Teen hermit crab hooked on borrowed items

If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was losing my mind. But since I’ve already lost it or possibly had it stolen, I know that can’t be the true. What is documentable fact is that as the single parent of a teenage daughter I have been living around intensifying crazy-making.

My daughter has been especially challenging in recent months due to her habit of borrowing. I use the term “borrowing” loosely, as it implies initial permission to use something and its eventual return. From what I’ve observed, she has no intention of either.

Two different, full-sized, wooden wastebaskets have walked off from the basement and family rooms, respectively, and ended up in her room, where they keep company with the painted table swiped from the attic, along with a clock she also liberated. Holy hermit crabbery. It’s making me crabby.

I could write a book about the innumerable nail clippers and countless tweezers I’ve never had the opportunity to use before they mysteriously disappeared into the Bermuda Borrowing Triangle also known as my daughter. To ensure I had a brush to do my hair, I had to lash one onto the bathroom towel bar using a lanyard that hadn’t yet been borrowed. No kidding.

The smoothness of her moves brings to mind watching professional ice skaters performing an impressive feat called the triple-axel. When caught “borrowing,” my daughter has developed the verbal dexterity to perform its argumentative, hypocritical equivalent. If butt-covering were an Olympic sport, she’d capture the gold! I call her patented maneuver the “triple-standard,” which consists of a double-standard followed by a half-rotation of blame pointed in the direction of its victim.

“Mom, you have the crappiest make-up,” she recently complained. I found that an interesting comment, as my monitoring various product levels revealed they were going down at alarming rates. How clever to criticize the very thing one is pilfering – to divert suspicion from oneself!

To deter my daughter from my personal care products, I took her cosmetic shopping for her own. She surprised by asking for items identical to mine, albeit a lighter shade of foundation and brighter color of lipstick. Affordable, conservative choices. But more importantly, different from mine.

If you thought, like me, that purchasing my daughter her own cosmetics was a solution to the problem, you’d be wrong. She apparently regarded the acquisition not as a replacement for, but an enhancement to my make-up collection, which she’s continued to use regularly.

When I confronted her about getting into my stuff, she told me I was welcome to use hers. I replied I had no use for hers, but did have a vested interest in keeping her out of mine, as it is rarely put back where and in the same condition she found it.

Not only did she ignore my request to stay the heck out of my things, but she ceased trying to hide it. I started finding my foundation three rooms away from the bathroom, my loose powder in a laptop computer bag and my favorite lip crayon in the car door compartment. The already-challenging act of getting ready in the morning became a full-scale scavenger hunt.

Frustrating doesn’t even begin to describe my feelings regarding this kind of trespassing. And just when I didn’t think it could get worse, she took my make-up with her during a weekend at her dad’s house. When I, the victim of this property violation, discovered its absence and called to confront, my daughter’s response was classic: “You don’t even need make-up, Mom.” As if that statement, even if it were true, somehow justifies heisting my belongings. How silly of me to have had belongings in the first place! Why, I shouldn’t miss them at all!

Did you follow the flawlessness of that triple-standard maneuver? To summarize, first you criticize the victim’s choices; second you take advantage while they are caught off guard by the smokescreen of distracting comments; followed by third, you try to make them feel stupid and selfish for self-advocacy. Triple-standard perfectly executed.

Fortunately, life offers no long-term reward for hustling. You meet your cosmic and cosmetic comeuppance when you least expect it. At least, that’s what I hope will happen soon.

 

Underwear prevents winter driving accidents

Finally, after approximately a two-month delay, winter weather hit. I hope I don’t sound glad because I’m not. But I have a pretty strong sense that it was my heart- and butt-felt prayers for the time to heal my aching piriformis muscle (that would have made shoveling and/or snow blowing impossible) that kept southwest Michigan’s winter weather at bay.

Even though I’m not glad, I’m also not disappointed. Screwy weather conditions and timing are just our way of saying, “Welcome to Michigan.” The mystery behind our unexpected and dysfunctional climate change-ups is as broad and deep as the Great Lakes. I’d like to call it “charmingly fickle,” but that would be as untruthful as calling me “flexibly friendly” in my response to the 2015 Indian summer and fall.

When I wrote this in early January, the temperature had unexpectedly (gauged by the unseasonably high temperatures we’d had) “dipped” down into the 30s. I went into a shaking frenzy along with it. Strange thing was, I was shaking and complaining about the temperature more loudly than I normally would when things drop down below zero for the first time. It’s all so relative. With overnight lows predictions down into the teens, I feel absolutely beside my frosty self.

If I had a choice in the matter, which none of us year ‘round Michiganders do, we’d get a major snow and/or ice storm the week before Halloween, like that memorable one nearly two decades ago. No wimpy testing of winter’s soon-to-be-frozen waters with that: demon drop straight into the main course of winter without so much as an appetizer. Mother Nature’s crashing that fall party left no one wondering when she’d make her appearance! It surely prepared us for whatever was to come next.

Whatever comes next this winter, I’m ready and able, although dubiously willing. Got gas ahead and a new cord for electric-starting the snow blower; salt and shovels are poised by the back door; heated mattress pads are on the beds; boots, hats and gloves are on standby; and emergency provisions (former zombie apocalypse preparedness gear) have been readied by my son.

I truly do not mind driving in crappy winter weather. There’s no getting around this unfair fact of living in Michigan. I have never owned a four-wheel-drive vehicle because, well, actually, I have no good explanation – except they cost more and might ruin my sense of adventure.

Historically, I’ve commuted thousands of miles for business travel. I contrast that with my dad, who would at the most log 80 miles during the busiest of weeks, and only if he had to go to Charlotte for combine parts. He continually made comments to me about wearing out my car “gallivanting up and down the road” for no reason. Well, I tend to view work as a valid one. And he seemed to like to read the resulting newspaper articles I wrote.

I get calls, emails and Facebook messages either telling me or asking me about the weather. It’s funny because I don’t check the weather report. However, I also don’t mind giving live testimonials and receiving real time weather warnings, especially from people with 4WDs. They challenge me to be all I can be behind the wheel. I give the most credence to other people who have to drive a lot for work, while I ignore nervous Nellie, Sunday drivers.

What’s my secret weapon for driving on bad roads? I’ve shared it before and continue to stand by it: bad underwear. While some people save up their worst, worn-out, torn, stained and sprung elastic underwear to wear on vacation and pitch as they go, I save mine for winter car travel.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been slipping and sliding along Michigan roadways when I re-read the “Don’t Despair – Remember Your Underwear!” note on my steering wheel. The mere thought of some EMT or emergency room staff getting a glimpse of my rat-gnawed-looking granny panties has countless times saved my butt from the ditch.

Granted, close calls sometimes necessitate tossing out a soiled pair once I reach my destination, but it’s still the cheapest way to safely travel the Michigan winter roads.

First world problems from second-rate minds

Recently there’s been growing concern regarding “Affluenza,” or conspicuous consumption at its worst. On our multiple-channeled, satellite-fed television sets we’ve followed the Ethan Couch “Affluenza Defense” court case where it was argued he could not be held responsible for his drunken killing of four people because he was too influenced by privilege and his parents’ permissiveness to know right from wrong.

In our minds, Affluenza is a condition from which OTHER PEOPLE suffer. To the backdrop of that denial, the phrase “First World problem” has entered our national lexicon, keeping pace with the Affluenza epidemic to which the United States has succumbed while we were vigilant in guarding against more unlikely illnesses, like Ebola.

Although “First World problem” first appeared in writing in 1979, in G.K. Payne’s Built Environment, it wasn’t officially recognized by popular culture until November of 2012, when it showed up in the Oxford Dictionary Online. A year later, it officially entered my vocabulary via a conversation with a co-worker, who was fretting over the amount of embellishment to use on an invitation to our workplace’s annual meeting.

“Talk about a First World problem!” she laughed. Seeing my puzzlement, she explained First World problems are issues in First World countries that receive more attention than they deserve, or superficial things that get complained about only because of the absence of more pressing concerns. Way too much ado about nothing.

I got it and was happy to have a word to classify a lot of the ridiculous hooey I have noticed with my fellow citizens and myself getting our name-brand panties in a bunch over, while people in Third World countries go without basic clothing.

The fact I am typing these observations on my laptop computer in cozy pajamas and suede Land’s End slippers in my warm dining room at an antique walnut table with a decorative pewter bowl atop it while drinking a cup of coffee with flavored creamer that came in commemorative Star Wars packaging gives me zero room to talk. But that has never stopped me.

If it’s any consolation, something we Americans like – consoling, I realize how good I have it and how unnecessary my luxuries. In good conscience, I can’t award myself even half a humanitarian point for my feelings of guilt because my furnace no longer requires me throwing wood into it to generate the heat I cease to appreciate, until there’s a power outage and I complain all the way to someone else’s house or a hotel. Americans have Affluenza bad and that ain’t good.

As with most problems, I notice the symptoms more easily when they’re displayed by other people. Just the other day, I found a good deal on steaks, bought them, then asked my teenagers to grill them for dinner. I thought they would be grateful because it’s been a long time between steak dinners.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” one of them said. “There’s snow on the grill and I don’t want to have to go out in the cold to flip them.”

Holy First World problem! There are many countries where they would be grateful to have any kind of meat, let alone steak. And a propane-fueled cooking source?! They would have died and gone to Heaven or been reincarnated or whatever, depending on their religious beliefs. But in our First World country, discomfort and inconvenience are synonymous with deprivation.

To raise awareness of Affluenza in developed countries, some videos are available on YouTube showing Third World scenes with un-American-accented residents reciting First World problem statements. They effectively show us how ridiculously, unnecessarily and unappreciatively good we have it.

My favorite is the half-starved-looking girl, with a pig rooting about her shack of a home, who comments, “Don’t you hate it when you ask for a burger without pickles and they give you pickles, anyway?!”

Ethan Couch deserves incarceration, right? It would serve him right! Unfortunately, prisons are not immune to First World problems, either. As one exasperated female inmate announced to corrections officers after losing electronics privileges as a behavioral sanction, “I have never been to a prison like this before!” Affluenza strikes everywhere: a First World problem of second-rate minds.

 

New planner signals new year can get started

I started to pay bills on December 30, but remembered to hold off for a couple of days. Why? Because if I write a handful of checks on January 1, it will jumpstart my mind into 2016 mode and writing 2016 (versus 2015) on everything. Well, until it’s time to do my tax return and I have to revert back to all things 2015.

This Christmas, I thought I did an extra good job of curbing spending. Unfortunately, my car noticed this and ran up repair bills just shy of a grand. Happy post-holiday to me! So much for entering 2016 in the black. But red really does make a statement. In my case, it’s “Why me?!”

I really shouldn’t have begun that sentence with the word “so,” as it’s the first of the words Lake Superior State University had on its recently published list of words that should be banished from the English language. While it’s okay to continue to use “so” as in “for the Bible tells me so,” the word needs to cease being used as an empty lead to a sentence.

Keeping track of such things, including the annoyingly overused words I plan to send in for consideration on next year’s banished word list, got swallowed up during December amidst all the musical, medical, employment, family and community happenings that came at me fast and furious. So fast, in fact, I had to stick up a butterfly net to catch the tail end of the month. That was tough, as I was already booking ahead into 2016 as far back as August.

Problem was, I had no date book or planner for 2016, so I mostly just wrote on my hands any upcoming appointments I needed to calendar, followed by making a mental note not to wash them until I had transferred the details to a more permanent location. It’s not the kind of system I would recommend, but you have to work with what you’ve got.

Clearly, I needed a planner, but not just any planner. Historically, I have messed up big-time by rushing out and buying the first one I saw just so I could check off “obtain planner” on my to-do list. Allowing my employer to pick one out for me was an equally bad office-kind-of arranged marriage. I should know. I suffered all last year trying to fit 10-daily appointments in boxes approximately the size of a head of a pin. Even repeatedly reminding myself that 2015 planner was free did not lessen my annoyance with it.

While I have in the past ordered planners online and through mail-order catalogs, I’m too persnickety about them to trust that process. I like to personally feel the pages between my fingers, mentally transfer daily data entries onto its lined spaces and see if it will physically fit into my purse and/or camera bag.

Relying on both objective and subjective criteria, I ventured in to Barnes & Noble last week to check out datebooks and planners. They had the usual nature-scened offerings, others featuring the works of prominent artists, and still others with photos of either dogs, cats or quotes adorning the covers and pages. Unfortunately, some of the ones I liked stylistically, did not address the practical functions I desire.

Call me concrete in my thinking, but I like to see full-month calendar pages throughout my datebook/planner. I need that visual more than I need cutesy day of the week divisions that defy my sense of time and offend my sense of space. I need days and dates to fall in a linear order, left to right, even more than cool graphic design.

I spent nearly an hour sorting through all Barnes & Noble calendars before settling upon a gold-colored Gallery Leather 2016 Weekly Professional Planner. It was originally priced at $19.95, but was 50% the day I purchased it. In addition to the full-page monthly calendars and anal user linear date listings, it sported approximately 30 lined pages at the back for note-taking. To someone who forgets what is not written down (and much of what is!), that became its selling point.

New planner in hand, I officially decree 2016 open for business.