NaBloPoMo

Husbands should not be allowed in the grocery store.

Yes, I said it, and I’ll say it again: Husbands should not be allowed in the grocery store.

I’m not talking about men. I’m talking about “men whose wives normally do all the cooking and shopping but who, for some unknown reason, feel they need to have a say in Thanksgiving dinner preparations and who don’t know where anything is or anything about grocery store etiquette,” those Husbands.

Of course, some would argue that grocery store etiquette is an oxymoron and that some would include me. You want examples of an inability to perceive spatial relationships and demonstrations of “alone on the planet syndrome” look no further than your average grocery store aisle in which you are likely to find a cart parked smack in the middle, or perhaps even cross wise. So no, grocery stores are not secret havens of good manners and consideration for one’s fellow human beings.

That said, nothing, nothing is more useless in a grocery store on the weekend before a major cooking holiday, and Thanksgiving is the major cooking holiday in the U.S. calendar, than someone who 1) can’t be sent to fetch things because he doesn’t know where anything is, and 2) has no concept of how to get in and out in the fastest time possible.

No, Husbands want to browse. They want to compare. They want to know why this brand has to be bought instead of this other brand. Husbands fail to recognize that for their wives the object of the grocery shopping errand is mostly likely to get in and out as fast as possible.

And they’re in the way. They’re an extra body that those of us who tend to shop at the about the same time every week now have to navigate around in aisles that are already way too crowded with displays that manufacturers think are going to boost sales or stock that still needs to be thrown even on a Saturday afternoon because store management is too cheap to pay for clerks to do it at night when the store is closed.

I realize that it is a tad bit sexist of me to label these people Husbands just because 90% of them are male. The fact is that in my household TGF hasn’t been to the grocery store but a dozen times in as many years. This is not to say that I do the cooking. In fact, it’s kind of scary when I cook outside my comfort zone, but I am the one who sacrifices herself on the grocery store altar each week for the simple reason that I’m the one who hates the task least.

This week’s grocery run took two hours instead of the usual 50 or so minutes just because there were so many extra bodies to navigate around, not to mention the extra bodies that felt the need to have their own carts. That additional hour spent matters when it already looks like midnight outside and it’s only 5:30 p.m.

So please, for the love of whatever god you happen to believe in, don’t think that if you don’t normally do the shopping that you’re “helping out” by coming along this week. You’re not, and you’re just making people who don’t know you even more tense than they would normally be anyway.

Soap operas, commonly known as “soaps” or “my stories” depending in the U.S. on where you live and in what economic stratum, started out on radio in the 1930s largely in daytime slots and, because of this, largely pitched to women. It was their sponsorship by manufacturers like Proctor & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers that created the association with soap, an association so strong that in U.S. slang any overly dramatic, romantic story, regardless of whether it is a daytime serial or not, is often referred to as a “soap opera.”

Soaps migrated from radio to television in the U.S. starting in the early 1950s gaining popularity which peaked for daily daytime serials between the mid-1970s and early 1990s and even spawned a group of well-known, highly successful weekly primetime serials that included Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Knots Landing in the 1980s and a second group that included Dawson’s Creek and Beverly Hills 90210 in the 1990s.

The general rule in writing for either television or the movies is that one page of script equals roughly one minute of screen time. In the U.S. the average 60 minute program contains 13 minutes and 52 seconds worth of network commercial messages with some shows giving up as much as 20 minutes to direct advertising. [Read more…] about I just can’t cope without my soap*

I have jury duty today.  In DC Superior Court they do “one day or one trial” service. It may seem like a pain but when you consider that residents of the District of Columbia, you know, those of us with no actual voting representation in Congress, are the jury pool for certain Federal court trials where jury service consists of being on call for a whole month and not knowing from one day to the next whether you’re going to court or you’re going to work “one day or one trial” is comparatively not bad.

Conditions have supposedly improved: the Court’s web site tells me there is now free wi-fi in the jurors’ room.  That’s a far cry from “we have four modems and whoever gets here first gets to sit on them all day because we’re not policing that.”

On the other hand: it’s jury duty.

There may be more entry later in the day.  It just depends on the wi-fi speed and how much I can stand to type on the iPad’s stunted, badly arranged “keyboard.”

What does irk me about how jury duty service is handled in DC is that some of us have to serve longer.  If you have the 8 a.m. call and you aren’t put on a trial you usually get dismissed around 4 p.m. and if you have the 10 a.m. call and you don’t get put on a trial you usually get dismissed…around 4 p.m.  A sense of civic pride doesn’t compensate me for that extra 2 hours, does it?

Random bits for a random Tuesday

It was a strange day yesterday and I promise no coherence in this installment.

I suppose topless is an option.
One of the more aggressively crazy homeless women who haunts the neighborhood around my office has decided that topless is her preferred fashion statement for the season. Last week it was lunch time. This week, apparently, it was Monday morning.

On one hand, I totally get it. Clothes can be a burden, especially in 100degF+ heat with humidity in the same range. On the other hand, it is November. Regardless, that was a bit of a shock at 8:45 in the fog yesterday morning. I actually heard her coming before I saw her. I did mention aggressively crazy, didn’t I?

It may look like it’s just midnight but it’s really a whole new world.
I hate falling back. I really do. It’s jarring to walk out of office to discover that it’s fully dark outside at 5:00 p.m. It’s even more jarring now that my office is when without artificial lighting what a friend so aptly described as “like trying to photograph a black cat in a coal mine.” But on my walk to the subway this evening I noticed something interesting: it’s a completely different world from day time. [Read more…] about Random bits for a random Tuesday