When you call a business, do you sometimes continue to carry on side conversations after dialing the business?
If so, did you know that the person at the other end of the line can hear you clearly…and sometimes hear the others too? Especially when you are shouting?
This week at work, I answered a call with my usual professional greeting, and immediately the caller shouted, “Grab your underwear and put some lotion on!”
Then she began speaking to me as if nothing had happened.
Sometimes you just need to laugh.
This gallery of absurdly bad “glam” photos show made my day!
(Click on the link below)
My life has been full of surprises this year.
I didn’t expect to move to another state.
I didn’t expect to find a beautiful 100% cashmere, beaded, Oscar de la Renta sweater at The Salvation Army store for $1.99, in my size. Sure, there is a tiny chip on one of the beads. Beads can be replaced, people! Would you give away a classic Mustang because it had a flat tire? I don’t think so.
I didn’t expect to see horizontal lightning while driving home from work. I’m pretty sure they don’t have that kind of lightning back in California.
I didn’t expect to get a bowl of soup with my meal when we went to lunch that day, but there it was…soft yellow, creamy looking, in a little white rimmed bowl, on a little white plate, served with a rounded spoon and two traditional cracker packets. Perfect.
“What kind is it?” my husband asked.
“Cold!” I exclaimed in surprise, “and lemony…or just sour.”
Confusion set in before I realized, with embarrassing clarity, that what I had tasted was not soup at all. This was the Italian dressing for the salad I had ordered.
“Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone in order to do it.”—Unknown
Could some of your clothes make you happy by leaving your closet? Would the disappearance of that pile of papers put a spring in your step?
If the glass hummingbird figurine your grandmother gave you when you were in grade school suddenly took flight through an open window, would you breathe a sigh of relief?
Imagine that your clutter wants what is best for you.
If only the expired coupons had hands, they would toss themselves right into the waste basket. If the shoes that hurt your feet could walk on their own, they would have shuffled off to the thrift store ages ago.
Those old VHS tapes regret taking up your shelf space. They don’t want to stand in your way. They want you to be fulfilled, to live the life you have always dreamed of.
Make it an amicable parting of ways.
Sign #1: You found your hairbrush in the microwave.
Sign #2: The spiders have constructed a town hall and drafted a constitutional charter.
Sign #3: The coat stand tipped over and crushed your favorite end table.
Sign #4: To get to the spare room, you need to climb out the window, dangle from the eaves and crawl through a ventilation shaft. (Be sure to bring a flashlight and a grappling hook.)
Sign #5: Poor Aunt Delores hasn’t been seen since she opened up the pantry door to find the dog food. What day was that? Where is the dog? Well, maybe they went for a really long walk…
I have spent the weekend primarily in bed, recovering from a particular type of illness. My time tested self-medication includes: rest, water, ice, Canada Dry ginger ale, and Saltine crackers — in that order.
My menu has recently expanded to allow mugs of hot, salty broth and bowls of Wheaties seeped in rice milk. The chicken tandoori being consumed downstairs has been politely refused; yesterday, the smell of garlicky pork nearly caused a relapse.
Only hours before the gastric rebellion commenced, I had enjoyed (courtesy of a dear friend) a remarkable meal delicately prepared by a short, mustached man with the name Gustavo embroidered over his heart. He came to our table to explain each delicious course. I remember a kale pesto, a risotto with white truffle oil, and some other things only barely within my food vocabulary. Apparently, I was not meant to absorb the nutritional benefits of this feast.
Gustavo is not to blame, I want to make that clear.
I felt nauseated on the drive up to the city. I had thought perhaps my belt was too tight, and so the belt was left abandoned in the foot-well of the car. My dear husband had asked me earlier, “Is that what you’re wearing?”, so I wasn’t worried about spoiling my glamorous look. Without the belt, I still felt slightly ill, but I chalked it up to the mysterious ‘car sickness’ I have heard about from others. ‘There is a first time for everything,’ I thought to myself, rather optimistically.
I wished for my queasiness to go away long enough for me to enjoy a rare evening out. My wish came true.
Earlier in the day, I had looked inside the pantry and wished for the ginger ale and crackers I had bought weeks ago to be consumed, rather than wasted. That wish also came true.
I can think of better wishes, now.
After reading a thought provoking blog post from Backstage Spotlight, called “Be Yourself, But Don’t Disagree with Me” regarding that elusive balance of honest expression and conversational harmony, I was inspired to extend the topic in my own way.
My idea is that you should Be Yourself, But Be Reasonable. I honestly don’t care if you disagree with me or not, just be tactful and make some sense, for pity’s sake!
Last night I had a conversation with one of my kids that made me want to bang my head against a wall.
I saw a game controller tipped at the edge of the counter, like a car with one wheel over a cliff, and when I alerted him to the problem, the conversation went something like this…
That controller looks like it’s going to fall.
No, it didn’t.
What?
No, it didn’t.
I didn’t say that it did, I said it looked like it was going to.
Yeah, I know.
What?
What?
I don’t understand.
It didn’t fall.
(Pause) I heard you. I am saying that I don’t understand, because your response didn’t make sense.
Yes, it did. I said it didn’t fall.
No, what I mean is that I was talking about the future, but you were talking about the past, so it didn’t make sense.
What you just said doesn’t make sense.
Umm…I was… The future and the past are different.
I know.
~~~
He will be in middle school next year. Teachers, consider yourself warned!
Seriously, I want my kids to be themselves, and to feel comfortable talking to me — I want everyone to feel that way. The tricky part is that I want the same in return.
We all have different interests and perspectives and personalities. We have different opinions, too. For example, Backstage Spotlight used an example conversation about The Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but I don’t have very strong feelings about those movies, so I am going to use The Sound of Music for my own examples. I have seen that film more times than I have seen any other film.
You don’t have to agree with me. You don’t need to like The Sound of Music just because I do. Go ahead, express yourself. Just be reasonable and polite about it — and, please, get your verbs straight.
If I say that I like The Sound of Music and you say that you don’t like musicals, I understand your opinion. If you say it is an endlessly boring and stupid movie, well, then I understand that you are rude, but hey, at least you are honest.
If I say that I like The Sound of Music and you say that you like it too, then you are probably a woman. If you say that you like doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles, then I know that you have probably seen the film as many times as I have.
If I say that I like The Sound of Music and you say “No, it didn’t“, then I understand that you and my kid should get together and play video games, because neither one of you makes any sense.
One of the biggest arguments I have ever had with anyone started up after I spent time gushing about a college class I was really enjoying at the time, and about all that I was learning from the class. The person to whom I was speaking responded (essentially) by giving the opinion that classes similar to the one I spoke about were worthless, stupid, and a waste of time.
Now, this was, I thought, a clear and personal insult, given the fact that I had just expressed my enthusiasm for the class. I took offense.
I would submit that a better response would have been something like, “I wouldn’t be interested in a class like that. I just don’t think I would get anything out of it. I would rather take a class about —–.” To me, that is still an honest response, just a more polite one; it is a response that supports communication instead of ending it.
In any case, I think we can be ourselves and have our own opinions and still get along. All we need to do is to be tactful and reasonable, and know the difference between past and future verb tenses.
(with thanks to Backstage Spotlight for the inspiration!)
Driving has never been simple for me.
Driving requires multi-tasking and navigation, two things I’ve never been able to properly manage. The first time I learned to drive, even I knew it was a bad idea.
One of the first cars I drove was the family car, a Volkswagen bus, which may not be the best starter vehicle because it has a flattened front end, in contrast to most automobiles.
My poor mother in the passenger seat always had white knuckles. She tended to grab at the dashboard, and make small squeaking sounds while stomping her foot on the floor in search of a brake. She was always a nervous driver; having her child behind the wheel didn’t make the experience better. I inherited my bad sense of direction from her, too.
During driver education class, I was too distracted by far. I noticed that although other teens were excited about the process of learning to drive, I would rather have been somewhere else…anywhere else!
My driver education instructor noticed that I didn’t check the traffic before I tried to merge on the freeway during the final test of the class. For some reason, he wanted me to pass the test anyway, so he asked me to return on another day for a do-over.
I suppose it was kindness on his part, but I thought if he took his job more seriously, he would realize that excessively spaced-out teens were a danger to society. I don’t recall if I returned for the driver education do-over, but I do know that I decided not to try for a license. I wasn’t ready, and I knew it. Public buses and my bicycle served as transportation for the next several years, and I was satisfied with those methods.
I finally tested for my license in my early twenties. I passed both the written exam and the driving test easily enough. I even knew how to parallel park. My boyfriend at the time had coached me in parallel parking my late Great Aunt Gertrude’s powder blue 1972 Ford Maverick. (My photographs are packed away somewhere since the move, but you can see some other Mavericks at http://www.fordmaverick.com/.)
That particular model of car was often categorized as a muscle car. I think this expression refers to the fact that it was a masculine car with a strong engine, the kind of car young men might “race for pinks”. In this case, I thought the term muscle car was appropriate because it took muscles to drive it. Someone had to turn down the engine idle for me, because whenever I took my foot off of the brake, the Maverick lurched forward like a racehorse out of the starting gate. It was a little bit too much car for me to handle.
Parallel parking a heavy vehicle without power steering is a challenge to a petite girl with skinny arms, believe me. Sometimes my boyfriend had to help me turn the wheel when my arms got too tired, which was most of the time. My arms would ache from holding up a hair dryer back then, but they developed a little bit more muscle from maneuvering that steel monster.
With a black interior, vinyl seats, and no air conditioning, the Maverick was a bad car for summer driving. I burned my hands on the metal seat belt buckles more than a few times. Winter was also a difficult time, because the only way to defog the windshield was to leave the windows open — not a good option on a rainy day! Forget about the vent system, too, because opening that up meant launching an endless hissing torrent of dried leaf fragments into your lap. To make matters worse, between the Maverick’s rumbling engine and the traffic noise from the open windows, I could barely hear the AM radio — not that there was anything to hear.
The day after I passed the final license test, I was driving alone for the first time when a police car signaled for me to stop.
I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I was pulled over because one of the Maverick’s tail lights was out. They test the lights during the test, so I knew that the light must have gone out in the past day. I didn’t even have my real license yet, just the official dot matrix paper printout from the Department of Motor Vehicles. The officer seemed to feel sorry for me. I felt sorry for me, too.
A couple of years after that, I was pulled over because the tiny light over my license plate was out. Someone told me later that I was probably pulled over because of my car. The Maverick was apparently popular with young men who were up to no good, and sometimes those no-gooders deliberately dimmed the light over the plate so the car could not be identified during late night misadventures. I was a victim of profiling!
Why dear old Great Aunt Gertrude, who was neither young nor a man, had purchased this “suspicious looking” vehicle, I cannot say. At least it wasn’t red. In that case, I might have been pulled over more often.
I don’t mean to disparage the car. It was a classic, with some real personality.
It stood out, and I could find it in a parking lot when I had forgotten where I had parked, which was (and still is) most of the time.
Now where did I park my car?
When I realized the Maverick’s operational days were numbered, I sold it to a restorer. A man in the neighborhood had three or four Mavericks parked outside of his house. He was using the parts from multiple bodies to rebuild a single Maverick. The body on mine was banged up, not from my driving, but from Gertrude’s run-ins with a few trash cans and walls, so my vehicle was to provide the interior for the final restoration. Dear old Gertrude had parked her car in the garage for twenty years, and the inside was almost entirely intact. I was happy to sell the car to someone who appreciated its classic charm.
The next two vehicles I owned were totaled, with me inside. So was a third vehicle, not my own. Each time, I was on the receiving end of a hit from another driver, and I sustained minor injuries like whiplash and contusions.
These days, I drive my unclassic car without incident, and even parallel park once in a while. My car hasn’t been pulled over or smashed into for at least a decade, so I feel safer on the road now than in the past, but I still don’t like driving. I still get lost without GPS and I almost always forget where I have parked. Even with air conditioning, power steering, a CD player, and seats that don’t melt the skin on my thighs if I wear a skirt… I would still rather be doing something else.
Being very distracted by my upcoming move, I decided on a shortcut to my usual goals of simplifying life and maintaining a positive attitude. To continue my weekly posts, but save myself some time and stress during the moving process, I have cut back on my writing time and am sharing something that makes me laugh each week.
This week’s laugh is about something I did. It was pretty foolish, and a little costly, but I can laugh about it now.
My son wears a contact lens in one eye. He gets a new contact lens every two weeks, and I gave him a fresh one in the morning, on the appropriate day. I was right on top of things, and I was feeling pleased with myself. My son opened the package, but hadn’t put the lens in yet, and he told me so. Just seconds later, in a cleaning frenzy, I whisked away the open package. Into the trash went my son’s expensive custom order lens.
He looked at me. “Wha…? Did you just…?”
“Did I what?”
“That was…”
“You mean that lens package? It was empty wasn’t it? Didn’t you just put it in?”
“No, I just told you.”
“Oh…ohhh. You did tell me! Whoops!” I peered into the trash. “Maybe we can…”
“I’m not putting it in now.”
“Don’t worry, I can’t find it anyway.”
A Clean Surface. 