Susan's Scribblings the Blog

I’ll admit it up front:  I can’t sing.  I don’t sound like a hippo or anything, and I’m not totally tone-deaf, but busker will never be in my resume.  However, in the old days I used to have fun singing in the car.  It’s easy to do and doesn’t require taking one’s eyes off the steering wheel.  Also, with the windows closed, nobody knows how bad you are.

Now that my driving route is so tediously long and devoid of traffic lights (it’s one major highway straight up and down either way), and I have a CD player in the car, I’ve treated myself to some music in the car again, and my first choice was The Ultimate Bee Gees:  The 50th Anniversary Collection.  The Gibb brothers have been in the music business as long as I’ve been alive, so there were some songs that were released when I was too young to appreciate them.  This was a golden opportunity to catch up and enjoy some classics from “my day.”

I would not recommend a non-singer try what I did:  I wound up singing along to the entire album and paid the price with a scratchy throat that lasted for days.  Of course, I guess I should have left the falsetto to Barry Gibb, who is best qualified to hit those high registers, but what’s a good Bee Bees song without a bad Barry Gibb impression thrown in by an appreciative listener?

I know I’m not “Alone” (pardon the insider joke) in doing this.  Find me a Bee Gees fan who hasn’t tried either the trademark falsetto or holding a note with that heart-stopping quaver like on “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” and I’ll show you somebody who has lost that sense of adventure in their life.  Leave the bungee jumping to the adventure geeks: I’ll go for the bad karaoke effort anytime.

The Bee Gees as we knew them over the years has changed slightly.  Recently the two remaining brothers, Barry and Robin, performed for the first time as a duo for “Dancing With the Stars.”  The third Bee Gee, Robin’s twin brother Maurice (pronounced Morris but affectionately known as Mo), died suddenly in January 2003, and after six years it seemed that the group was finished.  The brothers decided to reunite at last, and the collection is a celebration of the last half century of work.

It’s said that when you mention somebody, you honor their life or their memory, so if I’m warbling in the car, poorly, with a sore throat and flat notes and no diaphragmatic ability to hold that sustained note on “Staying Alive” anyway, I guess it’s all okay.  And thank goodness I keep the windows rolled up.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear the Halloween costume shops pulled up stakes and disappeared at 12:01 the morning of November 1st, and in their places are Christmas shops.  Already!

It’s bad enough that the card shops start peddling ornaments in July, and that gaily packaged holiday junk food starts appearing on little green or red tablecloth covered round display tables in Macy’s by mid-September.  Now the stores are engaging in early sales hoping to gain revenue even before the Black Friday madhouse begins.

Really, can pre-packaged stuffing in a bag produced in October still be worth eating in late November?  If so, it must have been preserved using methods taught in ancient Egyptian tombs.  Perhaps we should already have figured this out, since it comes at the same time as the first batches of fruitcake, which everybody knows was found, still edible, in a burial vault in the Valley of the Kings.

The food is just part of the insanity.  Your local pharmacy should be well stocked by now with tons of cheap stocking-stuffers which would have made our founding fathers faint.  Do we really need a dispenser, shaped like a reindeer, that “poops” brown jelly beans?

Nativity scenes start showing up in garden shops, next to the holiday villages from some joint called Department 57.  I guess that name is based on a classification in some manual called the Department Store Code Book of Merchandise Sorting or something.  I don’t buy miniature villages, mostly because the people in the scenes are never proportioned to the size of the buildings.  I realize their size is required by a safety law meant to prevent small children from choking on Mr. Ice Skater from the magnetic pond feature, but can’t they just make the buildings larger?

I don’t buy nativity scenes because I just don’t ever see one I like.  They’re always too modernistic or Renaissance-y or nondescript.  Besides, Baby Jesus always winds up getting lost for some inexplicable reason, even from supersize nativities in front of houses of worship.  Maybe folks who display them could put an appropriate lightbulb in the crèche and keep the infant savior secured in the vault instead.

By the time I have my first bite of turkey, I’ll be tired of the pre-holiday sales.  I’ll also have a sore back from hauling all the Black Friday newspaper inserts out to the curb for pickup on trash day.

Whenever a birthday comes around, I try to look back on the past year and think about what I did well or (in a lot of cases) not so well, and resolve to do better.  I think it works better by not waiting for New Year’s Day, because shortly after January 1 comes all the December bills and income taxes, and these deliver quite a reality check roundhouse kick to the head no matter what your intentions.

First, I plan to forget trying to write neatly and just concentrate on jotting things down so I can at least read them.  When I was in school, teachers certainly did teach good penmanship, but only as long as every student was right-handed and good with spacial relationships.  I may have been destined to be left-handed, but we’ll never know:  I was forced into a pen hand so disastrous that I had to re-teach myself a better script as an adult simply because I was so darned tired of slowing my handwriting down just to conform.  My journals and notebooks all contain sparse entries in a neat scrawl, which is why they are so sparse.  Heck, I just want to let the creativity rip and make a mess on those pages.  I bought the things, so if I want them to look like maniacal ravings, it’s my privilege.

I also want to walk more.  Working in a call center at a desk spells disaster for any physique.  Add to it all the car commuting I do, and there is very little time for walking.  I do like to walk; when I go to New York City I walk from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to Lincoln Center at a decent clip without getting winded, so I think I could add some more foot time to my routine if I can find it.  Recently the Philadelphia transit workers went on strike, and traffic was at a standstill, so everybody in the city walked.  I walked to University City, where the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel campuses are located, along the 20-block uphill grade in about 15 minutes.  Whether the workers go back or not, I may just consider ditching the bus altogether.

I would also like to go on a date once more in my life, without being considered a cougar.  Since when did age become a predatory aspect of female nature but not so for men of any age?

There are others I want to do, like figuring out why I can’t get the stitch count right in my crocheting, but these will do for now.  If I finish any one of them in a year, I’ll never complain about being another year older again.

I have issues with my newspapers.  I get two every day, and they seem to be less enjoyable than before.  My Reader’s Digest has already become a wasteland of advertisements, but now the newsprint media is following that same path to implosion.

One local paper has even stooped to printing a 1 1/4 page front.  That’s right:  a flap of a page piggybacks onto the “real” front page:  the piece is simply a reprint of what lies beneath it.  Often it simply falls off.

Section A of the paper includes a major department store ad which is a separate section but still labeled as Section A, possibly as a ruse to encourage readers to open it seeking other articles of importance.

The entertainment page has doubled to include the cooking section on some days, the social calendar on others.  It’s depressing to see celebrity breakups on the left page and then read about the latest expensive common folk nuptials on the right page.

The television section only features prime time listings for about 50 of the 200 channels we get on our cable system.  I don’t know why networks like BBC America put up with not having their own listings in the paper:  how are people supposed to know what programming is on?  Don’t refer me to the onscreen guide:  I nearly broke my fingers trying to scroll through the listings in a vain attempt to pre-program my week’s tapings.  I’ll never touch that onscreen hindrance again.

The type is getting smaller in the daily papers, and the grammatical errors are beyond belief.  The comics are squeezed into tighter formats:  even Prince Valiant loses some drama when the panels are the size of wallet photos.

One of the two carriers manages to throw the paper onto the doorstep every day.  The other hurls it onto the wet lawn (sometimes unbagged).  One paper has decided to offer a call-in forum for comments about general issues by the readers, and the biggest complaint is that of senior citizens who must make a daily (and often cumbersome) trek to find their papers in the morning.  In second place is the volume of complaints about that aforementioned front flap.

I honestly believe that this world is going out of its way to make life as difficult as possible for select groups of people.  If the readership for newspapers in print goes, then the papers disappear, it shouldn’t be long before the intangible integrity of internet news will face its own problems.

A recent spot previewing the CBS show “How I Met Your Mother” had a character complaining about a situation resembling “a fat lonely girl your mom made you call.”  That, the Dove campaign for “inner beauty” and the recent “Pass It On” campaigns which feature lame scenarios designed to boost national self-image, all make me want to scream.

Truth is, it’s impossible to be perfect, beautiful or happy.  Life isn’t designed that way.  Of course we can slim down if we want to eat nuts and berries and eschew all other foods for life.  We can glop on makeup and hair goo to improve some aspects of our faces.  We can try to be nicer to people, too:  I’m sure that fat lonely girl would be less fat and lonely if somebody would call her (if you had to sit all day waiting for somebody to call you, you’d be fat and lonely too).  Beneath the surface there are still some very internally ugly people, like serial killers, corporate cheats, terrorists and marital infidels who can appear just as “normal” as the rest of us.

I would like to see a Dove commercial in which the woman doesn’t already have a ton of makeup on after supposedly rinsing the beauty bar off her face.

The reason most of America is fat lies in the unfair food retail system that puts fast food within reach of the poor, taints healthy foods with chemicals and overprices it for the middle class and proportions all packaged foods in such a way that it’s impossible to figure the math if you are an average citizen.  The rich, in fact, seem to enjoy depriving themselves for what they call beauty.

Did you ever look at the way nutrition labels are allowed to be couched in deceptive language?  One would have to be a rocket scientist to plan a decent meal.

Also, as an employee of a call center environment, I can tell you that spending all but 65 minutes (one 45-minute lunch and two ten-minute breaks) a day seated in a cubicle tethered to a headset is not the best way to stay healthy.  In fact, I’ve seen more grossly obese employees than usual, and they all have health and self-esteem issues.  The same people who would be loath to call a fat, lonely girl, ironically, are the ones who call into phone centers and abuse calltaking associates in the first place.  Often these calltakers, psychologically speaking, are underpaid but overly dedicated masochists who work all day for the public and soothe their damaged minds with a good meal.  Zapped in a microwave, it packs upwards of 2,000 calories onto a body that is not allowed to work out.  Take that, Jillian Michaels!

In fact, I’d like to see the Biggest Loser folks try to figure out how to get a call center into shape.  How do you get a treadmill under a cubicle chair?

Television has been dumbing down its content for years to keep up with a dumbing population.  The makers of an ad for Plavix(R), a clot prevention prescription product of Bristol-Myers Squibb, recently changed their commercial  to point out more clearly what the drug does.

In an animation of blood platelets traveling through your bloodstream, the white platelets of an unhealthy person at risk for heart attack start to stick together and form a clot.  New signage in the animation actually draw lines to point out that the funny-looking white stuff blocking the blood flow is a “CLOT.”  Duh.

Did anybody actually write in to the manufacturer to complain that they didn’t know what they were seeing?  Has anybody out there actually not been able to figure out that they were looking at a sample of what happens when a clot forms?

Commercials can often talk down to viewers, and that immediately loses my attention.  If you want to sell me on a product, just keep it to-the-point.  I see how I can get a clot, I see that if the platelets don’t get sticky I won’t get a clot.  Simple.

The object of enlightening an audience is to peak the curiosity of some while holding the attention of the rest.  Making an ad that panders to those with a 5th grade education won’t get anybody anywhere.  We need to bring back the 1960s, when Hitchcock wasn’t afraid to put a collegiate vocabulary into his movies and television treated viewers as if they actually had a brain.

Yeah, gotta take some time off.  Back in October.

On my usual Thursday shopping excursion I came across a talking Christmas ornament in the Carlton Cards store.  I haven’t gotten into collecting ornaments, mostly because i don’t get into trees anymore.  Still my shopping buddy enjoys the anticipation of seeing the new collectibles when they start showing up around June each year, so I was looking at them while she decided which ones she wanted to add to her warehouse sized collection.

As a Twilight fan I would have considered buying any such themed ornaments had they been available:  they weren’t.  What did attract my eye was a talking ornament featuring Bela Lugosi as Dracula, with several classic (dare I say immortal) lines from the appropriately accented voice of the greatest king vampire portrayer ever.  After listening to the first phrase to respond to my press of the hidden button (“I am. . . .Dracula, I bid you velcome!”) I moved on to check out the other ornaments and catch up with my friend.

While I was in the middle of noticing that the employees had mixed up the names of the South Park Cartman and Kyle in the display, a woman came into the store and gravitated immediately to the same Dracula ornament.  What struck me about the visitor was her pale mien, lack of hair and sheer scarf wrapped stylishly around her head.  My guess, like anybody else’s, was that she was likely undergoing chemo, and I tried not to seem as if I was staring.

Suddenly my mind began to whirl.  Being a Dracula fan for years, I am very familiar with the most popular lines Lugosi spoke in the role, and as I saw her press the button on the ornament I anticipated–and got–an unexpected scene played out in front of me.  The next line to come up on the ornament was, “There are worse things awaiting men than death.”  She released the ornament and walked quietly away, but the implications of that moment were simply mind-numbing.

I have been able to come up for air just long enough to observe how the timing of the Labor Day weekend and the sudden change from summer heat to September chill was amazingly out of whack this year.

Labor Day was a week late this year as it was, but the cold weather arrived early as if to stomp out any “last hurrah” folks would want to indulge in before school and regular autumnal life started.  School started early for many people as well:  they even had kids in school for two or three days before letting them out for three days again.  What was that all about?

The lower temperatures came at an appropriate time for me because I didn’t have air conditioning for a few days.  Had the heat stayed around I would never have been able to function in those last days of vacation.  Now that the artificial cool has come back, we’ve spent two days relying on the artificial heat because somebody just yanked the plug on indian summer.

Last week was a madhouse, with nothing but meetings, appointments and adjustments to new schedules.  Next week won’t be any better.  This is how it will be until the holidays, when we add more insanity to the mix.  Why do we do this to ourselves?  Can’t we stand on even ground all year and not have to worry about adjusting all the time?