Unemployed, So I'll Blog

Is There ANY Symptom Of Menopause That I DON’T Have?

2009-10-14T01:48:00.001-04:00

It is 1:33 AM and I am sitting at my computer, unable to sleep, which is a symptom of menopause. I alternate between shorts and a tee and a sweatshirt and flannel pajama bottoms because of the menopause-induced hot flashes. I cannot focus on any one thing because…menopause robs you of that skill.

I gained 30 pounds in a year in spite of not having changed a thing about my diet or (lack of) exercise. Then one sleepless night while looking up “menopause” I discovered that sudden weight gain was also a menopause thing. Oh-my-God.

Lately I have been sneezing. I mean, really sneezing. Those come-from-your-belly sneezes that feel like you are going to sneeze up a gut. And I don’t just sneeze two, three times. Oh no. Multiple times a day I sneeze between 15 and 25 times in succession.

And now I am wheezing. So as I sit here, fat and alternately hot and cold, as I sit here, wheezing in-between sneezes, I did a search for “menopause and wheezing” and sonofabitch if it isn’t another damn symptom of menopause.

I tell you, if men had to go through this there would be a cure -- or at least a panacea for my troubles.

I have to go now. Although I don’t know why because I can’t focus, but I think I do just the same because I need to find some tissues, a snack, a fan, a sweater and an inhaler.

Copyright (c) 2009 Inkwell Television

Goodbye to Summer (sigh)

2009-09-16T10:38:00.002-04:00

I am not happy that summer is coming to an end. Not happy at all. I hate seeing all that Halloween crap in stores, I don’t want to “Fall into____(insert “savings” or “school” or “a manhole” here). All I want to do is wear shorts and tank tops all year long and never have to don a down jacket. The occasional hoodie, sure, I’ll wear that. But I don’t ever want to wear a hat or gloves. Never.

I love summer. I love the heat and the humidity, I love the beach and the long days and the food. I love driving around with the beach chairs in the back of my truck, all the time, just in case. I love sitting on the beach listening to the Atlantic sing it’s songs for me. I love Jersey Fresh corn and tomatoes, Vidalia onions and the sweet watermelon with seeds that come in late August. I love walking on the jam-packed boardwalk on a hot Saturday night, playing Skee-Ball and trading tickets for trinkets. I just plain love it.

Perhaps it is my aversion to any season that isn’t summer that has kept me from caring about my birthday. I was born on the 28th of October, right smack dab in the center of autumn. Not the colorful, changing leaves, apple-picking half of October – no, I was born in the gray, rainy and cold part. And right before Halloween, meaning that from the age of about 5 onward, most of my birthday cakes were a jack-o-lantern, a witch’s hat, or a layered affair with lots of red and orange leaves. Autumnal. Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of these “I don’t celebrate my birthday” types. I am old, and that’s that. But birthdays aren’t special to me. Maybe if I were born in June, July or August I would feel differently. Then I could have had cookout parties instead of bowling parties. I don’t much like bowling either.

Before long I will indeed embrace the season. I will say “Oh, aren’t those leaves pretty,” while wishing they were still green. I will comment on the crisp air as I wrap a scarf around my head, remembering fondly the flip-flops and bathing suit that sit alone in deep storage. And I will eat (hopefully) Fudgie The Whale as I celebrate my autumn birthday. And when I blow out my candles and make a wish, I will wish for June.

Copyright (c) 2009 Inkwell Television

Earth Day 2009

2009-04-22T12:12:00.002-04:00

Today is Earth Day, according to all the signs in the streets and on the Google home page. As a user and abuser of the Earth as opposed to a conserver and preserver, I really don’t know what that means. I guess it has to do with trying to ‘save the planet’ or something, but in all honesty I never paid it much mind. Just as my ancestors never did as they burned ton after ton of coal, blackening sky and lung alike. Hey, they’re long dead and buried, what do they care, right?

I took the train in to work today (yes, I know the name if this blog is “Unemployed, So I’ll Blog,” but I can’t very well change it to read “Employed for the Next Seven Weeks, So I’ll Blog Sporadically”), so that is better than traveling alone in my SUV, idling in traffic as my exhaust pipe spews invisible toxins into the otherwise pristine New York air. Yeah, good and all, but I prefer aiding to the demise of the ozone layer over sharing a smelly metal tube with strangers. Sorry. At least I am honest. (And, it actually costs more to take the train than to drive. But that’s okay, because when I am homeless down the road because no one will hire an over-the-hill TV producer who has no savings after spending it all on expensive LIRR train rides, at least my environment will be clean and fresh!)

The office building where I am working pretends to care about Earth Day. I am not so sure if they do, of if they are just paying it lip service to get the environmentalists off their backs. For instance, yesterday they put up a little sign in the kitchens near the coffee machines announcing the “Ugly Mug Contest” in an effort to use fewer Styrofoam cups. I guess buying paper cups instead of Styrofoam cups was not an option. They want you to bring your ugly mug to the lunch area on the bigwig floor, where the owner of the ugliest mug will “win a prize.” They don’t even make it enticing by telling you what the prize is. Maybe it’s a recycled banana peel made into an iPhone cozy. Now there’s something worth entering the contest for!

Okay, I guess I do care a little. I try not to let the water run when I brush my teeth, I am trying as best I can to avoid beverages in plastic bottles, and I hardly ever over-use hair spray anymore. And I am writing a blog instead of publishing a book in an ongoing effort to save some trees. Of course, if anyone wanted to publish my essays in book form I would be the first one at the edge of the forest with a chain saw, felling virgin trees in anticipation of a giant run. But until then, I will write for the ether of the Internet whilst sipping organic coffee from my ugly mug.

Copyright (c) Leslie R Becker

Shopping At Fat Girl World

2009-04-20T13:07:00.002-04:00

I was never thin. Well, wait; I was thin when I was very little. So thin in fact that when my sister Lynne and I took baths together she would tell me I better get out before my mother opened the drain or I would be sucked away with the bath water. I was skeptical, but not skeptical enough to chance it, so I usually jumped out soaking wet. But then at about the age of 12 (right about the time my friends the hormones kicked in) I started to pork up, assisted in part by the opening of our town’s first McDonald’s. (No, I am not about to blame my weight on a fast-food chain. I was the one jamming fistfuls of French fries in my mouth, not Ronald McDonald.) And while I have had my good years and my bad years weight-wise, I have been on a steady upswing lately (right about the time my friends the hormones decided to abandon me), assisted in part by my renewed interest in McDonald’s, something I had been averse to since the age of about 30. But all of a sudden a Happy Meal sounded good again. And that is what has brought ne to my current weight, which has in turn brought me to the plus size department when shopping for clothes.

I call these departments by many names – fat girl world, big girl world, jumbo world (notice the pattern…) or my favorite, which I cannot take credit for, Lane Giant. However, department stores have their own names for the place where women of a certain size shop. Macy’s calls it “Macy Woman,” presumably because thin people are always girls, whereas heavy people are women even if you are 17 years old and a size 24. Kohl’s, Target and Wal-Mart call it like it is – Plus Size Women. No fuss, no muss…but of course, you can’t actually buy plus size clothing at Wal-Mart because all they do is add a few yards to styles that have no business coming in large sizes. I mean really, who wants to look at someone wearing size 22 Daisy Duke shorts? Yeah, no. But my favorite of all is Nordstrom’s: They call their plus size department “Encore.” Yes indeed. Encore: Because there is more of you. Encore: Because more is better. Encore: When regular just isn’t quite enough. Encore. Yes indeed.

And where in the stores can one find Big Girl World? Put on your walking shoes, you have a trek ahead of you.

Most department stores are set up the same. The cosmetics and the men’s departments are located right inside the door from the mall and the parking lot respectively. I am not sure why cosmetics are so readily accessible, but presumably the men’s department is so close to the door because men refuse to travel more than 50 feet into a store to purchase clothes. If their stuff is not right there at the door then they will simply turn around, leave the store, and resort to wearing whatever they happen to already own. I don’t know that I buy that theory, but that’s neither here nor there. Juniors and young men are typically on the first floor as well, since teens have the attention span of a gnat and they must be grabbed before the smell of the food court works its magic and drags them out into the mall where they will spend the next five hours standing by the fountain and texting their friends, who are on the other side of the same fountain. The second floor houses women’s clothing, because most women will travel three states away for clothes – the second floor is easy. But where is Fat Girl World? Keep walking…

The plus size department is always located on the top floor, way in the back. You have to go past housewares, lingerie, children’s clothing, furniture, gift wrap and customer service. And there, way in the back of the back can be found the women’s department, the plus sizes, big girl world. By the time you get there you are so weary that you will buy just about anything simply to justify the time and effort spent in travelling to the summit of the store. But really, why do they make the fat girls travel the furthest? Is it some sort of mean ploy on the part of the store designers? Do they think that by putting our department furthest from the door it provide us chub-ettes with the only exercise we’ll get in the next few weeks, aside from the walk from the car to the all-you-can-eat China Buffet? Do the people who watch shoppers via the cameras in the black bubbles on the ceiling take bets when a fat woman enters, sizing her up to see if she will actually make it to jumbo world without passing out from fatigue or lack of oxygen in the rarefied air of the top floors? Or am I being paranoid?

Ironically, the plus size department is usually found right next to petites, because nothing makes a fat girl happier than to inadvertently wander one rack over and mistakenly pick up a pair of size 4 petite Capri pants thinking they are fat-people shorts. But the biggest insult of all comes when you have finally settled on an outfit, whose combined material could make a jib sail for a small racing yacht, and you go up to the register to pay. (And pay more than the exact same outfit down in skinny girl world because of the extra material, and all the extra stitching required in the making of your sail, I mean, blouse.) It is at the register that you really feel like a big schlump. Why? The Godiva Chocolate display. That’s right, here in Fatty Land they sell candy at the register. Because fat people simply cannot resist a good candy, I guess. Or they think we will be so weakened from the climb and the shopping that we’ll think “what the hell, I’ll take this $8 candy bar because I will need sustenance before I begin the descent to sea level.” That is just the ultimate in insults. I am sure that candy is tasty, but I will never, ever buy candy at the register in the plus size department. I refuse to support that stereotype. Of course, if they had a McDonald’s up there, that would be a different story. French fry, anyone?

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Camping With Gay Men

2009-04-09T17:13:00.003-04:00

I love camping. I have been camping ever since I was I was a tiny girl. Not that my father took me, as you are all assuming in your heads right now. No. My father hated camping. It was my mother who was more outdoorsy in this area. My father loved fishing and being out in the fresh air, but at the end of the day he wanted a hot shower, a meal cooked in a real kitchen, and a bed that was more than 6 inches off the ground. So it was my mother, and the Girl Scouts of America, who took me camping.

I have never been sure if my mother truly loved camping, or of it was just something she put up with just so she could wear the tailored green leader’s uniform (that she looked fabulous in, I may add…she had, and has still at the age of nearly 82, a cute little Irish body. I got the German hips and bosom from my father. Figures.) But at any rate, it was her leadership in Girl Scouts that started me out on a life-long love of camping. And the lessons I learned in Girl Scouts have served me well when in the wilds of a state park, which is about as remote as I’ve ever gotten.

But no Girl Scout Jamboree could have possibly prepared me for camping with gay men.

Let me preface the whole “camping with gay men” statement by qualifying a few things – first, none of the five men I camp with are very girly or anything like that. A few of them are downright butch. So I was fairly confidant there wouldn’t be any “Ahhhh! There’s a SPIDER in this wretched tent!” moments. And there weren’t. So while that stereotype didn’t play in camp, just about every other one did.

First, one couple was shocked and dismayed to see that the tent they purchased at a big warehouse store lacked all the poles essential for it’s erection (you can’t have a story about gay men without the word “erection.”). So almost as soon as they arrived they had to go to the local Wal-Mart to purchase another tent. While they were gone the rest of us busied ourselves with setting up camp. Aside from the couple who went tent shopping, there were two lesbian couples, another gay couple, and one gay man who is in-between relationships. And it was this man who brought the item that made the others very, very jealous. Because gay men are competitive, I was to learn that weekend. I guess when you strip away the word “gay” you still have “men,” after all. They can’t help it – it’s in their DNA.

I was busy putting up my tent when I realized that there was a lot of noise coming from Howard, the single man’s, tent. I walked over to see what was causing this not-very-nature-like noise, and there he was, his oh-so-fabulous tent pitched perfectly against the autumn backdrop, and he was vacuuming. And the vacuum was plugged in to the wall of his tent. “What are you doing?” I asked, loudly, over the noise of his camouflaged camping Dyson . He shut it off and said, as if everyone in the world vacuumed their tent, “I am vacuuming!” And with that the other two gay men screamed from inside their tent, where they were hanging faux-Persian rugs on the walls, "Whaaaaaaat? You have a vacuum?!?! Oooooo! Let us borrow it! There’s all this nasty dirt in here!”

And thus began a weekend (the first of many) of tent vacuuming. But wait, there’s more. Remember couple number one, who went to Wal-Mart to get a tent? Yes, well they arrived back in camp and began the very complicated set up of their tent-come-chalet. Vacuum man helped them since he was all done with his electric tent set up. I heard lots of “Oooo-ing” and “Ahh-ing,” and exclamations of “What a pretty color!" but when I heard Howard, the man with the coveted vacuum, say, with just a tinge of jealousy in his voice, “Are those closets?” I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to go over.

Sure enough, their multi-room tent had closets, one on each side of the tent. The right closet had shelves; the left had a hanging bar. For all their camping suits and dresses, I suppose. These closets jutted out from the sides of the tent, looking like little after-thought additions to a summer bungalow. And remember the other gay couple, the ones who borrowed the vacuum? Yeah, well, by the time we all went camping again a few weeks later, they had purchased a new tent the size of a small park. We could have driven one of the cars right in to it. But they kept it very clean with Howards’s vacuum!

Soon I will write a story about how these men used tea lights and tiny paper bags to illuminate not only our campsite but the banks of the creek we camped upon. And about how Howard went in to the woods for firewood and came out with an entire dead tree that he knocked down. It’s true. I was there. Camping was never this much fun before the gay men started going…

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

“Everyone Gets A Trophy” Ruined Our Economy

2009-04-05T17:21:00.005-04:00

The Trophy Generation

I know I have blamed the ruination of our economy on everything from George W. Bush to the rising cost of cashews, but today I realized what truly, I mean really and truly, caused our recession/depression: The “everybody gets a trophy” policy that was brought in to play by some annoying parent with a child who was uncoordinated, a sore loser, stupid or all of the above.

When I was a kid you got a trophy if your team won the big game at the end of the season. Only one team got the trophy, and even of you were the team that played the winner, which of course made you second-best, you got squat because YOU DIDN’T WIN. It made us want to win, but it also taught us how to lose. Because guess what, all you undeserving trophy holders of the last two and a half decades – sometimes you lose and that’s all there is to that.

So now we have a young workforce full of people who got a trophy for showing up for more than half of the soccer practices. They got trophies for managing to not break a bone, they got trophies for wearing matching socks, they got trophies for coming in tenth out of ten. And now they want bonuses for not calling in sick every week and actually doing their jobs.

My sister told me the story of two 19-year-old workers who told her, their boss, that they felt “unappreciated.” Their job was to either hand out towels at a hotel’s poolside towel shed, or bring chairs to the beach for guests. And they felt unappreciated because she didn’t say “Nice job! Here’s a trophy!” after every time they actually did their job quickly and efficiently. She told them that the paycheck they got every week was appreciation enough, and that they should appreciate the fact that she didn’t fire them for performing at a consistent 80%. They quit and she replaced them with one 45 year old school teacher on summer break who did both of their jobs far more efficiently, and never once asked for appreciation or a trophy.

And today we have a Wall Street that is populated with the trophy generation, stock-brokers who seem to believe that even if they fail, even if they lose fully and completely, there is a trophy on the table at the end of the field already engraved with their name, and they get it no matter what. You made a huge error in judgment and told clients to buy Merrill Lynch? That’s okay; you still get a bonus and a trophy. You work for AIG? Here, we have your trophy AND a huge bonus! Whoops! You lost your company millions of dollars? That's okay, you're still a WINNER in our eyes! Have a cookie and a big trophy because you have a big heart! And we wonder why we are in this economic mess.

The Trophy Generation had better wise up soon -- even though their inability to comprehend loss if not their fault -- because if they don’t we are all gonna be in some sorry shape, just you wait and see. So to all you parents who celebrated your inept child’s trophy for 15th place, to you mothers and fathers who told your children that a D average was worth a trip to McDonald’s, to you coaches that allowed the kids with no athletic skills whatsoever to play in the game even though it was obvious that their two left feet were going to cost the team a win, I say shame on you. I may be looking at a dismal old age because you were too weak to tell your kids they needed improvement. But you will suffer the same fate as me, I suppose. So when we retire, I’ll see you in the cat food aisle as we each shop for lunch. I hear 9-Lives has the tastiest shredded beef in savory sauce.

Copyright (c) Inkwell Television 2009

All I Want To Do Is Go To A Yankee Game

2009-03-18T00:02:00.006-04:00

I never wanted to be one of those old people who say things like “I remember a time when…” but this ticket buying nonsense at Yankee Stadium has me all riled up.

So here I go.

I remember a time not too very long ago before cell phones and pagers and even before answering machines when we would call our friends at work because that was the one place we knew we could reach each other. Back then I was living in Hoboken and my good friend Donna was living in Montclair, and we were, then as now, Yankee fans. And one of us would call the other at work and say “Hey, wanna go see a game tonight?” And it was that easy.

Of course, that was in the dark years between 1978 and 1996 when we celebrated if the Yanks finished the season one game over .500. But even last year, the very last year that the House the Ruth Built was open for business, I was able to easily and somewhat affordably purchase tickets to the last Tuesday night game ever played, the fifth-to-the-last game ever at the renovated original Yankee Stadium , and I did it just two days before the game. But I digress – I was talking about the good old days. I will kvetch (because old people don’t bitch, they kvetch) about the new days later on.

Donna and I would do what fans have been doing since time immemorial – we would meet at the bat, the giant Louisville Slugger that towered over the plaza near Gate 4. From there we would go to either the little red ticket booths, or then when they closed, to the blue ticket booth shoots right at the gates. These booths were staffed by men who were already middle aged when Gerhig gave his “Today (today today today), I consider myself (consider myself sider myself), the luckiest man (man man) on the face (facefaceface) of this Earth (this earth earth), so by the time Donna and I showed up in 1985, these men were ancient. I mean old as crap. Nearly blind, and almost always deaf. And they held your fate in their hands.

We would survey the lines, watching to see whose line was slower. A slow line could simply mean that the all but comatose man inside was just slow as molasses (and yes, they were always men, it was what it was and I am not in the mood to discuss women’s rights at this moment – right now I am bitching, er, I mean kvetching about tickets to a stupid baseball game), but a slow line could also mean that the nonagenarian housed within was actually taking the time to find the very best seats for his anxious fans. We always chose the slowest line.

When we arrived at the Plexiglas window, each clutching a five-dollar bill (with another in our pockets that would buy us a beer and a hot dog, and maybe some Cracker Jack), we would smile our best twentysomething smile and say “Do you have anything on the first base side for $4.25?” and then we would wait, hoping one of us reminded him of either his great, great granddaughter or his first girlfriend. And also hoping he liked his great, great granddaughter or his first girlfriend. The little man in the booth would reach for a stack of rubber-banded tickets and he would thumb through them like a deck of cards, making that thhhhhffffttt sound. And then he would stop suddenly, remove two tickets from the three inch thick stack and say “How about first row loge, box 421?” JACKPOT!

Sometimes we got a mean old man who resented Reaganomics and the fact that he still had to work at the age of 94, so we got really bad seats, buried in the middle of a 45 seat row with nothing but drunken blue collar Jersey boys all around us. That was great for Donna, who would spend the entire game flirting, but for the person with the walnut sized bladder and no interest in any men at the game other than the pin-striped ones, it meant pissing off a bunch of construction workers every other inning as I "excuse me, pardon me" 'd my way to the end of the very long row.

But the point I am trying to make, and not doing a very good job of it, I may add, is that if we wanted to go to a game, we simply went. And it cost us no more than $15 including our train ride. Less of we brought a submarine sandwich with us. It was a fine way to entertain ourselves well within our budget.

But today, well today I wanted to look into getting tickets for the Yankees at their new stadium. But apparently, here, one short month away from opening day, single game tickets are not yet on sale. But I discovered that there is a plan for buying single game tickets, a plan I didn’t know about. No one told me about it. Apparently I was supposed to register to be a part of a lottery. If I were chosen at random in that lottery, I would then be allowed to try and purchase tickets online. Try, but there is no guarantee. Try. But I missed the deadline by 34 minutes to register for the lottery that may or may not lead to tickets , so I was told that if there were any left after the lottery winners have at them, then they would be put out for sale. And if I do manage to snag a seat, it will cost me about $75. That’s right, seventy-five dollars. Per seat. Way out near the foul pole. Seventy Five US dollars.

The average salary in New York City in 1985 was $20,000. Today it is $80,000. That means that my seat at the stadium should be $17, based on what it was in 1985. But no, it is $75. Parking is another $30, a hot dog, beer and Cracker Jack runs another $22. So for just $127, I can go to a game! Oh wait, no I can’t – because I didn’t register for the lottery to be considered to have a chance at being one of the people who tries to buy tickets. Alas.

What happened to us? And how to we get back? I am starting on the time tunnel tomorrow. I’ll let you all know when it is done and we can go back to 1985 when there were only 18,000 people in a stadium that held 50,000, when boys with names like Mattingly, Henderson, Winfield and Righetti played a game in a place that that was hallowed, a place where cheers and boos alike lingered long after the fans left for the season. I remember that place. That place may be gone soon, but not from my heart. So my heart will get to keep the memory while the Yankees get to keep the contents of my wallet, assuming I even get a ticket.

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

More Olde Stuff

2009-03-11T09:56:00.006-04:00

Dear Blog Readers:

I apologize. I have been busy editing and have not written a blog, and for that I apologize. However, because I sometimes write crap just to amuse myself, I have a bunch of old things that I can recycle here, things you probably have not yet read -- and if you have, maybe you would like to read it again.

This was written in December of 2005. I hope you enjoy it. I looked for something about St Patrick's Day or Lent or Easter, but I guess I never wrote about those...so another Christmas-themed blog it is. Christmas in March.

Shopping in New York City is a challenge on the best of days. Shopping in New York City in December is downright insane. But that's just what I found myself doing today. Why, I wonder, when I have a car and I live in Brooklyn and I can easily drive to any number mall-ettes, do I feel the need to travel, by subway of all God forsaken things, into the city? Oh, and I call them "mall-ettes" because where I come from, there are strip malls and real malls. Here in the outer boroughs of New York City, you have the "mall-ette." Not big enough to be a mall, but way bigger than a strip mall. But I digress…I'll wax poetic on the joys and pitfalls of the uniquely American shopping phenomenon at another time, in an essay entitled "I Hate Malls."

So there I was. I had been to The Container Store over the weekend. Sunday to be exact. I needed containers. They have many. But they also had tables full of cool stocking stuffers. A wind-up flashlight for all the blackouts that happen every 20 - 30 years. A "survival" kit containing gum, candy and snacks all neatly packed in a sardine can. Light up pens. A Willy Whiskers key chain. Remember Willy Whiskers? A face with bits of metal that you drag with a magnet to make whiskers. Yeah. They had that. Cool. I was going to buy it all. Willy Whiskers beats the hell out of another Chap Stick, right?

I wanted these fun items. Monday and Tuesday were nasty and rainy and cold, so I stayed home. Sure, I wanted cool stuff, but was it worth getting sick over? But Wednesday dawned clear and warm. So, on a Wednesday in December, on a matinee day when the city is filled to capacity, I took the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I arrived at The Container Store, debit card at the ready for some serious stuffer purchasing. And did they have these stocking stuffers, two-and-a-half days later? No, they did not. "Oh, we sold out of the good stuff really fast!" exclaimed the perky Container Store Elf. Bah humbug to her, I say.

I left The Container Store. I didn't need containers. I needed candy in a small fish tin. I met up with my friend Gary and we walked over to the Farmer's Market and Kristmas Kiosks at Union Square. They were selling everything there. Remote controlled hover crafts, patchouli scented "sex candles," and a whole booth of things made of leaves from both Central Park and Union Square. I asked the guy selling the "Green Man made from Central Park Leaves" why it was necessary to make green men out of leaves from a particular place. He didn't have an answer. I asked him if he had any dog crap that looked like Jesus or Joe DiMaggio or something. He didn't so we moved along.

Lots of people had other Jesus stuff. One booth even had a Saint Simon pin cushion. Many booths had Jesus the Action Figure (pocketful of miracles sold separately!) but what I really wanted was Jesus and the Apostles finger puppets. Sure, there are more Apostles than you have fingers, but you can always improvise for the Last Supper scene: JESUS: Take this bread, all nine of you because James, Bartholomew and Phillip are still at The Olive Garden having all you can eat soup and salad, take this bread and eat it, for this is my body…"

After Jesus browsing we headed to Times Square because I wanted to go to the music stores to get a snare drum, hi-hat cymbals, and stands for my niece for Christmas. Okay, two huge red flags right there - first, actually going to Times Square, and second, purchasing heavy drums and stuff that then have to be carried through the crowds and down into the subway. Alas. But up to 42nd Street we went anyway. We came out of the subway at 40th and Broadway. It was fine for two blocks and then we hit the tourist wall. The tourist wall is the human barrier that is formed in places like Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Big Top All-Girl Review…places like that. The tourist wall cannot be penetrated, surmounted, skirted or summit-ed. The wall moves, but it moves v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y. I think the city of New York should remember lessons learned during the Republican Convention of 2004. When the Republicans were in town, the city made what I called "The Republican Corridors." Either the center lane or the extreme side lanes of every avenue from 3rd through 9th, and of major cross streets from 14th to 57th, was blocked off with cones. New Yorkers sat in traffic as Republicans whizzed by us in their specially marked Republican Corridors. Well, I think the city should make "New Yorker Alleys" on the sidewalks near tourist attractions. The majority of the sidewalk can be used for strolling and looking at the buildings and the bright lights and the fake Prada salesmen. But there would be one lane, marked off with cones, that was just for New Yorkers. We would walk very fast there. No one would be allowed to stop. If they did, they would either be trampled or knocked down and rolled out of the way. Exits and entrances would be at corners and subways. And God help the tourist who wandered in to the New Yorker Alley by mistake. No mercy would be shown. But of course, we are all tourists at one time or another, as I was reminded when a young man, exasperated when he couldn't get by a group of digital camera-wielding women, exclaimed "tourists!" in that oh-so-disdainful New York way. One of the women turned to him and said "Hey! Stay away from my beach this summer!" We are all tourists.

After visiting the music stores and buying 98 pounds of stuff, we headed to Port Authority so Gary could catch his bus back to New Hope. He runs a B & B there. I hate B & B's. But again, that will be for another time, in an essay entitled "I Hate B & B's." Anyway, Port Authority is one of those places where even New Yorkers feel alien. Nothing but florescent lighting and the air is filled with the smell of diesel fumes. And it shakes like there is an earthquake all day long. You can always spot a transplanted Californian at Port Authority. When the building shakes they do that turtle thing where they immediately try to pull their heads in to their shells, only we people don't have shells. Visible ones, anyway. Then they run for the door. New Yorkers, thinking the bus/train/taxi/pedi-cab is leaving, begin running too. New Yorkers will run for any reason, or no reason, as long as someone ahead of them is running. It's fun to watch. But the best fun in Port Authority is Leisure Time Bowling and Cocktails. You can have a martini and then put on someone else's smelly, multi-colored shoes and hurl an orb at objects carefully arranged at the end of a runway. Just like fashion week!

So all that to say…I will never shop in the City in December again!

Copyright (c) 2005 Leslie R Becker

Crime Doesn't Pay

2009-03-04T09:00:00.006-05:00

I don’t understand why there are still criminals of any kind in this day and age, a time when you really can’t get away with anything. But yet there are dim-witted people out there who wake up one day and think to themselves “I’m going to rob a bank! Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. Then all my money woes will be gone forever!” And so they shall be. But your “Uh-oh, I’m gonna be somebody’s bitch in prison” woes will just be starting.

There are closed circuit television cameras everywhere, people. Perhaps not as many as they have in England, where officials can peer into almost every aspect of your life, but unless you have been living in an ice fishing shack on Antarctica for the last 25 years, you know that at the very least, banks have cameras, for crying out loud. And guess what? Wearing that NY Jets ski mask to conceal your identity is pointless if you write the “Gimme all your money and no one gets hurt!” note on your own pre-printed-with-your-name deposit slip.

One of my favorites is when people get pulled over for speeding and the cop discovers 85 pounds of marijuana or a kilo of cocaine. I mean really. How incredibly clueless do you have to be? If I had as little as a single joint in my car there is no way I am going even one mile an hour over the limit. Stupid pot-heads. “Dude, go faster! Let’s see if we can go real fast and travel to the future and sell this pot for like, way more than it’s worth now! Whoa…what’s that light and noise behind us, dude? Is that the time tunnel sucking us back, or what?”

The other day I read about two very stupid criminals, one a shoplifter/petty thief, the other a car jacker. Brainless thief #1 decided to rob the same corner store in Brooklyn that he had been chased from earlier that day for trying to shoplift a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English 800 Malt Liquor. He must have been successful in stealing a bottle of the demon brew from one of the dozens of small stores all within a stone’s throw of each other that populate Brooklyn from one end to the other, because he grew a set of (drunken) balls and went back to the store from which he had been chased, and he accosted the owner for cash from the drawer. The owner handed him a few measly dollars and the thief stumbled outside and ran past a beat cop who happened to be right there. The cop chased the guy down the street, into a building, and up to an apartment. The cop knocked on the door and a different man answered. The cop mistook him for the drunken thief he was just chasing and arrested him. (Apparently stupidity is not confined to the “robber” side of “cops and robbers.”) But the real robber showed his true-but-dull colors because as the cop led the unfortunate look-alike away, the real thief shouted from his window to the cop, telling him how stupid he was for arresting the wrong guy. Guess what the cop did then? Yeah, he went back upstairs and arrested the mind-numbingly un-smart braggart. What a dumb ass.

And thief #2 has a story that is not as colorful but just as incredible on the idiot scale – it’s the story of a car thief who called cops repeatedly to brag about having gotten away with stealing a car. Except the brainiac was using his own cell phone, so the police were able to easily track him down and jail him. How dense can you really be? I mean, really? That's as bad as the kids who do stupid petty crimes, videotape themselves doing it, post it on YouTube, and then are surprised when they get arrested. But presumably we can blame their stupidity on raging hormones. A grown person has no excuse.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t bother breaking the law. You won't get away with it anyway, and you will end up on the pages of “Stupid News, Stupid Criminals.”

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Stupid People

2009-03-03T10:22:00.003-05:00

I belong to a service called “Theater Extras.” You pay a yearly membership fee of $95.00 and you are then eligible for two free event tickets. Well, there is a $4.00 processing fee, but almost free, especially considering how little you can buy with $4.00, so it’s as good as free. There is the occasional Broadway show (and attending one show essentially pays for the membership fee), quite a few Off Broadway shows, opera, concerts with famous and not-so-famous orchestras, a crap load of cabaret shows that I am just never, ever going to attend (I mean really, who wants to see yet another gay man sing the songs of Judy Garland?) and every once in a while a popular artist concert. I even went to a Martina McBride concert at Jones Beach last summer, and I have no idea whatsoever who Martina McBride is. But it was $4.00 and it was at a fabulous outdoor amphitheatre overlooking the Atlantic Ocean on gorgeous summer night. What the hell, right?

My friend Donna Coney Island (no, that is not her maiden or married name, but it is her name nevertheless) got me to join back in October of 2006 in an effort to secure tickets to Barbra Streisand’s appearance that year at Madison Square Garden. Apparently when Babs decided to take herself on tour again and set her prices in the stratosphere, she failed to consider that most people didn’t want to see her badly enough to pay $600 for a seat on the 17th floor in the way-back of a giant arena. Nor did she consider that most of the concert-ticket-buying public have no clue who she is. They were looking for Shakira or The Killers – not a sixty-something warbler from a bygone era. Sure enough, she failed to sell out The Garden, and Theater Extras had Barbra Streisand tickets. They were going to put them up at an appointed hour, and Donna figured that if both of us were members we would double our chances of getting tickets. And sure enough, we got’em! We were about three rows up on the first ring, only about halfway back in the arena. They were really amazing seats, and they were four dollars! But that’s not what this blog is about. I just wanted to give you a little history of my membership in Theater Extras.

Last week there was an offering for The Little Orchestra Society’s concert honoring the bicentennial of Abe Lincoln’s birth. They were playing, among other things, Aaron Copeland’s “A Lincoln Portrait,” and it was to be narrated by James Earl Jones, who could narrate an autopsy and make it sound good. This was one of their concerts for young people, so Jacki and I went in to it knowing that there would indeed be lots of children, and therefore a fairly high level of noise, probably more than usual. The concert was at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Avery Fisher Hall was built specifically to become the home of the New York Philharmonic, who up until that time had played concerts at Carnegie Hall. Avery Fisher opened in 1962 (but it was not called Avery Fisher until a man named Avery Fisher gave them a giant lump of cash and they named it after him), but much to everyone’s dismay, it was an acoustical dud. Well, it is not acoustically great if you want to hear what’s being played on the stage, but I know first hand that if you are in the 7th row and you have gum, the whole damn place can hear you getting that gum out. I’ll explain further on…

Because Theater Extras tends to get some of the worst seats at the event, we have become accustomed to either being way off to the side behind a pillar, way up in the last row of the rear mezzanine, or in the case of a place like Avery Fisher, way down in the front where you can hear essentially nothing, get a stiff neck from craning upwards to see, and at that can only see the tops of musician’s heads. But hey, it’s $4.00…Anyway, we took our seats at this Lincoln Center concert for Lincoln and the music began. I don’t remember what the first piece was, but it was indeed lovely, and they had a slide show of Daguerreotypes and photos of Lincoln and the Civil War and slaves and other things iconic of that era. And bunting. There was lots of red, white and blue bunting because nothing says Olde Time Americana like bunting.

At the conclusion of the first piece the conductor turned to talk to the audience, because remember, this is a young people’s concert and they try to get the kids involved. Plus, kids today think everything is interactive anyway, so might as well flat out talk to them rather than expecting them to sit there quietly like we did in the days before “interactive.” No, wait – we had “interactive;” it was known as “go outside and play with your friends,” but I digress. The conductor said, “Who knows what year Lincoln was born?” Now remember – we are there for a bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. Presumably every adult in there knew the answer, and knew enough to keep quiet and let the kids answer. But no. This guy in the 7th row shouted out “1809!” and the conductor looked at him oddly, as if to say “You’re an idiot, that question was not for you” but instead said “Yes, that’s right, 1809” and then he talked more about Lincoln’s early years. Then the conductor said, “President Obama is our 44th president – does anyone know what number Abe Lincoln was?” and sure enough, dick head shouted out “Sixteen!” The conductor, like those of us near him, were beginning to wonder if maybe this guy was developmentally disabled and had the mind of a child and that is why he is answering. No. He then high five'd his girlfriend, who was clearly impressed by this jackass’s intellectual prowess on the subject of Abraham Lincoln, and it was then that we all saw that he was just an annoying blowhard. Finally, the conductor said, “President Obama and President Lincoln were both from the same state when they were elected…anyone know what state that is?” And at this point the conductor leveled a look at Shit-For-Brains that clearly said “DO NOT ANSWER THIS” but sure enough, he shouted out “Illinois!” The conductor's shoulders dropped, he said nothing, turned to the orchestra and began the next piece, clearly defeated and deflated by this buffoon’s ruining of his lesson to the children. In the meantime, Genius’s girlfriend was so impressed that she felt the need to deep tongue kiss him for the next three full minutes.

The concert proceeded with no more shenanigans until there was a really quiet part. A guest violinist and composer was on the stage playing a solo medley of songs written during the Civil War, which was apparently a very prolific time period, song-wise (a fact our man did NOT know, thankfully). As the haunting strains of a sad melody from this lone instrument tried valiantly to make its way to the back of this acoustically imperfect hall, the Dynamic Duo in row 7 thought to themselves, “Hey, now would be the perfect time for minty fresh breath! Let’s push gum chiclets through this really noisy foil/plastic container, and let's do it over and over again.” So they did. Of course, they dropped the first piece, so that was a do-over. And I guess Mr. Know-It-All has a really big mouth, because he needed to chew three pieces simultaneously. So the gum wrapper noise lasted for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, a 9-year-old in the row in front of them turned around and shushed them. And when the child turned back around they did what any adult would do in a similar situation -- they had another piece of gum.

We really enjoyed the concert, but I doubt I will be going back to any young people concerts. And not because of the kids – no, they were perfect audience members. It’s the adults I am afraid of. Because we live in a world with no rules, especially for the two people in seats 16 and 18, Row G, Avery Fisher Hall, on February 28, 2009. Idiots.

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

My Father's Voice

2009-02-27T09:26:00.004-05:00

I still hear my father’s voice from time to time. He passed away in April of 1995, so it’s been quite a while since I really heard his voice, if you don’t count the cassette tape of him talking to his banjo instructor that my mother found a few years after his death. We listened to that when she found it, but that’s not the same. Especially since we could only listen once…not because we were overcome with sadness after hearing his voice – no, it was because his inability to actually play the banjo (the last of many instruments he tried and failed to learn) was such an assault to the ear that we felt bad laughing at him when he wasn’t there to defend himself.

But in spite of the years gone by, I can still remember the sound of his voice. I clearly remember his laugh. I remember the way he cleared his throat. And even though it’s been over 35 years since I heard him say it, I still remember what “Because I said so, that’s why!” sounds like. But when I say I still hear my father’s voice, these are not the things I mean. I mean I hear all the life lessons that he spent 36 years planting in my head. “Change your oil every 3000 miles and your car will last 15 years or more.” And “Don’t worry about a dandelion in your lawn…life is too short to be mad at a flower!” And my least favorite: “Oh yes you WILL need algebra someday!” And don’t I just find myself using stupid algebra more than I care to admit. So when I say I hear his voice, it is more that I find myself benefiting from his lessons of long ago. And were it not for one of those lessons, my car may have been totaled.

I was on my way to visit an old and dear friend in Weehawkin, NJ from my home in Brooklyn. The best way to get there is to go through Manhattan. Always fun at rush hour (which should be renamed “rush morning” and “rush evening” since each lasts 3 hours, but that’s for another time). I was stopped at a light, and I was the first car. The light turned green and I proceeded through the intersection. Okay now, at this point in the story I should set up some visuals for you…first, at the time I owned a mini van. These are not cool, racy vehicles that inspire speed. No. These are the station wagon for the turn of the century. Secondly, if you’ve ever driven in Manhattan during rush hour (and I would imagine the same holds true for many cities), then you know that pedestrians truly believe that they are made of steel and can therefore either walk right in front of your moving vehicle, or they think it is okay to move ten feet out into the crosswalk so that after your car passes by they can make a mad “I am made of steel” dash for the other side of the street in the 14 feet that separates your moving car from the also-moving car behind you. I cannot confirm it, but I would bet money that no pedestrian who behaves this way has ever driven a car in New York City. Anyway, between my less-than-racy car and the annoying coffee cup-clutching, office-bound pedestrians, there was no way I was doing more than 15 MPH when I reached the other side of the intersection. But, New York being New York, there was one of the city’s famous “mound of unnecessary asphalt” followed by an un-filled pothole (perhaps the mound of asphalt was intended for the hole…who knows?), followed by a steel plate that had one corner that was raised up about 3 inches. And I was this hazards next conquest.

Of course, it wasn’t until after I’d had my little mishap that I discovered all the complexities of the hazard described above. There was no way I could see all that as I approached it. I was too busy looking at the man on my right and the woman on my left who were each vying to be the person who gets closest to my car without actually touching it, and it wasn’t until I was right on top of the asphalt mound that I noticed the gouge marks on the pavement beyond it. Do you know what I mean by gouge marks? It’s the way the street gets ripped up by all the vehicles that encounter something like an asphalt mound or a sink hole (because the streets of New York City are NOT built on bedrock, but on century-old pipes stretched across deep crevasses to hell) and then the front end of the car slams! into the pavement and leaves a big gouge. When you see them you instantly brake and hold your breath, hoping against hope that you don’t hit too hard. Or, if time permits, you try to steer around it like NASCAR drivers do when the car in front of them spins out of control. But I was already on top of my asphalt mound, and since the people on my right and left were so close they were leaving breath marks on my windows, steering around wasn’t an option. So it went like this: Slam! Up! Down! Gouge! Snap! Oh…that was bad.

I heard the clank of metal as something rolled away from my car, and the man on my right, (whose Starbucks venti extra-foam-who-knows-what-but-it-costs-a-fortune-coffee-something was miraculously still in his hand in spite of being a millimeter from my side-view mirror) said “Whoa...oh…uh oh…” Oh shit. When pedestrians feel compelled to comment on a driver’s plight, you know it’s bad because pedestrians dislike cars and their drivers as much as drivers dislike pedestrians. Uh oh is right.

I braked and looked down at my dashboard and saw that the little oil light was on. I'd never seen that light on in that car before, and I’d had it since 1998. I remember thinking the light looked a lot like a tiny Aladdin’s lamp. But before that thought had the time to take hold and distract me with thoughts of ancient Arabia, I heard my father’s voice in my head: “If your oil light ever comes on, pull over right away and shut the car off before the engine seizes.” I saw a fire hydrant (which in New York City is usually the only part of any street devoid of a parked car, and even that’s not always true), so I pulled over.

I immediately shut the car off, got out, and looked underneath only to see the oil literally gushing from the place where the oil is usually neatly contained. It took all of 13 seconds for the entire contents of my oil pan to vomit itself on to the street. Somehow I knew this wasn’t good. I called my roadside assistance people, who amazingly showed up 15 minutes later. The tow truck guy looked at my predicament and shook his head in that superior ‘man’ way. I hate that. He walked all around the vehicle, shaking his head and tsk tsk tsk-ing his tongue against his teeth like my grandmother did when she disapproved of something, and then this superior man tow truck driver proceeded to grill me about what happened in the moments after plowing up roadway with my front end (and I was grilled again later by the mechanic where the car was towed): “Did you run the car after you ripped the oil pan off?” and “Are you sure you didn’t try to start the car after you opened the oil pan like a soda can?” and “If you tried to run the engine after it disgorged its oil all over the street in a messy environmental hazard, then your engine is toast…are you sure you didn’t do that?” I guess they didn’t believe that someone who could be so careless as to punch a 6 inch hole through a thick metal cover and the oil pan it protects would have the presence of mind to shut the car off and not try to re-start it. I repeatedly told them no, I had shut the car off right away. I then explained that my father said to me “Pull over and shut it off” and when they said “Lucky for you your father was in the car with you,” I didn’t bother trying to tell them otherwise. Neither seemed the type to get it.

As for the asphalt mound oil pan destroyer, apparently I was the latest in a long line of oil pan gougers. As my car was being hooked to the tow truck, I was standing there worrying over what to do about all the oil on the street when a shop owner came out with a bag of stuff that looked like cat litter, but was named “Oil Be Gone” or something like that. As he scattered the oil-absorbing stuff over my big black puddle, I thanked him and apologized for the mess. His reply? He said “Oh, don’t worry about it. The city gives me bag after bag of this stuff because someone rips up their oil pan at least once a week on that intersection. They’ve spent more money giving me these bags than it would take to fix it. But that’s New York for ya!” Then he went back in his shop. Gotta love New York City.

And my father…well, I still hear his voice and his lessons. Recently I heard him say “If you pick up a nail in your tire, get it fixed right away before it does more damage,” but I ignored that advice, and now I am on my way to get a new tire because the nail I have been driving around with for a month has punctured the tire in three new places and caused irreparable damage. I really need to listen more closely to my father…

Copyright (c) 2005 Leslie R Becker

Olde Tyme

2009-02-24T08:48:00.003-05:00

I just joined AARP – the American Association of Retired People (or persons…I don’t remember because apparently at this age your memory begins to fade). And joining AARP has actually had a more profound affect on me than tuning 50 did.

AARP has been sending me their junk mail since last January of 2008, because 2008 marked the 50th year since the year of my birth. But because I didn’t turn 50 until the 10th month of the year, I just kept throwing it out. I was too young. I didn’t yet qualify. Then when I did turn 50, I didn’t want to join because it made me feel old. So I threw it out again.

But these AARP bastards are persistent little retired people or persons, because they KEPT ON SENDING CRAP. So today I went on the website to see what there was to see. Oh. Yes indeed.

I guess a great number of retired people or persons are not well versed in the ways of the Internet. How can I explain – okay, try this: If web sites were to be compared to books, the average web site is an easy to follow novel like you’d get for a long flight. Maybe like a romance novel or something. Easy, not too in-depth. And then there are some web sites are murder mystery level – a little harder to follow but worth it in the end. The AARP site? It’s the Dick and Jane First Grade Reader of web sites. “See big button. Click big button. Blink, button, blink. Oh no! Do not click the button twice!” It was insulting. Even the type was bigger than most sites. It’s the Dick and Jane BIG PRINT web site. Jesus, I feel old, and I think I need a nap.

But I signed up nevertheless and now I am a card-carrying member of AARP. I can get discounts on movies, Depends and Early Bird Specials at the South Bay Diner. Well, maybe just the movies. I still eat dinner no earlier than 7 PM, and the Depends thing – well perhaps I need to stop joking about them because given how karma works it may just come back to haunt me, a retired people or person, down the road.

But there is one nagging thing about being a member of AARP -- I am not yet retired, and the "R" in "AARP" stands for "retired" after all. As in no longer working. Able to play golf or fish or sleep any time you want. Retired. But with the economy the way it is and since everyone keeps telling me that by the time I am eligible to collect Social Security the pot will be so dry that all I’ll get is $11.87 and a free block of government cheese each month, it doesn’t look like I’ll be retiring any time soon anyway. Maybe I’ll start AARPOPWAETRBCAT – The American Association of Retired People or Persons Who Are Eligible to Retire But Can’t Afford To. I’ll be sending out my literature soon. Once I figure out how to print this…

Copyright (c) 2008 Leslie R Becker

Cheese-Food

2009-02-23T10:20:00.004-05:00

Those of you who know me well know that I enjoy cooking. I truly enjoy it, very much so. I find it relaxing and fun. I am not a fancy cook -- I don’t make fruffy dinners out of ingredients that can only be found in specialty shops (and I hate it when cooking shows say things like “You can find argan tree oil at open-air markets in Morocco, but if you aren’t planning a trip there any time soon, walnut oil works great, too!”). Nor, however, do I cook with some of the ingredients that are considered staples in many American homes. Things like corn flakes as a topping for a casserole, condensed mushroom soup, or meat of any kind in a can. Eggs get deviled -- ham never should. And if it is, should not be sealed in a can, impervious to natural or man-made destruction for all time.

Another food I have never cooked with is Velveeta, which is not cheese, but rather “processed cheese food.” Is it food for my cheese, like cat food is food for my cat? No. Food that is like cheese, I guess. I have never understood that phrase. But it never mattered, because Velveeta never crossed my threshold.

Why am I telling you about Velveeta? Well, I wanted to make this particular macaroni and cheese that I have enjoyed at my brother-in-law's sister's house at Christmas-time. They are Italian and do the “Seven Fishes” thing on Christmas Eve, although it’s usually only 3 or four fishes. But they also serve macaroni and cheese made with spaghetti instead of elbows or those other squiggly noodles you sometimes find in macaroni and cheese. There is no corn flake topping, just the crunchy wonderfulness of cheese-baked spaghetti, and it is amazingly good. I wanted some of that last night. Macaroni and cheese made with spaghetti. Yes sir.

I called my sister and she verbalized the recipe for me since it isn’t written down anywhere. She told me she never made it, but that her sister-in-law told her what it was once. It went something like this: “Cook the spaghetti to al dente since it is going in the oven anyway. Then you chunk up some Velveeta and put half in a pot with milk…” and that was point at which I stopped listening. Velveeta? We used to use Velveeta as bait at Pay Pond, the place where trout were jam-packed stocked in this little pond and you paid the owner for all the fish you caught. This was long before I learned how to fly fish, so we would roll up balls of Velveeta, put it on the hook of our spinning rod, cast out and whammo! We had trout for dinner. But I had never cooked with it, and I had certainly never actually eaten Velveeta…or had I?

And wait a minute, are you telling me that these people, these Italians whose fresh-caught fried flounder melted in your mouth, whose clams posillipo tasted like heaven, these people used processed cheese food? In a casserole that also contained spaghetti they made that day from flour and egg that was formed into a dough, then forced through a machine that was clamped to the end of the table, making long strips of fresh pasta? After all that, they were topping it with Velveeta?

Well, I wanted me some of that macaroni and cheese, so off to the store I went. I didn’t even know where to look for Velveeta. I went first to the dairy aisle because it is cheese, after all. Nope, it wasn't there. So I went to the cheese case where the fancier cheeses are kept. Oh God, no, please don’t let it be there. Nope, it wasn't there, either. Finally, I asked a clerk, even though I didn’t want this 17-year old to know that I was actually cooking with Velveeta “Excuse me, but where can I find Velveeta? Not that I am cooking with it, mind you. I need for my daughter’s science fair project.” Wow. It was scary how the lie just escaped from my lips as easily as "super-size it, please" normally does. Especially since I don’t even have children. But I was too embarrassed to let anyone know I was purchasing food that I considered white trashy. Or bait. “Um, yeah, aisle 8,” he replied without even looking up from his phone as he busily sent text messages with his right hand while he stocked tuna fish where the baking powder should go with his left hand. “Aisle 8?” I thought to myself? There are no refrigerator cases there. No, indeed.

I arrived in aisle 8 and there it was: A full array of Velveeta processed cheese food, in various sizes ranging from personal cheese food snack to polygamist-compound-family sized 5 gallon tub. After my initial shock over the amount of shelf space it commanded, I gathered my wits and reached for the 8-ounce brick. It was then that my eyes fell on the price for this product, this orange-colored food that didn’t need to be refrigerated until after opening and had an expiration date of August 31, 2009: The price was $7.99! For Velveeta? For trout bait? Are you kidding me?

I put it in the basket along with the spaghetti, then quickly paid and fled the scene before anyone could see me or the contents of my environmentally incorrect plastic shopping bag. At home I followed the directions, at least up until the part where I stopped listening. After assembling the cooked spaghetti, Velveeta, milk, real actual cheddar and Parmesan cheeses (thank God for that at least!), I put it in the oven until it was done. I don’t remember how long it was actually in the oven because I was busy licking the Velveeta wrapper.

When the top looked like it did on Christmas Eve, I removed it from the oven and let it sit for a minute to allow the cheese food to absorb back in to the pasta. Then I cut into it and served it up. And it was...delicious.

Yeah. Velveeta is now a staple in my home too. But don’t tell my gay boyfriends. They would be appalled. It’ll be our little secret, okay? Wanna come over for dinner? We’re having macaroni and cheese, green bean casserole and Underwood deviled ham toast points.

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

How “Friends” Caused This Depression (or I Can’t Buy A House Thanks To Monica, Rachel, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe and Ross)

2009-02-20T11:31:00.004-05:00

This depression that we are in is really starting to bug me. So much so that it actually took up at least 15 minutes of my time this morning as I was making breakfast. And in that time I had an epiphany: I have found the reason why we are so bad off financially. It’s because of the 90s hit sitcom “Friends.” So here, my four readers, is a completely non-researched explanation of the economic crisis.

Everyone likes to say that the Bush administration is responsible for our current economic depression. Yes, well, perhaps he and his minions are (and if there is anything bad that needs blaming, I am happy to blame W), but he was aided by the entertainment industry. The downward spiral towards financial ruin started when the stars of “Friends” wanted a cool million dollars each per episode for the making of their silly but entertaining show. Okay…sure, why not. Here’s a million dollars for a week’s work. Because showing up every day and saying things like “Monica! Please stop organizing the shelves!” is worth a million dollars. And by paying them that money, it meant that in a 24-episode season, the star’s salaries alone were $144,000,000. Notice all the zeroes. That’s one hundred forty four million dollars. Unbelievable.

Old news, you say? We’re over that, you say? Think again, I say. I hope you all enjoyed watching Rachel be confused about love or Joey make a fool of himself over and over again, because even though Reagan’s “trickle down economics” didn’t work, the Friends “trickle down depression” sure did. Think about it: NBC had to pay them stupid amounts of money to act (act, people…not perform brain surgery or find a cure for disease or perform sex acts your spouse wouldn’t dare), so NBC was then forced to raise the advertising rates on that show and other “Must See TV” shows of the era. (Well, they told us it was “Must See TV,” but to them it was really “Must Pay Jennifer Aniston’s Salary” night where they got to charge really high rates for 15 seconds of airtime on all the shows, because most people sat like zombies the whole night and watched whatever was thrown at them just so they would ultimately get to see 30 minutes of twentysomething (and later thirtysomething) zaniness.) But how do you think the companies whose wares were being hawked paid for those exorbitant rates? They raised their prices, that’s how. And you are paying now.

So the next time you are lashing out an unseen enemy, the next time you are cursing how impossible it is to make $100 pay for $143 worth of groceries, please remember your “Friends,” the people who brought you this depression. Or better yet, call them up and ask for a loan. Combined they are worth more than the gross wealth of the entire nation of Cambodia, and have better credit ratings than 90% of US banks. Go ahead, call.

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

What Is The Big Facebook Deal?

2009-02-18T23:29:00.005-05:00

In light of the recent hoopla surrounding the Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) I decided to actually read the current TOS. I would have read the new TOS they put in place in the beginning of February, but they have taken them down and replaced them with the old ones. The old one was boring and full of legal jargon, but I was able to understand it just the same. Its really not all that hard...I bet most people simply failed to read them.

They way I see it is this: WE OWN OUR OWN CRAP! Jesus people. Yes, they reserve the right to keep archived copies of stuff, but that is pretty standard, considering how often Internet providers are subpoenaed to provide information about a user, especially after something creepy happens, like the user is accused of hacking people to death using the sharpened edge of an old laptop computer. So really, unless you fall in to that kind of category, you should not worry.

Plus, do you really think the folks at Facebook want 175 trillion photos of birthday parties worldwide? Do you think that they really want to own the stupid haiku about shrimp fried rice that you wrote that night you got really drunk playing beer pong? (And we knew you were hung over the next day because you announced it in your status update…) Does Mark Zuckerberg want to read your “25 Utterly Boring To Everyone But Me Things About Me?” Yeah…no.

Since I joined Facebook (maybe last summer? I just can’t remember when) there have been certain “friends” who repeatedly post status updates about how pissed they are because they don’t like the new look or how they want something else from the site that it is not currently providing them (as if it is Facebook's responsibility to make these people happy). It is these same people who are all up in arms about the new TOS. Okay, people, if it’s that bad an experience for you GET OFF! Really! It’s a social networking site that some smart kid made up and now he’s worth a crapload of money. Don’t like it? LEAVE!

I am so sick and tired of all the “wah wah wah” that we as a nation do on a regular basis. Sometimes it seems like all we do is whine and complain. Its like the whole country is going through either menopause/mid-life crisis or puberty, both of which seem to produce grouchy complainers. Shut up, people. You live in the most amazing country in the whole goddamn world. No, we don’t have socialized medicine, and yes, we have a lot of poverty and hunger and home foreclosures, but c’mon…do you really want to live somewhere else? Why do you think illegal immigration is such a problem here? BECAUSE THE USA IS THE BEST PLACE IN THE WHOLE WORLD TO LIVE, you idiots, and that’s why people risk their lives to come here.

So if all you have to complain about is the Facebook TOS, I say, shut yer damn mouth. Or better yet, get off Facebook and start your own site. Plus, we're tired of your status updates...no one really cares that you are going to bed, or eating a ham sandwich, or suffering from Montezuma's revenge, or glad the day is FINALLY over…

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Don’t Read The News

2009-02-18T10:33:00.003-05:00

In spite of my unemployed state, I try (and sometimes fail) to have a regimented day, to have some structure in an otherwise jellyfish-like life. What does that mean, you ask? Well, if I do not actively plan my day then I seem to simply float from thing to thing, like a jellyfish in the undulating waters. I go into the living room to dust the furniture and remember that I wanted to re-wire the television’s stereo speakers, so I go in to the office to retrieve some speaker wire and electrical tape, and while there I spot my guitar, so I take it out of the case and play for a while, but I realize my nails are a little too long and if they were shorter I could play that little “doodily-doo, doodie doo doo, doodily doo” thing at the beginning of “Ventura Highway” better. I then go in to the bathroom to get a nail clipper, and when I open the cabinet I see the cough syrup and remember that I never called the doctor’s office to get the results of my blood test last week. So I go to the kitchen to get my phone and I see that I didn’t wash the coffee pot this morning, so I do that. And this goes on ALL DAY LONG. Oh, and once in a while I think “I’m going to check my emails,” which may be a big mistake, because sometimes getting online is akin to a person on acid looking in the mirror – what feels like a few minutes is in actuality hours on end.

What was I saying? Oh right, a regimented day. So in an effort to not get distracted by every shiny object in every room I enter, I try very hard to stick to a routine. I get up, feed the animals, make the bed, drink coffee, check the job websites, read my emails and then read the news online. From there I walk the dog and then try to do something constructive like baking a fake (cake from a box) or writing a blog . But I often get hung up at the “read the news online” thing, because often there is no actual news. Today I made an honest and good faith effort to find real news, news that was, well, news-y. But just about everything I found was just plain gossip. And it wasn’t even good gossip.

Have we really come to the place where we believe that what Paris and Nicky Hilton did at yesterday’s runway show during Fashion Week is news? Is it really news that Alex Rodriguez didn’t realize he was taking steroids? Do I really care that Amy Fisher’s career as a porn star is taking off, 17 years after shooting that poor woman’s face off? And really, I mean really, is it news that Salma Hayek breast fed some other woman’s child in Africa? That’s not news, its just weird. Yes, yes, it was nice of her to be a milk dispenser when the boy’s mother had been completely tapped out, but does she have enough milk in those breasts of hers to go around to all the babies in need? THAT would be news.

I finally decided to end my quest for news when I read the article that Marlon Jackson (of The Jackson Five and brother to all those other crazy Jacksons) was considering building a Jackson Five theme park and museum in a Nigerian park, a place that was the port of departure during the slave trade, a place where untold thousands were herded into the holds of ships and brought to America and the Caribbean, where they and their descendants were sold and enslaved for generations. He is going to build a theme park in place of pain and suffering from long ago? And a golf course? The city of Gary, Indiana must have gotten a bad batch of fluoride that was added to the drinking water back in the 60s and 70s, because that Jackson family is populated with one weirdo after another. A theme park, golf course and Jackson Five museum. All built over what Nigerians consider sad and sacred ground. Yes indeed.

I was going to give up reading the news in the morning, but then I realized that just about everyone on the planet who is fodder for “news” is weirder than I am, so by reading the paper I can feel superior to them in spite of the fact that my weekly Unemployment Insurance payment is less than most of these people spend on a single pair of socks. So while I may not be monetarily superior, I can be morally so.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to read about how a Taco Bell drive-through was hacked in such a way that customers were greeted with shouted obscenities; instead of hearing a cheerful “Welcome To Taco Bell” when they arrived at the tiny speaker, they got “Go f__ yourself!” Finally! Some real news!

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Not That I’m Counting…

2009-02-17T09:49:00.005-05:00

Last night when I signed off Facebook there were 303 pictures of me. Last week there were 331. This morning there are 255. I am dwindling! Are people gathering up their pictures of me and leaving Facebook behind?

They way I look at it is this: If you take my picture, that’s fine, I don’t care. And if you want to put it up on Facebook and tag me, that’s fine too. But once it goes into that “Pictures of me” folder, I WANT IT! I have gotten very used to those 331, or 303, or 255 photos of myself. Okay, most of them. Well, some of them. A lot of them are candid group shots where all you can see is my foot or my left arm. Clearly I was tagged by some mad tagger who feels the need to identify every bit of every photo on Facebook. I really don’t need those pictures of me, but some are really great photos, and I want them back! You teased me with these photos, making me think that I could forever see myself in your 17 of the 331, 303 or 255 photos of me, and now you have removed them from my realm forever. That’s just plain mean.

What can I do? I have tried saving them to my computer, but they are quite small and not worth the trouble. (“Really, that little dot there is ME, I swear it!") Maybe I can make a new album within Facebook as I have seen others do. (Which is another thing that perplexes me – someone will tag or comment on a photo I took and posted, so I get an email announcing it, but it says my photo is in a album called “Sally’s Road Trip!” and in the meantime I am not “friends” with anyone named Sally, and the rest of her album is populated with people I don’t know in places I have never been – but there’s the photo I took, nestled amongst them like it belongs there, familiar yet somewhat out of place, reminiscent of ET in the closet with the stuffed toys…) But even if I make a new album of other people’s photos, who’s to say Facebook won’t one day just go away? We have no control over this website whatsoever! (Rather, it controls us.)

I guess I need to not grow attached to these photos of me and my friends, because they can be snatched from me at a moment’s notice either by the fickle will of a “friend”(or of a “friend’s friend,” or a six-degrees of Facebook separation “friend”), or by litigation against the owner of Facebook which will result in the whole site’s crashing down in a pile of li'l green patches, unwanted status updates, and 10 trillion photos of 150 million “Me’s.”

Leslie is NOT happy that Facebook has this hold on her!

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Half-Priced Candy in a Heart Shaped Box Day

2009-02-15T10:32:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, the day we celebrate love with hearts and flowers and candy. The actual history behind St. Valentine’s Day is a bit blurry, but there are a few fairly plausible stories about a priest named Valentine that seem to make up the basis for the day. One story tells of how Valentine performed marriages for soldiers in the face of the Roman Emperor’s decree against them (something about soldiers and sex not mixing so marriages were banned). In another story, Valentine was jailed for performing these unlawful marriages, and while in captivity he fell in love with the jailor’s daughter. Before being sent to his death (and becoming a martyr and ultimately Saint Valentine and the man behind this huge Hallmark holiday) he seems to have penned the very first Valentine's Day card by sending her a love note signed “Your Valentine.”

And that's basically all we know about St. Valentine’s Day (and its actually far less than we should considering how fervently we celebrate it), but the history behind Half-Priced Candy in a Heart Shaped Box Day is far less murky. What happened was this: Greedy retailers were convinced that every man and woman on the planet would want to buy their Valentine a heart-shaped box of candy to mark the occasion. These boxes held less candy than their rectangular cousins but could easily be sold at a higher price, especially if adorned with ruffles or fake flowers. So these retailers purchased pallets full of candy, and artfully displayed it in the seasonal aisle between the expensive pieces of folded cardboard bearing messages of eternal love, and the stuffed bears holding stuffed satin hearts trimmed in lace and fancy ribbon.
In the days leading up to February 14 (which MAY be the day that Valentine died, or it may also be a date picked by Pope Gregory, who thought that changing the calendar was somehow the job of the pope), people flock to stores both large and small to spend hard earned cash on cards, stuffed animals, jewelry, underwear, and candy in a heart shaped box. But inevitably, there is always an obscene amount of love bits left over. They can sell the stuffed animals to carnivals as prizes for the Great Water Balloon Race Game, and jewelry is good no matter what the month or day. Underwear never goes bad, and cards can be easily stored for next year. But what’s to be done with all that candy? Yes indeed! Jackpot!

I first started celebrating Half-Priced Candy in a Heart Shaped Box Day as a single girl in my early 20s when I happened into the corner druggists on February 15th and saw the display. I promptly bought one for myself and one for my roommate who was also single and in need of candy. We gorged ourselves on this loveless prize, convinced that it actually tasted better because it was cheap, and there were no expectations attached to it. And since then, every February 15th I have celebrated this most joyous of holidays. Oh, I still buy my Valentine an expensive piece of folded cardboard bearing messages of love and forever, and I still buy a (small) box of full-priced candy in a heart shaped box, but the next day…oh, the next day…

And guess what February 21st is? 75% Off Candy In A Heart-Shaped Box Day! See you at CVS!

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Did We Really Need A New Penny?

2009-02-13T09:33:00.002-05:00

Let me begin by saying that I am not a Lincoln-hater. Quite to the contrary. He led our country through one of its most difficult, tumultuous times, and even though in every photograph ever taken of him he seems to have really messy hair, I like him.

But did we need new pennies? Four of them? Yes, yes, I understand that yesterday was the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in a log cabin somewhere in Kentucky, and then his mother died and his father got a new wife they went to Illinois and he read by candlelight and got his lawyerin’ education and debated with Stephan Douglas and became president. And I understand that here, 144 years after his untimely death at the hands of an actor with good timing but bad height judgment, we still want to honor the man known as “The Great Emancipator.” (And I guess now would not be the time to bring up how freeing the slaves was an afterthought. The fact remains that he thought slavery was morally wrong, so we’ll leave it at that and not mention how he actually wanted to ship all the freed slaves to Liberia. But we won’t talk about that.) I say no, we didn’t need new pennies. What we need is for everyone to empty out their coin jars and get the gazillion dollars worth of pennies that are stashed in every house in America back in to circulation. Now THERE’S an economic stimulus package for ya!

Plus, they’re pennies. One cent. You have to gang 5 or more together in order to actually purchase anything (and I am not even sure if 5 of them buys a piece of bubble gum anymore, since my teeth are only slightly younger than I am, and I am no longer willing to sacrifice them to a tiny pink square of a filing killer). So why do we need pennies? Do we need them so that things for sale can be priced at $X.99? What’s the point of that, anyway? Do retailers think that if I see an item for $29.99 I think its $29 and not $30?

Lincoln is also on the five-dollar bill. So why aren’t we making more of them? They are worth $4.99 more than a penny.

I am often confounded by why we as a nation do the things we do, and the manufacture and circulation of these new pennies is one of them. But I do plan to collect all four – in a big jar on the floor next to my dresser.

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Christmas is OVER! Take Your Decorations DOWN Already!

2009-02-11T10:19:00.001-05:00

I noticed the other day that some people still had outdoor Christmas decorations up, and in my naiveté, I just assumed they were rogue revelers, lone non-conformists who had rebelled against the Gregorian calendar and decided to continue the celebration. But then I realized that a lot of people still had their stuff up and out and on daytime display (because although their adornments were still quite evident in daylight, they had the good sense to discontinue the nighttime show – either that or they got their electric bill from December and just can’t afford the added attraction the glow provides). So on my way over to Joanne’s house yesterday (yes, we continue to write, not blog, but we also watch TV, eat pizza and Entenmann’s cake, drink coffee and gossip, so it’s not all bad), I decided to count how many people have yet to take down their Christmas decorations.

Now, according to Google Maps, I live 3 miles from Joanne. That’s not really far at all. That’s the length of a good parade. So imagine my surprise when I stopped counting at 15 houses! And I was only about halfway there. In Joanne’s neighborhood I saw another 5 or six, but by then I was so fed up with these lazy people that I could not even bear to look at what was in their yards, what they felt was so very special that it needed to be left up until at least February 10th, a full 47 days after the accepted date of celebration. FORTY-SEVEN DAYS!

I mean really, people. It’s bad enough in the middle of January. I was annoyed at the entire town of New Hope PA on January 24th because everyone’s lights were still on and burning, but in retrospect I realize I owe those poor Keystone Staters an apology. By Long Island standards, they were still in the thick of the season! However, once you cross the imaginary line between January and February, it’s just plain trashy. Take that stuff down.

Some of you may not be as annoyed as me, some may feel that I am being overly critical, so as one last “in their defense” I will offer this: I understand the joy of the season, and I understand that some feel a slight depression when all is said and done and the decorations must come down and be stored away for another 10 ½ months. It can make one melancholy. But the way I look at it is this: It’s even more depressing on Easter Sunday to have to pass houses that still sport a display of lighted candy canes, red-bowed reindeer made of fake white wicker and arranged in different poses on the lawn, and inflatable mangers complete with Santa on a choo-choo train (because it is a well known fact that Santa was at the birth of Christ, and he arrived on an inflatable choo-choo), all topped off by a house rimmed in icicle lights that have started to come away and are now flapping in the wind, providing the neighbors with a chorus of “thwack thwack thwack” all the livelong day.

TAKE THEM DOWN! Thank you.

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Performance Enhancing Drugs

2009-02-10T09:56:00.001-05:00

I have to say, all this talk about performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs, has got me to thinking: If I thought it would make me better at what I do, would I do them?

I am actually of many minds here (having never done performance enhancing drugs, but having many times taken mind altering drugs), so I am not sure if I will even be able to answer the question.

Let’s start by saying you made a stupidly high amount of money for doing what you do. Whatever it is that you do – accountant, nurse, writer, IT person, doctor, lawyer, janitor. And what if someone said “Hey, if you take this, you will be an even BETTER______!” (Fill in the blank with your profession.) So you took the drug and sure enough you kicked some major ass! And then your bosses wanted to give you even MORE money because they were so impressed by your abilities. What would you do? Hell yeah, you’d take the drug!

Okay, then your better judgment kicks in and you think to yourself “Oh no! This isn’t fair because I am not really this good!” Okay, that’s not a realistic scenario. Try this: Your boss says you have to pee in a cup and they are going to test you for PEDs and if you turn up hot, you will be punished. They don’t know what that punishment will be, and you will probably still have your job and an indecent amount of money, but may also have to go on ESPN and tell everyone you are an idiot. You’ll still be rich, but an idiot. Oh, and you will have an asterisk next to your name for the rest of your life.

The way I see it is this: This is a no brainer. Of course you take the damn drug.

So for right now I am of the mind that if there was a drug that made me better at what I do, and if I could make 28 million dollars a year by taking the drug, and then not really be held too very accountable, yer darn tootin’ my ass is on that drug, even if it means I grow a moustache and an Adam’s apple. Testosterone, anyone?

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Things I See On The Ground

2009-02-09T12:19:00.001-05:00

I have a dog named Sophie, and that dog needs a walk multiple times every day. She likes going to the same places over and over so she can smell where she peed yesterday and where the boxer down the street pooped today. So we tend to go to up and down the same blocks over and over again. Occasionally I will go on other blocks because I really don’t care where she peed or some other dog crapped. Plus I am on the control end of the leash, so we get to do what I want to do. Most of the time, anyway.

However, one thing I have noticed, whether I am on on the usual blocks or different blocks, is that people toss the most random things on the ground. Today alone we found two whole carrots and a whole red onion (whose papery outer skin had been peeled or otherwise removed), two small and empty bottles of vodka, 4 AAA batteries, one Nike sneaker, looked to be about a size 7 men’s, Taco Bell wrappers, and a soccer ball that is inside the fence of church-owned property which is the size of a baseball field yet is only open for parking during Christmas and Easter and for the big carnival they have once a year where they bilk the neighborhood out of it’s hard earned cash via rides and greasy food (God forbid they let area children actually play in the field…). And that was on one block of the walk.

We usually come upon an assortment of discarded bones, and I have to yank poor Sophie away from them because she thinks bones are a fine snack, while her intestines think they are a deadly snack. I sort of understand chicken bones, since there is fried chicken available every 7/10ths of a mile here on the Island of Long, but what I don’t get are the pork chop bones. Unless there are drive-thru pork chop windows that I am unaware of, that means that people are packing themselves a pork chop lunch and then when done gnawing the meat from the bone they simply and thoughtlessly toss it out the window where it sits in varying states of decay, waiting to become my dog’s next conquest. I have been known to pry her mouth open and reach down her throat to dislodge the partially swallowed (whole, mind you) bone. That is fun. But she lets me do it, so what the hell.

I see lots of things on the ground. It’s sad and weird. Look down next time you are out for a walk. You will be surprised, disgusted, dismayed and humored. Oh, but you better bring a bag to pick up your own dog’s poop, because I do not want to step in it when I walk my dog!

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Wet Sleeves

2009-02-07T11:49:00.000-05:00

I didn’t mean it to be so, but it seems that my blog is going to be a complaint repository. I apologize. Maybe it’s just now, and later I will be less grumpy. But my “less grumpy” will not be today, because today I am going to bitch about public bathrooms.

“Eww,” you may think to yourself. “Why do I want hear about that?” Okay, that’s valid. Except it’s not the gross stuff I want to complain about. I want to complain about the placement of the paper towel dispenser.

Who thought it was a good idea to put the paper towel dispenser six feet up the wall? I mean really. I have taken the care and time, prior to getting wet, mind you, to push my sleeves way up on my arms. I don’t like wet sleeves. As a matter of fact, I have been known to go change my shirt simply because my sleeves got wet and I can’t stand the way it feels. I refuse to suffer the wet sleeves until they dry. So here I am, in a public toilet. I have washed my hands in hot soapy water while singing “Happy Birthday” to myself (my cousin who works in food service told me that the Health Department guy said that the minimum time that you should wash your hands for is the time to takes to sing “Happy Birthday," so every time I wash my hands it's like a party, only there usually isn't any cake -- usually), and now I am ready to dry my hands. But have I bothered to seek out the towel dispenser before my wet, soapy songfest? No, I have not. Because if I had I would have seen that the stupid thing is so high on the wall that any little people requiring a towel would be out of luck, and us average sized people are destined for wet sleeves. Had I seen where it was I could have waved my hand in front of it 20 or thirty times just to get a 12”x8” slice for myself, and then kept it low where I could get at it after washing. But I have failed to do that.

I don’t want wet sleeves. What do I do? I can weave and bob in front of it, hoping that the sensor mistakes my head for a hand and magically spits out a towel, but that usually only results in me loosing my footing and smashing my head against the sensor, and sometimes I actually break the dispenser completely. I can wait for another bathroom patron to come by and hope that they do that nice thing where they wave in front of the dispenser to get some out, a little gift for the next person in line. Then I could reach up reallyfast and swipe it off, and that way I may avoid a wet sleeve. (And as an aside, on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving we stopped at the Cheesequake rest area on the Garden State Parkway to use the bathroom and get our sleeves wet, and when I came out of the stall to wash my hands I found Jacki at the bank of sinks and towel dispensers, and she was waving in front of each one – and there are about 20 of them. As she waved out paper at each dispenser she said “Happy Thanksgiving!” and when I asked “What are you doing?” she replied “I would give thanks if I came out of the stall and there was paper waiting for me, so I am giving everyone a Thanksgiving present!”) But usually there are no patrons to assist me, and no physical gyrations on my part will afford me the paper I need to dry my hands.

I could wipe my hands on my clothing, which is what I do where there are no paper towels, only those stupid air dryers, which are also 6 feet in the air, only with the dryers you are forced to hold your hands up for so long that your sleeves get wet all the way up to your elbows,, but I don’t want to do that. There is perfectly good paper in there, and I want some of it. I have no choice but to trade wet sleeves for dry hands.

So here is what I have to say to the public bathroom designers of the world (most of who must not actually wash their hands, because they would know better): Please don’t put that dispenser up there. My sleeves are wet.

AOL is NOT My Friend

2009-02-05T23:34:00.001-05:00

I hate AOL. I do. Yes, it is indeed my primary email provider, and even though for years I have been saying “AOL sucks! I am going to switch to another email,” I never do. Oh sure, I open other accounts, but I never even get as far as alerting my friends to this new address. Why? Well, different reasons -- I don’t like the way it looks, or I can’t figure out how to save mail into folders or it pisses me off in the way that only an inert software program can, so I give up on the new kid on the block and stay with old faithful, no matter how much I hate it. And I hate it bad.

I am not quite sure what AOL’s definition of “SPAM Blocker” is, because I delete an average of 75 SPAM emails a day. Yes, I said each and every day. Here’s a list of what was deleted today alone:

ADD TO YOU DVD COLLECTION TODAY!
TIP: DRINK THIS SMOOTHIE TO SMOOTH YOUR SKIN!
LESLIE, DO YOU NEED CASH ASAP?
FORECLOSURE WOES? CALL NOW!
WIN $10,000 BY PLAYING FUN TV TRIVIA GAMES!
ADVANCE YOUR CAREER TODAY WITH A NURSING DEGREE!

Who told AOL I wanted any of these things? Well, I do need cash ASAP, but I am sure whatever they are offering is bogus, just like the whole "Blog for fast $$" thing. But at least the emails about increasing the size of my penis have finally stopped. I was seriously getting a complex about my small penis, a complex that was made worse by the fact that I don't have a penis. But, they did finally stop, presumably since I never actually clicked on the link to a "...larger, fuller, more manly you." I kind of miss them, though. I liked knowing how to grow 2 inches without electricity or painful pumps.

But mostly I hate AOL because they know they have me and that I will never leave them. It’s like the smug husband who openly cheats because he knows his spouse will never, ever leave. Well guess what, buster, one of these days I am OUTA here. You’re not the boss of me! I’m going to get me a new email address! So take your cheatin’ AOL ass and LEAVE! But wait…before you go, I need to send a few emails…

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker

Still Unemployed

2009-02-05T09:44:00.001-05:00

Yes, still no job. Fortunately, the Federal Government has 13 additional weeks of Unemployment Insurance for me, so at least I get a little something. I use the money I get, which is about 65% less than I was making, to buy Ramen Noodles and macaroni and cheese in a box, because that's all I can afford to eat. Okay, that's not true at all, but it makes it sound pitiful and that was what I was aiming for.

It's funny, because people say "Oh! You should write a book!" Okay, great. Well, I have enough written material to fill a book (bearing in mind that most of it is random thoughts that I simply wrote down long before this phenomenon known as "blogging" came in to being, where anyone on the planet can have their written words seen by a katrillion eyes), but the problem is 1) I don't have an agent; 2) I can't get an agent until I have been published, and; 3) No agent will take on an unpublished author. I wonder if when the 13 weeks of additional UI is up I will be eligible for the additional additional 7 weeks.

Some people have even said "You can make money blogging!" Really? Where did you hear or read that? Please send me the link to the blogging cash source, because I want a golden egg from that goose. Or, did you just make that up because you feel superior, sitting there at you job making money and buying yourself new pants and electronic doo-dads? Because guess what? You can't make money blogging! Oh, okay, maybe if I write a 600 piece on something I will get $3. Yes, I said three dollars.

Of course, I could set up a donation button on this blog, and if you enjoyed it, you can send me $3. But I will refrain from that. For now anyway.

Okay, I am off now to go over Joanne's house. She is my TV partner and we are going to play Wii and write. Not blog, write. There's a difference, you know.

Copyright (c) 2009 Leslie R Becker