Department Of Why You Don’t Want Me To Fill Out Your Survey
Dear, ____ (name of artistic group whose events I patronize),
I know that you-who-sent-moiself-this-survey – or the consultants which convinced you to do so, to justify their services – hope that having me fill out your survey will help you to “gain insights into the kind of audience” you are attracting, or wish to attract. [1]
However, I am slightly annoyed/somewhat mystified by the myriad of (what I consider to be) none-of-your-business/how-does-this-matter? questions. Checking “prefer not to disclose” was not satisfying, to moiself…then, my annoyance morphed into delight, when I came upon this question in your survey:
Please select any of the following sexual identities/orientations that describe you.
Aromantic
Asexual
Bisexual
Fluid
Gay
Heterosexual or straight
Lesbian
Pansexual
Queer
Questioning or unsure
Prefer not to disclose
Other:
At first glance I thought the first option was “Aromatic.” Which I decided to disclose to you, under “other.” I also thought about checking “pansexual” (I have this thing for cast iron skillets)…but…nah.
Anyway, thanks for the entertainment.
Are those your grill ridges, or are you just happy to see me?
* * *
Department Of These Labels Violate My Boundaries
Sometimes moiself wonders if social media has amplified the tendency we all have toward practicing amateur psychiatry. We scoff at our social media friend who barks, “Don’t poison your body – do your own research!” and sends us a link to a 15 minute video hosted by a dubiously-credentialed Guy In A Lab Coat® who spouts conspiracy theories contradicting 15 years of medical research on RNA vaccines. Then we turn around and employ (and misuse) psychological concepts and diagnoses, such as boundaries and narcissist.
In psychology jargon, boundaries are rules and guidelines we set for *ourselves,* to help us set realistic limits on activities and relationships. We choose and set these boundaries; thus, it is we who are in charge of enforcing them. Yet, those [2] I hear (or read about) who use the term boundaries emphasize the actions of *other* people – extended family; coworkers; friends and neighbors – whom they accused of ignoring or violating their boundaries. They forget the crucial point of boundaries (or perhaps never understood it in the first place): boundaries are rules that *they* set for *themselves,* not for others.
” Yet even as ‘boundaries‘ have taken off, the concept has become misunderstood, joining gaslit and narcissist in the pantheon of misused psychology jargon. When you want someone to do something, throwing in the word boundary can lend the request a patina of therapeutic legitimacy.
When imposed on us, boundaries can feel upsetting. Because many people view happy relationships as problem-free, a request to behave differently can feel like a rejection. Some people—out of trauma or other wounds—interpret a ‘no’ from a loved one as the end of a relationship. But boundaries are supposed to help preserve relationships, not destroy them. ‘People typically believe that boundaries are to control people, and in actuality, they are safeguards for yourself and for peace and comfort in your relationships,’ says the therapist and Drama Free author Nedra Glover Tawwab.”
( “The Most Misunderstood Concept in Psychology: What are boundaries?” By Olga Khazan” The Atlantic 8/23 , my emphases )
That article got me to thinking about more misuse/misunderstandings of the other two psychology terms the article mentions – terms that but get diluted with mis- and over-use.
Narcissist. How many times have y’all heard that term, used as a pejorative and also as an analysis of a difficult spouse/coworker/person/family member, despite the fact that the person being labeled a narcissisthas not received a Narcissistic Personality Disorder diagnosis from a mental health professional, nor has ever even visited a counselor? [3]
” ‘One of the internet’s favorite diagnoses is that someone is a narcissist—which has become shorthand for anyone who appears self-centered or entitled. The term is ‘thrown around so carelessly,’ says Jacquelyn Tenaglia, a licensed mental health counselor based in Boston. ‘I see narcissism being especially misapplied when it’s used to label someone who exhibits qualities that someone might not like.’
While it might feel good to call your frenemy who only talks about herself a narcissist, mental-health experts suggest refraining. Narcissistic personality disorder is a clinical diagnosis….”
And gaslit – I’m hearing that term more and more, to describe the allegedly nefarious actions and/or motivations of someone we don’t trust and/or just don’t like…but, are we really using it correctly?
The term is derived from the 1944 movie, [4]Gaslight. Gaslight tells the story of a late 19th century woman who is whirlwind-romanced into marriage, by a man who wants to gain access to her wealthy aunt’s estate, in which, he’s discovered, many valuable jewels are hidden. The husband tries to convince his wife that their house’s gas lights, which flicker and fade (but only when she is in a room, alone) are not in fact actually dimming, and that she is imagining the sounds she hears coming from the attic. The husband himself is the one behind both the noises and the dimming lights, in a strategy to drive his wife mad and have her institutionalized.
Someone can treat you poorly, even lie to you, without “gaslighting” you.
“Although in most cases the word serves to expose implicit power dynamics and level the playing field, it can also be used to do the exact opposite. That’s thanks to a process called ‘semantic bleaching,’ where a word’s true meaning gets diluted through imprecise and bad-faith usage…. woke—a word that originally meant ‘socially and politically aware,’ but now can be used to mean ‘sensitive’ and ‘irrational about social and political issues’ because of semantic bleaching by right-leaning media.”
Moiself highly recommends these articles I’ve cited (and hope I’m not violating any of your boundaries with this suggestion).
* * *
Department Of And One More Thing We’re Overusing/Doing Wrong:
Can we please stop referring to people as toxic?
“One of my most important rules as a therapist: Ignore all adjectives. When one of my clients says someone in their life is selfish, or cold, or hot-tempered, it doesn’t tell me much about the problem. Adjectives aren’t facts.
That’s especially true of ‘toxic,’ an adjective that’s become increasingly popular in and outside of my office (it was even the Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year in 2018). It’s also easily overused — a way of reframing a difficult relationship as one not worth having.
So, when I have a therapy client who uses ‘toxic’ to describe someone, I don’t ask them to clarify, or to reconsider the word. Instead, I focus on the facts of the challenging situation they’re telling me about….
When you feel anxious around another person, your brain will begin to take emotional shortcuts that usually involve fighting, fleeing, or complaining to others. You quickly label the person as ‘toxic,’ declare their toxicity as the cause of your anxiety, and assume that escaping them will fix your distress…
When one of my clients starts getting into adjective-heavy territory, I redirect them with questions like, ‘What did they do?’…and ‘Where and when did this happen?’ and ‘How did you respond?’ Notice that none of these questions have the word ‘why.’ This is because ‘why’ usually requires you to guess a person’s motivation, or label them as a certain kind of person….”
(“Why Therapists Avoid Using the Word ‘Toxic’ – Labeling others can stunt your own growth,” Forge.medium.com ; my emphases )
Hey, I enjoy petty name calling as much as the next guy. But do I really think the person who annoys me – or even the who has treated me poorly [5] for years – has venom running through his veins, and that touching him would set off an anaphylactic or neurological reaction? Or is it that he does ____, and ____, and ____, and thus I believe it is ultimately unhealthy for me to be around him?
Delineate, please. Be specific; calling someone toxic tells me nothing, except that you don’t like them.
“Toxins are poisonous substances produced within living cells or organisms and can include various classes of small molecules or proteins that cause disease on contact. The severity and type of diseases caused by toxins can range from minor effects to deadly effects. The organisms which are capable of producing toxins include bacteria, fungi, algae, and plants. Some of the major types of toxins include, but are not limited to, environmental, marine, and microbial toxins. Microbial toxins may include those produced by the microorganisms bacteria (i.e. bacterial toxins) and fungi (i.e. mycotoxins).” ( 14.4A; Toxins, Biology Libre Texts )
Is your boss doing any of this? He may be a brazenly manipulative asshat, but he’s probably not toxic.
* * *
* * *
Department Of Affirmations Gone Astray
Moiself received yet another solicitation to purchase “anti-aging” products. The misogyny and (ultimate) futility of the concept behind the term “anti-aging” I have railed articulately commented about, many times, in this space.
“Viral on TikTok” and “proven by science” – such a deal!
This time I had a minor epiphany as to the appropriateness of the term. Anti-aging: it is, indeed, anti– aging…which therefore makes it anti-life. Because if you’re not aging, you’re not alive. The only people who do not (who cannot) age are dead.
Feeling rather smug, I briefly meditated upon another embrace-the reality-maxim:
Today I am as old as I have ever been, and, as young as I will ever be.
“I realized early on that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious beliefs untenable. A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically? . . . What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?”
May you always identify as the Best-Smelling Orientation; May you remove unfortunate vestiges of earlier erroneous beliefs; May you enforce boundaries with the narcissistic gaslighters, real or imagined, in your life; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] I know this because it says so on the survey’s intro.
[2] These folks are not mental-health care professionals.
[3] Oh, but that would be typical of a narcissist, right?
[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[7] British physicist and biologist Crick, along with James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, helped decipher the structure and replication scheme of DNA, for which he (and others) won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine.
Can anything match the parental pride such as that experienced by moiself, when son K’s first reaction upon reading the name of the offender in the news article, Serial flasher gets long sentence for exposing himself… was, “It’s the role he was born to play.”
“Washington County Circuit Judge…handed down a sentence…to Michael G. Dick, who pleaded guilty to two counts of felony public indecency…”
* * *
Department Of Spending Too Much Time Thinking About An Existentially Inconsequential Concept.
.”…these dogs beds are not your typical slabs of foam covered in polyester. They are true inner spring mattresses that provide unparalleled back support and proper spine alignment for dogs of all sizes….”
I can’t remember if it was on an earlier HB episode or a different podcast where I also heard an ad for Saatva dog beds, in which it was claimed that a Saatva dog bed is the mattress “your dog deserves.”
This sterling example of the sentimentally manipulative capacity of marketing got me to wondering: How can a dog *deserve* a certain kind of dog bed?
deserve transitive verb: to be worthy of : MERIT
(“deserves another chance”) intransitive verb: to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital ( from Merriam-webster online dictionary )
I can understand a dog wanting something (a tummy rub) or needing something (a drink of water); I can understand a person wanting or needing something for their dog (a trip to the dog park; a leash). I can understand a person rewarding their dog for a specific act – with the reward directly connected to the act so that the dog understands that it did what was asked of it (e.g., giving the dog a treat for obeying a command to sit or heel…), and thus you can say the dog “earned” or merited the treat.
But how does a dog merit a piece of furniture that will be given to it – *must* be given to it (it’s not like the dog can take its Mastercard and go to Petsmart) – by its human?
I don’t know about that superlative. A dog meriting a bed is perhaps not the greatestmystery. But it does get me to wondering, about other mysteries of life and human behavior (this dog bed thing has everything to do with human motivations and almost nothing to do with dogs), including….
* * *
Department Of Existentially Consequential Concepts Which Deserve All The Time In The World To Contemplate…
Despite My Doing So Not Making A Damn Bit Of Difference
Sub-Department Of I Blame Vladimir Putin, For Everything…
…including the fact that beloved friends are going through a grueling Something which has afflicted them, for reasons unrelated to them personally and/or anything they may have done. Like Putin vis-à-vis the Ukrainians, there is this Something out there which is trying to torment and kill them, for no rational reason.
The cosmos is full of beauty and wonder and misfortune and pain, all of it unevenly and randomly distributed. Understanding this phenomenon is the key to equanimity…along with being able to tell the truth in all circumstances. Say, this is dreadful, when it is dreadful; cry when you have to and laugh when you can.
Moiself knows that disease organisms, like all primitive of life forms, just do what they do: try to survive and replicate. Got it. But, dammit it, you flaming asshole tumors, pretend for one nanosecond that you have sentience. Get some self-awareness here: if you kill the host, you die, too, HELLO !?!?!?.
We humanist/religion-free folk know that such afflictions are not personal: we know we’re not being punished when illness and injury occur, nor are we being rewarded when we somehow avoid or recover from the same calamities which afflict others. Still, as human beings; we suffer when hurt. At least we are spared the suffering from cognitive dissonance and the mental gymnastics that come with trying to live with and justify concepts such as karma and fate and believing the existence of deities which are supposedly all-powerful and thus *could* choose to alter the Something…but simply *don’t.*
So, we can admit upfront that contending with lethal illnesses et al sucks, as in, “This is massively, putridly, ginormously, donkey-dong sucking….”
“Hey! I thought you weren’t going to get personal?”
….even as we live in a world where, come yet another day, there will also be the mixture of the profound and the mundane to be appreciated, in, say, the sight of the morning dew sparkling on the araneusdiadematus’s web, which she’s anchored between the raspberry bushes and the recycling bin. And neither phenomenon – the simple but stunning example of the splendor of the natural world, and the specific ordeal of the illness we battle in that same world – is one we either caused or merited.
The late great Roger Ebert, noted film critic and freethinker, [1] shared his thoughts about his then-imminent death in his blog post, Go Gentle Into That Good Night. This was during a time when Ebert’s mental faculties were as sharp as ever despite his body having been ravaged by both his disease and the treatments for that disease. His perspective is one that is shared by many humanist/religion-free thinkers. It is a lovely meditation (excerpted here), the entirety of which is worth reading and rereading, no matter what your worldview is regarding your own mortality or that of a loved one.
“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear… I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris…
I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do.
To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
* * *
Department Of Because I Was Trying To Avoid Something I Need To Work On, And For Some Reason Had A Flash Back To This Topic
That topic, broadly speaking, would be co-worker relationships. Most of us have had a combination of ups and downs in that category, but have you ever had a coworker for whom your mere presence was apparently so annoying that it motivated them to play a petty (but delightfully so) prank on you?
Last week my remembrance of one such “relationship” resulted in a FB post from moiself. And now, my social media secret is revealed: the main reason for almost any story I post (or tell at the dinner table) is related to what inspires 5-year-olds to play doctor: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. I love to hear and read the stories of others, so I share one of mine, as a prompt.
My post:
“Okay, it’s another thinly disguised story prompt (I’ll show you mine if you show me yours): please share any similar stories you may have re a really poor relationship you had with a petty, nasty, bigoted, misogynist, and/or just plain stupid coworker, which led to an amusing incident. Here’s mine: On my first day back on at second season of a summer job (Disneyland; The Hungry Bear Restaurant), one of the kitchen crew clicked the play button on a mini-cassette recorder he had in his pocket, and serenaded me with Elton John’s, ‘The Bitch is Back.’ “
And dammit, although I got comments, for the first time no one shared a similar story. [2]
As you can imagine, this workplace incident didn’t happen out of nowhere. A friend requested the backstory; and so: [3]
At the end of my senior year in high school, anticipating the need to earn college tuition money, I began working weekends at Disneyland. I obtained “seasonal” worker status, which was the status of the majority of my male and female coworkers with whom I shared summer shifts at Disneyland’s Hungry Bear Restaurant (HBR). [4] Once we were hired by The Happiest Place on Earth®, if we seasonals worked the entire summer season and at least one other holiday season (winter or spring breaks; Thanksgiving…) we were guaranteed a job for the following summer.
The serenader in question – moiself will refer to him as Kid Rock [5] ( who wasn’t a thing then, but if he had been, I think my serenader would have been a *big* fan ).
Kid was a boor from the moment I met him. His square-jawed face’s limited repertoire of expressions were all variations of a smirk, and he oozed dumb jock attitudes and mannerisms. Moiself initially experienced a wee bit o’ guilt for judging him at first glance, until my second, and third, and one hundred seventeenth glances and encounters (as well as my observations of his interactions with others) confirmed my stereotyping assessment astute perception of who and what he was.
With his male coworkers, Kid was constantly jockeying for position, ingratiating himself with his kitchen shift managers, and attempting metaphorical pissing matches with the other kitchen guys. [6] He considered himself to be above his peers (although they were all doing the same job, at the same pay scale), even as he courted their respect (or fear) for being a “player,” with an edgy (read: mean and stupid) sense of humor. The nice guys in the kitchen crew (and there were several) earned Kid’s contempt, because being a nice guy meant being well thought of by the HBR females (we were “the girls,” of course).
“I can smell that creep from here.”
No surprise, Kid also had a binary way of relating to the HBR females: they were either objects of his sexual desire or not worthy of it. His preferred mode of communication with female co-workers was a combination of peacock preening, barely-masked sexual come-ons, and furtive insults (aka, “jokes”). He got giggles from some of the girls, but, as I observed, those girls seemed to be giggling to mask their unease, and trying to prove that they could “take a joke” and weren’t prudes. If Kid’s thinly disguised sexual banter was rejected by a girl, he’d let it be known that he hadn’t really wanted her at all – he’d just been trying to make her feel better, because she was unattractive. I saw him behave this way with *every* female at HBR, with the exception of one of the counter area managers, whose slight but noticeable physical disability effectively neutered her in his eyes.
And, as was typical of many guys of the time (even the not-so-loathsome ones), when Kid complained about his male coworkers he was able to do so using specific language re what bothered him about their actions: they’d been slow on the grill, had been late to their shift, had burned a batch of onion rings, had neglected key steps in their closing shift, had acted too passively, or aggressively….. Any complaints he had about a female coworker came under the cover-all of critiquing her very essence, with no particulars as to behavior: “She’s just a bitch.”
Kid’s attempts at titillating braggadocio didn’t impress moiself (SURPRISE !), and I limited our interactions as much as possible. Whenever possible, I ignored him. Therefore, of course (and, yay!), he had to announce to one and all that he didn’t find me appealing. But that wasn’t the end of it. It took me awhile to figure out the source of his irritation with moiself because I didn’t spend much time considering it – which was, for him, the issue. He seemed continually annoyed by my lack of interest in what he had to say, about anything.
In Kid’s eyes, I had committed the worst sin possible for a female: I’d indicated, not by saying so but by merely not engaging with him, that I had no interest in his opinion of me. I did not wear his taunts and insults as a badge of honor (as did a couple of my bad ass, feminist HBR colleagues), I simply stopped hearing them. I realized for the first time what it meant to hold someone beneath contempt. Strong emotions, including contempt, require effort and time to maintain. To moiself, Kid was just…macho flotsam.
I did not engage Kid in the repartee – playful, and with occasional double-entendre overtones – that I did with the “nice guys” and my female colleagues. We were all mostly within three years of one another, age-wise; naturally, there was workplace banter and casual flirtation and good-natured kidding bordering on insults. With regard to the latter I punched up, never down, with both male and female colleagues. The few guys who harbored a nasty streak stayed clear of me, after one of them, the Assistant Shift “Chef,” [7] tested my limits on my first week on the job. He did this with (what I later found out was) his standard routine with which he teased the new counter girls:
Assistant Shift Chef summoned me to the kitchen area, informing me that it was SOP to give counter girls a tour of the kitchen facility, even though they’d be working out front (later I was told that he always did this “tour” with others present, as having an audience was a key component of his routine.) Under the pretense of wanting my opinion about a possible flaw in Disneyland’s chef’s apron design, which seemed to have pockets and a seam or something no one could quite figure out, he reached down, fingered the outline of his crotch, and ask Newby Counter Girl ® moiself, “Do you know what this is?”
I’d been informed re the HBR hierarchy on my first day at work. Despite his title, Assistant Shift Chef had no authority over me (or any female HBR female), so I decided to go for it.
“Hmmm.”I assumed a wide stance, one hand on my hip and the other slowly stroking my chin in a gesture of solemn deliberation. “Wait; don’t tell me, this is familiar…Oh! I know! It looks like it a penis, only smaller.”[8]
Assistant Shift Chef guffawed heartily, as if he had collaborated with me on the joke. Still, I noticed (and savored) the nanosecond of terror and humiliation which flashed across his eyes, just after my line sunk in and before his crew began to whoop it up.
Once again, I digress.
The first day I returned to HBG for my second summer season (after my freshman year of college), I was delighted to see that several of my favorite seasonal employees had also returned…oh yeah, and there was also the Kid. Although, maybe he’d been there all year? I can’t remember if Kid had been a year-round employee or was another seasonal worker (all of whom were college students – the idea of Kid in any institution of higher learning never occurred to moiself).
Anyway, Kid had obviously been alerted to my return. He waited at the rear of the pack welcoming me back, and after the rest of us had exchanged greetings, he removed the mini cassette player from his pocket and pressed play. This time, I was the one with the genuine smirk on my face.
* * *
Department Of Entertaining The Donations Dude
Dateline: Monday; 1:30 pm-ish; Goodwill donations center. The guy helping me unload the donations from my car engages me in small talk about the current mugginess and upcoming weather forecast. I hand him a bag full of books; he points to a book at the top of the bag, whose title is something like, Staying Sane In An Irrational World.
“Well now, what’s that about?” he asks.
“Who knows,” moiself shrugs. “It’s a book of empty pages.”
May your pets somehow obtain the furniture (you think) they deserve; May the book of your life not be filled with empty pages; May you live long enough to find out that which makes you happy; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Ebert, who grew up Catholic, chose not to define his religious beliefs, saying he is not an atheist and not a believer. He clarified his religious views in a blog post called “How I believe in God.” He said, “I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist — which I am. If I were to say I don’t believe God exists, that wouldn’t mean I believe God doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean I don’t know, which implies that I could know.” (from Roger Ebert entry, ffrf.org )
[2] Perhaps there were none to share; perhaps all of my FB friends have been beloved (or at least tolerated) by even the most neanderthal of their colleagues.
[3] Thanks, RU, although I’d already considered sharing more of the details.
[4] Which, as more than one dissatisfied patron told me (as if I were responsible for the name or had any influence in *any* Disneyland policy) : “Shee-it, girl, this ain’t no restaurant, this is a burger and fries joint.” Or a glorified fast food place, with no table service…aka, in Disney-speak, a “quick service eatery.”
[5] I am happy to report that although I’ll never forget his face I cannot recall that co-worker’s name (nor would I used it in this space, even if I did remember it).
[6] At that time, D-Land’s various food attractions staff were sex-segregated with respect to responsibilities: males in the kitchen, running the fryers and grills and stocking the food wells, and females upfront – the “counter girls”, taking the guest’s orders, receiving payment, and “boxing” and giving to guests the food and drinks.
[7] I can’t believe that title (chef?) was given to the dude who was in charge of the run-the burgers-through-the-grill machine line.
[8] A thousand thanks to seventh grade PE teacher Mrs. Ewing, who suggested a version of that response to flashers and other harassers.
[9] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
The HTC: The Hood To Coast relay race, that’s what it is.
Hood To Coast is a long-distance relay race that starts at Mount Hood and continues nearly 200 miles to the Oregon Coast. Known as “the mother of all relays”, it is the largest running and walking relay in the world…. The race is held annually in late August, traditionally on the Friday and Saturday before the Labor Day weekend. The course runs approximately 200 miles…from Timberline Lodge on the slopes of Mount Hood, the tallest peak in Oregon, through the Portland metropolitan area, and over the Oregon Coast Range to the beach town of Seaside on the Oregon Coast. Teams of 12 runners take turns running legs along the course. ( from “Hood to Coast” Wikipedia entry )
The Hood to Coast Relay is so popular, it sells out every year within minutes on the day when it opens for team registrations. [1] HTC begins at Mount Hood, with staggered start times on Friday from 3 am to 2 pm (teams have 36 hours to complete the course). [2] This year there were 1,000 teams participating, and 12,000 runners. Teams come from all US states and 40 other countries, including our neighbors to the north:
Y’all impressed? You should be. For all the years we’ve been coming to the Oregon coast, the last weekend in August is one of the more fun times to be there (almost [3] fun enough to make me want to take up running again, just to participate in the HTC). MH and I hang in Manzanita, 22 miles south of the HTC finish point (Seaside). During the HTC weekend, almost about anywhere on the north Oregon coast you’ll spot the HTC team vans with their colorful names and mottos painted on the sides and doors, and encounter the enthusiastically exhilarated (and exhausted and sleep-deprived) HTC team members looking for food and drink, massages, blister relief, or just wanting to hang out.
Moiself knows many people who’ve participated in the HTC. This year son K joined a team for the first time, and asked me to be a HTC volunteer. All local [4] HTC teams are required to provide three volunteers or one exchange leader, [5] or they’ll be disqualified from the race. As you might imagine, with so many runners, a 200 mile race stretching from a mountain to an ocean needs a lot of people helping with logistics along the way, [6] including at the start and at the exchange points, to keep track of participants and vans (each team must provide two vans to transport members; each race member must run three legs of the race), and particularly at the end of the race, where the teams check in to a large, roped off section of the beach at Seaside, and have ceremonies and parties and eat and take official pictures…and did I mention parties?
I signed up for the 9:45a – 2:45p Saturday volunteer shift at Seaside. There were many of us volunteers at that shift time, and we were (most unscientifically) chosen for a variety of tasks. Moiself ended up in Trash and Recycling. T/R involved constant movement: for the next five hours (with lunch and hydration breaks at the volunteers’ discretion) we T/R crew walked a snaking/looping pattern throughout the various sections of the finish line area, from the perimeters to the zones within the zone, checking the I-lost-count-of-how-many trash and recycling receptacles. T/R volunteers duties included “pre-cycling” as much as possible (invariably, people dump the wrong items in the receptacles, despite the bins being clearly marked for trash v. recycling and having picture labels showing what items go where; thus, we had to move items from one bag to another), and changing the bags when they were 75% full.
* * *
Department Of People Are Fun
It was fun, even while digging through the icky T/R receptacles, [7] to see the teams arrive. There was so much sheer joy to be witnessed, on the part of the runners and the friends and family cheering them on. And the team names – I wish moiself could remember them all. I had a job to do, but tried to pay attention as the teams’ arrivals were announced over the loudspeaker (which you could hear from any part of the finish zone). Most teams go for a funny/punny name; e.g., one that satirizes their workplace and/or sponsors, or is a play on words with common situations and ailments faced by distance runners in general or HTC racers in particular (e.g., team “My Third Leg is Harder Than Yours”).
Most teams had custom shirts for their runners, and sometimes hats and other accessories. Teams decorate their vans, too. A popular team name motif is the slightly naughty/double entendre. Years ago, I saw a van with this motto painted on its rear door:
” Go Nads! (National Association of Distance Sprinters)”
Atop the van, attached to its luggage rack, was a large set of paper mâché…any guesses?
Another van’s display of their team name made me consider whether or not I would want to park (or walk) behind a van labeled, “Twelve Sticky Buns.”
A few intrepid teams run in full costume – moiself spotted members of one all male team which seemed to have a Barbie theme going on – or regalia related to their names. I never found out the name of the team whose every runner, male and female, was clad in red prom dresses, but they were a jolly group to behold.
Some team names I remember from years past:
* Run Like a Mother *199 Bottles of Beer on the Wall * Get in the Van! * Where’s the Beach? * Hauling Ass-prin * 12 Drummers Drumming * Cheap Hills * Forrest Stump [8]
* Endorphiends * Toenails Are For Sissies * It’s Cute You Run Marathons * Tektronic Megahurtz * Hoodwinked * Van You Catch Us? * The Team Formerly Known As Class Act [9]
* Back Fat * The Young and the Breathless * The Young and The Rest Of Us * Premature Acceleration * Monty Crython and the Hilly Trail * Oreo Speedwagon * Electrolyte Orchestra * Turd Herders * I-Be-Pro-FUN * Worst. Wine. Tour. Ever. * Obi-Run Kenobi * Cirque du Sore Legs * Last Place Legends * Team Questionable Life Choices * The Island of Misfit Toys * Married Up * Pace Cadets * Kids, Get Your Shoes On * Resisting A Rest * Seven Deadly Shins * Tequila Mockingbird * Another Run Bites the Dust * We’ve Got the Runs * The Kind Of Dirty Dozen * Lactic Acid Trip
* Two Dozen Scrambled Legs [12]
Now: who’d want to be a member of team Back Fat? When I saw several BF team runners hanging around by one of the finish area T/R receptacles, moiself had to ask. I did my T/R checking job, then prefaced my query by pointing to my shirt (as I did several times afterward, when I realized that people would answer *anything* I asked when they saw my shirt). “So,” I said, “in my ‘Race Official capacity, ‘ I must ask you: Why would anyone want to run under the team name, Back Fat?”
The BF-ers exchanged knowing glances. “Well, look at us,” one of them said, and he pivoted to show me his back. Yep, in their green polyester, clingy running shirts (mostly) covering their squatty, chunky physiques….I’ll concede that their team’s name was a first-rate example of truth in advertising.
“We’re just running for fun…we’re not the elites,” the BFer said, as he hoisted a beer with one hand and with the other hand, pointed behind moiself, to the Nike area (Nike had its own roped off zone within the finish zone, with complimentary food and beverages for Nike-sponsored teams, as well as their own set of gleaming white, porta-pottie trailers. Bouncers checked IDs at the entrance to the Nike zone, ensuring no plebes – except for those wearing Race Official ® shirts – got inside.) “We know we’re not the team that’s in the best shape…” BF guy snickered.
“But you’re the team having the best time,” I offered. He laughed heartily, and he and his fellow BFers toasted me with their beers.
Moiself moved on to the next set of T/R bins, where another group of racing men stood (hanging around the T/R bins seemed to be a thing). There were six of them, all wearing their race shirts and, from the waist down, colorful batik, sarong-type wraps. They were quite the contrast to the BFers: they were all tall, slender, in their 40s – 50s, in great shape, with that lanky, distance runner’s physique. And the way they were groomed: even after having just finished a two-day race, their hair was neatly styled and none of them looked the least bit sweaty. Distinguished-looking, you might say. Something about their aura and the way they carried themselves radiated, “well-kept” (read: money).
I asked about the team’s name on their shirts (a word which sounded Hawaiian to moiself); also, noting their sarongs, I asked if the team had some Polynesian connection (although the men were all haoles). One of the men began to explain: “A few years ago, a friend of mine bought a small island in Fiji…” To which I interjected, “As one does.”
Well-Groomed Man didn’t miss a beat; he continued to tell me about how their team name was a word his Fijian-island-owning friend had introduced them to. The word had a few variants among the Fiji Islands and was similar to the Hawaiian alohain that it had no one translation, and could be used as word of greeting and departure, or as a way of wishing someone well, etc.
My next T/R stop took me to the Nike area – my Race Official ® shirt was my entry ticket. It was quite the nice setup. About twenty minutes later, I encountered a T/R volunteer in a (non-Nike) area by the finish lines, and she told me that although there were not long lines of people waiting to use the porta-potties which lined the perimeter of the finish zone, the facilities always seemed to be occupied. I told her that if she needed a bathroom break, she should go to the Nike area and use their pristine facilities. “But, isn’t that for Nike people only?” she asked. “Who cares?” I snorted. “I didn’t see anyone checking IDs once they let you in their zone. Besides, if someone questions you, give them a WTF look, show ’em your shirt and your trash bags, then ask them if they’re saying that you’re good enough to pick up their trash but not good enough to use their porta potties?”
* * *
Department Of People Are Pigs
Oh, but it wasn’t all fun and games. As a member of the T/R crew, I had more than enough job security. As my shift wore on I became lip-curlingly disgusted with my fellow human beings, too many of whom left their discards in the strangest places – as in, obviously and deliberately misplaced, not just dropped in carelessness.
Yeah, clever, dude! Because that’s where recycling goes.
Besides the Nike teams’ area there was another restricted/ID required zone: The VIP tent. There was a guy seated at one entrance to the tent, whose job was to check people’s…. status, I guess?…before he let them into the tent. Moiself never found out what qualifications were needed to enter the VIP tent (I saw several people – non-VIPs, I assume – turned away). However, Those Of Us Wearing Race Official® shirts were allowed inside the tent, to do our T/R duties. The first time I approached the VIP tent, I saw Entry Checker Guy eye my volunteer shirt and the extra T/R bags I was carrying. I told him I was there for a VID – a Very Important Duty. “Ah, yes,” he said. In a tone both flip and friendly, he added, “But, are you a VIP?” To which I replied, “I am a Very *Impudent* Person. Is that VIP enough for you?” Turns out it was.
When I came back on my third run-through in the VIP tent, its T/R receptacles, while not yet full, needed changing. I was disgusted by the behavior of the VIP tent occupants, who’d left their trash *everywhere.* A couple of VIPs were seated less than two feet from the T/R containers, and when they saw me, they nodded in acknowledgement (as if to say, “Ah, here comes the help”) and then just – I couldn’t believe it – set their plates of partially eaten food and their half-empty beer cans down, on the sand, nudging the items toward the T/R receptacles but not bothering to get off of their Very Imperious Posteriors and properly dispose of said trash. Something in me snapped, a wee bit. T/R volunteers had been told (at the beginning of our shift, by the volunteer coordinator who did our T/R duty training) not to berate or even correct people who discarded their trash improperly, but to just “fix it.” So, I did pick up the VIP refuse and sort them into the proper bins, but decided to leave the tent with full T/R bins, and did not return to check on them later.
My HTC volunteer experience brought to mind the gentle…warning, for lack of a better word, which I received many years ago from someone who was quite the dedicated volunteer. She had volunteered across a variety of fields and for a variety of events and services, for decades, and she told me that when you volunteer, for anything,
“…be prepared to be disappointed in your species.”
As the hours went by it began to bother me, more and more: the amazing amount of trash, and waste. T/R receptacle liners bulged with utensils, non-recyclable cups, and plates loaded with food – plates of food from which someone had taken a couple of bites, from hot dogs to burgers and noodle dishes/stir frys, and then thrown aways the rest. Why do people even bother? Did it taste bad? And the food – apart from that served in the VIP and Nike areas, was not free – it had to be purchased from various booths. Were the people who bought it even hungry; did they get a burrito, then realize, Oh, I don’t really want/need this? You don’t have to eat every time there is food around, (perhaps the food wasters fell prey to that American Mindset®: “Look, food! Must be time to eat.”)
I just didn’t get it; I didn’t want to get it…
There were many booths in the finish zone, some with sponsors/vendors giving out free cans and bottles of various beverages (kombucha and flavored/”energy” waters). We T/R crew would find many of those cans and bottles cracked open but half full, buried in the sand, or leaning against the recycling receptacles (which had notices asking people to please empty cans and bottles before recycling them). What’s the deal, of not taking five seconds to empty it? Were they just waiting for/assuming someone else to do it?
When checking in volunteers were given a Race Official shirt, which we were told we must wear over whatever other shirts we had on, during our shift. After check-in we were directed to move away from the check-in line and wait for a volunteer coordinator to assign us to task groups. As I stood in the waiting-group, I looked noted that most of that group, plus those in the volunteer check-in line, were female. One young man, who looked to be in his late teens-early twenties, was standing at the periphery of my waiting group. I pulled on my RO shirt, sidled over to him and asked if he was or had been a HTC runner. He shook his volunteer shirt (he was holding a Race Official shirt but had not yet donned it) and mumbled, “No; I’m just doing this for a friend.” Another volunteer also greeted him, and by the look on the young man’s face I couldn’t tell his reaction: was he mortified, or disgusted, to be surrounded by middle-aged women, some of whom were actually attempting to talk with him.
Once I was on my T/R shift, I continued to note (anecdotally; this was not a scientific survey, but I saw what I saw) how the volunteers were overwhelmingly skewed, gender-wise. Particularly, those who were chosen for T/R duty – I saw only one man doing T/R. And while moiself recalls being thanked by four (yes, I counted) men during the five hours of my shift, I lost track of the number of female race participants who, when they saw my Race Official shirt (and noticed me picking through the trash), thanked me for doing so.
That’s women for you, I groused to moiself. We are the world’s garbage collectors. I was reminded of a quote I read, decades ago, from a woman who was part of a lawsuit against a local (So Cal) municipality which refused to even consider hiring women to work on refuse collection crews: men don’t object to the fact that women pick up/deal with the world’s physical and metaphorical garbage, as long as we aren’t paid to do so.
Stop getting all existentially bummed, I castigated moiself. If K runs the HTC again next year and asks me to volunteer, I probably will. I can select a different shift and locale – maybe somewhere midrace, at an exchange point? Oh, but there’ll be trash duty there as well. Will I just be removing moiself from seeing the majority of the waste produced by this event…. This is way too much ruminating on yet another example of how we continue to literally trash our environment, which is our home, our VIP zone. So, after my shift ended I went home and washed out the reusable containers in which I’d brought my lunch – yeah, that’ll save the planet….
* * *
Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time again, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself . Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [13]
May you respect the person who picks up your trash; May you be the person who picks up your trash; May we all have the means to buy a (trash-free) island in Fiji; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Beginning in the 1990s, Hood to Coast implemented a lottery system to select participating teams.
[2] Some elite teams, often corporate (read: Nike) sponsored, have run the course in half that time.
[4] As in, from within Oregon, not those flying in from, say, Costa Rica.
[5] Exchange leaders work in the exchange zones, where a race participant passes off to the next participant in rotation to run the next leg. Each leg of the race varies in distance, from approximately 4 – 7 miles.
[6] …and an estimated 500 port-a-potties are staged along the route.
[7] I insisted on the thickest pair of gloves they had at the volunteer check-in booth. Some T/R volunteers just wore thin vinyl gloves.
[8] All Forrest Stump team members were adaptive athletes: all team members had some physical challenges, including prosthetic legs and/or use wheelchairs due to spinal cord injuries….
[9] The story behind this name: One year a team called themselves, “Class Act.” The next year they were, “Class Act Is Back.” During that second year one of their vans was pulled over and reprimanded by a Sheriff’s deputy when the riders were shooting Super Soakers out the window on the highway. Thus, the third year’s Prince-inspired moniker, to allow for how their “classy” reputation had been tarnished.
[11] They were young (I think the minimum age for runners is 13) and female, and they were running fast – picking up the pace! – when I saw them cross the finish line.
[13] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
(Which makes MH, Mr. Abner Kravitz. Yep, I’ve been having fun with that all week).
Left: Gladys Kravitz; Right: Samantha Stevens
For those readers younger than 50, Gladys Kravitz was the nosy neighbor of the TV series Bewitched‘s protagonist, Samantha Stevens. Gladys was convinced that there were extraordinary goings on in Stevens’ household, and was exasperated to the nth because she couldn’t prove her suspicions to her husband ( “Abbbnnneeeerrr!” ) [2]
Background to this startling revelation about my heretofore secret identity: Dateline, Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am. I was at the coast, out for a morning walk…
But first, a relevant digression. A long time ago…oh, no – here it comes again…
From my late high school years until my late twenties, I ran [3] between two to five miles, every day. As recreational runners know, unleashed dogs and runners are not a good combination. [4] Every runner I’ve met has stories of being confronted, harassed and/or attacked by an unleashed/unaccompanied-by-its-human, aggressive dog. The stories, and the avoiding-being-a-dog-bite-victimadvice runners receive and pass on to other runners, are mostly similar, but sometimes divergent.
A person running triggers the prey instinct in many dogs; thus, the common wisdom shared amongst runners: when approached by a dog whose posture and behavior…
* stiffening or freezing of the body; * forward-leaning, hunched down, hunting/stalking posture; * “whale eyes” (wide, with a lot of white showing); * teeth baring; tense mouth/curled lips; wrinkled nose; * ears laid flat against the skull or stiffly held straight up (not relaxed); * barking, growling; “air-snapping”….
…indicates aggression, and there is no dog owner in sight, you should:
* stop running * stay as calm as you can * avoid eye contact (which can be seen as aggressive); * speak to the dog in a calm, firm, but non-threatening voice; [5]
* remain upright; * don’t scream (or flail your limbs or panic or jump up and down); * back into a corner or against a wall so the dog can’t get behind you; * look for a tree or car to climb [6] and hope to f***’s sake the owner appears…
I faced the aggressive dog situation many times when I was running for exercise. Those strategies worked for me, as they did for other runners…except when they didn’t. I heard too many stories of someone who did everything right and got bitten anyway.
Fellow runners also shared the WTF?!?!?confusion of hearing sure-fire advice from so-called experts which contradicted advice shared by other experts. As in: ignore the dog; *don’t * stop running. Continue what you’re doing, because some dogs will pay you no mind when you walk or run past them but if you stop, they “think” (okay, no human really knows what a dog thinks, we are trying to guess/interpret) you are a threat to them.
In other words, encountering an aggressive dog is situational and dog-specific: sorry, but there is no sure-fire, works-every-time, strategy. But, human nature being what it is, there is this sure-fire reality: there will always be some person who will tell you that, whatever you did, you should have done something else.
Back to the future background to the Mrs. Kravitz revelation: Dateline: the Oregon coast (Manzanita); Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am; out for my morning constitutional. On that day I decided to walk north along the imaginatively named Ocean Road, which parallels the beach, then splits into two roads, one of which (Beulah Reed Road) continues along the coast and up into the streets winding around the base of Mt. Neahkahnie.
I walked along the road, noting the increasing number of vans and other vehicles I’d been seeing in my early morning walks – vans and campers parked alongside Ocean Road which look as if they’ve been there all night (as opposed to the vehicles whose drivers pull over, watch the waves and savor their morning coffee [7] before driving on to their jobs, or what/where ever). Those been-there-overnight vehicles are situated in such a way to indicate that the occupants are camping there, despite the fact that it is illegal to do so, and despite the “No Parking between 11pm – 5am” signs posted along the road.
As I turned up Beulah Reed Road I saw two more looks-like-illegal-campingvehicles parked on the west side of the road. Safety-conscious pedestrian that I am, when I am walking along a sidewalk-less road, I always walk facing traffic; thus, I passed close by both of the vans, whose occupants were presumably still inside/asleep (the vehicle’s windows had shades and other objects blocking the windows and windshields). One of the vans stood out due to its color and décor: a green van festooned with white and yellow flowers, sporting a Nebraska license plate and a message – “love mother nature and she will love you back” – painted on the van’s rear window.
The Green Van was in the same spot on the west side of Beulah Reed Road where, in the past few months, I’d walked past other camping vehicles one of which provided moiself with a memorable visual a couple months ago. The naked man who’d emerged from that vehicle and began urinating by the side of the road just as I was passing by was an unpleasant sight, but a minor startle compared to what happened Tuesday am.
I continued walking up Beulah Reed Road for a few more minutes, then headed back to Ocean Road. As I neared the Green Van(this time, walking on the far side of the road) I saw a husky/malemute dog lying in the sand by the right rear of the GV. The dog had not been there five minutes ago, when I’d first walked past the GV, and there was no sign of any humans (other than moiself) about. When I was about thirty feet away from the GV the dog’s eyes fixed on me; it got up and slowly began to cross the road toward me.
Oh, shit. It takes minutes to type what flashed through my mind in nanoseconds Some of the nicest dogs I’ve met, and some of the meanest, have been husky/malemutes – and those two breeds consistently rank high on the Biting Dogs lists….[8]
The dog was obviously not going to be one of the nice ones. It slunk toward me, in a crouched position (the classic hunting posture – have you ever seen footage of wolves or other carnivores stalking their prey?). Its approach was menacing, but silent…which I found more disturbing than barking. [9] If it had been barking, that would have (hopefully) alerted its owner.
“How’d ya like to see these teeth up close?”
I stop walking and spoke softly but firmly, remembering not to make eye contact. I did all the “right things,” which had no effect on the dog’s aggressive body language and approach, so I slowly began to continue my walk. The dog circled in front of me, blocking my path. It growled, bared its teeth and walked stiff-legged toward me, then began to snarl and bark. I put my walking poles between me and the dog and called out loudly: WHOSE DOG IS THIS – COME GET YOUR DOG. I did this several times; finally, a woman appeared from the west-facing side of the van. She had long, reddish hair and looked to be in her late 20s – early 30s. She made no apologies for her menacing dog, but unenthusiastically attempted to
(1) assure me that her dog was not aggressive (“He just has a lot to say” she said,
as her dog began barking even louder, flattened his ears, and raised his hackles) (2) get her dog under voice control.
She failed at both (1) and (2).
She held no leash (and with the dog’s thick fur I couldn’t tell if it even had a collar to which a leash could be attached). She kept calling to the dog, which would turn to look at her, take two steps toward the GV, then turn around and bark and take three steps toward moiself. As the dog continued to ignore the anemic “suggestions” of his owner to return to her, I swung one of my walking sticks at him, which temporarily stopped his advance (at that point he was less than two feet from me).
Oh, for some pepper spray, I thought – not for the dog, but to use on that pathetic excuse for a human being. GV lady may make van-decoration-declarations on loving Mother Nature but she obviously doesn’t give an oyster’s ass about walking responsibly through Mother Nature’s land while respecting and protecting *all* of Ma Nature’s creatures, including bipedal ones.
This brand only works on German-speaking dogs.
I made firm, aggressive eye contact with the woman when she repeated her, “He’s not mean/he has a lot to say”bullshit excuse. I replied, “Yeah, he’s saying a lot and none of it is nice – I’ve been bitten by a dog; I know when I’m being threatened. You need to get your dog under control, RIGHT NOW.” The insolent look on her face reminded me of a pouty adolescent whose parents had threatened to ground her until she cleared the dinner table. “I am going this way,” I pointed toward Ocean Road, “and your dog needs to gothat way.“ I pointed toward her van.
Which eventually happened. After the woman and her dog disappeared behind the other side of the van, I took a picture of the back of the GV.
I was seething when I got home (and really hungry). I posted the GV picture on my FB page, along with a very brief description of the incident. As I was doing so I remembered that on my way back I’d passed an elderly couple walking on Ocean Road, headed in the direction I’d come from. Damn, I chastised moiself– should I have warned them about staying away from that van? With that thought in mind I posted the same photo and incident description, with an “FYI” warning/introduction, on a FB page where locals post pictures and info about items of North Oregon coast interest.
I knew I should report what had happened to “the authorities.” As I fixed my breakfast and mulled over whom to call (The town? The county? ) I was contacted by my Friend and Neighbor ®. F&N had seen my post, and urged me to report the incident. I called the police non-emergency number; the dispatcher who finally answered said that Beulah Road was under Tillamook County jurisdiction, and that she’d have a TC deputy contact me.
The TC deputy took down the details of my report, and then…oh my my (“Officer Chatty Cathy,” my mind soon nicknamed him). He had a lot to say about what had happened to me, and about related incidents he had been/was currently dealing with. I was apparently a sympathetic ear into which he unloaded his and his law enforcement colleagues’ frustrations with similar incidents and with “what’s going on in the county,” including:
* increased illegal camping * increased reports of aggression between illegal campers and county residents * illegal campers’ aggressive/unleashed dogs (who go after both people and other dogs) * the overload of reports the county has to investigate without the staff to do so….
He said that TC had a backlog of *hundreds* of calls about illegal camping and other violations, but that because what happened to me involved menacing, he could prioritize my report, and would head for Beulah Road. I thanked him, and noted that the van had probably moved on. Actually…probably not, he said. And, in his experience, if it did move it would likely move to somewhere nearby, and a green van with Nebraska plates would be easy to spot. Should he find the van, he said he’d have an in-depth conversation with the van/dog owner. How he handles these cases, he explained, is based on the dogs’ and or vehicles’ owners’ demeanor and response. If they listen respectfully and are forthright and apologetic, he tries to educate them and lets them off with a warning. If they are unapologetic and insolent, and even (as some people have done) go so far as to assert that they have no intention of abiding by the _____ (leash, parking/camping/trash disposal, etc.) laws, he’ll give them “as many citations as possible.”
He asked me to spread the word: please tell people to report these encounters, even as he acknowledged the perception that “They (law enforcement) will do nothing,” and so most incidents go unreported. It’s true, we (local police/sheriff departments) are understaffed, he said, but people need to know that the reports, even if they cannot be immediately investigated, help them gather statistics in general, and make records in particular for individual menacing dogs and their owners, so that if (or as he put it, “unfortunately, when“) the dog harasses/attacks another person or pet, the dog owner can’t get away with, “Oh, he’s harmless/he’s never done that before….”
At one point in our conversation, I told him how I’d began my walk thinking about the increase in illegal parking/camping, and asked if he knew if that is indeed the case, or just my anecdotal impression? And is this uptick (in illegal beach camping) related to homelessness? He told me the increase in numbers wasn’t my imagination, but that my assumption about the cause was incorrect. He then asked me something which led to an “aha” turn to the conversation: “Have you heard of the website, ‘vanlife’?”
“You’ve seen the hype around #vanlife. You’ve seen the stunning photos on social media. Now you want to throw everything to the wind, quit your job, build out a camper van, and live a carefree life of adventure…. This page is designed as a jumping-off point for your personal vanlife journey. We go over the pros and cons of this lifestyle, the reasons why full time van life is awesome… We answer the most frequently asked questions about living in a van – everything from bathrooms and showering…to finding sweet camping spots.”
“After we’ve posted this cool picture of ourselves can we go back to our penthouse and order takeout sushi?”
I said I knew of the site, but had never visited it. I thought it was similar to other sites I’d heard about, where people share information about RVing and/or traveling and living in trailers and vans. It is that, Officer CC said, but has become so much more: it has become a source of the increased “incident” calls faced by local law enforcement. He proceeded to express his frustration re the influence of the van-lifestyle sites, where people post info for others who’ve chosen to live in vans, sharing tips about where to travel and camp “for free” (but not necessarily legally).
More and more, Officer CC said, the people he speaks to and then warns and/or cites for illegal camping are mentioning (in some cases, boasting) that they were “referred” to the Oregon coast by vanlife and similar websites and online bulletin boards. And, he stressed, these people are *not* homeless– they seem well-funded (trust fund babies?) and/or are working remotely. For whatever reasons, they have romanticized the idea of public urination and defecation[10] life on the road. They…
* find it glamorous to be house-less by choice;
* take pride in ridding themselves of the bourgeois trappings of consumerism:
* receive positive feedback from like-minded folk when they post cool pictures on Instagram of their adventures in livin’ on the road;
* believe that dogs also “need freedom” and so they ignore local leash laws;
* tell him that they love livin’ “for free”…
which – surprise! – turns out to be anything but free for the people in the communities who pay the taxes that fund the services to clean up after those freedom lovin’ van lifers, who leave their trash and toxic waste behind as they move on – and the damage these love-nature-and-she’ll-love-you hypocrites do to natural habitat areas frustrates him to no end…
As he described his dealings with these voluntary nomads, more than once he referred to van-life enthusiasts as, “hippies.” I could tell from Officer CC’s voice that he was much younger than moiself; it took all of my maturity (ahem) to refrain from correcting him:
“Actually, they aren’t hippies – that was an older generation. Any surviving hippies are at home rubbing patchouli and/or CBD oil on their aching joints…I think y’all need to come up with a more contemporary epithet for the younguns whose lives and values you find disrespectful, or just fruity.”
I’m not criticizing or mocking the deputy. He was amiable, empathetic, and eager to articulate the frustrations of law enforcement officers who cannot adequately fulfill their oath to serve and protect when they are overwhelmed by calls they cannot address.
Our talk turned to what people can do to protect themselves against aggressive dogs (Officer CC said his wife is a runner, and that she and her running buddies frequently deal with unleashed and aggressive dogs). I said that, due to my afore-mentioned, bitten-by-a-dog incident, I’d done my research, and ordered a cannister of citronella spray [11] and an air horn, for self-defense. Before I could tell him I’d ruled out bear sprays/pepper sprays, he strongly advised that I tell my friends *not* to carry pepper sprays, because
* Unless you’re an expert who practices with pepper spray on a regular basis you can end up inadvertently spraying yourself, particularly when you’re under duress; * At the beach, where gusts of wind can arise seemingly out of nowhere, pepper spray can backfire, as in, get blown back on *you.*
He said that while he hated having to recommend it (“Nobody wants to hurt an animal,”) carrying a club might be called for (I said thanks/no thanks, and mentioned my walking poles). He expressed admiration for the air horn strategy: “What a great idea!” he enthused, noting that the loud noise would both startle the dog and alert nearby humans.
Yeah; okay, are we ever gonna get to the Gladys Kravitz connection?
After my conversation with the deputy I drove to Hillsboro, where I had business to attend to. While driving I received a voice mail from my Friend & Neighbor, and pulled over to return her call. F&N said that my local/beach group FB posting had spawned a comment firestorm: most were from people relating their own/similar incidents, and/or expressing sadness re what happened to me in particular and what they saw happening to their community. Other posters engaged in unfounded and unsolicited second-guessing, reframing the incident, and even claiming to know the dog’s intentions, despite having not been there. [12] Several of those I-wasn’t-there-but-I-know-what-really-happened posters also opined on what I *should* have done to avoid being menaced by the dog.
( Ladies, does this sound familiar?
“If you’d only done this/said that/worn that/walked this way,
you wouldn’t have been assaulted.” )
I’d read a few of the early comments, including two which asserted that “people should mind their own business” and “stop caring about who parks where or does what.” [13] The MYOB theme was picked up by a few other unbalanced strident posters. How that became a thing, considering the context, was a mystery to moiself. Translation: I found it bewilderingly irrational. The afore-mentioned Gladys Kravitz remark came from one such poster, who addressed her remarks to moiselfand fumed about why I was being Gladys Kravitz, and that I should have minded my own business….
Say what? Minding my own business – exactly what I was doing. I did not approach the dog and try to determine whether he was neutered. My business, which I was minding, thanks for your concern, was walking. I was out for a walk on a public road, enjoying the scent of the briny coastal air and minding my own beeswax, when an aggressive, unleashed canine decided to make his threats my business.
F&N and I had a giggle about how comments on my post had spiraled into many tangents. I said that, after violating the never-feed-the-trolls rule (I corrected one unhinged commenter, who seemed to be reading comprehension-challenged and tried to rewrite my story to fit her outrage at…whatever), I’m not going to read any more comments on that group. F&N said she’d keep me apprised of the more entertaining (read: whackadoodle) posts…although, I told her, the Gladys Kravitz epithet would be hard to top.
The next morning my phone rang: it was F&N’s update call. Apparently, by the end of the previous day, “things got nasty,” as she put it. She’d checked the FB local/beach site before bedtime: there were “248 or 258” comments, including a thread where people posted pictures of when they’d been bitten by an unleashed dog, and others posted either support or criticism for the bite victim. Then a man mentioned that he might carry a gun when he goes to the beach, and lawdy mama, it took off from there, with about 40 more posts related to carring concealed weapons on the beach. In the morning when F&N rechecked the site, about 40 of those packing-heat-on-the-beach posts had disappeared, taken down by the group moderator (or perhaps, I posited, by the posters who’d developed cooler heads overnight?). F&N said the nastiness also included some posts which made blatant or tacit references to class warfare, claiming that heartless “rich people” at the beach hate “the rest of us” and harass people who have no choice but to live in their cars…in sharp contrast with the deputy’s testimony that the majority of the people he and his fellow deputies encounter and warn about/cite for illegal camping are neither destitute nor homeless, but self-obsessed, “van life” adventure seekers, whose idea of freedom is mooching off of public services they can well afford to pay for….
And moiself? Oy vey. I’d not even considered filing a report about illegal camping.
I just want to go for a walk, anywhere it’s safe and legal to do so, and not get bitten.
May you enjoy any/all outdoor activities free from dog (or human) harassment; May you delight in observing online trolls but not in feeding them; May you enrich the public discourse by coining a better word than “hippies” to describe Gen Z…hippies; …and may the hijinks ensue.
[2] And of course, Gladys Kravitz turned out to be spot on: Samantha Stevens *was* a witch. Despite promising her mortal husband Darrin that she would *not* use her powers, just about every episode of Bewitched involved Samantha using witchcraft to create unusual happenings, or to try to undo the wacky situations created by her witch and warlock relatives, who would make mysterious arrivals and departures and mess with the mortals. Mrs. Kravitz witnessed just enough to have her suspicions, which would always be explained away by Samantha or others. Yep, Mrs. Kravitz was a nosy neighbor, but her suspicious were correct, and she was gaslighted.
[3] Or I could say, “I was a runner,” but I never took my identity from that; I ran for enjoyment and exercise, as opposed to training for the Olympics or whatever.
[4] Unless the dog belongs to the runner and is also running because…well, it usually isn’t the dog’s idea.
[5] This is not to make yourself the alpha or assert dominance, but to get as much control of yourself and the situation as possible, and to make any cues you give the dog – “sit; down; stay; go home” as understandable as possible.
[6] The strategy used by one elderly gentleman, in a neighborhood I used to live in, when he was attacked by two free-roaming dogs when he was doing his early morning neighborhood rounds, delivering advertising flyers. The man and I had greeted each other when I went out for my morning run, and I was able to rescue him when I returned and saw that the dogs had treed – carred? – him.
[7] Or sometimes, doobies…as I notice when I pass the vehicles and they have the windows down.
[8] Which I learned in my training for the animal rescue organizations for which I volunteered, and I confirmed this when I returned home, by searching for dog bite statistics.
[9] Many a person who has survived a dog attack says that the silent ones, who approach you steadily, are more dangerous than the barkers.
[11] The smell of citronella is irritating/offensive to dogs, but not harmful.
[12] Perhaps there is a Canine Psychic Intentions website I am unaware of.
[13] Those comments seemed to be related to other posters who focused on the illegal parking and camping situation, not the aggressive dog.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
But if moiself did publish such a book, it would have a chapter titled, “The Girls of Summer.” Said chapter would be devoted to describing the elaborate role-playing [1] games my grade school friends and moiself played, in my backyard and/or garage, during summers, on the three-point-five days a week when we were *not* at the beach.
The games we played on a regular basis included
* Dracula (we were – surprise! – vampires, although no one ever played the titular Count. [2] );
* Haunted House (we transformed my family’s garage – in which my parents did not park their cars because doing so would have taken away a vital part of our play space – into a haunted castle, wherein we would haunt [read: terrorize] our younger siblings, aka “The Little Kids ®,” who were so desperate to play with us Big Kids ® that they’d do anything we’d say);
* Leopards (we were a family of leopards, living harsh lives on the African plains and forests)
* Amazonian Women ( explanation forthcoming)
.
* * *
Department Of The Hitherto Unexplained Connection Between Barbies And Nuns
First, the Amazonian Women game explained, or at least outlined.
My childhood home’s backyard was a vegetation paradise, particularly during summer. Our fruit-producing trees and shrubs included a lemon tree, a peach tree, a plum tree, a pomegranate bush, several banana trees, [3]and five apricot trees. A huge, great-for-climbing pine tree of some sort (the sort that produced so much sap my mother kept a jar of Crisco, soley dedicated to sap removel, by the kitchen sink) was behind the garage. The pine tree provided a good access point to the garage roof, which we kids were technically forbidden to climb onto, due to our (read: *my* ) tendency to play WWII paratrooper and jump off of the roof holding an umbrella. [4] Summer night bonus: If you climbed far enough up in the pine tree you could see the halo at Anaheim’s Angel Stadium light up when an Anaheim Angel hit a home run. The view was definitely worth the sappy hands, arms, elbows, knees….
The perimeter of our yard’s back and side fences was lined with a variety of shrubbery. Cascades of bougainvillea flowed up and down and around the backyard fence, and the vines’ vibrant magenta-colored flowers provided the perfect tropical aura for our Amazonian game: we would drape a garden hose at the top of one of the vines and adjust the hose’s sprayer to the finest mist setting, which provided the proper, lounging-by-the-waterfall atmosphere, and also kept us cool. You could work up quite a sweat in the summer as an Amazonian warrior, canoeing from island to island, hunting and fishing and gathering tropical fruits, fighting off dangerous wild animals, and planning excursions to either visit or plunder neighboring islands.
Our brothers and other neighborhood boys were welcomed for the tag games [5] my girl friends and siblings and I played on balmy summer evenings, but with the exception of having one boy join the Dracula or Haunted house game on a few occasions, the other games were all-female. There were no literal male occupants of our Amazonian island; there were a never-specified number of men that we’d taken from neighboring islands and whom we kept in captivity. My friends and I knew enough about mammalian reproduction to know that our species could survive as a single gender, so we kept these imaginary male captives for “breeding purposes” – the ultimate meaning of which was lost on us, but somehow, we knew we had to acknowledge that aspect of our culture.
My notes for my SoCal girlhood memoir have gathered dust; moiself hadn’t thought of the Amazonian game in ages, until Monday, when friend CC and I saw the Barbie movie. During our après-cinema lunch when we were discussing the movie, [6] I told CC about the Amazonian game, and how it fit into my theory of why so many girls (especially those whose girlhoods were 40+ years ago) – girls who would either then or later identify as feminists – liked playing with Barbies, and also sometimes pretended to be nuns.
Hold on to y’alls wimples: it’s the long-awaited for, Barbies-Nuns Connection. ®
Like all the girls I knew when I was in grade school, my sisters and I were given, and played with, Barbie dolls. I never received, nor wanted, a Ken doll. [7] I did have a few male dolls: I asked for, and received for Christmas one year, a G.I. Joe doll and a Johnny West cowboy doll (which came with a palomino steed, and a plastic vest and chaps and spurs wardrobe for Johnny!). But as I discovered, a boy’s G.I. Joe was not to be called a doll, but an “action figure.” You’d best not refer to any of a boy’s male play figurines as what they were – dolls – lest the boy’s little dingus shrivel up and snap off at the mere suggestion that he played with a kind of toy commonly associated with girls.
Like many most of same girls with whom I played let’s-pretend we’re_____ games, we also played the We Are Nuns games. This was not a The Sound of Music fantasy thing, [8] and with one exception these friends were *not* from Catholic families. But there was a similar appeal to the world of Barbies, Amazonian island women, and nuns.
It’s not a complicated connection, not in the least. The appeal was that those worlds (Barbies; Amazons; nuns) were composed solely of females. Thus, girls got to do *everything.* This was not the case when we played games with the neighborhood boys.
One of a bajillion examples: One summer day I agreed to play “The Smith’s Home” (or some other family name) with my younger sister and our next-door neighbor boy. Next Door Neighbor Boy and I were The Smith Family. We were a recently married couple, with a dog and a cat and two hamsters and no children. After we’d discussed the game parameters, NDNB announced that he was leaving our house (a fort we’d built in my backyard) to “go to work.” I wanted to head out as well, but NDNB boy-splained to me that things didn’t work that way: as the wife, I had to stay home. When he insisted on taking the family pet, a German Shepard (played by my sister), to work with him, I in turn explained to him that things didn’t work that way. Husbands do not take the family pets with them to work – name one husband in the neighborhood who does that?! And that was the end of The Smith Family game.
Now then: NDNB was a nice boy, of whom I was genuinely fond re his gentle disposition and kind heart. But he, like the other neighborhood boys and the brothers (whether older or younger) of my friends, always tried to take over during the few times we let them join our games. If the girls were starting a game of Blackbeard’s Buccaneers you didn’t want the boys to join in because they’d insist on being all of the pirates and you had to be…something else.
Who you callin’ a scullery maid?
As young females, we grew up seeing a world where males were in charge, of just about everything. In television and movies men were the primary (if not the only) protagonists, with the women there as domestic/romantic supporting players. I was no fan of Catholicism and steadily (if secretly) came to despise almost everything about any religious doctrine (including my own family’s moderate Lutheranism); still, nuns held a peculiar attraction for many girls such as moiself . [9]
Sure, nuns were “cloistered,” but at least a nunnery was a cloister of choice. Girls grew up seeing few-or-no female counterparts to the much-envied, free-livin’, swingin’ bachelor: whether by choice or circumstance, females who remained single were portrayed as objects of pity. “Spinsters” and “old maids” were the only terms for women who remained single and childfree.
Similarly, when you played with Barbie dolls, you could be the good egg, the louse, the protagonist and the hero and the side player and everything in between. Our Barbies ran the house, earned the paychecks, planted and harvested the crops, designed fantastical machines, drove the stagecoaches between the OK Corall and Santa Fe, flew to the moon in shoebox rocket ships – whatever you wanted them to do, with no Ken to tell you that you couldn’t, or yeah, maybe just this once but you gotta ride…
“Sidesaddle my PVC ass, Ken.”
* * *
Department Of Wait Wait Wait Wait Wait A Minute…
“The battle over legacy and donor admissions to college — the practice of giving special treatment to family of alumni and contributors — is about to heat up in California as critics take aim at what they see as a long-standing barrier for less privileged students to access elite institutions.
State Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) plans to renew efforts to deny state financial aid to any college or university that gives an admissions advantage to such applicants, who research has shown are overwhelmingly white and affluent.” ( “Battle over legacy and donor admissions preferences to heat up; USC, Stanford could take hit.” LA Times 7-31 )
What the….
Moiself is, of course, *highly* in favor of such a bill, even as I’m stunned (naive? ) by California’s need for it. Since when did state financial aid go to private universities?
* * *
Department Of And In A Related Story…
A long time in a galaxy far far away: In the summer after son K’s junior year of high school, he began the first of several rounds of visiting colleges he was interested in applying to. Moiself accompanied him on the first three campus visits, which were in California. [11] It was late June when K and I flew down to Sacramento, rented a car, then in the next three days toured UC Davis, Stanford, and UC Santa Cruz.
My Oregonian born and bred son, who was known to complain when the temperature rose above 72°, seemed to have had an weather-influenced relationship with the colleges we visited on that trip: the closer we got to the coast, the more he liked the school, inversely conflating the temperature of the area with what his academic experience would be.
When we deplaned in Sacramento the heat blast hit K in the face, and I remember thinking, “Yep, this is familiar…” I am a UCD alum. A couple of summers I stayed in Davis to work expanded hours at the student job I had during the school year. I assured K that if he went to UCD he would probably not be staying during the summer, and that Davis had winters an Oregonian would appreciate. Nevertheless, looking back, I think all he “saw” of UCD was the heat.
Neither MH nor I were the kind of parents who lobbied (nor even encouraged) our offspring to consider attending our respective alma maters. But in the fall of K’s junior year, one winter weekend afternoon when he and I were hiking in a local nature preserve, K mentioned his interest in studying entomology. I told him there were not many colleges which offered an entomology major, and of those that did…things may have changed, but when I was at UC Davis it had the top-rated entomology program in the nation (when we returned home I did an internet search and confirmed that that was still the case).
I forget the reasons K had an interest in Stanford (his aunt, my younger sister, was a Stanford alum, but I don’t know if that was the influence); he was curious about UC Santa Cruz for its connection to the Human Genome Project. So: we planned our trip, signed up for the campus tours of and presentations by the respective colleges, and moved from east to west, starting with UC Davis, then Stanford, then UC Santa Cruz.
As moiself mentioned, I don’t think K saw much of Davis but the heat. UC Santa Cruz – he liked many things about it, although he agreed with my observation, as we did a bus tour around UCSC’s verdant campus, which is situated in the forested hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Monterey Bay, that it might be like going to college in summer camp.
As for Stanford, our visit there provided the most indelible, visiting-a-campus story.
We both enjoyed the Stanford campus tour, which was led by an enthusiastic student who was personable and articulate and knowledgeable and proud of his campus. K was quite keen about Stanford after that tour. Next on the agenda was a sit-down presentation for prospective students and their parents, given by Stanford’s Director of Admissions. In 20 minutes K went from, “Wow, I really like this place; it’s definitely going to be on my application list,” to, “I wouldn’t go to this snobby, elitist, self-aggrandizing institution if *they* paid *me* to do it.”
One of many statements the Dude of Admissions made which K found off-putting was a dyad of contradictory statements, which he kept repeating:
” *Any* person can get into Stanford! “ (After saying this, he would give examples of students from lower income, and/or nonwhite and/or non-big city backgrounds who were Stanford alums)
” Stanford, as one of the top rate universities in the United States,
is very selective, and has one of the, if not THE, lowest acceptance rates
of any college in the world! “
Several times during his presentation Admissions Dude said that he wanted parents or students to ask questions at any time, about any Stanford-related subject. After AD’s third repeating of his anyone-can-be-here/almost-no-one-gets-in couplet, a student raised his hand and asked how he might increase his odds of getting accepted to Stanford. AD answered with what he obviously meant to be a humorous story: “First of all, don’t do this….” He proceeded to tell how a high school senior had marched into AD‘s office, unannounced, hours before the admissions deadline. The student dismissively flung an admissions packet onto AD‘s desk and said, “Take care of it.”
I looked around the room, noting that both parents and students were snickering with “Oh, can you believe that arrogant wiseass?!” amusement. Moiself raised my hand, and when AD called upon me I asked him, “Was that student a legacy?”
Admissions Dude turned an impressive shade of white. [12] In a Very Serious Voice he stammered, “I can’t give any names; I can’t – uh, we can’t reveal any personal information about an applicant…”
To which I perkily replied, “I didn’t ask for his name; I asked if he was a legacy.”
Admissions Dude was quite flustered that I’d brought up an apparently taboo subject – as if no one present in the room had ever heard of legacy admission preferences before the big-mouth Oregon lady brought it up. He squirmed with discernable discomfort – I thought he was in danger of pissing his Trussardi trousers. The more the AD tried to act “plussed” the more nonplussed he became. As he strove to change the subject, several parents seated in front of K and I turned around and flashed me knowing, sympathetic, and/or incredulous looks.
K ended up applying to six of the seven schools he visited that summer. He was accepted at all six, and chose to attend the University of Puget Sound. He did not apply to Stanford.
Stanford LegacyGuide (The Koppleman Group)
* * *
Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time again, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself . Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [13]
“If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” ( Anatole France 1844 – 1924, Parisian poet, journalist, writer )
* * *
May you have fond memories of your own childhood summer games; May you be mindful of what popular foolish thing you believe; May you enjoy your own reign as Employee of the Month; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] No, not today’s RPG. It meant something different back then.
[9] One that was romanticized, of course, but what other options did we see?
[11] MH did the next three visits with K, to colleges in Washington, British Columbia, and Minnesota. And K and I later made an overnight trip up to Tacoma to visit the University of Puget Sound, which is where he decided to go (as did his sister, Belle, three years later, and for similar reasons: they both had the experience, upon touring the campus, of “Oh, this is my place.”)
[12] Made even more impressive by the fact that he was not white.
[13] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Department Of If Only People Understood This Basic Statement Of Reality Ninety Percent Of Interpersonal and International Conflict Would Disappear
Yourreligion does not prohibit *me* from anything.
It prohibits *you.*
Learn the difference.
* * *
Department Of Awwwwwww
Just sat down – well, metaphorically speaking, as I have a sit/stand desk and happened to be standing – when MH walked into my office and showed me what he’d found. It was, as he put it, “…a reminder of Crow”…and there went the rest of my plans for my post.
The reminder was a bag which holds vacuum cleaner attachments. Our late great cat Crow was obsessed with chewing on plastic bags. If you look carefully, you can see her toothmarks all over it.
I found the timing of this reminder somewhat bittersweet. It was almost exactly a year ago that we said goodbye to Crow, as noted in my post of 7-15-22…which I am going to revisit in its entirety here. Moiself be getting too sentimental now to write about other topics, as I’m thinking of Crow…and also our remaining Cat, Nova, who is not much longer for this world (she has stage 3 kidney disease) :
7-15-22
The Multicolored Overpass I’m Not Traversing
Something moiself has been thinking this week: it’s been over 29 years since we (MH and I) have been a less-than-two-felines household.
We’re down to one, the all-white Nova , as we said goodbye to Crow this week.
It had been a challenging past 18+ months for Crow, with a possible “vascular incident” (stroke?), the progression of her painful arthritis, and finally, diabetes. After veterinary appointments, blood tests, and consultations, we made an appointment with a veterinary euthanasia service who came to our home to do the deed.
As difficult a decision as it was, we were also much relieved, once having made it. Crow spent her last days at home, lazing on the carpet in the sun, eating and drinking whenever she pleased. [1] We were at her beck and call; I told her she was at a kitty spa.
At the time we adopted Crow (fifteen years ago), all-black cats were the most likely to not find a placement. [2] Instead of adopting a rescue greyhound, which was the original plan to add another pet to our family, we went to Bonnie Hayes Animal Shelter, [3] opened our house and our hearts, and Crow made herself at home. Crow had a good life, and she was spared a lingering death.
After the phone call with our veterinarian wherein we discussed treatment and care options, MH and I had a calm, rational discussion. We considered all the angles – plus the fact, particularly important to moiself, that Crow (like any pet) cannot consent to nor “understand” any course of treatment. After the phone call, we decided upon euthanasia. When we agreed that this is what we agreeing to, I asked MH if perhaps we might take Crow on one last trip to the beach, because she seemed to enjoy lying on the deck in the sun. And we both lost it.
A much younger Crow and Nova, circa 2008, playing with Nova’s favorite toy (a Lego helmet).
* * *
Department Of The Downside Of Loving Them
Dang, these critters tug at our hearts. And because we care for them properly, they just don‘t die like they used to: they get good medical treatment; [4] they live inside and thus don’t get killed by coyotes or run over by a car or contract illness and/or injuries and/or infection from other animals…. And if they refuse to die in their sleep in their old age, the combination of aging and chronic illness takes their toll, then *we* have to make the life-and-death decisions.
MH’s astute observation: for all but one of the cats we’ve had who’ve died, there came that awful time when we had to opt for euthanasia for them. Odds are that, with our remaining cat, the same will (eventually) be the case. Each time, we knew we were doing the right thing. Each time, it was still heartbreaking.
Observant readers may notice that moiself is *not* is reporting that “Crow has crossed the Rainbow Bridge.” Nor am I using similar euphemisms to describe the fact of her death. Although some pet owners seem to find such metaphors comforting, they make me…well…emotionally retch. Moiself is not a believer in – as in, I’ve seen no evidence for – any kind of “heaven,” for any kind of creatures. And since I hold no such ideas for humans I see no need to burden our recollections of our animal companions with similar mythologies.
I don’t mean to come off stony-hearted. Grief is complicated; expressing it, even more so. I promise not to slap you if you use the RB term around moiself, and I hear or read about “the RB” often enough to know that it makes some pet owners feel good. The only afterlife I give credence to is the only one we can know for sure exists: that which resides in our hearts and minds. In that way and in those places, our loved ones truly do continue to live “after” they are gone.
BTW: The Rainbow Bridge, for those of you who are fortunate enough not to have encountered the treacle-ism, is a mythical overpass (apparently based on imagery from some cheesy sentimental poems from the 1980s) which serves as a kind of transit for pets. For example, upon the death of their friend’s chihuahua, RB fans will say that Sparky has “passed over the Rainbow Bridge,” into a verdant meadow (or other Nature Setting ® ) where Sparky will frolic carefree until the time Sparky will be reunited with his “human parents.”
While I don’t believe in Rainbow Bridges, I do believe that pictures of baby sloths in pajamas are comforting to everyone.
* * *
Department Of There’s Always Something
After we made the decision to euthanize Crow, moiself thought, once again, about the many rational discussions which can be had as to whether people do or should treat or view their pets as their “children” – a perspective which, I believe, diminishes and misunderstands the reality of and relationships with both animals and children.
Also (as mentioned in a previous footnote), many people, including animal lovers/pet owners and those who are pet-free, hold strong opinions as to the ethics of using advances in veterinary medicine to treat conditions considered fatal just a few years ago – treatments which cost pet owners thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars…and the outcome is, eventually and ultimately, the same.
Pets, like their human owners, are mortal. They’re gonna die. Are you keeping your pet alive – in some cases, using tortuous treatments that humans with the same diagnoses can (and often do) eventually opt out of – because it’s in the animal’s best interest? Or are you prolonging its life (read: extending its dying) because (you tell yourself) you love it and want to keep it around for as long as possible/can’t deal with its absence…or want to assuage the guilt laid upon you, whether purposely or inadvertently, by yourself or by well-meaning friends and family (or even your veterinarian)?
“Leigh K—…found herself facing a five-figure bill when her dog, Rutherford, was diagnosed with a brain tumor…. Leigh knew Rutherford needed help when the large-breed coonhound mix struggled to walk a straight line and keep his head up. But you can’t treat without a diagnosis, which meant brain scans, which meant $2,500 down before the technicians would warm up the machine.
Then the real bills started. Radiation therapy was projected to cost between $12,000 and $15,000, which, for perspective’s sake, is a quarter of the average American household’s annual earnings. It’s a sum weighty enough to give even relatively affluent Americans a lightbulb moment on how drastically their lives might be rerouted.”
If my father had lived to see the age of $3k MRIs for pets, [5] he would have scoffed at the very notion. It’s not that he didn’t like animals, or was one of Those Pet Haters ® . Growing up in the Parnell family, moiself cannot remember a time when we didn’t have pets. My siblings and I were allowed to acquire a variety of critters, from dogs and cats to hamsters and reptiles. While my parents appreciated their children’s emotional bond with their pets, my father never seemed to have much of an attachment to them. When I look back via an adult’s perspective, I consider this pet-bonding detachment of his to be due, in part, to his impoverished childhood.
Chet Parnell grew up poor, on a farm, in a place and time when animals were utilitarian. His family’s infinitely patient and tolerant farm horse, who would let Chet and his siblings climb all over him, was a plough horse. A succession of family dogs had “jobs” to do – they kept the crows out of the corn and chased the neighboring farms’ dogs and roaming strays away from the chickens, and the barn cats earned a roof over their heads by keeping the mice and rats at bay. With the exception of the horse, the other “pets” had to hunt for and feed themselves (although my dad’s mother occasionally snuck table scraps to the barn cats, much to her husband’s dismay).
My father’s heart rose to the occasion when our family cat, Mia, died. Mia, a stray kitten adopted by my family when I was in grade school, had been “my” cat, [6] but stayed with my family when I went off to school. After graduating college and joining the working world, my parents and I agreed that, considering both my inability to pay my apartment rent if I also had to buy pet food and litter, and Mia being an old lady kitty and attached to her home, it was best if Mia stayed with them. I saw Mia two to three times a year, when visiting my parents, and noted Mia’s increasing frailty with the passage of time. Pay attention, I pleaded with them. If there is something wrong with her, take her to a vet, don’t just let it slide.[7] I was determined to be dispassionate about it – if Mia was dying, I did not want her to suffer.
One day when I was in my mid-twenties I received an early afternoon phone call from my mother. She called the private line in the medical practice where I worked, which was a red flag. [8] She apologized for calling me at work, said she thought I’d like to know about Mia, and told me the following story.
In the past few weeks Mia, age 20, had grown weaker, lost weight, and developed a tumor on her head. My parents found a veterinarian who would do house calls; after speaking with my parents over the phone, the vet came to their house with the assumption that he would likely euthanize the cat. After briefly examining Mia he told them that that would be the most humane option. My younger sister, by then in college, happened to be at my parents’ house for a visit, and she and my mother became so distraught re Mia’s situation that Chet banished them from the scene. He shooed his wife and daughter into the house, while he stayed on the back porch with the veterinarian.
After Mia had been euthanized and the vet had left, Chet got a legal pad and a pencil, and a shoebox for the body (Mia would be buried in my parents’ backyard, by the rose bushes where she would nap in the summer shade). He wrapped Mia’s body in a towel, placed her in the box, then composed a poem, on the spot, about Mia.
Mom read the poem to me. I found it overwhelmingly touching then, and still do, after all these years – to think about what my father wrote to comfort his grieving wife and daughter, and also the mere fact that he did so. The poem’s theme was how gentle and sweet Mia was; how she’d had a good life…. I can remember only parts of it, [9] but its closing stanza is etched on my heart:
Mia was loved by the Parnells all;
As there is a time to rise, there is a time to fall.
To be loved by a family is why she was made,
And now our dear Mia will rest in the shade.
As I hung up the phone, my employer noticed the distraught look on my face. Dr. B asked me what was up. With all the detachment and professionalism I could muster – which turned out to be none at all – I blubbered, “My family kitty died!” and tried to tell him how my father had written a poem….
I was a hot mess. Dr. B placed his hand on my shoulder. Compassionately, yet firmly, he said to me, GO HOME.
And now for dear Crow, I say, with gratitude for years of love and “tummy time,” Go home.
Crow was a gentle spirit and a good sport. Here is one of moiself’s favorite pictures of her, one I called, for obvious reasons, *rumpcat.
* * *
Department Of The Supporting Cast And Crew
I cannot say enough good things about the doctors and staff of our family’s long-time veterinary clinic, the (surprise!) feline-exclusive All About Cats Clinic. Also deserving of high praise is Compassionate Care, the in-home euthanasia service we used, as per ABCC’s recommendation. CC’s vet was kind, empathetic, sweet, and competent – she gave MH and I (and Crow, I imagine), a sense of tranquility in an emotionally taxing situation.
“She had a good life,“ was son K’s post on our family chat site, when MH informed our offspring about Crow’s death. My reply:
“Yes, she did…and though it may sound strange, I dare to say that her death was good, as well. She was comfy on the carpet, enjoying lots of pets from us, and she just ‘went to sleep,’ as they say. It was one of the more peaceful things I have ever seen.”
* * *
Punz For The Day Dead Catz Edition
Hmmmmm. On second thought….
When face palm cat just won’t cover it.
* * *
May you experience the distinctive love of, and for, a pet companion; May the inevitable loss of that love help you to appreciate it all the more; May you be strong enough to lather, rinse, and repeat; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] But not, oddly, wanting “tummy time” with MH, which, until the diabetes, was her favorite activity. She seemingly became uncomfortable sitting in laps or being held during her last two weeks – one more piece of the puzzle which help us make the decision.
[2] Fortunately, thanks to deliberate and innovative strategizing on the part of regional animal shelters, almost *all* healthy cats and dogs at shelters who do not have “behavioral issues” (read: biters) now find homes.
[4] Too much, some critics say, in that using “human” treatments for cancers and other mortal illnesses – treatments previously unavailable to animals and to which they cannot consent – are essentially torturing pets in order to assuage our guilt….and speaking of the latter, many people on fixed incomes cannot afford the substantial vet bills but feel pressured, if the procedure/treatment is available, to do so, lest they be considered a heartless person who doesn’t really love their pet.
[5] Which was one of the quotes we got for what a brain scan would cost, when we were trying to figure out the “neurological incident” our cat Crow seemed to have suffered.
[6] And was so named to indicate that – mia is Spanish for mine.
Department Of The Best One Sentence Movie Review I’ve Read In Some Time
That would be from friend CC, in a text on Tuesday, furthering the conversation we had in the movie theater parking lot on Monday, after having seen Past Lives. Which, BTW, is the next movie *you* are going to see, (if moiself can influence you to do so) and then talk about with friends and family.
Here’s the movie’s summary/blurb, from people who are paid to do such things: [1]
“Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Decades later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront destiny, love and the choices that make a life.”
It’s the kind of movie…I want MH and my offspring to see it, although in a nod to ageism, a part of me thinks that, even at ages 30 and 27 respectively, my son and daughter aren’t old enough (as in, have not had the life experiences) to truly get it. Also, in another nod to ageism, it’s a summer release movie without the “summerisms”: there aren’t any superheroes or explosions….
…and it is a gentler-paced movie, even as it time jumps through 24 years…. But damn, there is so much going on.
CC wondered if MH and I had talked about the movie – she and her husband had a conversation “…about love and life’s twists and turns,” when she returned that afternoon after having seen the movie. No, we didn’t…even though I wanted to. But I held back, giving MH only a brief description when he asked me how the movie was. I was still ruminating on it moiself, and wanted him to see it so I wouldn’t have to explain the unexplainable. Such as, how you may love someone in some way, and maybe the way they love will not be enough…and will you be “the person who leaves” in someone’s life, and/or “the person who stays,” in another someone’s life…and the concepts of destiny and fate –in yun, from Korean/Buddhist influences – which can also be seen as coincidence, and all of which might have much more influence in our lives than we think…as per this bit of dialogue (from one of the Korean born protagonists to her American husband) from the movie:
“There’s a word in Korean: 인연 [in yun] — it means “providence” or “fate.” If two strangers walk by each other in the street, and their clothes accidentally brush, that means there have been eight thousand layers of 인연 between them.”
Yet again, moiself digresses. CC’s one sentence review which I thought nailed the essence of the film, and its influence:
“I was pondering that all couples should see this film to give them better words to say to each other and know how normal all of this is, immigration or not, to question how a person loves and to accept how a person loves.”
* * *
Department Of Ethics Teaching Of The Week
Humanists generally follow The Platinum Rule, not The Golden Rule. There is an important distinction between the two directives, in both the statement and implications. Class, do you think you can spot the difference?
First, we have the more familiar, “The Golden Rule.” There are various phrasings of TGR – an ethical principle found across religions and world views – which all amount to,
Treat others the way you would want to be treated.
TGRis phrased in either “positive” (to do something) or “negative” (to refrain from doing something) formulas. In Christianity this principle is found in Matthew 7:12: “In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you. . . .”
The “negative” form of this principle, “Do not do to others what you would not like done to yourselves,” is found in 2nd-century documents of the early Christian church ( Didachē and the Apology of Aristides), in second century Jewish works ( Tob. 4:15), in the writings of the classic Jewish scholars, including Hillel and Philo of Alexandria “…and in the Analects of Confucius (6th and 5th centuries BC). It also appears in one form or another in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Seneca.” [2]
Examples of TGR across world religions:
Lay not on any soul a load that you would not wish to be laid upon you, and desire not for anyone the things you would not desire for yourself. ( Bahá’í Faith; Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings)
Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. ( Buddhism; The Buddha, Udana-Varga 5.18 )
One word which sums up the basis of all good conduct….loving-kindness. Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself. ( Confucianism; Confucius, Analects 15.23 )
This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you. ( Hinduism; Mahabharata 5:1517)
Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself. ( Islam: the Prophet Muhammad, Hadith )
One should treat all creatures in the world as one would like to be treated. ( Jainism; Mahavira, Sutrakritanga 1.11.33 )
What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it. ( Judaism; Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a )
Do not do unto others whatever is injurious to yourself. ( Zoroastrianism; Shayast-na-Shayast 13.29)
The Golden Rule variations are well-intended; however and ultimately, they miss a key point of Human Reality:
* People are different. *
Okay; sure; you know that. But do you really get what *that* means?
Not all people like or want the same things. This reality is both simple and profound, because it means that while at first glance it sounds fine or even admirable to treat everyone like yourself, it is in fact inappropriate to do so, given people’s different backgrounds, experiences, mental and physical abilities, and expectations.
The Golden Rulelets you get away with, and even promotes, self-centric thinking (“Others think the way I do.”). And self-centric thinking [3] lets you off the hook from doing the work, which can range from pesky to grueling, of trying to understand someone else’s point of view.
So, what’s an honestly-seeking-to-do-the-right-thing ® kinda person to do? Follow the principles of Humanists, Freethinkers, Brights, Skeptics, and other supernatural-free world views. As in, practice The Platinum Rule:
Treat others the way *they* want to be treated.
Meditate on this, for a moment.
“Girls and Boys, can you spot the difference? I think you can.”
The subtle yet powerful difference is that The Platinum Rulecalls for a more thoughtful consideration of the *others* who will be on the receiving end of your treatment of them.
As in, don’t presume that *your* likes and preferences – or dislikes and aversions – are universal.
Here’s an example a child could understand: There’s nothing Jilly likes better than having her feet tickled. Not only that, Jilly’s best friend, Millie, also enjoys having her feet tickled – she and Jilly agree, it’s the best fun, ever! But for Jilly’s brother, Billy, having his feet tickled is tantamount to torture. Should Jilly and Millie tickle Billy’s feet?
* * *
Department Of Public Service: Things To Ponder® Moment Of The Week
Brought to you by the following excerpt from my recent letter to moiself’soffspring. [4]
…. Yesterday morning I went walking in the Neahkahnie Beach area, and wondered if I would catch a glimpse of the coyotes that have been spotted crossing the roads there, and out on the beach.
The coyotes (at least two adults, possibly a pair raising pups nearby) are going after unleashed dogs on the beach: one tries to lure the dogs to follow them by assuming play postures, then running into the shrubbery (where coyote #2 would spring out and attack – wildlife biologists note that this is a hunting adaptation of coyotes living near human-populated areas). One coyote has even chased several dogs, as reported by the dogs’ owners who came to their pets’ rescue, then posted on a local FB group to warn others.
Some people responded to these reports and warnings (which have included pictures of the coyotes) with, “My dog responds to voice control,” or “The coyotes just want to play.” Some people are morons.
And I can call them “morons,” although I can’t (even though I wouldn’t) call them “retards,” which I find mildly bemusing.
Y’all might want to rephrase that.
Get ahold of your nightsticks, y’all self-appointed word police: I understand (and agree with) the prohibition of the term retard, as it became a shorthand pejorative for people formerly known as “mentally retarded.” But the term mentally retarded is not a pejorative in and of itself, and was once considered to be a valid descriptor for adults classified on (an outdated) psychiatric scale of severe intellectual disability. The scale was:
* Moron (adult with an estimated mental age between 7 and 10 and an IQ of 51–70)
* Imbecile (” ” ” ” mental age of three to seven years and an IQ of 25–50)
* Idiot ( ” ” ” ” less than three years; IQ below 25)
Now then: I can and do sometimes use those words (moron; imbecile; idiot) to disparage someone and/or their behaviors…although, when I do so the image of an actual person with an intellectual disability *never* comes to my mind.
I can think or say that people who let their dogs go off leash on the beach – after having been warned about coyotes going after unleashed dogs – are morons, or that their behavior is idiotic and/or their reasoning imbecilic. I’ve used the words (moron; idiot; imbecile) sporadically over the course of my life (most frequently during the #45 administration), with no corrections from a Well-Meaning Guardian Of The Hurt Feelings Of Others ® (“It’s not nice to make fun of morons.”). And I can’t help but wonder why that is. [5]
May you avoid self-centricism masquerading as ethical principles; May you follow The Platinum Rule; May you see the movie “Private Lives” and discuss it with friends and family; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] In this case the movie studio PR staff, I’d guess.
[4] I send daughter Belle and son K weekly letters, every Friday. Letters as in snail, not e-, mail.
[5] Isn’t it time for another footnote? Just wondering.
[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Department Of The Universe Is Telling Me I Should Stop Writing And Run For The Border Take The Next Shuttle To Mars
Moiself just found out that this is a thing: Taco Bell Quarterly. A new “literary” journal.
* * *
Department Of Why Does This Question Need To Be Answered, Let Alone Asked? [1]
“Is it morbid to take selfies with the deceased in their casket at a funeral?” (from a letter to advice columnist Dear Abby, The Oregonian, 6-3-23 )
* * *
Department Of A Question Worth Answering, Or At Least Pondering.
As posed by the No Stupid Questions podcast:
Do you have a scarcity mindset or an abundance mindset?
Some parameters might be useful. As per the NSQ website:
“…a scarcity mentality refers to people who see life as a finite pie – a zero-sum game. If you have something, I can’t have it…. people with a scarcity mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit, whereas someone with an abundance mentality has the idea that there’s plenty out there for everyone. The rising tide lifts all boats. Let’s not just give me a bigger piece of the pie; let’s make the pie bigger….”
My bet is that every person is a combination of the two, and that some folks will definitely skew one way or the other. Scarcity and abundance not just in terms of economics, but in regard to relationships, time management and perceptions, emotional self-regulation, creative endeavors….
The No Stupid Questions podcast on the scarcity/abundance mindset took me on Lyft ride down memory lane. In particular, this happened when NSQ co-hosts Stephen Dubner and Angela Duckworth were discussing research addressing the origins of the scarcity mindset concept:
NSQ cohost Stephen Dubner: “…Shankar Vedantam, (host of the Hidden Brain podcast, speaking in a piece he made for an NPR show)…says: ‘When you’re hungry, it’s hard to think of anything other than food. When you’re desperately poor, you constantly worry about making ends meet. Scarcity produces a kind of tunnel vision, and it explains why, when we’re in a hole, we often lose sight of long-term priorities and dig ourselves even deeper….’ So he’s making the argument that scarcity — real scarcity, not a scarcity mindset — can impose an even additional burden because it forces you to spend a lot of your attention and resources on just getting enough.”
NSQ cohost Angela Duckworth: “…I’m going to read you the end of the first paragraph [of the research paper, Some Consequences of Having Too Little ]: ‘Resource scarcity creates its own mindset, changing how people look at problems and make decisions.’
The first line [of the paper] is, ‘The poor often behave in ways that reinforce poverty…. For instance, low-income individuals often play lotteries, fail to enroll in assistance programs, save too little, and borrow too much…. But we suggest a more general view. Resource scarcity creates its own mindset, changing how people look at problems and make decisions.’ “
SD: “…there’s a lot to untangle here….low-income people often compound their low-income-ness by making choices that contribute to a furthering of that pattern…. So, there are people who say, ‘Well, there you go. Poor people are poor because they make bad decisions.’ And what this line of research is saying, if I’m understanding correctly, is that poor people are poor for any number of reasons. And then it’s easy for poverty itself, for scarcity itself, if we want to call it that, to essentially compound on itself.”
AD: “…I think it would be easiest to actually explain some of the research…a summary of a series of laboratory experiments…to basically create a fake [game] world where [researchers] could randomly assign people to be rich or poor and experimentally figure out what the heck is going on with decision-making that is different for those who are rich and poor…”
SD: “…the idea is to measure how good or bad a decision is when you’re under different stressors?”
AD:| “…you want to see if you randomly assign people to be poor in these games, do they accumulate more debt than people who are randomly assigned to be rich?….what [the study did] is create a microcosm of society, except they get to choose who’s rich or poor….they can show that you can take people who have…nothing wrong with their decision-making faculties, assign them to have fewer resources in a game, and show that they’ll accumulate more debt than rich people…
…the key insight is that there seems to be a shift in attention. When you are assigned to be in the poor condition and you have fewer resources…your attention is going to these urgent problems that are right in front of you, and you’re not making decisions that are good for you in the long term. Whatever you want to call it, that focus of attention on the urgent [is] the landmark finding. And immediately, you can change the way somebody’s brain is functioning just by putting them into a situation where they have scarce resources.”
SD: “So there’s this snowball effect, which is when you’re dealt a bad hand, there are a number of cards within that hand that will lead to further bad cards, essentially.”
AD: “That’s the vicious cycle that would logically ensue…. you’ve got fewer resources and more stress and less time, and you’re making even worse decisions with each round of life.”
( excerpts, my emphases, from “Do You Have a Scarcity Mindset or an Abundance Mindset?” NSQ, 5-7-2023 )
When I was in college I took a class [2] on The Sociology of Poverty. Decades later, when I first heard the term “scarcity mindset” (coined by academics, so hey, it’s a thing!) my mind immediately flashed back to one of the required books for the class. The book consisted of chapters presenting studies of the roots and realities of poverty alternating with chapters telling the story of a woman and her family (her husband and four children) who lived in New York City. [3] The wife and husband were each born into and continued to live below what was called the poverty line. Both adults were marginally educated; the wife raised the children and tended their home (a rental apartment); the husband was sporadically employed in a series of low skill/low wage jobs.
While I was taking that class I was cobbling together different jobs to put moiself through college, and was well acquainted with stretching a dollar until it tore in half. Which is perhaps why moiself found it depressing and frustrating to read the family’s story, to see how they seemed to defeat themselves on a day-by-day basis. The woman (the main focus of the story) and her husband were functionally passive, drifting through life, like human flotsam at the mercy of the tides of fate (and the whims of their capricious deity, which the woman mentioned several times, ala, “God will provide”…except, of course, he didn’t).
She lived for the day, instead of planning not only for today but for the tomorrows which would, inevitably, become the todays. One of many examples: instead of getting her family to walk with her further in (or out of) her immidiate neighborhood, just once a week, to a larger, discount grocery store where they could buy rice and beans and other staples in bulk to last an entire week’s worth of meals, each afternoon the woman would go to the (expensive) corner bodega, getting the ingredients for whatever she’d decided to make for dinner that night, spending two or three times the amount for items that would last one meal, at a cost that would have lasted for six meals if she’d purchased the same items at another store.
When I finished the book I realized there was something else going on; something I didn’t have a word for until I heard the term, scarcity mindset. When I was growing up my family, although not below the poverty line, had to be quite careful (read: things were “tight”) with money. However, unlike the adults in the book, the parents around me (both mine and those of *most* of my peers [4] ) set a good example with regard to planning, budgeting, and spending. From day to day the Book Woman ® didn’t know for certain if her husband would bring home enough money to buy a half-pound box of rice and a can of beans and some vegetables, and she was surrounded by people living the same way – people who had developed and/or were born into the same mindset. On a day when there was money, they ate a little better. On a day when they had little money (and/or the rent was due), they ate a little worse.
* * *
Department Of A Word To Stop Over Using
Seems like moiself can’t spit without hitting [5] a news app or story wherein someone, in a letter to an advice columnist or in a first-person essay, writes about their “toxic“
* in-law * parent
*sibling * extended family * friend * next door neighbor * spouse * children * coworker * barista…
Speaking of spitting, what’s the name of that reptile which can gob its venom? Ah, yes, that would be the aptly dubbed, spitting cobra.
“A ‘spitting’ cobra is any of several species of cobra that can intentionally, defensively shoot their venom directly from their fangs…. Most spitting cobras’ venom/toxungen is significantly cytotoxic, apart from the neurotoxic and cardiotoxic effects typical of other cobra species….” (excerpts from Wikipedia entry on the spitting cobra )
Note the repeated usage of the word toxic, as per its original/primary definition, [6] referring to a substance being poisonous and capable of causing death or serious debilitation, or that which exhibits symptoms of a deadly condition caused by a toxin.
Yeah yeah yeah, I know – language evolves. I moiself enjoy many a repurposed or expanded usage of an old term; still, IMO, the widespread and often hyperbolic application of toxic (or any adjective) lessens its potency.
Sure, there are people who behave nastily and/or whose (intentional or incidental) malice seems to be a part of their very essence. But you and your sister strongly disagreeing about politics and religion and memories of who did what to whom in childhood – does that mean your relationship is comparable to a paralytic venom? [7] The guy in the cubicle next to yours who rummages through the break room refrigerator, pilfers and consumes half of your avocado hummus sandwich, then blames your disappearing lunch on the new HR intern – is that guy really “creating a toxic work environment,” or is he merely (and effectively) acting like an immature, entitled, inconsiderate asshat?
Whenever possible, I opt for the Asshat of the Week ® Award.
* * *
Department Of Veggiepalooza
Dateline: a couple of weeks ago, outside my neighborhood’s cluster unit mailboxes. Exchanging what-have-you-been-up-to?s with a neighbor, and when I mentioned I’d just returned from picking up my CSA share, [8] he said that he and his wife are trying to eat healthier (“more vegetables and all that”). Of course, I had to put in a plug.
Even before MH and moiself joined our first CSA (over a dozen years ago) I was already more than halfway toward a whole foods plant-based eating life. But the introduction to foods I’d never or rarely seen in the local markets was a special benefit of CSA membership. Before that, how would I know that I would have liked, for example, shishito peppers, Chinese broccoli, celeriac, and kohlrabi so much?
I’m intrigued by any plant which resembles a jellyfish-Russian spy satellite hybrid.
Speaking of kohlrabi, I came up with this recipe many years ago, when moiself was craving Indian-spiced food and had leftover tomatoes & kohlrabi from our CSA share. I told my father about my creation, and he said that he looked forward to me cooking it for him the next time he and Mom came up for a visit.. Alas, I never got to make this one for him (he died a few months after that foodie conversation of ours). Here’s to you, Chet. And here’s the recipe for Kohlrabi Dal.
KohlRabi Dal (Serves 4) The recipe name is a play on words for the root veggie, and dal (in Indian cuisine, dal are dried, split legumes),
and honors my father, whose nickname for me was Robbie Doll.
Ingredients: – ½ t each of whole brown mustard seeds and cumin seeds| -1T neutral oil – 1 medium yellow onion, diced – 2 garlic cloves, minced – ½ T minced ginger root – 1 large green jalapeno, stemmed & seeded & finely chopped – 1½ T pomegranate molasses (or tamarind paste – you want a tart, tangy taste) – 1 packed t dark brown or coconut sugar – scant 1 t chili powder (New Mexico, if possible) – ¼ t ground turmeric – ½ c masoor dal (red lentils), picked through [9] and rinsed – 2 medium tomatoes, chopped (or canned, to equal ~ 6 oz/170g) -3-4 med-large Kohlrabi (~675 g or 1 ½ lb) – peeled & diced small -Salt to taste -Chopped fresh cilantro and cooked brown or white rice -Drained unsweetened soy/other plant-based yogurt OR soft silken tofu, to equal 1 c,
blended with 1/8 t salt and 2T lime juice
Instructions: – Heat oil in a Dutch oven or other high-sided pan. Add the seeds; sauté until the seeds pop (30 sec to 1 m). Add the onions and sauté for 5m. – Add garlic & jalapeno & ginger; sauté until fragrant (30 s – 1m). Add the molasses and the remaining spices; stir for 15 sec. – add dal to the pan. Sauté for 1-2 m stirring, until dal is covered w/oil & spices. – Add tomatoes and 1 ¾ c water, bring to boil; turn heat to low, cover pan & simmer 20 m. – Meanwhile, prep kohlrabi: steam or nuke the pieces 5-6 m or until tender. – Add steamed kohlrabi to pan, continue to simmer, uncovered ~ 10 m or until lentils are cooked through and sauce thickens. Add more water if necessary for desired consistency. – Add salt to taste. -Serve: atop rice of choice, with dollops of lime/yogurt sauce and sprinkles of chopped cilantro.
Chet Parnell and his Robbie Doll, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….
Ali Rizvi is a Pakistani-born, Canadian, atheist ex-Muslim
and secular humanist writer and scientist (oncologic pathologist)
who explores the challenges of Muslims who leave their faith.
* * *
Of all the selfies you may be tempted to take, may none of them be at a funeral; May you maintain a healthy disance from actual toxins; May you discover (if you haven’t already) the joys of kohlrabi; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] I didn’t read Abby’s advice. Didn’t need to; the question itself was so grotesquely entertaining that I couldn’t imagine any answer which would top it.
[7] And I’m not casually dismissive of the label, nor do I think it has no legitimate application. I know more than one person whose close family member(s) have poisoned their relationships with continual, malicious, soul-crushing words and deeds.
[8] Community Shared Agriculture, or CSA, is a farming model built on fairness and transparency for both the farmer and the consumer. Traditionally, a consumer buys a share of a farm up-front, which provides financial security to the farmer for that season. In return, the consumer receives a regular box of fresh produce. ( What Is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)?, The Spruce Eats )
[9] Any dal or dried beans can sometimes include small bits of chaff or even pebbles.
[10] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Department Of Two Words, Which Bother Me, To The Same Degree
Those would be: selfie, and panties.
Selfie. Why is that necessary, when you have perfectly good words like narcissist?
Panties. Seriously? Grown ass females, even little girls, do not wear panties; they wear underpants or underwear. Fetishists and pedos [1] want women and girls to wear panties.
* * *
Department Of Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned
To maintain a pretense of sanity, moiself has been trying to stay away from the news. But some gems still sneak on through. Attention, all ye Book Banning Cretins, especially the ones in Florida: isn’t there some other classic Florida Man® thing you need to do, maybe throw an alligator through a fast food franchise’s window, to protest…something?
Apparently, among the books the BBCs have banned from their own narrow minds are anything involving the history of
* freethought and expression
* the exchange of information
* the kind of people who ban books and what happens to them and their society afterward.
I know; y’all will need the smelling salts to believe that an elected official who took an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution would support banning books.
If requested to offer sage counsel, moiself would advise that DeSantis and his ilk should avoid pissing off us cranky, feminist authors. The older we get, the less the phrase “life-in-prison” is a deterrent.
* * *
Department Of Belated Yet Timely Information
“…an anthropologist from Utah State University, David Lancy, performed (an) analysis on parenting. The conclusion was….clear-cut: When you look around the world and throughout human history, the Western style of parenting is WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies..). We are outliers.
In many instances, what we think is ‘necessary’ or ‘critical’ for childhood is actually not present in any other cultures around the world or throughout time.
‘The list of differences is really, really long,’ says Lancy…. ‘There may be 40 to 50 things that we do that you don’t see in indigenous cultures.’
Here in the U.S., many parents don’t have…firsthand experience before having children themselves. Instead, we often learn…through parenting books, Google searches and YouTube videos. But this information comes with two big caveats….
For starters, parenting advice can give the impression that the recommendations are based on science. But a deep look at some studies reveals that the science is more like smoke and mirrors. Sometimes the studies don’t even test what the parenting expert is purporting they do.
… Ben Bradley argues…: ‘Scientific observations about babies are more like mirrors which reflect back the preoccupations and visions of those who study them than like windows opening directly on the foundations of the mind.’…
And sometimes the data supporting the recommendation are so flimsy that another study in a few years will come along and not only overturn the first study but completely flip the advice 180 degrees…”
‘Twas a wee bit past Mother’s Day is when I saw this article, and Father’s Day is just around the proverbial bend. After attending a family wedding this past weekend, wherein with two of my nephews were new and/or about-to-be fathers, I found this article most noteworthy. [2]
Reading the article made me think about way back when, [3] to the baby books MH and I were given/bought, and how eventually I set them all aside (in one case, I threw one across the room, yelling, “Oh seriously, fuck this!”) in dissent and frustration).
The book that became a frisbee was one of those dreadful, “how to get your baby to sleep” screeds books (which had been either recommended by or gifted to us by a family member). Several of the parenting books contained “advice” and “expertise” which didn’t sit well with either MH or moiself and which seemed contrary to both logic and the reality of our babies. I began to look up information about the authors of those books, and when moiself did so I found that they were penned by – surprise! – stealth conservative evangelical Christians. [4] This explained much of which I found questionable about their advice: *control*was the overriding and underlying issue.
William and Martha Sears, just two of the stealthers, have co-authored several books peddling their attachment-style parenting theories, and one of them was given to me by a friend. Guess what the Sears’ also wrote: The Complete Book of Christian Parenting and Child Care: A Medical and Moral Guide to Raising Happy Healthy Children. The word “medical” being included in the title both cracks me up and disturbs me. [5]
Once again, I digress.
The sleep advice books were the worst of the parenting manuals authored by conservative evangelicals. In the Conservagels[6] world, there is a supposed, divinely ordained, patriarchal hierarchy: On top of the pyramid is a (male pronoun-using) deity, followed by a father, followed by a mother, then children. Parents *must* be “in control” of their children, from birth to young adulthood. The takeaway was that your children, yes, even that six-week-old infant, are sneaky little buggers trying to control their parents, and will manipulate you unless you set the rules and routines *from the get-go.*
Creepy. That’s the word which comes to my mind as I recall the gist of those books: You must set a routine early on for sleep-training and other despicable concepts practices to let the little pea brain precious gift from above know that just because he cries it doesn’t mean he’s going to get a response from you if, in your opinion (which you will form using the criteria in the book), his vocalizations are not for a legitimate need (e.g., he’s hungry, or has a wet/poopy diaper). He needs to learn self-control; he needs to learn to self/soothe cry it out, and not have his parents (read: the female one) at his beck and call.
*From the get-go,* from the moment we escaped from the hospital, [7] K wanted to eat, lightly, around the clock (every three hours, for many, many months). That was just how he was – eat a little, sleep a little. Three years later, on the evening when his newborn sister Belle and I came home from the hospital, I had to go in to wake Belle up to nurse, after she’d slept for five straight hours and I feared she’d succumbed to SIDS or something. [8] *From the get-go,* Belle was a different infant. She would nurse heartily, then sleep heartily. After Belle was weaned, she and K seemed to switch sleeping patterns for a little over a year – she became the night owl and he in turn liked a good 8-10 hours. [9]
After two weeks (ha!) paternity leave, when MH was home from work he did the lion’s share of our babes’ care, except for feeding them. We figured it made no sense for *both* parents to be sleep-deprived, and since I was the one with the human milk glands, I was the one getting up to feed them. [10] Several months into a brutal sleep deprivation, I tried a sleep training book’s advice: after feeding K and changing his diaper and rocking him for a bit, I’d put him down in his crib, and let him cry and cry. It did not set well with either of K’s parents, to put it mildly. I usually went back to K’s room after an hour, fed him/changed him/rocked him again, and he’d go back to sleep.
One night, the third or fourth in a row when we were trying the sleep training advice, MH and I were in bed, attempting to read our respective books, while K was wailing away in his bedroom. MH, frustrated with the “let him cry” advice, announced that he couldn’t take it anymore. He got up and headed to K’s room, with moiself trailing behind. “He’s a baby,” MH said, as he picked up and cuddled our son, who immediately stopped his wails. “He’s just trying to tell us…something…in the only way he knows how.”
I came to the conclusion that my son may have been channeling the spirit of one of the bajillion pet hamsters I had as a child (K seemed to be nocturnal)…or maybe he was just bored and/or lonely, and guess what – he doesn’t speak yet. Other than that, no, this 3-month-old infant who doesn’t even know his top from his bottom is nottrying to manipulate me, and no thank you – and by no thank you I mean, F-off – to the rigid asshats who are trying to convince me that he is. [11]
Eventually, both K and Belle learned to speak English.
* * *
Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time again, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself. Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [12]
May your pictures of yourself be just that, and not selfies; May you shun panties: go commando, or put on underwear; May you ban book banning and read banned books; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Hum these three words to the tune of Winnie-the Pooh’s “Heffalumps and Woozles.” You won’t regret it.
[2] The story would be interesting even if I had no kinfolk on the cusp of parenthood; the timing of my seeing the article merely coincided.
[3] Okay; thirty years ago, anticipating/after the arrival of our first born, son K.
[4]Stealth as in, they were attempting to fly under the radar by not identifying themselves as such.
[5] Because, as we know from SCIENCE, babies born to Christian parents will have different physiologies (digestive tracts; REM patterns…) than babies born to Humanist, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and Jain parents.
[6] Forget selfie; here’s a neologism which begs to be coined.
[7] That’s kind of how we viewed it – a concept shared by many new parents, as we discovered later when we compared notes. We left the hospital, where we and our baby were being cared for by professionals…and they’re going to just let us get in the car and take our baby home, when we’ve never done this before?!?!
[8] Plus, by then, *I* needed her to nurse. Nursing mothers understands the old farm idiom of why the cows come home.
[9] Which translates as nothing resembling a regular sleep pattern for moiself. For the first five years of motherhood, I often felt like I’d fallen out of the zombie tree and hit every branch on the way down.
[10] K and Belle were breast fed exclusively – no bottles – when it came to liquid nourishment. They went from me to a sippy cup, which had its advantages when we saw other parents deal with the fight to get their kids to give up the bottle.
[11] K later became a fine sleeper, thank you very much.
[12] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[13] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Dateline: last Saturday; 8 AM-ish; walking north along a section of the Oregon coast, from Hug Point to Arch Cape and back, during a minus tide. While looking at tide pools and observing the creatures in and around them, moiself had a flashback to childhood:
Flashback dateline: a Saturday, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (So Cal; late 1960s), at my usual hangout, a minimum of four days a week, in the summer: [1]
This beach day is a family outing, to Corona del Mar. After a morning of finding less-than-rad barrels to body surf (I prefer the waves at Newport Beach), I scarf my tuna sandwich and Seven-Up, [3] and look for something to do during (what I’ve been told is) the mandatory post-prandial 30 minute wait before going back into the water.
Debunking the Myth
“No, you don’t have to wait 30 minutes or more to swim after you’ve eaten. Swimming right after you’ve had something to eat isn’t dangerous at all. The concern was that because digestion diverts some of your blood flow from your muscles to your stomach, swimming might somehow inhibit that necessary blood flow to the stomach, causing cramps so severe that you could drown. Alternately, another version of the myth claims the opposite: your limbs won’t get enough blood flow because your stomach is diverting it, causing you to drown. These concerns are unwarranted because your blood just isn’t diverted enough to cause any real problems. There are no documented deaths attributed to anyone swimming on a full stomach….
Where Did the Myth Come From? …It turns out that this “rule” has been around since at least 1908, when it was included in a Boy Scout handbook. The handbook warned that if boys didn’t wait at least 90 minutes before swimming, they might drown — “it will be your own fault,” the manual admonished. Where the Boy Scout handbook got the idea isn’t known, but it certainly wasn’t accurate. Still, the fallacy has doggedly persisted for over 100 years….” (Is Swimming After Eating Really Dangerous? Dignityhealth.org )
I get my parents to follow me south along the beach to the base of some cliffs, to one of my favorite tide pool areas. Many is the afternoon wherein I pass more than the minimum 30-minutes-after-eatingdictum by exploring the rocks and tide pools, playing with harassing the anemones, [4] or just settling down on a rock and watching the ocean’s flora and fauna. My parents dutifully follow me, but after a few minutes of tide pool observance, they want to move on. One of them (I can’t recall who said it first but the other chimed in with agreement) says something along the lines of, “Yes, it’s nice, but there’s not much to see. Not really anything here.”
Looking back, moiself realizes that they didn’t mean to sound dismissive, they were just ignorant. To them, and probably to most non-scientist-folk of the time (or, sadly/likely, even most folks today), what counts as Life ® – as in, as in, something “to see” – is something that’s big, and furry. As in, mammals…followed by birds and fish and “bugs.”
My folks looked in the tide pools and saw seaweed-covered rocks and saltwater. The fact that the ocean in general and tide pools in particular teem with life – the kind of life which actually dominates the planet, in terms of sheer biomass and diversity of species.… That kind of life-stuff didn’t count.
Anemone. Like this minty one on the Oregon coast, sea anemones were thought by my parents to be plants, until the little smartass that was moi’s preteen self informed them that sea anemones were predatory sea *animals,* related to jellyfish.
Excerpt from the episode’s conversation with Freakonomics host Stephen Dubner and guest, Holy Shit author Melissa Mohr:
Stephen Dubner: “What do you think is more common over time: for words that are taboo to become less taboo, or vice-versa?”
Melissa Mohr: “Hmm, that’s an interesting question. You’ve got this kind of euphemism treadmill [5] that Steven Pinker talks about, where it starts off as a bad word but then people use it more and more and you get used to it and then it falls away, and then you need to come up with another bad word…and you’ve seen that with religious words; we’re seeing that with f*** and c*** and sh**…”
SD: “But on the other hand, ‘homeless person’ becomes taboo.”
MM: “Yes. Right now we are in a New-new Victorianism in that way. And of course that’s very culturally specific in the United States. Among my relatives in Wisconsin who didn’t go to college, they’re not going to say, ‘the unhoused,’ …but in academia, and Cambridge it’s, yep —.”
Moiself highly recommends the episode, which deals with one of my favorite subjects: language, and the evolution [6] of usage and vocabulary. Speaking of which, if you’ve the mind to do so, read some of George Carlin’s books, or just google some of his standup routines. The late great comedian and author was noted for his keen, observational wit and analytical social critique, and had an almost academic interest in the quirks of the English language. Plus, he was fuckin’ hilarious.
“I noticed that of all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers that I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answer at about the same 50 percent rate. Half the time I get what I want. Half the time I don’t. Same as god; 50/50.
Same as the four-leaf clover, the horse shoe, the rabbit’s foot, and the wishing well. Same as the mojo man. Same as the voodoo lady who tells your fortune by squeezing the goat’s testicles. It’s all the same; 50/50. So just pick your superstitions, sit back, make a wish and enjoy yourself. (George Carlin, from his live standup album, You Are All Diseased)
“You want I should squeeze *what*?”
* * *
Department Of, Seriously?
Dateline: Wednesday, circa 10:45am, in a movie theater, watching previews before the main attraction (Chevalier, which moiself recommends). Among the trailers was one for the upcoming (and likely, final) Indiana Jones movie.
After the fast-paced series of exotic locales, death-defying stunts, and other hallmarks of the IJ franchise, the screen cuts to the movie’s title…and I was…what?
The coda to one of the most successful action/adventure series in movie history gets this lame name?
I know, right?
* * *
May you stand in awe of the diversity of this planet’s non-furry life; May you debunk a myth (and get to blame the Boy Scouts handbook for the myth’s origin); May you avoid strenuous workouts on the euphemism treadmill; …and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] This is not an exaggeration (and I have the sun damaged skin to prove it). Until we were older and could either drive or bicycle to the coast on our own, my friends’ and my parents (and then our older siblings, when they got their drivers’ licenses) took turns taking us to the beach.
[2]The Beachwas our generic term for the Orange County coast, from Huntington Beach to Laguna Beach. Most often it referred to our favorite hangout, Newport Beach, followed by Corona del Mar.
[3] The Parnells were not a soda-drinking family (for which my parents received high praise from our dentists). Soft drinks were for special occasion only, but this rule was suspended during summers, when my siblings and I could have one soda each to take with us to be pat of our beach lunch.
[4]Moiself love the feeling of sticking my fingers between their tentacles, and having the tentacles close around them. It freaked out some of my friends, which therfore made it even more fun to do.
[5] “Psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker coined the term euphemism treadmill in a 1994 article in the New York Times. It refers to a process by which words that are used as a euphemism for a concept that’s somehow tainted then end up becoming tainted themselves by association. At that point, society generates a new “correct” euphemism. Then that chugs along for a while until it picks up the taint as well, and people seek a new term. A matter of racism: Pinker pointed out that a good indication that there’s an underlying issue is that the euphemism treadmill keeps coming up with terms that are essentially synonymous with one another, e.g. coloured people, people of colour, Negro (literally, Spanish for black), and black. That underlying issue is, in the case of skin colour, racism. Even the most derogatory N-word derives from the Latin for black, but countless layers of complexity and history have piled up on top of it. All that complexity and history passes right on along to the next popular term people choose.” (excerpt from “What is the Euphemism Treadmill,” Mental health at home, )
[7] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Defipix: indiananition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
Active, reliable, sarcastic, affectionate, bipedal, cynical optimist, writer, freethinker, parent, spouse and friend, I am generous with my handy supply of ADA-approved spearmint gum and sometimes refrain from humming in public.
The Classic TV Sitcom Identity I’m Not Hiding
August 25, 2023
Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), nature, Oregon, politics, Recreation, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! aggressive dogs, batshit loony commenters, Bewitched, bogus class warfare, dogs and runners, Gladys Kravitz, hippies, illegal camping, nature loving hypocrisy, The Classic TV Sitcom Identity I'm No Longer Hiding, van life 1 Comment
Department Of, Curses – My Cover Has been Blown!
According to a rather irrelevant and batshit crazy deranged, ad hominem attack/comment someone made about moiself on a Facebook group…
Can you believe it – someone said something nasty on social media?!
…I am…(gulp)…Gladys Kravitz. [1]
(Which makes MH, Mr. Abner Kravitz. Yep, I’ve been having fun with that all week).
Left: Gladys Kravitz; Right: Samantha Stevens
For those readers younger than 50, Gladys Kravitz was the nosy neighbor of the TV series Bewitched‘s protagonist, Samantha Stevens. Gladys was convinced that there were extraordinary goings on in Stevens’ household, and was exasperated to the nth because she couldn’t prove her suspicions to her husband ( “Abbbnnneeeerrr!” ) [2]
Background to this startling revelation about my heretofore secret identity: Dateline, Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am. I was at the coast, out for a morning walk…
But first, a relevant digression. A long time ago…oh, no – here it comes again…
From my late high school years until my late twenties, I ran [3] between two to five miles, every day. As recreational runners know, unleashed dogs and runners are not a good combination. [4] Every runner I’ve met has stories of being confronted, harassed and/or attacked by an unleashed/unaccompanied-by-its-human, aggressive dog. The stories, and the avoiding-being-a-dog-bite-victim advice runners receive and pass on to other runners, are mostly similar, but sometimes divergent.
A person running triggers the prey instinct in many dogs; thus, the common wisdom shared amongst runners: when approached by a dog whose posture and behavior…
* stiffening or freezing of the body;
* forward-leaning, hunched down, hunting/stalking posture;
* “whale eyes” (wide, with a lot of white showing);
* teeth baring; tense mouth/curled lips; wrinkled nose;
* ears laid flat against the skull or stiffly held straight up (not relaxed);
* barking, growling; “air-snapping”….
…indicates aggression, and there is no dog owner in sight, you should:
* stop running
* stay as calm as you can
* avoid eye contact (which can be seen as aggressive);
* speak to the dog in a calm, firm, but non-threatening voice; [5]
* remain upright;
* don’t scream (or flail your limbs or panic or jump up and down);
* back into a corner or against a wall so the dog can’t get behind you;
* look for a tree or car to climb [6] and hope to f***’s sake the owner appears…
I faced the aggressive dog situation many times when I was running for exercise. Those strategies worked for me, as they did for other runners…except when they didn’t. I heard too many stories of someone who did everything right and got bitten anyway.
Fellow runners also shared the WTF?!?!? confusion of hearing sure-fire advice from so-called experts which contradicted advice shared by other experts. As in: ignore the dog; *don’t * stop running. Continue what you’re doing, because some dogs will pay you no mind when you walk or run past them but if you stop, they “think” (okay, no human really knows what a dog thinks, we are trying to guess/interpret) you are a threat to them.
In other words, encountering an aggressive dog is situational and dog-specific: sorry, but there is no sure-fire, works-every-time, strategy. But, human nature being what it is, there is this sure-fire reality: there will always be some person who will tell you that, whatever you did, you should have done something else.
Back to the future background to the Mrs. Kravitz revelation: Dateline: the Oregon coast (Manzanita); Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am; out for my morning constitutional. On that day I decided to walk north along the imaginatively named Ocean Road, which parallels the beach, then splits into two roads, one of which (Beulah Reed Road) continues along the coast and up into the streets winding around the base of Mt. Neahkahnie.
I walked along the road, noting the increasing number of vans and other vehicles I’d been seeing in my early morning walks – vans and campers parked alongside Ocean Road which look as if they’ve been there all night (as opposed to the vehicles whose drivers pull over, watch the waves and savor their morning coffee [7] before driving on to their jobs, or what/where ever). Those been-there-overnight vehicles are situated in such a way to indicate that the occupants are camping there, despite the fact that it is illegal to do so, and despite the “No Parking between 11pm – 5am” signs posted along the road.
As I turned up Beulah Reed Road I saw two more looks-like-illegal-camping vehicles parked on the west side of the road. Safety-conscious pedestrian that I am, when I am walking along a sidewalk-less road, I always walk facing traffic; thus, I passed close by both of the vans, whose occupants were presumably still inside/asleep (the vehicle’s windows had shades and other objects blocking the windows and windshields). One of the vans stood out due to its color and décor: a green van festooned with white and yellow flowers, sporting a Nebraska license plate and a message – “love mother nature and she will love you back” – painted on the van’s rear window.
The Green Van was in the same spot on the west side of Beulah Reed Road where, in the past few months, I’d walked past other camping vehicles one of which provided moiself with a memorable visual a couple months ago. The naked man who’d emerged from that vehicle and began urinating by the side of the road just as I was passing by was an unpleasant sight, but a minor startle compared to what happened Tuesday am.
I continued walking up Beulah Reed Road for a few more minutes, then headed back to Ocean Road. As I neared the Green Van (this time, walking on the far side of the road) I saw a husky/malemute dog lying in the sand by the right rear of the GV. The dog had not been there five minutes ago, when I’d first walked past the GV, and there was no sign of any humans (other than moiself ) about. When I was about thirty feet away from the GV the dog’s eyes fixed on me; it got up and slowly began to cross the road toward me.
Oh, shit. It takes minutes to type what flashed through my mind in nanoseconds Some of the nicest dogs I’ve met, and some of the meanest, have been husky/malemutes – and those two breeds consistently rank high on the Biting Dogs lists…. [8]
The dog was obviously not going to be one of the nice ones. It slunk toward me, in a crouched position (the classic hunting posture – have you ever seen footage of wolves or other carnivores stalking their prey?). Its approach was menacing, but silent…which I found more disturbing than barking. [9] If it had been barking, that would have (hopefully) alerted its owner.
“How’d ya like to see these teeth up close?”
I stop walking and spoke softly but firmly, remembering not to make eye contact. I did all the “right things,” which had no effect on the dog’s aggressive body language and approach, so I slowly began to continue my walk. The dog circled in front of me, blocking my path. It growled, bared its teeth and walked stiff-legged toward me, then began to snarl and bark. I put my walking poles between me and the dog and called out loudly: WHOSE DOG IS THIS – COME GET YOUR DOG. I did this several times; finally, a woman appeared from the west-facing side of the van. She had long, reddish hair and looked to be in her late 20s – early 30s. She made no apologies for her menacing dog, but unenthusiastically attempted to
(1) assure me that her dog was not aggressive (“He just has a lot to say” she said,
as her dog began barking even louder, flattened his ears, and raised his hackles)
(2) get her dog under voice control.
She failed at both (1) and (2).
She held no leash (and with the dog’s thick fur I couldn’t tell if it even had a collar to which a leash could be attached). She kept calling to the dog, which would turn to look at her, take two steps toward the GV, then turn around and bark and take three steps toward moiself. As the dog continued to ignore the anemic “suggestions” of his owner to return to her, I swung one of my walking sticks at him, which temporarily stopped his advance (at that point he was less than two feet from me).
Oh, for some pepper spray, I thought – not for the dog, but to use on that pathetic excuse for a human being. GV lady may make van-decoration-declarations on loving Mother Nature but she obviously doesn’t give an oyster’s ass about walking responsibly through Mother Nature’s land while respecting and protecting *all* of Ma Nature’s creatures, including bipedal ones.
This brand only works on German-speaking dogs.
I made firm, aggressive eye contact with the woman when she repeated her, “He’s not mean/he has a lot to say” bullshit excuse. I replied, “Yeah, he’s saying a lot and none of it is nice – I’ve been bitten by a dog; I know when I’m being threatened. You need to get your dog under control, RIGHT NOW.” The insolent look on her face reminded me of a pouty adolescent whose parents had threatened to ground her until she cleared the dinner table. “I am going this way,” I pointed toward Ocean Road, “and your dog needs to go that way.“ I pointed toward her van.
Which eventually happened. After the woman and her dog disappeared behind the other side of the van, I took a picture of the back of the GV.
I was seething when I got home (and really hungry). I posted the GV picture on my FB page, along with a very brief description of the incident. As I was doing so I remembered that on my way back I’d passed an elderly couple walking on Ocean Road, headed in the direction I’d come from. Damn, I chastised moiself – should I have warned them about staying away from that van? With that thought in mind I posted the same photo and incident description, with an “FYI” warning/introduction, on a FB page where locals post pictures and info about items of North Oregon coast interest.
I knew I should report what had happened to “the authorities.” As I fixed my breakfast and mulled over whom to call (The town? The county? ) I was contacted by my Friend and Neighbor ®. F&N had seen my post, and urged me to report the incident. I called the police non-emergency number; the dispatcher who finally answered said that Beulah Road was under Tillamook County jurisdiction, and that she’d have a TC deputy contact me.
The TC deputy took down the details of my report, and then…oh my my (“Officer Chatty Cathy,” my mind soon nicknamed him). He had a lot to say about what had happened to me, and about related incidents he had been/was currently dealing with. I was apparently a sympathetic ear into which he unloaded his and his law enforcement colleagues’ frustrations with similar incidents and with “what’s going on in the county,” including:
* increased illegal camping
* increased reports of aggression between illegal campers and county residents
* illegal campers’ aggressive/unleashed dogs (who go after both people and other dogs)
* the overload of reports the county has to investigate without the staff to do so….
He said that TC had a backlog of *hundreds* of calls about illegal camping and other violations, but that because what happened to me involved menacing, he could prioritize my report, and would head for Beulah Road. I thanked him, and noted that the van had probably moved on. Actually…probably not, he said. And, in his experience, if it did move it would likely move to somewhere nearby, and a green van with Nebraska plates would be easy to spot. Should he find the van, he said he’d have an in-depth conversation with the van/dog owner. How he handles these cases, he explained, is based on the dogs’ and or vehicles’ owners’ demeanor and response. If they listen respectfully and are forthright and apologetic, he tries to educate them and lets them off with a warning. If they are unapologetic and insolent, and even (as some people have done) go so far as to assert that they have no intention of abiding by the _____ (leash, parking/camping/trash disposal, etc.) laws, he’ll give them “as many citations as possible.”
He asked me to spread the word: please tell people to report these encounters, even as he acknowledged the perception that “They (law enforcement) will do nothing,” and so most incidents go unreported. It’s true, we (local police/sheriff departments) are understaffed, he said, but people need to know that the reports, even if they cannot be immediately investigated, help them gather statistics in general, and make records in particular for individual menacing dogs and their owners, so that if (or as he put it, “unfortunately, when“) the dog harasses/attacks another person or pet, the dog owner can’t get away with, “Oh, he’s harmless/he’s never done that before….”
At one point in our conversation, I told him how I’d began my walk thinking about the increase in illegal parking/camping, and asked if he knew if that is indeed the case, or just my anecdotal impression? And is this uptick (in illegal beach camping) related to homelessness? He told me the increase in numbers wasn’t my imagination, but that my assumption about the cause was incorrect. He then asked me something which led to an “aha” turn to the conversation: “Have you heard of the website, ‘vanlife’?”
“You’ve seen the hype around #vanlife. You’ve seen the stunning photos on social media. Now you want to throw everything to the wind, quit your job, build out a camper van, and live a carefree life of adventure….
This page is designed as a jumping-off point for your personal vanlife journey. We go over the pros and cons of this lifestyle, the reasons why full time van life is awesome… We answer the most frequently asked questions about living in a van – everything from bathrooms and showering…to finding sweet camping spots.”
(excerpts from the intro to Van Life How To: Complete Guide to Living in a Van Full Time,
my emphases )
“After we’ve posted this cool picture of ourselves can we go back to our penthouse and order takeout sushi?”
I said I knew of the site, but had never visited it. I thought it was similar to other sites I’d heard about, where people share information about RVing and/or traveling and living in trailers and vans. It is that, Officer CC said, but has become so much more: it has become a source of the increased “incident” calls faced by local law enforcement. He proceeded to express his frustration re the influence of the van-lifestyle sites, where people post info for others who’ve chosen to live in vans, sharing tips about where to travel and camp “for free” (but not necessarily legally).
More and more, Officer CC said, the people he speaks to and then warns and/or cites for illegal camping are mentioning (in some cases, boasting) that they were “referred” to the Oregon coast by vanlife and similar websites and online bulletin boards. And, he stressed, these people are *not* homeless– they seem well-funded (trust fund babies?) and/or are working remotely. For whatever reasons, they have romanticized the idea of public urination and defecation [10] life on the road. They…
* find it glamorous to be house-less by choice;
* take pride in ridding themselves of the bourgeois trappings of consumerism:
* receive positive feedback from like-minded folk when they post
cool pictures on Instagram of their adventures in livin’ on the road;
* believe that dogs also “need freedom” and so they ignore local leash laws;
* tell him that they love livin’ “for free”…
which – surprise! – turns out to be anything but free for the people in the communities who pay the taxes that fund the services to clean up after those freedom lovin’ van lifers, who leave their trash and toxic waste behind as they move on – and the damage these love-nature-and-she’ll-love-you hypocrites do to natural habitat areas frustrates him to no end…
As he described his dealings with these voluntary nomads, more than once he referred to van-life enthusiasts as, “hippies.” I could tell from Officer CC’s voice that he was much younger than moiself; it took all of my maturity (ahem) to refrain from correcting him:
“Actually, they aren’t hippies – that was an older generation. Any surviving hippies are at home rubbing patchouli and/or CBD oil on their aching joints…I think y’all need to come up with a more contemporary epithet for the younguns whose lives and values you find disrespectful, or just fruity.”
I’m not criticizing or mocking the deputy. He was amiable, empathetic, and eager to articulate the frustrations of law enforcement officers who cannot adequately fulfill their oath to serve and protect when they are overwhelmed by calls they cannot address.
Our talk turned to what people can do to protect themselves against aggressive dogs (Officer CC said his wife is a runner, and that she and her running buddies frequently deal with unleashed and aggressive dogs). I said that, due to my afore-mentioned, bitten-by-a-dog incident, I’d done my research, and ordered a cannister of citronella spray [11] and an air horn, for self-defense. Before I could tell him I’d ruled out bear sprays/pepper sprays, he strongly advised that I tell my friends *not* to carry pepper sprays, because
* Unless you’re an expert who practices with pepper spray on a regular basis you can end up inadvertently spraying yourself, particularly when you’re under duress;
* At the beach, where gusts of wind can arise seemingly out of nowhere, pepper spray can backfire, as in, get blown back on *you.*
He said that while he hated having to recommend it (“Nobody wants to hurt an animal,”) carrying a club might be called for (I said thanks/no thanks, and mentioned my walking poles). He expressed admiration for the air horn strategy: “What a great idea!” he enthused, noting that the loud noise would both startle the dog and alert nearby humans.
Yeah; okay, are we ever gonna get to the Gladys Kravitz connection?
After my conversation with the deputy I drove to Hillsboro, where I had business to attend to. While driving I received a voice mail from my Friend & Neighbor, and pulled over to return her call. F&N said that my local/beach group FB posting had spawned a comment firestorm: most were from people relating their own/similar incidents, and/or expressing sadness re what happened to me in particular and what they saw happening to their community. Other posters engaged in unfounded and unsolicited second-guessing, reframing the incident, and even claiming to know the dog’s intentions, despite having not been there. [12] Several of those I-wasn’t-there-but-I-know-what-really-happened posters also opined on what I *should* have done to avoid being menaced by the dog.
( Ladies, does this sound familiar?
“If you’d only done this/said that/worn that/walked this way,
you wouldn’t have been assaulted.” )
I’d read a few of the early comments, including two which asserted that “people should mind their own business” and “stop caring about who parks where or does what.” [13] The MYOB theme was picked up by a few other unbalanced strident posters. How that became a thing, considering the context, was a mystery to moiself. Translation: I found it bewilderingly irrational. The afore-mentioned Gladys Kravitz remark came from one such poster, who addressed her remarks to moiself and fumed about why I was being Gladys Kravitz, and that I should have minded my own business….
Say what? Minding my own business – exactly what I was doing. I did not approach the dog and try to determine whether he was neutered. My business, which I was minding, thanks for your concern, was walking. I was out for a walk on a public road, enjoying the scent of the briny coastal air and minding my own beeswax, when an aggressive, unleashed canine decided to make his threats my business.
F&N and I had a giggle about how comments on my post had spiraled into many tangents. I said that, after violating the never-feed-the-trolls rule (I corrected one unhinged commenter, who seemed to be reading comprehension-challenged and tried to rewrite my story to fit her outrage at…whatever), I’m not going to read any more comments on that group. F&N said she’d keep me apprised of the more entertaining (read: whackadoodle) posts…although, I told her, the Gladys Kravitz epithet would be hard to top.
The next morning my phone rang: it was F&N’s update call. Apparently, by the end of the previous day, “things got nasty,” as she put it. She’d checked the FB local/beach site before bedtime: there were “248 or 258” comments, including a thread where people posted pictures of when they’d been bitten by an unleashed dog, and others posted either support or criticism for the bite victim. Then a man mentioned that he might carry a gun when he goes to the beach, and lawdy mama, it took off from there, with about 40 more posts related to carring concealed weapons on the beach. In the morning when F&N rechecked the site, about 40 of those packing-heat-on-the-beach posts had disappeared, taken down by the group moderator (or perhaps, I posited, by the posters who’d developed cooler heads overnight?). F&N said the nastiness also included some posts which made blatant or tacit references to class warfare, claiming that heartless “rich people” at the beach hate “the rest of us” and harass people who have no choice but to live in their cars…in sharp contrast with the deputy’s testimony that the majority of the people he and his fellow deputies encounter and warn about/cite for illegal camping are neither destitute nor homeless, but self-obsessed, “van life” adventure seekers, whose idea of freedom is mooching off of public services they can well afford to pay for….
And moiself? Oy vey. I’d not even considered filing a report about illegal camping.
I just want to go for a walk, anywhere it’s safe and legal to do so, and not get bitten.
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]
* * *
May you enjoy any/all outdoor activities free from dog (or human) harassment;
May you delight in observing online trolls but not in feeding them;
May you enrich the public discourse by coining a better word than “hippies”
to describe Gen Z…hippies;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Or at least, channeling her spirit.
[2] And of course, Gladys Kravitz turned out to be spot on: Samantha Stevens *was* a witch. Despite promising her mortal husband Darrin that she would *not* use her powers, just about every episode of Bewitched involved Samantha using witchcraft to create unusual happenings, or to try to undo the wacky situations created by her witch and warlock relatives, who would make mysterious arrivals and departures and mess with the mortals. Mrs. Kravitz witnessed just enough to have her suspicions, which would always be explained away by Samantha or others. Yep, Mrs. Kravitz was a nosy neighbor, but her suspicious were correct, and she was gaslighted.
[3] Or I could say, “I was a runner,” but I never took my identity from that; I ran for enjoyment and exercise, as opposed to training for the Olympics or whatever.
[4] Unless the dog belongs to the runner and is also running because…well, it usually isn’t the dog’s idea.
[5] This is not to make yourself the alpha or assert dominance, but to get as much control of yourself and the situation as possible, and to make any cues you give the dog – “sit; down; stay; go home” as understandable as possible.
[6] The strategy used by one elderly gentleman, in a neighborhood I used to live in, when he was attacked by two free-roaming dogs when he was doing his early morning neighborhood rounds, delivering advertising flyers. The man and I had greeted each other when I went out for my morning run, and I was able to rescue him when I returned and saw that the dogs had treed – carred? – him.
[7] Or sometimes, doobies…as I notice when I pass the vehicles and they have the windows down.
[8] Which I learned in my training for the animal rescue organizations for which I volunteered, and I confirmed this when I returned home, by searching for dog bite statistics.
[9] Many a person who has survived a dog attack says that the silent ones, who approach you steadily, are more dangerous than the barkers.
[10] That was my snarky thought, not his.
[11] The smell of citronella is irritating/offensive to dogs, but not harmful.
[12] Perhaps there is a Canine Psychic Intentions website I am unaware of.
[13] Those comments seemed to be related to other posters who focused on the illegal parking and camping situation, not the aggressive dog.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org