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Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Travel hints

What to do in South Carolina when the business news is bad, and the business news is very bad indeed.
1. Read Sleep Savvy, the magazine for sleep professionals. Of special interest is the section entitled: SNOOZE NEWS/ Stuff you can use.

2. Check out the vitrine in the Spartanburg Marriott, featuring mannequins of Miss South Carolina on a very unfortunate hair day.

3. Learn to shoot skeet. Actually, fail to learn to shoot skeet. Watch others, both experienced and neophytous, succeed in shooting a bright orange clay disk. But still, I fail to make contact. My excuse, if you care to hear it, is that my eyes do not work in tandem. They started out not working at all, which is to say, I had severe strabismus as a child. Then the eyes were operated on in this fashion: the surgeon popped out the eyeballs, tightened the nerves and tendons that connect the eyeballs to the brain, and then popped them back in.
For many years I believed this to be exactly what happened, until one day I sat next to an ophthalmologist at a 50th birthday party and explained this surgery to him. He looked at me with a combination of incredulity and scorn, revealed his specialty, and told me that I was entirely wrong. That I couldn’t be more wrong. That I was deluded in every possible way. That such an operation did not exist, and I was either stupid or gullible, probably both.
Whatever happened on the optical operating table lo those many years ago, my eyes no longer wander but neither do they track. I compensate for that, so I am told. But not enough to shoot a shotgun and have the ejected shot make contact with the soaring orange clay disk. As I said, such is my excuse and I will stick to it.

4. Enjoy the signs in the plant.

5. Think of sastrugi in Antarctica when it's only cotton waste.

6 comments:

Diggitt said...

Go tell that ophthalmologist that my ex-husband and my cousin Johnny both didn't have the same surgery you didn't have. In fact, after my ex-husband didn't have that surgery, I picked him up at the hospital. That surgery he didn't have left him with eye sockets that were bloody for at least a week.

Good thing he didn't have the surgery, huh? Think what a mess he'd have been if he'd had it. It took months for his eyes to track together. Cousin Johnny has had no depth perception since his 1960 surgery. That he didn't have.

Diggitt said...

Now that I think of it, a different ex -- one who didn't not have that eye surgery, which is not to suggest that he did have that eye surgery, because he didn't -- was a national skeet shooting champion. It is very hard to shoot skeet and requires considerable skill. Don't feel bad that you couldn't.

HoofClix said...

Alas, I say you must have fallen prey to the worser elements of your Southern family to have had to endure such torture on your recent trip south. My side would never have made you gaze upon vitrine, sastrugi, or for that matter tried to destroy poor little orange clay pigeons. You'd have been made to do more simple things, like maybe shovel horse-cr@9.. Well, for all those years that I restrained my feet when I passed that lavatory, in utter fear of the consequences, I declare that if I do happen to ever pass it again, I'm going to tempt fate and go through that door just to see what might happen...

blewis said...

All I can say is, I'm glad you travel with a camera. And I'd like to know what, exactly, the discipline is for a man who has the temerity to enter the Ladies Room in SC

Rebecca Rice said...

I love the quirkiness of all these details. Who knew there was a magazine called Sleep Savvy?
And the sign on all the ladies' room really made me chuckle. I, too, am glad you had a camera. Truth really is stranger than fiction!
Thank you for making this Yankee smile!

LSS riverrun said...

That is the best rest room sign I've ever seen. It knocks my previous favorite right out of the water.
My old favorite is in Grand Central Terminal. That sign, in the ladies room, says something like "no smoking, no alcohol, no knives, no hair washing, no begging, no bullying, no picnicking".
I think I remember it rightly.