Cattywampus

A good old fashioned rant

Disclaimer **In this post I am very angry and ranty about completely non-knitterly things, if you'd like to see nice happy knitterly things please scroll down and look at my Simurgh stole and maybe even stop & peruse the quilts immediately below before you get that far.**

I haven't had a good rant in a while, but this one is a doozy and I can't just let sleeping dogs lie.

Let's start with the basics.  I am from New York, a reasonably liberal state.  I consider myself a modern woman, my husband and I share duties around the house and every once in a while he even does a load of laundry with no prompting.  We are both educated, we both have decent careers,  we are approximately the same age - so I ask you this:

WHY on God's green earth does the realtor call ME when she thinks the dining room floor isn't shiny enough and email him when she wants to talk about pricing based on neighborhood values.  SHE.  Not even he, SHE.  Seriously?  I am on the books as the daytime contact, but I'm not good enough to have a conversation about pricing? 

I wouldn't notice whether or not the dining room floor was shiny even if you gave me months to notice, she is obviously under some misapprehension that I should be concerned about the lack of shininess of my dining room floor.  I'm not.  I don't even know how one would go about making the floor shiny compared to vaguely smudged.  I count myself lucky to have a decent job so that I can afford to pay somebody to mop my floors every once in a while because people, I hate cleaning and knitting time is precious - given a choice, I will choose knitting every day.

Does she think that my husband will make some decision about the pricing of our house without consulting me?  It was an email, I could have been cc'd - how hard is that?  But I should have been called.  If I can be called at work about the freaking floors, I can certainly be called about PRICING.  I've gotta say, I'm much more concerned about and interested in pricing and fluctuating values in the neighborhood than whether or not the dining room floor is smudged.

This happens all the time to me in the south and it very, very rarely happened to me when I was living in the northeast.  A few months ago I had a lady quote me $120 to clean the gutters and when I told her I wanted to schedule it she asked me "Don't you want to check with your husband first?"  I calmly told her that no, I didn't need to, I can make this decision all on my own, thank you very much.  This I didn't find insulting, just par for the course around here. 

But the realtor, who sat down at the table and talked with us, SHE assumes I only need to be called about cleaning issues and can't deal with the rest? 

Absolutely.  Completely.  Unacceptable. 

Overheard

A conversation had in complete seriousness:

College student number 1:  "Hey man, what day is Thanksgiving next week?"

College student number2:  "Thursday"

At least he got the day right. 

I am not even going to include the rant.  There's no point.  The conversation says it all. 

ETA:  In context, the question College student number 1 asked was what day Thanksgiving fell on,  as if maybe sometimes it happened on a Wednesday or a Friday, and he was checking just to be sure.

Jinxed.

In general, I don't believe in jinxes.  I believe in bad luck, oh yes, I am a firm believer in bad luck.  I also believe, on the plus side, that you can make your own luck - good or bad.  You can put yourself in a position to have good or bad things happen to you depending on the situation.

This, however, is just silly.

Do you remember the last time we saw Cirque (towards the bottom of the post)?  Well.  This time I purchased the tickets the day they went on sale, got us floor seats, row 2, all VERY exciting.  I've had the tickets for 5 months - I'm quite impressed that I didn't lose them.

We had a lovely dinner, got to the coliseum 45 minutes before the show started b/c traffic and parking can be a mess sometimes, stood in line & were all prepared to be seated with a full 30 minutes until show time...but alas, alack, it was not meant to be. 

Our tickets were "invalid" - were were told to go stand in the box office line.  Okay.  I'm already unhappy at this point.  We wait 10 minutes to get to a counter *standing in line behind people who did NOT prepare ahead of time - so why am in this line, exactly?* to get to a lady who says we have to wait for the supervisor, which we do.  She comes down about 5 minutes and *never apologizing or explaining once, mind you* takes our tickets and disappears, she shows back up with 5 minutes to the start of the show and says that the manager is on the way down.  5 minutes later *obviously they were descending from Mt St Helen's* she appears and starts solving the numerous problems people are lined up with.  We do get our tickets, we do get seated approximately 20 seconds before the show started, but there was nary an apology, nary an explanation, just some attitude that we had to be dealt with and seeming confusion that we (collectively a group of people with problems) were annoyed at waiting 30 minutes with no explanations and no attempt at solving the problems.

Really.  Obviously, I am asking too much from the world and my fellow human beings.

But on the bright side...Cirque was AMAZING.  The last one we saw was Corteo, this one was Saltimbanco.  Corteo was very melancholy and had a distinct plot line through the whole thing, very...relaxed and peaceful, if you can ever say that about Cirque.  Saltimbanco was frenetic, colorful, wild and crazy, and we have no idea what the story line was, we hypothesized, but our opinions don't match the description of the show.

It's amazing, wonderful, fantastic, mind-blowing, completely entertaining, and worth every penny.

We also got to see some of the sideline action b/c of where we were sitting - one of the characters took a liking to us - she came over and played with my hair - sort of petted me - and said 'wooooowwwww' once and then another time snuck in the seats behind us and tickled the back of DH's neck and then waved playfully when he turned around in surprise.   It was pretty funny, I guess they are supposed to keep in character and interact with the audience when they are waiting for their turn to go up on stage.

Despite the madness with the tickets it was a wonderful night - Cirque rocks.

For real?

om I haven't ranted in a while, so I guess it's about time.  Apparently I've been in a particularly good mood b/c usually rants abound in my life. 

Seriously?  Blueberry muffin.  I do not now, nor have I ever, nor will I ever, want to smell like a strawberry shortcake doll.  Or an icecream dessert.

There is a fine line between 'oooh that smells goooood' in fruit scented perfumes - like some of Comptoir Sud Pacifique, which I adore, the Vanille Abricot specifically and the 'oooh that smells like dessert' that seems to have appeared in Demeter's line of Jelly Belly perfumes.

This is actually so bizarre that I can't even get up the energy for a true rant.  It's just plain weird. 

Suffice it to say, that I will continue to smell like the Vanille Abricot above, one of the delightful L'artisan perfumes - Saffron Troublant is next on my purchasing list, Papillon Extreme is my most recent (my Valentine's day gift from DH), and this lovely Jasmine Green Tea blend from L'Occitane (which DH bought for me in PARIS last year) - just in case anybody was wondering what perfume I wore...

I refuse to smell like something that could invoke cannibalism around the office if extreme hunger hit.   

About diamonds

Tis the season to rant about commercialism and all that jazz, which I did a little already.  But still I just hate the fact that there is some sort of judgement call about a relationship based on whether or not diamonds have been purchased for the holiday.

But really what I have to say is this:  if the diamond *insert piece of jewelry here* you are about to buy your wife/girlfriend/fiance/mistress ends in .99 - as in 49.99 or 79.99 or even 129.99...just don't do it.   It's not worth it, take her out to dinner instead.  Or maybe save up for a few years and then buy one really nice thing, don't feel pressured to buy some bad quality diamonds every year...

If, on the other hand, it ends in 99 as in 1299.00 or 799.00 or heck even 5999.00 - then, kind sir, go right ahead, just make sure you have those diamonds certified and insured. 

Disclaimer:  I said it before and I'll say it again - this is in no way, shape, or form an indication that I do NOT very much appreciate jewelry and/or diamonds at any holiday or even on a tuesday just because.  I'm just saying...they aren't the end all be all, and forgoodnessake if you're gonna be suckered into American bigger is betterism, at least make sure they're good ones and they won't look grey once they're outside the jeweler's sparkle enhancing lighting. 

Evolution

Crackerjack.  A prize in every box.  Do you remember those?  I do, not the good prizes of course, by the time I was getting Crackerjacks the prizes were ink tatoos and really ugly plastic rings.  They were still fun, but they were like finding the secret decoder ring, always promised WAY more fun than it actually produced. 

What troubles me is the commercial for the heart shaped diamond necklace that comes in a box of candy.  It looks like a little box of those cinnamon flavored hearts...

Edited to add:  here it is

First things first.  When are we, as a society, going to stop equating the spending of one's retirement fund on shiny little things with the 'quality' of love?  I rush to state that I am not against diamonds, I ADORE diamonds, I would love a gift of jewelry as much as the next girl...BUT I do not, under any circumstance, require pretty shiny things to understand how much my husband loves me.

And I will go out on a limb and say that the box with the candy AND diamonds...contains neither good candy...nor good diamonds.

And I will walk even further out on that limb and proclaim at the top my lungs HOLY COW I HOPE I NEVER GET ONE OF THOSE.

Am I crazy here people?

Sisyphus or WHY I HATE MY JOB

Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he reached the top of the hill, the rock always escaped him and he had to begin again (Odyssey, xi. 593). The Image personifies Vain labor.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

Have you ever hated your job?

Visualize this: 

• Say you were hired to make widgets, and the board gave you a directive and said "Put together a committee to make a plan to make widgets."  So you did, in April you got approval to put together a committee to make a plan to make widgets.  In June the committee started to meet about making widgets, but nobody on the committee thought making widgets was a good idea.  So through June, July, August, September, and October you met for an hour and a half every week about widget making and slowly convinced the people on the committee that making widgets was a good thing to do, something you SHOULD do, something you needed to do.  And in November the Widget Committee put together a proposal for a solid plan to make widgets and you presented it to the board.  The board said 'ooh, this looks like a good widget making plan, let's review it after the first of the year'. 

• So now it's January and the board has met again and asked you this:  Why did you put together a plan to make widgets?  We thought you were making fuzzydigits!  Give us numbers to prove that widgets are better than fuzzydigits!  What are the advantages of widgets over fuzzydigits?  Defend this widgit making plan!

• And then you sit there in utter disbelief that you spent God only knows how many hours pushing people to put together this plan to make widgets, researching how to make widgets, and writing the proposal for the plan to make widgets over the last 7 months.  Now the people who requested the widget making plan are asking you to justify the widget making plan.

I say this: 

1. I don't give a flying BLEEP whether or not there are ever any #$%^#$ widgets here!!  I have no personal stake in widgets.  I will NOT defend the widget plan.  I will not sit here and listen to you attack me for MAKING the stupid widget making plan in the first place.  I don't want the BLEEPING widgets.  You ASKED me to do it.  If you wanted freaking fuzzydigits you should have asked for fuzzydigits 7 months ago!!! 
2. Are you completely insane???  If you actually want me to work here, I think you should reasses your evaluation of the widget plan. 

It's a bit traumatic (the biggest understatement of the day) to realize that you are being criticized for putting together and presenting EXACTLY WHAT THEY ASKED FOR.  And that all your work over the last 7 months was completely pointless.   Thank goodness for the three day weekend.  At least I can take a little while to take stock and really think about whether or not I actually want to continue working here. 

Fibonacci Striped Sweater & Minor Rant

I feel like I should rant.  I haven't ranted in a while, and a post on my SP's blog tuabella.blogspot.com about teaching HS and how she has to accomodate slacker students made me want to rant a little about how those accomodated slacker students end up on my academic probation list two years later in complete disbelief that we are refusing to bend the rules for their special little situation.

So this is a half-hearted rant about the kids coming out of highschool these days completely and totally unprepared for college - even a community college that has whatever remedial coursework they need.  As far as I can see it - here's the problem:  a.  they have to do work and b.  if they don't do the work, somebody ACTUALLY FAILS THEM.  and that's it.  And as far as I can tell, these are the same kids who got trophies for finishing last.  I NEVER got a trophy for finishing last at anything and I SUCKED at sports when I was kid - I was HORRIBLE.  I am uncordinated, I have asthma, I'm not fast - I suck.  And I never got a trophy for that.  Somehow, I didn't have any mental collapses about it.  Instead I found things that I could excel at and I focused on doing those things.  If I had gotten trophies for my failures would I have been so quick to move on?

Really, what I am saying is simply this - if I ever have children, I will allow them to fail and take responsibility for the consequences of that failure - how else are they supposed to learn? 

I can tell you from watching these college kids - 18 is NOT the time to start with life lessons. 

But the bright side is that even though I might suck at soccer, and any other sport you care to mention, I managed to find a few things I'm good at.  I'm pretty damn good in the kitchen (IMHO) and hey lookie here - my very first sweater design brought to life, there's no trophy, but I'm  seriously proud of it nonetheless.