Activities to pass time in elevators

Do you have small metal cubes in your building that groups of people occasionally stand in together for what feels like an extremely tame version of seven minutes in heaven? At my building we do.

Very small talk

How was your weekend? It's Thursday. 

Study the floor or gaze into the air in front of you

Still looks like a regular floor and regular air. Interesting.

Distract yourself with your phone

If you hold it close enough to your eyes you can pretend you're somewhere else. People in the elevator might still be able to see you though, I'm not sure.

Ask if your elevator-mates if they've ever been in an elevator accident.

This is the unexpected Best Thing Ever. Everyone has been in one or knows someone who has. What better place to tell these stories than inside an elevator? Who better to tell them to than strangers?

I only discovered this technique yesterday and already I've heard two stories about an elevator dropping a floor, one story about someone losing a foot, and one story about a subway. Subways aren't even elevators, but they come up, that's how good this conversation starter is.

And if we all start telling more horrific elevator accident stories to each other, eventually we're all going to start taking the stairs more, which is going to save our lives, and the world.

And then if that doesn't work try this.

10 million things in Portland: night food

I like Portland. Some people have never been. Visit Portland! Here are 4 of 10 million reasons you should. If it's the middle of the night and you are hungry it is really lucky that you found this.


Some people will tell you the best thing about Luc Lac is that it’s open until 4 am. These people are not to be trusted. After midnight they have a limited menu with no curry and you’re either going to get pho but be too tired to maneuver eating it or the next morning you’re going to have a vague memory of eating eight crispy rolls. Or you might have a vivid memory and that’s a lot worse.



Get the kind with pineapple, I can’t be held responsible for anything else you get and I can’t be held legally responsible for the pineapple unless you print out this blog post and have me sign it.



I have never eaten Voodoo donuts but I have been near it many times and you don’t even need to be near it to smell it. I can smell it right now. If you take a deep enough breath so can you. If you can eat donuts you should probably go, because it’s a Portland thing, and they have vegan ones, because that’s a Portland thing, and the lines are hours long which is a Portland thing so you're really getting your money's worth here.



My life has become a quest to figure out the next time I will get to eat Sizzle Pie. The great thing about Sizzle Pie in the summer is there is no air conditioning or fans or windows just all black and pizza ovens and it's a great opportunity to eat pizza while feeling like you are a pizza. I can't recommend it enough. I don't know how late Sizzle Pie is open but it's open as late as I've ever felt like eating pizza which is always.

no cavities is a triple-word score

She was definitely only listening to me to be polite. "Have you seen The Cove?" I asked.

She hadn't. It would have been a great time to stop talking but I didn't.

"I watched it last night. In the cove where they slaughter the dolphins, there's so much blood that the water looks like paint - just red paint with boats full of dolphins in it. That's what it looked like when I brushed this morning. I just wanted to give you a heads up."

My dental hygienist's name starts with H and ends with a bad hand in Scrabble. She was so, so, so sorry that it was 7:30 in the morning but I didn't mind at all. The way I see it I have to be somewhere at 7:30 every day and really the dentist is at least in the top ten.

tep ten places to be at 7:30
1. running
2. at the coast and there are one hundred killer whales
3. just waking up from staying overnight at a planetarium
4. road trip with my dog
5. getting a haircut
6. at work being super productive
7. swimming pool of money
8. the dentist
9. the airport
10. in bed having nightmares about dolphins

Especially my dentist, where there are enough luxury options to make it almost seem like the worst spa ever. Heated neck pillow? Massage chair? Sunglasses? Bitter mouthwash that makes your gums numb for thirty minutes? Sure, I'll take all of it.

Hsqqmkji likes toothbrushes made of organic materials, and she likes anyone from Minnesota, and she loved that I forgot to take my glasses off before the 3D x-ray so I looked like some sort of happy robotic skeleton nerd. "Everyone is going to get such a kick out of this." said Hmjjqtfm. She let me made me take all the floss I wanted.

Now my teeth look great and my neck feels really really cold.

Why I have a scar on my ankle

When I went in to get my spider bite looked at the doctor was a retired military doctor who was not going to take any funny business from girls with spider bites and at one point she even said “You’ve got yourself some ‘splainin’ to do.” I have wanted my whole life for someone to say that to me.

She loaded me up with medicine (“If I got to make the rules you’d be getting a lot more than this but they get after you for stupid little things like that.”) and she drew a crooked circle around the spider bite with a sharpie and she told me “DON’T let it get outside this line” so seriously that all I could say back was “Yes ma’am.” I have wanted my whole life to say that to someone.

Mini is like small, but smaller.

I only hate five things.

I hate high tops.

Let's take the worst thing about shoes - how long it takes to tie and untie them, and make it twice as bad.

I hate when people ask how to spell my name.

I know that's a useful trick to ask someone their name if you can't remember it. But my name is hard to remember and very easy to spell. I sound crazy spelling my name to you and you're not fooling anyone.

I hate subtitles on movies.

Not because they're in another language but because I get so absorbed in reading that I might as well have a plane sky-write the script of the movie. It wouldn't be more convenient or cheaper, but I could be outside.

I hate creative sizes at restaurants.

Just because I'm buying sixteen ounces of ice cream at Cold Stone doesn't mean I've lost enough self-respect to say something like "I'd like a Gotta Have It, please."

I hate too-small hoods.

The only thing that beats having a nice warm dry back-of-the-head and a soaking wet face is everything else on earth.

I'm not crazy about this picture

But it has Marseille in it. Do you miss Marseille so, so much? I do too. Have you eaten Bouillabaisse? I hope not. It combines every gross food there is.

I do like the next picture, because it is so, so complicated and step 32 looks like an episode of Cooking Dares, a game my siblings and I invented that once resulted in all of us drinking peppermint extract with allspice, beef bouillon cubes, and red pepper flakes mixed in it.

Outer space tights and the not worst idea I've ever had

I signed up for another race a few weeks ago - the cheapest race I could find when I woke up in the middle of the night and started signing up for races and buying space-printed tights online.

I didn't get incredibly excited about the race until yesterday, when I got an email that detailed a ton of important information I skipped over, and a short reminder about weight categories. Weight categories?!

Every weight category is named after a different type of horse (obviously) and while my weight has zero benefits, the class just fifteen pounds above me gets a discounted race fee and a ton of free things. Possibly a free horse. I skipped over most of the email.

Challenge accepted, horse race. The race isn't for another week and fifteen pounds is nothing - that's like an especially large sandwich or two newborn babies.

In high school all my friends started a two-day steak-and-excessive-amounts-of-water diet to meet the minimum weight to participate in the blood drive and everyone swore it had absolutely nothing to do with an attractive and persuasive health teacher who smoked cigarettes through a Kleenex to show us how much tar was in them. This story ends with everyone dropping like thin vomiting pubescent flies in the halls so I'll skip over the middle parts.

The only possible downside is that if I gain fifteen pounds my new space tights might not fit anymore - I knew I should have bought more pairs. They're going to make me so good at jumping.

superpowers and super-diseases I'm interested in.

If I were in charge of designing heaven there would be a station where you could test out how each of these things feels. There would also be an arena where you could watch ancient Greek athletes compete in an arena versus modern Olympic athletes. Who would win? Aren't you curious? Now back to the superpowers and illnesses station:

Supertaster for one meal
The way food tastes to me depends more on my mood than what I'm eating. So I'm very interested in being a supertaster for one meal, and I would like the meal to have hot chocolate in it.

Face blindness for an hour
Are you a hypochondriac? I worry I might be. I also worry I might have face blindness, especially after I meet a dozen blonde girls or five bald middle-aged men with one-syllable names. I don't have face blindness though, and I am curious what it looks like.

Photographic memory for a week
Like Cam Jansen. Camera phones have made photographic memories obsolete and poor Cam Jansen probably owns thirty cats by now but I'm still mildly interested in this.


Mantis shrimp vision for one second
Mantis shrimp vision! What if you could see color through 16 cones instead of 3? What would seeing a thousand times more colors than we see now even look like? I have no idea and I wish I could see this for even just one second. More than a second would probably drive me insane.


Pigeon sense for a day
I wish I could traverse the earth using magnets. The way pigeons do, not the way people who have swallowed magnets do.

Super jumping for a lifetime, if you use it for good not evil
Humans don't ever have this ability, but I wish I could jump over buildings, the way a grasshopper can.  I would like to be able to use this skill forever, so I could perfect it and not smash through skyscraper windows or hit birds. I would jump to work and I would jump over rivers and I would jump in malls instead of using the escalator. Is this bad on your knees? Not in heaven. Not in the heaven I'm designing.

 

especially if the cheetah also had leather pants

What did you do this weekend? I ran a relay. It was 216 miles, plus some decimal.

I am not the best runner but the other people on my team were. One had their pelvis crushed by a truck but it somehow healed and they are still running marathons. The other runners were all equally impressive but did you read that part about the truck?

In a relay you all take turns so when you're not running, you're driving in a van full of runners to the next exchange so you can swap runners. While you're driving you can eat whatever snack foods you want. Here's how it went down:

When it was my turn to run (I was last) I ran six miles. Super fast because I was so excited!

Then, while the other half of our team was running, we drove to a high school gym where hundreds of us were taking 90-minute naps on cots in semi-darkness and I thought "I am in a dark room with hundreds of insane people" over and over and I hardly slept at all. 

Then we got back in the van and I ran another six miles in the dark with a flashlight and the stars were so beautiful there were veins of galaxies swirling around them. 

Then we drove to a campsite and while the other van was running I slept for 90 minutes in the front seat of the van sweating even though I was cold. 

We woke up and it was so beautiful and all of us were vomiting from exhaustion and we got back on the road.

When it was noon I ran another six miles, promising to myself that when this was done I would buy a Rascal and never move again. And then we were done and it was so amazing and I got a ton of free quercetin samples and I wish I could do a relay every weekend.

The roads we ran on were unmarked so there was no way to know if you'd run ten feet or ten miles. It felt like running in the middle of the ocean until you got to the "One Mile Left" sign at the end of every leg, and the "One Mile Left" sign was the Best Sign Ever. 

Because, as people on my team kept saying, "You can do anything for a mile." And that felt pretty true. Even if I were tired or wearing leather pants, I could probably run a mile from a cheetah. I could walk a mile barefoot to a pharmacy to get bandaids if I had cut my hand while slicing an apple again, because I always put my thumb under the apple and hope for the best. I could skateboard a mile, even though skateboarding is something I've never done but always assumed I'm a natural at. You can do anything for a mile.

But then my friends in the van started getting a bit more generous with what "you" can do. When one of us was feeling exhausted but had a 3-mile leg coming up things suddenly escalated to "You can do anything for three miles." And then later, completely unprovoked, I heard a "You can do anything for six miles." Stop right there.

There are only a few things I can do for six miles and running is barely one of them. I can't even look at Instagram on my phone on the bus for six miles. Six miles is a really long distance, and I ran that distance three times in two days on very little sleep. I love sleep. I did a crazy thing this weekend and it was the best weekend ever.

Things I can eat for 216 miles:
trail mix made entirely of seven different kinds of chocolate
chia bars
strange and delicious hummus that made us all sick
two thousand carrots
antioxidants dipped in chocolate
an island's worth of bananas with very fancy peanut butter
Greek yogurt chips
handfuls of turkey slices
more of that hummus