Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: January 2017

• Weekly Retort

  Posted at 4:05 am by kayewer, on January 29, 2017

  I wasn’t really sure how to react to the first week of the Trump presidency.  I could say a few things jokingly or a lot of things scathingly, or the other way around. It looks like people do have a lot to say, and they’re letting off steam all over the place. Women are marching, anti-abortionists (including men) are marching, protestors are. . .okay, they’re not marching so much as fist fighting and yelling, but you get the picture.

  With three years and 51 weeks to go in his stint in the White House, it looks like our new president is trying to cram it all into the first eight days. Slow down, man.

  Sometimes when a new person takes over, they go into hyperdrive and do everything at once. People do that when they get an unexpected monetary bonus or an economy sized bargain at the store. The problem is, all the reward, and the joy of it, runs out rather quickly, and you’re back to square one.

  What comes to mind is one of the Harry Potter movies in which a new person in a position of power started tacking up new rules, regulations and policies on the walls of Hogwarts to the point of the ridiculous. I think she got abducted by some nasty creatures or something.

  The president won’t have to worry about nasty creatures taking him away. We will, however, let him know what we’re thinking. We’d better, whether we voted for him or not. Sometimes it takes a jolt from the joy of the reward to get focused on what matters.

  Yup, three years and 51 weeks.

   

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• The Make or Break Dollar

  Posted at 3:36 am by kayewer, on January 22, 2017

  If you had a choice between smoking a cigarette or saving a  life, I’m sure most of you would ditch the smoke, but if I mention that the act of saving that life costs one dollar more than you would pay on an annual bill, would you shrug it off and go smoke? One dollar has a varying amount of significance to people, but it can mean a lot more to those who don’t have one than those who do.

  Every year there are great causes which ask for a dollar contribution, fully tax deductible in most cases, but people not only shrug off the request, but they get downright mean about it.  Around the holidays, every charity gets its share, but not everybody eats well, finds a place to live or gets cured and/or disappears until next December when it all comes back again. Sure, I know that a lot of charities ask for ten, twenty or some larger amount, but I want to address the little organizations who work for the public good and ask for just one.

  Sometimes in my job I get mail in which a customer has expressed disgust about a dollar contribution, and it usually comes after the fact.  For example, the bill comes over a month in advance and lays out in detail what each amount charged is for, along with mention of the tax-deductible contribution. All one has to do is look at it and, if they have a question, just call. If a customer has authorized a credit card to be charged automatically for each year’s bill, it’s a sure thing that a month after that notice went out, at least one person will contact us and grouse about that dollar.  They didn’t authorize it (they just threw the bill away without reading it), they don’t know a thing about it (because they threw away the leaflet that came with the bill, which also mentions a web page explaining what the dollar does), and dag gum it, they want their dollar back.

  These are the same people who go to fancy pants restaurants and spend a day’s pay on food and alcohol which will be flushed into the sewers in a matter of hours. Yes folks, that exquisite stuff you just consumed (with poor table manners to boot) will be poo tomorrow. But that dollar you so indignantly coveted could buy several meals, or help dress a child with no clean dry clothes, or prevent a foreclosure, keep a drug abuser clean for one more day, or teach school children about traffic safety.

  Or those folks who complain about the dollar would spend $40 on a case of cigarettes and smoke it away.  I’ve always found smoking a bit strange: one runs from a burning building because the smoke is bad for you, but people who like cigarettes willingly inhale it.

  So, Mr. Disgruntled Tightwad, you take back that dollar. I’d give it to you in person if I could. Smoke it away. Eat or drink it and release it into the void with a wad of toilet paper.

  See you in December.

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• Space Jerk

  Posted at 2:01 am by kayewer, on January 15, 2017

  I was in one of our small towns this morning and needed to find a parking space. The street has no meters, and the main strip has about two dozen spots into which one can parallel park. The only problem was that the number of spaces was lessened by four; two jerks took up half of two spaces. The only cars that could have squeezed in would be one of those cute little Smart cars.

  That’s why they’re called that: people probably buy them knowing they can override a jerk’s lack of spacial acuity and get into a tight parking space. That’s smart.

  I remember learning how to parallel park in high school during driver training. I don’t know if schools have them anymore; they may have gone out of style with home economics,  physical education and most aspects of the arts programs, but we did learn it. When I went to take the driving test, the street on which I had to prove my parking skills was wider than I expected, which changed my sight lines for backing in, and it had no marked spaces but cones. I got between the cones just fine, but I was too far from the curb to pass.  Not to worry, though, since for my second attempt I had a fresh instructor and a different street (and the fellow who flunked me had also tested and flunked a half dozen of the remedial testers ahead of me and had to bypass us all).

  Of course a lot of driving experience has me parking like a pro, though some people never quite get the knack for it. Still, one should check before leaving a vehicle out of bounds on a street where parking is at a premium but costs are not. Small businesses need all the cars coming in that they can get. This one has a nice bakery, a florist, a deli, a few nice salons and a new restaurant coming in soon. That may make parking even more difficult.

  In my fantasy world of perfection, I would’ve had a dozen weightlifters at my beck and call who could lift and move those two jerks’ vehicles into the proper spots so I could have pulled in. Since that didn’t happen, I parked on a side street and mumbled under my breath a lot about people who don’t have Smart cars and aren’t smart behind the wheel.

   

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• And They Called the Whine Mariah

  Posted at 1:31 am by kayewer, on January 9, 2017

  I am about to speak in defense of Mariah Carey, which is a bit strange because I know little about her and am not what one would call a fan. Her experience at the “ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” broadcast was so widely criticized, that I thought I could throw in my two cents’ worth of opinion as a third-party observer who has no interest either way.

  I didn’t stay up to see it live (I’m getting to that age when balls dropping remind me of my future of declining dexterity and skin tone rather than a new year), but I saw enough repeats of what happened to know that everybody involved was somewhat at fault. Performers, and singers in particular, are commodities whose wants, needs and goals are at war with their contract-wielding, money hungry executives. Putting on a performance such as the NYE event costs bundles of cash, all of which the producers intend to get back from their working capital, namely Mariah. The other party is the audience, and let’s admit that we are a demanding and fickle mob.

  Let’s take a song like “Emotions,” which is one of her hits. From the moment the song hit our virgin ears back in 1991, we knew we always wanted to hear Mariah sing it just that way every time she sings it, and we want her to sing it all the time. This means producers and managers and agents line her up to sing it just that way, and that means if a performance is going to be on a cold stage at the end of December, some setting up has to be done.

  If anybody thinks for one minute that a song recorded in a sterile, acoustically perfect studio can be put on a stage anywhere and sound exactly the same, they need to hire a crew to hoist a rock from on top of them.

  Then of course you need the panoply and effects brought by high-tech sets and back-up dancers and singers, who stand in front of immense high-volume speakers with Mariah and try to make the audience excited and thrilled.

  Now you add to that all the electronics which can suffer quality loss under cold temperatures, and you have a recipe for a musical failure. But we came to see and hear Mariah sing just that way, so they give her an earpiece and mic her up and the show goes on. Except the earpiece wasn’t working.  Tough, they said.  The show must go on, she said.

  The fickle audience had the gall to be surprised.

  Sure I’ve been to concerts. In stadiums it works a bit differently. One time back in the day, the producers of a Billy Joel concert moved my seat and those of about 30 or so people so the console used to control the action onstage could be seated there.  I didn’t mind; it wasn’t my first time at the rodeo. This is how these things are done.

  It’s all hugely coordinated, because it’s popular music and that’s how the bigwigs want it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they did urge Mariah to go on in spite of the problems, because Dick Clark was not there to give the artist what was needed. Dick Clark knew performers and he would not have stood for that.

  Well, that’s not what I normally watch anyway. A bunch of choreographed song and dance pop is not my thing so much anymore. Give me a Broadway show any day. Give me true singing artists like Hugh Panaro and Hugh Jackman (who were both performing on the same block sometime back); men of talent whose voices can tickle the hairs on the backs of the necks of the last guy in the nosebleed seats (and now somebody will grumble that the performers have mics and I’ll challenge them to see if that little dingly thing glued to their foreheads can work outdoors).  Give me Placido Domingo or Marcello Giordani at the Met; now that’s singing.

  In our forebears’ days, Frank Sinatra had the stage by himself with a stool, a mic stand and a glass of water. I’d like to see Mariah Carey do that, and even though I’m not a fan, I’d pay for a seat.

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• The Year in the Mirror

  Posted at 3:06 am by kayewer, on January 1, 2017

  I did a few interesting things this past year, experienced some pain and some joy, and changed some of my philosophies on life. Judging by the upcoming year of 2017, many of us may change plenty of our philosophies on many things, but the results will have to come in their own time. As for the year we just survived. . . .

  I learned a silly piece of helpful information: if you are in a rental car or are driving a car for somebody else for any reason, and you need to fill the tank but are not sure where the gas cap is, look for the little graphic of a gas pump on your fuel indicator, where an arrow will indicate the side on which you should pull into the service station.

  If a game on Facebook is slow to load, scroll up and down the screen two or three times. I think it’s more of a time-waster than an actual fix, but progress seems to take less time when I do that.

  When Prince died this past April, the news flashed all over the monitors in the office, but my desk is in an area where no screens are visible (not to me nor to the office manager, strangely enough), and I was plugging away at a project which needed close attention to detail. I didn’t find out until I got home. The tears didn’t come until the next morning, when I bawled to every song on the 1999 album all the way to work. In the days and weeks that followed, I reconnected with old fan friends, and a friend who had never seen Purple Rain got to enjoy it with me. The sad truth about losing Prince is that his musical genius didn’t help him when it came to his health. He damaged his body for his fans by jumping off onstage props and becoming dependent on pain medication which nobody monitored properly for him. If ever there was a cause for stopping our pill solution-based medical ideas, this is it.

  Bullying and terrorism look like one and the same to me. When you break down the details of what they both do, they are crimes and should be dealt with harshly. When I read recently about Brandy Vela, a teenager who was bullied into shooting herself while her parents watched, the thought came to me that, had I been a teen in 2016, I probably would have been dead before 2013. Fortunately I forgave everybody who tormented me ages ago. It also occurred to me that the bully or bullies in this case may also be troubled teens capable of suicide.  They hid their identities to cyber-terrorize Brandy so they could not be traced.  A person who hides such rancor needs an understanding ear and serious professional help. Another case in which a story has two sides. I grieve for Brandy and her family.

  Went into a store to look into what was new for my cell phone service.  The guy couldn’t help me because he had limited access to account information. He told me to call customer service for help.  I did that in 2015, and they didn’t want to sell me anything.  I felt as if I was in an opposite skit from “You Can’t Do That on Television.”

  The manufacturer of panties labeled “briefs” should have a standardized guideline for what height constitutes a proper brief.  I bought two packages from two different companies, and one set was two inches too low and should have been labeled bikinis.

  I have vowed that, if I get the stomach virus again, I won’t leave the house until it is completely over. Last March, for the first time in 26 years (yes, I remember it that well), I caught the stomach virus that was going around, but was over the contagious portion when I went to New York to see the Met’s production of Manon Lescaut. Knowing the Puccini opera was a downer, I should have opted out, but I wound up feeling red-eyed and weepy at the young protagonist’s death in a desolate wasteland. Then I suffered the virus’ climactic crescendo of severe bloat, which popped up unexpectedly while I was trying to get a cab. Not one of my favorite moments. I think the cab driver stopped because he saw my general face of fright and thought I was desperate. I was, but not for the ride so much as a way to deflate my poor suffering gut.

  The progress I’ve made on my writing has given me a lift.  I blog and do side projects like synopses for IMDB.com to keep my creativity going.  One of my previous movie synopses got a padding out from another fan. That’s a good thing; the movie gets some more information added to its database, and somebody read my stuff. Doubly cool.

  So much for thinking back. The best things in life truly are free all the time, and I couldn’t survive the many chapters in this past year of life without the support of family, friends, co-workers and readers who may not even know me personally but take a second to read anyway.

  Bless you all. Here is the hope of a good 2017.

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