Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

On Wednesday during lunch, I was strolling down Market Street carrying a bag of assorted and sundry goods from Whole Foods, including organic taco shells, Clover Stornetta sour cream, and a quart of milk---in a glass jug!---from Straus Family Creamery (Arethusa, I hear you. I grew up on Hamburger Helper and fast food, but I'm trying.)

As is often the case on Market, I passed many homeless people holding cardboard signs. For the most part, the faces were familiar, as were the written messages. There was some guilt. When you're carrying designer milk and walking past folks who may not know where their next meal is coming from, it's hard not to feel like a dirty yuppie. Anyway, one of the guys sitting on the street seemed a little off to me---he was too young, too blond, too freshly scrubbed. We locked eyes briefly and I felt compelled to read his cardboard sign. In neat lettering, with a ballpoint pen, he had written the following:

"I NEED A GIRLFRIEND."

I had to smile. And at first I thought,"Wow, that's pretty high up there on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs." But that would only be true if he was genuinely seeking "love and affection." If his intentions were more, um, carnally inclined, then that's way down there at the base of the hierarchy, with food and shelter.

Hope all of y'all are getting your needs met way up at the tippy-top of the triangle.

Smelly Cat

First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for your insightful commentary on "Quality Time." You've given me a lot to think about.

I think there seems to be a general consensus that both individuals in the relationship need to have reached a certain level of emotional maturity and/or openness to a lifelong commitment. Also---and this appears to be especially true for men---most folks expect to have completed their formal education and established themselves in some sort of career before they start seriously thinking about happily ever after. And all of that has been the case for generations. But it does seem to be taking longer and longer to reach that point (the average age at first marriage is now 25 for women, and 27 for men, which is the oldest it's ever been in America.) I imagine this is due in part to the fact that a graduate degree is fast becoming what a college degree used to be--i.e., a ticket for entry into the middle- and upper-middle classes.

So it's taking people longer to finish their educations and move from proto-adult mode ("Look, Ma! I can take care of myself!") to mature adult mode ("I can take care of myself and other humans"---typically a spouse and/or children, but this could also mean dependent parents, siblings or extended family).

I'm definitely a proto-adult right now, because I'm really only responsible for myself. But I'm eager to transition into the land of mature adults. Jury's still out on where Engi'dear fits in this schema, but he's all done with grad school and really loves his job. Stay tuned...

Yeah, so obviously this post won't be about a smelly cat. But I did love Phoebe's rendition of that song on "Friends." And with that non sequitur, I'm going to segue into my contribution to Kjerste's smells and emotion topic. I've decided to focus on the smells of my childhood days in daycare.

Smells Like Disappointment: Off-Brand Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

I spent a few years with an in-home daycare provider named Becky. Every day at snack time, I would hope against hope that the cookie tin would contain real Oreos. But instead they were always generic knock-offs, and usually stale. Some good things about my time with Becky: She taught me to play chess. She let me watch "Punky Brewster," even when the smaller kids wanted to watch cartoons instead. She tried in vain to get me to stop biting my nails.

Smells Like Frolic in Sunshine: Honeysuckle

During part of my fourth grade year, I was enrolled in an after-school program in Palo Alto. I spent the afternoons outside tearing around on the playground, and when dusk fell I would come inside and read Garfield books. The chain link fence that surrounded the playground was covered in honeysuckle, and sometimes my friends and I would bury our noses in it, or chew on the little green plant shoots. Good times.

Smells Like Love and Guilt: McDonald's French Fries

Sometimes, when my Dad had to work late, I would be the last kid at the center when he came to pick me up. He would often find me playing a half-hearted game of checkers with some staff member who wanted to go home even more than I did. I would be positively ravenous, so we'd stop by McDonald's before driving home to our (then-new) house in San Jose. I would ask if I could just have a large order of fries for dinner, no burger. He would enthusiastically say yes, and he would go on to expound upon the nutritional merits of the lowly, unsung potato. And then we would both feel better.

Quality Time

After my singles class at church on Sunday, I had my first substantive conversation with Engi'dear. It was sparked by a statistic that had been highlighted in the video we had just watched---apparently couples that date two years or more before getting married have half the divorce rate of couples that date less than two years before heading to the altar. Obviously there are exceptions--the pastor facilitating our class has been married about 15 years, and he said that he had dated his wife for six weeks, proposed, and then married her eight weeks after that. (Granted, they'd been spending a lot of one-on-one time as strictly platonic friends for a year before the courtship commenced).

Anyway, in the post-video group discussion, one of the girls up front---I'm guessing she was in her mid-thirties--said that as you get older, it takes less time to figure out whether a relationship is going to work. She said that she was pretty much able to figure out what a guy was about within a week! I will admit that I recoiled in horror at the first mention of the two-year benchmark. I mean, two years is cool if you're still in college or not far from it, but it sounds like an awful long time once you're grown up.

So I asked Engi'dear what his take was. He said that in his experience, there are a lot of things that you can't possibly know about yourself, your partner, or the dynamics of the relationship before at least the two-year mark.

Hmmm. I don't think I have enough experience to make an informed judgment here. As I said, my gut reaction is that two years is a long time for the post-grad school set to hem and haw about a potential spouse. But then again, I've never actually dated anyone for two years.

Thoughts?

The War on Drugs is Keeping Me Awake at Night

So, last week I stayed home sick from work on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. That's highly unusual for me--I'm one of those people who tries to attack the illness with Airborne and Trader Joe's supplements at the first sign of a sore throat. Often I win the battle. Even when I don't, I've been able to rely on DayQuil and NyQuil to help me soldier through the cold as a functioning human being. Like many other over-the-counter medicines, they once contained a magic ingredient called pseudoephedrine that helped me to breathe.

But then word got around to the powers-that-be that some folks, specifically long-distance truck drivers and athletes, were using cold meds as a stimulant. (The chemical structure of pseudoephedrine is very similar to amphetamines). And then, alas, illegal drug users began using innocuous decongestants in really unfortunate ways. So several state governments, including California, stepped in and started regulating the purchase of medications containing pseudoephedrine. At first this translated into a mere inconvenience for consumers---you had to buy DayQuil/Nyquil or its generic equivalent in the pharmacy section of the drugstore, instead of the regular checkout, and present a valid photo ID. But---bummer for me---the pharmaceutical firms responded to the regulations by reformulating their meds with a less effective ingredient, phenylephrine.

So now I can't sleep because I can't breathe well, and I end up calling in sick not just because I have a lil' ol' cold, but because I'm exhausted from not sleeping. And a cold that might have kept me out of the game for one day, if that, before The Prohibition, now requires a three-day marathon of bed rest. And I suppose that's not so bad, because I have the sort of job where I can be gone for three days, get paid for it, and still be employed when I come back on Monday. There are lots of other hardworking, honest Americans for whom that isn't the case. And they get sick, too.

Ka-chunk. (That would be the sound of me falling off my soapbox).

Crush Groove

For the past few weeks, I've been attending a small group/Bible study affiliated with my church. I like it a lot. This is due in no small part to the fact that my group has many men. Cute, Christian men who are my age and sport totally naked ring fingers. They all have interesting, smart-guy jobs. And they surf! They hike. They careen down snowy mountains. They organize charitable events that benefit the homeless. Sometimes they huddle in corners and mutter about their business ideas. Anyway, one of these fellows in particular has caught my eye. And now I can't stop thinking about him. (Or, sadly, Google-stalking him.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I have...a crush.

I know y'all are all real grown-ups, so you don't have crushes---you have relationships. Marriages, even! And that's fully awesome. But do you remember crushes? Do you remember what nerve-racking, giddy fun they were?

The gentleman in question---whom I'll call, um, "Engi'dear"---won't be at small group tonight. He's away on business in some far-flung city. I won't get my next fix until our singles class before services on Sunday.

Oh, Engi'dear. If I were your woman, I would have helped you pick a great necktie to wear during your presentation. I would have tucked a happy little note in your carry-on next to your toothbrush, so you could read it in your hotel room at the end of a long day. I would have dropped you off and picked you up at the airport, despite my limited driving skills and woeful sense of direction.

But I'm not your woman, Engi'dear. So when your flight lands tomorrow night, you'll shell out the cash to liberate your car from long-term parking. And when you get home, maybe your roommate will remember to ask you how your presentation went. Then again, maybe he'll be engrossed in some television show, and he'll scarcely acknowledge your return. He almost certainly won't greet you at the door with a kiss.

But if he does, buddy, this crush is SO over. ;-)