Susan's Scribblings the Blog

234 years after a group of officials gathered in a tiny room in Philadelphia and decided to turn the newly minted colonies into one big land of free agents, our country has gone up and down in popularity and effectiveness.

We keep building and breaking down what the founding fathers tried to do.  Sometimes we take a step forward and other countries hate us.  At other times we take a step backward, and other countries laugh at us (and still hate us).

We really shouldn’t base all of our decisions on what other people think.  We started the country because we wanted to worship in our own way and make our lives without looking over our shoulders to find somebody coming our way wanting to take it from us.  That hasn’t changed, only now the monarchy in England sends envoys instead of redcoats, and the true enemies come from other places that should know better than to mess with the American democracy.

Now that we’ve been here for awhile, we have established, challenged, and modified our documented rights to modernize our lives and try to maintain guidelines by which almost everybody can co-exist without much turmoil.  Naturally some people don’t like rules, and some have their own rules which, within the confines of their own physical and psychological boundaries, may work for them but not for others.

People who don’t want to live by the rules have the choice to conform, deal with any consequences of not conforming, or leaving and finding someplace in which they can live by their own rules.

Even anarchy has rules, though they may differ with each person.  The problem is, nobody knows anybody else’s rules, so everybody must break rules frequently in an anarchical society.

If we want to have co-existence, some rules are inevitable.  Our original document–the Declaration of Independence–simply made it official that we weren’t going to abide by the rules of the place we left behind, and the Constitution set up the first of our own set of rules.  They are not perfect, but they are necessary.  If the people want to alter the rules, they can do so in a democracy with the popular vote.  Those who don’t like the rules have the choices already mentioned.  Anarchy did not get us to where we are 234 years later.  Forgetting what we went through to get here won’t help either.

It’s tough to work on a book with other people, especially if they’re scattered all over the place and never have more than a few hours each month to get anything done.  For the past few months, I’ve been working with some fellow writers to put out an anthology.  A project like this takes lots of time, dedication to the craft of actually writing something meaningful down, an anal retentive eye for accuracy, loss of sleep and a skinny wallet.  None of us is Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer, so even though those great best-selling authors work hard, we work another kind of hard and without the backing of an agent or a waiting list of anxious fans.

We’ve pumped out pages of manuscripts.  We’ve picked the pages clean of passive sentences, and reviewed them over and over until our eyes are dry.  Now the time has come for the details outside the manuscript, such as what will go on the back cover and in the spaces between each writer’s manuscript.  We each must do a bio page in which we condense our writing-related accomplishments into a short paragraph or four.  It’s taking longer than we anticipated.

Along with the trauma of having to speak well of oneself (which I covered in a prior blog about performance reviews), this exercise requires a trip back in time to when none of us came even close to being true writers (which we may still not be now).  That is hard.

I remember back in elementary school when a teacher told me that I had been selected to go to an advanced writing workshop at the high school.  They made it sound like either a death sentence or the worst piece of news they could break to me.  I was ecstatic at the news, and the workshop was (in my mind) a validation of my talent.  In a place where a select few adults chose the select few children, this meant something.  The way they communicated it to me, though, I realized that it didn’t mean I was special.  Of course not.  I was a kid, and there were great authors out there well beyond their tween years.

Realistically, writers are a special breed.  Not many become Stephen King or Stephenie Meyer, and the few spots open for other good craftspeople are tough to get into.  When it comes to talking about myself as a writer, I think about how that faculty member told me the news that I was chosen for something related to writing.  I then take a deep breath, start tackling those non-passive sentences, and review them until my eyes are dry.

Every once in awhile my mind works in funny ways.  It’s a writing thing.  I decided to put a small piece of an idea I had for an unusual type of storytelling here for readers to look at.  Try your hand at the following:

Ape rises a furred ford a reed or hook candy sigh ford this intense.

If you figure it out, pat yourself on the back for finding something different on an Internet blog, and pass it on to your friends to try.  A good command of English helps, and don’t be afraid of public speaking.  Hope it’s interesting.  If not, just remember that most experiments are touch and go anyway, so there is always room for improvement.

Once the temperature climbs above 60 degrees, it seems the summer clothing starts coming out.  Considering the winter we’ve just been through, it’s not surprising that folks want to dress down and disown anything remotely resembling clothing designed for warmth.

Unfortunately, this also means that ugly sandals come out in droves, and by the pair, no less.

I won’t even go into detail about those dreadful gladiator look sandals that lace above the ankle.  And huarches have to be the most bizarre excuse for footwear I’ve ever seen.

At work, the policy allows for sandals but still is business casual.  Defining it is a three-month challenge which ends unresolved just in time for the summer dress code to end in September.  Generally business persons are not supposed to wear anything that would be used on the beach, but then the shoe manufacturers have brought out black patent sandals with thong toes, and the line in that beach sand is drawn yet again.  I’ve yet to see a worker sent home because of a fashion mistake, but such faux pas happen daily somewhere in cubicle land, which is why smart people testing the policy waters bring a backup pair of footwear.

I never understood why people like to flog the bottoms of their feet with flip flops.  Every step brings a slap of rubber, and in a crowd the hundreds of slaps start sounding like a mass tap-a-thon from a Broadway musical

Besides the red soles resulting from shoe self-flagellation, sandals tend to irritate the feet in at least one spot (and it seems the exclusive bane of women sandal wearers).  A woman’s feet suffer more degradation in summer than in a stiletto pair of Manolos.  Along with the requisite nail polish and weekly (or more) mani/pedi rituals, bandages and cotton balls are stuck on blisters between toes, callous files get worn down to nothing, and Dr. Scholl stock goes through the roof.

The parade of bare feet in summer is amusing for the casual observer.  Even the ugliest toes are put in display (attached to feet with distinct tan lines).  The fact that feet are exposed to more germs on the ground than ever doesn’t seem to matter (though logically more foot exposure should mean more bathing).

The only bare feet I have no issue with are kids’ adorable toes.  Youngsters have nice feet, and nobody has to paint their toenails or squeeze them into orthopedic nightmares with thong toes.  It seems adulthood demands more pain in the name of fashion, which is why I always watch the stock market to see how Dr. Scholl is doing to determine if the fashi0n trends are just right for decent sandal buying.

It seems that everybody in the past week has been talking about toilets.  My favorite columnist Lisa Scottoline did a piece about automated restrooms that made me laugh so hard I bust a seam.  At the office, the maintenance staff have been having difficulties with the thin but must-have seat covers.  Sometimes the paper is so thin, not only does it stick to you in an inconvenient place, but you never seem to get all of it peeled off once it has a hold on you.

People were talking about the floors (never clean enough, even after they’ve just been mopped), the flushing mechanisms (an almost invisible rubber coated button) and the fact that the seats jiggle around because they’re not secured very well.  We can send a man to the moon, but try to secure a toilet seat in a public restroom.

The office was so busy this past week, I think everybody was grateful just for the chance to take a bio break, complaints notwithstanding.

Why is it that when Americans get three days off after a dastardly winter and months of school and work make-up days, we all feel compelled to pack up and go someplace other than our homes?  Just when we were comfortable with all the fixing and spring airing-out we’ve done, we suddenly decide to escape to some B&B or hotel, risk sunburn and freak out the family pets by putting them up in kennels (or worse, in pet-friendly hotels where they can smell the remnants of other pets’ presence and freak out for a few days).

Not only do we have to hope we’ve packed enough for the trip (including hubby’s laptop so he can stay on call at the office), we also have to pay up the nose for food, lodging and souvenirs that we’ll wind up giving to the Salvation Army in a few years anyway.

It’s strange how somebody else’s hometown can seem like a fun place to visit if you decide to play the role of tourist for a few days.  The locals usually go about their business while you’re visiting.  They go to work, shop at the market and hit the local watering hole at night.  The tourists hang out at the historical landmarks, visit the gift stores and get plastered at the hotel nightclub.

If you stay home for a holiday weekend, there is the requisite cookout on the grill the size of your indoor furniture and which costs enough to send your kid to a semester at Harvard.  The master of the grill is the man of the house:  you can pick him out of the crowd by the soot embedded in what is left of his eyebrows.  the food is set up by the women, who usually plan days in advance how to get the stuff bought the cheapest and stored in the fridge without cramping out the tofu and yogurt bought at deep discount the week before.

This year I’m putting together potato salad and cole slaw (one for Sunday, and one for Monday) to go with the burgers, which we bought last week and managed to cram into the freezer, which was filled with frozen dinners which conveniently went on sale the week before.

I don’t use mayonnaise; I use salad dressing.  Apparently that is a mark against my character, because most people seem to prefer mayo (though the salad dressing manufacturers seem to stay in business just fine).  I like mayo, but I use salad dressing when I cook for myself.  At least I won’t pay up the nose for my cole slaw at the hotel restaurant.  And once I’ve stuffed myself, I can sleep all weekend in a bed that nobody else has slept in, and I won’t have forgotten to pack my laptop.

Is it me, or are we too obsessed when it comes to power?  As children, we’ve all had the experience of having somebody hoard all the toys.  Some kids would cry, others would go in and beat the be-whoopie out of the other kid and take all the toys for their own, and occasionally one kid would get hold of one toy and leave the other kid holding the rest.  Now that is a smart child.  The child with one toy is still content, and the other still has a stockpile, but only has two hands to hold onto them, and legions of other kids who will annoyingly cry or come in hungry for some be-whoopie time.

Power isn’t about having all the money or having all the answers or fifty jillion legions backing you up.  Nor is power about being the person with one opinion whom everybody backs out of their own hunger for status or fear of not belonging if they digress.  These are the problems causing terrorism and bullying and drug wars and everything else wrong with the world.

The horrifying part is that some people think the only way to hold onto power is to kill everybody who doesn’t agree with their opinions.  The terrorists who blow themselves up may take out a dozen people with one bomb, just to make sure a dozen fewer people don’t walk around not believing in a particular interpretation of an idea.  Unfortunately the bomber also takes themselves out, so it seems awkward to be so desperate for a certain way of life that nobody else is allowed to exist who doesn’t believe in it.

If we want to put religion into the picture, the duality of good and evil, and the existence of each in spite of the other, is proof that killing is not the way to have power.  If killing off all the good by evil or evil by good were the solution, it would have happened by now. They both have to exist, in varying quantities, for the world to be balanced.   True power is having enough to hold onto with your own two hands, others can have some as well, and nobody is coming to beat the be-whoopie out of you for what you have.

Sometime between the age of heavy metal desks and cubicles, office air conditioning became impossible to manage.  My office has a temperature range so widely abnormal, you can go from Miami to Siberia in a few steps.  At one end of the office, women on various rungs of the menopause ladder strip down to within being in violation of the summer dress code, while a few feet away others are wrapped in blankets (really).

I sit near the boss, and he wants the air cranked up.  I keep a sweater handy and use it often, with sips from a hot container of tea,  to keep away the threat of hypothermia.  The consensus is that the law regarding cold summer offices is exclusively a male dominated process.  That makes sense, because offices are generally still male dominated places.  If that is the case, why don’t men work on roads more often in winter than summer, if they hate sweating so much?  Go figure.

If the office dress code is liberal enough in summer, the men can take off their suit jackets and still complain they are hot.  Women get to wear short sleeves, but often they have to cover up with blankets.

The summer dress code for women has been a challenge, and it makes me glad not to be on the committee that has to establish what not to wear in the office environment.  The code breaks down the legality of clamdiggers and capri pants, the horrors of any kind of denim (skirts included), and whether a toe thong is allowed as part of dress sandals.  Men get to take off their jackets and avoid tee shirts, and bare feet in huaraches are out of the question.

Meanwhile the air continues to blast away to keep the men, and our sensitive computers, happy.  The rest of us enjoy the winter of 2010 all over again.

Life in general has a way of putting us in our place.  In the animal kingdom, the zebras stay in a group, as do the gazelles and warthogs, and lions come around only when they’re out to kill their next meal.  Otherwise, lions don’t belong where the zebras, gazelles and warthogs are.

Human beings categorize and make rules for all sorts of things, but the most complicated system of categorizing  involves ourselves and where we belong.

We tend to have places for (almost) everybody.  We prefer to keep criminals away from us by confining them to large, guarded penitentiaries.  We keep our children in school buildings or gated playgrounds to encourage their learning and protect them from harm.  We have state laws designed to help people enjoy a degree of comfort and confidence in the tenets of our law-abiding country.  We do, however, tend to see our state of residence as being unique and, much like those zebras, we get uncomfortable if a lion from someplace else wanders in.  They might be here for lunch.  Travel from state to state is a culture shock in itself, without somebody from overseas or north or south of us complicating matters.

The common notion about Texans, for example, is that their gun laws are designed with their residents in mind, and it is possible that plenty of folks there carry guns.  If the law says it’s okay there, and folks are okay with that, then it’s a fine state law for Texas.  Let’s say, however, that a Texan takes a road trip to another state.  They might not want to pack heat there.  By the same token, somebody from the other 47 contiguous states who takes a trip down to the Lone Star State might want to bone up on the local culture, if for no other reason to avoid being freaked out by some local pulling their map out of the glove-box and having a pistol fall out behind it.

Because so many people feel like fish out of water outside their own area, and because people tend to look suspiciously at anybody with a out-of-state license plate, we frequently wish–even if for a moment–the outsiders would not venture about.  After all, zebras aren’t known to deal with rogue zebras who want to eat them for dinner, do they?  Let’s keep the warthogs and gazelles, too, but we get nervous around lions.

Arizona wants to keep illegal immigrants out of the state, so a new law has made it a state crime to be there without proper documentation.  If an officer has reason to believe that somebody may be illegally trespassing, they can ask for official proof, such as ID or work papers.

There are arguments about profiling going around in light of this law.  After all, no zebra asks a lion for ID.  A lion is a threat to the culture of zebras and gazelles and warthogs.  The idea from the law partially stems from recent killings along the Mexican border:   the lunch was usually a hard-working Arizonian, and the lion was somebody hopping over the border with a desperation not unlike hunger.  So let’s go on record as saying these incidents involved criminal lions.

It’s an unusual situation in Arizona and Mexico border states, involving lots of fish out of water.  What Arizona might need to do is sort out the zebras from the lions and figure out how best to keep their economy strong, whether it involves changing their labor policies or trying to physically keep the borders breach-proof.  However, they should remember that zebras don’t just live in Arizona, and lions don’t just come out of Mexico.