One of a kind

I've always thought that Abraham Lincoln has a very distinct look

Aside from his natty beard and top hat of course.

It's something to do with his cheekbones and high forehead--something I've never seen on someone else.  Some people get close, but no one truly ever looks like Abraham Lincoln.  I've always wondered why--did the high-cheekbones-and-high-forehead genetic stock somehow die out?

Apparently not.

It just hasn't been in America.

Meet Christopher Eccleston.

He's British.  And if he was given the right beard and hairstyle we'd have a dead ringer for Abraham Lincoln.

Or maybe I just need sleep.

Night.  :)

Wednesday Words

Today I don't have just one word to share with you.  Today is one of those days where one word just won't do it.

Let me first tell you a short story.

My Bubby is 101 (coming up on 102) years old.  I love spending time with her because the wealth of her knowledge about the past and the nature of humanity is impossible to find anywhere else.  I remember hearing her stories about our family since I was very young.  I remember all the pictures in her apartment and could tell you all the stories about them.

But one day not too long ago I noticed something in her bedroom that I somehow had never noticed in all my years of visiting with her: a poster.  It was nicely framed and had a lot of words in it--but somehow I'd never 'seen' it in all this time.  A little bit surprised at myself, I stood and read what it had to say, never dreaming that what the words were saying would be even more surprising.

Here is what it says:

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

I was pole-axed.  I had been living these words already for so many years but here they were written down in a beautifully clear form.  

I give them to you today as they were given to me: my Bubby had bought this poster nearly 80 years ago.  Today when I told her how much I admired it she told me I should take it home with me, that it was far better that I should own it because I valued it and could appreciate it.

Like me you may wonder who wrote these words and where they came from.  The Internet is a beautiful thing.  :)  

It was a man named Max Ehrmann who wrote this prose poem entitled Desiderata; meaning 'desired things' in Latin.  It was possibly written in 1927, and was only discovered years later.  I hope it gives you as much meaning as it does to me.

Things I've learned from jobs I've done

1. Always be polite no matter who you're talking to.
            --I knew this one already before I ever drew a paycheck but it really came home to me after I saw the sheer negativity you have to swallow down when you're in a job.  I've been a busser, a phon-a-thon caller, a cashier, a janitor (and many more) and I can honestly say that your day becomes a lot brighter and easier to bear when the people you're trying to help take a moment and say thank you, or just give you a nice smile.  It doesn't take much on your part to make someone's day that much better so why not take that extra second and be polite to your cashier?

2.  Always put your trash in the garbage (and always use a garbage bag).
          --Again, things that I knew already.  But when I was a janitor I learned just how many people didn't seem to care if they just left enormous amounts of old food and other garbage on every surface.  They didn't pick it up because they knew you would.  Please people, be considerate.  The garbage is right there.  It's enough work to clean a room even without your extra mess.  Also, don't ever put trash in a bin without a liner of some sort.  That gets disgusting really quickly and adds a ton of horrible smelling work for the person who now has to clean out that trash can.  I've been less than perfect with my cleanliness habits before and in places like hotels there is always the lazy impulse that 'someone else will clean it up.'  I've been that someone else, and I swore that I'd remember what it was like on the other side of that sentiment.

3.  Don't park in front of a mailbox.
        --Admittedly this is something I never thought about until I got a job as a paper-deliverer.  I never thought about mailboxes and how I should be careful not to park too near them because it would make it difficult for the person who has to deliver the mail.  Well, now that I'm the person who has to deliver papers, I'm thinking about it!  Isn't that the way of things?  We never really think about things until they effect us.

Polka Will Never Die!

Sigh.  There are so few of you who will understand why that is so funny.  And to you all I say thusly: 'What are you doing?  Go read The Dresden Files!  Now!!'

But this post is not about Jim Butcher's going-on-fourteen-books amazing series that you should immediately read .  (hint hint).

It is about Polka!

(just in case you didn't know what polka sounded like because everyone you've ever met has been a hater)

Polka is amazing!

But what surprises me most about polka is how many people dislike it.  Passionately.  They despise polka so much it's amazing there hasn't been a legendary polka-music-burning like what happened to all the books in Germany before WWII.  (I'm not trying to minimize the horror of what happened back then by comparing it to polka.  But in all seriousness, I've met more people who hate polka than I've met Anti-Semites.  Why are there no Polka Hate groups?  No scary tatoo clad men running around destroying clarinets and accordions?  I'm sure most people would be glad of their absence.  Not me!  But some people)

But I think I've discovered why there is no middle ground with polka.

I know--it's a big shocker that I discovered the secret after all this time, but it took a keen mind and countless hours of--oh, wait a minute, it only took listening to three polka songs in a row to understand.

People hate polka because they don't like being happy.

No really!

Polka is so ridiculously joyously fun-filled that it leaves no room for anything but having an amazingly ridiculous joy-packed fun-filled time.

So if you have any tendencies towards gloominess at all--no matter how small or slight--you don't like polka.  It will annoy you.  You'll wish that it never existed and that someone had killed the first person to invent it before they wrote a single note of it.

So you and all your grumpy-gill friends can go stand in a corner discussing how much you hate the rain.  I'll just be over here cavorting with everyone else who wants to have a good time.

Polka will never die!

The Grandparent Scam

When I opened the front door to my Bubby's apartment this morning I was greeted by an unusual sight: my Bubby was standing near the phone instead of sitting in her chair where I usually find her on my visits.  I asked her what was going on. 

I'm so glad you're here, she said.  I didn't know what to do. 

What's wrong, Bubby?

I got a call from your cousin Nora about an hour ago.  She said she was in jail in Mexico.

What?  Why?

She said she was just vacationing with some friends in Mexico when their car got pulled over and they were all searched and the police found drugs in the car--they weren't Nora's--

Of course they weren't.

But she didn't even know they were there, her friends had bought them--but the police arrested them all and now she's in jail and she was crying so hard--she's so scared--and she told me she couldn't call her mother, she didn't want to upset her--

All right.

And then she put this other man on the phone and he said that she was going to be held for up to two months if someone didn't pay the bail.  I said I would pay it, it was only $2,700.15.  Of course I'd pay.

Of course you would, Bubby.

But then he said he had to put me on hold and then the phone cut out and he hasn't called me back and I don't have his number and I have no idea how to reach him or Nora.  That was over an hour ago and I've been standing by the phone waiting for him to call back--why hasn't he called back?  I'm so glad you came.  I wasn't sure what to do.

Don't worry, Bubby.  Don't panic.  We'll figure it out.  There has to be something we can do.


Cue three hours of panicked phone calls with family members while we all try desperately to find my cousin Nora and try to get her out of a Mexican jail--wherever it was in Mexico.

Where did we eventually find my cousin?  In northern California staying at a friend's house with poor cell service. 

Not in a Mexican jail.

Not needing bail.

She's just fine.

So what happened?

My friends near and far--my Bubby was nearly the victim of a scam.  It is in fact a well-documented scam but it's not one I've ever heard of before.  And it is so easy to believe.

It's called The Grandparent Scam, and it seems to have reared it's ugly head not so long ago but it's quickly become very sophisticated thanks to the internet and all the information that's out there on all of us.

Someone calls a Grandparent and claims to be their grandchild or niece or nephew and begs them to send money because they've been arrested/gotten in a car accident/been mugged.  And don't tell my parent's because I don't want to upset them.

That all sounds horribly familiar to me who just spent three hours with my Bubby trying to figure out what had happened to my cousin. 

The strange part about the phone call is the fact that they didn't actually get to the part where they told my Bubby how to send the money.  She said that the man on the phone (whom she thought was a lawyer/representative/police man) asked her a few questions and then put her on hold before they got to the money part.  When I asked her what the questions were, they sounded all right enough--but then she said something that surprised me.  She said that somehow her age had come up (she's 101 years old, soon to be 102) and it was right after that that the man had placed her on hold.

Whereupon he hung up on her not much later.

These people are successful criminals.  They steal money from old people all day long.  They seem to have no qualms about it.  They cry and they lie and they take your money and it's lost forever. 

So why did they stop this time?  Why didn't they continue the scam and steal my Bubby's money?  I mean, I'm so very grateful that they didn't--but why did they stop?

Is it possible that they have scruples about stealing from a 101 year old, but not a 70 year old? 

I just don't get it.  But I'm grateful all the same.

So please everyone--I beg of you--tell your grandparents about this scam.  Let them know that someone could call them pretending to be you and asking for money.  And if they tell you that of course they would never believe it, that of course they would know that that wasn't your voice--please tell them that they're wrong.  It is so horribly easy to mistake one voice for another on the phone.  Especially when that voice is crying and sobbing and begging you to help.

It's enough to make me want to start using secret pass codes when I talk to my grandparents: just to let them know that it is indeed me. 

Because I never want to spend another day the way I did today.  And I don't want anyone else to go through this horrible experience of worry and fear and terror. 

Tell everyone you know about this.  Tell them to tell everyone they know.  And maybe we can put these people out of business for good.

Double Day!

Today is both Unintentional Double Day, and Actual Factual Twin Day!  Yay!!

(made up days are fun!)

Our stars of today's Unintentional Double Day are Sophia Myles and Yvonne Strahovski. 

 Sophia Myles      
Of the Underworld, Tristan and Isolde, and Outlander fame.  I love her.  I wish she was in more things.  sigh.

Yvonne Strahovski 

Mostly just the awesome tv show Chuck.

They bear more than a small resemblance to each other--so much so that I mistook one for the other in a movie.  Even though I'm really very good at recognizing actor's faces.  And as far as I can figure they're not at all related to each other.  Huh.

Now for our stars of today's Actual Factual Twin Day: Aaron Ashmore and Shawn Ashmore.

 

Aaron Ashmore 

He was in Smallville and Warehouse 13 and other smallish movies.

  

Shawn Ashmore 

 You'll know him from X-Men as Bobby--or if you're geeky enough to admit it--the Animorphs series or the Earthsea mini-series.

I was watching a funny little bad movie on Netflix (A Bear Named Winnie) and it had Aaron Ashmore in it.  His face felt so familiar and I finally realized that he was in X-men.  Iceman!  But no.  Imagine my surprise when I read the IMDB page and realized that it was his twin brother who was in X-Men.  Whoah.  And the even bigger shock was that I should have recognized him earlier because he plays Jinx in Warehouse 13 and I love that show so much!  But there you have it: twins.

(I would like to add a disclaimer about the photos of the Ashmore twins: I believe that they are indeed photos of each one--but I could be wrong.  Seeing as they're practically identical the Internet may have failed me and given me the same twin twice.  Ah well)

So glad that you could join me for Unintentional Double Day and Actual Factual Twin Day.  :)  May your life be similarly interesting.  :)

Monday Musing: Patience

‘Never pray for patience.’  

Did you ever receive this advice?  I remember hearing it as a child—and when I asked ‘Why not?’  I was told something like, ‘because all that will happen are situations guaranteed to make you impatient.’

Being a sensible child, can you guess the one thing I never prayed for?  Absolutely right: Patience.  If that was all it took to keep life sailing smoothly, why invite disaster?  Life was already full of things to feel impatient about.  Long car drives.  Waiting at all the places that we drove to.  Waiting for the adults to stop talking.  Waiting to go home.  Waiting for dinner.  Waiting for dessert.  Waiting for summer vacation.  Waiting for Christmas.  Waiting for birthdays.  Waiting to grow old enough so that I could stop waiting.

I hate to break the news to any young readers, but I still haven’t been able to stop waiting.  I just wait for different things now and since I am an adult, I’m not allowed to jump up and down and whine about them.  Bummer.  I could use a good bit of whining. 

Couldn’t we all?  Life just seems to get harder and harder and our only recourse is our least favorite advice: be patient.  Patient?  Patient?!  How much more patient do I need to be?  Will that really solve my problems, being patient?  No.  But I suspect it’ll make everyone’s lives around me a lot easier.  But is that the only reason we should be patient: because it is a social construct?

When you were a kid, what was the best part of Christmas?  The presents?  The food/candy?  (seeing relatives is more of an adult joy, but we’ll give it an honorable mention).  I’ll admit that for me it was always the presents.  I was one greedy little child and I loved being given things.  At some point however, I realized that presents weren’t living up to my expectations anymore.  Not that they still weren’t wonderful—they just weren’t as wonderful as I always wanted them to be.  There was no perfect present that could keep me interested and happy to match the amount of time that I spent anticipating the presents I received.  It dawned on me that I was enjoying the idea of Christmas far more than the reality of it. 

Perhaps this should have ruined Christmas for me.  But for some strange reason I think I started enjoying Christmas even more.  Christmas and my Birthday, to the sometimes amusement and sometimes over-patient bemusement of my parents.  Because now that I knew the real fun was in anticipation, I made sure to milk as much anticipation as possible.  I would start counting down months in advance of my birthday, getting a thrill of glee each time I said the words:

‘Dad, Dad, guess what?’

‘What?’  (imagine a world weary exasperated sigh)

‘It’s 89 days till my birthday!’

‘Oh, wow, is it?’

Seriously, best Dad ever.  He plays along with me every year. :)

Hold on a minute, though.  We were talking about patience: is anticipation really the same thing?  Could you have one without the other?  You can anticipate something with impatience, as well as with patience, so maybe not.  But I think that anticipation is far more fun if you’re at least a little patient.  Impatience ruins the fun of it, because you can’t enjoy the moment when you’re impatient.  You’re always looking ahead, looking for the big thing coming up; and you miss what’s right there in front of you.  Whereas if you are (at least mostly) patiently anticipating something, you never lose sight of the excitement that will be, while still maintaining enjoyment of the now. 

I believe it is a grand thing to enjoy ‘what will be’ before it happens, because no matter what happens after, you just spent so much time being happy about it that even if the moment doesn’t live up to expectations you had all that time enjoying it already. 

One day of a good Birthday still equals only one day.

Three months of anticipating that Birthday equals three months of happiness.

Mmm, good math.

But this idea of waiting for the good things in life seems to have faded out of style along with poodle skirts and mullets.  We are the instantaneous generation.  We have our computers and our iphones (or droids/blackberries/etc) at our fingertips constantly: we are never out of touch with the rest of the world.  Have a question?  Just consult the internet, you’ll find the answer in less than five minutes.  There’s no more waiting, isn’t that great?  I don’t know.

I don’t mean to sound down on modern technology.  I love my computer.  I love the internet.  Cell phones are great.  Having all the knowledge you could ever want at your fingertips can be thrilling.  All the things we can think!

But—

But.

What is it doing to us?  What are the consequences?  Do we care?

I do.  Call me old fashioned, but if I’m taking the time to be with a friend, I don’t want them to be ignoring me in favor of their cell phone, no matter how many texts they’re getting or posts on their facebook wall.  We’re never truly ‘with’ people anymore, because we’re carrying around the entire world with us wherever we go. 

Everything is getting faster.  (people keep saying that, I know, I know).  We don’t even take the time to speak full words anymore: why do that when you can say everything with a couple letters?  Lol.  Rofl.  Asap.  Brb.  G2g.  We don’t even have the patience to think anymore.  Thinking takes too much time; the world is moving too fast for us to think about it.  Have to keep up!

We have lost the art of waiting.  We have lost the ability to be patient when nothing is happening.  In some ways it’s not our fault—not anyone’s fault.  Our world moves so fast we never have the time to be impatient with the dead space because there’s so little of it.  But when there is that five second gap—hoowee.  The long and short is that we panic.  We don’t know what to do with silence, because the only thing that’s there other than silence…is us.  And if we’ve never had the time to get to know ourselves and be comfortable with who we are…man, that is one awkward silence.  Even worse than an office party.

The reason I object to our fastfastfast culture is that it takes away our ability to be.  Be what?  Be ourselves mostly.  People complain and complain about how shallow our culture is—newsflash, a culture is defined by its people, and we are shallow people.  We’ve never been taught how to be anything else.  We’ve never had the time to be anything else. 

But we could.  We really could be so much better than we are.  But it all starts with waiting, with patience, with anticipation.  With time.  And above all, a little bit of silence.

Monday Musing: Biological Imperative

It is one of the great strangenesses of humanity that we both crave what is new and different—yet at the same time refuse to acknowledge change because we’re very comfortable as we are, thank you.

Where’s the switch?  How can we exist in such a state of controversy?

To that end, I give you the Biological Imperative.  (clap clap clap clap)

I take you back now to the dawn of time.  Whether we just crawled out of a slime pit or God just placed two people in a Garden, or we were created from trees (by the way, Norse mythology has the coolest Armageddon ever.  Ragnarok Rules!—now I want a t-shirt), you can choose.  (It matters not what your views are on Macro-evolution, but micro-evolution is a documented fact.  Feel free to look up the difference).

So there are all these people running around on Earth and in order to survive they’ve got to have two things (technically three, but we’ll get to that): food and shelter.  Shelter will probably occur near a large deposit of foodstuffs, and it is easier to determine what makes a good shelter.  Does it keep out the elements?  Check.  Does it in some way protect me from creatures and other people?  Check.  Is it in a place that is unstable or will kill me?  Hopefully not Check.  So you see, shelter’s not so hard, and even to people of lower ‘intelligence’ like our ancestors possibly were, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

But food—there’s the problem.  How did they know what was good to eat?  Some people posit that by watching animals you can figure out what’s good to eat.  Not always true, as it turns out, since some animals can eat everything, and we can’t.  So what it really comes down to is trial and error.  And most errors ended in touching eulogies.  Possibly. 

This is where the Biological Imperative starts to come in.  I ask you this: if curiosity is a trait that is bred into your DNA, how long do you think it will take for all the curious people to die off because they don’t know how not to shove everything in their mouths?  It’s quite possible that some people back then were so curious they’d put our best minds to shame.  Although their curiosity likely put them to death because of their lack of common sense.  So if all the curious people are dying off, they’re likely dying off young, and therefore have no time to procreate and pass their fatal trait onto the next generation.

(and this kind of comes around to that third necessary thing for survival: members of the opposite sex.  Because in order so you all don’t die off before you find what’s good to eat, you’ve got to have progeny to keep going after you’re dead.  But the basic man/woman ratio isn’t usually that hard to keep going, so this is only sort of ‘necessary’)

And it would probably only take a few generations for the curiosity DNA to get severely pruned back in a family tree.  But the legacy of this harsh weeding out is that we are genetically predisposed to be wary of new things.  It was the thing you didn’t know that would most likely kill you.  New plant?  It’ll probably kill you.  New animal?  It’ll definitely kill you.  New person you haven’t met?  He’ll steal your food, rape your wife, and also kill you.  Only the cautious survived.

So it wasn’t the curious ones who were breeding, it was all the cautious ones who hung back and let their stupid brother try that berry first.  So now we’ve got two traits that are essential for survival: caution, and the ability to manipulate the actions of others.  This doesn’t mean that curiosity was wiped out, by any means.  Every invention we have is proof of that.  But these two traits are responsible for why every single one of us on this Earth will choose to travel the road they already know to get to that place—or why someone will only eat the same food they ate growing up—or why they’ll never listen to a different form of music—or even why so many people never travel or move away from their home town.  The human animal is most comfortable amongst that which is known—that which is safe. 

But we’re thousands of years away from the time when what was different could kill you.  Why aren’t we any different?

Well we are.  Sort of.

Curiosity is no longer a shunned trait.  We revel in our inventors (when they’re not in middle school.  They’re such geeks) we create new works of fiction by the hundreds, we change our fashions weekly, we are all about the new experiences. 

But what about the hikers who go into the woods completely unprepared because ‘they’ll be all right.’  Or the ones who provoke an animal because they don’t know any better.  Or hey look, there’s a cave.  Lets see what’s inside.  There are plenty of ways for our natural curiosity and lack of common sense to kill us, even now. 

All this is to say, there is nothing wrong with our biological imperative to be afraid of what is new and different.  That’s the little thing keeping us alive sometimes.  But there’s also nothing wrong in overriding it and telling it to be quiet when we want to do something we haven’t ever.  We’re human, which means both that we’re large bundles of chemical interpretations of instincts, but also that we have intelligent minds that can overrule what our bodies tell us.  We are the dichotomy of fear and curiosity, the juxtaposition between the new and the different.  We are curious cowards and reluctant explorers.  We are the uncomfortable middle.  We are human.  No more no less.

Also, I'd like to wish Richard Dean Anderson a Happy Birthday!  We love you MacGyver!