Susan's Scribblings the Blog

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.

The year has not been a good one. In fact, there is not one person I know who has not been touched by a crisis of some sort in 2016. I thought, as many of us did, that 2015 would come to an end and 2016 would be better, but on the roller coaster of history it looks like we’re still not at the bottom of that horrifying first dive. One has to hit bottom to go up again.

Or at least we have to crest that first bump.

We lost great people this year. Not all of them were celebrities (though the unnecessary death of Prince still rankles at number one for me). Victims of bullying were in all the major magazines and newspapers this year. Hundreds of people died in terrorist attacks and natural disasters. No rosters of names appear anywhere. The celebrities get the airtime. Bodies are found and discarded and life goes on. Nobody interviews the bullies to learn the aftermath of what they did to cause their victims to die. Were their lives any better? I’d like to see one done. Just once. Maybe we’d understand terrorists better. How different are the two, really?

Crime was rampant, and it seemed the number of black people dying in police encounters was reported more than the number of white people dying in police encounters. Maybe as a race white people should hoist signs and protest when anybody is killed by officers, but there seems to be a cultural divide that enables white people to just move on. I can’t figure it out and don’t feel right about trying.  We all matter, though. Don’t we?

Obesity and nutrition are big topics. Recently the dairy farmers have been encouraging the enforcement of the definition of what milk is, since almond milk does not come from any type of animal, but real milk does. The information out there about what is good for you or might kill you is mind-boggling. Nobody can possibly keep up with all the nutritional news garbage being put into the news.  I can’t even get past what constitutes a healthy breakfast, since everything on the menu has potentially fatal consequences for being eaten. Except water. If the pipes are okay.

And in less than a month we will have the most controversial new president in office, and people are genuinely afraid for our future.  Nobody seemed this scared when President Obama was sworn in. And in terms of calming the tide of fear when it comes to black versus white culture, that is saying a lot. And it is a positive in a year of negativity.

So how do we go forward in peace?

Simple.  We understand that we cannot fix everything, but we can start within ourselves to take a cleansing breath and move forward. Crisis is a part of life every day of every year. Tomorrow is just another period of time in which to make something different.

Breathe in, and breathe out. One moment of peace is a way to get up that next hill on the roller coaster and ride the rest out.

Find peace. That is my wish for you this week and always.

If one were to listen to all the diet and health hype in the media, we would avoid every food on the market and starve to death. I decided that if i could control one thing in my diet, it would probably be sugar. Our bodies know what to do with the natural type, but ever since artificial sweeteners came out, we’ve been stuck in an endless loop of obesity and fad diets that don’t work, and it might well be because diet foods with artificial sweeteners are not helping us.

I’m in Day Seven of a modified eating program. Sure, I’m going out to holiday parties, but the days of noshing on one of these and one of those at the buffet table are over for me. At least for now. I cut back on grazing, which is hard to do when you work in a contact center where the only thing around other than equipment is food.

The holidays guarantee a smorgasbord of food. And I’m not touching it.

For our recent event, I brought in deviled eggs, which went over like gangbusters. They included olive oil, which made them heart healthier. I passed on the diet soda. I turned down the cookies and cakes. I munched on celery.

I started substituting my usual yogurt with something called skyr (rhymes with leer), a cultured product normally found in Iceland and Scandinavian regions and recently brought to our shores, likely by homesick entrepreneurs from Reykjavik. A cup contains regular sugar, not like the others which can have sucralose or aspartame (think Equal brand). I guess if the artificial stuff is hundreds of times sweeter than regular sugar, I’m better off eating regular sugar; even if I go over what my body needs, it will probably know how better to handle it than try to work out the chemical content of something in a little brightly colored packet.

This is the time of year for everything sweet, everything in excess and everything to do with enrolling in a gym. I probably should do that latter sometime soon. Meanwhile I’ll see what effect my strong sense of self control does to my waistline. If it doesn’t work, stand back from the candy box.

The problem with the holiday season is its lack of variety. Not only do we tolerate the same songs, the same color schemes (red and green or blue and white, and such) and the same consumerism, it seems that every year we are in more of a rush than ever to tire ourselves of them all long before 12/25. This year they started with pre-holiday hype in October, for crying out loud.

We spend eleven months paying down the debt from one December, only to rack up more the next.  We put up with commercials that all seem to focus on one thing: put some jingling bells in the soundtrack, and it’s a holiday commercial. I do like one of the ads, though: the Hershey Kisses ringing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which has been around forever. And maybe the M&M guys meeting Santa, which is also a classic. Since they took off the Norelco spot with Santa dashing through the snow on an electric razor, I’ve never felt the same about Christmas commercials.

All the charities come out for fund raising this time of year, but I wonder what happens on December 26 through the rest of the coming year. People can’t wait 365 days to eat or get a fresh winter coat or shoes on their feet (or socks, as I noted previously).

That’s why I save some charitable work for January through November.

When I do get home from helping others, I enjoy those M&M guys that much more.

My office has several charitable projects throughout the year, but the holiday season is the most busy. Over the summer we sorted stubs of crayons for a group that melts and recasts them for children in hospitals. For winter we do charities such as Toys for Tots.

We also started doing socks.

Studies have shown that socks are not normally included in clothing donations, so we collect new socks for the needy from November to December. It’s a great idea. Even if one doesn’t have a good fitting pair of shoes, a warm pair of socks on a winter night is a treasure. Also a person with unhealthy feet can wind up with other serious ailments. Feet need to be warm and dry.

Judging from the collections we’ve made so far, they will also be ridiculously fashionable. We have filled a donation bin three times over with every color imaginable, and we’re going for another refill before the lot is donated.

Until I started looking for socks to contribute, I had no idea there were so many new designs for socks. The colors and patterns are staggering, and the costs run from a few dollars to the heights of high income splurging. I tried to go simple for men and more flirty for women. Not having worn socks for some time (think business attire), the only time I wear socks is when I slather cream on them or cover a bandaged foot to keep from losing them in the sheets overnight. And who wants to wreck good socks with cream or bandage adhesive?

I still have a rag sock monkey stored away somewhere. You know the kind with the red heel which becomes the face and butt, with beige and grey elsewhere. Between that and putting one on a hand to entertain preschoolers, nobody really seems to think about socks that much. Unless you’re homeless and have none.

If you’re doing a clothing donation this holiday season, throw in some socks. Go grab a package somewhere and add it to the collection, for peace afoot and good heels for men.

I am taking time off. See you next week.

The mall Santa was having a stimulating conversation with the mall cop, and holiday tunes were tucked between songs from artists few over 30 can appreciate. This was the face of holiday shopping eight days before Black Friday. For some stores, Black Friday has already been going on since Chartreuse Monday two weeks ago, or something like that.

It’s the two months out of every year when life falls into chaos. And we added a presidential election to it. No wonder everybody is going insane.

There are some things about the holidays which we should, in the words of Shark Tank guru Kevin O’Leary, take behind the barn and shoot, because all the years of repetition in the world can’t save them from being unnecessary and bad for the human spirit.

First is bringing Santa to the malls anytime before, say, the Saturday before Thanksgiving. It’s so disconcerting to see clearance items from Halloween with candy cane footprints glued to the walkways leading to the poor guy in the red suit, who has to spend extra weeks away from his workshop to meet with kids who haven’t even gotten over their candy high yet. It’s not as if we have to wait six weeks for the photos with Santa: now they’re printed on site and cost a week’s pay (those of you who remember “Santa and Me” photos know what I mean). Also, the road to Santa is now paved with commercial tie-ins and elaborate settings which overwhelm the kids and parents while the queue grows by tens every second. Whatever happened to a small plot of mall space with a big throne and the man sitting there in full view of all? I miss those days.

The next thing that should go is the annual gag gift of the year. You know the one; it costs $19.95 and is usually designed to make grumpy guys laugh and their friends break it during an inebriated evening watching football.

Finally, festive food packaging has to go. For about six weeks out of the year, every item in the grocery store has a candy cane, a snowbank or snowflakes or shiny outer wrappings and a higher price tag. I don’t think any of us parade our holiday packaged stuff in front of the guests before setting them on a festive platter.

If these things have to continue, they should wait a bit before they materialize. Some of us just aren’t ready, like that mall Santa with no guests. That’s just sad.

Have you ever watched an animal’s eyes when they are in full-blown predator mode? The look is primal, untamed and destructive. I’ve seen that look in the faces of people who bullied me in school, and I got to see it again this week after the elections were over.

An animal that fights to survive and kills for its food gives into instinct and basic survival mindsets to hunt and bring down other animals which will attempt to run away and deprive it of its needs. In groups, they work together for a common cause. We, as human beings, normally only kill for our food if we decide to execute a lobster for dinner. Otherwise we tend to let experts kill and dress our food. To survive we strive, through craft and knowledge, to better others like us, and our groups are much more exclusive. In the wild there are no major deviations between lions or elephants; a lion is a lion and an elephant is an elephant. Humans, though, separate themselves and may choose divisive measures over working together for a common cause. Humans work together for the common cause of a few. That is where cliques are formed, races divided, education divvied out like a prize for the chosen few.

Why else would we see such a shocking turn of events as watching a black person beating up a white person because of the results of an election? Why else would middle school students start chanting about a border wall, making their fellow Hispanic students cry?

I have never understood why humans go into predator mode over nothing. We are all the same, basically. Just because we all don’t look like what we call a lion or an elephant, we tend to behave as if there are really some human beings who don’t matter. We all matter. When we start feeling desperate enough about being poor or ignored or disenfranchised that we vote as we did last Tuesday, nobody should be surprised by the outcome. It’s survival instinct which drives us all. If you’re going to kick a dog, don’t be surprised when the dog bites back. We have all brought these election results upon ourselves because we let our primal fears and instincts take over. Some of us are overreacting; some of us have no right to complain because we sat and did nothing.

It doesn’t matter if you can put two and two together; you should look at yourself and ask yourself, “What kind of a human being am I, really?” “Who am I afraid of, and why?”

If you’re not sure, that’s where we have the real problem.

Being human is a curse and a blessing, in so many ways. Animals are lucky: with very few deviations lions look like lions and so on, but unless you’re a multiple birth person, nobody looks like you. This also gives rise to our constantly picking each other apart for unusual reasons. With the election and a controversy surrounding the new Marvel feature Dr. Strange, I realized how petty we are and how it all really doesn’t matter.

The news was that Tibetans would be protesting the casting of actor Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One in the movie because she is scripted as a Celtic woman, and the story-line was originally based upon a Tibetan monk and, naturally, a man. The movie industry is being called out for not representing other races properly and skirting the issue by hiring white casts for principal roles and nominating them for awards over less non-white cast films. I recall a little movie called Slumdog Millionaire with a mostly non-white cast and which portrayed some aspects of India as, shall we say, less than developed, yet it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and seven other Oscars ™.  Yet there are still those who grumble that white people just aren’t getting it right.

I beg to differ: we do. It’s just that you pick apart ours more than we pick apart non-white efforts to portray white people.  Nobody laughed louder than me when Eddie Murphy did comic portrayals of white people, because I could relate to exactly the type of people he was creating onstage. He even went so far as to get into a full body makeup as a white man and took to the streets, and didn’t get recognized. There are men out there who do a better job looking like a woman than many women. I don’t protest. I admire.

Having seen Dr. Strange, I was impressed by Tilda Swinton. She looked rather nondescript as far as nationality was concerned. Sure the folks at Marvel could have gone with by-the-book casting, but in a world in which we are being led to believe that it is not the only one, who says what an “Ancient One” is supposed to be? If they had cast a kid in the part, and it was true to the ideals of the story, why pick on it? Why not just accept it?

So what does this all have to do with the election? Well, the party lines are being blurred because many people don’t like either of our two major choices (we will put aside the independent candidates for now, especially since one seemed to have no awareness of what the situation in Aleppo is), and the political ads and stumping show how much we pick each other apart for being not what we want. One points out that somebody was “a Mexican,” and anticipates us filling in the blanks with whatever prejudices we have about people from Mexico. The other is reminding us that male candidates can be crude and think too highly of themselves to realize how horrible an attitude they have. Yeah, they’re human, just like us, full of prejudicial baggage that keeps a wonderful world at bay so we can try to group ourselves into convenient ideals of what is normal and refer to outliers as “the other guys.” Or the wrong guys.

If I were casting a movie, how would I have enough of an understanding to write a part for a Tibetan monk unless I had a Tibetan monk write the script? Then how do I find a good Tibetan actor who would appeal to a world audience? Any place that hated Tibet would not want to see the movie. Also I should point out that Dr. Strange’s assistant, Wong, appears in the film as a rather dour (but kick-ass) scholarly librarian, and is played by Benedict Wong, an Englishman born to parents from Hong Kong. So there was international casting going on. Just not what some folks wanted.

So I would recommend voting and seeing Dr. Strange. And stop picking on your fellow man.

I can say I was at the Metropolitan Opera for some wonderful productions. This year they are celebrating 50 years at Lincoln Center, and they have enjoyed success there. Sometimes, though, I am witness to some strange goings-on, like this past Saturday.

I went to see the matinee performance of Guillaume (William) Tell, a new production and one which hasn’t been done in decades. The music is well-known to the average person, even if they don’t like opera: the performance starts with immediately recognizable movements such as the storm music often used as a meme in cartoons (Tom and Jerry comes to mind), and a passage probably best referred to as the background music to the comedic short “Bambi Meets Godzilla.” The famous overture is known as the theme for the original TV “Lone Ranger,” and probably one of the most frequently mis-hummed tunes known.* But this is not where the strange things went on. That didn’t happen until the second intermission.

After a walk to stretch my legs, I returned to my seat and dutifully went onto social media to say I was at the Met, put everything away and waited with the rest of the audience–who were also securing their social media gear–for the final act to start. Nothing happened. The orchestra had not even returned to the pit.

Somebody finally appeared onstage to announce that there was a delay  and the program should resume shortly.  Then they returned about twenty minutes before the production was scheduled to end, to say that circumstances had forced them to cancel the rest of the performance. An obviously enraged patron sharing my portion of the house started shouting rudely, “I want my money back!” and ignored repeated urging from the rest of us to shut up. We did file calmly out of the opera house. I assume the fellow stormed the box office in a snit. Perhaps the staff took the famous prop apple (which Tell shot off his son’s head) and shoved it into his mouth.

I found out later, via the New York Times, that an audience member has come to the Met with the ashes of his music mentor in a bag, and told anybody who would listen that he intended to scatter the fellow’s cremated remains into the orchestra pit. Apparently those who took this in simply replied, “That’s nice,” and didn’t give it a second thought. He did the deed at the intermission, causing the clearance of the orchestra pit and calling police and other law enforcement officials to investigate.

Isn’t the fault really as much with those who didn’t think about reporting the guy’s intentions to the staff at the Met, as it is for this schmuck who didn’t really think through what would happen if he threw a potential biohazard into the air where hundreds of people would be breathing? If he had asked beforehand, some accommodation could have been made to honor his mentor. As a result of his rather rash idea, the orchestra could not claim their instruments, a handful of people were treated by paramedics for handing the unknown stuff, the performance was left incomplete (and the evening performance was also cancelled) and hundreds of paying patrons–not a few of whom travelled some distance or were visiting from overseas to see the Saturday scheduled performances–were cheated of their experience. The man is known to the staff and apparently left without seeing the final act himself and, so far, is still being sought for questioning.

So I won’t get to see the end of the opera (I could ask for another performance, but the remaining dates are not good for me), and I won’t fault the Met or ask for my money back. I would, however, like to meet this fellow who ruined my day and pull a Dr. Phil on him and just ask, “What were you thinking?”

*(Most people hum the tune with all the “dadadum’s” one note until the “dum dum dum,” but if you listen you’ll find the next line does have a change of note. Don’t sweat it: it’s just good to know you have a little culture, and be proud of it.)