It’s pretty much universally accepted that we all learn valuable lessons at our first job. I certainly did.
My first real job was at a burger joint in Connecticut called The Big Toppe. It was modeled around a circus in that there was one picture on the wall of a clown. And right from the start I learned important things.
That first day, I was guided by a “counter girl” named Barbara, who really took me under her wing in those early days. And she taught me many of the rules that I’m sure she still lives by.
First, at head counter girl Lisa’s insistence because I was the new girl, Barbara took me out back to show me how to clean the restaurant’s restroom. Taking the key from the hook, Barbara grabbed the spray bottle of ammonia and water, walked me to the restroom, opened the door and led me in.
“All you have to do is stand here for 2-3 minutes. Then spray ammonia into the air and leave. Nobody will ever know the difference.”
Lesson number two was important, but only while I worked there.
“Make sure to talk to Frank (the manager) when you wipe down anything. That way he’ll think you are a good worker. Otherwise, don’t bother wiping.”
My next and most important lesson came one day when she wasn’t working but I was. Barbara stopped by The Big Toppe with her friend Mary to get some (free — if Frank wasn’t looking) carryout to take to the beach. Barbara’s friend was horribly ugly, and I saw her picking her nose when she was in line. “Yuck!” I thought.
Unfortunately for them, Frank was around and was making sure that nobody got free food that day. So, while Barbara chatted with me, Mary went back out to their car to get lunch money.
“She’s really ugly isn’t she?” Barbara said.
I tried to be nice and said “I’m sure she’s really nice.”
“Oh, no,” said Barbara. “She’s a real jerk. But I try to always hang around jerks. They make me look good.”
That was Barbara’s third bit of lifelong advice. Always hang around assholes so you look good.
I realized last night that Barbara is now working for the GOP. How else can you explain the fact that House Republicans invited this asshole to the President’s State of the Union Address?
It would be difficult to find a bigger asshole than Ted Nugent
Remind me never to go into restroom on the House controlled side of the U.S. Capitol.
Let’s put this in perspective, now. Gun violence is a public health issue. Period. We reduced other public health threats by taking appropriate action. We can fix this one too.
From the Journal of the American Medical Association — information on how we reduced deaths from other causes and what we need to do to reduce deaths from this one:
(Mozaffarian D, Hemenway D, Ludwig DS. Curbing Gun Violence: Lessons From Public Health Successes. JAMA. 2013;():1-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.38.)
But of course, this shows the heart of the problem:
More guns aren’t the answer. Guns in schools and shopping malls and office buildings aren’t the answer. Fewer guns — and guns with smaller magazines that’s the ticket.
To contact your Congressional representative and Senators and ask them to help enact reasonable gun laws, follow these links:
When I wrote a post on the night of the shootings about the fact that members my family grew up in Newtown and went to Sandy Hook Elementary School, I was touched by the comments of most of you.
One commenter I’d never heard from before, took the opportunity to make my comments section into her platform for how very safe she feels because she packs a gun. I tolerated her for as long as I could, mostly trying not to vomit at the comments. She berated me for my opinions, telling me in bad grammar that I was ignorant.
I am not ignorant. I have done the research. I even put some of it into the comments that she found so ignorant. Here’s the post, although the comments, which were mostly answered in those damn Word Press bubbles, do not appear in the order they were received. And since some of them required me to breathe deeply into a paper bag filled with Xanax, they were answered fairly randomly.
*****
As a news junky I am constantly reading about the incredibly stupid things normal people do with guns. People who mean no harm, who only mean to keep themselves and their families safe.
There was the man I wrote about in my first piece on gun control, Gunsmoke. He shot himself in the femoral artery while unbuckling his seat belt in a grocery store parking lot. His wife was inside shopping, and their four kids watched their father die stupidly.
There was the guy who was hanging out with his friends and demonstrated the infallibility of his gun’s safety by putting the safety on, pointing the gun at his temple, and pulling the trigger. His friends were quite impressed, I’m quite sure. He will never know.
And then along comes this guy, who gives a face and a voice to everything stupid about the crazy gun crowd.
In case you are on the fence on whether or not assault weapons should be banned, take a listen to someone who thinks they should not.
And then see if you can believe badly enough of George W. Bush, that you will go along with Alex Jones’ depiction of what happened on September 11, 2001, and therefore, why, really, we all need assault weapons.
*****
I’ve begun to believe that it is not necessarily mental health that needs to be evaluated before a person can purchase a gun.
We need to test their intelligence. Because there are way too many stupid fuckers out there with weapons.
In the spring and summer of 1986 random parts of my face started growing for no apparent reason. I would be at home, on the subway, or off working somewhere around DC.
First it was a swollen eyebrow. Then that would go away and a day or two later, my cheek would grow so that I couldn’t see well out of one eye.
Mostly it was my lips, though. They would grow, sometimes individually, sometimes together. I looked like a duck.
Did I mention I was also getting married in September? That September? And while John and I had a fairly small and simple wedding, I was unenthusiastic about going to the altar looking like a daisy. Especially this one.
Of course, John’s lips would have been normal. Mine? Not so much.
But work was so completely crazy that I ignored it. I was a lobbyist/flunky at the time, and was spending long days up on Capitol Hill working on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. (And it was the perfect assignment for me; I did my own taxes – on the U.S. Government 1040-EZ form. Tax Returns for Poor Dummies.) I was in over my head, didn’t have a clue what was going on, what was important, or which way was up. I was a wee bit stressed.
Plus that summer we decided to buy our first house just so we could send my stress level through the roof of my brand new adorable little house.
But back to my problem. My ever changing facial features.
People were looking at me strangely which I understood – I often and suddenly looked really odd. But even stranger, they stopped talking whenever I would approach. These were people I’d worked with for more than six years. Something weird was going on.
And I found out what that was early one morning as I stood talking in the front lobby to my boss, also (irritatingly) named John. He was giving me instructions on that day’s most important issues, when to pay especially close attention, when to call him immediately with an update.
At the beginning of the chat, my face was normal. But as we talked, my lips spontaneously grew larger and larger. More duck-like.
“Elyse,” my boss said, “what’s happening to your lips?”
“They’re growing. Spontaneously. I don’t know why. But you’ve seen me with a swollen face off and on for the last couple of months. Haven’t you noticed? And it keep on happening. Luckily, John has promised to marry me even if I look like Daisy Duck when I arrive at the church.”
The look of relief on his face was instantaneous – he joked with me about the fat lips, about stress, about what I might be allergic to. He’s a really nice guy, and he cared about me. But it wasn’t until much later when I realized just why he had looked so relieved.
He thought I was being abused by my husband-to-be. And he, a very powerful Washington DC lawyer, who knew/knows everybody in town, had no idea what to do. He didn’t ask me if anybody was hurting me. He didn’t threaten to report John, or try to find out discretely whether folks in John’s office thought John might be abusive. No, my boss talked to other folks who also cared about me and who also didn’t know what to do to save me from what, had it been true, would have been a huge mistake.
(In fairness, they didn’t know my John at all – it wasn’t a very social office.)
And once I made the connection, I remembered feeling similarly helpless once. I thought about a secretary named Kelly who had worked with us briefly a few years earlier. She and I had become a bit friendly, even though we worked on different floors and in totally different departments. We both loved to play softball. One day I saw Kelly with an enormous black eye.
“I was playing softball with my husband’s team,” she said, shaking her head. “I should have caught the damn ball.”
“I once caught one with my left thigh,” I responded to her, truthfully, but naively. “You could see the stitch marks on the bruise.”
The next day she was gone. Obviously to everyone else her husband had been beating her, and she got help and got away.
The image of her face has haunted me. What would I have done – would I have been able/willing to help her? Would I have ever figured out what was happening to her?
My story ended well. I hadn’t had time to eat properly and subsisted pretty much on a diet of Milky Ways for two months. Woman cannot live on Milky Ways alone. Maybe ducks can. I stopped eating chocolate and looked OK at my wedding. Or at least, I didn’t look like a duck.
I don’t know how Kelly’s story ended. I never will.
* * *
Yesterday, the GOP in the U.S. House of Representatives allowed the Violence Against Women Act, which had been law since 1994, to expire. And they let it happen because it would have expanded coverage of the law to more women including immigrants and Native Americans.
Perhaps you don’t know what the Violence Against Women law does.
My bible, Wikipedia, says that it provide programs and services, including:
Community violence prevention programs
Protections for female victims who are evicted from their homes because of events related to domestic violence or stalking
Funding for female victim assistance services, like rape crisis centers and hotlines
Programs to meet the needs of immigrant women and women of different races or ethnicities
Programs and services for female victims with disabilities
Legal aid for female survivors of violence
But what it really does is help abused women. To let them know that they can get help. That they are not alone. And it can also give their families, friends and co-workers vital, life saving information about how to help. How to act. What to do besides wonder amongst everyone else but the person most impacted. Literally.
Now tell me, what’s not to like about this law? It gives vital assistance to vulnerable women – those who most need it. A place to go where they can take their kids, get help.
It gives folks who don’t know what to do or what to say a clue as to how to help women in need.
Where they don’t have to give up that last little bit of their heart.
I have stated this more often than I can stand, but the men in the GOP are not on the side of women, or on the side of men who respect women.
GET THEM OUT OF OUR LIVES
Then, Damn them to Hell where they belong
***
What you and I can do:
Contact your representatives in Congress and demand they pass the Violence Against Women Act as it stands today with expanded services: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
We did it! Angie of Childhood Relived and I met for lunch! It was memorable. Sadly, though, we did stay in this decade, the 2010s (which sounds really weird). We simply couldn’t work in time travel back to the 1980s. Traffic congestion, you see.
We had wonderful plans, Angie and I. Tours. Nostalgia. Archie Bunker and the Smithsonian’s American Museum that contains just the right tidbits of crap from TV Land as brilliantly suggested by Darla of She’s a Maineiac.
But there was one thing that we didn’t factor in ahead of time. Now, what do you suppose that might be.
If you’re guessing that it’s the fact that neither Angie nor I knows how to shut up, “Come On Down.” Yup, we spent a 2 hour lunch fighting for air time. I had my stories; Angie had hers. It was close, but I think Angie won. I want a re-match.
Still, we did do a tour of DC. Sort of.
First of all, none of the restaurants I’d suggested in my earlier post um, worked out. Still, the restaurant we went to is a Washington landmark: The Old Ebbitt Grill. The restaurant has been there for centuries! Famous people have eaten there – Lincoln! Grant! Wilson! FDR! Checkers! It is a piece of Washington history that is seriously cool. Except that it didn’t happen at the place where we had lunch. Yup, we had lunch at the new Old Ebbitt Grill. The OLD Old Ebbitt Grill was torn down not long after I got to DC in 1979. I’m sure there is no connection. And I did tell Angie that we were having an expensive lunch in a fraudulent facility. That’s our nation’s capital for you.
Still, we had a great lunch. Of course, neither of us would stop talking. As a result, the food wasn’t as hot as it might have been. Perhaps we should have sent it back. A good restaurant should factor conversation in.
Anyway after our long lunch, we realized that we really didn’t have time for much else, so we decided to walk around the White House and gloat about Obama’s re-election. Of course, we didn’t know that that night Barack, Michelle and the girls were going to light the White House Christmas Tree. In public. With thousands of folks in attendance. Apparently, everybody in DC, VA and MD was there. So Angie and I, still never pausing our conversation, swam upstream against thousands of folks determined to see the festivities.
Here are the pictures. Angie did her best Angie-1980s in front of some of Washington’s most impressive tourist destinations.
OK, I can’t be that mean. Here she is — and really, she doesn’t often let her mouth hang open like that. It was done only by request.
And here is the picture she took of me!
But the single best moment was when I drove Angie in my car out of a Washington, DC parking lot where we had left my car for 3 hours.
“Twenty Dollars?” she said. “It cost $20 to park for three hours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Angie, you’re not in Kansas any more. Or one of those other fly-over states, either. Whichever one you come from.
FiftyFourandAHalf 