Susan's Scribblings the Blog

I know a lot of people will be watching The Big Game. I never do. I belong to that elite group of abstainers who try to not jinx the playing teams. Last year the Philadelphia Eagles won, and the last time they made the finals I had watched and they lost. This year it doesn’t matter, since neither team is local enough to require blind sports loyalty from the region’s residents (live in this town, be this team’s fan).  I like to see a good game of football, regardless of who plays, but the Big Game seems to spoil it all because it is too big for itself.

If you can’t even use the words Super anywhere near the word Bowl when discussing football in January and February, something is wrong with the world.

A sporting event can become larger than life because of overhyped publicity. It costs millions of dollars just to place a commercial on the game. The amount of food consumed during a Big Game is amazing, and the number of post-game hangovers bad for daily businesses (it is expected that workers will call out sick on post-game Monday). My office has workers on Sunday, so I had to order wings and veggie platters. I won’t get any, as I have the day off. Another reason not to watch the game: no food.

Then there are all the pre-game prep. Pre-game, pre-pre-game, the making of the pre-game and commentary enough to make into a miniseries. No wonder men don’t talk to women so much: they exhaust themselves all in one day.

It will be hard to ignore, but it will all be over for another year. I’ll be tired just avoiding it all. In the end, one team will win, and I will not have jinxed them.

Black Panther, the Marvel movie that excited and unified audiences last year, has been nominated for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards. It’s up against another movie with “black” in its title: Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, and the other competition includes Green Book (which is about another African American experience), the modern (for the third time, I think) remake of A Star is Born, Vice (about a politician) and the Queen rock band biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Oh mama mia, indeed.

The field now actually has, in the Marvel cinematic entry, a popular motion picture which came out nearly a year ago. How often do we see that? Many of the movies which end up nominated come out at the end of the year, leaving no room for popular early or summer fare, which have always seemed to be snubbed in favor of projects deemed more worthy by the cinematic hotshots. The masses get digitally ramped-up pap, while the classier folks with the northbound noses watch arty mental workout movies with little to offer emotionally, which doesn’t seem much like entertainment to me.

Movies that win awards tend to have some measure of merit in their product, or they are the best choice at the time from the competitors, and it’s good that this movie was recognized. It may not win; in fact, it is an unlikely underdog, unless the voters want to go with a movie that shows a positive message in everything it does. Women are strong bodyguards, political powerhouses or technology whizzes in Wakanda, the world with two sides: a developing nation on the public side of an invisible protective shield, and an advanced community who knew STEM before anybody else on the other. Sure it has costumes and a mythos and humor, but also a very human story. It’s a different type of production for such an honor, and in an ideal world it should take home the Oscar, to honor Stan Lee and director Kevin Feige if nothing else. Also, there was damn good acting by Chadwick Boseman and company.

Marvel fans are cheering. So am I. Let’s see how the rest of awards season pans out, and then we can watch the “big event” and possibly see history be made. Wakanda forever!

I’m recommending that everybody go out to a good TV show, play or movie, preferably a comedy, this week. I went to the Walnut Street Theater and saw “A Comedy of Tenors,” and it was a much needed reason to have a good laugh. We’re expecting bad winter weather, everybody is grumpy, government workers are desperate and we still have months until spring (and Captain Marvel).  So find a reason to laugh in a good comedy.

As a country we seem to have lost our reason to laugh. Sure we’re having some tough bumpy times lately, but stress is a big problem everywhere too, and the cure is to find what gives you positive feelings, not negative ones.

Having just been diagnosed with hypertension, I realized this week that I needed to chill a bit myself, and I tried to this week. It wasn’t always easy. It’s about finding your happy place and visiting it whenever you need to, not just when you can.

It’ll be raining a fountain tonight. I’ll stay inside and go to my happy place.

Being busy has caught up with me. Turns out I have high blood pressure. Me! I’m the calm, cool and collected mellow type. Or at least I have been until recently. Lately I’ve been, as the Brits put it, always on the job. Although they might mean something else when they say that: something which can also raise one’s blood pressure (in a good way).

Stress probably has a lot to do with it. From worrying about getting to sleep, to worrying about waking up on time, doofusses in public office and dingbats in the office environment, high prices and low morale, more of us are having trouble taking care of ourselves, and it manifests itself in physical maladies of all sorts. High blood pressure, also known as hypertension, can show no symptoms at all except when you get a reading at the physician’s office. Over the past year mine has been a bit high, so now that a follow-up has shown no improvement, it’s time to set those resolutions from a week ago into motion to get me pumping normally again.

This won’t mean much of a change in diet for me, as I don’t eat excess salt and watch my carbs and sugar. Medication  may help also. I will also have to chill out a bit and remember what it’s like to be Cx3M (calm, cool, collected, mellow) again.

So don’t piss me off.

Who needs a border wall? We don’t. The president wants to erect a dividing line between our country and Mexico, and he is so stubborn about it, he is willing to put people’s lives at risk and hold our congress at bay to do it. The government has been shut down for awhile now, and federal employees are about to go hungry, our national parks turn into refuse dumps (due to no cleanup crews) and the comfort of democracy riddled with holes.

We’ve been around for over 200 years and never closed off a single acre. People came in and went out, and things in general were peaceful. Good fences make good neighbors, the saying goes, but not always. We are not that far away from the day the Berlin Wall came down. Before that day (November 9, 1989), people were shot trying to reach one side or the other. The wall didn’t keep people out; guards with guns kept people living within. It made Germany into two prisons. America is not a prison; we have them, but they are supposed to be for the morally displaced who have been selected to change their ways there by the criminal justice system, not the entire citizenry.

We have a border with Canada, and nobody sees them traipsing over into our territory illegally. We don’t have anything for them, so maybe we need to not have anything to offer on our southernmost border, to discourage illegal entry.\

I have been a proponent of an international record of birth (IRB) to serve as a document for newborns to non-American citizen parents, so their native country can register them as citizens at another time. This would prevent an overabundance of children who, by virtue of their mothers giving birth on a plot of land within the USA, might otherwise be misidentified as Americans when they should probably be citizens of another country. In the name of diplomacy, other countries should be able to recognize their own new members. Really, don’t we only have so much room here? As far as a border goes, no constructed barrier makes a difference to people who are desperate for a life someplace not where they were before. They climb, tunnel under or force their way through. A wall won’t prevent that, but actions might.

We don’t need a border wall. We need to help the border states establish better working parameters, find our indigent residents jobs and tighten labor laws. If what is in front of you does not look better, you can still turn around and find green grass if you only look for it. We should encourage the president to stop the stubbornness and get our government back in business and forget the wall.

We forget history. That’s why a winter seasonal song hit such as “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is getting bad publicity in this socially sensitive age.  Originally a 1940s era “call and response” song (so named because of it’s conversational nature), it was designed as a party closer when it was time for guests to go home, and was first performed by its writer Frank Loesser and his wife Lynn Garland.

Back in the “old days,” a woman could actually drop by her date’s apartment for a nightcap or a quick smoke. In those times women were respected for what they were (for which men were actually grateful). Sometimes they mutually agreed to spend time together, but some conversational give-and-take would occur as a token effort to settle the issue of whether she should spend the night and ignore the community gossip sure to follow. It was all about maintaining respectability in an age just before the chaos of the 1950s with rock and roll and slowly loosening standards of conduct.

Followers of the “Me Too movement” and PC stalwarts challenge the song for what is being reclassified as implied date rape, mostly because the woman at one point asks about what is in her drink. Remember that people kept bar sets at home, and not everybody was a mixologist. However, the balance of jerks to gentlemen was decidedly in favor of the latter, and responsible drinking was the norm back then.

Simply put, the girl is staying, but she is doing her part to let the fellow know that no funny stuff will be going on.  It’s empowerment, people. The sociology majors probably get it; it’s time we did, too.