Susan's Scribblings the Blog

If everything I need is at the local WalMart, why do I always leave empty-handed?  They didn’t have my driveway melter, my facial scrub, my favorite underwear or a box of oatmeal.  I wasted ten good minutes of my one hour lunch break time, and the result was a big zero.

The writers have reached an agreement with the entertainment industry, thank goodness.  I genuinely feel for those folks who try to make a living by wordcrafting.  It’s not like the less-shaky ground of working in an office, where you have a place to go and a cubicle to sit in, and your presence is usually sufficient to guarantee you a paycheck as long as you’re productive and don’t commit any professional indiscretions.  I’ve written gratis for years, probably because I have a fear of getting paid for writing and suddenly finding myself in an unknown income bracket, with tax collectors breathing down my neck or stalkers waiting around the corner ready to poke a quill in my ear (hey, I saw Misery too, you know).

Not that I haven’t gotten recognition for my writing from various small venues over the years.  They just don’t have awards shows and red carpets for “little” writers.  I did get a fan appreciation award once for contributing to a newsletter with regular articles about current events.  Once, a celebrity even took the time to respond to an article I’d written, which was one of my top ten emotional highs of all time.  I didn’t feel I needed a paycheck for those moments.

Writing for a living must be mentally trying.  Days and months of effort can result in no pay at all, a promise of publication can go south if market conditions change, and only a handful of novelists get to be as big as Stephen King (and the peak of that roller coaster ride has just as precipitous a drop on the other side).

Sure, when a writer produces a work, they should be paid for it if that is what they are doing as a profession:  it doesn’t matter if the work appears on a flatscreen television, the Internet or a Dick Tracy wristwatch.  Musical artists are having similar problems with compensation (which is why I still shop carefully and stick with tangible media like CDs for my fave artists).

Now that the writers are back, I’m looking forward to some quality stuff to come out.  It will take time, though, because they don’t just sit in cubicles thinking up professional indiscretions to commit, you know.

The road is becoming more bizarre all the time.  Sure there are the prima donnas who apply makeup behind the wheel, the cell phone addicts who stare out the windshield with their eyes  slanted vertically because they’re sandwiching the thing between their shoulder and ear, and the Indy 500 wannabes who just have to get one car length ahead (until they get to the next “one car” up ahead).  Sometimes, though, people earn undue attention by the accessories they put on their vehicles.

I don’t get the meaning behind those. . . .putting this in somewhat medically proper terms (hide the kids’ eyes). . . .trailer hitch testicles.  Maybe you’ve seen them:  plastic reproductions of dangling male gonads in natural, blue or red (I don’t even want to entertain the question why somebody opted for red as a color choice) that some folks sling under the doohicky knob that hooks up the camper.  It’s a head-scratcher to me, and even more so when I get the chance to see the driver.

If it’s a woman, I wonder if the setup is a reference to some guy who done her wrong.  If a man, I’m not as sure what gives with slinging yarbles from the back bumper; do modern humans like to display body parts in this manner?  Is the driver claiming he has testicular fortitude?  Even stranger, is he saying he has no need for ’em ’cause he’s got his SUV and a full QWERTY keyboard and, by gosh, that’s manly enough for him?

Maybe it’s just a trailer hitch tool disguised as man-oysters.  I don’t know.  What I do wonder is how some poor church-going mother would explain the setup to her little daughter while waiting for the light to change.  “Oh dear, I guess he had a piece of plastic melt all over his trailer hitch, honey.”  Maybe a funeral pyre is just the thing needed for this accessory from “Carz R Us.”

On Saturday I was insulted–albeit innocently and unintentionally–by a seven-year-old.

We were gathered at a friend’s house to celebrate a young lady’s birthday.  Because she already had been feted by a gathering of friends her own age, we adults got together to have our own party with her.  It gave us an opportunity to enjoy each others’ company after only having been out once the entire year.

So we were sitting around the kitchen table playing “I Spy,” when the object in question was something red.  The birthday girl circuited the table, zeroing in on the red in question using our prompts of “hot” or “cold.”  As she came around to my end of the table, I did have a red object, but she asked if it was my spots on my face.

I’ve had acne since I was 12.  I’ll probably die with acne.  I cover it as best I can without dooming my poor facial skin to premature aging or glop that has to be chipped off with a crowbar, but I still look splotchy most of the time.  Some people, I’ve been told, go into seclusion rather than go out in public because of the stigma attached to not being pristine.  It’s not that acne is a plague spreadable by casual contact; it just stands at the top of the list of aesthetically unpleasant stuff nobody likes to look at or acknowledge.

What happened after the comment was made?  We had a laugh about it.  I laughed, too, though I did have to momentarily suppress a wave of discomfort.  The words I used to get hurled at me in high school crept into my subconscious:  pimple-faced palsy was at the top of that list, as were the commonplace zitface, scuzzface and the lot.

Of course I realize that the age gap between the young lady and me is wide enough that I can pass off the comment as being non-malicious.  She meant no harm, really; another friend’s gingham blouse was the topic of humor as well, so it wasn’t just a matter of my mug being singled out for a light jab.  However, since adults tend to be more quiet about bringing such shortcomings to light in public, I hope some time will pass before I hear another reference made about my face that reminds me of how imperfection can be so painful in life.

We spend a lot of time in our lives just sitting down.  Everything we do is based, to some degree, on being able to sit all or some of the time.  It begins when we get out of bed in the morning, which requires a least one second of butt-roll time just to leave the mattress behind (bad pun & unintended).  We sit in the bathroom.  We sit at the table for breakfast (or in front of the television), then plant our glutes in the car to drive to work, the market, the doctor’s appointment.  School is often spent sitting in hard chairs, on bleachers or on the floor.  It’s a never-ending part of daily life.

The people who don’t stand for considerable periods are grocery store clerks, tollbooth operators, street workers and (dare I say) streetwalkers.  They often wind up with swollen feet or ankles or get dog tired from prolonged standing, so I guess sitting is a necessity to give the body a break.

Sitters, though, get flat behinds.  This is especially true of cubicle rats like me (and you while you’re probably reading this sitting down).  The need to exercise to keep the buns from deflating gets us on our feet long enough to appreciate just how lucky we are that we can sometimes sit down to recuperate from a hectic life.

Yeah, I did quite a lot of work this week, all of it from a seated position, but boy am I worn out from it.

This week it was time for me to evaluate myself at my job.  Does anybody really enjoy either trying to write about their entire year’s worth of toil in the cubicle kingdom or reading those self-aggrandizing exploits?  For one thing, telling the truth about yourself is nearly impossible, and over- or under-bragging never really seems to change the way the boss sees you (plus you already know the raises are capped and impossible to change anyway).  For another, it’s a matter of one human being sending their view of the workplace to a totally different human being who may not see it the same way.  You’re always in danger of toppling the entire process against yourself by saying what you’re supposed to say and having somebody read it the wrong way.

The appraisal process in my office is all done on the computer.  The questions don’t really ask what I did for the past year (in fact, there were few questions needing an “I” answer).  There is no mention of whether I was on time or sick, or if production went up because of me or in spite of me.  What it did have was a box to hold a set amount of my text, and a spelling checker.

I did my human best to make the system work for me.  I dug into my mental storage boxes to find highlights from the past 12 months (I gave up trying to find five minutes to chronicle what I actually accomplished each day via one of those nifty $200 planners months ago), and tried to find someplace in which to list my actual production figures.  There was none.  I could mention that I’ve had perfect attendance for 20 years on the job (I’m not kidding you; really I have), if there was space for it.  There was no place to mention that carpooling a total of nearly 70 miles per day helped the environment, or that I had adopted every little job that nobody cared to do.  The questions were closed, static and meaningless in terms of how they capture who I am when I put on my business attire and wield my pen every day.

The evaluation my boss will provide, on the other hand, will have my name all over it, followed by sentences of excruciatingly detailed feats and faults that somebody, somehow, managed to gather.  I can just hope they are positive enough to matter.

So 2008 is five days old, and everything is back to normal.  Folks called out of work, the traffic picked up, the stores rolled out the old junk from before the holidays and tried to pass it off as new junk, the networks are in reruns. . . .oh wait, that’s the writers’ strike. . . .football season is winding down, basketball season is winding up, and the bills and income tax forms are starting to show up in the mailboxes.

Fortunately I didn’t buy anything in the stores during the holiday season, so the only charges I’ll see are for shampoo and gas.

January is a bleak month.  Even though we’re on the gaining side of sunlight, the cold weather is officially set in and temperatures will make any sunlight seem like a cruel spotlight on our misery.  Add to that the end of month/week/year reporting everybody has to do in one way or another, and the days drag on endlessly.

Anybody who made a resolution to diet probably didn’t get far, since leftovers still have to be eaten, and it’s doubtful that anybody’s pantry was devoid of high calorie snack foods as of midnight on December 31st.  Can’t we just start dieting in February instead?

Part One:

Believe it or not, one of the highlights of the year just happened this past week.  A pair of lost dogs turned up on our block the other day; with the help of some good friends, neighbors and the animal control people, the dogs were reunited with their owner within hours.

Best Shopping of the Year:  Macy’s.  I actually found a handbag line I can live with, and the salespeople actually make you feel good about buying things.

Worst Shopping of the Year:  Family Dollar.  They got rid of the slippers my family swears by.  Can’t replace them, as other stores don’t carry them.  Guess we’ll have to go barefoot.

Best Video Purchase of the Year:  A tie between the BBC release of “Count Dracula” with Louis Jourdan and the new DVD of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  The video shelf looks a lot nicer with these little suckers in the stack.

Best Music Purchase of the Year:  I’m still filling out my Hugh Panaro music collection.  It will take awhile.  With his first solo album still pending, maybe I’ll have something for next year’s list as well (crossing fingers).

Best Writing Goal Achieved:  Completed another chapter.

Worst Writing Goal:  Finishing the darned novel this year.  Won’t happen, but with one more chapter down, maybe next year. . . .

Best Book Read:  I read so much this past year, I can’t keep titles straight, but I haven’t found a book I didn’t like for a change.

Stupidest Thing I Did This Year:  Had issues with my blogging.  Dumped a three year old blog, and in hindsight I shouldn’t have.  Oh well, let’s just start all over again.

Smartest Thing I Did This Year:  Worked hard at my job.  They value me, and I them.

Hardest Thing About My Job:  The darned commute.

Sure, we Americans have a few distinctive flaws like any other country.  A big one is the fact that we now spend only five months each year observing the correct time of day, and the other seven in denial.

The idea behind Daylight Saving was to give the farmers extra time to work.  Today the American farmer, depending on who tells the story, is a rarity and not as likely to actually be spending copious hours harvesting because subsidies keep half the farmers paid and the other half are going bankrupt anyway and will lose their farms.

We have gadgets like VCRs and televisions that could be programmed to observe the time change, but they stopped working when President Bush changed the rules on Daylight Saving to end in November and start again in March.

People have a lot of timepieces to reset twice a year.  I personally enjoy having a collection of watches (nothing fancy:  just lots of different discounted Timexes), so I always have to reset them.  I actually took the time to count all the time dependent things I had to reset last week:  sixteen, including the car clocks (had to break out the owner’s manual for that one).

Now that it’s dark during the morning and evening rush hours, it’s easier to handle traffic in my opinion.  Brake lights in the dark are easy to see.   I don’t particularly like it when people amp up their headlights with halogens or those new blue gizmos, though.

I wonder what it would be like if our next man in the White House actually abolished Daylight Saving.  Could we try it for one year and see how it goes?

Having had a blog elsewhere before this one, I feel reluctant to rehash old topics.  The week was such a blur for me, entrenched as I was with multiple projects at work, that I wasn’t sure what I should cover as a topic here for this week.

I did decide not to touch the subject of religion, though I could go off on how a friend of mine, an open minded Wiccan, wished a passerby a happy Halloween and got dressed down for having the gallstones to mention the holiday in the presence of a Christian.  I figured the poor person belongs to a sect that practices “I love everybody, as long as they’re just like me,” and feel they have bigger problems than rejecting a holiday that has been degraded to an adult excuse to have their children obtain candy for them one night a year.

I also decided against politics, because with elections coming up, I’m not really sure if voting for anybody is a good idea.  As long as the persons in positions of political authority are human beings, we will always have to deal with human faults like corruption, mishandling of funding and scandal.  It’s times like these that I wish Martians would invade Earth; maybe they would make better leaders.

Naturally I’m disappointed by the lack of Halloween tradition this year; the number of visitors to my doorstep was down to less than a bagful.  Even with Daylight Saving moved back a week, either curfew, fear of not knowing which houses had “bad people” living in them or, possibly, the concerns over the obesity epidemic, had most of the little costumed darlings staying at home this year.

Maybe I’ll just wait until next week and rant about this whole Daylight Saving thing.