On Affectations

I just spent an hour waking up over coffee at an outside table at Delaney's on Denman St., Vancouver, British Columbia, Home and Native Land. Had I chosen my seat better, it would have been a delightful, quiet slide into a soft day. As it was, I spent the whole time struggling to read my blessed and incredibly informative Globe and Mail. My difficulty arose in that I was simultaneously resisting the impulse to saunter back to the two gay men chatting at the table behind me and giving one a brisk slap in the chops.

This impulse might cause you to pose two questions, so let me jump on those up front.

1. How did I know they were gay? Because they spent a large chunk of their conversation discussing a mutual third party and how odd it was that while he looked really good in the buff and was great in the sack, for some reason neither could quite get their arms around (sorry), he didn't look so hot in his clothes. Should they stage a "What Not To Wear" style intervention? This, methinks, was a fairly crisp indication on which side of the teeter-tooter they bounce.

2. Why did I want to slap the one (let's call him "Frank")? Good question, since Frank seemed like a nice enough fellow, had civil coffee house table manners, wasn't screaming into his cell phone, etc. And let me state up front that I had zero issue with Frank's sexual orientation. Aside from the fact that it's none of my concern, even if I did have issues, a) I would have had no business sitting in a coffee shop in this particular section of town, and b) I would have wanted to give them both a good cuff upside the head.

No, the source of my irritation was Frank's outrageous "gay" lisp. Call me an uninformed boor, but I just don't believe that people are born with that kind of speech impediment. It's a "nurtured" as opposed to "natured" feature, it's dumb, and it just grinds my gears big time. So, when one is forced* to overhear two men dishing a third on the cut of his clothed jib and one of them insists on delivering the word "slacks" with way over-the-top hissy silibants, well, who can blame a girl for an itchy palm?

And just in case you are ready to draw and quarter me for being a homophobic poop-head, I feel exactly the same way about Orange County bobble-heads who use such thick coats of lip gloss that they daren't allow their top lips to contact their bottom lips while speaking. This leads to an affected open-mouth "I'm so bored with this whole conversation that I can barely keep my lips moving" delivery, which is almost always exacerbated by delivering every thought in the form of an oddly-gravelly toned question, as though life were just one continuous round of Jeopardy. "So, I was at the counter of Tiffany's? when my chihuahua Pinky? did a doo-doo in my new Kate Spade handbag? And, like, it was so gross? omigahwd...."

In this same category fall teen-age boys who insist on grunting for three or four years before they remember to use their words, seven-year old girls who baby talk only to their Daddies, and politicians who respond to every question with a "Oh, you can't throw me off with that one" kind of inside-track chuckle. I just want to slap 'em and slap 'em good.

Frank was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's all.

*Yeah, I could have moved, but then what would I have blogged about today?

Get Your Fingers ON

Get Your Fingers ON The Screen!

After spending years--okay... decades--developing a healthy aversion to finger prints on computer screens, I find myself writing this post by touching the shiny surface of my new iPhone and sliding my index finger back and forth across an interactive picture of a qwerty
keyboard. How slick is that?

It wasn't too long ago that this kind of technology debuted in email chains in a video file of a "touch table" demo. The table top was actually a huge screen that changed as if by magic in sweeping fluid motions as the demoer's fingers flew from corner to corner of the table.It was mesmerizing to watch and inconceivable to think that anything like that would be in my own hands in time for me to actually learn how to use it. Yet here I sit, making fingerprint tracks willingly as I play with "Wordpad," one of hundreds of applications available for the my new 3G iPhone. In fact, everything in my life with a screen now is vulnerable to the same treatment: I routinely attempt to poke my camera to life via the LCD display, and decide my blackberry must be broken when I can't initiate a call by touching the screen icon. The disturbing aspect of the whole thing is that a smudged screen still really bugs me.

Yes, it's a phone and internet connection that also now houses my entire music collection, address book, calendar, and the daily combined insights of every major and local newspaper in the world. And yes, Third Child was an integral member of the design team at Apple who created the charger connection (in spite of being ridiculously proud of him, we're still gonna have a chat about battery life). And yes, it may yet prove to have a meaningful business application someday. Meanwhile, this is the closest toy so far to the jetpack and/or hover car I always wanted for Christmas.
But, like everything else in life, nothing is perfect. Since the device lacks the fundamental word processing ability to cut and paste, my next trick will be to figure out how to post this puppy from here.
Stand by...