Social Change At Warp Speed

["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published September 30, 2024] 

We have a number of friends who are taking their high school seniors on college tours this fall. It really is important to let a student actually see a campus and imagine themselves there. That gut feeling is everything.

My older son, Rory, was convinced he wanted to go to the University of Hawaii but after the tour, he announced he just couldn't see himself on this campus. He couldn't explain why.

His bottom choice had been UC-Santa Cruz but after the tour, the school rose to the top of his list. The campus "spoke"  to him. His only misgiving, he said at the time, was that he wasn't sure he wanted to go to school in a "cold" climate. Spoken like a true Southern California kid.

Suffice to say, he has never lived this comment down. And by the way, he did go to Santa Cruz, met his wife, and is still there 29 "cold"  years later.

I had a similar experience looking at colleges. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and even my older brother had all attended the same New England university. But the school, despite the incredibly legacy, didn't excite me at all.

Fortuitously, I signed up for a tour sponsored by my high school for a different school and fell instantly in love with the beautiful campus, the strong feminist history, and the small size (900 students).

The school, one of the first women s colleges in the country, had been founded by a successful brewer in 1861 on an idyllic piece of New York State land. The founder designated pink and gray as the school's colors symbolizing "the rosy dawn on the gray matter of a woman s mind."   Nauseatingly poetic, but OK. Everything in the school bookstore was either pink with gray lettering, or gray with pink lettering.

As women s education was only for the wealthy initially, some of the dorm rooms had a small attached room for one's maid, should a student choose to bring one.

While the student body had become more diversified, both ethnically and economically, by the time I got there, the school still held on to long-standing traditions like demitasse in the parlors (the dorms had actual parlors) after dinner. I loved the bucolic campus.

Some of the traditions, admittedly, were definitely behind the times. You had to live on campus in one of the eight dorms. If you were pregnant or married, you were gone the next day.

There was room inspection every other week to make sure you'd cleaned your room. We had to wear a skirt to dinner in the dining room (each dorm had their own) and should you have a male guest for dinner, he had to be wearing a jacket and tie. Since dates had often not expected to have to dress up, a selection of abandoned (probably purposefully given their innate hideousness) jackets and ties were available. Of course, they never fit the poor guy who sat there in embarrassed misery eager to escape.

For us to leave the campus in the vehicle of a male person, we had to sign a leave card with the guy s name and license plate number of car. Curfew was 12:30 on weekends.

Boys could only be in our rooms at very specific hours. Doors couldn't be fully closed, and a certain number of collective feet had to be on the floor. These were known as "parietals"  (regulations governing the visiting privileges of the opposite sex in college dormitories). Mine was certainly not the only college in that era that had them.

In one throwback tradition leftover from the second World War when kitchen help was scarce, the school had continued a tradition requiring each student to do Scrape Duty once every 2 weeks, standing at the end of the kitchen conveyor belt and scraping plates into massive trash receptacles.

I never had a single class taught by a TA. All my professors knew me by name, or at least my last name as we were addressed as Miss [last name]. "Ms"  hadn't quite come into common use yet.

It's amazing how fast social change can occur. In the middle of my junior year, in a decision to go co-ed, the first 70 guys, all transfers from other schools, joined our campus and moved into my dorm.

In two weeks, 100 years of rules and traditions evaporated. The guys laughed at room inspection, were not about to restrict who could come into their rooms, and balked at a school store full of pink and gray apparel. Scrape Duty? Not happening.

As for the leave cards, they no longer made any sense.

The guys were unwilling to dress for dinner (having not had to at their previous institutions) and often showed up for breakfast in ratty pajamas. We stopped wearing skirts at dinner and began showing up in pjs at breakfast too. Our dorm dining room started looking like a co-ed pajama party.

All the parietal rules basically vanished overnight. And no one missed them.

Well, one set of parents did, claiming breach of contract and alleging that the college was promoting fornication. Um, yeah! Bring on the fornication! Biggest improvement in the school in 100 years!

The law suit was ultimately settled by providing one corridor on campus where all the old parietal rules were still in effect. Suffice to say, no one volunteered and those rooms were assigned by a lottery that no one wanted to win.

Within a month, burgundy and navy apparel had appeared in the school store.

Now, of course, the school is fully co-ed and twice its original student body. There s a central dining hall. The campus is as idyllic as ever.

Was the brewer-founder turning over in his grave as all this was happening? Maybe. It's probably just as well that he didn't live to see it. But I'd want him to know that I m grateful for all that rosy dawning over my gray matter when I attended. I have every faith it is dawning over the gray matter of the male populace too. Rosy dawning is equal opportunity.

Just tell me they haven't done away with demitasse.

 Me on Scrape Duty with Giuseppe, our dorm kitchen manager

On gorgeous campus

                                                            In front of my dorm

 

Mastering Spoken Coffee

[“Let Inga Tell You,” La Jolla Light, published September16, 2024] ©2024

This year I’ve made it my goal to master CSL – Coffee as a Second Language. 

I don’t have to tell you what a social disadvantage it has been to live in a place with so many good coffee houses and not speak Coffee.  

Of course, the main reason I haven’t learned it is that I don’t drink coffee. I love the taste and aroma but the family caffeine sensitivity has my hands shaking before I’ve taken a second sip.   However, as I am often reminded, you can get decaf versions of pretty much everything on the menu.  Although a triple shot espresso decaf would probably defeat the purpose.

While I certainly agree with my friends that coffee houses are an ideal place to meet, I’ve never frequented them enough to really master spoken Coffee.   That’s because the menu scares the daylights out of me.  The French may not be very tolerant of people who massacre their language but they sound like Barney the happy dinosaur compared to coffee drinkers stuck in line behind someone who does not speak Coffee.  The caffeine fiends are ten minutes past needing a fix, the tremors have set in, and anyone who holds them up is in critical danger of being fed into the bean grinder. 

Would that I was kidding.

Attempting to avoid becoming a new instant coffee drink if the clientele behind me seems unusually hostile, I tend to smile brightly at the barista and chirp, “I’ll have what that person just had in a decaf.” 

Unfortunately, this doesn’t keep them from asking you more questions. Lots more questions.  The milk options alone are terrifying.  In fact, I think that if you factored all the possible combinations and permutations of coffee drinks, the number would be in the bazillions. 

But the problem with spoken Coffee is that it is a language with an unbelievable number of dialects.  For example, there’s the Frappuccino-Macchiato dialect from the Sucrose region of Italy.  Only serious linguists and/or pre-diabetics really understand it.

And just when Coffee was already an incredibly complicated language, they’ve thrown in Fair Trade, i.e. that the farmers who grew the beans were paid a fair price.  Was I born yesterday? I’m sure there are standards for this but the cynic in me still wants to see sworn testimonials from the farmers.  Better yet, can I call them in person? 

And of course, we now have the option of “organic.”  I kind of hate it when they bring up that word because it immediately raises the specter of what’s in the non-organic.  Should we be thinking salmonella outbreaks in egg farms in Iowa?  One thing is clear:  if it’s fair traded and organic, we’re going to pay more for it. So I’d just like to know for sure those South American coffee farmers have 401ks and I’m not drinking chicken doots.

But just when you think you’ve miraculously gotten out of the ordering process alive, you discover that when your drink is ready, they sometimes don’t call you by name but by what you ordered.  The short hand name of what you ordered.  I have no idea what I ordered.  I just hope it really IS decaf.  And preferably has whipped cream on it.  I have let my coffee order get stone cold for fear of taking someone else’s drink by mistake.  Because if you think coffee drinkers are cranky being in line behind a non-Coffee speaker, don’t even think what would happen if you accidentally took their vente grande small cap no foam dolce.

I have to confess that I do truly envy people who can drink coffee, especially as a way to wake up quickly in the morning, or revive themselves at 4 p.m. as they’re about to slump over in a meeting-induced coma.  I don’t usually achieve sentience until about ten in the morning under the best of circumstances, and as for those work-day afternoons, I’ve often nearly severed my tongue biting it to keep awake.  Fortunately, I am now retired and can be as perpetually foggy as I want at 4 p.m. Or better yet, just take a nap.  Being awake can be really over-rated. 

My friend Amy’s mother, Toni, has been lobbying her local Starbucks to introduce a new drink, the mocha valium vodka latte.  Now this is a drink I could get my head around.  I wouldn’t even need this drink in a decaf.  A nice simultaneous upper and downer, it just falls off your tongue when you say it.  Of course, you might fall on your head after you drink it.  But it has the added advantage that within minutes, you don’t care if you speak Coffee or not.

 

 

 

Habits Of Annoying People

["Let Inga Tell You,"  La Jolla Light, published September 9, 2024] 2024

Hi folks - for the first time in 530 columns, I'm inviting the readership to join me for a Whine and Cheez Fest. Get your lists ready! So much to complain about, so little time!

Of course, I've always been a world-class whiner. (Everybody has to have a skill.) And some of the items on my list (below) of Habits of Annoying Fellow Humans have been the subject of entire columns already. But then it occurred to me: why shouldn't my readers, who don t have the luxury of a public forum, be able to whine too?

I confess that this particular column was inspired by one of my all-time top annoyances: the Reply-All option on email invitations. Even I, Technomoron to the Stars, figured out pretty quickly that even though all 75 invitees are listed, you should really only reply to the host.

Of course, many group invitations now are sent as blind cc's or otherwise hide the guest list. But alas, not all.

Maybe the host wanted you to know, as a courtesy, who else was invited. Or maybe they are as big a technomoron as me. But if they do that, they should probably note: "Please reply only to sender."

The invitation of which I speak went to 75 guests and resulted in some 43 Reply-All replies. So you're probably surmising - correctly - that this was an older crowd. But still, a number of the replies qualified as over-sharing. "Sorry, I can t come. I have to prep for my colonoscopy that night."   Or even some pretty personal chat about the responder's life (their kid was finishing rehab and they were very hopeful.)

But it got me thinking about all the other things that annoy me about the world I live in besides Reply-All replies. So here's a list that immediately comes to mind:

People in front of you in line at Gelsons salad bar who take one teeny item from all 50+ bins.

Family members, including the dog, who suddenly change their food preferences after you've stocked up on what they liked before (which, by definition, was not available at the place you usually shop). (We're talking about you and that particular brand of Cinnamon-Raisin English muffins, Olof.)

Miscreants who park in the middle of two spaces in grocery store or other parking lots. It's always the spaces up close.

Technology. All of it.

TV ads that admonish: "Do not take this drug if you are allergic to it."

Phone calls selling solar. (I thought of changing our phone message to "Hi, you've reached Inga and Olof. And no, we don't want solar.")

The new typeface in the San Diego Union-Tribune and La Jolla Light. Feels like a 3-point font!

People who say they can text without anyone at the table knowing. (Um, no you can t.)

People who take non-emergency calls during restaurant lunch dates. (There's this great invention called "voice mail." )

People who, right before they take that non-emergency call, say, "I ve got to take this."   (Um, no, you really don't.)

Not being able to find a seat at a coffee shop because they're all taken by people with laptops who aren't drinking coffee.

Not being able to figure out which small white fluffy dog is yours at the groomer's holding pen when they all want to go home with you.

Drivers who do not signal. (I mean, seriously folks, it's not that hard.)

Intermittent technical problems which by definition will not manifest themselves when anyone with the power to fix them is present.

Upselling from dentists, vets, dermatologists, and pretty much everyone. It seems have become the national pastime. 

Parents who tell their kids to get a ride home from soccer practice. (Special place in hell for them.) The kid never lives near you but you can't just leave him at the field (however tempting). 

Having to change passwords every 90 days particularly on sites you only use maybe once a year and for which you truly don't care if your information on it is accessed.

Passwords that have a number 1 or letter l, or zero or letter 0 in them. (Should be outlawed.)

People who don't respond to invitations.

People who respond to invitations that they re coming and then cancel at the last minute for what is usually a really flaky excuse. 

People who respond to an invitation with "I'll try to stop by."   (No, please don t.)

Toilets at other people s homes that I can't figure out how to flush.

People who drop their t's when talking ( "Alana"  for Atlanta, or "imporen" for important). Amazingly, even newscasters do this. 

Wordle - you have four of the five letters but the 5^th letter could be one of six options and you only have two more tries. 

Smoke alarm batteries that start beeping that they need to be replaced at 3 a.m. (Are they programmed to do this?)

Idiots with clear death wishes who walk behind cars that are backing up. (Not everyone has those beeper things!) Or is this natural selection at work?

And finally (and this one really annoys the heck out of me): Your husband getting the Saran wrap roll messed up.

So now, let s hear yours. (No politics please.) I think we d all agree that the world is an incredibly annoying place. I'll be happy to run the responses (anonymously, of course).