Procrastination As A Work Ethic March 5, 2022

 

I'm working on my income taxes today.  So far, I've laid in my bed watching You Tube videos for an hour, drank a cup of coffee, had breakfast with another cup of coffee, did the dishes, cleaned out the microwave, did one wordsearch  puzzle and watched 25 minutes of the Dead Poet Society.  Now, I've sat down at my laptop and I'm writing and thinking about writing another concert review that I've put off for a month.  It's only the consideration that I really need to clean the bathroom that  has gotten me here in front of the computer.  Cleaning the bathroom, in the procrastination sliding scale, rates above doing the taxes.

I want to point out how much a person can accomplish avoiding something else.  At work, I have finished projects and started others in the hope that the Performance Appraisal I have to do, not anyone's favorite thing as far as I know, disappears.  Sorry, that doesn't happen.  It, like taxes, lurks in the background waiting for your sense of panic to kick in.  There are different levels of procrastination.  Only the most profound level of accomplishment is truely "Procrastination As A Work Ethic".

Level 1: Avoidance through Media.  This is the lowest level, since it rarely accomplishes anything but passing the time.  Also useful when you are too tired from real work to do anything else, this procrastination technique can accomplish nothing in hours, even days of your life that would otherwise mean something. The top (or bottom) rung of avoidance through media is watching unplanned television with the commercials.  No binging and fast forwarding at this level, you aren't selecting something you want to watch as much as trying to find anything to watch.  Wandering from show to show, never seeing a whole one, you realize that switching channels does not enable you to avoid commercials.  Network have figured this out and they all have their commercials run at the same time.  Go ahead and switch channels.  It'll do no good.

Level 2: Thank goodness for cable.  No commercials and you can watch a show that started ten years ago continuously and only come up for air when you catch up to the present day.  Binging selected shows, watching You Tube videos, reading posts on Facebook, playing Solitaire, Candy Crush, Tetris all accomplish nothing while feeling like you are really doing something.  You beat the level.  You learned how to play the intro from Stairway to Heaven (well, if you actually played guitar).  You sent someone a "Happy Birthday" message.  You watched someone's comments on a Metallica song, all the while griping about how many times they stop the song to comment. Way to avoid copyright infringement, guys.  

As a side note, what is it about us that makes us sit through a movie on TV of  something we have sitting on the shelf as a DVD right next to the TV, or can stream for free without commercials.  And complain about an interrupted song that we can listen to in its entirety on our phone.  Is it "a bird in the hand, is worth two in the bush?"  Are we compelled to stop and watch our favorite movie, cut up by commercials, edited for television and censored because it's on NOW?  

Level 3:  Procrastination as a Work Ethic.  I'm not doing what I should be doing, but I'm accomplishing a lot of something else so it isn't really procrastinating.  This is an excellent strategy at home and at work.  You need to do that performance appraisal by Wednesday so you catch up on email responses, make corrections on a report, do the required reading for training.  You accomplished so much today.  Just not the work with a deadline.  Start a new project.  Finish an old one.  That perf app will be waiting for you tomorrow and if it's close to the deadline the anxiety will wake you up during the night!  So, back to my taxes.  So many "procrastinants"* are available.  Dishes, laundry, trimming the rose bushes, grocery shopping, vacuuming, mopping, mowing the lawn/shoveling the snow/raking the leaves/weeding, reading the rest of the book, it's only a few pages**.  Finishing a blog article.  

I have a confession to make.  I started this March 5th and it's now March 13th and I still haven't cleaned the bathroom (Hey! no judgements, please!).  I have done one page of the tax info sheet.  

Was that the dryer?  It's after 11:00, a diet coke sounds good.  I wonder what I have for lunch.  I guess I'll just pay a few bills before I start the taxes again.

EM

*Not a real word. Patent pending.

**See "Sleeping With Bookmarks".  "Just one more chapter" at 10:30 pm can allow you to be practically comatose at work the next day after sleeping only 3.5 hours.

Sleeping With Bookmarks

 I woke up one morning, rolled over, and found a bookmark stuck to my back.  I had finished a book, probably in the wee hours of the morning because I just had "one more chapter" put the book down and shut off the light. If someone asks me what my hobbies are I say, "reading".  I read everyday, and I'm not talking about what I have to read for work.  Whatever book I'm reading, and I read anywhere from 5 to 10  books a month, if I can count audiobooks, which I do, I read every day.  Why is an audiobook considered "cheating?"  Now if it were abridged, maybe.  Someone is reading you the whole thing while you drive.  Or while you are sitting in the driveway because it's almost done.  A book is a book.

The very first book I remember reading, or having read to me, was Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.  My third grade teacher read some of it to the class every day and I loved it.  When we moved to another state I loved it so much, I borrowed it from my fourth grade teacher's classroom library and never brought it back.  I essentially stole it.  Sorry, Mrs. Bruce!  Back then it was Mrs. and Miss.  Ms. wasn't in general use yet.  This is the cover.  Except not with the 50th anniversary edition.  [Stop counting on your fingers, yes, I was born before it was published.]

A friend of the family gave us a set of the old blue cover Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene.  My sister and I used to play Nancy Drew on rainy days.  She, being older, was Nancy and I was usually George.  Imagine my dismay when I grew up and found out Carolyn Keene is a collective.  The ones in the blue covers, set in the 1930's to 1950's gave way to the yellow covers in the revamp from 1959-1979.  When I read some of one from the later period, Nancy was wearing platform shoes.  And slacks!  How shocking.  Evidently, there were more than one "blue cover" Nancy Drew books.  The ones my sister and I had were the 1947-1951 publications.

I was always reading.  Under the covers with a flashlight past my bedtime.  Novels hidden behind my math book after I finished the work and was waiting for the remainder of the class to finish.  I wonder what the kids who could really do math well did while they waited.  What is it with teachers? When I finished early, I wasn't supposed to read my book while I was waiting.  My son had the same problem.  He'd finish and start playing on his gameboy.  What did the teacher want him to do if he finished early?  More work.  What kind of incentive is that?  Your reward for doing well is getting more work to do?

My sister was reading the Outsiders by S.E. Hinton when I was nine, so I read it also and tried to lend it to my best friend.  Her parents wouldn't let her read it because it had gang stuff in it.  What a strange concept.  My parents never took a book away from me and said I couldn't read it.  Well, except when I took a medical book for show and tell in the 4th grade called something like, "Communicable Diseases" with illustrations.  That's the same book my mom used to find out more about why my sister's immunization shot starting spreading out in a large round circle.  Bad mistake.  Those cases pictured are the most extreme examples of what could happen.  I read the Outsiders so many times that I had the first paragraph memorized.  But I must not have been paying attention because I was very surprised when I saw the 1983 movie and they had Southern accents.  Outsiders is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma!  I thought gangs were in LA and New York and the ones in New York could sing and dance.  Oklahoma is wind, wide open spaces and also has people who can sing and dance.  Perhaps I should get out more.

Stories have stayed with me for years and, like smells that can spark a memory, things in the real world can bring back a story.  Oatmeal, for instance.  Whenever I eat oatmeal, I always think of the story from the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books about the pig who taught children table manners.  Let me give you some background.  Mrs. Piggle Wiggle was the Dr. Spock of the neighborhood, helping parents cure their children of bad habits such as lying, being selfish, wanting to stay up all night using a variety of peculiar gumdrops, sets of dishes that got smaller and smaller, a set of marking pens and labels.  You get the idea.

Well, the young man who had hideous table manners was taught by a small pink (anthropomorphized) pig named Lester.  They had oatmeal for breakfast in the morning and Christopher does his usual; he pours all the cream on his oatmeal, puts on a ton of sugar and proceeds to stir it like he's mixing cement.  Christopher has bad table manners, but is a really thoughtful kid.  He beats Lester to the breakfast table and his mom was frying bacon.  "My gosh, Mother, don't you have any heart at all? Last night you had spareribs for dinner and Lester almost got sick, and now this morning you are cooking bacon."  Mrs. Brown said, "Why, Chris, I thought I had a delicious dinner last night.  Spareribs have always been one of your favorite foods."  Chris said, "But, Mother, spareribs are pork.  The come from dead pigs!"  Which is why they ended up with oatmeal for breakfast.

If you read my previous post, the Little House on the Prairie series has been one of my constant friends, too.  The amazing thing about them is the growth.  In the first book Laura is five years old and the print and point of view is from someone that age.  As the books progress, the tone and voice get older along with the characters.  I think reading the series stirred my interest in history.  I even made a pinafore in sewing class and wore it to school with a long dress my mom made.  Shows you what a geek I was.  It connected me to others things in my life as well, or my life gave me more of a connection to the stories.  I played the violin when I was young, and when Pa played the fiddle, I had some background.  In a later book, autograph books were all the rage when Laura was a teenager.  When some family papers came my way, I recognized my great-grandmother's autograph book for what it was.  Now, 140 years later, some adults are trying to get her books removed from the hands of children because of the racial insensitivity depicted.  Should those sections be removed?  Or perhaps instead of censoring what offends us, we should discuss with our children why this attitude existed and how it has changed over the years.  Or how it hasn't changed.  Sanitizing literature is like cleaning so your house is germ-free or not letting your child do anything because they might be hurt or come across something you don't approve of.  Once they go out in the world, they have no immunity to germs and no knowledge to judge what is bad behavior and no tolerance for anyone different.  At the worst, they apply their own sensibilities to people who they look down on for being "less enlightened" or "savages".  Does that sound familiar?  It should.

If you don't want to learn about people who think differently than you, or countries and civilizations that are not like your own, don't read.  Just don't stop anyone else from reading or ask for something to be censored or removed because it's not "politically correct" now.  Erasing it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  So, tell me a story.  Tell me what it's like to be you and live where you do, or did.  Tell me what you love about it.  Tell me what's wrong with it and what you would change.  I'll do the same.

Right now, I'm still working and can't (or shouldn't) stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning to finish a book, because I can't prop my textbook up in front of my face and sleep on the desk behind it.  But retirement looms like a distant beacon with a stack of books I haven't read yet.  Fun fact, if my library branch has 70,000 books and I read 20 books a month it would take me 292 years to read them all.  I probably should have started sooner.

EM

PS.  Items found in library books used as bookmarks: Leaves, flowers, grass, dandelions.  Money, paystubs, movie or theater tickets, bills, postcards, letters.  Personal products, photographs, court documents, plane tickets.  trips of bacon.  I myself have used paperclips, grocery lists, envelops, other books, post-its, bobby pins, receipts and, of course, actual bookmarks.  I have a collection.  One is even scratch and sniff.

Weather Whining

 

It's been snowing this week and I'm already tired of scraping off my car and driving carefully over potential car accidents in the guise of frozen slush.  My daughter and I spent an hour digging out the driveway and her car so we could get it unstuck from the side of the road.  As the guys in pickup trucks left for work and easily cleared the foot or so in the street, my daughter's more low-slung car got stuck three times just getting out of the driveway.  Anyone in the southern United States want to take in a northerner sick of the snow?  I do laundry and dishes and make mediocre and repetitive dinners?  

Truely, between the heat and humidity in the summer and the colossal bugs that also like warmer weather, I couldn't make it in the South.  My family went to San Antonio to visit relatives and it was 90 degrees with 90% humidity.  We thought we were going to die.  And we were living in Arizona at the time.  It's a dry heat. Yeah, like getting into your car when it's 110 and seeing the insulation has melted out below the dashboard in the passenger side is o.k. because, "It's a dry heat."  My parents were stationed in Texas and in Hawaii, both memorable for the humidity and the size of the insects.  I understand Western Canada has the same thing in the summer.  And you get to freeze in the winter, so there's no getting away from it.

Each section of the United States has ample reasons for Weather Whining.  When the Southern U.S. received an unprecedented amount of snow and cold over last winter, the Northern U.S. teased them about declaring an emergency just because of a little snow.  "We have 10 inches and it doesn't slow us down!"  It's like a "who has the biggest snow dick" contest.  They must have pickup trucks.  What the South doesn't have, and doesn't need to have, are snow-plows, below-zero grade outerwear and methods to take care of 10 inches of snow and ice.  It just isn't cost effective.  We don't have storm cellars here, but we do have snow plows.  But if I lived in Tennessee or Oklahoma and had to choose one, I'd definitely go for the storm cellar.  You'd think Kansas would have the most tornadoes, but you'd be wrong.  I think it's the whole Wizard of Oz thing.  I looked it up and Texas has the most tornadoes in the U.S. followed by Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida and Nebraska.  A list from 2020 has Mississippi first, then Texas.  

It seems unfair that Nebraska has the potential for both tornadoes and blizzards.  I read (and can recommend) a book about the Children's Blizzard of 1888 by David Laskin.  A unique and devastating weather phenomenon, like a snow storm version of "The perfect storm", this blizzard worked it's way south from North and South Dakota and Minnesota to Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas.  It was particularly devastating for the people in Nebraska because the brunt of the storm hit in the afternoon when the children were dismissed from school.  In three minutes the temperature dropped 18 degrees. Lost in the blizzard with zero visibility they were subjected to an overnight wind chill of 40 below zero.

My experience with tornadoes comes from the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, These Happy Golden Years, set in South Dakota.  The two things I remember are her description of the sky turning green and how random and vicious the tornado was, touching down in one location and stripping the very clothes off the people caught in the storm and leaving other things untouched.  Although the people are driving in cars rather than in a horse drawn buggy, the tornados were as eternal and mindless last year as they were in 1884.  Laura's blizzard four years before this, and 8 years before the Children's Blizzard, had a similar randomness.  One person wandering in the whiteout of the blizzard froze to death in his own farmyard.  The students at Laura's school walked together in a line from their schoolhouse, hardly able to see each other, to get to their homes in town.  A chance contact of one of the children in line bumping into the corner of the last building at the other end of town before the prairie opened up saved them from the blizzard swallowed them whole.

There have been floods this year as well.  Tennessee was hit very hard after heavy rains and 28 people were killed in the flood that followed.  Floods in New York and New Jersey as well as Alabama were also from flash flooding due to record rainfall.  Other floods are caused by hurricanes or other intense storms.  Floods are one of the major causes of death, an average of 85 people per year in the United States.  The Johnstown flood in 1889 was caused by a combination of very heavy rain and the failure of the South Fork Dam.  There is a story in my own family of relatives in Texas, two boys who waited out their flood by climbing a tree and staying there for several days.

Because I am familiar with or even know people in the various states of America, I listen more intently and grieve more intensely about these than in other countries.  Almost 200 people in Germany died in a flood just a month before the flood in Tennessee.  It always annoyed me when the news reports a disaster outside the United States and says, "130 people died in the plane crash, 4 were Americans" as if we only care about deaths if they are American deaths.  Well, here I am worrying about the people in Tennessee when Germany was hit harder than that and I hadn't even heard about it.  Are we all so egocentric or is it just me?  I don't think we as humans mean to be ignorant of people and places outside ourselves.  But in an emergency, the closer we are to the eye of the storm, as it were, the more it joggs us out of our complacency.  If my child is sick, if my neighbor's child is sick, if a mother across the world's child is sick, they are all equally important.  But to each mother, the concern centers on the child that is theirs.  It doesn't dilute my concern if it spreads to other people, other states and other countries.  But, I can only feel so much across space and time before I can't bear it and I retreat back to my own.  When we lived in Los Angeles, my mom would call and ask if we were o.k. because she was worried about the earthquake.  "Earthquake? What earthquake?" I would answer.  Somewhere in the area, but not my area, evidently.

Blizzards, tornadoes and floods are as impersonal as a mountain or the ocean.  They just are and they don't care about us one way or the other.  It's fine to help people prepare and give them ways to obviate the risk, such as not driving into a flooded street just because the water doesn't look all that deep.  Or shelter in your basement or storm cellar during a tornado.  It's not fine to "Monday morning quarterback" someone else's disaster.  "Well they should have..." "I wouldn't have..."  Yeah, whatever.  You don't know unless you experience it yourself.  I myself after years of earthquake training at work, duck and cover, stood by my sink directly in front of my kitchen window during an earthquake, wondering what was happening for several seconds before I froze in fear, gripping onto the sink until it was over.  Not so good in an emergency, am I?

People do what they can do.  They make the decisions they make and sometimes die from a bad choice.  But sometimes they die even if they do everything perfectly.  Or they live despite themselves.  The funnel cloud touches down on your house and not the house next to yours.  You don't prepare for snow because it never snows where you live.  And then it does.  People may not be prepared because they never needed to be.  Until their own "perfect storm" happens and catches them unaware.

Two weeks later and the snow has all melted and our high is approaching 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  And yet.  A town in Western Australia also had 50 degrees just two days ago.  50.7 to be exact, except they measure in Celsius and converted back to Fahrenheit, it was a record 123 degrees.  I wonder if the United States sticks with Fahrenheit, because hot weather in Celsius just doesn't sound all that hot.  No, I'm not accepting comments for how dumb that last sentence is.  Give me an inch and I'll take a ... kilometer!

Words: their use and abuse

I woke up the other morning to the 7:00 BBC news and heard a report on an executive who not only told a large portion of his employees to stop whining about the pandemic, but (added the British accented BBC reporter) he also called the company's training on unconscious bias "complete crap".  I woke up laughing my ass off.  Now there's a guy who doesn't have a good filter!  I told you in a previous post that I have learned to shut up rather than open my mouth and let the crap fall out.  It may be insensitive, but I think this executive needs some "keep your complete crap to yourself" training.  

Words are interesting things.  When we were growing up, family words make it into our lexicon from various sources.  Mispronunciations.  Mistakes. Smart ass comments. Creativity.  My sister created a mixture of canned chili and Franco American Spaghetti-O's which she called "Spa-chili".  I read a lot and knew many more words than I could properly pronounce.  Another reason to shut up.  When one pronounces "impotent" as "in-potent"  [which actually makes some sense] and "clandestine" as "candle-stein" one's friends who can talk better will make fun.  So, added to that was long dialogs of Monty Python sketches in fantastic British Accents, or we thought so, lines from Psycho 2 "Cu-cu-cutlery" and Katharine Hepburn's Lion in Winter speech, "I'd hang them from the nipples but I'd shock the children." and Prince Geoffrey's: "I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family."  With the smug little grin, of course.  I was faster saying other people lines than words of my own.  Unless I was singing them.  My sister and mom spoke faster than I could, so I ended up listening a lot.

What is it with accents.  No matter where anyone is from, they don't think they have a accent.  And if someone has an accent, why do they seem so much more interesting?  So exotic. Growing up watching imported British programming, it's a wonder I think the accents are still interesting and exotic.  But they are.  And so many variations throughout Great Britain and the English speaking, non-American, world.  Just in the British Isles and Ireland we could hear the smooth BBC accent, the Beatles Liverpool, the very-hard-to-imitate Cornwall, accents from Northern England, the Scottish cadence which could become hard to understand and the lilting, musical accent from Wales.  Our grandmother's mother came from County Cork in Ireland, so we found the Irish accent even more interesting. If there are variations within Ireland, our ears couldn't really pick them out.  Or all Irish actors are from the same area.  I did take German and a little French in High School, but really am crap with languages.  I tend to mix them up and end up with phrases such as, "Guten Tag, Monsieur, que pasa?"  Any port in a storm.  My parents took German in College and all my mom really remembered was, "Ich bin ein Stück Papier" which translates to "I am piece of paper".  I guess not all that helpful of a phrase.

There are many more accented English language speakers, Australians, South Africans, those who's English is accented to American ears, and accents that are non-native English speakers speaking English.  This may be true of South African speakers who's first language may not have been English.  And someone from Wales, Scotland or Ireland could certainly make a case for English being their second language. I asked an Australian citizen if there were differences in the Australian accents around the country, like there are in America.  He said not.  Or perhaps not so pronounced.  The beauty of America accents is we have, over the years, become home to people from all over the world.  Different areas of the United States became home to different groups of immigrants that, being people, tended to herd together in familiar groups.  The accent variation comes from the non-English speakers pronouncing English through the filter of their original languages.  And then people started moving around.  People in Michigan and Illinois can sound like they are from Mississippi, Alabama or Georgia.  Our aunt was from South (North?) Carolina and we loved hearing her talk over the phone.  What a lovely accent.  New Yorkers moving down to Florida with their accents to join the Florida population than sounds rather Southern to my ears and the Cuban accented English from those immigrants.  Unlike the New Yorkers who retired to Florida to get out of the snow, our Scandinavians tended towards familiar climates such as Wisconsin [my Norwegian family] or Minnesota.  

I have a theory about weather and human emotions, not based on anything remotely scientific.  Our ancestors from colder areas tend to not express anger.  They brood silently and are passive-aggressive.  Our ancestors from warmer countries tend to be more expressive and express their anger more openly.  My theory is, if you are in Norway in the middle of winter, you better brood silently if you are ticked off at your spouse.  If you fight and then slam the door on your way out of the house, it's likely you'll freeze to death before your anger cools.  It's adaptive survival.

Although it's unfortunate about my languages deficiency, it's lovely to hear another language spoken if you don't have a clue what the person is saying.  English directions to put together a piece of equipment can sound totally poetic and rather hot said in French or Spanish.  And foreign-language swear words can be delightfully fun.  As well as rude gestures.  You can Google rude hand gestures from around the world and find out what you can use to insult citizens in their own countries.  Of course, the idea is to NOT accidently make a gesture that insults your guest country's population.  Interestingly enough, my Australian friend said he and his mates use the word "cunt" as a casual greeting. To them, it doesn't mean much.  His mom had to warn him not to use that word that way in the States.  One of the few words I'm offended by.  I don't know why I should be, particularly.  A harsh, negative curse for a body part I have?  Calling someone a dick sound so much more fun and positive, as insults go.  I try not to use God's name as a swear word, either.  I think it hurts His feelings to have His name used as a swear word.  I wouldn't like my name used as a swear.  Sort of reminds me of when my mom used all three of my names, first middle and last, when she was angry at me.  Yeah, everyone's mom does that.  My husband said he thought his first name was Dammit when he was s a kid.  Seriously.  Well maybe he wasn't totally serious.

Some YouTube accent swear word exploration: 

Australian reacts to 50 American accents 

US / UK / Aussie / South African English Pronunciation Differences (Same Language, Four Accents) 

And the classic: George Carlin - 7 Words You Can't Say On TV 

Don't bother watching George Carlin with the close captions.  They censor half the 7 words. 

Euphemisms. The two topics with the most euphemisms seem to be death and having a bowel movement.  Neither of which most people want to deal with or know what to say about.  You can say, "She died".  Clear and not a lot of room for interpretation.  You can be more gentle and say, "Passed on", "Passed away".  Listen to the Monty Python Parrot Sketch: 

Mr. Praline: "VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!

Owner: No no! 'E's pining!

Mr. Praline: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

There are gentle euphemisms, religious euphemisms, crude euphemisms, country and community specific euphemisms, medical euphemisms.  We are told when you talk to children about the death of something or someone, do not use euphemisms.  If you aren't clear someone is dead, a child will interpret "gone" or "passed" literally and ask when the person is coming back.  It doesn't make it hurt any less and the person is just as dead even if you call it something else.

Having a poop, a shit, a bowel movement.  Is there any word for it that isn't a euphemism?  Medical definition:  def·e·ca·tion (def'ĕ-kā'shŭn), "The discharge of feces from the rectum."  Huh?  So convoluted you are not really sure what is happening.  If you don't know what defecation, feces and rectum are, it might as well be saying, "Your car blew smoke out of it's tail pipe." I was moving one time and cracked up the med tech helping us because I had labeled one of the boxes with mixing bowls and dishes, "Bowels".  No spell check writing on a carboard box.

All the euphemisms here are not to gently mention the subject, but to avoid embarrassment or get as crude as possible.  The nouns: shit, poop, doo-doo, crap, feces.  The active verbs shitting, pooping, crapping.  No "fece-ing", though.  And the phrases range from the demure, "Visit the ladies room" to "Take a dump".  The most colorful, creative phrases I've heard come from my husband who works construction.  They "take a dump" "make a foreman" "lay a log".  Very active, somewhat work related descriptions.  You want more?  Here's a website for you:  69 Euphemisms for Pooping  My new favorites from that list include,  "Drop the kids off at the pool" and "the Barbarians are at the gate".

So if you are in the middle of watching BBC America and eating spachili and think you are going to "push up the daisies" if you don't "Cook a butt burrito", don't feel im-potent!  You may only have to fart.  Have gas. Pass wind.  OK, that last ones a little creepy when you think Pass is one of the death euphemisms.  So I may not talk fast or know how to spell, but I sure have "writer's diarrhea".

EM

Not Saying Goodbye

One day a little boy from the neighborhood knocked on our door to visit.  Blonde hair and big blue eyes, he was about five or six. Being a "feed everyone" type of mom, I had popsicles and offered him one.  We saw him often that summer and he became friends with my boys who were two and four years younger.  They shared bad language and sketchy ideas.  They played video games and rode around on bikes.  He was at birthday parties in a group of boys at Nickelcade or the skating rink.  His family moved away after a time and being two years older meant he was at junior high and then high school before my boys.  We didn't see him like we used to, although the boys stayed in contact.

We were told about his death when he was just a couple months from his 19th birthday.  His girlfriend broke up with him and he chose, in that moment, to die.  We went to his funeral to say goodbye.  I looked at his beautiful face with love and anger and sadness.  How could he have been so stupid!  How could he choose to leave his family and friends?  Many teenage friends were there, including my own who were not able to bring themselves to see him or even come inside the funeral home.

What do you say to his parents besides, "I'm so sorry." "I will miss him."  They will miss him more.  If we think about him often, they will think about him everyday for the rest of their lives.  I can't say all of what I was thinking. "It wasn't one of my kids, it wasn't one of my kids, it wasn't one of my kids."  But he really was one of my kids for many years.  And while I'm thanking God that it wasn't one of my own children, it could have been.  And it still could be.

There seem to be more than one kind of death by suicide, and I'm not talking about the method.  Some people are going along well and then hit a wall of pain and need to get out of it.  Some run away, some take themselves out of it by suicide.  Some of us fight every day with depression trying to drag us down with it.  We can get so tired of fighting and the world gets so narrow that death seems like the best choice.  Those two types of situations, the wall of pain and the roller coaster of down and up and down again mean a momentary decision, a momentary choice.  In the time it takes for a stray thought to come and go, the young man steps out a window or hangs himself.  The young woman cuts her wrists instead of just cutting.  A handful of pills.  A loaded gun.  How many of those people we love make that decision, act, and then think, "Oh, shit.  I can't change my mind."  

Let's talk about God and free will.  Why didn't God prevent this?  Why didn't God stop this?  I can love my children with all my heart, which I do, but if one of them chooses in a bad moment to die, it's not about me and there is nothing I can do in that one moment to prevent it.  No amount of vigilance or talking or hovering.  Taking everything away that could be harmful.  Tying them up, locking them into an empty room so they can't make good on that choice?  Do I have the right?  God can stop them.  But He could stop so much and doesn't.  How far can He confine us to prevent us from hurting ourselves or others without making us ceased to be humans?

I was reading a book about police officers that contained stories of patrols. One of those stories was about a little girl, a two year old, who was found under the bed in the parents' apartment.  She had died.  There were two years of neglect and abuse, but the police never found a cause for her death.  The closest anyone could come to was that she had enough and decided to leave.  Like an out of body experience without coming back.  The book implied that this is not unheard of.   Adults have reported out of body experiences or near-death experiences during which they were given a choice to return or not.  Do modern medical advances allow people to return and take up their lives again?   

What does this mean for people who choose to die?  Some who want to change their minds are able to do that, if they are revived and have not damaged their bodies beyond being able to re-inhabit them.  There was recently a young woman who did not die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and had a face transplant.  Are there others, like people who OD and are given Narcan injections, angry when they are brought back from their intended suicide?

Some people don't choose to end their lives in a bad moment or make a snap decision.  A family friend planned her suicide very carefully.  She chose a holiday weekend and reneged on plans to go out of town so that local friends assumed she wasn't home.  She posted a note on the door telling the next person that came looking for her, not to come in, to call the police and wait outside.  She covered a large area with plastic.  She not only took a bottle of pills, she then shot herself.  She was determined to die and determined that no one would stop her.  Where the former type of suicide seems a crime of passion, accidental manslaughter, if you will, this would be premeditated murder if she planned this for another person.

Does death hurt more or less for the family and friends they leave behind if they succumbed to the moment or planned their exit in exquisite detail.  I never liked the lyrics to "Suicide Is Painless".  No it's not.  Not for anyone.

I refuse to say goodbye.  You can go fuck yourself.  Oh, right.  You can't do that, either, anymore.

EM

PS: I'll tell you a secret.  There's other ways to kill yourself.  The way I know is trying to conform to someone else's vision of what you should be, slowly giving up things you love until you forget you ever loved them.  Until you exist by living your life so you don't disappoint anyone.  Instead of living, you're just waiting to die.

Just A Girl [She's Not Quite Up to It]

 👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸👸

When my boyfriend and his brothers talked about music and musicians, they judged the worthiness of the artists.  This was the 70's so bear with me.  Eric Clapton, the best guitarist ever [well, that's true], Cream is great, Rolling Stones are great.  Karen Carpenter: she's on the "best drummers" list?  Why?  She's lame.  Linda Ronstadt has some nerve covering a Stones song.  More like "Fumbling Dice."  And, Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles.

Do you notice the theme here?  Women are second rate artists.  Never quite as good as a "real", i.e. "male" artist.  Girls just hang around musicians and are easily replaced and interchangeable.  I didn't think too much about this at the time.  [Appalling, isn't it?]    I don't know what it's like to be a man, never having been one.  What it's like to be a woman is unpredictable, dangerous and underestimated.  Have things improved since 1975?  Of course.  Do some things still linger?  Yes.  Do some of these apply to men as well?  Yes but not all men.

Unpredictable.  Dangerous. Underestimated.

Unpredictable

My mom said it seemed every time she planned a vacation, her period would show up to go with  her, no matter what the timing.  The unpredictability of menstruation.  Even those of us who are very "on schedule" have just a general idea what day or hour it will begin.  Would it start overnight and you'll have to wash your sheets?  Will it start at school and you have to get up to go to the bathroom and there is a blood stain on the seat of the chair because your school makes you wear a friggin' skirt?  [I do understand boys have to keep a textbook handy in case they have to stand up and they are  already "stood up" if you know what I mean.]  Do you have supplies in your purse in case?  Will they drop out of your purse when you are digging around for something else and embarrass you?  Will they last long enough or will your pink jeans have a tell-tale stain that everyone can see?  

If I lay down, will the stain appear even if I try to stick the pad firmly between my butt cheeks before I go to sleep?  [No, not a tampon girl but they have their own problems].  Washing out underwear, sheets, pants.  Worrying about the timing.  How do girls that are blind know when their periods start?  Some people in the past sequestered menstruating women in separate areas because they were unclean.  With all the work required in their lives, a week of quiet in a tent might have been nice.  I tried to play the period card to avoid chores and my mom rolled her eyes and suggested I would probably be able to do them despite this.  My mom prepared me ahead of time and she and my older sister warmly brought me into their sisterhood.  My best friend at the time tried to tell me she started hers by very pointedly making dots on a piece of paper, which I didn't get, until she had to finally gave up and stage whisper to me during social studies.  I think the idea of celebrating this milestone is great and I took my daughter out to dinner.

If you've never researched the history of sanitary products, it's quite interesting.  [https://menstrualcup.co/history-of-feminine-hygiene-products/]  I thought the pads came about in World War I when the nurses found that the bandages provided for the wounded also made great sanitary pads.  Nurses rock!  This is true, but earlier that that, 1896, the first commercial sanitary pads were marketed, sank like a stone and disappeared.  Since they were unmentionable, no one mentioned them so they didn't sell.  I was prepared ahead by my mom with pads with material at each end to attach to a belt.  My daughter has a box of tampon with two sizes in one box in decorator colors. The wrappers, not the tampons themselves.  Wow-wee.

Having a period is a necessary, albeit inconvenient, part of a woman's life if she wants to have children.  It has also been used as a way to exclude women.  A woman can't be in the military or in combat because what if she starts her period in the middle of a battle?  I personally don't think it would be high on her list, or the lists of her male platoon members of things to worry about.  No swimming, so competitive swimming is out.  Oh, right, the Olympic swim team.  Except for those pesky sharks.  She's weak and will get sick during that time.  (I was slightly anemic since I was eleven.  I took iron supplements.)  Can't sing during that time, you'll be too tired, so you can't be a touring musician.  I just don't think menstruation is a viable deterrent.  Except for some men who think it's gross.  It's not like we need to go get stitches, guys.  It's not that sort of thing.  Be respectful and we'll try not to bleed on you. 

Dangerous.  

Is there a girl or woman out there that doesn't have to consider where she's going, who she is with and what might happen?  I'm going for a walk.  Is it in a safe place?  I'm going out, is the person I'm meeting interested in me or just hunting.  If I have a drink at a bar or party, will I be drugged?  O.K., you can make your case for all these things happening to men.  So what is the difference?  One man going out with a group of his friends. A certain percentage are going with rape and pillage as their agenda.  One women out with a group of her friends.  Is there a percentage that plan to stalk and kill?  It's harder to rape a man [as a woman] than the reverse.  Upper body strength.  Definitely a rape advantage.

There is a rape scene in the movie Flesh + Blood where one of the female characters "cheers on" the rape.  This actually bothered me more than the rape itself.  It seems like such a betrayal, one woman to another to encourage this.  Who's to know where this character is coming from.  People in real life are known to perpetuate the violence shown to them as children just like any other habit.  Children who are beaten or see one parent beat on their other parent have an instilled feeling that the behavior is normal, just as children whose parents smoke or exercise or whatever the habitual behavior.  The adult child has an unconscious sense of what is normal but has a conscious choice to follow or not follow the behavior.  I have very positive memories of my mother coming home from parties and kissing me goodnight smelling of perfume and cigarettes.  I associate the scent with her and with love.  I choose not to smoke, but the smell of a fresh lit cigarette is enticing. 

Perhaps I need to look at the dangerous part of being female in a different way.  On a sliding scale there are larger people and smaller people.  The percentage of a woman being the smaller person is higher.  Even if she is taller, body strength is definitely a factor.  But, to a man who is over six feet tall, fit and a bully, is a man who is 5' 6" [1.68 m.] seen as any less of a victim than a woman of the same size and fitness level?  Is the woman seen as softer, easier to chase, someone who is less likely to fight back?  I think girls are taught not to physically fight.  Verbally, yes.

I myself am 5' 8.5" [1.75 m.] though I used to claim 5' 9" before gravity took it's toll on my height.  All my immediate family is taller than me, which is a strange feeling. When growing up I was always one of the tallest girls in my class.  I was never petite and never would be and all the girls around me made me feel like a bit of a buffalo.  Not that they were rude.  I sometimes felt strangely protective over the smaller people around me, girls in or children.  I can relate to larger, taller men whose chivalric nature make them protective over their smaller family members and friends.  Standing between my sons who are 6' 2" and 6' 3" [1.88 and 1.91 m.] respectively (even my daughter is an inch taller than I am] I finally feel short, for once in my life.  When they were young men growing up, I emphasized keeping their tempers in check.  If a five foot three inch man takes a swing at someone, he can do some damage.  If a six foot three inch teenager looses his temper and does the same and he has 220 pounds [100 kg] behind him, he could kill someone. 

What if that teenager is either taught to be a bully or is naturally a bastard?  What if he feels he has the right to do anything he wants?  What if he has the charisma to gather a group of young men who lean that way, are looking for a bit of excitement or can be bullied against their better natures to participate?  Who would they pick as victim?

Underestimated.

So let's go back to Karen Carpenter and Linda Ronstadt.  Why can female musicians be compared with each other but once they are compared with a male musician they always lose?  Is it better than it was 50 years ago?  I don't think the women are more talented now or had to fight any less to get where they are.  But there is a change in the public's attitude now towards musicians like Madonna, Gwen Stefani, Pink and others who are not just called bitches or worse because they are smart, talented and assert themselves.  What they've had to put up with privately in the professional and business side of their careers, I don't know.  Rock music, grunge, heavy metal are very male-centric in terms of who are the most well-know bands and artists.  At least it seems that way from the fan point of view.  Why is that so?  Can the male fans identify more with the male rock musicians?  Are more of the female fans interested in the male rock musicians than in being rock musicians themselves?  For that matter, there are probably more fans, male and female that want to be the love interest for rock musicians, female or male, than want to be rock musicians themselves.  In either case, there are fewer very well-know female rockers than male since 1950.  Are there fewer because it's harder for them to get noticed or because it's not ladylike to play rock music and/or have tattoos? Well it certainly wasn't in the 1950's.  

In 2021 I don't think I would tell Pink, Gwen Stefani or Madonna they aren't lady-like.  None of us would be able to keep a straight face.  The perception of what a lady is has changed in fifty years.  Slowly. There are alternative rock or post-grunge female artists.  You just have to dig a little to find them.  Don't believe me?  Here is the list called The Best Alternative Rock Bands Of 2020, Ranked [https://www.ranker.com/list/best-alternative-rock-bands-2020/jovaughnbrown]. Ranked by fans:

Twenty One Pilots

Fall Out Boy

Foo Fighters

Cage the Elephant

Green Day

The Killers

Tame Impala

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Weezer

The 1975

You have to get down to number 15 to find a female band member (Evanescence founded by Amy Lee and Ben Moody if you are wondering).  After that we have female alternative bands or bandmembers in Grouplove, HAIM, The Pretty Reckless and Airborne Toxic Event who had a female band member, Anna Bulbrook, on violin and backing vocals, until recently.  If you think I'm belaboring the point, I'll belabor a bit more.  I looked up Alternative Rock Greatest Hits on Spotify.  The bands listed are Vertical Horizon, Staind, Creed, Incubus, The Calling, Lifehouse, Sugar Ray, Dishwalla, Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind, Counting Crows, Hoobastank, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, Matchbox Twenty, 3 Doors Down, Hinder, Green Day, blink-182, Nickelback, Gorillaz.  Oh, Gorillaz has female bandmember called Noodle, but she is virtual and was created by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett.  But her voice is done by singer, songwriter and musician Miho Hatori.  I finally got down to Sixpence None the Richer with founding member Leigh Nash (vocals) and past member Tess Wiley (guitar).

O.K., that's enough whining.  I'll put my money where my mouth is, figuratively speaking, and do a blog on Alternative Rock bands with female band members.  But you know what I mean.  The bands they list are great, although the fact that Seether isn't on it takes the list down a notch in my mind.  The Spotify Seether Radio does have Sick Puppies, Evanescence and Halestorm. in the list of . . .  Well, I'm too tired looking up all the bands I don't know to count all the songs.  60 songs.  I lied, I may be tired but my slight OCD kicked in and I had to.  Oh, Marilyn Manson.  Just kidding!!

EM

PS. So what about Yoko Ono breaking up the Beatles?  This underestimates men.  Just as the, "I couldn't help myself." rape defense bullshit.  (Bear with me).  Both statements assume men have no control, are easily lead and can't make their own decisions.   The last "man" I know who has those characteristics, a least the first two, was three years old.  Stop blaming Yoko Ono!  If someone says that to me today, I might slap them.  Or ask Pink to do it.  She looks like she could.  Although I'm sure she's too much of a lady. 

em

Just Act Your Age

 16:61

My mother said once that she didn't feel like she was sixty. She looked in the mirror and thought, "Who's that old lady?"  "Oh, it's me. I still think I'm 16."  She didn't see herself.  Many, if not all of us, don't know what we look like or sound like.  The mirror is an opposite reflection of how people see you and unless you look in the mirror consistently or have a profession that requires you to know what you look like or what your body is doing, you don't really know.  I don't.  I'll be 61 my next birthday and I have no clue what that means.  When I was twenty, sixty was old.  When I was forty, sixty was not all that old.  The sixteen year old me would look at the sixty your old me and think, "She's like, a grandma!'  Better that sixteen year old doesn't know that I'm her.  Or she's me.  "Oh my God, what happened?  What stomped across your life to make you look like that?"  (Think Freaky Friday, "Oh, I'm like the Crypt Keeper")

Ten things when I was 16//61

1. I have great hair//I still have great hair [Grey hair acts weird, though]
2. My mom wants to control what I do and she's too old to know what I'm feeling like//My mom was only 49 when I was 16.  I wish I could talk to her, hug her and say "I love you".
3. Nobody lets me do anything//I don't want to do anything, I'm too tired, too afraid or don't do dumb-ass stuff any more.
4. My boyfriend is sexy and I want to be with him all the time//I wish I wanted to make love with my husband more. Do I think I'm too old and fat to deserve it?
5. I'll be glad when I'm an adult and can do what I want//I have too much to do and I never have time to do what I want.
6. Why doesn't my mom chill out about stuff?//Why doesn't my daughter chill out about stuff?
7. I'm depressed//I'm depressed.
8. I want to travel around singing and playing my songs for a living.  I want to be a famous writer//

Sub List Interlude: Why I'm Not a Rock Star

* I don't have a steel string guitar.

*I don't know how to play with a pick.

*I don't like being in big crowds of people.

*I have enough of an ego to either become a self-inflated dick with too many compliments or be crushed with criticism of my music and quit.

*I get motion sick.  So touring 18 months to 2 years traveling on buses and airplanes would be a puke fest.  And doing that head banging, flip your hair move?  I have the hair, but throwing up on stage is probably not a good performance piece.

 //I'm glad I'm not famous.  I like to stay home, in the quiet and only talk to people I want to.

                9. I wonder what it would be like to marry my boyfriend//I'm sure glad I married my husband                     and not all the boyfriends I had before him.   

             10. When will I be old enough?//How much time to I have left?

      Enough with the lists.  If you ignore the mirror, like I do, you can be any age you want.  Or any age you feel like.  Which can be a bad thing if you are  30 and you feel 60.  Or you feel like 20 and take your 60 year old body mountain climbing.  Not the Jack Lalanne 60.    The "I've ignored my weight hoping it would go away" and "sat on my ass" 60.  

I was riding in the car with my mom, sister and grandma, my mom's mom when from the backseat grandma started talking about when she was a nurse in 1916 or so.  When the male patients got frisky [i.e. got an erection] she'd just throw a wet, cold washcloth over the offending member.  My mom, who was driving, was visibly shocked.  "Mom!" she said, "You never said anything like that!".  My grandmother answered, "I'm 80 years old and I can say anything I want."  You go, girl!  I can understand that.  After being less than decorous with my language as a teenager, I went to the stage of having kids [be a good example] and working [over the decades from watch your mouth to don't let your mouth say anything that might possibly offend someone] I am to the "fuck it" stage of my decorum continuum.

Not that I disagree with the idea of treating people respectfully at work.  Harassment is bullying no matter how you dress it up.  If we need laws to keep bosses and coworkers from acting like assholes, which we do, the rest of us need to support that.  Over 100 years ago, the girls [and I do mean teenage girls] and women working in shops such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, would end up with bladder infections and UTIs rather than ask permission of the male supervisor to go to the bathroom.  The same supervisors that required "favors" for consideration.  The same shop that locked the doors to the stairs to prevent those women and girls from stealing materials and caused the deaths of over 100 people.  From the Wiki page: "Most of the victims were recent Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese."  [Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on March 25, 1911].  

Women and men have fought over the years to get to this stage at work that it is a fire-able offense to demand sexual favors for promotion, be allowed to constantly harass coworkers about their race, age, sex, sexual orientation and make them uncomfortable with jokes and comments that they find offensive.  If you find this blog offensive, you can just stop reading.  If I find someone on the radio offensive, I can use my finger, middle or otherwise, to switch channels.  But if I have to choose between putting up with a predator or bully at work or quit and starve, that is different.  That is not freedom of speech or expression.  That said, I have been extremely fortunate to have just worked with ladies and gentlemen over the years.  At least they kept it to themselves at work, if they weren't.

So I turned 60 and this year I've been questioning everything.  Do I want to be here?  Do I want to do this.  Is this me?  Yes, I did say 60, not 16.  I forgot something in my 16:61 list.  At 16, I could easily sleep 10 hours a night.  This year I suddenly started waking up at 3:15 a.m. and not being able to get back to sleep.  Or I don't give up until midnight and I wake up before 6 wondering what I'm missing.  Hasn't improved my punctuality at work to be up 3 hours before I have to be there, but what the hell.  I find something I want to do and suddenly I have 5 minutes to dress, pack a lunch and eat breakfast in the car.  I never make it in 5 minutes.  Do you know you're suppose to brush your teeth for 2 minutes?  That's almost half the time right there!   

So, I will be 61 my next birthday whether I'm o.k. with it or not.  Do I have a clue yet what that means?  No, I fucking don't.  Ask me when I turn 80.  Have I got some stories for you!

EM