Chai, Two Lumps

I was in Turkey for three weeks working at a museum. My assumption before visiting Turkey was that I would be drinking a lot of Turkish coffee. But they don’t drink as much coffee as they do tea or, as they call it, chai. Chai was a part of everyday social interaction, business dealings and every meal. When someone offers you chai, you accept.  I did not accept on a few occasions and always ended up spending more time explaining why we couldn’t stay for chai than it would have been to just have had the drink.

Chai is served hot extremely hot. I secretly think this is so more time can be spent hanging out and talking while it cools down. Chai is traditionally served in hourglass shaped glasses so that any loose chai leaves get caught in the bottom of the glass.  

We were at the museum late one night, waiting for a shipment. In Izmit, large trucks are not allowed on the roads during the day, so we got shipments early or late. And when you are waiting for a shipment, you drink chai.  One of our interpreters, Setar, was helping with delivery and offered me chai via the security guards. I agreed and was asked how many sugars I wanted. I said two because it was late and I was considering this dessert chai. Two sugars is considered a lot.  Almost as many as three or four.  Setar then brought up a memory from his youth.  He said he remembered a Bugs Bunny cartoon where chai was being served and when Bugs Bunny’s nemesis asked for three or four sugars, Bugs hit him on the head.

Here is that clip:

I immediately found this both funny and interesting.  In the translation from English to Macedonian (I didn’t mention that Setar is 24 year old from Macedonia, moved to Turkey to go to school, showed up not speaking a bit of Turkish, was not allowed in school because he couldn’t speak the language and then worked in a restaurant over the next 6 months, picking up the language as he went along. His comment to me, “Once you know how a person is feeling, you can learn what they are saying.”) So in the translation from English to Macedonian, it was just translated as, “How many sugars to you want?” not “How many lumps do you want.” Whack. Whack. Whack. Whack.

Why is this interesting?  When I explained it to him (sugar = lumps = lumps are bumps) he “got it.” But either way, it was still something that he remembered and thought was funny, even though the actual joke was not revealed until 20 years later.   Bugs Bunny has that effect.

This is probably even more interesting because the translation in the cartoon was probably done correctly and that Setar was just humoring me with my observation.  Satar probably saw that I was proud of my clarification of the joke, knew that I was excited about my observation and that it would be best to leave it at that. Everyone happy. Everyone drinking chai.

How to Hide Your Pregnancy

You are pregnant and you want to hold off telling the world for a few weeks. Most of your co-workers and friends have accused you of being pregnant before, but they were just guessing. Now they would be right, but it’s none of their business. Here are a few tips on how to hide your pregnancy.

Pregnancy Test Tricks
Run out and buy a set of pregnancy tests. Keep one in your purse. Ensure that you accidentally pull it out whenever your curious co-workers are around. Act embarrassed and say a lot of “oops!” and quickly hide it away. Keep suggesting that you are tired of buying them every month.

Take the second test and have your husband pee on it. Unless he’s pregnant, it should come up negative. Rinse it off and keep it in the cabinet. If you are going to have friends over, stage it in the trash can. Leave the empty box in the medicine cabinet for your curious friends to find.

The Purse
Everyone notices when a woman takes her purse into the bathroom. It means only one thing: she’s on her period and not pregnant. Ensure that you take your purse to the bathroom on every trip. It’s even better when you leave it at the table and then come back for it a few seconds later.

The Calendar
Use your home and work calendar to track phantom ovulation dates. Only track it a few weeks in advance and don’t fill up the calendar. Fill in fake body temperatures for added reality. Drop a couple 99.3s in there for excitement.

Drinking
If you are a good mother, you’ll have quit drinking as soon as you found out you were knocked up. Your friends are used to you knocking back a few Capt. N’ diets at the bar and are now curious as to why you are refraining from drinking. Try these methods and excuses:

Faux Cohol: ask the bartender for a coke in a tumbler with a lime. It looks like a mixed drink and you can pound 8 – 10 of them before you start to get woozy. You can also order cranberry and soda or have him put a NA beer into a pint glass.

Hold and dump: if someone buys you a drink, put it to your lips for show. Later, take it with you to the bathroom and dump it out. Go to the bar and buy a Mormon Mother and a drink for your friend. Don’t get them mixed up!

Antibiotics: if someone catches you not drinking, tell them you are on antibiotics and cannot drink for seven days. At the end of seven days if you get called out, explain that you missed a few doses and you have to go back and retake the whole series again.

Fertility Drugs: If for any reason you get called out and find yourself stumbling… lay out that you are very embarrassed; but that you are taking fertility drugs and that you cannot drink while on them. The key to this is using you initial hesitancy as fake embarrassment. Tell the person to keep it a secret so that you can ensure they will tell everyone.

Smoking
Yes, you need to quit smoking if you are pregnant. If anyone asks, just say that you are planning to be pregnant soon and you’d rather quit now than later.

Emotional
You might be a bit stressed out with the whole “living creature in my belly” thing and it might come out in tears or possibly rage. This is an easy fix; just tell people that you have been trying to get pregnant for the past X months and you are getting fed up with all the tips and tricks that everyone keeps telling you. They’ll get the hint.

Puking
This is easy: say you had White Castles (Krystal) for lunch. No one will ever disbelieve you, especially if you use this excuse four days running.

The Rodney

I work with people that design Things and people that build Things. These people usually do not get along. The designers want the impossible and the builders want practical.  Somewhere along the way, they end up bruised and bloody, but in agreement and The Thing gets built.  The designer and the builder then go off and have a drink while the third, yet unmentioned party called the installer, takes The Thing in the field and tries to make The Thing that is too big/ too small / too upside down fit into a space that is too wet / too curved / too gravity.

The installer hates the designer and the builder because they always forget about her/him. Usually the installer ends up calling one of the two from 2000 miles away and asks them what they hell they were thinking when they designed/built The Thing. And because they are still out together having that drink, they tend to let the installer go to voice mail.

Recently, I installed A Thing as part of a much larger project. It was a decorative barrel. The designer and the builder had some really good ideas about how this engineered and scenically treated decorative barrel should look and function.  I do not think they had very many thoughts about how it would be installed. They created a steel frame that could be fastened to the wood floor with large lag screws. They made wonderful holes in the bottom the 36" tall frame in several locations so the barrel would be firmly attached.  The metal frame was connected to other barrels' metal frames so they would all hold each other up. It was a really nice design except for one item: the holes in the bottom were 36" away from the top and the metal frame inside only allowed for about 3" of access to the bottom. Imagine trying to stick a drill 36 inches though the tiny gaps in a Christmas tree made of 1" thick steel branches. It's mostly impossible unless you have a specialized tool.  So with a bit of improvisation, we created "The Rodney."  Not named for the designer or the builder, but for the guy that manages those two entities. And Rodney can take a joke.

So to get through the very small gap, 36" down to the bottom of the barrel, we purchased three 12" socket extension and a magnet.

The extensions connected to one another, but would fall apart when suspended. Using tape, I connected the three extensions together.

I then taped a magnet to the socket so that the lags would not fall off as they were lowered into the barrel. The fastener is not taped to the socket, ti just looks that way. The magnet taped to the socket holds the lag while being lowered into the barrel.

We christened it "The Rodney" and set off to try it out.

The magnet was so strong that I had problems getting it to the bottom of the barrels without it sticking to the frame.  Once the fastener did make it to the bottom and I would start the drill, the damn thing was wobbly as hell and it was difficult to get the lag to dig into the wood.  After several rough starts, the lag finally grabbed into the wood and The Rodney drove them through the frame in solidly into the floor.

There were five barrels in all and they each got a taste of The Rodney.  Then The Rodney was put on a shelf and mostly forgotten until now. In the end, it got stripped down so that we could use the magnet to fetch some metal bits from under an exhibit and someone had their own Thing to deal with and just needed one 12" extension.

No design is perfect. No fabrication technique is flawless. No installation is simple.  But when your back is against the wall and The Thing is making the situation seems hopeless, just remember that The Rodney will always be there for you.