Category Archives: Observations

…raining on your morality parade

It’s a watershed moment in America.  A woman who was suspected of murdering her daughter, dumping her in a field and living the high life for 31 days before notifying authorities (excuse:  missing child) was rendered not guilty by a jury of her peers.  The peanut gallery gasps in horror at this miscarriage of justice for the slain toddler.  News, being news in the United States, can only focus on one story per day and this is it.

The jury is a collection of fools.  The prosecution was robbed.  The toddler’s memory was tarnished.  The peanuts take to the street, marching in lock-step tooting their horns and waving the “It’s unfair” flag while singing songs about the terrible, murdering mother.  All while overlooking some significant facts:

  • It is the responsibility of the prosecution to prove guilt.  Clearly, from the jury’s perspective, it did not.
  • Children are abused on a daily basis.

I understand the concept of cause célèbre.  We all have our pets we choose to support.  But let me ask the peanuts in the parade some critical questions:

  • Where is your outrage when it comes to other children being abused, beaten and slain?
  • Are you fully aware of the broad reach of child abuse?
  • Aside from Twattering and Fecesbooking, what are you doing about it?

Now…I’m certainly not denying the right to one’s opinion.  What I am trying to do is offer a different side to the tale.  It’s very easy to lash out at a monster who would harm his/her child when it’s the dominating story in the daily news.  It’s very easy to express outrage. That said, if you’re so horrified by child abuse, what are you doing in your community to stop it?

No one is omnipotent.  Dollars to donuts, abuse goes on behind closed doors and the general public is never even aware of it transpiring. That does not change the fact that it does happen.  A parent doesn’t have to murder a child to be a monster.  A parent doesn’t have to get caught to be guilty of this crime.

The sad fact of the matter is that a variation of Casey Anthony lives on every block in every neighborhood in every state/country. The sad fact of the matter is that most of us are blind to it.  Rather than taking the easy way out and joining groups supporting the non-purchase of any tell-all book, why not get involved in your communities and schools and help a child in need?  Surely that is a far better investment of time and energy, yes?

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.

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.

Erect the Pole

It may look vaguely Christian.
It may seem quite devout.
But the meaning of the Maypole,
Is not that hard to figure out.

Every year around Midsummer,
We stick it in the ground.
We erect it and insert it,
And then we dance around.

Then we eat and drink too much,
And into the woods we run,
To do our own impression,
Of the Maypole just for fun.

All this Maypole imitation,
Is the reason, no doubts or maybes,
Why every year in Sweden,
There are so many April babies.

A Traditional Swedish Midsommarstång or Maypole

Those people…

Have you ever bought a newspaper and then forget to read it?  This happens to me all the time, especially with my favorite Sunday Editions of The New York Times.   At $6 dollars each, they are as expensive as a paperback novel, and probably contain as much writing.  I enjoy the Sunday New York Times, even though a lot of my peers give me grief for its liberal bias.  So what?  I watch Fox News too, and you can’t say that they don’t have a conservative bias.  You see, there’s two sides to every story, and I enjoy reading, listening, and watching both the liberals and the conservatives.  This entire country was founded on discourse, debate, and heaven forbid, compromise.

At any rate, last night I was cleaning up the man cave and I stumbled across the March 13, 2011 edition of The New York Times.  Good grief, that was a while ago.  The paper is already fading as some papers tend to do under the elements and time.  I’m now catching up on the past if you will.

Turning the pages I come to the Weddings/Celebrations pages in the Sunday Styles section.  I don’t know why, but I read the fabulous wedding announcements and I can’t help wonder, who the hell are those people, or is it, these people?  They look great, and reading their short bios I’m intrigued by how the majority of them come from wealthy families and places, have super awesome jobs, and are genuinely, not like us.  I’m lucky if I find a good deal at an outlet store, and these people are sporting the finest linens.

Not that I’m jealous, I’m just wondering what it would take for my sons to make it to the back pages of The New York Times Style section.  This fills me with a certain amount of dread that perhaps I’m not providing enough for my family in order to have this kind of lavish lifestyle.  I am partially comforted by the fact that I am able to provide for my family, we have clothes on our back, food on the table, a roof over our heads, health insurance, and books, oh yes, lots of books.  And yet I wonder about those people…

A funny thing happened on the way to my apartment…

Now that was weird. Earlier today as I was walking home from the tram stop, I recognized the woman who was getting her hair done at the same time I was getting mine done on Saturday. I think she and the salon owner might be friends because they both come from Iran and were speaking Persian to one another while I was there. I was headed home and listening to Lullaby by The Cure when she looked straight at me, obviously recognizing me. I smiled and nodded back, but as I mentioned, I was listening to my music and not in the position, nor the mood, to have a conversation with anyone.

A minute or so passed and I felt a tap on the back of my shoulder. I turned around and looked. It was her. I took my earphones out, thinking that she probably just wanted to say hello. Instead she took a small handbag out of her shopping bag and then reached in the small bag and removed two lipsticks. She said that the handbag and the lipsticks were new, that she had just bought them for 200 SEK, but that now she was out of money until Monday. Would I please buy them for 100 SEK? I looked at the handbag and it didn’t look new to me. There were no tags on it and it looked faded and worn. And only one of the lipsticks was unopened. The shrink wrap on the other one was broken.

I usually pay for things with my bank card and very rarely carry much cash. The grand total of cash I had on me was one 20 kronor bill (approx. $3.15) and a few coins. This is hardly anything. I honestly and sincerely didn’t have the money to help her and I told her this. She then continued to beg me to buy the items. I said that I understood and wished I could help her but I just didn’t have enough money on me. She looked like she was going to cry at that point, but she finally understood, and I finally was able to continue walking home.

I’ve seen many beggars and I’ve occasionally given them money to them, but I’ve never experienced anything like someone trying to sell me used makeup and handbags before. If I had a significantly larger amount of cash then I might have helped her out, but I wouldn’t have taken her used stuff.

Weird. It was just weird.

WOTD: superstition

There is superstition…the writing’s on the wall…

Today’s word is a noun, a concept really, defined as, “a belief or notion (not based on reason or knowledge) in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.” I find superstition as a concept to quite fascinating. The idea that certain objects or actions could possibly affect the outcome of random future events is something that occurs in every nation on earth. However, like art and literature and other things created by humans, superstitious beliefs are culturally specific. Things that considered bad or good luck in one country have no significance whatsoever in others.

In the United States for example, it’s said to be bad luck to open up an umbrella indoors. Certain numbers are considered good or bad luck. The most well-known of these is the number 13. I’m not sure if it’s really true or just an urban legend that certain tall buildings and sky scrapers deliberately leave out a thirteenth floor because of the ominous significance of that number. However, in Japan the number 13 has no significance and the number four is bad luck. This is because the Japanese character for the number four looks similar to the character for death, or something.

Anyway, what I find really interesting about superstitious belief is that even people who swear they aren’t superstitious nevertheless find themselves altering their behavior because something is considered good or back luck in their culture. When I was living in Japan I remember being at a department store picking out an umbrella. Several others were there and they were all opening and closing different umbrellas in order to try them out. I’d heard people say that opening an umbrella indoors was bad luck, though I never seriously believed it. Yet, I found myself reluctant and almost uncomfortable with the idea of opening the umbrella inside the store. It was weird. How can the action of opening an umbrella indoors possibly have any affect on anything? And yet, I hesitated.

Some of the most superstitious people are actors and sports people. They might have been wearing a particular pair of socks and had an unusually good game or performance, so they decide that those socks must have certain powers and if they wear them for every single performance or game then they’ll have a greater chance of succeeding. Of course it’s all bullshit, and often they realize it’s bullshit, yet they still don’t feel ready to perform unless they’re wearing their totemic item.

Enough for now…