Knots Untied

The Halloween weekend brought three undoings with it.   

A few weeks ago, I bought some blue dichroic glass earrings.  They sit closer to my earlobe than my original green zircon studs, are less pokey than my silver star earrings, and less dangly than my crescent earrings.  And they flash between sapphire and cobalt.  

I have a tendency to fiddle with whatever earrings I'm wearing; Saturday night, I reached up and discovered that the blue glass sphere on my right earring had fallen off of the post.  (At first, I thought the glass had been partially pulled through my earlobe.) Presumably, it's somewhere in the house.  

Later, I was eating a power bar in preparation of going out dancing with Mark—it doesn't do to have a carb crash thirty minutes into the night. I regularly consume a power bar about an hour before working out to keep from fading out during exercise sets.  After three high-protein bites, the sticky mass of the power bar lifted a crown off of my lower back molar. Luckily, I didn't swallow the crown and my tooth wasn't causing any pain.  (Although at first I wasn't sure if my molar was topped with tooth decay or decades' old dental adhesive.  Thankfully, it was failed adhesive, and the dentist glued the crown back on Monday.) 

Mark and I went dancing anyway and got back home shortly after midnight and before the change to standard time.  

Sunday, I slept late, and had a lazy morning in the bath reading The Two Towers.  I wondered what the third thing to come undone would be.  Would it be something connected to my elderly parents?  Would a button pull away from a dress shirt?  Would it be another inconvenient loss?  Would one of my unicorn socks develop a hole?  Would it be a sudden momento mori punchline?  

I wouldn't discover until I found a parking citation (for nine times the cost of a daily permit) on my car Tuesday.  I typically order parking permits Sunday—it's apparently a universal law that university parking is complicated and a pain.  Somehow I missed reminders on various devices and failed to order a parking permit Sunday (and Monday) morning for Tuesday (and Wednesday).  

An earring, a crown, and a permit undone on Autumn's cross-quarter.  It sounds like a nursery rhyme or fairy tale.  Fingers crossed for a happily ever after ending.

OH !

I work at the University of Oregon.  Parking is luck of the draw here; drivers have a choice of paying lots of money for a reserved stall in a lot, or paying lots of money for a "hunting license" that comes with the privilege of circling through lots trying to find an empty stall.  Usually, the empty stall is sandwiched between two SUVs that are barely able to fit within the stall boundaries.  The signal to parking staff that you shouldn't be towed is a plastic dangling permit one hangs from the car's rear view window.

Last year's dangler featured the school's mascot, Puddles the Duck, holding up a white sign where an expiration sticker could be attached.  This year's dangler prominently features two gloved hands making the international sign language sign for vagina, otherwise known as the sports teams' "O."  Incoming comrades -- er, students -- are taught how to pose for pictures with their thumbs and fingers joined into a giant O.  The gloved O-making hands on the dangler have a yellow highlight on them to make the O more visible, and the remaining fabric appears to be some kind of black and white bar code pattern. 

I think this year's parking permit should come with a brown privacy wrapper. pic.twitter.com/WXRDfjzj93

— John Burridge (@JBurridge) September 28, 2016

So, in order to park, I have to hang what looks like a yellow vagina surrounded by a bar code tattoo from my rear view window.  I suppose it's subversive... but it really feels like I've become an advertising tool for an athletics business that comes up with phrases like "I love my ducks" and "duck-alicious."  

I suppose this is some sort of competition with the Oregon State University mascot, which is Benny the Beaver.