Category: rant

A Wal-Mart employee in Nassau, NY was murdered by shoppers breaking down the doors and trampling anyone who fell down in their focused drive to get to the Black Friday bargains offered at the discount chain.

I don’t know how any of them feel.  I’d bet a lot of ’em feel pretty damn shocked and horrified.  In fact, I’m even willing to bet that most of ’em are trying to convince themselves they were in the wrong part of the crowd to have stepped on the temporary employee hired for the holiday season.   I’m none of them want to think it’s their foot that dealt the death blow.

This is not going to be a piece decrying materialism.  As far as I am concerned, anyone writing a piece on a laptop with her iPod syncing to her electronic music collection who is also mentally debating whether nor to to make herself an espresso from a machine she has in her kitchen has no right to sneer at materialism.

I don’t think it’s materialism that did it.   It was a rather twisted sort of competitiveness.  No, not gonna sneer at competitiveness, either. I’m a self-employed writer.  You have to be pretty damn competitive to be able to make a living like that.  It’s the twisted part that’s the issue.  It’s losing sight of what’s truly important.

If you do not keep constantly in mind that people are more important than things, your priorities are way out of whack.  Anyone willing to participate in a mob scene that knocks people down and ends in a death to get to a sale on something that’s not even necessary to keep you alive has gone from from focusing on people to focusing on things.

If this had been a bread riot or something like that, I could understand it.  But it wasn’t.  These weren’t people going hungry here who had a chance at more food.  They were more like this guy 500 miles away,

“Even with the economy, you’ve got to go with the deals,” said Robert Balboni of Centreville, Va., while loading his shopping cart with a 42-inch flat panel TV, a portable DVD player and a Philips 2GB MP3 player.¹

Notice the urgency of the words that were quoted.  “Got to”.  People are putting survival urgency on non-survival things.  The behavior at the Wal-Mart where the employee was murdered was survival behavior applied to a non-survival situation.   We do it all the time — in relationships, in our business lives, in our home lives.  And that’s where the priorities are screwed up.

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¹http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/28/news/economy/blackfriday_walmart/?postversion=2008112811

Dear Telemarketers Working for Political Campaigns,

I’m unplugging the house phone now. I know who I am going to vote for, work from home and need to finish work for my clients more than I need to be informed why I should vote for your client.

No Love at All,

Noël

I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with the panicking about the horrible days to come with the bad economy and the high fuel bills, and, andand…

Are the high fuel prices biting me in the ass?  Yep, and it’s not even winter yet.  I live in Northern New England in a wooden tent I can’t leave legally until February and I’m self employed.  Ain’t sayin’ it doan suck.

It sucks.

What I am saying is that I’m sick of the panic.

Could things get a lot worse than they are?  ‘Course they could.  Wait’ll hunger becomes an issue.  It could.

Still, what in hell happened to facing difficulty with courage?

The people that post solutions and ways to get through?  I salute you guys.  That’s some cool stuff.

The people who say, “Yep, yep, yep, hard times suck, but damn’f I’m going to let that stop me from enjoying my days as best I can”?  You guys are great.  Keep it up.

I think courage is important.

My two grandmothers both grew up without much.  It really colored both of their lives.  One grandmother was ashamed to own anything old, and was always embarrassed.  I loved her and everything, mind.  She had her good points — intelligent, good at solving problems in a way that would put most of my readers to shame…

My other grandmother had all that, but she had one little extra thing, and I think it was the spark that made all the difference.  She was proud of those same abilities she shared with her child’s mother-in-law.  She would frequently come up with a nifty solution to something, step back, take a deep drag on her cigarette and say with most prideful sarcasm, “Never improvised a day in my life.”

Now, notice both grandmothers were clever, and could kludge a solution whenever they needed to.  But that pride, that optimism and that flair?

Which of my grandmothers do you think enjoyed her life more?

Look, I don’t think driving drunk is okay.  Hell, I don’t think driving sleep deprived is okay, either.  It’s not nice to the people you might run in to.

That said, what the Oceanside, CA School District decided was okay in trying to teach this lesson is completely unacceptable.

They thought having the California Highway Patrol come in and tell some high school students their friends were dead in a drunk driving accident, letting them freak out and then saying, “Nope, everything’s okay, it was just an object lesson!” was just fine and dandy if it saved a life.

Bull.

I’m all for teachable moments.  But you have to use your brain.  The lesson that was taught there was, “You can’t trust us to tell you the truth if we have an ulterior motive.”

Fair enough.  Those kids can’t trust the cops or the school district to be honest if they have an ulterior motive.

Is that the example you want to set of how an adult should behave?

Is that the level of sensitivity you want them to show people they have power over in years to come?  Don’t fool yourself that we’re talking all that many years, by the way.  In five years, some of those kids will be teachers.  I bet some of them are camp counselors, swimming instructors or lifeguards right now.  You want them to get that Machiavellian with your children?

Even so, there are better ways to teach a kid not to drive drunk.  How about… talk to your kids about alcohol?   I’ve told my kids flat out the average rates at which a human processes a drink.  They’ve watched adults in their lives decide not to drive a car because they’d just had a drink. They’ve heard them say things like, “Can someone else drive?  I’ve just had a glass of wine.”

They’ve been told you can overdose on alcohol.  I even told them the story of me drinking a certain quantity of alcohol on a bet and how a friend insisted I throw up when he found out what I’d done.  I also explained that if he hadn’t done that, my son would never have been born, because I’d’ve died.   Growing up Southern Baptist means your alcohol education is sketchy at best.  At the time, all I had to go on were my parents quite moderate drinking habits on the one hand and the church and my school’s (considerably lighter) scare tactics on the other.  I’d internalized that as long as you don’t get behind a wheel or make a stupid decision about condom use, alcohol really couldn’t be dangerous and the school was being its idiotic, dramatic self.

My children are getting a lot more facts.  Parents, if you think your moderate drinking habits are a good example, don’t rely on that.  The schools might be using scare tactics.    The kids might blow off what they hear in school.  You make sure your kids get the accurate facts.

Will they always follow through with intelligent choices?   As badly as it scares me, probably not.  But goddammit, they know they’re getting told the damn truth.  They trust me to do that.  If an activity is mildly risky, they know bloody well I’m not going to lie and blow the risk out of proportion because I don’t want them to get hurt.

I sincerely hope the parents in Oceanside raise holy hell about this and stop that sort of nonsense!

What the hell is up with the contortions about what age is what?

I got it first almost ten years ago from an OBGYN who was fitting me with an IUD and scolding me about my weight, saying that biologically I was more like my grandparents in their late teens, so I should be careful.  I never quite understood that.  Three generations isn’t enough to promote a change in aging that dramatic.  I do appear younger than my grandparents did at my age, but that’s because I am more careful about sun and don’t smoke. That’s about it.  I don’t look younger than my non-smoking mother did at my age — and that’s a time period about which I have quite clear memories, as I was already an adult.

It hit me again recently when I was looking up long hair care techniques.  I’m a swimmer, I wear my hair about waist length, and I dye my hair.  Since it’s quite chemically-abused, I was checking some stuff out.

There was the usual advice that when a woman hits forty she should cut her hair (anyone really wanna bet that in six months I’ll be sporting a short hairstyle?  REALLY???? Sort of impending chemo-therapy, and using my hair to make a wig, we’re talking SERIOUS improbability)

Then I ran across this article that explained that it’s okay for a woman past forty to wear her hair long “because forty is the new thirty.”

No, forty is still forty.  And it’s okay to wear long hair under one condition: That you want to.

I always liked Gloria Steinem’s retort to the reporter who told her she didn’t look like she was forty.

“This is what forty looks like!”

Apparently there’s a new fad out there — hanging rubber or chrome testicles from a truck’s trailer hitch.

And because it’s (OMGWTFBBQ!) a physcial representation of a body part having something to do with <gasp!> sex, some peabrain in the Commonwealth of Virginia wants to ban them.

I think balls for trucks are great! They’re awesome. They’re a big ole danglin’ sign that there’s someone in that truck that is too tacky for me to associate with.

I mean, really… Without those swingin’ nuts, I might actually have to waste the valuable, limited seconds of my life listening to them talk to discover they’re too idiotic to be worth my time.

So if you feel the need to give your truck balls, why go for it, my dear.

And thank you from the bottom of my heart for your philanthropic service.

A Mississippi bill to prohibit food establishments from serving food to obese people.

Am I the only person who looks at that and thinks of the “Physical Jerks” scene from 1984?I mean, Sweet Zombie Jesus, it’s not like I don’t believe in healthy eating and exercise.    My ass was in the pool today and I swam a whole mile.  You can’t say I don’t work out.   I believe that eating right and exercise is good for you.

It’s just that it’s not the State’s goddamned job to force it.