Someday, maybe I’ll have a bench named after me.

The other night my friend asked me if I get nervous before doing interviews.

It is possible that there’s no understatement that’s more understated than this one: I get nervous before interviews.* My anxiety before meeting someone I don’t know spikes beyond the clouds, the sun, beyond nebulae in distant galaxies. Um, yeah. It spikes. Stratospherically. I will pre-play how such a meeting might go, over and over and over. And over. Such escalating nervousness has been known to contribute to me not falling asleep, due to the aforementioned pre-imaginings. Such spazzing leads to me not being able to concentrate on anything else until said meeting is over. Often, after surviving such a meeting I am so exhausted from all my anxiety — more than the meeting itself — that I could take a nap at my desk, and thus I can’t do anything after the meeting, either.

You might wonder what the heck someone so stressed about interacting with people is doing being a reporter, whose job it is to meet with people and uncover their truths and stories and even secrets.

This is an excellent question.

Zipper goodness

Several people have asked me how the beloved boots are, now that they’ve been um, repaired.

If you judge boots on, say, whether you can get them on and off, which I have now learned is the only real metric that should be used for judging boots, my boots are now in the top tier of, you know, bootness. The new zippers, which delightfully release my feet at the end of a long day without the assistance of Billy, spoons, corn starch, shoe horns, Black and Decker workmates, banisters, dogs, foot powder or good old-fashioned physical struggle, have been masterfully stitched into the inside walls of the boots and work smoothly.

I am, however, still dealing with corn starch and foot powder residue. As in, every time I slide my feet into the boots, little clouds of white puff out. Kind of like boot special effects.

Or maybe airborne awesomeness.

My boots are in the shop.

It’s taken me several weeks to be able to write this post because I was too irrationally angry and humiliated by the events to be described below to write about them right after they happened. I needed some time.

But before I get into that…Remember the story of my boots? And what might have seemed like the end of the story of my boots? Yeah, those boots. The lovely leather boots, that I splurged on after heading back to work full time.

I did not return the boots. I love them, despite what might be described as minor failures of design. So they are impossible to get on or off, so what? They’re great boots!

I have managed to wear the boots several times with the help of plastic bags from Safeway arranged over my stockinged feet, which then slid right into the boots. The plastic bag trick turned out to be the winner. (Let’s ignore the fact that every time I had to put the boots on I used two perfectly good plastic grocery bags, and then ripped them to shreds getting them out of the boots so that my feet did not crinkle and boil all day at work. Let’s ignore the fact that even after wearing the boots several times, the plastic bags were still very much required if I wanted to get the boots on my feet. Period.)

As for getting the boots off, Billy turned out to be the winner. As in, I needed to wear the boots on days I knew I could count on Billy to be around when I wanted to take the boots off. As in, I sat in an armchair and held on for dear life and Billy tugged the boots as hard as he could without causing some sort of dismemberment, and usually they came off on the second or third try.

But the perky shoe woman I spoke with on the phone was right, the boots were stretching, and it was getting easier. Which is why, one damp and foggy morning, I decided to wear the boots to work. I knew that this was a risky choice, because Billy was on a business trip to New York. But the closet stars had aligned in such a way that many items of clothing involving much simpler and less stressful footwear — slip-on flats! — were in the wash. I told myself that I had to wear the boots, and that surely (surely!) they had stretched enough that I’d be able to get them off, no problem.

New England produces a lot of cranberries.

It’s taken nearly 20 years, but math has come back to bite me.

I was a kid (pretty much from first grade math on) who hated (hated!) math. I avoided it, I shunned it, I cursed it, I cried over it, I hid from it. I just didn’t see the point. My parents sympathized (they were not math people, either), but tried to tell me that I’d need math to get along in life for balancing checkbooks and…well, balancing checkbooks. I am sure that I regularly responded (through tears) “I’m not going to balance my checkbook!”

For the most part, that has turned out to be true. Thank you, Quicken.

I made the executive decision to end my misery in math during the first semester of trigonometry, which I was barely passing. We were studying vectors, and our teacher said that the math we were learning was useful to pilots. That cinched it for me: I wasn’t planning to fly planes, and so what was I wasting my time with trig for? I dropped out of math at the end of the semester and signed up for a course called “Foods” (really), a class which would make a fascinating case study on American public high school education, and from which I learned, through a series of excruciatingly slow filmstrips, that New England produced a lot of cranberries, and that onion slices, when thrown at your classmates, tend to disintegrate into their various layers. But that is another story entirely.

However bad vectors were, there was absolutely nothing worse than word problems. I dreaded them. Just
reading those things made me frustrated. It was as if math was taunting me. I didn’t see why I should have
to find out how fast Mr. Smith’s car was traveling (why didn’t he just look at the speedometer?) or whether train A or train B was going to arrive at its destination first (um, hello, that’s why we have timetables).

So, imagine my shudders when, as I was doing some reading at work on Friday, I came across this:

The energy that can be tapped from wind is proportional to the cube of the wind speed…Consider two sites, one with an average wind speed of 14 miles per hour and the other with average winds of 16 miles per hour….

Seriously, I thought my head might explode. For most people, these kinds of numbers and phrasing are no big deal. But they might as well be nuclear physics, or rocket science or brain surgery (or whatever your favorite clichéd expression may be) to me. I see words like “proportional” and “cube” and I panic.

I thought, this is some kind of 21st century 7th grade word problem, except that I’m not in 7th grade and I need to understand these things in exchange for being paid. My lifetime avoidance of math had quite suddenly been thrown into question. I had miscalculated: The parents were right! I really did need to know how to balance my checkbook. Except in this case, balancing my checkbook involved understanding how much more electricity the second wind farm generated than the first.

But just as I was having these thoughts (i.e. that my master plan of just pretending math didn’t exist might have been a mistake of huge proportions, that my mother had been right, that if I had just figured out how fast Mr. Smith was driving or how much older Sue’s father was than Sue, that I might now understand how much more power could be generated from a gusty site than from a merely breezy one) I noticed that there was no need for rethinking basic life principles (i.e. Math is Evil) because the answer was (just like the timetables and the speedometer and Sue’s father’s birth certificate) right there.

Clearly, I have cursed myself.

I’ve cursed myself by writing this, for which some people have called me insane. I think I agree.

Not even a day passes from when I wrote my ode to commuting to work, and my to/from work experience sinks swamp-low.

First I sprayed myself in the face with a hose this morning. That has no relevance to the commute, but it kind of sets the mood. (It was an accident. I was watering the plants, and I dropped the hose. It sprayed me in the face. I had just dried my hair, and I had to go and re-dry it. And my shirt.)

Anyway, the commute: I had a morning train incident, in which I was forced to get off my train (the doors wouldn’t open, and it was pronounced disabled) and onto a more crowded one. On the packed train, I was squeezed in by a teenage boy who was freaking out, and then this drunk man who can barely stand up pushes in next to us, forcing me to edge closer to the poor teenage boy. No matter how loud my iPod volume was, the smell of alcohol did not go away. Because I was late, from the train, and I had an interview at 9am, I didn’t stop for coffee. So I was under-caffeinated for my interview.

And the interviewee blew me off.

The rest of the day, not so bad. Normal, in fact. Except for one very minor action on my part.

Boots: The Conclusion.

I got up the nerve to call the place I ordered the boots from today, and the woman did not call me a moron. She said that my boots were very popular, and that no one ever returned them.

Really? No one? is what I was thinking. But I said, “Well, they are very cute.”

“Yeah!” the shoe woman said.

Then she said, “There are three ways to get them on.”

Conveniently, I was calling from work, so I had a reporter’s notebook right at hand.

“The first one is to fold the boots over,” she said, after cautioning that I should be wearing nylons, since bare feet would get stuck. “And then pull from the back of the boot. Everyone tries to pull from the front, but that doesn’t work.”

I wrote down: 1. Nylons. Fold boots, pull from back.

“The second one is to — it sounds weird — put your feet in plastic bags, and then slide them into the boots.”

2. Plastic bags!

“Interesting,” I said. “I definitely wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“You just rip the bag off your foot, once you get the boot on.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, OK, I’ll try these and see how it goes.” I should get back to work is what I was thinking.

“And the third thing,” the shoe woman said, as if I had not just tried to extricate myself from this conversation. “What is the third thing, let me see.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Oh! The third thing is you can try putting baby powder in the boots. That always helps.”

I wrote: 3. baby powder, always helps.

“Ok, got it,” I said.

“They’re hard to put on at first,” shoe woman said, “but they stretch out. I swear! It gets easier.”

“Are they as hard to take off as they are to put on?”

Another awkward pause.

“Wellll… you might need some assistance,” she said. “But they really are great boots!”

Yeah, really great is what I was thinking.

“Thank you for the tips,” I said. “I’ll try these out when I get home.”

Shoe woman said: “Whooo! Alright! Good luck!”

Really. She wished me luck.

Putting aside the fact that since the boots arrived it has been downright balmy in San Francisco thus negating the need for said boots at all and making the aforementioned and disparaged flowy skirts and skimpy shirts a necessity, and putting aside the fact that I had to stifle my giggles throughout much of the conversation with perky shoe woman, I knew that I would nevertheless try items 1, 2, and 3 on my list of Ways to Get Beloved Expensive Boots On. I had to.

After dinner tonight, I went upstairs to face the boots. I again pulled them carefully from their wrappings. Looked at their cute buttons. It’s possible I stroked their soft leather. Then I got focused. Slid on some stockings — with my shorts, because it’s currently that hot in SF — and then folded over boot #1 and stuck my foot carefully into the opening. No luck. I tried Billy’s shoe horn. Nothing. Foot still stuck in the ankle. Give it up, Elizabeth is what I was thinking. Let it go.

But alas, I did not give up. I could not let it go. I went into my office and found a plastic bag and slid it on my foot. I slid my foot into the boot opening again, but this time, my foot kept going. All the way into the toe of the boot. I had one boot on! I was so pleased with myself that I hobbled down the stairs wearing one boot, got another plastic bag from the pantry, and with dog staring at me the whole time (no doubt plotting how he could kidnap and eat the boots), hobbled back up the stairs again. With my other foot in a bag, the second boot pulled right on.

I had the boots on!

And my feet in plastic bags, inside the boots. When I walked, they made crinkling sounds. Also, my feet were very, very hot.

I remembered perky shoe woman’s advice: Just rip the bags off your feet! Conveniently, the handles of the Safeway bag boiling my right foot were sticking out of the boot, so I tugged. It kind of hurt, and the bag did not rip.
Still, I had the boots on! And they looked pretty darn good, if I do say so. So they crinkle a little. And my feet were approximately four million degrees, sweating in plastic. And it required extreme contortion and assistance from Billy to get the boots off again.

They really are great boots.

these boots are made for … returning.

When I found out I’d be going back to work in an office every day, I looked into my closet and discovered that three years of not working in an office leads to buying clothes that aren’t really office material. So to speak. I have a lot of jeans, a lot of t-shirts. I have clunky shoes and cute little sneakers with red tire treads on the bottom. I do not have a lot of work clothes.

So I went shopping, before I started my job. It being summer in most places in the United States, and summer meaning warm temperatures in excess of 90 degrees, the stores are offering lovely skirts and skimpy shirts and dresses and short pants.

This being summer in San Francisco, where temperatures regularly reach, um, 60 or 65, flowy summer skirts and backless dresses and short pants are not ideal. I spent a couple of Saturdays looking for, say, a pair of pants, and came up short. So to speak.

You might be wondering, when is she going to talk about the boots?

I’m getting to that. Really.

My shopping expeditions came to nothing, and so I rooted around in the dark reaches of my closet, and discovered some skirts, most of which were unfashionably leftover from when I worked in an office before, three years ago. Whatever. I thought, well, I could wear these when it’s chilly, if I just had some boots to wear with them to keep my legs a little warmer. Brilliant!

Obviously, no one is selling knee-high boots right now. Because it’s summer! I went online, and against my better judgment, visited the site of a shoe company that I adore. Against my better judgment because their shoes are expensive.

I should pause here to say that I am not one of those women who is really into shoes. If I need a pair of shoes, I’ll buy them, but I’m not a shoe collector, or a Sex-and-the-City-esque, fawn-over-Manolo-Blahniks type of girl. (In case you didn’t get that from the reference to the sneakers with red tire treads on the bottoms.) I hate heels and until a few years ago had never (never!) owned a pair.

The point being, it is extremely rare, if not completely unheard of, for me to buy an expensive or designer-ish pair of shoes. But this one shoe designer, I am not naming any names …. man, do I love those shoes. They are somewhere between funky … and … you can get away with this at work. So: I found these boots, and they looked … perfect. These boots were cute, they were hot, they were professional enough to wear to work, they embodied everything I was looking for on my shopping trips but could not find.

They were a big splurge, but I ordered them. I figured, hey, I’m getting paid soon, it’s a gift to myself for starting a new job and all of those other stupid rationalizations that women go through when they buy something expensive for no reason whatsoever. Blah, blah, blah.

When I got the phone call the next day, my first day at work, I should have listened.

The guy called, he said, to tell me that the boots “might not fit.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Well, a lot of people have trouble getting these boots on, and I wanted to call and warn you. You just have to use your thumb…”

I’m sorry to say, I tuned out at this point. Why would a shoe company call their customer to tell them that their shoes wouldn’t fit? is what I was thinking.

“I just wanted to tell you that if you have trouble, don’t despair, just call us back and we’ll talk you through it,” the shoe guy said.

Do I want to own a pair of boots which will require ‘being talked through it’ in order to put them on every day? is what I was thinking. But I said, “OK, well, thanks for warning me.”

After several days of the UPS rigmarole, i.e. daily post-it notes that describe times the truck will return that no working human would ever be able to accommodate, as well as a nice conversation with a woman in Kentucky who rerouted my precious boots to my office, the boots arrived.

I clutched the box of boots all the way home on the train, then carried them carefully up the hill to my house. After dinner, I peeled back the brown paper wrapping and pulled out The Boots.

Wow. They were as leathery and cute (little buttons on the side!) and hot (but still appropriate for work!) as I imagined. I took them upstairs and put on a skirt. I donned the socks I might wear under a pair of boots. I slid my foot into a boot, very slowly. And then my foot stopped. Before it had reached the ankle of the boot.

Billy came in, then, and saw me half-sitting on the bed, madly wrestling with the boot.

“I can’t get the boots on,” I said.

“Really?” He reached down to feel where my foot was inside the boot. (Yeah, still stuck somewhere around the ankle.) “Huh,” he said. “What did they say to do when they called you?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. “Something about my thumb.”

“You’d need a really long thumb,” Billy said. “Or maybe just a long shoehorn.”

Sigh.

It’s been two days, and I still haven’t been able to get the boots on. And I’m feeling weird about calling the guy back. What if someone else answers the phone? What kind of conversation will we have?

Me: Hello, I ordered some boots from your store, and I can’t get them on.
Store person: Did you order the right size?
Store person, in her head: Moron! What do you mean you can’t put on your own shoes?

And so on.

And I wonder: If it’s so hard to get the boots on, what will it be like to get them off? I picture myself wrestling with my own leg at the gym, rolling off the bench in the locker room after work, while dozens of women whisper about my boots that don’t have zippers.

Yeah, that’s right. I spent all this money on boots, and they don’t have zippers.

And so, it’s likely that I will package my poor boots back up, wrap them in more brown paper and send them back from whence they came. Maybe I’ll call the shoe guy and talk him through it.

Opposite day.

Yesterday sucked. It was one of those days:

1. I slept very little the night before (insomnia!) and woke up cranky.

2. It was pouring rain and hail. All. Day. Long.

3. No one called me back for the six stories I’m trying to write by the end of the week. In fact, one guy even emailed me to tell me that he would never call me back. (Um, gee, thanks for your cooperation.)

4. I decided, despite the hail and rain and plunging temperatures, to cheer myself up by going to this cool shoe store I really like and buying this pair of shoes I have wanted for a long time. Our car is in the shop (Thank you DHL truck and cab driver for side-swiping our parked car) and so I walked (in the pouring rain and hail and violently blowing winds) about a half a mile to get to said shoe store. When I got there, the one salesperson ignored me. Just flat out acted like I wasn’t there. So I finally left without said beloved shoes. By the time I got home, I was soaked, cold and maybe, just a little bitter.

4. Did I mention no one returned my calls?

5. Even Stalker Cat was in a bad mood, because he was stuck outside in the pouring rain and hail and he kept coming to my window (his fur slicked and wet) and yowling incessantly. I’m a sucker and let him in, which was fine until later in the afternoon when he hopped up on my kitchen counter and proceeded to carry off a bag of bagels. A small cat! A bag of bagels in his mouth! He carried them up the stairs, where when I reached him, laughing, he was trying to gnaw through the plastic bag. There were teeth marks in the bagels. I wish I had a picture, because watching a cat lug a bunch of bagels up the stairs was pretty funny.

The one bright spot in the day was getting emails from a couple of people I generally find to be awesome.

The point of this post is not, actually, to rant about my bad day. The point is this: Sometime in the hopefully not-too-distant future, I’m going to avoid tumbling headfirst into the seemingly bottomless pit of despair that accompanies a Bad Day. I always forget that there’s a Next Day, which is usually — not to get all empowerment and positive thinking-y on you — a better one.

For example: Today is the exact opposite of yesterday.

1. It’s sunny and beautiful outside. Blue sky, puffy white clouds.

2. I’ve actually left the house and gone to the gym. On the way home, I stopped in the bookstore and bought two books. Even if nothing else had gone my way today, that would have been enough to make things better. I don’t know why I didnt’ do it yesterday.

3. Everyone called me back! Even the place where I’ve left six messages in the past 5 days and which seems to be more of a fortress than an office.

4. More emails from people I generally find to be awesome.

5. I ordered the aforementioned cool shoes online. Ha! Take that shoe salesperson! I hope you work on commission.

Rejecting setbacks

So, I am job hunting. I have not been writing about this, or writing at all, frankly, because this is a demoralizing process and has been taking up a lot of my time. And depending on your perspective, the whole thing is rather frightening on certain levels. I have been reading a lot of job ads recently, and my reactions generally range from laughter to yawns to the itchiness that comes from an editor type reading language that’s just, well, wrong on many levels. I should point out that I am looking for writing and/or editing jobs. The excerpts below are all from job ads found in the writing and editing category on Craigslist, or on sites specifically devoted to jobs in media and publishing.

I give you the recent “best of”:

Job responsibilities:

-“Ensure documents are placed correctly into the documentation system.” I don’t know about you, but I think that sounds absolutely fascinating. Where do I sign up for that?

-“Leverage content testing technology to iterate messaging ideas.” I don’t know where to even begin to understand this. If you are messaging, aren’t you already “iterating” ideas? And who says things like that?

-“to evangelize product FAQ’s, web design and customer experience.” Evangelize? Talk about words that tell me to run in the other direction. And how do you evangelize frequently asked questions?

Job Qualifications:

-“Ability to conduct effective informational interviews with SMEs”
Who? And why isn’t “ability to comprehend unexplained acronyms” on this job listing?

-“Geographical aptitude—i.e., a working knowledge of the 50 states, locations of major/minor cities and varying time zones” A “working” knowledge of the 50 states? Aiming high people, aiming high.

-“Candidate can reject setbacks.” Or, thankfully, jobs in which the employers say things like “reject setbacks.”

-“Experience writing for end users who use complex specialized tools.” Like power saws? Does this mean they have opposable thumbs?

-“Bullet-proof time-management skills.” Not the best imagery for recruiting purposes, I don’t think.

-“Doesn’t use interface as a verb.” Thank god, someone is sane. Unfortunately, not a job I was interested in.

And finally, the winner: I recently saw a job opening at “Whore! Magazine.” (Was “Whore” not catchy enough, is that why they needed the exclamation point?)

Maybe I’ll apply. I’m thinking that the name alone would be a huge! resume builder.

Growlier than a jaguar with no capybara to snack on

Wow, have I been in a bad mood. I was in such a funk that posting here would have frightened all five of my readers away. You’ll be relieved to know that I have snapped out of it. No more funk. Sometimes getting out of the house and doing something fun will do that for you. Last night I went to see the X-men movie with Billy and his friend who’s visiting from Boston for the week. Even though the movie was not one I probably would have seen otherwise and even though I found it only so-so, it was nice to get out. There was dinner afterwards, too.

Last night I saw the trailer for the movie “Snakes on a Plane.” It’s about, um, snakes. On a plane. First of all, did someone actually think that would be a good plot for a movie? And second of all, what were the writers, directors and whoever else thinking when they titled this movie?

Important writer/director person #1: What should we call this movie?
Important writer/director person #2: Well, let’s see, it’s about snakes. On a plane.
Important writer/director person #1: Hmm. Snakes on a plane.
Important writer/director person #2: Oh! I’ve got it! “Snakes on a Plane”!
Important writer/director person #1: That’s our winner, Bob!

Yikes.

sick and shown up

I am sick. Sick! As in, sneezy, wheezy, coughing, runny nose, can’t sleep, achy. Bleh. As a result, not much has been happening around here besides me whining about my condition from the couch while flipping back and forth between the Food Network, the Giants game (Bor-ring! SF 9, Colorado, 0), and HGTV’s stellar Friday night programming (a lineup which included a show whose sole purpose was to highlight the ugliest bathrooms ever. It doesn’t get much better than that on a Friday night, let me tell you.)

With no other news to report or opinions to put forth, I offer an update on the miscellany of my previous post:

For starters, the iPod vending machines. In response to my question, Who does that? Apparently lots of people do, as pointed out by a highly esteemed former colleague. I still find this vending machine concept ridiculous, in an I-don’t-want-to-be-part-of-the-future kind of way. You can call me a stodgy Luddite if you wish. I give the machines a year.

As for the streamlined joys of the Cordarounds and horizontal seersucker, another of my highly esteemed former colleagues (nothing gets by these people!) has pointed out that the aforementioned company appeared in a New Yorker Talk of the Town column. (What’s slightly embarrassing about this is that the column appeared in the same issue as the ad I noticed which prompted me to write about the company in the first place. My odd New Yorker reading habits have been exposed: I plunge right into the feature articles, then when I have been through all of the full-length stories and reviews, I return to the movie review blurbs and the Talk of the Town. What often happens is that I never get to those parts because a new issue arrives and I jump into the full-length stories again. Clearly this is a habit that I will have to break.)

Finally, I have offended Mr. Chippy. The pesky little bird must have broadband access, because ever since my rant about his repetitive chipping, I have not heard one measly chip.

Mr. Chippy, seersucker, and other California treats

1. So, I was shopping in downtown San Francisco last week, and I stopped into Macy’s to use the restroom, which is down in the basement level where the food court is. The place is often overrun with tourists, as there are few quick and easy places to eat in Union Square. Plus, as food courts go, the one in Macy’s is on the nicer side in terms of food options. You can get sushi, and homemade cookies and sourdough bread; it’s all very San Francisco.

Anyway, so I am walking through the food court, and I notice a vending machine. Filled with iPods. That’s right, an iPod vending machine. As in, “Wow, that Wolfgang Puck Express BBQ chicken pizza was delicious. I think I’ll stop by the iPod vending machine on the way out, maybe pick up a Nano.”

I mean really, who does that?

2. There’s this bird that lives near our apartment we call “Mr. Chippy.” This is because for about 23.5 hours out of every 24, Mr. Chippy can be heard calling “chip! chip! chip! chip!” in an amazingly repetitive make-you-want-to-scream high-pitched sort of a way. He is unrelenting in his chippiness.

The other day, I had a conversation with my husband that went like this:

Me: Wow, Mr. Chippy sure is chatty today.
Billy: I know! So chippy!
Mr. Chippy: Chip! Chip! Chip! Chip! Chip! Chip! (and so on..)
Me: You know, I caught a glimpse of him on the neighbors’ roof, and he’s a mockingbird.
Billy: Whatever he is, he certainly is chippy.
Me: Who do you think he’s mocking?
Billy: Us. He’s mocking us.

The thing is, Mr. Chippy is crafty about his vocal preening. He likes to perch at the top of this hollow metal pipe thing that runs along side of our building near several of our windows. It’s a bit like a woodstove pipe, except it’s on the outside of the building from the ground up, and there’s no cap on it. Mr. Chippy, I can assume from the frequency of his presence at this location, enjoys the fact that his little chippy voice is magnified ten-fold by the hollow metal pipe he calls into. It’s a mockingbird megaphone, if you will. I have banged windows open and shut, and yelled at Mr. Chippy, to no avail. It is, of course, possible that Mr. Chippy is actually a Mrs. Chippy, and she has a nest up there, in which case we are going to be blessed with the joyous songs of many mini-Chippies amplified ten-fold by the aforementioned metal pipe, a day I can hardly wait for.

3. I was all ready to say that this had nothing to do with California, but I did a little more research and discovered with almost no surprise that the following company is based in San Francisco. I was flipping through a copy of the New Yorker last night, and I noticed an ad that said: “Finally, horizontal seersucker!”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I see the words “finally” and “seersucker” I want to see the words “no more” between them. But, apparently, some people dig the seersucker. Some people also feel strongly that the texture of the materials they wear should be horizontal rather than vertical, and those some people are a company called Lindland’s Cordarounds. They make corduroys and seersucker that “wears sideways, cheating wind and lowering drag.” That’s right, horizontal cords are apparently more aerodynamic “to keep up with our fast-paced lives.” They also reduce heat caused by — I am not kidding — “vertical cord friction” to the crotch. Really.

Anyway the horizontal seersucker is apparently better than the vertical “sucker pucker,” which can — again, not  kidding  — “whisk radiant heat from asphalt to crotch to form an uncomfortable and possibly incendiary column of superheated air.”

I don’t know about you but this happens to me all the time. Especially in the oven that is San Francisco, where temperatures regularly top, um, 60 degrees.