President Obama came to Holland, Michigan this week. That’s right, B.O. himself caught wind of the Dutch frenzy that permeates the hamburgers in this town of non-risque nightgowns and large family portraits. Though he was a few days late for the massive whole-town world cup cheering, orange-wearing, and street boozing that didn’t happen at all but should have when the real Holland played in the finals last Sunday, he did arrive in time for my Thursday work day. Our leader with the unfortunate initials flew Air Force One into Gerald R. Ford International Airport (sorry Mr. President, this one is taken) and then took Marine One to Tulip City (what else) airport.

I’m glad the guy has gusto. We are on the map now for a new electric car battery plant that is about to break ground, and he had no problem calling out our local representative that blocked his efforts along the way but showed up for the ribbon cutting and sampling of what I’m sure were fine Michigander appetizers.

I didn’t get invited to (but was probably on the B-list for) the selective-audience event, but I was in a meeting in a room with a window when someone noticed the president’s helicopter fly overhead. With my neck pre-craned, I scrambled to the glass with my colleagues to get a look at a hunk of metal in the sky.

Everything else happened in slow motion. I lurched forward, head aimed at the clouds, shoulder and chin leading me on a trajectory to success. I can’t be sure of what happened next. A miscalculation or an interception? A stumble or a trip? Accidental or deliberate, it doesn’t matter how many times I replay it in my head. My body was suddenly careened into the chest of a co-worker, absorbed, and released. Newton and his laws took control and I bounced off said co-worker and missed my chance of seeing the underside of the vehicle that probably contained my President.

This is the end of my story about my visit with Barack Obama. A few weeks ago, I did an extra lap around a block on my way home from work because I thought I saw a tea party gathering. Why else would a crowd of people gather together? I think I’m worried that I’ve become numb to Holland. Do I forget what Thai food tastes like? Have my ears fallen into harmony with the flat ‘A’? We have none of the trendy au naturale frozen yogurt bars that are probably now out of style everywhere else, and vegetarians are eaten as appetizers. Does this bother me anymore? I’m starting to get twitchy and complacent. I need something to make this place real again.

Maybe I’ll stub my toe on the way to Wal-Mart.

On display in downtown Holland. I wonder if each sub-family picked their own color?

In seventh grade I subscribed to the ‘tight tank top under loose tank top’ style made possible by The Gap and several trend-setting pre-teens.  In fifth grade I embraced the gloriousness of hypercolor fabric with a classy tank that changed from blue to pink during the hotness of kickball at recess.  I got out of the habit of wearing any sort of tank throughout high school and college because my swimming-enhanced shoulders advised against it, but I generally think tank tops on women work just fine.  To all men everywhere: I never need to see your armpits.

Armpit shirts are going off this summer in Holland. Going off! Every teenage boy and a large hunk of men are wearing t-shirts with the sleeves cut off and the armpit holes enhanced so that they start at the shoulder and end at the bottom of the ribcage.  “Dude, your pits look sweet in those holes.” “Dude.”

The armpit shirts in Holland don't even come with muscles.

Armpits aside, I’ve now lived in Holland, Michigan for a year.  Yesterday, on July 3rd, I attended my first repeat event in the Midwest: July 4th.  When Sunday belongs to the Church in your town, you make the necessary adjustments. July 3rd has a nice ring to it too.  “Yay, we’re almost independent!”

It’s probably time to admit that this isn’t my first time in the Midwest.  During the summer of 2003 I lived in Minneapolis, MN for 40 days and 40 nights. I was doing a geology project making giant plaster models of river channels and measuring how they eroded as water flowed through them.

It was oppressively hot that summer in Minnehaha (the locals will know it), and I needed to take desparate measures.  I spent my time in clothing coated in plaster, but underneath my clothes, I was covered in powder, by choice.  With each step I took, a poof of white dust emanated from every angle of my body.

I didn’t care that I was a walking chalkboard eraser. I needed to douse myself in powder every day in order to ward off the heat and humidity of the Midwest.  Powder? If you have to ask, you’ll never know. Sidenote: I’ve been waiting to use that phrase ever since it was the theme of my high school yearbook freshman year.  Each morning I would arrive at work with my right hand covered in hot coffee and my body drenched in Minnesota heat.  I had a shared office, and by getting into it first each morning, I was able to dump powder down my clothes and then stand in front of our fan for 10 minutes while coaxing my core temperature down ten degrees.  Inevitably, the fan blew the powder all around the room, and my office-mate always commented on the persistent white fog, but I had the cover story of my plaster experiments.

It’s been seven years since my biblical stay in our neighbor to the Northwest, and here I am again in a Midwestern summer. I’m really hot.  I don’t know if anyone noticed the white dust under my chair at work last week.

Do armpit shirts count as business casual?

I sat in the faux-Italian-themed Holland, Michigan restaurant waiting for what I knew would be sub-par pizza to be carried the six feet from the kitchen to the checkout counter.  I allowed my eyes to blur in an attempt to trick myself into thinking I was at least in the Las Vegas Venetian, and a small dust ball rolled across the floor and completed my desert meditation.   Only when the small dust ball focused itself into a mouse, did I really hit Holland jackpot.

A shriek emerged from the waiter helping me. He had one of those bodies that took control of him from the knees and lurched him like a marionette.  A second man emerged from behind the open kitchen area and tried to stomp on the mouse with his boots of rebellion.  I immediately decided that I would still eat the sub-par mouse turd pizza, if only for the sake of talking about it later.

Last week I went to Grand Rapids, aka G-Rap, for the second ice hockey experience in my life.  My first game was in third grade.  I went to a Boston Bruins game with a classmate and his dad and spent the entire game milking the Fruit Roll-up that his had given us for a snack.  Illegal in my house, I wrapped that snack jackpot around my left index finger and when I finally sucked it clean an hour later my finger was pink and wrinkled for a week.

At Grand Rapids Griffins hockey games, pizza falls from the sky.  Like any good Midwestern sporting venue the Van Andel Arena (if you ain’t Dutch you ain’t much) shoots t-shirts out of air canons, hurls hot dogs with sling shots, and drops pizzas with parachutes from the stadium ceiling. My long torso did nothing to help me grab meat and cheese out of thin air, but with a seat right behind the goal net, I had something better. I had Newbury.

Who doesn’t love a good, strong mustache? I finally had something to root for – let’s go Newbury! Bring in Newbury! Newbury for Senate! I eagerly awaited the shift from second to third period so Newbury would be fully featured once again.  Skip to 1:04 for a frontal view and stroke of said Baleen.

I thought of Newbury as I sat and watched the mouse turd pizza place lose stars in real time on my Yelp review.  A third employee came out, looked at the skittering bundle as it easily outran the boots of rebellion, then shrugged with conviction as he looked at me and stated, “That’ll happen.”

He could’ve been wearing a mustache.

Where is Alanis Morissette when you need her?  From the windows of my apartment I can see three retirement homes, three buildings run by the rescue mission, and one scrap yard.  If the perpetual haze of West Michigan would have lifted this week I might have been able to see Sarah Palin, twenty miles away in Grand Rapids.  I was bombarded by local media channels informing me of the arrival of this exhausting “politician” for three straight days.  I tapped a note into my phone about her arrival and the embedded spelling program auto-corrected Palin to Palindrome.  Imagine the intellect embedded in a flurry of palindromes rolling up on a bus to taut a new book!

Instead, a direct quote:

“My husband is hunting and I have no responsibilities so I will head to Barnes and Noble at Midnight.”

Yes, I was peeled to the local news: hunting, husbands, responsibilities – the people camped out to see the woman that’s ruining female for me are a people-watchers dream.  The local news rolled its Econovan up to the Grand Rapids Barnes and Noble and interviewed these intellectuals for a few days in a row.

Found in the bathroom of a restaurant that I can also see from my window.

Lately, I’ve been interested in WOODTV 8.  As social media channels allow me to self-tailor the content I consume to my needs, interests, and surroundings, the traditional local news has a chance to relate to its communities along relevant axes.  The demand for hyper-local news appears to be higher than ever.  If there is going to be a wooden shoe convention on my street this week (yes, it happens), I want to know about it.  If there is going to be a tomato throwing party on your street this week (it could happen), I don’t care as much.  But, the local news is getting trashy, turning tabloid.  Why can’t it respond, iterate on the same boring model that repeats the same sentence five times in a row for apparent gravitas?

I’m staring out the window now, looking at MY missions, rest homes, and scrap metal. Is there a story there?

I wish, madam, that you had written ‘rouge,’ not ‘rogue.’

I’m partial to one side of the street in downtown Holland, MI.  I’ve tried the other side, but really, I have no interest in it other than looking in at the seniors eating bagged lunches at the downtown retirement home.  Brown paper lunch bags are fantastic in their own right, but I also slow my gait and people-watch the elders as they watch me.  I like the messaging that’s packed into a senior citizen.  They’ve seen everything come and many things go and, with each one you may or may not have a gold mine of experience, a fortune cookie message that you might save in your wallet or leave on the table.  I don’t know what age you have to reach to employ the Q-tip hairdo, but if it’s bold enough to tackle my straightness I will embrace the halo of white fuzz as my own.

That's it?

In the meantime, I usually walk on the non-retirement side of the street.  I counted 40 storefronts between my house and the one coffee shop that makes me feel like people live here.  Out of the 40 storefronts, eight of them are empty. For effect, I’ll repeat this fact in a different, generalized, and therefore slightly inaccurate form that highlights the economic downturn: twenty percent of the stores in downtown Holland, Michigan are empty.  The feel of a barren corridor of previously Papyrus font-laden establishments is particularly enhanced on Sunday, the day when nothing is allowed.  I went out to breakfast this morning and found myself excited as we pulled up, simply because the place was open.

My norms might be shifting and I will be the first to tell you I’m a bit delirious, but I still know a winner when I hear one.  On the radio station that used to wake me up with sub-par humor but has switched to all Christmas music, all the time as of November 1, I heard a radio contest this week where the winner was to be awarded one dozen frozen pigs in a blanket.  One dozen, frozen, pigs in a blanket – might as well throw in a whole chicken and can of hairspray.

The potential joy of the arbitrary will keep me listening to the Christmas music for another 40 days.  Pigs in a blanket can overcome pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.  Why is the unexpected refreshing?  Why does it take the unexpected to show us the obvious?  What is the most unexpected item I could put in a brown paper bag?

When you wander the streets of quaint towns like Holland, MI, you overhear things being said in the local language.  Most of these words are recognizable, but recently I heard a squawk of a word that should come with a warning.  Both parts of this word come with the flat A sound merged with a number of Y type noises.  Cover the ears of your children and say it with me: backtrack.

Beyehcktreyeck!

This kind of lust is for sun only.

I find it odd that someone in the town planning committee didn’t yell ‘backtrack’ when the they decided to roll out the town visual identity signage.  Conservative but suggestive – wow! This might be a spicy place after all.

Words like backtrack make me wish I knew more about linguistics.  Actually, I wish I knew more about a lot of things, or that I, at the very least, retained info that I know I used to know.  Have you ever opened up an old notebook from school and marveled at the type and scope of information you once retained?  Why, body, have I decided to forget useful back of the envelope math and instead decided to retain the memory of standing bent over in the middle school girls locker room, waiting patiently as the passive-aggressive gym teacher counted my vertebrae to make sure I didn’t have scoliosis?

This rainy, Michigan weekend is devoid of sunlight.  On one hand, I finished my indoor skateboard and now my bare feet can grip soft leather like never before.  On the other hand, the gods at Hulu keep trying to convince me that I’ll dance awkwardly and my eyelids might darken if I would only take

The internet thinks I would take a pill for 16 weeks for this...

Latisse.  Who wouldn’t risk permanent eye pigmentation for the chance at creepy eyelashes?

Can an ad be an ad without letting me know it’s an ad?  Will we ever get to the point that advertising is something I crave? As much as I like saying the word ODST, I’ll never play Halo.  I will, however, quickly succumb to any number of user experiences.  Tease, embed, dangle, lust, tactile, grasp, assume, embody…a stream of consciousness that I dare you to use on me.

It’s raining.  Can I get scoliosis from sitting on the couch?