Ship of Fools

Do you know what I discovered?  April fool’s Day is almost upon us and to my chagrin, the older I get the more patently aware I am of having played the fool in my youth and having almost derailed my fragile life.

“FLY, YOU FOOL—FLY!”

The word “fool” is not a popular word now—at least it isn’t as potent as it was in my youth and in the way only older Black folks could use it in the day:

• “You old fool!” (when referencing an older person—usually a man—who never let go of his childish ways—specifically chasing after young girls or trying some foolish get-rich quick scheme)
• “Go on fool, Hell ain’t half full yet!” (when chastising a driver with a lead foot, or a womanizer, or a ‘ho’)
• “Damn fool!” (anybody who was held in judgment by the speaker—the speaker usually being your mother or grandmother)
• “Shut up, fool; I ain’t talkin’ to you!” (directed toward anybody that got on the speaker’s nerves)

DEFINITION OF A FOOL ACCORDING TO TODAY’S DICTIONARY:

Noun—a person who acts unwisely or imprudently; a silly person: “what a fool I was to do this” (simpleton – dolt – tomfool – ninny – nincompoop).

Adjective—foolish or silly (foolish – daft – goofy – fatuous – idiotic – asinine)

Foolish Prank||image from motleynews.net

The most foolish thing I’ve ever done (that almost cost me my future and my life) was after winning a four-year scholarship out of the ghetto and a string of foster homes and orphanages to a college about 20 minutes or so from Kent State University, I let some guy I hardly knew talk me into participating in an attempted take-over of my college’s administration buildings shortly after the Kent State Massacre.  I believed the asshole when he said there would be no guns, and we’d be protesting racism on the campus and not the Viet Nam War.  Not only did we get caught (the organizer of the coup tipped the “po-po”in the hopes there would be a shoot-out), but we were almost killed by state cops already on edge from the Kent State debacle.  Most of my peeps were thrown out of school.  It was determined that since I wasn’t carrying any weapons, and my responsibilities only included providing the catering and entertainment for the revolution (God help my foolish sorry-ass!), and that I was on the Dean’s list to boot, I would not be kicked out of school, so long as I kept my nose clean and out of trouble until I graduated the following year.  The entire scenario turned out to be a loosely tagged-team scheme tied to the Kent State mayhem in order to manipulate a race war that would add to a SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) nationwide, anarchist upheaval.  I almost got killed for fried chicken, manipulated by people I didn’t know, who didn’t give two shits about me.   God, what a fool I was!

In case you are one of the few who have never been a fool but fear your time might be drawing nigh, here are a few examples of modern-day fools to help steer you clear of the fool abyss:

DENNIS RODMAN

“Rodman visited the reclusive North Korean leader (Kim Jong Un—parenthesis mine) at the end of February. At the conclusion of the trip, the basketball star spoke glowingly of Kim to members of the media. ‘I love him,’ Rodman said. ‘The guy’s really awesome.’” By Ryan Grenoble for Huff Post World

Dennis Rodman and North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un

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PEOPLE WHO TEXT WHILE WALKING

“While there’s little current data about the number of people injured while texting, more than 1,000 pedestrians visited emergency rooms in 2008 after they were injured while using a cellphone to talk or text. That had doubled each year since 2006, according to a study conducted by Ohio State University.”—By Casey Neistat for The New York Times

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PEOPLE WHO TEXT WHILE DRIVING

“It took six months for Chance Bothe, 21, to recover after flipping his truck into a ravine while texting and driving. He broke nearly every bone in his body.”—By Charlie Wells for New York Daily News

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NRA SPOKESMAN WAYNE LAPIERRE

“Earlier this week, Wayne LaPierre wrote a giddily batshit insane column opining that what we need around here is more guns, all the time, everywhere, because you never know when the zombie apocalypse is going to wander off the nearest bus and where will your government be then, hmm? As partial defense of his premise, he used Hurricane Sandy as an example of a situation where people really, really ought to have hauled off and shot some folks.” By Hunter for Daily Kos

I am discovering that you can start out your adulthood trying not to make a fool of yourself and hoping to make a difference in the world with the most heartfelt naiveté.  But then you can screw up your life by thinking you’re only going to a “sit-in” with a bucket of chicken but it’s really two steps to your potential death.  Being a fool is costly but you don’t know how costly sometimes until many years later. 

I am convinced that the foolish things we do in our teens will have consequences in our twenties, the foolish choices we make in our twenties will have us paying the cost throughout our forties, and the stupid things we do in our thirties will haunt us to our grave.  I aligned myself with doctrines and dogmas (both left and right wing) in my youth of foolishness that cause me to shutter sitting from a perch of wisdom in my old age.  This is why the young so desperately need the old as mentors on their journey of life.  Too bad the young are usually too foolish to listen.

“Mr. T”

“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”— Proverbs 17:28, Bible

“Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.”—Elbert Hubbard

“It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero

      “Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.”—African Proverb

WHEN FOOLS COLLIDE

 

No Longer Workin’ for the Man

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   It only took me 24 hours to determine the answer to the most repeated question from everyone I see:  Do you think you’ll like being retired?  Well, the verdict is in:

Yes, Bitches, I love that I’m no longer “workin’ for the man”!

I am officially retired as of last week, had all the parties, and received the gold watch (not really—damn aftermath of the recession has affected everything), and I am doing a dance of unmitigated joy.   Don’t get me wrong, I really liked my job and I’m going to miss the Benjamins (it was a great gig as jobs go), but it was still a job working for someone else, following someone else’s commands, and multi-tasking to the beat of someone else’s drum.

Image from studiohelper.com

Besides, because I was born a poor black child, I’ve been working ever since I was five years old, and the concept of work for work’s sake lost its novelty around age six.  Contrary to nasty-ass Newt Gingrinch’s campaign idea of abolishing child labor laws and making poor kids work as janitors in their schools to give them a sense of purpose, other Ayn Randians tried that 60 years ago on me, and it didn’t make me any more purposeful—it just made me fucking exhausted.

The other day a twenty-something college journalist, who is the daughter of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of mine, dropped by my “Ask Dalai Mama” Show (formerly “Ask Big Mama” Show) and interviewed me for her college newspaper.   She was fascinated with the concept that I was doing the “Newt Gingrich Dream Act for Poor Children” long before he thought of it—just when he was only eleven years old in Georgia and having newly escaped poverty, fatherly abandonment, and his god-awful christened name:  Newton Leroy McPherson.  The young reporter noted that the thing that seemingly kept Newt from my child labor fate, and thus ever thinking that his future sorry-ass concept would be a good campaign idea 60 years later, was the appearance of a stepfather who adopted him and the color white that saved him.  Had he walked a mile in my shoes, the pathetic child labor idea would have never crossed his mind as an adult.

REPORTER:      “Dalai Mama, I am so excited about interviewing someone who has reportedly been working since she was five years old.  What job could you have possibly gotten at that age?”

DALAI MAMA:   “Baby, I had two jobs.  A five-year old could get any job in the inner city of Cleveland that they could master by standing on a crate so that they could reach the bench, the table, or in my case the washing machine or the ironing board to do their jobs.  My mother, my baby sister, and I ended up homeless in the dead of winter in 1953, and a woman who owned a boarding house in East Cleveland had pity on us and took us in.  It just so happened that there were several cottage industries operating under the roof of that boarding house:  a kitchen beauty shop, a laundry, a neighborhood pick-up site for illegal numbers runners (the legal game we now call Lotto), and the selling of stolen goods.  My two jobs in that house of horrors were as a two-step laundry assistant.  In the first job where I was responsible for wringing dry the shirts from a barrel washing machine, I would stand on a wooden crate in the basement, pull out the wet white shirts and insert them into the wooden ringers on top of the washer.  Because I had to lean into the machine to reach the shirts at the bottom (forcing my feet off the crate and suspending my legs in mid-air on the edge of the washing machine), I would almost always get my chubby little fingers caught in the wringer with the shirts as I fell against the rollers.  It’s a wonder I still have use of my hands.  I believe I learned and utilized my first swear words at the age of five:

“Somebody help da po’ child!  Dis fuckin’ monsta is eatin’ my fingas like dey was chicken bones!”

Image from myauctionfinds.com

REPORTER:       “Oh my God, I can’t even imagine that torture.  I had a hissy fit when my mother tried to get me to clean my room on Saturdays and make my bed.  She never did win that battle.  Wasn’t the electric wringer invented by an African-American woman in the 1800s?”

DALAI MAMA:   “Yes girl—go on with your bad self!   Her name was Ellen F. Eglin and she was from Washington, DC, but she never patented her invention and sold it for $18 to a white man who made a considerable fortune.  Ain’t that a pip?   Ellen Eglin once said that she thought white women wouldn’t use the machine if they knew a black woman had invented it.  Personally, I hated that machine and wished it had never been invented. I’d like to have a little chat with her when I see her on the other side and tell her how her stupid wringers were known for catching hair, clothing, and fingers (a four-year old reportedly choked to death from one), and almost dismembered me several times as a child laborer.”

REPORTER:       “What was your other job as a five-year old?”

DALAI MAMA:   “One that was equally as dangerous:  I had to stand on a wooden crate and press stiffly starched shirts with flat irons that were heated on the stove.  They were so heavy that it took both my hands to lift the irons whose handles were wrapped in towels (one was heated on the stove while the other was simultaneously used to press the garment), and I always ended up burning the easily scorched shirts because I would get tired and couldn’t lift the iron fast enough.  But I didn’t keep that job very long.  Once I discovered that starch burned quickly, one day in a fit of anger, I staged the youngest labor strike in the history of man and performed scorch art all over the paying customers’ white shirts.  We lost the business, and I lost the skin off my ass for many months from endless beatings; but it was worth it, because I never, ever had to do that job again.  To this day I hate to iron clothes.  If the cleaners in town didn’t iron my husband’s shirts, he’d have to go to work looking like he slept in his clothes.”

REPORTER:      “Didn’t you tell me in our pre-interview that you once worked for the Mafia when you were a child?”

DALAI MAMA:   “Yes.  Talk about working for the man!  Yep, after I lost my ironing job, the landlady’s aunt (ostensibly my babysitter) decided I would make a great “bag-girl” to carry the numbers bets from the boarding house to a drop-off point which was a store that sold peanuts and cheese.  Numbers runners were constantly being killed by heroin addicts or other numbers runners or they were being shaken down by the “po-po” (police) when they transferred the money to their contact further upstream.  What better decoy could they use than a six-year old with numbers slips and cash pinned inside her overalls or winnings hidden under peanuts in a bag on the return trip home.  Other residents in the house said that the numbers game in my neighborhood was ruled over by “Don (The Kid) King,” who, for the last four decades or so, has gone “legit” as the fighting promoter of people like Mohammad Ali, Mike Tyson, and Evander Holyfield to name just a few.  I never met him because he was too high up the food chain, and I doubt if he ever knew who transferred the money from my boarding house to the peanut/cheese man, but the year I almost lost my life and most definitely almost lost my mind was the year I worked for his operation as a bag girl.  It was also the year “Don (The Kid) King” killed a man in his house for stealing his numbers stash and got away with it because it was considered self-defense in the then strongly Mafia-run Cleveland.  But you can find out all that well-documented information from The Life and Crimes of Don King by Jack Newfield or watch the movie, “Only in America”—a phrase I think the infamous gambling lord coined about himself when he went legit and became world-renowned.

Don King with Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie by his side, King speaks at a 2004 victory celebration for newly re-elected President George W. Bush||cnn.com Getty Image

REPORTER:      “Wait a minute.  You brushed over something intriguing when you said you ‘almost lost your mind’ while working for the man—Don King.  I’d like to explore that some more.”

DALAI MAMA:   “No can do, darlin’.   I’ve got to save something for my memoir.”

REPORTER:      “Well, surely you didn’t work through all of your childhood.  Didn’t you catch a break at some point?”

DALAI MAMA:   “Nope.  Because I was considered a “Ward of the Court”—no parents sane enough or alive enough to take care of me—I drifted in and out of a group of foster homes that always saw me as cash flow in their pockets and a maid and nanny in their homes.  I’d go for a preliminary visit with my very naive social worker all throughout my teenage years—usually a young lady about your age who had good intentions but had never seen the underbelly of Cleveland’s inner city.  The foster-mother and father would be all, ‘Welcome to our humble abode.  We’re such good Christians and Christ has led us to open our homes as a respite to these abandoned chilren—our home is your home, you po’ sweet motherless child.’  But as soon as the social worker would leave, the smiles would fade from the foster parents’ faces faster than a roach fleeing an airborne fly swatter, and they’d let the true boss-man or boss-lady emerge:  ‘Get your fat ass off my good plastic-covered furniture (I better not ever catch you in here again or your ass is grass).  You ain’t here for no vacation—you here to work and learn some responsibility.  Go on and get that mop and bucket and start cleaning the bathroom and moppin’ the kitchen flo’—and don’t take all day if you want to eat!  Fried chicken and biscuits is being made for my real chilren but you gets bologna sandwiches and milk if you scrubs these floors so spotless that I’ll be able to eat off ‘em.  If you don’t make this place spotless, you’ll be going to bed hungry—I promise yo’ sorry-ass that much.’  Newt Gingrich would have been very proud that his idea of child labor had been instituted in the ghetto before his time with such demoralizing success that it helped turn me into a productive citizen.”

I am discovering that everything I’ve done throughout the last 60 years were “jobs” to pay the bills or help me and mine survive the suffering of the outrageous slings and arrows of life’s misfortunes.  I’ve been a secretary too many times to count, a music school teacher, an actress, a singer, a voice-over talent, a maid (not a very good one), and a nanny (also not very good).   I am not ungrateful for those opportunities, it’s just that there is so much more to me, and had I been born a Kennedy instead of a poor black child, I probably would have fulfilled that potential.  Most people go through life only working at jobs—a small percentage pursue careers—but only a blessed handful of people become artists.  Ever since I could first dream, I always wanted to become an artist—to be consumed by art without any interference from having to leave my art and go “work for the man.”  Well, now is my chance.  I want to exit stage left (to die) as an artist.  I want the epitaph on my tombstone to read:  Here lies Eleanor Tomczyk.  She started working for the man when she was five years old and had to tarry in that field until she was sixty-five years old.  But when she died, she died an artist.

      “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist”—Louis Nizer

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Exit Stage Left

Do you know what I’ve discovered?    There are 7 major transitions in life, barring a religious conversion, barring any unforeseen mayhem such as war or the world coming to an end, or barring Jesus coming back sporting a T-shirt that says:  “Listen up everybody—I’m back and I’m majorly pissed!”  IMHO there is:

1. Birth
2. Marriage/divorce
3. Having children
4. Menopause/male mid-life crisis
5. Becoming empty nesters
6. Retirement
7. Death

I’ve completed the first five transitions, and I have two more weeks to go before I exit stage left and enter transition #6 from my job of 14 years that I really enjoy.   It has been interesting watching the reaction of my co-workers to my retirement announcement:

“Listen up, everybody, I’m blowin’ this Popsicle stand, and I’m going to become an entity!”

Each person starts with the same opening line: “Gosh, you’re so lucky, and I’m so jealous—I’ve always wanted to become an ‘entity.’  What exactly is an entity?”   They go on to ask:  “Are you excited?”  Then I watch their eyes widen and the inside voice of their thought-bubble say to their souls:  “I sure hope she knows what the fuck she’s doing, because she’ll never get another job like this. She can’t possibly have enough money to retire at such a young age; what in the hell will she do in the future—work at Wal-Mart?”  Their outside voice says:  “Anyway, you can always get a job somewhere if the writing thingie doesn’t work out.”  Their personal fear of the unknown is palpable.

To resist being pummeled by their fear, I remembered two things:

1. I’m younger looking than I really am (thank God, Black don’t crack!), so I don’t have as long on this Earth as they think.  In other words, time is of the essence.
2. Transitions—from birth to death—are only for the learning, not the be-all or end-all of the journey.  I know this because I’ve been through five other transitions—none of them was the destination—all of them were my personal journey of spiritual growth.

So I go to my happy place which is usually repeating the courageous lyrics of some well-worn spiritual (“Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel—then he will deliver poor-ass me”) or a country music tune (Donald Alan “Don” Schlitz, Jr’s “The Gambler,”), and I try to propel my spirit away from their anxious auras:

“You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,

Know when to walk away, know when to run.

 You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table,

 There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.”

But being asked the same question in the same manner, day after day, will start to wear down the nerves of Jesus, and before you know it, fear begins to seep in—other people’s fear.  Consequently, I started thinking about all the rejection notices I’ve already received for my manuscript, how the publishing industry is dying, how even if you get published your book will most likely languish on the shelves, how there is already a plethora of opinionated black women on the scene dispensing “Mother-Earth” advice to the culture (Oprah, Whoopi, Wendy, Iyanla), and the Supreme Court has ruled that we can only have four such black women like this flooding the airwaves with their opinions at any given time.  (Just kidding, trolls; save your hate mail!)  All these realities make me want to run back into the comforting arms of my employer and beg to be kept on until I’m 102 doing anything, even if my soul shriveled up in the process.  That would be safe; that would be predictable.

And when I am awash in the worries of others, I become a cast member in my own “Amazing Race” episode, and I start to dream.  Two nights ago I dreamt that WW (my husband) and I were stranded in the hinterlands of Alaska (if you knew me, you’d know that being stranded in Alaska would be my definition of Hell—especially if Sarah P. was anywhere within 100 miles of me).  We were told by some amorphous voice, which sounded suspiciously like Sarah Palin’s, that the only way to get to our next destination was to pilot our own plane out of there.  There was only one problem:  neither one of us had ever flown a plane before.  Also, the rules stated that we could not both fly in the same plane—each person had to pilot their own aircraft.   After much consternation, a retired old WWII pilot volunteered to help WW fly his plane since it was bigger and more complicated (a 12-seater that was won by a coin toss that could make it all the way to New York City).  I was given a 7-seater plane (all they had left) that could just make it to Seattle, but if I lived I could hop on a commercial flight to New York.  WW’s plane took off first and after a lot of spinning around on the tarmac like a dog chasing its tail, I managed to get my plane aloft.   I watched WW’s plane scale the high mountain in front of us, but no matter what I did, no matter how I maneuvered, no matter how much I cried and prayed, I couldn’t pull my plane up high enough to fly over the mountain.  To say I lost the nightmare game would be an understatement.*

Shaken, but not deterred, I went to work the next day determined to shake off the fear-fest that I kept running into.  After all, I knew that the remarks from my co-workers were made out of genuine concern for me as well as the thought of what they too would someday have to face.   All my “counselors” could hear the voices of their mothers and fathers decades ago saying to them as they went off to college:  “Pick something to study and an occupation that you can make money from, not something that tickles your fancy.  Tickling your fancy won’t pay the bills, young lady.”

But that night, I dreamt again.  This time it was about Death.  I had skipped retirement completely and was now headed to the great beyond—whether Heaven or Hell, I could not tell.

ME:                        Excuse me, please, where am I?

DEATH:                 For lack of a better word:  Purgatory.

ME:                        How can that be?  I’m not Catholic.  I don’t believe in Purgatory.  In my belief system, I go straight to the top.

DEATH:                 Seriously?  Did you ever think you might be wrong?

ME:                        Hell, no!  What’s the point in having a religion if you might be wrong?

DEATH:                 Oh, this is sweet!  This will be a good one for my blog titled, “Another one bites the dust and is surprised to find out she didn’t have all the correct answers”!

ME:                        You have a blog?  Does the whole damn world AND the underworld have bloggers?

DEATH:                 Does a bear shit in the woods?

ME:                        Fine, Mr. Smart-Ass!  Can you at least tell me what I’m doing here?    I had no warning, and I don’t even remember going through transition 6:  retirement.

DEATH:                 Warning?  Your entire life was a warning that I’d be dropping by at some point.  You knew transition #7 was coming—it waits for no man.  My orders were to pick up a mouthy, slightly chunky, blinged-out diva who was retiring in a couple of weeks, but whose time had come to an end.

ME:                        That’s the point.  My time didn’t come to an end.  I never got to retire.  I didn’t get my book published, and I didn’t become a humorous, joy-spewing, life-enforcing motivational speaker.  Look at all the millions of people I didn’t get to encourage in their life’s journey.  You interfered, you S.O.B!

DEATH:                 Hey, hey, hey—don’t blame me.   From what little I could see, you got all wrapped up in other people’s fears and “what ifs,” and you got frozen in place due to fear of the unknown and the naysayers. You thought you could take protected incremental steps rather than leaping with full abandonment into the great unknown to explore the rest of your pathetic little life.   You assumed you had more time than you did—big mistake—huge!

ME:                        You mean I should have exited the stage when first given the opportunity?

DEATH:                 Yep, stage left no less.

ME:                        Would I have reached my goals?

DEATH:                 How the fuck would I know?  My name’s Death, not God Almighty.  Speaking of which, you’re being summoned to give an account of your life.   Get that spirit moving, because its best not to keep the powers that be waiting.

I am discovering that I’ve always known when to “exit stage left” at any given point in life—most people do, but not everybody listens to that still small voice in their inner being.  And the couple times that I have ignored that instinct and overstayed my welcome, those times have been my most regrettable mistakes and time wasted that I’d love to take back again.  It takes a lot of courage to move on to the next level and walk into the unknown, but refusing to do so is not living—its treading water, and once you’re tired, the end result is that you drown.  All I know is that there is never enough time, never enough money, and never enough daylight to do everything we want to do.  But because I am fully aware that it is later than I could possibly imagine, I must take a giant leap into that wild abyss and explore what lies ahead.

Calvin and Hobbes||Cartoonist Bill Watterson

***

“Now ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin’

Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowin’ what to keep.

‘Cause ev’ry hand’s a winner and ev’ry hand’s a loser,

And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”

Songwriter:  Donald Alan “Don” Schlitz, Jr.

“There are two ways you can live: you can devote your life to staying in your comfort zone, or you can work on your freedom.” –Michael A. Singer

“It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death. No person or situation could ever teach you as much as death has to teach you. While someone could tell you that you are not your body, death shows you. While someone could remind you of the insignificance of the things that you cling to, death takes them all away in a second. While people can teach you that men and women of all races are equal and that there is no difference between the rich and the poor, death instantly makes us all the same.” — Michael A. Singer from The Untethered Soul

*The dream about the airplanes was an actual dream that happened a couple nights ago.  The discussions with Death were not—praise God!

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 

I See Them Trollin’—They Hatin’

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   A year ago if you would have asked me what a troll was, I would have told you it was a mythical being out of Norse mythology or one of those cute/ugly dolls that were a huge fad in the early 60s.

My Favorite: Blinged-out Troll||image from anythingtroll.trumblr.com

When other well-known authors, my kids, my husband WW, and my IT savvy friends helped me set up my blog and my first-time Facebook account (I had planned to live to 100 and never, ever engage in FB—I consider it such a waste of time), not one of my helpers breathed a word that I would draw the ire of “trolls” and that these entities would not be from fairy tales nor would they be cute little plastic dolls.  “You must enter the wide-wide-world of the Internet if you want to be successful as a writer,” they said—“Try it, it will be fun,” they said. 

Now that I am doing better than I ever thought possible with this blog venture and am riding on 93,000 plus blog hits with thunderous applause from my fan base, I am beginning to get my fair share of haters, and I have been informed that these cretins are called trolls.

http://beartoons.com ||(used by permission)

At first my “trolls” were “Christians” I had briefly known from a previous life (acquaintances, who when they contacted me via Facebook some 30 years after we’d first met, I couldn’t even remember who they were).   They had “friended” me on Facebook (probably to be nosy and see how life had treated me or kicked my ass in some divine retribution that they secretly hoped I deserved).  Upon finding out that even though I was chubbier than the time they had last seen me, I still “loved me some Jesus” but was “mad as hell” at the misrepresentation of the love of God by many of their right-wing heroes. I began to piss some people off when I used my humor to do a shout-out to anyone who would listen that I was a Christian, but not “one of those Christians.”   Wow, did the shit hit the fan, and the trolls started pouring in!

Bigley Cartoon||www.caglecartoons.com

“EXAMPLES” OF SOME OF MY TROLL COMMENTS ABOUT  MY BLOG

TROLL #1/MISSIONARY LADY:  “You are disgusting and need to burn in Hell.  What happened to you?  When I knew you on the mission field, you were such a lovely Colored lady who knew her place.  Now you’re crude and full of coarse humor and not worthy to speak our Lord’s name.  You’re leading all those naïve heathens astray.  You’re hanging around with liberals, befriending homosexuals, and voting for a Muslim terrorist for President.  I will pray for your soul because you sure could use it.”

• MY RESPONSE:  “WHO DIED AND MADE YOU GOD?  YOUR SORRY-ASS IS PERMANENTLY BLOCKED FROM MY FB PAGE.  AND . . . WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?”

TROLL #2/SARAH PALIN RELIGIOUS SYCOPHANT:  “How dare you question the wisdom of God’s anointed, Sarah Palin?  Do you know her?  We used to be roommates, and if you were truly my friend, you would agree with me that Sarah is the chosen one.”  (I checked around and discovered this troll had never met Sarah Palin.)  “Now I don’t mind your potty mouth like some others might.  But I expect better of you regarding one of God’s chosen.  This poor woman has taken such abuse from godless people like you.  God has called Sarah to lead our country out of the darkness.  She is a prophet, and you better beware of speaking against God’s anointed before he strikes you dead.”

• MY RESPONSE:  SAID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING—COMPLETELY IGNORED THE BITCH, BLOCKED PERSON FROM MY FB PAGE,  AND PERMENENTLY TURNED BLOG COMMENT MONITOR ON.  (I’d been wondering how to kick this relationship to the curb for years due to her increasingly right-wing leanings and the hurtful racist comments to me from her husband—so this was as good a time as ever.)

TROLL #3/MAD-AS-HELL-ROMNEY CAMPAIGNER:  “How dare you post congratulations on your Facebook page for a man who just stole the election?  You are much smarter than that!  Just because that Kenyan won, doesn’t mean your prayers were answered—it means the Devil tricked you, and all you and your liberal friends who want something for nothing.  You don’t even realize how much of a pathetic Christian you’ve become—you are the Devil’s spawn.  I can’t stop crying that such a good, quality man as Mitt Romney has lost to such a Communist that wasn’t even born in this country and neither can any of my true Christian friends who understand that our country is going to Hell in a hand basket.”

• MY RESPONSE:  “WTF? I didn’t post my meme on your Facebook page.  You were snooping around on mine!”  (I DELETED, BLOCKED SAID PERSON FROM FACEBOOK, AND WROTE A BLOG STORY ENTITLED:  “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU THINK!” (Writing is truly one of the best revenges!)

TROLL #4/BLOG FOLLOWER (SOMEONE I KNEW) WHO SUBMITTED A COMMENT TO MY BLOG LATE INTO THE NIGHT AFTER THE ELECTION RETURNS WERE ANNOUNCED IN PRESIDENT OBAMA’S FAVOR:  “Hi Y’all!”  (The “familiar troll” purposely addressed my audience and not me to stir up a response.) “Wasn’t tonight just over-the-top?  It is so special when we can all engage in the electoral process—it shows what a great and exceptional country we have.  Now, I must confess that I don’t quite agree with the results—no I really don’t.   I wanted to let you all know that I’m a Christian” (the familiar troll assumed no one else was a Christian or pro-life who read my blog) “and I didn’t vote for Barak Obama because I am anti-abortion and I believe that all those little babies deserve a chance to live which this president won’t give them.  He is also spending way too much money and has really bamboozled people who aren’t thinking clearly about our country’s future.”  (On this particular “familiar troll’s” FB page, the responders were all born-again, white, right-wing Evangelical women who were sobbing and damning all the liberal white women they didn’t personally know but who they assumed wanted their “free birth control” from Obamacare, which must have been the reason the election was stolen from Romney.  I purposely didn’t leave a comment on this person’s FB page so as not to be a disruptive troll.  I respected the posters’ right to have their own opinions—no matter how misguided—and I left them to mourn in peace.)  “I think if you’ll think about it and do some more research, you’ll find that we missed a true opportunity here to turn our great country around.  What do you think? Well, I’m just exhausted from all the excitement and need to turn in for the battle ahead.  Thanks for listening. Love ya!”

MY RESPONSE:  DELETED COMMENT IMMEDIATELY AND DID NOT LET ANY OF MY READERS SEE IT.   Sent an email to “said friend” who I am pretty sure is probably no longer my friend:  “Out of respect for you and our friendship, I just wanted to let you know that I deleted your comment on my blog.  I felt that you were baiting my readers.  I heard anger in the tenor of your comment and a desire to beat the shit out of the first liberal you could get your hands on with your southern boxing gloves since no liberal was venturing onto your FB page.  That’s not what Jesus would do, and I’m not going to let you do it.  This is a safe place for my readers and I want it to remain as such.”

“One rule of thumb is that trolls pretend to be sincerely interested in a topic at hand—that’s how they rope you in—but their real motive is to push your neural buttons and elicit some sort of reaction.  In other words, they want to make your brain every bit as angry and addled as their own.  Science has got some advice on this:  don’t let them.  Do not feed the trolls.”—Richard Schiffman, The Huffingtonpost.com

Cartoonist James Kim||image from uwire.com

TROLL #5/TEA-BAGGER STRANGER TO MY INAUGURATION BLOG:  “Eleanor, you are a horrid racist!  You hate white people, you’ve never known any white person which is why you hate us so bad, and although you write well (I’ll give you that), you spew hatred upon the white race and you want us destroyed.  You should be ashamed because you’re one of the reasons our country is headed for civil war.  Let me say this so that it gets through your thick skull:  You really hate white people like that racist Kenyan you worship!

MY RESPONSE:  (I talked to my white husband, and called all my white friends [in the interest of full-disclosure, I have more white friends than I do black friends due to the nature of where I live and work], and called my half-white children and asked them:  “Darlings, have I ever expressed hatred toward any other race, including the white race?”)  After picking themselves up from rolling on the floor with laughter, I SENT SAID TEA BAGGER TO SPAM AND NEVER LET HIS COMMENT SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY.  Although, in all honesty, I was strongly tempted to defend my honor (which is what this type of troll wants—they’re counting on you not being able to resist being falsely accused), but WW said:  “Do not reward negative behavior—ignoring the dishonest taunt will be the best revenge.  In other words:  Don’t feed the trolls!”

That is when I had an “aha” moment and realized that all Internet trolls are nothing more than the high school bullies of old.   The bullies want you to do what they want; think how they think, and submit to their control so that they can reign supreme, whether it is in the high school corridor, the church pew, or in the chat forums, the commentary sections of news articles, the message boards, or various blogs on the Internet.  Bullying never stops!  It really doesn’t get better after high school—sorry kids.  The attacked just have to learn how to fight back against the attackers by ignoring the trolls and not giving them an audience, and then learning the most effective way to banish them into oblivion (another name for troll hell).

image from Google Media

To be fair, I am discovering that, on the surface of things, one man’s troll can be another man’s hero.  When someone enters a rational and sane comment on an Internet forum about the sanity of strong background checks and limiting semi-automatic weapons as the beginning of an intelligent form of gun control, they are a standard bearer for all reasonable people—be they Democrats or Republicans.  But to a Tea Party conspiracy theorist, that person is the lowest form of troll pond-scum who is taking away their God-given rights.  If a fiscally conservative Republican enters a comment on a blog about the Sequester and gives a sound discourse on how to balance the budget with both spending cuts and additional revenue, to a moderate Republican and Democrat he or she is a smart thinking politician and a strong leader, but to Breitbart.com or FreedomWorks they are evil and must be destroyed.

But most trolls roam the Internet to demoralize and the validity of the subject rarely matters (it could be as delightful as loving cute furry animals or as mundane as one’s preference of jelly beans vs. cupcakes).  If a right-wing conspiracy theorist troll posts a missive on my blog about jelly beans being part of a Communist take-over, and that I and all my “half-breed jelly bean-eating children” should take my “fat ass back to Africa along with my Kenyan President and leave America to the real cupcake-eating Americans,” then what is driving the troll commentary is contempt for my existence and not the desire to show me a different side of a chewy intellectual argument.   So the problem is not the ability to challenge an argument with which we don’t agree.  The issue is motive:  What makes a troll a troll is anger and contempt (what the author Dallas Willard calls the twin scourges of the Earth).  The anger drives the contempt in us for our opponent and it is that very moment (in the dismissive desire to see one’s opponent harmed or eradicated) that the troll must not be fed and must be banned.

Image from sodahead.com

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“The way to work with a bully is to take the ball and go home. First time, every time.  When there’s no ball, there’s no game. Bullies hate that. So they’ll either behave so they can play with you or they’ll go bully someone else.”—Seth Godin

RECOMMENDED READING ABOUT DEALING WITH TROLLS:

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-schiffman/scientists-prove-that-int_b_2542663.html 
• http://uwire.com/2012/04/23/column-online-trolls-cannot-be-argued-with-rationally-dont-even-try/

(These are excellent articles about the subtle and not so subtle art of being trolled, and how to avoid being sucked into their vortex—be they former friends or new foes.)

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Infectious Coryza

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  If you don’t have a God, you sure as hell better get one!  Shit is hitting the fan and there is nowhere to run—nowhere to hide. I’m beginning to think maybe the world is coming to an end or it’s doing a damn good job of faking it.   Every day that we wake up there is something going on that is worse than the day before, and we never know when the chaos, murder, or mayhem (ranging from the smallest bacteria to the latest natural disaster) is going to strike our pathetic little lives.

Image from sodahead.com

My collision with the proverbial fan started a few days before Valentine’s Day.  I was taking a break from writing and decided to check on the children’s well-being (ages 30 and 28) via their Facebook pages (I rarely comment, but like any good mother, I spy).  The thirty year old was fine and seemed healthy enough, but Baby-girl’s posting about her encounter with the common cold almost made me hop a plane with a couple gallons of chicken soup and a tub of Vapor Rub:

“Sweeping declaration:  this is the worst cold I’ve ever had. 4 days out of 6 spent entirely in bed, sleepless nights, overwhelming guilt about what I’m missing, single-handedly employing the good people at Bite Squad to ship in truckloads of chicken soup—countless tissues and cough drops later and all I can think is….I freaking love my dog, she is the best, the sweetest, the cutest and refuses to leave my side no matter what. She is my buddy. ” [Used by permission]

Wednesday Addams—Guard Dog Sick Duty|Photo by CDT

Like any decent mother, I was on the phone doing my combo nagging/worrying Momma jig as I jokingly said:  “Child, you get sick more than anybody I know.  You must not be taking care of yourself.  I’m so glad I’m nowhere near you (sorry kid, nothing personal; I just can’t afford to get sick right now)—you sound so awful that I wouldn’t be surprised if that cold traveled thousands of miles through the cell towers and tried to zap me right off my non-sick feet.  Just for grins and giggles, I think I’ll sterilize the phone in case you have an infection that defies science.  Drink lots of fluids, get plenty of rest, take your vitamins and call me in the morning, cutie pie.  MUAH!”

It is as if the gods of chaos, mayhem, and destruction heard my glib reply to my daughter and sent one of their oracles from Baby-girl’s city to stand at the entrance of my town dispensing “Infectious Coryza” curses (the common cold) as if it were Oprah giving out cars to a handful of lucky winners, because I came down with the cold from Hell within 24 hours of the phone call with my sick kid.

Oprah “Give Aways”

It’s been six days!  Six days of my life being turned upside down by a common cold which, can I state for the record, is not “common” by any means?  This torture was tailor-made for me.  Six days of in-and-out fever, hacking, mucus—my God, the rivers of mucus—the aches, the pains, and a high-pitch ringing in my left ear that I am quickly lapsing into insanity over as I keep slapping my ear while turning in frantic circles like a dog chasing his tail to try and catch the sound or make it go back to the Hell from which it emerged.  If Lennon was right and “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” then “shit just happened” to me and I was definitely not making plans to encounter Infectious Coryza.  It destroyed my Valentine’s dinner with WW and turned it into a “Valentine’s Fail” because there ended up being no dessert that night (see “Epic Valentine Fails” http://howthehelldidienduphere.wordpress.com/).  Enough said!  I could hardly taste the delicious food and wine at my retirement dinner nor could I shake the concern that I might be killing off some very lovely people with my infection from Hell at the dinner party.   I’ve been in a complete fog at work (how much did I actually get done?), and I haven’t been able to write anything coherent for days which caused me to miss my blog deadline.  It hurt to even read so I dropped off the grid, and in just six days (not counting the mayhem, murder, and chaos in the Middle East and Africa that is always happening) I discovered that shit hit the fan in so many bizarre situations causing innocent lives to implode:

• An LAPD cop (Christopher Dorner) lost his mind and went on a killing rampage because he had been wronged on his job (who hasn’t been wronged on a job, and when did this become a license to kill?)
• The South African Olympian Blade Runner (Pistorius) allegedly shot and killed his girlfriend in a jealous rage (Yikes!)
•  A sorry-ass excuse of a man (Joe Rickey Hundley) flying on a Delta flight allegedly slapped a toddler (not his own—not that that would make any difference) across his face and left a scar, just because the baby was crying from an earache due to pressure from the plane landing, and to add insult to injury, Mr. Hundley allegedly called the baby the “N-word” (Huh?).
• A 10-ton meteor traveling at 40,000 mph exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk hurting over 1,000 people and exploding copious windows for miles around. It didn’t even land; can you imagine the damage if it had hit the Earth? (Did you know this happens all the time in Russia?  It just usually happens over Siberia where few people live.  The meteor that exploded near the Tunguska River in 1908 leveled 80 million trees and had this happened over a large metropolis, the meteor would have obliterated the entire city and its inhabitants—Holy Mary, Mother of God!)
• Fellowes killed off Matt Crawley on Downton Abbey (seriously, Fellowes, don’t I have enough stress?)
• A cruise ship (Carnival Triumph) left port on a 4-day cruise and got stranded at sea with only a couple of working toilets and 4,000 plus people, no air conditioning, not enough food, limited alcohol, and sewage back-up.  (Do I hear a mash-up of the Gilligan’s Island and the Love Boat theme songs making its way to YouTube?)

When I finally checked Dalai Mama’s Twitter account after six days of being knocked out by a common cold, sure enough my fans had a lot to say about bad things happening to good people citing the news articles I’d just gotten caught up on.  But the most delightful tweets were the Twitter feed from a couple of my fans on Carnival Triumph who sent me very creative reasons to never cruise again.

Cartoon by Chan Lowe|image from South Florida Sun Sentinel

“Shit Happens”/a tribute to the Carnival Triumph Mishap

Sung to the tune of “Love Boat by Paul Williams and Charles Fox

(My humble apologies to P. Williams and C. Fox)

CRUIS-ING—exciting and new!

Went onboard—sought a fantasy come true.

The TRI-UMPH—was a horror at best.

Shit seeping through the walls; shit flowing in the halls.

THE TRIUMPH—it won’t be making another run

THE TRIUMPH—just was too shitty for anyone.

Paid for steak, wine, and vodka

Got onions and mayonnaise.

And cruising—one of life’s great rewards

We’re so sick at sea—we just may swim to shore

It’s HEELLL!

 Welcome aboard!

SHIT HEEE-LL-LL!

There were 96 other verses on Dalai Mama’s Tweeter feed of “Shit Happens” (my readers obviously had a lot of time on their hands) but you get the point.  Dalai Mama’s readers paid for an expensive cruise and were expecting luxury, instead, “shit happened”—literally, and they got to cruise on a floating giant toilet with no air conditioning, no alcohol to numb their sorrows, and no gourmet food to assuage their pain.  In other words, they went in search of Heaven and landed in Hell.  C’est la vie. 

Cartoon by Simeon Liebman|image from London Times

I am discovering that no one ever wakes up in the morning and says, “today I’ll die in a Holocaust, get stranded at sea, or get shot by a madman.”  I am also discovering that bad things really do happen to good people, and we have little or no control over them when they do.  It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, male or female, black or white, religious or non-religious.   (Although, I’m getting a little sick and tired of never knowing when the sky is going to fall or when I’m going to get hit by the common cold or WWIII.)  I’ve got so many questions to ask God in order to try and make some sense of all of the chaos in world history.

I watched Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (a story about Polish-Jewish musician Władysław Szpilman, whose family was exterminated by the Nazis and who, himself, barely survived the occupation of Poland) while I was sick.  I was speechless through most of it. Why? Why? Why?  What was the point of all that hellish suffering?  And even though I get that we have no control over natural disasters (especially meteors), why should a two-year old adopted baby flying with his mommy have to learn so early in life that a stranger can cross the line, hate him, call him derogatory names, and hit and hurt him when he’s already in pain from an earache that he can’t control?  Why should a disgruntled cop be allowed to obliterate the hopes and dreams of people who had nothing to do with his grievances?  Why should the friends and families of all the gunshot victims we’ve been mourning from Sandy Hook to Chicago be battling anything today except possibly trying not to catch the common cold?  Years ago when I was stupid and self-righteous, I would have had pat answers to these questions.  Nowadays, since I’m entering my twilight years, the only thing I know for sure is that my response to suffering seems to mean so much more to my character, in the long run, than my ability to control every aspect of my life.  No one likes to suffer—least of all me.  But maybe Richard Bach has a point when he says:  “The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.”

“The person I choose to be from the suffering that is thrust upon me”|photo by “WW” Tomczyk

“In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

 “No man is broken because bad things happen to him. He’s broken because he doesn’t keep going after those (bad) [parenthesis mine] things happen.”― Courtney Milan, Unraveled

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.”― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:
- I shall not fear anyone on Earth.
- I shall fear only God.
- I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.
- I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.
- I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.” 
―    Mahatma Gandhi

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

Epic Valentine Fails

Do you know what I’ve discovered?    When I die and sail off into the great unknown, the first thing I’m going to do is look up Eve (of Adam and Eve fame) and kick her ass because of the “curse” and the gross birthing method women got saddled with.  I mean what woman has ever truthfully thought that that monthly plague we get was worth its hassle, or what woman wouldn’t exchange the excruciating pain of childbirth for the power men seem to have been endowed with from Jump Street.  In a fair world we should have been able to switch roles halfway through our lifetimes—kind of like musical chairs.  Maybe it would have been negotiable.  Who knows?  But we never got a chance to find out.  All that chick Eve  had to do was follow the game plan; but nooooooo, she was all:

EVE:       “Eat the apple Adam.  If you do we’ll be like God and we’ll know everything.  What’s the worst that can happen to us, Adam?” 

The second person whose ass I’m going to whup is Esther Howland, the mother of the American Valentine card.  The fluke thing that made Esther rich in 1840 was the spawn of all that is evil about Valentine’s Day in 2013.   It was just our luck that Esther was the daughter of a stationery store owner and she once got a frilly lace-embossed valentine card from Victorian England.  She was all:

ESTHER:  “Faaathaw, is not this lace-infused, linen-embossed, over-the-top valentine’s card simply marvelous?  What say you loan me some of your stationery goods and I’ll make every American woman lust after this manifestation of “true love” forever and forever.  My Valentine cards will be a tribute to the purest form of love and the start of a Valentine revolution!”

That was then:  1840

And this is what we’ve descended into now . . . 2013

valentine-teddy-gift-timesunion-dot-com

So 173 years later, lovers (men especially) must turn into consummate event planners for one day, lovers must become psychics who can accurately guess every whim of their beloved, and checking accounts must be depleted and drained to feed the restaurant, flower, candy, and hotel industries (worth about 18 billion
dollars) once Cupid’s arrow strikes its target.  The Valentine fails are legendary (I’ve had a few of my own).  Nothing ever turns out like we’ve planned:  a few Valentine scenarios will be better than anticipated but most will be worse, because shit always happens when you least expect it, because we’re humans.  The industry manipulations are too entrenched to throw them all overboard and start from scratch but guidance is definitely
needed.  I’m old and I know shit, so over the weekend I set up a “Dalai Mama Epic Valentine Fails website” to take questions from the Valentine road-kill in need of a word or two of wisdom about avoiding epic Valentine Day fails.

 Valentine’s Day Card for the Clueless

VALENTINE NOVICE #1: “Dalai Mama, I’ve met a girl I really like.  I’ve never done the whole Valentine production before but I thought, since this girl is so special, I’d rent a limo, take her to a great restaurant, and see where the night ends—if you know what I mean.  But there’s a problem, even though I started looking for restaurant reservations two weeks ago, everything from Manny’s Steak House to White Castle is booked, and no limo company within 200 miles will book me a reservation for under $200 an hour.  Also, did I mention that I just got my first job and I don’t have much money?  Can you help me or am I headed into an epic Valentine fail?”  Signed, Young and in love in Minnesota

DALAI MAMA:  “Of course I ‘know what you mean,’ Val Novice #1—I’m old but I’m not dead!   Yes, you are headed for an epic fail.  Only amateurs go to restaurants on Valentine’s Day.  An average dinner that would normally cost $70 will be sold to you for $150, and the food will be mediocre at best (a restaurant that normally serves a modestly priced fish dish will suddenly only serve high-end steaks or overpriced pasta with lobster and a mediocre red sauce that tastes suspiciously like canned marinara).  All the tables will be pushed together and maximum seating capacity completely ignored so that the restaurant can make up for its January slump, and every word you utter will be heard and judged by the elbow-bumping couples to your left, right, front, and rear. Not to mention that the noise from all the chatter will be cacophonous, and the agitated wait staff will serve you in such a hurried manner that you’ll complete your entire romantic meal in just under 55 minutes so that the 20 other couples can be rushed in to take your place and experience their wind-whipped Valentine dining experience.”

Dalai Mama’s Suggestion

Turn your living space into a restaurant and cook for your cutie (clean your apartment first—especially the toilet).  If you can’t cook, arrange for the local grocery store to prepare the meal, pick it up at the appropriate time and follow nuking instructions (throw away the grocery store bags to maintain the illusion).  Candles, romantic music, dim lighting, no old sock smells, and easy-going and funny conversation will go a long way to your final goal—if you know what I mean.  All women love a man with a sense of humor.  But if you’re humorless, well, I don’t know what to tell you—I can’t help you there.  P.S. If you really want to do the whole limo scenario, have one of your buddies put on a black suit and cap, and pick your girl up with you in the back seat carrying one rose.  (If you can’t afford a dozen roses during the hyped Valentine season, approximately $150-$200, one rose is always better than nothing.)

“Valentine lingerie”|image from toilette-humor.com

VALENTINE NOVICE #2:  “Dalai Mama:  I’ve been married to my wife for thirty-eight years.   Romance has never been our thing, but we almost got divorced out of shear boredom last year.  So I started taking the little blue pill, and I was thinking maybe it was time to spice things up a little bit this Valentine’s Day—if you know what I mean.   I was hoping to purchase my wife some sexy lingerie from one of the catalogues that recently came to the house, but it is hard to tell what she’d like.  I thought I’d better get some advice from a woman who is of similar age to my wife which is why I’m writing.  Oh, I forgot to mention that the wife is not the size she was when we first married.  What do you think:  am I headed for an epic Valentine fail?”  Signed: Looking to get a rise in Pennsylvania

DALAI MAMA:   “Dear Val Novice #2:  If you do this, I promise you that your wife will hate you forever.  Since when did you become an expert in women’s sizes?   You say she’s put on a few pounds?  This is an epic Valentine fail waiting to happen.  No man should ever buy woman lingerie, ever—no matter what her size!  That catalogue you received is a “sucker’s catalogue” trying to get you to waste your money on a multi-million dollar Victoria Secret’s industry.  They will sell you anything, including thong underwear that doesn’t even look that good on the heroine-chic model sporting it.  I bet you that it’s edible, right?  (Can I let you in on a little secret?  That shit sounds better than it really is.  Trust me!)  If the lingerie is too big, your wife will think you think she’s huge and it will make her sad (and you won’t be getting’ nothin’ that night), if it is too small, she’ll think you’ve been watching porn and she will kill you.  (And why does everyone keep asking me if “I know what they mean”—I’m not a sexless idiot!)  What if we switched the idea to another ass?  What if your wife bought your chubby little droopy ass some sexy underwear she saw on David Beckham in an underwear ad?  How would you respond?  (Never mind, don’t answer that; men are generally clueless when it comes to how they look in inappropriate underwear.)”

Image from cartoonstock.com

Dalai Mama’s Suggestion

Don’t do it—don’t ever do it.  Give your wife a gift card and let her buy what she thinks is sexy.  Besides, now that you’re taking the little blue pill, methinks she could be wearing a burlap sack and you’d still be dancing around the house singing, “Let’s get it on!”  Good luck!

Source:  remember-neverlosehope.com

VALENTINE NOVICE #3:  “Dalai Mama, I HATE VALENTINE’S DAY!   I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!  I can’t believe you’ve made my pain even worse by doing an entire blog about Valentine’s Day.  This ersatz “holiday” cuts through me like a knife.  (Did I mention that I hate it?)  Nothing makes me feel like such a loser than everybody showing off at the office by getting flowers from their boyfriends and husbands.  For the past five years or so I’ve been sending myself flowers just so I won’t feel like such a dork, but this year I’m not even going to bother.  I am what I am—alone, and I’ll die alone.  Most of my friends are engaged or married and the only guys I know are gay.  (Did I mention that I hate you for reminding me that I’m alone?)  Signed: 3^rd Wheel in Toronto

Dear Val Novice #3:  “Are you through feeling sorry for yourself?  ‘Cause the Dalai Mama don’t play that shit.  Life is what you make it and if it gives you lemons then you go out and make goddamn lemonade.  Dalai Mama didn’t marry her man until she was in her thirties, and “White and wonderful” (WW) was worth the wait.  In fact, had I married any one of the jerks I met before WW, I shudder to think what my life would be like today.  Have you seen Valentine’s Day by Gary Marshall?  It’s an awful movie, but the scene worth watching and emulating is the “I hate Valentine’s Day” scene where all the unattached girls meet for dinner with a piñata heart and beat the shit out of it with a baseball bat as they recount their horrid past relationships.  Excellent therapy!  So grab your single friends—guys, gals, straight, gay, divorced, widowed—and get all dressed up, and cook a great dinner for each other and then pulverize your own version of a piñata heart.  And then declare your urban family love for each other—being there to watch each other’s back no matter what is needed.  I guarantee you that Valentine’s Day will work for you and not against you.  P.S.  It helps if everybody gets a little bit drunk!

Jessica Biel in “Valentine’s Day”|Warner Bros. Pictures

I am discovering that we are all the victims of the money-grubbing Valentine industry.  Our minds have also been poisoned by storytellers like Nicholas Sparks and Hollywood’s formulaic romantic comedies (boy sees girl, girl sees boy, both fall madly in love, both fall out of love, both run languidly through the wheat field/airport/city
street/along the beach declaring their undying love in the last five minutes of the movie and live happily ever after.  Life is just not like that.  Relationships are up and down, in and out.  Romance is real but is only meant to be a beckoning call to attract each other and sexually connect us.  Once that has happened, then the real work
begins—the “growing in love” part.

The romantic love we feel toward the opposite sex is probably one extra help from God to bring you together, but that’s it. All the rest of it, the true love, is the test.”—Joan Chen

The sooner we untangle ourselves from the commercialism of Valentine’s Day and search for what makes us happy as individuals and what makes those who love us happy, the better off we’ll be as people and lovers.  Trust me—it has nothing to do with money and over-the-top treacle romance.  It has more to do with the “c” word:  commitment.

My parents circulate the room hand in hand . . . Soul mates. They really call themselves that, which makes sense, because I guess they are . . . They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish—expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other’s spaces liquidly.  Making it look easy, the soul-mate thing.  People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.”—by Gillian Flynn from Gone Girl

 “True love doesn’t happen right away; it’s an ever-growing process. It develops after you’ve gone through many ups and downs, when you’ve suffered together, cried together, laughed together.”—Ricardo Montalban

  “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”—Lao Tzu

 “I don’t understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine’s Day.  When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon.” —Author Unknown

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

All Bets Are Off

Do not read if you have not seen Season 3, Episode 4 of Downton Abbey.  Also, do not read if you are pregnant with your first child and are already scared shitless about the whole birthing process (I know, girlfriend!—what WAS God thinking?)

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   Even when one tries to get away from the chaos and meanness of everyday life and wants to submerge one’s brain in the soapiest of soap opera fantasies with a bottle of wine and a bucket of chicken wings, pooh-pooh always occurs and snatches one’s mind right back to reality and the horrors of the past!   So says one.

Downton Abbey Cast 2013/Carnival Film & Television Limited 2012 for MASTERPIECE/PBS

Having coerced my husband to watch the “can’t miss TV Episode 4” of Downton Abbey in exchange for two episodes of Homeland and some hot wings, WW (“White and Wonderful”) promptly fell asleep leaving me riveted to the 52-inch screen in his man cave contemplating what it would be like to have been born white, rich, and British with a to-die-for wardrobe, mountains of bling, and tons of servants.   As soon as Lady Sybil (the youngest daughter) took to her bed in the final weeks of her pregnancy, with swollen ankles, high blood pressure, high fever, and random crazy talk, I started beating WW’s leg with a chicken bone to wake him up to witness what I knew was the inevitable:  Lady Sybil was going to bite the dust with something that had almost killed me 28 years ago—preeclampsia (what used to be called “toxemia of pregnancy”).  Having the baby is the only cure for preeclampsia and sometimes that doesn’t even help.

ME:        Wake up, WW!  Wake up!  That damn writer, Julian Fellowes, is going to kill off Lady Sybil—I can feel it in my bones.  I know these symptoms.  I swear to God if he kills Lady Sybil off, I’ll have to get on a plane and fly to the UK tonight—tonight I tell you—to open up a can of whup-ass on his chubby little British butt.

WW:     Huh?  No, no, no, no, no.  You’re getting all bent out of shape about nothing.  You’re watching this so that you can relax, remember?  Fellowes knows he has you women wrapped around his finger.  The writer is just messing with you.  Look, the baby has arrived.  It came through with flying colors and all is well.  In the meantime, stop beating my knee with that damn chicken bone.

ME:        It’s all a ruse!   I had this sickness when I was in the final stages of my pregnancy almost 30 years ago.  Don’t you remember?  I almost died, and I had modern medicine and antibiotics.    Lady Sybil doesn’t have a chance.  I’m telling you:  a tragedy is unfolding in my favorite happy place!  Rich white people are going to suffer and I can’t handle it.  Nothing is supposed to mess with their world—they’ve got it all.  In fact, when I finally come face-to-face with God, I’m going to ask him why the hell he didn’t make me white, rich, and a man.  So I don’t want to hear about death and mayhem messing with my “upstairs” Downton peeps.

Joss Barratt photo|Lady Sybil and Tom Branson|Downton Abbey

Sure enough, when everyone at Downton Abbey (both upstairs and downstairs) was doing the delirious “Hallelujah-glory-dance” over the birth of the first Downton Abbey offspring from one of the Crawley girls, Lady Sybil suddenly went into a seizure and died from:  dun, dun, dun. . . “eclampsia” while two doctors (one of them, an arrogant asshole) looked on helplessly.  As Tom, the husband, and Cora, the mother, flung themselves on Lady Sybil’s body and pled, “Please don’t leave us, please,” I broke down into inconsolable sobs while flinging chicken bones at WW for falling asleep in yet another eclampsia episode.  (Oh, oh, you wonder, is this foreshadowing?  Can it possibly be true that WW, “White and Wonderful,” slipped from his god-like pedestal and royally blew it by falling asleep in his wife’s hour of need—say it isn’t so?!)

Cartoon by Dave Coverly|speedbump.com

In defense of WW, my eclampsia crisis happened a long time ago in a far, far away land—the land of Jesus’ birth.  We lived in a border town that connected to Lebanon and eventually Syria where WW’s job provided the occasional stress of having his bullet proof-jacketed-ass shot at while going to and from work, the periodic necessity of shuffling his family into a bomb shelter while Katyusha rockets reigned down from the north (Lebanon), the medical requirement of driving his bed-ridden pregnant wife back and forth to a doctor who was two hours from our home, and the fatherly duties of taking care of our newly adopted older daughter, while doing all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning.  This was not how we had planned our lives would transpire.

When we first moved to the land of the Messiah with our two-month old adopted daughter, it was assumed that I could not get pregnant.  Well . . . more like I could get pregnant, but I couldn’t stay pregnant.  WW and I had made peace with being dealt our infertility hand, and figured there were worse things in life.  Besides, by the time all was said and done, I was way too old to start popping out babies.  But as is common to most, as soon as we stopped “trying,” we got the news:

ISRAELI DOC:      Congratulations, Bubbe (translation:  grandmother in Yiddish)!  You’re carrying the gift of life.

ME:        Say what? No, no, no, no, no . . . I came to see you because I’ve had the stomach flu for three months, and I can’t stop throwing up.  What kind of joke is this?  Something is definitely being lost in translation between us, because I can’t get pregnant:  אני לא יכול להיכנס להריון!  (Mumbling to myself)  Although, come to think of it, I was contemplating suing Jane Fonda because her exercises sure don’t seem to be working—my tummy is blowing up like a balloon. 

ISRAELI DOC:      What is that to me?  You’re in the land of miracles.  If your Jewish Messiah could be born here from a virgin Jewish mother, then you, Bubbe, can get pregnant.  Mazel tov!

Cartoon by Jeff Swenson|swensonfunnies.com

I thought being bed-ridden for six months (because I almost lost the “miracle baby”) was hard enough, but nothing could have prepared me for the preeclampsia manifestations.  By the eighth month my ankles were the size of elephants, my body looked like a chocolate Goodyear blimp waiting to take flight, and when I walked into my Israeli doctor’s office in Haifa for my penultimate pre-natal appointment, I had a fever of 103 and high blood pressure of 260 over 110—stroke level.  (Oh, did I forget to tell you that I lost my mind and turned into a crazy woman?)

ISRAELI DOC:      I’m worried about you, Bubbe.  You have all the symptoms of toxemia.  I can’t risk you going back home via a mountainous two-hour drive.  I want to check you into a hospital.

ME:        Hell, no, Doc!  I’ve got to get back to my 20-month old.  I’m pretty sure her baby-sitter is a serial killer or at least wanted by the Mossad.  But she was the only person available who speaks English who could watch the baby.

ISRAELI DOC:      You don’t have a choice in this.  Besides, I’m sending you to one of the best hospitals in the country—it’s a Kupat Holim hospital on Mt. Carmel.  You’ll get the best of care.  The midwives are waiting for you.

ME:        Read my lips, Doc, I’M NOT GOING!  I have to get back to my baby.  I don’t know this baby inside of me (maybe he’s someone I’ll like—maybe he’s not—only time will tell), but I do know the one that is at home, and I’m telling you that psycho-chick is her babysitter.  I don’t know why I let WW talk me into letting her sit for my baby, but she’s his secretary, and he insisted I couldn’t miss this doctor’s appointment because I was all feverish and shit.  But you need to know, the secretary-bitch has a legion of demons running around in her and eyes like Rosemary’s Baby.  Besides, I’ve heard about that hospital you want me to go to and I ain’t havin’ it, Doc.  It’s on Mt. Carmel where Elijah fought the gods of Ba’al and won, BUT not until Jezebel almost fricasseed his ass.   I know the Talmud—you can’t fool me.  That hospital is sitting on some pretty funky ground.  Who knows what might come up through the basement and possess my baby?

ISRAELI DOC:      First of all, Bubbe, how do you know your baby is a boy?  You wouldn’t let me use my new magic machine from America called the “ultrasound.”  I’ve got the only one in town.

ME:        Cause I don’t know what that thing is!   They didn’t have those when I left America.   For all I know that radiation thingie will turn my baby into a Conehead from the planet Remulak, and it will be entirely your fault.  Besides, all my Jewish neighbor-friends assured me I was going to have a boy by the shape of my belly.  We don’t even have a girl’s name.  Anyway, I had a dream from God and he told me to name him Brian Eden.  If this baby doesn’t come out sporting a penis to claim the name of Brian Eden, then it will go through life nameless.

Ultrasound| fins cartoon by Mark Elden fins.voot.com.au

Yeah, I was shit-faced delirious and in full-blown preeclampsia.  After fighting for 45 minutes with my very patient and wise doctor, he and WW tricked me into going to the hospital for a urine test which they both adamantly assured me wasn’t situated on the part were the “Ba’al gods” used to roam.  They promised I could go home and rescue my older daughter from Satan’s helper once the test confirmed that I didn’t have elevated protein levels in my urine (a sure sign of preeclampsia).*

My saint of a doctor conspired with the hospital to detain me and perform an ultrasound test while WW had everyone he knew from the States call me and try to pull me back from the brink of insanity.  At 10:00 p.m. I started down the road of 20 hours of the most excruciatingly induced labor I have ever heard of in my life (I will never let my youngest child live this down—ever!)  It felt like a watermelon was trying to ram through a vagina hole the size of a pea.  At the 21^st hour WW fell asleep for a few minutes and woke up to the screaming of a banshee:  “ARE YOU FUCKIN’ KIDDING ME—YOU’RE ASLEEP?”  At the 22^nd hour, midwives stepped aside and let my Israeli doctor perform a C-section, and Baby-girl (“CDT”) was born.

When I awoke some time later, I asked WW all the questions you might think:  was our baby okay, did it have all its fingers and toes, and was “Brian Eden” a lovely chocolate-brown?  WW looked at me and slowly said the doctor had assured him our baby was fine, but WW was convinced that the nurse had given him the wrong baby to hold and promptly told her so:  “This is not my baby—you made a mistake.  First of all, it is a girl (we don’t have a girl’s name picked out), she is completely white with grayish-green eyes (obviously, she’s supposed to be brown), her head is in the shape of a cone, and her face is a canvas of bruises from trying to push through the birth canal.  I gave the baby back to the nurses and told them to look for a mocha-chocolate boy.”

Before I could even begin to process WW’s information, I lapsed into eclampsia (name of malady after the baby is born), and began a week-long struggle with high fevers as I muttered:  it’s a “girl,” she has a cone head from the ultrasound, and she doesn’t have a name—oy!”  Anti-seizure meds were fed to me like water, and at one point, the nurses pushed my bed into a storage closet to get some sleep and escape the chaos of my “semi-private” room of 12 new mothers and their extended families in a hospital that seemed to have 24/7 visiting hours and rockin’ out birth parties.

The fever would break on the 7^th day and I would take my beautiful “ginger baby” (as the Arab women in the hospital called her) home to meet her big sister (“KLT”).  My beautiful baby-girl would no longer have a cone head and bruises, but her older sister (having been promised a little brother who would be her playmate), after two months of listening to crying, eating, burping, farting, and watching Baby-girl sleep would summarily announce:  “You know that baby you got at hospital?  Take back—it broke!”

Not our baby but sure looks like “CDT” when she was born—only her head was pointier and her face was so bruised it looked like she had been cage fighting

I am discovering that all bets are off when it comes to filling in the blank space between birth and death, if you survive the birth.  I don’t care how rich you are—whether to the manor born like Downton Abbey or born in the projects of Cleveland like me—few things in life will follow our best laid plans.   At the time of Lady Sybil’s death, 37 million had died in WWI and 27 million were severely wounded—no young men were still alive for the women to “court” according to Lady Edith, Sybil’s middle sister.   Until WWI, tragedy was not a Crawley relative.  If we’re lucky as humans, a couple aspects of life will turn out better than we expect, but most of life will be much harder than we could have ever imagined.  It takes great courage to live life.  It is easy to be born and it doesn’t take that much effort to die.  It is the stuff in between that takes everything we’ve got.

******

“Don’t tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won’t respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, ‘Melissa you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep’.”—Joan Rivers

“Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth – look at the dying man’s struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.”—Soren Kierkegaard

“When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.”—George Carlin

“One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”—Maya Angelou

***

* “Nobody knows what caused preeclampsia in the early 1920s or causes it now. It appears to be an out-of-control state of inflammation.”—David Brown (“Lady Sybil’s shocking death. Did it have to happen?”) Health and Science/The Washington Post.  My story was presented tongue-in-check but preeclampsia is no laughing matter.  I almost died and women still die from it today.  Even though I told first-time mothers (the most likely candidates for this condition) not to read this blog, if you disobeyed me  and read it anyway, and you start to display any of the symptoms suffered by Lady Sybil and me, run don’t walk, to your doctor’s office because preeclampsia is serious shit. 

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eleanor Tomczyk and “How the Hell Did I End Up Here?” with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.