Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: December 2013

• I Resolve

  Posted at 1:53 am by kayewer, on December 28, 2013

  2014 will be the year. Lots of people say that every new year, but one time it has to be THE ONE, and 2014 for me will be that ONE.

  I decided to make it easier to keep some of those resolutions that always go wrong within hours or days of January 1st, so I ate some of the most godawful cafeteria food, wore some of the clothes that make me look fat, made a note of how many steps it took to get me winded and comparison shopped for fitness equipment at Five Below (they have resistance bands for five bucks).

  Now I am ready to quit eating, exercise and lose some weight.

  My food portion sizes will fit on a teacup saucer. The contents of that saucer will be primarily veggies, with a smattering of starch and protein to make it look appetizing. My ketchup is already free of high fructose corn syrup, and I rarely touch the salt shaker, so the next step should be easy, right?

  To fill in the time I will gain by eating less, I have a project a day lined up for me to do: writing (always), crochet and felting. As for the latter, I’ve found a wonderful UTube tutorial which will teach me to make wonderful poseable animals from fluffy wool, some wire armature and a lethal-looking barbed needle which one uses to inflict multiple injuries to the fibers to tangle them into solid matter. As I poke away at the wool, I can recall people who have caused me to lose my temper, or I can think about all the terrible stories on CNN, which blares constantly in the cafeteria at work while I’m trying to enjoy my food (which will now come in a saucer sized portion).

  I have a walking program lined up. I will get out and walk a bit every day. This will  make up for the time I sit glued to my chair waiting for the once yearly phone call from the company CEO, when I can explain that my boss is in a meeting at another location and can he return the call. If I do this for my two ten-minute breaks a day, that will be 100 minutes of exercise a week. Not bad for the girl who never could run and, in the old days when school children could run around the school building without fear of interference from the outside world, she usually finished steps ahead of the chronically obese kids in the class. Funny thing is I’m not really out of shape: I just never could run, so walking is the thing for me.

  Last year at this time, I had lost fifteen pounds to stress. Once the stress ended, I gained it back. The key was to eat lots of soup. Unfortunately soup does not fit on a saucer well.

  Maybe I should just resolve to write more. I could exercise more by going back and forth to the mailbox looking for responses to query letters and live off ramen noodles to lose weight. I could be in a size six by Valentine’s Day!

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• Say Goodbye to 2013 By Numbers

  Posted at 3:40 am by kayewer, on December 22, 2013

  I think the major problem with 2013 is that there is a 13 in it. If there is a bad number like 13 in a year, other bad numbers come up, like the clock radio I bought a few years ago (covered in an earlier blog here, too), that still runs seven minutes fast. Or the fact that anytime I play “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on Facebook, I tank on the $250,000 question. During one regular game, I second-guessed myself and gave the same answer as everybody else: if I had followed my gut, I could have been the only person to get the $10,000 question. That error put my out of the game when I’m used to being in the top three.

  At my job, my parent company spun some of us off into another corporate arm for 20 months, which didn’t work, so now they’ve brought us back in. That doubled our paperwork, but at least it’s not likely to happen again.

  I sat in traffic for two hours or more twice this year, busted one tire on my car (replaced all four), spent eight days with a splinter in my thumb (it only seemed bruised until the offending sliver poked out by itself), and did not have my hair cut once. I saw two 3D movies and five regular movies which I liked, but also saw dozens of movie trailers which did not influence me to see the films at all.

  In 2013 three major landmarks came down (an adult performance venue called the Fantasy Showbar and then Jersey Girls before closing, a Chevy dealer in Moorestown– the former Classic Chevrolet, with its trademark neon sign–and a landmark Sears Store). The porn palace was replaced by a Taco Bell, the dealership will have a Wawa store soon, and the former Sears is just a gaping hole in a city full of them (Camden, NJ).

  With only ten days to go in the year at the time of this posting, I’m glad we can put an end to this one. Maybe 2014, being an even year, will be better. At least my clock radio will be into it seven minutes before everybody else.

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• Hollywood Corporate Compliance

  Posted at 1:16 am by kayewer, on December 15, 2013

  When I’m at work, the company requires all employees to complete courses to enlighten us about business issues, a program collectively called corporate compliance. We are reminded how important it is to  maintain a secure office environment, how not to cause emotional disturbances in a diverse workplace and how our elected officials have designed programs with rules to live by when we’re on the clock. We usually take three courses a year; new employees have a few extra courses to help assimilate them into the corporate environment; it doesn’t matter if it is their first or fifth job, it’s a company rule to make sure everybody is exposed to the courses and knows what is expected in the world of cubicles and corner offices.

  I was at the movies last night at the premiere of The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug, which I saw in IMAX 3D. I don’t go to a lot of IMAX features, because not all the movies I see get to play there. Those that do are big.  The theatre screen is the width and height of my family home, and the sound quality has the effect of a giant cotton swab. I turned to my theatre companion during the commercials, which were softer due to their not having been filmed for IMAX sound quality, and told her I hoped the sound would get better in time for the feature, and in the next second the first IMAX footage hit the screen, and the speakers, with a sonic boom that punched the sweat from my pores (and cleaned my ears). The folks at IMAX must have planned it that way.

  One can almost forget where they are (a big, boxy and expensively maintained piece of real estate) and believe they are in, say, a huge grand hall filled with pilfered gold and guarded by a fearsome dragon, when watching a big Hollywood production on an IMAX screen. It was totally enjoyable, though I felt afterward as if I had been in a war, feeling emotionally drained from dodging dragons, giant bees and other impressive things coming out from the screen into my face.

  The experience of a movie in 3D on such a grand scale is immersive and assimilating, much like corporate compliance places all employees on the same page when it comes to the world inside an office. As I watched the previews for upcoming features, I noticed a trend that seems to scream corporate compliance requirement. If Hollywood had a corporate compliance course listing, they might require some interesting things of their employees. Herein is my list of compliance courses (which Hollywood seems to follow well):

  Equal Employment in Battle Epics: The upcoming movie 300: Rise of an Empire appears to be compliant with this course, in which women dress minimally but have the testicular fortitude of 300 men. Warrior women are claiming their own spot in the movie versions of history, and any film that has battles in them will need to include at least one hard-as-nails female.

  Taking Risks: Going again to the preview for 300, it seems a lot of movie big men are required to leap from a cliff or building into mid-air without thinking about where they might land. The business world likes risk-taking to a degree, but corporate risks don’t normally include defying death.

  Landing on Your Feet: Some movie superheroes seem to have picked up a trait by which they fall from the sky (see the above course) and land in a kneeling position, causing a seismic wave with the impact (as happens in the Ironman  or Thor movies) Doing so with a weapon like a hammer in your hand is a bonus.

  Diversity Training: Quite a few movies focus on young people who have special gifts, what used to be referred to as quirks. They may get bullied, and teachers and bosses may not like folks who don’t fit into the mold, but they make for good cinema, and a diverse workplace should have people from all walks of life, before or after world destruction and takeover. Thus we have compliant films like Vampire Academy and Divergent.

  Environmental Impacts: Any movie trailer that opens with a vista of fields or destroyed cities counts in this course. Interstellar counts as one; the new Godzilla counts as another. It’s always important to let people know what their world looks like now, and what it might look like if we’re not careful.

  So there I was in the IMAX theatre having my ears cleaned by sound waves, trying to figure out why images distort when the 3D glasses tilt on my nose, and cursing myself that I couldn’t leave my job at the door. Don’t get me wrong; the movie was spectacular, and I was there at a unique moment to interpret everything before it like this. You don’t get that from a newspaper columnist; only from an office worker who is corporate compliant.

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  Posted in Commentary, Theatre/Movies/Entertainment | 0 Comments | Tagged Hobbit, IMAX 3D, movie trailers

• The Holy Day Question Part One

  Posted at 3:24 am by kayewer, on December 8, 2013

  Let’s take a look at the state of the Christmas holiday in 2013. Warning: this blog may be provocative and negatively influential, so I’ll be as brief as one can on such a subject.

  There is a distinct likelihood that the holiday, as we know it, has been manipulated by the machinations of men, and it is possible that we are not celebrating the birth of Christ on the proper day. There, I’ve said it. In doing so, some folks may feel that, in spite of my life’s efforts, I may well have just purchased an irrevocable one-way ticket aboard the satanic express train to that other place, where a private fate teeming with brimstone and suffering await my damaged soul. It’s hard to talk about things like this and not wonder about what one is saying when saying it. As a human being, I know that we are all making errors all the time, but when it comes to doing the ultimate duty to honor the birth of our Lord in whom we and millions of others believe, do we want to err this way? If nobody can claim December 25 as the actual birthday, let’s examine why we’re moving such important dates around for convenience’s sake (and I won’t even mention Easter).

  All the writings and rumors point to a scheme perpetrated in the past by which our ancestors replaced a pagan holiday with a holy one, probably with the intent to realign people who, in the opinions of others, were in error by worshipping nature or practicing holistics or something of the sort. Sure, folks can argue this point and other aspects of our faith to exhaustion, and I certainly don’t want my spouting off about Christmas herein to become an all-out religious argument (which it often does when somebody brings this matter up in the first place, and I’m certainly not the first). So let’s take a breath and get down to the real question.

  My question is this: Who, if anybody, knows on what day Jesus was actually born, and why has it not been shared, if somebody does know what day it is?

  Maybe it has something to do with the history of the day itself. Christmas was supposedly banned in the United States for a while, then it came back, then it gained the trees and holly and songs and carols. In modern consumer times it has ballooned into a free-for-all in the malls, theft, debt and mayhem. Every time I read about people being trampled over a piece of merchandise, or a town hall arguing over whether a snowman can be displayed on the lawn if a crèche cannot, I shake my head.

  How can one day on a calendar be such a disaster? If we can put an end to all the misinformation and correct our erroneous ways, why not get started on it now, before we have another season of mistakes? How do yule logs, faith and annual cheese log catalogs all fit together when the real idea of the day is to celebrate a life-changing birth?

  (Part Two is coming, if the results of Part One permit.)

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• With Charity for All

  Posted at 3:29 am by kayewer, on December 1, 2013

  This is the time of year when requests for donations increase tenfold. If you have not received a dozen calendars, packs of wrapping paper or greeting cards, a glitzy set of address labels or a hard plastic card displaying next year’s calendar in print that will blind you without a magnifier, you are lucky as you are apparently off the grid when it comes to charities.

  Organizations seem to feel that, in sending you cost-minimal items you may use, you will feel like contributing to their cause out of a sense of guilt, obligation or because you forgot when you last wrote them a check. The common gist of most conversations between people who are inundated with charity guilt swag is that, if the organizations didn’t send all the stuff, they could put the costs into the very cause for which they are trying to get your money.

  Some folks are quite particular about what appears on their address labels, and not everybody likes to see their name incorrectly listed on a twenty page notepad which might be spotted at the supermarket with the grocery list on it.

  One can also only use one or two calendars at a time (except a friend of mine, who buys about five versions of polar bear and panda calendars every year). The ones you don’t use tend to wind up in the “take one, give one” pile at the office. Sometimes this works for people who don’t go out and buy a themed calendar for their cubicle.

  I tend to give to charities every month except December. That is the one month when people tend to remember to be charitable, so I declare December a month of rest. My charity list will hear from me again next year, when everybody else forgets that people starve January through November, too.

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