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?

Last night, Anamika Veeramani won the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee. Ever since Spellbound moved into my top five favorite movies, the Bee and its participants have been one of the highlights of my yearly entertainment. This year the event was taken to the level of sport, with ESPN’s Erin Andrews calling the shots, including a frequent mis-pronounciation of the name of the winner. You’d think, for the Spelling Bee, you’d study up on correct pronunciation.

Nobody from Holland will ever win the National Spelling Bee. Children here have milk and koekjes when they read boeks. The K is everywhere. Need a K? Take a K. Have a K? Give a K. Want more? Make that an ‘aa.’ Want to add some oomph? Start your word with a ‘van’ or a ‘de.’

Want to study the dictionary for year and win 40K? Spell: stromuhr.

In Mid-May, Holland, MI hosted its event of the year: Tulip Time. I’m still recovering.  For the uninitiated, Tulip Time is a week-long festival of everything Dutch.  Everyone dons traditional costumes, complete with wooden shoes, and lines the streets while bouncing around arm-in-arm in a format known as Klompen dancing.  Klompen dancing is a high school sport in Holland, and they even have team jackets.  Had I grown up here, the jackets alone would have merited my participation.  Now that I live here, the combined sea of tulips and Dutch people keeps me looking.

The wooden shoes are just that, and each dancer wears around 8 pairs of socks to give sufficient padding as they pound the closed streets of our downtown metropolis. Thirteen hundred pairs of feet.  Thirteen hundred pairs of feet in eight pairs of socks and non-venting shoes. Thirteen hundred pairs of hot, sweaty goodness. Is their inner sock layer some sort of wick-away fabric?  Is this an opportunity to design performance clothing for niche local festivals?

Tulip Time is more than Klopmen.  It’s a trifecta that’s completed with Tulipalloza (real name), and a constant stream of high school bands and the range of fantastic uniforms that they are forced to wear.

Some people I’ve met here are adamant that they stay away from Holland during Tulip Time.  They have pride in their non-attendance.  I don’t get it.  I love Tulip Time.  This small town makes perfect sense for just this one week per year. Exposed Dutch everything plus miles of tulips that have been protected and manicured since December plus carnival food that looks like fried dough but is called an elephant ear (why?) plus Republicans!  How could you stay away during the week it all comes together?

Mid-week I sat in the outdoor seating of a restaurant downtown with some local friends and watched another round of Klompen.  One of my friends pointed out that Erik Prince’s mother was sitting right next to us in a soft pink sweater.  Remember Erik from that fun Blackwater scandal? Yes, he grew up in Holland and delivered this year’s Tulip Time keynote.

Like I said, it all comes together. Welkom back, Erik.

Someone needs to redesign detention.  I pulled up to the border yesterday around 11am.  I rolled down my window at the checkpoint, placed a polite hello and ended up in Canadian immigration detention for an hour and a half.

I’m convinced that the border employees had a pool going on who could get the most benign person thrown out of their country.  Everything about my presence in Canada is legal.  I’m not a threat to jobs or security and I had my passport, a smile, and a hood with pink lining but it wasn’t enough. It was almost as if I tried to enter Arizona.

My pink hood and I sat in detention next to a man who had tried to bring guns in to the country. We chatted. A Russian man with wispy hair came in looking disgruntled.  We waited together. Us. The three amigos. Three’s Company.  When the immigration officer came in and asked, “who’s next?’ the Russian pointed at me and said, “ze pink hood.” Aw, shucks.

I'm about ready to get a flag tattoo (image from immigraitionvoice.org).

While I was sitting around with my new pals I couldn’t help but think that we might come up with some crazy ideas in a brainstorm. What a fantastic opportunity to have a group of people together with extreme diversity of perspective and experience, and plenty of time to dive into a range of issues.

Friend time was cut short by my immigration officer, Mr. Happy.   Without going into details, I wasn’t doing well in the interview.  It was fascinating to watch myself fail.   Words were vomiting out of my mouth and each one was incorrect.  I had no idea how to save myself and Mr. Happy was twisting my language, seeing nuance, and wanting clarity where I was comfortable with ambiguity.  Eventually, he accused me of changing my story.  I needed a Twix.  I told him I was as confused as he was and asked for a phone call.

I’ve always wondered what happens to prisoners when they use their single phone call on someone that doesn’t answer. I’ve had the same question for contestants on ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?!”  If your ‘phone-a-friend’ doesn’t recognize the number, will he or she pick up?

My release included a large rubber stamp that Mr. Happy didn’t enjoy using as much as he should have.  I read the word ‘approved’ in outlined font upside down because Mr. Happy couldn’t bring himself to tell me that my lifeline had passed the test.

I hope it wasn’t the pink hood.

My day was devoid of tricorn caps, muskets, and marathoners.  I heard no gunfire.  I went to work without incident and returned home with zero fanfare.  Today was Patriots Day and nobody in Michigan noticed.

Patriots Day! How can a holiday so central to my childhood pass by with no more than a comment about the Icelandic ash cloud? Oh, but I love that cloud.  I love how a volcano erupted and the Eyjafjallajoekull glacier sublimated and jökulhlauped in a furious rage that faded into a passive aggressive aggregation of ash hanging over Europe.  Thank goodness the ash cloud is commemorating the shot heard round the world, because Michigan is silent.

Patriots day is always marked by a reenactment of the first battle of the Revolutionary war, held on the triangular splay of grass in my hometown of Lexington, MA. I used to think everyone celebrated Patriots day and that every town had a square shaped like a triangle, but only when I left the state did I start yearning for the holiday and searching for alternate geometries.

Will we ever reenact the ash cloud?  More things in life should be reenacted.  Iceland is the only place in the world where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is on land.  This is no small feat. The Ridge, yes, I’m capitalizing it, is a gaping, open-mouth zipper that spews oceanic crust out from the innards of our planet.  I’d reenact that.

So hot.

"I'm having a reenactment at my place."

Two weeks ago I was eating real fruit.  I was also eating plantain chips, tortillas, beans, and apparently anything else I could get my hands on.  I’ve just returned from an excellent trip to Belize and in every photo, I’m eating.  To be fair, my sister realized that she was capturing most of my eating moments on camera as we were on our trip, and then to be unfair, she made it her personal goal to accumulate as many as possible.  I now have a library of myself with my mouth open.

We didn’t realize that Belize lacked the tropical vacation staple, the beach, until we arrived.  Shoreline, yes, beach, no. After double-checking in the Lonely Planet book for pages that may have described this but were accidentally stuck together like the ones that caused Rachel to layer ground beef between lady fingers and whipped cream on the classic 1999 episode of Friends, we iterated on our intentions and embraced our adventure.

Nice beak! Lots of room for food.

Face down in warm water, our snorkel-enhanced faces watched a sea turtle mow a lawn of seagrass in slow motion.  The sea turtle made me feel better about myself.  Both of us were eating.  Belize is known for its birds, and it turns out that they love eating too.  The state of Michigan and Belizian wildlife both eat a lot, and there I was, suspended between two worlds.

My mouth was open again as my plane neared Grand Rapids and hugged the Lake Michigan shoreline.  There they were: miles and miles of beaches.

On my first day back to work I rode my bike home and took a big whiff of Michigan: hot dog.  I won’t ever compare to real smell savants, but I know pink pleasure as it wafts up my nostrils.  I was ‘home.’  But the Michigander Fairy wasn’t done with me. I walked downtown to meet a friend for a drink and on the way I encountered this:

This is Holland, Michigan.

I’ve been in a daze lately.  I started to think that my life here in Michigan is normal, but no – papaya, pineapple, and cantaloupe all taste different in real life.  Real life fruit is drippy, soft, and unexpectedly amazing to those of us that usually have to get it at grocery stores in Michigan.    It took a trip to Central America and another to Starbucks to wake me up.  I bought a fruit cup from Starbucks on a connection through Dallas on my flight home.  This fruit cup had ingredients – ingredients! And, there was one I didn’t recognize: Ver 2.  What?  I am not even going to give it the time of day to look it up.  I know that Ver 2 makes fruit taste like chemical.  Fruit, version 2. Fruit 2.0.

I’m a fan of prototyping, but there are certain things that do not call for iteration.

Fruit, version 2.

“You know how your father is, he won’t like that suit,” a mother, sitting on the filthy floor of the Target dressing room, said to her 12 year old daughter every two minutes when she came out to display a new piece of swimwear.  Cheers to ambiance.

Yes, I chose to do the bathing suit shopping for my upcoming vacation at Target.  Their branding team has convinced me that it’s cool enough for me to be seen in the store, and with the state of my body I didn’t want to invest in anything of higher cost.  The Midwest winter has left me without self-control.  It’s easier to eat Peeps than not to eat them, and now that I’m old enough to drive, I can get them whenever I want.  When I was in first grade I stole a marshmallow-filled chocolate egg from Walgreens.  My parents never let me have junk food snacks at lunch.  Carrots, celery, even the occasional pretzel rod to really get things dehydrated – all those snacks came in my lunch bag, but each day at snack time I’d uncrinkle that brown paper and in slow motion peer over the cusp into the abyss that might, just that one day, contain a piece of candy.

One March in 1986, I could take it no longer.  We were in Walgreens for a routine trip to stick our arms in the air bladder blood pressure machine.  With each ‘pfft’ of the machine that was confused at the two small, unmeasurable arms, I became more and more convinced that a marshmallow filled egg would satisfy me for life.

Placing bathing suits directly in front of the entrance of the store is a horrible idea.  Being seen shopping for bathing suits is the same as being seen coming out of the bathroom.  Everyone does it but it’s a sharing moment for nobody.  I’m not at my best with two armfuls of small plastic hangers and spandex.

The egg theft happened.  I enjoyed that marshmallow egg.   I didn’t understand it as a theft until years later.  I confessed to my mom in college. Both the egg eating and eventual confessing were fully satisfying.

Three laps in and out of the dressing room later I accepted a polka dot suit as the only option.  I’ve been seeing spots everywhere lately.  Spots are super-hip.  Bored with the usual? Add spots.  Feeling chubby? Add spots.  Last weekend I enjoyed this excellent spotted wall in Grand Rapids.

It's easier to paint them than wear them.

I also saw this giant spot, know to many as the Sun, for the first time in months.  Exaggeration is for people that live in sunny places. This was a feat.

It does exist.

Finally, the local grocery store, which also happens to be a behemoth that two Wal-Marts could fit inside, presented this gem in the cranberry juice section.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to get a photo of my spotted swimsuit.

Free the giraffes into their native cranberry bog habitats.

“Let’s push it out of the road and into the church,” said the Michigander.  Yes! Let’s.  As a friend pointed out, I was “lucky there was one nearby.”  Friday was my Jeep’s first day with its new Michigan license plate.  I made it approximately half of a mile before it broke down in the middle of Holland.

If you’re unfamiliar, this license plate was a long time coming. Months of struggling with the California DMV ended with a blog post, contest, and subsequent connection to two fantastic California DMV employees, Jan and Kitty, that Arnold should promote if he hasn’t already.  Arnie can you hear me? I consider it a major life achievement (check!) that a DMV employee called me at home.

"Plate it your way" -State of Michigan

As winner of the contest, Micah Lande was given the opportunity to design my new Michigan plate.

A friendly neighborhood Republican helped push my car out of the street and half-into a parking lot that is shared between a church and the Holland Tulip Time Festival Store.  A patch of ice and tolling church bell prevented us from making it all the way.

Have you seen those mini shorts with writing on the butt that many teenagers think they can pull off but can’t?  My car was essentially wearing butt shorts as it stuck out of the church parking lot.

Don't dare bring one that's not laundered.

Before I even finished dialing AAA I was pre-annoyed with the tow truck company.  What do you do if you work in a job where you are set up for failure?  It is impossible to be excited when calling for a tow, but what a design challenge! Can the experience of a tow ever exceed expectations?

When you are stranded, even in your own town, you see things you would have otherwise missed.  It’s neat to be forced to look at what’s around.  The feeling is similar to doing user studies in design.  How else would you know that the Dutch Costume Resale next week is the 59th straight resale?

It's official.

Remember the days before mobile, internet-ready phones when we read Sweet n’ Low packets as we waited for coffee, and shampoo bottle ingredients as we sat in the toilet at a friend’s house?  Your mind seeks something, anything, to take in to pass the time.

When the truck finally came my Jeep was hoisted up and its butt shorts were rolled through town.  The process was fast – too fast. Shouldn’t there be more pomp and circumstance?  I waited 45 minutes for a process that only takes six?  What a great word – pomp!  More things in life should involve pomp.

There’s a strange exhilaration that comes while watching your car being driven by another car.  Is everyone looking at me? Hey everyone, look at me! It’s a combination of awkward exposure plus pride.

Butt shorts.

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.