Skyfall (No Spoilers; I Promise)

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   Some of my fellow citizens (way too many) almost lost their freakin’ minds over the recent presidential election.  (I never thought I’d live to see the day that a black man could have so much power he’d be considered both the Anti-Christ as well as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world—twice over).  Both sides (liberal and conservative) were guilty of being obnoxious in their over-the-top verbiage surrounding said black man’s re-election, but some (not all, thank God) of the extreme right wing arm of the conservative party seemed to win the prize for out-and-out nastiness and racism.

The Internet was aflame with accusations from the Right that people who voted for President Obama were “pimps, whores, and welfare brats” (thanks, has-been rocker, Ted Nugent), some threatened to secede from the nation while guaranteeing that the rest of us were going to Hell on slip-and-slides ordered up by “freeloading ni@%ers, sluts, and fa%@ots” (thanks crazy-ass Texas), and one Christian ex-SNL comedienne tweeted:  “I can’t stop crying. America died . . . Thanks a lot Christians for not showing up. You disgust me” (Birther, pro-life advocate Victoria Jackson).  Yikes!

And that was the “mild vitriol.”  There were companies who fired employees for voting for President Obama, southern college campuses that burned our President’s body in effigy as they hurled racial epithets, and misguided souls who took to Facebook to call for President Obama’s assassination, convinced that our country will implode under his leadership.  I’ve got to confess that as an African-American, Independent, Born-Again Christian, pro-choice and pro-life (yeah you read that correctly; there are more of us than people realize), intelligent female, tax-paying citizen, I seriously thought about becoming an ex-pat in Canada because this racist shit had gotten so bad, but my husband (who is white) refused to move.

After kicking a particular snarky hater off my Facebook page into FB-Blocker Hell (really Biotch, I don’t even remember who you are—wouldn’t recognize you if I passed you on the street—and you try and hate on me on my own FB page—seriously?), my husband (WW) said he wouldn’t move to Canada but he wouldn’t mind wallowing in a little escapism for a day to wipe away all the political vomit out of his psyche.  I chose a marathon viewing (second time around) of the first two seasons of Downton Abbey, but WW said:  “Shoot me now!  If I have to sit through that damn chick’s flick soap opera again I’ll definitely move to Canada—but without you!  Take me to see the opening of the new James Bond movie, Skyfall, if you want to save our marriage.“

Produced by Eon Productions and distributed by MGM and Sony Pictures Entertainment

I started to protest but then WW reminded me that I made him sit through last week’s episode of Glee does Grease the Second Time with me in which he broke out in hives at the end of the show and needed three gin and tonics to get over his mind-numbing boredom.  So at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning (having had no breakfast because my husband thought we wouldn’t get a seat), armed with a huge bag of popcorn and no liquids (the movie is 2 ½ hours and I have the bladder the size of a pea), WW and I settled into the middle section of a packed IMAX theater and were immediately transported.

Even I will admit it—it’s  the best Bond movie ever!  The action is non-stop, the story doesn’t have any holes in it, and up until Sam Mendes’ Skyfall (wait until you find out the meaning of the title) I always thought Sean Connery was my favorite Bond.  Move over Sean because Daniel Craig has stolen my heart!  Up until Skyfall, I thought Dr. Julius No was my favorite villain, but Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva makes Hannibal Lector look like child’s play—you will pee your pants (I certainly would have if I had had any liquids in me)!

Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva in Skyfall|Produced by Eon Productions and distributed by MGM and Sony Pictures Entertainment

Dame Judi Dench as “M” is the character I would have most liked to play if they had asked me (well, actually I would have liked to have been a Bond girl but, hey, reality is a bitch!), and she is AWESOME!  I agree with the critic, Donald Shanahan from the Chicago Examiner, that “the last five minutes of the movie is the best five minutes of any movie you’ll see this year,” and I love the life lessons he cites in his review, although our conclusions about those lessons are slightly different:

LESSON #1:  A moving target is hardest to hit (I for one don’t plan to slow down enough for the haters in life to hit me with their slime—what doesn’t stick to me can’t hurt me.)

LESSON #2:  Losing a step (None of us has the entire picture of who God is or what he is about, so all of us miss a step or two trying to make our way through life, and the older we get the more we realize that we don’t know as much as we thought we did.)

LESSON #3:  Think on your sins (Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.)

http://www.examiner.com/review/movie-review-skyfall-cements-the-brilliant-new-direction-of-james-bond

Dame Judi Dench as “M” | Produced by Eon Productions and distributed by MGM and Sony Pictures Entertainment

And then there is the theme song co-written by Adele.  That baby tears this song up!  It’s new, it has flavors of earlier Bond themes, and it grabs your heart.  Ms. Adele will definitely win a Grammy for this.

Let the sky fall

When it crumbles

We will stand tall

Face it all together

Oh yeah . . . all in all, WW and I agreed that this movie experience was better than church!  We felt re-born and revitalized!  We returned home free of all the political nastiness, partisan crappiness, and religious self-righteousness that had washed over us during the election cycle.   We shook off all the Ted Nugent quips, Victoria Jackson hissy-fits, and Internet trolling racist barbs of the world, and we are going to treat others like we want to be treated and keep on rollin’.   (We also stopped reading any comments from trolling haters.)  I, for one, think the next four years are going to be fabulous!  How about you?

Theme song banner|image from bestmoviesevernews.com

I am discovering that I actually learned a great deal from Skyfall and I’m glad I saw it.  We (Americans) have an enemy but it is not each other, unless we chose to make it so.   We really are on the same team.  Our common enemy is hatred of our way of life that strikes at us through the form of terrorism that owes allegiance to no country and no people group other than its own raw ambition and meanness.   To paraphrase President Obama, we are not Red States or Blue States, religious or non-religious, Black or white, rich or poor, gay or straight—we are citizens of these United States.  We all see in bits and pieces; we all have portions of truth; and we all could be wrong about so much that we are willing to kill each other over today.   We need each other if we’re going to make this democracy work.  What say we wash the bile out of our mouths, find the things we can agree on, and let’s get to work, because yesterday it was 9-11 and al-qaeda, the next day it was Katrina and oil destroying the Gulf, today it is a hurricane ravaging NYC and New Jersey, tomorrow it may be you and your town being decimated.  We will all need each other, at one time or another, and in our hour of need, we won’t give a damn about our differences just so long as we are lending a hand to help each other survive.

Image from wheelingsoup.org

“We are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided.”― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

 “The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees.”― T. H. White, The Once and Future King

“Pit race against race, religion against religion, and prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.”― Eleanor Roosevelt

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.

 

When Trouble Comes a Knockin’ at My Door

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  We are born, we die, but everything in between is usually one pratfall after another, which can be embarrassing and mortifying and seem like the most insurmountable problem at the time, until we actually run up against real trouble knocking at the door of our lives (mixed metaphor intended).

Image courtesy of flatrock.org.nz

A few days ago, my husband (WW) and I had just hunkered down in preparation for Hurricane Sandy to hit.  Expecting 80 mile an hour winds and living amongst obscenely tall trees, we had put away anything that could turn into a flying missile, cleaned out the gutters, primed the sump pump, gathered the emergency lights and hand-cranked radio, and descended into the basement to stand guard through the night against something
we couldn’t even begin to fathom or control.  What made the waiting worse is that one of our daughters and our only grandson were in the storm’s direct path in New York City.  Worry about and for them was so debilitating
that I was practically near a nervous breakdown.  During times such as these, WW is steady as a rock and I am a whirling dervish of frenetic talkative energy and planning.

Whirling Dervish|image from mysacredcircle.blogspot.com

THE MOTHER (Me):    Honey, did you tell our daughter to get cash from the ATM in case the electricity goes and get tons of non-perishable food like tuna fish, peanut butter, crackers, and applesauce?  Did you remind Boo to pack an emergency backpack for her and the baby and keep it by the door in case they have to evacuate?  Oh and what about flashlights, battery-powered radios, and a security rape whistle in case the metropolis turns into Gotham City and anarchy ensues?  Oh, and she should probably get duct tape (no emergency is complete without duct tape) and an ice chest full of ice for perishables and her friend’s insulin medicine.  Did you tell her about filling the bathtub full of water to flush the toilets in case the city sewer pump gives out at the water station?  Huh, huh, well did you tell her?

THE FATHER (WW):    No, you told her all that and more during the 10 text messages, 14 phone calls, and 20 emails you sent her over the past two hours.  In fact I just got a call from our daughter that I couldn’t understand what was being said through our grandson’s screaming and our daughter’s yelling because your last suggestion about filling the bathtub with water caused mass hysteria in her house.  The new kitten, Jo-Jo (used to jumping into the tub to play with the baby’s bath toys) didn’t realize the tub was full of water and took a flying leap off the side of the tub into what quickly started becoming his watery grave.  Our grandson got hysterical because Jo-Jo was drowning, the shower curtain got ripped to shreds because the kitten tried to use it as a ladder to climb out of the tub, both our grandson and our daughter have kitty scratches from head to toe, and now the kitten has gone into hiding and refuses to surface—all this before Hurricane Sandy has even shown up.  I just got a text message from our very frustrated older daughter that says:  “Dad, contain your woman; she is driving me freakin’ crazy!”

“Soggy Pissed-off Kitty”|Google Image

THE MOTHER (Me):  Well, excuse me for just trying to get everyone prepared for what the weathermen are calling the “storm of the century”!

THE FATHER (WW):  Honey, you know that most things we obsess about never come to past, but when they finally do knock on our door the best we can do is be prepared and the rest is in God’s hands.  You’ve done your part, now let God show up.  Why don’t you take your mind off obsessing about the safety of our grandson and do something constructive.  What’s the theme of next week’s blog?

THE MOTHER (Me):  Oddly enough—worrying about stupid shit we have no control over.  Isn’t it ironic?  We could be blown away at any minute, and I’m still being plagued by an embarrassing incident that happened to me on the elevator at my company the other day.   I’m actually mortified at the thought of what people must be saying about me behind my back, and the irony of it all is that it wasn’t my fault!

THE FATHER (WW):  All righty, now.  This story sounds like one for the family scrapbook.  Pass me the popcorn, and let her rip.

THE MOTHER (Me):  (You have no idea how much of a pun that is!)  Well, you know what an impeccable diva I am?  How everything has to be in place and just so?  The other day, I was really struttin’ my stuff (black and white “to-die-for” ensemble with gobstopper pearls, Coach bag and gorgeous Stuart Weitzman pumps) when I got on the elevator on the executive floor of my company (picture badge and name prominently displayed for all the world to see), and a building services man that I recognized didn’t speak when I spoke to him, but gave me a rather chagrined expression as he sped past me to exit onto my floor.  Once the elevator doors had closed, I instantly knew why his expression was so tortured:  he had left behind a fart of biblical proportions!  It was so rank that the paint seemed to be peeling off the elevator walls. I have no idea what that guy had had for lunch, but it smelled as if something had died in there.   I was the only one on the elevator, and as I tried my best not to breathe, I pushed the next floor’s button hoping I could escape before anyone else got on (I should have reopened the doors and gone back the way I came but I was too flustered to think—I think the funk had addled my brain).  As Murphy’s Law would have it, a gaggle of chattering new college hires (all shiny and new and dressed to the nines on a tour of the Executive floors) flooded the elevator and blocked my ability to exit before the doors closed.  Like magic—within five seconds—all of their chirpy voices screeched to an immediate halt as they all turned and looked at me in wide-eyed horror as they grabbed their noses and exclaimed in a unified Greek chorus shout-out:  EEUUEW!  At the next floor they all fled the elevator like a flock of magpies being chased by a skunk—leaving me alone with a shattered reputation in the midst of a funk not of my own making.   I wanted to go running after them to plead my case:  “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me; I’m too cool to fart in public,” but I was so mortified, all I could do was hang my head as the doors closed and the elevator car descended to the first floor. How can I show my face again at work?  Every time I get on the elevator now I feel as if people I don’t know are pointing and whispering:  “That’s her—that’s the chubby Pépé Le Pew we were telling you about.”

That’s what I want to blog about.  Why did something (not my fault) cause me such chagrin and mortification, and why can’t I shake it off?  Nobody got hurt, no property was lost (last time I looked, the elevator car had not imploded), and nobody died.

“Elevator Fart”|image from gomauri.com

THE HUSBAND (WW):  Well, in light of a very real tragedy that is about to descend up our heads, you might just get some perspective about how in the scheme of things, a smelly ol’ fart is no big deal.  If our family lives through this storm without loss of life or property, a misguided fart in juxtaposition to Hurricane Sandy will be a great story for your readers.  Ask them what nonsensical things trip them up that should be simply shaken off on any given day, because at some point, real tragedy comes a knockin’ and we need all the courage and strength we can muster to conquer those “real” trials!

****

I am discovering that the playwright Jean Kerr of Mary, Mary was correct (and I paraphrase here):  “It is no use making up troubles that don’t exist because trouble will come knocking at your door soon enough.” When WW and I woke up the next morning, our house was not flooded, the tall trees were still standing, and my daughter and grandson were unscathed in Queens.  But what is fast becoming legendary is that millions of others from the Caribbean to Maine lost electricity, lost their homes to fire and floods, and some lost their lives trying to escape the mayhem of what turned out to ironically be called the “perfect storm.”

Trouble had indeed come a knockin’ at many of our “neighbor’s” doors in New Jersey and New York, and now it is up to us and every other American of all stripes and colors, political persuasions, and religious ideologies to get over our petty and nonsensical selves and our entrenched ideologies and lend a helping hand to our neighbors, relatives, friends, and strangers far and wide so that they may recover as soon as possible.  No state government can stand alone in times like these (no matter what the Republicans tell you), no federal government can do it all (no matter what the Democrats tell you), and none of us can exist without each other (no matter what the various ideologues preach to you).   As we approach the presidential election, Hurricane Sandy has made it abundantly clear for those who have eyes to see that now is not the time to elect a rich,
heartless, corporate raider whose mantra is, “I’ve got mine, too bad you never got yours,” but now is the time to RE-ELECT a brilliant man who has the Christlike heart of a community leader and understands that if the United States of America is going to make it in the future when trouble comes knockin’ at our door, we will all need to underscore the united part of our country’s title and pledge allegiance to the fact that we are all our brother’s keepers and all in this journey together.

Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who have been harmed by Hurricane Sandy and suffered loss of family, friends, and property.  We pledge to come to your aid as brothers and sisters and fellow Americans until you can stand on your own two feet again!—Image from homeless.samhas.gov

      “Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other”—Albert Pike (American Lawyer, Journalist and Soldier, 1809-1891)

“If you really believe in the brotherhood of man, and you want to come into its fold, you’ve got to let everyone else in, too”—Oscar Hammerstein II (American musical comedy Author, Lyricist and Producer influential in the development of musical comedy. 1895-1960)

      “People ask me all the time, ‘What are you, a Democrat or a Republican? A Catholic or a Muslim…’ What am I? I am none of these. I belong to nothing but the human race. Why isn’t that ever enough?”— Kate Miller

THE WORRIED MOTHER (Me):  “WW, did you tell our daughter that she needs to get the largest mallet she can lift and carry it with her at all times because I just read an article on Huff Post that millions of rats have been washed out of the sewers of NYC, and they will be roaming the streets in gangs (you’ve heard of the Crips and the Bloods—well, these will be the “Rats”) because they can swim and climb.   Huff Post says that there is a good chance that our grandson could be exposed to ‘leptospirosis, hantavirus, typhus, salmonella, and even the bubonic plague.’”

OUR DAUGHTER (Boo):  “Daddy, your wife is driving me insane!”

“My inner self—The Eternal Worry Wart”| image from iwillassistyou.wordpress.com

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.

 

The Bright Side of Life

Do you know what the Dalai Mama has discovered?  There are two kinds of people:  optimists and pessimists.  And when the shit hits the fan, IMHO, it is better to be an optimist.  I’ve also discovered that E.J. Dionne, The Washington Post columnist, was right when he quoted a pollster friend recently:

“When you give conservatives bad news in your polls, they want to kill you,” he said. “When you give liberals bad news in your polls, they want to kill themselves.”

Last week, even though I am an eternal optimist, I wanted to kill myself when the Prez acted like his strength had been zapped by anniversary sex (Didn’t anyone tell POTUS and the FLOTUS that just because it was their 20^th anniversary not to do the “wild thing” before sending the Prez into the boxing ring against Romney?).  Every athlete knows you can’t be distracted or have your potency drained before the big fight even if your honey of twenty years is one fine lookin’ woman.   Mohammad Ali could have told the Prez that salient piece of advice from his championship days.  I mean, what else could it have been?  I’m just sayin’.    Next time:  Focus, Barack, focus goddamn it!

Anyway, an election that was beginning to look like a slam-dunk for anybody who is part of the 47% or cares about human beings in general, or adheres to the “true” teachings of Christ, suddenly came up for grabs as the polls tightened and The Mittens trounced our President in the first debate and declared a fatwā against Big Bird and his homies on Sesame Street.  (I don’t know about you, but threatening the big yellow six-year-old bird whose raison d’etre is to teach little kids the alphabet was the last straw:  “Your ass is mine, Mittens, and you are going down,” I screamed at the TV as I slid into the worst depression I’ve suffered in years.)

Sesame Street to Mittens: “let’s rumble”||image of weknowmemes.com

Then the sharks began to circle the perceived “blood in the water,” as hateful vitriol intensified against our president and his legitimacy, women and reproductive rights (“legitimate” and/or “easy” rape), 47% as “takers” not makers, and black people in general who “need to be taught good discipline and character as per Paul Ryan, the arrogant Catholic.  Finally, the week was topped off by a truck load of manure dumped in front of an Obama campaign headquarters in my home state of Ohio. As a born-again Christian who is fed up to my eyeballs with the numb-nut stupidity of my ex-religious leaders (I have summarily left the Church but kept my Jesus), I waited for at least one prominent Christian evangelical leader who claims to love Jesus to come forth and speak up for Big Bird, speak up for the poor and down-trodden, speak up against the “Christian” Congressman who claims our daughters can be “legitimately raped,” and speak up against the latest racist claim by a “Christian” legislator that “slavery should be considered a ‘blessing’” cause it brought Africans to America where we are so incredibly blessed.  (Well, we black people truly thank you, Massa!)

Fired by “Mittens”|image by mashable.com

All I heard was the sound of crickets—no righteous Christian leaders speaking up to defend the poor and down-trodden like Jesus did.   And the Dalai Mama wept as I decided to pack my suitcase in disgust and move to Canada (where else am I going to get healthcare in my old age if Romney/Ryan wins the election?).  My husband, WW, who is white and also a born-again Christian suggested I not be too hasty, and that I take a road trip to the beach with him to clear my head before I did something so drastic that I’d have to learn French before migrating to Quebec (if one must live in Canada, one must do so in Quebec City because it’s like moving to France).  I really trust his judgment so I acquiesced to his plan, but told him if the beach didn’t manage to cheer me up, he’d better brush off his passport and dust off his French.

Abolitionist, Frederick Douglas calling Christianity to task for its deceptive stance on
slavery and women’s rights in the 1800’s ||image from leftcheek.bloogspot.com and joanhascheeseburger.com

On our way to the beach, we were forced to stop at a Chick-fil-A, which was the only eating establishment within miles because as WW said, “I am too hungry to stand on principle because I have to piss like a race horse and I am falling asleep at the wheel from lack of food.”  With baseball cap pulled down over my face and large bumble-bee sunglasses secured to disguise my face, I furiously lectured my husband about my signed online petition against Chick-fil-A and how they perfectly illustrated one of the reasons I was going to have to migrate to Canada, because of their contributions to organizations that specialized in hate.  As we scurried past long lines of very fat-bottomed white people (I was the only black person for miles around, and my ass is quite normal, thank you very much!) who were still engaged in their month’s long “chicken-in” demonstration of support for Chick-fil-A against the gays, my husband made me promise not to go all Norma Rae all over the place and get myself arrested while he was in the little boy’s room “pissing like a race horse.”

Cartoonist: Mike Lukovich/Atlanta Journal

I refused to even order a soda, and I know that I stuck out like a raisin in a bowl of milk, so it didn’t take long before one of the employees came over to ask if she could help me as she looked me over with a frozen
smile on her face trying to determine if I was a lesbian reporter about to cause all kinds of trouble up in that place.  I don’t know what motivated her to engage me in conversation.  Maybe it was the fact that I was furiously taking notes in my blog notebook while trying to hide my face, or maybe she saw me contemplating what it would take to climb up on one of the tables without falling off and breaking my ass to start my Norma Rae
impersonation as I mounted my very vocal protest:  “Why do you hate gay people; what have they ever done to your chicken except eat it like the rest of us? Why can’t we all get along in this great country of ours, and What Would Jesus Do to you if he knew the hate you were spewing against his children with our chicken dollars?”  Just as I thought I saw Sarah and Todd Palin queuing up for a couple bags of chicken which gave me all the motivation I needed to start my revolution, WW returned, grabbed me by the arm and marshaled me back to the mini-van before the two policemen staring at me in the corner had a chance to put down their chicken sandwiches, arrest my sorry-ass, and ruin our beach vacation by throwing me in jail for disturbing the peace.

The Palins “protesting” on behalf of Chick-fil-A|thedailywhat.cheeseburger.com

After WW convinced me that I was hallucinating from lack of food and backed up urine, and that I didn’t really see The Palins in that Chick-fil-A, I spent my vacation at the beach thoroughly bummed out about the first presidential debate until one of my blog friends gave me a verbal swift kick in the ass (Frank Angle) and told me to “snap out of it.”   WW added his two cents and told me to cheer up because “it’s not over for the presidential election, or anything in life for that matter, until the fat lady sings—so don’t worry, be happy” (and WW is a pessimist—go figure)!  Once I realized WW wasn’t talking about me as the “fat lady” (I’m slightly chunky and an ex-opera singer), the clouds lifted, my optimistic personality came back into gear, and I returned home, ready to greet a new day.  I am going to add a couple of disciplinary actions for my mind, however:  I don’t plan to watch anymore debates (I’m an Independent but I’ve already made up my mind so why be tortured), and I don’t plan to read any more stories about what the haters are doing in our midst to rob me of my God-given joy.  Haters will always be hatin’—but I don’t have to be listenin’!  (I’ll just keep prayin’ that God zaps their sorry asses into the lowest point of Hell, though, so that the rest of us can live in peace!)

Haters be hatin’ but I’m gonna ignore ‘em all and just be chillaxing

image from joanhascheezburger.com

I am discovering that there are two ways to live one’s life:  either as Henny-Penny (“The sky is falling”) or as Little Orphan Annie (“The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow”).  Henny-Penny may be proved right in the long run, but Orphan Annie will have a hell of a lot more fun and peace of mind before the sky flattens her, especially since she has little to no control over the powers that are making the sky fall.  So to all of my “depressed Democratic friends,” get up off your sorry-asses and do the only thing in your “Orphan Annie” power that can defeat the Koch Brothers, the racists, the shit dumpers, the liars, the Ayn Randians, the 47% haters, and the 1% makers:  GO VOTE, take a friend, and say a little prayer while you do it!  We may just win the day ‘cause God is alive and well and “God don’t like ‘ugly’ (a.k.a. ‘haters’).”   (Besides, WW thinks Obama will win a second term, and he’s a pessimist!)

***

Some things in life are bad,

They can really make you mad.

Other things just make you swear and curse.

When you’re chewing on life’s gristle,

Don’t grumble, give a whistle,

And this’ll help things turn out for the best, and…

ALWAYS LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE. . .

Life’s a piece of shit,

When you look at it.

Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.

You’ll see it’s all a show,

Keep ‘em laughing as you go.

Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

SO. . .ALWAYS LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE OF LIFE. . .

“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” from The Life of Brian by Eric Idle

“Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!”—Oscar Wilde

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”—Helen Keller

“For myself I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use being anything else”—Winston Churchill

      “In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip.”—Daniel L. Reardon

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.

 

A Warning to Mittens and the Gang

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  I don’t have much to say this week because I’ve been partying with a three-year-old who could care less about what is going on in this nasty political world except how it affects his chicken nuggets, juice boxes, MeMa kisses, and his Shrek and Donkey doll needs.  In fact, I asked him yesterday where he was off to in such a hurry as he raced past my office while I was banging my head against my laptop keyboard trying to eke out a blog for this week, and his toddler worldview response to me was pretty matter-of-fact:  “I’m going anywhere!”

I don’t know what in the hell that meant in my grandson’s toddler musings, but after spending all my writing time taking him to the water park, to the aquarium, and watching cartoon marathons, I had no energy left to do anything but collapse into bed each night when he did, and I finally decided that “going anywhere” simply means, I’ll let the wind take me where it will and discover what it has to offer later because my brain is fried.  In other words, this week’s blog post is going to be a quickie and when in doubt, bring Big Mama out!

Writer’s block image from clucluz.blogspot.com

Dear Mitt (“Mittens”) and the Gang:

It’s Big Mama givin’ you a shout-out, but you probably don’t remember me because I left your party a while back when the crazies started taking over with the Pat Robertson and the Pat Buchanan types.  But I used to be one of your few black conservative peeps—not the hook, line, and sinker type, but enough to get my toes wet as a supporter of one or two of your candidates when the Dems were the Party of the “South will rise again, but this time without any Negroes” political party.   I used to wander in and out of your ranks as an independent when you still appealed to fiscal conservatives and socially kind-hearted people, and some of my good friends are
Republicans (the sane Repubs, not the nasty-ass Tea Party types).  But you’ve been really actin’ the fool lately—so much so, that I barely recognize you as the party of Abraham Lincoln that helped set my people free from slavery.

Racist Poster from 1850s||Google Image

But now the coin has flipped and y’all have just gone plum crazy!   I read that the former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and God were sending down some last-minute messages to Tampa to get your attention, and I thought maybe I’d add my two cents as well.  Your buddy Jeb is concerned that your rhetoric might be just a “tad bit” off-putting to the people of color outside your tent and Gov. Jeb thinks it is going to come back and bite you in the ass in the future.  At the printing of this post, God is barreling down on your behinds in the form of hurricane Isaac (hey, if one of your main loud mouths can prophesy that the Haiti hurricane of 2010 was a storm of their own sinfulness, then the same reasoning can be laid at your feet—I didn’t make this shit up, go after Pat Robertson).

Cartoon by Horsey||image from LA Times

Looks like both Jeb and Jesus are telling you, my wingnut brothers and sisters, that if you don’t straighten up and fly right, you’re going to have hell to pay.  Well, while I’ve got your ear, I’d like to add a few of my own warnings listed under the heading of “Oh no, you de-en’t.”

“OH NO YOU DE-ENT:

 BLOW A DOG WHISTLE OF RACISM TO YOUR TEA PARTY BASE, MITTENS!”

“I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born,” Romney said, naming the local hospitals where he and his wife were delivered. “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place where we were born and raised.”—Mitt Romney to a Michigan audience on the campaign trail.” ||BY KRISTEN A. LEE/NY DAILY NEWS

WARNING TO MITTENS:  Seriously, Mr. Smart-ass, was that necessary?  Cause it looked to me and my peeps like you just wanted to be a hater.  That “joke” just told any Independent African-American voters that you don’t want their vote and you just told the Hispanic population that you may have lived in Mexico (are you sure you’re an American citizen, by the way?), but your heart was born in racist Jerks Ville where everything is white and rich like you.  Big mistake—huge!

Image courtesy of stephanbc.wordpress.com

“OH NO YOU DE-ENT:

 PICK A VP WHO IS AN AYN RAND DISCIPLE, MITTENS!

DIDN’T YOU GET THE GRAND POOH-BAH OF CONSERVATISM, CHUCK COLSON’S,

 WARNING ABOUT RAND BEFORE HE DIED?”

“. . . (Chuck) Colson condemned the strong support of Rand in Republican and conservative circles and urged his followers not only to stay away from the new film of Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, but to “stay away from anyone who intends to watch the film.” Colson goes on to say Rand and her followers were precisely the types of “cranks” and “crypto-cultists” that his friend Bill Buckley had fought to purge from conservative ranks. He says the “real problem with Rand is the world view her novels and other writings sought to inculcate in her readers… it’s hard to imagine a world view more antithetical to Christianity.”—Eric Sapp (The GOP Must Choose: Ayn Rand or Jesus/Huffington Post)

WARNING MITTENS: God is not mocked, boy!  Remember the name of the God in the title of the “Latter Day Saints” of your church’s title, Sugah?  Well, I have it on good authority that Jesus loved the poor, served the needy, and required that we shun the evil of the love of money if we didn’t want to lose our souls.  Ayn Rand preached that greed was good, altruism was bad, selfishness was to be celebrated, the poor were parasites, and money was to be glorified and worshipped.  Just to show you how nasty Rand’s philosophy was, one of her worshippers who is a writer in NYC once said that when a homeless person asks him for a little bit of money or food, his “Ayn Randian” response is:  “I could, but then you might live longer, so you see my dilemma.”

Rand’s “Dominance” of Alan Greenspan and Wall Street which caused our country’s financial demise||Andrew Corsello’s “The Bitch is Back” from GQ

And yet . . . and yet, Mittens, Baby, you picked a running mate, Paul Ryan, who was one of Rand’s disciples and claimed to have based his budget plan on her principles, and in a 2005 speech he stated that “I grew up reading Ayn Rand, and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.”  Mittens, what have you done?  Didn’t you read Alan Greenspan’s own words, about his fierce devotion to Objectivism and how he was Ayn Rand’s bitch?   Because I sure did, and it scared the shit out of me, especially when I realized Greenspan’s enslavement to Objectivism tanked our economy.  Good God, Mittens, what were you thinking when you chose a mini-me Greenspan to be your VP?

“OH NO YOU DE-ENT:

DRAG YOUR FEET BEFORE CONDEMING ’HURRICANE TODD,’ MITTENS?”

(Yes you did, Mittens—no need to deny it—and now Hurricane Todd is arriving in Tampa with Isaac
and since Akin’s pride seems to be the size of an actual hurricane—you and the
party are in real trouble, boy.)

Mittens, if you get a chance to chat with Todd Akin at the convention, tell him to go and visit the Congo and interview the nearly two million women who have been raped as an act of war (nearly one rape per minute).  Be sure and let Mr. Akin know that 5% of those women got pregnant (thousands of children have been born as a result of forcible rape in the Congo), the same percentage of women who get pregnant when having consensual sex anywhere else in the world—there is no difference.  According to the New York Times, this is a country where abortions for rape are not permitted, where the women are ostracized, and sometimes the babies themselves are raped by the attackers (if the babies haven’t starved to death) when the monsters return to recommit their atrocities.  Make the Congressman understand that his “legitimate rape vs illegitimate rape” science is a piece of shit and as a woman, a rape survivor, and a Christian, there is only one kind of rape, and I’m praying for a pox on both your houses for your stupidity in all of this!

Signed:  One Pissed Off Big Mama!

Image of funny-pictures.feediio.net

I am discovering that the Republican Party is severely tone deaf and a dollar short and a dime late.  By the time the Party comes to its senses, purges the Rand Objectivism from its blood, drains the racism from its arteries, flushes the anti-scientific crap from its mind, and exorcises the cold-heartedness from its heart, there will only be two classes of people left:  the haves and the have-nots.  The middle class will have slipped into the permanent realm of the working poor—stripped of all safety nets and supports by the Romney/Ryan team—and the rich will be sporting I AM JOHN GALT license plates on their luxury cars as they zip by the 99% on the Lexus lanes on the highway of life telling the have-nots that “the rich have their bountiful goodies, too bad it sucks for you.”

****

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”—John Rogers

Stephen Colbert

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.

 

Sucking Out My Brains

Do you know what I’ve discovered in my old age?  There are only three appropriate responses to things that happen to us in life: “hallelujah” (heart full of gratitude), “WTF” (incredulous bafflement), or “shit, the zombies done sucked the brains plum out of my head and that’s why I do what I do” (excuse for becoming a nasty individual).

When I was young, I didn’t want to admit that zombies existed (as a child, I called them “demons” or the “bogie man”), but recently I’ve come to realize that I’ve always known they were real and have spent the last several years just trying to stay out of reach of their brain-sucking ways.

Bubble Girl Running from Zombies||courtesy of vowelmovement.com

But this past weekend, the zombies caught up with me and started attacking me in such an insidious way that I almost lost my soul and didn’t even know it.  On Friday morning bright and early I set out to take a trip to Minneapolis (most people go to Paris, London, or NYC to get their freak on, but I go to Minneapolis—that’s my “partying freak-on” not “doing the wild-thing freak-on,” so get your mind out of the gutter, nasty boys).  I had had a grueling week and was looking forward to some much needed R&R as I got together with family and friends and tripped the light fantastic in the city of “Minnesota nice.”

Have you ever had a day that rolls away from you from the moment you step outside your house until it ends at midnight?  My life went to Hell in a hand basket when I didn’t get home from work in time enough to get my packing act together and I just threw things into bags in the hope that all would end well.  I barely got two hours of sleep, and flew out of the house like a woman crazed when the phone rang and the cabbie announced he had arrived at 5:45 a.m. ready to transport my husband and me to the airport. But when I went outside, the cab was not in front of my house.  As I searched the dark street, I saw the taxi in front of a neighbor’s house with its emergency lights flashing and the silhouette of the driver kneeling on the ground in front of his high beams, presumably facing Mecca, while he unashamedly participated in his morning prayers to Allah.  Now I’m all for religious freedom, but when I’ve got a plane to catch and you’re my cab driver—WTF (incredulous bafflement)!  Whatever possessed that cabbie to call me, announce that he had arrived, and then drop to his knees for a chat with his god? Why didn’t he pray first and then engage in business with me—I would have never been the wiser.

To make matters even worse, WW was respectfully standing several car lengths away from the cab with our bags in tow as if frozen into place.  (Because WW knows everything, apparently, he knew it was Ramadan—the high holy fasting period for all who follow Islam.)  Agitated as hell, I tried to be as gracious as two hours sleep could grant me as I whispered to my husband:  “Why don’t we just drive ourselves to the airport; I don’t have time for this crap—I’ve got places to go, and things to do, and I’m exhausted, God dammit!”  But the dude had blocked our driveway with part of his car and WW thought it would be bad karma to run over a praying man with our car as we were trying not to miss a flight.  And so we waited and waited as I pondered about the tad bit of xenophobia growing in the back of my brain and seeping down into my heart at the thought of my cabbie imposing his religious rites on my busy schedule.  I mean whatever happened to a regular ol’ Black man who spoke English (thank you very much) picking me up like in the good old days without any of this dropping to your knees in the middle of a dark road stuff.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, like the flutter of butterfly wings, a random thought flittered across my brain that this was Ramadan season and the cabbie was just doing his thing like I am wont to do at Easter and Christmas, but my shitty attitude squished the thought like a bug. I didn’t realize it then, but a zombie of xenophobia was attempting to suck out my brains and love for my fellowman was starting to grow cold.

Zombie’s reason to live||courtesy of emergingmagazine.com

The airport was a zoo—more so than usual—and as I stood in line a very grumpy, over-the-top, fat slob of a TSA agent roamed the holding area and lectured all the passengers about making sure we had no illegal substances like hairspray, gels, racks of ribs, and apple pies in our carry-on luggage.  “That’s why the lines are so long, people, because you’re not obeying the rules and you’re trying to travel with all sorts of crazy shit,” screamed the TSA Nazi as he frantically pointed at the banned contraband poster.  Before my embarrassing TSA smack down which was inevitable given the way my day had started, I remember kibitzing with another seasoned traveler about how sad and humiliating it must be for a novice flyer who didn’t know all the rules of post 9/11 flying to encounter this TSA dude who seemed to have had a roasted jalapeno pepper shoved up his ass that morning or was being taken over by a zombie.  As I passed through the “orgasmatron” (imagining TSA agents FOTFL at images of my little fat naked body), dreaming about the steak and vodka gimlet I was going to consume at my favorite Minneapolis restaurant, Manny’s Steakhouse, bells and whistles began to sound, the conveyer belt with my stuff screeched to a halt, TSA agents came running from everywhere, and a Brunhilda agent barked commands into the walkie-talkie on her shoulder as she ordered me to step to the side for questioning and a body search as WW pretended he didn’t know me.

Cox and Forkum|image from authenticallywired.com

The long and the short of it was that I had inadvertently packed a Costco-size can of hairspray and wig detangler in my carry-on case.  As all the other passengers whose schedules I was holding up looked at me with death ray eyes of scorn laced with pity, the TSA Nazi with the roasted jalapeno ass held up my hair products above his head and shouted out my verdict to everyone from here to eternity:  “THROWING AWAY A LARGE-ASS HAIRSPRAY CAN AND WIG DETANGLER BOTTLE FROM THE WOMAN STANDING IN FRONT OF ME AND TOSSING THEM INTO THE CONTRABAND BARREL TO MY LEFT!”  As he slammed my precious hair products into the confiscated bin of no return, I remember screaming, “noooooooo, that shit costs a fortune and they don’t sell this in Minneapolis because there are not that many black people who need their hair detangled—how the fuck am I going to do my hair while I’m there”?   As the TSA Nazi gave me a look of complete and utter disdain, I snatched my bag from him with all the force I could muster and conjured up the fiercest “evil eye” that I could beam toward him as another zombie of mean-spiritedness began to chomp down on my brain and drain into my heart against another fellow human who was just trying to do his job.

Meet the Fockers/”The Evil Eye”|Image of Universal Pictures and Dreamworks SKG

Needless to say, when I landed in Minneapolis—the land of Garrison Keillor (one of my literary idols), Prince, Charles Schulz, and “Minnesota nice,” I was fit to be tied.  I drank too much and I ate too much and within 24 hours I had a zombie nightmare brought on by the meat sweats of the worst kind because that is how a 24-ounce rib eye and a triple-sized vodka gimlet will punish a person’s gluttonous ass.  In the dream I kept trying to get back home like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, only I had to go through airport security, but they wouldn’t let me back on the plane because they said I was possessed.

TSA AGENT:  Well, well, well, Mrs. Tomczyk—we meet again!  It seems you not only don’t know how to pack in order to get on an airplane these days, but it seems your name has now been put on the “no fly” list because you couldn’t keep your attitude in check.  It looks like your ass is going to be driving home, m’lady, and we’ll just see if Homeland Security even lets you cross the state borders.

ME:  I know I screwed up; I’m so sorry.  I’ve done a lot of thinking and I’m not the same person that came through the airport in DC a few days ago—I swear to you, I’m back to being the Eleanor we all know and love.  I’ve given it a lot of thought and I think a couple of zombies made me act the way I did.

TSA AGENT:  Zombies, heh?  What makes you think you have the ability to spot a zombie invasion?

ME:  That’s just it; I think I’ve always been able to see them ever since I was a little girl.   I just stopped paying attention.  But you know they’re in the vicinity when humans and animals start acting irrationally.  Zombienation.com told me that the definition of a zombie attack is “A living being stripped of its will, humanity, and normal behavior by outside forces either supernatural or mundane.”  Haven’t you noticed how there’s been a series of animal attacks over the past decade that just don’t make sense?  Remember the sting ray stabbing of the Crocodile Hunter from Australia?  Don’t you think it’s weird that he didn’t get killed by a vicious crocodile but bought the farm from a normally passive sea creature?  Zombie attack I tell you.  And what about Siegfried and Roy—a tiger they’d worked with since he was six months old ate Roy for lunch less than 24 hours after Roy’s 59^th birthday celebration, and they still don’t know why Montecore, the tiger, attacked his master.  Well, I do:  It was a zombie attack!  Every day there is a story about a chimp or a shark or a crocodile chewing up a human or two.  It’s those damn zombies!

Monkey Attack|Image from funnydowntown.com

TSA AGENT:  So instead of using the age-old excuse, “the devil made me do it,” you’re blaming zombies for your shitty attitude and xenophobic behavior?

ME:  You know about the praying cabbie?  How do you know about him?

TSA AGENT:  We’re Homeland Security—we know everything.

ME:  (Slightly rattled and somewhat chagrined) Yeah, well I’m not the only one.  Have you been watching the race leading up to the presidential campaign, lately?  The Supreme Court unleashed a legion of zombies when they upheld the Citizens United request to allow corporations and unions to spend unlimited funds on political campaigns.  Because of that misguided debacle, have you seen the nasty shit we’re being bombarded with from all sides?  It’s enough to suck out your soul.

TSA AGENT:  So because the Supreme Court lost its mind, you have the right to do so as well?  I thought you were supposed to be a Christian—full of love, charity, mercy, and grace.

ME:  Wait a minute, here; I thought you were a TSA Agent.  You’re beginning to sound a lot like the voice of God.  I’m just saying that Americans are daily flooded with hatred and lies from the political campaigns and it is beginning to affect my mind.  It’s beginning to affect all of our minds.  Both sides share the blame in polluting the airways, although the Republicans should own the lion’s share of hateful ads and lies against our President because, thanks to the Koch brothers, they have five times the amount of money to waste on negative ads.  There hasn’t been a sitting president to encounter so much hatred since Abraham Lincoln.  To hear the Republicans tell it, President Obama is either a Muslim plant in the Oval Office or a bloody terrorist who shot up the theater in Colorado and the Sikh temple in Wisconsin to take away automatic rifles from “real Americans.”  Only people who’ve had their brains sucked out by zombies could believe that shit about our President, and if he’s fighting back, you can’t much blame him!

Obama, the Zombie Fighter|Image by rotflpictures.com

TSA AGENT:  What does that have to do with your attitude and making your way back home?  You’re responsible for you and you alone.  Why should I let you go home?

ME:  Because I’ve changed.  I had a “come to Jesus meeting” or should I say a “come to Garrison meeting.”  I ran into the writer, Garrison Keillor, when I was in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area (at least I think it was him) and as our eyes locked for a brief moment as the clouds parted on a beautiful walking path one morning, I could have sworn I heard him say:  “Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.”   And just like that, my zombie oppression vanished with a little Prairie Home Companion wisdom and I regained my grace and brotherly love.  I asked God to forgive me when I realized that my horrid attitude toward the cab driver was pathetic and mean-spirited.  The cabbie turned out to be a really sweet man who was just trying to honor his god, and all I could see as the impatient, ugly American was that he was interfering with my schedule.   You see, I want to be a gentle person—not a mean person—but a gentle person who can still be a zombie slayer when needed.

******

I am discovering that we are all just one zombie brain-sucking moment away from being haters and murderers.  All it takes is an insipid lie to invade our gray matter about the character or actions of another human being, and then the next thing you know we’re dealing with another massacre or assasination.  If we want to kill the “anti-love zombies,” then gentle people everywhere need to continue to be vigilant of our attitudes and rise up and push back the darkness of hatred and racism with our tolerance, love, understanding, and grace.  By doing so, maybe—just maybe—we will all manage to make our way back home.

Zombie Sticker Alert|image from humorusonline.com

 “In my racket, there’s a serious occupational hazard: becoming a nasty individual. That’s because humor so often involves mockery and ridicule — you get your laughs at the expense of others. . . Controlling this nasty impulse is a constant challenge to the Modern Humourist, especially when under provocation.”—Gene Weingarten (“Gezundheit!” from The Washington Post)

“If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.” ― Gene Roddenberry

 “Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.”― Aberjhani

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.

 

The Kids Are Watching Us

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   Parents are constantly under surveillance.  We’re not being watched by the CIA or the FBI (well, maybe some of you are, depending on how crazy your behavior got in the 60s), but we’re being monitored by our children when they think we’re not looking.   Before you decide I’ve lost my mind, think about the last time you spent any extended amount of time with your grown children.  Didn’t you notice them staring at you—watching your every move as if they expected you to self-destruct before their very eyes, and for the most part, looking absolutely scandalized at you as they thought:  “Oh, my God, did you see that; have they lost their freakin’ minds?”

Image from forparentsbyparents.com

. . . Or:  “Oh, Lord Jesus, the Poor Rents—I knew all that pot-smoking from their college days would catch up with them sooner than later.”

Image from baby-cute.com

My husband and I were recently made aware of the scrutiny of our adult children in our lives when we went to visit our younger daughter and got lost at every single meeting point the entire weekend, even though we’ve visited the city multiple times.  Baby-girl was so mortified at our mishaps that she told every friend who would listen about our crazy missed exits and off-ramps.   I just know she is secretly checking out nursing homes in her area in case we show other signs of incompetence and brain fogginess, and she’ll be forced to commit us.

I blame last weekend’s mishaps on the fact that WW and I have lost our inner traveling compass.   For the past five years or so, we haven’t left home without an electronic GPS system, but we didn’t have one in the rental car and that’s where all the mayhem began.  We no longer know how to function on our own.  Without a GPS our instincts fail us.  We have lost our personal compass.

animalcapshunz.icanhascheezburger.com

Because I was “Oprah” long before Oprah was Oprah, I did what I frequently do and turned last weekend’s “lost in Minneapolis” debacle into an “A-ha” moment when a mother in a minivan full of kids flipped me the bird because she thought I didn’t turn fast enough.  (Who gives you “the finger” in front of their kids?)  My A-HA moment:  Losing one’s traveling compass is akin to losing one’s moral compass, so that when we’re stressed, fearful, or angry we lose our way as humans and crap all over each other.  But Houston, when this happens, we have a problem because the children are watching.  (Look out Oprah!) 

So this week, I reviewed the most uncivil acts committed by high-profile people (and some not so high-profile), and I sent them a short note with a picture of a particular type of child they may have influenced with their gnarly behavior.

Gov. Jan Brewer Disrespecting the POTUS||File photo/Google Image

Dear Gov. Jan Brewer:  Rumor has it that at the Republican Party’s annual Flag Day fundraising dinner in Irvine, AZ,you gleefully posed with an admirer while recreating your infamous, classless and tasteless action against the President on the tarmac in Phoenix a while ago.  The back-drop pictures on stage were two oversized photos of your now slovenly act against the President with the words:  “You go, girl!”   Some say it was racist the first time you did it (I said it was a low-class way to up the sales for your book).  But I say, now that you’re taking your wagging-finger show on the road, it’s not only racist, but it is damn contemptuous of the Office of the President.   Get over it, woman, the intelligent, sophisticated, Harvard educated, “not-scared-of-you” black man won the election and does not ask “how high?” when you say jump.  That’s all she wrote, Gov.   I also read that you consider yourself to be a born-again Christian, so I thought, as a “sista in Christ,” I’d school you on the lesson you taught to the likes of Arizona’s “Bad-ass Baby, Clive Jr.” (picture included).   Baby Clive was watching your finger action and emulated your spirit which elevated him and you right up there to the top of the list of what Jesus would not do (WJWND).   Sista Jan, remember that scripture that says:  “Woe to you who cause these little ones to stumble”?  Yikes, wouldn’t want to be you when Arizona’s kids grow up!

Outhouse labeled as Obama’s Presidential Library that was painted to look like it was riddled with bullet holes and proudly displayed to a laughing, cheering crowd in Montana.||AP Photo

“Inside (outhouse), a fake birth certificate for “Barack Hussein Obama” was stamped with an expletive referring to bovine droppings. A message in the structure gave fake phone numbers for Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi “For a Good Time.” By Dana Milbank/The Washington Post

Dear Head of Montana’s GOP convention:  Wow, remind me never to visit Montana.  As a “Negro” and a woman, my ass would be grass!  Come on Repubs—have you no mothers, sisters, or female cousins?  Do you not have one black (light-brown) person in Montana?  And here we go again dissing our (your) President and his Lady in the most disrespectful way.  It’s like you’re itching to have a bunch of black people come to Montana and beat the shit out of you just to make you give the Prez some respect.  But then we’d be no better than you, so we’ll keep following the President’s gracious example and “turn the other cheek.”

I read that Congressman Dennis Rehberg and Newt Gingrich were on-site and neither one of them said a word in protest of the Outhouse.  (I wonder how they would have reacted if it had been them and their wives?)  You’re bullies—no more, no less.   Truth is that I have no idea what will happen to the lives of the people you stuck in your toilet (maybe you will get your wish, although I doubt it), but I do know that you’ve been responsible for setting back the education and citizenship in the family of man of Montana’s children by about 100 years because your babies are watching and learning from you.

Karen Klein, Elderly School Bus Monitor||AP Photo

“A widow of 17 years and a grandmother of eight, Karen worked as a bus driver in Greece, New York for 20 years, and has been a bus monitor for the last three years. Her duty is to ride in the bus with students, making sure that they behave themselves on the route to and from school for which she gets paid around $15,000 annually.” Posted by Charles Wuckland

Dear Pack of Thirteen-Year-Old Boys from Greece, NY who took it upon themselves to torment a sweet, hard-of-hearing Grandmother:  Now let me get this straight, children.  According to all the news reports, you said the following hateful things to a sweet old lady who had never done anything to you, except try to keep you safe:

Oh, my God, you’re such a fucking bitch!”

“You are such a fucking troll!”

(After poking Mrs. Klein): “Your reflexes are so slow, you freakin’ fat bitch.”

“You’re so ugly, you should commit suicide.”

“You don’t have a family because they all killed themselves because they didn’t want to be near you.” (The worst part of these taunt boys is that Mrs. Klein’s son did kill himself ten years ago.)

And to all this Mrs. Klein replied as she was crying:  “I am a person, too. I shouldn’t be treated this way.”

***

Dear Parents of the 13-year-old future terrorists, Gov. Jan Brewer, the Tea Party, the Birthers, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Donald Trump, Fox News, Andrew Breitbart’s friends, the preachers praying “imprecatory prayers of death” against those who disagree with them (California preacher Drake says he’s praying for death of President Obama while another preacher has burned his body in effigy), and all the nameless haters and bullies like the ones who built the “Obama Outhouse Presidential Library:” 

Haters:  I give you your children.

  Children: I give you your teachers!

I am discovering that regardless of what the politicians and the news pundits tell us, it is not the economy, stupid.  It is our ability to remain a civil society in the midst of hard times and be our “brother’s keeper” that matters.  Yes, times are hard, but we’ll get through them if we stick together and don’t adopt the Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged attitude of the Tea Party, “I’ve got mine, too bad it sucks for you,” as the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush once wrote.  Where are our leaders (especially on the Republican side) who will stand up and say enough is enough?  I may not agree with your politics, but I regard you as a fellow citizen, a child of God, born with the right to exist, and I will listen to your “civil” discourse and treat you in the way I want to be treated.  Besides, some of my best friends are Republicans.

Dear Repubs (yes, I’m singling you out because I don’t recognize you anymore, and I used to be a Republican):  Don’t give me that childish excuse that the Dems said awful things about President Bush (since when did two wrongs make a right, children?).  And don’t even try to give me that teenager’s excuse that everybody else is doing it, and you can’t control certain elements of your party.  Tell that to your god, because People, our kids are watching and they are going to “lose their way” just like us!  If we don’t hurry up and change our compass to due North, we’ll save the economy and leave the country to a bunch of fat and sassy racists, terrorists, homophobes, misogynists, and heartless cretins.  Are you listening, Mitt?

 

(“Suffering from disgust of grownups?”)||Piclac.com

***

      “When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency.” Samuel Johnson

“The uncomfortable truth is that if we are to solve the difficult problems we face as a national community, we must act affirmatively and with courage and clarity to reclaim civility in the public square. Civility is quite simply the glue that holds us together and allows us as citizens of a representative democracy to dialogue with each other.” Cassnadra Dahnke, Tomas Spath, Donna Bowling (Institute For Civility In Government)

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”—Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

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.

 

Black Don’t Crack

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  My birthday is coming up during this next week and I suddenly realized that I’m getting old—really old!  Two days ago it seemed as if I were in my twenties; dreaming twenty-year-old thoughts of grandeur (I was going to change the world for the better along with all the other Jesus Freaks of our baby-boomer generation). . .

1960’s Time Magazine Cover

Now I’m more than disillusioned by the failures of a movement that changed my life, and I can’t even sneeze without peeing my pants or take two steps without my ass exploding in a cacophony of farts, no matter how much I “pinch and hold.”  (Dairy, thou hast become my sworn enemy!)

Image from jokesprank.com

Last week I spent a lot of time having a very interesting discussion with people all around the world (online and off) about whether there was a devil (see last week’s post: “The Devil Made Me Do It”).  It was stimulating, spiritually enlightening, and mentally invigorating.  This week my mind has turned to addled mush as I try to comprehend a news article about how soon my children and their friends will be able to know that I’m within a mile of their vicinity by my “distinctive smell.”  Because, apparently, the older one gets, the riper one becomes, and wherever an old person is, his or her smell lingers forever and a day and is distinguishable from every other age group’s smell!  Think:  Nursing home smell.  Holy Mary, Mother of God!

Elderly Woman by Mary Cassatt||Wikipaintings

“Wait a minute. There’s something unusual about the subway seat you just claimed. It’s awfully warm, and a peculiar odor seems to hover in the air nearby—a stale, musty odor tinged with something as acrid as mothballs. You know this aroma: it’s ‘old person smell.’”  ‘Old Person Smell’: Study Confirms You Can Recognize Age by Scent, By Ferris Jabr||Huffingtonpost.com

What is this smell the author is talking about?  Is it the smell of death?  When does it start?  How much time do I have before my children have to start hosing me off before I can enter their homes?

Well, screw last week’s blog!  Right now I could care less whether there is a devil or not—I have a more pressing issue to deal with.  I cannot get old and start to stink!  Yet, next Sunday, if I haven’t fainted dead away from the sheer horror of it all, another candle will be added to my birthday cake, ratcheting me closer to the finish line of living and toward an unfathomable, unearthly B.O that I’ll take to my grave, apparently!  Is it because I believe in a theology that marches me to the grave first and then onto resurrection at some point?  Would this “old people curse” still make its claim on WW and me if we got recycled, instead?

Horrified, I asked my husband, WW (the smartest person I know), if we could incorporate reincarnation into our theology and return in another life as something—anything—that didn’t have the potential of becoming Pepé Le Pew in our golden years?

 Warner Bros.||Google Image

But WW (White and Wonderful) just kept on playing with his new iPad and barely looked up when he answered:  “NO, absolutely no reincarnation theology—don’t start getting crazy on me in your old age.  I’ve just gotten used to your Lucille Ball zaniness in this life; I can’t imagine having to survive your antics in another life!  And besides, speak for yourself, ‘pale face,’ I don’t plan on stinking—ever!”

Crap!

I don’t know what WW is so bent out of shape about.  Reincarnation simply means “reentering the flesh.”  I wouldn’t mind a do-over in life in spite of WW’s reticence.  My husband was born white and male so the deck has always been stacked in his favor.  I’d come back so much wiser and richer and take the helm with the people holding the power and the money, and see what it’s like to start off life “ready to rule.”  I wouldn’t waste my time with gnarly people or shit that didn’t matter.  And I’d take better care of my body from the very beginning so that my old age would be free of disease.  In fact, maybe I’d come back as a scientist and eliminate this “old people funk” that’s been discovered by Johan Lundström of the Monell Chemical Senses Center who, IMHO, should have used his smarts to determine whether there is really a devil and come up with a plan to eradicate mayhem and chaos from the Earth rather than giving me something else to be mortified about as I get older.  Then we wouldn’t have had horrific “devil” instigated massacres in Syria this week, “devil” inspired zombie cannibalism stories freaking me out so badly I can’t sleep, and a “devil-led” Fox News 4-minute, blatantly false, attack ad against our President—dropping the illusion that they ever were “fair and balanced.”  (Talk about something smelly this way cometh!)

But I digress.  When I did a little bit of research about reincarnation, I realized WW had reason to be concerned.  I discovered that one is not assured to return as a human on a higher plane (richer, thinner, smarter) and much depends on karma.  One could come back as a Fox News anchor or as an insect which means one could be destined to go through life stupid as all get out or squished by something as delicate as a child’s sandal on any given Sunday just because one was considered to be “icky.”   Either way, I’d be screwed.

Image from faniq.com

Since karma is a bitch, I just know given some of the stupid choices I’ve made in life (I was not always the charming person you’ve grown to know and love); I could easily come back as a really scary looking bug:

Grasshopper (Vietnamese)||Google Image

. . . or too small a bug to keep a donut hole from crushing me to death.

 

Joanhascheezeurger.com

Or, horrors upon horrors, maybe the smell issue would become all invasive because of my ungrateful complaints, and I’d come back as something 100 times smellier than an aging Baby Boomer:

joanhascheezeburger.com

SWAT!  SQUISH! RETCH!  WTF!  There goes Eleanor’s recycled life and all because she didn’t want to own and “rock” a mature old-age smell—vanity thy name is Eleanor.

I think I’ll leave well enough alone, be grateful for what I have and the God I love, and trust that I will be able to grow old gracefully and in my right mind (maybe I’ll add another shower in the evenings).  And maybe, just maybe, when I finally do die, I’ll discover that “who” and what is “beyond the veil” is so fantastic, the thought of recycling back to an Earth with a Devil, brutal despots, wannabe zombies, crazy-ass terrorists, and Fox News won’t interest me in the least bit.

******

I am discovering that part of my blessings from God in this life, of which there have been many, is that he’s included me in the Black Don’t Crack club and given me a heart that easily loves in spite of the fact that I was born a poor black child in the “mistake on the lake” city, currently nicknamed, “The Cleve.”  (Translation of ‘Black Don’t Crack’:  An urban legend that African-American skin doesn’t age as quickly as Caucasian or Asian skin due to the melanin that seems to have caused us problems in so many other arenas in life.  Go figure!)

Case in point:  old Asian? Caucasian? lady in her 80’s

Image from onemansblog.com

The African-American singer and actress, Lena Horne, in her 80’s

(no she hasn’t had any face lifts)||lifestyle.allwomenstalk.com

I’m just sayin’. . .urban legend or no, some of that non-crackin’ mojo got bequeathed to me and I will be eternally grateful!

So I may take on this alleged “eau du elderly smell” as I get older—God didn’t promise me a rose garden—but by God, I’ll still have the skin of a twenty-year-old when I die and the heart of someone who loves deeply and profoundly—that’s got to count for something when the younger generation scrunches up their noses and exclaims:  “Peeeeeuw, Grandma”!  Right?

Happy Birthday to me!

The Author:  Old, really, really old, and getting older by the day

“Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened?” —Jennifer Yane

“I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”—Woody Allen

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” —Mark Twain

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.

 

Are You Happy?

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  The Federal Government wants to start measuring our happiness as American citizens.   After all, our constitution does guarantee us the right to the “pursuit of happiness.”   What a hoot!  They’ll probably call it the GNH (“gross national happiness”) as opposed to the GDP (“gross domestic product” or the sum of our economic output), and that will be one more thing to worry about.  (Note to the Feds:  please do not give me a survey on my opinion of our sorry-ass Congress or the state of the Republican Party before you give me the survey about my GNH—results will definitely be misrepresentative of my actual state of being which will be highly agitated.)

Kingdom of Bhutan—“Land of the Dragon” (Photo courtesy of buddhanet.net)

The term, ‘gross national happiness,’ was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck but according to Peter Whoriskey’s article in The Washington Post (“If you’re happy and you know it . . . let the government know”), “. . .statisticians will first have to define happiness and then how to measure it.  Neither is a trivial matter.   There is even some doubt whether people, when polled, can accurately say whether they are happy.”

Photo courtesy of businesspundit.com//Google Image

Right now the Mega Millions Lottery which covers 42 states is worth $640 million, and I’m sure most Americans are secretly fantasizing about what they would do with that much money if they won it, because they are all assuming it would make them super happy.  But research has borne out the facts that 9 out of 10 lottery winners end up worse off than before they won the lottery and many wish they had torn up the ticket.  Because, you see, humans are creatures of extremes:  whatever shit you were addicted to before you were flushed with cash will simply get magnified once it is infused with $640 million.  Data has shown that if you were a gambler before the jackpot, you’ll simply become a person who bets higher stakes until the money is all gone; if you have an addictive personality before you win the extra Benjamins, you’ll become a junkie who uses a gold tipped syringe to “shoot up” rather than a stainless steel one.  And if your cash-infused habits don’t get magnified to the extreme, then relatives you never knew you had will come out of the woodwork and torment you for handouts until the day you die or give away all your money—whichever comes first.

Daily News/Google Image

So I’ve given this entire “gross national happiness” concept a lot of thought and since I’m old and have learned a few things along the way, I thought I’d write an open letter to our President in this week’s blog to offer him some suggestions as to what he should look for to determine if his American peeps are really happy or if we are just bullshitting him (not counting Fox News or the Tea Party—there is nothing that would make them happy except Ronald Reagan coming back from the dead).

OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Dear President Obama:

First of all:  How you doin’?  My name is Eleanor Tomczyk and I’m one of your biggest fans.  While reading The Washington Post the other day, I noticed that the Feds want to start monitoring GDH.  Personally I don’t know how you’re going to accomplish that since we are such a desperate, angry bunch of humanoids.  But if you were to ask me, if you really wanted to know how to do this, I thought I’d send you a few tips to pass along to your census takers.

IMHO, Mr. President, all your questioners need to ask are three non-sectarian, bi-partisan questions and they will be able to determine the state of mind of any American in the land.

GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS SURVEY

• DO YOU NAP?

Nap Time/Google Image

Here’s the deal, Mr. President:  I’m sure you’ve noticed that you are in charge of a bunch of really cranky, partisan people.  We are perennially pissed off about everything, and some of us are really bent out of shape because you slipped by them into the White House!  On top of all that angst, we love us some guns almost as much as our religion and lack of sleep and guns are a volatile mix!  Why, today, in a neighborhood not too far from where both of us live, one neighbor shot another neighbor over three trees bordering the property that wasn’t the property of the neighbor who got shot.  And the shooter wasn’t even the owner of the house—the owner’s father shot the other dude on his behalf who was the friend of the neighbor who lived down the street—all because of three fuckin’ trees (pardon my French)!  I think we Americans are on the verge of losing our minds just because we are so freakin’ tired.  I don’t mean to sound like an “old fart,” but we haven’t had a good attitude about life sense the Sunday Blue Laws were struck down.  Even if you weren’t religious and didn’t go to church, no matter how rich or poor you were, at least you could catch up on your sleep and read a good book.  It may be my imagination, Mr. President, but we could use a national nap time to up our “happiness quotient.”

•  DO YOU GARDEN?

E. Tomczyk’s “Blush” Hibiscus

E. Tomczyk’s prize-winning variegated yellow Princess Hibiscus

E. Tomczyk’s Violet Wave Petunias

Mr. President, enclosed is a small sample of my flower garden last year (aren’t they fab!).  I’m recreating something similar on April 30^th for the 2012 summer season.  As I’m sure the First Lady has told you, there is something about digging in dirt that eases the stress and elevates the endorphins, especially when Puccini’s La Boheme (or Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”—whatever floats your boat) is playing in the background.  (Personally, I’m rather suspect of a person who doesn’t like to garden.)  Mr. President, my American sisters and brothers need to get back into the dirt.  Anything as little as flower boxes outside our apartment windows to community gardens would help relax our minds and shrink our chubby waistlines.  Whether a person gardens or not, will give the Feds an excellent understanding as to whether Americans are happy or agitated as hell because they don’t have any dirt to turn into something beautiful to soothe the soul.

•  DO YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ANYBODY BUT YOU AND YOURS, AND HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT CULTIVATING EMPATHY FOR OTHERS WHO ARE NOT LIKE YOU OR HAVE DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES?

Twins: blue-eyed white-skinned “Remee” and her biological twin sister, brown-eyed, brown-skinned “Kian” born in 2005 in Britain

Mr. President, I’m sure you know this, but I have discovered a secret:  we are all God’s children—just different flowers in God’s garden.  I know an alien from another planet would never believe that concept that we’re all created equal if “It” had dropped down into our country the past two weeks and witnessed the Trayvon Martin murder and miscarriage of justice, along with the attempted smearing of Trayvon’s reputation from the extreme Right, and Spike Lee’s stupid terrorization of that sweet old couple when he tweeted their house address by mistake in his attempt to flush out the murderer, George Zimmerman.  (Really, Spike?  Seriously, Dude?)    Mr. President, if you see Spike when you’re out and about would you please ask him what the hell was he thinking?

The other day I discovered a phenomenon:  Black and white twins born from the same parents.  Did you know that the chance of this happening is only one in a million, but in one family it has happened twice?  But don’t you think God purposely allows twins to be born of different skin and eye colors from the same parents just to mess with our heads and to illustrate a point:  we are all sisters and brothers under the skin?

Triniti and Ghabriael Cunningham—twins born in USA/ABC news file photo

 If we answer the “happiness” survey as people who try and consistently learn something that will broaden our perspective about those who appear different than us, then the Feds might find that our happiness equates to that openness.  Might I suggest that you have the survey ask how many of us have seen or plan on seeing “Bully,” the documentary about the realistic portrayal of middle school and high school students who are bullied—some to the point of suicide?  Have the Feds ask your survey takers if they plan on teaching their children not to stand by and watch the bullying of another child or if they plan on teaching them how to put a stop to it.  Our country’s happiness and future depend on us becoming more empathic to the suffering of others, not becoming bullies ourselves, and joining together as a nation to stamp our this scourge.

Courtesy of www.thebullyproject.com ||Contact this site for distribution of the film in your city

Thank you, President Obama, for considering my input and here’s wishing you and yours an abundance of joy and grace.  I’m pulling for you.

E. Tomczyk (a.k.a “Big Mama”)

P.S. I just have to ask, Mr. President:  Are you happy?

******

I am discovering that money will come and it will go, things will always happen that we can’t control, and that happiness is temporal:  Joy is what is eternal.  Happiness is circumstance based and the circumstances can be destroyed in a heartbeat by mean people, the weather, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But joy is attitudinal and no one—absolutely no one—can take that away from you.

Author: “One Joy-filled Big Mama”//photo by J. Tomczyk

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”—Viktor E. Frankl

“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor E. Frankl

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.

 

Bracket and Blog It!

Do you know what I’ve discovered?  March Madness—and Sarah Palin drove me to it!  What you need to understand is that I don’t know a damn thing about basketball (I mean, I’m black, so I KNOW about basketball, but I could care less about hoops in my old age).  I haven’t been to a basketball game in 45 years, not to mention that I pretty much hate all sports.  I’d much rather be attending a Broadway show or reading a book, so if I’ve currently lost myself in basketball madness, then you know I am close to losing my freakin’ mind.

Here’s what happened.  Recently I was going along my merry way—minding my own damn business—when I got a chance to check out the HBO production of Game Change.   I thought I knew what to expect; I thought I was prepared for the horror, but I was wrong.   The picking of Sarah Palin to run for vice president, who would be a heartbeat away from the presidency of a running mate who was 72 years old at the time, turned out to be one of the most reckless, cynical, and arbitrary things that has happened in recent American history.   I was once a fan of McCain’s (war hero and all; you know how much I love “true grit”), and had actually considered voting for him (a black woman voting for a white Republican male, right?—go figure), but I got to see enough behind the curtain of Ms. Palin to send me fleeing to the left before it was too late.  I had no idea that I had only glimpsed a token amount of what the writer, Richard Cohen, calls Palin’s “great talents to deny the truth,” her sheer ignorance about simple foreign affairs, and her petulant, childlike ability to sulk away, shut down, and go into a catatonic state, not to mention her arrogant hard-headedness when she didn’t want to study and absorb what was being taught to make her a viable candidate.   And since Game Change has been endorsed by most of Palin’s top campaign staff as accurate, according to Mr. Cohen, Miss Sarah can’t deny its veracity; she can only accuse them of being disloyal.   That is a very small price for her to pay to have awakened us all to the fact that we escaped a self-absorbed, celebrity seeking, clueless ex-beauty queen, ersatz Born-Again Christian who had heard “God say” she was called to save our country for the “real Americans” through her vice presidency because she “so didn’t want to go back to Alaska.”

Game Change/Movie Trailer (Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin)

“At some point while watching HBO’s absolutely smashing (and terrifying) movie “Game Change.”  It occurred to me that Sarah Palin has ruined America . . . With her selection as John McCain’s running mate, American politics lost its way—and maybe its mind as well . . . Après Palin has come a deluge of dysfunctional presidential candidates (Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum—parenthesis mine).  They do not lie with quite the conviction of Palin, but they are sometimes her match in ignorance.”—Richard Cohen (“Sarah Palin’s Foolishness Ruined U.S. Politics”—The Washington Post)

*****

I couldn’t breathe.  I was depressed for days!  And when I thought about sorry-ass John Edwards on the left who had cheated on his cancer-ridden wife all during his campaign, sired a child with his mistress, lied about it, and even campaigned to be President Obama’s vice president until he was exposed (just in time):  I threw up!

Normally, when I am scandalized by things like this—white people acting the fool—I write about something absurd that will make me laugh at the sheer craziness of it all.  So I searched all my news sources and the only thing that was absurd, but not sad, this week (because absurd plus sad usually equals mental illness and isn’t funny to me) was:  mantyhose (a.k.a “brosiery”).

“This is the flagship men’s pantyhose style by Ohio-based Comfilon’s Activeskin Legwear for Men. The company, which has seen a steady increase in sales, uses the tagline, ‘This is NOT your mother’s pantyhose.’” By Vidya Rao (Today)

Oooooookay!?!   What?  WTF!  AAAUUUGGH!

Picture pinned by Eric Xiao Ming/Pinterest

As I went screaming into the night, it was at that exact moment (as it almost always is when one is being seduced) that two junkies saddled up to me and whispered in my ear the “fix” they could provide to break me out of my misery:  “Psst!  We got just what you need, girlfriend—March Madness.”   I put up a struggle—I really did.  But they told me “everybody was doing it,” and the more I fought, the more terms like “seed the field,” “bracketology,” “ratings percentage index,” NCAA, ESPN—to name a few—started sounding a little less foreign to me.  And the more things started making sense, the more I came under the March Madness spell.  Then the coup-de-grace, the hook, the manipulation: One of the junkies told me I could have “diva shoes” for the entire March Madness season if I just played along, and Lord have mercy, I lost my soul.

OH, SNAP!

…AND DOUBLE SNAP!

I found out about this new “March Madness” drug at 11:00 a.m. on March 15th (the final day to finalize one’s bracket), and I only had an hour to submit my choices once the junkies clued me in on the wonderment of getting high off bracketology.   I had no idea what to do, but like true junkies, my suppliers said they’d give me this year’s instructions for “free” and walked me through the process.  They said it didn’t matter that I didn’t know my ass from my elbow as far as the basketball teams were concerned, because that really wasn’t necessary to “get high”—I just needed to go with the flow to get hooked.  So I picked teams according to whether I liked the colors of their school (Syracuse), or if I didn’t like their state politics, or if they were an underdog due to extreme economic hardship (Michigan State), or if WW and I ever lived in the state.  With everything chosen and in place, I submitted my NCAA Bracket under the pseudonym, “Big Mama’s Picks,” and then I slid into a catatonic state of basketball euphoria.

 

BIG EAST ACC TOURNAMENT/clotureclub

******

BIG MAMA’S PICKS (as of 10:00 p.m. 3/15)

Big Mama’s Champion Pick:  Syracuse University

Why?  Because their school colors match a pair of my favorite shoes!

I am discovering that “sometimes a baby’s got to do what a baby’s got to do” and join in on the fun—especially where new shoes are involved and shattered nerves from movies about monsters almost taking over the White House can be soothed.   Whatever it takes, I say (within reason), and the ability to purchase kick-ass shoes is always a plus.

…AND TRIPLE SNAP, BABY!

“When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team.” ~ George Raveling

“When it’s played the way is spozed to be played, basketball happens in the air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams.” ~ John Edgar Wideman

A special “shout out” to my “March Madness Junkies”:  Jean W. and Kathy P. (thanks for the title, KP)

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.

 

My Application to Join the 1%

Do you know what I’ve discovered?   I deserve the right to be “bougie” (meaning bourgeois—pronounced “boo-gee” with a soft “g” for my non-ghetto friends).  I haven’t always felt that way, but I just got back from an island vacation after taking my husband (White and Wonderful, a.k.a. “WW”) there for his 60^th birthday and that experience left me thinking:  “I want in on the good times too—all the time—you 1% Mofos!”

I’ve been saving for a year to surprise WW with this ostentatious trip because I knew he would not take turning sixty years old with even the slightest amount of grace.  I knew this because he’s been announcing his attitudinal demise for five years:  “You better be on the alert, Cutie, I will not do turning 60 very well at all!”   This was one unhappy white man, and he was careening towards sixty years old kicking and screaming like a toddler.  I was not looking forward to hanging out for a year with a grumpy old man.  I decided to give him a birthday gift of a lifetime in the hope that it would be an infusion of joy to sustain him over the hump of the big 6-0.  So I put his list of favorite things into a search category (sea, sun, sand, snorkeling, boating, hot weather in January, easy to get to from the States, and fascinating new experiences), and Google spit out the Cayman Islands.

Google Image/Public Domain

The seduction started immediately.

Beautiful Hotel Assistant (BHA):  “Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. High Muckety-muck.  Would you like a glass of guava-mango nectar and some freshly baked chocolate chip cookies from heaven while you check in?”  Even though I have a gluten allergy, those cookies were so “to die for” in my newfound “Bali Ha’i” that they didn’t even make me sick.  (WW says the cookies were gluten-free because our holiday handlers were just that good and trained to make sure they didn’t miss a beat regarding our personal preferences.)

Gorgeous Concierge:  “We’ve solidified your itinerary for the week according to the specifications that you sent to us via email”:

• 90 minutes spa appointment for Mrs. High Muckety-muck
• Snorkeling trip on private sailboat to three prime locations off the beaten path (only Mr. HM. will be snorkeling—Mrs. HM will go along for the ride and do her diva thing)
• Hawaii Five-0-type helicopter ride to survey the islands and the coastline (fascinating new experience)
• Rollin’ with the pirates on a sunset cruise (new experience)
• Touring a rum distillery (new experience)
• Dinner at the restaurant of a world-renowned French chef
• A day at the beach in your own private cabana (waiters in attendance with unlimited food and exotic drinks)

“Enjoy your stay, Mr. and Mrs. High-Muckety Muck.  Let us know if there is anything we can do for you.  We’re here to serve you.   There’s nothing we can’t provide for your vacationing pleasure.  Now will that be Visa or MasterCard?”

Ei-yi-yi-yi-yi!  WW and I had died and gone to heaven.  The sun kissed our skin with a perfect 82 degrees every day, and a constant trade wind gently blew across our bodies every second from the moment we ate our sumptuous breakfast on the private balcony to our room (overlooking a tropical garden), until we retired at night to the turned down sheets with gourmet chocolates gracing our over-stuffed pillows.

Google Image/Public Domain

The helicopter flung us through the air in an hour of Hawaii Five-0 duck and dive-type maneuvers that caused a young newlywed to lose her lunch but made WW and me scream with delight like little kids—“Again!”

The French pilot gave us a tour of the islands and slowly circled the houses of the rich and famous.  As he told us of his carefree existence in our “Shangri-La” (“I cam her for a vizit dirty yerz a-go and nev-air vent hume agane”), he assured us that we too could have our “joie de vivre” in the Cayman Islands if we just set our minds to do it.  As the pilot flew us over the houses of the real High-Muckety-mucks—not the posers like us—the gateway drug of greed bite WW and me solidly in the ass.  We are near retirement.  Why not quit the jobs, sell our house, cash in our retirement funds, and move to the Cayman Islands—never looking back.  The kids are grown and could fend for themselves.

But could we afford it?  “Of curz vous can,” said the pilot.  “Zat’s my houze below.  Zee what a magnefeesant manzion I own.  Vous know why:  NO PROPERTY TAX, NO INCOME TAX, NO CAPITAL GAINS TAX, AND NO INHERITANCE TAX!  (Suddenly, all trace of a French accent had disappeared once the pilot started talking about the absence of taxes.)  “With your money stashed in one of our 280 banks, you’d be sitting pretty, and without the curse of the IRS breathing down your throats your dreams could come true here in Cay-man.  Let’s bank to the left and swoop down on that mansion below.  Does this suit your fancy?  The owner is selling it for $60 million.” (I learned later that the French pilot sold real estate on the side and wasn’t as “French” as he claimed to be.)

Living room of Castillo Caribe, Cayman Island/Google Image

No matter how we jumbled the figures (and we seriously tried), the pilot’s suggestion was never going to be ours unless Mitt Romney gave us a percentage of the money he’s been sheltering in the Caymans.  Maybe then, and only then, could WW and I buy this house and never return to real life in America.  This was Mitt Romney rich, not “middle-class couple from the 99% saves for a year for a week’s vacation rich.”  We had to find another way.

And then the devil showed up.

Devil (posing as Captain Drake):  “Welcome aboard, Mr. and Mrs. High Muckety-muck.  I’m your Captain today and I will take you anywhere you want to go or wherever the wind blows.   May I call you John and Eleanor?  When I’m through with you, perhaps you’ll like the islands so much you’ll never return home.  I came here ten years ago for a vacation and never left.  Imagine your life with the sea and me on a boat like this.  Mr. John: let’s see how you look behind the wheel of this beauty; try it on for size why don’t you.”

As the Devil escorted WW from one glorious private snorkeling location to another, I could tell my husband was no longer feeling the devastation of turning 60.  When WW got to snorkel in and around an old wreck. . .

. . .and play kissy-face with a stingray, my husband cast off twenty years into the sea.

Seeing my husband so happy and energized, I stretched out on the deck and worked on my tan while the Devil continued to work on our minds.

Devil:  “Mr. John—Imagine taking your grandson out on a boat like this and teaching him how to fish and snorkel.  Can you see him spending the summers with you frolicking in the ocean and building castles in the sand?  Miss Eleanor—Imagine writing the great American novel right here in paradise.  All sorts of artistic people find their mojo here.  See that house on your left?  That used to be Sylvester Stallone’s mansion.”

But WW and I didn’t inject the “happy dust” into our veins at that point—we’re not stupid, and we know when we’re being played.  We didn’t succumb until we took the sunset cruise on the pirate ship and met a man and his wife who came down from New Jersey every other week and stayed in their custom-built home on Rum Point.  Sometimes they came alone, sometimes their best friends joined them, sometimes their grown kids tagged along with the grandkids, and sometimes it was just them and the grandkids.  They were our age and they were living the dream.  Suddenly a Gollum-like lust engulfed me:   “We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious.”  This island was my “precious,” dammit.  Why did New Jersey guy and his wife get to live the good life in the Caymans and we couldn’t?  What were WW and I—chopped liver?

The week flew by (doesn’t it always when you’re having fun), and we didn’t wake up from our choke-hold of greed until we were in the cab going back to the airport.  As we had done all week with anyone who served us, we asked the cab driver how long he had been living on the island, especially because he was an American and he was around our age.

Cabbie:  “I’m from upstate New York.  I came to the Cayman islands twenty years ago as a hotel manager.  It was a great life until Hurricane Ivan struck in 2004.  I lost everything (my house, my car, and my job) as did many of the other residents.  There’s the hotel I managed over there on the left.  It was never rebuilt—only the shell remains.  The entire island was out of electricity for three months and out of water for two months.  Sometimes it would take all day to queue up just to get a gallon of water.  And the summer heat was off the charts.  The hurricane sucked all the clouds and the trade winds out to sea while the mosquitos came up out of the swamps by the legions.  I swear they were the size of helicopters.  The very rich left on their private planes before the storm hit and hung out in one of their many other homes since they only come down here a couple of times a year.  Many of the international hotel workers who escaped via the evacuation never returned since everything they owned was in their luggage and what got left behind was destroyed anyway.  Everyone else who stayed was forced to keep their windows closed at night or the mosquitos would pick them up and carry them out to sea.  It was either die of heat exhaustion or be eaten alive.  Homeless families moved in with whoever still had shelter.  It took us quite a while to get back on our feet as an island and we still haven’t gotten back to where we were before 2004.  Poverty is at an all-time high, and the rich who use the Cayman’s as a second, third, fourth, or fifth home have driven the cost of real estate to the moon.  None of the locals who work in the service industries can afford homes anymore, and there is very little rental property for local use.  Because there are no taxes, the public schools are sub-standard (those who can send their children abroad to boarding schools), and the Island’s infrastructure is crumbling.  So here I am driving a cab in my golden years when I should be retired in paradise, but at least I’ve got a job and a home.  Have a safe trip back—I’d give anything to see snow again.”

As the sun set over the sea and we thought about the cab driver who was part of the 99% in the Cayman islands, WW and I got our sanity back, and thanked God for the “gift” of being able to experience a little piece of heaven.  Then we promptly dropped our lust to be part of the 1% into the sea as we headed back home with grateful hearts that we didn’t have to permanently live in the tax sheltered shadows of the rich and famous.

I am discovering that there are respites in our lives that are given to us as gifts to revitalize and encourage us in our journey.  They are meant to be enjoyed and relished.  But the gifts are never meant to be lusted after and sustained for life.  When that happens the respites are no longer gifts—they are heroin—and we will be consumed by our lust for them.

I am home now and it is freezing.  I’m back at work to make money so that I can take another trip next year to bring WW and me another joy-infused vacation (somewhere world) because travel is our “joie de vivre.”  We just won’t get greedy about it.

I am home now and my head hurts.  Another racist low-life has disrespected President Obama by jamming her finger in his face as if he were her house-boy; Paula Deen has fallen into disgrace by hiding her diabetes diagnosis for years while foisting hamburger, egg and bacon, donut sandwiches laced with sweet tea on her fans; Demi Moore is in the hospital for substance abuse after being screwed over by a little boy, and the Republican Party is eating its own.  But at least for a week, I got to go to heaven with the man I love and leave these types of troubles behind, and the Caymans gave me enough of a joy-infusion that it kept my head from exploding from all the crazies in the land.

Happy Birthday, my love!

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“There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.” ― Maya Angelou

“Greed, envy, sloth, pride and gluttony: these are not vices anymore. No, these are marketing tools. Lust is our way of life. Envy is just a nudge towards another sale. Even in our relationships we consume each other, each of us looking for what we can get out of the other. Our appetites are often satisfied at the expense of those around us. In a dog-eat-dog world we lose part of our humanity.” ― Jon Foreman

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All text and photos by Eleanor and John Tomczyk © 2011 , except where otherwise noted

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.