Tag Archives: personal

All in the (video) family

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My dad didn’t like All in the Family. I think he and Archie had way too much in common, and seeing his own opinions laughed at rubbed him the wrong way. So we only watched it occasionally in the first season, or so. Usually when Dad wasn’t around.

I had mixed feelings about the show overall, and about some of the characters. Except, of course, Edith. As portrayed by Jean Stapleton, Edith Bunker was the sweet, ditzy, long-suffering wife of the unapologetic racist, conservative, and working class Archie. Edith was adorable. She was the favorite aunt everyone wished they had in their family.

By the time my folks divorced, All in the Family had been the highest rated network show for a few seasons, and the network had started broadcasting reruns of early seasons on weekday afternoons (it didn’t enter syndication for a few more years). I was able to see a lot more of the show, sometimes watching episodes with my grandmother, who loved Edith as much as I did.

Although the show was a licensed Americanization of the British series, Til Death Do Us Part, Stapleton played Edith much more naive and happy than the character from the British series. I’ve heard some people disparage the show in comparison to the British original, referring to Edith as an example of “typical American dumbing-down.”

They may be right about the show over all, but they’re wrong about Edith. Edith was ditzy, naïve, gullible, and clearly not a rocket scientist, but she wasn’t stupid. Ms Stapleton played her as warm, loving, and trusting. She was gullible because she saw the best in people, assuming that they were trustworthy until shown otherwise.

This was probably best demonstrated in an episode that a lot of people hate, “Edith’s 50th Birthday,” in which Edith is taken captive in her own home, and nearly raped in front of the audience. Edith eventually fights off the attack with a flaming birthday cake (seriously, and it wasn’t in a funny way). All the ways Edith tried to talk her attacker out of it, how she reacted to his threats, his gun, and finally, as the the birthday cake in the oven burns and fills the house with smoke, convincing the rapist to let her pull the cake from the oven, which allows her the smash the thing into his face and chase him out.

I saw the actor who played the rapist, David Dukes, on a talk show some years later, where he described the episode. The show was filmed before a live studio audience, at the time, and he said that the audience was clearly shocked when his character took Edith hostage, but they were still thinking that, since the show was a comedy, things were going to turn to slapstick at any moment. There was a point, when he had Edith up against a piece of furniture and he was pulling some of his clothes off, that the audience realized that this was serious. “There was a collective gasp,” he said, “which immediately changed into a growling. And I thought they might storm the stage and try to kill me.”

The birthday cake smoke appeared at that point, and moments later the audience was cheering very wildly as Edith scalded his face. He said he hadn’t really understood that Edith Bunker was “everyone’s favorite aunt” in the collective imagination before that moment.

And the problem was, he said, that because they filmed before a live audience, they also recorded every episode twice, each time in front of a different audience. “So, after genuinely fearing for my life, I had to turn around and do it again.”

He said he still occasionally received hate mail, “some of it with rather serious-sounding threats” years afterward.

After portraying “everyone’s favorite aunt” for over 200 episodes spanning nine seasons of All in the Family and one season of the spin-off, Archie Bunker’s Place, winning three Emmys and two Golden Globes, Stapleton thought Edith’s potential had been reached, and felt there was no story left to tell of her. When Stapleton asked Norman Lear, the creator and producer of the series, to kill Edith off, Lear was noticeably upset. Stapleton is said to have said, “Norm, she’s just a fictional character.” Lear responded, it is said with a tear in his eye, “No, she’s not.”

Before playing Edith, Stapleton played numerous roles in Broadway musicals and plays, appeared in several movies, and play dozens of guest starring roles in television. She continued to appear on TV and in movies for years afterward. But for many of us, she will always be Edith, the person we all wished we knew.

After news of Jean Stapleton’s death at the age of 90 on Friday, I noticed a sudden spike of traffic on this blog, all going to a post from last August called, “Maybe it was the heavy syrup?” I was referencing an episode of the series. I suspect people were looking for a clip. So, here’s one from the episode in question, “Edith’s Accident”:

The boy who knew too much

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Yesterday, a bunch of people linked to this article about Daniel Dobson, the son of a prominent fundamentalist preacher, talking about being a gay Christian. One of the places that linked to it also linked to this blog post by Ryan Barnhart, which sort of goes off on a tangent. But I understand why, because Dobson’s interview sent me on an even more meandering trip down memory lane.

During high school, I joined an interdenominational evangelical teen touring choir. I’d been raised in evangelical churches in several much smaller towns. Moving halfway across the continent to a bigger town had me feeling more adrift and out of place than before, so an organized religious musical activity was a welcome refuge.

I’d also spent my middle school years discovering beyond a doubt that I wasn’t straight, while experiencing entirely new levels of bullying. I was desperate to get rid of those feelings, so being confronted with a way to do “god’s work” seemed like the solution to all of my problems. Here were a bunch of people more or less my age who had a common background and a holy purpose—plus it combined aspects of music, theatre, sound, and light production…

Continue reading The boy who knew too much →

Memorial

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Grandma often called it by the older name, “Decoration Day.” Each spring, as May approached, Grandma would start making phone calls to distant friends and relatives, making sure that flowers would be placed on the graves of relatives in that area. She would also make plans for the graves of relatives that were within a reasonable drive of her home. During the days in the week before Memorial Day she would visit each of those graves and place flowers. If the particular relative in question had also been a war veteran, she would place a small U.S. flag along with the flowers.

The pastors in the Southern Baptist churches we attended might give a sermon on the last Sunday in May about the importance of turning grief into rejoicing because someone has been “taken home to be with the Lord.” There would be some mention of people who died in military service (often as part of one of the prayers, asking god to comfort the families of the fallen soldiers, airman, marines, and sailors), but it was seldom the primary focus of the sermon.

For most of my childhood, I understood that Memorial Day was a time for families to visit the graves of loved ones. It was about remembering anyone who had died. The fact that many people used the day to specifically remember and honor those who had died in battle seemed to be a subset of the larger goal of celebrating the lives of all your loved ones who had died.

Most of my grade school career occurred before the passage of the federal Uniform Monday Holiday Act, so Memorial Day landed on whatever day of the week May 30 was, and I don’t think we were usually let out of school to observe it. When the Monday Holiday Act went into effect, I remember a lot of grumbling from various adults in my life. One particular rant stood out: an older man at the church potluck in May started complaining about “Yankees taking a good, pro-family holiday and turning it into a pro-federalist celebration of war!” He was shushed by his wife before he got too far along.

I didn’t meet my first Radical Memorialist until High School. Someone made a comment about the big barbecue their parents were planning for the weekend, and another of my classmates went ballistic. Memorial Day was not supposed to be about parties and celebrations! It was a serious day to remember people “who gave the ultimate sacrifice to keep this country free!” Anyone who didn’t do that was ignorant and shallow at best, selfish and unpatriotic at worst.

I genuinely was stunned. This being in the Stone Age (before the advent of the internet), I had to look up Memorial Day in an Encyclopedia. And that’s when I first learned how the original Memorial Day had been observed in 1866 intended to honor “those fallen in battle defending their nation during the recent rebellion.” A decidedly northern perspective.

Before that time, many southern states had a tradition of a Decoration Sunday that sometimes happened in April, in other places in May, where the aim had been to put flowers on the graves of family members. Families would frequently have a picnic lunch in the graveyard or cemetery, telling stories and celebrating the lives of their dearly departed. These often turned into family reunions, because family members living far away would try to get home for Decoration Sunday.

Which is why for many years a few southern states didn’t recognize a state holiday of Memorial Day. Several of those that did recognize Memorial Day still also had a separate Confederate Memorial Day or Confederate Decoration Day, because even today in those places Memorial Day is seen by many as “pro-Union.”

Of course, the historical reality is more complicated than that original encyclopedia article I read. While the Civil War was still raging, groups of people, mostly women, in both the north and the south organized days to decorate graves of soldiers from both sides. There was a recognition of the common humanity of all the soldiers. Some people coordinated it with the existing Decoration Days, others did not.

When I saw certain people going off on rants this weekend, angry that there are people who don’t spend the entire three day weekend on the sober, solemn, and somber business of mourning fallen veterans, I felt conflicting emotions. Of course we should be grateful to the memories of the men and women who have died in battle, fighting in our name in various wars and conflicts around the world. Of course we should comfort grieving widows and widowers. We, as a nation, should take care of children bereft of a parent because of a war fought in our name. Of course we should do all of those things.

But being a jerk to people who don’t choose to do it precisely the same way and at precisely the same time as you? That isn’t something I can support.

Memorial Day in my family was always a day to honor the memories of people such as my great-grandparents: people I knew and loved and who are no longer with us. It was a time to call my maternal grandmother to hear about everyone she had contacted while arranging the flowers, to get news from distant relatives (many of whom I barely remembered). For the last several years I haven’t been able to do that part. Grandma died on the Friday before Memorial Day, 2007. She was putting flowers on the grave of one of my great-aunts. My step-grandfather was getting ready to take a picture, when Grandma looked up, said she didn’t feel good, and then she fell over, suffering a massive aneurism.

We realized the next Memorial Day that none of us knew how to contact everyone that Grandma always got hold of to make sure flowers were placed on the graves of my great-grandparents, or Great-great-Aunt Pearl, or several others of the more distant relatives. My aunt located a few. One of my cousins tracked down a few others. and all of us spend some time on this weekend thinking about Grandma, and all the ways she kept everyone connected.

I’ve spent other time this weekend thus far thinking of many people I have had the privilege of knowing and loving who are no longer with us. My two grandfathers and eight great-uncles who served in WWII among them. Rather than lament their loss, I think about the good things they did, and about the fun times we had together. Memorializing someone should be about celebrating their life. Not just weeping.

And it certainly shouldn’t be about scolding people who have the temerity to wish you a happy holiday weekend.

Mundanity and a slice of key lime pie

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The pollen count as been up, and up, and up, and down, then up, then, not-quite-so up (but not enough of a drop to count as down), and so on for the last few weeks. So most days I have fairly bad hay fever. Couple that with some big deadlines at work, and my productivity on home projects, including my own writing, has not been great.

It doesn’t help that we’re getting into heavy movie season, with Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness taking up a bit of my time and a lot of my mental space.

Friday before last started like a typical work-from-home day. I got up, took some sinus medication because of the hay fever, logged into the work network, dealt with some emails, then downloaded some files to work, before taking a break to drive my husband to work. I do that on work-from-home days so that I can pick him up at the end of the day and we can go directly out to dinner afterward, rather than waiting for him to ride his bike home and so on.

By mid-afternoon I was feeling really tired and my throat was starting to hurt. Throat symptoms are not typical for my hay fever, so I was beginning to worry. Then my hubby walked in the door, saying he’d left work because he was sick–sinus headache, sore throat, itchy eyes, and a fever. He went straight to bed.

I kept working until the end of my work day, but I was getting a bit groggy. Some point in there I took my temperature and confirmed I was running a low-grade fever. Finally, I logged out, went upstairs, and collapsed into bed. I woke up an hour or so later and asked Michael what he wanted for dinner. Neither of us felt like cooking. What I was craving was burgers and pie. As soon as I mentioned pie, Michael admitted that sounded good. But neither of us knew anywhere that delivered pie. So I drove to the store, picked up juice and things for easy meals for the next couple of days, and a banana cream pie. Then I got drive-through burgers.

I had to take another nap after dinner. Then we slept in both Saturday & Sunday, both of us taking frequent naps. Originally we had been planning to go out to see Iron Man 3 on Friday night, so when on Sunday afternoon we realized we both felt a bit better, were both feeling a little stir crazy, and there was a showing at the theatre within walking distance in about 35 minutes, we went. We stopped at one of our favorite restaurants on the walk back afterwards for dinner, then came home. I took another nap before waking up to serve us each a slice of pie.

So we had pie several nights in a row. It made being sick seem a little less icky.

For various reasons I needed to go into work earlier than usual three days the following week. One of those days I wound up driving in, which I almost never do, because it was the only way to make sure I arrived when I needed to. The drive in took less time walking to the bus, riding the bus, then walking to the office. But the drive home, as it has every time I’ve driven to this office, took more than three times as long as the drive in.

Friday night we saw the new Star Trek movie. I want to see it on the big screen again. Probably several more times. Yes, I liked it that much.

When I was picking up groceries Saturday in preparation for friends coming over for the monthly writer’s meeting, when I went looking for desserts I found myself picking both a coconut cream pie and a key lime pie. Just because pie sounded good, and one friend who usually attends really like coconut cream, while another friend who attends less frequently really like key lime. I like both (even though all this pie isn’t really on my diet). So while I was a bit disappointed that the key lime-liking friend didn’t attend this month, it was kinda nice to have all that leftover pie in the fridge Sunday.

Because it’s always nice to have pie.

Write it or lose it

writing,

My writing goal for this last weekend was to complete the cleanup on a novel so I can send it to some people who have volunteered to copy edit it. This goal was set before the really bad hay fever I’d had all week turned into a cold Friday. By the end of my work day Friday the sore throat, low grade fever, and rundown feeling required a short nap before I could even discuss dinner with my hubby.

And since he had come home early from work sick, he was in the same boat.

I napped a lot Saturday. And slept in both days. Technically We could have opted out of going to the movie Sunday, but I’m not sure I would have gotten much more writing done if we had.

So of the 21 chapters, I got through three over the weekend. And a fourth Monday night. Not all of that was because of being braindead or asleep so much of the time. The other part was that my muse really didn’t want to work on the chore of consistency checking.

So at one point two of the characters started talking very animatedly in my head. And it was a conversation that is important to the plot… But it’s the plot of book four. I was supposed to be working on book one (yes, I’m writing a series; no, I didn’t plan to). The problem is, the conversation they were having concerned a part of the story of that book that I haven’t figured out yet, so I needed to write it down. Because if I don’t, some time later when I’m actually working on that book I’ll get to a tangled part of the plot and know that my subconscious has figured out how to solve that little thing in a clever way, but I won’t remember it.

That’s what it’s like in my head a lot. Ideas come out of the mysterious darkness and say, “Write about me! Write about me! Write about me or I’ll friggin’ go away!!!”

At another point, I read a single line of dialog in which the shrine guardian says, in answer to why he’s a kitsune trapped in an otter’s body, “It’s a long story…” And suddenly, in the back of my head, he and another character popped up and told me the fable-like tale of how it happened.

And I had to go write enough of it down so I could flesh out the tale, or I’ll forget some crucial bit. (I think it’s going to be called, “The Engraver, the Pearl, and the Impossible Customer,” but don’t hold me to it.)

I wrote down the outline and a few lines of dialog, but refused to let my muse distract me further to actually finish the story. Because if I follow all these distractions, I’ll never finish the previous tales.

Because my muse has super-hyper-ultra ADHD, and a tendency to hold some ideas hostage until I pay attention to its new shiny.

But every now and then we wrestle out a tale that makes me go, “Wow. Did I write that?”

Which is worth all the hassle.

(At least, That’s what I tell myself.)

Artistic license

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Certified Dictionary Thumper t-shirt.
A close up of the t-shirt.
Recently a couple of different friends sent me a link to that day’s Shirt-Woot. A t-shirt with a dictionary joke. Of course it’s the perfect thing for Gene.

It is rare to find a t-shirt with a dictionary joke, so of course I ordered it. But I commented to one of the friends who had sent me the link that there was one problem. There is no way that the dictionary pictured is unabridged. Look at how easily the person is holding it with only one hand. It would need to be a fairly thin dictionary to be held that way.

Seriously, look at the picture on the t-shirt. He’s not even using all four fingers! The pinkie, at least, is curled under.

Trying to hold the dictionary
Trying to hold it one-handed
I own four unabridged dictionaries. I got out the smallest of them, and tried to hold it as they are in the picture. I can hold it with one hand for a short time, but notice that I have to cup my hand under it, to support all the weight. Three fingers are on the front, but the pinkie is still helping, by stabilizing the dictionary’s weight. You can’t tell in the picture, but it was hard to hold it still, because it’s too heavy and awkward.

The friend thought I was being silly to point this out. And it is a silly t-shirt, which I was delighted to order. I’m going to wear it and let people laugh at the joke. And it’s true, it would be extremely painful to be literally thumped with a hardback book the size of one of these unabridged dictionaries.

Labeling myself a dictionary thumper is not inaccurate. I can be pedantic about the meanings and usage of words. I also get that way about syntax, which would make me more of a style guide thumper, but that joke wouldn’t work as well. People know what a dictionary is, but a style guide, not so much.

I’m nowhere near as pedantic about grammar as people expect. And I’m not pedantic about words in the way that people expect, either. Being a technical writer by profession for over two decades, I can’t begin to count how many times co-workers and other colleagues have come to me with questions about spelling and usage that fall on the fringes of what I think the heart of language is. See, folks think of grammar and usage in very stiff and absolute terms. They believe that there is always one and only one correct way to use a specific word. I’ve always assumed this comes from having been admonished in school for doing something incorrectly, so that they think of grammar as a long list of prohibitions: “Thou shalt not dangle thy participles” and so forth.

Holding the dictionary two-handed
It really takes two hands.
But there are no official lists of rules handed down from on high. Language has rules that have evolved as we’ve used it. Word meanings change over time. New social, cultural, and technological situations require new ways of describing or discussing what’s going on. And the beauty of English is that there are thousands of correct ways to construct a sentence to convey a particular meaning. “The man walked down the road” means the same thing as “He walked down the road.” Structurally those things are nearly identical, so they barely count as two ways, but we could also say “He plodded along the street.” Or we can add more details, “The man, stoop-shouldered and sun-burned, trudged beside the highway.” We can turn the structure around, “The crumbling road guided his footsteps to his destination.”

All of those are correct ways of explaining the same basic situation. But they all evoke different moods and details. What makes a particular version of each of those right or wrong is the context, which is not a matter of grammar at all.

Besides saying “Certified Dictionary Thumper,” the t-shirt includes a slogan. “Have you been soteriologically extricated?” Soteriology is a synonym for salvation, deliverance, or liberation. Extricated means to be disentangled, rescued, or released. So the slogan literally means “Have you been rescued in a liberating way?” Or more simply, “Have you been saved saved?” Which is redundant. If I were feeling the need to use the multisyllabic soteriologically, I would have chosen the slogan, “Have you been soteriologically explicated?” Since to explicate is to define something to have had something defined or explained to you.

I strongly suspect that that was the original joke, probably told to the artist by someone else, and somewhere along the line someone misheard. Explicated and extricated sounding quite similar when spoken aloud.

Of course, that just gives me more to explain if someone asks what the shirt says. Which, for someone like me, makes it even more of a win-win.

Regret is the mind killer

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I read this great post, “The Reading Police of the Young,” and found myself remembering the weirdly inconsistent way my reading habits were monitored when I was a kid.

For example, I remember longing to read my mom’s copy of Dune, the paperback sitting squeezed between a bunch of her Agathe Christies and Robert Heinleins. Mom had told me I wasn’t old enough after she finished it. When she realized I kept looking at the book–not reading it, not even opening it, just looking at the cover–she moved it to the small shelf in the bedroom, the one that had Dad’s books that I wasn’t allowed to read (mostly Matt Helm and James Bond books, whose sexual situations were considered pornographic back in the day, but are rather quaint and downright prudish when compared to modern prime time fare).

And so I wondered what forbidden topics were hidden within. When I finally did read it, some time in my teens, I was a bit disappointed. Not at the book, I found the story quite interesting. I was disappointed because there didn’t seem to be anything in it that should have been forbidden.

I mean, yes, it is clear that the Baron has a thing for pretty young men, but there is nothing about the way it is described that anyone could call erotic. And Herbert’s unconcealed homophobia, manifested primarily with the old cliche that the more gay a character is, the more evil they are, should have resonated quite nicely with Mom’s evangelical sensibilities.

Those evangelical sensibilities waxed and waned throughout my childhood. At one point she was encouraging me to read Asimov (both his fiction and nonfiction), Tolkein, LeGuin, and Bradbury. At another point we had the first book-burning incident–when under the influence of a new pastor, she decided that the astronomy books I’d checked out from the library were astrology books, and since astrology is the same as satanism, the books needed to be destroyed.

(I still occasionally have bad dreams that include a reenactment of my tearful explanation to the librarians about why I couldn’t bring the books back. When they called Mom to ask for the books, she harangued them for letting children check out satanic books. The library set up a special spot for my books from then on. I could check out books and read them in the library, but couldn’t take them home.)

The second book-burning had been Dad. Dad’s reasons weren’t overtly religious, my dad is the kind of atheist who is angry at god for not existing (think about that for a bit). No, he decided that I was getting bullied at school so much because I spent too much time “living in a fantasy world.” His book burning was worse because he forced me to pile up the books, pour the accellerant on, light the match, and watch it burn. With random slaps and punches because I was crying while doing it.

Then a year or so later, he bought me an encyclopedia set and told me that I was going to go to college and “make something of yourself” or else.

For the longest time I attributed those mixed messages to the ebb and flow of Dad’s alcoholism and abusive behavior. The worse Dad got, the more intense Mom’s fundamentalism got. When Dad appeared to be changing for the better, Mom loosened up and re-embraced her inner sci fi and comics fangirl.

Those were definitely major factors in the dysfunction in our family, but I wonder how much of the inconsistency was also due to their youth. My parents were both 16 years old when they married, then I was born 6 days before my dad’s 18th birthday. Current brain research indicates that the prefontal cortext (the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, foreseeing consequences, emotional modulation, et cetera) doesn’t fully develop until around the age of 25.

That couldn’t have helped.

While both of them were readers who believed in the value of education, I know both of them felt they hadn’t done as much with their own lives as they could have or ought to have. So while hope for their kids drove some of their decisions, regret played a very big role, as well. Regret drove them to push me to do better in school, which is a good goal. But regret also drove them to micromanage my behavior on all levels, which isn’t just impractical, but if they had been successful would have had the opposite of the desired effect.

We can’t learn how to do anything correctly without learning from our mistakes as well as our successes. That’s just as true for thinking and imagining as it is for basketball or playing the piano. And while there is value in studying what other people have done, it isn’t sufficient. You have to try, fail, and improve on your own. Avoiding someone else’s mistake is no guarantee you won’t make new mistakes. Trying to duplicate someone else’s success may help you find a good way to do something, but it should also lead you to new directions they couldn’t explore.

And when you are buried in your own frustrations and regrets, you’re least likely to possess the objectivitely required to identity just which if your own past actions were mistakes, and which weren’t.

Regret, in that case, becomes both the mind-killer and dream-destroyer. You can’t wallow in the regret. Face it, yes. Let it serve its purpose of motivating you to do better. But then, let go. And become the better you.

Why I hate hay fever, reason #5821

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Sometime in the wee small hours, an alarm went off. My befuddled, barely awake brain was arguing about whether it was a fire alarm or the Emergency Broadcast System while I was stumbling around the dark house, trying to find what had made the noise.

Both TVs are off, and the alarm had stopped and I couldn’t find anything in the house that was smoking, ominously glowing, or otherwise in a disturbing state.

My head hurt, but I wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t merely because I had been awakened from a sound sleep. I crashed back into bed.

About an hour later I woke up, and my mouth was so dry it hurt. My headache was much, much worse. I lurched and stumbled my way to the kitchen, guzzled a glass of water, then refilled and drank some more water, and tried to make myself think. Everything seemed foggy, and I suddenly remembered the alarm from before. Maybe I couldn’t find what was wrong because whatever it was was happening in one of the other apartments, and smoke was slowly filling all the units?

I went to the front door and opened it. The cold air felt good, but didn’t seem to be any less foggy than the air inside the house. I concluded that everything looking foggy was just a combination of me not being fully awake, and the usual blurriness of not having my glasses.

My mouth still felt terribly parched, even though I’d had two large glasses of water. I went to the kitchen, had another glass of water. By which point the bad feeling of the dry mouth had lessened enough that the sinus headache was more noticeable. So I took some cold tablets, drank some more water, and collapsed back into bed.

By the time I woke up for real, it was clear that I was having really bad hay fever. I took some more meds. When I went to get some more water, I found my phone on the counter. There were two amber alert messages, the first at 3:30 am. The phones make a noise similar to the Emergency Broadcast System alert sound when the emergency alerts come through. That must have been what I heard. And it had sounded like it might be coming from either the kitchen or the living room because, by chance, both Michael and I had left our phones off the chargers. Mine was left in the kitchen, his in the living room.

Michael is also having a horrid hay fever day. We’ve both taken naps. All of my sleeping periods since the stupid alarm have included dreams about fires and explosions and the like. Earlier I told Michael I blame the alarms, but the hay fever contributes. In my bad dreams about fires and explosions, I keep getting eye and head injuries, for instance, which I take as my subconscious trying to figure out why my head and eyes hurt so dang much.

Plus, severe hay fever just messes you up. It isn’t just the drugs that make your brain go woodgie1. The histamine cascade causes changes in blood vessels, releases various enzymes, and other systemic changes. When you throw meds to deal with the pain or sinus pressure on top of that, it should be no surprise that one’s mental processes function differently than usual.

And I hate it!

1. Yes, that’s a technical term.

Everyone needs a hobby, but…

life,

When I first moved into this neighborhood, 17 years ago, there was the shell of an Alfa Romeo on blocks in the driveway of a house down the block. It was missing at least one door, parts of the body were rusted out, that sort of thing. Over the years, I have watched it slowly be reconstructed. It’s kind of cool to see. I’ve even seen the owner driving it up the street once. In fact, that’s the only time I’ve ever seen the owner’s face.

But it hasn’t all been cool.

His driveway slopes steeply down to the basement garage. At the other end it slopes down from the sidewalk to the street. So the only flat spot he has to work on the car is the sidewalk itself. And because he has thorny bushes on his property, and there’s a low sprawling cheery tree on the planting strip, when he has left it parked on the sidewalk (sometimes for days at a time) walking around it isn’t trivial.

Since every morning I have to walk that way to get to the bus, then back again after work, it was a bit annoying.

I sympathise. He has this (potentially) nice car he’s trying to restore, but the sidewalk is a public right of way. Technically, it’s a ticketable offense to block the sidewalk. Heck, a neighbor on the next block was cited for the lower tree branches that blocked the sidewalk there at about my chin level and up (and since I’m shorter than average, that meant everyone but small children had to crouch or duck to walk along that part of the sidewalk.

Most of the time the car is parked on the little bit that slopes from the sidewalk to the street. It doesn’t quite fit. The tail end of the car sticks out into the sidewalk, but you can walk through all right.

Some years go I remember a couple of days when not only was the car blocking the sidewalk, but a big tarp covered with car parts was spread out along the sidewalk. There have been numerous times when it was parked just off the sidewalk but various electrical cords and/or hoses were strung up from the garage to the car. Again, something I can step over, but a bit of a barrier to people pushing a stroller or a cart. And a trip hazard for anyone.

A few months ago we came home one night and found that the car had rolled into the middle of the narrow atreet, completely blocking it. We and the car behind us had to back up and go around the block. While I was unloading our car, once we got home, Michael walked down to knock on the owner’s door and help push the car back into the driveway.

Then one morning this week, just as I was about to get into the shower, I hear a horn start blaring. It wasn’t a “beep-beep-beep” of an alarm or someone pressing their “where did I park it” button. It just blared steadily.

After a minute of it going, I pulled my sweats back on and stepped outside. A couple other neighbors were just coming out. Of course, I’d been in a hurry, so I didn’t have shoes nor had I grabbed my glasses. I hadn’t heard a thud or crash before it started, but I was half expecting to see some kind of accident down the road. I couldn’t see anything.

A neighbor with a two-year-old in her arms said, “I can’t see any obvious cause. It’s like in a movie, someone just slumped over, head hitting the wheel?”

I went back inside for shoes and my glasses, then walked down the street.

Of course it was the Alfa Romeo. No one was in it. It was just sitting there, blaring.

I knocked on the door of the owner’s house. After a minute, an annoyed voice asked through the door. “What do you want?”

“Is this your car out here blaring?”

“I don’t know! Is it my car?”

I stopped myself from saying something crude. “I don’t know! It’s in front of your house!”

“Okay. I’ll be out in a minute.”

One of the neighbors who lives further away than I did had stumbled out in a robe and slippers. It wasn’t that early in the morning (I go in a little later and work into the early evening, myself). The blaring was loud enough to wake up someone at the other end of the block. And I didn’t pound on the door. I just knocked normally. I was trying really hard not to be Angry Man, so I was careful to just knock.

Since he heard the knocking, there was no way that he hadn’t been able to hear his own car, right under his window, blaring its horn for four or five minutes. What the heck did he mean, sarcastically asking “I don’t know! Is it my car?”

Even now, I still have only seen his face that one time he drove the car up the street while I was weeding our lawn. The only reason I even looked up from the weeding was because the car was coughing and sputtering and sounding like the engine was going to either explode or die any minute. It lurched up the block and out of sight. Minutes later the sound fading as he kept going somewhere in it. I’ve seen his legs sticking out from under the car while he’s working on it. I’ve seen his silhouette at night coming out to deal with the car. So I don’t know him.

All I know is he’s been working on this car for nearly two decades, he’s only gotten it into barely working order briefly a few years ago. He’s had a string of cheap cars that look like junkyard rejects parked at the curb in front of his house (and occasionally in the driveway behind the Alfa). His yard is always overgrown. And he blocks the sidewalk with rather tiresome frequency.

I don’t want to tell him how to live his life. But I really, really, really wish he’d pick a different hobby.

Over prepared

life, ,

I come from a long line of worriers. Some of them were world-class fretters, constantly obsessing over the most unlikely things. I’m not a fretter. The worrying tendencies manifest in me as being over prepared.

For instance, even though the battery of my smartphone normally has no problem lasting through a day at work and an evening of dinner with friends afterward, I have a case that contains a spare battery which can recharge the phone from absolutely dead to more than 80%. Plus, in my backpack I carry adapter cables so that I can recharge either the phone inside the case, or the phone and case simultaneously using USB ports on a computer. And I carry a small adaptor for charging directly if there is no computer. And finally, The backpack also contains an external battery and adaptors that, if there is no power at all, can recharge my smartphone and power a dead laptop for about four hours.

And I’m not sure I have enough of my bases covered.

I know this is paranoid overkill.

The backpack has a spare two day supply of my prescription meds just in case. Plus a collection of over-the-counter allergy meds, tylenol, and other minor medications. During the cold part of the year there’s a pair of gloves and a stocking cap always in there, along with a pair of sunglasses that will fit over my eyeglasses. In the warm parts of the year the gloves and hat are replaced by a slightly rain-proof windbreaker.

And you don’t want to know how many pairs of eyeglasses I have and where…

I also misplace things. All the time. I can lose, find, and re-lose a set of keys ten times in less than ten minutes. So I have spares of lots of things, because sometimes you don’t have time to spend twenty minutes figuring out where something is.

I know that preparing for hypothetical difficulties is an attempt to control the future. Which is uncontrollable. On the other hand, the quirks it manifests as for me aren’t disruptive to other people’s lives, doesn’t interfere with my ability to interact with friends and family, and it means I’m not stressing over things I can’t control. At least I’m not likely to worry myself into a heart attack.

Besides, watching me unpack my backpack looking for something causes some of my friends great mirth. And the world can always use more laughter.

Right?