A Thought on Aging

You know you’re getting older when jumping rope makes you pee midair.

Coke or Coke?

One day while snooping through my son's email this is what I found:

"I shouldn't have sent you the message about your eyes. There was a lot of Coke at that party."

I read this probably 50 times before it occurred to me the 10-year-old sender was referring to the kind that you drink.

I then spent an hour searching for the message about his eyes. Never did find it.

30-Minute Meal Whore

While making my decision to buy Wal-Mart’s beef stock or to pay about seven cents more for Progresso’s version, I saw it -- Rachel Ray Stock-In-A-Box. This 12 oz. cardboard box confirms my theory that Rachel Ray has no soul nor any catch phrases, cooking techniques, ideas or thoughts that she has not peddled or pushed to make a quick million or two. (Is there really any difference between Rachel Ray and Eliot Spitzer's girl? Well, we know her first and last name; she keeps her clothes on in the kitchen; and, she is one of the biggest multimedia moguls in the world. Never mind.)

So, in addition to the cooking phenomenon's name and smiling picture on a box of broth, you can also buy Rachael Ray All-Italian EVOO (her acronym for Extra Virgin Olive Oil), Rachael Ray 8-Star Balsamic Vinegar of Modena. After you fill your pantry with Rachel Ray basics and a few tasty treats for your pets, you can buy the full line of cutlery, cookbooks, DVDs, cookware, chefs’ apparel, and, of course, the Rachel Ray garbage bowl. Yes, you read that correctly. If a bowl from your cabinet isn’t good enough to catch peelings and scraps, you can purchase a designer melamine bowl to hold your cooking rubbish for only $18.95 on her official website and at many other fine retailers near you.

Although the bowl concept has been universally trashed by bloggers, the bowls are flying off the shelves. So, who are the people buying these bowls and her other products? Me and people like me. I am the fish that chomped on the pretty fluorescent pink chick-pea. Now I can’t get the damn hook out of my throat.

When Rachel Ray came onto the scene about eight years ago, she was hocking the concept of quick , healthy, and inexpensive meals. The target audience was busy moms who disn’t have the time, inclination, or, in my case, the ability to cook the way their own mothers and grandmothers did. I bought it, and so did millions of others. Taking Ms. Ray’s advice, I mixed a can of green chilies with refried beans for a little added flavor – “delish.” My kids love the chicken nugget dip made up of ketchup, mustard, and ranch dressing – "yum-o!" You’ll frequently hear me say, “Baking is too exact...too fussy. Rachel Ray says so.” I’ll even throw out an occasional “eyeball it” or “two turns of a pan.” Although I wish it were not true, I have the Rachel Ray lexicon.

Her cooking concepts are practical and just plain good. So, where did it all go wrong? Her solid concepts beget great success which beget great backlash. However, Ms. Ray is not blameless in the backlash. Branching out into areas that have nothing to without cooking has led to her downfall.

While drying off with one of my 5 five Rachel Ray towels that I purchased from a liquidating Linens ‘n Things for $4.99 each, I wondered why a chef is designing towels? But do one really design a towel? Isn’t it just a rectangular piece of fabric? And what would possess her to think that she has the knowledge to create linens. Then it occurs that I am thinking about Rachel Ray while being naked. All my inner dialogue stops immediately -- nothing like a little humming while putting on hose.

Nonetheless, Rachel Ray’s rein of retail terror must be stopped; she is the Microsoft of the culinary world. No more RR broth, olive oil, dog treats, garbage bowls, or knives. Sure, keep her cookbooks and sneak a peek at her cooking show on the Food Network (the one where she actually makes a meal in 30 minutes from start to finish; not the one where she eats her way around the world; or, the one where she sees how much food she can get for $40 a day; or, the one where she dishes with celebs). Cooking is where she started and that is where she should be. Well actually, she started out in grocery store, but let’s leave her with some dignity and a nice little show on a cable network.

Librarian Goes Ghetto

Librarians tend to like old stuff. Old librarians tend to like really old stuff. So, the local archive was the perfect training destination for a group of 8 bunhead librarians (a.k.a. old) and me, a NextGen librarian (a.k.a. young).

With books from floor to ceiling and filing cabinets from corner to corner, we barely noticed the diaries, weddings photos, property deeds, old grocery store receipts, maps, and sketches strewn across the hundred-year-old wooden work table like a buffet for history junkies, genealogy nut-balls, and decrepit librarians.

Piece by piece the archivist explained how history can come alive in the archive. The same old self-importance spiel that archivists, historians, and librarians utter to justify their grossly disproportionate education to income ratio. Pretty standard stuff until the archivist got to a three ring binder labeled Maria LaFleur, our town’s first and most infamous Madam.

“Maria LaFleur was both a madam and an active member of the community who even donated books to the library. People were always trying to run her out of town, but she was steadfast in her commitment to providing the community with a much needed service. She called her brothel, the Candy Shop,” explained the archivist with a little chuckle. There was a faint collective snicker from the”we are serious librarians; therefore, we do not smile” crowd.

Unable to resist the urge to appear both erudite yet culturally hip, I postulated with my best I am smart, damn it voice: “Interesting that candy shop was a euphemism for prostitution in the late 1800s. It is still used in the same way today as clearly demonstrated with the hit Candy Shop by rapper 50 Cent.”

Silence.

The archive was as quiet as a library back in the day when librarians shushed people, and you couldn’t talk on your cell while drinking your latte and checking out the last 2 seasons of House and the latest erotic masterpiece by Zane.

Maybe they just need a little more detail to get it.

In my best white girl from central Pennsylvania, keepin’-it-real, hip-hop voice, I rapped:

I'll take you to the candy shop
Boy one taste of what I got
I'll have you spending all you got
Keep going 'til you hit the spot

As eyes awkwardly looked at the ceiling and floors, it occurred to me that I learned absolutely nothing from the tap dancing while pregnant incident at my last library job.

“Okay…. Here you will see a map of sugar beet dumps in our town. You may recognize many of these street names. We believe this map is from the early 1900s,” said the smiling, unruffled archivist who still had to show us saddles, yearbooks, umbrellas and an old Lions’ Club file of rejected and expelled members.

It’s hard out here for a NextGen librarian.

My Virtual Friends: A Few Thoughts on Facebook

I have three groups of friends on Facebook. Although high school, college, and adult life would be the logical classifications, my actual friend groupings are:

1. You don’t give damn about me but you want a higher friend count.
2. You don’t give damn about me but you are sure happy to gossip about me.
3. You have put up with my crap for years and for some stupid reason you are my friend in real life too.

The first group of friends will never take the time to actually look at my profile, and they will never click on my blog link from Facebook. I could call them by name and write things like: “She sure got fat since exiting the crack-cocaine scene of the ‘80s”, or “He is a gas attendant; too bad all that Future Farmers of America training didn’t work out for him", or “Those are some weird looking children but with her elongated forehead and his buckteeth, there just wasn’t much hope.” They would never know because they are too busy searching for another 157 long lost friends.

I am really trying to not be this type of disinterested friend. But sometimes when I see the name of someone that I had conversation with 20 years ago, I can’t control the Friend trigger-finger. In theory, I should only send friend requests to people who I would actually want to talk to in real life. Yeah, that probably won’t happen. I am a Facebook hussy who friends everyone. I will continue to electronically befriend acquaintances from the past who will eventually become part of my second group of friends: You don’t give damn about me but you are sure happy to gossip about me.

These members are the cyber-gossips who scour every profile looking for crow’s feet, gray hair, a weight gain of anywhere between 15 and 35 pounds, divorced status, unemployment, and education details with no graduation date. This group will absolutely link to and read my blog for 4 reasons:

1. They will want to see if my writing sucks.
2. They will want to see if my life sucks.
3. They will want to see if I have an ugly husband and alien-looking children.
4. They want to gossip about me and other people. These virtual pseudo friends will happily tell the ex-cocaine addict, the wannabe farmer turned gas attendant and the breeders of ugliness what I wrote along with a message that reads: “Melissa is the same two-faced loser that she was back in the day. Like any magazine would ever run her stuff.” This will only be sent after the cyber-gossip completely agrees with what I wrote and quotes it to 71 close friends.

I struggle not to be a Facebook gossip, but I am losing the struggle. I confess that I once sent a friend request to a girl from high school because in her small thumbnail profile looked picture perfect. So, I had to have access to the larger pictures to look for weight gain, age spots, wrinkles, yellow teeth, or mild hair loss. Nope. Nothing. Completely flawless as always. I was elated for her. Really I was. No, really I was. I have evolved.

Of course, the third group (my real life friends) knows that I just completely lied. This group sadly makes up the smallest amount of my Facebook friends and is really the most irrelevant. Not irrelevant because they don’t matter way, but irrelevant because we email, talk on the phone, and hang out in real life. So why do we have to flaunt our real friendship to our virtual pals? However, when perceived real life friends don’t respond to private messages sent to their inbox, it makes me wonder if those friends belong in group one or group two. (Mr. Senior Year Prom Date, I am talking to you. Hope to see that response in my FB inbox soon).

Actually, I guess there is a fourth group too: You just met me; should you be afraid? This group consists of my new acquaintances such as Moms Club members, my kids’ babysitter, my realtor, and my hair stylist, who will probably check out my blog to be polite and to learn a little more about me and family.

After reading my blog, chances they will be afraid, and I will have a lot of my free time on my hands when playdates are cancelled.

Guess that just gives me more time for cyber-stalking.