Areas of Unrest

29 April 2001 - The Miris: An Entirely Useless Awards Presentation

QOTD: "I think that I have never trod / On anything so swell as sod." - Ernest Hemingway

Reading: Steve Sherman, Maple Sugar Murders

Listening to: the original cast recording of Sondheim's Marry Me a Little

The Miriams just didn't sound right for giving out awards, hence the rather odd abbreviation of my name in the title. I haven't quite thought out the concept of what the award should look like. Little silver or gold statuettes of myself would be too scary to contemplate - think of the Venus of Willendorf with long curly hair and you wouldn't be too far off. Perhaps the best approach is to supply the lucky winners with Belgian chocolates, fresh strawberries and similar sybaritic pleasures. Except for the awards that seem to merit cactus and horseradish and other sharp and bitter things. Presumably you will all be able to tell which is which.

The first award is for Best Employment of People Who Cannot Read Timetables and goes to my company's travel agent who insisted that the only United flight to Baltimore would get me in at 11 p.m., leading me to book American instead. It's not that I mind American per se, but that was via Dallas, and it turns out that there was a non-stop United flight that would have gotten me in at the eminently reasonable hour of 7 p.m.. And I might have gotten to see a movie as well. On the plus side, three of my four American flights were actually early.

Which brings me to the award for Slowest Moving Human Being in Creation. That one goes to the person who determined whether it was faster to walk or take the "Traain" (American's cheesy little subway system) when connecting at DFW. Despite the signs that insist that one should use the "Traain" between terminals, anybody who is capable of moving faster than a giant sea slug is far better off walking. That means pretty much everybody except my mother.

While I am on the subject of travel itself, the award for Best Misdirection by a Website goes to Maps On Us for telling me to take exit 20B instead of exit 20A to get to the hotel I was staying at. The plus side of this is that driving a few miles in the wrong direction meant that I did manage to locate every boring chain restaurant in Columbia, Maryland.

Thinking of restaurants leads me to the award for Best Meal For Reliving High School. There is a chain of family restaurants in the northeastern U.S. called Friendly's. They do not exist in California. Therefore, the experience of going to Friendly's for a tuna melt and an ice cream sundae is not one that I get to indulge in all that frequently. It seems like a waste to eat a ten buck supper when you've got a 42 dollar per diem (and I get reimbursed for actual costs, so it's not like I can pocket the difference) but it was worth it for the perfect experience of noshtalgia. (Noshtalgia is a yearning for the snacks of yesteryear. It's not original to me, but I can't remember where I heard it.)

I did have a free day to play tourist, which brings me to the Best Reason to Like Annapolis. I drove there to wander around and do a Volksmarch and satisfy my minor obsession with capitals. As I was walking around the historic area, I saw two policeman, who appeared to be patrolling the district. One of them was eating a red, white and blue popsicle. You just gotta like any city where the cops carry popsicles.

The final award for business trip related activities is for Best Home Movie. The Thursday night banquet speaker at my conference was astronaut Tom Jones, who was part of the shuttle crew that brought the Destiny module to the International Space Station. In addition to wonderful still photos, he showed us a 17 minute video of his shuttle mission. All home movies should include space walks.

Back at home, I worked on getting an award for myself - Best Imitation of a Total Slug. However, I'd bought theatre tickets a while back and did have to drag myself out of the house and downtown to the Music Center to see 3hree. This was a collection of three short musicals, selected by Harold Prince. The first one, "The Mice," was clever enough as it told the story of a woman who raises mice and releases them in her neighbors' houses in order to further her affair with the town exterminator. Next was a romantic urban legend named "Lavender Girl." But the real highlight was the final musical, "The Flight of the Lawnchair Man." As it happens, there have actually been several people who have independently come up with the idea of taking to the skies in a lawn chair hoisted by helium balloons. This musical retelling of a New Jersey incident was uproariously funny. I could probably create a whole series of awards just based on it, e.g. "best performance by an actor wearing the front half of a Boeing airplane."

Instead, I think I'll end this now and do some housework before my living room wins an award for Largest Dustbunnies in the Known Universe.