Monthly Archives: October 2011

October 17, 2011 · 0:00

You can bank on it

I’m ready to go along with the folks occupying Wall Street.  Because I too am getting rather peeved with the whole banking industry.  It’s gotten so irritating, I just don’t know what to do.

My husband, John, got annoyed as anything last month when he looked at his bank statement and realized that every time he goes to the ATM and wants his balance, or wants one of those little statements, they charge him a buck.

I would have been annoyed had I seen that charge, too; then again, I would have had to open up my statement.  And since I can proudly say that I have not, in fact, actually opened a bank statement since 1973 when my father carefully taught me how to reconcile one, well, I didn’t notice the fee.

But there are more and more of these annoying surcharges, and they are sooner or later going to affect how I spend my time.  And if I have to start actually paying attention to my money instead of simply letting it run through my fingers on luxury items like bread and water, well, there will be hell to pay.

And another thing:  What is with all these bank mergers?  I have been banking at the same place for about 25 years.  Well, the same building, anyway.  The bank’s name changes more often than the tide.

In fact, it is this last name change of my bank that has me ready to join up with the Occupy Wall Street gang.  Because the bank’s name went from the throat-clearing-aid name “Wachovia” to “Wells Fargo.”

Now every time I got to the ATM I get stuck with two things:  those damn fees, AND the tune and lyrics of the most annoying song ever.  The Wells Fargo Wagon tune from Music Man:

 Oho, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin’ down the street

Oh please let it be for me

Oho, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin’ down the street

I wish, I wish I knew what it could be!

It sticks in my head each and every time I go to the ATM.  I’m not happy about this, nor is my husband.  John thought it was bad when I kept singing the same verse of “Desperado” over and over again.  For some reason, it annoyed him no end, even though I explained to him that it was the best verse of the song.

But with the bank’s new name, I end up singing that stupid song all the time.  I’m going to start standing outside my office building with a cup and a sign to get some cash, just to avoid the ATM and spare my husband.  Yes, I do try to be a good wife.

But you know, I’d be happy to have them double the fees if they would just change the name again.  Here’s my suggestion:

“The Impossible Dream” Bank.

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October 15, 2011 · 0:00

Sign of the times

It is election season here in Virginia.  In fact, it always seems to be election season in Virginia.  We have elections just to show off Virginia’s historical connection with the U.S. Constitution – Madison, for example, was a Virginian, and he wrote most of it.  Jefferson, another Virginian, wrote him letters from Paris with helpful hints on how to write something that would one day be put into a really cool frame.  George Mason was in on it too, so were a whole bunch of other Virginians we all learned about in grade school.  Folks from other states had their fingers in the pot too, Virginians admit, but only when pressed.

But Virginia still takes its voting rights very seriously.  So we have elections frequently just because we can.  It is now mid-October and I’ve already voted twice this year. We will, of course vote again on the 1st Tuesday in November.   Yay.

Actually, I don’t really mind.  I vote in every damn one of them.  I value my right to vote.  Even more so since 2000 when I was living in Europe and my absentee ballot didn’t show up.  You know what happened – George W. Bush became President.  The world went to hell in a handbasket.  If only my ballot had shown up, things might have been different.

For a while, I blamed myself – until, of course, I realized that my absentee ballot would not have been for a vote in the Supreme Court.  Damn!  I want to get one of those, but I’m not quite sure where to apply for it.  In fact, the longer John Roberts remains Chief Justice, the harder I’m going to try to find a way to get a vote there on the Supreme Court.  One of those awesome black robes would be pretty cool, too.

So now that it is just a few weeks away from the next election, the political signs are out all over the place.  Big clumps of them at every corner.  A big mish mash of signs advertising people I’ve heard of and people I haven’t, for positions I have never heard of either.  What does a delegate do?  Or a county supervisor.  Who does he/she supervise?  And if they need to be supervised, shouldn’t we just get rid of them?

This time around, there are also candidates running for School Board, and one candidate made me nearly get out of my car and knock over each and every one of his signs on principle.  Or maybe on principal.

Why?  Because the guy is not running

FOR School Board

Nope.  He’s running

4

School Board

Is it just me, or should folks on the school board know how to spell those sound-alike words?

The sign made me realize that, yes,  it IS bad when the Supreme Court overrules the popular vote of the country.  But when you start out with a school board full of cretins who cannot distinguish between “for” and “four” (and probably “there, their, and they’re”), well, that’s when you can pretty much be sure the next generation is going to be dumber than we are.

You can vote on it.

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October 9, 2011 · 0:00

… comes around

A friend of mine told me that this weekend was her 20th high school reunion.  Immediately, I was transported back to mine, back to one of the best nights of my life, back to when someone who had bullied me showed everyone else his true colors.

My hometown was a wealthy suburb, a place where rich, well-schooled, successful folks go to raise their families.  A town filled to the brim with liberals who mostly commute to New York City, just a short train ride away.  A town of folks that raise their kids to be liberals too.

My classmates and I were at the tail end of the Baby Boomers, old enough to protest the Vietnam war but not old enough to serve.  Old enough to remember and mourn the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr., to have seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.  We participated in protests, celebrated the Women’s Movement, went braless through high school, and believed that all you need is love.

My family landed in town when my father bought a run-down Victorian house, sight unseen, in 1963. Kids in the neighborhood thought it was haunted; we moved in on Halloween.  My two brothers, two sisters and I started school the following Monday.

Within a week, I had ruined my life.

You see, in 2nd grade, every Friday at my new school, we had Show and Tell.  I bet you did too.  But I bet you didn’t, well, show and tell quite like I did that very first week.

You remember Show and Tell, I’m sure.  Everyone gathers together on the floor and everybody raises their hand to perform; three or four kids are chosen every week.  They sing songs, tell jokes, juggle.  That first week I anxiously raised my hand, but the teacher didn’t call on me.  I performed anyway.  There in the middle of the circle, I wet my pants.

I do not recommend “showing” in this manner if your goal is to one day be voted “Most Popular.”

I don’t remember what happened for the rest of the afternoon.  I don’t know if I went home early, if my classmates got wet and ran screaming from me.  I have buried that memory.  I do know that it started four years of hell.

Tommy was the lead bully.  He dubbed me “Weenie Girl” and teased and tormented me through 6th grade.  He was truly cruel, and tried to keep others from being my friend.  I hated him.  I saw him less as we got older, but he was still a classmate when we both graduated in 1974.

But by the time of my 20th reunion, I had more or less gotten over my shame over the incident.  And I did it with a very public therapy session.  One night, when I had had way too much to drink at a bar, I climbed onto a table and told everyone in the bar my hilariously funny/sad story – how I ruined my own childhood during Show and Tell.   I had always feared that someone would find out and ridicule me.  Instead, there I stood, making the room love me, as I showed them the humor and the pain.

It had taken me years, but I had to admit it was funny.  I mean after all, I didn’t do it during naptime.  I didn’t do it during storytime.  I didn’t pee while learning long division.  I wet my pants during Show and Tell!  Why hasn’t anyone put that scene into a sit com?

So on the night of my 20th reunion, when I saw lead bully Tommy heading towards me to say hello, I had forgiven him.  Completely.  And although I thought of all the things I could say to the nasty bully, I smiled politely, chatted amiably to him and his wife, and moved on with my life.  It was a proud moment.

But the night got better.  Much, much better.

You see, Tommy was the MC of the evening.  It was his job to introduce particularly successful classmates, tell who was living in exotic places, and what surprising career choices had been made by a few.  He showed pictures of us when we all still had hair, when we were thin, when we were young.

And Tommy did a good job speaking to that extremely liberal crowd of editors and publishers, doctors, public interest lawyers.  People who still wanted to save the world.  Good people, people with heart and soul.  Liberals.

And then it happened.  Towards the end of the evening, Tommy stood up on the dias and started to wind things down.  And he said to my extremely PC friends and classmates:

“My wife told me not to tell jokes tonight.  But I’m just going to tell the one.”

“Why is a man like a linoleum floor?”

Tommy paused for effect.

“Lay him right the first time;

walk all over him from then on.”

The room went silent, as one by one, each head turned towards the dias and each person either thought or said aloud:

“What an asshole.”

And after realizing that everybody agreed on that one point, I cracked up.

“Hell, I’ve known he was an asshole since 2nd Grade!” I said.

I’m pretty sure that when I am taking in my last breath, I will still be smiling about that night, knowing that in this life what goes around really does come around; sometimes it just takes a while.

The scene of the crime

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October 6, 2011 · 0:00

Flower Power

Every time some high-profile person dies I get like this.  Annoyed.

Not generally at the person who died or the fact that they did.  That’s not usually their fault.  And let’s face it, sometimes their, uh, absence isn’t such a bad thing for the world.  Of course it depends.

No, what annoys me are all the damn flowers.  Folks started doing it last night, probably as soon as word went out that Steve Jobs had died.

I was irritated because I knew that outside each and every Apple Store, outside headquarters and outside any house where an Apple-product fan lives, there would be flowers.  And each and every damn bouquet would still be in its plastic sleeve.

Now I think Steve Jobs was a great guy, truly.  And Macs are absolutely the way to go.  If I could afford one, well, that’s what I’d be working on right now.

But the fact that folks go to all the trouble to get flowers, take them to memorials, take them to places of quiet contemplation and remembrance and LITTER, well, it makes me nuts.

When I see someone doing that I want to toot my car horn and shout “Litterbug, beep, beep” like we did as kids.  I want to get that crying Indian from the 70s to ride after them (on a diapered horse, of course) and make them pick up their trash.  I want there to be a 2011 advertising campaign to stop people from throwing plastic down on the ground and leaving it there, even if they mean well.  Even if there is something pretty still inside.

I can still remember that when Princess Diana died, there were so many £5 bouquets of flowers wrapped in plastic outside of Kensington Palace that they declared a public emergency and brought in bulldozers and backhoes to remove the mess.  They asked people to stop bringing flowers.

To my mind, a plastic-enclosed bunch of flowers is just not a very good way to say good-bye.  Well, maybe to the chairman of the Hefty Trash Bag company, but not to Princess Di and not to Steve Jobs, and not to anybody else I can think of unless there’s someone out there who routinely wraps him or herself in plastic.  And I’m pretty sure you won’t be getting a lot of hands up in the crowd from folks who admit to doing that.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t like flowers.  I just don’t like flowers left in unseemly piles of plastic crap.  It is environmentally, politically and humanitarianly incorrect.  It’s bad for Mother Nature.  And it is damn ugly.

Lovely Flowers for Princess Diana

So, I would like to tell you, my enormous fan base, years from now when I die tragically here at my computer from Blog-itis, and when my die-hard devotees simply must, MUST memorialize me with flowers, 

TAKE THEM OUT OF THE GOD DAMN WRAPPER

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October 4, 2011 · 0:00

Buttons

I’ve always thought that my car had too many buttons.  But now I’m not so sure.

At last count, there were 223 buttons of different sizes and shapes.  They control the stereo, the lights, the wipers.  They open the windows, heat the seats, and reset things I cannot identify.  In fact there are a lot of them that I’m just not sure about; so I try not to press them.  I fear disastrous results.

I didn’t used to worry about what would happen if I pushed something unfamiliar.  I thought, well, I can just press it again if I don’t like what happens.  But that was before owning my dearly departed Mini Cooper.  It had one button that was strategically located right next to the window control, and it terrified me.   My husband, John, said:

“Don’t press that button.”

Why not?

When you pressed it, the rollover control for the car went off.  I don’t know why a car would have that button.  The only explanation I ever found was that the Mini Cooper was very much like my dog, Cooper, who loves nothing more than a belly rub.  And so I figured that sometimes, my Mini Cooper just needed a belly rub, too.   And that button made it all possible.

But this morning I realized that my car is short a button.

Today, I drove to work a different way.  It was 8:45, and I was 15 minutes from work, when I got to the end of one road, and needed to turn left onto the next four-lane road.  I’m sure you realize that I am a terrific driver, a really nice, considerate, non-assholic driver.  So of course I was in the left lane, with my car responsibly flashing its left turn signal.  There was a silver Honda next to me in the right lane.  Obviously, being in the right lane, he was turning right.  He was not proudly displaying his turn signal, I might add.  At least not so I could see it.

When the light changed, I pulled forward, and I crossed the two westbound lanes and the left, eastbound one to take my rightful place in the right lane.  But my friend in the silver Honda did not turn right – he turned left – from the right lane!  And I immediately remembered that, well, he could do that at that spot on that road.  He was allowed to.

I cut him off.  And I nearly smushed his Honda flat enough to be used as one of those silver plates that cover big holes in the road.  Oops.

I felt bad, and not just because of the language with which he described my driving.  I am still blushing.  But I really do try not to be an asshole, at least when I drive.  And when I do act like an asshole, well, I want to mean it.  You know, like when someone drives really slowly in front of me, or really fast behind me or smokes in the car ahead of me with his arm hanging out the window so I have to smell it.

But after I cut off the man in the Honda, I tried to let him know I was sorry, that I had made a mistake, that I was glad he was not now in an ambulance, headed towards the trauma unit.  But there really wasn’t any way to do that.

That’s where my new button comes in.  I want to be able to hit a button and have a light flash that says,

“Sorry, my fault.”

I’m pretty sure though, that my new friend in the silver Honda wants a different phrase to come out when he smacks his new button.

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