101 posts from 2007

I'm at home in the afternoon for the first time (except for days off) since I started this job October 18. I will work this evening for four hours only and I'm thrilled about it. I love the idea of extra money but working nearly full time has been hard on me/us.

Of course, nothing is ever so easy. I've been summoned to jury duty on Friday, and if I don't have to serve, I'm supposed to sub for a co-worker who is out this week. But then next week, next week I'm gonna be part time.

The job itself is good. I'm a little concerned that I'm going to lose faith in the younger generation, because essentially all the students I work with are remedial. I have to keep reminding myself that they're not all like this. Just the hundreds upon hundreds who come to my lab and know, on balance, almost nothing. Don't worry; I'm almost unfaiIingly nice. I don't hold it against them. But I have never been faced with so many blank looks. They are writing about violence and genocide, but by and large they don't understand my references to the Sudan, Rwanda, Stalin, Mao. The only thing they know is Hitler. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Many of them are under the impression that the U.S. entered World War II to save the Jews.

When I told Duff all this, he told me about Godwin's Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Quick update: I started my new job about a week ago. So far so good except my wardrobe is completely unsuitable (pardon the pun).Seriously, what do you people wear to work? Suggestions appreciated.

Basically they've got me working full time while I'm training, so I don't have time to do anything else. I know, other people would have time, but I don't. It's just the way I am, I guess. I'll be glad when it switches to part time, which is what I signed on for.

So I ordered this book from a Half.com vendor. I homeschool my son and we are about halfway through the first volume in this series, which I really like. On Friday, I received not one but two copies of this book. Weird, eh? Wasn't sure what to do. I knew the proper thing to do would be to inform the vendor and offer to return the extra copy, but I am not exactly reliable when it comes to mailing packages at the post office, as anyone on my Christmas list can attest. So I didn't do anything.

Yesterday, I received yet another copy of this book. Needless to say, I checked my bank account to make sure I haven't been charged for all of these books. Everything looked okay. Finally, I broke down and dug around Half.com for a way to contact the vendor. I wrote him/them a note saying, Hey, you sent me three copies of the book I ordered. Something is wrong with your order fulfillment process. I didn't supply all the details, because I'm still not enthusiastic about returning the extra copies, but at least I felt a little less despicable.

So far, I've had no response from the vendor. But in today's mail, I received three more copies of the book. Three! Can you believe this? I feel like I'm trapped in some Internet shopping twilight zone. What's next? Will owls start dropping copies of this book down my chimney? 

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Britney Spears' continuing downward spiral took a devastating turn Monday when she was ordered to relinquish custody of her children by a judge who had cited her drug-and-alcohol-fueled lifestyle.

I was shocked by this news, not because it was unexpected, but because I was thinking of myself—as one does, or at least as I do—and how awful it would be to have my children taken away from me “indefinitely.” On top of it all, there is the public humiliation to be endured. This may or may not particularly bother Britney Spears, who apparently courts the public eye on a daily basis, but it would pretty much finish me off. I wonder if she feels, as embattled people sometimes do, that she is simply misunderstood, and is being punished unfairly, and if people only knew the truth, the rest of us wouldn’t judge her so harshly.

I imagine she will be crying most of the day. Grabbing up the boys every few minutes and squeezing them a little too hard, pulling on a bourbon and Coke, and railing into the telephone about "fucking lawyers" and how much she hates her ex-husband.

I believe I read something in which she was quoted as saying she just wants to be a mom. The reason her story is interesting, the reason it gets so much attention, is because of all the party girls in Hollywood, she had the most to lose, and she was on a direct path to losing it, and anyone with any common sense and life experience could see that it would end badly if she didn't change her ways. But she didn’t seem to see it coming. Hubris has been her undoing! It is tragic in the classical sense!

I took my mother with me to Costco yesterday. Since she’s not as strong as she used to be, I told her that I was going to go to the back of the store and get some sodas, and that I would be right back.

 

“Oh!” she says. “Could you get me some 7-Up?”

 

I’m a little surprised, because my Mom doesn’t really drink soda, but sure, whatever. I take the cart to the back of the store and load up a 36-can box of soda for me, and a 36-can box of 7-Up for her. Then I stand there for a minute, debating. What on earth is my mother going to do with a 36-pack of soda? She lives by herself in a tiny apartment. She doesn’t usually drink soda. Surely she doesn’t really want that much 7-Up. But we are at Costco, and she understands the whole bulk-buying concept. Maybe she’s planning to sock them away in a closet for the kids? I think about telling her we can get a six-pack at the grocery store, but I’m actually not sure I’ll have time to take her. And experience tells me that if I put the box back, I’ll have to go back and get it again. By the same Murphian logic, if I take the box to her, she won’t want it. So I heave the case into the cart and start looking for her. Because of course she has wandered away from where I left her.

 

After several minutes of searching, my phone rings. She is calling me.

 

“I’ve been following you all around the store, but I can’t get caught up,” she explains. She says she is at the front of the store. OK, fine. I tell her to meet me by the nearest endcap, which is helpfully marked with a giant number 320. I stand by the endcap and wait, and wait, and wait. There is no possible way it could take this long to walk from the front of the store to this endcap, which is about three racks from the front. I’m about to give up when I see the tip of her cane poking out from behind a box. She rounds the bend looking so much like Tim Conway doing his elderly-man walk that I start smiling; it’s all I can do not to laugh. She is smiling, too, but only because that’s the way she is. She tells me that she has been standing at the other end of the aisle that I have had my back to this whole time, waving at me and calling and trying to get my attention.

 

I show her the soda and say I don’t know why she would want so much soda. She says, no, she doesn’t need that much.

 

“I only want one,” she says.

 

“One?” I say. “One can of soda?”

 

“Yes. To settle my stomach.”

 

I’m thinking, What the hell? But I don’t say it. I just leave her again so I can return the 36-pack of 7-Up to the back of the store.

Later, on the way home, we get to talking about school uniforms, of all things. She says in high school, the nuns used to do a skirt check. They'd make the girls kneel on the floor and if any girl's hemline didn't touch the floor, they were in big trouble.

"Then somebody tipped them off about the Maidenform bra," she says. "Then we had to do a check for that!"

"What was so bad about the Maidenform bra?" I ask.

"It made you ... point," she says, drawing a pair of triangles in the air in front of her.

She says she wore uniforms all through school. In third grade, she attended St. Patrick's. She had to wear a green plaid skirt with a beige blouse and tan knee socks made of cotton lisle, which she hated hated hated. I can't even think what cotton lisle looks like. She says her mother used to starch almost everything she wore, and one time, she lined up all her petticoats on the floor, standing them up in a row, and called her father in to have a look.

"You see that?" she said indignantly. "I have to wear those!"

"That's very impressive," he said.

My mother called me this morning to say that O.J. Simpson had been arrested in Vegas following an incident in a room at the same value-priced "locals" casino where we stayed when we went down there for my nephew's wedding.

"I know," I said.

"Oh, you knew that?"

"Yeah."

"Oh. Well, he's an arrogant son of a bitch, isn't he?"

"Yep."

"Now he might have to go to jail after all."

"I don't know. I hope so."

"That's why when everybody was saying, 'Oh, he couldn't have done it,' I said 'Oh yes he could have,' because I remembered what he was like when he was up for that golf tournament that time. Especially to her."

"Wait--what?"

"When he came in the gift shop, he was so damn arrogant, and rude to everybody..."

"You never told me this!"

"...but especially to her..."

"You mean Nicole? You saw her, too?"

"Yeah, Nicole. She was there. They were up for about a week. I'm pretty sure it was a golf tournament. And he was such a rude bastard. To everybody, but especially to her. I remember it very well. And that's why I say, I just knew, and anybody who was working there at the time would tell you..."

"Mom! You never told me this before! How could I have not heard this story..."

"Well, I don't know..."

"...when that trial went on for ever?"

"I don't know."

If you had any idea how many hundreds, perhaps thousands of bone-dry stories I've listened to over the years about my Mom's old boss Gayle-Ann, you might understand why I was so annoyed that she never ever mentioned this semi-interesting tidbit about the times O.J. and Nicole Simpson came to shop in the casino gift shop where she worked, even though they were in the news for the entire year of 1995. Seems like it would have come up, doesn't it? 

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