Day 249: Living the Good LIfe Isn't the Same for All of Us

I don’t feel nearly 40. I don’t even feel 30 really. I’m not good at sending cards and gifts to people when they have babies, birthdays or weddings. I don’t like to clean my house. I don’t feel like almost 40 is supposed to feel—or what I perceive almost 40 to supposed to feel like. At 37, I still live pretty much the same way I did 10 years ago and I don’t mind that. I feel young, I don’t look too bad and the husband and I have a pretty fun life. Not feeling my age does not present a problem for me, except when it comes to the expectations of others.

Mom was the one who sent the gifts and cards and kept track of what was happening with everyone. Together, Jeff and I manage to remember everyone’s birthday usually within the correct month. We move so much and live in a perpetual state of half unpacked that there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of permanence. We take long weekends whenever we can, travel as much and far as we can afford and don’t really feel the need to put down roots. To us our life is fitting and although a bit chaotic, it works. To others we likely look forgetful, selfish and unconcerned. All true except for the last. We do care and we do want to be the kind of couple that remembers to send you a wedding gift or a happy baby whatever, the intentions are there, just not the follow through.

We may not be the kind of adults we expected to be, but we’re doing our best to enjoy life and to not piss too many people in the process. The problem, is that most people live their lives the same way. Grow up, go to college, pursue a career, get married, buy a house, have kids, make friends with other married homeowners with kids, etc. We can accept them and their lifestyle despite how foreign it is to us, but we don’t always get the same courtesy in return. I don’t want your life, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like and respect you. We joke a lot, but the truth is, we want everyone to live exactly the way they want without peer pressure, guilt, or unnecessary sacrifice. That is how we live and it sucks that sometimes that means we can’t live up to your expectations, because we’d really like to, we’re just busy planning our next vacation and watching the game.

Day 248: Uh-oh, it's the Tebow's

Oh Pam and Tim Tebow, if only life were so simple as your sweet rainbows and sunny skies portrayal of it. Sure, all women who are told by doctors they should medically abort should instead go forth because they will both survive and that child shall be a blessed being, capable of all sorts of football greatness (with the exception of taking the snap from under center). Sure, that’s the way it works, except of course for the fact that abortion is illegal in the Philippines, including for medical reasons. Uh-oh, story is starting to fall apart. I wonder what else might be fishy in this lovely and possibly fantastical tale the Tebow's are set to tell during a Superbowl ad?

First off, I should make it clear that I am not pro-abortion. As much as the anti-choice (because I’m sure they are against all choices in all situations) people would like to pretend, I don’t know a single pro-choice person who actually advocates for abortion. Personally, I have never gone up to a woman and told her she should get an abortion. Although, if those damn Duggars get pregnant one more time I might start doing just that. No one is pro-abortion. I know a ton of annoying children and even more irresponsible, narrow-minded and just bad parents, but I still would never have told any of them that abortion should be their choice. So no, people are not pro-abortion just like the other side is not anti-choice. (I prefer to call them Fascists, and since many of them aren’t actually all that smart, they don’t know to be offended.)

The reality is that there are well educated, kind, loving people on both sides of the argument. All pro-lifers are not stupid (despite my joke above) or even Republican. All pro-choice supporters are not tree hugging liberals, feminists or elitists. We’re just all people with our own opinions and the Tebow's are no different. My problem with their ad is that it’s airing during a sporting event that should be more about neutrality than taking sides. Sports unify races, religions, and ethnicities so we shouldn’t let it be divisive politically. My other concern is that the ad is sponsored by Focus on the Family (FOTF), which is not just a conservative group, they are a hateful bigoted organization. During an Oklahoma 2004 political rally, the FOTF leader Dr. James Dobson added to his usual homophobic rhetoric by saying gay marriage will destroy the earth. Um . . . okay.

I believe the Tebow’s genuinely want to spread what they believe to be a message of love and Godliness. When you let an organization with such a hateful background and overall message be your trumpeter, however, you cancel out your own the benign nature of your message. Add to that the basic fact that it is most likely impossible that any physician in the Philippines advocated an abortion in Pam Tebow’s case. A quick and completely non-thorough ten minutes of research suggests that the Philippine abortion laws are 100% comprehensive and punishment is very severe. Doctors do not suggest abortions there and underground clinics and back alley abortions are practically unheard of. So I’ve got to doubt the premise of their story.

I’m not going to object to the expression of one side’s views. You want to spend $2million dollars on an ad, go right ahead. I’d rather the pro-choice side used that money to actually help women in need, so I hope we don’t waste time or money trying to respond. I do not agree with that ad airing during a major sporting event. So much of life is divisive and political, it would be nice to just enjoy three hours of a violent sport without the type of aggressive and confrontational behavior an ad like this is sure to evoke. Ironic yes, but the violence of football will be unmatched in the fight for the right to choose.

Day 247: A Good Deed is Just Vanity Expressing Itself

Do we always do the right thing? For that matter, how do we even know what the “right” thing is? Sometimes we think we’re on the path to a good deed, but it might be a mistake. Who doesn’t want to be the hero, to save the day? I’m not even that nice of person, but I try to good when I can. The problem with some acts of random goodness, is that unless we’re there to see it through to the end, we don’t really know if what we did was the right thing after all.

Last night I was working on my resume (draft #217) in front of the TV. It was local news time, definitely not an incentive to watch, but at one point something did get through. I looked up to see a description of a car the police were looking for. It’s not something I would generally pay attention to, but it was an orange Cadillac with a cracked windshield. You don’t see a lot of orange Caddy’s so it stuck in my mind. I did not now then, nor do I know now, why police were looking for the car. It could have been stolen, involved in a crime, or the vehicle a dangerous criminal was last seen driving. It could be anything, but today when an orange Caddy pulled onto the highway in front of me, I took notice and now I’m not sure I should have.

I drove faster and spent several minutes trying to see the windshield. It didn’t appear to be cracked, but I couldn’t be sure. I wrote down the license plate number and spent a few more minutes watching the driver. It was a woman, maybe 30, black, attractive. I kept thinking that she did not look like someone who committed a crime and since I didn’t really see a crack I could be getting her in trouble for nothing. Still, there was this nagging voice that kept telling me to call it in, what if they got the windshield replaced or patched it up? What if whoever was wanted committed a violent crime and I could help catch him or her? I watched what exit she took off the interstate, then I pulled over and reported it to the police.

I felt good for about a minute, my good deed done, I drove a little faster, sat up a little straighter and believed that I might have contributed to the good in the world. Then it hit me, I had no idea what would happen next. That woman, that poor woman, just driving along on her lunch break or running an errand was about to get pulled over and possibly hassled because of me. The fact that she’s black was not lost on me either. She looked like any one of my friends and yet the possibility exists that she might have been treated unfairly or worse because she happened to be black and driving, an admittedly ugly, orange Cadillac. It’s stayed with me all day and the fact that I’ll never know what happened, if anything, is a killer.

So was my good deed good at all? My motives to do the “right” thing might not have even been pure. I admit it felt good for a moment to think I’d done something superior, reporting the car to the police was just as much vanity as good deed. I hope that either the police caught a bad person or they never went looking for her. I know that doing the right thing isn’t always the easy thing, but not sticking around for the end game just seems selfish and insincere. There might have been a crack in the windshield, but I didn’t see it. I just saw a woman I sold down the river. So much for good deeds.

Day 246: I'm Not Racist, I Just Want My Damn Salad!

I am not a fan of fast food except for two items, I love McDonald’s Diet Coke and I am a fan of fast food salads. Almost any of the major fast food joints have decent salads these days, but Sonic and McDonald’s are my favorites. McD’s makes a southwest salad with grilled chicken that is filling, healthy and delicious. Unfortunately, ordering it has become a bit of a communication skills challenge. The same problem occurs every time I visit if one of two Hispanic women are working the drive thru window. They are friendly and seem perfectly capable and efficient except for one little detail, they can never understand me when I say “tortilla.”

This shouldn’t be a huge problem and it wasn’t . . . at first. As the year has passed, however, with the exact same problem cropping up in the exact same way over the exact same word, I’ve become both perplexed and annoyed. I am not one of those people that expect those in the U.S. to instantly or always speak English. I am guilty of traveling all over the world without adequate language skills and I am fine with America being a melting pot. Most of the world is exposed to more than one language. We are very isolated here both by geography and our attitudes. We believe people should speak English in the states and while I’m all for learning the language of the country you reside in, I am also aware that even in Charlotte, NC there are largely Hispanic communities in which you can be either a natural born citizen or immigrant and still have an accent and speak solely your natural language around close family and friends. I do not care that they are Hispanic, have accents and may not be 100% fluent, nor do I believe we should pass some ridiculous and bigoted English as our national language amendment. It’s bullshit and prejudiced.

My order, when visit McDonald’s is never-changing: Large Diet Coke, easy on the ice and a Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad with no tortillas and no dressing. Despite their thick Spanish accents and my mid-west, not a speck of an accent English, we have no problems understanding one another. They get it, the “easy on the ice” part doesn’t throw them, “no dressing” is understood and my diction does not give them trouble. It is a perfectly ordinary visit to a fast food joint except for the “no tortillas” part. Every damn time, they make me repeat this over and over until they finally give up and ask me to pull around, at which point I again repeat it over and over before launching into gestures meant to demonstrate the scattering of fried tortilla strips on a salad and the hand gestures universally regarded as meaning “no.” McDonald’s and these two, perfectly nice women, have forced me to commit odd, charades-like antics in my car and I’m beginning to think they’re doing it on purpose.

Is it possible, that our nation’s obsession with forcing everyone who crosses our borders to speak English is inspiring them to exact revenge? How else to explain that two Hispanic women understand every word out of my mouth except “no,” which is pretty much the same in every Westernized language and “tortilla” which IS A SPANISH WORD?!? Are they fucking with me? They get “easy on the ice” but not “no tortilla”? I don’t mumble, I pronounce tortilla correctly, I think they’re just fucking with me! It’s become a downer when I go because I know I will end up doing car charades to order my salad and I’m pretty sure they just keep me going until they can no longer hide their laughter. I bet I’m the joke at their dinner tables the days that I come through.

So can we all please agree that it should not be an ordeal for me to order a damn fast food salad and stop making people feel ostracized for not speaking like they grew up in Anytown, USA? Maybe if we lighten up on arbitrary reflections of patriotism like what language we speak the ladies at McD’s will stop punishing me. I really just want my salad. It’s healthy, I don’t eat the cheese and I try to get it without the fried tortilla strips and I use salsa for salad dressing. I like my salad, I want my salad, I just don’t want the 2-3 minute antics required for me to order it. I would be completely okay with it if they did not understand something else I was saying. I’m pretty sure they are immigrants, so I don’t blame them for not being as fluent as I am, I was raised in Indiana after all which is the only state without an accent, I love culture and languages and differences. I don’t care what race or ethnic background or accent my drive-thru person has, I just want to order a damn salad in less than three minutes. If they were confused by anything else I said, I’d be fine, I mean my French is atrocious and I’m sure when I visit France no one will have any idea what the hell I’m talking about, but it’s a SPANISH WORD and that is what they don’t understand! Please McDonald’s just stop putting fried tortillas on your otherwise healthy salad so I can stop the insanity.

Day 245: February 1 was a Historic Day, but I Bet You Didn't Know it

Today is a historic day, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the news. I guess not a day goes by that something of historical significance is not celebrating an anniversary, but some things are bigger than others. Today is one of those days and I feel like for all our progress to become a more accepting, tolerant and unified nation we’re losing sight of what it took to get here. Today we have a black President, and no I won’t say African American any more than I would call another American an Italian American or Scottish American. We are Americans with only the slimmest percent of us hailing from this beautiful, massive and rather segregated (geographically) country of ours. So why was it so difficult for me to find information about the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in that happened fifty years ago today? Where is our national pride celebrating an event that acted as a lightning rod the already swelling civil rights movement?

The whites only lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, NC was the site that four black students picked to sit down and demand service. At this point in history Martin Luther King Jr. was already the face of civil rights reform, Malcolm X was on the scene and feisty Rosa Parks had camped out on that seat on the bus five years before. The fight for racial equality was not new, but within six months of that day Woolworth’s would desegregate. Over 50 cities in nine other states had their own sit-ins just two months later. This day accomplished something real and lasting and the fact that it happened in the state I currently call home does make me proud. So where the hell is the press? What happened to the expected op-eds or the feel good stories?

It’s hard to make lasting progress in this country when we don’t remember that progress was even made. Women are still getting pregnant and changing their behavior just for the chance of finding someone to love them and the biggest critic Hillary Clinton faced were other women calling her a bitch. Minorities have celebrated the nomination of our first black President, but the acknowledgement of what we've come through as a people seems to be slipping away. We are all trying so hard just to live a good life and grab a piece of that elusive American dream we’ve been hearing about our entire lives, that some of us no longer remember the struggle that even made that a possibility for us. Think about it, 50 years. It was less than 50 years ago that we had routine segregation of the races and open bigotry. That means we all know someone alive at that time, someone who may have experienced it first-hand or at least lived at a time when it was happening to someone in our nation.

It’s difficult to criticize minorities as a white person in America, but as a woman I’m still in the fight for equal rights. We may not have been prejudiced against in as open or as hateful a way as racial minorities, but we’re still getting the shaft. Everyone knows to keep their racist comments to themselves if they still subscribe to that hate-filled lifestyle, but we’re not yet there with women. It’s still okay to routinely objectify us, hell we do it to each other. No one is meaner to women than other women. I guess what I’m saying is that I expected a bigger acknowledgement of the sacrifices made in bringing us to a point in America that a black man can be president—we’re clearly not ready for a woman President of any color – but we have made historic racial strides so let’s celebrate it. NPR spent much of today paying tribute to those four black students and sharing not only their stories, but the stories of their living family members and the legacy they created. Sadly, not enough people listen to NPR, so we’re losing some of our important history, because we’d rather talk about Lady Gaga’s Grammy wardrobe. I guess we've come a long way after all, it's just not something to be as proud about.

Day 244: Is it Possible to Disagree on Facebook and Not be a Villain?

Facebook is many things, it a social networking site, facilitator for organizing reunions and parties, and a means of reconnecting with old and almost forgotten friends. It’s a medium for keeping friends and acquaintances tuned in to what we are doing in our everyday and work lives. Sometimes we use it to announce special projects or performances, collect charity donations or to promote social causes. As a political person I am unafraid of a good in-depth discussion and it neither bothers me to divulge my own political leanings, nor to discover those of my FB friends. What I notice more and more as we all become too familiar with one another, is that people are taking offense at the discovery of differences in opinions. Why, I wonder, are people getting so up in arms at a differing political opinion on FB?

I have been a victim of this type of virtual attack on more than one occasion. I suppose that my openness to discuss such issues is partially to blame. If you post something political or regarding a public figure in politics then I am going to assume that is an invitation to discuss. Otherwise, why would you make it public in the first place? There are things that I do not want you to debate or weigh in on and those things will not grace my own FB page. Everything else is fair game as far as I’m concerned and if you want to debate, negate or corroborate I’m cool with it. Others do not seem to be as open to a dialogue about what they post on their page, but since it is a public forum with a list of friends extending to those they barely know, perhaps it is the wrong place to announce their most sacred and private beliefs.

There are rules and I play by them. Just because you post a photo of your child who is funny looking does not mean I am going to tell you the kid resembles “Sloth” from the Goonies. Nor will I insult you or your lifestyle. Comments regarding public figures, political parties, social causes, etc., should be open to discussion. Just because I do not agree with you does not mean I am right or you are wrong, it simply means we disagree; that’s still allowed in the states, correct? A public discussion regarding a political or public figure posted on a public site should not necessitate anyone calling someone else’s intelligence into question or insulting them outright with name calling. Since when did feeling comfortable utilizing the freedom of speech guaranteed us by our nation become a crime? You are free to disagree with me, I’m okay with that. The real question, is why aren’t you?

Day 243:If Hollywood has a Worst Films List, My Husband Will Want to Watch

I love my husband. Jeff has many positive attributes, choosing movies however, is not one of them. This weekend we are in Fayetteville, NC, on base at Ft. Bragg where he lives during the week. Snowed in for the most part and without good cable we decided to rent movies and once again my brilliant, handsome and intelligent husband chose the worst possible film. What is it about otherwise smart people that makes them somehow incapable of completing small tasks that others with half their intelligence seem to have no difficulty with? Whatever it is, the husband is devoid of that particular talent and recently I have fallen victim.

The list of awful movies picked out by Jeff is long, but some of the more memorably awful ones include “GI Joe” (tonight), “Transformers II,” “Jumper,” “21” and the inexcusably horrible “The Happening.” This last offering by M. Night whatever the fuck was so bad that I actually spent a good portion of the movie sitting in the hallway playing video games on Jeff’s phone. I joked that the mystery that was killing everyone in the movie was the fact that they had seen the movie, because after an hour watching it I wanted very much to slit my wrists, stab myself in the throat with a pencil or run myself over with a lawnmower.

“The Happening” might have been the worst but it is only a blip on the six years of bad movies Jeff has subjected me to. Given the choice of legitimately funny movies like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “The Hangover,” or “Pineapple Express” we’ll end up watching “The Hulk.” He’s a smart guy, I really don’t get it, but I do know that I suffer from his poor decision making . . . repeatedly. I’m not expecting us to always have the same taste, I just want him to not have such consistently bad taste. Though I suppose if he’s going to have a bad habit, this one isn’t the absolute worst. I just wish I did not consistently get sucked down with him. In case you’re wondering “G.I. Joe” is every bit as bad as you thought it might be and it feels much longer than it’s already interminable two hours and fifteen minutes run time.