We decided to go to the beach last weekend.  We waited until last minute to make the reservation to make sure the weather would behave.  Waiting until a day or two ahead of time usually isn’t a problem, especially off-season.  But when we called our hotel to make a reservation, they told us that every room was booked.

Well that was odd.

We called the hotel across the street, which was also booked.

“Is something happening on the island this weekend that we don’t know about?” Josh asked, since we had carefully picked this weekend around popular yearly events such as the Oyster Festival.

“There’s a huge duck decoy auction happening!” the man at the second hotel told him.

Oh.

This is how we came to stay at the Coraline Hotel that contained the man wearing the offensive t-shirt.

*******

We’ve stayed at the same family-owned hotel on the island for twelve years so I had mixed feelings about staying at a different hotel.  I wanted to go to the beach, but it felt odd to turn into a different parking lot.  To lighten the mood, as we walked into the building, I told the kids that like Coraline’s Other Mother, this was our Other Hotel.  It would be equally as sinister and equally as difficult to escape.

Upon reflection, this was probably not the best joke to make.

It definitely tinted our experience of the space beginning with the too-excited-to-see-you-smiles of the people at the front desk.  They were a little too welcoming.  Too eager to tell us about their exciting hotel pool policy.  Too happy to stuff us with an afternoon treat of cookies and lemonade. (Why do you want to fatten us?  So you can eat us?  It’s to eat us, right?)  The lighting was a little too bright, the elevator a little too convenient, the whole place white and clean as opposed to the rustic, track-in-the-leaves-and-sand feel of our normal space.

I know — craziness.  I mean, it was clean, safe, and fully-functioning.

Scary.

*******

When we walk into our usual hotel, whoever is working the front desk usually calls out, “the twins!” as a way of greeting.  It’s a simple statement: you are you!  As in, we remember you from visit to visit mostly because you two dart around like minnows through the lobby.  At the Coraline Hotel, after we dropped off our bags in our room, we stepped into the hallway and encountered a member of the staff who paused to stare.

“Are they twins?” she asked us, as if my children existed in another dimension and couldn’t hear her to answer themselves.

We nodded and smiled politely.  “They look like twins,” she told us.

We nodded again, still moving towards the elevator.  “I could tell that they were twins,” she said.

“Why did she want to know if we were twins?” the ChickieNob asked once we had moved away from her.

“Because she collects kids to hold in captivity at the hotel, and she’s the one who sews on their button eyes.  And she was just excited because they’ve never been able to capture twins of their collection of childrens’ souls.”

Why did I say that?  Why did I make this hotel even freakier than it already was?

My stomach started to scurry around in my abdomen like a rat navigating a maze.

*******

We drove past the duck decoy auction.  It was packed.  As in, people brought trucks with trailers attached so they could haul home lots of wooden ducks.

“All these people are duck murderers,” the ChickieNob commented as we parked our car at the bike shop.

“Or hunters,” Josh corrected.  “They’re actually called hunters.”

We biked out to the empty, secluded beach the twins and I found during our trip this summer.  We were pretty much the only people on the sand except for an older couple fishing in the ocean.  There was an eery quietness under the crash of the surf that usually comes in the horror movie before the unsuspecting family encounters an army of sea zombies.  Not that I’ve ever seen a movie with sea zombies, but I’m fairly certain that’s how it would play out.

We left the beach and returned with a picnic dinner, eating it in the cold wind that blew over the sand.

On the very empty beach.

Just like the unsuspecting family would do in a horror movie.

*******

At night, we watched Hugo with its creepy automaton.  And then we tucked in the kids and I went back to reading Gone Girl.  I could feel my stomach clenching as I read it, so I put it aside and started surfing the Web.  Except that led me to the anxiety-producing mystery of 77 Days (which turned out to be not so scary in reality, but I didn’t know that at the time).

By the time I was ready to get in bed myself, I half expected the walls to burst forth with a wave of black beetles.  Or for snakes to rise out of the carpet.  Or for the woman from the hallway to slip into our room with a needle and thread, crooning, “Ooooooh, we have plenty of singletons, but we sure would love some twin souls.  It’s time for your eye buttons, dearies!”

Even the friendly plastic sign on the bathroom counter took on a sinister hue.

Why do they want to make sure I’m comfortable?  Why do they want to be so helpful?  Have they poisoned the complimentary toothpaste?  Put acid on the shower caps so I’ll singe off my hair?  Help meeeeeeeeeeeeee.

I really wish I hadn’t combined Coraline jokes with Gone Girl with the 77 Days thing.

*******

The whole thing made me wonder why I found good, old-fashioned friendliness so creepy.  It reminded me of the Truman Show, how he was surrounded by these smiling, helpful neighbours and friends, which made the whole premise more unnerving.  Why is friendliness so often employed as the foil in the horror movie?  The kindly character who turns out to be a cold-blooded killer.  Is that why friendliness from strangers puts me on edge?  Not the sort of friendliness that comes about after 12 years of staying in the same place, but the sort of friendliness that feels too bright, too slick.  The smile that doesn’t actually extend to the eyes.

“It’s called customer service,” Josh commented when I told him that I felt unnerved by the Coraline Hotel.  “What do you want them to do?  Curse you out as you walked in the door?”

Uh… maybe?

All I know is that I triple checked the locks before I went to sleep.

*******

Am I the only person unnerved by extreme friendliness?  Of course I would always choose friendliness over rudeness, and I know calling kindness creepy sounds a bit odd.  But that perfect Coraline mother is really scary.

Dear Man Wearing the “Everything I Need to Know about Islam I Learned from 9/11” T-shirt in Our Hotel Lobby:

Through a stroke of luck, my husband saw you when he went downstairs at the hotel to get a cup of coffee before we took our kids to the breakfast room.  It gave us a chance as parents to talk to our twins about you before they saw the t-shirt themselves and asked about it.  Because, believe me, kids notice all the shit you don’t want them to see.

When my husband told the kids what your t-shirt said, knowing they might encounter you when we all went downstairs a few moments later, they were confused.  Why would someone wear something like that?  Well, that’s a good question, kids.  Who the hell proclaims their ignorance across their body?  A college, yes.  A favourite sports team.  Even hipster sayings such as “this is not a t-shirt.”  But hate-mongering?

This is what you taught my kids with your t-shirt: they learned that there are terrible people in the world, and I’m not talking about terrorists.  I’m talking about the sort of people who they are statistically much more likely to encounter, people like you.

The ones who will have already formed an opinion about a person before they open their mouth and interact with a person based on their religion. Or their skin colour.  Or sexuality.  Or the amount of money or education they have. Or their age.  The ones who will judge people before they’ve done anything — uttered even one word — to show what sort of person they are.

And that sucks.  It sucks as a kid to learn about that.  And learn about that.  And learn about that.  There have unfortunately been many opportunities in their young lives to talk about this with them, whether it was overhearing adults talking about Trayvon Martin or seeing some flippant remark in my Facebook feed during the last election. They get it. They know.

But it doesn’t suck any less every time it is reinforced.

Because they know, they will change the way they navigate this world. Instead of being themselves, they will hide essential parts of their being that they can hide, or their posture will be an apology for the things they can’t hide.  They will tuck a mezuzah necklace into their shirt in order to not be judged.  They’ll say they’re going on a vacation rather than taking off for a holiday.  They’ll not volunteer openly who they love or they’ll vaguely answer questions about their ethnicity.  Whatever it is that the yous of this world will judge them on, they’ll figure it out and adjust accordingly.

And the world will be worse for that.

Because all of our kids are learning this horrible message: that there are people out there who hate them and they’ve never even met them.  The answer some of them arrive at is “don’t be myself.”  The way they interpret this message — from quiet self-hatred or low self-esteem all the way to suicide — differs from child to child.  But most of them get to “don’t be myself” eventually: at least, all the ones who find themselves on the receiving end of someone else’s hate.

So thanks for wearing your t-shirt into our hotel and reinforcing once again what my kids have already figured out: that some people would rather approach the world in a state of hate instead of a state of love.  I am sorry that your experiences in this world taught you to move through the world this way.  But I really don’t want my kids to learn whatever you learned.

So next time you book a room at a large, chain hotel, please think for a moment before you pack your wardrobe.  And dress in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the people around you.

Signed,

Mother who wanted to vomit that she had to have this conversation yet again with her children

Once again, here are three more levels that people keep emailing me about — level 33, 65, and 97 of Candy Crush. I really enjoyed going back and playing them again now that I’m farther away from them. Back when I played them the first time, I got stuck on each of them for a while.  So it’s either distance or skills picked up in later boards that made me see these boards differently this time.

For people who have already emailed me about these, I don’t think there is anything new in this post that I didn’t already tell you. For everyone else, the tips are here if you want them.

BUT WAIT, BEFORE YOU READ ON OR CLICK AWAY: Could you take about thirty seconds to fill out this questionnaire if you play Candy Crush to prove a point in my mind?  I’ll post the findings next week.  And pass along the link to the form to friends who play too.

Yes, I am this frivolous with my brain space.

Level 33

I don’t know why, but I actually liked this level. Maybe it was because there were so few moves, so you could play the board quickly. I liked knowing that it wasn’t going to work out without having dedicated multiple minutes to the round.  See, silver lining!

That said, the key here is cascade, cascade, cascade. Start with the bottom two squares because you may be able to pop some of the top ones inadvertently with a cascade. If you can get a horizontal or vertical stripe, use it, but the cascade will pop just as many jellies as the stripe.  So don’t be tempted to make a stripe when there are perfectly nice moves you can do on one of those bottom two levels to create a cascade.

The cascade is key!  Don’t get distracted by making stripes that may pop nothing in a row.

Level 65

This level sucks and there isn’t any nicer way to describe it.

Unlike level 33, where you should ignore making striped candies, you cannot win this level without making vertical and horizontal stripes.  There is just no possible way to break through the licorice, break through the chocolate, AND clear all the jelly without plenty of stripes (unless you’re purchasing boosters).  So above all else, make the special candies.  If you can get a striped and wrapped combo, excellent.  If not, make striped candies and explode them around the board.  It’s just a matter of making enough of them and using them before chocolate covers them.  So to that end, never leave a striped candy sitting there.  Use it!

In terms of the chocolate, treat it like clutter in your house.  You don’t want it to get out of control, but clutter isn’t the same thing as filth.  Don’t focus so much on cleaning up the chocolate in this level: focus more on keeping it at bay.

Good luck.  Really, it’s not you.  This level just sucks.

Level 97

Whoa, there is a lot going on here.  Bombs dropping (and they go off after 8 moves), weird cascading, and a minimum point collection quota.

So let’s look at it this way first: you will go far in reaching your quota just by taking care of the bombs.  You can’t only clear the bombs and make enough points to win, but you can collect at least half the points you need just by playing and making sure you always take care of the bombs before they go off.

You can luckily make a lot of striped candies on this board for whatever reason, so they will help you to collect points (though I found they rarely helped me take care of the bombs for whatever reason).  And when I re-played this level to remember how I did it, I got two speckled doughnuts during the round, one of which landed next to a green striped candy (when the board felt full of green candies).  I collected tens of thousands of points through both of those moves.

So focus on the bombs first and foremost.  Secondly on making and using special candies (striped, wrapped, and speckled doughnut).  And thirdly on just gritting your teeth and saying to yourself, “well, at least I don’t have to deal with chocolate on this level too!”

Currently: I’m on Level 201, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that. Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved. Let me know the level you’re struggling with.

I just learned about the 77 Days videos, which hint that something is going to happen on Monday.  It reminds me of when I was in elementary school, and the Book of Nostradamus had predicted something to happen on a certain day.  I wanted to stay home, certain that it meant the end of the world, but my parents packed me off to elementary school, promising to run and fetch me if the world ended.  I spent all of recess staring at the sky.  Nothing ever happened.

But viral Internet projects are very different from a dusty book of prophecies, hundreds of years old.  This creepy site has only been hinting about this date for 77 days.

September 24th.

As in this Monday. [Ha – I got the date wrong.  Thank you, Stacie.  The 24th is on Tuesday. So I get one extra day to feel uneasy!]

The site creepily states (did I mention this is creepy?  And unsettling?  And… creepy?)

Well, here you are. Somehow, you stumbled on the mystery of Pronunciation Book and its sudden, unsettling countdown to… something… on September 24th — 77 days from July 9th, 2013 (How To Pronounce 77).

You might’ve thought to yourself, “Why, this looks like fun!” And then you looked closer. Deeper. Now you do not know what to think.

Worry not, intrepid internaut, for help is at hand.

You are one of us now.

Creepier still (creepy!) is the spectrogram that forms from the silences in the pronunciation videos.  It’s a man with the word “Tomorrow” written over his eyes.  The image is in that link.

Theories abound about the meaning, from the freaky to the terrifying to the commercial.  It could be a viral campaign for a movie or it could be the release of a news story.

But whatever it is, it’s unsettling.  And I don’t like feeling unsettled.

Your thoughts?

Passing along two cool things I learned about this week that both were told to me because I blog.  Which means that if I didn’t blog, or if I had chosen to write about a different topic that day, I would not know of either of these things.  Isn’t that a strange idea; not just the roads not taken, but the information not known.  Anyway, mind blown and onward.

The first is Coursera.  Did you know that you can take classes online for free?  Another Dreamer told me about it in a comment.  You can go peruse the course listings, decide what you want to learn, and then take a class without ever leaving your home.  For someone who likes to learn for learning’s sake, this is the most brilliant, wonderful thing I’ve ever found.  And yes, I am probably going to sign up for one of the computer programming classes to complement what we’re learning from the book.

The second is The Room.  A friend mentioned it in a comment on GeekDad, and I decided to download it because he described it as similar to a text-based game (my favourite kind of game) upgraded with graphics.  And that is exactly how I would describe it too.  You feel as if you are in the room, actually touching each safe, picking up the various items you find and using them to solve the puzzles.  The Wolvog and I are working on it together (though I accidentally found one of the keys when I was trying to show the game to Josh, and I feel majorly guilty that I did it without him).  Would have paid a lot more for this game but was grateful that it was only 99 cents (and there is a free version for iPhone with in-app purchases).  Gorgeous graphics, sort of creepy music (but we keep the sound off).

Passing on the love since I was grateful to learn about both these things.

*******

Akismet saves me from a lot of spam — upward of 300 pieces on a regular day.  But it also sometimes yanks in perfectly normal comments that don’t discuss Viagra.  When it pulls them into the moderation folder, I see them and approve them immediately.  When it pulls them into the spam folder, well, I have to admit that lately I’ve gotten lazy and hit “delete all” without looking closely at the spam folder.  Looking closely means scrolling through 300 comments that are gibberish strings of random words, ads for sexual aids or… well… actually they’re pretty much all ads for sexual aids.

Bea noticed that her last few comments weren’t on the blog, so I dove into the spam folder and found two comments underneath one for “medieval fuck screens dragonball.”  So… while Akismet is catching the dragonballs, it’s also catching perfectly normal non-dragonball comments.

Please let me know if your comments are not going through.  I know Akismet sends a few to moderation each day, and I haven’t been able to get that to stop.  But I will dive into the dragonball-filled spam folder and pull out comments because I don’t want your words to go missing after you took the time to write them.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Selling the Fantasy of Cancer Survival” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, A!
• “Outing the Single Hussy” (Knocked Up by a Test Tube)
• “Dear Writers: Success is Mattering to Somebody” (BlogHer)
• “The Bitch in My Head” (Where the Bleep is Our Stork?)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Project Sweet Pea has a post about BFPs in the ALI blogosphere (as opposed to the face-to-face world).  I loved this post because it tells the whole picture.  Sure there is envy, but there is also the fact that she writes, “I need to read about these BFPs. I need to know that this can work for people. That there is a possibility this might work out one day for me too.”  It’s a sweet post.

Persnickety Chickadee writes about how before she started trying to become pregnant, she had never had an overnight in a hospital.  Infertility has made her practically blase about surgery.  She writes, “Look, growth as a result of infertility. Not sure I wanted it in this way, but it is here.”  Sending her good thoughts for a quick recovery from the surgery this week.

Lastly, Two Adults, One Child has a gorgeous post about a run she took to quiet her mind.  You seriously need to read this post in full, but here is a taste: “Street lights overhead, casting a pattern of light, then dark, then light, then dark — not unlike the recurrent pattern of hope and despair with which I am so familiar.  Month after month.  Year after year.  I am comfortable here.  I know this place.”  The final line will break your heart.

The roundup to the Roundup: Coursera and The Room.  Are your comments in my spam folder?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 13th and September 20th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.