How to Succeed in Shopping Without Really Trying

Or: How to Get Free Stuff Without Ruining Your Karma.
The trick is being oblivious, so you probably shouldn't read this.

You'll need:

• small ears (optional)
• headphones from a company with a generous warranty policy
• tape
• obliviousness

When I was in high school, a catty girl that I spent a lot of time with told me that I have freakishly small ears. I'd never really considered before that there was a standard size of ear, and that mine failed to live up to such expectations. Despite her best efforts, my ears never became a cause for self-consciousness for me, and I forgot all about this interaction. That is, until my tiny ears set off a chain reaction for which I have just become extremely grateful.

Over a decade after the Great Tiny Ear Revelation, I received from my parents a very thoughtful gift of on-ear headphones, which I'd wanted for some time. They were fancy beyond anything I'd ever experienced in my world of multicolored $9 Panasonic earbuds. But when I put them on my head, they just weren't comfortable.

"Ahem," said my tiny ears in unison. "Forgetting something?"

"Huh?" I asked.

"We're tiny, genius."

"Wait, who is this?"

But my tiny ears were right. These on-ear headphones were threatening to become over-ear headphones, but not quite succeeding. And so it was with great sadness that I returned this thoughtful gift to my parents and went about looking for a suitable replacement.

It wasn't long before I found them: beautiful, big, resonant, and with a shiny wood finish. My tiny ears rejoiced, and all was well.

For about 8 months.

One day, I realized that the right headphone was very quiet. By the time I finished my walk to work, the speaker had stopped working entirely. I tried switching the cables and tapping the headphone, and failing there, I was out of ideas. But then I was told about the company's 1-year warranty on all products! I e-mailed a representative and received a very prompt reply of, "We'll be happy to send you another pair. They have been mailed to you already."

"Should you maybe ask if they want the old ones sent to them?" my conscience asked.

"Uh," I said. "Hey, look, videos of puppies on YouTube."  And so the matter was settled.

A week later, I received the headphones. But instead of the luxurious, over-ear beauties to which I'd grown accustomed, they were earbuds: still quite beautiful and made of wood, but nevertheless not what I wanted. I wrote back to the company and told them of their error.

"Oh okay," their e-mail more-or-less read. "We'll be happy to send you another pair. They have been mailed to you already."

Once again, no mention of a return, even on these brand new, unopened earbuds. This time my conscience just shrugged. Even it couldn't find a way in which we were being unfair.

Another week.

Another pair of headphones.

Another few months of auditory bliss.

And then another sudden one-eared musical deafness.

This time I was outside the bounds of the warranty, so I knew that the company would not help me (and after all, had they not done far more than their fair share?). So I finally turned to that last resort: hypothesis testing. Now pay attention, dear reader, because this is where it gets complicated. I unplugged the headphones from my phone and plugged them into a different device. Where they worked perfectly. And so did the old pair. And a string of lower-priced earbuds that I had similarly discarded into the near-impenetrable abyss that we've taken to calling "the electronics drawer."

Now that's how you science!

About two minutes of Googling then told me that the issue was likely to be dust in the jack, and a couple of applications of a thinly rolled up piece of tape, sticky side out, would fix the problem.

I now have three pairs of fully functional headphones for the price of one. Not to mention a tangled heap of countless old headphones, revived from the dead in true Frankenstein style, just in time for Halloween. And all it took was being too lazy to test a hypothesis for a few months.

That and small ears.

Home

Today.
I'm sitting in the Westport cabin next to a roaring fire while a light summer storm blows on the river outside the windows. We'll be moving on to our next adventure next week, and I'm thinking about the summer we've spent here.

Day 1.
We arrive on a rainy evening to a house on a beautiful river that has no electricity or running water. No, that's not quite true. When we turn on the pump, water gushes out from a severed pipe under the kitchen floor. Which we know because the floorboards aren't attached so we can easily lift one up to reveal the half-drowned crypt beneath -- a graveyard for plastic milk bottles, for reasons I will not spend time attempting to fathom. Oh well. At least we remain hydrated from above as well as below. There's plenty of water coming from the ceiling, fresh from the clouds, with only a tinge of roofing tar.

We look at each other for a while, each reading the other's face for whether we are going to abandon the whole idea of living here and just find a motel that'll take us and the dogs for the next two and a half months. But finally, with a nod, we acknowledge that we won't turn back now. We take stock of the task ahead.

The main room is full of furniture in various states of decomposition, most of which seems to have come with the house when it was purchased decades ago from an even then long-defunct boys' camp. The floor -- which itself is comprised of boards of wood that seem to be in a state of disagreement amongst themselves about which way is horizontal -- is covered in threadbare rugs with a zeal for one-way transmogrification (into dust). And on top of all of this is a pile consisting of the summary of five years of modern living, most of which seems completely pointless now that we've clearly returned to basics.

As Asa goes out onto the porch -- most of the slate tiles of which have been torn out and removed, leaving bumps like concrete roots in the resulting stone jungle -- and takes a maul to the most accessible and least moldy furniture, I start and tend to a fire in the huge stone fireplace that acts as the centerpiece of the room. (In the dark, I can only see the outline of its majestic form. It won't be until later that I notice the yellow expanding insulation that Asa and his brother used to seal up the cracks in the stone twenty years ago.) As I feed pages of a mold-eaten zoological volume from 1880 into the flames, I can't help thinking of two young fugitives in a fairy tale who've stumbled upon what is obviously a witch's house in the woods. Slowly but surely, we begin to revel in the adventure.

Today.
There's a comfortable familiarity now to the sound of raindrops falling into pots in the kitchen and the faint smell of gas that leaks out whenever the hot water is on for too long. A floorboard is leaning up against a wall -- surprisingly, it was the only one that gave up under our weight  in all this time and broke to reveal a four-foot drop to the ground below. There's a collection of shells on the porch that we've gathered on our daily walks on the beach. The dogs are sitting by the river and wistfully watching the droplets hit the water. I think they, too, know somehow that our time here is almost up. Maybe they know that if we come back next summer, this house and its decades of do-it-yourself fixer-upper history will probably be gone.

Something about our time here turned this abandoned witch's hut into a home, and we'll be sad to see it go. But it's given me faith that anything can be an adventure worth having, and that's not a bad thing by which to be remembered.

But for now, please excuse me. Our rain pots are overflowing.

Holy Shiatsu

In Review: Massage
Rating: Painfully amazing

I call to make an appointment for a massage. "BRC Spa and Sauna," says a gruff Russian-accented voice at the other end of the line. I awkwardly bumble something about wanting a massage at 11:15, because I have a lifetime of unjustifiable inferiority complexes built up regarding conversing with Russian adults. On the other end: silence. "So, um," I eloquently wrap up. Some more silence, followed by, "I'm listening."

Most of my interactions with the desk clerks at the banya, as my people refer to it, go pretty much that way. It's hard to explain to a person with limited experience talking to Russians that those guys are actually really nice. But I will try anyway.

Asa and I arrive at the banya at 11. Have I mentioned that it is run by a gentleman who is lovingly known as - and this is true - "Metal Pete"? Metal Pete isn't at the desk this time, though, and we are greeted by the only other person I ever see working there. Let's call him Boris the Knife. I tell him about my upcoming appointment and he nods vaguely. We put our valuables into a plastic bag in exchange for a locker room key.

When I come out, fully bathing suited and bath robed, Boris the Knife asks me, in Russian, if I'm ready for my massage. This is the first time he's said a word in Russian to me because, perennially embarrassed about my accent in my mother tongue, I speak English whenever I can. "Oh, sorry," he recovers in English. But I finally decide to stop hiding behind my American intonations and tell him, in Russian, that I am in fact ready. His buddy (Mikhail Kalashnikov, say) has been leaning menacingly over the counter, and he suddenly laughs. Boris the Knife tells me, while never marring his hard expression with a smile, that he and Misha here were just discussing that I must be Russian, because beautiful women always are. I laugh awkwardly and give them what I must assume is a smile so charming, it disables their ability to make any further conversation. The Knife leads me silently to the massage room. 

Which brings me to what this review is actually about: Annie. Sweet, tiny, painfully strong Korean Annie. 

She does not speak In English sentences, but she can communicate with me pretty effectively just by using a word or two. "Robe," she points to a hook on the door. "Bathing suit," she points to an empty space by the sink. "Face down," she points to the massage table. "Muscle good," she says, looking at my back. This is cryptic, but clearly a compliment, so I mutter thanks, and she gets to work. And hot stones, does she know what she's doing. She finds my sore and tight spots within nanoseconds, and wastes no time. "Hurts," she laughs, and continues shoving her thumb into my neck. "Mrvvrrrth," I sort of respond, maybe. This conversation doesn't matter anymore. After years of the pathological caution I've grown accustomed to at American massage places, her unapologetic assailment of my anxiety-constricted muscles is disorienting and amazing. I actually feel like those ladies in massage commercials who seem transported to a wonderful place by the relaxing aroma, the mountain view behind them, and the gentle touch of their masseuses. Except I'm in what I think used to be a broom closet and instead of looking like a beautiful model with a peaceful expression unmarred by a lifetime of actual human concern, I think I'm drooling.

"Married?" Annie asks suddenly. There is a pause while I get my drool under control, which she mistakes for a lack of understanding. "Have baby?" she clarifies. She's asking this while she massages my butt, so I'm not sure this cryptic question is quite complimentary. "Not... yet?" I say somewhat doubtfully, since I'm starting to think she understands my body better than I do, so maybe she knows something that I don't. "Have baby," she assures me. Before I can really worry that this is a statement of fact, she elaborates, "Have baby, happy every day." For some reason I assure her I'll have a baby soon (anything for you, Annie), and with this out of the way, she happily resumes the massage.

When she's done, I'm pretty much a pile of vaguely connected body parts. She must be aware of this, because she pushes me into a sitting position. I wait for her to leave before putting on my bathing suit, but she doesn't seem particularly inclined to do so. Whatever, I think, and put on my bikini in front of her. "Russian woman?" she asks me while observing me out of the corner of her eye. "Happy woman," she mutters sagely when I nod. I thank her profusely for the amazing massage (have I mentioned that I can turn my head to the left for the first time in months?) and my tiny masseuse grins at me. "Have baby soon," she says in place of a goodbye.

A Nice Day (and Where to Have It)

In Review: Vermont DMV
Rating: Faith-in-humanity-restoring

I was in Costa Rica with my family a couple of weeks ago, and maybe that should be its own review, but all I'll say here is that we got expertly alleviated of many of our possessions; among them, some drivers' licenses. This meant very different things for some of us.

For my mom, it meant going to the DMV in New Jersey, getting yelled at for presenting a credit card as one of her six points of identification, having to go home and get a debit card, coming back and presenting the debit card and an insurance card and her passport, getting to the photo booth and suddenly being told that since she has a middle initial on her license but not on her passport, she needs to go find the original copy of her naturalization certificate. That is: go back home, root through the safe, find that the certificate is not there after all, ask father-in-law to go with her to open his safe at the bank, see some direct evidence of the near-delusional scale of his lifelong preparation for the zombie apocalypse (which for some reason necessitated putting empty plastic bags in the safe - "to prevent shifting"), finally find the certificate, go back to the DMV, and no less than a full workday later, come out with a grumpy picture (because they told her not to smile).

For us, it meant a trip to a Vermont DMV, which is a little different. We went up to Montpelier with our dogs (because there are some nice hiking trails right next to the municipal building). When we got inside, we were nearly the only ones there. Asa took a number and a form to fill out. The only proof of anything he brought was a single piece of mail. No picture ID is necessary here since they already have the license photo on file. Meanwhile, a very elderly gentleman hobbled over to the counter, relying heavily upon a rolling walker with a basket in the front. He asked to speak to Caroline. Caroline was busy, but he said he'd wait. A few seconds later, Caroline turned out to be available after all, but she clearly didn't recognize the guy. "You helped me get my disability placard," he told her, and some possibly artificial recognition crossed her face. "So I wanted to give you this." And he pulled out a wrapped gift from his basket, which turned out to be a cutting board that he custom made for her. She thanked him profusely and told him he didn't need to come all the way out here for that. He told her that she went out of her way to help him get his placard, so it was the least he could do. Asa's number was called before the exchange was even finished; by the time the old man was out the door (which someone held open for him, of course), Asa had his new license in his hand. And in the photo, he was smiling widely.