Origins: the Mother’s Day why and how

Posted: May 12, 2013 in THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS
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Happy Mother’s Day! Get out your white carnations and head on over to your mum’s place of residence for a day of fun-filled appreciation (and maybe the occasional guilt trip). Or, if you’re like me and live half a continent from your mother, call, email, Skype, Facebook, blog, or snail mail that letter you’ve been meaning to write. Then, if you’re still being like me, google the origins of Mother’s Day to find out the where, when, and why for our celebration of half of the you-founding team. If, on the other hand, you’re not being like me, read on, because I’ll save you the typing, clicking, and reading of your search. In short, I present Mother’s Day modern-american style.

Photograph of three carnations with buds and s...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The holiday as we know it today has its origins back in 1905, when Ann Jarvis, peace-keeping pre-hippie of the Civil War, passed away, leaving behind a devastated grieving daughter named Anna. Anna reflected greatly upon the life of her mother and sought a way to memorialize her forever. She put on her battle gear and started on an epic quest to claim one day each year in the name of birth-giving mothers. By 1908 she had organized a day of celebration at the church of her departed mother, while another event occurred at an auditorium in Philadelphia. As a show of support for the Philladephia event, Jarvis sent a crap ton of white carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, to be worn as a sign of the pure love a mother has for her children.

Yet all of this wasn’t enough. Anna’s thirst for remembrance remained unquenched. She continued to write letters and got some pretty influential people to support her cause, including the floral industry. In 1914, Congress officially made the second sunday of May the designated day for Mother’s, and Jarvis was finally at peace. Or was she?

It wasn’t long before the evil, black-hearted floral industry expanded their influence on the holiday. They diversified their sales by offering bright colored carnations for living mothers as well as the white carnations for those mothers who had moved on to the next life. Soon, Mother’s Day specials popped up everywhere. Jarvis’s peace was shattered. She hated the commercialization, the bastardization, of her holiday. She didn’t see the need to buy things to honor a mother. Rather, she desired a visit or a handwritten letter; a personal touch on a personal day of thanks. She publicly cursed out the a-holes who sought to make a profit and began to campaign against the floral industry and anyone else who was misinformed about the true meaning of Mother’s Day. Basically, she kicked, screamed, bit, and spat her way to a mental asylum, because you can’t fight commercialism; it’s the American way. As a nice kick in the pants to Jarvis, some very gratified florists partially, and secretly, paid for her stay at the Asylum. The real ironic part of the story is that before she had succeeded in Congress, Jarvis was mocked for her efforts to create a holiday for mothers, because some people found the idea of a singular day to honor and appreciate their mom was absurd. “Every damn day should be mother’s day,” they cried. With the commercialization of her holiday, every day except the second sunday in May became Mother’s Day for Jarvis.

And that, my friends, is why the chicken crossed the fracking road. You can buy the Empire State Building for your mum if you want, but you still need to call, write, or at least think about her today. And then start looking forward to Papa’s day, which from googling that I find is in June.

Happy Mother’s Day Mom!

Peter Pan Sydrome: take your growing up and eat it

Posted: May 6, 2013 in RANTING, THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS
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At what point are we expected to “grow up?” What does “growing up” really mean? I get the feeling that some people believe growing up means sucking the fun right out of life. I’m almost 25 and I play video games and read comic books and like to go on adventures instead of looking up exact directions, but I also get up at 5 am, arrive at work early and work hard all day, pay my bills on time, and I have pretty darn good credit. I’d say I’m plenty grown up, but some people would disagree with me because of how much I hold on to my childhood.

Let’s put aside the fact that, relatively speaking, I am still a child. I can take care of myself without causing harm to others. That’s pretty responsible. I can generally see both sides of an argument, and I can usually come up with three or more solutions to a problem. I don’t confront people; I try to see things from a different viewpoint; I am in control of my emotions (most of the time). That’s pretty mature. I also like to drink, laugh at fart jokes, be crude, and generally live in a juvenile state of mind because, and I’ll say it a hundred times, being a grown-up SUCKS. The world isn’t sharks and dolphins, and we don’t encourage people to think solely in terms of sharks and dolphins, so why can’t I be a grown-up child (or a child grown-up)?

Video games, especially nowadays, are like movies that you control. You can sit through a two hour movie, sure, or you can play through the movie and control the action yourself for 8+ hours (usually +++ hours). Comic books, like video games, are an art form in themselves. Someone writes the book, someone draws the book, someone else colors the book, and a team of other developers bring the comic to life. Have you looked through a comic book these days? The amount of detail that’s in the drawings is amazing; it’s not some general picture, it’s a masterpiece; a drawn out snapshot of life, and that’s something that kids and adults can both appreciate. It’s all different modes of entertainment, like reading a book or playing a sport, and each medium provides a different experience.

And why the rush to grow up? We spend our childhoods waiting for the day we can call ourselves “grown-ups” and our adult lives wishing our childhood days would return to us. I think we can have the best of both worlds. Enjoy life, age be damned. I’m grown up enough for right now, and I refuse to participate in a society that demands we return to the 1950′s and crush our youth when we enter the working world. There’s a reason those people drank so much; they were filling a void.

I’ve heard my women friends complain many times about how all the men in the world have Peter Pan Syndrome and act like children all the time. You’re damn right we have Peter Pan Syndrome. Growing up sucks! Not everyone wants to graduate high school or college, get married, and procreate; some of us, men and women, want to experience life in a different way. We’re not necessarily ruling out children, we’re just saying “Hold your derby horses.”

I don’t see a reason to punish anyone for wanting to live a different way. I do, however, want to punish people for refusing to let me live the way I want to live. It’s my life, fuck off and live your own. I don’t need to grow up, you need to be more open-minded, you close-minded yuppie. Yeah, name calling, what up? Solving problems by calling you a different name, mmhmm, because it makes me feel better. Let’s all hug and appreciate each other for our differences, but don’t touch me while we do it. I do not like to be touched.

Moral Dilemma: Peeing while you’re Cleaning?

Posted: May 2, 2013 in THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS, RANDOMMINITY
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Shower time. You feel great. The water’s at a perfect temperature. You step in. Out of nowhere, disaster strikes! Your bladder suddenly decides it’s full. Your shower is ruined as you’re faced with the moral dilemma of whether to pee in the shower or hold it until you’re all cleaned up, because there is no way in Hades’ Underworld that you’re stepping out of the shower just to go to the bathroom. (I passed my personal trainer certification test, by the way).

Peeing int he shower is a doozy of a moral issue because it’s like a secret reveal about yourself. No one has to know you let the flow go in the shower; that’s your secret. On the flip side, no one has to know you were faced with a monumental decision and chose the moral high ground. Sure, you can tell the world either way, if you don’t mind a few glares here and an empty corner as your sole companion (and a rather dull companion at that), but this is mostly between you (and maybe that wall).

So what do you do? This isn’t a 911 emergency call situation just yet; you could hold it if you had to, but it ruins your relaxing shower experience. You’ve had a hard day, you wanted to relax, maybe you were too lazy to draw a bath (insert crayon and pencil joke about drawing a bath because I’m too lazy to be that clever), or maybe you don’t have bathtub access, so you decided a shower would be the perfect mode of relaxation and release. But do you release everything?

Why wouldn’t you? There’s running water, just like in a toilet, and it’s all going into the same sewer drain. And it’s proven science that holding in your excretions is one of the worst decisions you could make, so why the howdy do would you willingly destroy your wee-time area for such a silly reason as upholding the moral fabric of society when society is fuh-freaking clueless in regards to your act of desecration? You silly person, you.

So you pee in the shower. Ahhhhhhhh baby, yes please. Fool! The apocalypse is one day closer because of your selfishness. Are you going to tell the next person who uses the shower that you peed in it? You know, waste products leave a residue, and some poor idiot is going to step in your soap scum and yellow snow-juice. What if you were that person. Oh sure, it’s fine if you stay ignorant, but if you just stepped in the shower and someone told you that they had wizzed in the shower not five minutes past, how would you feel? What if they had turned the water off before they’d released their nitrogenous river, meaning the liquid at the shower floor is not residual water, it’s someone’s pee. See how society unravels. This is why we can’t have nice things.

The decision to pee in the shower is ultimately a moral one, because there’s plenty of reasons for and against both sides of the situation. And you know what I do when faced with a moral issue? I ask myself “What would Batman do?” Without thinking too much about Batman peeing in the shower, I like to believe he’d hold it. He may even be so bold as to get out of the shower, but I doubt it because no one does that. Not even Batman. If you can pee in the shower, who knows what else you’re willing to do? Kill an old lady? Recite Shakespeare, ignoring the rules of iambic pentameter?  Poo with the door open?! Wizz away, but know that it’s a slippery slope, peeing in the shower, and you control the soap dispenser.

Exercise in Self-awareness: One word that describes you

Posted: April 2, 2013 in THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS
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One word that describes you. It’s not a word that defines you, but it does bring a sense of order to the things you do. Singular acts may not always reflect the word choice, but looking at the larger sequence of actions will show the effectiveness of the word, because that word is you. What is yours?

Mine is “Adaptable.” I will adapt to any situation I’m put in. I will be uncomfortable, I will make a thousand excuses why now is a bad time, I will make things up as I go, I will complain (bitch, whine, and moan), but at the end of all, I will adapt. I don’t seek out conflict and I tend not to resolve it either. Instead, I adapt. It’s not so much out of cowardice, but from a need to maintain homeostasis. Mini-evolution.Body-wise, adapting to stressors is called General Adaptation Syndrome, and it’s the reason body composition changes. When you work out, for example, a light workout won’t induce the same reaction from the body as a heavy workout. Walking for twenty minutes feels different than running for twenty minutes. Soreness is part of the body’s adaptation process. In some ways, then, adaptation makes you stronger, assuming the right variables are in place. Eating three pounds of chocolate will initiate a reaction, but it will not be a strength reaction, though it will be a strong reaction.

I attribute my adaptive abilities to the reason why I’ve always been good at a lot of things (no ego here). I’m a fast learner; I use my senses and wits to assess situations and act accordingly. At the same time, though, I’ve never felt like I really excel at anything. This is the negative side of the adaptability trait. By the time I get good at something, I’m ready to move on to something else; I’m already adapting to other stimuli. This would be where self-diagnosed ADD and procrastination come in. When the mind cannot focus on a single task, it becomes overwhelmed by possibility and can no longer adapt. In my case, I shut down. Stress is too great? I drink…to adapt…to cope.

Not only is overstimulation the nemesis of adaptation, but refusal to adapt is about as effective as Princess Leia running away from the Stormtroopers on the Tantive IV. Face plant. It’s when I fight my adaptive urges that I begin the self-loathing process. Let’s say I’m working out and the exercise is especially challenging. I might start complaining about how tired I am, and how much I hate it, and the whining increases to a point where I become annoyed at myself (which tends to match my trainer’s annoyance levels).

Think about what word describes you. When you find it, your priorities, your motivations, your successes, and your failures suddenly mesh together to form a beautiful amaze-balls picture (I didn’t want to sound too mushy). You don’t need to broadcast it, because it’s not something anyone else needs to agree on. This is totally about you; your moment to be as selfish as you can possibly be. What is your driving force; what keeps you going? I adapt.

Moving Weekend Nightmare: Reality

Posted: April 1, 2013 in RANTING, THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS
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One hellacious, hair-pulling, follicle-growth-reversing week later, I am moved out of my old apartment and into a temporary place of residence. Not only did it come down to the absolute last minute, there were a few ass-kicking surprises that left me huddled in the corner of my empty room in a puddle of tears. Figurative tears, mind you.

Thirty minutes prior to my leaving to pick up the U-haul van I’d scheduled to move me across the city, my new roommate called to tell me he was in trouble with his Super and had to get a lawyer to sort out the mess, which meant I was out of an apartment and back to square one yet again (this was the fourth or fifth time I was back to square one, and I was getting a little tired of going back). My second choice apartment was one I had never intended to even see, let alone consider taking, but the Fates intervened with their twisted sense of humor and I ended up crawling back to the tenants for a place to stay. Meanwhile, I reached out to anyone I could for alternative housing arrangements with less than a day remaining before I had to turn in my keys.

I was able to get help clearing out the majority of my apartment from an unlikely source: Mormon Missionaries, and I had a friend lined up for Saturday to help me move my stuff to the new apartment. However, I had no one to help me when I had to reschedule my move to Sunday, which meant I made who knows how many trips from the apartment to the elevator, the elevator to the ground floor, and the ground floor to the van. Repeat the process in reverse for the move to the new place as well. (This was also my first time driving in NYC, by the way. I resisted the urge to slam on the horn a couple times, but I did throw out a couple “moron’s”. I had my wits and manners about me, parental units.

Alternative arrangements were found as I was returning the van to the Shell station, ye bastard Fates. I was moved in and paid up for the month and could only laugh at the whole situation. I had supper in my empty apartment, a last goodbye to the place, turned in my keys, and headed up to the new place…in the rain. I also got slightly lost when I got off the subway and walked a couple blocks in the wrong direction…in the rain. And this morning I have a bunch of really nice and dark bruises all over. And I forgot to mention the part where I fell up the stairs.

Rough week, rougher weekend, Happy April Fools Day, don’t ever move by yourself, don’t let it get down to the wire to find an apartment (although that wasn’t entirely my fault), get out there and make friends, and so on with the lessons learned. Now I can finally get back to studying and writing, and I have to say that I was getting stressed out even more because I didn’t have the time to do either. I took the day off today, so who wants to day drink?!

Random thoughts: “Soberrings?”

Posted: March 25, 2013 in RANDOMMINITY, THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS
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Hi there! Nice to “see” you again.

I’ve been a Rockstar today. Capital “R” Rockstar. I was a lowercase rockstar yesterday (fizzled out towards the end, I did). No need to go into details, but I’m awesome at my job and totally deserve a raise (the details being I totally did the work of two people today. Sucked? Yes. Awesome? Also yes). The raise is in talks, btw. Cross your fingers for me.

My lease ends on Sunday and I don’t know where my next apartment is. :S This has been a month of learning. For some crazy reason, I got the idea in my head that you can’t find an apartment in New York City more than a month prior to your move date, so I didn’t even begin my search until the 4th of March. As with all things, my procrastination led me to inquire and wait for responses. Wrong. I should’ve inquired and kept going, which I did after a week or two. After a couple dozen failed inquiries, I found a place that turned out to be the total opposite of what it advertised. Rather, it left out a lot of details. I was looking for my own apartment or maybe one roommate and I was about to get 4 roommates. Hello college without the perks. I continued my search with a week to go. I have a couple viewings tomorrow. Cross your fingers for me again.

Some people walk unnaturally slow and in a very subtle meander-like fashion. It’s Carnation Instant Annoyed for fast walkers and long-striders, of which I am both. No one anticipates my every move like these people. Cross your fingers that I can keep my cool. Patience, young one.

There’s been a number of people who have tried to converse with me this past week while I have my earbuds in. Okay, sometimes I’m not listening to anything, I just put them in so people leave me alone (Greenpeace), but most of the time I have something on as loud as possible without disturbing anyone because I want to drown out the world. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m very moody, and I frequently want to scream and run away. Introvert and whatnot. So I’m listening to some tunes and ignoring the world and suddenly someone’s shouting my name. Of course, it registered a few seconds prior to my responding that someone was attempting to gain my attention, but I hope they’ll give up, and if they don’t give up, then I make them work for my attention. Moody jerk.

I’ve been hooked on British television as of late….again. It comes in phases. This time it’s the 1970′s version of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” a “Downton Abbey” forerunner, and the original “Shameless” series (did you know that the US version is a rip-off of the UK version? Rip-off is a harsh term because they’re both really great shows). My love of UK TV probably stems from my determination to absorb the British culture so completely that I turn into a Brit meself. Shut up, it’s a realistic goal. Cross your fingers for me.

“The Great Purge” is what I call sorting through all your crap before you move and discarding all the junk you’ve collected and kept, and paring down your stuff to the absolute crap you can’t live without. That happened here this weekend. I can’t imagine having to move with everything I ended up throwing out. I have been accused of being a packrat, though. I just also have the ability to chuck things when I need to. Key concept: needs v. wants. Great for stress drinking.

Moving is a universally recognized source of stress. Member: “Hello! How was your weekend?!” Me: (long pause where I make a number of faces) “Stressful. I’m in the process of moving.” Member: “Say no more.”

Phantom scrapes, cuts, and bruises are your body’s challenge to deduce what you’ve been up to. Solution before problem. In summary: Your body = Moriarty, You = Sherlock Holmes

Chat at me: what do you want to see more of on this website? What do you want to see less of? Any topics to which I should bring my voice? This is a communal effort. Time to start building a community. I’ll be reaching out to my fellow writers and bloggers and blogging writers too….eventually. :)

PROCRASTINATORS FOREVER!

 

 

 

Disturbed Personas #5: woe to the angel of hope

Posted: March 14, 2013 in DISTURBED PERSONAS, WRITING
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“Let me dance for you.”

She moves like a snake: smooth, sensual, elegant. She singles me out from the crowd. She always singles me out.

“You should smile more,” she says as she flips upside-down on the pole. To her, I am the lone patron.

She never stops smiling. She is my beacon of hope in a lighthouse of never-ending positivity, guiding wayward vessels astray from the rocks of foul deeds. I don’t know how she manages to stay so bright working for him.

Her glitter-covered body glows with an otherworldly quality, accentuating her already angelic features. She doesn’t even have to try to make me want her. I want to reach out and save her from this life; to take her far away from this city and live in a small cottage near some remote European village. I think she’d like Bulgaria; this country is too vulgar. She deserves better than this.

She slides down the pole until her hands touch the ground. A momentary handstand. She looks lighter than air as her legs slowly draw themselves to the floor, and with every inch of her smooth, naked legs, she casts a spell on her gaping-mouthed fans. She hooks her leg onto the pole and sails around, reaching for the crowd. Reaching for me. I can’t help but to reach out to her. Our fingers almost meet, they want to interlock; to caress; to hold; to save ourselves from relentless agony, but we both pull away. We are bound by rules, and cannot touch.

He abuses her because he believes it gives him power. She allows the abuse because of some debt she owes to him; a chosen ignorance blossoming from a sense of duty. I cannot help her; I am bound by rules.

Her skimpy top falls to the floor. She is straddling the pole, degrading herself with the greatest of confidence. She’s appears to be the happiest woman in the world, but she is miserable, maybe even suicidal. If she killed herself we could touch, just for a moment, but we could never be together.

She flips upside down again and spreads her legs wide. She teases me, and she loves it.

The song changes. She grinds down off the pole as the next girl comes out and starts dancing. She picks up her top and the money that has been thrown at her feet. A glance at me when she sees the twenty dollar bill I’ve set on the stage. Our eyes meet. My mind is flooded with visions of her past and future. I smile.

“Thank you,” she says.

“Sultry Goddess,” I cry out, “I want you forever and always to be mine. I’ll save you from this life; I’ll take you far away and you will never be sad again. I’ll erect monuments in your name and resurrect Michelangelo himself to sculpt the likeness of you a thousand times if only you’ll run away with me.”

She is gone with a smile, and the stage is dominated by a competent girl whose only fault is that she’s not her predecessor. My proclamation of unyielding love stayed on the edge of my tongue, where the rules say they belong. We are bound by rules, her and I, but mine are inescapable by even the greatest of escape artists. I’ll come back tomorrow to see her again, and that will have to be enough.

I’m out of cigarettes. I’ll search out the bum. “Bumming” a cigarette off a bum brings a smile to my face, which makes me think of her. She likes it when I smile.

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