A Thousand Times No

Even though it was the night before the biggest fireworks celebration across the land, I still saw plenty of pyrotechnics from overhead while flying westward this evening. The odd thing was how close to the ground they all appeared to be.

Whenever I watch fireworks from the ground, they always seem to soar high overhead, perhaps because of how far backwards I need to crane my neck to see them. From the vantage point of several thousand feet in the air, firecrackers seem more like tiny, ephemeral asterisks.*

* People below.

When I was in the first grade, one day in class our teacher asked us each to stand up in front of the class and talk about what our fathers did at work as part of their jobs.  (Yes, I’m that old — nobody asked what our mothers did, and everyone assumed we had fathers who lived at home with us.)

When it came to my turn, I got up in front of the class and confidently said, “My dad goes to The Office.” As far as I knew, that was what he did.  I had briefly visited The Office on a few occasions.  There were plenty of desks, and usually a lot of people were very friendly and nice to me for the few minutes when I was there.

“And what kind of office is it?” my teacher asked.  “Is it a bank?”
I shook my head.

“What kind of things does your father do there?  Can you tell me the name of the company?”

I had no idea.  My dad went there each morning with his briefcase, and came home each evening.  He didn’t talk to us about what happened there each day.  We didn’t see other people from The Office, except for one person who knew my father long before they had both started working there.  It was simply The Office, a steady, opaque, constant presence in our lives.  My father continued to go to work at the selfsame office until he suffered a heart attack, and went into early retirement soon thereafter.

Tomorrow, I will get on a plane to go visit my parents, where my father (having now enjoyed a couple of decades of retirement) will be the first one to remind me of the benefits of getting out of The Office.  After what I had to deal with at work today, that will come not a moment too soon.

Because I work at a university, I have the option of setting aside money for my retirement with TIAA-CREF (the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association - College Retirement Equities Fund).  TIAA-CREF has served as a financial services agent for people working in education and other non-profit fields for nearly a century, and is one of the juggernauts of the retirement sector in this country.

They’ve always been economical, operating with astonishingly low fees and cost ratios, and they’ve been reliable in a wooly, stolid way.  There was a span when one could consistently expect former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to bring up a shareholder motion to divest all funds of tobacco holdings, and just as dependably count on it to be quietly, politely voted down.

A few years back, TIAA-CREF started to spruce up its branding as they began offering public versions of their mutual funds to individual investors.  They revamped their logo and adopted a new catchphrase, “Financial services for the greater good.”  Someone called in a crackerjack team of graphic designers, because the quarterly and annual statements were transformed into beautiful models of readable, decipherable presentation.

Recently, I signed up for a complimentary one-on-one retirement consultation with a TIAA-CREF advisor.  There were several pages of preliminary forms to fill in preparation for the hour-long phone call.  I found the session helpful, because it gave me the opportunity to ask plenty of questions and it brought to light some investment options I hadn’t previously considered. When the advisor I worked with told me she would be mailing me a report summarizing highlights of our discussion, I thought nothing more of it.

Then the report arrived.

Yowza!  Full-color, heavy paper stock, staple-bound, and fully customized with my information, it was one of the most gorgeous financial documents I’ve ever laid eyes on.  I’ve seen plenty of annual reports from exchange-listed firms that didn’t look even half as good.  It’s a smart, well-conceived blend of old-school (solid, clean visual design) and new school (digital document templates, color laser printing) to produce a dazzling final product.

I know plenty of you reading this also have holdings with TIAA-CREF, too.  Call them and see if you’re eligible for a personal retirement planning telephone session — because one of these beauties should have your name on it.

Paris Review deputy editor Matt Weiland opens a Slate piece today with a lyrical paean to Minnesota place names that damn near made my eyes water:

On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn’t much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron Range, with traces of the Finns and French who settled there. Crookston, Warroad, Thief River Falls: the dark romance of the forested northwest. Moorhead, Brainerd, Saint Cloud: the dull thud of the flat and unlovely middle and its Norwegian bachelor farmers. Pipestone, Owatonna, Blue Earth: the dreamy vowels of the riverine south. Did I want to go to these places? No more than I wanted to go to Narnia or Middle-Earth. But I found in their names a kind of secular liturgy, beautiful and full of promise.

I was once at a reception here in Philadelphia chatting with a strapping blond chunk of a man decked out in a tuxedo.  He was, I discovered, a former high school hockey player from Minnesota.  We reminisced about people’s reverence for the state tournament, and agreed that the phrase “ice hockey” was anathema to sensible sports fans everywhere.

“There’s no room for bullshit, that’s why I love the game,” he said fondly. “There’s a bunch of guys with knives on their feet and clubs in their hands, moving with the speed of cars.  If you mess with someone for no good reason, you’re toast, plain and simple.  People will see to it.”

Roseau, Bemidji, Lake of the Woods.

I watched the four-hankie weeper “Atonement” this weekend, prompted by an interest in seeing more of James McAvoy.  Can someone please tell me what it is that they put in the water in Scotland that produces the likes of McAvoy, Ewan McGregor, Craig Ferguson, Robert Carlyle, and Sean Connery?  If they could put that stuff in a bottle…

(or “How To Tell Which New Hit Movie Is Which”)

It has come to our attention that numerous similarities between two of the summer’s biggest films — “WALL•E” and “Wanted” — both of which opened yesterday, may create confusion among movie-viewing audiences.  Consider:

Our humble hero leads a mundane, utterly unheroic existence marked by repetitive tasks and mind-numbing routine.  Then, one day, out of the blue, SHE drops into our hero’s life — sleek, sexy, otherworldly, guns ablaze.  Our hero feels compelled to follow her into an unknown corner of the universe, and thereby fulfill his destiny.

Since this could describe either flick, here’s some helpful cues that distinguish one film from the other:

If the film contains:

• Cockroaches
• Our hero handling a brassiere
• Characters devoted to obsessive cleanliness
• No dialogue during the first half-hour

…then you are watching “WALL•E”

If the film contains:

• Rats
• Actual cleavage
• Characters engaging in recurrent bathing
• No meaningful dialogue during the entire film

…then you are watching “Wanted”

We hope you enjoy the summer blockbuster(s) of your choice.  Please remember to turn off all cell phones and pagers, and to keep the movie theater afloat financially by patronizing the exorbitantly priced concession stand.  Thank you!

Last week, the online magazine Slate ran a piece about the disappearance of the certain punctuation from present-day writing that asked, “Has modern life killed the semicolon?“  As its author Paul Collins noted, “The semicolon allows woozy clauses to lean on each other like drunks for support.”  True enough, I thought to myself, which I why I only use them once in a blue moon.

Or so I thought.  With my curiosity piqued after reading excerpts from reader responses to the Collins piece, I decided to see just how completely I had dispensed with the semicolon.  It turns out I’ve already employed it 22 times since the beginning of the year on this site alone, while the frequency of blue moons (the second full moon in a single calendar month) averages out to around once every 19 months.

A more apt description of the role of the semicolon in my writing, then, is PWB: Punctuation With Benefits, uniquely suited to certain hookup needs.    How very modern!

Guess what piece of tableware makes a cameo appearance within the first ten minutes of the new Pixar film, “WALL•E“?

Hint: Not a spoon.  Not a fork.

That alone was worth staying up after midnight.

But wait, there’s more! WALL•E is a solar-powered robot.  When he needs to be recharged, he sits out in the sun, unfolding a threefold panel that looks uncannily like the face-frying devices used by ardent suntanners.  As he reaches full charge, he gives off a loud chime, warming the Pavlovian cockles of my heart:

 

 Charge!: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Functional air conditioning.  Blockbuster action films.  Ice cream.  Free laundry.

Yes, through a quirk in the system, I have access to free, high-efficiency (HE) washing machines and voluminous dryers for the remainder of the summer.   After I declared laundry bankruptcy (and had the delightful experience of using a fleet of brand new appliances), I decided to start boycotting the sorry coin washer and dryer in my own building.  I haven’t looked back since.

I could tell you more, but then I’d have to send a secret society of assassins after you, armed with quiescently frozen confections…

Guess what I will be doing at 12:05 am on Friday (June 27)?

Hint: Apple’s lead industrial designer, Jonathan Ive, had a hand in some of the design.