F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

Perhaps you’ve noticed the recent slew of self-help books designed to aid people in manipulating people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t. "Convince anyone to do anything!" What’s worse, these sneaky violations of trust are presented as being not only useful, but emotionally healthy ways to approach interactions with others.

The most recent one I’ve run across deals with manipulating one’s spouse to help with household chores. You can read excerpts HERE. That’s OK, I’ll wait. You’re back, great. So what have we learned? How to manipulate by playing games( leaving the folded laundry for him to put away as a reminder of how much work you do)? How to treat your husband like one of the children? How to threaten him with maid service and expensive child care if he does not help around the home? Swell.

I’ve been married a long time and I have a little piece of advice I’m going to pass along-overlook. A lot.  You might be able to ‘train" your husband to change certain behaviours, but decent people do not go into relationships trying to change someone’s behaviours to their liking. I know there is an entire industry built around the idea of counseling and therapy, but I can’t think of anything more disrespectful to your partner than trying to manipulate them into doing something differently. If you can’t work out an agreement or compromise based on a desire to be courteous to each other-out of genuine respect, tricks like leaving the folded laundry on the bed aren’t going to accomplish much. Honestly, I’ve never had to do more than ask, "Can you help me with this" to get some help around the house. I realise he’s not a mind reader though, so I have to ask. I don’t leave his underwear on the bed or hire a maid out of spite. He does have a habit of leaving his clothes where they drop, but honestly, it isn’t that difficult to pick them up and walk to the hamper. Really, it isn’t and I can’t imagine making it a struggle of wills involving sneaky manouveres to feel I’ve asserted myself. Yay, you win-now what?

Years ago, I read a thread on a parenting board where the poster was complaining her husband left his empty soda cans on the computer desk where he was working from home. To show him how much this upset her, she saved them all up until she had about fifty and then tossed them on his side of the bed. Well, I’ll bet that showed him! Best part? She had a psychology degree. Insert joke about "takes one to know one." Not surprisingly, the thread was filled with well-wishes, congratulations and encouragement. Of course, this was also someone who felt it was perfectly OK to scroll through her husband’s Internet history files each day. Can you imagine? What a way to live.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that resorting to manipulation may alter behaviours for a while, but it does not build a relationship. If you can’t tell the person you’re married to that you’re tired and need help, or a break, there’s something worse taking place in the relationship than poor housekeeping skills.

Just to test out this theory, I asked my husband to trim the dog’s nails tonight and guess what? He did. Isn’t that cool? All I had to do was ask for help. Neat, huh? I should write a self-help book about it.

"Are you wearing your seat-belt, citisen?"

THIS story is also lots of fun-students in paramilitary dress declare their obedience commitment to remaining drug and alcohol free. I like the bit in the article with the nine year old in camo chanting slogans. That’s excellent. 

 From the article:

"With sharp staccato movements, seven girls wearing deep maroon scarves and sharp black berets danced to the rhythm. As the girls moved on, 18 students from Papillion’s Hickory Hill Elementary stepped forward, eager to deliver their own message to the crowd gathered at the 2008 Red Ribbon Walk and Rally.

Wearing camouflage, and with black paint smeared over her 9-year-old cheeks, Allie Gravelind, screamed out a military-style call-and-response chant with the rest of the group.

"Huskies! Drug Free! Huskies! Drug Free!" "

And when they’re through chanting slogans, they can go report on their parents and neighbours!  

I realise people seem to be getting some sort of kick out of the Wall Street mess, but before you gloat too loudly let me remind you that an awful lot of people have their pensions tied up in the market. Will you be so snarky when your mother-in-law has to move in with you?*

*Not that I’d have a problem with my mother-in-law because she’s a lovely person, but you know what I mean. 

Isn’t it interesting how every four years the Democratic nominee immediately becomes "The most liberal member of the Senate (or whatever office they held)." Isn’t that just amazing how Obama is suddenly more liberal than Bernie Sanders who last I heard was a freaking Socialist. I’m old enough to remember when "liberal" was in insult meaning you waffled in the middle instead of committing to a radical position.

I can’t begin to describe the weirdness of listening to this debate where both McCain and Obama were trying their best to prove Kissinger agreed with their positions more. You’d think, (or I would anyway) that a Democrat wouldn’t be trotting out Kissinger as an expert. If anything, Obama could have pointed out that Kissinger is an advisor to McCain’s campaign when he ought to be standing in the dock at The Hague awaiting trail. I know he wouldn’t say it, but damn-why hold him up as a policy expert? I just don’t understand how he is not only permitted to walk free, but is made a celebrity as well. Sickening.

That said, the debate was still better than what I’d seen in the past couple election cycles of course the absence of the president probably elevated the conversation a few IQ points.  

It’s true. Flush (heh) with money from their oil sands our northern neighbours have now taken to wiping their filthy poop chutes with cashmere! Triple ply cashmere at that. Oh, the decadence. What happened to wiping your arse with The Globe and Mail? The national paper isn’t good enough for your ushy-gushy-tushies?

We have a similar product down here in the United States called Cottonelle. Cotton-because we aren’t extravagant fools. A nice, respectable, conservative cloth coat toilet paper. Oh sure, some men give their wives cashmere to wipe their butts with-in Canada!

And we’re keeping the dog too.

A woman being prepped for a caesarean section is screamed at by a medical worker who thinks too many women are opting for the procedure. Yeah, that’s pretty inappropriate-but I have an even better story.

About a week before Danny was born, there was a horrible murder in Missouri where a baby was cut from the mother and kidnapped. It was everywhere in the news and being nine months along, it was a bit disturbing.

I was awake and quite alert during my c-section. I couldn’t see the doctors on the other side of the screen set up across my abdomen-but I could hear them.

"Hey, that’s a nice incision. Not like one of those Missouri sections I’ve been hearing about!"

"Yeah, I’ve been practicing."

My husband just looked at me aghast while the surgical assistant tried to shush the doctors.

Bonus from the article-the patient says she won’t go to that hospital if she fell pregnant again. I realise it is a medical condition and all, but "fell pregnant sounds a bit like contracting typhoid.

OK, well I wasn’t really holding my breath.

We’re gonna watch to see if he gets in front of the camera and declares:

"Capitalism has failed."

Did you hear the latest Palin flap? While meeting with important "for-i-ners" at the UN to score some of that all-important "for-i-ner" policy experience, Palin’s staff wanted to limit media access to photographers only. I guess it has something to do with those hard-hitting journalists from the mainstream media that might ask questions that haven’t been pre-screened and selected. Yeah, that would suck-she’s running for public office, she shouldn’t be subjected to that kind of treatment.

You have to love that it was CNN that raised a stink. I’m glad they relented though, because America has a right to know who does her hair in that hideous up-do, and where she buys her glasses.

Speaking of idiot journalists…

Did anyone catch the Steve "I’m A Complete Fucking Moron" Inskeep interview with Ahmadinejad? You can listen HERE if you can stand it. Why does Inskeep think being rude and mocking is the stuff hard-hitting interviews are made of?  

419 scam

I haven’t thought about those boxes of slides in years, but reading of the almost certain demise of Kodachrome makes me sort of wish I’d shot more. I admit to being a nostalgic sort of person that still has an old Underwood typewriter, a Victrola, and a radio from the 1940’s sitting in my front room-I like keeping these relics around. I’m not a hoarder (thank God, I don’t know how people live like that) but I find it difficult to let go of things that are no longer in production. I don’t save bits of string, or rubber bands, but I do save old blotters (usually with neat printed advertising on the back as they used to give them away) because fast-drying ballpoints made them obsolete. Sometimes the demise things make no sense-I collect egg cups because you cannot find them new-you can’t, I’ve tried. I don’t know what people do with their soft-boiled eggs these days, but apparently, they aren’t lopping the tops off the shells and eating them balanced in cups.  Now Kodachrome is disappearing. I feel like I’ve perhaps outlived my usefulness as well.

Here’s where I rant like the old person I apparently am, though I swear I didn’t notice it happening until I was screaming at kids to get off my lawn (no, not really-at least not yet). You know how the rant goes:

"That’s noise, not music."

"If her skirt were any shorter, we’d be seeing what she ate for breakfast!"

"Well, when I was your age…"

"Hey, who wants to look at slides from my holiday in the Bahamas?"

Dear God, I’ve turned into Andy Rooney.

"Well…well why do you suppose that is?" (That was my Andy Rooney impersonation-it’s better in person).

It’s strange, but I just want to sit down and cry over the stupid colour film, and the boxes of slides I’ll probably never look at again. I know, you can shoot a gazillion digital photographs to document every second of your child’s life with the advances in technology today. It’s true, I never would have been able to afford all those pictures were they being printed off by a lab. Still, they don’t look the same. I can look at Kodachromes from my childhood and the colour of my raw-silk blanket will still look as silvery-white and turquoise blue as it did in 1968. Somewhere, Kodachrome documented my sister’s first experience with a product known as Sun-In*-do you think digital would capture the subtle chartreuse shade of her hair after a couple applications of that stuff?  That’s the beauty of Kodachrome, and you just don’t get that with digital. You don’t get the light hitting just-so off the soft folds of a blanket, or a bad first experience with peroxide. With digital, you fix it after the fact to look like you remembered it (at least, that’s how it works around here-you may have a better camera and more talent).

So sad.

*Sun-In was a close relative of a product known as "Quick Tan" that turned your skin carrot orange to match the lovely green of your hair. Thus, many a girl spent her summer looking for all the world like a carrot, greens still attached. Not that I ever did that, because I had an older sister to try it out first.

HERE. All you need is some bar soap, Borax and baking soda. I’m doing this. We run through so much money on laundry items.

I needed to ship out a few packages today, and didn’t feel up to a trip into Omaha to the central post office. Luckily, the post office station at the grocer is open on Sunday and the boxes will ship out first thing Monday. That’s perfect except that it involved driving to Lincoln. I hate Lincoln. In fact, it would be half an hour closer to do my grocery shopping there, but I head in the other direction to Omaha just so I can carry on my little one-woman boycott of the city. Still, I’ve been sick and it was closer, so I packed Danny along for the ride and off we went on a quick errand.

Standing in line at the service desk, Danny asks what town we’re in (as the store was unfamiliar). "We’re in Lincoln, Nebraska" I told him and returned my attention to the packages. I really should have known better-he is, after all my kid. Much to the amusement of the old men standing in line buying lottery tickets, Danny began chanting:

Lincoln, Lincoln, I’ve been thinkin’

What the hell have you been drinkin’?

Looks like water

Smells like wine

Oh my gosh, it’s TURPENTINE!

So if you were standing in line at the 27^th Street Hy-Vee around eleven this morning-that was us.

Well, Old Mistresses  has a different connotation.

I won’t be forced to listen to some middling class know-it-all from suburbia blathering on at length about "single source chocolates", imported truffle butter, or $17 a pound coffee beans that were grown in the shade and hand picked by a yogi who imbued them with magical powers that answer the meaning of life. Yeah, that shit is just going to stop cold when the economy implodes and we’re all eating sardines on toast for dinner.

And that’s my home economics tip for the week-sardines on toast. Add a nice warm bowl of tomato soup and you have the foundations of childhood trauma dinner. 

Literally.

Hey, they’re not spigots, you know. 

Oh man, is THIS funny.