Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Excuse me for using the Australian term for the bathroom.  The way people misuse restroom facilities irks me.  It’s on my top ten pet peeve list.

I ended my work week with a flood coming from a locked maintenance closet in a men’s restroom.  The brackish water emanating from under that door ruined new carpeting on the lobby and leaked down a stairwell into the floor below, not to mention seeping under office doorways.  We were forced to evacuate the building in the rain and disable the elevators to avoid an electrical hazard.  Places that harbor water or waste should be respected and handled with more care.

Not all people take that idea to heart, unfortunately.  Of all places to desecrate, religious buildings and bathrooms tend to get an unfair share.  There is nothing more disheartening than entering a bathroom and having to peer into two or more stalls before finding one good enough to use.  This is the most evident after a weekend, when maintenance crews may not clean as often.  I have seen seats left uninhabitable, and I pity the cleaning crew who has to deal with it.

Maybe certain people are annoyed by the fact that they have to set their genitals over a hole in a seat and evacuate waste.  Sure, we’d all rather be elsewhere, but the few minutes it takes to “go” are not so bad in retrospect.  In fact, I can come up with some positive things to say about going to the bathroom:

1)  Be glad you can go.  I know people with problems like diarrhea and constipation or bladder infections who wish they could just go normally.

2) If you’re home, you can take a moment to read.  Come on, you all know you keep some reading somewhere near the toilet.

3) If you’re at work, it’s a break you’re entitled to.  Of course, smoking or cell phone use is no longer allowed in most restrooms, but do you really want to multitask on the toilet?  Like the late George Carlin said, bathrooms are like elevators, in that there’s really nothing for you to do while you’re there.  It’s a mindless activity that at least gets you away from the cubicle.

4) American bathrooms, for all the misuse, are among the best in the world.  Some countries still use squatting holes over trenches (I’ll never get the image of the toilets in  Slumdog Millionaire out of my mind).

I don’t know what I would do if I caught somebody leaving a bathroom stall without policing their activities.  I’m afraid I would be likely to speak up and kindly remind them that they should straighten up the stall before they go.  I’d also probably get a response that Ce Lo Green would be proud of, but I feel we all have a right to a positive bathroom experience when not at home.

So how did you leave a public restroom stall last time you had to go?

There used to be a great product for removing scuff marks from shoes.  When you consider that a good pair of women’s shoes cost the equivalent of a BMW, a good scuff remover is a must-have accessory. Unfortunately they’re off the market, because teenagers were buying them to sniff the contents and get high.

Bill Cosby mentioned in his comic routine that kids are brain damaged.  They develop at such an astounding rate, they don’t know what they’re doing half the time.  This fact, however, is no excuse for drug abuse.  It’s a shame that perfectly good products go away because they have huffing potential.

But then, what do I know?  I don’t smoke or drink, nor have I felt the urge to try taking a deep breath of some chemical to see if my world looks better with toxic fumes swirling in my brain.

Let me qualify the smoking part.  Back in junior high, I and a few cohorts got hold of some cigarettes and had at them.  Later, alone, I lit one up, but after seeing myself in the mirror holding it, I thought I looked completely idiotic.  Actresses like Bette Davis could blow smoke rings and make it look sexy.  I’m not Bettte Davis by a mile.  Such was my career as a smoker:  not starting meant I didn’t have to quit.

I never could grasp the concept of artificial happiness brought on by synthetic compounds.  Sure, perfume is cool, but a scent doesn’t define people any more than shoe scuff remover can make life seem better by inhaling its odor.  We are so obsessed with our sense of smell that we overbathe and underplay how much odor can tell us.  Dogs can be trained to sniff out bedbugs, and we can know there is a fire at home by smelling smoke not caused by cigarettes.  We know dinner is on the stove (or microwave), the factory down the street is busy, or the seashore is minutes from our anxious bare toes.  Who needs to inhale chemical crap?

Spend one day just smelling life.  It’s better than anything in a bottle.

We women have it tough when it comes to lugging stuff around.  Sure, men have to sit on overstuffed wallets that may well make their buns fall asleep, but one time I actually weighed my purse and found it took second place only to a bowling ball.  That explains why I walk with one shoulder lower than the other.  Beats bun pain by a mile, though.

Women are usually armed for anything, which is why a purse is necessary.  We need to carry tissues, hand sanitizer gel, car cell phone chargers, schedules, bills to mail, prescriptions to fill, travel size products of every description and enough change to fill a slot at the casino to choking.

I miss the purses of yesteryear.  Back in the day, my favorite all-time purse was the Ambassador II, an organizer handbag like no other and the undisputed king of bags.  Each bag came with a wallet, change purse, cosmetic bag, mini address book, notepad, two key rings (which fit into snaps inside the bag) and even a pen with its own sheath.  Now those were the days when mail order gave you value (plus shipping and handling).

Of course we fill the freebies with stuff; keys by the dozen go on the key rings, a model’s dream supply of makeup in the cosmetic bag, plus pocket change, hand cream, spare batteries, a book for the commute, mail and such, and that bag becomes quite a load to carry.

The company that manufactured the bag seems to have vanished, or they just went out of production without notice, which infuriated legions of the bag’s fans.  There was a video on YouTube about the bag   (http://www.uniquehandbags.info/1978-ambassador-handbag-ultimate-bag-commercial.html) which was recently pulled because of some legal problems about its appearance.  The bag has been out of production for some time, so somebody must have an issue with nostalgia advertising (unless, by some miracle, somebody is bringing the bag back).

Today’s so-called organizer bags are bottomless caverns of inefficient design.  I have yet to find a bag I truly like to replace the Ambassador.  The best I’ve come up with is a Gianni Bernini with two zip closures (I preferred the large flap of the Ambassador), wide bottom (close enough) and some serviceable pockets.  I bought a black one and a beige one, never having been one to be out of season with my purse.  I hope they last two seasons apiece before I’ll need to replace them with something new.  Have you ever noticed that, when you find something that works for you, it goes out of production?

As long as I carry a purse, I’ll continue my quest for the holy grail of bags.  A suitable heir to the Ambassador is sure to come along in my lifetime, right?

My college diploma arrived in the mail.  I know I should be happy, but I’m not.  True, it’s an admirable achievement at my age, especially when my high school guidance counselor discouraged me from furthering my education at all, but still it is a bittersweet accomplishment.

I never understood why people in the education system, who should have been invested in the future of every student, put such cruel obstacles in my way.  Several women in my family had and either didn’t take advantage of or lost the opportunity to attend college for various reasons.  That did not qualify me any less.  Any time I accomplished something, the elementary and high school faculty acted as if they were disappointed.  I still remember an elementary school teacher telling me that I had been selected to participate in a high school creative writing seminar, with a look that condemned my daring to have any sort of talent.

When I first applied to college, starting with Rutgers evening classes, I only took one or two classes, hoping I could concentrate better on my studies in small quantities.  I also didn’t want to appear to be somebody who craved being academically overloaded when I wasn’t a day person.   I didn’t go for dorm life, but commuted from home at night and paid from my own pocket.  After all those years of being told I was unfit, I decided to be fit on my own terms.

In the end I was able to get reimbursements for classes from work, and I still commuted 50 miles from the office to home at night, then got to school with two methods of public transportation (which didn’t get reimbursed).

With some breaks from academics while pursuing other aspects of life, it’s finally over.  One class at a time, I cobbled together a four-year degree and finished it.  I won’t march in commencement or hang the diploma on a wall as if I have to brag or say to anybody “I told you so,” mostly because all those faculty members who discouraged me are, for the most part, dead.  They did their damage and escaped.  That, above anything else, I think, is what made me hold back tears before I opened the envelope and read the Latin pronouncement that I had finished something nobody wanted me to even try.  If those folks are indeed spirits out there somewhere, I wonder what they think now.

The news on the street is that a Bachelor’s degree is similar to the high school education of the 1970s.  The other news on the street is that people with Master’s degrees are unemployed in huge numbers.  Readers never are told who compiles this data, but I think it may come from people who have no or the wrong degree.  But I did it, I earned it, and whatever becomes of the knowledge I’ve obtained, I won’t stop here.  I like learning.  How dare I.

Language has been, and always will be, volatile, emotionally charged and constantly changing.  Words come and go, and occasionally they come back into fashion, but there are a select few that don’t get spoken without some penance involved.

The late George Carlin referred to feces, urine, a sex act, female genitalia, insulting monikers about sexual relations (twice) and breasts to come up with his infamous list of seven “dirty” words unspeakable on the airwaves.  I’m sure that my clues make it somewhat easy to guess correctly what most of the originals are without offending anybody.

In our so-called modern world, two words are still volatile enough to warrant censure:  the “f” word (what in A Christmas Story was spoken as “fuuuuudddddge”), and the “n” word.

Recently I overheard a grammarian use a word that raised some eyebrows.  The person was referring to a tightwad who apparently didn’t just pinch pennies, but rubbed Lincoln’s beard raw.  The poor literary adept person then wondered why the tightwad was so niggardly.  Heads spun around, white and otherwise.  It was as if somebody had said the “f” word out loud.  I didn’t even look up from my lunch.

The word means stingy or miserly.  It has nothing to do with anything pertaining to the African American heartache associated with the original “n” word.  But the question lingered whether the negativity associated with an unrelated word could condemn it to obscurity.  Hopefully not.  Words have a connection to what we learn and have learned from our past and future, so trying to blot them out does nothing.

Back in the old days, the world had movie theatres.  One screen per building, one movie at a time.  The place sold out.  In our parents’ time, in the heyday of Hollywood, films were released in batches, and the screenings changed a few times a week to accommodate the big producers’ large catalog of new product.

Nowadays, the new movies come out on Friday a few at a time, and most of them are horrible.  Still, we have movieplexes with 20 screens (or more), and on opening night they’re packed, too.  Once the freshness dies, we wait for the movie to come out in another form, like on pay cable or DVD.

I’m going to miss DVD when it dies.  Like I miss the videocassette.  When we look back on how recorded media has changed from the 33 rpm record to cassettes to the (relatively short-lived) 8-track tapes to CDs to cyberspace downloads, it’s enough to make your internal memory (brain) explode.

Along with the turnover in media goes the fate of the video store.  It’s strange to me that people are increasingly turning to more impersonal forms of entertainment rather than actually interacting with a person at a store.  Not so long ago, we had video stores like Erol’s, Hollywood Video and Blockbuster easily accessible to everybody.  I especially remember, with fondness, the Movies Unlimited store.  Now there was a store run by people who knew movies (they do mail order now, along with a wide audience of cable channel TCM’s fans who want to collect classics).  Today, stores are shutting down and turning to mail order services like Netflix.

My Blockbuster just shut down earlier this month, but the owner turned me on to their mail service, and I love it (I don’t intend to turn to the Netflix dark side).  I get deliveries to my mailbox with no restricting return policies.  Sure I can watch movies in my pajamas without having to jump into the car to return the movie by midnight, but with my time schedule it’s the delivery convenience that sold me on this new idea.

No matter what, I refuse to approach a kiosk like that carmine colored souped up ATM in front of the pharmacies and grocers that spits out rentals like a vending machine. Talk about impersonal.  One even sprang up just yards from that ill-fated Blockbuster, and folks flocked to it.  There is something kind of creepy about that to me.

In the movie Dune, humans became so dependent on machines to do jobs for them that they fell into apathy and were subdued by enterprising men who formed alliances with those machines to take over the world.  We are seeing a society grow more like that frightening archetype, as we gravitate more toward internally gratifying amusement that seals you into pressing buttons and putting earphones on to block out the rest of the human race.  There is another Blockbuster within five miles of home, so I’m visiting there now (I didn’t tell you that I can return my movies to the store instead of mailing them, and get another movie on the spot).  Kicking and screaming into the death of video rentals go I.

For some strange reason, my new clock has lost track of time.  Or else somebody is lying about what time it really is.

As I mentioned in my March 2010 post, my old faithful clock radio lost its LED readout.  It still woke me up on time, but I couldn’t see the time readout.  When a thunderstorm caused a blip in the power, the clock became useless and I had to go out and buy another one.  The one I chose came with claims of being automatically set to my time zone with help from an acurate atomic clock source in Boulder, Colorado, which claims accuracy without losing a second in something like a billion years.  It also has a backup battery in case of other power outages.

It has worked well, but the time has always been about two minutes behind what the cable company displays on the converter box.  Suddenly, this past week, the clock gained another two minutes.  Or else Comcast is trying to speed the time along so they can get more programming into a day.

According to an online resource called Weather Shack, the clock is probably not receiving the atomic clock signal, so it has resorted to being just an ordinary clock with no idea whether it is telling the correct time or not.  The website recommends unplugging and re-plugging the clock to see if it realigns itself with the mother ship in Boulder.

As a final resort, I will have to take the clock out at night, unplugged, and allow the ET function to phone home.  I’m sure the neighbors will gossip about that for a month afterward.  I just hope no UFO’s show up.

How did our technology get so strange that we have gone from aligning our television antennas on the rooftop to aligning our clock radios at night?  And can the aliens tell us what time it really is?

Love is still the world’s most unexplainable human quality, and that’s terrible.  Every year around this time (Valentine’s Day), millions of dollars are spent on cards, flowers, jewelry and trips to hotsy-totsy naughty late-night getaways with satin sheets and champagne bubbles in the hot tub, while untold numbers of folks get zilch.  Oh, sorry, that’s wrong, they do get one thing:  forgotten.

Holidays in general are depressing times for people who are left out of the loop.  In December one bunch of people are celebrating Christmas while another waits for Hanukkah or a third waits for Kwanzaa.  The nature-based religions (Druids and such) who used to make merry on dates like 12/25 have to share, and I guess that over time nobody minded that much, as long as they still had the right to celebrate.

The exclusivity of holidays tend to leave large numbers of people segregated yet unable to escape the din of the merriment, much like a teetotaler making a wrong turn onto a street full of boozers.  The best you can do is politely push on and hope it’s over soon.

When I used to take the train to and from work, I would see men in business suits holding huge balloons or red and pink bags filled with gifts bound for an appreciative mate.  As I observed the passengers I could see those who would raise their books a bit higher to cover their eyes or opted to look out the window at the passing scenery instead of lingering on the loneliness of going someplace where nobody would be bringing such appreciation home to them.

Fate or circumstance makes some people prone, for whatever reason, to avoidance by the opposite sex.  Nobody really knows why.  There doesn’t seem to be much reliable data on depression or suicide rates specifically related to Valentine’s Day, but spring tends to cause a slight increase in suicide rates, and with all the lead-up in the media and in storefronts nationwide, you can be sure some folks will get the blues come 02/14 when there is no balloon or flower to mark somebody’s love for them.  It’s just plain sad that on a day meant to celebrate love, some just won’t get it.

Don’t you agree that we have all had enough of all the dieting and restrictions and arguments over what to eat on a diet and what to or not to restrict?  Our country is so full of fat people (or, if you’re sensitive, dimensionally challenged) and reduction methods that don’t work, we’re smothering in poundage and pages of useless research about the epidemic that offer nothing solid in return for all the grant money spent (plus the trees to make the paper are dead and gone).

I count myself among the obese in America, and yet I supposedly eat healthy.  In my childhood I was the weirdo who actually liked vegetables (I had issues with brussels sprouts but tolerated them) and drank milk and orange juice daily.  Now, if you believe the propaganda, orange juice is not good for you because of its sugar content, and most veggies will pack on the pounds as surely as an ice cream cone, because they harbor starches.

Sugar is bad.  So are sugar-free substitutes.  Salt is bad.  Green peppers are bad.  Yessiree, those staples of the average salad plate should not be there, according to an expert who champions Atkins style diet choices.  He suggests more meat because we were designed to eat it:  we started as hunters, and we killed and cooked our own animal flesh, and nobody has ever seen a cave drawing of a fat caveman, he says in so many words.  The health community, however,  says not to eat meat because it can lead to heart disease.

Potatoes and pasta are out, too.  And certain fish are already on the no-no list because of mercury and contaminants.  The late fitness guru Jack LaLanne (who died January 23, 2011) claimed that if man made it, he wouldn’t eat it.  The Atkins supporters say if it grows in the ground you shouldn’t eat it.  Recently apples were touted as being the worst fruit you could eat, so I guess stuff on trees are out, too.

I’ve been eating 80 calorie yogurt, but since it has sugar substitute, I guess I should drop that habit.  I also include green pepper (oh no!), carrot, celery and radishes in my lunch.  They’re all, to put it in British vernacular, right out.  Cereals are made with the wrong grains and add sugar, so they’re not right for any diet.

That leaves us with water, in which are mercury and contaminants that kill the fish we used to eat.   I’m waiting for somebody to tell me that water should be off everybody’s diet.

Maybe the solution is substituting all food with an IV diet of just essential nutrients.  Can’t you see Campbell’s and McDonald’s and Atkins going into the medical supply business to stay solvent?  I don’t know about you, but I wish somebody out there would just come out with the outright truth and stop stacking the deck against everybody who has to eat to stay alive.