Category Archives: etc.

Hidden Tattoos

etc., family, fashion, ,

My husband and I are, if not addicted to, at least fond of tattoos. (I’m one of those people that no one, including me, thought would ever be likely to get a tattoo. But I digress already.) For me, it started with small tattoos: punctuation that had nonobvious psychological meanings, and a stack of books (guess why).

My first major tattoo was a tribute to my mother: A yellow rose on a compass rose (that thingy on a map that points N, S, E, and W). My mother and I traveled together a lot, to Rio, England, and many places in the US, and her favorite flower was a yellow rose. I thought it was appropriate. It’s on my left shoulder.

Dan’s first tattoo was a bear paw on his right shoulder. He identifies with bears, perhaps because he looks like one, especially when naked (no photos available). I’d say it was his spirit animal, and it did appear to him in a dream once, but I know that’s an appropriation of an indigenous philosophy. (I explained that to him, but he got the tattoo anyway, and it suits him. But I digress again.)

We had ideas for future tattoos all lined up too. Dan wants a tat on his inner forearm (one of the only places he’s deficient in hair) of a musical note, a heart, and a dove—for music, love, and peace, of course. (He’s an old hippie. What can I say?) My idea is to get a tattoo of Orion with the phrase “We are made of star-stuff” underneath on my right shoulder. (Orion is my favorite constellation, and I took Carl Sagan’s class when I was in college. He’s one of my all-time heroes. I’m not sure how it would look, but my tattoo artist has done Orion before, so that’s a good thing. But I digress some more.)

Then it came to me—the tattoo we both should get: tattoos of hearts over our hearts. We saved up our money and waited until the tattoo artist had an opening. A little research showed that it was a traditional tattoo: a heart-shaped locket with a keyhole in the middle of it. I also saw ones that included a key, like the one in the illustration for this post.

We had some difficulty communicating our idea to the tattooist. Her original sketch had the locket colored gold instead of red. Gold isn’t a great color for a tattoo. It tends to fade quickly. (My yellow rose could use a touch-up.) But she soon fixed it and made it red. And she came up with a great idea—keys underneath the hearts with little labels attached to them. Mine would say “Dan” and his “Jan.” (I agreed to Jan rather than Janet because that would have made the lettering impossibly small. But I digress yet again.)

I know that people say you should never get a tattoo featuring the name of a boyfriend or girlfriend because of the possibility of breaking up. But Dan and I have been married for more than 43 years, so that seems unlikely.

This is the first tattoo either of us has gotten on a place on our bodies that’s unlikely to be seen by others unless we wear bathing suits, which we don’t. (Or skinny dip.) But that’s okay. It’s a private, personal thing, which is why I didn’t include actual photos of the tattoos here. It’s enough for us to know they’re there.

Adventures in Writing: AI

etc., literature, writing, , , ,

I must admit I’ve had some experience with generative AI writing. I know I should be ashamed of this, but I’m not. Here’s what I learned about this tool or terror.

When ChatGPT was new, I was intrigued. I just had to try it out. I spent a couple of days feeding it some of my favorite topics and styles to see what it could do with them. What it produced was largely crummy.

For example, I asked it to write a haiku on the subject of sex. What it produced was: “Whispers in moonlight/Bodies weave an intimate/Haiku of passion.” Not exactly T.S. Eliot.

I asked it to write other kinds of poems. In almost every one, ChatGPT included the word “poetry” or the name of the style: “The poetry of passsion’s sweet romance” or “O sonnet of the flesh,” “Each line a brushstroke in the poet’s light,” “In every sonnet, life finds sweet peace.”

It also relied heavily on metaphors, many different ones in the same piece. For example, in a poem on writing, it offered “With verses woven like a tapestry. The writer’s heart, an open book” and “how the words, like melodies, entwine, In stanzas, whispers of a silent song.” Now that’s just bad.

It mixed metaphors atrociously: “The enigmatic tapestry…kaleidoscopic hues… orchestrated by unseen forces, paint the canvas of existence… a symphony of discordant notes, each mood a chapter in a cosmic novel.” All those in one paragraph. Another particularly egregious one was “etched into the fabric of one’s existence.”

It also got facts wrong. Recently, hoping that it had improved, I asked it to write a country song about horses in the style of Willie Nelson. “He’s a big ol’ bay with a coat dark as night” was one of the lyrics. (Bay horses are reddish brown.)

Later on, I had a chance to give a workout to a different AI program tasked with writing ten chapters of a novel. Then I was tasked with cleaning it up into human language. It was a lot of work.

AI couldn’t keep track of the characters, for one. It called a little boy Nicky, Billy, and Jamie and another character Henderson and Nelson in different chapters. It chose weird words (“thrummed”) and repeated phrases (“weight of the world”) in nearly every chapter. It forgot that a pivotal scene was supposed to take place in an abandoned warehouse, setting it instead in the woods. Once I had to have it produce a whole new chapter because the first one was so far off. Plot, characters, dialogue, narrative, backstory, continuity—all would be rejected by any competent editor.

AI nonfiction can be just as bad. There’s a tendency to be simply wrong about names, dates, and locations, for example. Flaws like that will seriously mislead readers. AI nonfiction has also been known to get things like herbal remedies drastically and dangerously wrong.

Once I toyed with an AI image generator, which did reasonably well with a human girl (though it couldn’t produce medium-length auburn hair), but couldn’t make a satisfactory alien to meet my criteria. It looked like one of those sad-eyed children in the old paintings.

I understand why special effects professionals hold AI in horror. Entire departments are being canned and replaced by larger, more sophisticated sorts of AI than the Tinkertoy ones I played with. But movies have been using CGI for years, so AI is the next logical extension. I’m not saying that the SpFX companies are right to abandon the people who have done so well for them over the years. Human imagination controlling the tools of creation will—or should—always have a place in the equation.

But generative AI has a long way to go before it can produce prose or poetry that can substitute for human works. I understand that publishers are being assailed with AI-produced novels, but I can’t imagine they can’t tell the difference. Readers of self-published novels, though, should watch out for AI books and avoid them.

Or, if you prefer, avoid all AI writing. I understand why you would.

(Note: Aside from the brief quotes, no AI was used to write this post.)

Let Your Freak Flag Fly

etc., fashion, humor, , , ,

To those of us who were hippies back in the 60s and 70s (and are now in our 60s and 70s), letting your freak flag fly meant something special. If I had to define it in two words, it meant Weird Pride. The straight world viewed us as weirdos, and, rather than being insulted, we embraced the title.

A lot of the controversy had to do with hair—specifically, long hair on men. I know it’s hard to believe now, in a time when anyone can do anything with their hair and not have anyone bat an eye, but back then it was a form of rebellion and a cause for discrimination. (There was a time when long hair was considered a job-killer. Beards too. Now about the only job-killer appearance I can think of is face tattoos. But I digress.)

It’s hard to let your freak flag fly anymore. There don’t seem to be any more freak flags. Not even hairstyles. Mohawks are passé. Shaved and partially shaved heads are accepted, even for women. Grandmothers are dying their hair green, pink, and blue—and not the kind of blue that used to be called a blue rinse. (Though many old ladies called it a blue wrench. I’m not sure why. But I digress again.)

It seems like the only way left to have a freak flag is based on your clothing. Even then it’s hard to do. I’m not talking about tie-dye, either. That can be worn by anyone, not just Deadheads. Mismatched, colorful socks won’t do it, and (unless you move in Martha Stewart’s orbit (which I don’t, needless to say) neither will wearing plaids with polka dots. (If you’re wearing a suit, the mismatched striped socks thing might work, but anything unusual worn with a suit would count as a freak flag (except an AR-15 pin, and maybe not even that in some surprising circles). Business suits are still an indicator of a non-freak. But I digress some more.)

Even non-clothing freak flags are getting more permissible. Psychedelic music is now on the oldies stations. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In hasn’t worn well, even though you can find it on a streaming channel. Marijuana is legal in many states (does anyone still say weed, pot, Mary Jane, blunts, roaches, etc.?) and used for relief from physical pain and illnesses. Psychedelic and party drugs are being used for psychiatric illnesses.

Protest songs don’t even exist anymore, though they’re sorely needed, if you ask me. Vulgar and obscene t-shirt sayings barely rate a blink. There are places to go if you’re a nudist, gay, or kinky that don’t get raided. Bare feet are about the only things that can get you tossed out of restaurants.

There are no freak cars anymore either. People don’t paint their VWs with flowers. A VW bus is more likely to belong to a soccer mom than a commune. And when it comes to travel, no one has to go to Canada to evade the draft. There are no draft cards to burn. Teenagers don’t even know what the draft was, and Vietnam vets are old men and women.

Now I’m not saying these new sensibilities are bad things, not at all. It’s probably a good thing that more styles are not only acceptable but non-controversial. It’s great that people can express themselves more freely. Whenever my husband wears his Jerry Garcia t-shirt, people think it’s far out. (I know people don’t say “far-out” anymore. Or “groovy.” I can’t keep track of what they do say. Plus, my husband’s t-shirt usually draw remarks that he looks like the picture. But I digress yet again.)

Basically, if you can find a way to let your freak flag fly, do it!

Fraidy Cat

cats, etc., humor, pets,

I’ve read that if you surreptitiously place a cucumber or zucchini behind your cat, when the cat notices the vegetable, it will jump straight up in alarm (the cat, not the cucumber). I’ve never tested this out because I’ve also read that the cat thinks the cucumber is some kind of fat, short, immobile but threatening green snake and is genuinely terrified. Some people thought it was cruel to put a cat through this unexpected terror. (Though no one seems to care that the whole red dot thing puts a cat through unrelenting frustration. We think it’s funny, so that’s okay. Actually, the whole cucumber thing was supposed to be amusing, too. Go figure. But I digress.)

I’ve never tried the cucumber trick on any of our cats. They have enough things that they’re afraid of already.

Knowing that I’m a cat lover, my friends often give me cat-related gifts—cookie jars, Christmas ornaments, earrings, mugs, and so forth. One year, someone got me a pair of cat house slippers. They were very lifelike, a pair of puffy, furry, black-and-white cats with little pink noses. Basically, they were adorbz. (Yes, I know that “adorbz” is years old and probably as horse-and-buggy as “horse-and-buggy.” But I like it, so it stays. It’s not like a piece of slang that no one can figure out what it means without context (or maybe even with) like “rizz.” But I digress again.)

At any rate, the first time I walked down the hall wearing them, our cat Shaker (who was also black and white) saw the pair of mirror-image cats shuffling toward her, she turned tail and ran. (The same thing happened when Dan “walked” a 3 1/2-foot-tall plush rabbit down the hall. (Dan won the rabbit at a carnival. He had fun driving home from Pennsylvania with it. He strapped it in the passenger seat and enjoyed seeing children waving at it. It didn’t go with what we graciously call our “decor,” so we gave it to a friend with a young child. The child appreciated it, but the mother didn’t. Didn’t go with her decor either. But I digress some more. (Embedded. Are you impressed?)))

Another cat we had shared with most other cats a love of plastic bags. (We once met a cat in Dubrovnik who tried to climb into our souvenir bag and come home with us. But I digress even more.) Anyway, Jasper, who was a little skittish anyway, got tangled in a plastic grocery sack, which was enough to alarm him. What he didn’t realize, however, was that the bag contained a CD in its case (CD = a horse-and-buggy item). Startled, Jasper tried to get away from the thing by running upstairs. But the bag was caught on his leg and chased him, thump, thump, thump, all the way up. He couldn’t get away from it. Unlike a cucumber, it wasn’t stationary. Like a cucumber, it terrified him.

Our current cat, Toby, is afraid of water. No, not his water dish. Not rain. Not even the water in the shower (he likes to sit on the shower seat, though not while the water’s running). No, he’s afraid of bottled water. The fizzy kind, anyway. If I crack open a bottle and it makes the fizzy sound (which it always does), Toby does that cat thing where he levitates three feet off the ground like he’s spring-loaded. I don’t know, maybe fizzy water sounds like another cat hissing.

I suppose it’s wrong of me to laugh at the fraidy cats. They don’t laugh at me when I run screaming from bees and wasps. Or at least I don’t hear them. (Maybe they’re polite enough to snicker behind my back.)

The Purple Leash

etc., family, pets, , ,

What does a woman do when she’s suffering domestic abuse but has a beloved pet she doesn’t want to leave? She may stay and endure the abuse because there is no shelter that will accept her pet as well. Her choice is to abandon her pet and go to a shelter alone or to remain in an abusive household. For many women, it’s an impossible choice, with no good answer.

Purina is working on the problem. They, along with Greater Good Charities and RedRover, have instituted what they call the Purple Leash Project. It’s a call to action for domestic violence shelters to have facilities where women can bring their pets with them when they have to go there. (Purple is the ribbon color for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.)

In most places, there are very few shelters for women that are also shelters for their pets. And, sad as it is, lack of shelter for dogs and cats can lead abused women to stay in dangerous situations rather than seeking help. They may treasure their pets as they would children. Or they may worry that their abuser would abuse the animal too for revenge because they left. Some even know that their abuser is prone to violence against animals, having witnessed it.

As one woman put it, “I endured domestic violence for many, many years and due to the fact that I could not leave my dog behind and our local shelter does not accept pets, I stayed. I stayed for over a year and a half.”

Another anonymous woman said, “I cannot thank you enough for taking this issue seriously. I actually cried when I watched your video as no one to date has taken this subject seriously. We have no shelters that allow pets in my area. Please continue to fight for what is right. For some of us, our dogs are everything.”

A woman named Angie added, “I wasn’t expecting I wouldn’t be able to bring Princess. And that was heartbreaking, especially for the kids. I feel proud just knowing other families will be able to keep their pets…that’s just awesome. Because, for us, Princess was everything.”  

This October, in support of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Purina is offering a Purple Leash Project digital coupon and will donate 50¢ to RedRover for each coupon redeemed through October 31, up to $300,000. I know it’s late in October, but there’s still time to take advantage.

Purina has also joined forces with renowned artist Kristen Visbal to create statues of a woman and a dog, titled Courageous Together. They’ll be making their way around the country in 2024 to raise awareness of why pets are a crucial part of the conversation around domestic violence.

Serving Society

education, etc., , , ,

It all started with a game of Texas Hold’Em held in a bookstore to raise money for charity. I had pocket aces (as shown), a very strong hand. I should have slow-played them and let others raise the pot, but I was a newbie and all excited, so I didn’t make the most of the opportunity. Shortly thereafter, I left the game.

(Texas Hold’Em became trendy and popular in 2004 with the publication of Jim McManus’s Positively Fifth Street. It led to such oddities as the World Series of Poker (yes, there is one) being televised. The title of the book came from the arcane but intriguing insider terminology used to describe the various parts of the game, such as the flop, the turn, and the river (aka Fifth Street), which refer to when the communal cards are exposed. Naturally, I was drawn to a game that had its own language. But I digress.)

After I left the poker table, I was drawn into a conversation with a woman who was watching the game. She wanted to know whether I did anything besides play poker. (Yes, there are professional poker players.) When I told her that I was in educational publishing, she relaxed. Her point was that professional poker playing served society not at all, but educational publishing filled a valuable niche in service to education, a worthy goal.

That got me thinking. Who exactly serves society and in what capacity?

I think we all agree on some of the basics: teachers, medical personnel, police, religious figures, volunteer workers, and firefighters. But are they the only ones who perform worthwhile services?

Politicians are not held in high regard these days, and neither are lawyers. But when they act on principles (if they ever do), they serve society by making laws and administering justice.

I’m less open to the idea that entertainers serve society by entertaining us. Of course, some entertainers (and I’m including professional athletes in that) donate large sums of money to assorted worthy causes or start charities or foundations that serve some segments of society, usually the underserved. But those people, it seems to me, are philanthropists (good-deed-doers) who also entertain.

(Speaking of entertainers, I can’t abide most reality shows, particularly the kind that might be called “Famous for Being Famous” (I’m looking at you, Kardashians) or “Rich People Behaving Badly” (I’m looking at you, Real Housewives). I do like the ones where fairly normal people actually make or do something like cooking or baking, designing clothes, forging knives, and so on. I can’t say whether they technically serve society, but at least they’re creative. But I digress again.)

But what (to get back to my much-neglected point) about sanitation and maintenance workers? Without them, our streets would be awash in litter and worse. Our offices would be grubby and perhaps disease-ridden. Our school corridors would be besmirched by vomit. I think taking care of all these problems serves society in a very real way. (And there are never reality shows featuring them. Probably something to do with the vomit. But I digress some more.)

I’ll admit that poker players don’t do anything to serve society, but I think we have a limited view of those who do. Public servants are held up as examples, and they should be. But farmers don’t get mentioned, and they feed us all. Train engineers and truck drivers serve society by delivering that food, as we learned during the pandemic. Psychiatrists and therapists serve members of the public who have mental illnesses. Meteorologists serve society when storms happen. Anyone from architects to bus drivers, yoga instructors to zookeepers. Even burger flippers and pizza delivery people serve society or at least individual members of it.

Let’s expand our definitions of who serves society. There are a lot of people who don’t get recognition and should.

That Hoodoo That You Do

arts and crafts, etc., family, humor, ,

Having the in-laws visit is a situation that is fraught with peril. There’s the frantic pre-cleaning cleaning, the cleaning, the post-cleaning cleaning, and the tidying up. There’s the delicate balance over what foods to stock up on and whether or not to go out for a meal or meals, and other aspects of potential entertaining. And, for those of us who don’t have the luxury of a guest room, there are the sleeping arrangements.

But the particular challenge that I want to discuss is when my MIL visited us.

We cleaned, of course, though perhaps not up to her standards. We loaded the pantry and the fridge with the mineral water, breakfast items, and snacks she preferred, plus more than our usual supply of staples, meat, vegetables, bread, fruit, and beverages.

No guest rooms chez nous, but at the time, we had a pull-out sofa bed. Being at least aware of one or two of the social norms, Dan and I would take the sofa, giving up the bed to Mom. We made sure there were clean sheets, blankets, towels, and such.

But upon seeing the sleeping arrangements, Mom announced, “I won’t sleep in that bed!”

“What’s the matter?” we asked, puzzled.

“That … thing. The one hanging over the bed. It’s a hoodoo. I can’t sleep under that.”

Now, Dan has been to Africa, where he encountered some shamans, and I have been to Jamaica, where I failed to encounter any voodoo priests, but in all our travels, neither one of us had ever acquired a hoodoo. (I did encounter lepers in Jamaica once (or persons living with Hansen’s Disease, as we would say now). (I was there reporting on charity work.) The residents’ cases were no longer active, but they lived apart in their own establishment (aka “leper colony”). They liked singing religious and folk songs, and when I asked if there was anything they needed, one man asked for new guitar strings. But I digress.)

At any rate, no hoodoos were acquired from anywhere.

The suspected hoodoo was a small wicker circle with various objects attached: a piece of red yarn, a bean from the castor plant, a cat whisker, a small bag of polished stone chips. It hung over my side of the bed.

What it was, of course, was a dream catcher.

I have nightmares from time to time. (I also have the usual anxiety dreams about being lost in a hotel, missing a plane, and not being able to find a clean toilet. Now that I think about it, as much as I love it, travel makes me anxious. But I digress again.) During one particularly bad spell, Dan made me the dream catcher. The items attached to it were ones that had special significance to me. The red yarn was a scrap from my mother’s crocheting. The stones were for my love of the semiprecious variety. The cat whisker—well, do I have to explain that one? (No, I never tried to kill anyone with a castor bean. It was a plot point in a mystery novel I was writing, though. But I digress yet again.)

It was a whimsical, tender memento that held no special power but that showed how much concern Dan had for me and how much he wanted to relieve my distress.

What it was not, was a hoodoo. (I’ve never seen an actual hoodoo, so I don’t know what they look like. I guess I can see how a dream catcher could be mistaken for one by someone who has no idea what a dream catcher is but is well up on hoodoos. But I digress some more.)

Our choice was obvious—remove the hoodoo or banish Mom to the sofa bed. It was a tough decision, but we removed the offending object (the dream catcher, that is) and Mom agreed to sleep in the bed. The dream catcher went right back up after the visit ended.

No sense wasting a perfectly good hoodoo.

Finally, I Gave In

etc., fun and games, , , , ,

All right. I admit it. At last I’m doing what the cool kids do. I’m playing Wordle daily.

I resisted for as long as I could. I even wrote a blog post about how I was not going to succumb. I found it annoying when every day I saw people posting on Facebook what their scores were. That trend seems to have stopped, or at least pulled back. Now, most people only share their results when they get the word in two or three guesses.

My first brush with Wordle came when I was visiting friends in Michigan. Leslie was playing Wordle while someone else drove. She was having a hard time with one particular word and was down to her last try. I looked over her shoulder at the puzzle and said, “Prism.”

“That could work.”

It did.

“You’re good at this. You should be playing it.”

But I resisted. I’ve long been a fan of crossword puzzles and anacrostics. I’ve also done a lot of sudoku and right now I’m obsessed with jigsaw sudoku. (This is an insidious form of the puzzle in which, instead of neat little square blocks, each area is some other shape. A “U” or a snake or some unidentifiable blob. The rules are the same. Each shape contains nine little squares, which must contain the numbers from one to nine. Each row and column must also contain one through nine. But I digress.) (My husband’s famous quote regarding sudoku is, “I may not be able to spell, but goddamit, I can count to nine!” But I digress some more.)

Then one day, one of my writing buddies, Mary Jo, sang the praises of Wordle. “You should try it,” she said. “It takes less than five minutes a day.” (Jigsaw sudoku takes longer than that.)

So, okay. If Mary Jo recommended it, I decided I would try it. I’ve played it every day since, so it’s all her fault.

I have my routine. My first and second words are always the same. They give me all the vowels (including Y) and at least three of the most common consonants. I’ve solved it in three tries more times than six, but four is my usual. I’ve learned to hate words that have several possible choices for the missing letter, like STEA—it could be STEAM, STEAK, STEAD, or STEAL, and if I run out of guesses, I’m screwed. Then there was the time the word was PENNE. Two double letters. Only one letter was revealed by my first two guesses. But I got it!

When I reached a streak of 30 consecutive completions, I told Mary Jo. She admitted, faux-modestly, that her record was 390 days. (I’m sure it’s even more by now.)

Then I found out her secret: She cheats.

(Okay, technically, I guess you can’t call it cheating. She has Wordle buddies that consult with her daily and give each other hints. (I’m not one of them, [sob!].) She refers to the complete list of words that have been Wordle solutions, so that she won’t get hung up on STEA if STEAM has already been used. I didn’t even know the list existed until recently. But I digress again.)

I won’t say I’m addicted to Wordle, but if I’m up after midnight, I do go directly to the Wordle page on the NYT site and try my brain. I tell my husband my score daily. (I don’t do so well on Spelling Bee. Sometimes I can guess at least one word just by looking at it. Other times, I simply can’t, no matter how long I study it. So I don’t. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, I now expect my friends to laugh and point (insofar as you can point online). Especially Mary Jo.

Don’t Harsh My Buzz

etc., food, funny things, , , , ,

Haters gonna hate. But I wish they wouldn’t, at least when it comes to personal preferences.

At this time of year, there is one major group of haters: those who hate pumpkin spice, who think it ought to be abolished. Who make fun of the people who enjoy a nice pumpkin spice latte.

I don’t get it. I love cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves. I’m especially fond of cinnamon and ginger. In fact, I love them so much that I believe all pumpkin pies should be made with more of the spices than are called for in the recipe so as not to be overwhelmed by the pumpkin, which is, after all, not all that flavorful.

And yet some people hate on pumpkin spice “everything.” I don’t often drink coffee and never lattes, so I don’t know exactly how a pumpkin spice latte tastes. But my bet is that it doesn’t contain any actual pumpkin flavor. It’s got to be doctored with only the spices. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Obviously, there’s a market for it, or Starbucks et al. wouldn’t be offering it. And offering it in September is totally legitimate. September is the gateway to fall.

(Except this year, of course. September is meant to herald the onset of sweater weather. This year, it’s still the month of boob sweat rash. But I digress.)

There are lots of other things made with pumpkin spice that are delightful as well. There are cakes and cookies, candy and cereal, bread and pancakes, soup and cheesecakes, muffins and doughnuts, macarons and popcorn, protein shakes and yogurt. But if you hate pumpkin pie spice, you can simply not buy them. You don’t have to declare how much you dislike them. As some of my friends say, “Don’t yuck my yum.” (We old hippies say “Don’t harsh my buzz,” hence the title of this post. Other formulations include “Don’t harsh my mellow,” and “Don’t be a buzzkill.” But I digress again.)

There are other things that people hate on. Country music. Rap music. Superhero movies. Horror movies. Romance novels. Science fiction novels. Et endless cetera.

Some of these impinge on me personally. I love country music (at least classic country and what they call Americana these days). Yet when a person says that they love country, people assume they’re an ignorant, racist redneck. I love science fiction, but I’m not a teenage, basement-dwelling geek. Those are stereotypes. Like most stereotypes, there’s a reason they exist. And also like stereotypes, they don’t apply to everyone.

Basically, I think all this hate would lessen if more people understood Sturgeon’s Law, which says, “90 percent of everything is crap.” (Sturgeon is Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction author. One of the Big Names, at least of the old guard. But I digress some more.)

What Sturgeon meant is that 90 percent of anything you’d care to name is crap: 90 percent of country music is crap; 90 percent of rap music is crap; 90 percent of science fiction is crap; 90 percent of romance novels are crap; and so on. And 90 percent of coffee drinks are crap, I suppose.

That leaves 10 percent of everything that isn’t crap—indeed, it may be extraordinary. But the catch is that you have to wade through the 90 percent of crap to get to the 10 percent of great. And most people aren’t willing to wade through the crap to get to the non-crap. It’s much easier just to dismiss the whole 100 percent as crap.

All I’m really asking is that you leave the pumpkin spice lovers alone. Don’t yuck their yum. If you don’t like country music, you don’t have to go through the 90 percent to get to the 10 percent that I love. Don’t harsh my buzz.

Life would be a lot more pleasant if everyone would simply refrain from yucking yums and harshing buzzes.

Is that too much to ask?

How to Start a Conversation

books, etc., fashion, humor, , , , ,

I never used to be any good at small talk. I would stand there, tongue-tied, while conversation went on around me. I was afraid I had turned invisible.

Then I met Erma the Armadillo, pictured here. She’s a purse that my mother bought for me from a catalog called, appropriately, What on Earth. This was back in the 90s, and I don’t think she spent more than $25 on the purse. When it came time to scare up a photo to go with this post, I found that today Erma is considered “vintage” and sells for as much as $140, used.

(I have a thing about armadillos. I fell in love with them when I learned that their main defensive technique is to jump straight up two feet, and their main natural predator is the automobile bumper. My defense mechanisms are like that, too. But I digress.)

Erma was actually a lousy purse. She was stuffed with cotton and had only a small zippered slot that would barely hold a driver’s license and a little cash. I had to carry anything else in my pockets. But what she was good at was starting conversations. Not that she spoke, but when other people saw her, they did.

People were fascinated. They always remarked on what an unusual purse Erma was. I would point out that she even had little tiny toenails printed on her stubby little feet. They’d ask where I’d gotten her. They’d ask why I wanted an armadillo purse. They’d ask more questions and share about other purses they’d seen or owned. Children were especially captivated by Erma. They couldn’t get over the fact that she wasn’t a toy and that she had handles. They always wanted to touch her, and I always let them.

When it comes to starting conversations with strangers, I always recommend accessories. My jewelry collection has some peculiar specimens. I have a sushi necklace that my friend Leslie made for me from air-dry clay. I also have a pair of bacon earrings, though I never mix cuisines in an outfit. Another set of earrings that people found amusing were the ones that looked like the planet Earth, complete with continents. (When I wore them, I liked to shake my head violently and shout, “Earthquake!” But I digress again.)

Conversation goes both ways, of course. “That’s an awesome (fill in the blank). Where did you get it?” is a good start on a good chat. People love to tell stories about their possessions, gifts, travels, etc. From there, conversation is an easy two-way street.

(It can fall flat from time to time. I once shared an elevator with a woman who had itsy-bitsy feet. I felt like I might have been staring at them. So I cleverly said, “Those are great boots! They make your feet look really small!” She replied, “They are really small.” After that, the conversation, and the elevator ride, ended. But I digress some more.)

I don’t know how people who don’t have unusual accessories start conversations. “Is that a good book you’re reading?” is one ploy, but it hardly ever works. Most people don’t read books in public, and if they do, they don’t like to be interrupted. And when I read books in public (which I do), I read them on my e-reader or phone, so the general public just thinks I’m doom-scrolling (which I don’t do).

Erma is no longer with me. Her handles wore out and Dan was unsuccessful at replacing them, which he tried to do. I don’t go out much anymore but when I do, I miss her. And the conversations.