A funny thing about getting older: most of us get wider at the same time. It usually happens slowly, gradually and sneakily. Yes, that is a word (now).
Our taste in clothing changes as we get older, too. Not necessarily for the better, but at least most of us realize that wrinkled cleavage, expanding stomachs, sagging butts and floppy thighs should be covered up instead of showcased. Women know that each clothing manufacturer has a different sizing scale, too. So as we change our wardrobes, moving away from designer clothing and into the more run-of-the-mill – and affordable – mass produced stuff, we aren’t usually alerted by different sizing. We try stuff on, make sure we aren’t walking on hems, that we can use our hands without rolling up our sleeves, that we can breathe, and then move on to the important act of hiding what we want hidden.
I once bought a pair of jeans that were labeled “Size 2″. This was just a couple of years ago and I am fully aware that the rest of the label that read “Big and Large” had probably been removed. But, hey. Size 2! So what if I have to roll them up so far that the hems rest against my knees? That just means I’m short. They’re a size 2!
Not only am I really good at ignoring those nagging little details I don’t want to acknowledge, I am lazy. Lazy, lazy. Exercise? Pfft. I live in a two-story house. The only people who need to buy a StairMaster are the people who don’t have real stairs. Cardio? Pfft. I have an alarm system that I accidentally set off on a fairly common basis. Why go jogging around the neighborhood, when all you need to do is set off that siren occasionally? Also, our house is haunted. Nothing like hearing the floorboards creak outside your bedroom door just as you are peacefully dozing off to get that old adrenaline system working overtime! Of course, sleep deprived isn’t the healthiest way to be, but that’s why God created caffeine. So just living here provides me with all the good, healthy stuff any doctor will tell you that you need.
Along those same lines comes the diet.
Diets are work. Diets involve study, calorie-counting (math…EEEK), perseverance, expensive food items, and self-control. But most of all, diets involve effort. Grinding, painful effort.
There are diets for absolutely every possible human condition on the face of the earth. There’s the meat-eating diet; the vegetarian diet; the zero carb diet; the low-fat diet; low salt/sugar diet and zillions more that I am not going to list here. Diets for everything. Because I am aware that I am expanding and because I miss my feet, I follow a diet. I call it the “Contented Sigh Diet”.
Like all the others, the Contented Sigh Diet involves self-control. Unlike all the others, it doesn’t require much else. I eat what I want, when I want it. The self-control part comes in two areas: First, I have to eat fairly slowly. This means not waiting until I am famished to pile a plate high with food and devour it like a ravening beast. The second part is where the real dieting comes in: I have to stop eating when my body tells me to.
Something I’ve noticed a lot over the last couple of years: while eating a meal, there always comes a time when one unconsciously heaves a deep, heavy, satisfied sigh. Since becoming aware of this when I do it, I’ve realized that everyone does it but not everyone knows what it means. That is our bodies’ way of saying, “Put down the fork, Porky. I’m full.”
This has several benefits, not the least of which is avoiding portion-control mind traps. We all know we should exercise portion-control, but, really. Who uses a saucer? Who wants to look at a vast expanse of empty plate in between tiny islands of delicious food? Nobody. Ruins the meal before you get comfortable at the table, thinking of how hungry you are and how that little bitty amount will not satisfy you. And if you’re lazy like me, you know you’ll be having to make that arduous trek all the way back into the kitchen to rebuild those tiny food-islands halfway through the meal. Ugh.
So: Contented Sigh diet. Use common sense. We all know what a well-balanced meal should be: use that knowledge. You get to put as much food as you want on your plate, keeping in mind that you may well be wasting some of it. You get to eat as often as you want, just as long as you eat at a sedate pace. Now, by that I don’t mean you have to eat so slowly that your food gets ice cold. This is not the “Too Cold And Icky To Eat Any More” diet. Nor do you have to chew your food until it’s the consistency of baby food. No, you just have to eat at, say, a restaurant-meal-with-a-companion pace. And then pay attention so you’ll catch it when the contented sigh happens. Then, no matter how little is left on your plate, you have to stop. I had one bite left of Randy’s Killer steak left once when the sigh happened. I would have ignored it, but Randy heard it and remarked on it so I had to stop.
This actually works. I don’t know if I can say I’ve lost weight because of it, but I can say I haven’t gained any in a few years since I started doing it.
Lazy Dieters Unite!
For the past couple of years, we have been getting phone calls, sometimes as many as three per day, from some robot that sounds like it’s coming from a collection agency. Maybe more than one.
It wasn’t calling for Randy, DaBoy or me; it would get our last name right, but always get the first names wrong. Now, it’s not like we have never had to be legitimately harassed by a collection agency, but over the past seven years or so, we have worked very hard to not get behind. That makes these calls even more frustrating: they’re interrupting our day and not even for us!
Here’s how it goes: You have to stop what you’re doing to answer the phone. Then scream obscenities and hang up, or sit through the idiotic robot voice asking for the wrong first name, right last name and threatening all kinds of legal action for not hanging up RIGHT NOW if you’re not that person. Then it tells you to Press One To Speak To A Representative, so you Press One because you’ve learned that just hanging up RIGHT NOW accomplishes exactly nothing and you’ll risk the legal action just to get them to quit bloody calling. The majority of the time, you get disconnected after you Press One To Speak To A Representative, but sometimes you actually get a real person. They always sound simultaneously incredibly bored and incredibly surprised that you actually want to speak to them. And you say: “You have the wrong number. There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be anybody here by that name. Stop calling.” There is a pause, which leads to a couple of different scenarios that begins by them saying, “You’re not wrong first name, right last name?”
SCENARIO ONE:
You: No. Take me out of your auto-dialer.
Bored Agent: If you’re not the person we’re calling why didn’t you just hang up?
You: Because that doesn’t bloody WORK. You just keep calling anyway. Stop it!
Bored Agent: I can’t talk to you. <click>
SCENARIO TWO:
You: No. Take me out of your auto-dialer.
Bored Agent: You really aren’t the right person. Sure.
You: I’m NOT. You have the WRONG NUMBER.
Bored Agent: Why haven’t you told us that before?
You: I DID. Every time you CALL, I tell you. STOP calling me!
Bored Agent: Okay. I’ll take you off our list. <click>
Scenario One leads to more phone calls because of course the agent didn’t take you off the list. Scenario Two leads to a week or two of quiet before the calls start up again, asking for a different wrong first name, right last name.
The thing is, our number is unlisted. I don’t know how they got it, but I do know how they figured out the last name: it shows up on Caller ID with a first initial. Finally, a few months ago, I got fed up with the whole thing and called the phone company with an idea.
The agent I spoke to was very helpful, but doubted that we could change the way the name shows up on CID if it doesn’t match the billing name. I used all of my powers of persuasion, so he gave it a shot and was shocked to find the system actually let him do it. He said he was going to do it for his own phone number; it’s a fabulous way to learn immediately if the person calling you actually has business with you or not.
Fast forward to this morning. I had to call our insurance agent to ask him a general question. So he answers the phone, I say something like, “hello, I was wondering about”…and asked my question without identifying myself. In the course of answering my question, he said he had to dig up our policy. Without asking my name, I heard him start to type, then he stopped and said, “Um…I don’t have a client named…er…Zelda Pinwheel. Could it be under another name?”
I was laughing too hard to answer right away, but I finally did. It’s funny, I set that up so I’d get to giggle at some robot or spam caller trying to say it, forgot about it and caught my insurance agent instead.
There are some authors that I just love, but they have one thing that just makes me crazy. Here, I will post a plea to them and hope that other people add their own.
Lisa Gardner: Please stop using the “good news department/bad news department” thing. It was witty the first time I saw it, but to run across it in every. single. book. spoken. by. every. single. character. is *way* overkill. It was colorful and snappy, which is why it stands out. Every. Time. Also, please do not replace it with another witticism for every character to use. It throws the reader out of the story to keep coming across the same line no matter how good the line is.
Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb: I love your non-romantic stuff. Love. Even some of the romantic stuff is great, except for one thing: Stop having your male antagonist forcibly kiss the female protagonist. I don’t know where you got the idea that it’s hot and steamy to pin a woman who has said “no” against a wall for a long, lingering kiss, but it’s not, no matter how good a kisser he is. Worse is that she always likes it, which makes it not only degrading, but insulting to those of us who mean “no” when we say “no”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t play coy and neither does any woman I know. You’re a best-seller. It would be nice if you would quit perpetuating the myth that a woman who says “no” is just playing hard to get.
Catherine Coulter: I don’t know why you hate cell phones so much that you’re advocating violence against them, but can’t you have your characters “dial” a number, or “scroll through the list”, or, heaven forbid: “hang up”? Why does everybody have to “punch in”, “punch up” or “punch off”?
Dean Koontz: Please stop tearing down the fourth wall in order to educate the reader. If you want to be sure we understand exactly how difficult it is to live with some kind of handicap, just show us. We don’t need a first-person dissertation on the limitations of whichever condition you’ve saddled your protagonist with; you can just let us see them for ourselves. Another thing: if you insist on carrying on entire conversations in some obscure lingo, simply include a glossary. That way, I can look up a word if I am interested, or I can just skim over it like I do when an author lapses into another language and doesn’t translate it, however clumsily.
Barbara Taylor Bradford: The word “instantly” means “in an instant”, which is a very small increment of time, comparable to the blink of an eye. Therefore, as one example, Emily cannot switch on the car’s radio, fiddle with the dial long enough to decide she can’t find a song she likes, and then “instantly” switch it off.
Stephen King: Please double check the names of your tertiary characters whenever you mention them to make sure you haven’t already mentioned them using a different name.
General: It absolutely drives me crazy when the author assumes the reader is not paying the proper amount of attention so they italicize an action: “The car was rolling!” just in case we would have missed it otherwise.
Add on…
You know, for the most part, I like Johansen. She’s one of those authors I’ll buy without even reading the excerpt on the back.
So I am very disappointed to report that “Quinn” was a total waste of money, paper and time. Without spoiling it, I will warn that the book ends on a cliffhanger note and the sequel, “Bonnie” (which is not hinted at on the cover, in the excerpt or anywhere else until the very last sentence) is not due out until 2012. This, after many, many chapters are wasted on telling a very old story to which the ending is already well known. The chase scene in the beginning makes it very clear that the original hunt for Bonnie’s abductor failed and one, single, throwaway line would have been enough to tell the unfamiliar reader how Joe and Eve met. Even readers for whom “Quinn” is an introduction to Johansen don’t need the trip through the past to explain any of it. She obviously needed a lot of filler to make an average-length story into a two-parter – unless we are also going to get “Eve” and “Jane” books as well. I won’t buy them.
When I realized we were going to take a trip down memory lane, I had hopes that the universal slavish devotion to Eve would finally be explained. I have never understood why she is so adored by everyone who crosses her path; she is self-absorbed, thoughtless and completely focused on her mission to the exclusion of the people she claims to love. She stubbornly bulldozes her way into messes, forcing Joe to find and rescue her time and again after she’s snuck off and left him behind “to protect him” from the dangers she is willingly jumping into and as a result, puts him at even more risk. She is grasping, needy and ungrateful while insisting that everyone else understand why she can’t give anything of herself to anyone except her mission to “bring home” her daughter. We are told incessantly how wonderful Eve is, but all we are shown is her obsessive, demanding and ungenerous behavior.
Joe is, as always, portrayed as the junkyard dog: too stupid to act intelligently, must be lied to – as always – to protect him from himself, yet in the end, manages to ride to the rescue and – possibly – save the day.
On a high note, there is very little of Jane in this book. Jane is even more unlikable than Eve, and even more attractive to men who never fail to fall head over heels for her, in spite of her icy, condescending hauteur.
One wonders if even Johansen can’t like these characters, which is why she goes out of her way to remind us constantly how well loved they are by all. Much like that boyfriend all of my friends hated in spite of my defense of him who turned out to be a total jerk to no one’s surprise…even my own.
As I said in the beginning, for the most part, I like Johansen. But I won’t be buying any more of her books until I have checked to make sure it is not another Eve Duncan story.
We all have a quirk of the Universe that follows us around.
My mother, for example. She cannot go out in public and eat a meal that does not include somebody rushing over to sweep or vacuum the floor next to her table. I’ve seen this phenomenon myself; it never fails.
It’s not that she’s a sloppy eater, it’s just her personal Universe quirk. She can’t even go through the drive-through that somebody doesn’t come outside and sweep the ground between her car and the drive-through window as she’s reaching for her food. She tells a story about having lunch in a park with a coworker, thinking that would be safe. Until a street-sweeper drove past the park, turned in, drove down the sidewalk toward them with his brooms running, circled the picnic area and then drove off. I believe that happened.
Some people simply can’t drive anywhere without hitting every single red light between their home and their destination. Others can’t seem to get electronic devices that actually work. I have a dear friend whose quirk seems to be living in a slapstick comedy. If something embarrassing is even remotely possible, if a pratfall is lurking anywhere about, this poor woman will get hit. Universe quirks. We accept them and live with them.
Mine? My quirk is: confessions. People like to tell me things. Or, I guess you could say my quirk is to spend most of my time in public with a blank look on my face, trying desperately to think of something to say because the things people tell me are usually the kind that leaves me speechless. I don’t encourage this behavior in any way. I don’t go around randomly asking for confessions, making eye contact or smiling at strangers.
The first time I actually noticed this phenomenon was when I was 20 years old. I was sitting in the cafeteria after work at a well-known department store. I was having a coffee, reading a book and waiting for my ride when a woman and her toddler sat down at the table next to mine. I didn’t think anything of it when she asked me what time it was; I was wearing a watch and was still wearing my nametag. I told her the time, she thanked me and said she needed to leave to go pick up her oldest daughter from Kindergarten. Then she said, “I hate her,” and burst into tears. Needless to say, this got my attention. I stared at her, thinking I’d misheard. She saw my shock, nodded and clarified, “I hate my own daughter. What kind of monster am I?” Then she put her head down on the table and sobbed.
I don’t remember how I got out of there. I hope I did it gracefully, but I truly don’t remember.
People will strike up a conversation with me standing in line, in an airplane, at the doctor’s office. It always amazes me how somebody will just start chatting with me, a total stranger, and tell me – sometimes in excruciating detail – why they are at the doctor’s office. Once, when we were having a garage sale that featured DaBoy’s outgrown clothes, a woman informed me that she was trying to have a boy, then asked me what sexual position I had used to conceive him. Before I could think of a reply, she listed the ones she’d already tried. We were in the driveway.
I don’t call for any kind of service, appointments, information or even business hours unless I have time to sit and chat. Even on the phone, people tell me their life story. I have lost count of how many horrible-boss stories I’ve listened to when I was just calling to schedule an estimate for something. How many marital troubles, kid troubles or bad-day litanies from people – not just women, either – I have never spoken to before or since.
You’d think this would be funny, but it’s usually not. Rarely do I get told funny stories; they are almost always heartbreaking, shocking or depressing. Like the cashier at the store my sister patronizes, for example: my sister and I live halfway across the country from each other. I was out there visiting her just recently when we went to the store together. She led me to the checkout lane she always goes to when this specific cashier was working; she’s been favoring this guy for three years. While he was ringing up our groceries, my sister introduced me to him and listed the reasons she only gets in his lane. I said something like, “Well, everybody wants to be great like him!” He met my smile with direct eye contact and replied, “Nobody wants to be me. I have BPD, chronic depression and I’m suicidal. Some days, it’s all I can do to pretend to smile. I want to die.” Then he gave us our total, wished us a good day and we staggered out. My sister was completely stunned; she’d been seeing this man several times a week for three years and he had never even remotely indicated anything like that. One time speaking to me, and, voila! Shocking confession. Now she doesn’t want to go anyplace with me.
Most often, it’s merely frustrating. Randy once made arrangements via Craigslist with a guy who wanted to trade a guitar for a guitar. The guy came over on a Wednesday night and brought his girlfriend with him. The exchange was agreed to in a matter of minutes, but they stayed for literally hours because the girlfriend was regaling me with horror stories about the guy’s mother, their living conditions, their sex life and her job. I kept giving Randy The Look, but he was busily watching the trainwreck in our dining room and didn’t notice how late it was.
Randy finds the whole phenomenon fascinating. He doesn’t like me to go out in public without him because he might miss something. He’s never been with me when strangers tell me things that are horrifying. He freely admits that I do absolutely nothing to encourage this, and that is what makes it so amazing to him.
Maybe I was Freud in a past life.
I just read in the news that the Attorneys General from about six states are suing the big banks (Wells, BofA, etc) for the way they handled foreclosures during the Depression.
Why aren’t they suing the entire government as well? After all, it was our previous and current President who made that possible, and Congress just shunted it along. What did they think was going to happen? Did they really believe that bailing out the banks would mean anything to the average borrower? Is our government really so far out of touch with reality?
No; what it did was give the banks a billion-dollar cushion to sit on while they raked in properties hand over fist and refused to work with the average borrower. Who did not get a bailout, and whose cushion – if they had one to begin with – was disappearing out from under them. Did the government actually believe they were helping anyone other than the banks? All they accomplished was to remove any need for the banks to work with the borrower; after all, they had their bailout money. No incentive to deal, because they had nothing to lose and millions to gain. Those banks who were in desperate need of bailing out paid that money back within a year and the CEOs didn’t even have to lose their millions in bonuses.
I said all along that if they wanted to hand out billions of dollars to bail out anybody, they needed to give it to the individual taxpayers. We are the ones who spend money. We are the ones who go shopping, go out to dinner and pay our bills. Wouldn’t that cash infusion have propped the economy up? It would have kept small businesses from closing, would have maintained jobs, would have kept people from losing their credit ratings and most importantly, their homes. They could have given us those funds at a comfortable interest rate and saved everything.
I don’t know about anyone else, but if I had been given a 6-figure check, I’d have paid off my mortgage and bought a second car. Then they could have tapped my paychecks for repayment at, say, 3% interest, gotten the money back in the Treasury and made a tidy profit. That interest rate would have been free money for them and taxpayers wouldn’t have lost anything. Assuming that most people would have paid their mortgages off or made a whopping payment toward the principal, that would have brought the real estate market down to workable levels. We would have had to sell for less than we paid in a lot of cases, but that wouldn’t matter so much if the mortgage was paid off and if other houses were reasonably priced. Then the only people who got underwater on their mortgage would have been the ones who poorly chose to throw it all at expensive toys instead of doing the responsible thing, and those people? Would have nobody to blame except themselves.
After a year or so of being down, we finally were able to get Fogism back online! Thanks, Randy!