No cause for concern

DID YOU KNOW? Via Wikipedia, regarding the town my grandmother lives in: "On 1813, Thomas Walker, a politician, was scheduled to vote on whether Jonestown or Lebanon should become the county seat of Lebanon County. But on the day of the vote two men from the Lebanon faction took Walker to the Buck Hotel (still open and located in the main square of Jonestown) and kept buying him rum until he was too intoxicated to vote. As a result, Lebanon won by a vote and is now home to the county courthouse."

Not that I don't give Sam's Mom a reason for concern--during our weekly phone call yesterday I revealed to her that our trip through the Midwest was now going to include a road trip to Austin, MN (now revised to include Mason City, IA), that I'm running a marathon in October, and that I have varicoceles. But of particular concern to her was my hilarious anecdote about how I woke up in my favorite shirt and noticed that itw as being "eaten through by acid" and still managed to turn the day around into one of the best that I've had in Oakland so far.

So, I mean, you know, poor choice of words. Precision of language, Jonah. I noticed some purple stains on my favorite shirt on Friday afternoon and assumed they were from the blueberries that I had been eating in my Super Granola that morning. So I was unconcerned. I almost licked them off. Luckily, I did not. The next morning I woke up to discover that there was a tiny hole in the shirt where each purple stain had been, and touching the stains only caused the shirt to crumble like a good pie crust. I was kind of sad.

But really, "eaten through by acid" was a misnomer. Destroyed, yes, but not by acid, because I didn't use any acid in lab on Friday. Right now my forensic analysis suggests that I actually spilled some cellulase on it--dangerous to the one hundred percent cotton shirt, but, thankfully, not so much to my skin. Unfortunately, I hadn't come up with this by the time I was finished talking to Sam's Mom on the phone. Say what you mean, but it don't mean a thing.

Anyway, still, my shirt was eaten, metaphorically, by some kind of chemical compound, and I remained inconsolable. My plan was to head over to Goodwill that afternoon to find a cheap yet appropriate frame for the picture, which remained undamaged and which I seriously think is one of the great pieces of artistic expression of our generation.

But then Ruthie woke up and was all, "Pillow cover!" and I was like "Hmmm. That's the ticket." So a quick trip to Cheeseboard (Ruth's first time, with an outstanding representative nectarines and mozzarella), a double chocolate cookie (available only for one hour per week in Cheeseboard's bakery), another awesome goodwill painting, three $8 t-shirts, some gardening, a trip to the drugstore, a dinner party, and Bloodcar later, we started on our finest collaborative creation. Lo, less than 24 hours after finding my favorite shirt destroyed by enzymatic degradationon its surface (kind of the point of my research, now that I think about it), I had helped to construct a new favorite pillow.



Honestly, a total collaboration, but mostly Ruthie's doing--she c0nceptualized the initial idea, found the fabric mere seconds after I made the macabre suggestion of "some kind of kitty fabric" and did most of the sewing, although I was somewhat able to redeem myself from the B- that Ms. Weber gave me on my purse-sewing project in 8th grade (which has long been disputed by Sam's Mom) with some interior stitching that seems to be holding up pretty well. But yeah, all I provided was a little sweatshop labor and the original clumsiness that destroyed the shirt in the first place.

And the best part is that Ruthie e-mailed Threadless today and found out that it's totally legal to make pillows out of destroyed Threadless shirts and perhaps even to sell them at a profit. See, Sam's Mom? No cause for concern. Because now I am going to be filthy rich.