Short One

I've already written about Valentines Day so here are some visual aids to get the point across

If that doesn't do it, then let me get to the point.  Have a Happy Valentines Day.

DND

I'm not talking about some RPG, no I'm talking about a Do-Nothing-Day.  DND's are very important.  Most people who have a day off make plans to catch up with friends, go see a movie, do some much needed housework or something else we've put off until their day-off.

How about considering on one of those days, just doing nothing.  The absolute minimum you have to get buy.  Eat prepared food, sleep in, do nothing of important or requiring effort.  The hell you say.  This is just plain wrong, immoral, lazy, possibly illegal & probably communist.

When is the last time you took a DND?  For most of you, I bet it's been too long.  Try it.  Give yourself permission do to nada.  Sometimes they require some pre-planning, but that's OK, as long as the planning isn't done on the DND.  Get someone to watch the kids, pre-order pizza, do whatever you need to do the day before.  Never tell anyone you're taking a DND unless they're taking it with you.  Or else, they will feel like they have the right to infringe on your DND & bother you to do something.  Send the kids & Significant Other to the Moon if you have to, just take your DND.

People tend to hate other people's DND's.  They get haughty & self-righteous about the matter.  To hell with them, let'em get their own DND.  DND's let you unwind, recharge & just let go of all the bull in your life, even if it's just for one day.

You deserve a Do-Nothing-Day.

The Social Animal

I was "raised" by alcoholic parents, a manipulative grandmother, other uninvolved adults & one well meaning, slightly older sister.  The problem with this is that while my sister managed my younger brothers & myself the best she could, she was a kid herself.  My brothers & myself were just short of feral.  We came in when we were hungry & we came in to sleep.  We weren't really taught to do much at all.

Watching my brothers & me get along was sort of like watching a mixed-age litter of kittens.  At times we could get along (usually only if mutual benefit was assured), but most often we kept our distance from each other.  When forced to be near each other, the fight was inevitable.

Concepts like responsibility, goals or just about anything social were lost to us.  We were the lords of our own fortunes, no matter how meager they may have been. We were not about to abide anyone telling us how to act or what to do.  Eventually we started to realize that we were very different from the others.  We resented that difference & the others for being different.

We became mercenary, oddly charismatic & manipulative.  Some might say we were well our ways to becoming sociopaths.  Not all people who have such persuasions are criminal, most are just anti-social.  They make great business men, politicians & lawyers.  If we wanted something, we would find a way to get & it was seldom the conventional way of doing so.  I went to college, even got a Ph.D., but it wasn't for the right reasons.  I didn't go there to learn or even to improve my life.  I went to college because I had absolutely no other place to go.  At college I could pass, blend even thrive, but it was still just a con.

In my late late thirties, my father showed back up.  I had not spoken to him sense I was sixteen.  It was not an amicable departure.  By this time I was + & on disability.  He tried to enter my brothers lives only to find them still mostly beastly.  There had been run-ins with the law & jail for both of them, prison for one.  They couldn't hold jobs, they couldn't maintain relationships & mostly didn't care about those things.  This baffled my father.

He constantly talks about how my brothers don't do this or haven't done that.  He doesn't like anything about their lives & acts like they should know better.  I finally had it & told him that no one had ever taught us to do any of that crap.  No one taught me how to cook, do laundry or even how to shave.  I learned all of that on my own often through disastrous trial & error.  I didn't get my driver's license until I was twenty-six.  I'd drove since I was twelve, but I didn't have a license.  Check books, running a household, shopping & a host of other things most people's families teach them were mine fields of experimentation for me.  Yet still my father acts like my brothers & me had some type of instruction manual for life that should've taught us everything we needed to know if we'd just bothered to read the damn thing.

I would've been ecstatic if I'd found an instruction manual.  I went through life like a stray cat, not sure to purr for attention or attack the person trying to get too close.  My brothers & me are territorial, defensive & quick to over react. If something threatens you, clobber it, so it can never do it again.  We pace, we snarl & we avoid most unpleasant situations no matter what the potential outcome.

I've been more fortunate than my brothers on this matter.  I've learned to blend better & at least act like I care about some of the social norms & niceties, but I really don't buy any of it.  I can maintain until my habits & rituals are through out of whack.  I realize that reality is fragile & things constantly threaten all paradigms.  Let something like a frozen pipe or a screwed up car come along & for a bit I'd rather just bite something than deal with anything.

Eventually I calm down & start building back up the mask of the socially well adjusted individual.  When I was younger I used to think everyone was like me & they were just faking it.  Later I decided, no it's just me & those people raised like me.  I'm no longer that certain.  Maybe were all just violent animals hiding under the facsimile of the well socialized member of society?  Watch any disaster movie, when the people are stranded or threatened, the social mores & norms go the way of the do-do bird.  Sure some of the "good" guys maintain their programming, but just barely.  And, that's only so the writers could make it looks like the just, socially entrenched individuals are somehow more moral & sanctified than those who aren't.

We are all just animals agreeing to maintain an illusion of civility, but let something become too much of a threat or present too tempting of an opportunity & that beast lying underneath will rip back into reality & do what it thinks needs to be done.  We are animals, social, sometimes civil animals, but animals all the same. Sometimes animals bite.

Little Thing, Again

This is the third time I've talked about this, but here we go again...  I feel so Gleeified McCartney...




Valentine's Day is Monday & so many people will looking forward to it either in great hopes or utter desperation.  We let this holiday get to us in ways not even Christmas does.  This is a holiday of self assessment & downright judgement. Am I worthy?  What did I do right or wrong?  Will the little red headed girl be my valentine?

I've never been all that into VD.  Even as a gift giver I find this celebration a bit trite. Three things come to mind when I think of this holiday; St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Hallmark & sobbing people.  Only one of those things has any one coming out on top.  Cards, candy & flowers are the game, if you're in those games you're going to make a mint.  Otherwise February 14th is not such a great day.

If you must give a gift, you can go with the typical & for some that is all they will want or understand.  But just as any other gift giving it matters most what is personal & will make memories.  Now candy & cards are fine, but why not look at this as a time to make a new tradition, keep an old tradition going or just have a genuine moment between you & your valentine?

Try one of these...

Get pictures made
Actually cook a romantic meal
Go to a concert
Try something new for both of you
Zoos are great during the winter, the animals are all fluffy
Take a weekend trip to anywhere

Just keep in mind, it's about the memories not the roses, the chocolate or the cards.  So, keep singing your silly love songs & running to the mail box in search of that desperately awaited valentine's day card.

For those of you those of you out there not into this holiday or for some reason feeling left out, look to your other friends in the same situation.  Try starting your own solo Valentine's Day tradition with them.  Eat all the chocolate yourself, treat yourself to a great dinner, or buy yourself something special, but meaningful.

Little things may just be what you need to make it through a day like VD.  String out a lot of little things through out the day, make it something that only you could do or give.  The devil may be in the details, but the little things are where you know someone actually thought about you & cares.

Have a Happy Valentine's Day...

I'm Desended From Monkeys, The Hell You say...

I can't have been descended from monkeys or apes. Whatever, I came from, either developed in a nice moderate climate that never got to hot or too cold or I am descended from bears.  Bears, I'll buy that.  In my opinion there is only one thing to really do when it gets cold, hibernate.  

Yes, you should stock up on reserves, find a nice dark, cave-ish place (preferably with lots of blankets) & set your alarm for Spring Time.  Past the winter holidays there isn't mush good about Winter & I'm sure all those gifts will hold to spring.  If it's perishable, just set it on the floor in back room & I'm sure it'll stay frozen.

I do not like cold, at least not to any discernible level over hot.  I prefer a nice middle ground, extremes are just a drag.  I know the cold weather is necessary.  It resets everything.  It lets the plants rest & bugs die off.  I still don't like it.  Let me eat up, stock up, pile on the blankets & turn off the lights, cause I ready to sleep until at least March, maybe April.

Getting out of bed in the winter is act of utter betrayal & cruelty to one's body.  You are in your nice toasty place & have to leave it for the frozen level of hell your home has given refuge to for the season.  Which is worse, the cold floor, the cold keyboards or the cold toilet seat?  You take your pick.  And, all of this is on the inside.

If you venture out in the bitterness, you face ice, snow or sleet (that non-committal stuff).  Icy weather is never good & just because winter is gone doesn't mean icy weather is, there is always hail.  Outdoors leads to slippage, either on your butt or fishtailing across the road.

They say over the hills & through the dales.  To hell with that BS, if granny wants to see you tell her to come to you or get Skype, that is if your warm enough to still work the computer.  They say cold is good for computers, again BS.  I never get blue-screens any other time of the year like I do in the winter.  My little Dell hates, repeat hates, the cold.  It acts like a person, because the first things to screw up are the peripheral devices & their drivers.  You know the computer's fingers & toes.  They get frostbite.

Enough for now, my warm bed & cov-covs are calling me.

TV Failure...

Tuesday nights are usually pretty good TV times for me.  I have NCIS & NCIS: LA.  But last night was a total dud, a complete failure.  NCIS tried to cover the impact of a character's death who had left the show in 2005, over five years ago. The LA version is dealing with the mysterious background of the main character.  LA is treading very close to soap opera territory.

This must seem like an odd posting for this + blog, I just get irritated with things that are there just because.  These two episodes were just filler episodes, pure unwanted fluff.  This was one of the precious few episodes of these shows I will get this year.  Say I'll get 22 episodes this season, that means this one airing amounts to 4.5% of a wasted season & thats only if they don't waste another episode.  Then there are just plain, badly written episodes that pop up from time to time, most often around sweeps week.  That means by the end of the season after a couple of fluffisodes, a few badly written plots & a sweeps number, I'm losing 27.2% of the season to this drivel.

The writers & producers feel like they have to put something out there even if it is total crap.  I disagree.  If you can't put out a good product, don't put one out at all.  I'd rather miss an episode than be given a craptastic one.  There needs to be a Mike Holmes of TV production.

This isn't a filler entry. The point is that there are things in our life that are there just because we're used to them or we haven't decided what to do with/without them.  These things are clutter, they weigh us down.  They aren't worth having, just to have.  Many of us are hoarders of stuff, physical & not.  This junk eventually gains enough mass to occupy our whole lives.

I love the movie, Up In The Air.  You can check out the link to see the synopsis of the story but the main character develops a very interesting philosophy.  He asks, "What's in your backpack?"  He has you picture all the stuff you carry around everyday being put in the backpack & then setting it on fire.  He makes you realize that most of that stuff was totally inconsequential.  Then the character asks the people to do the same with the people in their lives.  He doesn't ask them to set the pack on fire but to examine the sheer immensity of the weight of all those relationships, expectations & obligations.  To examine which of those are really necessary, which are brining something good into our lives & which are just dragging us down.

Over the past couple of years, my roomie & me have been trying to clear out house of physical clutter.  I think we've definitely witnessed the positive effects removing that stuff has had on us.  All that clutter is stressing.  Having things or people in your life just because is not good enough. You don't have time for it all.  You don't have space for it all. You don't have the energy for it all.

I don't have the energy to waste on a bad NCIS episode.  I don't have the space to deal with junk I haven't used in years.  I don't have the energy to deal with people who don't bring anything  positive to my life, even if they have been in my life for some time.   I will continue to place the unnecessary in my backpack & when it's full, then burn, baby, burn.

Cats...

I like cats.  We have permanent indoor felines & some outdoor ones.  I am a Cat Person (CP) not a Cat Lover (CL).  CP's realize that cats are just that, cats.  They can be wonderful & fun to have in your life, but they can also be annoying, exasperating balls of puking destruction.  CP's treat their felines as pets, companions in their home.  They realize that cats scratch & sometimes bite.  They are not offended if the cat deigns not to lavish you with its furry attention for hours or days at a time.  CP's realize that if you have a cat & play with it, there will be a price to pay, the proverbial pound of flesh scraped away under the cat's claws.

Cat Lovers on the other hand, are of questionable sanity.  They want to dress their felines up in cute little suits.  CL's only buy the bestest-bestest food for their little babies.  They see their cats as their babies, the equals or worse their betters.  CL's fail to realize cats are just cats.  They are not replacements for human companionship, they are your offspring, & they most certainly do not wish to be dressed up like Jack Sparrow, a mushroom, or any other outlandish outfit you might have found for them.  Cats do not care about going to cats shows or how many articles you've submitted to Cat Fancy.  They might care about being on Youtube videos, cats are fairly vain after all.

The biggest difference between a Cat Person & a Cat Lover is that a CP can let the cat be, while the CL can not.  CL's have their feelings hurt if the kitty doesn't want to come play with them or nestle down with on command.  CP's know that when the cat gets hungry enough, cold enough or just plain bored it will come out & demand attention.  CP's have lives, while CL's lives are their cats.  CP's may have a few cats, but CL's can become the crazy cat person down the road with thirty some felines howling in the night.  The bad thing is that often cats aren't overly fond of Cat Lovers.

I may be rambling now, but to wrap this up, remember a Beatles song, Let It Be...