Susan's Scribblings the Blog

My town is selling fireworks this week from a tent in the shopping center, which is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime. July 4 is the big fireworks day, but it’s also a day dreaded by fire departments, law enforcement and emergency rooms nationwide because of the problems they create.

Of course I come from the late baby boomer generation, and we swung incense sticks and sparklers around on Independence Day with reasonable care because our parents said that if we burned something they would kill us. And we believed them. We were the take-a-hammer-to-blaster-caps generation, and helicopter parenting was not the emotionally charged war zone it is today in the liberal age, and we came out okay.

But then the world began to get dumber, and responsible fireworks handling (along with responsible parenting and adult common sense) was replaced by excessive caution and bans. At my age now, I see why this is not a bad idea, because the average American is so blase’ about handling cigarettes (which are pretty much miniature lit torches) that they don’t seem phased by an object set aflame and holding explosives with the potential to prematurely go off, maim and kill.

Leave it to the pros? That’s for the pros to say to ruin everybody’s fun, people say.

Every year our pros set up in the high school athletic field for the yearly ritual. They check winds and clearances, follow all the rules and do everything to ensure public safety. Usually debris from the fireworks falls away from anything important, and they’ve cooled off by the time they hit the ground, but once in a while a car gets pelted, or things land on lawns. And of course, every year some animals get the fur scared off them by so much booming and banging, that lost pet recovery runs into the next week.

Funny thing is that I usually find it too hot, muggy or buggy to watch the fireworks outdoors, so I watch the New York display on TV. Not to insult my beloved town, but without children to enjoy it with, the thrill of being out there is gone. But I salute the pros who go out there to make the holiday fun and safe, and I wish everybody a safe time.

Our skulls are growing new bones! It’s true. A new bony protrusion has appeared on x rays of skulls, and the guess was that it was happening mostly in teens, as reported in a Scientific Reports article by some Australian researchers. The possible cause? Tilting our heads down too much when looking at our devices.

Looking down used to be a cultural sign of submission, because one did not look others in the eye if they were of a lower class or being subjugated in some other way. Now we look down chronically as we watch cat videos or text our every move to our friends.

This is nothing to panic about, however. The growths show up in people of all ages, including the elderly, and with our bones regenerating periodically, teens with growth spurts are bound to have bone spurs here and there. I had one in my shoulder which incapacitated me for a while until anti-inflammatories and a cortisone shot killed the problem. It’s not a big deal.

What is a big deal is how much we look down, when we should ideally be looking up at everybody and everything. And yes, keep drinking your milk.

Babies and I don’t seem to have good karma. The first time I had any real contact with a baby, I was about eight or nine, and my grandmother tried to plop the infant into my arms without any preliminary instructions. All I remember was that the baby was mighty heavy, and my arms not all that strong, and my short life flashed in front of me as I thought I would drop the poor baby and be put away for manslaughter. My grandmother laughed. Actually everybody who was there at the time laughed. Not me.

The next time I held a baby, I was in my thirties. No, that is not a typo. Let’s just say that I don’t have much contact with big families with children. This time I was smart and sat down while the mother placed the baby in my lap. After about three minutes the child was bored and turned into a screaming terror anxious to get away. Everybody else just smiled knowingly. I was just as perplexed as I had been 23 or so years ago.

Since then I’ve seen countless people with babies, but haven’t held or even touched one. The other day, a co-worker on maternity leave stopped by the building with her new son and older sister, who is about three-ish now. She looked glum, probably because everybody fawns over little brother and ignores her, so after I greeted my coworker and expressed my joy at seeing the new baby, I took a minute to talk to the girl, to let her know she was important. My coworker asked me to open the door to the office for her. I did, and off she went.

So much for my life with babies: an unsolvable mystery.

Today I had the privilege of meeting with some friends at the local burger joint (the one with the name like that of the little bird who welcomes spring). Some of us have not seen each other in 20 years or more. We still look fabulous. And we still (pretty much) remember names and faces. I’m nearly always rusty with that, but not today.

It was just five of us for lunch, but we’re planning a bigger event for all of us to get together one last time, sort of like D-Day 75 plus a year, with folks not quite yet in their final years. We may not be as spry as before, but we’re still moving well all things considered.

We talked about the past and shared each other’s lives since we last met (along with our aging aches and pains). It’s get-togethers like this that keep me grounded in the present without dwelling on the negative past or the uncertain future.

We all have similar stories to tell, and we all indulged in food we really shouldn’t be eating. Heck, it’s a reunion, so why not? After nearly ninety minutes and plenty of laughs, we decided to meet again soon.

I’ve missed them; it can’t be soon enough.

I am planning a major blog post next week, but for now have a good holiday weekend, and please don’t let your fun be injurious to others’ well-being. Let’s all have a safe three days and enter Tuesday healthy and happy.

Otto Warmbier is 24602. Let me explain this. The man, age 22, technically died on North Korean soil after what was determined to be torture and injurious imprisonment. He was accused and convicted of mishandling a propaganda poster. He was not caught with the poster in his possession, but film footage apparently showed that he removed it from a wall and set it down because it was heavy, after a night out in Pyongyang with other travelers. The trial concluded that he “damaged” the poster depicting a head of state, a serious crime in North Korea. He was sentenced to years of hard labor, served 17 months in captivity, was returned to the United States after negotiations, but arrived comatose with little explanation from the North Koreans, and died in a hospital shortly afterward.

In Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Jean Valjean actually stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, and served years of hard labor for doing so, as prisoner 24601.

That is why Otto Warmbier is 24602.

His mother, Cindy Warmbier, has commented on the diplomatic attempts to work with North Korea, but these negotiations by the Trump administration appear to solve nothing.  The difference between a country of freedom and one of mystery is hard to decipher at times, but a man who, at age 22, hardly started his adult life, should not have suffered and died as he did. We may receive no truth in this terrible affair, and both countries remain at odds.

What I will remember is Otto Warmbier, #24602.

Hype is a soul killer.  April and May seem to be full of hype: spring comes, winter ends (they’re separate joyous times), and the entertainment industry starts to release the big events. May is a sweeps month, so all the television shows save their best for last. Movies start coming out in anticipation of a big summer.

Two of the biggest events this year are Game of Thrones, a cable TV series which features what may be the biggest but penultimate battle* this Sunday, and Avengers: Endgame which just appeared in movie theatres. GoT is halfway through its final season and prepared to meet viewer expectations in a nearly 90-minute episode depicting the Battle of Winterfell, in which humanity takes a stand against the invading undead White Walkers intent upon wiping out all living things, while the heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe try to restore the galaxy after a supervillain wiped out half of all living things.

Somehow I think the two should have traded places. But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, the Avengers and company have run for over 20 films and featured more fantastic actors than the Academy Awards could hold in one auditorium, while GoT has run eight seasons and worked effectively to exceed even the author George R. R. Martin’s novel output (who knows how he will catch up to them). It’s all coming (or come) to an end at last. I haven’t even brought up the last Star Wars movie (The Rise of Skywalker) coming in December, nor have I mentioned the last episodes of The Big Bang Theory, which I’m told is just as big as the rest of the series out there. I’ll get back to them.

All this hype and anticipation and the dates and episodes coming and going all at once can be hard on the spirit. I just saw the Avengers movie last night, clocking in at over three hours and feeling like a thrilling roller coaster ride which ran in slow motion in my mind to protect me from exploding. It probably didn’t help that our seats were three rows from the 3D screen. I will offer no spoilers here, but the intensity was so overwhelming that I could not process it all. With hours to go before the GoT episode, I know I will be mentally exhausted when it’s all over. Just in time for the workweek to start again. Is this what in war is considered fair? We are talking four and a half hours of my life which I am voluntarily giving over to creative minds who seem to want to, to put it politely, mess me up, so that my non-entertaining life might suffer.

There doesn’t seem to be a study of such things, but grouping so many big events together cannot be good for anybody. Studies have concluded that too much horror film exposure is bad, so excessive drama is probably equally as injurious. The only reason I’m doing it is that I am still young enough to enjoy the indulgence and old enough to appreciate what goes behind making such overly fantastical visual events. Also, anybody following a storyline craves closure. Any good tale needs a good beginning, strong middle and satisfying end.

I know without watching a single episode of Big Bang Theory that their fans will be split into love/hate camps and analyse it forever after the last hurrah. Same with Star Wars fans, of which I am one. That release date is before Christmas, and fans deal with it. We used to look forward to May releases, but not anymore. As if the holidays are not stressful enough, we have to sit in a theatre and worry about what happens to fictional characters.

I may be burning brain cells more than calories this year. Has anybody done a study on that?

*(Fans anticipate the ultimate GoT battle to come before or during the final episode, when the quest for who will sit on the Iron Throne is completed.)

The nine words no consumer wants to hear are, “We don’t have it, but we can order it.” I have heard that so many times lately, I’m wondering if anything in the world that I like is actually in stock.

I went to the shoe store, and the styles I wanted were out of stock, but could be ordered and arrive within a week. Since I was shopping during a coupon event, and time was growing short, I bought two other pairs instead, and I figure I’ll return when I can use my store credit to order the others. Naturally credits or shopper rewards cannot be combined with coupons. Besides, I have shoes, so it’s not as if I’ll be barefoot in the meantime, but I suppose shoes are hard to keep in stock in every size. If they come in wide and narrow widths, it’s an even bigger problem. Imagine a shoe in three or four colors and narrow and wide widths, and you have a stockroom just for one style of shoe.

Welcome to the shoe store. We sell one shoe, but it comes in all sizes.

The cell phone store, however, doesn’t carry batteries for the phones they sell. I found this out when my phone was expiring and wouldn’t hold a charge, and I went to the store for help. No can do. They didn’t have it and could not order it. A sales rep did show me a battery online I could order from “the big online retailer.” I ordered it, and what came was not even close to what fits in my phone. Not only don’t they have it and can’t order it, but they know nothing about it.

I got a recommendation from a friend and went looking inside a store that sells–believe it or not–just light bulbs and batteries. What a concept: a specialty store! I was almost giddy, thinking I would walk out of the store with a new cell phone battery.

They didn’t have it, but they could order it.

Since I already ordered a replacement from “the big online retailer,” I passed, but maybe I should call them back later. They did provide me with helpful information on when their stock order would come in. Everybody is happy to provide that information, because what they don’t have might come in, and then they can ship it.

It seems the only people making out on merchandise these days are the ones who ship it.

Violence in the workplace affects everybody; if you’re in a supermarket, it’s somebody’s workplace. Workers these days may be asked to review emergency procedures to protect themselves and others, and that was what I experienced this week. I saw a short presentation about active shooter safety entitled “Run, Hide, Fight: Surviving an Active Shooter Event” from the Department of Homeland Security and  the city of Houston, TX.

I found it mildly disturbing, and not because of what you might think. In the first minute of the video, a clean-cut black clad man calmly walks into an office lobby, pulls a highly lethal weapon from a backpack and opens fire with precision, cutting down two people–one a security guard–on camera and a fleeing employee out of sight. The overall sense of dread as employees act out the prescribed scenarios modeling the choice to run, hide or fight when confronted with an active shooter then play out.

“Run, hide, fight” is the DHS prescribed way to deal with a shooter in your office. In short, if you can escape, leave your things and get out, and try to take other people out with you; if you can’t escape, hide as best you can; if those will not work, grab anything you can use as a weapon and aggressively fight the shooter for your life.

Three workers run from the building and stop a man parking his bicycle from going in, as a woman in the group dials 911. A group of employees in a break area push furniture in front of a door, while two women hide in different spaces: a cubicle and in a dimmed office with a copier blocking the door. When the break area employees realize the shooter will come in for them, the men grab chairs and other objects, a panicked woman moves to a corner out of the way, and when the shooter enters the action freezes and then cuts to the responding rescuers looking for their suspect.

That was what disturbed me. What happened after that?

The old saying attributed to Anton Chekhov (and never really accurately quoted) is that a gun revealed in act one needs to be fired by the end of the play. An apt saying for this kind of situation, because we know the confrontation is coming, but then we are cheated out of it. There is no resolution to the incident, and any writer would likely pick that up immediately and question it, including me. The rest of the video plays out, showing workers racing to safety behind emergency vehicles and such, but the story wraps up without going back to the break area. The video runs slightly less than six minutes, but they could have wrapped up the story with four seconds more.

I wanted to see the gunman on the floor of the break area, knocked out cold by the man wielding the chair. I wanted to see the leader of the group holding the gun pointed at the gunman, or better yet, the gunman, sans widow maker, running down the hall for dear life and into the hands of law enforcement. Anything but what we got: nothing.

If we’re going to be proactive enough to deactivate an active shooter, we could benefit from seeing that it can be done. We don’t even need to know the how, just that it can happen. If we can’t deter them, beat them.

(Because I don’t want to disturb or offend readers, I am not providing a link to the video, but you can choose to view it or not on your own and see what you think.)