Would You Like a Side of Babies With That?

Antique & Collectible stores are amazing. So many treasures and lucky finds! Objects you might have owned, your mother, her mother, and stuff your ancestors way back several generations may have owned. The other day, my daughter and I took my shiny new credit card and ventured into this world of the impossible,the unknown, and the occasionally downright creepy.

There are a lot of pictures of other people's families. I do enjoy them, because I like to make up stories in my head about the people and their lives. Unless they were cast in soap operas or Downton Abbey, I don't think these people did those things. They certainly weren't having fun doing them anyway, you can tell because they never smile. If you did mount one of these pictures on the wall, you would have terrible nightmares from being scowled at by dead folks.

One thing you find out at such stores is that there are humans who will collect ANYTHING. A standout for me is the mugs with bizarre, grotesque faces. My daughter, perfectly soberly, told me that these are collector's items which can go for thousands of dollars at auctions. I am hoping they are strictly for collections and nobody is ever going to approach me with a cup of tea in one of these things. I know I would scream and drop their $3000 dollar face.

Some of the arrangements in antique and collectible shops don't make sense. Take, for instance, the display of tiny ceramic babies that was included with a bowl and an array of old spoons. I don't care what side of the abortion debate you are in -- I don't believe serving up babies with cream and sugar is ever politically correct.

At these stores, sometimes you don't know what things are.This occurred for mydaughter and me. At the third store we perused, we found her perfect item. It was a set of jadeite bowls. However, included with the bowls was a device my daughter identified as a urinal and I thought might be some kind of torturous douche machine. We took it to the counter and discovered it was neither of those things. It was a juicer/strainer thingy.

Our purchase came to $99.99.999, which is what items always cost at Antique and Collectible shops.

But of course the purchases at these stores are never complete. We must find attachments and the actual mixer to go with the $99.99.999 purchase. To be fair, I did get a discount of 9.99.99 and it seems most people do.

Thus we are lured back into this wonderful world of the collectible, the unknown, and the old and bizarre.

Old People Hate Rap

Lots of people have eclectic musical tastes, even us elderly people. However, in my wanderings upon the interwebs, I have noticed one kind of music is almost universally hated by all older folks: Rap. Quotes I often hear: "that's not music, that's noise." Or "that's not music, that's a bunch of criminals talking." Etc., etc.

Wanna know why I think old people hate rap? Because our generation did not invent it. Things might have been different if we had. Picture the Ed Sullivan theatre, 1964:

Ed: "And now, something really, really big. All the way from Liverpool, the new musical sensation: THE BEATLES!"

George in spotlight, on turntable: Scritch-scratcha-scritcha, scratch-scratcha-scritcha

Ringo in spotlight, Beatbox: BOOM shaka-laka, BOOM shaka-laka

John in spotlight: I said she loves you babe

Paul in spotlight: (I said the bitch she loves you yeh)


All four in spotlight and the crowd goes wild! BOOM shaka-laka, SCRITCH-scratcha-scritcha continues in accompaniment.

"She loves you babe
(bitch I said c'mon get down) 
She loves you good man
(I said the bitch is money, y'all)"

And so on. . .


Screaming crying CROWD CONTINUES TO GO WILD!

I'm just saying.

Just like our parents with our music, we just didn't do it first so there must be something WRONG with it. Right?.

Birds in My Belfry

While earlier in my life, I would have been considered a Crazy Cat Lady, in my later years, I appear to have chosen birds.

Now birds may seem to be idle loafers who do nothing but throw seed and incessantly chirp your temples off to lobotomy land all day long, but in reality, they have quite Purpose Driven Lives and Big Important Jobs they do in order to earn their toys and seed.

When I first knew my cockatiel Corky, for instance, the woman was a logger. She buzz sawed impressively through a seemingly quite sturdy top perch log in less than a week. No amount of cuttlebone or calcium block material would distract her from this important task. Not long after though, she became an expert laundry woman, methodically stripping off cage newspaper and cleaning it in the laundry dish (meant for drinking, but let's not split feathers over it), soon earning a raise to wallpaper design/interior decoration by plastering the washed remains onto her walls. I believe lately she may have entered retirement and passed the legacy of Hard Work on to the parakeets.

Lollipop also does a hell of a lot of laundry and wallpaper plastering. However, she's also going for the gold in the Olympics, swan diving and swimming in water dishes even out of season. Once attaining that lofty gold medal platform, I believe she'll be off to Professional Escape and Aviator status, having recently created several unique flying patterns in order to evade her captors. She also has achieved Clearing the Bowling Ball from the Bowling Alley Toy and Clearing the Mirror from the Bird Carnival Toy- and has applied to several pet toy manufacturers as a Strength Tester. Lollipop's understudy, Piper, has yet to find her first job, but then she is still a young child.

Expressions We Know and Hate

How many current common expressions exist that me and thee get sick of hearing? Some of them are so overused they have ceased to mean anything at all anymore. Surely there is more creative language that could be put to use.

For me, one of these insanity-inducing expressions is "it is what it is." Now it's awfully hard for something to be what it isn't, that's true. We know that, though. Why not at least try to describe what it is instead of leaving it up to out fertile imaginations?

Another one is "if you will." By God, perhaps I WON'T! Leave it up to the listener, and chances are he's been a rebel his whole life and he won't. It might be a good idea just to state that you have uttered your opinion. Explain your position if you want. Leaving it up to others whether they will is just asking for trouble.

I'm also sick of  the word "arguably" thrown in willy-nilly whenever one is expressing an opinion. You are perfectly allowed to own your opinion without inviting an argument about it. If you think a novel is the best ever, then for heaven's sake just say so. 

Dear reader, feel free to jump in and suggest your own personal vomit-inducing phrases. IF you will!

Hooka Tooka My Veeblefetzers?

It was when I was in class to learn how to be a drone, er employee, in a large local call center, that I realized I was getting older. How was I so informed? By my young classmates, who understood not a word of my cultural references.

If you have never heard the genius lyrics to the smash hit "Hooka Tooka My Soda Cracker" (I used hooka tooka to find out who stole my desk calendar) then you're really unlikely to relate to a "veeblefetzer" reference cleverly dropped while discussing a computer program you've never heard of in your life. All about veeblefetzers:

Important Veeblefetzer information

Now it was my favorite reading material in seventh and eighth grade, Mad Magazine -- a detour on the way to the more mature National Lampoon -- which introduced me to the aforementioned veeblefetzer. This has been a handy word for me to reach for throughout my life. The more the memory loss sets in, the more I find myself uttering it.

And in this training class I first had to acknowledge that my vocabulary is entirely too full of "cultural references." However, I don't feel too much like the "Lone Ranger" (there's another!) because I could spout "Seinfeld" lines and plots and be entirely understood. Sadly, a younger friend of mine had never, ever watched Seinfeld. You might say he felt like a cake someone left out in the rain.

I Reject My Final Frontier

Much of my life is lived on the keyboard. My work, play, news, socialization has largely been computer based since December of 1996 when I bought my first computer. I now  have an all-in-one desktop, a Nook, an iPad, a Laptop. I believe obtaining all these devices disqualifies me from being a Luddite.

However, there is still one device I don't have and hope to never have: a cell phone. I see individuals carrying these around streets and shopping malls, and it would seem that nobody is ever off their cell phone. The first irritation I receive from these phones is the fact they cause people to crash into me and then give me an angry look that seems to say "why don't you look where you're going?" It seems like they could glance up from their all-absorbing texting and avoid running an old lady down but NO.

Also, why do I want to give anybody the ability to find me anytime day or night? I simply do not. I barely answer my landline. This may be a  malady common to those of us who spent a gazillion years off and on working in occupations that involved answering the phone all the time.

It seems these phones get smarter and smarter all the time -- except when it  comes to the autocorrect thingy, which you'd think would be vastly superior to a mere human editor. However, from humor websites I've visited, I can tell that any feature which will change "china" to a very personal female body part while you're texting with your mother  is one which should not exist or should be deactivated at all times. Are they smart phones, or are they smart@ phones?

What's more, this cell phone is apparently now a must-have for children. And they're not cheap. We know you got Johnny his cell phone so he can call you from the snow drift with a "help help" - but think about how many times last year Johnny lost his mittens. And a cell phone is harder to pin to his coat. Johnny's going to get home just fine, but his phone is stuck somewhere in a snow drift with his mittens.

The cell phone is, for me, the final frontier. Fortunately for me, I rarely go anywhere and if I need rescuing I can always use my landline - or my iPad,Nook,laptop, or desktop.