Category Archives: Confession

I am the grammar cop, judge and jury

Confession, Musings, Writing, , ,

Keep calmStep away from the keyboard now!  Put down the mouse.  You are guilty of bad grammar and your computer privileges have been suspended   until you learn how to use apostrophes.   I have the power to pass this sentence on you because I am not only part of the grammar police, I am a grammar judge.

Oh, I wish I could punished people for bad grammar but it doesn’t work.  Over and over people misuse adverbs, have no idea the difference between the objective and the subjective pronouns, and have to be told over and over to set  off  a noun of direct address with commas.    And they use hopefully  when they really mean I hope. 

I hate to admit it but when I was a teacher, I roamed the hallways with a huge marker and correct the signs students made  about football games and meetings and whatever.  I did this because I could not stand to walk by the same poster over and over that misused commas.

But reality has balanced out that addiction to correct bad grammar. sort of, but it still bothers me.    I have learned to ignore, “My mother made a blanket for my daughter and I.”   Oh, inside I scream, “She didn’t make the blanket for I!  She made it for ME!  For my daughter and ME.”   But, outside, I’m serene and accepting.    I hate it when someone states, “You need to speaker louder.”  No!  An adverb modifies a verb.  How do you need to speak?  More loudly!  More loudly!  More loudly .”   Excuse me while I breathe deepLY and calm down.

Don’t get me started on “hopefully”.   As an adverb, it modifies a verb (as mentioned before) noun and means “with hope” as inhopefully“The dog gazed hopefully at the treat in my hand.”   WITH HOPE that he’d get the snack.    “Hopefully, we will all sleep late.”   No, we do NOT sleep hopefully!   Correct:  We hope we’ll sleep late.”

For my peace of mind, I’ve had to give up.  Language changes.  I remember back when I was in seventh grade and taught “I shall” was correct.

Yes, I have to accept, but I don’t like it and I’m going to keep my marker handy.  Watch out and speak correctly!

 

How are you?

A question, Confession, George, , , ,

cat how are youWhen the nurse is taking me back to the cubicle where I will be imprisoned until the doctor drops by, he or she always asks. “How are you today?”  That question always stumps me.  My first thought is to scream, “I’m at the doctor’s office.  How do you think I feel?”  However, I do possess a thin veneer of courtesy and say, “Fine, thank you.  How are you?”

Then I sit in the little room and ponder that question.    Finally I decide the nurse is not really  asking for a health report. “How are you?” is a  polite social convention which really doesn’t demand an honest answer, only recognition that the rules have been applied and accepted.   Yes, I may be throwing up on the nurse’s feet, but I answer, “Fine.”  I may be doubled over in pain or spouting blood from every orifice, but that’s not what the nurse is asking.   The nurse is simply recognizing that I’m there and my answer merely says, “Thank you.”

But the question came up again six months ago  and again I had to work out what others were saying,  Only minutes after George died, one of our ministers asked, “How are you doing?”  My mouth dropped open.  I wanted to shout, “How do you think I feel?  They joy of my life is gone.”  I didn’t of course but had no good answer.  People asked that over and over in the months after George’s death and, every time, I thought, “You have to know how I feel.”  But I didn’t say that.  “As well as can be expected,” I’d say and that was the truth.  But why did they ask?  comforting friendsDidn’t they know?

Again I realized that, yes they all knew I hurt.  That question meant, “I care about you but I don’t know what to say.”  It meant, “He was my friend and I hurt.  How are you doing?”  It meant so many things my friends and George’s didn’t know how to ask, what words to use.  And thanks to all those friends and ministers and family members, I’m doing fine, sort of.  Thank you for asking.

 

 

 

 

.

What’s in your drawers?

A question, Confession, Musings, ,

 I can never find batteries.  I buy them, I bring them home and I never see them again.  I have a number of batteriestheories on that.  First, the Energizer  bunny sweeps through the apartment at night and gathers them up, for what reason I don’t know.    Second, I’ve used them all and just don’t realize it.  But my main theory is this:  I put them away in many different places, each time thinking, “I’ll remember where they are when I need them,” but I never do.   I also believe  one day I’ll open a drawer and find thousands of them huddled together..

What do you keep buying  because you can’t find where you put them the last time you made that purchase?  I’d love to know.  It always makes me feel better when you confess and I know I’m not alone.

Paperclips and Panic

Confession, Musings, , ,

I  think of myself as open, flexible, quick to accept change.   The realization that I’m not always shocks me.  I’ve blogged on this before but it keeps happening.

The most recent example:   I had to fill out an insurance claim which consisted of several pages of information, a few documents to prove the claim,  and a dozen forms.      The instrucitons stated:  Do not use highlighter, staples or paperclips.”  Until that moment, I didn’t realize I was addicted to paperclips.   Oh, when I was teaching, I used clips to hold papers together and, as a writer, I clip chapters together but I hadn’t realized I couldn’t NOT clip  documents together, that not doing so left me anxious.   I couldn’t breathe.  My hands shook.  I’m also compulsive about following directions so it made me even more anxious to ignore the instructions and clip the papers together.  What to do?

After great agony and long consideration, I came up with a plan.  I organized the pages in the order listed on the instructions, wrote on the top exactly what the form was because  most of the forms were identified only as CLAIM FORM.  Then I numbered them all.  On the documents with more than one page, I labeled them with  A, B, C.   All this means that I had one section entitled, “Cancellation  5A.”

And I feel so much better.  I didn’t use staples or paperclips (okay, I DID highlight one thing), and followed directions.  Victory!

 

What makes you anxious that you know is silly?

 

 

Mispeling

Confession, Musings, , ,

Please excuse and understand any misspellings.  Like Jay Leno, I’m dyslexic.   He often states he’s a terrible speller.  I am, too.  Plus, I don’t recognize my mistakes.  I can proofread something ten times and either don’t see errors or, when I correct them, I make them worse.   I’ve had friends proofread which doesn’t help because, again I’m likely to add more errors.

And now the speller on the blog site doesn’t work.  Every time I run it, the messages comes back No misspellings.  I know that’s not right because I never write a paragraph without problems.

I try.  I really try to write cleanly.    I even wrote a section in the book The Overcomers about my struggles.

So now I’m going to run the spell check and reread this and hope you can decipher it and forgive me.

What do you do in the shower?

A question, Confession, humor, , , , ,

I grew up taking baths.  My mother said that was what “we” did.  I don’t know what that means except it conveyed the idea that soaking in gallons of water was the only way to become truly clean and that those who showered were covered with scum and unclean.   Oh, I took showers at camp.  In my college dorm, I took showers because I don’t remember there being tubs.  I went to college shortly after the movie Psycho was released so taking a shower was an act of courage.  In the sorority house, we had two tubs, located in the same small room–a literal “bath room”.  Cozy and a little creepy so most of us took showers.

I didn’t really become a shower fan until I had to get up at five-fifteen to get to work on time.   I’d always taken a bath at night and washed my hair in the sink in the morning, a great waste of time when one has to leave the house at six-thirty. 

It wasn’t until many years late after watching an episode of Friends that I discovered I really didn’t know exactly how one took a shower.  I mean, there are no classes in it, no pamplets or information booklets.  Yesterday, I googled how to take a shower and found pages of information with instructional sketches and pictures and explanations of how one takes a shower.  Amazing. 

I asked the question in the title of this blog NOT to elicite stories of unbounded lust.  No, I asked that because as I read those blog pages, I discovered that it’s a good idea to brush your teeth in the shower.  This cuts down on having toothpaste down the front of your nightie.    My question:  Do you brush your teeth in the shower?  If so, how did you know learn about this?  I’m feeling a little ignorant on this point.

I’ve just started reading the Jack Reacher books.  In the first book, this man travels for a day, walks fourteen miles, is arrested and spends the weekend in jail.  Four days without a shower or change of clothing and women still fall all over him.  He did, however, take showers in the third book and describes his three shower techniques in detail.   The shortest takes eleven minutes, a basic shower plus hair wash.   I can’t image spending eleven minutes in the shower.  What does one do?  Wait, I don’t want to know.  The second type of shower adds a shave and takes twenty minutes.  The third is an eleven-minute shower.  Then, he gets out of the shower with moisterized skin and shaves, then finishes the shower and washes his hair again.  A total of over thirty minutes.  With Reacher, it’s all or nothing.  For me, a waste of the morning.

Anything you’d like to share?

 

What day is it?

A question, Confession,

One of the problems with being retired is never knowing exactly what day this is.  My sister-in-law–who is retired but seems to do better with this than I–brought this to mind this morning when she asked, “Where’s your Friday blog?”

I hadn’t realized I’d missed Friday.  Completely.

So a quick apology.  I promise a blog for Tuesday.

If I remember what day that it.

Goofiness: a stage of mourning

A question, Confession, George, Musings, , , , ,

In the 1970’s, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief was vastly popular and much preached.   We had the idea that one worked through these stages–denial, anger, bargaining, and  depression–in that order until finally arriving at acceptance, the final stage.   However, Dr. Kubler-Ross hadn’t meant that these five stages made up the entire task of grief, that one could wrap up  mourning in a neat little package and would recover if one followed her teaching exactly.   No, she stated that these were five of the stages of grieving but not all of them.  She also stated some people didn’t go through all of these and, if they do,  probably not in a set order.  

After George’s death, I was drowning in denial but don’t remember bargaining.   If I did experience anger, it was transient and certainly not against George for leaving me.   And I also experienced stages she didn’t include, the first of those being goofiness.  

My favorite color is yellow, the color of sunshine and flowers and, for me, healing and joy.    When my friend Ellen sends me a gift or flowers, she always chooses yellow.  I adored my yellow car.  I felt positive  driving it and could always find it in a parking lot which cut down on stress.   Although it’s not a good color on me, yellow tops and shirts fill the closet because they cheer me up.  Yes, I love yellow.  Always have.

George’s choices of colors were, well, boring to me.  He liked dark green, gray-blue, beige and other earth tones.  When I wanted to buy a light-colored sofa, he reminded me what three cocker spaniels would do to that.  He was right.  Nonetheless, after he died, I needed yellow.  Yes, needed yellow!  Yearned for it, craved the warmth of my favorite color.  I bought two yellow throws on-line, picked up two floral pillows to replace the matching dark green pillows of the love seat, pulled out the yellow towels to replace the blue.   Then I bought bright art.   I replaced a small picture in the guest bathroom with a map of the United States in yellow and orange and bright primary colors.  I bought a 3 x 3 hanging with a yellow background.  

Then, after a  week,  I didn’t need it anymore.  I feel slightly embarrassed about that map now.  It would look great in the room of a five-year-old.  I don’t know what the saying  on that wall hanging is because I never put it.  It now lives in a closet. 

But I needed to do this.  For a few days, I needed to be weird and goofy and crazy.   The yellow throws got me through those days of intense pain, lifted my spirits in the way dark green didn’t. 

For me, goofiness was definitely a stage in healing.  I haven’t arrived at complete acceptance but am moving in that direction.  I’ve gone through gone-ness, curiosity, and shame as well and plan to share them with you.  The point of this blog is that we all grieve in different ways.

Would you share how you’ve handled grief?  Have you felt goofy at any time during the process?

What are the cutest cats in the world doing?

Confession, Pets, ,

There are some women in the world who keep their homes immaculate.  I am not one of them.   I know women who say that they would be mortified if, after they died, people would come into their homes and find a mess.   I’ve never said that.  In the first place, I’d be dead and wouldn’t care.  In the second place, I would hope my friends wouldn’t either. 

But the cat tree was driving me crazy.  With two tuxedo cats–black and white–their fur shows up every place.  White on dark fabrics and dark on light fabrics.  The cat tree used to be light beige.  When I looked at it this morning, it was beige and black tweed.   I do have a limit with how much non-immaculateness I can put up with.   The cat tree hit it.

For that reason,  I pulled it from its corner, got a stiff brush out, and started de-furring–the cat tree not the cats.  That will come later.   Of course, as soon as the position of their favorite piece of furniture (after me) moved, both Maggie and Scooter had to come out and investigate.   They investigate by climbing up the cat tree and curling up on their levels.  As you may guess, this makes it much more difficult to clean.  I gave up. 

The picture at the top explains why. 

Late

Confession, ,

I’m late with this blog.  I had one all ready.  Pictures, spell checked, etc.  I worked ahead on Tuesday evening so I could just click it on.   Then I had guests for dinner and had to clean off the dining room table where I keep the old. slow computer which is also the one I use for my blog because I still haven’t figured out everything on the iMac.  

Odd how guests seem to assume they won’t be eating with a computer taking up most of the table.

I carefully put the mouse “some place”, you know, some place I’d remember, some place that would be obvious, some place I could easily see it.   This morning, I put the computer back on the table but–you guessed it–no mouse!   I looked all over.  I knew it couldn’t scoot away.   I could not  find it.  Until I did.  This evening.  In a drawer.  I don’t know why.   A little late to put a blog up.

A new one Tuesday and Friday of next week!  Sorry.