Rusty's Blog

Walt Disney World Resort/Compound gate

The last leg of our Traditional ‘Merican Vacation took us just south of Orlando to the Walt Disney World Resort for two days. Amber had never been, and I hadn’t been to a Disney park since I was about 14 or 15 years old.

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Cassadaga Information Center sign

Cassadaga, Florida is a Spiritualist community established in 1894 that has remained largely unchanged in the time since, save for better signage. It contains about 55 homes, and around 25 people earn their living as spiritual mediums.

Of course we had to go, especially since it was conveniently located off I-4 W between St. Augustine and Orlando, the two primary destinations on our Traditional ‘Merican Vacation.

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I have not been writing much about mundane things in my life recently because for a while I wanted to just sit back and enjoy them and not think about them. I’m sick with the tail end of a cold right now and not enjoying my life as much as usual this week, so this is a good time to take note of a few things since the week is otherwise shot to shit.

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This is one of a series of posts about jobs I’ve had during my time on this planet. You can read more posts by clicking the “jobs i’ve had” tag, and read a lengthier intro to the series in the first post.

I had hoped the temp agency would find me more mindless work, but it didn’t. So I spent a few months sending out resumés with no luck, and then took a job as a UPS seasonal driver helper as much to get out of the house as I did to make any money, since it didn’t pay much.

The job was simple: deliver packages to people’s doors to take some of the strain off the driver since there was a much higher volume of packages at this time of year. If there was anything remotely complicated about a package delivery, like needing to get a signature, the driver did it himself. It was the definition of mindless work. I never got to play with the DIAD, the magical electronic clipboard-looking device every driver carries that seems to keep UPS’ entire worldwide operation running.

Since I didn’t care if I got fired from this job, I blogged extensively about it, as it was happening.

My time was spent working with two drivers: a skinny, surly, cussing, chain-smoking redneck whose skin looked like beef jerky; and a socially awkward slob who frequently made inappropriate remarks. I mostly had fun working with the first guy, but not so much with the second guy.

In just a week or two working with the second guy, he managed to explode a fire extinguisher, get his truck stuck in a trench, and cost me and someone else a whole day of wages because he called the wrong person. The cab of his truck was full of apple cores and squalor, enough so that I felt compelled to make a diagram later:

But what beats all were some of the awkward remarks he made. He talked politics in a confrontational way, oblivious of how much tension it would have caused had I happened to disagree with his beliefs. That this guy voted for Kerry maybe should have made me reexamine my own beliefs. But here’s my favorite story he told me:

At some point we were talking about Asian women versus Brazilian women versus Italian women. God knows how I let that continue past one sentence. Anyway, he felt a need to defend the fact that he’s 45 years old and has never been married, which I didn’t know and hadn’t given a second thought about until that point. Even better, he said he’d been dating a girl for about a year and that “things got real intimate, real early.” Like I didn’t hear him the first time, he repeats, “real intimate.”

Customers were funny and weird.

One was a sexy senior citizen, which in retrospect is more awesome than weird to me, but I guess I was a little more prudish in some ways at the time. When she answered the door, she was wearing a penis amulet and broke out into song.

Another had an unhealthy addiction to QVC. No joke, every day I rode with the first driver we delivered a package from QVC to her.

But my favorite thing I did during that time was to snap a photo with my cell phone camera anytime someone had a steep driveway. Rich people with long, steep driveways were the bane of my existence during those weeks. I posted the photos to my blog under a series of posts called “Your Driveway Sucks.” They looked like this:

Amber started reading my blog about this time and later told me she was intrigued, asking herself, “who is this guy who keeps posting photos of people’s driveways?”

See also: Amber’s time as an HTMLer for an Internet startup and as an office worker for the Humane Society.

Amber is planning a trip to Australia in either November or January with a friend. This has been in the works for a long time. She’ll likely be gone for two weeks, and I’m thinking of taking my own trip during this time, albeit a shorter one (maybe three or four days). I’d like to convince one or more people to go with me, but will still go even if I can’t.

My ideas so far are:

Las Vegas

Upside: I have never been, and it seems like that is a glaring deficiency in my travel log. If I couldn’t convince someone to go with me, I could still have fun gambling and visiting weird locales.

Downside: It has been so long since I’ve played poker that my game, which was never that great to begin with, would be very sad. I would budget myself a certain amount of money I was ok with losing at the card tables, and if that ran out too quickly the rest of the trip might not be much fun, especially if no one else went.

New Orleans

Upside: It’s New Orleans.

Downside: I have been to New Orleans before, and it seems like I should take this opportunity to visit somewhere I’ve never been.

California

Upside: I have a cousin who lives in a suburb between San Diego and Los Angeles I haven’t seen in a couple of years, and it’d be nice to see her. I’d love to spend some time in L.A., which I visited when I was a teenager but don’t remember much about.

Downside: Without checking with her, I don’t know if visiting would be disruptive (i.e. – could she get off work? would she want to put up with me for several days? etc.)

Somewhere with an awesome college football game being played in a historic stadium I’ve never been to (if this was going to happen in November)

Upside: Aside from the obvious, not only do I not mind going to college football games alone, I almost prefer it. Sort of like movies that I want to pay close attention to.

Downside: Would make for a short trip unless there was something else I wanted to see/do in the city.

Thoughts? Votes? Any other ideas?

Update: Ryan on Twitter suggests the U.S. Virgin Islands as well. This is intriguing because it’s warm all year and I wouldn’t need a passport.

Amber has already written a lengthy, well thought-out response to the AJC article about Craigslist shutting down its erotic services section. I emailed Megan Matteucci, the author of the piece, this morning, the text of which follows:

Hi Megan,

I am writing in response to the article titled “Atlanta group: Craigslist must do more to fight child prostitution” which ran on May 13.

We all can agree that human trafficking is one of the most deplorable acts people perpetrate against one another. However, I take exception to the lede in your article that “children will be a little safer now that Craigslist will no longer post prostitution and other ‘erotic services’ ads.”

While there are exceptions, few of the people doing actual human trafficking are using Craigslist. Most of the people who are targeted by this change are adults engaging in consensual business transactions.

It is extremely important not to conflate the two because it does everyone involved a disservice. If people are interested in “saving” adult prostitutes who are in the profession consensually (a term I also find objectionable, but which is a discussion for another time), putting a felony on their record is a terrible way to go about it. Targeting trafficking is an extremely difficult and scary proposition, and shutting down adult services on Craigslist accomplishes nothing on that front.

I recommend reading my partner Amber Rhea’s response to your article. It may seem a little harsh on first pass, but there is a lot of good information and links to other sources and perspectives in there:

http://www.beingamberrhea.com/2009/05/13/craigslist-erotic-services-ads-ajc-get-it-so-so-so-very-wrong/

I hope the next time you write a story on this subject you will take some of these perspectives into consideration.

Thanks,

Rusty Tanton
East Atlanta

I have yet to receive a response, but will update this if I do. I may rework it into a regular letter to the editor later.

I was inspired to take down some of my Internet history when Amber and Garrett had discussed writing similar posts a few days ago. Amber has since published a post.

I’m going for an executive summary here and will probably miss a few important items, but if I try to be a perfectionist about this I’ll never end up writing anything. I am also including some pre-Internet backstory that I think is also important to take down. Read more after the jump.

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We started celebrating by eating at Radial, our favorite breakfast spot, this morning. Then I gave her the present I bought her, a robotic baby chick from Thinkgeek (pictured above). Tonight we’re going to have dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. And, you know, anything else she can think of that she wants between now and later.

Amber is an avid bird lover who has owned several Zebra Finches over the years. When I first met her, she owned seven of them. This has rubbed off on me. We currently own two Zebra Finches named Puff and Stuff:

They are an endless source of entertainment and intrigue. Every time I think I’ve seen all their behavioral quirks, they do something else that’s strange or funny that I’ve never seen before. Like falling asleep in awkward positions on top of a swing. Or pulling paper towels up from below their cage lining to make a nest with it. Or doing cannon balls into their bath and soaking the table cloth.

One of those nauseating couple things we do is almost anytime we see an inexpensive bird trinket in a store there’s at least a 50 percent chance that we’ll buy it. So far, we have:

• a kitchen chicken
• a kitchen owl
• three living room chicks
• a bedroom hummingbird (Jen gave us this one)

We also have several paintings on the wall with birds on them. I’m probably forgetting a few things, but you get the point.

It was only a matter of time before we installed a bird feeder on our balcony. So we did a week or two ago. I mounted it on a light fixture built into the wall outside, dangling it from one of those things that hippies use when they go rock climbing. It sat there full of seed for a while seemingly without consequence. We figured that it would take the birds some time to find it, since we’re in the part of the building that faces away from most of the greenery.

One day I looked outside and all the sudden maybe one-eighth of the seed was gone. Those birds sure were hungry, right? Right?

Not long after, I looked outside again and saw a squirrel sitting on our window sill like he owned the joint. And the seed was all over our balcony while his friend nosed around eating it. I banged on the window, which convinced the little buggers to piss off for the moment, but I knew they’d be back.

The feeder we bought was advertised as squirrel proof. It has a mechanism where if something heavy enough pulls on it, the holes used for feeding are covered up. Birds are too light to trigger this mechanism, but supposedly squirrels aren’t.

After some trial and error, we figured out that it didn’t matter what weight sensitivity setting we had the feeder on. The squirrels managed to get around the mechanism by propping themselves up on the wall and shaking the seed out onto the ground. Clever squirrels, very clever indeed.

While we tried to figure out our next step, we left the seed out on the balcony and brought the feeder inside. Several birds started coming by as well as the squirrels, and sometimes the asshole squirrels would chase them away.

Last night, I mounted the feeder so it hangs off the rail. My theory was that the risk of certain death from a fall of a couple of stories combined with an inability to spill seed onto the balcony where it’d be easy to collect would serve as a deterrent. Like so:

And I was kind of right for a little while. This morning Amber said she saw them trying to figure out how to crack into it for several minutes, but they eventually went away empty-handed. I went to work hoping we’d seen the last of them, but not quite believing it. I was right to be apprehensive:

As you can see, the squirrels managed to chew through the plastic on the bottom of the feed holes, making the openings just large enough to poke their stupid little muzzles through as they hung upside down on the feeder, risking a two story fall in the process. Amber actually saw one of them do it.

So what now?

I would be perfectly happy to sit on the balcony with a BB gun and pick them off, but Amber (for now at least) doesn’t approve of that idea.

And at least they didn’t get as much seed as they were getting by tipping the feeder over. This has slowed them down quite a bit. And the birds haven’t been scared away yet:

We are looking for other ways to deter the squirrels. To be continued…

Amber had a doctor’s appointment this morning, so I took MARTA to work. I got off the train and made my way toward the office, white earbuds contrasting with my gray shirt and olive green cargo shorts, listening to This American Life on my iPhone. The picture of white hipster douchery could only have been more complete if a friend drove up in a Prius with an Obama sticker on it, stopped and suggested we should totally bail on work to go rock climbing. Or snow boarding.

As I’m about to cross the street, I see a former co-worker of mine from a past job. He’s spastic, but nice enough I guess. He has long hair, speaks with what sounds like a sort of British or maybe Irish accent and spells his name with a Z where an S should be. I ran into him at the same intersection a little over a year ago.

He stops me in the center of the crosswalk as I notice the signal turning from Walk to Don’t Walk.

“What are you doing around six o’ clock tonight?” he asks.

I remove my earbuds and lie.

“We’ll be out.”

“You will?” he asked.

He didn’t sound convinced.

“Yeah, we’re leaving right after work,” I said, not really convincing myself either.

“I’m going to call you this afternoon.”

And so the conversation ended as we both noticed our allotted time to cross the street had long since expired, and with a few more seconds we might start a riot. I was already self-conscience enough about my douchery, and didn’t need to be the guy standing in the center of the crosswalk blocking traffic. People who do that are assholes.

He called just now, but I didn’t answer the phone. He didn’t leave a voicemail. I’m vaguely curious what could be so important that he would stop traffic to tell me about it and ask me to show up after I hadn’t seen him in a year or so. But not that curious.