There was a triathalon (Latin for “must can’t afford a car”) in our town recently and I saw one of the participants running and talking into his cell phone. What is that? The ocean swim segment must’ve been a bitch.
I was in Target the other day and couldn’t escape the loud ramblings of a cell phone addict.
“Ohmygod, Tiffany, you should see these little fountains; they are sooo cool. Huh? Oh, I’m on aisle nine. Yeah. Okay, now I’m looking at these plants that kind of look like ficus trees or something. Okay, now there’s this really cool pillow that I think would look good on my bedroom on account of it’s fuchsia. Huh? Fuchsia! Hell-o, it’s like hot pink?”
My mom-friends are pathetically addicted to their cell phones. Rarely do we go to the park that their purses don’t start ringing. Usually, and I have never understood this, it’s the husband.
Why do some married people call each other all day long? I used to work with a woman who made at least five calls a day to her hubby on her cell phone. He did the same, so all day long anyone unfortunate to be within earshot learned that the dog had some kind of worm, hook or ring or tape, I forget which; hubby was “bored” at work; their sod isn’t “taking” in the backyard like it did in the front and root rot is suspected; and wifey had developed what the commercials call painful trapped gas after eating a chimichanga from the office vending machine. Which just shows you what a lunatic she was.
At the park recently, my friend slammed her cell phone shut, and announced, “My husband calls me all day and he has absolutely nothing to say.”
All over the park, you could hear the chatter. “We’re at the park. Huh? At the swings. Yeah, we’re going to head on over to the monkey bars in a minute. Huh? Meat loaf. No. No. Guess again. No. Butterbeans!”
The weirdest sight I see is redneck guys on cell phones. There’s just something profoundly unsettling about a guy with a mullet chatting like a girl into his little Barbie dream phone.
The other day, I got behind a babbling Bubba who talked all the way through his quarter-pounder and Shamrock Shake order (“Thanks, darlin’, keep the change”) and never stopped talking while he ate, special sauce dribbling off his bouncing chin.
Here’s another scary thought.
Next time you’re in the grocery and hubby calls your cell phone to remind you to pick up some athlete’s foot powder and a six-pack of Coronas, you could think that you’re in for a fun time tonight, but what you don’t realize is that you could be partially responsible for a serious breach in that old bugaboo, National Security.
Turns out that the technology that allows us to enjoy our God-given right to talk with our friends while bummed in traffic actually leaves “radar holes” that expose the stealth bomber.
Picture it. The stealth bomber is supposed to be, well, stealthy. Because of these cell-phone-caused radar holes, the bomber’s up there, squealing and doubled over, trying to cover its naughties.
One minute you’re calling your mama to ask if she’d mind coming over Saturday night so you can go see Charlie’s Angels 3 with your baby’s daddy and the next minute Saddam sees the stealth missile headed his way and blows it into bits. Sure, it’s fab that you’ve got a sitter lined up, but at what cost, little missy?
This is the second shocking bit of news I’ve heard lately about cell phones. The other? The Amish use them.
A proud people who can actually use “shun” as a verb without cracking themselves up, the Amish don’t even use zippers because they think they’re too high-tech. Now they’re going to be just as annoying as the rest of us.
Welcome to the shallow end of the gene pool, my hat-haired friends. There is room for all of thee.
Somehow, the mental picture of an Amish farm boy riding into town in the family buggy in his button-crotch woolen knickers isn’t nearly as quaint when you realize he’s talking on his cell. (“Yes, Percival, we harvested fifty acres today and tomorrow Mom’s going to make one hundred and eighty-seven cobblers for the tourons. What? Oh, yes, that new Xbox kicks some major—whoa, Bessie! Sorry, Percy. She just trampled another loser with one of those goofy cardboard cameras. Hell-o. Why don’t these morons go digital?”)
Technology has gotten completely out of hand, if you ask me. I recently read about a security device that uses high-tech computer radar to see through clothing. It can spot concealed weapons from as far as fifty feet away.
The “remote frisk” can be used in large crowds to spot terrorists, but privacy nuts are concerned that, if it falls into the wrong hands, it could be used to spot exceedingly large balambas instead. I don’t care how much they crow about screening the applicants for security jobs, you just know they’re going to end up hiring the feebjock you went to junior high with who pestered you on the school bus everyday to show him your ta-ta’s.
I’m not sure which of all these reports is the most troubling but I don’t really care all that much. The truth is, it’s foot powder and Corona night at my house and I’m feeling lucky.
5
REAL SIMPLE MAGAZINE: MEET MANWICH,
the Working Girl’s Best Friend
How to Feng-Shui Your Way to Di-Vorce Court
Have you seen Real Simple magazine yet? It looks a lot like Martha Stewart Living with page after luscious page of lovely foods and happy, real simple people wearing expensive clothes and smiling at how simple their lives are.
“Tra-la-la,” they seem to be saying as they clink simple, elegant glasses together while wearing simple, elegant monochromatic clothing.
The only problem is you can tell just by looking at them that life is Real Simple only because there’s a Rosita somewhere taking care of the kids while they enjoy “soul-nurturing ritual times.”
Whatever the hell that means.
Real Simple is supposed to be a classy antidote to magazines like Martha’s that encourage us to spend our spare three and a half minutes a day sponge-painting terra-cotta pots with yogurt in order to cultivate a “distressed” look. (Look closer, toots. That’s me, not the pot, looking distressed.)
According to its editors, the magazine was created to “provide beautiful, actionable solutions for simplifying every aspect of your life.”
Words like actionable leave me feeling unsimple and even anxiously complicated. Much the same way I felt while reading the “Pantry Dinners” section of the magazine and discovered that their idea of a simple recipe for Vegetable Chili with Polenta contained thirteen ingredients, not a danged one of them in my pantry.
What? You people never heard of Manwich?
Another issue printed a recipe for a tuna casserole that didn’t even include cream of mushroom soup, proving that they’ve got a lot to learn about the simple life.
Real Simple is shameless in its quest to simplify everything. There’s even a section called “Soul—In a Nutshell,” apparently for people who are overcome by the rigorous demands of developing a soul via Oprah’s three-minute “Remembering Your Spirit” segments. Shouldn’t some things take a little time?
Real Simple seeks to remind the frazzled working woman and mom that “It’s about quality, not quantity.” Less is more, they say.
No, it’s not. More is more. Their idea of a lovely table is one white candle plunked down in the middle? I’m glad these freaks didn’t plan my wedding reception, where every table had enough flowers for a casket spray.
It’s quite trendy now to take decorating advice from “minimalists.” Take ikebana, for instance. This is a type of flower arranging where you essentially take a big stick from your yard, wire a single flower to it, and charge fifty bucks. I don’t get it.
With this simplicity movement comes the new national obsession: “nesting” at home. Whatever happened to going out on the town, spending too much money, and staying out too late?
I’m sick of all those magazine articles about the importance of pot-roast-and-mashed-potato family dinners. I can’t honestly believe that macaroni and cheese is the best way to soothe our national psyche. No
pe. I want to go out on Friday night and have somebody serve me something sumptuous that isn’t topped with Tater Tots. This is what it means to be an American, not sitting around weaving and discussing everybody’s damn day. Don’t we do that enough the rest of the week?
The whole return to the nest has led to a new design trend: the “hearth room.” This is what we used to call the living room, that oversized, underfurnished, and always-cold-in-the-winter room where nobody ever went unless it was Christmas or piano-lesson time.
Later the living room morphed into the “family room” and, finally, the “great room.” We have a small one so I just call it the “okay room.”
The new “hearth room” is a kitchen/great room combo that actually includes a fireplace where you can tend those stewpots on Friday night instead of going out and getting sloppy on licorice margaritas like you used to do until They decided we should spend Fridays mixing cookie dough with the kids.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I love cookie dough, but adults deserve some downtime, away from all that hearth and kith and kin. Or you can kith your sanity good-bye.
The hearth room is supposed to call to mind the homespun life so revered in shows like The Waltons. One big room with Grandma rolling out lard biscuits while John Boy scribbled obsessively on the settee.
Designers should remember that there was a reason everybody hung out in one hearth room back then. It was the Depression, that dark time in our nation’s history when nobody ever had a date. Better to remember that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to spend Friday nights at home. Or something like that.
Aside from the silly hearth room, there’s the huge trend of “feng shui,” which is pronounced fung schway just to play with your head. In a soulful nutshell, this promotes moving your furniture and pictures and stuff around to create a harmonious environment that will “grow” your spirit.
A friend begged to give my house a fung schway makeover. She said our wealth was “just a-flyin’ out of the house” because we had a deck on the back that was, unfortunately, smack in the middle of our “wealth quadrant” and this meant there was nothing to harness the financial energy and keep it from running like a madman into the street.
She was also distressed to see that the closet on the northeast corner contained coats, a vacuum cleaner, brooms and mops, assorted skates, and a Wiffle ball set. She said this was chaotic, and I said, what’s your point? It’s not like I can walk around all day with this stuff strapped to my back or a shopping cart. I mean, that’s okay for some members of my family but not for me.
Moving upstairs, she was horrified to see the TV in our bedroom and suggested that we replace it immediately with candles and treasured books, with everything facing east.
She meant well but she was talking nutty as a three-ingredient Real Simple fruitcake. Trust me, hon, I told her. Without ESPN in the bedroom, there will be no harmony. So there.
I told my husband all about our free fung schway consultation that night and I don’t think he understood. He just said that if I was thinking about fung schway to please be sure to order a couple of extra spring rolls because I always eat the baby shrimp out of his. (And where do they get those anyway? Do they make ’em smoke when they’re young?)
Fung schway isn’t new, of course, but the whole Real Simple anti-Martha movement has given it new life.
True believers love that this ancient Chinese art of decorating is based on promoting balance, harmony, light, and inner peace, as opposed to our style of decorating, which is based on moving the furniture in front of wherever you couldn’t scrub the Magic Marker off the wall.
Fung schway has its place, I guess. Why else would so many people turn to respected FS expert Angi Ma Wong who writes columns about this, answering the questions of angst-filled readers who fear that their BarcaLoungers and buffets are out to get them?
In one column I read, Ms. Wong addressed the question of whether it would be okay to install mirrored closet doors in the bedroom, even though the mirrors would face the windows, a huge fung schway no-no.
Ms. Wong’s answer, written in the time-honored Magic 8 Ball style, said “It is not advisable” to put mirrored doors in the bedroom “especially if they reflect any part of your body while you’re in bed.” (Amen to that!) She pointed out that mirrors move energy around and since the soul does its astral traveling while you’re asleep it might get “startled by seeing its image in a mirror.” I don’t know about y’all, but I usually tell my soul to just stay put while I’m sleeping. As long as I let it watch the occasional Law and Order rerun first, it’s usually perfectly happy to settle down for the night.
Another letter tackled fung schway for the home office. Ms. Wong says that if you use your home computer to earn money, it should be located in the southeast corner of your home. Well, this explains a lot. My computer has faced northwest for years now but I have since moved it based on Ms. Wong’s recommendation and should be insanely wealthy by the time you read this so, Prize Van, ease on down da road.
Ms. Wong advised another reader that open bookcases may direct negative “sha” energy toward the occupants of your living room, causing injury or pain to the body part the edges are pointing toward. This explains all those guests who, over the years, have reached for another Tostito, then collapsed in a heap. I always assumed it was my salmon dip.
Sha energy? Shee-it.
All of this makes me pine, almost, for my Martha magazines. Martha is the Antichrist of simple. Or maybe she’s just the Antichrist, period. I finally let my subscription lapse after she made me feel irrationally guilty for not sewing my own shower curtain.
When Martha got in trouble for insider trading a while back, I never worried that she’d suffer. Martha is a survivor and, while it would be a little odd to pen Martha Stewart Living from the pen, I knew that Martha would not only find the silver lining but grab it by the corners, stuff it with free-range goose feathers, and embroider it with silk thread produced by millions of tiny silkworms she tended in her prison windowsill.
While Real Simple would embrace the chic minimalist beauty of the cell, Martha would find all sorts of ways to find the “good thing-ness” of her new home.
I sent Martha some magazine ideas I came up with just in case she’d actually do jail time.
In “Woodworking for Survival” Martha could share techniques for carving and painting decorative shivs for use in shower stall encounters of the unpleasant kind. (Just because it’s a weapon that can remove one’s spleen with a flip of the wrist doesn’t mean it has to be unsightly!)
In “Prison Laundry This!” Martha would demonstrate fabric-softening techniques that transform that eighty-thread-count prison sheet into something as supple as Egyptian cotton. Sidebar: “How to Fold a Fitted Sheet,” a skill she has often demonstrated on TV, empowering millions of women to try, give up, and ultimately stuff ’em back into the linen closet in a flowery wad and start drinking because “it’s five o’clock some-damn-where.”
In “Growing Just About Anything from Seeds!” Martha could rely on help from her new prison friend, Bertha, to secure seeds to produce lush, hardy plants that, when smoked in the rec yard, would ensure a voracious appetite for the evening meal of Noodleroni and canned fruit cup.
In “Doing What You Have to Do,” Martha could share how a few moments of mindless sex with a prison guard helped her acquire lavender water for her hand-tatted pillowslips and a smallish Vulcan range.
In “Doing What You Have to Do—Part II,” Martha adds a Sub-Zero refrigerator, a set of Calphalon cookware and a case of seventy-year-old balsamic vinegar.
In “Basic First Aid,” Martha could demonstrate how to dress a scalp wound properly while advising readers that, when asked what a mandoline is, simply explain that it is a French kitchen tool for making perfect angular slices of vegetables and fruits, rather than ask, “What were you? Raised by wolves?”
Those Berthas can turn on you, you know. Simple as that.
6
SCREW THE WISDOM OF
Menopause
A friend confided to me recently that she wasn’t sure if it was the “change,” plain old PMS, or just a slow shift toward embracing her inner witch that is causing her to become progressively more irritated by everything her husband does.
I laughed when she suggested this irritation might be a sign of menopause because, as I reminded her, we are exactly the same age, which is way too young for that. And on an unrelated subject, why doesn’t anybody in this rathole I call a house ever turn the air conditioning on? You could fry a steak on my face, for heaven’s sake.
But where was I?
Oh yes. My friend said that she realized just last week that her husband chews his food “funny, from side to side, with his chin wobbling left to right like it’s playing its own little table-tennis game.”
When she complained to him, suddenly and explosively one morning—“Why do you have to eat like that? It is driving me insane, you thoughtless prick!”—hubby just looked puzzled. Using so-called logic, he said very calmly, “I have been chewing this way my whole life and you never said anything about it before.”
“Your whole life? How the hell would I know about your whole life? Do I have to remind you one more time that I am not your mother!”
The next day, the bestselling self-help book, The Wisdom of Menopause, appeared on her nightstand, still in its Barnes & Noble bag. This, incidentally, constitutes gift wrap to most men.
The Wisdom of Menopause is very popular among women in my age bracket, which, now that I’ve turned forty-five, is more cruel than I realized. Consider the age breakdowns on a typical warrantee card you might fill out for your new hair dryer or toaster oven: Your Age (please check one): 18–24; 25–44; 45–100…
I haven’t read The Wisdom of Menopause because the title sounds like New Age crap. Every time I hear a fifty-something friend crow about how she’s finally old enough to explore her inner self and really get to know who she is in this life, I tell her I’m sure she’d trade all that self-awareness in a nanosecond for a chance to be a fit and bra-less twenty-six doing Jell-O shots with Jude Law.
We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier Page 12