Archive for January, 2009

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This here new-fangled embed video thang…


2009
01.27

Posted in death & dying, mortuary school | No Comments »

Last night in class our professor was complaining about his hair. Or rather, he was a little miffed that we students have spent so much time talking about his hair which – since he’s taken to looks that vary between “can’t find my comb” to “mafioso” – has been an ongoing source of amusement.

So you can imagine his absolute delight last night when, after he’d shown up looking a little shaggy, the dean of our college gave a local news station full access to our classroom for a story they were doing on jobs in the healthcare sector:

I think the message here is simple folks: work with stiffs and you can beat economical woes like a dead dog. Even if you have iffy hair.

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Quiero cerveza!


2009
01.23

Posted in life in california, school | No Comments »

I have decided that 2009 is the year that I finally learn a foreign language. 

It’s an endeavor I have pursued on and off for a good chunk of my teen years and those adult years after 1998 when my college-related beer haze wore off. Up until now my attempts have basically gone something like this: Take a class or two. Study hard. Get an “A”. Skip a semester or two. Start back at the proverbial first square.

Anyway. Since my fat mouth and I have worn out our welcome with the English speaking world I figure it’s time I to get to work annoying foreigners. But which ones? I have several years of high school and college German under my belt but unless I wanted to start hanging around white supremacist types it’s a pretty useless language here in Northern California. I tried taking French seriously enough to finish a class once before I realized that it was even more useless than German and the people who speak it make the white supremacists look positively charming. Russian? Now THAT would be useful here in the Sacramento area but it’s been so long since I’ve taken a class that the only phrases I remember are “Good night”, “thank you” and “that is a house” or “that is my house” or “those are my wet leg warmers” because my ability to inflect correctly is hopeless.

So I’ve decided on Spanish. Not only is it crazy useful here in California, but it doesn’t involve reading The Turner Diaries or re-memorizing the Cyrillic alphabet.

I started about a month ago by digging out my old college texts and a set of cd’s I had purchased when I was still living in San Jose. Since then I have spent a couple of hours every day brushing up on basic vocabulary, feminine vs. masculine articles and conjugating various verbs. Today I hit the mother lode when I discovered several large stashes of old flash cards I had made while at DeAnza College. Eureka!

I grabbed the stack and settled onto the couch where I spent the better part of the afternoon staring hard at each card before flipping it into my lap and going on to the next one. I had made it through three separate piles before I came upon one that said “hockey”.

Q: There’s a Spanish word for hockey?

A: Well, kind of. El hockey. Being a cognate it’s hardly a truly Spanish word but seeing as how the coldest thing that comes to mind when I think of the Spanish speaking world is the ice in a margarita, los eruditos del espanol can most certainly be forgiven for not having their own original word for a game that involves a bunch of white people armed with sticks ice-skating ferociously after something the size of my fist.

Still, the fact that at some point in my prior education there was a need for me to create a flash card with the Spanish designation for “hockey” begged a question:

Does the Spanish-speaking world really need a word for hockey? Really?

And that question had a sister question: While I sit here and memorize words that I will never use in the event that I find myself lost in Mexico City, what would I prefer to be taught?

Which is how I came to write a list of words and phrases that I wish my Spanish teachers would have taught me but didn’t because even if they had wanted to they probably would have been fired:

How much is the ransom for my husband?

Even for a donkey that’s rather large.

Officer, I have no idea how those drugs got there.

Where is your nearest public restroom in which I can reasonably expect not to find small children pilfering the toilet paper and selling it back to me for $5 American?

I’d like a lawyer who speaks English please.

No! I don’t want any fucking chiclet already!

If I blow you will you let me out of jail? (No? What if I blow the donkey?)

You know? I think I have a good start to a pretty useful new phrase book even if I do say so myself.

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A good start to a luddite colony


2009
01.12

Posted in computers, family, technology | No Comments »

I want to thank my readers for your kind and encouraging words during last week’s episode of Oh my God I can’t take this mind numbing grind much longer and I want to kill myself, or bungee jump out of a helicopter over the Grand Canyon, but mostly just kill myself is over. They say that time heals all wounds and the freshness date for a crushing case of ennui is – apparently – about a week. Although I’m not ready to completely discount the role that cabernet may have played.

Also, my in-laws had computer trouble last Sunday and everyone knows that whenever you mix technology and anyone old enough to have watched The Lawrence Welk Show hilarity ensues. And hilarity = recovery.

So there we were, my husband and I, minding our own business in our kitchen when his mother called from the RV park in Arizona where they are spending the winter. They were having computer problems and happened to sense that 750 miles away, their oldest son’s defenses were low enough to reel him into another rousing session of Let’s Buy Gadgets That Require Technical Savvy And Then Make Our Son Spend Several Hundred Hours Explaining Them To Us Over A Bad Connection.

My in-laws. The ones who think that Vista is a desktop background. My in-laws who spent six months figuring out how to switch their Garmin back to English after my husband programmed it in Russian as a joke. My in-laws, who still haven’t figured out that hitting ctl-alt-dlt twice does not result in one’s computer playing the Windows theme song. 

These are the people who were marooned somewhere in the southwestern desert in an RV and no internet and boy was my mother-in-law hopping mad over it. Especially since the only person in Arizona willing to dodge her fists long enough to help was my father-in-law and his solution to every computer-related problem from networking to gum in the keyboard is ” needs more RAM”.

Anyway, so my mother-in-law and my husband were on the phone for several minutes when it was discovered that my mother-in-law had deleted the firewall.

My husband immediately leaned on our kitchen counter and rubbed a spot between his eyes that only gets rubbed like that when Jehovah’s Witnesses are at the door or his patience is being taxed by unhousebroken animals.

It took about fifteen minutes to determine that his mother had turned her computer on and, when she failed to get the internet, began deleting items that didn’t “sound” critical to the operation of the machine. In between her exasperated outbursts about the “stupid, stupid computer being utterly retarded” my father-in-law wrestled the phone away to assure my husband that everything was under control - he would simply install more RAM.

Meanwhile I played the part of supportive spouse by keeping close and not laughing too loud as my husband struggled to convince his mother to stop fiddling with the control panel and call tech support already.

After half an hour I left to go visit my grandmother. Later that day, as I plopped into the car to make the drive home from Modesto, I received the following text from my husband:

My mom just called me again, apparently she tried to re-install Norton rather than just disable the firewall. She got some installation error & now has no idea what to do, but I did hear my dad in the background suggesting they need more RAM.

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Probably the most honesty you’ll ever get out of me (so don’t get used to it)


2009
01.08

Posted in anxiety, family, marriage | No Comments »

Have any of you – particularly my female readers – had this ever happen to you?

You’re cruising through life – a normal life - in which the Law of Average prevails to preclude both Uninvited Death & Dismemberment in addition to its equally extreme but polar opposite sister Daily Throes of Ecstasy.

So there you are, in your average life doing various “things”: the help-the-kids-with-homework thing, the make-dinner thing, carpool-in-the-mornings thing, the PTA thing, the send-out-Christmas-cards thing in addition to other equally mundane things. You’re getting “it” done. No grocery list or committee assignment stands a chance once it’s on your to-do list. You’ve got this normal life thing down.

…and it makes you want to run screaming to San Francisco International where you can find a one-way flight to Phnom Penh.

Except that you can’t, you see, because you have a husband and kids. And even though the husband likes to pull the covers over your head after he farts and the kids have this annoying habit of shedding trails of clothing coated in gunk that looks suspiciously like the Godiva chocolate you purchased last week, you love them.

Also, it doesn’t hurt that your mom dumped you when you were a teenager and that abandonment spurred you to swear up, down and sideways that You Would Never Do That To Your Own Children Even When Your Own Children Do Their Level Best To Make You Crazy.

Has this ever happened to you?

Have you ever been grateful for the fact that you are able to stay home with your kids and enjoy full-time motherhood while simultaneously wondering why you didn’t run like hell from these little humans that want, want, want? Have you ever wondered Just why did we sell the big house and buy the much smaller house again? and then realized Oh yeah. Because I was the one who was adamant that our children would have a stay-at-home parent. And then you call the nice lady at the pharmacy and have your prescription for Zoloft refilled. And inquire about any extra Vicodin that might happen to be lying around.  

 Anyone? Has this happened to you?

Has anyone ever wondered why having kids seems like a relatively good idea until you are faced with the cold, hard fact that your progeny are congenitally incapable of understanding that Mommy has heard their pleas for McDonald’s and yes she would very much like to see them chomping away on Happy Meals but it’s going to be a few minutes because she has just spent the last couple of hours crying in the fetal position on the floor and, well, she needs to pull herself together. And yes, she realizes that you are eight and three-years-old so you don’t really care about her problems, but the nice lady who takes your order might be provoked into calling child protective services if Mommy shows her face in public while looking like she’s a half-tank of gas away from leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Has anyone ever felt the immense guilt of looking at their lives and acknowledging on a purely logical level that their life is good, terrific even? That their needs are met? That they want for nothing? Except a little freedom? And to have their existence acknowledged? And maybe throw in a box of Godiva chocolates since their kids ate the other box while hiding in the pantry?

Has anyone ever received a call from their brother just as he is boarding a plane bound for Japan and secretly thought, Why did you have to call me right now? With this? You do realize that I would love nothing more than to get out of this country for a while, right? And that I can’t even find the time or cash to get out of Elk Grove?

Has anyone ever developed an interest in off-the-wall stuff just to shake things up? To see the world from a perspective that isn’t so damned mundane? I can’t be the only one who’s gone back to school and taken up dangerous hobbies to stave off the soul-crushing effects of ”normal”.

Anyone? Bueller?

Alright. Time to get off the computer and shake this funk. Or run away to Thailand. I haven’t decided yet.