tuckova

ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things

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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

travel and other meanderings

Dear airports (and airlines), you dole out basic amenities like the Czechs used to dole out toilet paper. Small servings of a thing that I think you could easily include in your overhead costs and are making us pay for as a means of reminding us who is in control. A Czech acquaintance of mine wrote her thesis on gay lifestyle as recorded by one of the toilet guards, as public toilets were one of the places for gays to meet under Communism. Picture some middle-aged woman, tearing off individual squares and recording the various antics she saw in public bathrooms in the eighties; I expect she got more out of it than whatever is being collected while we sit in suspended animation buying four dollar water, ten dollar wine, trading our grandmother's maiden names for five minutes of connection to people we already like in an attempt to avoid conversation with people we won't.

Overheard, while waiting for the plane to Madrid:

Young man: So… are you going to Madrid, too?
Young woman: Yes.
YM: For vacation or…?
YW: I'm going to study there for a semester.
YM: Wow! So… you speak Italian?
 
Once while I was disembarking from a plane with young Squire a business suit came to me and said that he had never seen a finer job of parenting than me on a plane. It probably made my year, totally taking credit for what was in fact an incredibly easy kid to travel with. I regret that I was unable to say the exact same thing to the woman seated a row ahead of us yesterday. I was saving it for when we got off the plane, but when I turned she was gone. She was amazing. Not that the kid didn't cry, though he cried very little, but that the parent seemed to so completely enjoy him while not presuming that the rest of the plane shared her feelings and used her enjoyment of him as a means of entertaining him. Anyway, dear lady in 10C, thank you for making my flight better in more ways than one. 
 
Band names that didn't make the "stuff on our table" list of bands: The Plastic Knives. The Gravy Boats. The Sporks. 
Acknowledgement of but failure to actually go into the article about band names and which ones use definite articles and what that conveys, because I'm too jet-lagged to look into it. 
 
You guys, I am so tired. But happy to be home. Didja miss me?
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