Saturday, December 31, 2011

The Next Best Thing

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

This past week, I was on my way home from my holiday vacation, and it was pretty much the typical scene.  A group of unsuspecting travelers stuffed into an airplane cabin roughly the size of my bathroom.  Every available space crammed with carry-on luggage that really should not have been carried on or even carted very far away from the house.  Crying babies strategically placed every couple of aisles for maximum passenger irritation.  Like I said—typical.

But somewhere between the mountains of luggage and the screaming children, I noticed that I was sitting next to an elderly person and right in front of a crying baby.  And I started thinking about New Year’s and about the two holiday characters—Father Time and Baby New Year—that go along with it.  And I have to admit that as holiday characters go, they’ve got to be two of the strangest around. 

Of course, there’s nothing all that odd about an old holiday character like Father Time.  After all, Santa Claus is old, and nobody complains.  Then again, Santa is an old guy who brings people presents, so why would anyone complain?  And Uncle Sam from the Fourth of July is old, too.  I mean, I don’t think there was ever a time before he became an uncle that people just called him “That Guy Sam.”   And he’s sort of a perennial “funny uncle,” too.  But that makes sense.  If Uncle Sam was a father, his kid would be “The Son of Sam,” and that wouldn’t be very patriotic at all.

So, there’s really not anything all that weird about a holiday character being old, but then again, most older holiday characters actually serve a purpose.  They have a job to do.  Santa delivers gifts and spreads holiday cheer.  Uncle Sam makes you want to wave a flag and go join the army.  But Father Time doesn’t actually do anything, and I think that’s what makes him seem so strange to me.  I mean, as holiday characters go, he’s completely useless.

The funny thing is that in way, Father Time seems like he’s rigged out for something.  I mean, the guy has an hourglass in one hand and a scythe in the other, and these are not things that people just carrying around for no reason.  The hourglass kind of makes sense, though.  After all, he is Father Time, so it seems reasonable that he would have an hourglass or a sundial or at least a decent watch on him.  But the scythe is just confusing because a scythe is usually used to harvest something.  So what?  Now Father Time is a farmer, too?  Then why isn’t he wearing overalls?  Where’s his tractor?  Why aren’t chickens trailing around after him?  I mean, what is the deal with this guy?

Of course, the scythe is usually a big symbol of death, but even that doesn’t make sense.  I mean, killing people is the Grim Reaper’s job, and that’s one department we don’t need any redundancy in.  Besides, what’s Father Time supposed to do?  Cut off Baby New Year’s head?   Oh, yeah, a headless baby—that would be a really great image for the beginning of a new year. 

And think about what would happen if Father Time actually did cut off Baby New Year’s head.  Then we wouldn’t have a New Year.  We’d just have more of Father Time’s homicidal rampage, and the world really would slowly wind down, one person at a time.  And while I’m sure that there are people who get up on New Year’s day and feel like it really is the end of world, that’s just a hangover.  It’ll pass, and besides, that’s not really the agenda we want to set for the rest of eternity.

I’m not saying we should just get rid of Father Time, though.  I just think we should let him retire.  I think the government should give him a nice pension and maybe buy him a condo in Boca.  Oh sure, some people would write their Congress people about how that’s government waste and all, and doubtless a few people would complain that Father Time is “just phonin’ it in,” but at least he’d be happy.  He’d probably make some friends and learn to play bridge.  And he could use his scythe to play shuffleboard.  If nothing else, it would be a lot better than him just wandering around in a dirty toga with that hangdog look on his face and sharp weapon in his hand.

In a lot of ways, though, Father Time actually has it easier than Baby New Year does. After all, he’s on his way out.  Nobody really cares that much about him.  That’s why he can go around looking so disheveled and being such a mess.  Once the ball drops in Times Square, he’s out of here.  He’s history.  He didn’t have a job to do, and he didn’t do it.  And as holiday characters go, we’re OK with that.  But Baby New Year is a whole other story.

Of course, there are other holiday characters who are babies.  My arch-nemesis Cupid immediately springs to mind, and I suppose that if you look at Christmas from a certain perspective, the Baby Jesus qualifies, too, although there does seem to be something kind of blasphemous about calling the Baby Jesus a festive holiday character even if you aren’t a Christian.  Luckily, Cupid casts a big enough shadow to prop up the whole Baby Holiday Character category, so at least Baby New Year isn’t out there having to pioneer the whole idea of the festive infant symbol on his own.

But I think Baby New Year’s job has gotten harder as time has passed because we’ve come to expect more out of babies than we did before.  I mean, back in the ‘50s, what did anyone expect out of a baby or even a young kid?  Look at Beaver Cleaver.  Leave It To Beaver is based on the fact that The Beaver actually isn’t very smart.  He gets simple stuff wrong all the time, and he tells a fib when there is absolutely no reason to.  He’s like an idiot compulsive liar, and he wouldn’t get into half the trouble he does if he had some critical thinking skills.  But then again, watching Beaver reason his way out of a problem wouldn’t make for very good TV, I guess. 

Yet, that’s how TV sets our expectations for babies and children.  We’ve had generations of sitcoms—The Andy Griffith Show, Dick Van Dyke, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family—that gave us nothing but children of barely average intelligence and underdeveloped morality, and we set our expectations accordingly.  Back in the 1960s, we were happy if Baby New Year could actually count to 60 and wasn’t on an acid trip.  In the 70s, we were just satisfied that he hadn’t gone disco.  And by the ‘80s, just being able to name three hair metal bands was enough to get you into a good college, so Baby New Year had no problem fulfilling our expectations.

But these days, everything is different for babies.  We have the little E-Trader baby who stands up in his crib and tells us about how he put stop-loss orders on all the stocks in his portfolio, and Evian has this creepy ad featuring a bunch of  roller-skating, breakdancing babies that look like Munchins on crack.  And then there’s Stewie on The Family Guy.  He’s just kind of a basic super-smart, pervert baby who makes you want to sell your house and move away.  I mean, seriously, kids today, right?

At this point, though, TV has so totally sucked us into The Cult of the Genius Baby that we think babies can do anything.  A baby walked on the moon?  Sure, why the hell not?  A baby jumped the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle?  OK, that sounds reasonable.  A baby won the Nobel Prize for Physics?  Yeah, so what else is new?  I mean, really, is there anything a baby can’t do anymore?

Well, yes.  In reality, babies can’t do a lot of things.  Like walk.  Or talk.  Or use the toilet.  Most of them can’t even stand up on their own.  I mean, basically, babies do four things:  eat, sleep, poop, and go on planes and cry.  Occasionally, they laugh and smile and are cute, but for the most part, it’s really just the four things.  That’s the reality of Baby World.  Unless you actually are a baby, it’s just not that impressive a place.

And no one is really paying the price for our distorted perceptions and unrealistic expectations more than Baby New Year is.  You see, unlike Cupid, Baby New Year has a really badly defined job.  I mean, Cupid’s job is easy—step one:  shoot person in chest with arrow; step two—fly away.  There’s really no room for interpretation there.  But Baby New Year’s job is to usher in the New Year, and I don’t think anyone actually knows exactly what all that entails.

I imagine that in earlier years, all it amounted to was the Baby New Year showing up, pushing Father Time off the stage, and saying something like, “Happy New Year!  And best of luck to ya!”  But of course, now, it can’t be that simple.  It’s not just an appearance.  It’s an extravaganza!  There are musical acts and dancing bears and fireworks.  Father Time is digitally erased pixel by pixel over the course of several hours.  And it’s all streamed live over the internet to cities all over the globe in beautiful high-definition (and stunning 3-D in selected markets).

And ten minutes before his appearance, Baby New Year is probably sitting in Makeup with a Manhattan in one hand and a cigarette in the other swearing at his agent, “What’s with this glittery diaper?  I look like an idiot!” “Uh, let me see what I can…”  “And geez, what’s this sash made out of?  Sandpaper?  I’ve got a rash the size of Texas on my chest!” “Well, yes, but you see, the sponsor…”  “Oh screw the sponsor!  I’m not doing this next year unless I get more money!  You tell them that!  Do you hear me?” 

And then someone yells, “Cue the baby!” And it’s show time.

And two seconds later, it’s all over. The New Year comes, the Old Year goes, and that’s the end of that story.  Maybe the New Year Baby did a good job, maybe he didn’t.  It’s sort of hard to tell.  I guess the only indication that it’s been successful is that Father Time is gone, and seeing as how he has a tendency to wander off even when he’s not being depixelated into cyberspace, that isn’t such a hard thing to accomplish.

All in all, you have to admit that Father Time and Baby New Year are two of the strangest holiday characters going.  Father Time’s job is to get pushed out of the way.  Baby New Year’s job is to push him.  After that, they’re both pretty much unemployed for the rest of the year. I don’t think any other holiday characters work less than those two, and if I was Baby New Year, I’d look out for Cupid trying to horn in my gig.

Anyway, as I sat on the flight back from vacation with an elderly person next to me and a crying baby right behind me, I realized something:  this was the same flight I took home last year.  And it will probably be the same flight I’ll take back next year.  There’s an odd kind of continuity to it, and I really sort of like that because even though the new pushes the old out of the way once a year, my own life just doesn’t change that fast.  And I really wouldn’t want it to, either.  I mean, when you really stop to think about it, the New Year is a two-second holiday with a cast of the laziest holiday characters going.  And it’s great and it’s fun and it’s festive, but what really matters is what we do with the other 31,535,998 seconds before it happens all over again.  After all, the next best thing you’ll ever do is always the one thing you haven’t done yet.  So, Happy New Year, Dear Readers.  And best of luck to ya.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.



© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Trick or Treat


Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

When my sisters and I were kids, my parents tried to instill a lot practical wisdom in us.  And I’d like to think that at least some of it took, too.  My parents always were and still are big believers in the idea that you just have to use whatever is at hand to get the job done.  That’s one thing they really drilled into our heads:  you have to be resourceful.   And they’re rather ingenious people themselves.  My mom is the kind of person who could build a life raft out of nothing but old Ziploc bags and guile.  And these days, my father is planning out how he’s going to use the tank from an old water heater to create a super-compressor for his paint gun.  I think his ultimate goal is to be able to spray paint the patio furniture from outer space.  Trust me, when it comes to being resourceful, these people aren’t fooling around.

I don’t think either my sisters or I have ever been quite that resourceful or had such cosmic plans, though.  I especially tend to think on a much less grandiose scale.  I mean, as a small child, my greatest talent was the ability to turn virtually anything into a hat.  Of course, all that really involved was putting the thing in question on my head and saying that it was a hat, but still, at least it fell within the family tradition.  The real test of resourcefulness in our family, though, came every year on Halloween.  For me and my sisters, it was the greatest challenge of how to work with whatever you had available.  And one way or another, we always seemed to find some way to get through it.

Growing up, we had two Halloween costumes.  One of them was a tiger outfit with a striped pair of flannel pants, a matching striped flannel top, and a mask.  Without the mask, the whole outfit looked a lot like a pair of pajamas.  In fact, it might actually have been a pair of pajamas at one point.  I mean, it would’ve been just like my mom to dig up an old tiger mask somewhere and then convince us all that the whole getup was a Halloween costume.  She was kind of crafty like that.  And we were kind of gullible.

No one really remembers what the other costume even was.  It was probably something completely inappropriate like an old Santa Claus suit or a pilgrim’s outfit.  So, of course, nobody wanted to wear it.  I mean, what little kid wants to go out on Halloween dressed as a pilgrim?  No one wants to give you candy if you look like that.  If you’re dressed like a pilgrim, everyone expects you to knock on their door and just hand them a turkey.  And can you imagine being the little kid who has to go out trick-or-treating as Santa Claus?  Grown-ups would open the door, take one look at you, and be like, “What the hell?”

Anyway, the strangest thing was that we had two costumes, but there were actually three kids in our family.  So, I’m not really sure what that was about.  At one time, of course, only two of us were old enough to go trick-or-treating, but after that, I’m not really sure what happened.  I guess we probably just had to go out in shifts.  One kid would put on the tiger outfit, do a block of houses, and then go home so the other kid could use the costume.  Then the second kid would go out, and the neighbor would say, “Weren’t you just here?” “No.”  Then his wife would call out, “Who’s at the door, honey?”  “I don’t know. Some kid in a pair of pajamas.”  “You mean the one with Santa Claus?”  “That was my sister, damn it!” 

Then the neighbor would look you up and down with more than a little suspicion and finally drop some candy into your bag just so he wouldn’t have to waste any more of his time trying to figure out if he was being played by a 7-year old over a roll of Smarties.  After all, trying to decide who’s who on Halloween can be tricky.  I mean, kids aren’t usually that hard to tell apart, but a kid in a mask and a pair of pajamas is a whole other story.

Anyway, after we finally outgrew the tiger suit and whatever the other outfit might have been, we just started making our own costumes.  That required a completely different level of ingenuity because we didn’t have a lot to work with.  Basically, my parents would let us make costumes out of just about anything that they were otherwise going to throw away.  So if you wanted to go as a ghost, you ended up a in sheet that likely had a giant tear going right through some mysterious stain that even three cups of bleach couldn’t get out.  You looked like a ghost who’d been mugged and then thrown in the gutter.  It wasn’t scary so much as it was just sad.

Of course, there was always the robot route.  Being a robot didn’t require much more than a couple of boxes, and my dad always had boxes in the garage.  But that was the problem—my father has never willingly parted with a cardboard box in his life.  To him, a good, sturdy box is the key to surviving pretty much any disaster situation.  Now, exactly what sort of crisis one could fend off using nothing more than a cardboard box is a bit beyond me.  I mean, seriously, when was the last time you saw a superhero named “Box Man”?  When did anyone anywhere ever defeat a criminal by smacking him in the head with a cardboard box?  

But in my dad’s world, those boxes were his first and last line of defense.  If there was a tornado, we could hide underneath them.  If there was a flood, we could float away in them.  If there was a nuclear attack, we could use them to build a bomb shelter.  That man had more faith in cardboard than he did in God.  The way he figured it, those boxes were all that stood between him and utter chaos.  And there was no way he was giving up that kind of security just so some kid could be a robot for Halloween.

 Luckily, my grandparents had a trunk of old clothes that they kept around for us to play dress-up in, so if my parents weren’t throwing away anything that would make a decent costume, you could always just go as someone from the distant fashion past. The problem was that most of the clothes were my grandfather’s, and they didn’t exactly fit.  So, I’d head off to trick-or-treat in a pair of old pants cinched up somewhere around my armpits, a vest that ended somewhere around my knees, and a jacket that fit me like a full-length dress.  And it always went the same way with the neighbors.  “Trick-or-treat.” “What the hell are you supposed to be?”  Then the wife would poke her head around the corner and call out, “Who’s at the door, honey?”  “I don’t know.  Some kid in a tweed evening gown.”

I suppose it could’ve been worse, though.  If my mom had let us go out dressed in my dad’s old clothes, I would’ve been trick-or-treating in a floor-length Nehru jacket.  I would’ve looked like a tiny Communist dictator.  And I can just imagine how that would’ve gone over.  “Who’s at the door, honey?”  “I don’t know….I think it’s Mao-Tse Tung.” 

I imagine the neighbors started to miss the days when the strangest thing they had to deal with on Halloween was the untimely appearance of Santa Claus, but no matter what you were wearing, they always gave you some candy.  These days, of course, a lot of parents are pushing for healthier treats, but back then, if someone had given you a carrot stick, you’d have given it back.  I mean, back in the late 1960s, most people believed that sugar actually was one of the four food groups, right along with red meat, lard, and caffeine.  And if you were a grown-up, nothing topped off a balanced diet better than a cigarette and a martini.  So, it’s not like anyone thought that a little candy was going to kill you.

To me, though, Halloween was never about getting the treats.  After all, not all of the candy you got on that night was good.  There were always a few pieces of no-name, cut-rate candy that you just knew someone had fished out of the clearance bin at some seedy-looking convenience store.  That was always the candy that was either so hardened by age that it would actually break your teeth or so off-brand that it tasted faintly like dirt.  Either way, it wasn’t something you wanted to put in your mouth.

Every now and then, too, some joker on the next block over would slip you a throat lozenge and try to pass it off as a mint. And honestly, there are few things more disappointing than thinking you’re about to enjoy a delicious cherry treat and then finding out that it’s really just a Sucret someone dug out of the bottom of old purse.  I mean, if you actually had a sore throat, I suppose it was quite a find, but otherwise, it was a big gyp.

Besides, eating candy wasn’t that big of a deal at my house.  My mom always kept a little bag of Brach’s candy in the cupboard, and we were allowed to eat some most anytime we wanted to.  So, I spent my allowance on stuff that my mom didn’t keep around, like beef jerky and pepperoni sticks and tiny wheels of processed cheese.  When I was a kid, I didn’t have time to rot out my teeth or mess with my blood sugar.  I was too busy clogging up my arteries.

Anyway, we lost interest in our Halloween candy after about three days, and my mom would finally take whatever was left in our candy bags and dump it all into the Brach’s sack in the cupboard.  Then we’d all nibble away at it until one fateful evening when my dad shook out the last piece, popped it in his mouth, and then spit it out with a loud “Who the hell put a throat lozenge in here?”  Then he’d turn and look at me.  “And why are you still wearing your costume?”  “These are my pajamas, Dad.”  “Oh.”  And at that point, Halloween was pretty much officially over at my house.

The funny thing is that despite all the hassles that Halloween inevitably brought with it, I always liked that holiday.  There was never any telling what any of us kids might show up as—a World War I pilot, a secretary from Cleveland, a pre-pubescent version of Jesus.  It all just depended on what we had to work with.  It was the ultimate exercise in catch-as-catch-can.

In the end, though, I guess trick-or-treating really is good training for life.  I mean, what really happens when you go for a job interview?  You dress up in a businessperson costume, knock on the door, and go, “Hi.  Can I have a job?”  Then they give you a treat, or they say, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”  It’s just like trick-or-treating.  But more than that, Halloween has a great way of reminding us that a little resourcefulness, a little talent for making something out of nothing, is ultimately a good thing.  And it’s ultimately a fun thing, too, because let’s face it—deep down inside of all of us, there’s a little MacGyver just itching to get out.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.



© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Got Milk?

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

There’s an old saying that “you are what you eat,” and to certain extent, I suppose that’s true.  Scary, of course, but mostly true.  Then again, what you eat depends a lot on what you’ve got around to eat.  So, maybe it’s more accurate to say that you are what you would eat. 

I think people with families to feed have it easier in some ways when it comes to food, though.  Of course, the meal prep and the cleanup are bigger hassles.  When you’re only feeding yourself, you can eat right out the can with your bare hands if you want to.  It’s not like anyone is going to object.  But there does seem to be something about a child’s ability to use silverware that somehow makes parents feel like they’ve done their jobs.  So, even now, if my mother calls while I’m eating tuna straight out of the handy-dandy foil pouch, I always mention that I’m using a fork.  She seems to find that comforting.  Don’t ask me why.

And I don’t know if actual grocery shopping is easier if you have a family or not.  One day, I saw a woman in the store with a completely full cart and three little kids in tow…AND she was using coupons.  It was amazing.  I mean, I have a good deal of respect and admiration for firefighters who run into burning buildings, but I was utterly in awe of that woman.  If I had had the money, I would’ve paid for her groceries myself.  After all, I think that kind of bravery really should be rewarded.

But shopping for one is a completely different experience.  People always say that you should never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry.  But that’s the only reason I ever go grocery shopping.  I mean, if I’m not hungry, why would I go buy some food?  That just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Now, I realize that there are lovely, responsible people on their own who plan ahead and stock up on food accordingly.  I am not one of those people.  I just figure I’ll worry about what’s for dinner when it’s dinnertime.  Besides, if I go to the grocery store when I’m not hungry, I tend not to buy any actual food.  Instead, I come home with 48 rolls of 9-ply toilet paper, an entire selection of coma-inducing cold medicine, and batteries.  Lots and lots of batteries.

And I don’t know what it is about the As Seen on TV aisle that holds such special meaning for me, but if I get anywhere near that section when I’m shopping without being hungry, it’s like being enticed into an opium den.  I mean, I can’t even figure out what half of that stuff is supposed to do, but who cares?  Some little thing will catch my eye, and it’s like I can’t turn away.  I’m totally mesmerized by that thing.  It folds up, it folds out, it expands, it contracts, it absorbs, it repels.  It’s magic!  Magic, I tell you!  And I must have it.  Even if I don’t have any idea what it is.

Of course, when I am hungry, I’m not that much better at shopping.  When you’re single, you can eat whatever you want to eat whenever you want to eat it.  And while that might seem oddly freeing, trust me, it isn’t.  I don’t know how many times I’ve come home with ten pounds of some kind of fish I’ve never even heard of.  I can’t count how many jars of cocktail onions have found their way into my cart.  And every now and then, I just go into an absolute crouton mania.  There’s just no telling what I might buy.  I remember coming home one time only to find that after I’d put all the food away, my entire freezer was filled up with nothing but frozen waffles and vodka. 

I’ve tried the idea of making a list before I go to the store, but it never quite works out.  After all, I don’t have time to make a list.  I’m hungry.  I need some food right now. 

At one point, though, I tried keeping a rolling list that I would work on from time to time so that when I got hungry, I could just snatch it up and head off to the store.  The problem was that lists like that tend to be rather, well, optimistic.  It was more a list of what I thought I should eat rather than what I actually do eat.  So, I’d write down stuff like string beans and peas and low-fat milk and bananas, and then I’d get to the store and wonder, “Who broke into my house and made up this list?”  And then I’d end up going home with a TV dinner, a jar of pesto sauce, and this lingering feeling of guilt and shame.  So, I gave up on that idea a long time ago.  If there’s one thing I don’t need in my life, it’s the stress of trying to live up to my grocery list.

My strangest grocery shopping experiences, though, were back when I was finishing college.  One summer, a friend of mine and I were both working on the graveyard shift as janitors for the university, and since we needed to keep our nocturnal schedules over the weekends, we did our grocery shopping at about 3am on Saturday nights.  Back then, the 24-hour grocery store was a completely new thing, so it seemed like an adventure.  A really weird, kind of creepy, sort of scary adventure, but an adventure nonetheless.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store in our town was really kind of seedy and cut-rate.  Their big selling point was that their prices were lower because you had to bag your own groceries.  Personally, I think their prices were lower because they never cleaned the place or bothered to replace any of the continually flickering overhead lights.  Just walking into that store was like being sucked into a scene out of a David Lynch movie.  From what I could tell, they employed nothing but drug addicts.  Even the customers looked strangely vacant and potentially dangerous. 

I don’t actually remember the name of the store, but they really should’ve just called it The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store because that’s about what it amounted to. When you walked in, you really sort of expected to see an aisle sign that read “Bloated and Dented Canned Goods.”  A section of completely mislabeled food items wouldn’t have been out of place, and to be honest, this was the kind of store that would happily sell you an opened box cereal or a half-eaten sandwich.  I think their whole business plan was based on a mixture of apathetic capitalism and brutal honesty.  They didn’t know anything about food safety, and they weren’t trying to hide it.  But if you insisted on buying groceries from them, they wouldn’t try to stop you.

One of the most entertaining parts of the store was a section located beyond an entire aisle of used cardboard boxes they were trying to sell and just to the side of a fairly disreputable-looking dairy case.  That last section was the kind of area that really should’ve been called something like Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck.  You never knew what you might find back there.  Boxes of prime rib, cases of scotch, Barbie Dream Houses, tube socks.  There was really no telling.  Whenever I went back to that area, I always sort of expected to find some heavy-set guys sitting around smoking cigars and playing poker.  But really, if I’d come upon a chorus line of dancing midgets, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The funny thing is that as strange as that store was, my friend and I kept going there.  After all, they did actually have lower prices, and as long as you made sure that whatever you bought wasn’t misshapen or giving off a foul odor, you were pretty safe.  Besides, back then, bagging your own groceries seemed oddly empowering.  It was like the store was entrusting you with a sacred duty, and that made you more than just a customer.  You were an integral part of the machinery that was The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store.  Whether or not that was something you wanted to admit to your friends was a whole other story.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store is a really common thing these days although shopping at 3am is still a lot like being trapped in an episode of The Twilight Zone with little snippets of the movie Dune thrown in just to confuse you.  What makes shopping even stranger, though, is that the Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck section seems to be a staple in a lot of the bigger, super-grocery stores.  In fact, it’s taken over about half the space of those stores.  And I might just be Old School, but I don’t ever think I’ll understand that.  I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with knowing that the grocery store that sells me milk and eggs is also willing to sell me a car and finance the loan.  My mind just can’t expand quite that far.

My mom, of course, thinks the idea of the grocery super-store is great because it’s more convenient.  I mean, to her, if you need groceries and a new couch, what could be better than finding it all in one place?  And I suppose she’s got a point.  It really is a lot more convenient.  But for someone like me, it’s also a lot more dangerous.  After all, if I find myself in a regular grocery store now without being hungry, the worst thing that will happen is that I’ll go home with five rolls of non-stick aluminum foil, two boxes of dryer sheets, and a loofah sponge.  And frankly, there are worse things I could do.

But the grocery super-store is just a disaster waiting to happen for someone like me because suddenly I’m not just walking out with a package of light bulbs. I’m walking out with a new set of patio furniture. I’m not just buying a new dustpan. I’m buying a lawn vacuum.  And I don’t even have a lawn.  Or a patio.

What scares me most about it all, though, is that I really do believe that you are what you look around your kitchen and decide you would eat.  So I’m perfectly willing to say that I am ten pounds of lutefisk.  I’ll own up to being a jar of maraschino cherries.  I’ll stand on the highest mountain and proudly proclaim that I am a crouton.  But I’m just dreading the first time I go into a grocery super-store when I actually am hungry.  The sheer number of products will be overwhelming, and I have no doubt that I’ll eventually return home dazed, confused, and probably slightly motion sick only to have to look myself straight in the mirror and face the fact that I am a radial tire.

All in all, I miss the days when I was a little kid going grocery shopping with my mom.  My whole job then, at least as far as I understood it, was to hang off the cart and grab random things off the shelves.  These days, I’d happily pay some little kid to do that for me.  Hell, I’d pay a grown-up to do that for me.  But there’s something about being a grown-up yourself that makes people think you should have mastered the fine art of grocery shopping by now.  And I suppose that to some extent, I have at least reached some level of competency when it comes to buying food.  After all, I haven’t starved to death yet.  Still, whenever I see some parent in the store with a child, there’s always some part of me that just wants to lean down and say, “Kid, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.”  But, hey, I’m an adult, so I just gather up my tube of cake frosting, my bottle of soy sauce, and my block of cheese because, you know, it’s dinner time.  And I’m hungry.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.


© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Back on the Chain Gang

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

So, Labor Day has just passed us by, and I have to say that I think it’s a bit of a weird holiday.  I mean, it’s cool because most people get the day off, but it’s odd because it’s a holiday that was basically invented by a labor union for no other reason than they thought that people should get a day off.  It wasn’t originally intended to be a celebration of anything, really, except maybe the more mischievous side of union agitation.  In fact, if you listen closely on Labor Day, you can almost hear the faint sounds of Jimmy Hoffa laughing his ass off from…well, wherever he finally ended up.

Of course, what’s really tragic is the day after Labor Day.  It’s like on Labor Day, everyone says, “Yes, let’s celebrate YOU, the American worker!  You are the lifeblood of this country, the machine that drives us forward as a people, the very heart and soul of everything that makes this nation great!”  And people wave flags around and have parades and feel the need to publicly read Carl Sandburg poetry out loud.  Then the next day, it’s like, “And now you better drag your lazy butt out of bed and get to work, or you’re fired.”

Well, so much for the celebration of the exalted American worker.  After Labor Day, if you want a day off to relax and reflect on your contribution to this great land of ours, you have to get it the old-fashioned way.  You have to call in sick.

Now, I have to admit that I’ve long had a somewhat defiant attitude about calling in sick when all that’s really wrong with you is that you’re having a bad hair day or don’t have any clean clothes to wear.  To me, these are perfectly valid reasons to stay home.  I mean, you’re probably doing your co-workers a favor by not subjecting them to your distressing hairdo or your filthy, dirt-encrusted clothing.  But more than that, I think a sick day should be a private thing between you and your not entirely guilt-ridden conscience.  And I can trace that attitude right back to its source:  my first professional job.

You see, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I had a job with a big corporation, and for the most part, I liked the job just fine.  But that company had the strangest sick leave policy I’ve ever seen.  Basically, you got “short-term sick leave,” which was a day or two, and you got “long-term sick leave,” which was five days or more.  The strange thing was that you only got five short-term sick days per year, but you got four weeks of long-term sick leave.  And it wasn’t cumulative, either.  At the end of the year, the slate was wiped clean, and everybody just started over with the same amount of sick days.

The idea, as far as I could ever tell, was to discourage you from calling in sick because you got so few short-term days that you didn’t want to blow one just because you felt kind of sort of cruddy.  As far as the company was concerned, if you felt kind of sort of cruddy, you could drag your sorry butt into work and just sit in your office feeling that way.  After all, we had an infirmary on site in case things turned ugly, so as long as you weren’t actively bleeding from a major artery, the company just figured you could come to work. 

Of course, in practice, the sick leave policy worked the exact opposite.  If you got a stomach bug that normally would’ve taken two days to get over, you stayed out for five days so that you could take long-term sick leave.  After all, if you came back after two days, you’d used almost half of your short-term days.  But if you stayed out for a week, you’d only used a quarter of the your long-term time.  So in the end, the sick leave policy wasn’t even about the number of days you were out sick.  It was just about fractions.  And apparently, whoever made up the sick leave policy wasn’t very good at math.  Or predicting human behavior.

Anyway, at one point, I think the company must’ve caught on to what was happening, but instead of changing the policy, they just tried to make it scarier to call in sick by requiring you to specifically list what was wrong with you.  Now, I don’t know what kind of twisted soul ever thought this up, but listing what was wrong with you wasn’t just a matter of writing down, “I had the stomach flu.”  These people wanted details.  Disgusting, horrible details. 

So, if you had an ear infection, you couldn’t just say, “I had an ear infection.”  You had to describe the blinding, crippling pain.  If you had a cold, you had to tell them all about your runny nose, furry tongue, and pounding headache.  If you sprained your ankle, they wanted an essay on the swelling and torn ligaments.  Like I said, I have no idea what kind of sick mind ever thought that up. 

I also don’t know what kind sick mind ever thought that would work.  I mean, all it did was encourage people to exaggerate or just flat-out lie.  In my department, the phrase “projectile vomiting” became so commonplace that it ceased to even raise an eyebrow among the most sensitive of employees.  In fact, we would just sit around making up the most disgusting descriptions we could think of.  It was everybody’s favorite office game. 

Eventually, though, we realized that even though the “Gross Me Out” system was probably the brainchild of some genius manager in Human Resources, it was the administrative assistants over there who really had to deal with it.  And I don’t think they wanted to read that icky stuff any more than we wanted to write it.  And beyond that, if you used terminology that they wouldn’t be likely to know right off the tops of their heads, they wouldn’t look it up, either.  But really, who would?  I mean, if part of your job involved reading the kind of stomach-turning stuff people had to write on their sick leave forms, why would you want that torture to go on for one second longer than it had to? 

All that mattered was that something sounded reasonably disgusting enough.  As long as you cleared that hurdle, you were golden.  Well, OK, maybe not golden, but at least you were sick as far as the company was concerned.

The problem, though, was that I’d never been any good at lying, especially about being sick.  I’d always come up with something like “beriberi,” which sounds a lot more like a frozen drink you’d buy at the Taco Bell drive-through than a nervous system disease.  Or I say that I had “dengue fever,” which would actually make sense…if I lived in Nigeria.  And when I couldn’t think of anything, I tended to panic and write down stuff like “rabies” or “ebola virus.”   Then I’d always imagine some HR person reading that and thinking, “And you only needed one day off to recover?”  Thunk.  Denied.

But there was even more pressure on that job because you couldn’t just go with a disease name, even if you could come up with one that actually sounded like a real illness and wouldn’t need to involve a mad dog or a trip to a sub-tropical region in Africa.  It was all about the symptoms with that company.  So one day, I got out my dictionary and just started making up symptoms that were basically honest but could still pass the HR retch test. 

And in honor of The Day After Labor Day, I’d thought I’d pass them along.


Symptom
What It Really Means
Why It Would Work



Acute Bellicose Rupture
You got really, really angry with someone really, really fast.  And then you snapped.
Well, it just sounds awful, doesn’t it? “Bellicose” sounds like the first cousin of a varicose vein, and a rupture just sounds really messy.  Besides, “acute” makes it seem like a real emergency, and that’s always a plus in an excuse.



Chronic Ennui
You are frequently bored in a really hanging-around-in-a-French-café-wearing-a-beret-and-smoking-an-unfiltered-cigarette-left-over-from-WWII kind of way.
“Ennui” sounds vaguely gastrointestinal and not in a particularly pleasant way.  But more than that, it’s chronic.  That means you can use it over and over and over.  It’s recyclable.  It’s eco-friendly.  It’s the ultimate green excuse.



Generalized Malaise
You’re just kind of tired and uninterested in doing much of anything…like, say, going to work.  In fact, the very thought of going to work makes you tired and uninterested.
The idea of a generalized illness puts people off right away because there’s no telling what’s wrong with you.  There’s something wrong, but it can’t be pinpointed.  That’s the beauty of it.  It might be nothing. It might be epidemically contagious. Who is to know? And besides “malaise” is a French word…and most people would rather avoid French words.



Impacted Truculence
You have a scathingly harsh sense of judgement wedged into your psyche.  When someone says you have a stick up your butt about something, this is what you have.
How many phrases do you know of that start with the word “impacted” and turn out to be something good?  This isn’t a symptom anyone is going to want to personally verify.  Trust me.



Infectious Juvenility
You’re so immature that it will affect others.  You won’t just come to work wearing a big clown nose.  You’ll bring enough big clown noses for the whole office.
It’s infectious. And infection scares people. No one wants to be around anyone who is infected with anything. No one will even take the chance of making you come in to work if you say you have this.



Intumescent Jackassery
You have a swollen, engorged sense of foolishness. You’re puffy with giddiness.
Actually, I don’t think this one would work.  I just always wanted to write the word “jackassery” on a sick leave form.  I love that word.  It’s like tomfoolery on steroids.



Localized Apathy
You don’t care about one specific thing…like, say, going to work.  You care about other stuff…like TV and candy.  But you don’t care about going to work.
It sounds kind of serious but still like something that, given enough time and rest, you can recover from without having to have something amputated.  It’s definitely one to use if you’re going for the sympathy vote.  You might even get flowers out of the deal.  If nothing else, it automatically authorizes you to walk with a limp.



Oozing Turpitude
You are leaking moral corruption and general depravity.  It’s kind of like having cystic acne on your soul.
Would you really want to see something that’s oozing? I wouldn’t.  And neither would whoever is checking your sick leave excuse.  It’s like the free pass of the sick leave world.



Paralytic Indolence
You’re too lazy to get up.  In extreme cases, they couldn’t blast you off your couch with a fire hose.
Well, you’re paralyzed.  That’s never good no matter what the reason behind it is.  And no one expects you to come to work if you’re paralyzed.



Relapsing/Remitting Hedonism
You are far too occupied with the pursuit of pleasure to come to work.  It can also just mean that you’re too drunk to show up.
It relapses, it remits, it’s all over the place!  It’s completely unpredictable.  It could surface at any time.  And hedonism sounds like the result of some sort of genetic mutation, so nobody is going to question it.  In fact, if you say you have this, most people will feel sorry for you.  And then they’ll avoid you.





The trick to using the symptoms, though, was to combine them in ways that sounded like real illnesses. What started as a small bit of intumescent jackassery, for example, could quickly develop into full-blown infectious juvenility that could ultimately result in a bad case of oozing turpitude. And, of course, a good case of impacted truculence could always quite easily lead to an acute bellicose rupture. I think Hallmark even makes a card for that.  And who could ever predict when chronic ennui, a generalized malaise, and a stubborn case of localized apathy would collide into the perfect storm of make-believe illness?

You had to be kind of smart about what symptoms you put together, though.  After all, the HR people tended to gossip, and it wasn’t like you were never going back to your job again.  So, you probably wouldn’t want to combine something like relapsing/remitting hedonism with paralytic indolence.  That makes it sound like you were too lazy to get off the couch and come to work because you were too busy drinking cheap scotch and watching movies on “the special TV channel.”  And that’s really not the image you want to get back to your co-workers and managers.  I mean, if that’s really why you didn’t come to work, you probably would be better off just saying that you had rabies.

The funny thing is that for all the time I spent making up those symptoms, I never actually used any of them.  In fact, I rarely missed work, mostly because by the time I was awake enough to even think about calling in sick, I was already in my car and halfway to the office.  Still, I always kept that list in my desk drawer, and even after I left that job, I’ve always had a copy of it around.  And I’d love to say that those excuses were my way of flying in the face authority and of sticking it to The Man, but really, I still keep the list around just because it makes me laugh.  And because it reminds that if everything in business really made sense, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.

So, sometime soon, schedule an afternoon appointment for some reparative therapy to address your acute nutritional deficiency syndrome.  In other words, take a long lunch.  And don’t feel too bad about it, either. I mean, we take one day out of the whole year to extol the virtues of everyone who works for a living.  On all those other days that are most decidedly not Labor Day, you have to fend for yourself and remember that in the end, it really is the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the worker that makes a country great.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.



© R. Rissler, 2011. All rights reserved.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Always Something There To Remind Me

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about mementos.  No, not Mentos.  Those are little mint things.  I’m talking about mementos—all those various little souvenirs of experience that pile up over the years.  It’s stuff like that t-shirt you got at the last Stones concert or that trophy you won in the local bowling tournament or that glass eye you got after your last bar fight.  It’s all the stuff that reminds you of where you’ve been and what you’ve done. 

Now, I’m a very sentimental person, so mementos mean a lot to me.  In fact, my friends often joke that the best way to get revenge on me is to give me an ugly shirt as a present.  I’ll never wear it, but I’ll never have the heart to throw it out.  I’ll be stuck with it until the end of time.  I’m one for keeping keepsakes, no matter how much I don’t like them. 

I’m one of those people who has never thrown away a personal letter or card.  I’ve taken a clipboard from every company I’ve ever worked for just for the memories.  I’ve even been known to print out CT scans of my kidneys and hang them on my fridge.  I’m all about creating evidence of having had a life, and that’s what mementos do.  They’re tangible proof of having been there and done that.

In a way, though, some of the biggest successes I’ve had in life have left behind such strange souvenirs that I really have no idea how to deal with them.  I mean, a couple of weeks ago, I passed a big, important exam at school, and I walked away with pretty much nothing to show for it.  Well, I did get a piece of paper saying that I had convinced four professors that I actually knew what I was talking about, but I had to turn it in at school the next day.  So, I’d spent months studying for this test, and as it got closer and closer, I had pushed everything else in my life aside to get ready for it.  And in end, the only souvenir I got from that whole experience was an incredibly messy apartment.  I got a stack of unopened mail that took up most of the coffee table, a fridge full of mostly rotten food, and a pile of laundry that was actually taller than I am.  So, I had to decide if I was going to clean the place up or just cover everything with a coat of polyurethane and enshrine it for all time. 

When you really stop to think about it, though, there’s really something sort of fascinating about having to deal with a mess.  Probably one of my earliest memories of having to deal with one was when I first started mowing the lawn.  Of course, I didn’t start out at lawn mowing daughter status.  In my family, all three of us kids started out on clipping duty.  We divided up all the edges of the lawn that my dad couldn’t get close enough to with the mower, and then we went around on our hands and knees with hand clippers and clipped the grass.

I hated that job.  First of all, it took forever, and it seemed like it was always at least 110 degrees outside every Sunday when my dad wanted to do yard work.  And I always seemed to end up with the crappy green pair of clippers that I swear to God had been manufactured sometime around World War I and hadn’t been sharpened since the day they rolled out of the factory. 

On top of that, I’m allergic to grass, so I’d never get more than a few minutes into the job before my eyes would tear up, my nose would start running, and I’d break out in an itchy rash.  But then again, pretty much everyone in my family had hay fever, and everyone was suffering.  So you could swell up like a big, itchy, teary-eyed tick, and you still weren’t going to get out of doing your clipping.

But more than just the allergy stuff, I hated clipping because there were bugs.  There weren’t a lot of bugs, of course.  I mean, we lived in Colorado, not Georgia.  But most of the clipping was around my mom’s gardens, so there were always bees and wasps and caterpillars and spiders, and I secretly believed that there were probably poisonous snakes and plague-ridden rats hiding out in the flowers, too. The worst area was the tomato plants.  There was just no telling what you might find over there.  As far as I was concerned, that whole garden was like one big pit of primordial ooze capable of spontaneously generating the most heinous insect life any kid could imagine.  I’d make almost any deal with little sister to get out of working over there, and she knew it.

My dad was pretty picky about the clipping, too.  You had to clip at the same height that the rest of the grass would eventually be cut at, and if you did a shoddy job, he’d make you go back and do it again.  It’s not that he was really such a maniac about the lawn, though.  After all, this was the suburbs back in the early 1970s, long before everyone just hired a lawn care company to come and deal with the grass.  This was back in a time when parents still realized that their children were an invaluable source of free labor, and no kid in my neighborhood under the age of 15 had ever seriously uttered the word “no” to either of their parents.  But beyond all that, lawn care was a competition sport with the fathers in my neighborhood.  It was what they did before mixed martial arts came along.  So, you weren’t just clipping the grass.  You were part of a team.  You were fighting for your family’s honor and an entire week of bragging rights.

Anyway, once you got to a certain age in my family, you were promoted to lawn mower duty.  My older sister got that job first, but I don’t think she liked it that much because it took longer to mow than it did to clip.  And she was all about spending the least amount of time possible teasing the Great God of the Heat Stroke.  So, one summer when I was about 12, my sister stepped down, and I was magically lifted out of the ranks of the grubby-faced, swollen-eyed clippers and elevated to the status of Assistant Deputy Chief Lawn Mowing Daughter.  It was one of the proudest days of my life. And it’s also when I got my first taste of what dealing with a mess is like.

Back in those days, you see, no one had a mulching mower.  So, we collected all the grass in three huge burlap sacks.  Of course, if my dad just put the grass bags out for the garbage pickup, then they’d throw his bags away, too.  And I think he’d had those bags since about 1960, so he wasn’t about to give them up.  He was really very attached to those grass bags, and in a way, it was kind of oddly touching.  But it also meant that all that grass had to be disposed of some other way. 

So, along about five o’clock on Sunday evenings when all the neighborhood parents were having some iced tea on the back patio and all the kids were watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on TV, my dad let me know that we were going to dump the grass.  Then he’d give my mom the high sign, grab his car keys, and from there, the race was on.  The race against what, I don’t know.  But it always seemed like we were racing against something.  We’d run out and toss the grass bags into the back of the station wagon and then go speeding out of the neighborhood as fast as we could without attracting any undue attention.  The trick was to get out of the our subdivision and over by the railroad tracks as quickly as possible.  From there, we’d drive several miles out into an area of overgrown fields, and after glancing nervously around several times to make sure no one saw us, my dad would peel screeching off the road.  Then we’d jump out of the car and empty the grass bags as fast as we could.

It was all pretty routine, but the way my dad acted about it, you’d have thought we were dumping toxic waste or disposing of a body.  It was like we were on a mission for the CIA, and  I was always sort of surprised that he didn’t insist we both wear ski masks.  I mean, it was a positively clandestine operation, and to this day, I have no idea why.  Nonetheless, as soon as the grass was dumped, we peeled out and put some serious distance between us and that abandoned mess.  When we got home, my mom would just say, “Did you get it taken care of?” and my dad would nod silently.  After that, no one ever mentioned it…until, of course, the next week when we had to do it all over again.

So, what I know about mess management, I learned from my father.  Basically, you dump your mess on somebody else’s property and hope like hell that no one saw you do it.  That’s the suburban approach to dealing with chaos.  And from the time I’ve spent living in big cities, I think it’s a big part of the urban strategy, too.  The only difference is that the suburban style is a “dump and drive” kind of thing while the urban one is more of a “dump and run.”  And that makes sense.  A lot of people in big cities don’t have cars, and if they do, they’re parked somewhere in a garage six miles away.  You have to take a cab to get there.  It’s not exactly convenient.

In a big city, you can’t really abandon your mess any father away than you’re willing to carry it, but the interesting thing about the dump and run strategy is that it ends up requiring a level of secrecy that even a cagey guy like my dad would have a hard time with.  I mean, if you dump an old couch half a block from where you live, you can’t really get that far away from it.  You can’t pretend that you don’t know that couch.  But you have to.  Otherwise, everyone will know that you dumped it out there, and then it’s only a matter of time until some angry neighborhood improvement people show up at your door demanding that you go get your car from the garage on the other side of town, pick up that couch, and go abandon it somewhere out in the suburbs.

And it’s not like you can avoid the couch, either.  If you only got half a block away from where you live before your trusty helper said, “I’m not carryin’ this piece of crap one step farther” and just dropped it, you’re going to have to pass by it at some point.  And that’s when things get hard.  You can’t just pretend you don’t see the couch because then everyone will know you dumped it there.  I mean, it’s just suspicious to act like you don’t see a couch sitting right there.  And people in big cities aren’t dumb.  They catch on to stuff like that.  But then again, you can’t just stop and stare at it.  You can’t stand there in a fog of nostalgia over all the great times you had on that couch.  That’s a dead giveaway that you’re somehow connected to it.  Or it’s a dead giveaway that there’s something really wrong with you.  Either way, somebody is going to a call a cop, and you’re going to be sorry.

So, the trick is to be able to walk past the couch and notice it while saying to yourself, “I don’t know that couch,  I’ve never seen that couch before,” over and over and over again.  Just don’t say it out loud.  And don’t linger.  Keep moving at a normal pace.  And try to appear ever so slightly irritated that someone had the nerve to abandon a couch on your block.  That’s the key.  In an urban post-dump situation, it’s all about attitude.  

Of course, the urban dump and run strategy isn’t much use to me with my current mess. I mean, I live in a nice neighborhood apartment complex.  I know most of my neighbors, and at least some of them have been in my apartment.  They’ve seen my stuff.  So, if I started dumping it on the sidewalk outside, they’d probably think I was being robbed.  And worse, they’d think that all I owned was really crappy stuff.  And even worst still, they’d bring it all back.  They’d carry it up three flights of stairs and then call the cops to report the crime. 

So, I’d come home one night to find all my junk piled outside my door and some stone-faced police officer ready to take my statement and get a dragnet going.  And then I’d just crack under the pressure.  I’d not only admit to having dumped my own stuff, I’d own up to every bad thing I’d ever done in my whole life.  Then I’d start confessing to bad stuff I just thought about doing.  Eventually, I’d start claiming responsibility for things I didn’t even have anything to do with.  By the end of it all, I would’ve copped to the Kennedy assassination.  It would be a nightmare.

Anyway, the urban approach to dealing with my apartment was pretty much out of the question.  So, I thought maybe I’d look to my sisters for a little advice.  But both of my sisters live in rural areas, and mess management in those places is a whole other thing.  Well, actually, it’s more of a no-thing than an other thing.  People in rural areas don’t notice everything they own; they just pay attention to the stuff they’re using.  People in the country don’t deal with messes; they just ignore them. 

I mean, I could go to my little sister’s ranch, and there could be 10,000 Barbie doll heads laying in a heap in one of the pastures, and if I pointed it out and asked, “What’s that?” I can almost guarantee that the first words out of my sister’s mouth would be “What’s what?”  “That big pile of Barbie doll heads.”  “What big pile of Barbie doll heads?”  Then she’d stop and look over for a minute and just say, “Oh, those.  I don’t know.  They were here when we bought the place.”  And that’s the rural mess management approach. If you’re not using something, then it just doesn’t exist.  It doesn’t matter where it came from.  If you can’t use it and your cows aren’t choking on it, then it’s invisible.

The same thing even goes for bigger things like entire buildings.  My older sister’s place is in the mountains, and it’s got a lot of little weird old wooden buildings on it.  I was out visiting her recently and pointed to one and asked, “What’s that?” and she said, “What’s what?” (I know, typical.  I really should’ve seen that coming). “That building over there.”  “Oh, it’s a smoke house.”  “When was it built?”  “I don’t know.  It was here when we bought the place.”  “What’s in it?”  “Nothing.”  “Do you use it?”  “No.”  And that was the end of that.  I still don’t know how it happened, but that smokehouse just disappeared right before our very eyes. We weren’t using that.  So it didn’t exist.  It was like it had phased right out of our space-time continuum.  I remember rubbing my eyes several times, but it was too late.  I couldn’t see it, either.  I’d already gone rural.

By the time I’d taken the long flight back from my sister’s house, though, I’d returned to my normal self.  And it’s kind of too bad because when I walked back into my place, all I saw was the messiness.  But I also had an amazing realization:  for most of my life, I’ve been trying to use the rural mess management approach.  And it’s never worked, mostly because I’ve never actually lived in a rural area.  After all, if there’s one thing you absolutely have to have to use the rural approach to messiness, it’s a whole lot of “rurality.”  As a strategy for a one-bedroom apartment, it just isn’t that good a plan.  I mean, I really couldn’t ignore 10,000 Barbie doll heads piled on my bed no matter how hard I tried (and I don’t think I could push the creepiness factor of something like that aside for more than about 10 seconds).  And I couldn’t just disregard an old smokehouse in the middle of my living room even if it had been there when I rented the place.  It would block my view of the TV too much.

So, I finally came face-to-face with the fact that I couldn’t just dump the mess, and I couldn’t just ignore it.  The last resort of mess management was the only option I really had:  I was going to have to bite the bullet and clean my apartment up myself.  I was going to have to do my laundry and clean out the fridge and deal with all the mail.  I’d be erasing my big souvenir of having passed my big test, but then again, I figured I could always just go to school and ask them to make me a copy of the form that says I passed.  I mean, I suppose there’s something to be said for that kind of simple problem-solving.  And ultimately, too, I think a xerox copy is going to be easier to hang on my fridge than ten pounds of unopened mail, a rotten avocado, and a dirty shirt would be.  If nothing else, it’ll smell better.

These days, I try to work on my apartment whenever I can, and it’s slowly coming along little by little.  Every time I create a new oasis of clean, I get a little glimmer of hope, and I take a moment to stop and give myself a pat on the back for all the hard work I’ve done.  After all, when you rise to the challenge of cleaning up your own mess, it’s an accomplishment.  It makes you feel good about yourself.  Still, I have to admit that every now and then, I think back to my days as Assistant Deputy Chief Lawn Mowing Daughter, and I get a little teary-eyed, probably for several different reasons.  But more than anything else, those memories remind me that no matter where I go or what I do or how big of a mess I make, in my heart-of-hearts and soul-of-souls, I’m always just going to be a kid from the suburbs.  There’s always going to be some part of me that wants to abandon that mess in someone else’s apartment.  And there’s always going to be an even bigger part of me that just really, really wishes my dad would show up with his station wagon, a few hundred burlap bags…and a couple of ski masks.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy. 



© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.

Monday, May 16, 2011

It's the End of the World As We Know It

 
Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

Just this past week, I heard that the world is supposed to come to an end on May 21st.  My dad said that he heard it was May 20th, so already there’s some controversy brewing.  I don’t actually know too much about this prediction except that I found out about it when I drove past the university in my town and saw a bunch of people with signs out marching around and yelling at passing cars about it.  And of course, that struck me as a little strange.  I mean, if the world really was coming to an end, would you spend your last days marching around with a sign and yelling at cars?  I wouldn’t.  I’d go get drunk.  I think most people would go get drunk.  So, until I walk out of my house and see pile after pile of drunk people lying around, I’m going to be a little skeptical about this end of the world stuff.

From what I understand, the guy who made this prediction based it all on Bible math, too.  And apparently, that’s a type of math they don’t teach in school because most of the people who’ve tried to use it haven’t been very good at it.  The current guy actually first predicted the end of the world back in 1994, but after it didn’t happen and everyone lived, he went back and rechecked his equations.  Then he was just sort of like, “Oh, sorry, I made a mistake.”  And it was probably something simple, too, like forgetting to carry over a two or subtracting something wrong.  But this time, I think he used a calculator, so he’s pretty sure he’s got the numbers all worked out right.  I suppose there’s something comforting about that.

Of course, he isn’t the first person to predict the end of world (either time he’s done it).  The Mayan calendar says that the world will end December 21, 2012.  I’m not sure at what time.  I hope it’s sometime after 7 pm, though, so I have a chance to get in a few last reruns of Law and Order before I’m launched into oblivion.  That probably sounds flippant, but I mean, seriously, how are you supposed to plan for the end of the world?  What are you supposed to wear?  Do you need to take two forms of ID?  Will there be long lines?  Should you bring a book?  Does anyone ever take that kind of stuff into account when they’re predicting the demise of humanity?  No.  Does anyone ever publish an informational pamphlet or put together an instructional video?  No.  They announce the end of the world, and you’re just supposed to wing it from there.  Personally, I don’t think that’s a very good plan. 

The other thing that always struck me as odd about the end of world according to the Mayans is that it’s based on the end of the Mayan calendar.  Now, I’m sure it’s a perfectly good calendar, but just because it ends, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole stinking world goes up with it.  I mean, maybe the Mayan calendar maker just got tired of doing it.  Maybe one day, he walked into his office, looked around, and went, “I hate this job.  I want to learn to paint and be an artist instead.”  So, he just quit making the calendar.  Then when he got in trouble for it with his boss, he just made up some lie about how he’d finished the job because the world was going to end on the last date he’d worked out.  And then his boss was probably like, “Oh, OK, well, thanks for your years of service to the Mayan people.  Here’s a gold sundial.  Have a nice life.”  And that was that.

And have you ever noticed how people who predict the end of the world always predict it WAY far in advance of their own time?   I mean, you never turn on the news and hear, “Floyd Feeney, noted mystic soothsayer of Paramus, New Jersey, has predicted that the world will end next Thursday at 2:15 pm, Eastern Standard Time.”  No one ever predicts the end of the world within their own lifetime.  That would be creepy.  And inconvenient.  Oh, sure, there’s always a crabby next-door neighbor who sits out on the patio ranting about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket and is going to come to a crashing halt “one of these days,” but that’s really not quite the same thing. 

Personally, I think the end of the world is something that people predict far in the future so they don’t have to worry about it themselves.  After all, the height of the Mayan civilization happened around 900 A.D., and they didn’t predict the end of world (however it happened) until 2012.  So, it’s not like they spent a lot of time worrying about it themselves. I mean, what did they care?  They didn’t walk around going, “We’d better hurry up and finish those temples.  We’ve only got a thousand years left.”  It’s sort of like how I feel about the Earth’s loss of rotational momentum.  Yes, the Earth is slowing down.  And, yes, that’s going to be a big problem.  About a billion years from now.  So, what do I care?  I just need it to keep spinning for about 50 more years.  Tops.  After that, I don’t really give a rip if it spins or not.  I figure that’s pretty much how the Mayans felt about the end of the world.  It definitely fell into the category of “someone else’s problem.”

It’s funny, though, how fascinated people are with stuff like the end of the world.  But I suppose that makes sense in a way.  After all, if the world really is going to end on May 21st, I’m sure as hell not going to pay my phone bill.  And I’m going to call up my credit card companies and tell them to take a flying leap.  But I’m absolutely not doing any of that stuff unless I know for sure that the world is going to end  I mean, I know there’s a country song that says that you should live like you’re dying, but unless you really are, it’s not that great of an idea.

But maybe the thing about why we’re so into the ends of things is just because we figure that anything that has a beginning also has to have an end.  It’s hard to imagine one without the other.  I mean, people go to a movie and wonder how it’s going to end.  No one walks in and wonders if it’s going to end.  No one ever stops and thinks, “Maybe I shouldn’t go into this theatre.  Maybe this movie won’t end.  Ever.  And then I’ll have to stay here.  For the rest of my life.”  No one would ever go to the movies if it involved taking that kind of a risk.  Luckily, our little human brains just don’t think that way.  If something begins, then it eventually ends.  That’s the deal.

And it’s amazing how much of our everyday lives is built on that idea.  I think that’s one of the reasons why immortality isn’t such a great thing when you really stop to think about it.  People always say stuff like how sad it would be to be immortal because all your friends would die before you did and because the love of your life wouldn’t last for your whole life.  They tend to think of the big, emotional stuff.  I wouldn’t want to be immortal because of the little things.  I mean, the total percentage of my immortal life that I would have to spend waiting in line to renew my driver’s license would be staggering, and I can’t imagine what my VISA bill would look like after two or three hundred years.  And it just scares me to think how much useless stuff I would buy over the course of a millennium or two.  Someone would walk into my house a hundred years from now, pick up object, and ask, “Is this a priceless antique?” and I’d have to say, “No, it’s a Slap Chop.  Would you like me to dice you an onion?”

And work would just be hell.  At staff meetings, I’d hear the other employees whispering, “She never has any new ideas.”  “Well, what do you expect?  She’s been with the company for 350 years.”  The worst part would be that I’d never have enough money to retire.  I’d go in to see a financial advisor, and he’d say, “How much do you have in your retirement accounts at this point?”  So, I’d show him my numbers, and he’d look them over and say, “Well, if you want to retire in five years, I think you’ve got plenty of…wait a sec, it says here on your form that you’re immortal.”  “Yeah, that’s right.”  “Oh, well, then this isn’t going to be nearly enough.”  I mean, really, how do you finance eternity?  So, I’d have this suckwad job…and I’d have to do it forever.  That really is not my idea of bliss.

We also seem to have this idea that immortal beings are ageless.  They aren’t.  They’re deathless.  That’s a different thing.  There’s nothing saying that just because you don’t die you don’t age.  And that would be terrible.  I’m in my late 40s now, and just thinking about exercise wears me out.  Imagine what I’d be like in my late 400s.  I’d barely be able to drag myself off the couch…except that I’d have to so I could go to my suckwad job.  Finally, one day I’d just call in sick, and the secretary would say, “And why can’t you come in today?”  “Because I’m almost 500 years old, ya jackwagon.  I’m tired.”  And then she’d cover the receiver, but I’d hear, “She’s so crabby all the time.”  “Well, don’t take it personally.  According to her file, she’s been that way since the late Victorian period.”

Probably the worst part of being immortal, though, is that the neighborhood kids would constantly be trying to kill you.  They wouldn’t believe that you were really immortal, and everyone would want to be the one who finally proved it.   You’d be out in your yard, and some kid would come veering off the street and try to run you over.  The more imaginative ones would try to blow up your house. The next-door neighbors would probably try to poison you.  And all to no avail.  Which would, of course, only make them try harder.

So, that would be life as an immortal person  You’d have to drag yourself off your couch to go to a sucky job that you could never retire from, you’d have to sit through any number of insulting staff meetings, and then you’d go home to a house full of Slap Chops, Showtime Rotisserie Ovens, Miracle Blade sets, Magic Bullets, and assorted sizes of ShamWows.  You’d be so wrinkly that people would often mistake you for a gigantic Shar-Pei, and you’d spend a fair amount of time at home tweezing grizzled gray billy goat hairs off your chin.  And every time someone knocked at the door, it would be some teenager with a gun or a knife or baseball bat who came over to try to kill you.  You’d spend most of your free time in the hospital, and trust me, no health insurance company would touch you with a ten-foot pole.

So, that’s the thing:  the way we live is completely based on the idea of a beginning and an end.  You’re born, you go to school and learn some stuff, you piddletinker around for a while and pretend you’re an artist, then you get a job, you piddletinker around for a while and pretend you’re a businessperson, then you retire, and eventually you die.  That’s how it’s set up to work.  A beginning, an end, and some stuff in between.  That’s life as we know it, and we have a very hard time picturing it going any other way.

And maybe when all is said and done, that’s what makes the idea of the end of the world so strange.  We get that things end.  In fact, we expect them to.  We just don’t expect all of them to end all at once.  And that’s what makes the idea of everything ending at one time as unbelievable as the idea of things never ending at all.  So, no, I don’t really think that the world is going to end on May 21st.  But then again, as my father always says, “Plan for the worst.  Hope for something slightly less horrible.”   So, I guess this week would be a good time to go out and treat yourself to something special just in case the world actually is going to end on Saturday.  And while you’re at it, you might as well pick up 10 or 20 bottles of wine.  Personally, I’d recommend a nice pinot noir.  I’ve always heard it goes well with an apocalypse.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy. 



© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.