Feel Anything Yet?
21 Oct 2011 12 Comments
in Art, religion Tags: artist trading cards, ATC, Christopher Hitchens, God, Harold Camping, religion, the Rapture, wackjobs
Harold Camping is at it again. Remember him from last May 21 when he said the end of the world was at hand? Well, he made a teensy miscalculation at that time, so he upped the date of the Rapture to today, Oct. 21.
“Thus we can be sure that the whole world, with the exception of those who are presently saved (the elect), are under the judgment of God, and will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on Oct. 21,” he says on the website.
I like this little poem (courtesy of Christopher Hitchens) that explains it all for us:
We are the pure and chosen few
And all the rest are damned
There’s room enough in hell for you
We don’t want heaven crammed.
Hold the Phone
11 Jun 2011 18 Comments
in Aging, Art, Family, Humor, kids, Life, Women Tags: Aging, Art, artist trading cards, ATC, Humor, iPhone, kids, pet peeves, rude people, technology, Walmart
A lot has been written about cellphone etiquette lately, but that’s not going to stop me from adding my two cents’ worth to the discussion. It has become a pet peeve of mine, coming in a close second to people who like to rant about their pet peeves.
I’m not the only one who’s exasperated with the increase in “techno-rudeness” encountered every day by folks all across the social strata.
My daughter and her family were at a restaurant with their kids, aged 10 and almost 9. When they go out as a family, they expect the occasion to be just that—a family one, where everyone is engaged with the other members of the group. At the very least, eye contact is expected to occur at some point during the meal. Conversation doesn’t have to be witty and sparkling, but actual utterances beyond the monosyllabic shouldn’t be the exception.
However, as my daughter told me later, they were taken aback by the family seated next to them; one that was quite similar in composition to theirs, with pre-teen kids and two parents.
The difference, though, was that everyone, including the kids, was on an iPhone busily texting or otherwise absorbed in their own electronic world. No one looked up at the other family members gathered around the table.
No warm smiles, no shared laughter. Nada. Zip. Bupkus.
This is what we have come to.
No man is an island, but you can certainly tune out any intimate contact with people and go there on your iPhone when it’s convenient.
The other thing about cellphones that makes me “peevish” is the sheer obliviousness by chronic users of this technology to their own rudeness.
I was at WalMart the other day (they’re going to set up a cot for me in the back since I’m there so often) because I had to return a toy I’d bought for my grandson.
It was a Ben 10 Ultimate Alien “Ultimatrix,” and unless you are up on the stuff 10-year-old boys covet, I won’t go into the details beyond saying that he’s desperately wanted one since last August when all the Christmas toys first made their appearance at WalMart.
At that time it cost twenty dollars, which is a lot of money for some plastic, but the toy manufacturers know what they’re doing and have us all by the habichuelas, so what’re you gonna do?
Last week they marked down the toy to just seven dollars. What a deal! My grandson had four dollars saved and I told him he could do some chores around the house and easily earn the other three dollars. The fly in the ointment here is that Mom and Dad have been trying to discourage rampant consumerism in their kids and have been keeping the lid down on toy consumption lately.
But, Memaw saw a way around that. I went back to WalMart the next day and bought the toy before it disappeared from the sale rack with the idea that I would hold it in safe keeping until my grandson could earn the dough to pay for it.
It turns out, the next day my grandson phoned me and in an excited voice told me he’d done a lot of yard work for his folks and earned the money for his prize, which he had purchased himself. I was happy for him and didn’t tell him or his parents that I’d done an end run around them and had bought one too.
Everybody wins!
So, I found myself at the returns desk at WalMart behind the most obnoxious woman who was loudly talking on her cellphone while she was trying to conduct a transaction with the patient woman behind the counter.
I mean, she was jabbering into the phone while she was looking straight at the WalMart lady, Rosa, an Hispanic woman in her fifties.
But it was like Rosa was invisible!
To her credit, Rosa just kept a neutral expression on her face and carried out what she had to do for the bitch, occasionally trying to get a word in edgewise to complete the deal. Unbelievable.
When it was my turn, I thought Rosa deserved to be treated like a human being, so when she asked for the reason for the return I briefly told her the story of my grandson earning the money himself without any help from me.
Rosa smiled a warm smile and told me that when her son was five, her sister had a house cleaning company and had offered him a job of picking up fruit off the ground at one of the houses. She paid him $20 for his work and he was very proud of the money he made.
Then, he did something extraordinary for a five-year-old. He told his mother he was going to take her out to dinner with the money. And he did, proudly squiring his mother at the restaurant.
Rosa went on to say that now he’s 28, a Marine, college educated and on his way to obtaining a doctorate degree. Eventually he wants to work for the CIA. She is so proud of him and I told her she has every right to be.
It was a wonderful story and the woman who had been standing behind us said she couldn’t help overhear it and it had given her goosebumps.
I left feeling really good for my grandson, for Rosa and her terrific grown son, and for the human connection I’d unexpectedly made that day.
And all because I chose to treat someone with the respect they deserve.
As the old phone ads used to say: “Reach out and touch someone.”
Hold On, Medicare…I’m a Comin’!
04 Jun 2011 42 Comments
in Aging, Art, Humor, Life, Nostalgia, Women Tags: Aging, artist trading cards, ATC, birthdays, Humor, Nostalgia, one year closer to Medicare, Paul McCartney
In honor of my birthday yesterday, here’s Paul McCartney’s “When I’m 64.” Which I am.
When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me,
Will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?oo oo oo oo oo oo oo
oooo
You’ll be older too, (ah ah ah ah ah)
And if you say the word,
I could stay with you.I could be handy mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride.Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight,
If it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera, Chuck, and DaveSend me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, Wasting Away.Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?Whoo!
I’m Hip, Man…
27 May 2011 29 Comments
in Art, dieting, Humor, Women Tags: Aging, artist trading cards, ATC, hips, Humor, it's not my fault I have big bones
Researchers have found that the width of the pelvis, the distance between the hip bones and the diameter of the hip bones all increased as people got older, even after people maxed out height-wise.
“I think it’s a fairly common human experience that people find themselves to be wider at the age of 40 or 60 then they were at 20,” study researcher Dr. Laurence E. Dahners, a professor in the orthopedics department at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, said in a statement.
For years, people thought the widening was because of an increase in body fat, but the new findings show that pelvic growth may lead to an increase in waist size as people get older — and not just because they put on more weight, Dahners said.
The pelvic width of the oldest people in the study (ages 70 to 79) was, on average, about an inch larger than the youngest people (ages 20 to 29), according to the study. That translates to about a three-inch increase in waist size between someone age 20 and someone age 79.The new study was published May 25 in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research.
Drenched in Tears and Rolling in Dough
25 May 2011 29 Comments
in Art, ramblings Tags: a sucker born every minute, artist trading cards, ATC, money, sad stories, scams
This email was in my inbox this morning. I thought it was too good not to pass along, if only for its audacity and tragic, literary overtones.
I’ve highlighted one word that leaped out at me in particular because of its jarring juxtaposition with the overall humanitarian tone of the plea.
The sender doesn’t disclose the country of origin so where, in your opinion, do you think it came from?
Beloved,
I am drenched with tears while writing this short message to you. It was
heartbreaking news to me few days ago when my doctor notified me on
complications on my health condition which he officially made known to me. He
further stressed that the complication I had in my human mechanism as a result
of a secondary liver cancer which have destroyed all the organs in my body
system. According to him, he said that this complication will lead to my
imminent death since no medication can alleviate the high system of deformation
I am encountering at this time in my system.In the view of the above, I am in quest to find a trustworthy and upright
individual whom I will entrust the sum of $4.8 million USD and this has led me
to you. The said fund was acquired by me as an inheritance from my adopted
father who died as a result of political crisis which erupted among his most
political associate and business clique.I will make available to you all information and officially authorize document
which will endorse your claim as the beneficiary to the fund in question in the
finance house where the fund was lodged by my adopted father. I have mapped out the modalities on how the fund will be apportioned. 35% of the principal amount of the money will be dished out to you while 65% will be allotted to any charitable or orphanage home of your preference.My motive to dispense the funds to a charity and orphanage home is that I grew
up as an orphan and do not have any heirs hitherto.Upon your acceptance to this proposal kindly get back to me.
Best Regards
Cecilia Frazier
Nevermind…
21 May 2011 22 Comments
in Art, Humor, religion Tags: artist trading cards, ATC, Harold Camping, Humor, idiots, Rapture, religion
Harold Camping--Doomsday Predictor
Middle School Makeover
29 Apr 2011 20 Comments
in Aging, Art, Humor, Nostalgia, Women Tags: 1950's, artist trading cards, ATC, body image, cooking, food, Home Economics, Humor, Junior High, Nostalgia, teachers
All of the hoopla surrounding the Royal Wedding in England and the subsequent extreme scrutiny of the attendees’ attire and figures reminded me of my own first encounter with a body image critic at the young age of twelve or thirteen and what it meant to be a girl in the late 1950′s.
Here’s a post I wrote about it in this blog’s infancy:
“Does This Teacher Make My Butt Look Big?”
The phantom of Miss Elwell still follows me about, even after fifty years.
It was 1959 and I had just entered junior high school. In those days, a girl’s highest aspiration was to become a wife and mother. This may not have been stated outright, but it certainly was implied by society and the general culture of the times.
The curricula for seventh-grade girls included a year of “Home Economics.” This entailed a semester of cooking instruction and a semester of sewing. Having just come from a previous school year where I had excelled at touch football with the boys at recess, this was not welcome news. I could kick and pass a perfect spiral and, because the boys were still on the shrimpy side at that age, I had reigned supreme. Now I was supposed to be a lady? I was completely thrown for a loop.
The Home Ec. teacher was a rather portly woman in her 50′s by the name of Miss Frances Elwell. She was charged with the formidable task of trying to whip all this green talent into some kind of reasonably feminine shape by year’s end.
I never did quite figure out why this domestic onslaught had to be imposed on the seventh graders and not the more “mature” (relatively speaking) ninth graders. I guess the school board felt that we were more malleable at that age, before we got any further into the smart-ass teen years where it would be next to impossible to get any kind of response out of us beyond a sneer.
By the luck of the draw, I had been assigned the cooking section for my first semester. We were divided up into groups and given our own little versions of the Happy Homemaker kitchen. No Easy-Bake ovens here. This was the real deal.
Thinking back, I was so oblivious to everything of a domestic nature at that age. My Mother didn’t make me do any housework at home under the assumption that ”You’ll be doing it for the rest of your life” so why bother with it now? The fallacy in all that was how will you know what to do when the time comes if nobody shows you how to do it beforehand?
Consequently, my Mother did quite a bit of my homework for me for cooking class. Make that just about all. One important assignment was to create a place setting for an imaginary individual whom Miss Elwell had randomly chosen for each of us. My Mother and I slaved over every detail. Well, she slaved and I watched her slave.
When I presented the setting to Miss Elwell, I closely watched her face for some sign of benevolence. She critically observed the place setting before her and looked at me with twinkling eyes. Then she said, “Do you really think an elderly bachelor would want a pink paper parasol in his juice glass?”
If I knew then what I know now, I would have responded with:
“Yes, if he were Truman Capote.”
The actual cooking assignments in class were ones that I had to wing on my own. Only one of those stands out in my memory. (There may have been successes, but I doubt it.) We had to bake muffins, which sounds easy but can be very tricky. You’re not supposed to over beat the batter because that can cause too much air to become incorporated into the mix, creating all manner of havoc and the end of the world, apparently.
After my batch came out of the oven, I nervously took my burnt offering up to the altar of Miss Elwell and waited for the verdict. She broke one open and studied it like an oracle examining the entrails of a goat. Then she pronounced,
“These have tunnels so large you could drive a truck through them.”
I mentally made a note to look for a husband who was wheat intolerant.
Having gone down in flames in the cooking department (figuratively, not literally) I had the sewing semester to redeem myself. It turns out I was even less adept at this than I was in the culinary arts.
My Mother, of course, was a veritable whiz at sewing. She made most of my clothes for school and really knew her way around a sewing machine. I viewed it as an instrument of torture. So, again, my Mother commandeered my sewing projects while I wandered off and watched American Bandstand on t.v.
The main project for the semester was a circle skirt or full skirt. It should have been a fairly straight-forward task but, again, nothing came easy for me in Miss Elwell’s bastion of the feminine arts. I couldn’t find a pattern that fit me. My Mother had to do a lot of cutting and pinning and sweating to get the thing to correspond to my dimensions. All those years of being a tomboy had given me an athletic build. Not good in the world of Elwell.
So when I went before her with the finished product, it was pretty obvious that my Mother had cranked it out. I couldn’t do work like that and Miss Elwell knew it. She gave it a cursory glance and said simply “C,” for my grade. Which was fine with me because I just wanted the ordeal over with.
But when I said something about not being able to find a pattern to fit me, Miss Elwell uttered the words that have stuck with me to this very day, some fifty years later. Words that have haunted me in every dressing room of any clothing store I’ve ever been in and before every mirror where I have stood and contemplated my visage.
Sitting at her desk she looked up at me with those twinkling eyes and said,
“You have an oddball shape.”
This was spoken by a woman who was as wide as she was tall.
There was one happy memory from that year of living femininely. I had to sew a shank button on a piece of fabric, which meant sewing the button on loosely and then wrapping the thread many times around the bottom of the button to make it more secure. I tentatively placed it in Miss Elwell’s hands and waited for the usual. Instead, she looked at me with those twinkling eyes, smiled and said “A.”
I may be an oddball, but I wouldn’t be an old maid after all.
This ATC’s for you, Miss Elwell.
Up and At ‘Em!
23 Apr 2011 17 Comments
in Aging, Biology, Humor, marriage, Women Tags: Art, artist trading cards, ATC, bathtubs, Cialis, Humor, husbands, libido, marriage, sex, Viagra, wives
Here’s an excerpt from an interesting article I found at MSNBC.com on the perils of ED drugs like Viagra and Cialis, written by Judith Newman of Prevention magazine.
She explores these drugs from the viewpoint of women on the…er…”receiving” end of their benefits.
(I always knew those bathtubs were the Devil’s playground!)
The problem can be especially daunting for older women who are widowed or divorced or just beginning to date after years of being alone or with one man. Certainly this was the case for Marjorie P., a 60-something woman who complained about the drugs on a 50+ Web site:
“Men have been saved from their middle-age sexual issues by Viagra and Cialis. They can be thirty again, while I have to deal with the sexual issues of being my age. It’s put the world on ’tilt.’”
Andrea D., a twice-divorced physician from Santa Monica, CA, and an over-50 dater, put it more bluntly. “Viagra has been liberating for men, but unless a woman is taking hormone therapy, she may have vaginal dryness and really not be that interested in the kind of driving, pounding intercourse he’s now capable of.”
There is also fallout from the erroneous belief that Viagra causes not just greater blood flow but also greater desire. The hormone testosterone is the driving force behind libido; a man with little or no testosterone will not have any desire to have sex, Viagra or no.
Moreover, even with normal amounts of testosterone, “Viagra does not just instantly give a man an erection,” says Abraham Morgentaler, MD, associate clinical professor of urology at Harvard Medical School and author of The Viagra Myth.
“You have to be in a sexual situation, you need to have desire and intent, in order for the drug to work.”
Dr. Morgentaler tells the story of a patient who was very upset because Viagra didn’t do the trick for him.
“He said, ‘Doc, I followed your directions exactly. I took the pill an hour in advance. Then I watched a baseball game on TV and waited.’ The man’s wife was in the other room, waiting too; neither of them realized that the drug would be effective only if they were together, doing what couples do.”
Adds Andrea, whose own Viagra dating experiences and the experiences of similarly aged friends have ranged from excellent to Emergency Care Needed:
“You have to be crystal clear about what works for you and what doesn’t. Because even with someone you really, really adore … sometimes you just want to get back to reading your book!”
Your thoughts, ladies? (And gents.)
Age: It’s All (Your) Relative
26 Mar 2011 31 Comments
in Aging, Art, Family, Humor, Life, Women Tags: Aging, artist trading cards, ATC, birthdays, Humor, husbands, mothers, nursing homes, Roseanne
When I spoke with my son a few days before his 45th birthday last week, he seemed somewhat bummed out by the prospect of his advancing age.
I tried to reassure him that, from my perspective of 63 (soon to be 64), he was a young whippersnapper. To me, 45 is still youthful.
I don’t think I convinced him.
Two days ago my husband had his 75th birthday. He’s not big on celebrating his natal day either. He discourages any big show of gifts and he suggested that everyone just ignore that date on the calendar.
He felt it should be skipped over for lack of interest—his.
But I couldn’t do that, of course, so I got him a funny card from me and the cats, and our daughter here in town got him three packages of his favorite treat this time of year—Easter Peeps. (Those things make my teeth hurt just looking at them. Everyone knows chocolate is the only real candy, folks.)
In an odd juxtaposition with my telling my son he’s still (relatively) young, my husband’s 92 year-old mother phoned to wish her first born son a happy 75th.
Now, that has to be a weird feeling for her. How many mothers live long enough (and have their children young enough) to be able to wish them that?
Not many, I’d wager.
Last night on an episode of “Roseanne,” her mother, Beverly, is considering moving to a retirement condo. She’s 63.
Jackie is all for it because it will get their mother out of their hair, but Roseanne is oddly reluctant. The condo is set up for older residents, with a medical alert button on a wall in every room and the option of moving to an adjacent nursing home should the need arise.
Roseanne tells Jackie that it makes her really uncomfortable to consider their mother’s death.
Jackie: “Come on, Roseanne! We’ve been planning her death for years!”
Roseanne: “That’s plotting, Jackie, not planning.”
Beverly has her way and moves into the condo without Roseanne’s blessing. But Roseanne drops by with a housewarming gift and the two have a chat.
Roseanne asks her mother how old she feels inside, since she and Jackie had that conversation earlier.
(Roseanne had said she feels like she’s still sixteen. Jackie started to say “Twenty-…” and then amends that to ”Twelve—or maybe eight.”)
Beverly is perplexed: “I feel like I’m 63. I feel like a 63 year-old woman.”
After a bit more discussion about the retirement condo and the looming nursing home, Beverly hugs Roseanne and tells her not to worry.
Beverly: “I may be 63, but I don’t feel like I’m old.”
Roseanne: “Yes, you are. And you’re draggin’ me with you.”
Crouching Tiger Mom, Hidden Agenda?
18 Mar 2011 18 Comments
in Family, kids, Life, Women Tags: Amy Chua, ATC, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, kids, mothers, Parenting
I just finished reading “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” by Amy Chua and I have to admit I have conflicting feelings about it.
My own kids are grown and most likely irreparably damaged at this point, so I didn’t read the book to get any great insights into parenting techniques.
I’m just joking about the damage part—my son has a Ph.D in neuroanatomy and is a successful magazine editor and publisher and my daughter is a furniture designer who’s had her home featured in national magazines and on television, so I guess I didn’t screw them up too badly.
(I also didn’t have anything to do with their career choices, so all the praise for their successes should go to them.)
I try to keep my nose out of their business when it comes to raising their children. I figure they have every right to louse their kids up as much as I did. Dr. Phil (sorry about bringing him into this) says that parents do the best they can “with what they knew when they knew it.”
In other words, we don’t always have access to the right information all the time as parents and often we learn more in hindsight when it’s too late to apply that knowledge.
Amy Chua’s book chronicles the early upbringing of her now teenage daughters. She mercilessly makes them practice the piano and violin and will not accept any grade below an A in anything except gym and drama. She puts forth the not unheard of premise that Asian (in her case, Chinese) parents create better outcomes with their children overall than Western parents do–particularly American ones. This is not something new, but the look into her family life with all its pressures (and triumphs) is pretty eye-opening.
The author has undergone quite a bit of backlash over her book, which she calls a memoir and not a “how-to” book. I agree with her on that. Not everyone comes from a family that has the monetary resources she does (she’s a Yale law professor and lecturer and her husband is also a Yale law professor and fiction writer). She spends oodles of money on lessons and anything that will help her children be the absolute best in everything they undertake—whether they like it or not.
This is where the backlash comes in. It’s one thing to encourage your kids to do their best and keep on trying at something like piano or violin when they want to chuck it in, but it’s entirely another thing to make them practice for six hours at a time until they get a certain piece “correct” while leaving teeth marks in the wood of the piano over middle “C.”
She berates the kids unrelentingly, telling them that she’s only doing it because she loves them and wants them to succeed.
At one point the youngest daughter rebels and refuses to do anything her mother wants her to do—including play the violin, which she has become extremely good at and actually loves. She feels that her mother just wants her children to be the best so that she (the mother) will look good.
Granted, the kids are amazingly talented and very poised for their ages, but one wonders if it was all worth the price they had to pay by not having a more “normal” American childhood. We’ll have to wait and see because at the publishing of the book the oldest was just sixteen and the youngest about thirteen or fourteen.
I think back to my own upbringing and wish that my mother had been more encouraging to me. She usually went with the assumption that I wasn’t capable enough to do something, whatever it was, for a variety of reasons—I was too young or just didn’t measure up to the task at hand somehow.
Now, looking back, I think she essentially wanted to keep me dependent on her because that was her “job”—being a mom.
When I was grown and already had two kids of my own, I finally got a chance to go to college and ended up getting accepted into the dental hygiene program at our local community college. I went up against 250 other applicants for a slot in a class that would be limited to just 24 students. I got in on the first try.
My mother, upon hearing that I was accepted, said to me “If it gets too hard for you, you just quit.” I guess it was her way of giving permission to fail, but that wasn’t exactly what I was hoping to hear at that moment—more like “Congratulations, that’s really great!”
Now that I’ve thought about it, I’m pretty sure I was a threat to the way she had lived her life as a stay-at-home mother. She initially didn’t even want me to apply to the school because she said that at the end of the two year program ”You’ll be thirty years old!”
I came back with, ”At the end of two years I’ll be thirty anyway, so I might as well be thirty with a degree in dental hygiene.”
Parenting can be really complicated.
It’s too bad we can’t know what we didn’t know when we didn’t know it.
Where’s Dr. Phil when we need him?
Your 2 Cents