Dear Uptight Seattleite,
Should one tip one’s colon hydrotherapist?
No Catchy Pen Name, Please Invent One for Me
Dear No Catchy Pen Name,
I can’t invent a pen name for you. I’ll bring in one of my fellow Metro poets to help explain why. A certain Kimble James Greenwood. This, his winning poem, is called “Stick of Incense” and may be contemplated on routes 5, 48, 72, and 11:
I blow you out,
little friend
For you serve me better as ember,
than flame.
I quote Kimble James because I, too, will be of greater to service to you as ember than flame. Rather than asking me to light the way directly to a clever pen name, allow me to drift as a richly suggestive column of aromatic smoke toward your true identity. As my latest button puts it, “Catch My Drift!”
As for your question, the answer is no, little friend. But your confusion is understandable. We inhabit a wilderness of Reiki Masters, Healing Touchers, Low Qi Specialists, Rolfers, Dulas, and Orthomolecularists. While some of these practitioners may welcome your tip, others may see it as an affront to the validity of their discipline. Think how your X-ray technician would feel if you tried to tip her.
This isn’t as hard to figure out as you may think, though. Just watch for any of the following signs that your therapist would see any gratuity as gratuitous: Their title includes a word of three or more syllables, they wear a white lab coat, their job involves human birth, or their office is a place of clinical silence rather than softly noodling Celtic harps. Otherwise, the standard 15–20 percent applies, depending on the degree to which your spirit was refreshed.
Dear Uptight Seattleite,
I know it’s supposed to be a war out there between cyclists and motorists, but I find Seattle drivers to be remarkably thoughtful. Have you seen how they drive in southern California? When a driver does something particularly nice, what gesture should I use to thank them?
Bob, Biking
Dear Bob,
No need to be limited to a friendly wave, Bob. Especially if you want to use the occasion to offer some commentary on the fact that you’re on a bicycle and they’re in a car. In which case a military salute may convey the right tone of affectionate teasing. Like you’re saying, “So nice of you not to run me over, Major Polluter!” If you wanted to push this attitude a little bit, you could sarcastically exaggerate your salute and scowl a little. (A full-on Fascist salute might be overplaying your hand).
For a more whimsical chastisement, do one of those charming hat-doffing pantomimes where you twirl your hand around and around. Want a more comically oblique approach? If you can safely take both hands off your handlebars, your options include underarm fart and Jewish shrug. In keeping with the affection and wonder my recumbent bike excites, I myself like to hold my nose and make a goofy face like I’m going underwater. It’s a fun and silly way to convey the message, “People driving, oceans rising!”
Dear Uptight,
Whenever I go to my local p-patch, geezers leap from the weeds with unsolicited advice and insinuations that youngsters like me can’t possibly know how to weed or plant. I grew up on a farm. I’ve gardened my whole life. Is there any way I can shut them down politely without going into my personal bio?
Waylaid Weeder
Dear Waylaid,
Well, it’s not a contest on who knows more about gardening, is it? I ask this having recently visited a p-patch nestled in a quiet corner of Phinney Ridge among well-kept bungalows festooned with lungta (“Tibetan prayer flags” to the Noble Truths–impaired). Known as “Billy Goat’s Bluff” because of its 30-degree incline, it’s one of the city’s truly magical places. Stroll through it on a summer afternoon and peace, not competition, will come to dwell in your mind. Sit in the shade of a 70-foot pine tree and tune your ears to the bugs, the birds, and the breeze blowing through lovingly tended zucchini and hydrangeas. Feel the earth roll away toward Ballard, which gently asserts itself as an ambient roar against the Cascade Mountains.
But let’s say gardening were a contest. Why would you surrender your deadliest weapon? Not your wide-handled Japanese weeding fork, Waylaid, I’m talking about your rural background. Your “personal bio,” to use the phrase with which you distastefully push this great asset aside. There’s no need to “go into it.” Simply brush against its vastness with a show of restraint. “My pa back in Kansas used to say that,” you can say when they make their suggestions. “Of course that was 20 years before the farm went totally organic.” I guarantee that silence in the garden will once again be yours.
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