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A Pile of Phonebooks…My Stress Shelf

General Suckitude, Home Repairs, Life SucksWrite a comment

Today, as I was driving down the road with a screaming 6 week old in the backseat, the variety of “issues” I am dealing with of late suddenly materialized in a vision of phonebooks…and I began to see all the things causing me stress as big, heavy, useless phonebooks. And if you think about it, it makes sense. In today’s world a phonebook is a big waste of space: the info they contain is more easily accessed via the web, they usually arrive on the rainiest day of the month so you are left with a sodden heap, and as you get another one each year, they just seem to pile up – like stress – a big pile of useless rain warped newsprint.

As I mentally scrolled through each problem, I pictured one of those giant phonebooks getting dropped onto a rickety old shelf – you know, like the ones you buy from K-mart made of particle board that just don’t seem to appreciate being asked to perform as God intended them to – ie – to hold items with any degree of competence? But I digress.

So there I was, fingers gripping the steering wheel, tightening just a bit more when a particularly high-pitched scream pierced the humid air of the car; uppermost in my mind was the fact that I just failed my vehicle emissions test…with a car that has barely 40,000 miles on it. The “obd” indicated a problem, but after running a diagnostic check – no actual problem could be found – which means a trip to the car dealer for me…THUNK (that’s the sound of a fat old phonebook landing on the shelf). Next is the frustration of yet another installment of Appliance Hell. My fancy, EXPENSIVE, less than 3 month old dryer has decided to flake out – and, like the K-Mart shelf, doesn’t seem to want to perform the task God (or some dude in Korea, it’s an LG) intended it for – so after a brief visit with a serviceman on Tuesday, I’m waiting for a part to come in, then another visit to be scheduled, which will then hopefully result in my having a working dryer again. The good news is it’s still under warranty and none of this will come out of my pocket – the bad news is it flipped out last Friday and with a newborn in the house – I FREAKIN NEED TO DRY MY CLOTHES!!! I am doing some loads pioneer style and hang drying them, but just refuse to do towels or baby clothes that way, I might as well use tree bark to dry off with when I get out of the tub and dress my baby in sandpaper. So, the highlight of my day will be when I get a call saying the part has come in…knowing my luck, the repair guy will plan to arrive at the same time I have scheduled to go get my car looked at. THUNK. The fact that this machine could malfunction with no warning and after I so recently purchased it freaked me out enough to send me running back to Home Depot to buy their extended warranty package. Something I am slowly coming to learn as a consumer – I will never buy an extended warranty for a car again (those car guys will weasel out of any and everything), but for certain appliances, where just having a dude come out and say, “Yep, it’s broke.” and charge you $80 minimum…well, $100 for a 4year extended warranty doesn’t seem like such a bad deal. Again, I digress – back to the growing pile of phonebooks. As the bundle of ear-splitting sound in the seat behind me reminds me, I just gave birth to a baby barely six weeks ago – as more than evident when I look over my body. My feet have finally shrunk down to close to normal size, so I am able to wear most of my shoes again – but my fingers are still not my own. I can slide my wedding ring on, but it is so tight I risk losing that appendage if I leave the ring on for more than 10 seconds. Having experienced carpal tunnel syndrome with this pregnancy, I fear my joints may have swollen permanently, and in order to show the world I did not bear my children out of wedlock, I’ll probably need to get my ring resized. THUNK Speaking of size, my weight, an issue never far from my mind, is, forgive the pun, weighing me down. I have lost about 27 pounds since delivering the baby (granted, 8 of that was baby) but I still have a long way to go before I am back to where I was before I initially began my journey into motherhood with my first daughter 5 years ago. Sometimes I forget how much bigger I am now, then I see a picture someone has taken of me, or catch an unguarded glance in the mirror (ah! stretch marks! ah! a belly that still seems 5 months pregnant!) and the reality is all too unpleasant. I know what I have to do, and am doing it, but the results are slow in coming and the here and now of what I am just makes me very unhappy. THUNK. Moving from the list of repairs I need to make to my body, is the even longer list of things that need to get fixed around the house. The leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom. THUNK. The very leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom. THUNK. The side garage door that has a gaping hole from an old dog door, pathetically covered over with duct tape. THUNK. The sinking concrete patio that causes torrents of water to flood towards the house. THUNK. The broken piece of trim in the kitchen. THUNK. The fact that we still need to have the gutters and fireplace professionally cleaned. THUNK. And this list doesn’t even touch on the various more cosmetic wish-listy items I have in mind for the house – such as new carpet, updated kitchen counter tops, a brick patio/enclosed gazebo for the backyard. Ka-Thunk (that’s a little phone book hitting the shelf – I have no time to stress too much over the luxuries right now). All these repairs cost money, and that is another phonebook all its own…my career situation; which has been steady in the 5 years since I embraced semi-stay at home motherhood, is most likely about to change, and the contribution I make to the household income, will change with it. THUNK.

As you imagine, my shelf is on the verge of crumbling into a pathetic mess of particle board chunks, but it –  like me, will hold out – because, what else can you do? I pull into the garage, calm the lungs with legs down and try to remember all the good things I have – all the good things in my world that I should be so thankful for. And then I see my blessings as structural reinforcements to that shelf – and they are so plentiful I know that it will support all the phonebooks I can find to dump on it.

Proof That Commercials Are Effective, Even if They Don’t Live Up to Their Promises

Hallmark Moments, Kids, UncategorizedWrite a comment

On several occasions recently, my 5 year old has fallen prey to advertisements; leading me (and my wallet) to purchase various items that, while she enjoys very much, have caused her to make the shocking realization we all must face one day: what they say on t.v. isn’t always true.

Take for example the line of VIP Littlest Pet Shop toys. One day Aishtyn is perusing one of those little brochures, a mini-toy catalog if you will, that companies so thoughtfully include in the packaging of all their products. Bringing it over to me, she points and says, “Can I have one of these? I can go on-line with it!!!” I’m sitting there thinking, “how the heck does she even know what ‘go on-line’ means???” Yet before I know it, we (or, I should say she) owns 3 of the cute little critters (1 as a present for being the big sister, 1 for taking a week’s worth of eye medicine without fighting, and 1…I don’t remember what the other 1 was for). So, yes, she goes on-line with them, apparently there is an entire virtual world set up for the VIP’s and Aishtyn has a grand old time buying them clothes, choosing condos, and sending her animals to work in an ice cream shop. She really loves them, but has one terrible disappointment; in the ads, it is noted that you can “bring your VIP alive!” when you get them on-line. My sweet girl, bless her heart, sat her little stuffed monkey next to her at the computer, got logged in, and then waited….and waited. When my husband asked her what the problem was, she replied with a question of her own, “When is my monkey going to come alive?” Leading to a discussion of how alive in a virtual internet kind of way differs from alive in a breathing, jumping, swinging from the ceiling fan kind of way.

My daughter is on a steady diet of chicken nuggets, cheese quesadillas, crackers, and pasta (and that only in wheel or shell shape). Beverages consist of water, mass quantities of chocolate milk, and sweet tea. Trying to get her to eat a vegetable is laughable and fruit, not much easier – so when she came to me saying she wanted me to buy her some Juicy Juice, I was more than happy to oblige. What marketing scheme was it that so successfully appealed to this 5 year old’s cerebral center of consumerism? It wasn’t a popular cartoon character or special toy…it was a basic appeal to her ego. Apparently, as seen here in their commercial, “Juicy Juice is the very best juice for the very best kids.” Aishtyn, of course has no problem acknowledging the fact that she is among the very best of kids, so clearly she deserves the very best of juices! Upon arriving home with a jug of the bestest juice, Aishtyn takes a big swig, swishes like an elite wine tester then remarks, “It just tastes like juice!” Thankfully, she still deemed it worthy of her superior self and drained the glass.

While I am sure these are not the last of the disillusionments my daughter must face, they are endearing as some of her first.

A Work So Lacking in Genius it’s Heartbreaking

Books, IMOWrite a comment

From reading his memoir, I get the very distinct impression that author David Eggers is the kind of guy I try to avoid at parties. The blustery, “you must listen to me and my ideas because they are just so awesome” kind of guy I never have the patience to humor. So you can imagine that listening to him (well, to his voice in my head as I read his words on the page) for the length of an entire novel was…staggering in its monumental boredom.

He started out well enough, with a unique random musing sort of free flow preface that was entertaining at first, but got old pretty quickly. And that is overall, the central problem with this book. Any well-phrased thought or insightful moment the author has is ruined by his inability to let it stand alone; clean and whole and…simple. Instead, he has to unpack the moment/thought/whatever. Unpack it and examine it and complain about it and ridicule it (or brag about it outrageously, depending on the situation) until you are just sick of hearing about it and any pleasure initially derived is lost in a wasteland of, “Dude – will you just shut the hell up!?!?”

That’s another problem with the story – you want to feel sorry for this guy, really, you do. I mean, both his parents die of cancer within weeks of each other (I’m not giving anything away here, Eggers reveals this himself on the dust jacket). But he feels so sorry for himself, that you just want to shake him and/or slap him and point out the fact that there are millions of people out there who have dealt with tragedies much worse…he was in his twenties when his parents die for one thing – sure beats losing them when he’s a kid. And yes, his little brother is still a kid and Eggers has somehow been shouldered with the task of raising him but he has two older siblings to help him out and relative financial stability. Many families are thrown into tremendous debt in the wake of a family member’s illness, but his parents had good health and life insurance; and enough assets that their children could: pack up, move to California, and bascially take the summer off from the realities of life. Not a bad way to deal with a horrible situation, all things considered. So, yes – it’s sad what happened to his family, and while tragedy will often allow for a certain degree of…allowance for otherwise asinine behavior, let’s say…Eggers blows his allowance in the first chapter or so.

Aside from the pages upon pages of musing that basically say the same thing, another irritating aspect of this novel involves the way Eggers deals with his parents’ deaths. Like the speech he gives at his mother’s funeral; rather than focus on the parents he has lost – the memoir is all about how the loss impacts HIS LIFE, how HE has to manage, cope, struggle, deal – and well, it’d be nice if he could do a better job acknowledging the lives that have been lost. His attitude reminds me of a memorial I recently attended for a much beloved professor and mentor at the university I graduated from. Near the end of the ceremony, past students were given a chance to stand up and share a memory of the man who had meant so much to all of us gathered there. A few stories were wonderful; snapshots of his life and personality that had us all laughing and crying. Many though, were about the speaker himself, and about what a great person he turned out to be (I guess the point was supposed to be that this greatness was in part owed to the dearly departed teacher, but the speaker rarely made it around to that point, too busy expounding on their own wondrousness). It all kind of made me sick, and angry, and left me biting my lip in a tremendous struggle to resist the need to jump up and shout, “Sit down! Nobody wants to hear about your life, we are here to remember Jack!” I resented the way these people seemed to steal the beauty of the moment for themselves – and that is very much how I feel about Egger’s work. He is so that guy who would be at a funeral and feel the need to turn the crowd’s attention to his pain, his accomplishments – simply, him.

Needless to say it was a struggle to finish the book, a struggle I clearly shared with fellow bookclub members, seeing as how many chose not to attend the discussion group, not having finished it – including the group’s head organizer, who has never missed a meeting yet. Unable to leave a book unfinished, I pushed through, but found it no great loss to miss the meeting. It was less than a week after I had delivered my baby, afterall, and this novel certainly was not worth the effort of getting out so soon after major surgery.

A statement that leads me to wonder what novels I would deem worth making an extra effort for…hmmm….I have to think about that. Diana Gababldon’s books, perhaps – though I doubt I will ever suggest them to my book club; their length is, ahem, rather intimidating. At least with Gabaldon, every page is interesting…and with the number of pages in her books, that is really saying something.