Categories
Serious Stuff

Save the drama and/or trauma for yo mama

DRAMA!I almost backed into someone in a parking lot today – yay blind spot. When they started laying on the horn, I came to a dead stop at least two feet away from them. I know that even a slow-moving car in reverse can cover two feet pretty quickly, but the point is: contact was not made.

Well, not physical contact. The driver leaned out her window and started trying to contact me verbally immediately. I decided to put it in drive and just pull away.

She then pulled up alongside me at the point where the parking lot exits out onto the street, technically blocking the incoming lane so she could roll down her passenger side window and bellow at me. I finally decided I’d say a word to her. The moment my window opened even a little, all I was hearing over and over was “YOU ALMOST HIT ME! YOU ALMOST HIT ME!

I waved – with all five fingers extended, I might add – and said “Sorry.”

“BUT YOU ALMOST HIT ME!” the other driver said, somewhere between angry and tearful.

“ALMOST SUE ME!” I shouted back with a shrug. I was more amused than genuinely angry.

For all I know, this woman has a nervous disorder, or panic attacks, or all of the above. I didn’t want to be any ruder than that. Then she waved at me – with just the one finger – and I realized that there was no disorder in play beyond her merely being an asshole.

What is it about our culture that we just love our little traumas? Mountains are tearfully made out of molehills on an annoyingly regular basis. Personally, I think it’s got not just a little to do with weepy “confessional” scenes built into nearly every “reality” TV show on the air right now. But the explanation on the ground floor is probably a lot simpler: it’s tied in, intensely, with the sense of entitlement-to-everything that pervades our culture even more deeply than the reality TV disease.

I think some people love their trauma and/or drama because then maybe folks will have to be nice to them, materially or otherwise, because in their world, the cosmic scales have to be restored to some kind of balance. I hate to tell them, but the universe doesn’t work like that. Despite our torted-up (as opposed to tarted-up) legal system which seems to reinforce the opposite view. Worse yet, it lessens the plight of those who really have been traumatized and those who really have been wronged. It’s like living in a village where every other boy is crying wolf while, on the outskirts of town, one boy really is being eaten by a wolf – but since he didn’t make enough noise to cut through the clutter, nobody notices and nobody helps.

This condition urgently needs curing. Please discuss.… Read more

Categories
Defies Description

Earth

I don’t know how I managed to sleep through this particular event, but apparently in 2007 and then again in 2008, the Japanese Kaguya lunar orbiter filmed a pair of Earthrises and Earthsets in full 1080 HD. You can watch them online, squashed down to an unfortunate 480 x 270:

2008 event (absolutely astounding, even in low-res)
2007 event (impressive, but not as jaw-dropping)

I know I had a baby I was dealing with at the time, but man, how did I miss this? Please tell me it showed up as a blip on everyone else’s radar. … Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Critters

Pyg(flu)malion

Evan hasn’t been feeling great lately; on Monday, he was running a fever at day care, and there was a bit of a scramble because that’s one of the days that I go to work fairly early. The doctor said he had the flu, and of course even a solitary sneeze is treated as H1N1 these days, so it was Tamiflu time…and Evan had to stay home the whole week, which made my work schedule interesting. Fortunately, he’s got a new friend to help keep him company while he gets to feeling better.

Evan and.... what's his faceRead more

Categories
Serious Stuff

The Christmas Invasion

Okay, people. Two houses on the drive between my place and, well, the rest of the world, have Christmas decorations up. I don’t mean tinsel. I mean major freakin’ department-store-scale displays.

Quick date check: it’s at least a couple of weeks until Thanksgiving. I remember seeing one of the aforementioned Christmas displays lit up on Halloween night as I drove little E home from trick-or-treating.

It’s bad enough that the stores decided that Christmas starts at 11:59pm on October 31st. When did the rest of us start buying into this? Since when does the average family in middle America take its holiday decorating cues from the retail giants?… Read more