Category Archives: Rant

On complaining

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I must admit a major failing in my character: I complain way too much. In an ideal world, all machines would work, everything would occur on time, there would always be an empty parking spot, the food would be hot and tasty, the drinks cold and refreshing. People would not text and drive. Drivers would pay attention to what they are doing, and waiters would always get their orders right. Yet, I don't live in an ideal world: potholes are real, delays are common, waiting in line is the order of the day, so I complain. I complain about slow service, high prices, a lack of time. I complain about complainers. I got caught in a huge traffic jam on I-35 this afternoon through no fault of my own--seven cars had suffered a chain-reaction collision and the wreckage was blocking two lanes of the highway. My biggest complaint in life has to be a lack of time to do the things I really like to do, such as eat and sleep. Being both hungry and sleepy at the same time is depressing. I love to complain about the endless lines at check-outs in big box retailers, who don't care at all about making me waist my time waiting to by a pizza. I have the same complaint about some doctor's offices--not all are horrible, but some are just unbearable. We should be able to bill them for wasting our time. I endlessly complain about the weather. Bugs, enough said. Rude people everywhere. Students who cut class, don't do their homework, fail exams, and then contact me because they are worried about their grade. I complain about the airlines, but I realize that airlines are complex and prone to scheduling disasters. I complain about the prices that certain professions charge: plumbers, mechanics, doctors, lawyers. Why should they have all the fun separating hard-working people from their cash? I complain about bumpy, pot-hole filled roads. I hate stoplights with a pure passion and have an endless series of complaints about how stupidly they are programmed--by people who never drive through them. All parking lots need to be complained about. I complain about how loud television commercials are, how stupid most of the ads are, how idiotic their arguments are for buying their products. Do the commercial makers think we are all cretins? Sometimes I complain about how fat the rest of the world seems to be getting, but that seems like a rather useless complaint when you look at all the food opportunities we have everyday. I hate the aggressive driving I encounter everywhere. Photocopiers are often the object of my ire. It bugs me when people cannot answer their cell phones. I complain about people talking and texting while they drive. I think it's very thoughtless when a dog owner leaves the dog's gifts where someone might step in them. I complain about politics, but no one wants to hear what I have to say. But does complaining actually help? I often complain without thinking about the pointless nature of my complaints, the fact that no one cares, that I am just making myself more unhappy by articulating, lustily, my disagreement with the world. I'm sure this is a short list--there are more things I can complain about--but by complaining, I can get my cares off of my chest, and maybe put some of it behind me. The problem is this: my complaints are often well-deserved but the wrong people are hearing them, which makes them irked and me sad. Yet, unless we complain will we ever change the world? Sometimes complaining can make a difference, and passive indifference will only make a bad problem, worse.

On complaining

Posted on by
I must admit a major failing in my character: I complain way too much. In an ideal world, all machines would work, everything would occur on time, there would always be an empty parking spot, the food would be hot and tasty, the drinks cold and refreshing. People would not text and drive. Drivers would pay attention to what they are doing, and waiters would always get their orders right. Yet, I don't live in an ideal world: potholes are real, delays are common, waiting in line is the order of the day, so I complain. I complain about slow service, high prices, a lack of time. I complain about complainers. I got caught in a huge traffic jam on I-35 this afternoon through no fault of my own--seven cars had suffered a chain-reaction collision and the wreckage was blocking two lanes of the highway. My biggest complaint in life has to be a lack of time to do the things I really like to do, such as eat and sleep. Being both hungry and sleepy at the same time is depressing. I love to complain about the endless lines at check-outs in big box retailers, who don't care at all about making me waist my time waiting to by a pizza. I have the same complaint about some doctor's offices--not all are horrible, but some are just unbearable. We should be able to bill them for wasting our time. I endlessly complain about the weather. Bugs, enough said. Rude people everywhere. Students who cut class, don't do their homework, fail exams, and then contact me because they are worried about their grade. I complain about the airlines, but I realize that airlines are complex and prone to scheduling disasters. I complain about the prices that certain professions charge: plumbers, mechanics, doctors, lawyers. Why should they have all the fun separating hard-working people from their cash? I complain about bumpy, pot-hole filled roads. I hate stoplights with a pure passion and have an endless series of complaints about how stupidly they are programmed--by people who never drive through them. All parking lots need to be complained about. I complain about how loud television commercials are, how stupid most of the ads are, how idiotic their arguments are for buying their products. Do the commercial makers think we are all cretins? Sometimes I complain about how fat the rest of the world seems to be getting, but that seems like a rather useless complaint when you look at all the food opportunities we have everyday. I hate the aggressive driving I encounter everywhere. Photocopiers are often the object of my ire. It bugs me when people cannot answer their cell phones. I complain about people talking and texting while they drive. I think it's very thoughtless when a dog owner leaves the dog's gifts where someone might step in them. I complain about politics, but no one wants to hear what I have to say. But does complaining actually help? I often complain without thinking about the pointless nature of my complaints, the fact that no one cares, that I am just making myself more unhappy by articulating, lustily, my disagreement with the world. I'm sure this is a short list--there are more things I can complain about--but by complaining, I can get my cares off of my chest, and maybe put some of it behind me. The problem is this: my complaints are often well-deserved but the wrong people are hearing them, which makes them irked and me sad. Yet, unless we complain will we ever change the world? Sometimes complaining can make a difference, and passive indifference will only make a bad problem, worse.

On blood pressure

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My blood pressure was normal this morning, which is what I want it to be. My grandfather, a lovely, kind-hearted generous man, died of a stroke at the young age of 62 years. I can't help but think that he had uncontrolled high blood pressure and that it was also uncontrolled. There were probably other factors that contributed to his death at a young age, but the blood pressure thing haunts me to this day. So when I was going through a courtesy screening process for high blood pressure at my church a few years ago, I took heed when the nurse told me I should get my high blood pressure checked out. I needed medication. I had inherited high blood pressure, and I needed to do something about it. Beside medication, I have changed my eating habits, lost some weight, and made exercise a daily part of my life. I don't smoke, and although I occasionally have a few non-standard beverages, drinking is not a part of my life. I was pleased that this morning, in spite of driving in crappy traffic conditions on I35, my blood pressure was well within the normal range. This is encouraging. Our modern life style of over-commitment, jammed schedules, poor sleep habits, questionable eating habits and choices, and stress does not lend itself to having naturally normal blood pressure. The heart, lungs, veins, and arteries all work in tandem to keep us upright and moving in a consistent manner, but even the slightest problem can cause the blood pressure to go up which increases everyone's chances of having some other vital system fail: kidneys, liver, brain. I suffered from headaches as a child, and today I am headache free unless the headache is a synecdoche for something or someone else—especially if it involves putting furniture together. Sometimes I would like to blame our fast-paced consumer society that puts a huge emphasis on buying and consuming to the detriment of all of considerations and factors. Black Friday, a real blood pressure buster, is looming on the horizon and will whip people into a lathered frenzy of hysterical consumers and blind irrational spending. At other times I’d like to blame our bizarre addiction to digital communication—email, texts, social networks, blogs, television, movie services, and eight other things yet to be imagined. Desire, to be liked, to want, to covet, to envy, drives a lot of things that make us have high blood pressure. Schedules, bookings, travel, meetings, deadlines don’t help either. I’m not sure that the instant communication networks to which millions subscribe really help anyone at all. We like hectic lives, shrouded in quiet desperation as we wait for the weekend or the next vacation. And, of course, we suffer and our collective blood pressure goes up, and frankly, I don’t see any relief in site.

On blood pressure

Posted on by
My blood pressure was normal this morning, which is what I want it to be. My grandfather, a lovely, kind-hearted generous man, died of a stroke at the young age of 62 years. I can't help but think that he had uncontrolled high blood pressure and that it was also uncontrolled. There were probably other factors that contributed to his death at a young age, but the blood pressure thing haunts me to this day. So when I was going through a courtesy screening process for high blood pressure at my church a few years ago, I took heed when the nurse told me I should get my high blood pressure checked out. I needed medication. I had inherited high blood pressure, and I needed to do something about it. Beside medication, I have changed my eating habits, lost some weight, and made exercise a daily part of my life. I don't smoke, and although I occasionally have a few non-standard beverages, drinking is not a part of my life. I was pleased that this morning, in spite of driving in crappy traffic conditions on I35, my blood pressure was well within the normal range. This is encouraging. Our modern life style of over-commitment, jammed schedules, poor sleep habits, questionable eating habits and choices, and stress does not lend itself to having naturally normal blood pressure. The heart, lungs, veins, and arteries all work in tandem to keep us upright and moving in a consistent manner, but even the slightest problem can cause the blood pressure to go up which increases everyone's chances of having some other vital system fail: kidneys, liver, brain. I suffered from headaches as a child, and today I am headache free unless the headache is a synecdoche for something or someone else—especially if it involves putting furniture together. Sometimes I would like to blame our fast-paced consumer society that puts a huge emphasis on buying and consuming to the detriment of all of considerations and factors. Black Friday, a real blood pressure buster, is looming on the horizon and will whip people into a lathered frenzy of hysterical consumers and blind irrational spending. At other times I’d like to blame our bizarre addiction to digital communication—email, texts, social networks, blogs, television, movie services, and eight other things yet to be imagined. Desire, to be liked, to want, to covet, to envy, drives a lot of things that make us have high blood pressure. Schedules, bookings, travel, meetings, deadlines don’t help either. I’m not sure that the instant communication networks to which millions subscribe really help anyone at all. We like hectic lives, shrouded in quiet desperation as we wait for the weekend or the next vacation. And, of course, we suffer and our collective blood pressure goes up, and frankly, I don’t see any relief in site.

De uoluminibus trianulibus

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All of the noise being made about three-ring binders is just silly--It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s just office supplies, or is it? Imagine, presidential candidates discussing office supplies, or were they discussing women? I've had three-ring binders for years, and they have proved ever so useful. Yet, I can't but help think they are both a bit quaint and old-fashioned. When I was five, I didn't have any binders, but by the time I was in the seventh grade, I had several and kept my English/Spanish notes in a three-ring binder. I keep my choir music in a three-ring binder--very orderly. Most of our tenure notebooks are three-ring binders. I have never, however, had women in three-ring binders, and I'm not really sure how that would work. Even if we invoke the use of the poetic trope, synecdoche, where a part of a thing stands in to represent the whole (“All hands on deck!”), why don't we just say that we keep information about women in three-ring binders instead of we have women in binders. Yet, I'm not sure which sounds worse, information about women in binders or women in binders. The whole mess sounds dirty at best, and at worst it sounds like someone with a fancy for S/M is offering up their phone list of participants. If we take the “women in binders” remark seriously, it points to both shoddy thinking and careless rhetoric, not to mention completely slighting all women who have been reduced to collections and lists that have been filed in three-ring binders. By definition the binders of women are exclusionary and speak to the reality of the glass ceiling in American business, education, religion, and politics. The binders, themselves, are just mindless objects with a quasi-utilitarian organizational slant that some people use to keep track of paper or papers which they need to preserve. The binders act as temporary book covers for the perishable material inside. Most people have binders, and most people don’t give them a second thought until they need them. I’ve suggested that students use them while writing a thesis to keep their pages from getting mixed up or lost. I’ve received scripts that have been held together in three-ring fashion. In and of themselves, three-ring binders are antique, anachronistic, and clumsy in our digital age of binary information storage. Any tablet could conceivably hold the information from thousands of binders, so the contemporary use of binders, unless it’s for music, a thesis in progress, or tenure notebooks speaks to unprogressive thinking, old habits dying hard, and out-of-date analogue storage. This is the digital age and except for a few old-fashioned applications, binders are passé and junk, speaking to a mind that is not only not contemporary, it is not moving forward at all, anchored in a past of paper, outmoded thinking, obsolete platforms, archaic structures, and worn-out ideas. Information via the digital highway has long since passed many of us by, speed limits are up, and the new generation of thinkers, men and women who don’t use binders, are leaving us all behind.

De uoluminibus trianulibus

Posted on by
All of the noise being made about three-ring binders is just silly--It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It’s just office supplies, or is it? Imagine, presidential candidates discussing office supplies, or were they discussing women? I've had three-ring binders for years, and they have proved ever so useful. Yet, I can't but help think they are both a bit quaint and old-fashioned. When I was five, I didn't have any binders, but by the time I was in the seventh grade, I had several and kept my English/Spanish notes in a three-ring binder. I keep my choir music in a three-ring binder--very orderly. Most of our tenure notebooks are three-ring binders. I have never, however, had women in three-ring binders, and I'm not really sure how that would work. Even if we invoke the use of the poetic trope, synecdoche, where a part of a thing stands in to represent the whole (“All hands on deck!”), why don't we just say that we keep information about women in three-ring binders instead of we have women in binders. Yet, I'm not sure which sounds worse, information about women in binders or women in binders. The whole mess sounds dirty at best, and at worst it sounds like someone with a fancy for S/M is offering up their phone list of participants. If we take the “women in binders” remark seriously, it points to both shoddy thinking and careless rhetoric, not to mention completely slighting all women who have been reduced to collections and lists that have been filed in three-ring binders. By definition the binders of women are exclusionary and speak to the reality of the glass ceiling in American business, education, religion, and politics. The binders, themselves, are just mindless objects with a quasi-utilitarian organizational slant that some people use to keep track of paper or papers which they need to preserve. The binders act as temporary book covers for the perishable material inside. Most people have binders, and most people don’t give them a second thought until they need them. I’ve suggested that students use them while writing a thesis to keep their pages from getting mixed up or lost. I’ve received scripts that have been held together in three-ring fashion. In and of themselves, three-ring binders are antique, anachronistic, and clumsy in our digital age of binary information storage. Any tablet could conceivably hold the information from thousands of binders, so the contemporary use of binders, unless it’s for music, a thesis in progress, or tenure notebooks speaks to unprogressive thinking, old habits dying hard, and out-of-date analogue storage. This is the digital age and except for a few old-fashioned applications, binders are passé and junk, speaking to a mind that is not only not contemporary, it is not moving forward at all, anchored in a past of paper, outmoded thinking, obsolete platforms, archaic structures, and worn-out ideas. Information via the digital highway has long since passed many of us by, speed limits are up, and the new generation of thinkers, men and women who don’t use binders, are leaving us all behind.

On the Yankees

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The Yankees were eliminated in four straight games by the Detroit Tigers. Four and out and into the off-season, pitchers and catchers will report to Spring training in February. I am both fascinated and repulsed by the Yankees as a team and as a sports phenomenon. If you had all the money in the world so you could buy all the best players, who would you get, and how could you possibly lose? Well, this year the Yankees didn't lose very often, and they won the Eastern division. Baltimore pressed hard during the final weeks, but the Yankees can always find a way to win--the best hitters, the best pitchers, the best fielders in the league. I suppose that all leagues need their bullies, their high class hitters in their tailored uniforms and luxury club house. The Yankees create conflict, drama, suspense, romance, comedy, pathos in a continuous narrative of wins and losses, mostly wins, highly charged in a mediatic circus that runs 24/7 during the baseball season. Even when the Yankees lose and get eliminated, the media will make a bigger deal out of that than the fact that Tigers are going back to the World Series. In other words, even when they lose, they are a bigger story than the team that beats them. No matter how they play, they always get coverage from the national media, and they are the object of speculation and analysis, interviews and opinions, and the highlights always feature both their triumphs and their failures, making no distinction between either. When one of their players is injured, dates a movie star, hits for the cycle, or makes an ad for underarm deodorant, it's national news. One gets a little tired of always hearing about the Yankees, who is playing well, who is going to disappear, who they are going to buy next. Today the Yankees were eliminated by the Tigers, but no one was interviewing the Tigers, they were listening to the Yankees manager talk about the loss. The Yankees are a good team, they should win, so it's surprising when they collapse. I guess that's why they play the games because you never know how they might turn out on any given day. The Yankees are supposed to be the heroes of the narrative, the knights that always slay the dragon, that always overcome the opposition. They always occupy the head of the table, get fed first, always get the girl, always ride off into the sunset at the end of the season. All of the rest of the players in the league are just a bunch of also-rans that carry the Yankees bags and act as patsies and victims for the heroic men in pinstripes. The problem with these expectations and hyper-narratives is that they don't always jive with reality because in the end the Yankees are just men, fallible, weak, tragic, just like all the rest and deserve no more respect than any other team or player in the leagues. I imagine, though, the media is pissed because they won't make as much money off of a non-Yankees World Series because now the New York area won't tune in to see Detroit and St. Louis. The commentators will continue to discuss the Yankee "collapse" and wring as much blood out of that stone as they can even while the season goes on without their heroes.

On the Yankees

Posted on by
The Yankees were eliminated in four straight games by the Detroit Tigers. Four and out and into the off-season, pitchers and catchers will report to Spring training in February. I am both fascinated and repulsed by the Yankees as a team and as a sports phenomenon. If you had all the money in the world so you could buy all the best players, who would you get, and how could you possibly lose? Well, this year the Yankees didn't lose very often, and they won the Eastern division. Baltimore pressed hard during the final weeks, but the Yankees can always find a way to win--the best hitters, the best pitchers, the best fielders in the league. I suppose that all leagues need their bullies, their high class hitters in their tailored uniforms and luxury club house. The Yankees create conflict, drama, suspense, romance, comedy, pathos in a continuous narrative of wins and losses, mostly wins, highly charged in a mediatic circus that runs 24/7 during the baseball season. Even when the Yankees lose and get eliminated, the media will make a bigger deal out of that than the fact that Tigers are going back to the World Series. In other words, even when they lose, they are a bigger story than the team that beats them. No matter how they play, they always get coverage from the national media, and they are the object of speculation and analysis, interviews and opinions, and the highlights always feature both their triumphs and their failures, making no distinction between either. When one of their players is injured, dates a movie star, hits for the cycle, or makes an ad for underarm deodorant, it's national news. One gets a little tired of always hearing about the Yankees, who is playing well, who is going to disappear, who they are going to buy next. Today the Yankees were eliminated by the Tigers, but no one was interviewing the Tigers, they were listening to the Yankees manager talk about the loss. The Yankees are a good team, they should win, so it's surprising when they collapse. I guess that's why they play the games because you never know how they might turn out on any given day. The Yankees are supposed to be the heroes of the narrative, the knights that always slay the dragon, that always overcome the opposition. They always occupy the head of the table, get fed first, always get the girl, always ride off into the sunset at the end of the season. All of the rest of the players in the league are just a bunch of also-rans that carry the Yankees bags and act as patsies and victims for the heroic men in pinstripes. The problem with these expectations and hyper-narratives is that they don't always jive with reality because in the end the Yankees are just men, fallible, weak, tragic, just like all the rest and deserve no more respect than any other team or player in the leagues. I imagine, though, the media is pissed because they won't make as much money off of a non-Yankees World Series because now the New York area won't tune in to see Detroit and St. Louis. The commentators will continue to discuss the Yankee "collapse" and wring as much blood out of that stone as they can even while the season goes on without their heroes.

On dead batteries

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Is this the most annoying thing to have to do on a regular basis? Our lives are filled with electronic gadgets that need batteries: flashlights, remote controls, garage door openers, watches, security systems, cars, smoke alarms, hearing aids, cameras. What is annoying about having a dead battery is pretty obvious: the car won't start, the flashlight is dead, the garage won't open. Murphy's Law of Dead Batteries suggests that when a dead battery event occurs, you will not have a backup at your location. A corollary of that axiom suggests that the event will occur when it is totally inconvenient and will cause the most trouble. You will, for example, have a dead battery in your flashlight when you get a flat tire at midnight on a lonely country road on a night with a new moon--dead blackness. Your garage door opener will go dead on a very rainy day when you are wearing a new suit and new shoes. You may never know that your smoke alarm battery is dead. You will find out that the backup battery in your alarm clock is dead that day when the power fails and you oversleep for work. When the remote control fails because of a dead battery, you are trying to watch two things on two different channels at the same time. Since you don't have replacements at home, you have to get in the car and go get some, but your car won't start because the battery is dead. After you appeal to your neighbor to give you a ride, you find out that the store is fresh out of the batteries you need and won't have any new ones until next Tuesday. You check your watch to find that the sweep second hand has stopped moving and is no longer ticking. They are out of those watch batteries as well. You ask when they might get those again, but the old guy helping you can't hear because the battery in his hearing aid has just quit on him. So you do finally get a new battery for your car, but the fittings on the battery are metric and your tools are standard American. You put two new double AA's in the remote only to find that the cable is experiencing a temporary outage, and you can see nothing but snow. You call your mother to complain, but the battery in your cell phone is dead, so you plug it in and charge it. Your car with the dead battery sits in the driveway, motionless, in front of the closed garage door. The smoke alarm chirps a weary warning that it's battery is about to die as well. You rummage through a drawer filled with dead batteries, a cemetery of unfinished projects, hoping to find a good one you might have overlooked. Your flashlight sits on the counter, waiting for you to re-install its energy system, but you are out of D cells. You drop two old batteries into the flashlight, and a pale yellow light shines in your hand.

On dead batteries

Posted on by
Is this the most annoying thing to have to do on a regular basis? Our lives are filled with electronic gadgets that need batteries: flashlights, remote controls, garage door openers, watches, security systems, cars, smoke alarms, hearing aids, cameras. What is annoying about having a dead battery is pretty obvious: the car won't start, the flashlight is dead, the garage won't open. Murphy's Law of Dead Batteries suggests that when a dead battery event occurs, you will not have a backup at your location. A corollary of that axiom suggests that the event will occur when it is totally inconvenient and will cause the most trouble. You will, for example, have a dead battery in your flashlight when you get a flat tire at midnight on a lonely country road on a night with a new moon--dead blackness. Your garage door opener will go dead on a very rainy day when you are wearing a new suit and new shoes. You may never know that your smoke alarm battery is dead. You will find out that the backup battery in your alarm clock is dead that day when the power fails and you oversleep for work. When the remote control fails because of a dead battery, you are trying to watch two things on two different channels at the same time. Since you don't have replacements at home, you have to get in the car and go get some, but your car won't start because the battery is dead. After you appeal to your neighbor to give you a ride, you find out that the store is fresh out of the batteries you need and won't have any new ones until next Tuesday. You check your watch to find that the sweep second hand has stopped moving and is no longer ticking. They are out of those watch batteries as well. You ask when they might get those again, but the old guy helping you can't hear because the battery in his hearing aid has just quit on him. So you do finally get a new battery for your car, but the fittings on the battery are metric and your tools are standard American. You put two new double AA's in the remote only to find that the cable is experiencing a temporary outage, and you can see nothing but snow. You call your mother to complain, but the battery in your cell phone is dead, so you plug it in and charge it. Your car with the dead battery sits in the driveway, motionless, in front of the closed garage door. The smoke alarm chirps a weary warning that it's battery is about to die as well. You rummage through a drawer filled with dead batteries, a cemetery of unfinished projects, hoping to find a good one you might have overlooked. Your flashlight sits on the counter, waiting for you to re-install its energy system, but you are out of D cells. You drop two old batteries into the flashlight, and a pale yellow light shines in your hand.