Susan's Scribblings the Blog

While watching a movie on AMC today, a little blurb appeared at the bottom of the screen courtesy of Ask.com in which was typed, “Which state has the most single women?”  The answer then came back:  New Jersey.

Well, my first reaction was “duh,” my second was, “so how else can the television depress me today” and the third was, “so where is the state with the most single men?”  They didn’t bother to answer any of those statements.

Believe it or not, there are some decent single women in New Jersey.  It’s not that we’re all in an enclave of ugly misfits, or that we are all stuck in a rut because Bruce Springsteen or Jon Bon Jovi are spoken for.  Maybe it’s the water here.

At any rate, if I had the courage to reveal my dating life in a blog, I’d be laughed out of the sorority and commanded to change gender.  It’s impossible to find a fit when all the men your age are either compromised by prior interpersonal disasters like divorce, gay or sporting a Norman Bates complex the size of California (where I have found that a large contingent of men reside).

I am the youngest in a foursome of women friends, two of whom are married; of the two remaining we both seem to agree that men are apparently looking in the wrong places for potential mates.  They certainly haven’t found us.  The other half of the manless duo goes to church, so nobody is showing up there, and I frequent theatres, bookstores and the opera, so I have a mixed bag of places in which to find a man, but none has surfaced.

When you’re a woman and single, most places don’t want you around because, even if your face could curdle a brick wall, you’re considered a threat to the men about the room regardless of status.  You’d think that those same folks rejecting you would go out of their way to pawn somebody off on you so you would no longer be a threat.  Doesn’t happen.

So besides all the other things to be said of the Garden State, we are also where all the single women go to get old, and it took watching ten seconds of AMC and Ask.com to put me in a funky mood for the rest of the day.  Thanks, guys (and I don’t mean that figuratively).

All it takes is the first half decent warm day to make people prematurely shed their coats (risking rebound colds and pneumonia), throw on their pre-Easter drabbery and strut their liabilities publicly.  Maybe it was due to it being the last day of real time until November (I have issues about Daylight Saving, but that’s for another time), or perhaps folks just didn’t get around to their first coffee of the day, but if aliens landed in the parking lot of the Thriftway market and saw what I did, they’d likely think the planet was overrun by giant amoebas.

I have never seen so much exercise wear on people who obviously don’t exercise.  Senior citizens were wearing the stuff.  Pant cuffs were dragging on the blacktop and butts were unrestrained by any type of much needed support.

Of the six vehicles I saw pull into the lot, four of them dropped off passengers at the door, and the potential patrons trodded their way to the automatic doors as if to an execution.  Granted, going to the supermarket has become an acceptable  form of torture with all the tasty food overpriced and the bland stuff on sale for prices nobody really wants to pay.  However, is depression an excuse for slovenliness?

It bothered me that people were not really looking at themselves before heading out the door.  Achieving that happy balance of neat, clean and assembled is something nobody should abandon because of the weather or even the economy.

I kept my jacket on today, for fear of being caught with my resistance down just when I encounter a germ on a public surface.  Once we’re sure spring is here for good, I’ll run my outerwear to the cleaners and break out the short sleeves.  Meanwhile my ill-fitting exercise gear is in the drawer where it belongs.

I was looking at the drug store ads when my eyes settled on a sale item that gave me the hinkies.  An intestinal purging product apparently merits an occasional discount, probably for the convenience of folks who, in additional to being able to fill a ten page holiday family newsletter with relevant bragging paragraphs of fluff, thrive on a sanitary colon.  The price, however, didn’t faze me; it was the picture of the man on the front of the package that stirred my brainwaves.

Why do some of these medically questionable niceties feature people on their boxes who look so nerdily authoritative?  They all seem to have the same type of smile on their faces, somewhat like male underwear models only with clothes on.  Are they smiling because their colons are clean?  Are people drawn to purchase this product because a handsome guy looks like he has a happy colon?

Why can’t products like that feature a little sun icon or a relaxing waterfall?  What’s with the models?  Are they supposed to be doctors, or make the buyer think the product is recommended by the guy on the package because he is a doctor?

Which reminds me of women’s health products that feature women staring off into space on their boxes.  They’re worse than the men on the colon health boxes because they also have perfect skin and better clothes than me.

I don’t think products you don’t want to wave around in public should have people featured on their packaging.  The models probably don’t even get paid the same as they would modeling underwear.

It’s strange to go to the junk food aisle and see two similar products from the same company.  Drake’s Yodels and Hostess Ho Ho’s are both products of Interstate Bakeries Corporation, but no two rolled up creamy chocolate enrobed cakes are the same, which is why both products wind up on the same shelf in the store.  Snack cakes apparently are as polarizing to society as religion, so neither product can be discontinued without causing an uprising.

I am a Yodel fan, and I realized that the reason for my loyalty must lie in the added calorie content compared to the Ho Ho’s.  There is no getting around the tastiness of the stuff, even if it winds up in my midsection.  I’ve tried the Ho Ho’s and they just don’t fulfill that sweet need.  I find Ho Ho’s to be blander than Yodels, but the dieter in me likes the individual servings offered by the competition compared to the Yodel two-pack.  Has anybody ever actually gotten away with folding up and stowing that second Yodel back in the box?  I can’t do it.

There is also a difference in the ritualistic peeling away of the chocolate enrobing:  points come off the Ho Ho’s for the tendency to come off in chips while the Yodel’s sheathe  slides away in a curlicue of delectable delight that can be saved for after the cake is gone.

I know that dieting is not supposed to include such guilty pleasures, but I find it hard to deny those temptations that come in my human wiring.  The occasional Yodel is a must.  If I need a fix and the Drake’s cake aisle is lacking, I’d settle for a Ho Ho just to keep me jolly (in attitude, not in weight).

Eh, so it’s Valentine’s Day.  Yes I’m one of those eternally single people who spend this day alone as always, but really I don’t want to carp too much about it.  After all, this is supposed to be a day for love in all forms, not just pairs in the throes of passion (or just “in like” with one another).

However, I look at all these high profile consumeristic holidays and wonder why we do this to ourselves:  hanker for things we don’t need and spend too much money on (the flowers and candy and private hotel rooms with champagne glass shaped bathtubs), yearn for it when we can’t get it (out of candy and the rooms are all booked, and boy will my honey be teed off about it) and get depressed when it doesn’t seem to extend to us (all the Charlie Browns out there are sighing right now).  When majority rules, the minority can’t just leave the planet while they all celebrate, so where do we all go while the others are cavorting around?  In my household it’s called Homeside Park, where the food is reasonably priced and guaranteed to please and the bed is comfortable and hasn’t been slept in by 50 million strangers before.  So the tub is round:  I’ve got bubble bath.

I have some wonderful people in my life, including a circle of friends, my family and God.  Nothing would be nicer, though, than to have a nice warm hug or some pleasant words from a stranger, if only to acknowledge that I was seen as an existing member of this planet, and nobody passed out as a result of viewing my visage.  I guess I’m feeling a bit dejected because yesterday a baby turned away from me in disgust but giggled gleefully at the office manager who warned the tike’s mom “I tend to make babies cry.”  Go figure babies these days.  Unpredictable.

Let’s face it:  some things are just because they are, and there is not much that can be done about it.  So I’ll spend another Valentine’s Day alone, but not exactly lonely.  I mentioned in an earlier post that my avatar in Second Life gets hit on while its owner doesn’t, so I’ll just log in there and have some fun by proxy.  By tomorrow this holiday too will all be over and I can look forward to Easter, which has the same overpriced candy but less of the emotional baggage.

High fructose corn syrup:  more deadly than nuclear war, more insidious than a Dark Lord of the Sith and the blood supply of every grocery chain CEO vampire in the world.

If you haven’t been reading about all the funky gunk inside our food, you’ve either been chowing down on chips and couldn’t hear the television, or you’re in denial.  HFCS and the digital television conversion are both life changing things, but the latter will just affect your TV viewing while the former can kill you.

HFCS, for all intents and purposes, is a sugar product designed to make foods taste irresistable.  Studies are linking it to obesity, and it isn’t surprising since it appears in your ketchup bottle, your orange juice, your diet soda and even in some things you normally wouldn’t put suger in, such as soup.  Seriously, would you drop a spoonful of sugar into your soup?

Sugar and salt have a common effect:  as you consume it, you find the need to consume more of it as its ability to stimulate your taste wears off.  Think of the cigarette habit:  people start at one or two and move up to a pack a day.  Alcoholism makes drinkers up their intake.  So it is with these two partners in seasoning or sweetening.

I went cold turkey on salt once, and it took about 48 hours for foods to start tasting good again, but I can tell you that I actually tasted the salt naturally present in the food after I stopped shooping the table salt on everything.  The same thing can happen with sugar:  cutting back or out can affect the taste of foods for a bit, but then your body adjusts and sugar in its natural form can be tasted more readily.

I don’t know how difficult it may be to lessen the amount of HFCS in my grocery shopping, but I’m taking a shot at it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

While I was on vacation I noticed something about the morning news programs.  Everybody calls everybody else by name constantly.  “Back to you, Rita.”  “Thank  you, Fred:  I’m here with Ethel and Lucy to talk about back scratchers for under ten bucks. . . .back to you in the studio, Bart.”

The last time I saw names used so much was when I was reading comic books, and then it was just to enforce in young readers the fact that everybody knew who everybody else was.  Do we really need that in our news programming?  Are viewers so dense that they can’t remember the names of the same half dozen people they see each morning?

The only time I pay attention to the name game is when somebody new is filling in, such as when Anderson Cooper sat in for Regis Philbin on the “Live” show:  the announcer then moved co-host Kelly Ripa to the front of the roster because she was the one half of the pair actually onstage that morning.  It was jarring to hear that deviation from the norm.

On “60 Minutes,” only Andy Rooney doesn’t appear onscreen to introduce himself to the viewer:  usually the last person onscreen gets the distinction of saying “Those stories, and Andy Rooney,” as if the poor fellow doesn’t get a headshot privilege.  Why not?

Human beings often have a love/hate relationship with names.  We only want to hear our own names when something good is coming such as a promotion or something.  Mispronounce a name and watch people’s faces screw up in disgust.  Speak the names of some famous or infamous folks and get tons of reactions all around.

I read recently that a family named their child Adolf Hitler (I don’t recall the last name), and apparently a store refused to place the moniker on a birthday cake.  I like seeing my name on a cake, preferably chocolate.  Since nobody normally prepares a birthday cake for the real Adolf Hitler, maybe the store was just trying to avoid a trend.

Back to you, Katie.