Monthly Archives: November 2011

It’s a damned waffle maker. Sit and eat your leftovers instead.

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By now everyone has seen the video of the waffle maker bruhaha at  Walmart somewhere “in one of those sister-marrying states,” as was so eloquently described by a commenter on Reddit.  Of particular value to that video is the obese woman who was less concerned about her pants falling off and more concerned with throwing elbows to make sure she got four of the waflle makers, adding a ready-made metaphor to an already accurate representation of one of the most disappointing facets of our national nature.

This has gone viral, and is being touted as an example of American consumerism, and people are shocked by this.  I’m not sure why, though.  This is nothing new.  Boston residents have long watched The Running Of The Brides with amusement, going back to the late 40s.  Cabbage Patch Dolls, Tickle Me Elmos, Wii Game Systems, all have storied histories of having fights break out during the Christmas shopping season.  A couple of years ago in two different places people died in stampedes on Black Friday.  When I worked in retail during and immediately following college, I worked a couple of Black Fridays that completely disgusted me and after that I always found a way to avoid working those days after that.

I am the last person to criticize mindless consumerism, I have my own issues with impulse buying in certain areas.  That said, however, I don’t get the whole concept of fighting crowds and adding stress and aggravation to shopping just to get a few deals.  A friend of mine has a system, where she gets her entire season’s shopping done early in the morning, bribing clerks with candy bars, and getting up at the crack of dawn to brave the crowds for the bargains.  Another friend makes a day of it with her mom, spending the morning in a familial bonding tradition that I can respect but not understand.

It’s nothing new, and that’s fine.  I’ve never been a huge shopper anyhow, I generally don’t care for wandering and browsing stores, I have a goal for shopping, I go to the store, I get what I need, and will occasionally look at something for a bit of my eye gets caught, but I can’t take time “to just go look”.  The one exception to this was my brother and I used to take a list of people to buy gifts for, and spend a late December Saturday at the mall finding items in a collaborative manner for each person on the list.  That was not out of a desire to do it that way, it was more a result of procrastination.

It is just not worth it to me.  Granted, I am already very jaded and cynical about the holidays anyhow, I honestly can not remember the last time I was actually excited about the approach of the Christmas holiday season.  I think it may have been the year I got a Big Trak. So, maybe 1980?  Maybe my disillusionment with the holiday has a lot to do with it, I dunno.

But now, this idea of starting this shopping frenzy at midnight on Thanksgiving night, the one end-of-the-year holiday I have always enjoyed, really gets under my skin.  I have a good-sized family, and we’ve always been fairly close, so it makes sense that Thanksgiving has meant more to me.  While the extravagance of the meal is a bit of an indulgence, the day is not tied to reckless consumerism the same way Christmas has become.  It’s a day when families get together, enjoy a nice meal, and have a day where you enjoy each other’s company without having to worry about making sure you got Aunt Catherine the right size sweater, or getting annoyed because your sister got a nicer gift from your grandmother than you did.

Growing up, we used to go to my grandparent’s house, and got together with my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side, and had a nice day watching football, eating turkey, avoiding my uncle napping on the floor of the family room after dinner, and when my cousin Julia got older, we kids would go to a movie.  Usually a Disney-type movie, but one year we did see “Jingle All The Way” and my brother David might get forgiven for that suggestion, probably when his sons are married, however.  The last conversation I ever had with my grandfather was on Thanksgiving, 1999, and he passed away a few weeks later.  This year marked the first Thanksgiving without my grandmother as well, and there was definitely a large hole in the celebration not having her there.

But Thanksgiving also lent a certain perspective as well.  We were fortunate.  So many others were not, and this was a reminder that it was incumbent on us to recognize that, and do our part to try and make the world a little better place for others as well.  When my great-aunt passed away a few years ago, I was (not very) surprised to learn that she would spend Thanksgiving morning helping at Rosie’s Place, a women’s homeless shelter in Boston.  Then she would return home and host a Thanksgiving meal of her own for her family. My senior year in high school and a couple of times after that, I got a great deal of perspective and satisfaction from volunteering at a Pine Street Inn-sponsored Thanksgiving meal at the St Francis Center in Boston.  My high school’s motto, “Men For Others”, was put into practice and added a dimension to my worldview that I had not really appreciated growing up by some of the community service outreach projects I participated in during my time there.  As an unrelated side-note, though, they still had a long way to go as far as universally applying that motto, but that’s a different post altogether.

I look back most, however, on the tough times, when money was tight or non-existent growing up.  The time I spent homeless, crashing on my friend’s spare bed or couch when my parents lost their house and if not for family and friends who knows how my brothers and I would have ended up.  This is why the trend towards putting more emphasis on Black Friday and shopping for Christmas and taking it away from the actual day of Thanksgiving itself is so viscerally offensive to me.  I am thankful for what I have right now, and how lucky I am.  Life is definitely full of adversity, and I have had more than my fair share of it.  I am very fortunate, however, having overcome a great deal, made it through some very difficult times, with the help and support and love of family and friends.  I have a good job,  and while jobs have been tricky to come by, I have been very fortunate even in a tough market, with the longest tenure I have been out of work being four months.

I still have a long way to go before I can actually enjoy the holiday season.  But I do still love Thanksgiving, and it just makes me sad to see these videos, hear about all the excitement over sales and opening the stores at Midnight or even earlier, taking away the purpose of Thanksgiving on a personal level.  We are so driven by this commercial culture and manipulated by corporations who are interested in parting us from our money, and are slowly losing this day that we have institutionalized as a day of thanks and reflection.

We have viral videos of waffleiron riots and people pepper-spraying other shoppers to get these bargains held up as our reflections, instead.

Extended Thanks

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At Thanksgiving, one of the stereotypical traditions is the family goes around the table, stating what they are thankful for. Generally they are things like “having this family” or “my health” or “Great-aunt Mildred leaving me the beach house in her will”, and while all of those are valid, and of course I am thankful for my family, friends, and relative health, I realized there are a few other things that would get short shrift in the going-around-the-table conversation.

So here are some things I am thankful for (outside of the usual list):

  • Pandora’s collection of Northern European heavy metal.
  • co-workers who have a sense of humor. Nothing helps get through the day without having the pressure of not being able to crack a joke for fear of having to fight with an HR report.
  • Whoever the genius is at JetBlue that first put the TVs in the headrests of the seat in front of you. Now if that person can come up with a way of not having the person in front of me ALWAYS recline.
  • Sweet Tarts.
  • This election cycle’s crop of GOP candidates. So many of them are so ludicrous and making the lives of late-night talk shows and The Daily Show’s writers’ lives so much easier.
  • Not having cable TV as a kid. No, really, having to mess around with rabbit-ears or worse, that circular UHF antenna, gives a deeper appreciation for cable tv.
  • A bunch of friend in college that I have since fallen out of touch with, for the most part, but helped me get through an incredibly difficult period in my life, and at least waited a few years before judging me.
  • The dynamic of the internet that has somehow made it so that I have good friends in most of the major cities in the country, and some in other countries. Explaining to people about being invited to a wedding in Toronto for two people I know a ridiculous amount about but have never actually met was not what Tim Berners-Lee imagined, I know, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

There are more, but really, that’s enough.

Happy Easter! Thanksgiving!

At the end of the line

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All say, “How hard it is that we have to die” – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.  ~Mark Twain

 

One of the hardest lessons we learn as children is when we are introduced to the concept of mortality.  Sometimes it is a pet, sometimes an older relative, sometimes someone we are close to.  A grandparent, maybe.  But most of us are introduced to it at an age where it is merely a concept, in many ways what higher science becomes to most people, you understand the basic idea, but the actual meaning of it is lost to you.

My earliest recollection was a vague recollection of being told my great-grandmother had died. I was maybe three or four years old, and the total of the memory was that we wouldn’t see her at Christmas anymore.  A couple of years later, I found my kitten, cleverly named “Baby Kitty”, in the backyard, and after an investigation my mother told me she probably fell out of the big tree I found her under.  I do remember crying about that, but that’s about all.

As I grew older, the family cat (and Baby Kitty’s mother) died at age 14 when I was 11 or so, my dog died when I was 15, at nearly the same age, and these deaths really affected me.  I remember coming downstairs and stroking my dog’s fur, saying goodbye to my best friend and constant companion growing up as the Oscars were being awarded on the TV in the next room.  Even now, thinking about it decades later, I still tear up a little bit, and whenever the Oscars are on, I think back to that evening.

I was lucky, though.  I did not lose any people that were close to me until I was well into my teens, when my paternal grandfather passed away my senior year.  The next three years, well, let’s just say it was a crash course as several of my older relatives on my dad’s side all reached that age together and it felt like every couple of months was another funeral.

As I have gone through life since, I have lost friends, relatives, people I have loved, and people who have meant more to me than I truly realized.  Just a few weeks ago, my grandmother passed away at age 91, and I’m still somewhere in the middle stages of dealing with it.  But really, I cannot complain, she lived an amazingly full life, and got to know her five great-grandchildren and took great joy from them, and her life in general.  I was so fortunate to have had both of my grandparents until my thirties, and my grandmother until I was 42, and I am fully aware of how rare that really is.

Tonight, I visited my great-uncle Paul, who has been ill for some time now, and is in the hospital after having a heart attack.   To be frank and blunt, he does not have much time left, but tonight in his room were four of his sons, three of his grandchildren, two of his daughters-in-law, myself, my aunt, and my uncle who is also Paul’s godson.  We sat in his room, visiting with him when he was awake, telling stories, jokes, and reminiscing about times past, much like we did at my grandmother’s house the night she died.

As I drove home tonight, I thought about all of this, and pondered how very Irish this was of us.  There’s an appreciation for a life well-lived, and for what the generation before us gave us.  A bonding and a sharing of comfort during a sad and stressful time, as well as a reflection on your own life and how the person who you no longer have in the circle with you has affected you.  And then it really hit me.

I’m 42 years old, have a family of my own, a career, and supposedly a smart guy.  But after all this time since I was told about my great-grandmother, since I buried pets, relatives, and friends, I realized that I still don’t fully grasp the entirety of death.  Some day there will hopefully be a group of my loved ones sitting around my hospital room, sharing stories and telling jokes as I approach my threshold on that journey at the tender age of 135, and I am willing to bet that even then I won’t have my brain wrapped around it.

This a bit heavier than I had intended for my second post on this site, I was originally mulling over a bit about the Occupy Wall Street events from last night, and complaining that the guy with the guitar at Occupy Boston should not be trying to sing House Of The Rising Sun with rewritten lyrics and somehow managing to have three different keys in there, none of which are the same key being played on the guitar, and even that is not the key the song is supposed to be in.  But that seemed so petty in light of how my day turned out, and how hard it is for my cousins, whose mother suffered with Alzheimer’s for many years before passing away last summer, and is now watching their father in a hospital bed, returning to him a tiny fraction of the love and comfort that he and his wife gave to them growing up.

In any case, I lost the urge to bitch about politics and stuff, and instead just decided to reflect a bit on this journey every single one of us will take one day, and how really lucky I am to have the family I do.  I also came to the conclusion that working for an effort like OWS, political campaigns, social groups, or even just the company you are employed by seems so important, and sometimes is, but it just pales in comparison to being a part of and really appreciating a great family and circle of friends.

Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life!  ~Albert Einstein

Opening Day

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I used to have another domain, geekdroppings dot com, that was the repository of a blog where I wrote all sorts of dreck for a few years, but after it got hacked by a malware distributor, Google blocked the domain as an attack site, and I sort of stopped writing there.  I was trying to start my game blog, too, so it all fell by the wayside.  Then this past spring, I forgot to renew the domain.  The day it expired, it was grabbed by a squatter who locked it down and wouldn’t give it back to me without money.  Now it’s a Japanese spam site, selling skin care products probably made out of rhino horn and discarded foreskins.

So here I go again.  I like Facebook, am lukewarm to Twitter, but miss some of the freedom long-form blogging allows.  I have had this domain sitting around for a while (see the About link above) and figured what the hell, why not use it.  It fits me a little better than the old one did, and I’ll keep the gaming stuff over on Massive Crits.