Doesn't seem fixed to me.

There are a few different kinds of bikes and I don’t know all of them but I do know two kinds - single speed and fixed gear.

Single speed is the type I’m borrowing from Krissy and you can spot someone with a single speed because they are either real slow going up hills or their bike is red and has a wooden basket and they’re riding it on the beach in short denim shorts. 

Fixed gear sounds similar but it’s not. You can spot someone with a fixed gear bike because they keep moving their feet constantly, even when they’re going down hills. If they stop moving their feet the bike stops moving. I should warn l you I have done no research to back this up, I haven't even read the Wikipedia page. I know nothing about how fixed gear bikes work.

I think a lot of people might say I don’t look like someone who owns a fixed gear bike and normally I would agree with them but what they don’t know is that my dad owns a fixed gear bike and I look almost exactly like him. I could probably stand in for him at a business meeting or family reunion, if people weren’t paying too much attention.

So actually I do look like someone who owns a fixed gear bike, just one specific someone.

I hope you didn’t hope to learn anything about bikes from this.

Questions for dentists

I try not to look at my teeth too much in mirrors, but I know they’re more metal than teeth. I have a lot of cavities. Growing up I always had at least two new ones at every dentist visit. I have bad teeth.

“They’re not bad, they’re just soft.” my dentist would tell me.

“They’re not soft, they’re round.” theorized a new dentist we switched to when our health insurance changed. He had no Magic Eye books in his waiting room and was the worst.

“They’re porous teeth.”

“They’re wide, food-sized.”

“They’re sticky, plaque just clings to them.”

My dentist in college said the problem was my mouth was too small.

Dentists have been saying a lot of things to me about cavities for a long time, and I got used to it. Until I moved to Portland. All my Portland dentist ever says is “Looks great, no cavities.” It's muffled, because he doesn’t ever take off that dentist mask. He also doesn’t ever say hello or goodbye, or really do anything with that little metal scratcher besides waving it a few inches above my mouth and squinting before declaring me cavity-free. Obviously, something has changed.

Let me make this clear: the thing that has changed is not my brushing habits. Any self-respecting person with teeth would be nervous about my brushing habits. I brush twice a day, but it’s usually about ten seconds of brushing followed by a gradual disintegration into ten minutes of me sucking on my toothbrush absentmindedly while I text or make myself an omelet.

If I have impeccable dental hygiene it means someone is breaking into my apartment at night and brushing my teeth for me.

I haven’t contacted the Mars factory in Hackettstown, New Jersey, but unless they’re putting considerably smaller amounts of sugar in M&Ms in the last few years, I’m not eating any less sugar.

And I definitely can't attribute my dental health to fluoride in Portland water. We are 100% fluoride-free.

So I’m adding this cavity question to a long list of questions I can ask my landlord or a rabbi or a bus driver or Oprah or God. For now I’m just going to assume that I’m the luckiest and keep sucking on the free toothbrushes my dentist gives me. And if you’re ever looking for a dentist I recommend Portland dentists, because they prevent all cavities and you will be happy and lucky and smiling forever.

Nothing makes sense any more

Did you know men's restrooms don't have baby changing places?

That seems like a large-scale and strange enough problem that it's worth telling everyone on earth to not use public restrooms for 24 hours so they can fix it, but I guess there are millions of other oversights to fix.

Sometimes the entire world seems to me like when you and your friends want to watch a DVD and you have twenty pretty great DVDs to choose from and you use the method where every votes off one movie at a time until there's only one left and it's terrible, it's the last thing any of you would have wanted to watch and everyone looks at the case and just says "Oh no. I guess this is just the one that slipped through the cracks because no one felt strongly enough about it and now we all have to deal with it." But movies are only two hours and the world lasts an embarrassingly long time.

Some parts of the world are great though, and almost all of those parts are in the badlands.

I don't know anything about your dog.

In high school my family had an exchange student. She had the perfect level of English fluency - the level of French fluency I hope I have - where everything she said was technically right, but sometimes just a little tiny bit wrong.

The best example is one morning she looked down at our dog and asked: “Is your dog a man?”

“He’d like to think so,” I said.

Our dog’s name is McGee, and he is a man. But if people think he’s a girl, or a woman, I don’t correct them. 

If someone says “She's so cute” I don't correct them, they're right. My dog is pretty cute, I think. The "she" part doesn't matter so much to me. Dogs aren't boys. Dogs aren't girls. Dogs are dogs, to me.

If someone says “Why does she smell that way?” I don’t say it's because he’s a man and that’s what men smell like. I usually just say that we don’t wash him very often. The groomer said he has sensitive skin so we’re not supposed to. Try standing further away if it bothers you. Or stand upwind maybe. 

It’s ok that our dog is sensitive. Our dog doesn’t care if you call him a him or a her. I'm almost positive our dog doesn't subscribe to any traditional or even non-traditional gender norms. All I really know is he’ll lick up his own pee if we don’t move him along fast enough. Licking pee is something our dog avidly subscribes to.

Wikipedia says that being soft, dependent, and emotional are feminine characteristics and my dog is all these things. If you count leg-humping as being sexually aggressive, that’s a masculine trait. But if you count leg-humping as flirtatious, then it's feminine. Our dog has a few different styles of leg-humping for different occasions.

The point is if you have a great dog, and I bet you do, I’ll want to ask “Can I pet him” or “Can I pet her” and honestly I can’t tell if your dog is a boy or a girl, so I’m going to have to guess.

And I’ll probably be wrong and you’ll probably correct me, and that’s fine, but I won’t really get it.

I don't think your dog cares. And I think your dog smells great.

I will never make a cross-stitch.

For most of my life if I had guessed which was more likely: talking to a rabbit or talking to a rabbi, I probably would have guessed rabbit. 

Rabbits can’t even talk, I know this because in first grade we did a craft project where we made a puppet of our favorite animal and a sign with the sound they made, and my teacher said I couldn’t make a rabbit because they don’t make sound. 

“Rabbits don’t talk.” she said. 

“But they can scream.” I said. They can, they scream when threatened with death.

Hana Akiyama made this

First grade was a while ago and I’ve still never talked to a rabbit but a few weeks ago I was talking to a rabbi.

Rabbis love talking about life. The rabbi said life, is like a cross-stitch. On our side it may look messy, and we may not understand why things are the way they are. But the reason is that there is another side of the cross-stitch we can’t see, and on that side everything has a purpose and creates a beautiful picture.

I wasn’t that interested in the metaphor. Mostly because, to be honest, crafting metaphors have never done much for me. I appreciate a good hill metaphor any day, and I’m even pretty into laundry metaphors and airport security metaphors, but anything that compares my life to hot glue, sequins, beading, or needlework, just doesn’t really resonate. So I forgot about it completely until last week, when I was at the police department.

Chloe Giordano crafted this

At the beginning of summer I dropped my wallet somewhere in the forest, and considered it more gone than anything else I have ever lost. I lose socks and notebooks just like everyone else but this wallet was gone forever. To put it in crafting terms it was like… a very small piece of felt dropped in a shag rug? I really don’t love crafting metaphors. The wallet was gone. That’s the best way I can explain it.

So I replaced all of it and none of it was even that annoying. I got to learn more about how my bank works and got to visit the DMV, and got to talk with the woman who works at the DMV who told me that someone had broken in that morning and turned the thermostat to 85 degrees and turned all the faucets on. She wasn’t sure who did it. I had a few theories but she didn't think any of them were likely.

I told people that story for weeks, and if I hadn’t lost my wallet I never would have heard it. 

Then, months later, after I’d forgotten about the lost wallet and the new license and the DMV and the DMV sauna, I got a letter that the Portland Police Department had my wallet and I could come to a creepy warehouse and get it.

I didn’t think I would care too much about having my wallet back, since I’d essentially cloned it. But reaching through a weird metal security drawer and holding my wallet again changed everything. 

And suddenly I was incredibly into crafting metaphors, that cross-stitch one especially. Because this wallet had disappeared into thin air, and then months later, popped up in a different place good as new - there was even a $5 bill, a free drink coupon, and two forever stamps still in it. And there was only one explanation for it all:

I am living on the right side of the cross-stitch.

And now I can’t wait to talk to that rabbi because I know we will talk about life again, and cross-stitching will come up, and I can say I know exactly what you mean. I have tasted the other side of the cross-stitch and it tastes like a free drink from Sisters Coffee Shop, that the manager gave me because I was polite to other patrons, and I put that card in my wallet, which I dropped in the forest, and picked up in an evidence holding facility two months later. 

Life is one of my favorite things in the world and if life is what rabbis like talking about than I am into it. 

I would talk with a rabbit about it too if the opportunity presented itself.