Age Changes Taste

When I was young I enjoyed romantic movies in which the hero kidnapped the heroine and finally made her love him. I saw nothing wrong in the brutality that often occurred before that point. I have changed my interpretation of the 'feel-good' movie.

Recently I watched one of my teen-age favorites The Black Swan. Tyrone Power was handsome, dashing, and really 'turned me on' years ago. Having lived and worked through the Feminist Movement, I feel differently today. I dislike the reaction of my body to violence and suspense. I don't want to pay or waste my hours of my life to shudder, perspire, quake and grip the sides of my chair. I want to leave the theater feeling better than when I arrived. I want only 'feel-good' movies and thank BBC for keeping Austen and Bronte alive today.

Reason to clean up the kitchen

If you are tempted to go to bed with a dirty kitchen, this one may tempt you otherwise.

Vacations End

It is always a shock that Labor Day is the end of vacation time. It used to be considered the end of summer. I don’t know if it is global warming but the Fall has been warmer in the past few years. Last year, near Boston, we didn’t have a frost until November.

Some habits don’t die. It still doesn’t feel right to wear white shoes and carry a white handbag after Labor day. Now isn’t that silly on those hot days and in Indian Summer?

Boston Lying –In Hospital where women went to have their babies had a joke about answering the phone: “Boston Lying-In, where every day is a holiday….Labor Day!”

KEEP ME LAUGHING

Seven years ago, on Halloween, my husband finally succumbed to the cancer that had taken over his body. He had talked of feeling his body had been taken over by an alien inside that he couldn’t get out. I insisted that Hospice put his bed in the living room so that friends and relatives would have easier access to visit him and say their goodbyes. Many kind people asked me what they could do to help. I learned that there is little anyone can do to help. Death comes when it chooses. People who visit try to do something about their own sense of helplessness. Many gestures are as ineffective as those of people who insist on ‘helping’ with the dishes, piling them everywhere on the kitchen counter, creating more chaos than help to the hostess.

Nevertheless, I recognized that others were also feeling helpless. I needed to be doing as much as I could to attend to my fading husband so I suggested to those offering that the best thing they could do for me was to keep me laughing. Since my computer has been my link to friends all over the world, I was soon inundated by jokes. At one time my mail folder for them had piled to 5000 unread items. I learned there were some who, despite my protests, insisted on passing along mushy, irritating, spiritual prayers of hope which I only found annoying, not amusing. Death is inevitable and neither he nor I believed in an afterlife. I’ve always believed that no benevolent God would ever put me in a Heaven with BOTH my husbands.

It didn’t take me a long time to figure out which of my friends understood a good belly laugh from an unfunny post. I made two folders into which my email program filtered them. One was for those who sent really clever, funny stuff, puns, surprise endings, lists that keep one laughing longer, cartoons, and those not circulated with Fwd: (several times in the subject). I appreciated those who learned to BCC: so that I didn’t have to see pages of email addresses of those who preceded me in the reading. These were not passing out my address as well.

To this day, I still get many good laughs everyday, whenever I choose to open these folders and take a few minutes to read. When I have a bit of free time I forward them on to others who, I think, will lighten up for a few moments, as well. I do not keep a “joke list” because not everyone finds all jokes appropriate or funny. Instead, I check my lists of friends and family and single out those who might, to my mind, appreciate this single one. I refuse to forward to: “*** Forward this to at least 11 people and see what comes on your screen, you will laugh your head off!!!!!!! This works. I don't know how...” Of course, you don’t know how, because it doesn’t and can’t work. Despite the glitches, my friends have kept me laughing and I am grateful to all of them for it.

That What Holds the Boobs Up

Most females wear a bra except at a youthful age when they stand right up there without one. Most bodies don't permit this for very long, though .

Just Go to Your Room; Think What You Have Done

This parental command is a puzzler to children. If you have already said you don’t know what someone is talking about, what good can that do for a little kid who has only a millisecond long focus once alone in a bedroom with toys. Frustration and isolation, as a punishment, is experienced but not understood. . The child has, for reasons unknown to him/her, made the parents angry. Children learn to understand anger very early because it is usually both visual and audible from the parents. It has happened before though they may not understand how to avoid it in the future. They are ill-equipped to figure out all those hard to understand reasons from the parents like: why things that are fun are so wrong sometimes, but not all the time. Until a child learns to think empirically, the world is full of unexpected responses. Small children do not know monetary value of things or how difficult it is for some parents to provide necessities, let alone luxuries. They assume that parents can replace any destroyed thing because parents seem so omnipotent to them. Toys break all the time and they don’t usually get angry at the parents. Indeed, it is usually the other way around, the parents get angry at them. Therefore, they are often conditioned to believe they will be held responsible for anything that breaks or other things they don’t anticipate. This only fosters the need to hide from the parents, to be less than truthful for fear of the response. If parents want to encourage openness and honesty from children, they have to guide them to that safe place where they can discuss accidents and infractions in their behaviors with their parents.

Focus is put on the disastrous result rather than the process. The need is to explain to a child, in full detail, what has been upsetting in the child’s behavior (defying a request, keeping hands off a specific object that has then been destroyed, violating boundaries which were never really made clear to the child, or similar deficiencies) This process might be explained by: ‘We are disappointed that you disobeyed, which caused the accident or loss of an item much cherished by Mom, Dad, or whoever’; ‘We are sorry that we no longer can trust you to do what will protect the property of others or even your own’; ‘You cannot control your behavior, therefore you need some quiet time to regain control of yourself’; and the list can go on and on.

Parents have a great responsibility to help a child understand emotions and put words to them. The earlier the child can do that, the easier it will be for them to communicate with family and world. That understanding does not magically come to them, it is taught to a child.

©

The Right Thing To Do

The problem of figuring out what is the ‘right thing to do’ has plagued me for a lifetime. I’ve searched for a magic book with all the answers. I didn’t find them in the Bible. A How-To book sometimes substitutes lack of ability to size up some situations but does not really give broad enough contexts for people in most situations. There is, in fact, nothing to compensate for good common sense, empathy, sensitivity, and integrity.

I was reminded of being scolded by a Priest in a Greek Orthodox Church twenty-one years ago as being disrespectful in the House of God for laughing at something someone said while waiting for my mother’s funeral to begin, as people were still filing into the church. That my body could come up with a laugh was for me a very healing thing at the time. At the time, I wondered whether God might have respected my manner of grief more than this unfeeling Priest, who cared nothing for me but only followed his Babbited brainwash.

The ‘right thing to do’ has been claimed often as a reason for doing things. George W. Bush used it when it later turned out that it was not at all the right thing to have gone to war with Iraq. It was invoked to set up Gitmo; have right-to-lifers shooting abortionists; let criminals (who are clearly unrepentant and dangerous to society) go free because they have ‘paid society back for their crimes’ by time spent in jail; or parental physical abuse of a child in the name of good parenting. .

It is rarely found outside one’s self. One reaches a set of rules by trial and error, through life. For some, it simply means not getting caught doing what you know is wrong. For others, it is always giving to others and never to one’s self, as opposed to the ‘me-first’ people.

In truth, ‘the right thing to do’ is arrived at in a very subjective way and can be evaluated by the gain to the ‘doer’ and the pain to the recipient.

Having talented grandchildren is a real plus in life

Bloggers have to believe they have something to say that would be of interest to others, otherwise they would just privately keep a journal for themselves. Perhaps they also have to be opinionated, which doesn't mean they have to be rigid in their opinions, just that they have to make up their minds as to what they believe.

My granddaughter taught me to set up this blog and got me started. Once shown things, I can then run with them. Hence todays title.

All my life I have been told to 'act my age'. This is useless to say to someone. Once, on a TV news broadcast, I watched a mother of a 4 year old little girl (who was dancing gaily in a store, being spirited and happy) told to "act your age". I was vastly amused as I thought of this mother expecting a four year old to know how she was supposed to be at a given age. Then I thought of my own behaviors. I don't 'act' like most friends who are my age, for the most part, either. No one ever taught me what behaviors were supposed be as the years passed. Even if they had, I probably wouldn't have followed their directions, anyway. Consequently, most of my interests remain what they have been for several years. I don't sit sedately, I speak loudly and sometimes with profanity, and I like change. No subject is taboo in my mind, unless it would be embarrassing or hurtful to another.

So, henceforth, on this blog, I will try to act my age.