Susan's Scribblings the Blog

The state of North Carolina is in the middle of a controversy regarding who can use gender specific public bathrooms. The governor signed a bill into law which affects opening up rest facilities to persons who identify as a gender other than the one into which they were born. Being human (or being a human being) is becoming more complex by the minute.

I think this means it is time to change our bathrooms, not the people using them.

Let’s look at what we’re dealing with. For all of us every day, using a bathroom is a biological necessity and a bane. Millions of us handle our bodily functions with decorum, but others, without going into gross detail, do not. In addition to the hygienic issue of the public use toilets, there never seems to be enough of them. The lines for women’s facilities are twice as long as men’s, and let’s face it: nobody likes to stand in a line that long, knowing what we’re planning to do once we get there anyway.

So the “modern” restrooms have walls, a flimsy door and plenty of ventilation. Often there are gaps everywhere, which can also be abused by voyeurs, and the only thing distinguishing them, other than signs with stick figures of humans–one of whom has a skirt–on the doors are the addition of urinals for the men. Aren’t they a bit of an accessory anyway? Men can urinate in a toilet, but I guess it would put those scented cake manufacturers out of business if we do away with the porcelain penis-height peeing points.

A person who may resemble a man but is actually a woman (or vice versa) normally should not have an issue with entering a restroom, except that men might expect users who can pee by unzipping their flies at the urinals. Does anybody really care if a woman who identifies as male enters a stall and sits to pee? If they wash their hands, who cares if they have one body part over another?

Maybe what we need are all access bathrooms which are safe, non-gender specific, with ecology minded low flush toilets and a place to put one’s carried accessories (purses or coat) or a child (like on a changing table) without worrying. We don’t need to worry about showing our birth certificates to prove what gender we are when we have to go.

Commercials sometimes annoy me. One in particular irks me every time it appears on television. The folks at Breathe Right®, the inventor of the nasal strip, features a commercial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJAcDq_IxBcin) which they discuss what happens when your nose is obstructed and you are forced to become a mouth breather to compensate for the lack of open passageways. The newest clip on television includes a daughter video recording her stuffy-nosed mother, presumably for future shaming on social media. A cat appears to look on with contempt–well, maybe that isn’t so unusual–at its human in the same situation, stuck with his mouth open to breathe. “How can anyone sleep like that?” the voice-over lady asks. How, I ask, does anybody not breathe while sleeping?

So when did breathing through one’s mouth become unpopular? Culturally the term “mouth breather” is often used as an insult to imply that somebody is less intelligent. Why is that, when air can get to the lungs, and oxygenate the brain, quicker by inches that way? I find it contemptible when somebody snorts or whistles through their noses, but I don’t shout “Nose whistler!” at them.

So there is plenty of information out there about the causes of mouth breathing unrelated to allergies or colds, including reports from periodontists who claim that improper jaw or tooth alignment can affect closing your mouth properly. Other causes include large tonsils, a deviated septum (think anybody who has broken the nose) or nasal polyps.

Nobody ever mentions that some people have a jungle of nose hair in their nostrils, which surely slows down normal breathing, and the folks at Breathe Right® have never tried to invent a nose hair machete. If they ever remake the 1966 science fiction thriller The Fantastic Voyage, it should still be about a crew of miniaturized scientists who are injected into a person to reach and treat a dangerous life-threatening condition, but instead of exiting the patient’s eye, they must chop their way out through the nose hair jungle.

The idea behind the nasal strip is that a metal piece adhering to the outside of the nose spreads the outer edges of the nostrils to clear the airway. I actually tried the product once when I had a bad cold. The next morning, the strip was not on my nose, so a search party was called out and it ultimately turned up perched on the outer rim of the wastebasket. So it seems it didn’t keep my nose open, but it flew gracefully through the air and nearly stuck the landing.

Sports figures tend to wear the nasal strips; sometimes they are color coded to match the team colors of those burly football players. If you’re the fashionable tight end, you want the right color strip on your nose. You can even get lavender scented strips, but since it is above your nose, and you have a cold, can you really smell it?

I don’t know if mouth breathing is really as bad as they claim in the commercials, but I feel there are better ways to tout a nostril aid than making fun of its users. So when the ad comes on I simply sigh, through my mouth, and exhale through my nose.

Adult life is complex, and often we put our own dreams on hold so others can benefit from what we are willing to offer them. Usually before I go to sleep I think about what dreams I still have unfulfilled, and boy is it a list.

Some people call those unfulfilled dreams parts of a bucket list (named for things to do before one kicks the bucket). Really they are simply the carrots in front of our noses which keep us going when everything in life is making us want to stop. We live, breathe and die working to fulfill those dreams, often for years. That’s an awfully long time to chase a darned carrot.

Of course some dreams like completing medical school do take years, but the end product is personal enlightenment, humanitarian self sacrifice and some financial security, sleepless nights, chapped hands and a fried brain. Dreams like meeting a celebrity before you die can involve a burly 300-pound bodyguard and possible personal injury. Still, we hang on tenaciously to our dreams, because while they are unrealized, they still have the element of mystery and promise of happiness lingering on the thought of them.

There are charities like Make a Wish Foundation designed to help children fulfill bucket lists in a very short time frame, usually because they have a condition which will claim their lives long before graduation from high school, let alone medical school. For the rest of us, we continue to put dreams on hold and carry on with life as it is in the present.

It was the fictional George Bailey, portrayed by James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, whose dreams to travel and build were put on hold for the town, his neighbors and his family. In giving up the dreams on his bucket list, George actually found himself. Not all dreams are guaranteed to either help you find or lose yourself, but for now, just remember them before you go to sleep at night; who knows what will happen tomorrow morning.

There was a stomach virus going around our office recently. Actually it may be all around South Jersey, Delaware and parts of Philadelphia, but I digress. Whenever one gets sick in the abdominal region, it’s never a good sign.

I was certain I got sick from bad hamburgers at a popular joint whose name I’ll not mention because I sent them a complaint and want to see how they handle it. However, with many gastrointestinal events there are always the embarrassment of ailments which I also won’t mention because they’re just too gross. Stomachaches are no picnic.

The problem with being in an office environment with other people is that not everybody graduated the school of good hygiene. That is how we get sick, either from poor food preparation or a bug somebody who didn’t wash their hands just passed onto a surface 200 other people are going to touch.

So while I have recovered from whatever affected me, it’s going to go around for awhile longer, so keep your antibac handy, folks.

When those heavy little gold statues are handed out at the biggest film awards ceremony in the world, the only people who will be happy are the award winners. One wins one of those statues because a bunch of supposedly elite experts in film craft say it’s deserved. Who are these people, anyway, and why don’t the average movie going public have a say?

Why are the movies nominated come out at the end of the year when nominations are due? Why are the most popular movies often snubbed (Star Wars) and movies which could easily be accused of being interminably boring art projects featuring currently high ranked talent getting overpaid for emoting for two hours get multiple nominations (The Revenant)? You can always tell when the elite members of the group determining the winners have snubbed a movie because the best it gets is technical, sound or costume nominations. Often they also lose to a period piece.

As far as this (and other) years’ elephant in the room–the subject of non-white nominations–I was hoping John Boyega and Daisy Ridley would be nominated for Star Wars. Unfortunately big box office doesn’t always mean big nominations. Some time between the age of big epics like Ben-Hur being nominated from everything except the kitchen sink and today, the voters decided that arty movies are the only ones deserving of a nod. It’s a rigged class structure with rules meant to favor their own. This means that movies either have to get their attention, or the voters have to open their minds to other opinions of what makes a good movie. The mind is hard to turn, so we will always be at odds when it comes to that. We may never see a good pool of nominees as a result. But at least watching the red carpet is still fun.

Let’s set the rules down right now: if a person has no money, they are broke, but if a thing is somehow not functioning, it is broken. This must have been Bad Language Week, because I heard the word broke misused about a dozen times. One must be pretty lazy to conserve energy by leaving off one little syllable.

It was also Cultural Bad Habits Week, because the usage of the verb “to be” was left completely out of so many conversations, I had to step away and process what was just said because I didn’t understand it.  In some places, if clothing was soiled, a person would say, “That needs washed.” The better sentence would be, “That needs to be washed,” or even, “That needs washing,” but for some reason one of Shakespeare’s most memorable soliloquies was lost in translation.  Why people stumble over “to be” may be related to the variances in its conjugation, which don’t look at all like the original. However, just as in math, memorization goes a long way.

I heard the word broke used for so many malfunctioning things, my head was spinning. Things carrying no monetary support included our electoral system, a helicopter, racial relations and a few others in which the only part of the conversation I heard was that a thing had been broke.  Ugh!

It’s easy to occasionally forgive some dimly conceived but permanently implanted verbal gaffes such as “daze,” for  (substituting the slurred “they is” for “they are”), “Yiz,” or “Youse,” for several secondary persons (and their third party mate, “allayiz” or “allyouse”), but our language getting shorter is a sure indicator that our brain power is getting smaller. It is we who will wind up broken. And broke.

On Valentine’s Day not everybody has found somebody. I have so many friends who are perpetually lonely, this time of year can be a strain on the morale. There is really nothing wrong with people who are living without love; the problem is with the other people out there who apparently are incapable of love.

I would rather feel unworthy of love than be incapable of love.

People who live without love have their skins, minds and souls hardened every day by those incapable of love. The stings of physical, verbal or mental abuse often become as much a part of life as breathing. I’ve written before about the people who are so stunned by a dog who, after ages of abuse, strikes out at the next abuser to come along. That’s a fear response, and it can happen to anybody at any time, even among those hardened to the cruelties of this world. What is really amazing is when an abused dog licks the outstretched hand of its rescuers. This is a creature who was lost to love and still knows what love is.

Life will often find a companion for the lonely if circumstances allow. Often the powerful, most of whom are incapable of real love, repress the lonely. It might be a fear of somebody else’s happiness eclipsing their own, or a conditioned reaction to anything beyond their perception of normal. It’s against nature to deny love and, if I dare to be political, it is against our founding fathers’ wishes that anybody should be prevented from pursuing happiness.

I’ve seen my share of bullies, jerks and other people who seem challenged by the good things in life. I’ve seen beautiful miserable people and ugly happy people. Being loved is not about who or what you are, but that one other person sees you and respects your humanity in spite of what or who you are. I’ve been disappointed by lots of people, but I don’t hate them or wish them ill will. They need to be loved the most, because it is so much harder to do.

It’s true: love is hard, just like anything good and right is hard. So those who are spending their Valentine’s Day unloved are the ones you should seek out. They are capable of so much, while people incapable of love shortchange their lives of so much more.

So here is to all those lonely people on February 14th. I see you. I hope somebody special will see you someday, too.

Somebody posted on Facebook recently that February 2016 had four of each day of the week; a rare event happening only once every so many hundred years. I didn’t think anything of it until I glanced at my own calendar, remembering that it is a leap year, so this February has five Mondays. I can’t find the post, but unless I misread it, I feel that I’ve done my duty in letting you all know, at least, that this is a leap year and February will have 29 days in it.

Yes, this week was that bad that I have nothing else to post about.

We live in a world full of conflict, with right and wrong being redefined every day. We raise and lower the bar so much when it comes to humanity, it’s like playing a bad game of limbo in which we’re either getting off easy or breaking our backs. Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about lives mattering: Black Lives Matter, Cops’ Lives Matter. Usually we’re talking about senseless violence in which people are killed or lives are changed by tragedy. Something occurred to me recently: none of our lives matter. Paradoxically, that makes all of us important, even though we don’t “matter.”

Think about something basic like a tool for a moment: if you saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, you recall a pivotal moment in the prehistoric prologue when one individual suddenly realized that a heavy bone could be used to break things. In real life, that was another step in our evolution, but who recorded the name of the person who did it? Nobody. We don’t see a monument in any cave dwellings, and no stories passed his name down. For all we know, it could have been a prehistoric woman who discovered tools. Anyway, that person’s life didn’t matter, but they were important.

When Shakespeare said that our evil deeds are always remembered but the good we do often goes to the grave with us, he must have realized that we don’t matter. We move history along, we invent, we create and destroy, but whether time ticks on past the history or our lives or not, we don’t matter. What happens in everyday existence is what it is, what it becomes as a result of our interference or what it ceases to be because of what happens around it.

So what are we doing, exactly? We’re evolving. We affect things in ways we won’t even see in our lifetime. We walk a street and our DNA is cast onto the ground and becomes part of the rest of the universe. That is important, because what matters is that we all have something important to contribute.

That means the rich on the top of the hill should not swat at those climbing up, but understand that the top of that hill is meant to change, and they cannot always be on top of it. Sometimes it will be empty, or it will have somebody with nothing to offer sitting there, but somebody else will get there and life will evolve and change again.

Whether you do evil or good, the world goes on with or without you. The world going on is important, and since we live on this world, we are important.