Dueling domestic disasters!

I woke up this morning feeling so much better than I had any right to expect 24 hours after a night of unsleep in the suburbs (of which more later) that I'm feeling almost apprehensive. In fact, I awoke better rested than I am most Mondays. Poor monshu had a fasting test this morning, something that slipped my mind until I remarked on how bizarre it was to find him up and about without the coffee pot brewing. "Rub it in, why don't you?" he retorted.

A short while later I stepped into the tub and noticed two blurry squirming shapes. No, I didn't shriek like a little girl, but I was out of there so fast that I became a blurry shape myself. There was nothing I could capture them with (besides the water cup), so I pulled out the drain cover and rinsed them down. (If you want to see how I've disappointed my farm-bred father, look no further.)

The good news is that they were nothing worse than fluffies, and that--in retrospect--the bug that I watched the cat pursue and kill just outside the bathroom door a couple weeks back must've been one, too. The bad news is, well, bloody bugs in the bathtub. I ended up shampooing with my eyes open because stinging eyes still better than inadvertent contact with a complete harmless insect. (Hear that? It's the sound of my ancestors weeping all the way back to the goddamn Germanic invasions.)

While drying myself off, I heard a thud above, doubtless monshu wrestling with the kitchen trashcan. I'd left hairbrush and deodorant in my bag which was in the dining room, so as I came down the hallway half clothed I called out, "Do you need any help tearing apart our house?" A second later, I spied the garbage strewn across the floor and realised my mistake. Needless to say, the Old Man was fit to be tied, so I chased him out of the house and resigned myself to walking in to work fifteen minutes late after all.

The cat sniffed at the garbage but didn't try to play with it and it wasn't raining yet when I hauled it all to the dumpster. Despite how mild it was, I decided a sport shirt alone was too little and tried to figure out what had become of my blue pullover, which I'd washed on Saturday. As I failed to excavate any memory of folding it, a dreadful suspicion began to creep over me.

Sure enough, an entire load of laundry in the washer since Saturday afternoon. Well, I'll wash it again tonight and, whatever else happens, it will make it into the drier.

Lost in the suburbs I (In two parts for short attention spans)

[Click here to skip the background and go right to the riveting account of yet another Cab Ride From Hell.]

This was the first year I got an invitation to JP's Halloween Party, so already Facebook is paying dividends in terms of deepening social connexions. As grateful as I was, I'll admit that I waffled quite a bit about coming. Because, you know, motherfucking Bolingbrook. But in my mind's ear, I heard what sentiments like that sounded to my suburban friends and realised that, if I were them, I'll be telling myself to get over myself already. So I did.

(Still with me?)

In any case, typical me, I vacillated so long that I missed my chance for a ride and ended up taking a later train than absolutely everyone else. Who knew I'd have to leave my house by 5:30 if I wanted to be at the Naperville station before 9:37? (Gotta love weekend Metra schedules.) It was an uneventful trip to Union Station except that I panicked a bit about time and cabbed it across the Loop instead catching the bus. Good thing, too, since I practically circumnavigated the damn station trying to find the ticketing for Metra. (Am I just hallucinating a bank of machines near the Adams Street entrance?)

JP seemed genuinely surprised when I called him to tell him I was on my way. My earlier messages must've gotten lost in the confusion of pre-party preparations. He was apologetic about not being able to send someone to meet me at the station and I lied about being 100% okay with taking a cab instead. Not for the first time, I scolded myself for not getting my act together sooner and making it easier on everyone, not least of all myself.

Since after all, one of the real pleasures of riding Metra out to the boonies is the view from the upper deck. But of course it was pitch dark by the time I was sitting on the train, trying to block the chatter of the hoards of underage suburban spawn on the other side of the car. I was quite taken aback to see that they don't even light the signs at the suburban stations. And since the conductor wasn't calling them out either, I began to worry about missing my stop. Finally, when I got too distracted to concentrate any longer on what I was reading, I clambered down and asked someone how many stops to Naperville, then got ready to disembark one stop earlier, just in case.

So far so good. But then...

Lost in the suburbs II (In two parts for short attention spans)

When I disembarked from the train at Naperville, there was a single cab waiting in the parking lot. I counted myself lucky and jogged over to it. The driver was older and soft-spoken. I asked him, "How much to Bolingbrook?" and he asked me, "What's the address?" It produced no glimmer of recognition. JP had given me the crossstreets of the nearest major intersection over the phone, so as I climbed in I gave those to him. When he didn't say anything to that, I prompted him, "About $30, right?" and got a tepid response which could be construed as agreement.

The car was more spacious than a city cab and there was no barrier, but the seatbelt was broken so I had to shift over to the driver's side. As the cabbie prepared to turn onto a major road, I asked him, "Aren't you going to turn the metre on?" He did and, as we came up to speed, I was struck by the fact that he was doing the speed limit. My eye on the clock and the metre the whole time, fighting off the worry you always have in a town you don't know that you're going to end up someplace miles away from your destination.

Eventually the road became Weber, which I recognised as one of the names JP had given me, and I was able to relax a bit. We had just come over a wooded rise and I regretted once more not being able to take in the scene in the daylight. Then the driver asked me, "Do you know how to get to this place?" "No; that's why I hired a cab," I replied frostily. All my fears seemed confirmed, when he pulled out a metro area atlas as we slid into the left-turn lane before a stoplight.

Tenser than ever, I watched him flip endless to a dog-eared page, study it vaguely, and then turn to the street index in the back. I was about to suggest he pull over to do that when he made that choice himself on the other side of the intersection. "Must be a new street," he mumbled, and got out to retrieve a street map from his trunk. Disgusted, I called up JP again and told him we'd reached the intersection. "Are you going east or west?" "I've got no idea," I told him, "I've never been here before and I can't see the moon." He dictated a series of turns and I relayed them to the driver, who turned the cab around in the parking lot of mall and sent us off in the opposite direction.

During all of this, he'd left the metre running. As we passed through the intersection again, I informed him firmly but civilly that I wasn't going to pay the $3 racked up because he didn't know where he was going; I had to repeat myself several times before I felt like this had sunk in. By this time, several more minutes had passed and still no sign of the first turn we were supposed to make. He began to slow down at the entrance to a subdivision. "This is Danube," I said, "we're looking for Orchard." "Maybe we passed it already?" he suggested feebly.

I'd had enough. Furiously dialing my host yet again, I told him to forget it and let me out. "I can walk back to the intersection if that will make things easier," I volunteered, but JP told me to sit tight, they'd find me. Before I got out of the car I asked for the driver's company, name, and ID number so I could lodge a formal complaint. He complied, protesting, "This is a Naperville cab, not a Bolingbrook cab." "Then you shouldn't have taken the fare!" I snapped. I handed over $20--the amount on the metre as we passed through the intersection--and wrangled my bag out to the curb.

Ten minutes or so passed before JP called again asking which side of the intersection I was on. I reminded him politely that there's was no way to tell on a night that was dark and cloudy. Before we finished the call, however, he pulled up in a pickup truck driven by a kindly Nashville transplant. Those moments standing in the cool air had helped; I was impressed by my calmness as I gave my companions the play-by-play.

"All the cabs in Nashville have GPS," said our driver. "In Chicago, people break into cars just to steal the GPS," I replied. "I think the cabbies might be afraid to have 'em." What they do have, however, are dispatchers; I've had drivers before who called up to talk them through the route step by step. I fully expected the same from my hapless Naperville cabbie, which is why I hadn't been put off by his initial cluelessness. Are things just different out in the burbs or did I have particularly bad luck? Frankly I hope never to find out.

Don't let's let me get going

Let's is an odd word. I know that any dictionary or grammar book will describe it as "a contraction of let us" but that doesn't begin to capture how it's used in my speech. For starters, the so-called "uncontracted" form belongs to a completely different speech register than regular let's. Try saying "Let us get out of here" and see just how stilted that sounds.

When I was a young Catholic, "Let us pray" was the formula with which we ended our petitions in church. (I remember one of the nuns admonishing us not to run the first two words together so they sounded like "lettuce".) "Let's pray", on the other hand, is a preface to a casual wish for someone's safety, as in "Let's pray he's alright." No one in my milieu would've taken that as an earnest suggestion to clasp hands and address the Almighty.

That's not to say that let us doesn't appear in my informal speech, but only with a completely different meaning--one directly parallel to let me or let him. Compare "Let's go!" to "Let us go!" You can't "expand" the first expression to the latter or "contract" the latter expression to the former. In some cases, the result would be beyond ludicrous and into ungrammaticality. Consider the ordinary dual form "Let's the two of us" as in "Let's the two of us go to the cashier and explain." What fluent speaker would ever say *"Let us the two of us go"? I've even heard the contrastive usage "Let's us go".

Speaking of emphatic usages, I also have "Do let's!" in my speech, but only as a conscious affectation. (Although I know I've spoken before about affectations which become so routine they're more-or-less indistinguishable from one's natural usage.) That's something else about let's: It can be used on its own as an interjection, something else that doesn't really work with the ostensible "full form".

It's such a curious word--I'm not really sure what word class to file it away in--that I'm sure it must be extensively studied by syntacticians. If I weren't such a lazy bastard, I go look in McCawley or someplace to see what's been said about it.