can we talk?

we communicate often. but not well.


the digital age has brought us in regular contact with people we would have never in a million years known or had the opportunity to "talk" to. (yeah, i know......never end a sentence with a preposition. sue me.)

to be able to see what ben carson tweets? what the pope just posted? to see the inside of tom hanks' house? to listen in while reba mcentire explains what happened to her marriage? UNreal.

and yet, for all that intimacy, we know each other, i think, way less than we knew each other back in the day when we didn't know each other. you're just not gonna convince me that talking on a computer is equivalent to a front porch with some lemonade. you're just not. 



i get up every morning and within minutes of checking my phone and my laptop, i have been around the world at least 3 times. i know what tie vladimir putin is wearing today and whether or not it has a spot on it. i watch videos of tsunamis and it doesn't matter what time zone anyone lives in anymore, all you gotta do is click.

i see the pictures of your kids and you see the pictures of mine. here you are at a restaurant, laughing and looking adorable, and there i am at a restaurant, laughing, and there we are at a restaurant, and there they are at a restaurant and, well, the restaurants must be happy.

i can count the hairs on your cat's head.

i know when your blood pressure is up and when it's down. i know how much you weigh. i know if you're gluten-sensitive, doin' the PALEO thing or the Jesus Diet, how big your pecs are, and if you died overnight, shocking us all.




  but to think.......i never knew you.

what you need

what you need is a front porch.


you need a front porch, some sweet tea, and a dog who sleeps in the sun.

you need the mailman to bring along the mail in his usual slow style and you say, "joe! late again i see," and joe says, "no such thing as late when i'm bringin' your bills." you smile, say, sit down here a minute and help me figure out the world.

and he does. and you do. somehow or other, between the two of you, with no more than 20 years of schoolin' between ya, you figure out the world. and you get it pretty dang near right. and the sun sets low and joe is off again, to finish his route. so he can get home by dark and tell his wife what a good life it is delivering the mail.



what you don't need is wikipedia.

no phone

my cell phone died, i have ordered a new one, and in the meantime i am without phone service. i love it.


it's been 8 days since it died (but i didn't realize it), 6 days since i realized it, and 6 days since i arranged to get a new one. i seriously considered not getting a new one - but decided to finish out my contract and then, well.........we'll see.

i don't miss it.

not only do i not miss it but, as i said above, i love it. it's like i'm in a cave or something. caves are good.

i come out of my cave to walk down the street to borrow my neighbor's phone. who knew? i have neighbors!

i come out of it to try to find a pay phone. it's like a treasure hunt!

in between times of coming out of my cave, i listen to the silence. who knew? silence still exists!

no beeps, no bells, no notifications, nobody demanding my immediate reply. no nothin. Lord, i could get used to this.

i am used to this!


when my new phone arrives, i'll probably tear into it like grant through georgia. my fingers will probably start flying once again. i'll probably set the thing up so that everyone on God's green earth can contact me in a nanosecond and i'll probably have an individualized sound for each one. i will do these things because although i wish i were living in 1960, i am living in 2014.


but i wish i were living in 1960.

you CAN still ask a question on jeopardy!, can't you?

i miss the days when you could ask a question or say, "i don't know" to somebody else's and someone didn't immediately send you a link answering it. 

i miss the speculation surrounding a question: "well, it could be because of...." or "maybe (this) or maybe (that)," and my favorite - "huh. i don't know."


nobody doesn't know anymore. used to be, someone would say, "is it really true that a bunch of catholic priests tried to figure out once how many angels you can fit on top of a pin," and somebody else would say, "whaaaaat????" and a third person would say, "yeah......that sorta sounds familiar. i think it was the pope, though. i think some pope somewhere along the line tried to figure that out," and the next guy says, "it was the cardinals. the college of cardinals or whatever they call it..........why do they call themselves cardinals, anyway?"

you used to be able to have a conversation like that and nobody had the final answer. y'all just shrugged, said, "oh, well," and went out and had a burger and fries.


nowadays, though, nothing's left to the imagination. nothing's left to discuss. ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, here's your digital answer. 

i hate that.


wonder how a burger and fries came to be such a popular combination in the u.s.?


wonder how many of 'em you could fit on a pin?

george jetson gets a job at amazon.

have you heard? amazon is testing the idea of having drones deliver packages right to your door. within 30 minutes of your ordering them! can you say, "star. trek?"


according to reports (nope, sorry - don't have the link(s). look it up your own lazy self!).......according to reports, amazon's most aggressive timetable for being able to do this is in 2015, with more realistic ones putting it in the 5-years-from-now zone. 

wow.


i don't know about you, but i'm havin' trouble seein' how this is gonna work in new york city. a cornfield in iowa? ok. that makes some sense. (as much sense as a scarecrow in a cornfield in iowa ordering something from old navy makes sense, that is. although......a scarecrow ordering something from plow and hearth probably does make sense. a whole lotta sense, in fact.)

but, my thing is, why do i need something 30 minutes from now? and if i do need something 30 minutes from now, i shoulda planned better!

my other thing is.....drones???? really???? and linus was sarcastic when he said that a pink, aluminum Christmas "tree" really brought the spirit of the holiday home.

sheesh.



do i want to live in a world where a gunmetal gray thingamajig in the sky brings my stuff to me? no, i do not. it's impersonal as hell, scary, and besides,i don't fit the part of a jane jetson.


my waist has never been that small.

why i'm not on pinterest

SameReasonI'mNotOnTwitterYouReallyThinkIcanSayWhat'sOnMyMindIn140charactersOrLessWellIguessIcanNotCountingTheHashtagWhich,WhatTheHellsAhshtg?

buttons (and bows)

abby and eli bought me a new laptop as an early birthday gift. which should be a good thing - and it is. it's a wonderful thing. but, it's a bad thing.

i react very differently to things than most other folks do. not to everything, of course, but to a lot of things. technology being one of them. technology pushes not just my computer buttons but my personal buttons as well. and boy, do i ever have some personal buttons!

technology, in a nutshell, makes me feel like a moron. it frustrates the hell outa me. practically none of it makes sense to me. and there never seems to be anyone who can explain it to me - at least not in the unbelievably simplistic terms that a moron like me requires. however simple you explain it to me, i need it simpler. simpler than that. simpler! on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being the most simple, i need a -500. at least.

so, trying to get used to a new computer is a chore for me. a fun chore, in some ways - if that oxymoron makes any sense - but a chore nevertheless. a chore that underscores, at practically every key stroke, what an idiot i am.

and it makes me feel bad about myself. period. it just does.


on the flip side, though......i am like a fish gliding through blue waters when it comes to people. if technology is my button, then people are my bows. i totally get people. i get their moods, i get their non-moods, i get their needs, their wants, their fears. you bring me a stranger (which, as a matter of fact, is what my job is - i meet strangers fresh off the street everyday, sit down with them for an hour or two, and diagnose the hell out of 'em. then i send 'em off to a clinician in another department to fix 'em)..........but............you bring me a stranger, and i am in. my. element. i feel as comfortable with people as i do in my jammies.

so why can't the world be like that? a world of people and not things. not computers.

(cuz abby and eli can't buy me people for my birthday, i guess.)

why kids need a cell phone in case of emergency

they don't.


ever since cell phones have come along, i can never reach anybody. 

either everybody's phone's not charged or they didn't hear it ringing (hard to hear your cell phone ring with ear buds in your ears), or they forgot to put it on vibrate (please! can't we come up with another word for it than that!), or they don't know where they put it. 

or they hit the wrong button and accidentally deleted your call.

and now they can't call you back because they're driving.

and although being busy driving didn't stop them from trying to answer their phone when you called in the first place and then they accidentally deleted your call, the fact that they will now invoke the "i was too busy driving to call you back" clause - however safe that might be - is infuriarting. emergency or not.

the bottom line is, cell phones don't work. and if they did, world history would have no occasions of  successful resolutions to an emergency. which we all know is patently false. emergencies have been resolved countless times in the history of mankind - without anyone ever having to shell out bucks to upgrade to unlimited text and data. it's just ridiculous that we think we need cell phones.

what we need is a little perspective here, folks. first of all, hardly anybody ever gets into an emergency in the first place. that's A. 

B. is, if a kid does get into an emergency, he likely won't recognize it as such ("i didn't think there were that many drugs at the party, mom!") or, on the rare occasion that a kid will recognize an emergency when it hits him smack in the face, he will justify remaining in the emergency to collect data for his science project ("ok, ok! so i knew there were that many drugs at the party. i was just tryin' to get a better understanding of group behavior and how the different drugs interact with each other.....not to mention maybe find the cure for cancer!")

tell ya what, son.......you find a cure for batteries that need charging and you find a cure for never knowing where the damned cell phone is in the first place and i'll tell your teacher to give you an A on your science project.

but i'm still not buyin' you a phone.

spam!

i hear some of you talking about how much spam you get in your e-mailboxes and i wonder what i'm doing wrong. er, right. because i hardly ever get spam. hardly ever! i barely need both hands to count how many times i have received spam. it just never happens.

at home, that is. work's another story.

wouldn't you think that work - where we have these fancy schmancy I.T. guys who supposedly know everything (and, i must admit, they do know a lot)......wouldn't you think that in that environment, they'd be able to control for spam better than stupid little old me - at home? 

but they don't seem to be able to. lately, i have really been getting hit hard. yesterday, i had more spam than i had legit e-mail. 'sup with thaaaat? and what's worse is, the spam e-mail always arrives in my mailbox under the title "spam filter." 

let's just put it this way - i'm glad my air filter and my water filter and my oil filter and whatever other filters i have don't work as well as my work spam filter.

on a separate but related note, though.......i love spam. the food, not the mail. love. it. can't understand how the rest of you can dis it so bad. it's salty and fatty and totally fake. all the things i like in a food.

but not in my mail.

where facebook got its face

they call it facebook. we think it's some newfangled thing that we've only had since 2004.

we're such idiots.


facebook, as you know if you're on it, barely has a face at all. despite the profile pics and despite the cover photos and despite all the other endless stream of photos, it's really quite faceless. you can't touch anybody.


it doesn't really get its face until you......


meet up with these folks - often times again - many years later - in person. face to face.

what's new about that?

people (the smart ones and the not anti-social ones) have been meeting face-to-face since, well, since adam and eve. sorry, mark zuckerberg.

facebook, without ever actually meeting face-to-face, is a lot like what i have heard that many supermodels do......they soak cotton balls in various foods and food substances......and suck on them. so they don't gain weight.

facebook is like sucking on someone's teensy tiny profile pic without ever really sitting down with them over pie and coffee.

facebook is just a new way of saying "yearbook." but at least with yearbooks, you had to personally go down to the office to pick yours up and then you had to pass it around so everybody could write "U R 2 Nice 2 B 4gotten" on it.

and if i do forget,  just friend me on facebook.

pinterest

i don't do pinterest. not because pinterest isn't good but because it's too good.

i think everything has an upper limit. but pinterest violates that principle all. the. time. it is pinterest's job to continually do more, add more, be more. if pinterest ever established a limit and stuck to it, pinterest would be out of business. i get that.

i don't need an infinity number of recipe ideas. i have about half an infinity number of recipes as it is and i will never get around to making, well, half of them.

ditto with clever party ideas. besides, nobody ever created a party idea better than a keg. period. they just didn't.

i do not need idea after idea after idea about what to do with an ugly couch or how to turn my guest room into THEE guest room. i don't need a hundred and ten different ways to hang towels.

don't you people have enough information bombarding you from every direction all day long, every day of the year, without going out and purposely looking for more? how big are your brains, anyway?

the only idea that i have taken from pinterest is this:

don't do pinterest.

a "fold" button on your clothes dryer

something's circulating on facebook about how there oughta be a "fold" button on clothes dryers. so we wouldn't have to do it ourselves. 

i disagree.

i wash and dry - and fold - abby's and eli's and the twins' and the triplets' laundry every day. the washing and drying part requires practically zero effort on my part. basically, i dump it in, pull it back out, dump it back in, and pull it back out. that's what amounts to "the chore of laundry" in 2012.

the only part that requires any effort at all (and "effort" is an extreme over-statement) is the folding. if they invent a button for that (and they will), i will be able to look God in the eye and say, "yesSir. i did help my fellow man. i pushed i-don't-know-how-many-buttons in my lifetime. all on somebody else's behalf. now, let me into heaven."

laundry is love, people. buttons aren't. (unless you're sewing them on.) laundry is love and cooking is love (the kroger deli is impressive, but it isn't love), and cleaning dirty baby bottoms is love. (although, i must admit, i would no doubt gladly push a button for that!)

there isn't enough love in the world anymore. if, in fact, there ever was. (actually, there was. i think it's called "before they eat that fruit.")

i remember my grandmother spending an entire day doing laundry. for a family of 4 - not that many people. in between doing laundry all day, she cooked all day - using the stuff from her garden that she grew all day. when it was all over and she could finally collapse in her chair at night, she would always sigh (happily) and say the exact same thing:

"work is love, nancy. and love is work. don't you ever forget it."


"besides", she would say, with a soft light in her eyes, "the privilege of burying my nose in freshly laundered grandchildren's laundry is a whole lotta "work," too."

:)

babysittin' fee's goin' up

last night, olivia says, "gammy?" and i say, "yes?" and she says, "you look kinda old."

on top of that.........abby and eli's t.v.?? GGGGGGRRRRRR!!!!!!!! 

once upon a time, what you did with a t.v. was, you turned it on and then you turned it off. in between times, you turned it up.

also once upon a time, what you did with a t.v. was, you went into the kitchen and made jiffy pop.

but those days are over. now you gotta stand on your head and clap three times if you wanna turn on your t.v. provided, of course, the UB port and the IBS port are compatible with the little thingie on the remote that looks like two blue "Vs" trying to fly.


and then, if you think you hear one of the babies crying and you try to turn down the t.v. so you can be sure, you're out of luck. 


so, yeah. my babysitting fee is going up.


and then you tiptoe into the babies' room to check for yourself if one of the babies is crying and you see that none of them are but wendy's clutching her little bear in her little fist and her little butt's in the air.


so, yeah. my babysitting fee is going down.

first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and next

first - i spill wine on my laptop.

second - my laptop blows up. literally. ka-pow!

third - i try to un-ka-pow my laptop.

fourth - i try to un-ka-pow my laptop.

fifth - i try to un-ka-pow my laptop.

sixth - i call eli and ask him if there is anything i can do to un-ka-pow my laptop. he says likely not.

seventh - i tell myself, don't cry. don't cry. i tell myself don't cry.

eighth - i  don't cry.

ninth - i cry.

tenth - i call abby and ask her if there is anything she can do and she says yes, i can have her notebook until i buy a new computer.

eleventh - i say, notebook? as in paper and pen? as in spiral?

twelfth - she says, no. as in, you hate computers, mom.

thirteenth - i say, ok. thanks i'll come and get it tomorrow.

fourteenth- i come and get it tomorrow.

fifteenth- i come home and it won't connect to the internet.

sixteenth - i try this, i try that, i try this again, i try another that, i try another this. it won't connect to the internet.

seventeenth - i check the modem to see if it has red wine on it.

eighteenth - it does not have red wine on it. modem is a-ok, not ka-pow.

nineteenth -  i call eli to see if he knows what i can try to connect to the internet. eli says i know more about computers than i think i do because everything i have tried is what he would try. eli says to call tech support.

twentieth - i throw up. i mean, literally. (not literally.) who in their right mind wants to call tech support?

twenty-first  - i call tech support.

twenty-second - i can. not. under. stand. this. chick's. accent. i'm. sorry. i can. not. i. try. for. about. twenty. minutes. to. understand. this. chick's. accent. and. i. can. not. i. finally. say. to. this. chick., chick? (i don't really say chick)........i say, chick? i am so, so sorry and believe me, your accent is lovely, but i simply cannot understand you. i am so, so sorry. believe me. it's not you, it's me. i couldn't be sorrier. i am so, so sorry. truly sorry. sorry beyond belief.. its me, not you. sorry, sorry, sorry. and she says, lady? shut up. it's ok. i'll get somebody else to help you. (actually, she didn't say, lady? shut up. or maybe she did. i could. not. understand a word. this chick said.)

twenty-third - i get somebody else. the somebody else i get sounds like he sells used cars on the side. boy, does he have a deal for me.

twenty-fourth - 2 hours later, i still don't have internet connectivity, but he swears i will on friday (yesterday). i told you he was a used car salesman.

twenty-fifth - do i really have to tell you what the twenty-fifth is? really?

twenty-sixth - i call tech support. i didn't even vomit! i just did it! (i cried, though.)

twenty-seventh  - after 3 hours on the phone with a chick without an accent (God be praised), i have internet connectivity.

twenty-eighth - at the end of the 3 hours, i ask this chick without an accent (God be praised), i say, what was the problem in the first place? was my loss of internet ability connected to the wine i spilled on my laptop or was it just coincidental that it happened at the same time?

twenty-ninth - just coincidental, she says.

thirtieth - really, i say.

thirty-first - i don't know, she says.

thirty-second - i will not drink wine near my computer.(abby's notebook.)

thirty-third - i will not drink wine near my computer.(abby's notebook.)

thirty-fourth - i will not drink wine near my computer. (abby's notebook.)

thirty-fifth - does coffee count?