Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Whoever invented the “coffee table book” probably didn’t mean for them to be portable.  These days people seem to scoff at any book weighing more than a Kindle.  The over-sized hardcover book is still a part of literary and decorating culture, but obviously books that are the size of small blackboards or containing more than 1000 pages add some inconvenience to the package.

I’m taking a class and just got my textbook.  The questions came up as soon as I walked in the door from work:  how many books did you order?  When my reply was one, there was doubt.  As I picked it up to release it from the usual Amazon sparingly effective packaging, I realized I had a heavy one, weighing somewhere in the range of a bowling ball (I used to use an eight pounder).  Taking it to the bathroom scale, I found that the textbook weighed nine pounds.

So I have to attend classes each week toting the equivalent of a hefty newborn.  Maybe I should have bought two, so both arms could get a workout.  I always use totes rather than backpacks,  and probably in this case that is a good idea:  can you imagine the spinal agony I’d be courting if I dropped this literary piece of lead into a backpack?

I hope we use every one of the 2,000 pages in this literary behemoth.  I’ll be 2,000 pages smarter and, with the workout, maybe 20 pounds lighter.

The problems with the I-295 construction aren’t in the repair work itself, but in the people driving through it.  Miles of the major highway through New Jersey have been blocked off and squeezed in for repaving and other repairs continuing into 2012.  The posted speed limit is 45 in most of the construction zones; outside it’s a harrowing 65.

People, however, pay little heed to signs.  Since the police can’t do an effective job at stopping the masses of law breakers (how could they get into a lane to chase down somebody in a five-mile construction zone with no pulloff zones?), cars and trucks zoom through tight two-lane work areas at various speeds, and none under the posted one.  Even the truckers, who should know better, make commuting a death-defying feat.  On one memorable trip, a semi ahead of me in the right lane actually scraped the guardrails, and the smell and sounds of abused metal filled the cabin of my car.  The rails had only been in service about two months, and already they look 20 years old.

Yesterday, however, I had the most enjoyable trip using I-295.  Not only could I stay under 45 in the construction zone, but I also barely nudged my speed past 55-60 the rest of the way.  The difference was the lack of rush hour traffic at the start of a holiday weekend.  Sure, just about everybody passed me, because well established habits don’t get broken easily, but I was happy for a break from the stress of the Indy 500 in disguise.

I do feel for the commuters who hate driving the road on any day of the week.  I also feel for the officers who really should be allowed to put pace cars in front of the traffic to get it down to a reasonable speed.  I doubt anybody will consciously slow their cars down when the unpredictability of construction is putting such a measurable damper on the timing of their trips from day to day, but the only way to control what is out there is to set the example.  As long as everybody goes along, nobody will have the benefit of a relaxing drive on a major highway, with or without construction.

Why do we, as human beings, always manage to justify behavior in ourselves that we condemn in others?  Why is it so convenient to cast one human or an entire group of humans aside?  It doesn’t matter if you’re on the rejector or rejectee side:  at various times in your life, you will find yourself on both of them.

Insecurity is a strong motivator, and anybody from the schoolhouse bully to the radical extremist is proof of that.  The problem is this:  if your ideas are so good, it would be easy to attract followers, but if you have to frighten people or kill to get your point across, it might be time to rethink the idea.

Religions like Christianity and Islam don’t base their principles on killing the non-believers, but on the idea that if one shows by example that it is good to be what you are, then others will want to be part of it also.

Of course there are those who don’t feel that way; kill all the folks who are different and they think that all who will be left are the best people.  No two people are exactly alike, so unfortunately the only way to get such a Utopian world is to clone one perfect person millions of times and replace everybody with clones.  Scientifically that won’t happen.  Ethically that’s wrong, and morally how could we decide whom to replicate, and could we do that at the expense of our own lives?  Finally, in reality, nobody wants the world to be that boring.

Sure there will always be people out there who just want to annihilate others so they can feel a little better.  There will always be bullies, radicals, and a pecking order.  At least until we recognize within ourselves that it’s wrong to perpetuate them just because they have always existed.

In polite company, one is not supposed to discuss three topics:  religion, politics or sex.  However, in light of the controversy surrounding President Obama’s religious status, I thought it might be a good idea to throw my two quarters in (yes, the recession has raised that two cents up a bit).

At this moment, while you’re sitting on the computer reading a blog, millions of Muslims may well be bowing over prayer mats.  Also, those of the Jewish faith are going to temple, Christians are holding church picnics or getting married before a cleric.  You are still sitting at a computer reading a blog, and it makes no difference what anybody is doing regarding their religion.

To a point.  Right now there may be some really bad people out there doing some really bad things.  If a guy is standing in the middle of a crowd with a gun, the police are not going to say, “wait a minute while we round up everybody who shares the same religion as you, so we can shoot them all down, too.”  The police will, however, shoot the bad guy because he is doing something bad, and things should then get back to normal.

Of course there are people who will protest, “those police shot a fellow (insert religious identifier here), and that means the police hate everybody who is a (insert identifier again) and everybody else in the world must also hate people who are (insert again) because nobody stopped the police from shooting one (insert again).”  Come on, folks.  Nobody wants to throw out all the apples because one went bad.  Sort out the good ones, throw out the bad ones, and get on with life, for goodness sake.

If the President decided to give a speech while wearing one brown sock and one blue sock because he just didn’t notice it and didn’t feel the need to take the time to change them (because, after all, he would be standing behind a lectern the whole time, so nobody would be likely to notice), what does that have to do with how he runs the country?  Same thing with what building he worships in, how he prays, what saintly names he invokes (if any) or what scriptures he keeps on the bookshelf.

The Almighty made all of us, and if you believe that, then isn’t it wrong to exercise hatred for what we choose to do with our lives in His world, just because some of us don’t carry the same scriptures or worship in a building which is not like ours?  Tolerance for religion doesn’t mean we endorse bad people:  we just prefer our world with good people–of any faith–in it.

I don’t know what happened this past week, but everybody seemed so grumpy.  The weather changed from ten degrees short of hell to a comfortable mid-70 cool spell, but for some reason nobody enjoyed it.  Yesterday in particular–Friday the 13th, no less–the negativity was everywhere.

First thing in the morning, as I was pulling out into an empty road after patiently waiting my turn, somebody magically materialized from nowhere and I was somehow in her road.  She honked from behind me, pulled alongside me on my left, stopped her car while the traffic was starting to build again, and hurled invective at me from her open passenger window.  I slowed down beside her, though I didn’t hear a thing she said because my window was closed.  I politely tried to convince her to keep moving and not cause any problems with the people around us, by waving my hand in a general “go on ahead” manner.  I wasn’t in as much of a hurry as she apparently was.  She finally pulled off after a few lengthy seconds, still on a rant; I pulled over until the traffic cleared again.

A coworker had escaped to the peace and quiet of the restroom after a caller had given her a unanimous dressing down on the phone lines.  She told me it had been like that all day, with nobody seemingly content with the change in the temperature.

On the heels of the now infamous Jet Blue Airlines incident involving possibly equally grumpy flight attendant Steven Slater and a harried passenger (in which he made a classy exit from the situation, and the plane, by deploying the inflatable emergency chute and nabbing beer before doing his jump, sit and slide onto the tarmac), I wonder why we are all so testy.  Emotion doesn’t solve problems:  actions do.  Anger only traumatizes the body and spirit.  Anybody from a monk to a Jedi can tell us that.  A good count to ten, a step back or a self-inflicted slap upside the head might do wonders for many of the bad attitudes out there.  Long-term misbehavior, however, is still best resolved by quiet and effectively rendered inconveniences designed to redirect the unwanted behavior into new and good ones.  I think that, if you can solve a problem without raising either your voice or your blood pressure, that’s a sign of true humanity.

Oh, and next time you get in bad traffic and/or call customer service, remember that you’re okay, and the other person is okay, too.  It’s just the situation that stinks sometimes.

The old adage “you get what you pay for” is like a biblical quote in consumerism happy America.  There seems to be something in the latest must-have gewgaw for every income level, and sometimes the expensive item doesn’t look different when stood against the cheap one (especially from several feet away).

Every year I take at least one bus trip to New York, and inevitably a bunch of dudes toting bulging bundled bedsheets, like a bunch of off duty Santas, walk down the street with some followers in tow,  set the bundles down on a patch of pavement, and hordes of people swarm around to buy the knock-off illegal replicas of handbags inside them.  These are the type of bag that would set the penny-pinching customers back a few hundred dollars in Macy’s.

I have no idea what type of bargain these rip-offs would be, but then I have a $50 price limit on any handbag I buy, so Coach and Dior won’t make a thing on me even if they are on sale.  Besides, I would never plunk down a cent on a handbag I knew wasn’t legit.  I don’t think it’s right to flash somebody’s name around if I don’t know how the name got on the merchandise:  sometimes these knock-offs are made by abused slave laborers.  They may even generate profits for drugs or weaponry.

A few people I’ve known over the years have taken the opportunity to carry around one of the real satchels through a rental service online that sends a new bag to you to use for a monthly fee, and then return it for a newer one.  The people who indulge in this unique phenomenon like to show off their purses to co-workers and other admirers.  Usually the response is “Wow.”  At any price, that seems like a pretty expensive and shallow way to get recognition.  My lipstick and pocket change fit just fine in a $50 handbag.  By the way, I also buy my bags at Macy’s, right beside the expensive ones.

It’s tough to think about the fact that we are all illegal immigrants in the United States.  Even the original native Indians probably were on the continent because they were landlocked once the original “big continent” called Pangaea split apart.  That being said, the people who stayed on the land, survived and colonized it are the true legal residents.  Anybody else who comes in from elsewhere is an intruder until such time as they are joined to the main population (by marriage or whatever accepted means are used at the time, such as documentation or verbal agreements).

Over the years the Pilgrims conquered the Indians, the European immigrants set up shop, the North fought the South because nobody liked what the other side had or didn’t have, we’ve fought several major wars and established all sorts of general principles which are supposed to help us live peacefully.  We then go all out to destroy those principles.

Folks, North America only has so much room, and business and industry only has so many jobs to keep people living decently.  Our unemployment rate is too high, as are our demands on the taxation and compensation systems put in place to help the elderly, the unemployed and the destitute.  Yet we have people carrying signs and suggesting that we should add to the public burden by allowing more people into the country illegally.

During the 2010 census, people grumbled about being counted, as if we were in the schoolyard and trying to cover for the boy who snuck off to have a smoke by confusing the teacher’s head count.  Sure we want to keep good workers of any origin, and keep out the criminals, but leaving the barn door open in this case will let in the horses and the bobcats that will kill the other livestock.

The law Arizona is trying to pass is not trying to make the state a police run hotbed of searches and seizures:  they’re just trying to prevent the bankruptcy of the system which is trying to take care of our own.  Sure the rule has flaws, but if everybody wants to view the citizenship of this country as either “open to everybody or to nobody,” nothing constructive will get done.

We do need to turn within and tend to our own people.  We need to build strong math and science skills in our youth.  We need to get an economy in which a paying job pays the bills.  We need to employ our own before we can take care of anybody from the outside.  Most of all, we need to compassionately tell those who want to run away from their problems in their own countries to turn back within their own borders and make changes for themselves as we did for ourselves.  We did fight a war between the North and South and both sides grew from the experience.  The French citizenry stormed the Bastille and overthrew their tormentors to make the changes they needed.  I’m not condoning war:  I’m saying change can only come when we stick together and work it out from within.  Once we fix ourselves, we can stand again as an example of what works, and our doors can open a crack for more folks to seek the same things we’ve fought so hard for.

Sometimes a person can learn something in the strangest places.  While sitting in traffic in my neighborhood, I came across a bumper sticker on the vehicle ahead of me which claimed membership in something called the International Kitchen Exhaust Cleaning Association.  The what?

You better believe I looked it up.  It’s an entity founded in 1989 to provide professional and safety code quality professionals who can clean and maintain restaurant kitchen exhaust equipment.  According to the information on their website (ikeca.org), many eatery kitchen fires that could get out of control can be prevented by having a clean exhaust system.  The organization trains and certifies technicians to do this job.

This is a country full of clubs, organizations and groups (I don’t even have to mention politics, religion or Lady Gaga), but in our world of micro-tasking is it so unusual to separate the kitchen exhaust from the appliances it supports?   When a repair technician arrives at a restaurant, would (s)he go the extra step to check the exhaust, or would it be ignored because an organization like IKECA exists and it’s “their job, not mine” to do that?

It’s good to have specialists, but throw in too  many and it can look like the Monty Python “Gas Cooker Sketch,” with umpteen people in your kitchen discussing your exhaust while your risotto burns.

As in the world of medicine, it’s good to have general practioners and specialists in many other fields.  A stove repair technician should have some knowledge of a kitchen exhaust, and a direct dial to somebody from IKECA in case of emergency.

Writing can be painful sometimes, especially when you’ve decided to move away from a part of your manuscript because you’ve realized it isn’t meeting your expectations and you’re spending too much time trying to make it right.  As in many things in life, sometimes you have to put it down, walk away and get back to it.  Approaching a problem with a fresh mind, and after a looooong break, can help bring the solution to light.

In the case of my manuscript, I had this particular pivotal chapter down on paper for quite some time, but it wasn’t what I really expected it to be.  So I put it on the back burner and got tied up in other chapters instead.

This afternoon, in an aisle at Staples, an answer came to me, as if an angel of creativity whizzed by my ear and delivered a kernel of hope.

It’s a brilliant solution to a problem that stopped my drama dead in its tracks.  The problem had brought the entire story to a halt like a sledgehammer to the kneecap, and by some miracle the idea came along like a knee surgeon and fixed it like new.

Now, revitalized, I can stop blogging about it and go get that pivotal chapter back on its feet and marching toward the end like a true Marine fresh off the disabled list.  Oooh-Rah!

We spend a lot of time working at our place of employment.  This past week I feel like I’ve spent 80 hours working what is supposed to take about 37 1/2.  A holiday weekend doesn’t help matters, but any cubicle dweller knows the feeling of cramming an extra day of work into a four-day week.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says that men worked about an hour more than women in the workplace in 2009.  I don’t know how they figured that out, because it seems men dole out many responsibilities to women on the job.  Maybe doling counts.

My job includes meeting the demands of several people at once while I am only endowed with two arms.  I’ve learned to juggle file folders with my feet and mentally shut down any hunger pangs until I’m within five feet of a vending machine.

They really needed me at work this week, because like a fool I didn’t put in for vacation, so the others grabbed the chance to bail for the beach while they had the opportunity to escape.  Strangely, on Tuesday (the day after our and many other business’ holiday closure), things were calm.  Wednesday everybody apparently came to life (or used Tuesday to recover from the three-day weekend) and business overflowed.  I was bombarded from three or four people at once, all wanting something that was due, overdue or just needed yesterday.  And they all needed me to give them my attention.

It was comforting to know that, elsewhere in cubicle land, another person was cramming 80 hours into a four-day week.  They also called me toward the end of the week for feedback.

The only thing worse than the four-day week is the week before and after a week’s vacation.  I put in for one, like a fool, knowing I’ll have to deal with cramming 75 hours into two weeks book-ending the down time.  At least there is no holiday coming up that could make it worse.

I keep saying I’ll never take vacation again.  Why do I do this to myself?