Just Proving My Point

A while ago it was my mom's birthday. That night, after I called to wish her a happy birthday, I called Golden Boy to remind him to do the same, figuring he might have forgotten since he's been working crazy hours lately.

He laughed and told me, "In true Golden Boy fashion I already called her this morning."

Of course you did.

Once Again, I'm All Riled Up

A WalMart commercial opens with a Hispanic woman smiling and talking about how she can get IRS checks, government checks and all other checks cashed at WalMart for only $3 each. Then her husband is shown sitting to her left, agreeing with her about how great it is, and how $3 is less than the $8 charged by other places.

He then magically has a calculator in his hands and shows how over the course of a year going to WalMart can save them $200 a year, which the couple agrees they can spend on other things, like flat-screen tvs or computers, which also magically appear in his hands.

Why am I riled up by this? Surely you can guess. I mean, I suppose there are some people whose finances are so screwed up that they can't even get a regular checking account at a bank right? Okay fine, so WalMart provides a check-cashing service. But it's pretty gross to market this service to minorities.

Also, it grosses me out that WalMart is encouraging people on government assistance to purchase even more non-necessities like flat-screen televisions. If you want to point out that you sell food or sundries or diapers or clothing? Fine. Those are all necessities. Nobody needs a flat-screen.

I'm not disappointed in WalMart for this, because I've had such a low opinion of them for so long. But it's become blatantly obvious that people truly do not understand how things like credit or mortgages work. Or maybe, it's that they don't want to.

If WalMart wanted to do something impressive, start offering a service instead of your sweat-shop-in-China cheap products. What kind of service? I'm so glad you asked! How about a class offered on how to manage finances responsibly? How to avoid buying a house for more money than a person/couple can truly afford?

Dammit Jim, I'm Not a Doctor

I'm really fucking brilliant. No seriously, I am. I solved the problem in Haiti of all those parent-less kids and all the people who had their homes destroyed. Nobody listens to me of course, which is why the world is not benefiting from my problem-solving solutions. But if someone were to ask me, I'd have answers ready. Just saying.

However. I am not a doctor. I'm not POTUS. Plainly put, I'm nobody important. A little over a decade ago, when the car I had was dying out, at one point I said to my father, "I feel like I either need a new car, or a cell phone for when the entire bottom of my car falls out while I'm going 60 mph on the Northern State or Meadowbrook Parkway."

I got a new car. I didn't get a cell phone until a couple of months after 9/11. When I first got it, I used to keep it off all the time and only turn it on when I had to call someone. Texting is blocked on my phone. If I need to tell someone something, I can call them. Or it can wait. Despite being the MTV generation, I don't actually need instant gratification.

So today when I realized my phone had accidentally been left at home while I was out running errands, it was not a catastrophe. I did not ask to borrow a stranger's phone. I did not rush home. I have seen people freak out upon realizing they left their cell phone at home. This does not compute. Who do these people think they are that they're so important that they must be reachable all the time? It amazes me to see the level of freaking out that people do when they either can't reach someone they know has a cell phone, or when they either don't have their cell phone or have it but it doesn't work for whatever reason.

Once, back when I lived in Florida, I was babysitting for my friend while she and her husband were going into Miami for a wedding. It was the first time they were leaving the baby with a non-family member. I was going to be with the baby for a minimum of seven hours. Less than two hours after my friend left, she'd come back home.

Why? Because she didn't have cell reception at the wedding location. She drove an hour back home because she'd worked herself into a tizzy that something would go wrong and I'd not be able to (handle it or) reach her. She told me this, and I said to her, "You left the wedding invitation here - if I couldn't reach you on your cell phone, I would have just called the wedding place and asked them to get you. You know, as if it were 1991 back when only drug dealers had cell phones the size of bricks." She got a sheepish look on her face and admitted to having panicked.

Yes, there are fewer pay phones these days, I acknowledge that. But really, if you can't go out for a few hours without fully paying attention to the people you're with, rather than all the people you can reach*, then yeah, I think that's a problem. The world will not come to a screeching halt just because you're out of touch for a while.

It's not that I want to go live in an isolated cabin in the woods and only engage with others once a month when I go into town for supplies or anything. Don't get me wrong - I absolutely see both the value and the fun of having a cell phone. My issue is simply with the level of panic I see people have when cell phones are not available to them.

*This does not include actual doctors or people whose job includes being available 24/7.

Groundhog's Day

I woke up this morning thinking about my grandpa. It feels like so much longer than a year since he died, and at the same time, just a couple of weeks since he died. In the past I used to call my grandpa on Groundhog's Day. I didn't know if someone who was widowed would want to be wished a happy anniversary or not, so I wouldn't say it to him. I'd just call and chat with my grandpa, and we wouldn't address the fact that it was out of the norm for me to call on a weekday rather than a weekend.

Growing up I was so much closer to my grandma than my grandpa, but relationships change when you grow from child to adult. Since my grandma died two months after I turned 18, I didn't get the chance to form an adult relationship with her. In a way, I think it was because of her death that my grandpa and I became as close as we did, since she wasn't there to serve as a buffer between us. Please don't think she interfered, because she didn't. It's just that dynamics change depending on which people are involved.

I miss my grandpa. I miss how smooth his hands were. How I could look at his hair and see the same wave in the front of his hair as I have in mine. That my great-grandma, his mother, had in hers. How he always spoke as if he knew. I miss that if I read the Sun Sentinel before calling him, and then mentioned something I knew was going on in Florida, my grandpa was always on top of it - he'd read about it too, and had an opinion. When we'd talk I could visualize exactly where he was sitting. If I called at his house, I knew which chair in the kitchen he was sitting in, with his back to the oven, and all his papers spread out on the table in front of him.

I miss my grandpa.