A Few Weekend Clarifications

This is the "End of the Week" for me.

I'm going on vacation. There are a few things I wanted to tell you, though.

First:

Old and Busted-


New Hotness-



Second:
Connie, if you're reading this, it would make me very happy if you would update.

Third:
What the hell happened to all the great Rated R movies?
I have a hard time believing that Die Hard sells better in PG-13 than R. I mean, who wants to see that fucking movie if you haven't already seen the previous ones?

Fourth:
If you're gonna sell me something, be straight with me. If you fuck around, I'm gonna nail you to the wall. You know who you are.


See you next week!

And Now For Our Regularly Unscheduled Programming

You woke up this morning, with the wish that you'd hadn't woke up this morning.  

The complacent irony of this idea has led you to get the song by the Police stuck, playing mindlessly, the chorus, in an infinite succession.  While you smile for your appreciation of the song, you are immediately distraught with the length that the day can be drawn out to, when all you can think of is 15 seconds of a song.

On the way to work, you listen to the radio, however, instead of actual music, you're caught in a commercial vortex.  You are subjected to, tortured you think, by the worst jingles you've ever experiences.  Ads flaunting low-priced foods, low-priced automobiles, low-priced loans and low-priced drugs invade your commute and take your brain hostage.

You enter the building, and punch in, hoping you can find some solace in the work you're expected to do.  That you're going to be able to survive to the end of the day.

You spend the rest of your morning humming a hodgepodge combination of the jingles and the song:

"I wish I never passed up the great rates on the turkey penis enlargement, life was only 4.9% when it was driving a new Chrysler, Jeep or Dodge."

Happiness is Slavery

It's interesting to watch how our priorities change as time goes on.

One day, you're dreaming about all the money you're gonna have, and the nice car you're going to drive because you're living with your friends, and the mortgage payment, split 5 ways, is only $400 bucks each.

The next day, you're dreaming about marrying someone.  You're dreaming about the house you are going to buy.  The car has come down in price.  Maybe you're not buying as much stuff (unless you have a great wife like mine, who understands that it's the expensive things in life that keep me occupied).

We laugh about it.  My friends tease me about it.  But it happens to 98% of us.  We all want to settle down.

We all want hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

We all want to be slaves to our possessions.

An interesting observation I made to my wife the other day was that we all seem to fall into gender roles.  Not the big things, necessarily.  Like cooking, or cleaning.  (I love to cook... I don't mind vacuuming).  But the little things.

Like taking out the trash.

Every man in TV history is burdened with taking out the trash.  Even Sgt. Murtaugh, of Lethal Weapon fame, harbors the responsibility of the trash taking.  So one might assume that these gender roles are ingrained in our minds by the media.  Men take out the trash.

But my wife didn't grow up watching Family Matters or Step by Step or Growing Pains.  She didn't have cable.  She can't watch movies like Lethal Weapon.  Her favorite movies are period pieces, there was no trash, the servants made it disappear.

Yet, there are gender roles, because of what she grew up with watching.  Her parents.

Yet, like the idea of settling down and putting yourself into ambition crippling debt, it's written deeply in to her soul.

"Ron will take out the trash."

Role Reversal

Last night was the first time I've ever had my parents over for dinner.  Brother in tow.

My wife and I live in a townhouse approximately 1 block away from an identical townhouse that my parents owned about 10 years ago.  I lived there, too.

In a way, the layout of mine is identical to the way theirs was.  The difference lay in a missing fireplace and a 6 foot by 8 foot den, which is just open space for us.  Of course, everything else is completely different.  Except for the dinner table.  It's a different home.  A different life.

When my parents first visited a couple of months ago, there was no living room.  We had a dinner table we'd sit at.  The kitchen was in pieces.  Our bedroom was mostly made up, but you couldn't shower upstairs.  Not if you wanted to.  The office... was a room, with a table.

Downstairs, the essentials were installed.  The TV, the 360.  The surround sound system didn't even have mounted speakers at that point.  For my mother, from the moment she stepped in the door, "This place is so small" was her mantra.

Yesterday, I'm sure my father gave her a stern talking to, to ensure that only pleasantries may be spewed from her intellect.  So she needed a focal point:

The China Hutch.

This hutch and I, we haven't gotten along from the start.  It was forced upon us by my wife's relatives, who believed that it should be kept "in the family".  Of course, they had not wanted to keep it themselves.  

Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful hutch.  Made of nice wood, well finished.  Lots of glass.  My problem?

It's too nice.  And too heavy.

You don't want to leave it behind.  But you don't want to take it with you.  On top of being forced to take it, it's a trifecta of ideas I would normally never subject myself to.  It weighs close to 400 pounds.  If you take everything out of it.  Including the glass shelving.

This was the focus of my mother's attentions.  "What a beautiful hutch."  An attrition of the natural mental process where she would pick out the worst things in the room.  

Instead of "why did you pick that color for the walls" and "when are you going to paint the handrails" or "why is the carpet so dark"; 

"What a beautiful hutch."