My sieve-like mind

Thursday night, I decided to get a drop on the weekend (or catch up on the previous one) by doing a load or two of laundry. I got home, dumped my duds into a bag, and opened the drawer where my shiny new laundry card--which I just put $20 on--is always waiting until I need it. Except it wasn't. My first thought was that I had left it in the shorts I typically wear when I take the washing down. Nope. My wallet? No. Sitting on the table? Wrong again! After ten or so increasingly desperate minutes of pulling apart every conceivable hidey hole, I thought Maybe you put it in the other bag, the one that had the detergent? Fortunately, I knew exactly where this was: Next to the magazine basket.

Except it wasn't. Was I really lame enough to have left it downstairs in the laundry room? You betcha! The extraordinary thing was that, after ten days, not only was it still there, but the bottle of detergent was untouched. My faith in my fellow condo-dwellers momentarily restored, I turned my mind back to the problem of how the hell I was going to secure myself clean undies without shelling out a fiver for another electronic card.

As luck would have it, I had a few fantastic salt caramels (courtesy of e.) that I was meaning to take to my upstairs neighbour. In the process, I bummed her card, promising profusely to have it back within the hour and to repay her the value I cashed in. When I finally began deploying clothes into one of the front-loaders, a thought struck me: Wouldn't it be ironic if I ended up washing my missing card? Not two minutes later, I found something hard and oblong in a shirt pocket. Bingo!

Less than a week before, I unlost the lovely new winter gloves monshu bought me for New Year's. Like the card, I knew they weren't really gone; they were somewhere in the friendly confines of my apartment, I just didn't know where. How was I supposed to remember that a couple months previously I'd decided to wear my new suede jacket out to the local pub on a frosty night and had slipped my best gloves into the pockets to complete the ensemble?

If it were only the occasional lost item scare, I wouldn't mind so much, but it's much more systemic than that. Every time I'm walking home after having spent three or four hours wasting time on monshu's computer, things I meant to take care of in the process drift back into my head. Amazing how they get scattered to the mouldy recesses of my mind the minute I load LiveJournal and don't return until ambient distraction has dropped to a minimum.

At least that's less embarrassing than the loss of my once-keen ability to associate names and faces. Sunday afternoon, the GWO and I did dim sum with the Asians & Friends for the first time since...last November? As far as my mind is concerned, the gap was geologic. I recognised at least half the men at our table but there was only a single one I could name. I was even crushed out on this man's boyfriend before and I hadn't the slightest idea any more what he was called (a sure sign that I am well and truly over him).

Draminicks

The other night, I found myself at the local grocery around 11 p.m. picking up milk and cereal for Sunday breakfast. There was only one checkout line open and near the head of it was a little Ruth Gordon with a disreputable dog blanket wrap and a blonde wig that looked salvaged from the trash, so I settled in for a nice, long wait. I was not disappointed, but there were extenuating circumstances.

My attention was drawn by an argument near the front of the store. A large, burly man had a skinny teenager by the front of his shirt, and the kid was threatening to kill him if he let him go. They were using quite familiar terms of address (such as "cousin") with each other, so it wasn't until the dispute had escalated that I realised the larger man was actually a plainclothes security guard. This was after the manager, who had just opened a second register, left his post in order to come to his assistance.

In short, the boy had been nicked leaving with a bottle of unpaid-for wine. He offered to make good, but the guard called it "too late for that" and tried to hustle him towards the office to wait for the police, who my cashier had just been instructed to call. The kid was having none of it, though, and eventually the guard wrestled him to the ground and pinned him while he waited for the manager to cuff him. "Don't injure him or he'll sue you!" pointed out the old lady, and I didn't want to ask how she knew this.

This was all taking place only a few feet from registers, so pretty much the entire crowd was transfixed by the free show, including the young cashier. I'm afraid my callousness born of years of urban living came to the fore because I got her attention and asked, "Are you still open?" Flustered, she did her best to complete the old biddy's transaction, but it would've been a trial under even the best of conditions. With both of them distracted by the shouting only a short leap away, it was a complete fiasco.

Meanwhile, the tableau continued to unfold. The two store employees finally frogmarched the young man into the office, and the guard was trying to get rid of his buddy, who had been keeping a safe distance while urging the men to let his homie go and offering to pay for the wine as well. The guard repeatedly threatened him with arrest as well, but it was taking a while to sink in.

Then a distraught young woman showed up and started kicking the office door and screaming. The guard warned her that he'd take her in, too, and she replied, "I DON'T CARE IF I GO TO JAIL! OPEN THIS DOOR!" They obliged, and she disappeared inside. Then a young man who had been right behind me in line until the manager open a new aisle and he moved over asked, "Could we have our receipt?" which caused a wave of nervous laughter to break as another employee walked up, tore off the slip, and handed it to them.

Around this time, three more chavs wandered in, went up to the office door, and tried to negotiate with the employees; I kept my eyes warily on them in the unlikely event that one of them was dumbass enough to pull a weapon. After what seemed like a dozen attempts to explain to the old woman how much she owed over and above what her Link card had covered, she paid up and shuffled on and the young Ethiopian at the register moved on to the customer directly in front of me.

This is more or less when the police came in. "Anyone not involved in this, STEP OFF!" they announced and the boys vanished like smoke. "She goin' in for assault and he goin' for assault and retail!" instructed our Tysonesque security guard as the cops took over. When my turn came, I spoke to distressed checkout woman in the calmest and cheeriest manner possible, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

I thanked the bagger and wished him "a less eventful evening" from now on. "Sometimes they solve these things without so much conflict by just letting them pay for it," he informed me. As I was crossing the parking lot, I saw six or eight hoodlums in hoodies--including the four I'd seen arguing inside--plotting their next move.

Saturday night opera

Saturday night was the annual Rising Young Stars in Concert event at the Lyric. Nuphy and I have watched this grow from a simple Sunday matinee with piano accompaniment and brief explanatory intros to a full-on evening gala with orchestra, supertitles, and borrowed couture. It's nice to have the full orchestra, but I do miss getting to sit on the main floor.

Curiously, the programme was segregated by language (with the exception of one French aria classed with the Italian pieces due to the nationality of its composer). Unfortunately, even though I'd had plenty of sleep that day, the Italian first half was--at best--soporific, at worst physically unpleasant. There was powerful young soprano that thrilled Nuphy, but her voice had such a brassy shrillness that it actually made me shudder with discomfort whenever she really started belting. Fortunately, she was excluded from the concluding selection, the Act II duet from Norma, and this ended up being one of the high points.

Nuphy reminded me that they generally keep the strongest singers for last, and so it proved to be. We finally ended up with some males who could hold their own against the big voices of ladies, even if their diction often left something to be desired. One couldn't form a front rounded vowel to save his life (which is a real problem if you're going to sing in French) and another had never been told that Germans release final stops even when speaking normally, much less when enunciating for the stage; his Korngold selection had the word zurück in it at least eight times, and every time he made it sound like "zu Rüh'".