CSotD: Stressors and Stressees
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Monotonous, isn’t it? Except that this Sunday, it’s Baby Blues instead of Barney & Clyde.
As I’ve suggested before, it doesn’t seem it would be that hard or expensive to have somebody run through the Sunday comics at launch to make sure they each contain both a color and a black plate, and I’ll bet you could set up some kind of a preview screen so that person didn’t need to be doing it at midnight.
Well, this is the last Sunday on the current format. We’ll see how smoothly things run once the new, improved format kicks in Tuesday.
I had a flashback reading this one, because there came a point when my mother became tired of stuff all over the place. There were seven of us, though I think the eldest two were beyond this stage and the youngest two were too little to be held responsible.
But that still meant three kids strewing their toys around the house and so she began dumping them into a barrel in the cellar and making us ransom them back at some rate appropriate to our allowances.
IIRC, it turned into an interesting way of teaching us to budget our allowance, because a lot of stuff just stayed in the barrel as not worth wasting our limited candy money on. I wouldn’t give up a Hershey bar to bail out a single Tinker Toy.
Good concept, but it didn’t work and was only in place for a few months, and not because we suddenly became neat.
The lessons did kick in when I became a parent, which was to only have two kids and to not sweat what their room looked like. Anything left in common areas was tossed in with the rest of their mess and life went on.
She gets me. She really gets me. Though my actual line is, “Pardon the mess. I live like this.”
A distinction without a difference.
Close. Not a hammer but a heavy book.
There’s a thing technically called a ganglion cyst, which the Cleveland Clinic describes at some length. It’s a fluid-filled cyst that is non-cancerous and harmless, and they say you can reveal them with an MRI or an ultrasound, but that sounds like more of a procedure than is required if you just call it a “Bible bump,” in which case you cure it by whacking it with, as the name suggests, a Bible.
Which I have done, though I actually used a dictionary.
Best part is, you don’t have to get Medicare involved.
Lola reminds me that I should probably call Medicare and make sure I can get compensated for having a chiropractor work on my back, and I should probably make a sandwich first.
It could be worse. I had to call the IRS a few years ago and spent about 40 minutes on hold, only to be told that they couldn’t help me over the phone and I had to drive to their office, which was about an hour away.
There’s gonna be a lot of that happening after Elon and the Lost Boys finish wrecking the place.
It sounds as though most of their pointless destruction will impact new retirees and that those of us already on the system will be okay, as long as we don’t do something foolish like change our address or start dealing with a different bank.
Even then, I’m okay for now because I own a car. For people who don’t, I have no idea how they’re going to get to the office to do things in person, since the nearest one is 60 miles away and the only public transit we have is crosstown buses and a bus from Dartmouth to Boston. And if you can get there, you’ll likely need a sandwich and a sleeping bag.
Fortunately, the administration suggests two solutions:
1. Become the grandparent of a billionaire.
2. Quitcher bitchin, you fraudster.
The only people who gave me gray hair were my grandmother and my mother, and that from genetics, not stress. And since baldness is carried on the X-chromosome, I guess I can blame them for that, too.
Stress is a choice. Aging is not. I remember reading, back in the late 80s or early 90s, that as the baby boom aged, we’d see a lot more things marketed to older people, and so we have. Step-in Skechers are handy for aging backs, plus I just bought a pair of Chuck Taylor mid-tops because I need the support.
As for gray hair, it’s perhaps the most attractive change in women’s fashion, in part because it eliminates the bizarre sight of old guys with gray hair and wives with heads full of colored straw, since that’s what coloring does to hair.
And for those of us who are single, it’s a sign that you’re talking to somebody with a solid ego who doesn’t fall for a lot of fountain-of-youth foolishness. That shouldn’t be all you’re looking for, but it’s sure a good place to start.
You’ll notice there isn’t a gray hair in this entire tableau. Obviously, stress has nothing to do with it. Or maybe they all color their hair. Either way, it proves my point.
And speaking of insecure people who color their hair, Susan’s job requires that she be physically in the office, but she’s the only one and has been obsessing over it. Meanwhile, her boss, Savreen, is considerably younger and doesn’t see a problem.
Which reminds me of when I was interviewing for an editing job at a small paper and the publisher asked if I would be okay working for someone younger than me. I said, “At this stage, what choice do I have?” and he laughed. We got along great despite his youth.
As for working alone, I’ve been working from home for the past 16 years and prefer it. Once I got into middle management, I went into the office every single day, even when the place was otherwise empty.
That’s uncool, and taking a job where the office was 2,000 miles away lifted a lot from my shoulders.
Relax, Susan. And let your gray grow out.
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