Tales from a damsel in distress as she pursues the elusive goal of sanity in this tumultuous world, not always with success.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Dear Santa: Drop Dead
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Stevie Ray Vaughan-Inspired Ruben V Gets it Done
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
House Lust
I’d like to blame the people behind HGTV (home and garden television) but, in reality, they’re only partly to blame. OK, maybe they’re not to blame at all. Maybe they’ve just created compelling television and I’m the one who has morphed it into a pathological addiction.
Like an alcoholic who can’t handle having just one drink, I can’t watch just one HGTV show, so I have to avoid it altogether. But sometimes, like recently, I slip up, planning to catch just one episode. And then, the next thing I know, I’ve gorged myself on hours and hours of house-lust-inducing home improvement television.
Each show starts out by stirring up a need-to-know curiosity that’s akin to hunger and grows into a compulsion. I NEED to know. How will they transform the dated, discombobulated room into a dazzling showpiece? Which house will the couple choose and what will it look like three months later? How will they re-do a drab façade to possess attention-grabbing, jaw-dropping curb appeal? Each time, when the answer is revealed at the end of each show, I experience a sense of exhilaration, a rush that must set off serotonin surges in my hypothalamus—but it’s short-lived because then the hunger starts all over again and I keep coming back for more, more MORE!
It’s an endless tease in search of another aesthetic high, presided over by hip design priests and priestesses who are like seers of old, only instead of seeing future events they envision future environments with elements like travertine, accent lighting and coordinating fabrics in pleasing combinations beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. And then they conjure up the vision by mobilizing teams of carpenters, electricians, and assistants who do their bidding with skill and precision, all compressed into a 30-minute time slot.
Post-binge, when I’m finally exhausted by it all, I start to feel disgusted and depressed. My house is so UGLY! I need a design team to descend upon my humble domicile and transform it into stunning display of creativity that’s practical and functional yet sleek and inviting. And it has to have something that “pops,” according to the oft-repeated refrain of the HGTV design divas.
And unlike me, the design divas always seem to know exactly what they want. For example, it’s taken me months to try and choose a paint color for my dining room, where I turned the walls into abstract art from the application of myriad paint sample colors as I tried to make up my mind. Seriously, I must have bought at least 20 paint samples. Of course, part of the problem is that I was – and still am – dealing with dislocated, multi-colored furniture that wasn’t really designed to coordinate, resulting from the merging of my household with that of my husband’s. But the design divas have no such dilemma. They simply sketch a design, compile swatches, seemingly manufacture the components out of their fertile imaginations, and voila, there it is, design perfection!
Watching HGTV isn’t a waste of time, but it’s just that I lose all capacity for moderation. But I do get ideas and learn things, including facts about other cultures. For example, in one episode, I learned about a girl who was looking for an apartment in Saudi Arabia. The apartments she had to choose from each cost about $60,000 a year, which had to be paid for in an upfront lump sum, a provision that would exclude just about every prospective renter in the U.S.—but in Saudi Arabia it’s no problem because, according to HGTV, each Saudi is worth about $16 million, and besides that, 80 percent of the people in Abu Dhabi are foreigners and their employers often pick up the tab. In the case of the prospective renter, a Canadian, she was paid about $60,000 for teaching young children, plus she received a whopping $65,000 housing stipend from her employer. Not bad for a twenty-something who saw a bidet and asked, “What’s that?”
HGTV also provides an opportunity to see how other socio-economic groups live. Sometimes I can relate and other times I can’t, like when a couple that had a $2 million budget to spend on Napa Valley housing sniffed at a gorgeous home because it didn’t have a vineyard view.
Sometimes, the ideas are great but definitely beyond my skill level to implement them. For example, I would love to construct an inexpensive fountain/water feature out of plywood, pipe and slate, but lack the required carpentry cred. And by the time I factored in the cost of a carpenter to construct it, it would cost a couple of grand, decidedly more than the advertised "design on a dime" cost of materials.
The other day, I combined hours of watching HGTV with home magazine reading and talk about other peoples’ homes, resulting in irritation and dissatisfaction with my own home. As usual, Scripture provides the only antidote to carnal craving that’s beyond the bounds of what God has provided.
“Keep your lives free from the love of money,” says the book of Hebrews, “and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you’.”
OK God, help me, please … but first just let me see how the amazingly talented Candice Olson infuses this hum-drum space with a touch of glam and pizzazz … and then transforms this Disney-ish kids’ room into a sophisticated space a teenager will love … and then …
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Naked and Exposed
I think the neighbor saw me naked. It was just an unintentional flash as I walked past the window which, for some inexplicable reason, had both the shade and blinds drawn up. Fortunately, I think he just saw the top half of me which I’m more comfortable and confident about than my bottom half, but still, I’m a little embarrassed and concerned that we might develop a reputation as the weirdo, nudist flesh-flaunting neighbors.
Usually, the window has horizontal blinds that we leave down even during the day, although we open the louvers to let in some daylight. At night, we close the louvers and also pull down a hefty, opaque shade that totally blocks the light when the morning sun hits the window, allowing me to sleep like a baby, at least past a few snooze alarms.
So why in the world did I have both of them drawn up? And why in the world did I decide just at that moment that I needed to get something from the end table? And why did I think, ‘Hey, I’m going for it because what are the chances that, just as I walk past the window, the neighbor will be outside, which he rarely is, and look up?’” But I did, and he did, and in one mortified moment, I realized that he had probably seen me flashing my chubby, white self, or as I prefer to say, my ample assets of a certain ripened vintage.
As soon as I realized what had happened, I did a drop and roll on the bed to get to the other side of the room, ducked and did a guerilla warfare-style crawl out of eyesight. Still, I held out hope that maybe the light was such that, from the outside, I would just look like a vague, amorphous shadow. Intense light can be merciless, but diffuse or backlit light can be kind, and maybe the time of day and year and the quality and direction of the light would all coalesce to somewhat conceal me and protect me from myself, or—best case scenario—project an enhanced version of myself as a shapely and alluring but sufficiently modest silhouette, you know, like those on trucker’s tire flaps.
Over breakfast the next day, I told Vince what had happened, especially since I needed his help to test my hypothesis. But maybe in the back of my mind I was also thinking that I needed to tell Vince to alert him just in case my neighbor became so inflamed with lust that he would venture to commit a crime of passion like Scripture’s usually devout King David who impregnated Bathsheba and connived to have her husband Urriah killed after he saw her bathing on the roof. Ha, like that would happen! More likely, he could report me to the police for public, or at least quasi-public, indecency.
“I want to do a test,” I told Vince, “I’m going to go outside and stand at approximately the same angle as the neighbor and I want you to stand in the window and I’ll look up and see if I can see anything.” He agreed.
Later that morning, at about the same time of day as “the sighting,” I looked up at the window. Vince stood there shirtless and plain as day. He pranced around a little and did a Gypsy Rose Lee striptease-style chest shimmy that made me laugh, but it blew my hypothesis to smithereens because I could almost count the hairs on his chest—and he’s not even a gnarly, hairy guy.
If it’s true what Blanche DuBois said in A Streetcar Named Desire, then I’m in a heap of trouble. “After all,” she said, “a woman’s charm is 50 percent illusion.” So now, when it comes to my neighbor, I guess that whatever mysterious charms I once possessed are neither mysterious nor charming, but they just are what they are.
But I’m just thankful for God’s gift of a body that can enjoy so many things.
So dear neighbor, I apologize and, someday soon, I may actually be able to look you in the eye again, as long as you’re not looking back lasciviously because that would be just “Ewwww.”
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
A Sam's Club Fugitive
Maybe customer service could even award me a member card on the spot and I could bring it back to the tire department and bask in my newfound authority as a Sam’s Club card holder. Once I was ‘in the club” maybe I could actually buy some discount tires, whoppee!
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Feel the Love
First, let’s define love. In English, we casually use the word “love” to describe everything from spiritual love to lust. The ancient Greeks, however, were more precise. To them, “philia” meant virtuous or brotherly love, “eros” meant passionate love or lust, “storge” was natural affection, and” agape” referred to deeper, more spiritual or sacrificial love.
I love my husband, which incorporates emotional and physical love as well as commitment, spiritual oneness, and a reluctant willingness to put up with his misplaced affection for the snooze alarm. As Prince sang, “I would die for you.” It’s much more intense and all encompassing than what I mean when I say that I love Snickers bars.
My gas station love falls somewhere in between.
For some people, red symbolizes the Maryland Terrapins or the Red Cross. For me, “red” is all about Sheetz.
My love affair began when I used spend between five and six hours driving from Radford, Virginia, to Baltimore. After nearly four hours of road hypnosis, interrupted only on by an occasional appreciation for the rolling, maternal curves of the Appalachian Mountains, I would exit I-83 at Westminster and there it was—the friendly Sheetz, shining in all its red and silver glory, like a light on a hill or an inn in the desert, offering refreshment and calibration for the soul.
Sheetz symbolized civilization, refueling, and progress toward my destination. It offered practical amenities like a clean bathroom and yummy comfort food—warm coffee and a crunchy Snickers bar--all seemingly offered out of magnanimous concern for my well being. All told, the Sheetz experience stirred warm fuzzies and evoked something bordering on bliss in my innermost being--for real.
Sheetz was a marker, letting me know that the journey was not interminable, but would conclude within a reasonable and perceptible time span and that, in the meantime, Sheetz would minister to my most basic needs.
That’s why, when I recently saw a Sheetz truck with the slogan “Feel the love,” I did not resent it as a crass exaggeration or brand identification run amuck. Instead, I considered it a stroke of genius. Indeed, my friends, groove with me, revel in the redness, feel the shiny friendliness of your inner Sheetzness and, in the process, “feel the love.”
Thursday, May 13, 2010
The Dump
We’re basically animated, organic garbage dumps that lose the source of our animation after an average of 75 years or so.
During those 75 years we create and rearrange lots and lots of external garbage, some of it very toxic. Therefore, we’ve had to create complex systems for disposing of that garbage.
My life is in transition right now, so I’ve made several trips to the Baltimore County dump to dispose of the accumulated detritus of nine years in the same domicile—construction debris, clothing that’s not worth giving away, excess materials from half-finished projects, half-empty paint cans, all the stuff I’ve stored in the basement or shoved aside until I can determine its value or confirm the irrevocable passage of an expiration date. Eventually, the value of being free from “stuff” outweighs any intrinsic value or potential for repurposing, and it becomes garbage.
The dump is made up of things we’ve shed, but instead of organic skin cells, it’s often, plastic, metal or something poisonous like mercury-filled batteries or corrosive acid. Nothing is more soulless than metal, but there’s still something sad about a heap of discarded metal that once had purpose. The metal boxes that washed our clothes or contained our food end up twisted and empty, with gaping spaces where doors once stood, all bent and askew, discarded and unwanted-- and if you’ve ever felt discarded or unwanted, the dump can seem like a vivid illustration of your condition.
At the dump, the cutting edge technology of the recent past is now just toxic refuse, a reminder that people as well as things eventually become obsolete. Things that were once shiny and new dot the dump’s floor like dismembered robots, with clunky monitors for torsos, keyboards that look like elongated pelvises, skinny cords for arms and mouse clickers that poke up from crevices like fingerless hands, begging for mercy.
In a way, the dump is an organizational marvel. Upon entry, workers inspect your identification and assess the contents of your garbage to ensure that only properly authorized residents can dump the correct garbage in the correct location. Then, you drive your car through the proper lane depending upon the characteristics of your garbage and its recycling potential. Finally, you arrive at the general trash section, where you back up your car, take out the trash and toss or heave it down onto a concrete surface about 20 feet below.
I’ve made it past the inspectors and the recycling sirens, so now I’m allowed to enter Baltimore County’s inner sanctum of trash. I open the back of my car, take excess wooden molding and broken flagstone out of the back, and throw it over the edge onto a heap of someone else’s garbage of indecipherable origin, except for the soggy pillow. The pillow was once a bright, white stage for a theater of dreams, but it’s now dingy, wet and brown.
I take my own soggy dinginess, psychically transfer it to the flagstone, and heave it away from me. It goes flying down onto the pavement and shatters.
My old stuff is now discarded.
I thrust it away from me.
I am free.
--Jeanne Johnson (Ms. Sticky)
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Wedding Dress Blues
It seems like an ignoble end to a dress choice that involved blood, sweat, tears, and the near-murder of a “bridal consultant” from Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd. (NEVER go there!)
I loved my wedding dress, but getting it was an ordeal I would never want to re-live.
Every bridal dress purchase starts with a passionate devotion to research unrivaled by any merely scientific motivation. This is a wedding dress, after all, a purchase that should express who you are on your "special day." And figuring out how to express who you are on your special day requires looking at an endless stream of photographs of models with unrealistically wraith-like bodies wearing ridiculously overpriced gowns from designers who are probably gay. A colleague called it “wedding porn,” which is probably true in the sense that it involves lust, albeit for a dress, and voyeurism.
Apparently, these days, it’s OK for a bride to wear white even if she’s not a virgin, even if she’s pregnant, and even if she doesn’t know who’s the daddy. After all, discovering who you are on your special day is all about fantasy and if I want to fantasize that I’m a virgin, even though I’ve birthed three babies, that’s my right on my special day (so get over it Mr. Stuck- in-the Dark-Ages observer who thinks that colors should actually symbolize something). Still, I just couldn’t convince the Stuck-in-the-Dark-Ages observer in my head, so I opted for ivory, which is kind of like saying, “OK, I’ll concede that I’m not a virgin, but I’m trying to do it right this time so just consider me kind of a tarnished, off-white, wannabe virgin, who is at least going for virginAL, OK?”
So after I had torn out reams of samples and sulked out of the high-end wedding store with my tail between my legs, aghast at the $4,000-plus price tags, I perused the discount rack at Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd near my house (NEVER go there!)
Trying on wedding dresses helped me to discover the power of “structure.” What I mean by structure is that, if I suddenly disappeared, it would take my clothes a while to figure out that my body was missing. The older I get, the more my body loses structure, and the more I appreciate structure in my clothing. Still, the structure was so extreme that in some wedding dresses I felt overwhelmed and constrained by the dress rather than highlighted “on my special day.”
Finally, I found an ivory-colored dress in my price range in a shape and style that I liked. But when I tried it on, the structured bra cups were clearly made for someone with ginormous gazongas, not my middle-sized ones. My modest boobs floated around in those structured bra cups like marsh mellows floating near the rim in a cup of hot cocoa.
“That’s all right,” said the bridal consultant. “We can send it for alterations.” I couldn’t see how anyone could alter a structured cup down from a size that Heidi Montag would covet down to a simple B cup, but what did I know since I usually just buy clothes off the rack, minus the rack alterations?
So I ordered the dress, paid for the bulk of it, and waited. And waited. And waited.
Personally, I think the dress arrived way before they acknowledged its arrival. My theory is that the shop likes to wait until the last minute so that you’re in a desperate time crunch and you’ll be less likely to ditch the dress if you don’t like it or it didn’t turn out.
As it turned out, even after the dress came in, they wouldn’t even let me try it on unless I paid in full ahead of time. That should have clued me in that something was fishy about Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd. (NEVER go there!) So I paid and tried it on. And it was a disaster.
Even after expensive alterations, the floating marsh mellows aspect had not improved significantly, but other parts of the dress, which fit fine before, were now too tight, even though I hadn’t gained any weight. Instead of apologizing, consoling or reassuring me, the delusional “bridal consultant” actually said, “Well, of course it’s not going to fit because your waist is bigger than your bust.”
My jaw dropped. I may not have the proportions of Marilyn Monroe, but I can absolutely assure you that my waist is not bigger than my bust. I can prove this with photographs, diagrams, doctor reports, signed affidavits, or whatever documentation you desire, but my waist is definitely not bigger than my bust, and the fact that such words actually came out of the mouth of someone with the title of “bridal consultant” left me dumbfounded. You might expect someone who was dragged in off the street to be totally delusional and tactless, but a “bridal consultant?”
I wanted to throw the dress at her. Instead, I just abandoned the dress in disgust and marched out of the store, but I ended up having to come back, my chin held as high as possible, and retrieve the dress because, otherwise, it would be like giving Jacqueline’s Bridal Salon on Joppa Rd. (NEVER go there!) money for nothing. There was no way I was going to wear that dress, but there was also no way that I was going to let them keep it.
I ended up taking it to a different tailor, paying a lot of money for a competent tailoring job, and on my wedding day, I dressed it up further with some long gloves and a pearl- topped veil I got for $25 from Goodwill that looked great after I steamed out the wrinkles. In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed my dress, I had a great time on my “special day,” and I did it without spending ridiculous sums of money.
Still, it’s just a dress. I have no daughter who would appreciate having me pass it down, (if any daughter really appreciates that) and I’ll never wear it again, so let’s just be rational and trade it in for some practical spending money, and maybe even help out someone who can’t afford the usual overpriced wedding gowns as well as sparing them a trip to ... well, you know. Call it Cash for Cloth, or Bucks for Bridal Gowns, something practical.
Still, it sort of feels like selling off a field of dreams. I mean, it may be a wedding dress but it’s still just a dress
… isn’t it?
--Jeanne Johnson
Friday, February 26, 2010
My Mission: Find the T-Machine or Die Trying
It’s not the sleekest model, nor as cute and snazzy as my burgundy work computer, but I own it.
Beyond that, we have a relationship. I like how solid it feels in my lap and I enjoy how it seems to open up to me when I flip up the top. It waits for me to communicate and then it takes me on a ride down the information superhighway, guiding me as I traverse the perilous Autobahn where one false move can result in information overload.
But my “T” machine makes sure I can handle it. Or at least it did.
At the moment, the T-machine is gone, stolen by a greedy opportunist who smashed the window of my car to snatch it, along with my red, Samsonite travel bag, my hot pink Sony camera, assorted female paraphernalia, and a piece of my heart.
The police officer who took the report was nice enough. He had puppy dog eyes and I had to resist the urge to give him a hug. Something about him was sweetly world weary and he seemed like he needed comforting more than I did.
“What good does it do to steal a computer if the thief doesn’t have the password to logon?” I asked.
“Usually they take it to someone who wipes the hard drive and then they sell it to a pawn shop,” he replied.
I liked the “erase the hard drive” part in the sense that I didn’t want a stranger gaining access to my personal information, but at the same time, I hated the idea that some stranger could so easily wipe out some irreplaceable files, photos, music, and documents for illicit profit.
According to the police, pawn shops cooperate by reporting pawned merchandise and checking to see if items have been reported stolen. I had my doubts. Pawn shops might check before buying something, but they pay money up front so they really have no motivation to catch stolen merchandise once they’ve paid for it. And it took me an extra day to look up my computer’s serial number, so I figured that, by then, it was a done deal.
Determined, I used my lunch hour to call a couple of nearby pawn shops, concentrating on those with the easiest access to the crime scene, i.e., work’s parking lot.
The person at the first pawn shop said he didn’t carry notebook computers. At the second pawn shop, I asked if they had Toshiba notebook computers and the person who answered the phone said yes.
“Did you get any in the past couple of days?”
“Yes.”
I felt hope rising--and Barack Obama was no where in sight.
“Well, I had a Toshiba notebook computer stolen and I’m trying to track it down. Could you tell me if it’s the right model number?”
“Well, we have a lot of Toshiba computers, how am I supposed to know which one is yours unless you have the model number and s-n?”
“I do have the model and serial number.”
Suddenly, she shut down. She wouldn’t offer any information other than that they deal with the police department’s pawn unit.
So I called the police department and asked to speak to the pawn unit.
“We don’t give that number out,” said the rude person who answered the phone, parroting back to me the script about the supposedly cooperative relationship that pawn shops have with the police. “Do you understand,” she asked me condescendingly before hanging up.
“Yes, I understand,” I said, but I was thinking, “Yes, I understand that you’re uncooperative and just want to get me off the phone and you’re parroting information of dubious veracity. Do YOU understand?”
So off to the pawn shop I went.
The pawn shop was located at 424 33rd St, just off of Greenmount, an area where I usually wouldn’t go by myself. I maneuvered around mounds of dirty snow from Snowmageddon to finally find a parking space about 2/3 blocks from the pawn shop. While striding down Greemount in one direction, three gangsta-looking guys came toward me from the other direction with their “pants on the ground.” One guy was barreling toward me with one of his hands down the front of his low-riding pants. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have been intimidated, but not now. I was driven. “Excuse me,” I said politely, but there was an under-current of determination. In the end, they were probably more intimidated by me than I was by them because I was on a mission, propelled with all the righteous power of Moses about to part the Red Sea. And part they did.
I entered the pawn shop and confirmed that I was in the right place. “Are you the person who just called?” asked one of the clerks. “Yes,” I said, and her tone immediately became scornful. “And you’re so sure that your computer is here?”
“Well, yes. As a matter of fact, I do think so,” I said. “I’m looking for a dark blue Toshiba notebook computer, model number ….” I rattled off the model number and the list of other stolen items. I could sense recognition, even though they didn't acknowledge it.
“What’s the name?”
“How would I know the name of the person who smashed my car window and stole my stuff?”
Now that I was in the pawn shop I was surer than ever. I could tell by their duplicitous glances and closed attitudes. They absolutely refused to cooperate and it was obvious they were hiding something. Beyond that, it was like I had Lojack for Laptops in my soul and I could feel the T-machine calling out to me. I also felt spiritual opposition. It was so strong that it was physically palpable, almost as if it were pressing against me and trying to push me back. I wouldn’t budge.
Again, they gave me the same line about only working with the police pawn unit. “I called the police department and they said they don’t give that number out,” I said. So in a move that they probably thought would get rid of me, one of the clerks gave me the pawn unit phone number, but instead of leaving, I dialed the number on the spot.
I explained the whole situation to the police officer who answered but he said that no pawn shops had reported getting notebook computers in the past couple of days. That didn’t align with what the clerk had told me on the phone so I asked the officer to please investigate Famous Pawns on 33rd Street, and he said that he would.
The officer had a laid-back, sexy, sonorous, Barry White kind of voice. I envisioned him as a lady’s man, more inclined to chill out with some Courvoisier than to energetically track down a notebook computer thief.
In the meantime, I looked around at the pawn shop merchandise. There were cell phones, gold bracelets, amplifiers, and an ostentatious gold and diamond watch with an asking price of $2,499. I felt a combination of indignation, revulsion and greed. Maybe I could find a good deal!!
I reminded myself that these items were most likely the pilfered detritus of crime, or at least broken dreams. I thought of Roman soldiers casting lots for Christ’s robe as he hung on the cross, or the thieves that Ebenezer Scrooge saw in a vision from the ghost of Christmas future, gleefully distributing his material possessions.
I explained to the store manager that the police said they would investigate and, suddenly, she got friendly. “Oh, I had my car window smashed once,” she said, getting chatty and I went along with it, explaining how it’s my second stolen computer in one year and how nothing is covered by insurance because of the deductible. But I’m not fooled by her faux empathy. She’s just a profiteer of pilfered merchandise, trying to avoid police trouble.
As I’m headed out the door, I catch the tail end of a conversation and pause. “That computer is still here,” I hear one of the clerks say.
“Are you talking about my computer?” I ask.
“Oh no,” say all three clerks, shaking their heads in unison. An hour ago, they had “all kinds of Toshiba computers,” but now they apparently have none to show and they have no idea what I’m talking about.
I guess that, for the time being, I’ll just have to hope that Mr. Barry White voice does his job.
--Jeanne Johnson (Ms. Sticky)