The Word Vomit Post

I can’t believe it’s already 11:50 AM and I’ve been sitting at my computer since 7:30! God, these machines are evil time sucking animals. No wonder my butt is growing faster than my IQ. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s not like I’m sitting here downloading porn. Depending on how you use these time-sucking machines, computers can be very educational. There are online classes---not that I’ve taken any---and virtual museum tours---not that I've taken any---and a host of Ted Talks, Animal Planet and science stuff on the worldwide web. But more telling perhaps is the fact my butt would still fit on an office copy machine if that proves anything on the IQ-to-backside ratio. So there’s that. 

What did I do with my morning, you ask, if not improve my mind like I could have/should have done? For one, I lined up someone to clean out my rain gutters. And not a day too soon. The latest storm that went through had water cresting right over the tops of my evestroughs and it ruined a couple of my newly refreshed bark beds. I also spend time on my medical porta trying to find out when the infusion center can schedule my Reclast bone treatment now that the stay-at-home-order has been lifted. Supposedly it was ordered last April 15^th, when I saw the doctor. Since the pandemic shut down started the next day I figured that caused the delay. I figured wrong. What I found out is that the doctor’s office never sent the order in and had they done so I could have gotten the infusion back in April because that infusion is considered “essential for living.” The infusion center is putting an ‘urge’ tag on my file and I should hear back from them with an appointment date soon. 

The above two tasks ate up a lot of time but I also spent time online reading blogs, Facebook and e-mails plus checking on my e-Bay listings and watching panda and elephants cams. The panda and elephants cams are my secret indulgences. Better than fine chocolate for making me feel good. And I ask you, who on earth would pick watching porn over watching roly-poly pandas anointing themselves with sawdust or elephants giving themselves mud baths? That’s as voyeuristic as I want to get. And look who I’m telling that fib to---the blog community who has often read my voyeuristic ramblings on characters I’ve seen while people watching at the Guy Land Cafeteria.

Actually, would my Guy Land Cafeteria habits be called ‘voyeurism’ or ‘eavesdropping’? I just ask Alexa since she’s the only humanoid/virtual assistant who talks to me and she seems to think I’m eavesdropping at the cafeteria because voyeurism would require getting a derivative satisfaction out of obsessively watching a sordid subject. My fellow dinners are not ‘sordid’ and the only satisfaction I get is when what I see inspires a blog fodder topic. I don’t want to use the “P” word here again, fearing the internet crawlers will find this post and spam me with naked pictures of body parts, but Alexa seems to suggest that voyeurism rarely takes place in a public place where everyone is keeping their clothes on. People who watch “P” are voyeurs. But now I have another question: If pandas and elephants are naked and are being filmed without their permission am I an animal voyeur for watching them? Alexa says an obsession to watch is required to be voyeuristic. Check. Must be done in secret. Check. Get pleasure from watching. Check. Yup, add ‘animal voyeur’ to my resume.

Enough of the word vomit approach to writing a post and pick a topic, Jean. Okay, bossy voice talking in my head I pick coins. Foreign coins to be more exact. Back in my teens and twenties I collected foreign coins or I should say I bought them from several companies that were more than happy to advertise their wares via snail mail. They’d send you a batch every month and you’d keep what you liked, write them a check to send back with the coins you didn’t want. For decades I had my foreign coins framed and hanging on a stairway wall, but when I moved here almost two decades ago I took the coins out of the frames and threw all 250 of them in a box to dispose of later.

‘Later’ finally came this past week and I’m officially out of Foreign Coin Research Hell which is another reason why I’ve been living on the internet. The e-Bay listings will have closed and the packages mailed out by the time this post goes live but I don’t expect to make much money off from selling my old coin collection. Half the kids in America were buying stamps and coins from Littleton, Harris or Mystic back then and what we were buying by subscription were not rare by any stretch of the imagination. I divided up my foreign coins into eight lots and since I don’t ship outside of the U.S.A. I’ll probably have to beg e-Bayers to bid and I’ll be happy to do that thus ending another chapter in the mythical book titled Jean’s World of Collecting Curious and Obsolete Things. ©

e-Bay, Diaries, Babies, and Alexa the Bitchy Virtual Assistant

I have my dining room table back! Since the end of August it’s been e-Bay Central and since I don’t like listing in the winter when the roads are iffy and unpredictable, the last of my auctions for 2018 ended this week. No more running to the post office. Ya, I know I could arrange for pickups but I’m a control freak when it comes to e-Bay. I have a 100% feedback rating and I want to see with my own eyes that packages I put in the system get scanned---proof that can keep an e-Bayer out of the weeds. In just under three months I sold nearly $3,000 worth of mostly lighters and tobacco related advertising pieces. My husband had weird collections and of all the things I’ve sold since he died, this batch was the hardest and least fun to list. Why? Because tobacciana collecting has dropped off significantly here in America but it’s really hot in the Orient so I was getting a lot of messages written in broken English that had me scratching my head. I will start do some more e-Baying next summer---I have a box of transportation advertising under my bed that needs to go next---but for now, I’m free to tackle other projects.

One of those projects I’m tackling this winter is to go through decades’ worth of old diaries that I think I’m finally ready to dispose of but I’m thinking about picking out a few passages here and there to put all in one book along with some old photos. One or two pages with an iconic passage from each year of diary keeping. I could start from a point in the 1950s when I saw Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis at a live concert. I’m pretty sure I can make a book like that work (just for myself, not for mass marketing) and it sounds scary fun to try. Scary because once I commit to a project like that there’s no turning back, no restoring pages and diaries that I’ve read and shredded.

I’ve often wondered if the fact that I’ve never been a mother plays into my obsession about wanting to create something that will last longer than I will. It must be nice to look at a child that came from your womb, that you’ve mentored and influenced and think, “I made that, that’s my legacy to the world.” A fellow blogger who has cancer and is near the end of her life gave a baby up for adoption 50+ years ago and through a popular DNA test she was recently re-connected to that child. Reading her story and her bio-son's loving post about his adoptive mom---he’s a blogger too---was amazing. I don’t have a secret child out there but it was not uncommon in my generation for unwed mothers to go away to have and give up their babies in secret. And secrets like that revealed later in life come with unpredictable results.

I remember a day when I teased my husband that someday he’d answer the door and there on the steps would be a stranger with a suitcase who’d say, “Hi Dad!” It never happened but that day he and a neighbor went around and around about whether or not he’d feel instant, fatherly bonds with a child he never knew about. She said he would, he disagreed. She was a parent. Don never was. Recently, I was reminded of our ‘hi dad’ conversation when a random guy was being interviewed on TV and was asked if he had any children. He replied, “God, I hope not!” Cracked me right up. A woman might answer a door someday to hear “Hi Mom” from a stranger but at least she’d know with 100% certainty that the ‘hi mom’ scenario was in the realm of possibilities. Guys who might have sown a few wild oats in their youth could never be sure that it couldn’t happen to them.

Change of topic to my fur baby: Levi my mighty schnauzer had to go back to the vet’s office this week to get a follow up test on his Lyme disease. It’s been six months since his diagnosis and treatment, and I haven’t noticed any difference in him. He’s still doing the chicken-on-a-hot-plate dance that’s an early symptom of the disease, but he's as spunky as ever. I won’t know the test results until Monday but before leaving the place we’d run up a $350 bill that included the blood work, a winter’s worth of flea, tick and heartworm prevention meds, two ear cleansings, two weeks’ worth of antibiotics for something on his lip and a tissue analysis of the junk that came out of his lip. We have to get the infection cleared up first before the vet can see if there’s an underlying issue causing the lump that apparently bothers Levi because he's always digging at it.

And while writing this I learned that Alexa won’t spell ‘pussy’ as in pussy infection. She just told me, “I’d rather not answer that.” Okay, turning ‘pus’ into an adjective probably isn’t a real word which is why I wanted confirmation on how to spell it in the first place, But come on, she didn’t have to cop an attitude about it! I tried to ask a couple of times, enunciating clearer each time, but the bitch wouldn’t spell what she wrongly thought I was asking. And how does Alexa know I wasn’t writing an article for Cat Fancy Magazine and really wanted to spell 'pussy' as in pussy cat? Instead, she probably put me on a list of people who sexually harass virtual voice assistants! ©

Alexa, are you Listening to me?

I have started out so many new years with written declarations and goals for the coming months, but for some reason known only to The Shadow, this year was different. (If you know who The Shadow was congratulations, you’ve passed the age requirement test for reading this blog entry.) I wrote down nothing for 2018 Resolutions. Nada. But I do believe in having them. And I believe in having all my bills paid by January first and writing those last minute donation checks to charity when I can afford it. Both of those are checked and off the list in my head. I do believe in declaring that I’m going to lose all that weight I gained between Halloween and the last day of the year. Checked and we’ll see how long that promise to myself will last. My track record predicts I’ll make it to my bi-annual doctor’s appointment in April before that goal falls by the wayside. I do believe in setting goals for self-improvement and that we need that January first reset button to kick us in the butt because we humans are slackers when we’re doing stuff for ourselves. At least this human is. 

For the past eight or nine days I thought I’d die of boredom. If I talked to anyone it was one of those foreign scammers trying to get me to go to my computer and give them remote access so they can gobble up all the passwords to my bank accounts while pretending to save me from hackers. I do enjoy acting like Dolly Dumbbell that has them thinking they’ve hooked their fish before I press the button on my phone that cuts them off mid-sentence and blocks their number from calling again. But I’m not sure if those blood suckers count as human contract. 

I did have human contact last week by text, e-mail, Facebook and blog comments. While that’s very nice it’s not the same has hearing a voice or exchanging hugs in person. And I worry. It’s what I do best. I worry that someday I’ll think all the human contact that come through computers and devices aren’t real, with real people sending them. I mean already we find ourselves trying to have two-way conversations with our “intelligent personal assistants"---Siri and Alexa. That tells me we’re getting closer to someone creating a nanny app that keeps old people from getting lonely. (Remember the Saturday Night Live spoof “commercial” for the Echo Silver for the Greatest Generation?) It could/would be so easy to believe “friends” that are Wi-Fi enabled are real or that actual friends who use devices and computers to communicate are not real. 

Have you ever gotten annoyed with Alexa? I do it on a daily basis when she says, “Sorry, I don’t know that one.” Her tone of voice is so dismissive and I have to remind myself that Alexa is not a real person. It’s probably some software engineer with a peach-fuzzy chin that I need to direct my annoyance at when Alexa does something like recommend spinach and salmon sandwiches when I asked her how to fry fish. By the way, I didn’t really want to know how to fry fish; I like testing Alexa’s knowledge base and two times out of three when I asked if the world is round, she knew the correct answer but the last time she said she wasn’t sure. Yup, I managed to badger and bully Alexa into doubting her language processing algorithms. I told you I was bored. But it's kind of scary human-like that you can trick a computer into processing the very same information differently just by repeating it. Moms do that all the time, “Did you break that window?” “No!” “Look at me! Did you break that window?” No, Mom! “Jimmy, don’t lie to me! Did you break that window?” “It was an accident!” I guess that's not exactly the same thing, but humor me anyway.

Back to New Year’s traditions: One of my favorite movies to watch on the last night of the year is a 2011 comedy romance titled New Year’s Eve and it centers around the ball dropping at Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It gets stuck and the woman in charge of the drop steps forward and makes a touching speech and I’ll finish this blog entry by quoting it here. They're words we’d all do well to take into our hearts and try to live by: “…As you all can see, the ball has stopped half way to its perch. it's suspended there to remind us before we pop the champagne and celebrate the new year, to stop and reflect on the year that has gone by, to remember both our triumphs and our missteps, our promises made and broken, the times we opened ourselves up to great adventures... or closed ourselves down for fear of getting hurt, because that's what new year's all about, getting another chance, a chance to forgive. To do better, to do more, to give more, to love more, and to stop worrying about what if... and start embracing what will be. So when that ball drops at midnight, and it will drop, let's remember to be nice to each other, kind to each other, and not just tonight but all year long.”  

With the New Year, we each get a fresh start, a second chance. Are you listening, Alexa? Maybe I’ll start by being nicer to you. © 

 * Above photo: Orson Wells, the radio voice for The Shadow in 1937-38. The video below is the spoof commercial for an Amazon Echo Silver for old people.