Author: Lee Swanson

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~ Lee Swanson ~ 4 Comments

The State Department sent word to the embassy in Turkey and the consulate in Lebanon today that all non-essential employees should evacuate. Try getting another job with that on your resume.

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Because it was 86 degrees at the beach and we were tired of hearing people complain about the heat, we went to Phoenix over the Labor Day weekend. 107, now that’s weather worth complaining about. There’s a road west of Phoenix called Baseline. We didn’t ask about the pronunciation, but I’m fairly sure it doesn’t rhyme with the petroleum jelly. And, really, petroleum jelly?  Ewwww.

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There’s also a place outside Yuma called Dome Valley. It’s apparently both convex and concave.

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We walked the dogs early in the morning and late at night, when it was a pleasant 86 degrees. (See what I did there?)  One morning I saw three crows circling around cawing and then landing on a light pole and cawing some more.  They were trying to attract more crows.  It’s called attempted murder.

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This is something I really don’t want to talk about, but maybe it’s time you knew.  I suffer from early onset shyness.

I’ve tried all the usual medications—scotch, gin, tequila, even beer—but I still end up cowering in the corner, looking at my fingernails. It doesn’t have to be a large group to send me into myself. I fall silent during phone conversations. I’ve sneaked away from parties at my own house. (I do realize that hosting a party is a contradiction in the first place, but it wasn’t necessarily my idea).

My parents used to sympathetically tell me to “just get over it,” to “get out there and talk to people, ask questions, be interested.” But that would necessitate my being able to do any of those things.

They drove us to Illinois for a cousin’s wedding when I was a kid. The wedding sort of glazed over me, as weddings are apt to do. At the reception I only knew my brother and parents, and my aunt, uncle and two cousins who were otherwise occupied being the groom and his family. So there I was drowning in a sea of strangers.  I drank as much of the punch as I could hold – fairly passive, Protestant punch no doubt, as I was just a kid and probably felt more effect from the sugar than from anything else that might have been in it – and walked around to small gaggles of people, waited for a break in the conversation and gathered myself to “get out there and talk to people.”  I looked pensively and said, “Mingle – mingle, mingle – mingle, mingle, mingle,” then nodded and moved on to the next gaggle.  It was the only way I could figure to be there without being there. And I’d already studied my fingernails during the wedding ceremony.

So, it’s not like I haven’t tried. I did once make an attempt to only associate with other shy people (or not associate, as the case may be).  I found a group called “Shy Anonymous” and thought it would be perfect. If anyone wants to be anonymous, it’s a shy person. So I dropped in.  About a dozen people were sitting in a circle on metal folding chairs, looking at the floor. No one said a word. It was really comfortable until some happy woman walked in and suggested everyone “share a little something about themselves.”  I ran screaming from the room.  Who knew it was a twelve step program.

What I really need is not Shy Anonymous but Shy Invisible, so secluded it can’t be found. I think I’ll look under the bed.

Paperless

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

I was sitting in a chair reading a magazine this morning when one of those annoying advertising postcards they stuff into magazines fell in my lap.  It was a pitch for renewing the subscription.  And that’s fine, but at the bottom of the postcard is a message imploring me to “GO GREEN WITH OUR ECO-FRIENDLY AUTOMATIC RENEWAL PROGRAM.”

Now, let’s review.  This is a magazine, printed on heavy, glossy paper in billions of colors, bound with staples and glue and sent in the mail.  And inside this magazine is a postcard, printed with ink on paper, begging me to spend more money to get more copies of the heavy, glossy billion-color magazine, but to do it in the “eco-friendly” way of ordering online. Like I’m the one ruining the environment.

So, who is the villain here?  The guy who mails in the subscription renewal instead of doing it online, or the company that manufactures the magazine?

OK, so the answer is both, but let’s not get crazy about it.  If no one bought magazines and no magazines were printed, what would we do with all those trees, really?  Not to mention all those writers who would be out of work with absolutely no other marketable skills. 

But while we’re at it, what is the deal with all those postcards they stuff into magazines?  Isn’t it enough that there are a thousand pages of advertising for every page of content?  Do they really have to add more?  I used to love reading Vanity Fair. But the articles got so hard to find I had to admit I was just buying it for the ads. 

Magazine types call those cards “blow-ins” because that’s the way they add them to the magazine. A machine literally blows the postcards into the magazine.

A “blow-in” is also slang for an unwelcome visitor, like a blizzard of postcards that fall in your lap when you open a magazine, for instance. And don’t they realize that the first thing most of us do is grab the front and back covers and turn the magazine upside down and shake out all those blow-ins anyway? 

Personally, I save them to write phone messages on.  It’s eco-friendly.

On Writing

~ Lee Swanson ~ 9 Comments

Funny thing happened this week. San Diego’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists held its awards dinner and along with a great many well-deserved recognitions,  gave the Herbert “Woody” Lockwood Award for Humor Writing to this blog.

I was not there to accept it because the last time I stood in front of a large group of people and got a woody it wasn’t a pleasant experience.  I was probably about 13 but like receiving this richly undeserved award, it was both memorable and embarrassing.

The difference is I’m talking about this one. Having spent something more than 30 years writing what passed as serious news stories, getting recognized for humor writing is a major change of pace.

It is also the only sort of formal recognition I’ve ever received for writing.  There are writing categories in television awards, but I never thought my stuff qualified.   Writing television news doesn’t feel like writing, even to me, because if someone wearing makeup and reading out loud is the only person to read it, it’s not really writing, no matter how many people hear it.

Of course by that standard—and several others—this blog is still just barely writing.  Not that anyone is reading this out loud, I hope, but the loyal following is somewhere between the middle single figures and the low double figures.

Spending a career writing stories that are measured in seconds instead of pages means I don’t really have anything to show for it. Once it’s read on the air it’s in the air and on its way to Mars.

Several years ago, a friend who was also a news producer was at my apartment and pulled a book from my bookcase — How to Make $30,000 a Year Writing. “You do, you know,” she said.  That says a lot about a lot of things, primarily my impression of what I think writing is, and the kind of salaries news producers get.

So thank you SPJ for this misguided recognition of which I’m rather proud.

Light Bulbs

~ Lee Swanson ~ 5 Comments

I had a thought the other day when I was in the drug store buying light bulbs – and yes I realize the light bulb/idea thing is a cliché, but in this case it happens to be true.

Rest assured this is not one of those idiotic screeds about how the government is taking away our God-given right to buy incandescent light bulbs, though I do believe the possession of light bulbs should be guaranteed by the Second Amendment – a well-lighted household being more necessary to the security of a free state than a well-regulated militia.  If only there had been light bulbs in the late 1700’s (or well-regulated militias in the 2010’s, for that matter) the country would be a much safer place. But we’re not going there tonight.

First, why do drug stores sell light bulbs?  What happened to drugs stores selling, well, drugs?  A guy in a white coat buttoned like a Nehru jacket (look it up) standing in the back dispensing who knows what.  This was when pharmacists did more than count to thirty and put cotton in a bottle; when they actually had to know how to type on those little labels.

The rest of the store was devoted to aspirin, band-aids and birthday cards.  Maybe, if you were a lucky kid, the drug store also had a soda fountain where they made things like ice cream floats and chocolate root beer.

Mr. Peabody“Peabody here.  Yes, I said chocolate root beer. Come along Sherman, into theWABAC machine to get you a chocolate root beer. If you haven’t tried it, you haven’t lived.” 

Now, along with deodorant and hair dye, drug stores sell wine, beer, picnic baskets, toilet paper, pencils, ribbons, toys and light bulbs.

So I buy the light bulb at the drug store because there’s no hardware store nearby and before I can ask him not to, the cashier puts the single light bulb in a plastic bag and then reels off an eighteen foot long receipt with an offer to have a chance to win two dollars if I complete an online survey that primarily wants to query me about my name, age and e-mail address.  So much for privacy.  So much for the environmental advantages of the power-saving light bulb.

At home, I open the package to find that inside the carton is printed a coupon for a dollar off on my next light bulb purchase. This amazing energy efficient light bulb purports to have a lifespan longer than mine so the odds of being able to cash in this tremendous money saving offer are dim, so to speak.  The odds of finding this coupon again if I ever actually do buy another light bulb are even worse.

It might be better to just sit in the dark.

Innocent of Age

~ Lee Swanson ~ 1 Comment

A fat man with a stubble beard, a baseball cap and a dirty sport shirt sat in a broken lawn chair in front of a rack of stuffed animals and silver chains.  For a dollar he would tell you your age. It didn’t seem to me to be a particularly useful commodity.  I was seven.  I knew that; I didn’t have to pay someone to tell me.

It was the county fair and as we stood among the people crowded around his booth, yes even I understood he wasn’t telling them their age, he was guessing it. And there was some talent involved in that.

After all, to me there were only three ages: kids my age, big kids and grownups.  A few years later there were kids my age, little kids and grownups. And all parents were the same age as my parents. Once I was among the grownups, instead of getting clearer, everything blurred even more. I assumed bosses were older and co-workers were all the same age as me. That seems to say more about authority than age, which may explain why I’m not a good authority figure.

No surprise then that age has always confounded me. I never understood what my parents meant when they told me to act my age.  I knew they were telling me to quit doing whatever I was doing and start behaving the way they wanted me to, which probably was actually some age much older than mine. Somehow I don’t think Mozart’s parents told him to act his age, probably because by all accounts he was acting their age most of the time.

So what does that mean? How do you know when you’re doing something that is “your age?” I can’t run and jump the way I could when I was a kid, though I think I can – until I try.  I’ve been known to jump up at intersections and high five the Don’t Walk hand on traffic signals.  Often even when sober. You don’t see a lot of 60 year olds doing that, I guess. There’s a line in a song that pretty much says it for me: “I’m older than I act, younger than I look.”

When the dogs walk me in the morning, I am reminded to stand up straighter when we go past someone whose shoulders are stooped and I think to myself “I wonder who that old guy is; poor bastard, he must be…..well, hell, he’s probably my age.”  My booth would have been out of stuffed animals and silver chains shortly after it opened.

I hope I never get as old as I am.

(Don’t) Call Me Ishmael

~ Lee Swanson ~ 3 Comments

Somehow, when no one was looking, every kid born in the 70s and 80s was named “Seth.” Or at least every kid named Seth went to Hollywood or got a book deal or otherwise got his name foisted in front of me. 

My name, on the other hand, never made it on to the name popularity list, even at the bottom.  Not as a boy’s name anyway. Except for Moon Unit Zappa, every other girl’s middle name is either Ann or Lee. And I get my share of mail and e-mail that starts “Dear Ms…” And let’s face it, one such e-mail is enough thank you.

Some people know they are named after their father or mother, grandfather, favorite uncle, movie star, or in the case of one guy I know, family dog. I got my name because it was the shortest name my parents could come up with and my father had a thing about nicknames.

Not that it helped.  People are always asking if Lee is short for Leland or Leroy or some other ridiculous extension. And they are puzzled and maybe disappointed when I explain that it’s just Lee.

So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that, to a lot of my friends, I’m not just Lee.  I worked at the TV station in Waterloo Iowa back in the early Seth years and when I walked in for the first time, the anchor/news director who had hired me looked up and said, “well, if it isn’t Leo Swanberg.”

And for the next four years I was Leo in that newsroom. (Luckily “Swanberg” never caught on).

The name followed me to San Diego and Portland because television news is really a small community of disturbed nomads (no offense to nomads) so to many people I’ve worked with since I was 25, I’m Leo.

And that, one way or another, gets us to the grandchildren.  They are girls and no, they are not named Leo or Lee, or even Ann. But when the oldest started making sounds that her mother thought were words she asked what I wanted the baby to call me.  “I’ve always been rather fond of ‘Sir’” I said, but instead they settled on Leo.

Now the first thing I’m liable to hear in the morning is a little person’s loud voice calling “Leo-o-o-o” and it makes me feel happy all day—even though the next part of the sentence is likely to be “where’s Meme,” their grandmother.

At least they’re not asking for Seth.

People Watching

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

Some people do their people watching at the beach, the park or an outdoor café but for me the best spot is still the airport.  Parking costs more but for twenty dollars you can get a solid day’s entertainment.

 I usually position myself outside the baggage claim doorway to see people just after they’ve arrived and stepped out into the fresh air.  People flying out are frenzied, hurried and not nearly as interesting.

The first folks you notice are the ones who fall to their knees and kiss the sidewalk.  They are either natives of San Diego grateful to be home and away from wherever they were, or people who are afraid to fly and just grateful to be anyplace where there is something solid beneath the floor.

The business travelers are the least interesting and only partially because they are in business. They are in too much of a hurry to be bothered by anyone who is less important, and they are convinced that includes everyone. There’s a reason business people have a class all to themselves on airplanes and that custom should be carried out elsewhere as well, without the recliner chairs, special menus and free drinks, but with the exorbitant extra cost. Just cordon them off and make them deal with each other so the rest of us don’t have to.

I like to guess where people are arriving from and over time I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it. The easiest folks to spot are those who come from Minnesota, Wisconsin and other Scandinavian countries. Easiest for me because, whether I want to admit it or not, I was once one of them and I know what to look for.

There is, of course, the very pale skin. A Minnesotan’s blonde hair can bleach two shades just standing at the curb waiting for the rental car shuttle. By the time they get to their hotel they have second degree sunburn and when their week’s vacation is over, if they don’t have skin cancer they just weren’t trying.

As they stand and wait for the shuttle or a cab, you can see the Minnesotans gingerly fingering the zipper of their parkas, wondering if they will be risking frostbite if they open it just a little. After all, back home they wear their parka all year long; their only concession to summer is to replace the hood with a stocking cap. Minnesota has two seasons—nine months of winter and three months of bad sledding.

To be fair, these are generally the Midwesterners making their first trip out of the tundra. Those who have previously been as far south as Chicago or as far west as Omaha have found that temperatures can occasionally be above freezing at some times of the year in other parts of the world.  Those folks arrive shirtless, shoeless and almost pantsless and except for the translucent complexion could easily be mistaken for a typical student in his fifteenth freshman year at San Diego State.  Airport security people love them.  They can just wave them through. The Tourism Board is not as fond of these folks who have read the travel brochures and decided to “go native.”  They typically arrive with a pair of jeans and a twenty dollar bill and over the course of their stay, don’t change either one.

The other oddity one notices if you people-watch astutely and consistently is that Minnesotans don’t travel in December.  As they will tell you repeatedly—should you be unfortunate enough to ask—“it just wouldn’t be Christmas without snow.”

Really?

Anyone who has seen a second grade Sunday School Christmas play knows that those hanging at the manger in Bethlehem were wearing sandals, t-shirts and bathrobes; palm trees (perhaps plastic, but let’s not quibble) adorned the corners of the hay bale constructed crèche and the wise men rolled up atop camels.  Last I knew (and until global warming disproves this) camels don’t do well at the Iditarod. Yes, Virginia, the event that repeatedly spawns the greatest commercial success in world history took place in the desert. If Christ didn’t need snow, neither does anyone else—at Christmas or any other time for that matter.

So I pay the parking attendant and leave after a good day of people watching, content that it was money well-spent and convinced I’m fortunate to consistently be on the outside of the arrival gate at the San Diego airport.

Butterfly

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

Not that everything needs to have a purpose (if that were so it would certainly call my existence into question), but why, exactly, are there butterflies?

They are certainly lovely to look at as they glide along, flapping their wings and dancing circles in the air. They may be on their way to somewhere, despite all appearances, though who knows where. Man has marveled at the butterfly for probably as long as they have noticed each other.

Several years ago, I spent some time in Papua New Guinea with a zoological expedition. Zoological expedition sounds so much better than “a bunch of guys in the jungle trying to catch birds.” The leader of the motley crew was absolutely enthralled by butterflies. And he still is, veritably lusting after them. With net in hand he chased after many of them, as they looped and flitted always out of his reach. I don’t think he caught anything but air in that entire trip. And of course it begs the question that, like a dog chasing a car, would he have known what to do with his prize had he caught it.

But it was from him that I learned that wearing bright colors might attract a butterfly to you—a much less aerobic endeavor than going about it the other way around. And while I have never been sure that it was true, something remarkable happened in the back yard just the other day – thousands of miles and dozens of years removed from Papua New Guinea.

As I sat outside drinking a cup of coffee, I watched a butterfly overhead as it made its pointless journey from nowhere to nowhere in particular. And then it came by and lighted on the table just next to my chair. I can only imagine that she looked at me and blinked the way that I looked at her and blinked, astonished to be so close and yet knowing that it was entirely beyond my ability to have such a creature.

I have seen pictures, of course, and admired them from afar, but now I sat enchanted, seeing her up close and alive for the first time in my life. So close in fact that I could see a tattoo of a stripper on her thigh.

Type Casting

~ Lee Swanson ~ 2 Comments

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all

Typing was the only useful thing I learned in high school. Had we never advanced past manual typewriters the world would never have heard of carpal tunnel syndrome. Your wrists and fingers had to be strong enough to bend steel just to push down the keys and make a mark on a piece of paper. One of the many signs of advanced age is whether a person calls copy paper typing paper.

While useful, it was not my favorite class, though I’m not sure what was. Mrs. Sills would walk around the room and lift sagging wrists while we did drills.  asdfghjkl; They were exercises in every sense of the word.  We thought she was ancient, though when you are sixteen everyone over 27 is ancient.

Eventually I could look at the workbook and type the drill without looking at the keys. This all came in handy in journalism school when we were expected to type our stories without first writing them out in longhand (not to be confused with shorthand, which was taught in the next classroom by the equally ancient Mrs. Gaustad.  I didn’t take shorthand.  It was not something boys did).

Typing has held me in good stead ever since.  I seem to be able to think more clearly if I stare off into space while typing.  Somehow–and I’ve never understood this at all—my fingers know when they’ve made a mistake long before my head does.  And they stop and backspace and, sometimes, can even make the correction while I’m still looking down the hall at nothing in particular. Correction is a skill which came much later, with the advent of the computer, or at least with stuff called “correction strips.”  Backspacing was never allowed in Mrs. Sills’ class. It made for a rather messy paper, typing one letter on top of another. If White-Out existed, we didn’t know about it, and since we were often expected to use carbon paper (because apparently Xerox didn’t exist either) it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Typing class also taught things like indenting paragraphs and formatting letters.  Anyone who has ever read an e-mail knows that neither of those matters any longer. In fact the only vestige of typing etiquette which seems to linger on—much to the chagrin of many—is the convention of leaving two spaces at the end of a sentence.  I understand it’s not necessary, and not even considered correct in most circles, but my fingers can’t help themselves. If I think about it, I can use one space, but if I think about what I’m writing, and not what I’m doing, it’s always two spaces.  It just is.

But in point of fact, none of this will matter much longer, if indeed it does now. For most kids in high school and all kids in elementary school, typing is done with the thumbs while staring at the screen of their phone or tablet. Those reporters we used to ridicule who hunted and pecked their way through an assignment with one or two fingers were, it turns out, decades ahead of their time. Typing is going the way of punctuation and spelling. And when typing, or keyboarding or texting or whatever it will come to be called, is no longer an exercise for all the fingers, what order will the letters be in?  Except that it is the way it has always been, there’s no good reason for the letters on the keyboard to be arranged as they are. And, like double-spacing at the end of a sentence, one day it will change too.

When I do the drills on the proper way to hold a tablet while dexterously moving my thumbs about the screen, and hitting at least some of the keys I want to hit,  I’ll think back to Mrs. Sills, carbon paper (for that matter paper at all), and the keyboard.

Oh, QWERTY, I will miss you.

The Stamp Act

~ Lee Swanson ~ Leave a comment

The cost of postage stamps has gone up again.  Stamps, children, are used to deliver e-mails when the Internet is broken. Which it never really is. At least not long enough to get a letter delivered.

It seems we are using fewer and fewer stamps, and as an incentive to use more, the cost keeps increasing. It’s a reverse of the economic law of supply and demand which has been around at least since Adam Smith, if not John Locke, both of whom also knew about stamps but apparently couldn’t convince the Postmaster. That same backward logic, by the way, seems to be the revenue model of newspapers, with much the same result.

Now, I know all about the cost of postage being a great bargain and much, much lower than in Europe and other unfortunate non-American areas. And that’s all well and good, but not really the point.

There’s talk of eliminating Saturday mail delivery to cut costs. This idea is met with great horror by people who seem perfectly fine with not getting junk mail on Sunday but can’t imagine living without it on Saturday. Given the amount of useful mail that comes to our house, they could cut back to once a week, or less, and I don’t think I would notice.

But the post office is sensitive to bad publicity and just can’t bring itself to pull the plug on Saturdays.  Their motto after all is not, “neither rain nor snow nor Saturday morning…”

That same fear of being criticized gets us back to the cost of stamps. To stop people from bitching about paying an entire extra penny for a stamp, the post office invented something called the “forever” stamp.  Buy it now, at the going rate, and no matter what happens in the future you can still use the same stamp.  The price could triple and your Christmas card will still get across country with just one ten-year-old “forever” stamp. 

It keeps them from having to print one-cent stamps, which may cost as much to print as they bring in, particularly when you consider the clerks who have to miss their lunch hour to serve the long line of people waiting to buy fourteen cents in one-cent stamps. 

The forever stamp is an idea that would have sent Adam Smith frothing at the mouth, unless of course the post office can freeze all its expenses too.  For instance I think the concept of “forever” gasoline has real merit, at least until Exxon Mobil has a cash flow problem.  And given their current profit margin that could be, oh I don’t know, forever.