Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Playing The Game

It Pays to Complain – washingtonpost.com
Dont waste your time. A $2 fee may get your goat, but you cant afford to fight every charge. Your chances of winning are directly correlated to how much leverage you have. Consider this: A survey for Sullivans book found that customers who complain to credit card companies get results 65 percent of the time.

All true.

I used to have this yearly dance with my credit card company. After the “special introductory offer” expired five or six years ago, they began wanting to charge me $20 a year for the privilege of paying them interest every few months. Now, I do understand that people like me — people who typically pay their bill in full every month — aren’t profitable for these companies. However, every now and then I don’t pay the bill in full and then they get to earn their interest. And, since I’ve already established myself as a good customer who pays her bills, they can rest assured that they will, in fact, get their money.

So. Every year they started asking for $20. And every year I’d call them and tell them I was going to cancel my account if they didn’t waive the fee. And every year, I’d get transfered to an “account manager” person who would tell me that, of course, they’d waive the fee THIS year, but that I’d really have to pay it next year.

A couple years ago, the same company sent me an offer for a new card with no annual fees and a year of no interest. Since I’d just charged something expensive on the other card that I would have had to pay off over several months, it only made sense to cancel the old card and move the debt to the new card — with the same company.

Now, that’s how to play the game.

Fresh Duluth

Fresh Duluth Documentary | Pro Video Productions

Looks good. I’m sending for it.

Father’s Day

A Dad for All Seasons – washingtonpost.com
He has done this as he has juggled his sons’ needs and a full-time job, all the while maintaining a presence in his community — volunteering at the neighborhood pool, chaperoning field trips, hosting a monthly dads’ poker night.”He’s so on top of it,” said Carey Hitchcock, who lives down the street. “He makes all of us stay-home moms look bad.”

This is the sort of thing single female parents do all the time. Men should worry that it’s news when a father spends as much time with his kids as a woman would. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that this guy is so involved. His kids are really lucky to have him. I just want to focus on the larger issue of fathers who AREN’T involved.

I think there are a few reasons for why that happens. Probably the most common one is that their own fathers weren’t particularly involved in their lives when they were growing up and they just see it as the norm.

A second reason — one that a lot of women don’t like to think about — is that some women actually discourage a lot of fatherly involvement because, starting when the children are very small, they’ve made it clear they don’t actually trust the father to do things right. It’s amazing the amount of extra work women take on just because they don’t trust men to do it right. (Believe me, I know about this from personal experience. Since the vacuuming debacle of 1994, I won’t let my husband anywhere near the house cleaning equipment.)

So, what about my own father?

He and my mother divorced when I was 11 years old and he died 3 years later, so I never really got to know him well. He wasn’t especially involved in our lives before the divorce and afterwards he pretty much quit seeing us altogether. (Alas, far too common in divorce situations.)

He was charming and was something of a run-around, if you know what I mean. (My eldest half-sibling was born before my parents’ divorce was final.) He was an iron worker. He liked country-western music — and opera. He was really interested in Ancient Egypt. He read Argosy magazine and the translated works of Alexander Dumas. He was a very intelligent guy but he never went to college. Instead, he joined the Navy when he was quite young. He served in the Pacific during WWII as a radioman. For a while he was into building radio-controlled model airplanes. He liked ice fishing and duck hunting, but he couldn’t understand how anyone would want to kill a deer. He liked flower gardening.

He was an alcoholic.

I was the youngest of the three children my parents had and, although I’ve been told I was “an accident”, I was my father’s favorite — as he made painfully clear to my sister and brother.

When he was drunk, he could be nice — or he could be mean. He never hit me but I’m told he smacked my mother around from time to time. I remember hiding outside in his fish house one winter night with my brother and sister because it was too scary being in the house where my parents were arguing.

I remember being afraid of him and so wanting his love.

I wish he’d lived long enough to begin repairing some of the harm he’d done. Maybe he would have eventually stopped drinking. Maybe we could have formed some kind of relationship. But he didn’t, so I’m left with these memories. I’ve forgiven him — for my own sake more than for his. Still, I wish I had the chance to tell him so.

I Don’t Care About Most Of You

The Feminine Mistake – washingtonpost.com
News flash, Linda! We are women. We care about people. It’s what we do!

God, I’m sick of hearing that!

I’ve got a news flash for you, whatever-the-hell-your-name-is, I’m a woman and I don’t especially care about people! People in general irritate me. They’re loud and stupid and full of incorrect ideas about their own importance. People annoy me so much that I have pleasant day dreams involving pandemics that wipe out 99% of the population a’la Stephen King’s The Stand.

So don’t go around implying that being a woman automatically means we care about people. It doesn’t — and I’m hardly the only woman who feels this way about it.

If not for the fact that we hate group activities, we misanthropic women would form a coalition of some kind to finally put to rest the absurd notion that all women are friendly and helpful and like to go to the ladies room with one another.

Instead we’re reduced to snarling about it on our blogs.

Metro Cabin

I so want this. In the middle of many many acres, maybe overlooking a huge swamp. With alligators.

Okay… maybe not alligators. But I’d be okay with them if they showed up.

This is the Metro Cabin. It comes in two sizes and you can get it with a kitchen and/or bathroom kit. It can be outfitted with solar panels and a composting toilet for use “off the grid”. Envision the interior with bamboo floors and minimalist decor. Maybe a futon you could unroll at night for sleeping.

Imagine it as something you had to hike in to. Hm… I bet you could put a little wood stove in it if you wanted. For winter use, I mean.

This, to me, would be paradise.

Fanaticism Isn’t A Good Thing. Ever.

Martin Sheen opens up about son Charlie’s drug use | TuscaloosaNews.com

Nothing ever gets done unless it’s done by a fanatic.

Absolutely. Look how well fanaticism has worked for those Al Qaeda fellows.

I have to admit, when I saw the cover of this AARP magazine with Martin Sheen’s quote on the front, I said out loud, “What the fuck?? Is he nuts?”

It turns out, he was really just talking about having become a “fanatic” in terms of trying to get his kid (the perennially screwed up Charlie Sheen) off drugs.

I have to wonder what the hell AARP’s editors were thinking when they chose that quote for the cover, though. Do they not understand the word? To be a fanatic is to replace reason with ideology. It’s not a good thing to be. While some have questioned Sheen’s devotion to the Catholic church, it’s never been conclusively shown (to me, at least) that he’s a fanatic. So…

Mickey

Our good cat Mickey died yesterday. She was 14 years old. She had been sick, but we weren’t expecting her condition to deteriorate so quickly. On Friday she had surgery for obtaining a biopsy from a (likely cancerous) growth on her jaw. When she came home Friday night, she was groggy but still ate and drank some water. On Saturday morning, she also ate and drank. As the day went on, though, she clearly began to feel very bad. On Sunday morning, we took her to the emergency vet and she was admitted for testing and IV therapy. It turned out her blood pressure was very high and her kidney values were terrible. The vets tried several approaches with her (all somewhat conservative, at our direction, because of the likelihood that Mickey had a terminal cancer anyway) and, by yesterday morning, it was clear that nothing was helping. Her kidneys were pretty much shot and both of her retinas has detached so she was blind. We can’t be sure, but it seems likely that she suffered some kind of “insult” during or after her recent surgery. Possibly there was a bad reaction to the anesthesia. Possibly she had a “stroke”. At any rate, seeing that there was no chance for any kind of good life left for her, we took the route dictated by compassion and instructed the vets to euthanize her.

Mickey and her sister, Marjie (also gone now), came to us as rescue kittens. They had been living in a cage for all of their early kitten months so neither of them ever learned how to jump up onto high things like kitchen countertops. Many people might have considered that a real plus, be we always thought it was kind of sad.

I have to confess that for most of Mickey’s life I thought she was a pretty dull cat. She didn’t have an outgoing personality and she was generally cranky towards the other cats. It was only in the past 4 years that I really got to know her. In 2004 (I think), Mickey was diagnosed with diabetes. In the course of monitoring her condition and giving her twice-daily insulin injections, I came to understand Mickey’s personality better. She wasn’t dull — she was just subtle.

There aren’t many funny anecdotes to tell about Mickey. She just didn’t operate that way. When other cats might be running around the house acting crazy, Mickey was the kind of cat who would sit quietly to the side and watch. Mickey did, however, have one quality that really made her stand out from the crowd. She had the roughest tongue of any cat I’ve ever known. Truly, if she licked your arm it would REALLY hurt! Since Mickey was a cat who liked to groom us when she was feeling happy, we always had to be sure to offer her some part of our bodies that were less sensitive — like an elbow or a kneecap!

In the last nine months, Mickey’s health had really begun improving. We started her on a new diet (Wellness canned food) and she was able to completely come off insulin. She lost a bit of weight, her fur was looking glossy and smooth for the first time in years, and in general she really seemed to be doing well. She was, however, an old cat. Old cats get cancer.

Sigh.

We’re going to miss her.

When Good Editors Do Bad Things

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine
Given that someone someplace is often setting the defaults anyhow, wouldn’t we prefer that the guy in charge be Dr. Spock? Could any of us agree, however, about which Dr. Spock is truly worthy of making these decisions?

Of course, Dahlia Lithwick means Mr. Spock — the ever-logical first officer of the Enterprise as commanded by James Tiberius Kirk.

Since I generally like Lithwick’s writing and since I’m in the mood to actually forgive people for not knowing everything on earth there is to know, I’m going to blame this little gaffe on her editors at slate.com. Um… they do have editors there… right?

Okay, so how is this topic even blog-worthy? Is this minor screw-up on the name of my favorite Star Trek character really symptomatic of a larger problem of sloppiness and inaccuracy?

Probably.

Or maybe not.

Bleh… whatever. Return to your regular reading.

The King Statue

Unhappy With ‘Confrontational’ Image, U.S. Panel Wants King Statue Reworked – washingtonpost.com
A powerful federal arts commission is urging that the sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. proposed for a memorial on the Tidal Basin be reworked because it is too “confrontational” and reminiscent of political art in totalitarian states.

This is absurd. Now, now when the statue is this far along, they want to change it? Now?? What a bunch of assholes.

I like the statue just as it is. Yes, King looks a bit confrontational — but that’s good! He was a peaceful man but he also made it perfectly clear that it was no longer going to be acceptable to deny equal rights to black people. That took strength and guts and this statue shows King as a strong man.

It’s a good statue.

Perfect Duluth Day

This kind of thing makes me proud to be from Minnesota.

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Tip o’ the hat to the Perfect Duluth Day blog.