Tag Archives: personal

At least Scrooge found redemption

movies, , , , ,

Many, many years ago, before what most people think of as the internet, I was active in several forums on Fidonet. One December someone started a thread about Christmas movies, and someone else posted into that thread a brief explanation of why The Bing Crosby, Danny Kay, and Rosemary Clooney White Christmas was their favorite movie.

And one of the first replies to that post was a cranky rant about how that movie was not the film which had introduced the song of the same name, that the song had been originally written for the Fred Astaire film, Holiday Inn, and no one should like White Christmas because it wasn’t the movie that introduced the song.

Nothing in the original message had even mentioned the song, “White Christmas.” The person had even said that the movie was full of corny and silly bits, with a highly improbable plot.

I shrugged my shoulders at the cranky, crazy person, and went on to read other people’s recommendations of their favorite Christmas movies.

A year or so later, I think it was on a Usenet forum, a similar thread was in progress, and again, not long after someone mentioned White Christmas, there was another angry rant about how that movie wasn’t the one that introduced the song, and how much the person wished people would stop saying it had. Except, of course, that once again, no one had.

I’ve seen it again, and again. Mention the movie, White Christmas, and some troll will post a rant about it not being the movie that introduced the song. Now, sometimes, before the troll got there, someone would mention in a more friendly way the fact that the song was originally written for another movie, but had become so popular that a studio decided to base an entire film on the song. But eventually, there would be the angry post conveying the same fact.

When I posted on an old blog a list of my favorite Christmas movies, I got an anonymous message from someone, ignoring all the other movies in the list, to angrily tell me he’s tired of people mistakenly believing that White Christmas, the movie, introduced “White Christmas,” the song. Which, of course, I hadn’t said.

It’s perfectly legitimate to dislike a movie that someone else likes. It is also socially acceptable to join a virtual conversation about a movie by sharing some trivia about the film, one of the people in it, and so on. The part that I don’t get is why this movie, of all the innocuous, corny, trivial films that have ever been made, seems to always attract this one particular rant.

I have wondered if it’s just the same troll. Does he have alerts set up searching for mentions of this film, so he can log into whereever someone mentions it and post his rant?

If it isn’t the same troll, what makes several people feel a need to react with righteous outrage about a movie named after a song which it didn’t introduce? How can such a trivial detail provoke such outrage?

People get angry about things that other people enjoy all the time. No matter how wrong headed (and factually wrong) it is, I underatand why people get worked up about the so-called war on Christmas, for instance. Something that represents their faith and their personal history appears to be under attack. I think they are deluded to think it’s under attack, but I understand why traditions and beliefs and treasured memories are important to them.

But which movie introduced a sentimental holiday song? Really?

And of all the things about that song to get exercised about, again, it’s which movie introduced it? Not the fact that it’s a secular song about a sacred holiday? Not that a song for a Christian holiday was written by a Jewish man? (Actually, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that—because now the war on Christmas folks will decide that Irving Berlin started their whole war, or something.)

Maybe these folks just need to be visited by some ghosts, perhaps the spirits of Musicals Past, Present, and Yet To Come.

Haven’t you always wanted to see those ghosts doing jazz hands?

That Jingle Java Jive

life, ,

My late husband and I had been dating not quite three months, when one night he said he was going to make some coffee, then he turned and gave me the goofiest grin, “I got Jingle Java!”

It was early in my coffee evolution. I’d been raised in households that depended on cans of Folgers ground coffee, with jars of Taster’s Choice instant as a backup for those times when you didn’t want to percolate an entire pot. I had been introduced to Starbucks just a couple years earlier, since my place of employment was only a couple of blocks from the location of the original Starbucks store, and had quickly become addicted.

The Jingle Java blend he had picked up was a store brand of whole bean coffee, and it wasn’t bad. So the next time I saw Ray, I brought a bag of Starbuck’s holiday blend as a present. Unfortunately, it turned out Ray thought all but the very lightest Starbuck’s coffees were too darkly roasted, and didn’t much care for the holiday blend.

By the next Christmas season we were living together, and I wound up buying a small amount of Starbuck’s holiday blend for me, and a large bag of Jingle Java for Ray. Since I’d done that, Ray found another coffee company’s holiday blend for us to try (I don’t remember if it was SBC, Tulley’s, Peet’s, or someone else). I’ve never liked the notion of flavored coffee beans, so we stuck to the blends.

So a tradition started in which every December we’d get several different holiday blends of coffee and rotate through them throughout the month (and usually well into January). Which I kept doing after Ray died. Michael hates coffee, so it’s just me drinking it, now. Which means I’m often not finishing them up until mid-February.

Except this year, I’ve been having a hard time finding many varieties. Over the last couple of years, the variety of whole been coffees available in grocery stores has significantly decreased. I don’t know if it’s because after two decades the grind-your-own coffee craze is finally dying out, so only us hard cases are doing it, or if the economy just has people buying as cheaply as they can, or what. At most of the grocery stores I’ve been to, the only thing I’ve found is Peet’s Holiday Blend, already ground. Coffee starts oxidizing as soon as you grind it, which changes the taste, so I don’t like pre-ground coffee.

And the store brand Jingle Java we used to buy—nowhere in sight.

There are flavored coffees, but those usually just taste like someone poured nail polish remover into my cup. At least to me.

At one upscale market (that’s within walking distance of my house), I happened to find a display of one of the brands of coffee that I never see anywhere else, and they had a Holiday Blend, so I have two this year. I like both, there’s no reason that I need more than two to choose from–I don’t need any, obviously. But it’s something I liked doing. A silly tradition. An excuse to think about Ray and the many fun and silly things we’d do together every Christmas season.

I love new things. I just wish the universe would give me veto power over some changes, you know?

Joyous voices sweet and clear

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Several years ago, my hubby bought me an iPod Nano for my birthday. I had been resistant to the notion of an iPod. I was used to the ritual of changing out discs in a carrying case I kept with me to use with my portable disc player, and I just didn’t quite see the point.

The funny thing was that I had iTunes installed on my computer and had imported a bunch of my music CDs into its library. One of my Palm Pilots had used iTunes to synch music, so I had given it a try. I hadn’t been terribly impressed with the experience, but I had found iTunes on the computer a bit easier to use than other music playing software, so I had kept it.

The iPod quickly changed my mind. The convenience of something that fit in my pocket and replaced both the portable player and the carrying case with all those discs should have been obvious, I suppose. I found myself importing music like crazy, because the small number of discs I’d imported before that would hardly fill the Nano’s humongous 4 gigs of space.

I spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend importing Christmas music, and wound up with about 3 gigs worth of holiday songs. That left enough room on the Nano for a Scissor Sisters album, a few Queen albums, and my podcasts. So I could set the entire iPod music collection on shuffle for the month of December. I would get mostly Christmas music, with an occasional non-Christmas song to break things up.

And, of course, the iPod carried a much larger portion of my Christmas music collection than I’d been able to carry around in that case for discs.

The following year, Apple released the very first iPod Touch about a week before my birthday. Guess what my hubby gave me for my birthday? I think he got me the 16gig model, which seemed enormous. It was enough of an incentive to get me working a bit more seriously at importing all of my music collection on disc into the computer. I don’t remember how much of my Christmas music I got imported for that second Christmas (and because of a hard disk crash a few years ago, I can’t use the “date added” information in iTunes to make a guess–iTunes thinks the date added for about half my library is the day I bought the new hard disk and started restoring from backup), but it was far less than 16 gigs, and so I had start making big playlists if I wanted to have something I could randomize to give me hours of Christmas music while working.

Christmas music is one of my obsessions. I usually start listening to it a day or two after Thanksgiving and keep listening to it through Three Kings Day. Unfortunately, my hubby is one of those people who really dislikes Christmas music, or at least a lot of it. I’ve managed to figure out a bunch he can stand, and load that up in the player for the car. Otherwise, I listen to it when he’s in the other room or try to remember to use my headphones.

My hubby’s not the only person I know who has issues with at least some kinds of Christmas songs. I know a lot of folks who have problems with the specifically religious music. As a gay kid growing up in a very conservative and uptight denomination, I understand. Some sacred music triggers memories of very bad experiences. I get that what some people hear in those songs is, “You must conform to this belief system that has oppressed you, or else!”

My particular idiosyncrasy is that traditional religious Christmas songs just don’t register that way for me. I know all the words to “O, Holy Night” in more than one language (my Latin’s a bit rusty, but…), and intellectually I get that it’s sacred, but emotionally, it’s Holiday Music, to me. It evokes the same sense of wonder I get when accompanying friends out to the countryside and looking up into the night sky, hundreds of miles from a city, where the enormity of the universe is visible just by looking up. I love singing along to “Angels We Have Heard on High” because I remember the many Christmas concerts where I either sang it or played in the orchestra. In my head, I’m singing the tenor, and bass, and alto part (and wishing I could hit all the notes for the soprano), as well as playing the trumpet and baritone horn parts.

So I get a little bit too enthusiastic about lyrics that sometimes annoy some of my friends.

For me, Christmas is a season of light. We do these things to remember that the sun will come back, to remind ourselves how much metaphorical light our friends and other loved ones bring to our hearts throughout the year, and to give a bit of light and joy to both loved ones and complete strangers.

To absent friends…

life,

Today is World AIDS Day. Each year, I spend part of the day remembering people I have known who left this world too soon because of that disease.

So: Frank, Mike, Tim, David, Todd, Chet, Jim, Steve, Brian, Rick, Stacy, Phil, Mark, Michael, Jerry, Walt, Charles, Thomas, Mike, Richard, Bob, Mikey, James, Lisa, Todd, Kerry, Glen, and Jack. Some of you I didn’t know for very long. One of you was a relative. One of you was one of my best friends in high school—and beyond.

I miss you all. It was a privilege to know you.

Slow days

life,

Colds suck. I hate the sinus headaches, the sneezing, the itchy eyes, and especially that “I can’t breathe” feeling.

Chest colds suck worse. There’s something especially disheartening about the soreness that develops in your chest after coughing. And coughing. The only upside is that getting the mucous in your lungs reminds you that the “I can’t breathe” feeling from a head cold is actually not that bad. You could breathe with the head cold, it’s just that breathing through your mouth constantly for several days feels awkward. But actually having mucous build up in your lungs forcing you to cough and cough sometimes before you can take a breath? That’s awful.

An actual bout of influenza sucks much, much worse. There’s the coughing, of course, but also the all-over body aches, and those days of fever where you alternate between feeling as if you will never be warm again, or sweating so bad that you just want to lay down in one of those giant walk-in freezers. I’ve only had the actual flu a few times in my life, and each time, I remember how much worse it is than the worst colds I’ve ever had. Those memories are one of the reasons I have been getting flu shots consistently for 20-some years.

Unfortunately, flu viruses come in many, many varieties thanks to constant mutation, and so annual vaccine can never inoculate you against every possible variant. Or, sometimes the variant you run into is close enough to the one you’ve either encountered before or that was in one of the shots, and so you catch it, but it doesn’t last as long as it might have.

This year I have gotten to be the proof that sometimes that shot isn’t enough.

I had the extra joy of getting an opportunistic infection on top of the flu: bronchitis.

I’m at that annoying stage nine days past the end of the fever, where most of the symptoms are gone, but I still have a bit of the cough, echoes of the body aches, and no stamina at all. Even with a convenient four-day holiday weekend where I got to sleep in and lay about as much as I wanted, I still feel exhausted after being up and about for only a few hours.

So I’m getting through my work days, being fairly productive. But then I’m like a zombie for the rest of the night.

I’m tired of being tired.

Sweet and savory

life, ,

I love munching on olives while waiting for the big holiday dinner to finish. When I was a kid, there were always at least two kinds of olives out, usually away from the kitchen, often laid out with candy and nuts and some little napkins and tiny plates. It was part of “this food is to distract you and keep you out of the kitchen until the main event” table.

Depending on which branches of the extended family were present, the setting was referred to as either “the olives and pickles” or “the relish tray.” It was called a relish “tray” regardless of whether there was an actual tray. A real relish tray is a bit of glassware meant for a buffet table in a formal dining setting, which has separated compartments.

Sweet and Savory!
Relish Tray, Gene & Michael’s, Thanksgiving 2012

The relish tray’s heyday was before the 20th Century, when the only foods available during the winter months were those which had been canned, pickled, or otherwise preserved during the growing seasons. Home canned foods often are very bland, so pickled foods added bursts of vinegary or briny or sweet delight.

I didn’t know that as a kid. There just were always at least two kinds of olive, and usually sweet pickled beets and at least two kinds of pickles. And if this was the right branch of the family, most of the pickles were home-pickled produce. Grandma B. liked an even mix of savory and sweet choices. Grandma P. always had a lot of very spicy pickled vegetables. If Great-grandma S.J.’s pickled squash was in the mix, it was a very special relish tray, for instance. One year, Great-aunt Pearl (though now that I think about it, she was my Grandma’s aunt, so she was technically my great-great-aunt) had sent a jar or two of homemade pickled watermelon rind, and that may have been the best relish tray, ever.

It just doesn’t feel like a real holiday dinner, to me, if there isn’t a relish tray. If given half a chance, I’ll set out a spread of dozens of different kinds of olives alone. Even if it’s going to be a small group. Each vinegary, briny, and sweet morsel is a little bit of my childhood, coming back for a visit.

Soup to nuts

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One of the first times I ever heard the phrase, “soup to nuts” my incorrigible Great-grandpa I. tried to convince me it meant that crazy people would think dishwater was soup. None of the kids in my generation ever called Great-grandpa I. “great grandpa.” He insisted we call him “Shorty.” No matter how hard my mom and her siblings and cousins tried to get us to call him anything else, we all called him “Shorty.” ‘Cause he told us to.

When Great-grandma heard him tell me the wrong definition of “soup to nuts,” she explained it referred to a fancy banquet-style meal, where you would be served soup first, then a meat dish, then a fish, and so on, until dessert and finally nuts. Shorty interrupted at that point to say he still thought crazy people were involved somehow. Otherwise, why would you need such a big meal?

Continue reading Soup to nuts →

One size fits none, part 2

technology, , ,

I’ve been working on computers for an incredibly long time.

My first computer was from before the era of floppy disks. Printers cost about the same as a four-bedroom house at the time, so it wasn’t a tool I used for writing. It was a toy.

My second computer could have a floppy drive added to it, but it loaded programs by plugging cartridges into a slot. Reasonably priced printers had come into existence, then, but they were dot matrix printers that produced very low resolution stuff.

My third computer had a floppy drive built in. At the time I bought it, the first consumer-priced 1 megabyte hard disks were just coming on the market. Yes, I said 1 MEGAbyte. And it wasn’t the first consumer-priced hard disk, it was the first that was that large. Two friends of mine who both worked in electronics stores got into an argument in which one claimed that no one would ever, ever need anything that big, the other claimed that lots of people would. They both thought I was insane for saying that anyone would ever need more.

Computers were still primitive, in other words.

Let me describe the process for spellchecking a document on that third computer:

1. Insert boot disk into floppy drive, turn on computer, wait for it to load the operating system from the disk (about one minute).

2. Remove the boot disk and insert the word processing program disk into the drive. Type some commands, wait for the program to open (another minute or two, depending).

3. Type a document. Pull out the program disk and insert a data disk. Save the document to the data disk.

4. Pull out the data disk. Insert the boot disk. Exit the word processing program. Wait a few seconds for the computer to verify that the boot disk was there.

5. Pull out the boot disk. Insert the spellchecking program disk one. Type a command. Wait for the disk to load the spell checking program (this wait was for about four minutes).

6. When prompted, pull out the spellchecking disk one, insert the data disk. Pick the document from a list displayed. Wait for the program to load the document.

7. When prompted, remove the data disk and re-insert the spellchecking disk one. Press a key. Wait for it to scan the document (this wait was for about two minutes).

8. The program then would begin showing you chunks of text with incorrect words highlighted, and offer you the option to leave it as is, or re-type it. It did not offer suggestions for how to spell it correctly. Press a key to go to the next word.

9. When it reached the end of the document, it would prompt you to remove spellchecking disk number one and reinsert your data disk. It would save the corrected document, then it would inform you that you had successfully spellchecked words beginning with letters from A-M. Would you like to spellcheck the same document for words beginning with letters from N-Z?

10. If you said Yes, it would prompt you to remove the data disk, and insert spellchecking disk two. Wait for it to load the second half of the spelling dictionary (this wait was for about three minutes).

11. When prompted, pull out the spellchecking disk two, insert the data disk, pick the document from the list (That’s right! It didn’t remember which document was already half-checked!). Wait for the program to load the document.

12. When prompted, remove the data disk and (this is the tricky bit!!!) re-insert spellchecking disk ONE. Not disk two, disk one. Watch it load something from disk one.

13. When prompted, remove spellchecking disk one and re-insert spellchecking disk TWO.

14. Repeat step 8.

15. Repeat step 9.

Now your document is mostly spell checked. I say mostly because, let’s say during the second half of the alphabet sweep it found the work “spplication.” And let’s say you realized that it was supposed to be “application” and you went in to correct the spelling, but you accidentally deleted both the s and the p, so what you typed in to replace “spplication” is “aplication.”

The half of the spellchecker that was running at that time doesn’t know how to spell any words beginning with a… or b, c, d, et cetera, through m, right?

It wouldn’t tell you that you had replaced one typo with another in that case. It was a rare case, but it could happen.

So for a small document of say a couple thousand words, spellchecking was a complicated procedure that took about 40 minutes, all told. And that was if you didn’t screw up and insert the wrong disk at any of the dozen-plus times that you had to insert and remove a disk. Depending on when you did that, sometimes it meant starting all over again.

A second floppy disk drive made that process considerably easier, as there was less swapping out of disks. Unfortunately, a second floppy drive cost almost as much as the original computer had, so I didn’t get around to buying a second drive for at least a year after getting the computer.

In order to use that computer, you had to understand a lot more about operating systems, computer logic, and the hardware than the typical user of modern computers. You had to be comfortable typing commands like EXEC APWTR2 to start a program. Or to format text by pressing the ESC key followed by another key in order to turn on Italics, then moving to the end of the word, press ESC and a different key to turn it off. And programs had no What-you-see-is-what-you-get mode. You had to just take it on faith that: “I read ♦IThe Hobbit♦N in fourth grade.” would print out as: I read The Hobbit in fourth grade.”

Very few people would put up with that. I well remember the strange looks I would get from people when I was trying to explain the process of just getting the program going and writing a simple paper. They would look at their familiar typewriter and tell me the computer seemed like a whole lot of fuss to do a very simple thing.

And that’s exactly how I find myself feeling sometimes when talking to people about some of their modern gadget and computer choices. “Yeah, I had to root the device and sideload some patches to get it to work.” Or “This open-source program does everything your page layout program does… except use real fonts, or allow you to actually layout text and pictures on the page without hacking some of the configuration files, inserting a lot of extra codes, and experimenting for about a half hour per page. It almost looks the same, see?”

I understand that they’re perfectly happy working that way. I understand that it meets their needs. I understand that they think their own time isn’t worth anything. I understand that producing something that looks like utter crap doesn’t bother them.

Those things are their choices to make, and I wouldn’t dream of forcing them to do otherwise.

Now, if they would only allow me to do the same. Because my time is very valuable, and I’d rather spend it producing something I love than trying to make a poorly designed and under-powered tool do it half-assed.

Not forgotten

life,

Fifteen years ago today I had to sign some papers.

Then a couple of nurses turned off the monitors, removed the respirator tubes, and turned off the rest of the machines.

I held Ray’s hand, and said “Good-bye.”

I’d been crying off and on for hours—days, technically (though I’d only slept a couple hours out of the previous 59-ish, so it seemed like one really long, horrible day).

I don’t remember if I cried again. My last chronologically-in-order memory is taking hold of his hand that one last time. My memories for the next few months are like a collection of shattered glass pictures.

He promised me he would stay with me for the rest of his life. And he did.

Grateful, not resentful

life, ,

Many years ago, when I was either still attending university or during that first couple years after, while visiting my mom for one of the holidays, she handed me a manila envelope. “I was cleaning some things out, and I found these papers. I don’t know if they’re important, but it’s old school things I thought you might like.”

My mom is one of the people from whom I inherited my own packrat tendencies (which I have been fighting most of my adult life), so I knew if I looked at them while she was watching and decided they weren’t worth keeping, that she would retrieve them and hang onto them for years. So I always took whatever weird stuff she offered me and waited until I got home to review it.

The envelope contained about 20 sheets of paper. Two were report cards from different grades. Neither was an official end-of-term report card. Both were midterm “advisory” report cards. “Your child’s grade will probably be this if work does not change.” Most of the other papers were even less archive-worthy. Most contained no person information at all: announcements about an upcoming parent-teacher night, for instance.

But there were a couple that were revelations. There was a letter to my parents explaining that our family qualified to have a charity pay for my first pair of eyeglasses back in grade school. There were some papers related to a free lunch program during another part of grade school.

Until I read those papers, I had had no idea. I remembered, during those particular grades, that about once a month Mom would hand me a sealed envelope which I had to take to the school office, where I would be given lunch tickets for myself and my little sister. I thought everyone’s parents had to fill out a couple forms for lunch tickets. And I guess I just assumed there was a cheque in there, somewhere.

I knew that there were things we couldn’t afford. But other kids’ parents were also frequently saying, “We can’t afford that” or “When you get a job and can pay for it yourself, you can have a fill-in-the-blank.” So I didn’t think much about it. It never occurred to me that we were poor.

Of course, we couldn’t be poor! Poor people lived in shacks or in ghettos. We lived in ordinary parts of each of the small towns we moved to as my dad’s work demanded. We owned a car and a pickup truck. Poor people didn’t have jobs, or didn’t have regular jobs, anyway. They were always begging or looking for work. Or if they were “bad, lazy poor people” they were always waiting for their next Welfare cheque. My dad had a job. He’d been working for the same company for as long as I could remember, so we couldn’t be poor. We just weren’t rich, that’s all.

Certainly by the time I was in High School I had a much better idea of the broad spectrum of economic status that families inhabited. I understood that most of my childhood my dad had been “working class” rather than true middle class. But I also knew that the old lower, middle, and upper class division of economic status was a gross oversimplification.

And somehow, I had never figured out that we had taken assistance. I think the shock was mostly because of how hotly my dad frequently ranted about the evils of people who depended on charity. The almost stereotypical way he sneered at programs like welfare and food stamps because they “took money from hard working people.”

That attitude, which was frequently echoed by other adults in my community—especially at church social functions—had always seemed weird to me. During Sunday School lessons or the Sunday sermon, we would be taught that Jesus expected us to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and take care of the sick. Yet at the church potluck, people who actually took handouts were talked about almost as if they were in league with the devil.

Why the resentment? Everyone needs help some time. There should be no shame in needing a hand of any kind (I hate that cliche about hand-up vs handout) once in a while. The proper response to getting a little help is gratitude. And the proper response when you have been the one helping, is to tell the person, “if you want to pay me back, just promise when you see someone else who needs help, you’ll offer what you can.”

Resentment and condescencion corrupt and destroy the soul, leaving only emptiness behind.

Gratitude and charity do the opposite.

So, go feed your soul.