The New Year's Eve Post

New Year's Eve...is generally not my favorite holiday.

However, I think I managed to find a way around the sadness that was threatening: I made a long list of things I wanted to accomplish today, mostly in the realm of housecleaning and "starting the new year off right" types of stuff.

I washed dishes, cleaned the bathroom, changed sheets, did laundry (even all the stray laundry I'd stowed in the closet til "later"--dust ruffles, cleaning rags, the sheet I took down from my bedroom window last thing before leaving the house). I swept and mopped floors, cleaned the catbox, dragged all the flattened-out packing boxes down to the dumpster. I rearranged the hall closet, straightened out a couple of drawers, vacuumed the whole place. While all this was happening, I put a pot roast in the oven, and so I had a nice New Year's Eve dinner for one; then, once those dishes were cleaned up, I sat down to think about what I wanted this next year to be.

I am going to treat myself better this year. I am going to find things to do that will help me pull my head out of my navel; I am going to stop putting everybody else's wishes in front of mine. I am going to take care of myself, by MY standards--more of what I need to do, less of what everyone else says I ought to do.

I am going to create more. I am going to paint more, draw more, write more, sew more, crochet more, scribble more. Sometimes, I am even going to let the so-called "important" things wait, while I do the things that are important to me.

I am going to be kinder to myself. I am going to be a little bit stricter with myself, in some ways, but it will be for my own good--my REAL own good, instead of all those things that are SUPPOSED to be "for my own good". I am going to start treating myself as well as I treat the other people around me.

I am going to stop complaining. It's a horrible habit; I try to make it funny, when I do it, but complaining is complaining and all it does is make me see the bad in a situation. If I can't do anything about a situation, I'm going to be quiet; if I CAN do something about it, I'm going to actually DO it.

I am going to stop...I am going to TRY to stop assuming that everyone around me sees me as this pathetic, pitiable loser. This one's going to be hard. I bring a lot of it on myself, talking about things that are going on in my life, but obviously that's not having the effect I'd like it to have; ideally, I'd like for people around me to see me as strong, a survivor, somebody who's made some dumb choices, granted, but who has overcome and learned from them. I very, very much don't get the impression that that's how I'm seen. I don't know if that's an error of perception, or if people actually DO see me as a walking one-woman version of the Chicago Cubs. I'm a lot of things, but I'm really not pitiable.

I am going to stop being so scared of everything. I am going to finally let go of my sense of panic--another task which I suspect will be much, much harder than it sounds.

I am going to learn to enjoy my life.

I'm going to learn HTML, so I can pretty up this blog for realz. Templates are lame. :)

Happy New Year to all of you; and thank you all for being here with me through this year. It's been a wild ride, to say the least, and I appreciate everyone's support through the highs and lows. Here's to a wonderful 2008!!!

Arrgh.

I know it's fashionable to bash the traditional media for not being connected to the "new media"--by which they mean, electronic and viral media--and far be it from me to jump on the bandwagon...

...but man, they're gonna have to do better than this (seen on tonight's chyron on Fox News Chicago (WFLD) 10:00 newscast):

(something something) "...Joining the 'Blagosphere'".

If the story had been about Illinois politics, I could see it as an intentional, albeit hackneyed, pun (for my out-of-state friends, our governor's name is Blagojevich, and he's commonly referred to (among many, many less-flattering names) as "Blago", pronounced "bloggo", hence "Blago-sphere", ha ha freakin' ha)...

...but the story had absolutely NOTHING to do with Illinois. The story was about student journalists in Texas who were partnering with Fox News to deliver "new-media" content regarding the primaries and the 2008 election. The word "Illinois" was not mentioned even once during the story.

All of which leads me to these inescapable conclusions: not only does the guy in charge of creating the chyron text for the 10 PM newscast not know how to spell "blog", but he hasn't seen it out of the punny, old-media context to realize that "blagosphere" is not the correct spelling of the term; furthermore, either the individual doing the proofreading for the chyron guy fell down on the job (excusable, I guess) or he/she doesn't know the proper spelling of the term EITHER (just completely, utterly SCARY.)

Sometimes it's nearly impossible NOT to take a ride on the bandwagon.

Trends That Need To Stop, Now

I'll assume that it was that angry little boy in the middle of the top row--Stewie Griffin, of Family Guy fame--that started the whole trend. And yes, yes, babies have big heads. So ONE tiny tot with a football-shaped giant head and teeny-tiny disproportionately small body...yeah, ONE is cute. ONE is funny. ONE is....

Enough.

But then we had Franny, of "Franny's Feet" (top left). She not only has a big head, she has little stick-legs, which make me wonder how she doesn't topple over.

And then the "Super Readers", the four principal characters of "Super Why" ("Whyatt", top right, and then the middle row: "Princess Presto", "Alpha Pig", and "Wonder Red". For some reason, Wonder Red is the one who ticks me off the most; maybe it's that ridiculous spandex outfit and those roller blades, or maybe it's just that they didn't come up with a better superhero name for her than "Wonder Red". If I was going to be a superhero, even an enormous-headed juvenile one wearing spandex, I'd demand something a little flashier in the naming department than "Wonder" anything. But mostly it's their big-headedness that annoys me about these four...at least, as far as their looks. Their substance is even worse, as we'll get to in a moment.)

Then we get into the realm of the REALLY ridiculous. It's one thing to have giant-headed babies and tots, but then we get into the realm of the Big-Headed Tweens. (On the ends, Maya and Miguel, twins, of the show of the same name; and in the middle, the aptly-named Bratz. My opinion of THAT particular adolescent phenomenon is best left unmentioned; let's just say that any trend which results in little girls trying to dress like sluts-in-training does nothing for my estimation of children's television as a whole. I mean, LOOK at the outfits on those little bimbettes. If I had a preadolescent daughter, there would be no Bratz in my house, based on fashion alone--to say nothing of instilling poor spelling habits. It's one thing to use "z" for "s" on something meant for adults, who supposedly know the correct way to pluralize; children, on the other hand, need to see MORE correct usage, not LESS.)

If the large heads of these characters signified greater intelligence, even THAT would be a mitigating circumstance; but with the exception of Stewie, that's just not the case. Franny is probably the least-offensive of the little-kids' group; "Franny's Feet" is a cute show...too cute, if you ask me. It's full of squeaking butterflies and exclamations like "Fran-tastic!" and "Zammy! (apparently an expression of approval--whatever.) It's meant for very young kids, though, and it's far from the worst thing out there; it's interested in diversity, nature, and social skills, so if those things have to be cute-ified for the kids to like them...well, cute-ify away.

That's the good. Then there's the bad... "Super Why" (I refuse to use its official name, which is "Super WHY!", with the inappropriate caps and the exclamation point and the whole works) purportedly teaches kids reading and decoding skills via retellings of well-known fairy-tales.

Sounds like a fairly noble task, doesn't it? Well, there's a small problem: they completely and utterly screw up the fairy tales!!! I mean, an actual STATED part of the plot line involves "changing the story". Here's an example:

The setup for each show starts the same; one of the four main characters--Whyatt (oh, god, the spelling!), Pig, Red Riding Hood, and Princess Pea--encounters a problem in "Storybrook Village", which is where all fairy-tale characters live. In one episode, for example, a character called "Wolfy" (a baby Big Bad Wolf, obviously) keeps playing tricks on Pig, and Pig wants him to stop. He could just ask, of course--but of course, if the obvious answer took place immediately, we'd have no show. So he has Whyatt summon the Super Readers to the "Book Club", using a cell phone (of course) so he can explain the problem they need to solve. At this point the Super Readers transform into their alter egos-- "Super Why", "Alpha Pig", "Wonder Red", and "Princess Presto"--and fly their "Why Flyers" into a fairy-tale book, to see how a famous character escaped a similar situation. In this case, they fly into "Little Red Riding Hood" because (as Super Why explains, in case the parallel isn't obvious enough) the wolf in that story kept tricking Red Riding Hood.

Now first of all, the overlap between the actual fairy-tale and the framing device of the "Super Readers" being characters themselves...If I was four years old, I think I might be confused by this, is all I'm saying. (If Little Red Riding Hood is Wonder Red, and this is supposedly her story, then doesn't she already know how it turns out? Couldn't she just tell them how it ends? Okay, granted, I'm thirty-seven years old, not five; of course, every five-year-old I've ever encountered has been pretty good at picking up on paradoxes like that. Fine. Suspend disbelief, whatever.)

Here's where things go wrong. The Super Readers introduce all sorts of unrelated elements into the story, so that their characters can display their word skills. This usually SORTA sticks to the real story--for example, Princess Presto uses her "spelling power" to spell the word "BOAT" so the Super Readers can get across the river to Grandma's house. Every character has their role; Alpha Pig helps kids identify letters, Wonder Red deals in rhyming words, and Princess Presto demonstrates how letters go together to make words. Fine. But Super Why is supposed to help kids learn comprehension, and how to choose the right word that helps the sentence make sense--to me, the most important skill of all--yet when they get to "Super Why, with the power to READ" that they screw everything up.

Super Why, with the aid of a pen called the "Why Writer", makes changes in important parts of the story--like changing the "Big" "Bad" Wolf into a "Little", "Good" Wolf--and then Little Red Riding Hood asks the wolf to "stop tricking people". And the wolf--now good instead of bad--agrees to stop, in exchange for being made Big again.

At the end of the show, to tie everything together, the Super Readers--who, throughout the show, have been collecting something called "Super Letters"--plug their "Super Letters" into the "Super Duper Computer", which rearranges the letters and gives them the "Super Story Answer"--the word or phrase that is the solution to their problem. In this case, the solution is "STOP"--which, they extrapolate, means that Pig should ask Wolfy to "stop" tricking him. And of course, this solves the problem, and the end of the show features all four characters doing a hip-hop dance to a song which includes the lyrics "We changed the story/We solved the problem/We worked together so Hip Hip Hooray!"

"Changed the story" is right--like, to the point of unrecognizable, watered-down pap. The difference between the REAL fairy tales and their "Super Why" equivalents is the difference between fresh cold chocolate milk and tepid slightly-sour skim milk; between a plate of chocolate-chip cookies and a carob-coated sugar-free fiber bar. Not only are the original versions much, much tastier, you can't even necessarily argue that the redone versions are better for you. I haven't seen a single episode of this show that didn't suck all the life out of the featured fairy-tale--you should see what the hell they did to "Hansel and Gretel", for mercy's sake! And since one of the stated aims of this show is to foster a love of reading, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot--or maybe in this case, a better description would be "gently dropping a blob of room-temperature mush on their shoe". If I was a little kid, and I saw this show, no way would I want to read about Little Red Riding Hood--because I'd have the impression of it being a wishy-washy story about asking people to be nice. And seriously, what five-year-old wants to read THAT?

I'm not sure how this went from a diatribe about ugly cartoon characters to a rant on the state of kids' television--but there it is. And I don't even HAVE kids. I shudder to think how finicky I'd be about television if MY kids were the ones watching it, instead of some hypothetical kids I don't even know. (Of course, there's a good chance I'd be exposed as a total hypocrite; you all would be sitting at your computers reading my judgements on PBS shows, and meanwhile my five-year-old and my three-year-old would be sitting in pajamas from three days ago, eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos and drinking Kool-Aid while watching Maury Povich while I played World of Warcraft, or something. Yeah, that's an exaggeration--but it's surely easy to be all high-minded about other peoples' parenting choices when I haven't got to make any of those choices myself!)

Anyway: Dear animators: Big-headed cartoon characters are ugly. Please stop. Thank you very much. Sincerely, Gladys.

Tomorrow: the New Years' entry.

File Under: Needs Killin'

The highlighted text, for those of you who don't have your microscopes handy (dang, thought I had zoomed it enough):

"GARLAND, Texas--- A 6-year-old girl who won four tickets to a Hannah Montana concert with an essay falsely claiming her dad died in Iraq isn't going to the show after all."

(story continues--she won tickets in an essay contest, etc etc)

"The girl's mother had told Club Libby Lu officials the girl's father died April 17 in a roadside bombing, spokeswoman Robyn Caulfield said. Mom Priscilla Ceballos admitted later Friday the essay and the military information were untrue.

'We did the essay, and that's what we did to win. We did whatever we could do to win,' Ceballos told KDFW-TV of Dallas on Friday."

Hands down, no questions asked, this mom wins the 2007 inaugural Nobel "Totally Going To Hell" Prize.

Glad That's Over

I have to say, that was...You know, I am WELL aware that I have no right to be unhappy. But man, I really, really was. I just wanted to come home last night, and the night before...

Not that I didn't enjoy the company of the various relatives at my aunt-in-law's house--particularly the ones my age and younger. My various semi-cousins are really fun people, and their kids, who were toddlers or babies in bouncy-seats last time I saw them, are now ACTUAL LITTLE HUMANS, running around being wild (three-year-old boys) or little six-year-old girls showing off their twirly-skirted dress and Christmas toys. Christmas is one of the few times I think Hey, maybe I COULD do this having-kids thing...then I think, what crack am I smoking? Because first of all, see, that requires a partner, or at least someone willing to loan me a turkey baster....

And it's not that I didn't take some pleasure in working with my mom on the potato dish we'd promised to bring along, which necessitated an entire Christmas Eve of cooking and preparing(the end result of which was oh-my-god delicious, if you ask me, much like the rest of the dinner...My aunt-in-law's house is a WONDERFUL place to spend the holidays if you like to eat. I highly recommend it).

But Christmas Eve at Mom's, when it got to be bedtime, and I tucked myself into that same room where I've spent all the failures of my adult life, and thought about JP and what might have been (again, for the four-billionth time)...

Or on Christmas morning, when I feigned enthusiasm for clothes I already know I'm never going to wear, because Christmas is the time my mother tries most subtly to change me, even though I know it's done (mostly) out of love...

Or facing up to the fact that my mom is reaching the state my grandmother reached eventually, where the super-strict standards of housekeeping start to slip because she doesn't see the dust, or it hurts her back too much to bend down to scrub, or any number of other signs that remind me how old, exactly, she's getting...

Or when answering the innocent question "Oh, so you moved?" from people who hadn't heard the story, or listening to Mom practically BRAGGING, now that it's over, that I'd survived living on the West Side..."But she never had a problem the whole time she was there, surprisingly," I heard her tell someone...this from the same woman who begged me for four years to tell her family that I was still living in Rogers Park...

...or listening to the politics out in the main dining room, from the comfort and safety of the "kids' table" where most of the twenty- and thirty-somethings had landed just out of habit...

I know I have nothing to be unhappy about....but really, all I wanted for Christmas was just peace and quiet, mainly; or maybe just "quiet", since "peace" these days seems to be a little bit out of reach.

(A day off work would have been nice too, though I was heartened somewhat by how many of the rest of my age-bracket had to go to work this morning too. Seriously, though--How much does that suck??? WORK, on the day after Christmas??? Aren't we supposed to go out and shore up the economy with further mindless consumption today??? Doesn't the retail sector count for ANYTHING???)

I have a lot to feel thankful for, I know. I'm just having a hard time mustering the energy to feel it.

Remodeling, V 2.0

After a heartfelt plea from a reader, I've abandoned the white-on-black color scheme. Though I've never seen the problem reading light type on a dark background, I know a lot of people do have an issue with it--and believe me, my eyes aren't getting any better either, so I'm going to take the side of empathy here.

In other news...

Non-Chicagoans, bless your hearts, don't know what we're up against here.

I'm sitting here with my windows shut, and even though this is TOTALLY not Chez Gladys and these windows are actually GOOD, I can feel the wind squeezing through every crack. The wind here has, for the past 18 hours, been positively INSANE. We had wind gusts, according to the news, of 63 mph. Oh--and it's less than 20 degrees outside, too. So...(skips off to the Wind Chill Calculator) that's somewhere in the area of -2 degrees wind chill (assuming 20 degree temp, 45 mph wind). And that's saying nothing of the whole trees-blowing-over, power-lines-down issue. There are several major construction sites not far from my new home; I can hear a lot of flapping tarps and wind-howling-through-fence sounds, and one loud crashing noise which fell very clearly into the category of That Really, REALLY Doesn't Sound Good At All. I wonder whether the tree in the backyard of Chez Gladys survived--I always wondered what, exactly, was keeping that thing vertical.

The one major Hallelujiah moment of the day: realizing that I, in a show of forethought totally unlike my normal holiday proceedings, had completed my holiday shopping YESTERDAY. When it was still 50 degrees outside. :::pats self solidly on back::: If I'd had to go out today and take the bus or the train or the anything to go shopping...you know, I love my mom and all, but--just to face the facts here--it wouldn't have gotten done. There are some things I don't handle well, and having to go out in vile and unnecessary weather is one of them.

Instead I stayed in, slept late, edited Wikipedia for a while, made cookies, and ordered myself a pizza. As I said, I'm really, REALLY not feeling this holiday; I'm going to Mom's tomorrow, for Christmas Eve dinner, then spending the night and driving home first thing in the morning (to feed the kits--this fresh-food-instead-of-kibble plan has certain drawbacks) and then back to Mom's, to go to dinner at my aunt-in-law's.

The outrage of all this? I have to be back at work on Wednesday--in fact, I have to be back to work EARLY on Wednesday, since there's a project I'm working on which needs to be complete by Friday. We don't even know for sure if the project is going to happen--there are certain technical and managerial obstacles in the way--but on the off-chance it does, I'm supposed to be at work at 8:30 AM the day after Christmas. That doesn't seem quite cricket, but...oh well. At least THIS Christmas, I HAVE a job!!

I think I would feel better about Christmas this year if it wasn't so....obligatory. I'm expected to participate even though I don't really care to; I'd feel better if it was optional, if I had the chance to say "Hey, you know what? I'd rather not, this year." It's selfish, really; I have to keep in mind that time is passing, and nobody's getting any younger. At least one of the people who will be at dinner at my aunt-in-law's on Tuesday won't be there next Christmas; a friend of her family was diagnosed this past fall with terminal cancer, and he has maybe three months left. And who knows what the next year will bring to anyone?? I keep thinking of my mom's friend who passed away last January; she'd spent Christmas with her family, too, and then a month later she was gone. Nobody expected that.

I guess I'm thinking a lot about this sort of thing lately. (Who, me, depressed? Surely you jest.) I think about one of my old grade-school friends who, every Christmastime, used to have Nabisco Holiday Jingles cookies in her lunchbox from...it seemed like Halloween through Easter. We drifted apart during high-school, and I hadn't seen her for years; then, a couple of months after JP died, she was killed in a car wreck with her grandmother, right before New Years'. I think about her at this time of year...and of course, JP; and of course, my dad.

Dad was the one who would go all-out to get the weird, off-the-wall Christmas gift, the one that Mom couldn't for the life of her understand why you wanted it. The Laser Tag game, or the Douglas Adams box set, or the giant-size 1983 boom-box radio with dual cassette, or the Commodore Vic-20 computer...those were Dad-gifts, to go with Mom's more-practical, more-normal gifts--the dollhouses, the sweaters, the board-games, the warm winter boots. When my dad died in 1987, I gave up asking for technological gifts; no point confusing Mom, or making her feel obligated to do something she didn't enjoy. (Fortunately, I'm at an age where practical gifts are also much-appreciated; in fact, the KitchenAid mixer from two Christmases ago just mixed my chocolate-chip cookies, so: viva practicality!)

People ask me, "Isn't it strange, just having the holidays with you and your mom?" And in a way, it's not...this is how it's been, really, at least since Grandma and Grandpa died; but in a way...yeah, it kind of is strange--in the sense of "it feels like things are not as they should be." In a way, I take some of the blame for this; wasn't I supposed to have provided a husband and some kids to these proceedings somewhere? When I was in college, I always saw my late-30's self with a husband and a couple of kids--you know, like my cousins have. And then...well, things happened. I hadn't completely given up on the husband-and-kids side of things, even after JP died...honestly, I don't think I formed my final opinion on the whole parenthood issue til after CR left. Put it this way: I would have GLADLY had JP's kids; I would have had CR's kids reluctantly. After that, and maybe after looking back at how I treated my own parents...yeah, no. I can at least spare myself that experience. But it makes the world look a lot smaller, around Christmastime.

I'll be all right; I always perk up once the Christmas-ing actually gets going. Meanwhile, I hope all of you have a great holiday; I appreciate all of you, quite a lot.

(Okay, so I'm sitting here, blogging and watching the news on Channel 7 (the local ABC affilliate). They were about to cut away to a remote story about the wind, and as they cut, the anchor suddenly screams "WHOA!!" and there's a loud bang. They do the remote, and you can hear the remote anchor ask "What happened?" as they roll the audiotape. When they pull back from the remote, the anchor looks SHOOK--and he says "You might have heard, right before we went to our story, a loud noise in the studio...well, here's the reason why..." He cuts away to a picture of a CAR, which has crashed into their studio!! Their studio is at ground level on State St. and Lake, and apparently somebody lost control of their minivan and went through the window!!! It's the damndest thing--you just KNOW this is gonna make one of those "news bloopers" reels somewhere. I hope nobody was hurt, but...see, I LOVE it when stuff happens on live TV. (Now they're saying it might have been deliberate...hoo, man! This is wild.)

Pardon Our Dust

So...yeah, Phase One of the Great Remodeling Experiment has begun. (end blatantly obvious statements) It'll get better, I promise.

I am in raptures because I have discovered that I could, were I so inclined, use some of my SketchFu efforts as background images. I looooove me some SketchFu.

Otherwise, nothing new; just getting ready for Christmas. I'm not feeling it this year--I say that as though it's somehow different from any of the last few years!--and I'm seeing my holiday apathy as proof that I'm still somewhat depressed.

(Wait...I thought I ended the blatantly-obvious statements up there somewhere. Oh well.)

Random Bits and Pieces

First off, to those of you who were getting popups, or block notices, or any type of related crap--I found the culprit. (Firefly--sorry, didn't mean to send you into a spyware-related panic--in the joyful land of technical support, one report is a user problem; two reports is an issue.)

There was a list of blogs over on the left-hand side, in the sidebar with everything else, from a site called Link2Blogs. Well, apparently some of the crap blogs with names like "Free Money Making Site!!!!" learned how to bypass what minimal controls Link2Blogs.com had implemented over content, because instead of going to "http//link2blogs /blahblahblah", it was going directly to "expressaffilliates.com", which was causing the popups.

Needless to say, Link2Blogs will be cluttering my sidebar no longer. (Jeez, guys. Show a little quality control, will ya?)

Secondly: In trying to answer one of those online polls that comes up on the 9 PM local news, I was required to create an account at MyFoxChicago.com. Now, despite my suspicion and antipathy toward anything with the words "Fox" and "News" displayed near each other, I must admit I rather like the local Fox affilliate news team. I mean, don't get me wrong--I'm well aware that it's fluff and filler, not even remotely resembling journalism. It falls under the auspices of the usual "If-it-bleeds-it-leads" school of newsertainment; were it not for Stacy Peterson and Lisa Stebic, they'd have had to dig up some fake "expose'" to keep the ratings up for the past few months. They're basically just the same as every other local news show in Chicago. But their talking heads are less annoying, their weather radar is cool and technical-looking without being incomprehensible; and their human-interest stories are at least interesting once in a while. And they have this nightly poll, "Right or Wrong?", where they invite viewers to call in and agree or disagree with a given premise. They can also comment on the question via the website, and it was here that I found myself this evening.

(The question, incidentally, was "Is it right or wrong to require a three-month moratorium on foreclosures?" They really need to shoot the people who phrase these questions; I can identify at least six or seven major points of ambiguity which would make any attempt at a yes/no, right/wrong, or any other dichotamous answer completely useless.)

Anyway, upon registration, they ask you if you want to set up a blog; I figured "what the heck?" and so: http://community.myfoxchicago.com/blogs/gladys_j_cortez (for some reason, the nice "link" function on Blogger is pissing off Windows and/or one of my toolbars tonight.) Of course, I have no intention whatsoever of allowing the new blog to supplant this one--in fact, quite the opposite, which leads me to item three.

Item Three: It's been quite a while since I've straightened up around here. My Blogroll, as a few clicks will quickly demonstrate, is in a state of near-total disarray and uselessness; the template I'm using is getting on my nerves; in short, the decor is stale. The place needs work.

I'm drawing a couple of parallels here, I suppose. For example, physical residence and blog "residence"--in the "real" world, I've got a new home, and I'm trying to put my own mark on it. That's something that never happened in the former Chez Gladys; I never hung a single picture, never painted a single wall. I loved that house, but I was overwhelmed almost instantly by all the things that needed to be done, and I think that sense of being overwhelmed tipped over almost immediately into a pervasive and unbreakable apathy. Compared to the house, for example, the apartment is a showplace of tidiness and sustained effort; even though it's still got boxes that need to be unpacked, and it's clearly still in a state of not-completely-moved-in-yet-ness, it's clean, and it shows evidence of its owner's personality. That was never true of Chez Gladys, not even after four years. (There's a whole 'nother blog post in there, but as usual, it's way-too-late on a work-night to delve into my psyche.) But the same thing holds for the blog; I have been so overwhelmed for so long that I have allowed myself to sink into apathy in all realms of my life (again, there's enough material in that sentence to fuel at least another healthy-length post, but again: midnight on a work-night) and the blog has been one of the areas that's suffered.

Really, to put things flatly out there, I'm trying to overhaul my life. I have things I need to figure out, of course, but unlike previous efforts, I'm not going to allow those ambiguities to stop me from actually doing something. I have a bad habit of thinking too much and doing too little, and it's a habit I intend to break. Fortunately, I have a better-than-average track-record in regards to the breaking of bad habits, so I'm hoping this attempt succeeds as well.

Thus: Within the next few weeks, I hope to debut a new look for my happy little online home here. I have a few ideas, and I'm looking forward to playing with them.

In fact, I'm just generally looking forward to playing. It's been a while since I've let myself play and be creative, and I think my emotional state and my self-esteem have suffered for it. I'm looking forward to shedding my self-imposed restrictions and just having fun again.

Oh No He Di-n't: STFU, Drew, Part 2

(background here for non-Chicagoans, or for Chicagoans who slammed bricks through their TVs, radios, computers and newspapers long ago)

Is there SERIOUSLY no depth this individual will not plumb?

(inarticulate burblings of rage)

See, here I was all ready to feel sorry for myself (we may or may not go there later) and then I found this:

The Infantilization Of America Takes Another Exceedingly Wacky Turn

Because I know you all hate clicking on links: This story details a ban on mail addressed to "Any Wounded Soldier", which in many prior conflicts was used to send holiday wishes to recovering military members. One of the main rationales given for this ban:

USO spokesman John Hanson said that like the military, the nonprofit service organization does not deliver unopened mail to unspecified recipients. He said the USO worries about security as well as hateful messages from war critics. "We just want to make sure it's not, `Die, baby killer,'" he said. "There are people out there who act irrationally, and we don't want anyone to get a message that would be discouraging."

Now you all know I'm rabidly anti-American, and...wait, what???

No. Hold on. Lost my train of thought there.

Seriously: we can send adult human beings to entirely different countries, on largely-specious grounds, for the purpose of killing those with whom we disagree; can send them there to be killed and maimed by hostile factions, some of whom weren't even hostile until AFTER we got there; but by God, we must protect the eyes of our fighting men and women from the war critics' nanny-nanny-boo-boo?

We can lie to them about the death of their comrades, and have them shoot others full of holes as revenge for things that never happened; we can give them nonfunctional and inadequate protection against the attacks we're causing them to face, and point fingers at political figures from years past as the excuse; but dagnabbit, we're gonna make DARN SURE that no pinko commie lib'rul long-haired anti-Amurrican idjit calls our boys names by mail???

Jeebus Chesterfield on a dancing can of tuna-fish, have we LOST OUR EVER-FRAKKIN' MINDS???

Monday

So Monday, on my day off, I had Tim and Squeaky over for a visit.

Squeaky had invited herself, in the course of a phone call with Tim--he puts all our calls on speaker because, as we know, no reasonable conversation is complete without Squeaky getting all up in the middle of it. And speaker on a cell-phone is bad enough; speaker on a cell-phone where the other end is populated by Squeaky and a drunk Tim...oh, yeah, THAT's a conversation you want to avoid having, believe you me. And you CAN'T get away. Any effort to hang up is systematically thwarted. It's like...I don't KNOW what it's like. It's an experience which defies comparison, truly.

Anyway, during the course of one of these conversations, Squeaky asked me if I was working Monday, and I said "no" and she said "Cool! I'm gonna come visit you!"

I actually FELT my stomach sink. "Um...Yeah, sure...Okay," I said. "Tim, you're coming with, right?"

"Nah," he said. "I've got too much stuff to do, and..."


Typical Tim; he delights in exploiting my gullible nature. I saw through it; he was drunk enough to think his jokes were funny, so I could hear him smiling. And so after about half an hour of trying to get off the phone, it was finally set that they would come over at 1:00 Monday.

They got there at 2, and left at about 6:30; I was ready for them to leave by about 4. I mean, it was good to see Tim, sorta.

But Tim claims that he's trying to teach Squeaky certain skills she needs in the world--like, how to shop wisely, how to budget her money, things like that. While THAT sounds laudable, I have my doubts; from my perspective, it's a lot closer to "control" than "teaching". She's lost a lot of weight, which looks good on her; "...because Tim doesn't feed me," she claims. She brought her own cans of diet soda, instead of drinking her usual Pepsi, because "Tim says I can't drink soda with anything in it." It seems like he's building himself the "perfect" girlfriend--one who does whatever he says, cooks for him, cleans for him, worships the ground he walks on...

And if he IS "teaching" rather than "molding", he's missing some KEY points. Chief among them: Squeaky needs, above all else, to learn this: if two people who are NOT you are having a conversation, the thing to do is to wait til they're done making a point, or finishing a sentence, before interrupting. It also helps if, when you DO inject yourself into the conversation, you actually speak regarding a topic at least tangentially related to the subject at hand. Even MORE ideal? NOT interrupting every conversation with loud demands that one or both of the conversants direct their immediate attention to YOU.

A perfect example: Tim was trying to get some information from me about wireless computer networks. Before we moved, I gave him a defunct laptop and he had a friend fix it up for him (his friend had spare parts, apparently) and now he wants to get wireless service for it. But throughout the ENTIRE conversation--not an extended conversation, maybe ten minutes--Squeaky was interrupting with totally off-topic remarks designed to direct Tim's attention back to her.

This didn't happen once. It happened like, a dozen times. To the point where I was nearly moved to say "Hush, dear; grown people are talking." (I didn't. But I only BARELY didn't.)

I was very, very glad when they left, and so were the cats; Tim and Squeaky love cats, but they play rougher than my little fluffballs are used to.

(Of course, "things my little fluffballs are used to" is maybe NOT the best gauge of appropriateness; they are rapidly becoming used to late-night meals, generally served on demand, and having the run of the entire apartment. Ill-behaved little princes, they are; but unlike Tim and Squeaky, they're adorable enough to get away with it.)

I am so, so very glad that Tim and Squeaky are no longer a part of my day-to-day experience. Just being around them--their bickering, their schmoopsy-whoopsy-ness, the generally awful details of their little vibe--is exhausting for me. I have no idea how I lived with it for as long as I did; all I know is, I don't have to do it again and for that, I am exceedingly grateful.