What I Have to Say: Various Words

 

The Dark Side of Christmas: A Story of Lights

12/19/05

You heard it here first. Remember this later, when you see this in the news. Some poor schumck is going to die, or at least loose a limb after being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I promise you it's coming. Maybe not this year, but definitely at some point in time.

It's "Christmas Light Rage". You heard me. "Christmas Light Rage".

Picture "Road Rage", only you're in your own house, wrestling with length after length of Christmas lights.

So it's Christmas. You're happy. You've got your tree up, and all the decorations are down from the attic. You've got three very large, very full bags of Christmas lights: one of working lights, one of lights that have only 50% working lights, and one that's full of lights that don't work at all, but you can't bear to throw them out. Ever. (No matter how much your husband begs you!)

So you're sitting there with your lights. You open the boxes you bought last year at Target two days after Christmas when you had to wade through crowds to fight for the scant few boxes they had left after the holidays - lights marked down from $9.99 a strand to $2.99. You can't beat that, right? They go straight up into the attic to wait for Christmas the following year.

When they completely fail to light up. OR, better yet, they work when you test them, and then as you're wrapping the last length around the tree, they go out.

Christmas. Light. Rage.

And then, you decide that BY GOD you are going to get one of those half-working strands to WORK, dammit, because you simply MUST have another multicolor on the tree and so you sit down and test, one bulb after another, about 100 bulbs, prying them off with a tiny flat-head screwdriver. Only five or six times does it slip and plunge into your thigh as it dislodges a bulb. And only ONCE does the entire bulb shatter between your fingers, making you wonder, what's more frightening: all the tiny shards of yellow glass that narrowly miss imbedding themselves into your fingertips, or those little popping zzzzzt zzzzzt zzzzzt sparks from the wires on the still plugged-in strand so close to your body?

And at the end, although you replace a few burned out bulbs, the strand still doesn't light fully.

Christmas. Light. Rage.

So you go online, and research Christmas lights, and you learn about series circuits and parallel circuits and you go back out to the strand with a newfound purpose, and THIS TIME, you pull out each one of those bulbs again, but you test each bulb in a working strand already on your tree. You replace some more faulty bulbs.

And your strand still doesn't work.

And now you have two large blisters on your thumb and forefinger.

And the light strand on your tree you were using to test inexplicably goes out.

Christmas. Light. Rage.

This is a true story.

My husband wisely says nothing, but hands me a glass of wine. I throw the half working strand into the light strand "trash" bag (that will never be thrown away) and call a Jewish friend and learn that, wonder of wonders, he doesn't use lights. Next year, we're going with Hanukkah, mark my words.

 

Me & Online Crack, a Story of Addiction

12/15/05

Last Thursday (the 8th), Lane, my stupid, stupid husband, forwarded me this link: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/neopets.html?tw=wn_tophead_5

It's about a site called Neopets. Our daughter has a toy based on one of their creatures, he discovered, and he was letting me know the site exists. From reading the article, I discovered it's a place where you can "adopt" a virtual pet. You feed it, play with it and play games to earn points that you can then spend on things for your pet's home (after you pay to build one).

I should have known better when the article talked about this 51 year old woman who plays with her granddaughter. They each have pets, and she says something like "my granddaughter sometimes says 'let's go outside and play' and then we both remember our pets and say 'let's feed our pets one more time'". One school-age boy "plays" with his pet 2-3 hours a day.

I should have known better.

But I am weak and stupid.

I went to the site "just to check it out". I thought it might be fun, like the Noggin site, or Nick Jr and have games my daughter and I can play together. She already owns one of their toys, and I thought she'd get a kick out of seeing her very toy online and doing things. The article mentions it's a Flash-based site, and I guess I was expecting something a little more like World of Warcraft or EverQuest or even some of the more pixely games where we could "walk around" a world and do things.

Sadly, this is not the case.

Apparently, though, this doesn't matter to me or to the gazillion people of all ages who use this site.

I thought, I'll start up a pet for us to play with, so I created a little purple dragon. We named ours at home "ShowRoo", so I named mine online the same. He's this little cartoon of a dragon who occasionally pipes up "buy me stuff!" or "I need a home made of chocolate!". He wants to be fed and played with. You have to buy food and toys - and later, a home.

I thought, I'll just buy some food and a few toys. I played online games of mediocre quality for about two hours to get enough money to bid on what I wanted. Unfortunately, their "stores" are almost always empty of food, clothing, books, toys, furniture - whatever you're looking for, they almost never, ever have. They SAY they "restock" several times an hour and encourage you to "come back", but only once a day did I really find a shop to have something I wanted.

Of course, you can buy your items from a third party (ie, another user), but something that would cost you 200np ("neopoints", their currency) will cost you 1,000np in private sale.

So....I play these games, and I mange to buy some things for my "pet". For about four days, maybe five, I'm obsessed with this site. Every chance I get, I'm playing more games, visiting stores, trying to improve my pet's mind and abilities.

Their hook is that you can only get things from stores intermittently. You can only play each game three times a day. I'm like that little white rat, pressing the lever again and again, hoping they'll throw me a pellet. I AM a perfect model of behavioral conditioning. They could write a book on me.

So I decide, OK, I have all this money, I just want to build a house for my pet and then call it a day. Only, they give you this HUGE plot of land (that you have to buy and then wait 2 days to build on) and then each little area of the plot takes another day to develop, and then you have to wait and wait and wait to get furniture, items, etc.

Again, can you SEE THE RAT?!?!?

I finally went to their message boards and took a look. It's like one big chat room. And it's full of kids, all owning pets, some owning more than one, some trying to shuffle their pets around and create more than one account so they can get MORE pets. I read cases where people had been "playing" with their pets for FIVE YEARS!

Five years.

I will say it again for emphasis. Five. (Frikking.) Years.

And I decided right then and there. I was done. I had this image of myself, wasting two hours (at best) a day for FIVE YEARS. My daughter would be seven, and I'd probably still not let her play with ShowRoo. I walked out and told my husband, I'm quitting this site, I'm never, ever going back. I'm going to give up my things and my pet for adoption and be done with it.

So I give up all my things, every penny (NP) I owned, and went to leave my pet for adoption. The receptionist scowls at you and then when you click to "abandon", it says "are you sure?"/"please don't leave me!!"/"NOOOOOOO"/"I'll miss you so much"/"Why are you doing this to me?" click after click after click and then finally says "it costs 250np to abandon your pet".

And I had just given away all my money.

So I play more games (just this once, I promise!!) ;) and collect the money and go back, only to learn I have to wait seven full days before abandoning my pet.

Periodically, I checked to be sure that my pet wasn't starving, and then today, I put him up for adoption, ignoring his pleas for clemency. I paid my "money" and donated all I had left, and I'm never, ever going back.

I want to go outside. I want to play with my REAL pets, who certainly have more feeling than my online buddy and his "buy me more stuff" ways.

Neopets is a drug dealer. Don't let them hook you or your kids!!! JUST SAY NO TO NEOPETS!!! Spread the word.

As my husband said when I told him I was done, "Welcome back, sweetie." :)

 

Something Pretty This Way Comes

11/3/05

I have spent an inordinate amount of my life trying to be pretty. I've always been a "girly girl". In fact, I come from a long line of "girly girls", with my mom and her mother being my primary examples of how women should look, act, etc. My grandmother, Dorothy (Dot) was always very stylish. She dyed her hair jet black, and it was only in the weeks before she died in her 80s that I ever saw her grey roots. She wore fire-engine red lipstick, and carried very mod handbags with matching shoes. My mom has been much the same, and I've seen her in makeup with her hair done almost every day of my life. We girly girls don't leave the house without our makeup on, you see. And as we age, we don't try to stay forever young, but rather continue to emphasize those things about us that are our best assets, hair, eyes, teeth, skin, and we take as best care of ourselves as possible. Moisturize, condition, tweeze, define: we like to be as attractive as we're capable of being.

Therefore it was like a revelation the year I decided to be ugly for Halloween. It was the year following my divorce, and prior to this time, I'd always been something cute or sexy. Even the year I was Gomez from the Addams family, I was still a SEXY Gomez, very sleek and attractive. In my childhood, even, I'd only been "ugly" one time, when I was a witch. I don't remember why I didn't continue being that way, but I didn't, and went back to princesses, cats, fairies and other lovely get-ups.

This particular year, maybe I felt different inside somehow, or just wanted to separate myself from the person I'd been who'd just had this failed marriage, and I went as a psycho clown. I was freaky and disturbing and frightened some of my coworkers. I stomped around, making the most grotesque faces. I chased the girls dressed like saloon harlots and flappers around the office. I felt great. RARRR!

And so my ugly Halloween was born.

After that, I was a demented succubus, a kind of ice demon/gargoyle, a bride who'd died in a car crash, a psychotic vampire....all very unattractive creatures. The one year I ran out of time for a costume and had to recycle an outfit from a disco costume party, I still wore the two foot afro wig and headband that didn't really scream "pretty"!

I remember my mom saying to me, in this distressed tone of voice around the time of Car Crash Bride, "why can't you be something pretty?" - and it was like my entire life just suddenly made sense....why I don't go out with no makeup, why I hesitate to even walk to the end of my own driveway if I haven't looked in the mirror first, why I feel like I need to always be trying harder to look better....and it's not like I blame my mom for something, or her mom before her, because they're just doing what they were taught and not trying to do me harm, but I remember always being envious of girls in high school and especially college who could just wake up, put their hair in a ponytail and just GO and still look great - more importantly, still FEEL like they look great....I always wanted a little of that.

I also know that those same girls would see me at clubs or dressed up for a show or just playing around and they'd be envious of how fabulous I can become, how I can transform myself into totally different people using makeup and wigs - I've personally taught at least two of those kinds of girls how to be more fabu in their own right....what I've wanted to know is how they can teach me their way of thinking.

I'm better than I used to be, by far. I often don't wear mascara or eye shadow. (GASP!) I have a "quick and dirty" makeup routine that I'll do if I just have to run out for a bit, and I even manage to feel pretty most of the time anyway. But Halloween is my small place to start, I guess, where it all started for me, when I realized that it's actually ok to actively eschew the pursuit of beauty, even if it's only for one day.

So, bringing it full circle, this Halloween was the first year since 1996 that I went as something pretty. I was Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz. I was a damn good Glinda, too, if I do say so myself. It was strange to be making the crown and sleeves and thinking up all the details of the costume and not to be thinking "will the fake blood stain my corset?" or "where is the stuff I use to blacken my teeth?". I did, for one moment, consider coming as Zombie Glinda, but decided that I could manage to be pretty just one more day. :) Just for Halloween.

 

A Mother's Lesson: What I've learned today. :)

10/25/05

Well, last night, but it's really the same thing....

When your daughter is already up too late eating the dinner she's still hungry for since she gagged herself in the car and threw up all of Dinner Number One, and she's eaten lots of broccoli and black-eyed peas and chicken, but asks for more food, and you suggest raisins, but are feeling too ill* to get up off the sofa and find the package of REAL raisins, so you direct your husband to the package of "Craisins" (flavored dried cranberries), it's important to remember that Craisins are made of, in order, "cranberries" and "sugar".

When it's 11pm and your daughter is in her darkened room, in bed, and calls you back so you can watch her holding on to the side and jumping as high as she can, yelling "me love to hop! me love to hop!" over and over again, you have no one to blame but yourself.

It's best in these times to just let her out of her bed and allow her to run as fast as she can up and down the hall about 20 times, and then jump like a monkey on your own bed for about 15 minutes, until midnight, when you at last start to see the sugar rush waning.

Again, you have no one to blame but yourself.

I've let her sleep an hour late this morning to compensate for going to bed two hours late last night, but it's still going to be a rough morning.

*I'm dying of allergies. The mold count was higher here than ever in recorded history, along with high levels of weeds, grass and fall elm. Possibly shooting myself in the head would make me feel worse than I have since roughly Friday, but that's about all. :(

I lost my voice completely on Sunday, and have perpetual Drag Queen Voice in the meantime. I'll admit it kind of sounds a little sexy, but the constant blowing of my nose and coughing up crud kind of ruins the effect of the whole sexy thing, don't you think?

Hack. Cough. Hack.

ps. my daughter is now officially two. Happy recent birthday, Tiny Monkey!!

 

A Silly List (responding to being "tagged" by a friend)

10/17/05

So....here's 20 things about me you probably didn't know.

  1. When my daughter gets older and I have more free time, I want to get and train a bloodhound to be a rescue dog for lost children and work with the police department and families to try to find missing children hours after they go missing.

  2. I've always dreamed of being a Hollywood special effects makeup artist (zombies, monsters, etc).

  3. I have infrequent anxiety attacks that started when I was in my early 30s. They've gotten better in the last few years, but I still keep prescription medication on hand to deal with them if I can't control them otherwise.

  4. I do all my HTML coding totally by hand, "old-school". Mostly this is because I am a control freak. :)

  5. I have an ex-husband who was/is a crossdresser. We were married for nine whole months (after dating for 3 1/2 years). Our divorce had nothing to do with his cding, but our separation did, however, lead to my leaving a job in sales/conventions at an RPG company and put me on the path to my current profession as a graphic designer.

  6. I have a way with animals who aren't fully tame, especially horses, cats and dogs. There are very few dogs I can't get close to and befriend.

  7. I have a powerful and unshakeable belief in sea monsters.

  8. I like a good spanking.

  9. Very few people have ever seen me without makeup.

  10. I have absolutely no fear of speaking or dancing in front of large groups of people. I also like to dance when the dance floor is mostly empty.

  11. I came out as bisexual before it got trendy, back in the days when you just couldn't get a date from a girl or a boy (but especially the girls) if you were bi. (This would be the mid 80s, for those of you keeping track.)

  12. Whenever I type ellipses, I use four periods.... instead of three...which is totally incorrect, but I don't care. Four is one of my lucky numbers, so I've always used four. It's such a habit now I don't even have to think about it.

  13. I do almost all of the "handiwork" around my house. If it needs taking apart or putting together, I'm the one who does it. I LOVE a complicated piece of something that has 30 pages of instructions, and I prefer to put it together without help, although I will ask for help if I need it.

  14. I like to make only one trip to carry things: groceries, laundry, whatever. I will do whatever I have to do so that I carry it all from Point A to Point B in one go. If my hands are full, I will pick things up, turn on/off lights, open doors, etc with my toes. (My daughter is starting to do the same thing!)

  15. I use PINE to read all of my email.

  16. I almost never make a grammatical mistake (and will correct myself out loud if I get something wrong when I'm speaking) - but I can't keep the rules of lie/lay straight, so I just don't ever use them in a conversation!

  17. I rarely consume caffeine. Mostly, I drink only water or the occasional glass of wine. I have recently discovered a love of pomegranate juice, but don't get it very often.

  18. I type over 100 words a minute.

  19. When I'm brushing my teeth or using a loofa to scrub a heel or elbow, I sing "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General" from Pirates of Penzance in my head. I don't know why.

 

Spam....Not Just a Tasty Treat

8/3/05

I get these emails pretty much every day from friends relatives, etc, about NONSENSE, and 99.9% of the time, they're hoaxes (probably actually MORE often than that) and I always write back and provide the Snopes link so they can see for themselves....then they write me "oh, how did you know to do this?" :crazy:

Is it wrong to eventually shout at them: "BECAUSE I HAVE A BRAIN!!!"

?

:D

It's like, if you forward this on, Microsoft IS NOT going to send you money. A girl will NOT be cured from cancer. Jesus IS NOT going to understand that you somehow love him more.

There are no needles under the handle at the gas pump. There are no spiders waiting to lay eggs in your cheek to erupt 3 weeks later. Bad People will not try to drug you with perfume samples at the mall.

And, if I don't send something back to you immediately, it DOES NOT mean that I am no longer your friend.

Geeze.

My daddy gave me this cartoon (actually two) and I SO wish I could find them. They were about a guy getting a spam email saying "if you love Jesus, forward this on to 100 people" or whatever. He shouts over his shoulder, "KIDS! I can't go to church with you because I only have three minutes to forward this email on to 100 people to prove I love Jesus! I don't even know 100 people, so this is going to be close!"

Honestly, it was really funny.

But, basically, if you get some ridiculous (or not so ridiculous) spam email saying, really, ANYTHING interesting at all, before you forward it on, go to Snopes and do a keyword search on it. 9 times out of 10, you'll find it's a hoax and you can stop it in its tracks.

Really, you're just slowing the internet down for the rest of us. :)

 

Try Not to Swerve

7/22/05

So this week, two nights ago, I ran over an opossum. I was driving down a dark, winding road, bringing my daughter home from my parent's house, when it ran in front of me. I didn't swerve, but tried to brake a little, and hit it anyway. When I was learning to drive, there was a story in my town of a girl, Darla D., who had swerved to miss a rabbit on her way home from a friend's, and her car flipped into a ditch, where she lay listening to the radio for three hours, until they finally found her, a quadriplegic....so it's been ingrained in my head "DO NOT SWERVE for anything other than a human being". So I hit the opossum. :(

Another thing that's been ingrained in me is "don't let things suffer", so I turned around to see if I had killed it or merely mortally wounded it so that it would lay in the road, dying. If the latter, I have to run over it again to put it out of its misery. This sounds very cruel, but it's not.

When I was taking swimming lessons, I guess I was 7 or 8, I came out to get in the car with my mom, and we discovered a baby bluejay had fallen from its nest onto the concrete parking lot. It was so young it had very few feathers. It was being devoured by fire ants, and it was still alive. My mom pushed it under the tire of her car and backed over it. I cried and cried, but she asked me what was better, to let the baby bird suffer slowly or to end it quickly? What would I want for myself? And so I understood.

In my teenage years, I was driving home from a music show when a mother cat and her kittens, all in a line, ran out in front of my car. I panicked and swerved. And I hit one of the kittens. Backing up, I exited the car only to find that I had snapped her neck, not killed her, and she was blinking up at me with these dark, dark eyes, this very still, charcoal grey kitten, with her mommy and siblings sitting on the side of the road, just looking at me, not angry, but watching to see what I'd do. Because I was crying so hard, it took me three times around the block before I aimed the car well enough to run her over again, and afterwards, the mother cat looked at me long and hard, and then went away.

And now, last night, I was left with trying to see the opossum to see if, once again, I had to help out a suffering creature. It turns out that the grown opossum survived, but a baby she had been carrying did not, and while I did not exit the car to find out if it were alive or dead (Lila was in the car and I didn't want to be out in a dark road, peering at things in the street with her around), so I ran over it again for good measure.

None of this makes me happy, mind you, but it's satisfying to know you can help something that's suffering and has no chance of life, especially a wild animal. It reminds me of how I had to put my long-time, favorite pet cat Edie to sleep when her health was too poor, and how I'd want someone to do this for me, and why I have an extensive Living Will and contribute yearly to the Society for the Right to Die. My parents do too, and we have talks often (well, not like every day, but you know) about what we want if we are in certain health situations. I always thought these were attitudes that I decided for myself, but I guess they started years before, with things like that poor baby bluejay and a brave act on my mom's part.

There's no point to this journal, other than to tell you a little about myself, or if there is, it's to get your own Living Will and to have your ducks in line while you can still make those choices. And I guess, to try to keep the suffering of all living things to a minimum.

 

Old Enemies, New Thoughts

7/21/05

When I was growing up, I had a very good friend whose mother hated me. She fostered this odd competition between us that was all "her", not any of the doing of my friend or of mine. While she never laid a hand on me physically, I often felt emotionally abused by her, her sly, biting comments, and the backhanded way she would compliment me. I was intimidated by her, by the fact that she had a lot of money, by the fact that I never felt that she thought I was good enough for her daughter (who was, btw, a wonderful person). Even though her daughter and I are no longer good friends, I have grown up still feeling this intimidation of her, and this silent judgment.

She is very old now (older than any of our peer group's parents), her beloved husband (and also a very good man and nice person) passed away several years back (I sent a lovely card) and her daughter has moved very far away to be with her husband where they work. She is essentially alone and in such poor health she wears one of those medic alert necklaces in case of an accident.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to meet her again. My mom said, as we drove by her home on our way to run an errand, "You should stop in and see Mrs. X; she would love to see you and meet Lila." I was incredulous and accused her of being facetious, but Mom contended that, in fact, this woman was very lonely and would probably delight in seeing me. Despite the fact that I didn't believe her, I felt that in some way, since I looked good that day, and that my daughter is a delight, that somehow this would redeem myself in her eyes, somehow prove to her that I was worthy of being her daughter's friend so long ago. I expected a frosty welcome, but she was delighted when we called, delighted to see me and Lila, lovely and pleasant and reminiscing about all the "good times" we had at the house and what good friends I had been with her daughter.

It was amazing. I've read and seen in documentaries, how a child who was sexually or otherwise abused by a family member goes back, years and years later, to make peace or confront the person or whatever their motives are, and they're expecting this person to be the intimidating powerhouse they were before, this person who held them in their palm and manipulated and was cruel to them....often what they find, so many years later, is a shriveled up husk of a person, someone that they themselves could now physically intimidate, and it's sort of unnerving to see the shift in power, the change in their mindsets. It's not as though they say, oh, I pity you now, so I can forgive you, but at least that FEAR is gone, fear that the person would come and do more harm.

I felt that way. I felt, looking at this frail little woman, separated from her husband and daughter and grandchild, so thrilled to see someone she used to, in my mind, dislike...she remembered only the good times, genuinely seemed happy to see me, my daughter, said many complimentary things...it was very interesting, and I thought about it the rest of the day, how my thinking of her had now changed.

I wonder how many people in my past, people who have caused me pain and fear, are now just tiny, small people, not to be feared, and how I give them power by letting them live on in my own memories as these negative figures. Something to ponder, and a good argument for just going ahead and forgiving, especially for old wounds, as the person who committed them is very long gone, even if they are still alive somewhere.

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