Tag: japan

Categories
Essay Personal Update Random

The Most Expensive Bottle of Dr. Pepper I Will Ever Buy

A bottle of Dr. Pepper in my somewhat cluttered apartment
The culprit. (Photo credit: Me)

I’m not sure whether I’ll enter into the kingdom of heaven, but my JBL TUNE 760NC headphones certainly will.

Here’s what happened. Two days ago I was walking home from my new office on NAU campus. The office itself is worthy of another story sometime; it’s the kind of office that elicits the response “You’re in Peterson? That’s a rite of passage” from the older faculty members, located in a building that was reportedly supposed to have been torn down back in 2016.

What’s important to this story is that it’s a mile from where I live, which is short enough that walking is the best way to get there but long enough that it’s pretty miserable if the weather is bad. The rain started just after I left my office. Now, in Utah where I’m from, it’s not worth owning an umbrella, because it rains maybe twice a month, and when it does it’s over in twenty minutes. I thought I would be fine to push through the rain like the grown taxpaying adult that I am.

Never in my life had I experienced rain so thick that it felt like that scene in Lord of the Rings where the Fellowship are walking over Caradhras through the blizzard with their arms over their faces and Saruman says “If the mountain defeats you, will you risk a more dangerous road?” I couldn’t have been more drenched if the whole population of Flagstaff had taken turns emptying five-gallon buckets over my head. And every car that shot by flung dirty water onto the sidewalk, so that by the time I reached home, I was covered in water and mud and looked like I’d just cosplayed a car in a car wash.

(Incidentally, the shoes I was wearing that day—this was the third time I’d worn them—are still wet.)

So that was baptism by water for my headphones—which miraculously survived the whole ordeal well enough to repeatedly play the new Bleachers live recording while I furnished my office yesterday. They made it home dry and intact after work and I put them on the counter just in time for them to receive their second baptism in as many days: baptism by Dr. Pepper.

I was trying to be responsible, honest. After work I wandered around for a little while, trying to decide whether I wanted fast food, before realizing that what I really craved was a vanilla ice cream float with Dr. Pepper, and it would be cheaper to buy the ingredients for that than buying dessert at Dairy Queen. So I walked the fifteen minutes to Target and brought home a tub of ice cream and a two-liter Dr. Pepper. As soon as I got home, I set my headphones on the table, got out a cup for my long-awaited dessert, dished out the ice cream, and opened the Dr. Pepper…

…and a geyser comprising an entire liter of Dr. Pepper, fully half of the bottle, pumped through my hands with immeasurable newtons of force. It couldn’t have gone any higher if I’d dumped a whole bag of Mentos into that bottle. I yelled a couple of curse words and knocked over the ice cream cup—the ill-fated ice cream float got assembled, at least, on the kitchen counter—and, clothing soaked for the second night in a row, I rushed for a towel to absorb the lake of Dr. Pepper off the counter and the floor and the dishwasher and the walls and the ceiling (where brown Dr. Pepper droplets hung like stalactites).

For the next half hour, my roommates (who had been playing Super Smash Bros in the living room when all hell broke loose; Dr. Pepper made its way all the way onto their couches, fortunately upholstered in leather) and I conducted damage control on the brand new kitchen. I should mention that we’re the first ones to live here. Less than a month into our contract and the living room walls are permanently streaked with the evidence of my cola-flavored folly. It came off the baseboards and the doors just fine, and the floors are mostly sticky-free after a couple moppings, but I doubt the constellations of Dr. Pepper on the ceiling will go away without another painting.

I really tried my best to keep this apartment nice, but in the end—no matter how hard you may wish it otherwise—no treasure on earth, even a new apartment, is safe from the moth and rust and Dr. Pepper that doth corrupt, in the words of St. Matthew.

I’ve been reading the fourteenth-century samurai epic Heike Monogatari, which is all about the transience of glory and beauty: “Pleasure and riches are vanity…youth cannot save me, for many die young, and breathing out never assures that the breath will pass in again. Summer heat shimmer, a flash of lightning; life vanishes still more swiftly.” That hauntingly beautiful awareness of doom is moving to read about in classic literature, but I could have used without the reminder of the transience of my wordly possessions via the twin vehicles of H2O and Dr. Pepper.

Granted, my poor headphones made it through their ordeal well enough to deliver me the new Airborne Toxic Event single, so I’ll take what I can get. (It’s very Smiths-wave, for the record.) ∎

Categories
Random

枕草子: Delightful Things

(Image credit: Myself. Origami credit: Some really cool unknown person.)

The poet Ross Gay came to BYU this month and read some of his work at the English Reading Series. Ross’s skill with the English language is astounding, but what left the biggest impression was his attitude and character. “If you give yourself the task of noticing what you love,” he said, “your life is gonna be more full of what you love.”

I’ve been reading a book by another expert noticer of things. 清少納言 (Sei Shōnagon) recorded her observations and musings in 枕草子, The Pillow Book, a private journal that was leaked and circulated among her contemporaries. The book is full of anecdotes of court life mixed with all kinds of lists. Her observations are often as relatable as they are humorous. Do you relate to any of these?

  • Things About Which One Is Liable to Be Negligent: Preparations for something that is still well in the future.
  • Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster: To pass a place where babies are playing.
  • Things That Arouse a Fond Memory of the Past: To pass the time, one starts looking through some old papers and comes across the letters of a man one used to love.
  • Annoying Things: One has sent someone a poem (or a reply to a poem) and, after the messenger has left, thinks of a couple words that ought to be changed.
  • Things That Give a Pleasant Feeling: To throw equal numbers repeatedly in a game of dice.
  • Elegant Things: A pretty child eating strawberries.
  • Embarrassing Things: Parents, convinced that their ugly child is adorable, pet him and repeat the things he has said, imitating their voice.
  • Hateful Things: A man with whom one is having an affair keeps singing the praises of some woman he used to know… Even more hateful if he is still seeing the woman!

It’s a fun and fascinating read! Inspired by 少納言’s lists, and by Ross, here’s my own list of Delightful Things I’ve noticed lately, with pictures.

A paper dragon on campus.

Chalkboard art in the common room.

The light and shadows on the interior of the bus at evening.

This sign near the student center.

A still dragonfly.

An illustration drawn by one of my students while I was teaching.

Fried pickles at Texas Roadhouse.

A heart drawn on the concrete while it was wet.

Have you seen anything delightful lately? ∎

Categories
Personal Update

The Airborne Toxic Event

Today I learned that scholars think there’s a 5 to 20 percent chance that humanity will have gone extinct by the end of the century.

Now, I’m not huge on end-of-the-world scenarios, but there’s nothing that reminds one of their mortality quite like walking out the door to a grey world and the scent of smoke–not the pleasant smoke of a campfire, but an oddly sweet mixture, difficult to place, somewhere between tree sap and dilapidated shed and with a hint of roasted marshmallow. The towering mountains were completely obscured by the fog, giving an ethereal quality to the scene: we might just as easily have been on an eerily quiet island as in mountain suburbia. The smoke, odor, and wind combined to inhibit the senses and make the neighborhood feel almost like the aftermath of some disaster.

In his last lecture to our class, my biology professor summarized the capabilities of humans with two slides: the 9-11 terror attacks and the bombing of Hiroshima. The photographs elicited a grim, awkward silence from the class. He could have chosen any number of images to represent what Homo sapiens have accomplished in the 300,000 or so years of our existence. Perhaps Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, or the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or even Adam Young on stage. Instead, it was a reminder of the tremendous destructive potential that humans have developed, greater than anything nature has come up with. That 5 to 20 percent chance of human extinction is overwhelmingly due to human causes, an apocalyptic conglomeration of AI rampage, nuclear warfare, life-destroying nanobots, or some combination of the above.

The cashier-in-training at Chick-Fil-A had started the job to buy a new car after his last one got totaled. A young woman with long black hair was doing her schoolwork intently at the bus stop. The bombing of Hiroshima occurred 76 years ago today, and today, as they do every year, Japan is holding a festival where they pray for peace. Humanity has seen worse, and I envision promise in our future.

In the meantime, it seems that the cause of the smoky incursion is a larger fire being blown in from the West Coast. Utahns who already blame everything on California have reason to rejoice. ∎