Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: September 2011

• Motivate-Shun

  Posted at 2:08 am by kayewer, on September 25, 2011

  Some people diet successfully with a goal in mind.  I guess I’m not one of them.

  I have an event coming up in November, for which I figured I could possibly lose a few pounds.  It should be simple; when you eat a lot, you gain, so eat less and lose.  40 days into my motivational dieting and not a pound has come off.

  This means that, in an office full of bad foods, I avoided them and didn’t lose.  Extra trips to stores to have a reason to walk more didn’t help.  Filling myself with salads and no dressing didn’t help.  Switching from 2% to 1% milk didn’t help.

  Taking sodas (with their baggage of high fructose corn syrup and strange portion size issues) completely out of my diet didn’t help, either.  In fact, I tried to come up with a drink of my own, consisting of club soda with a splash of lemon and lime juices which I called Urp Number 7 (because it slightly resembles its real-life counterpart, it does bubble, and it took seven tries to get the recipe right).  This concoction was designed to be an accessory to the nearly 40 ounces of water and hot tea I drink daily at the office to stay hydrated.  All it did was send me on more bathroom breaks.

  The cafeteria at work has nice salads, so I tried a plate of greens with just spinach, lettuce, green pepper, mushrooms and about a tablespoon of fat-free vinaigrette.  The bottomless stomach didn’t even register a hint of satisfaction.

  In fact, I’ve gotten hungrier because of the deprivation.  The other day I treated myself to a plain donut at the office; it tasted heavenly.  When the office has had donuts six times since I started this program, I think I scored a B for only succumbing once.

  During the program, I took the time to look at portion sizes of everything, and it doesn’t seem right that food labels aren’t true to packaging.  Why can’t I have eight ounces of a beverage like iced tea for 100 calories, instead of wasting the other 150 on a larger bottle that I don’t intend to drink?  Needless to say, bottled tea did not go on my diet shopping list.

  Ice cream is off the list, too, but if one were to try portion control it is a son of a gun.  A portion size is really little more than a mouthful, so most of us are having a dish or cone which is at least ten times what one should eat.  And some folks eat ice cream every day.  I don’t.  Still, the pounds stubbornly cling and mock my attempts at success.

  So I’ll go to the event weighing the same, but packed into a nice, strangling control garment.

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  Posted in Commentary | 0 Comments | Tagged dieting, weight loss goal

• Bullying Pulpit Part II

  Posted at 2:17 am by kayewer, on September 18, 2011

  October is National Bullying Awareness Month.  I don’t know why it wasn’t pushed up to September, when school starts, but it’s good to have a month each year devoted to a perpetual and misunderstood problem.

  I have noticed a trend among televised anti-bullying media.  The articles start with a profile of how much bullying is going on in schools (estimates are that 15-25% of students are bullied), then a parent of a victim (living or dead by suicide) speaks up about stopping the madness, then the piece closes with a blurb about a forum or other event trying to target local bullying.

  It’s a step in the right direction.  Back in pre-segregation times, or in some current religious cultures, nobody has held a forum to stop racial violence or stood up against religious-based spousal abuse with the same degree of dedication.  Nobody seems to look at film footage of crowds being pummelled by spray from fire hoses and call it bullying, but it was.  And it was perpetrated by adults, openly, while other adults watched.  In many cultures open forum bullying isn’t even blinked at.  Maybe that’s why we can’t stop it in schools:  we expect our children to grow into the adult culture we insist upon.

  Deep inside us, there is an iota of brain matter that says it is okay to forcibly discomfort other people mentally or physically to align them with our own ideals.  It starts in school when all students–regardless of problems such as income, family values or learning roadblocks like dyslexia or ADD–are held to a conformity that dictates every aspect of life.  For instance, most schools claim they have no dress code, yet bullying targets visual perceptions of fashion conformity (just try talking your did into not buying those overpriced jeans). When lesson time comes, teachers who rely on lecture-based lessons may lose the attention of students who process visual aids more effectively.

  Maybe instead of charter schools concentrating solely on subject specific learning goals, they should concentrate on the education of a population based on their ability to learn.  A school that allows visual aid based learning for students who don’t process lectures well might help.  Schools might also consider a dress code that may not require uniforms, but would focus on specific clothing items which could be afforded by all students and would not cause distractions like the student who comes to class in big-money fashion while another wears more cost-conscious garb.

  We should also continue the trend toward tolerance.  Once we have united our human race, we can start dealing with other problems more effectively without concentrating on differences that really don’t matter, such as religion, color, choice of pizza toppings or what cell phone upgrade you’re using.

  And no, this topic is not exhausted yet.

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  Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment | Tagged bullies, bullying

• From Pillar to Post Office

  Posted at 2:42 am by kayewer, on September 11, 2011

  The post offices are in trouble because people aren’t writing letters as much as they used to.  I’m guilty of that crime just by posting this online.  The senior management as the postal service is talking about discontinuing Saturday mail delivery and cutting jobs to stave off default on their financial obligations.

  Sure, the computer age is partially to blame, because email is easy to type, quick to deliver and doesn’t require paper, a writing implement or a 44 cent stamp.  On the other hand, these virtues are in themselves sins that are negatively affecting our proper use of the English language.

  I do have issues with the electronic age that I don’t have with so-called “snail mail.”  For example, typing gives you many more opportunities to make mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar.  I pity those who rely heavily on “spell check” or other online grammar devices.  I groan and right-click my way through many a warning that my computer offers, accusing me of writing “run-on” sentences.  I plow through those squiggly lines at about 65 words per minute (without my first cup of tea).

  With handwriting, one must sit and take time to craft characters and periods and commas, so one must also stop to think about sentence structure.  I don’t think many people hand scribe “LOL” on a piece of stationery.

  I can’t say that any script font in all Microsoft Land can beat good penmanship, with a real pen and blue or black ink.  In fact, after suffering the ignorance of elementary school teachers who bowed out of the responsibility of teaching good penmanship, I took the time to hone my script myself and I’ll be darned if I’ll let that skill go just because I use a keyboard every work day.  I still write in journals, hand write greeting cards and envelopes and enjoy using those little sticky notes to jot down notes to myself.  Even the little one-inch variety can be fun to use.

  We could ask some of our elders about the good old days when mail delivery was twice daily during the holidays, or when one could take a discount on stamps if they inserted the flap on the envelope without sealing it (don’t ask me why that made a difference, but it did).

  Letters have always been the tangible evidence of life lived.  Years ago I had the privilege of seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s notes in New York, up close.  He wrote copiously, sometimes in backwards mirror code, sometimes in circular print and always in Italian.  I took the time to look at the ancient writing set to parchment so long ago, and marvelled at how fresh it looked under glass, just inches from my eyes.  The ages between us didn’t seem to matter.  When will that be said of an email?  In fact, which of these electronic blips in a machine’s memory will outlive us?

  There is something about sitting down and writing a letter that slows down time, relieves stress and grounds us in the world that is really simple but for our own machinations that surge us forward with time-saving on the mind.  The pen is really mightier than Microsoft Word when it comes to reminding ourselves that some old things like the post office are still relevant and need to be preserved.

  (P.S.  Back on 9/11 I was the first person on a message board to post about the events in New York and Washington.  The post disappeared with the message board.  If it had been a piece of mail, it would still be around today.)

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• Bullying Pulpit

  Posted at 2:30 am by kayewer, on September 4, 2011

  Every time the subject of bullying comes up, in my mind come two questions.  First, do bullies remember being bullies?  Second, do they remember who they bullied?

  In New Jersey, a Bill of Rights focused on bullying was signed by Governor Christie.  It is designed to make school students and faculty aware of their responsibilities to prevent harassment, intimidation and bullying.  It aims to form committees, involve law enforcement, and encourage active participation to stop negative behaviors before they get out of control.

  Though I’m a bullying survivor, nobody ever asks me for my opinion, because it’s been awhile since I dreaded the possibility that I would set foot inside my school and find myself on the receiving end of an attack.  Once school is out, nobody remembers or cares.  The end of school is like the end of war:  whatever happened, folks would rather forget about it and move on.  But servicemen come back from war with horrors etched into their souls, and emotional scars, regardless of origin, don’t just go away.

  I can tell you from experience that, somewhere in the list of causes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), there should be a section devoted to being a victim of bullying and the lingering emotional pain it can cause.

  Harassment, intimidation and bullying are all steps on the ladder of racism, ethnic cleansing and outright war, in that they attack the existence of humanity on an individual as well as a group level.  Even though we are moving toward a global understanding and tolerance model, we still have not gained enough common sense to realize that no single-minded population exists without some outliers on either side of what is considered the norm.  We tend to think of the differences between our own social groups with such stubborn prejudice that it would be just as easy to wage a war between coffee and tea drinkers as it would be to put a religion against another just because one does this and the other that.

  Once I saw a news story on television about the symmetry of the human face.  There actually isn’t any.  If one were to take one side of their face and duplicate it for the other side, the resulting face would be astonishingly different.  That’s because life itself has no set of features, no symmetry or perfection.  Groups form because they share common bonds, but not all of the bonds are the same.  Sadly, if somebody has a flaw that the others don’t like, they will reject that individual in spite of all they have in common.  Bullying is just a part of that sad journey toward rejection rather than acceptance.

  Besides, after school has ended and we have all gone off to live our lives, I don’t think anybody has had somebody say to them, “Congratulations on telling So-and-so how (insert putdown here) they were.  That shows you really are a person of character.”

  I hear the Bullying Bill of Rights is some 16 pages long.  I don’t think it will help, either.  Words and threats are the bully’s weapons in the first place.  It is an appeal to the soul that is needed.  Bullying damages souls on both sides.  That is an argument for another time, but it does need examining before bullying can truly be stopped.

  —To Be Continued.

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