Susan's Scribblings the Blog

It seems we are having issues with entitlement. Everybody seems to think the world is out of control, so people are grasping desperately at whatever might make them feel somewhat empowered, even if it’s for nothing at all.

It might have to do with our current state of national affairs. Nothing is within our control, including health care. In other countries, everybody gets health care, but it’s not because they are entitled to it, but because they look upon their health differently and don’t abuse themselves to the point at which caring for their self-inflicted ills becomes a burden on society. The system can afford to take care of people who take care of themselves.

Entitlement is a reward, but not an automatic one. Often entitlement tries to link up with empowerment, but they don’t always work the same. Here is an example.

A customer accused us of being misogynistic because an email contact meant for her husband appeared in her inbox. Of course there was a simple reason for it: they both provided her email address as a contact point. She was angry, though, because for some obscure reason, she felt that by us going through her to reach her spouse, that she was marginalized, and she was entitled to receive only contacts specifically meant for her. Sure she was entitled, if we got the right information. Misogyny had nothing to do with it, but her tirade sounded better that way to her at the time. She was angry, and angry people often want to feel entitled.

A coworker announced at lunch the other day, “I can’t quit smoking.” This means that she is entitled to keep on smoking. It also means that medical science is entitled to work diligently to cure her lung cancer, because she is entitled to a cure even if she caused the disease. Such a proclamation does not sit well with me, because anybody with an ounce of sense–including myself–knows that starting a bad habit is always easier than it is to break it, but that does not entitle us to keep doing it. Doctors are burdened with the task of working on sick people with blackened lungs who could have prevented it by just not picking up what is essentially a miniature lit torch and inhaling its contents for 30 years.

A commercial on our local networks tries to convince us that the Philadelphia soda tax is a good thing because children are able to attend Pre-K when they could not before the funding from the tax entitled more kids to the early education system. The ad shows cute little cusses in graduation caps, receiving diplomas for finishing Pre-K. When I went through school, one didn’t graduate anything except high school senior year. That cap and gown and diploma meant something because it took thirteen years of my life to get it. One was not entitled to graduation; it was earned through hard work. What on earth do these youngsters do to entitle them to a graduation from Pre-K? And then elementary school, middle school? We tend to over-entitle when we don’t want to wait for the reward.

People who feel entitled don’t flush toilet seat covers when they leave the restroom stall. They don’t wipe off a table when they are finished with it. They drop food wrappers on the sidewalk when a trash receptacle is feet away. To them, they are entitled, and all the hard work is somebody else’s job.

The problem is, you and I and everybody are somebody’s somebody else. The cleaning staff don’t feel entitled to clean after you when you make a mess. That was supposed to end before your age had double digits in it. The health care system steps in with a sigh because you decided to not eat your carrots when you were a kid and felt entitled to be a picky eater, and now you’re sick.

I could go on, but I feel you’re entitled to not hear me rant.

Somebody at work commented that I seem to have a lot of clothes. Not really. They fit in a few drawers and one tiny closet the size of a (now defunct) phone booth, but I try to make good use of what I have. It’s always good if somebody notices your fashion sense, especially when you saved cents to obtain the look you love.

The clothes don’t cost as much as my shoes, because with wide width feet the best choice is good quality shoes not found in your typical mall store. A friend liked my sandals, and I told her where I had bought them, and that they were on sale. She still cringed at the price, but good quality shoes last longer than one season; I have some pairs I have worn for over a decade because they were made well and I take care of them. We now have a bet that, ten years from now, she will check with me and I am sure I will have the same sandals. I look at the price as somewhere between discount Christian Louboutin and upper crust Payless (if they had such a thing). Some people like to buy and discard shoes each year; not me.

My clothes come from all sorts of places, but I embrace two designers who put out some great stuff and are rewarded with chunks of my paycheck regularly. I also check out Kohl’s on occasion. It’s how you wear them, not where they came from, that counts. The hunt is what makes the experience worth the time. Months go by with nothing to show for it, then suddenly something great appears and goes into my shopping bag.

This year I promised myself to go through each top once during the season. It has not been my best idea, because I have also been attempting to use Marie Kondo’s method of folding and storing clothes, and moving those neatly folded items assembly line style does not seem to be what she had in mind. So far it seems to be working, and if I come across a top that isn’t bringing me joy, I can set it aside for the donation pile and move to the next one. Everything in my wardrobe will get its time in the sun this year. And maybe some compliments to go with them.

Does anybody remember a cartoon from the good old days of the Electric Company and the “Sweet Roll” cartoon sketch? A waitress is taking a man’s order for a sweet roll, and though she tells him repeatedly that they are out, he asks for various beverages and adds the request for a sweet roll, finally giving up and asking for just the roll.

That’s what I went through with the cable company, on the holiday of all days, when I wanted to see if somebody was available to switch out a heavy television and hook up a new one. I told the customer service associate that the set had gone off, on and then off again, and no signal was coming from the set, so it was dead. She then asked if I had turned the set off and on again; I told her I couldn’t because the set was dead, so I could not turn it off. She then had me run a diagnostic of the cable box, which produced no signal because the television was dead. She then ran a check remotely from her location, which produced a healthy signal from the box but nothing from the television because IT WAS (bleeping) DEAD. Of course I did not use such harsh language with a poor contact center employee working the holiday, though I’m sure she got paid well for it. I also didn’t tell her that I would gladly go on record and tell whatever call monitoring service they use that it really should not be required to go through a whole litany of stuff when all I really needed was a technician with some muscle.

This went on for a few minutes, with me thinking of that comedic ditty “Star Trekkin'” in which the “voice” of Bones McCoy intones, “It’s worse than that; it’s dead, Jim.”

After ten minutes of protocol, she came back with the diagnosis that the television was indeed devoid of life.

It turned out that my neighbor, bless her heart, came by and risked life and limb to help me lift the sucker off the console and put up the new one, and because the old and new sets were the same manufacturer, we were able to photograph the setup from the back, recreate it on the new set and, fortunately, there was no syncing issue.

So two women saved a ton of money doing the job ourselves.  Huzzah!

And the corpse that was the old television will go to scrap somewhere, because it is dead.

I normally post early on Saturday, but I had to race a thunderstorm. With the wonderful weather devices we have today, combined with a meteorological world which seems to be more volatile than ever, a storm is not a surprise, but a threatening entity honing in on us as its prey. Once I had word that the storm was coming, I got away from my usual posting place and headed home before disaster struck. And it has, a few times.

A few years ago, my neighbor’s tree came down and took out a garage; one week ago a severe system sent a tree through a window of a house blocks away, and took out power lines as well as shut down a major road.

Rain has once again become something to fear.

Some storms have been so severe that entire towns have gone days without electricity. I needed to be home, at my post, in case something happened in the driving rain. Fortunately nothing happened to us this time, but unfortunately we shall see more of nature’s wrath and might as our planet changes and evolves. The winters become colder,  summers hotter, the winds try to sweep away our ecological transgressions.

The next generation may see quiet weather like we saw in childhood. Meanwhile, we will keep seeing the threats on Doppler radar and try to keep safe from their natural wrath.

Plenty of commencement ceremonies happened at high schools this past week. It’s not like it used to be, when high school graduation meant something. Now little children graduate from day care, kindergarten, elementary or middle school. Completing life as a high school senior is about as exciting as a glass of iced tea with melted cubes; you probably already had a sip or two, and the rest is just flat and doesn’t really matter.

I don’t know to what standards schools hold their graduating seniors these days, but at work they have a hard time finding people who can do tasks which were minimally basic ten years ago. The job market is hurting for qualified people, and I just read a survey in USA Today indicating that many graduates from college are working at jobs which don’t require the degree they received.

So a cap and gown is no longer a badge of honor, a degree has been downgraded to an expensive piece of paper, and for those students with time to go before they graduate, they have all summer to forget everything.

I’m a proponent of all-year school with increased breaks and a tiered summer vacation system to allow the older students time to get jobs and keep the younger ones absorbing as much as they can while their brains are ready to receive it.

I also find some of the graduation stuff a bit degrading. A class ring that nobody wears, a yearbook that doesn’t show how students really are, a ranking system that is never accurate, and all for some short-sighted bragging for a few hours, often followed by over-eating and drinking and moving away to new places and forgetting what you had just done for the past thirteen years.

When I graduated, I started a job the next day, and I’ve been working ever since. The yearbook is a bit dusty, the diploma is locked away and replaced by new ones. Next year is another reunion year, and it seems most of us are not in touch anymore. But the ritual of it all goes on annually. Life should mean more than this.

The recent Marvel hit Doctor Strange delved into how to alter time. The title character’s life was one of privilege as a neurosurgeon. He collected expensive watches, but he ended up with just one, and it got broken. Time didn’t stop, though; he went on to become a mystical superhero who could manipulate time. I’d like to do that.

Raise your hands if you would like to go back to (for example) November 8, 2016 and do something different. Or if you could go back to just one moment in time and change it. What would you do with that “do-over?”

The idea of time stopping, like when you are enjoying a delicious meal, or just before a drink spills on your expensive dress, sounds tempting. In the aforementioned movie, Strange experiments with time by causing an apple, from which he had taken a bite, to return to its uneaten state and then progress to turning brown and rotten.

These days we use the remote and rewind favorite scenes in movies.

No moment in time is the same as the next. That is what makes it possible for us to reshape what happens next by living in the present. That does mean taking one’s eyes off the cell phone and taking in what is happening in the real here and now.

The next moment is coming. What will we each be doing with it?

In the second Godfather movie, Michael Corleone said something like, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” I have been pulled back into the comics universe, and it’s happening right in the middle of a cinematic battle between the two titans, Marvel and DC. Sure I read comics in my younger days, and I even enjoyed Blade when it came to the movies, but I had no idea this was going to happen.

I went to the movies to see Wonder Woman last night, which is a DC offering. Previously I saw Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Doctor Strange,  both Marvel productions. I don’t know if being an adrenaline  junkie helps you lose weight, but I’m on a steady diet of it right now.

The best thing to happen to movies was CGI. Now anything we read about in the comics forty years ago can be brought to the big screen. On the other hand, that’s all that’s being brought to the big screen. All the trailers I saw in the theater were for action movies. Most are about other worlds or clashes between Earth and alternate universes, conflicts which need a ragtag group of outcasts to resolve, and enough one-liners to fill a guidebook. You know your world has gotten a little odd when you contact your IT guy and say, “I am Groot,” and they know you mean “I could use your help.” You also know you’re in deep when, instead of getting a sense of deja vu, you find yourself saying, “Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.”

And if you don’t know what I mean, please do look it up. You’re going to be seeing these things for a while.

I’ve decided to refresh the blog. See you soon with a new look (but the same writer).

I’m taking today off. It’s not a holiday or anything, so I’ll make one up: National Just a Saturday Day. Everybody who wants to can take off (unless you’re in the middle of complex neurosurgery or something). I’ll be back next week.