Take Two!: Cliche of the Year: Nowhere to Go But Up

Okay, I wrote this post about how stupid most year-end wrap-ups are and etc, and it got a bit downer, so I erased it. I now present to you Stuff that at Least Cannot Happen in 2005!

1. Smirking Monkey cannot be elected again! Hooray! And at least he'll have to deal with the enormous messes he's made out of just about everything, despite the fact that nobody in America (with any sway, that is) will ever hold him accountable. Hooray!

2. Most likely, no more tsunamis for a while.

3. Republicans are finding it more and more difficult to hide their true nature.

4. My grandma cannot get any more evil! (God, I hope...) (Yeah, let's just scratch that one. Let's say) I can no longer be astonished at the depth of my grandma's evilness!


Yeah. Have an awesome New Year.

Beware the Chattering Cyclops

Well, after digging out a path through the parking lot for my wee little car, and then having four very strong men (three of whom appeared randomly at exactly the right time) push while I rocked the clutch in order to escape from the aggressive puddle at the end of the drive, the snow plow came. I had already missed work, so I headed home for what is technically the birth of our savior but is more, practically speaking, a fake tree and a gift exchange.

There was the normal punching, yelling, baking, barking, and general rowdiness that apparently nobody is going to grow out of. This was the second year in a row we've had snow, which was certainly a nice touch, but it all felt so commercial leading up to the day itself that it was hard to feel like it was real.

Going home so often feels like waiting for a very exciting train that never shows up. Though it's not as bad as that makes it sound.

Flood

We got 15 inches of snow today. There is currently, surrounding our (town)house, a pile of snow 15 inches high for as far as the eye can see. This is freaking awesome. The local news weather people are beside themselves, and for once they have a reason to be. We never get 15 inches of snow.

My jaw's been broken/my heart is wrapped in ice

Hey, remember when I posted about my grandma finding out something that none of us told her? And joked that if she had us bugged, we'd be screwed?

Well, she did. And we are.

My grandmother has been intercepting a portion of my mother's e-mail and reading it. She's been doing this for almost exactly seven months now, as far as we can tell. My mom knew that her e-mail was screwed up, because people would mention e-mails they'd sent her and she wouldn't have gotten them, but we found out yesterday morning that they weren't just disappearing into cyberspace -- they were being pulled off the server by my grandmother, almost always in the wee hours of the morning.

She found out about the first thing that I mentioned, as well as several other pieces of news that family members had but hadn't made completely public yet. And she clearly found out about the mini-quilt that I made her as a surprise. She acted surprised. Mom and I went through all the e-mail I'd sent to her, and figured out which ones had never made it there; we looked at what they said and put several things together.

I've known for three years about how fundamentally dishonest -- no, how fundamentally maliciously mendacious -- she is. She's a liar, and has been as long as my mother and aunt have known her. She lies for the pleasure of lying, and sneaks around in order to gain information and power, and in order to try to turn others against each other and thus toward her.

She's violated my mother's privacy before. So much so that to speak of "my mother's privacy" barely means anything. But this is the first time, as far as I know, that she's violated mine. She intercepted at least seven messages from me to my mom.

I've always been sympathetic to my mom's situation with regards to her. I've tried to imagine what it feels like, but the difference between imagining and knowing is like the difference between imagining what cotton candy tastes like and actually tasting it. Now I can empathize, to a small degree.

Because of my grandmother (and grandfather), my mom raised all her kids with the utmost respect of our privacy, and our right to have our own lives. So in a lot of ways, I'm really lucky to have gotten this far in life without feeling violated in this way, and I owe that to my mom.


I'm also starting to understand better the extent to which my grandmother lies. She doesn't tell lies -- she acts them out, expresses emotion around them, shapes her whole daily experience around them. She gasped when I showed her the quilt, when she'd already heard several things about it, including the design I was using. She knows about several things we've been keeping from her, acting like she doesn't, and baiting us, trying to get us to slip up. She'll say things that she knows aren't true in hopes that we'll correct her with the real information. She has actually repeated things that my mom said in e-mails to me, saying that Mom had said them to her. While it was uncanny at the time, it is now sad and grotesque.

Instead of changing the password of my mom's e-mail account, or confronting her, or passive-agressively confronting her through an e-mail we know she'll intercept, we are embarking on what we've termed a "disinformation campaign." She wants to read our e-mails? She's welcome to, although we're not to blame if much of them turn out to be fiction.

It's already in motion. She's already intercepted a creative e-mail. She thinks we're clueless. And when I talked to her on the phone tonight, I think I got a taste of what her existence is like. She thinks she knows so many things I don't. She thinks she's toying with me, controlling me, spying on me. She thinks that she can be chipper and pleasant and that I am none the wiser.

Well, unless your Tennessee accent makes you sound like a robot, I really think it's the phone line.

Has humankind gotten thirty times more annoying and nonsensical than when I left retail? Observe:

Customer: Yeah, I need these filled.

Me: Okay, it'll be a few minutes.

[Pharmacy bustles with the filling of the customer's prescriptions.]

Me: Alright, I just need you to sign here at the bottom.

Customer: [Completely ignoring my request for a signature] Hey, I'm supposed to have a $10 copay.

Me: [Looking at the receipt] Oh, okay... Do you have a new insurance card?

Customer: Yeah, here.

Me: Okay, it'll just be a few minutes while we get that entered into the computer.


And observe:


Customer: I need these prescriptions filled.

Me: Okay, it'll just be a few minutes.

[Pharmacy bustles with the filling of the customer's prescriptions]

Me: Alright, I just need you to sign down here.

Customer: Okay. ... Hey, these are for Robby my son, not Robby my husband.

Me: Oh, okay. It'll be another minute while we switch that.


I cannot even tell you how many times a person comes in, requests something, watches us do it wrong, and then after we're finished, tells us the information that would have helped us out if they'd just given it to us in the first goddamn place. Why do people do this? How in the hell are we supposed to know these things? This happens at least three times a day. AND IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY. I think I'm going to make a sign.

Dear Customers,

Please don't be jerks.

Sincerely,
The Management

Dancin'; Romancin'

The following post contains:
a) Exhortation to embrace the no-repeat workday
b) Observations about family-friendly radio
c) A random story about my preschool Christmas musical

a) Don't It Always Seem to Go that You Don't Know What You Got 'Til It's Gone: The No-Repeat Workday.

The next time you, reader, are driving along in your car listening to the radio and you hear the dj say something chirpy about the No-Repeat Workday, and you may, as I used to, scoff at this silly notion, I urge you to step back. Relax a second. Have you really thought about what you condemn? Do you understand what it's like to lack the No-Repeat Workday?

Because I do.

When I worked at the first pharmacy, through high school and part of college, the radio was on constantly and the music was pretty damn cheesy. It was a station that played "soft rock," "great hits from the '70s, '80s, and today." This stuff was the kind of bad that is simultaneously awesome for its sheer badness. Sade, "I Just Called To Say I Love You," Stephen Bishop, Roberta Flack and Maxi Priest, "Little Pink Houses." Once, they played Jann Arden's "Insensitive" four times during my 8-hour shift. Now, when Other and I hear one such song, he'll turn to me and say, "Is this a pharmacy song?" And dude - it totally will be. The No-Repeat Workday is not really a necessity, because there is oodles of this crap. You could play every song back to back without repeats and it would stretch on for months.

At the pharmacy I work at now, however, there is a slightly different clientele, and the constantly-on radio station is a contemporary country station, sans the No-Repeat Workday. And apparently there are only about 30 contemporary country songs in existence right now. The building is set up a little differently, so that the sound doesn't really carry much into the pharmacy itself. But an especially twangy song (yes - an especially twangy *country* song) tends to come across better. And thus I can count on hearing Alan Jackson's "Remember When" at least twice, often three times, in four hours.

I'm not one of these country-hatas; when you ask me what kind of music I like, I don't answer, "Oh, everything but country and rap," 'everything' meaning "Crappy Top-40 songs and 'Alternative,' but I haven't figured out that there aren't only three kinds of music, or four, maybe, counting classical, and I'll listen to that occasionally too, to act cultured." That's not what I'm about.

However. I hate "Remember When." I hate "Man, I Feel Like A Woman." I hate some other twangy-ass song that I can't remember right now because I have "I Just Called to Say I Love You" in my head, that I always think is "Remember When" when I hear it. HATE.

I probably wouldn't even hate them if I hadn't heard them [doing some math] Good CHRIST. Assuuming that I hear it an average of 2 times per four-hour shift (which is entirely accurate), I have heard the song "Remember When" 404 times so far. I ask you, can any song withstand 404 repititions over three months?

In conclusion, No-Repeat Workdays=good.

b) Thanks a Whole Hell of A Lot, Janet Jackson's Nipple: Family-Friendly Radio

The aforementioned Warm 98 has overthrown its traditional catalog for the festive month of December and is playing all Christmas Carols. As I sat in Jersey Mike's Sub Shop, I heard Nat King Cole's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," and it was great. "Wow," I thought to myself. "I do not hate this version of this rather tired Christmas Carol." So, later in the day, hoping to hear it again (for, alas, Warm 98 is not about the No-Repeat Christmas Carol Day) I tuned in.

Now, while I have a pretty strong tolerance for just about any kind of music, I cannot stand the radio itself, unless we're talking about NPR. The commercials make me want to blow my brains out or drive into a tree or a semi or something, so it's better if I just avoid it. For instance, in my quest to hear Nat King Cole again, I heard this commercial about bariatric surgery, the logic of which went something like, "Hey, being good-looking won't make you successful, but you can be good-looking with our help, fatty, and then you'll be successful!" Then it went on to say, "Bariatric surgery isn't just for complete fatties -- some of our most satisfied customers weighed 125 pounds before surgery!"

Considering that this is a serious digression, I'll stop soon, but I just want to say: I weigh what I should weigh right now, and I've been feeling pretty good about that, despite the fact that I'm not skinny-skinny. And I've been feeling good about the fact that I've been feeling good about it. So I don't need no damn radio fuckhead trying to get me to feel bad about my body.

Anyway, sorry. So I'm listening to Warm 98, and I hear the funniest song ever: "Same Old Lang Syne" by Dan Fogelberg. (Sound clip available here. It's more of a ballad, really, and it's all about implied pre-/extra-marital sex and drinking and driving.

In conclusion: we should write angry letters to Warm 98 about how not family-friendly they are, despite their repeated (I'm talking three times a commercial break) claims to the contrary.

c) And they called her [tap, tap] Christmas Carol/There wasn't a Christmas song she couldn't sing: Disaster Onstage

When I was in preschool, there were three girls in my class and about 15 boys. Yes, yikes. Anyhow, we girls got to do a dance all by ourselves, and our number involved "raggedy" costumes - patched skirts, white shirts, and handkerchiefs tied on our heads to complete the look. As we were dancing around and singing and tapping our tambourines, I looked over and realized my friend Allison was in some dire straits, her handkerchief having fallen down over her face. She was staggering around something awful. I didn't know what to do.

In conclusion: don't you wish you could get your hands on that home video. (Oh yes there is a video.)

Love Fest '04

There is something very nice about being in an office on a long corridor, when many of the doors are open and there are students and voices and footsteps, people just buzzing along in their lives.

Why, I'd be crazy not to!

It's a balmy 65 degrees, and I'm sitting in a sub shop enjoying Warm 98's All-Christmas-Carols-All-This-Month extravaganza, specifically JT's rendition of some carol or another. Southern California? Try southern Ohio.

The weather today is weirdness, schizophrenic. One half of the sky is glory and puffy clouds and angels singing praises unto the Lord, and the other side is storminess, death, and penance unleashed upon the wretched sinners. And it's really windy.

Don't be mislead by my newfound wealth; my core identity has not changed from when we lived near each other.

Today I found midwestgrrl, which I may have found before. then forgotten about... but anyhow, it's great.

I recently finished reading David Starkey's Six Wives: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and it was really good. Some of the political wrangling was a little difficult to follow, but I learned several things from the book.

1) The word "sad" used to mean "wise." Ignorance is bliss, of course, but the flip side is (and apparently has been for a while) that knowledge is depressing. This reminds me of Jonathan Franzen's essay on "depressive realism," or the sense that a person can be rationally justify being depressed, considering the state of the world. The state of the environment and environmental legislation alone makes me feel this way.

2) Catherine Parr, the sixth wife of Henry VIII, was named after Katherina of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife, who was her godmother. Creepy!

3) "duckies" is a 16th-century slang term for breasts.

4) It's really funny to think about a king talking about "duckies" and thinking about breasts.

5) Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's fourth wife, was from Germany and he never liked her because she failed to participate in what she should have known were the games of courtly love. Poor Anne of Cleves.

6) Henry VIII actually was capable of having male children, which I hadn't realized; he had several bastard boys and a legitimate son who lived until the age of 15.

7) Once Henry wrested absolute power and absolute allegience from the papacy in Rome, it was impossible for him to logically establish absolute allegience as the head of the English church, because he had proven that what appeared to be unbreakable absolutes actually were not. This, I believe, opened the door to much of the further Reformation that was to come in England.

8) Every summer, the king and a group of people would travel the countryside and observe their kingdom. This was called the "Progress."

9) Heh, duckies.