Author Archives: Miss Kitten

Dear Brother

Do I have a soul? I do not know. We cannot know such things. I'd like to think that it's not me, but my soul, that rhymes and sings.

When I was seventeen, I told you,
My deepest darkest,
And most devastating secret.
What he did.

What he’d been doing, rather…

It had become my demon possessor.
Strangling me. Choking me.
Every day killing me.
Crushing me.

Under its enormous weight.

And I was suffocating.
So I told you.
But you didn’t believe me.
At least not at first.

Not that I blame you…

Selfish it was to share with you,
My crushing burden.
But we’d been through,
So much shit,

You and I, together…

And how could you go on,
Living day by day,
In the same house,
With the same man,

Who did that to your sister?

Much easier it must have been,
For you to tell yourself,
I made the whole thing up.
That I must be lying,

And pretend I never told you.

The Fourth

Many people wonder how and why,
We celebrate the Fourth of July.
What are we really celebrating?
It’s certainly worth investigating.
What’s being an American all about?
They say we kicked the British out.
But did we gain our independence,
Or did the British just abandon us?
Saying, take the bloody colony then!
And don’t ever ask for help again.
Whatever the reason, it’s our day,
Celebrated in the traditional way.
With big emotions, and big explosions.
And lots of alcohol-fueled commotion.
Obnoxious and big and brash and loud.
It’s what we are and we’re damn proud.
Don’t mess with us. Don’t even try.
Have a Happy Fucking Fourth of July.

WOTD: hoarding

Well, that’s it. Another year over and done with. I mean another school year, natch. Today was my last day at work before summer vacation. Yippee! Now I have four days to prepare mentally and, indeed, environmentally for the arrival of my mother, grandmother and cousin. They’ll be arriving on the 6th next week and will say in Gothenburg until the 11th, when we’ll all journey to Stockholm. I’ll celebrate my 36th birthday in style in Sweden’s beautiful capital city.

But I digress from today’s very serious topic: hoarding. Actually, I’ve never personally known a hoarder. Until now I think. There are several types of hoarding, one of which is the result of hardship. For example, many Japanese have begun hoarding rice and other foodstuffs because of the disasters that occurred earlier this year. Animals hoard food for the winter. Then there is the type of compulsive hoarding with which this post is concerned. Wikipedia defines it as, “the excessive acquisition of possessions (and failure to use or discard them), even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary. Compulsive hoarding impairs mobility and interferes with basic activities, including cooking, cleaning, hygiene, sanitation, and sleeping.”

There was a lot that needed to be done at work today to finish up the year. I did some administrative work, scrubbed the kitchen area, and threw away piles of old uneaten food from the fridge. Yeah, it was pretty gross but not nearly as disgusting as having to gather up the suspected hoarder’s multiple piles of accumulated stuff and moving them into her office. I don’t know if this person is at the compulsive stage yet, but could very well be on the way there.

Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but we have cleaners coming next week who will mop and wax the floors and who had requested that all personal belongings be picked up off the floor. So, since my pack rat colleague is already on vacation, the task fell to me to remove her stuff from the faculty computer room. This room is supposed to be at the disposal of all members of the faculty. However, it had gotten to the point where every surface: every desk, table, shelf, and window sill was stacked with her papers and belongings. I found lists of contact information for students who graduated years ago, and boxes full of old homework assignments, which for some strange reason she insists on keeping. I doubt if she even remembers she has this stuff.

She’s done the same thing in the exam marking room, and don’t even get me started on her office. Yeah, she has an office, but she never uses it. Actually she has part of a shared office that also happens to be my office. She has two desks, a couple of book trolleys, at least four of the large IKEA Billy bookshelves, and several paper shopping bags on the floor, all stacked and stuffed and crammed with books and papers. It’s even worse now because I just brought everything she’d spread out in the computer room and shoved as much as I could on her bookshelves and dumped the rest of it on her desk.

Man, she’s going to be pissed off when she sees that. Still, that’s her problem. This is certainly not the first time her stuff has been gathered up and removed. One of the assistant principals did it last year and told her that she must work at her desk and cannot take over various communal faculty rooms at the school. Well, it took about a year for the boxes and piles to build up again.

Anyway, here’s a couple of pictures. You be the judge:

Miss Kitten's desk with colleague Pink Lady's desk on the left. See the origami garden on the window sill?

I should point out that our desks don’t normally look this clean and neat. We spent several hours organising and discarding last year’s papers. I’m very pleased with the results. Our desks can get pretty messy when we get busy and don’t have the time to tidy up. However…

Here is Pack Rat's corner of the office. This is only one part of it. It wraps around to the right.

No wonder she doesn’t like to work at her desk. I mean, look at it? Who would? Most of the stuff shown in the picture was there before I moved more stuff from the faculty computer room.

It is not my intention to come off sounding like a holier-than-thou bitch. I can certainly be messy at times and I don’t mind messes. Most of them, anyway. Life is often messy and I enjoy cleaning it up. No really, I do enjoy cleaning. What I can’t stand is clutter. Particularly, pointless clutter on this scale. I’m concerned for my colleague’s mental health. She’s making working conditions for herself and colleagues unpleasant.

I can only imagine what her house must look like.

WOTD: whom

Okay, I admit it. I love the word whom. I’m an English teacher so I’d better goddamn love that word. It’s a pronoun, innit. It’s also one of those words that isn’t used very often anymore because it tends to make the user sound like a pretentious twat, or like an English teacher, which amounts to the same thing, really…

Many people find the usage of whom to be confusing, so they tend to replace it with the subjective pronoun, who. Whom should always be used with a preposition, such as: about, for, to, etc., and everyone knows the commandment of English grammar usage which states that Thou Shalt Not End a Sentence With a Preposition, right? Well, perhaps not, but ignorance of this rule leads to a lot of incorrect usage.

Example 1: Who are you talking about? This should be written, “About whom are you speaking?”

See? Now isn’t that as lovely and civilised as a Jane Austen novel?

Example 2: Who does this pen belong to? Well, this should really be, “To whom does this pen belong?”

Yeah, that sounds really stuffy. A little too stuffy. I say go ahead and use the first version, though it is technically incorrect. Who cares? The corrected version is approaching pretentious twat territory.

According to the Urban Dictionary, people who use the word whom do so because they are knowingly trying to sound smarter than they really are. When this happens, one should issue a whom alert:

Jim: So Rob, how’s that advanced calculus class going? 
Rob: I’m not certain for whom the curriculum was written, but I am definitely far too brilliant to be wasting my time on this tripe. 
Jim: That’s it, buddy! I’m calling a whom alert on you!

People who use whom are generally the same people who say, “It is I” instead of “It’s me.” Even I think that sounds self-satisfied and pedantic. Therefore, as an expert in such matters, my advice is to avoid using the word whom and other stuffy words and phrases in normal conversation unless one is an English teacher and/or a pretentious twat that keeps the company of likewise.

Also, one should avoid using the pronoun one in conversation because this also tends to lead one down the path of pretentiousness.

Then again, using one does make one sound like royalty. One agrees.

The stupid. It hurts.

Ah, Facebook. As much as I enjoy using it there are definitely times when it’s more trouble than it’s worth. ‘Tis the season, it would seem, for passive-aggressive “post this as your status” updates. A case in point:

PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THE FLAG OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND TO THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS, ONE NATION UNDER GOD, INDIVISIBLE, WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL!

MY GENERATION GREW UP RECITING THIS EVERY MORNING IN SCHOOL WITH MY HAND ON MY HEART. THEY NO LONGER DO THAT FOR FEAR OF OFFENDING SOMEONE!

LET’S SEE HOW MANY AMERICANS WILL RE-POST THIS AND NOT CARE ABOUT OFFENDING SOMEONE!…

Note that it’s not grammatically correct, and it’s written in all caps, for FUCK SAKE. This was posted by one of my more embarrassing red-neck American relatives, and true to form, it sparked off a comment war. I know I should have just left it alone but I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut when someone posted, ” If people don’t like it ,they should move to a different country!!”

*sigh* How boringly predictable.

My step-father, who happens to be the older brother of the person who posted the astonishingly ignorant update, posted the following:

That is a big problem with many here in the US, people forget that we have the right not to conform, to choose, now some people think that if u don’t like something you should leave! Sounds like someone doesn’t understand the Constitution Or the bill of rights. As for the one nation under god, that was added in the 50,s during the McCarthy era, a terrible time for the country. The country was founded on freedom of religion which means also freedom from religion. So of you need to lighten up & learn the law & be a bit more accepting.

Hear hear. I added the following two cents:

Personally, I don’t think it’s right to insist that children recite a symbolic oath of allegiance every single day. Just about everyone I’ve told about this over here has been absolutely horrified. They thought the United States was supposed to be beacon of freedom, and yet its children are made to recite these words over and over like little automatons without understanding what they are saying.

It smells very strongly of totalitarianism. So does insisting that anyone who disagrees with you should leave the country. In the United States we don’t oppress or deport people who don’t share our personal beliefs. Maybe in other countries they do that but America and Americans are better than that, right?

Of course I realise that my eloquently-worded comment will fall on deaf ears, but I meant every word of it. This got me thinking about the Pledge of Allegiance in general and I did a little bit of research. My step-dad is correct in that the “under God” part was added in 1950s as part of Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign. He wanted to make sure that those godless dirty red scum understood that We the People are God-Fearing Americans.

Anyway, it turns out that the original pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian Socialist. That’s right. The Pledge of Allegiance, recited millions of times by millions of American school children was written by a Socialist. Oh bless.

I wonder what those jingoistically patriotic if-you’re-not-with-us-your-against-us Americans would have to say about that…

Summermild

It’s feeling rather hot.
Though, truth be told, it’s not.
It’s a lovely breezy day.
Not at all like in LA.

Where the desert heat distresses,
And the summer months oppress us.
From the summertime we hide,
‘Cause it’s too hot to go outside.

To say it’s hot feels somehow wrong,
I’ve been in Sweden far too long.

WOTD: Spam

When I was little I sometimes went to stay with my great-grandmother for a day or two. She was in her 80s but she was a lot of fun. Everything in her house was old, but she came from a time when things were built to last. Her refrigerator was an ancient propane gas Servel from the 1950s, which still worked prefectly. She had held on to a lot of stuff from days gone by: boxes full of fascinating old clothing such as arm-length satin gloves, shoe boxes of old photographs, and even a few old magazines full of pictures of women in Christian Dior New Look dresses. Eventually all this ended up being given to my mother. I loved looking through the magazines and at the old pictures, mezmerized by the faces of people who were long dead.

Anyway, one day I was flipping through one of my great-grandmother’s old Harper’s Bazaar magazines from the 50s. In the midst of all the advertisements for cigarettes and liquor was an ad for Spam. I clearly recall what was written on the ad and will probably remember it forever:

Spam: The Ham that Didn’t Pass its Physical.

Isn’t that great?

Back in those days Spam was a canned meat product. Its name is a combination of the words “spiced” and “ham.” To me it’s always been one of those foods that older people eat. In fact, the only occasions on which I ever ate Spam was during those visits to my great-grandmother’s house. She always seemed to have some and she used to make us fried Spam, which was actally pretty good. It didn’t taste anything like ham, though.

Today, lower-case spam is something completely different. Wikipedia defines it as “unsolicited or undesired electronic messages.” These can come in many forms including emails and comments on blogs. We at Random Misanthrope use an application called Akismet which politely and discreetly moves comments which smell like spam to their own special folder. Today I saw that we had six comments sitting in our spam queue, so I thought I’d take a look. This one comment caught my eye because it reads like it was written by a Nigerian prince:

You have certainly antecedently been exceptionally strenuous publication pointing up all of this well weblog, Completely rather interesting to be able to read. Can’t time to wait to find out everything you articles about in the up coming last seven days. New for your huge positive aspects, choose to I do not very nurturing such a web site , and after that intend this guidance, too since the great evaluations some other rather folks wrote, ought to aid loved ones decide in the case when it is some of the ripe alternative for you in person. May be the idealfact Hydraulic.

All this was apparently the introduction to the last word, hydraulic, which was a (now broken) link. As you can see the comment is written in the all-too-familiar awkward style associated with Nigerian spam emails. Most of the language is sort of correct but definitely not standard English, “completely rather interesting”  being a key example. One wonders if this was generated by a spambot programmed to make the comments or emails read like that.

If so, then why?

Oh why?

WOTD: delightful

After yesterday’s WOTD post I couldn’t resist featuring this word. It deserves further discussion.

As I was saying, the word delightful is not normally used to qualify the word “orgasm.” Not that orgasms aren’t delightful…well sort of. The dictionary defines today’s word as: “giving great pleasure or delight;  highly pleasing.”

In the soft-porn romance novels normally offered for sale at supermarket check-out lanes, the orgasms that occur frequently therein are usually described as, “earth-shattering” and other cliched phrases. They’re not even called orgasms. Instead one might see something like “toe-curling climax.”

Something that can be appropriately described as “delightful” is that which one finds mildly but definitely non-orgasmically pleasurable. A colleague sent me a message asking if I’d like to get together for coffee next week and I replied that, “coffee on Tuesday would be delightful.” However, this would be quite different if my colleague and I were conducting an illicit affair and “coffee on Tuesday” was our little code for sex.

But rest assured we are not and “coffee on Tuesday” means nothing beyond just that. It will be a delightful afternoon but not an afternoon delight.