loved to be. And more than just the house in Winfield, the NHS band room and James and Mike and Billy and Megan’s houses came to mean those things as well. People-oriented Ecuadorian culture has become home for me more recently. Amongst Ecuadorians at church in Shandia or Babahoyo, or squeezed onto couches with too many other gringos at a missionary’s house in Quito, that feeling that you belong just follows you around.

So it’s been no surprise to me the past few days here in Dunwoody again that I’ve just felt at home. As Monsignor Lopez said this morning at the funeral, the house on Summerford Court has been a home to him (just as it’s been to the rest of us), not because it’s simply a familiar place, but because of the love of my grandparents. Even without Grandpa Bill there this week, it’s full of memories, good times, and (lately at least) more family members than I knew I had.

In fact, with all the Pecks, Thums, Brocks, Joyces and Jeffersons around for the last five days, it took until the reception at St. Jude’s this morning for me to realize that there’s really nobody my age around. My cousin Guy is younger even than my little brother, who’s not around himself, and Amanda has just seemed infinitely older than even the 3.5 years she’s got on me since she started doing things like getting married and having kids. But it took me five days to realize this because I’ve been at home, even surrounded by people who are all more than twice my age (and who are sure to make snide remarks about this paragraph when they get around to reading my blog). Around family, I just fit in.

Everyone has been saying good-byes this afternoon. And as I’ve gotten handshakes and hugs, my aunts and uncles and cousins have asked me “When are you and your dad going home?” And though I smile and say something like, “Well, we’re driving back on Friday,” I can’t imagine being much more home than this.

The merits of small-town life

When I first moved to from Lawrenceville, GA (suburb of Atlanta and home of the Gwinett Braves) to Clarksdale, MS (suburb of nowhere, home of the Delta Blues Museum: what a level of excitement for a 12-year-old who’d never even heard of Lucille) I basically thought I’d descended to the first circle of pre-teen hell, mourning my separation from movie theaters and shopping malls.1

Although it was in my first small-town experience that I learned valuable lessons like what it feels like to be a minority, how to properly cross the street,2 and Native American pronunciation, it was not those things that I began to appreciate while I was there. Those were ones like Freedom, Self-confidence, and how to properly toilet-paper someone’s house.

On days when I had marching band practice, I would walk the two blocks from Oakhurst Junior High to the downtown storefront of the J.C. Penny Co, Inc. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I was a pre-teen and I was entrusted with transporting myself from one place to another. Plus, I got to leave school in a slightly cooler fashion than hopping in my mom’s minivan. It also necessitated the learning of the second of the aforementioned then-unappreciated lessons.

I’d walk past Marty’s barber shop and wave to the grandfatherly man, sometimes armed with scissors, sometimes fast asleep in his own chair. Once in a while this guy that worked for my dad and went to the high school that shared my junior high’s campus would pick me up on the bridge over the Sunflower River. I’d feel even cooler for the 45-second ride, listening to Eminem and wondering was ‘cid was.

Now granted, I was never a fan of Clarksdale (although I’m sure this had as much to do with when in my life I moved there as anything else), but that has made me appreciate Elizabeth City even more. I’m surprised to realize even as I write this that in 2000 (the year I moved from the Delta to the Albemarle) that Elizabeth City had 3,000 less people than my former town of residence. But it had a movie theater with two screens and a shopping mall, and that was quite enough for me.

But it retained the small-town feel. I knew pretty much everyone in my graduating class, and a good chunk of my entire high school. And although I sometimes wish I’d learned to drive in a bigger place so that I’d be a more aggressive driver, I like the fact that rolling down Southern Avenue, Ehringhaus Street, Halstead Boulevard, or even Highway 17, I can’t help but pass someone I know. In one single day last week, I saw, waved to, or phoned after passing Jerry, Billy, Linda, Ginny, Madeline, two different Mrs. Julies, and my mom, and all I did was go from home to the bank.

Multiply that effect at least by two if I so much as take a walk down Water or Main Street. Dozens of people tell me the next day that they saw me from their car or office or Rachel’s Place (where Johnny still knows what to bring me for breakfast without so much as a word).

And forget the fact that people know me. I (try not to, but) can drop my dad’s name anywhere in Pasquotank County and people who don’t know me instantly love me because they love him and because they know who he is.4 Some people wouldn’t appreciate that, but in my experience, it’s not bad for a cop, FedEx driver, or random elderly lady at somebody else’s church to say “Hey, I know someone named ‘Peck’…”

Growing up in a small town tends to serve you well other places in the world, too. Add in being southern, and stopping on the sidewalk to chat with someone about their family, despite being 20 minutes late and still 4 blocks away doesn’t seem all that foreign, even on another continent. Living in a big city with easily defined neighborhoods isn’t a big adjustment either when you treat the couple square miles around you like a small town that’s just really close to all the other small towns around you.

I tend to think that personal relationships of all kinds benefit from their being born in a small town. Seeing the same people everywhere has pros and cons, but makes for closer relationships with those people. And that doesn’t necessarily impede branching out into new friendships either. I’m used to always being able to strike up a conversation with anyone. This is because I can invariably ask “who’s that” and get anyone’s life story around a place like this. Though I don’t always do that (probably because I know I always can later), it makes for a habit of just being friendly.

Something I learned in another big town was that no matter where you are, you’re going to say “there’s nothing to do in this place,”5 but the fact that I have said that in a city with 10 times the population and 14 times the area of this one sort of takes the sting away from the statement, and negates really the only disadvantage I see to being outside what we sometimes so wistfully think of here as “civilization.”

If the above paragraph sentence is any indication, then maybe going to school here had its effects on me. And I certainly know more country music than I’d care to know and more obscure history than I’d care to admit because of my two small-town stints. But I like the fact that the whole town can be like Cheers sometimes, that six days a week anyone who knows me knows where to find me, and that a movie ticket is cheaper here than it is in a developing nation (despite the need for a baseball cap).6

1Lydia is scoffing at this notion as she reads this post, but shopping malls do include book stores.
2Though I’d learned this already at a much earlier age, this was first of three times I would re-learn this important skill thanks to both witnessing someone being hit by a car and being (somewhat) hit by a car myself in the vicinity of Oakhurst Junior High.
3With, at the time, some semblance of a bookstore.
4Though I tend to have to say “I know… I look like my mom,” before they believe me.
5That’s never true if there are people around.
6Oh yeah, and discovering freedom, tight friendships, and the subtleties of race, street-crossing, and politics in a small place aren’t so bad either.

Across Two Februaries

Oh come on, I’ve made worse references.

Tonight I did some dp.n maintenance. I now own my domain for at least the next two years. I have no recollection of whether my hosting package automatically renews or not, so the site may still dissapear in five more days. I’ll try to pre-empt that.

I also upgraded my WordPress software. That’s basically everything that you’re looking at. I used to write 100% of my own code, and now I’m lazy and let blog software handle my posts, layout and pages, subpages, and photo gallery. Do I feel any less hack? Not really. I could still do it the hard way if I wanted.

I backed up my entire website, plus an additional WordPress backup, PLUS I imported it to my wordpress.com account (the software comes from wordpress.org, which is functionally an entirely different entity). I was getting ready to manual install the software and then I had an incredible idea. What if my host’s control panel would do it for me automatically? Turns out my hunch was right, and rather than spending the next three hours hacking away at code and uploading it all, here I sit with a new install of WordPress on my server, and all it took was three clicks and about 40 seconds.

At any rate, it probably looks no different to you. No changes even for those (few) of you who login to leave comments. My control panel is organized a little differently (different, not better). My posts will have a couple more categories to go into (I had reached the limit of number of categories I could have in the previous software version, but that number has since been increased). But no automatic aesthetic differences.

So was I prepared to upgrade, even before I knew it would be easy? Well, basically the entire reason I upgraded my software was to get rid of this annoying little message that told me every time I logged in that I needed to upgrade from version 3.1 to version 3.7. And the first thing I did when I finished was login to WordPress and glance up at the top of my dashboard.
Frakking message is still there. It now just says I need to go from version 3.7 to 3.7.1. Manually. Yeah right.

In fact, it will probably be right around February 2011 that I bother to make any major changes, when domainsite and intersabre start reminding me that my domain is going to expire again. But it has definitely been fun to look through all my files as they downloaded through my ftp client and take note of all that I’ve written, all that I’ve learned about web hosting, software, plugins, and writing since February 16th-ish last year. And certainly to think about all the things I’ve had to write about since then: Hospitality, smiles, children, airplane rides (ten), different countries, states and a districts, a dozen new best friends in an 11-hour range of time zones, a jungle, unexpected returns to favorite places, a new instrument, a new language, brothers, a brother, my brother and bros (nope, not a typo), and the Truth that permeates every one.

Thoughts from an anonymous "airplane" commentator

All day today, everyone’s been writing news articles and blogging about planes. And not to intentionally join the trend, but a comment on a blog about airplane safety caught my eye.

Turns out Popular Mechanics put to test the myth about every airplane seat being equally safe. You can read the article if you want the ins and outs of the statistical data, but in jet crashes with both fatalities and survivors (as opposed to one or the other only) the back seats are generally safer.

Out of 19 crashes between 1971 and the present with sufficient data to analyze, the front, middle, and back of the plane had 49%, 56% and 69% survivability in a crash. And while they made a big deal out of it, I’m not changing my ticket over 20% higher chances. Which brings me to my next point.

One of the commenters on the article wrote that a lot of things affect the safety of each seat and each passenger. While this person listed off proximity to the wings and engines, as well as the overall structure of different parts of the plane as being factors, he/she ended with another important safety factor: and individual’s “belief in God…”

I don’t know whether they were joking, or if they were seriously making statistical implications about prayer. But I do know that next time I get on a plane, the reason I’m not worried about that extra 20% average survivability rating is that I’m safe.  If I get there at the end of a long life or a short plane ride, I’m going to the same place.

Groundhog Day

One of my parents’ all-time favorite movies is Groundhog Day, and it ranks pretty high up there on my list as well. We watched it tonight, and so, unsurprisingly, I felt a lot like Bill Murray when I checked some other people’s blogs tonight.
Several of my favorite people are just scattered about the globe right now, and all of them have this amazing ability to not update their blogs at all. And since the most recent post on every one I checked was still from the first week of December (or November… or September) I could just hear “I Got You, Babe” as I went through the checklist of favorite (unupdated) blogs.

Then I thought to myself… “Mine looks pretty much the same.”
Now granted, I’m in Elizabeth City, I’ve been working my tail off the last couple of weeks between practicing various instruments and putting musical instruments into the hands of seemingly every middle schooler from Hertford to Manteo. But I’ve just been totally slack on my writing, both my own stuff and my more public face of dannypeck.net (/facebook).
So thanks to watching Groundhog Day all the way through for the first time in many years, here’s what I’d do if I had a day to live over. And over. And over…
1. Learn piano. And flute. And pan flute. And charango. I’d probably brush up on a lot of other instruments I play as well, starting with the guitar. I’ll probably never be Carlos Santana level. But repeating the same day over and over, I think I’d at least try. And I’d resort to music lessons much faster than Phil Connors (and before Sciuridaedicide).

2. Take up ice sculpting. I promise I’ll stop stealing from Harold Ramis after this one. But I mean, really? How many people can even do that? It’s gotta be pretty lucrative.

3. Reading. I think if I lived to be 300, I could start reading now and not stop till I died and still not have hardly put a dent in my personal reading list.

4. See how many languages I could learn. If nothing else, I’d finally know what Paul was laughing at in that Shyamalan movie, and I could exponentially increase the length of my reading list.

5. Travel. Bill Murray was stuck in Punxsutawney, PA because of a blizzard. Hopefully I’d have better weather. If you’re going to wake up in the same bed in the same place every morning, why not at least make it a challenge for God or fate or Harold Ramis to put me back in bed and make it to Ecuador or India or Japan by 5:59 am.

I could keep this list going. I could fill it up with more interesting, meaningful, or at least funny things than these. But I’m going to return to The Epic of South America and simply attempt to live out number 3 instead. Merry belated Christmas, Happy early New Year, and a prosperous Groundhog Day.

Comings and Goings

This week I’ve talked to Mike in Morocco, Skyped Teddy in Wales, and said good-bye to Julia before she heads to Ethiopia. I’m planning for Jerry and myself to see the Vivancos in South Carolina and play some music when they come up from Ecuador, and setting in motion some other plans that will take me back to la mitad del mundo. I’ve sent text messages to California, Michigan, and half the South, and got a super-brightly colored envelope from Wisconsin.

I don’t particularly like the way people boil down surprising relationships to a set of coincidences when they say what a “small world” this is. But that doesn’t mean I brush off how how amazing it is that certain people have been brought into my life at discrete times (not to be confused with discreet times, though that can be said as well).

Even looking around the Tangent Minds several months before I left for the summer, I  realized that it’s very likely that some time in the near future, not a single one of the people then present will even live in this country, and how significant that group has become in the lives of each other and how strange (and yet how reassuringly) we all found ourselves (or found ourselves placed) at the same certain place at the same time.

DST Thoughts

I was watching Jon & Kate Plus 8 last night. Get off me, I like it. At any rate, they took a two-stage trip to Hawaii. The first stage was a stop between their Pennsylvania home and their Pacific archipelagic destination for a few days in California. The idea was that they’d put all eight kids on Pacific time so that the transition into UTC-10 (Hawaii time) wouldn’t be as drastic.

It’s something I totally appreciate. Granted James has been home so I’ve not really cared about what time I’ve been going to bed this week. But even taking that into account, I’ve just been exhausted this week because of the time switch. Even five days later I’m not fully adjusted to it (and Pilgrimage this weekend is not going to help). And coming off Daylight Savings Time is only an hour difference. It makes you appreciate how sensitive the human body is to its environment.

My other observation about Daylight Savings Time is that almost every news article about it that gives any kind of history always mentions one the the “pros” of DST being the fact that children can trick-or-treat with more daylight. Why in the heck would you want more daylight? I always thought it was strange when I watched the movie ET and all the kids were trick-or-treating before dusk. Maybe it’s just a Southern thing, but everywhere I’ve ever lived, Trick-or-Treating begins when it starts to get dark and ends at about 9:00.

Are Georgia, Mississippi and the Carolinas just weird?

"Scratch That"

I remember this time when I was in junior high. We were on vacation in Atlanta during Christmas break, getting to hang out with family and friends there. In fact, it probably wasn’t more than six months after we had moved away from Atlanta, because as I remember I was still weirded out by the fact that my best friend was dating the girl I’d broken up with because I’d moved.

But weirded out or not, it didn’t affect our relationship at all. The two of us were happy to hang out together, and one night during the week we went to the mall. And by “we went,” I mean that my mom dropped us off and then came back to meet us at the entrance to J.C. Penny sometime before 9:00.

I thought my friend was the coolest guy on the face of the earth. He saw every movie that hit the theatres. He played trombone (which was infinately less dorky than the clarinet). He wore funny t-shirts and a backwards ball cap, and actually had 20 pounds on me that allowed him to fit into JNCOs. For a not-quite-thirteen-year-old in 1998, that was as cool as it got.

We looked around at PacSun and wherever else he thought was cool. And at some point we stopped at some trendy smoothie shop that had just opened to get a snack.

They guy working there was probably sixteen, but he seemed immensley older and cooler than me, or even my best friend. I don’t really remember anything about him except that he had spikey blond hair and a black apron and he had the kind of chill, trendy vocabulary that I understood, but never would have strung together in cool sentences in the same way.

I also remember him because he genuinely smiled at us the whole time we were there.

Most people working at hole-in-the-wall food joints in the mall will only talk to you for the bare minimum amount of time and with the fewest, least enthusiastic amount of words that it takes to recieve an order and hand you a meal, all the while with a totally slack expression. That goes double when they are dealing with two twelve-year-old boys, who they seem to assume are too idiotic to understand the menu and count change on their own (and which I was always prepared to take offense to, as my mom encouraged me to order my own food from about as early as I could actually remember what I liked at different places).

At any rate, the guy actually treated us like we were his buddies, and didn’t seem condescending at all. He probably just laughed to himself after we left, but he did seem like a really nice guy. And my friend just totally fed off his cool demeaner and trendy slang. I recognized that for what it was even then, but I still wished I was as cool as either one of them.

After we had both ordered, my friend decided to make a change. He had asked for an orange soda with whatever he got. He probably decided he was running low on fundalation, something else I recognized for what it was even at the time, but made no mention of (in sociology, that’s dealing with a “faulty performance,” which we do because we assume at some point in the future we will need someone else to ignore a faulty performance on our part- I did pay attentionin Mrs. Belloat’s class!).

At any rate he said (and this is one of the few things about that night I remember so clearly), “You know what… scratch that orange soda.” To which the cool smoothie maker responded “Scratch the orange soda? Okay.”

Why in the heck am I telling you this story? Because the other day I used the phrase “scratch that.” Nobody other than me would take any notice of that. I don’t even realize when other people use that phrase. But it is a phrase that I just would not incorporate into my own vocabulary at all. It slips out when I’m trying to sound cool.

It’s not even a really cool phrase. But I strongly associate it with the spikey-haired trendy teenager and my cool friend that didn’t want an orange soda. I wonder how many of these things slip into our speech or our thoughts unconciously. It actually surprises me that I remember why this one entered my pwn personal lexicon, and interests me to no end that even though I know where it came from and why I say it and can distinguish it from other choices of oration, there it remains in the pool from which I draw my words.

Door-Holding: A Totally Unscientific Study

I hold doors for people. It’s just something I think you should do. Recently, there was an entry in another blog I read that mentioned holding doors as one in a top 5 or 10 list of manners that need to make a comeback. I agree. But before I read that article, I didn’t realize how much people don’t do something that comes automatically to me.

I can mentally hear my dad saying “grab that door!” but only to drag me out of a conversation or contemplative state where I’m not paying enough attention to notice a shopper at J.C. Penney piled high with bags and struggling to make her exit. I’m sure he must have ingrained those three words into my subconcious from as soon as I had accumulated enough mass to actually win a struggle against the heavy doors in most public places (which Mike Turner would tell you was when I was about 17).

So, now aware of my own good habit and another blogger’s judgement of American society to be lacking in the same, I’ve been paying attention when I approach an ingress or egress around other people.

My data collection would warrant a C in either of the experimental science courses I’m taking this semester. No rhyme or reason to it, except taking note of people’s reactions when I happen to think about it. But I feel like after a week of taking note, I can draw some conclusions and tack science up on my blog right up next to the English language on the list of things I massacre.

School seems to win in terms of everyone following propper door-holding etiquitte. I have to pass through three sets of doors in two buildings on my cross-campus walk to 9:30 Spanish lab twice a week. And even at 9:29 I’ve had professors, students, and the seeminly sole maintenance guy left on campus all pause for incriments of time ranging from a heartbeat or two to  an akward handful of seconds in an even more akward behind-the-back doo handle grasp to let me catch up to the open door, and I find myself doing the same thing.

Apparently, most stores have either automatic doors or a garage door that just stays open, but restaurants (I have the worst time spelling that word in Spanish or English. I think the “u” is poorly placed in both languages) tend to have heavy swinging doors and you are almost always approaching them along with other mealtime patrons. Several places in Elizabeth City (Ruby Tuesday’s Applebee’s and, strangely enough, the Ehringhaus St. Burger King) have two sets of double doors. This gives you the opportunity to hold a door and have one held for you, as long as whoever goes first is so kind. I’ve never seen anyone have the first door held for them and then fail to hold the second.

Just today I did the door-holding swap with a guy as we walked out with our double cheeseburger and whopper meals (is it stalkerish that I listen to what is handed to the other people in line?) and he smiled and gave me a manly nod as he passed through the outer set. I turned to face the parking lot and had to catch the door again when I realized there were two women coming in. As I hung onto it for them for just a couple seconds more, one said “thank you, sir” (the “sir” sounding more like she was talking to someone older and respected as opposed to something automatic or humorous- which is almost making me rethink the beard) and the other told me to “have a blessed day.”

Other public places fair pretty well, although at the bank, I’ve noticed people tend to be surprised if you hold the door for them. Especially because people tend to be almost racing you to it, making sure they beat you to the table with the deposit slips first, so they can have a head start filling out their life story on the thing and making it into and through the line in the shortest time. Verbal responses over the last two Fridays have ranged from “Oh!” to laughter (as we did the double-door-swap) to a totally shocked “Thank you!” all from males and all older than me (and this even at the downtown branch that is exponentially more friendly in general than it’s Ehringhaus Street counterpart).

I’ve heard horror stories of friend being ranted at for holding a door for a woman who turned out to be a feminist to the extreme that she wanted to open it for herself (and then the friend trying to politely explain that they hold doors for everyone, men too). And I have both thought “that guy should have held that door for me,” and “I should have held that for them.” But it seems to me that most of the time people know what to do when confronted with both a door and a fellow human being. I hope the non-door-holders will take a hint, but I’m thankful that in my experience, they are the few as opposed to the many.

H.G. Wells once said “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.” And while controlling energy consumption is great too, I’ll settle for seeing a door held.