Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Last time we talked about how inhuman we are, so here is a continuation of that thought. It won’t be liked by everybody, but ideas that stir thought rarely are.

So you’re having a baby (or two) and it’s time to think about names. If you’re the father and have been reluctant to marry the mother of the bearer of your genetic future on this planet, be sure to complain about it all the time. Both of you should look to the family trees or your favorite sitcom or celebrity, and come up with a name which will be hard to spell or pronounce, or which can be turned against your child by bullies. If spelling has never been your strong point, don’t bother looking it up: just wing it on the birth certificate.

When your child is growing, make sure they see everything that happens on this planet, from G to NC-17. Don’t bother hiding anything from your child, including domestic disputes and unhealthy habits. Impose your strange habits on your child, especially if it will guarantee that they cannot integrate with anybody outside your home.

Throw discipline out the window and let your child be a barbarian in public. If you’re miserable, project that misery onto your child so they never smile, either. If you were raised in an abusive household, be sure to pass that down to the next generation so nobody else gets away with not being wretched.

As your child learns to talk, encourage obnoxious behavior or teach them to cower before your authority, or make sure they know how to beat the living daylights out of anybody who disses them; depending on how you know you are, you’ll recognize which of the above is right for how you raise your child.

Raise a son to be a macho womanizer. Raise a girl to be a privileged princess or a submissive wimp. Remember that only the freaks on the other sides of the normal curve will make a history for themselves worth remembering. If that history puts them in prison or in some other danger, that’s not your problem.

The biggest plague of humanity isn’t a virus or contagion, nor is it a natural event like global warming or drought; it’s ourselves. We are wayward monsters on a self-destruction binge which may obliterate the other guys first but ultimately will kill us all. It starts with the destruction of the human spirit.

So how do you start destroying a human being? Let’s start from scratch.

Step One: whether you have planned on giving birth to a human being or not, make sure you have messed yourself up prior to pregnancy so that your unborn child will have roadblocks before construction even gets under way. Smoke like a chimney, drink like you could down enough of the stuff to fill a community water tank, avoid anything that seems healthy and don’t go to the doctor until you’ve paid off last year’s bills.

Step Two: immediately assume that your child will be just like you. Get the word on the gender right away and either buy pink for a girl or blue for a boy, or fit in your lifestyle with some goth or sports team onesies or a babies’ room themed like your favorite television show. Come up with a name you think is unique but others won’t be able to pronounce or spell properly, or name them after some obscure historic figure.

Step Three: Make sure that when you are comparing pregnancy notes with other parents that your ideas are the ones which inspire the most awe and respect. Make sure there is no deviation from the established norm for your core group.

Now of course there are a bunch of folks out there who are not starting families, so there are some different steps for you:

Step One: Be sure to make snide and cruel comments to pregnant women. You can either choose to try to get them to drink or smoke, or remind them that they’re not part of the core group anymore because they went and got themselves pregnant. Remind them of how less prominent or overly prominent their bellies are compared to you or those you’ve known who are or were pregnant. Scare them with horror stories about pregnancies gone wrong.

Step Two: Pick apart all the choices the expectant family makes regarding baby names, clothes and room decor. Be sure to make snide remarks about prices and quality and how much better people you know did when they did their baby shopping.

Step Three: Get out of town or do everything you can to make yourself unavailable when the due date is imminent. Turn your back on low income families and turn up your nose at those richer than you. Only the way you got through your growing family matters, and nobody else is worthy of your invaluable help.

My mother was telling me a nostalgic story this morning about her childhood, when the neighborhood revolved around Stypa’s store. Back in her time, the corner store was the hub steering the entire neighborhood across generations and ethnic lines, and there was an abundance of all of those.

The children took pleasure in the penny candy, in the days when a penny got you a handful of selections and you wouldn’t think of having a bagful all to yourself. The men visited the store for tobacco and the basement pool table. The women picked up their sundries.

It was also the only place with a phone. Everybody gave out the phone number of the pay phone in Stypa’s store, and when a call came in for a resident, either the owner’s daughter or a neighborhood child would run to the recipient’s home to announce it (and the runner–if it wasn’t the daughter–would receive a nickel).

Neighborhoods were more unified in those days, in spite of a multitude of languages, probably because socioeconomic status was equal in those neighborhoods; everybody cherished the value in a penny when you could get five pieces of candy for one of them.

Our elders can still smile at the memories of penny candy, soft pretzel wagons and cones of yum yum. They remember keeping a bucket handy to retrieve the manure left on the street by the passing wagon horses (great for the rose bushes), and watching for the occasional bonus ice chips which fell off the ice wagon during deliveries (back when a block of ice kept your freezer cold), and which could cool off a summer day in the absence of money for yum yum.

The generation with those memories are nearing the end of their time on this earth, and we don’t always listen to their stories with much interest. That’s a shame. If we ever see an ice wagon or food of any kind for a penny, it will probably be under much different circumstances.

Lately it seems as if we human beings are acting like total screw-ups. Well I think we’re not seeming to be screw-ups: we just are. We’re designed to overthink and under-plan. We try and fail, and try the same thing again and again hoping to get a different (non-failing) result. We learn from some mistakes and don’t learn a thing from others. To quote a certain insurance company’s tagline, it’s what we do.

After we mess up, we go public and show off how screwy we are. The videos on YouTube are massive in volume and popularity, and somewhat strange. Who knew everybody could be so readily armed with cameras to catch that fall or shot to the shorts so nicely. We even have programs like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” which are just collections of our human errors competing for cash prizes. That’s us: rewarding the strangest things.

For the non-visual human error aficionado, there are the politicians running for public office to assault your ears. Just ask a politician a question and keep your finger on the microphone mute button while waiting for the gem of stupidity serving as their answer. In a world where a second of silence loses your audience, nobody seems to think before speaking. A moment of care can prevent a lifetime of regret, but of course it doesn’t make for good campaign entertainment.

Persons behaving badly, be they public officials or celebrities of any other kind, hide behind embarrassment or the cover language of their legal representatives. Wouldn’t it be a great teaching moment if one of them actually came out and came clean about exactly what they did and why they think they did it? One celebrity in particular comes to mind who could do the public a great humanitarian service by fessing up, even if this person’s public image is beyond repair. It seems some of our brightest and most admired people, when their reputation is found to be less than stellar, go to ground and hide, when instead they could just come out and talk about it. People like Paula Deen, of course, who admitted to human error, lost their reputations anyway, but at least we heard the truth.

When it comes down to the basics, we’re all human. In terms of good and bad, we all take that roller coaster ride of sanctity and sin, and none of us can be considered incorruptible. We just can’t give up trying, and sometimes we just have to laugh at those little shots to the shorts on television.

This week my office had food brought in two days in a row. I picked a bad week to start my diet. There is never a good week, because food is an evil you cannot totally exorcise from your life, and it’s everywhere. At office events, it often finds itself in your face for eight straight hours. Eventually it winds up in your gut and turns into astronomical numbers on your bathroom scale.

Contact centers (or phone banks, if you will) are sitting job parking lots and hotbeds of obesity. Workers are tethered to their cubicles receiving phone calls, and not all of them are from happy people. When you get a break, you pee and eat. That’s probably written in the guidebook of contact center life somewhere. Until we can take customer phone calls and walk 10,000 steps at the same time, that’s just how it is.

Our company has been encouraging camaraderie by having a monthly themed event (the theme named by committee) every Tuesday, and this month’s happened to fall on the same Tuesday as a sales commission event, which also is primed and pumped regularly by the delivery of food. We moved our event to Wednesday, which explains the abundance of food in my office for two straight days.

Our themed event for Wednesday had a patriotic theme and included hot dogs. For the Tuesday event, we had Italian food delivered by a fine establishment about ten minutes away. They came with huge trays of baked ziti and chicken parmesan, warm inviting loaves of garlic bread and enough salad that, even if only the vegetarians were working that day, they would have been ecstatic. My diet told me to behave myself, so I did.

Unfortunately we had seriously over-ordered for the event, and when the afternoon delivery came for the next shift, we looked like a Vegas buffet with a mile of food wafting the sweet smells of cheese and tomatoes and garlic around the department. When I left at 5:00, we could still have fed an army of Minions.

The next day, somebody broke the news to me that some of the food was wasted after the night was over, and that a fridge on the next floor is almost always empty and it could have been used to store the leftovers. They did salvage the salad. It went over like the holy grail of salad with the hot dogs, especially for the vegetarians. In fact, all the food was well received and consumed with gusto.

I caved and ate. It’s bad enough to be seated in a corner away from the general population and separated by a huge wall right out of “Game of Thrones,” but when people don’t see you participating, they tend to forget you exist or that you are human.

So I’m trying to make up for it the rest of the week by not eating like a human and trying to forget that I have a sitting job. Sure would’ve liked to try that chicken parmesan, though.

No wonder this country is so obese and diabetes is going up as well. Do you know how hard it is to find products without sugar in them? Sure, you can eat your meals for the rest of your life using the vegetables in the produce aisle (at least I don’t think they’re putting sugar in lettuce), but if you look closely, you’ll see that you’re likely eating a whole sugar bowl of the stuff before your first morning cup of coffee. And if you’re getting your coffee in a store, it’s probably jacked up, too. Do you think that choco-mocha-whipped cream macho hot cup of joe just tastes sweet all by itself?

My morning cereal has five grams of sugar, so that’s more than one teaspoon (to convert, divide grams by four). You’re supposed to have six teaspoons or less per day for optimal health. Orange juice, that staple of the healthy breakfast table, has about seven grams or about two teaspoons. The diet version is watered down prior to being bottled, which means you can take your morning OJ and just add bottled water to it and you’ll put two of your daily essentials into one drink.

Ketchup can contain sugar, as can salad dressing. Remember when we used to mix our own dressing in a cruet provided for an extra charge by the makers of the dressing mix in a dry pouch? I think it was Four Seasons or something. No sugar that way, and you mix just what you need.

I wonder what it would be like to go 24 hours without any sugar? Is it even possible? Has anybody tried it and lived? I guess the solution to preventing diabetes and obesity is to relegate sugar to an occasional (like birthdays and Christmas) trip to the bakery or the candy store. If food companies tried to do it, though, most would probably go out of business or their costs would go up to where we could not afford it.

So much hassle over a refined granule of sweetness.

I’m taking off for Independence Day and sheltering in place while all the hoopla goes on around me. Stay free, stay safe and I’ll be back in a week, when the rest of the summer gets going.

It will soon be Independence Day. It’s great to be free, but sometimes it comes at a great price. Our servicemen make sure we can continue to be free, and our laws are designed to help us keep to a standard which can help us not allow ourselves to get out of hand, because true freedom still comes with the burdens of conscience and common sense.

I will be cooking up the burgers and potato salad, flying the flag outside my home and enjoying the parades and fireworks. Some people go to the beach or a campground. Some don’t go anywhere or do anything. That’s fine. We’re free to do that.

While you’re out and about or sitting and relaxing on this historic holiday, remember that it took a lot of bloodshed and compromises and hard work to get our country to where it is now. We must continue to work hard at it every day so we can stay free.

I don’t own an Apple product. Not an IPod, IPhone, computer, watch or anything else they might have on the market. Still I am surrounded by Apple stuff every day, and Apple users have laughed at me.

I’m not buying any Apple products.

The newest commercials feature exquisite photos taken by–I assume–normal people using their IPhone cameras. I have never figured out how to use the camera on my Windows phone, but I carry a real pocket camera around anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

Why does a phone need a camera, anyway? It eats up battery time and storage space. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the over-the-top soggy and rainy weather we’ve had lately is due to too much stuff stored in that infamous cloud. Yes I know; it’s just a figure of speech, but if you can’t see where it’s stored, does it still exist? And what happens if somebody finds your cloud? Gives that Rolling Stones tune a new meaning, doesn’t it?

Hey you, get out of my cloud storage!!

Anyway, now Apple has a watch that you must get custom fitted and comes with an electronic personal trainer that eggs you on to bigger and more exhausting feats of daily exercise. About two years ago, my company gave out free pedometers, so I keep the battery fresh in that little guy, and it counts my steps just fine. Two LED indicators are missing, but I can tell an 8 from a backwards 3, so it doesn’t matter.

I see lines of people in Apple stores, and the workers are exhausted. My bosses joke with me that nobody is in line at the Windows store. Good. I can get service immediately.

When the day comes when all the Apple products go on the fritz, I’ll come charging in on my white horse with my Windows all ready to go, and then you’ll all be sorry.

Don’t throw Apples at my Windows: I’ll make applesauce.