We Interrupt This Blog With A Call From My Son

I have custom ringtones for a few people in my mobile phone. Scooter's ringtone is the Transformers theme. He's into Transformers, big time. If I get a call from my son it is usually about one of three things: He saw a really cool Transformer, he wants to to to Walmart to get a Transformer, he wants to know what is for supper.

Today he's out with my father for their Saturday Go-to-Breakfast/Go-to-Walmart excursion. Sometimes they go to a movie. They do this every Saturday. This means every Saturday I get calls from Scooter.

[Ringtone blares: "Transformers! More than meets the eye! Transformers! Robots in disguise!"]
"Hello?"
"Hey, Mother?"
"Yes?"
"I just  saw a Cliff Jumper! You know what it is? It's red! It's a repaint of Bumblebee. It's usually just a repaint of Bumblebee, but it's a Cliff Jumper! It's freakin' awesome!"
"That's great, Son."
"I love you, Mother." 
[click]

I  know a lot about Transformers these days. More than I want to know. But he likes them, and there are certainly worse things he could be enthusiastic about. Like girls. I'll take a 12-year-old toy geek over a 12-year-old horndog any day.

["Transformers! More than meets the eye! Transfor–"]
"Hello?"
"Hey, Mother?"
"Yes?"
"I talked to Jenny. She didn't get me that Scorponok. She wasn't shopping for Christmas. She just found it in the socks at T.J.Maxx and wanted to know if I had one."
"OK."
"That means I can get the cool red and black repaint Scorponok! Hurrah!"
"If that's what you like, Son."
"Hey, Mother? Thank you for getting me Swerve."
"You're welcome."
"I love you, Mother."
[click]

Arguably, he's spoiled. Between me and my parents, he gets most of what he wants in terms of Transformers. But in his defense, he doesn't ask for much else. He isn't into brand clothing (yet), he isn't constantly asking for a PS3 or a Wii or some hundred-dollar new video game. He's never once suggested that what we really need is a 15-foot plasma screen TV. And admittedly, I love to get him the damn things. He gets so excited! It doesn't matter if I like them or not. My pleasure is hearing him talk about them. I do worry about myself though. I've lately started to think Optimus Prime is kinda hot. You know, for a giant alien robot.

["Transformers! More than meets–"]
"Hello?"
"Hey, Mother?"
"Yes?"
"Do you have stuff to make spaghetti for supper?"
"Yep."
"Yes! I love you, Mother."
[click]

Love you too, Scooter.

Everything You Thought Is Wrong, But That's OK

Who can be certain in this life? We get fed a bunch of nonsense as children and then slowly watch all those beliefs get torn down as the years go by. Ideas like lifelong friendship, blood being thicker than water, good triumphing over evil, true love never dying...horseshit. Sure, sometimes it works out like that, but the reality is that you get burned a lot by banking on those ideas. It's enough to make you cynical if you let it. You just need to develop a more pragmatic view of things. Don't expect so much of people. Don't expect too much of yourself. We humans may be the "paragon of animals," as Shakespeare suggested, but don't get caught up in the paragon part of that phrase and forget the animals part.

1. Friends come and go. Friends are transient. The likelihood of lifelong friendship between two people is rare. The likelihood of lifelong friendship between more than two people is nearly impossible. This is just my opinion, but it's an informed opinion. I've seen friendships destroyed over things like jobs or politics. I know that your best friend will screw your wife under the least bit of opportunity or provocation. I know that your best friend will abandon you for somebody "cooler," even when you're grown up and think you are beyond that kind of shallowness. Your friendship might even end due to something less traumatic, like a move that puts distance between you until the friendship becomes more like an acquaintanceship. It happens. I used to lament this kind of thing, not just if one of my friendships was broken, but even when I saw someone else's friendship suffer. Now I see it differently. Friendship is like your favorite television series. It may have a long run, but in time it will probably get canceled. If you're lucky you'll get repeats of the best episodes now and then, and you can always remember those episodes fondly. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't give friendship your all just because it might not last forever. Of course you should. Then if it breaks or fades you'll be in good practice to be somebody else's friend for a while.

2. There is a fine line between love and hate. This is what you get with families. You are born into a family and almost forced to develop love bonds with them due to blood. It's automatic. But the intense love and familiarity that comes with blood relationships breeds opportunity for enmity. The worst fights and most painful estrangements you will see are between siblings. Usually it's money. Property, inheritance. It brings out the worst in people. And because they know you so well, they know best how to hurt you. Maybe that's why the poorest families seem to be the closest. That is, until you have two brothers in love with the same woman. Your family is your family, but figure out that they are no better or worse than anyone else in the world just because they share your DNA.

3. True love is as fragile and breakable as a china cup. An interesting fact about a china cup is that you can turn it upside down on the floor, stand on the base of it and it will hold the weight of an average person without breaking. It's that strong and amazing. But you can tap it carelessly with a teaspoon and break it into a million pieces. It's that tender. And that's how love is. Usually it will endure the heaviest burdens with ease. I think this is because we have a plan for those things. We realize those huge burdens are often beyond our control, and even imagine ahead of time what to do if one of these burdens falls upon us. But it's those everyday knocks that do us in. That little chip. That hairline crack that goes unrepaired. The careless misuse of love until it is barely holding together is its undoing. One day, it will no longer hold the tea and it will shatter. Yes, yes, some people enjoy a lifetime of use from their china cup, and that's great and beautiful. But most people are careless with their teaspoons. The good thing is, you only have to break one to learn your lesson most of the time.

4. The ultimate myth common to  all these situations and relationship is the idea that good triumphs over evil. It does sometimes, but you can't count on it. Good gets screwed a lot. I think I have figured out why. The assholes of the world spend a lifetime working the system to their own advantage. They bend the rules until they nearly break, they subvert the system, they burn both ends of the candle, they leave somebody else holding the bag. They get very skilled at it. It's a constant mental exercise. Meanwhile, those of us who try to do good are usually doing what seems most natural. We don't think about it. So the evil people of the world run on cleverness and the good people of the world run on instinct and emotion. Clever usually wins. If you want to even the odds you have to get smart, and the other side is already smarter than you are. They've had more practice. But it's OK. You know you're right to do the right things. Just heal up and move on. And get smarter.

God

I'm an Agnostic. I think. What I mean is, I don't believe in God the way most people do. I just never bought the all-knowing creator image. It never made sense to me, and still doesn't. And I'm educated and intelligent enough to know that evolution is real. That doesn't mean a God can't also exist, but it doesn't exist the way they taught me at Sunday School.

Growing up in the South, believe me, I had plenty of religious education. As an adult, I have found it illuminating to learn about the belief systems of others around the world, from various Christian denominations, to Buddists and Hindus, or Muslims and Jews. I find religion to be a fascinating subject and I'm not against it at all.

I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure nobody has it quite right. Not 100 percent. But I appreciate that we seem to be trying to get it right. No, not "organized religion" so much. Organized religion just wants converts and needs to be "right" all the time. I mean individuals. Whether or not God is real is beside the point. Mankind has created religion as a means to transcend. It gives us something to aspire to, guidelines for good living. Who can dispute the wisdom of The Golden Rule or the Four Nobel Truths? It gives me great hope that we humble humans have devised such guidelines and attempt to follow them, however poorly we may do so at times.

The Hindus have a greeting, "Namaste." Roughly translated, it means "The god in me honors the god in you." I have come to embrace this idea as the single tenet in my own personal religion. God does exist in every one of us. You see it in those people who give and love without asking for anything in return. You see it in human creativity, in literature and art and music. You feel when it is near you, and you feel its absence. We have the Devil in us too, and it's easy to spot when it rears its ugly head. The trick is cultivating god and choking down the devil. The choices we make and with whom we associate determine our success in that endeavor.

So no, I don't believe in a God that has the magic powers to bestow happiness and prosperity upon us nor take it away. I believe we have that power in us. So go be God today. Namaste.

None of Your Business: The Path to Happiness

There are things about which a person should care. Their job, their family, their health, their home. The essentials. In fact, we should care deeply about those things at the expense of everything else. Regrettably, we spend too much time giving a damn about stupid things at the expense of the essentials.

I blame my favorite thing in the world, the internet. Every day we are bombarded with things to care about that we would otherwise never even know if not for the world wide web. Oh sure, TV can bear some blame too, but the inundation of "news" and other minutia we get from the internet may be the single largest source of distress the world has witnessed since the Black Plague. We simply know too much and most if it is worthless. And "social networking" in the form of Facebook and internet forums is yet another flea on a dog's ass that keeps us scratching ourselves raw. We give a damn about stuff that is not important at all, like Some Fool's post or any number of things are None of Our Business.

So let's clear the slate a bit, shall we?

1. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize
Why do you care? Some Scandinavian committee arbitrarily gives out awards every year which do nothing to create peace nor destroy it. This award is no more significant to the lives of you and me than an Academy Award or the Piquipsy Rotary Club Man of the Year. I suppose unless you are from Piquipsy. Also, it's their committee. They get to pick. Therefore, it is None of Your Business. Stop caring.

2. The News
Don't watch it. I gave up watching the daily news a few years ago, to my great happiness. Sure, I still hear about things. Random stories of interest will appear on my home page, or Some Fool will post a link to something he gives a great big damn about, and I'll know it then. Not that it's any of my business to know it. And I promise you, if something really big happens, like a terrorist attack or a dramatic change in hemlines in the spring fashion forecast, you'll know it. So stop watching the news. Go have sex or watch a ball game. You'll be much happier.

3. Some Fool
I used to be like you and care very deeply about what Some Fool thinks of me on the internet or down the street. I have a long-standing and deeply-seated need to be accepted and loved. This has not served me well and I am trying to overcome it. I have figured out that what Some Fool thinks of me privately, or even says about me among his or her friends is actually None of My Damn Business. People are free to think whatever they like about me or you, and rarely will anything they say about us have any real affect on our lives. You know why? Nobody gives a damn about it except you and me. So why should we?

4. World Peace
Are you crazy? It's not gonna happen. Ever. You can fret and care and worry yourself sick about what the French think of Americans or what the Israelis and Palestinians think of each other or if the Italians elected another porn star to Parliament, but it isn't anything you can control. I understand that you worry you won't have as good a time on your trip to Paris if the French hate the U.S., or that the price of oil may rise if there is trouble in the Middle East. But it is still None of Your Business. We have the mistaken impression that the world is small, and it is not. It is big and full of all kinds of people. They are not under your control. Do you want them minding Your Business? Quid pro quo. They stay out of Yours. You stay out of Theirs.

You know that cliché Serenity Prayer? The one where you pray for the wisdom to know the difference about things you can control and things you can't? A cliché may be annoying, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Figure out for yourself what things you can actually control. Those are the things you care about. The rest is None of Your Business. Don't worry about it.

Zero Tolerance for Lazy Thinking

In the past week or so we've seen a Cub Scout and an Eagle Scout suspended from school for carrying knives. Poor little Zachary Christie, 6, faces 45 days in alternative school for bringing his eating utensil to campus. It was one of those spoon/fork/knife combos. He wanted to eat his lunch with it. And now Matthew Whalen, 17, is being suspended for 20 days for having a 2-inch knife inside a survival kit in his car at school. You see, these boys are clearly terrorists in the Zero Tolerance world of today's schools. Never mind that Zachary is an A student who wears a shirt and tie voluntarily, and never mind that Matthew is an honored senior who is already a soldier in the United States Army with aspirations of going to West Point. These children are a menace.

Zero Tolerance policies do not get the results they aim to get. They do nothing to prevent a violent attack on a fellow student. Those still happen every day. They do nothing to stop a person from committing an act of assault or murder if that is truly their intent. People with criminal minds do not follow laws, so your Zero Tolerance policy means nothing to them. So what are they for in the first place?

The real reason for ZT policies is to spare administrators and teachers the job of using their brains and assessing each situation on its own merits. It's the same sort of one size fits all justice that created the "three strikes" laws that removed judicial discretion from the hands of judges and placed it in the hands of bureaucrats. It's lazy thinking, and simply a way to disown any responsibility of leadership. It fails to prevent anything bad and punishes children who are no more a terrorist than I am.

Wait...I do carry a pocket knife.

UnaMUSEd

Yeah, yeah. It's been ever since I wrote anything. But since I'm experiencing yet another ban from a sports forum, I'll try to get back into the habit. I mean, I can't let down all seven of my followers.

Over here to your left is Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. She's not much help. I've never been much of a poet, though I think every writer wishes to be such. Perhaps Clio, the muse of history, would be a better choice. I suppose blogging is a sort of record of history in a way, though not likely a history many people are very interested in learning.

But I will endeavor to persevere with or without the help of a muse to inspire me. Sometimes you just have to be your own muse.

Part of the Problem

It used to be that friends and family only harassed you by telephone or with unannounced visits. My own family tends to just walk in because I almost never lock my door. Then I get greeted with statements like, "You're not dressed!" That's right. I might have been had you rang first, but you didn't. Now when I remember to lock the door they still arrive unannounced and pound until I let them in. The question then is, invariably, "Why is your door locked?" To keep you out.

But thanks to the wonder of technology, you can and will be harassed through email, text and instant message. Chronic harassers prefer these methods because they can't be rejected. You'll never actually block your dear friends' or your mother's emails, so they have a clear shot at you. Chain emails are my favorite, by which I mean they are the things that make me want to spill blood. Not mine either.

Guardian Angels, Friendship Roses and Good Luck Prayers clutter my inbox daily, all of them urging me to forward them on to at least 10 other unsuspecting schmucks, all of whom have probably already received this same email from somebody else. A few of them even urge me to forward the thing back to the person who sent it to me! I can't imagine such an idea. I didn't want the first one, so why in the hell would I send it on to 10 other people with the hope that all 10 of them will send the same damn thing back to me again?

It's not that I don't appreciate the thought that I'm included in someone's "forward to" list. Some of the emails are even cute, but most of them are stupid and none of them will I forward on to another individual. I will not do it because I have enough people and situations in my life that force my hand, and I will not be ordered around by an email. Threaten me with disaster and financial ruin if you must, but it's getting deleted. The other day I got one that said, "If you don't forward this message you are part of the problem." Good! Delete.

I've called my T-shirt guy and he's screening me a shirt that reads "I Am Part of the Problem." I'll take a picture of it and send it to all my friends and family with the plea that they forward it along to everyone in their address folder. If they refuse to do it, well, they're just part of the solution.

Left Out

I don't drink coffee. More than just not liking it, I am put off by it. Years ago I could at least say that I liked the aroma of coffee if not the taste, but when I was pregnant 13 years ago my sense of smell was heightened to such an extreme that even scents I liked before became noxious. Coffee was one of those, and I have never recovered from it.

The problem this poses for me is that I am totally left out of the Great Coffee Social that seems to thrill the rest of the world. All the time people are "going for coffee," or chatting it up on their coffee break or talking about how you "just don't want to see me before I've had my coffee," and it makes me feel like a loser. I think, "Wow...I wish people were scared to see me before I had coffee! That must kick ass." Hell, "Coffee" is the first entry on one of my favorite blogs ever, Stuff White People Like. See how important it is?

I've tried coffee every conceivable way, and it just doesn't work for me, so there I am, the one non-coffee drinker of the bunch. Oh, I've tried to fake it. I've done the hot chocolate instead. I've even gone exotic with a vanilla soy steamer or something equally ridiculous, but it's like I'm the one guy drinking a Fuzzy Navel when everybody else is doing Jåger Bombs. It's just pussy. You don't do it.

But the worst are the incredulous looks I get when I say I don't drink coffee. It's not astonishment even. It's more like horror. "You don't drink coffee? Are you kidding me?" No. Not. I'm just a vanilla soy drinking loser. Sorry to offend.

This is a manageable malady though. In time people come to accept my deficiency and some even find it charming in that "isn't she weird?" kind of way. I can live with it. I just have to remind myself never to mention that I also don't like Led Zeppelin. That would really mark me as a total freak, and I just don't know if I can deal.

Sexy Weather

Don't let the map of Ohio fool you. It was just too good not to use, but rest assured nobody has sexier weather than Alabama and no people get a bigger boner for the weather than people in the South.

I know what you're saying. We don't get blizzards down here and we rarely suffer major floods. It's true, our weather is fairly temperate. What that means is any weather incident is newsworthy and likely to cause great excitement and widespread panic. For example:

Heat and Drought
Amazingly enough, Alabama can go eight weeks straight with no rainfall and yet maintain a humidity level of 100 percent. This is typically accompanied by dramatic reminisces of the "Drought of '64" in which the earth was so parched and cracked you could stare straight down into the yawning mouth of Hell itself. It is also marked by comments on how dead the grass is, water use restrictions and fantastic weather graphics on the nightly news indicating the Deadly Heat Index. Eventually, it will rain, and this is always celebrated with a rash of car accidents as soon as the first drops of moisture hit the asphalt.

Tornados
It is hard to get sexier than a 250-mph funnel of doom. This typically causes a frenzied circle jerk among the weather persons in the state. All regular television programming is suspended on a night in which tornadoes are forecast so each station can run competing maps of their Mega-Doppler 3000 Accu-Cast. There is exciting talk of "hook echoes" and discussions of "straight-line winds" and "super-cells." Midway through the night, the weathermen will remove their sport coats, loosen their neckties and roll up their sleeves to better indicate their tireless efforts to bring us the news that "no tornadoes have yet been spotted on the ground, but folks we've got a long night ahead of us." My feeling is that these guys are all reciting voodoo incantations in front of their radar, praying for the worst to happen.

Snow and Ice
As exciting as a tornado is, nothing quite gets the juices flowing for an Alabamian like the threat of winter precipitation. This is of course because we rarely get any significant snow or ice and even the smallest amount will close schools and interstates and any state office, because God knows a bureaucrat will look for any excuse not to work. The most interesting thing that happens is the Bread and Milk Run on the local grocery stores where old ladies will tussel like mud wrestlers over a loaf of rye that they would never normally ingest. For some reason, people in the South feel that any winter storm can be weathered as long as one has enough bread and milk. I've always thought that if one is to be snowed in for a week and possibly frozen to death it would be more enjoyable to have lots of soft drinks, snack cakes and bacon. You know, something worth having for a last meal. Whole wheat and 2-percent just doesn't fire me up.

I don't watch the weather. I don't have to. I can walk outside to see if it is hot, my mother will call me at 2 a.m. if there is the possibilty of tornadoes, and if I walk into the Piggly Wiggly to find all the bread is gone I know that somebody mentioned snow. So I buy Twinkies.

Birthday

In a little over a month, provided I live that long, I'll be 39. I'm not particularly looking forward to it, though I'm not really dreading it either.

What is a birthday? I was excited to turn 16, but it was because that was the age for a drivers license. I was excited to be 18 because that meant I could vote. Typically, I was excited to be 21 because that meant I could legally buy alcohol. Beyond reaching those landmark years of increased privilege, birthdays don't really count for anything significant other than the passage of time.

This doesn't mean you don't notice them. When I turned 36 I fell into a significant depression due to a number of things, but as the year progressed I realized that a big part of it was that I dreaded my 37th birthday. I wondered why. Even turning "the big 3-0" hadn't bothered me at all. Perhaps it was because, at 36, you can still claim to be in your mid-30s, but at 37 you have moved into the late 30s area. And then there was that damned Marianne Faithful song, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan: "At the age of 37, she realized she'd never drive through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair..." Lucy ended up in the nuthouse, which is probably where I need to be half the time, but the good news is that once I actually turned 37 I was over it. As it turned out, it wasn't such a big deal after all, Paris notwithstanding.

So now here comes 39. People seem to put a lot of stock in this one. I have an aunt who used to tell people for years that she was 39, even when she was 60. "Thirty-nine and holding," she'd say. I think I may take the opposite approach and tell people that I'm FORTY-nine, so they'll be compelled to say, "My God, you look so fantastic!" and I can reply, "Thank you, yes I do."