Change

Don’t you hate it when there’s too much small change in your wallet? I don’t even know how much muscle mass I have gained after reverting to sometimes paying in cash. I’m almost as ripped as the duck by now (hahaha, I wish). But that’s not at all what today’s ramblings are about. As you may have taken from the last post, the duck and I have moved. And overall, I’ll be busier than I have been in the past few years (hopefully, there’ll be some time for lazing around; otherwise, we might lose ourselves). So, this will likely be the last post in the format and schedule that has served me relatively well for the past 4+ years (excluding those 2019 Advent calendar posts. They were nuts). I had a lot of fun (paired with the occasional portion of dread) acting as the chronicler of the duck’s fantastic not exclusively lazy adventures and also sharing some crumbs of my own life. Despite these changes, I still consider myself the Dr. Watson to the duck’s Sherlock Holmes, the Hastings to the duck’s Hercule Poirot- I’m already running out of examples. How embarrassing. Evidently, I need to keep up the regular reading so that I may one day meet another fictional chronicler of an infamous detective/hero. Although I often dread it sometimes, I like recounting the duck’s adventures. So, though the format and post regularity will almost certainly change, I will try to give occasional insights into the duck’s new (and improved, the duck insists) adventures with some old and maybe even a few new friends. Maybe. If the hoped-for laziness doesn’t take over. The duck’s “list of exciting things to do and ideally document if someone isn’t too lazy” is already two feet long – and the duck’s “hand-“writing is tiny! So, if the duck’s nightly whispers prove successful, this will just be a “see you later”  and not a “farewell.”

(Unless I fail. Then, this is farewell. It was exhausting fun while it lasted.)

Pretty priceless pigeonholes

Last year, I ranted about precarious pigeonholes. It’s unlikely I’ll ever accept when people use nothing but appearances and superficial conversations to draw conclusions about another person’s character. Neither am I amused with one-dimensional personality-based pigeonholes. This anecdote is an exception:
Let me start by recognizing that I used to be a bit of a nerd (if you ask the duck, I still very much am one. Well, I do love lists a lot); I was serious about my studies and fair comprehensible grading. That’s why my demeanor becomes particularly serious when I relate to my seniors, superiors, or people responsible for judging my work. In contrast, those who know me better (and in more casual situations) must suffer through my bad jokes and occasionally annoying cheerfulness.
One day, my friends/coursemates and I convened with a lecturer who had known us for a few years. After a long serious discussion, we were all exhausted and frustrated. I made a jokey remark, and my friends responded with a polite chuckle. When we realized our lecturer was staring at me perplexed, we froze. “Did you just make a joke?” he asked, looking as if I’d admitted to stealing a staircase.* I don’t remember the rest of the meeting, just that we couldn’t wait to leave the room and have a long, healthy laugh about the situation. Days, even years later, we still chuckled, imagining what kind of person I must have been in our teacher’s mind. It seems my “professionalism” worked too well on him.
Don’t get me wrong, I still resent feeling pigeonholed. But the way our lecturer was so sure of his reading of me and how this gave us all something to laugh about in an otherwise bleak situation made this a pretty priceless pigeonhole – one with a crystal chandelier (if we’re going with the literal sense of the word)!

Windy weather

A few years ago, whenever someone asked me about my favorite weather, I would respond, “windy!” without hesitation. My “windy” was a refreshing breeze by the ocean, dancing leaves in the fall, and fresh air atop a mountain. I enjoyed leaning into powerful gusts or receiving a determined push toward my destination from them. Sometimes, I still do. Even when I started living in Tokyo, a city occasionally visited by powerful typhoons, I was convinced I liked windy weather.
It took a series of surprised looks and chuckles from my coworkers after my favorite weather proclamations to make me question my conviction. I began observing my reaction to all kinds of windy weather. When the wind was accompanied by rain, and I worried about the well-being of my umbrella, or when it was so strong that I had to squint to shield my eyes, I wondered if I really liked windy weather the best. I recalled a period when I lived in an old building next to a park. Each time it was stormy out, I worried that my single-glazed window would shatter from a loosened branch or the pressure of the wind.
After a while, I aligned with the majority and made sunny weather my favorite. Despite my previous beliefs in the superiority of windy weather, I’ve always been a regular sucker for sunshine, more so than wind. My mood heavily depends on it.
I still love a breeze on a hot day or watching swaying trees through my double-glazed window. But each time I go for a slow jog on a windy day, I curse the wind when it amplifies my struggle to keep going. In those situations, the duck always asks me how I could ever have considered windy weather my favorite. You know what? Despite all that, I still feel like saying I like windy days (and imagine a refreshing breeze while I do). I suppose my volition to swim against the tide is firmer than my common sense (figuratively speaking. If I had to literally swim against the tide, I would give up after a few seconds).

A Shopping Basket Mystery

When I shop, I consistently choose shopping baskets over shopping carts. If there are no baskets, a shopping bag from the stash inside my backpack will have to do. But I prefer baskets. Can you imagine my disappointment when one of the few local basket-carrying grocery stores had seemingly run out? It was mild but memorable.
During another shop, I overheard an exchange between the cashier and an acquaintance of his, presumably a civilian-clothed (former) coworker. It went roughly like this:
Civilian: “Where did all the baskets go?”
Cashier: “They were (getting) stolen!”
Then, a shared knowing look and a chuckle (I might owe an embellishment credit to my memory for this part).
I wish I could recall the exact wording of the cashier’s statement, as there is a difference between: “All the baskets were stolen. There aren’t any left,” and “The basket supply was dwindling. We removed the remaining few”. The former sounds more exciting, though I suspect the latter to be true.
A few weeks later, when I entered the store, shopping bag ready, I was shocked to see the baskets had returned. I had expected their removal to be a permanent solution, especially after the overheard exchange. Then, I wondered: Had the baskets been removed to install anti-burglary chips? Had they been held hostage until a decision about their future was made? Maybe the no-basket period was simply a parenting tactic to teach the criminal neighborhood a lesson on appreciating the things it takes for granted? The more I thought about it, the more I believed in this sequence of events: The cashier and his friend, fed up with the regular disappearance of shopping baskets, had planned this stunt well in advance. First, they would hide all baskets. Then, they would stage several performances of the shopping basket conversation to ensure most patrons would witness it. Maybe, they multi-cast the role of “Civilian” to reduce suspicion. Either way, they must have done extensive purchase behavior studies beforehand so they wouldn’t hit the same clientele twice. Perhaps management was in on it? Maybe they hired professional actors? Possibly, this has the potential to become a new ducktective case. Probably, I’m overthinking this. Obviously, I need to know.
Asking outright would be too embarrassing. Maybe I could hire the duck to infiltrate the store and investigate the staff through some offhand new coworker questions? What do you think?

Being a completionist pt. 2

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about wanting to break my habit of being a completionist. I‘ve gotten worse am still working on that.
‘Tis the season of Christmas cookies and extra-delicious food, a.k.a. the perfect backdrop for writing about one completionist habit I don’t mind (though it does annoy people around me): food. Whenever I prepare a meal that’s not entirely inedible, I will eat it. I happily finish my plate, refrigerate or freeze intended leftovers, and always use up all the ingredients I buy – unless they’ve gone bad prematurely. The only time I’m not happy with this habit is when I eat out and haven’t brought an empty container for leftovers. Last summer, in a rare instance of outside dining, I ordered a vegetable pasta dish that was served in a medium-sized frying pan! The portion was at least 2-3 large leftover lunches large. I determinedly switched to main quest mode and began shoveling. When I had reached satisfactory fullness, you could hardly tell I had transferred any skillet pasta onto my plate. I was on a mission. So, I kept eating. I hadn’t felt that full in months years! But my aversion to wasting food trumped the growing fear of my stomach bursting. I kept on eating… until a knight in shining armor and an apron appeared at my side. Our excellent server had noticed my pained face and offered me a takeaway box for my leftovers. Yes! There’s no way I could have finished this pan-sized portion. My no-food-goes-to-waste-willpower has its limits.
I felt regret: Why hadn’t I thought about inquiring about a container myself (I would have happily paid for one) before the pain had set in? But I was also happy that I had one more day of good food before reverting to my own miserable cooking attempts. Thankfully, the duck wasn’t there to witness my embarrassment… or cheer me on all the way to my painful demise.

Small talk

I’m bad at small talk. When I meet new people, I’m decent at exchanging names (just to forget them immediately and then avoid any topic that might call for them) and other information relevant to the situation. I might throw in an “I like your T-shirt” or “what’s your dog’s name?” if that’s my genuine opinion/interest. That’s as far as my skills go. Don’t get me wrong. I like chatting about unimportant topics if I have anything to add to the conversation, be it an additional piece of information, a firm opinion, or a bad joke I can’t keep in. But is that even considered small talk, then?
When I meet someone I know, I usually utter the customary “how are you?”, maybe even an additional “how is your work/school/family/pet alligator/chocolate you’ve been keeping under your mattress?”. Then I wait for the actual conversation to begin or the encounter to end. Any further small talk becomes a challenge to produce polysyllabic answers while brainstorming questions without looking too uncomfortable. Even when I talk to people I’ve known for a while, I don’t always ask basic questions. Sometimes, I forget because I’m rude. Sometimes, I’m too embarrassed to ask them. Have you ever felt like it’s too late to ask about something you should know by now? I certainly have. So, because of my terrible past and present small talk skills, I avoid questions that might put me on the spot. If I ask: “how’s Al?” but don’t know for sure who Al is because I’ve only ever heard the name but never asked for details, things could get embarrassing. Let’s say I presume Al is an alligator because that’s the mental image I have every time I hear about this mysterious family member. Well, what if Al is a raccoon who has been part of the family for decades? In fact, at this very moment, Al’s grandchildren could be baking a fruit and nut cake in the family kitchen to celebrate Al’s 30th birthday because not only is Al not an Alligator, but Al is also the oldest raccoon alive. How embarrassing that would be! So, I add “pet alligator or raccoon?” to the list of conversation topics to avoid right below “my friend’s name” (clearly, I should be more embarrassed by my lousy jokes).
I’m pretty sure most people don’t care if you ask them about such things a few years too late, and often I still do. Nonetheless, I should probably try to get better at small talk if I want to shorten my list of topics to avoid… though I really don’t like exchanging irrelevant thoughts about the weather. Because what’s an acceptable response to “it’s been rainy recently, hasn’t it?” if you don’t have an anecdote/bad joke about the death of your umbrella to share?
I’m open to suggestions!

Learning my lefts and rights

I’ve always had difficulty telling left from right and, as an extension, east from west (on a map – physically, I have trouble with all directions). Like most directionally challenged individuals, I did learn the basics eventually. Unlike most directionally challenged individuals, I was well into my double digits when I got there. By “basics,” I mean that if I thought about it hard enough and visualized a page or a compass rose as an aid, I would probably get it right most times. I still need to do that sometimes. However, thanks to yoga videos, I’ve gotten much quicker in distinguishing the left side of my own body from the right. I even have a higher success rate at getting it right intuitively. As soon as I have to translate to another person’s body or think quickly, however, my success rate drops significantly… I’m still in awe when people just know which side is which in relation to anything. On the flip side, I get to have small successes like this: After one of my slow jogs, I was approached by two strollers asking for directions. Despite my terrible sense of direction, I was actually familiar with the place they were looking for as I had just jogged past it a few minutes earlier. I didn’t want to lie and knew I couldn’t run away – my jogging is way too slow for that because I’m polite. So, I took a deep breath and, using my hands as an aid (thanks, yoga!), I described the way slowly, but without messing up.
That was months ago, and I’m still super proud of myself!
I am genuinely happy with how far I’ve come in the past few years, as an adult on paper who has more trouble telling right from left than the average elementary schooler.
(I could probably improve my directional instincts if I consciously practiced. But presently, my motivation to improve is weaker than my laziness. What do I have a directionally talented duck friend for, anyway?)

Precarious pigeonholes (and abundant annoying alliterations)

Spring is officially over, as is (personally speaking) the predominant period of painstaking plots performed by particularly pernicious pollen. Strangely, I completely forgot to rant about the latter. To make up for that, I will tell you about an abiding abstract allergy of mine: stereotyped thinking.
I’ve been lucky to have been surrounded by people who make others feel like they’re three-dimensional human and feathery beings most of my life. I suppose that is why few things infuriate me more than harmful stereotypes that result in their victims’ lives becoming profoundly more difficult. I consider that reasonable resentment (though the extent of my exasperation, particularly pertaining to physical presumptions, could be called excessive). However, sometimes, a subtle hint that I might have been pigeonholed is all I need to feel personally attacked. I instantly imagine myself as a non-player character in a video game, clad in standard villager attire, invariably repeating a general warning about the dragon in the cave. The protagonist doesn’t care to find out that my bonnet hides a bald patch from the night the dragon scorched my shed in a destructive drunken drive. Or that the friendly neighborhood pigeon now lets me sleep on the sofa in its “bachelor’s den” (an embellished pigeonhole). All this is to say that, occasionally, my aversion to being pigeonholed (sans supportively supplied sofas), even with a well-intentioned implication innocently based on average assumptions, leads to the vehement wish to rebel. That’s why, a few years ago, when chatting about exercise (a topic I was extremely knowledgeable about, regularly regarding resolute runners), it irked me when my housemate recommended I do yoga because “that’s a kind of exercise women like to do, isn’t it?”. I had been critical of what I (foolishly) considered “slow exercise” before that. But now, I was adamant about avoiding yoga. The duck thinks it’s hilarious how much it bugs me when someone suggests something I suppose is based on a stereotype. The duck might be right. Fortunately, my friends tend to have an immaculate taste, so I’ve hardly ever received a friend recommendation I didn’t absolutely adore. Some have even offered up their sofa/[ch(air)] bed/camping mat/bathtub whenever I (spontaneously) needed a place to stay!

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P.S.: The duck asked me to include the following statement: “Pigeonholes are great! These so-called ‘bird hostels’ offer affordable accommodation for anyone (small enough) traveling on a budget”.

Bye-bye, computer hands!

A coworker once told me I have “computer hands,” a phrase I have reused many times to describe my hands since then.
At work, I regularly touched hot surfaces, washed my hands, and used the aggressive sanitizer provided. As a result of that, my hands had become uncomfortably dry. Whenever the opportunity arose, I would bury them in a thick layer of lotion to combat that dryness. After witnessing one of those moisture-replenishment sessions, my coworker asked me what was wrong. I told her that I had acquired the power to pick up dry cleaning cloths with my stretched-out hands (because my palms were so rough that they had a decent grip). She grabbed my hands, examined them, and casually told me: “Yeah, you have computer hands.” Unfortunately, our work didn’t involve any computer-related tasks.
After I had moved to Japan with the duck, my hands slowly regained their computer state. For a while, they were happy, regularly typing away on computer keyboards, with no consistent, aggressive sanitizing and hot-surface-touching to speak of.
When the pandemic started, I preferred to use my own mild sanitizer instead of the harsher ones provided at the entrances of public places (I love how I no longer have to hide my sanitizer bottle inside a pocket. Now I can walk around with it attached to my backpack without anyone judging me for being “too extreme”). My hands were happy, I was happy, and the duck was happy (because I wasn’t complaining about my dry hands).
Then I got Covid. I ended up using a lot of hand sanitizer, and not always the mild and moisturizing kind, throughout the day. Paired with washing them much more often than usual, I infuriated my spoiled computer hands (because, let’s face it, “computer hands” is just a term for hands that haven’t had to do a lot of strenuous work. In short: the hands of a lazy person, like myself). They were getting ready to revive the dry cleaning cloth magic trick. It’s been weeks since then, but my hands are still not back to their lazy, “let them eat cake”-state. Fortunately, I always have a few extra tubes of hand lotion stashed away!

Earphone drama

Though I do use my earphones to listen to drama, this story is about the dramatic demise of far too many earphones in far too little time:
I listen to podcasts a lot these days. Accompanied by stories, chores become substantially more enjoyable, but only with clear audio. When I got a new phone five years ago, I declared it my podcast machine and happily used the earphones that had come with it and with volume control to catch up on all my favorite podcasts. After two and a half years of dependable service, my earphones finally broke, and I was left to look for a worthy replacement. At first, I thought it would be best to order a cheap (probably knockoff) replica with all the same functions. Despite the visual likeness, the replacement shared no resemblance in longevity as six months later, the new earphones shared the fate of their predecessor. Thinking I might have received a faulty set, I went for an identical replacement. And, six months after that, another one. After my third set of earphones had also broken after half a year, I did some math: If three-to-four-euro earphones broke after six months, 10 euro earphones would function for about a year and a half, right? Well, after eight months of ignoring the duck’s chuckles whenever I confidently and naively plugged my neat new earphones into my portable podcast machine, I had to learn that that was not one of the real-life uses my math teachers had referred to in response to the regularly occurring question “why?”: My comparatively expensive earphones broke down after less than half their predicted lifetime.
At that point, I was frustrated. For a while, I made do without a functioning set of earphones. But I soon came to realize that the happiness I would feel from not getting guaranteed headaches after wearing my over-ear headphones (that I tend to only use with my laptop or on a plane) for too long would outweigh the anger from having to replace my earphones more often than some people – not me! – replace their toothbrush.
Well, these days, I sport over-ten-euro-earphones, and I’m optimistic that these, at last, will feed my podcast addiction for a minimum of two years!