Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: November 2009

• Take My Money, Please!

  Posted at 2:21 am by kayewer, on November 29, 2009

  We’re in the middle of a bad economy, yet the doors to many department stores opened on Black Friday (some on Thanksgiving Day) to throngs of people who were apparently excited to spend money they didn’t have.

  What is it about the last 40 or so days before the end of the year that makes people think the shopping horizon has changed?  Plenty of products are put on shelves ten months out of the year–some are useful, while others are a waste of resources and manpower–yet everybody seems to wait until the last-minute to release the “good stuff,” the “must have” stuff, the quintessential table cluttering pap that makes the area beneath a dead tree look a hoarder’s last-minute hiding place.  Add to it the perfect wrapping paper, bow, gift tag or gift bag (one of the few inventions that give wrapping challenged gift givers a break), and remember that all that concealment lasts about ten seconds from being lifted out from under the tree until it is shown around to the assembled throng.

  Last year some customers ran over and killed a store employee who opened the doors for the Black Friday crowd.  It’s insane that human beings are so overly excited by the prospect of running a marathon to a pile of junk that they have to wait in an interminable line and pay too much for.

  The only other madhouse I’ve even seen is the annual “running of the brides” at a popular store which deep discounts wedding gowns for a once-a-year event.  Unfortunately they don’t have fitting rooms or boxing rings and officials to referee fights between bridezillas over the perfect gown.

  Supply and demand never coincide, even though the stores have had ten months to figure it out.  The real test of what sold or not is the aftermath on or about December 26, when all that’s left are twenty boxes of odd colored greeting cards, broken ornaments and a bashed-in fruitcake.

  I have to get a Pollyanna gift this year, which is hard because the price limit is $15 and all the decent gifts are $19.99 (before tax).  That means a $9.99 gift and a $5.00 gift card, and the gift bag and wrapping paper don’t count in the final cost anyway. . . .

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• The Bad Barry Gibb Impression

  Posted at 2:15 am by kayewer, on November 22, 2009

  I’ll admit it up front:  I can’t sing.  I don’t sound like a hippo or anything, and I’m not totally tone-deaf, but busker will never be in my resume.  However, in the old days I used to have fun singing in the car.  It’s easy to do and doesn’t require taking one’s eyes off the steering wheel.  Also, with the windows closed, nobody knows how bad you are.

  Now that my driving route is so tediously long and devoid of traffic lights (it’s one major highway straight up and down either way), and I have a CD player in the car, I’ve treated myself to some music in the car again, and my first choice was The Ultimate Bee Gees:  The 50th Anniversary Collection.  The Gibb brothers have been in the music business as long as I’ve been alive, so there were some songs that were released when I was too young to appreciate them.  This was a golden opportunity to catch up and enjoy some classics from “my day.”

  I would not recommend a non-singer try what I did:  I wound up singing along to the entire album and paid the price with a scratchy throat that lasted for days.  Of course, I guess I should have left the falsetto to Barry Gibb, who is best qualified to hit those high registers, but what’s a good Bee Bees song without a bad Barry Gibb impression thrown in by an appreciative listener?

  I know I’m not “Alone” (pardon the insider joke) in doing this.  Find me a Bee Gees fan who hasn’t tried either the trademark falsetto or holding a note with that heart-stopping quaver like on “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” and I’ll show you somebody who has lost that sense of adventure in their life.  Leave the bungee jumping to the adventure geeks: I’ll go for the bad karaoke effort anytime.

  The Bee Gees as we knew them over the years has changed slightly.  Recently the two remaining brothers, Barry and Robin, performed for the first time as a duo for “Dancing With the Stars.”  The third Bee Gee, Robin’s twin brother Maurice (pronounced Morris but affectionately known as Mo), died suddenly in January 2003, and after six years it seemed that the group was finished.  The brothers decided to reunite at last, and the collection is a celebration of the last half century of work.

  It’s said that when you mention somebody, you honor their life or their memory, so if I’m warbling in the car, poorly, with a sore throat and flat notes and no diaphragmatic ability to hold that sustained note on “Staying Alive” anyway, I guess it’s all okay.  And thank goodness I keep the windows rolled up.

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• Pre-Early Bird Before Turkey Day Blues

  Posted at 2:05 am by kayewer, on November 15, 2009

  If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear the Halloween costume shops pulled up stakes and disappeared at 12:01 the morning of November 1st, and in their places are Christmas shops.  Already!

  It’s bad enough that the card shops start peddling ornaments in July, and that gaily packaged holiday junk food starts appearing on little green or red tablecloth covered round display tables in Macy’s by mid-September.  Now the stores are engaging in early sales hoping to gain revenue even before the Black Friday madhouse begins.

  Really, can pre-packaged stuffing in a bag produced in October still be worth eating in late November?  If so, it must have been preserved using methods taught in ancient Egyptian tombs.  Perhaps we should already have figured this out, since it comes at the same time as the first batches of fruitcake, which everybody knows was found, still edible, in a burial vault in the Valley of the Kings.

  The food is just part of the insanity.  Your local pharmacy should be well stocked by now with tons of cheap stocking-stuffers which would have made our founding fathers faint.  Do we really need a dispenser, shaped like a reindeer, that “poops” brown jelly beans?

  Nativity scenes start showing up in garden shops, next to the holiday villages from some joint called Department 57.  I guess that name is based on a classification in some manual called the Department Store Code Book of Merchandise Sorting or something.  I don’t buy miniature villages, mostly because the people in the scenes are never proportioned to the size of the buildings.  I realize their size is required by a safety law meant to prevent small children from choking on Mr. Ice Skater from the magnetic pond feature, but can’t they just make the buildings larger?

  I don’t buy nativity scenes because I just don’t ever see one I like.  They’re always too modernistic or Renaissance-y or nondescript.  Besides, Baby Jesus always winds up getting lost for some inexplicable reason, even from supersize nativities in front of houses of worship.  Maybe folks who display them could put an appropriate lightbulb in the crèche and keep the infant savior secured in the vault instead.

  By the time I have my first bite of turkey, I’ll be tired of the pre-holiday sales.  I’ll also have a sore back from hauling all the Black Friday newspaper inserts out to the curb for pickup on trash day.

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• New Year of Life/New Resolutions

  Posted at 1:18 am by kayewer, on November 9, 2009

  Whenever a birthday comes around, I try to look back on the past year and think about what I did well or (in a lot of cases) not so well, and resolve to do better.  I think it works better by not waiting for New Year’s Day, because shortly after January 1 comes all the December bills and income taxes, and these deliver quite a reality check roundhouse kick to the head no matter what your intentions.

  First, I plan to forget trying to write neatly and just concentrate on jotting things down so I can at least read them.  When I was in school, teachers certainly did teach good penmanship, but only as long as every student was right-handed and good with spacial relationships.  I may have been destined to be left-handed, but we’ll never know:  I was forced into a pen hand so disastrous that I had to re-teach myself a better script as an adult simply because I was so darned tired of slowing my handwriting down just to conform.  My journals and notebooks all contain sparse entries in a neat scrawl, which is why they are so sparse.  Heck, I just want to let the creativity rip and make a mess on those pages.  I bought the things, so if I want them to look like maniacal ravings, it’s my privilege.

  I also want to walk more.  Working in a call center at a desk spells disaster for any physique.  Add to it all the car commuting I do, and there is very little time for walking.  I do like to walk; when I go to New York City I walk from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to Lincoln Center at a decent clip without getting winded, so I think I could add some more foot time to my routine if I can find it.  Recently the Philadelphia transit workers went on strike, and traffic was at a standstill, so everybody in the city walked.  I walked to University City, where the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel campuses are located, along the 20-block uphill grade in about 15 minutes.  Whether the workers go back or not, I may just consider ditching the bus altogether.

  I would also like to go on a date once more in my life, without being considered a cougar.  Since when did age become a predatory aspect of female nature but not so for men of any age?

  There are others I want to do, like figuring out why I can’t get the stitch count right in my crocheting, but these will do for now.  If I finish any one of them in a year, I’ll never complain about being another year older again.

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• All the News Fit to Squint

  Posted at 1:37 am by kayewer, on November 1, 2009

  I have issues with my newspapers.  I get two every day, and they seem to be less enjoyable than before.  My Reader’s Digest has already become a wasteland of advertisements, but now the newsprint media is following that same path to implosion.

  One local paper has even stooped to printing a 1 1/4 page front.  That’s right:  a flap of a page piggybacks onto the “real” front page:  the piece is simply a reprint of what lies beneath it.  Often it simply falls off.

  Section A of the paper includes a major department store ad which is a separate section but still labeled as Section A, possibly as a ruse to encourage readers to open it seeking other articles of importance.

  The entertainment page has doubled to include the cooking section on some days, the social calendar on others.  It’s depressing to see celebrity breakups on the left page and then read about the latest expensive common folk nuptials on the right page.

  The television section only features prime time listings for about 50 of the 200 channels we get on our cable system.  I don’t know why networks like BBC America put up with not having their own listings in the paper:  how are people supposed to know what programming is on?  Don’t refer me to the onscreen guide:  I nearly broke my fingers trying to scroll through the listings in a vain attempt to pre-program my week’s tapings.  I’ll never touch that onscreen hindrance again.

  The type is getting smaller in the daily papers, and the grammatical errors are beyond belief.  The comics are squeezed into tighter formats:  even Prince Valiant loses some drama when the panels are the size of wallet photos.

  One of the two carriers manages to throw the paper onto the doorstep every day.  The other hurls it onto the wet lawn (sometimes unbagged).  One paper has decided to offer a call-in forum for comments about general issues by the readers, and the biggest complaint is that of senior citizens who must make a daily (and often cumbersome) trek to find their papers in the morning.  In second place is the volume of complaints about that aforementioned front flap.

  I honestly believe that this world is going out of its way to make life as difficult as possible for select groups of people.  If the readership for newspapers in print goes, then the papers disappear, it shouldn’t be long before the intangible integrity of internet news will face its own problems.

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