Things I Haven't Done Yet
Mamacita says: I’m listening to Straight No Chaser, and it’s impossible to be completely whiny when those blazingly, almost impossibly, talented guys are singing straight to me and me only. . . .
I know they’re big stuff now, and I’m glad because they so totally deserve to be big stuff, but let it be known that I loved them before you did.
But grooving all over Straight No Chaser is something I’ve already done and will continue to do. Here are some things I haven’t done yet:
1. I really need to mow the grass one more time before the snow covers it. Why do I need to do this? Because I’m hosting Thanksgiving, and I don’t want my family to get their knees wet when they walk across my lawn. And why, you might wonder, would their knees get wet if they walked across my lawn? You’re not really wondering, are you. Some of you have been here.
2. I haven’t taken the huge stack of midterm exams – makeup version – to the Testing Center yet, but I’ll do that tomorrow afternoon. Pig-genre Flu has taken its toll on my students.
3. I haven’t washed the fifteen bread pans I used this afternoon yet. I didn’t even know I owned fifteen bread pans, but I guess I do. Spread out all over the stovetop and counters as they are, a casual observer might guess that I owned a hundred bread pans. The dishwasher won’t hold them all, that’s for sure.
4. I haven’t loaded my Christmas music into my cd jukebox yet, but I’m thinking about it. I always try to wait until after Halloween, at least, but I do love me some purty Christmas music. If my mention of this fact has offended anyone, suck it up. People who take offense at other people’s celebrations make me tired.
5. I still haven’t stopped humming awesome Beatles’ songs; I’ve been a fan since sixth grade and since I saw “1964” a couple of weeks ago, the obsession has surfaced again. (Thank you so very much, Smaller Indiana!!!!)
6. There are leftovers in my refrigerator that have almost achieved the “science project” level. I haven’t cleaned it out in a while. Perhaps I should do that tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow. The sun’ll come out tomorrow. I’ll think about that tomorrow.
7. In my head, I’m still at Blog World Expo in Vegas. I haven’t really come home yet. I mean, I’m home, and back to work, but I’m not entirely here. Note: this is NOT the same thing as “She ain’t all there.” Although, there has been some doubt for some time. . . . .
8. Whenever I use an ordinary trash bag, I see gnats – or worse. When I use a Repellem trash bag, there are NO bugs to be seen anywhere in the house. They even take care of the ladybug beetles, which is nothing short of extraordinary for southern Indiana. I need to order some more Repellem bags. I haven’t done that for a while.
9. I still hate Pentax. Haven’t come down from the shoddy treatment yet.
10. It’s nearly three a.m. and I have to get up in a few hours. I always do this on Sunday nights. When will I ever learn? Probably never, that’s when.
And now, Carly Simon has begun to sing “bedroom songs, ” so maybe that’s where I’d best go.
Goodnight, dear Blogosphere.
Crabby Appleton Lives Here
Mamacita says: I am very grouchy tonight.
I’m not sure why – yes, I do* – but I’m really flashbacking to one parent conference after another: conferences that took place eight and ten and more years ago, even. What the heck is up with me tonight?
I am so sick, sick, sick of selfish grown-ups.
“Mothers” reeking of cigarette smoke who swore they couldn’t afford pencils and socks for their children. “Fathers” smelling strongly of booze and/or weed who didn’t even know their children didn’t have a winter coat. Family after family on free lunch who miraculously had the cash for personal luxuries but couldn’t manage to buy simple necessities for their children.
I wanted to thumb their eyeballs out, every time.
Sometimes, these people smelled so strongly of their selfish indulgences that I couldn’t even stay in the small conference room with them for more than a minute or two. Some of those chain-smoking women had new babies: innocent little things whose lungs were already full of dirt, symbolic of their parents’ lives.
I remember these people’s faces and I remember their raspy voices. I remember their whiny excuses most of all. I did not believe a single one of these people when they swore they loved their kids but just couldn’t afford these simple things.
If they had money for booze and cigarettes, they had money for socks and pencils. Life is full of choices and these adults, of their own free will, chose themselves over their children. These adults chose their own personal, selfish indulgences over things their children NEEDED.
These “parents” were monsters.
There was a world of difference between that kind of people and decent people – the people who came to parent conferences because they truly cared. Actual caring parents who ate AFTER their children ate, and who would never in a million years have even thought of buying a single thing for themselves until their children had what they needed. THOSE are the real parents.
Parenting is hard, folks – those who do it right know this. Those who don’t bother to do it at all, people who continue to live as they lived when they were childless, indulging themselves in whatever they wanted when they want it, not even seeing that hungry dirty child with bare feet in ill-fitting shoes, and no coat at all, and certainly not caring even when they did see. . . .sometimes, these people stood up in angry incredulousness, that someone was challenging the way they were living their lives, questioning them about how their** money was being spent, insinuating that they were lousy specimens indeed. . . . .
They would stalk out, and we would sadly make yet another phone call.
Seriously? I’d love to have a nickel for every winter coat, pair of mittens, and pair of socks I’ve bought for other people’s kids over the past twenty or so years.
If you are one of those people who thinks public school teachers are overpaid, think again. The good ones – and that’s most of them, no matter what you might think – are pretty much supporting a lot of little kids who are not their own, because we can’t bear seeing them get off the bus all blue and shivering day after day. I mean, it’s not like their parents are going to do anything about it; they’re too busy taking care of themselves.
Yeah, it’s going to be a long night. I can’t get the memories out of my head.
Oh, and you really don’t want to get me started on “Uncle Daddy” and “Daddy’s new lady.” Because he ain’t Daddy and she ain’t no lady.
*Bitch in the elevator
**Our money
Quotation Saturday: It's All About MEEEEEEEE! (Selfishness)
Mamacita says: Everybody is selfish on occasion; it’s human nature to want to “feel good,” and “look out for Number One” and think things like “this is best for ME,” and “I won’t share my candy!” and “It’s all for me and about me and because of MEEEEE and for my benefit!!!!” and “I want the whole thing!” Everybody has days – or years – of wishing things were different. . . more about ME. More about what I want. More about what I DESERVE. We all want, as Colin and Martha’s wise mother Susan Sowerby told Mrs. Medlock, “. . . the whole orange.” And if you’ve read The Secret Garden – insipid movie versions won’t do – you know what happens to people who grab for the whole orange. And rightly so.
And still, and yet, we want the whole orange and we don’t want to share it with anybody.
This is fine, if you’re single and childless.
People who’ve made promises, and/or had children, however, had best think twice before saying such things, and five or six times before acting on them. The world is watching, and it’s taking notes. Is this really the example you want to set for those children you created? Well, to each his own. There are many people in the blogosphere and in real life (there is no difference any more, actually, as far as I’m concerned) of whom I have a high opinion and consider good friends, whose lifestyles I would never be able to emulate, but that’s neither here nor there and absolutely none of my business except that everything is my business when it concerns people I love, and as I’ve stopped most of my judgmental rants, because if you’re looking for imperfection, look no further than right here, you’ll not find nearly as many rants here as you once did because one is never too old to learn valuable lessons, even though I would rather die a horrible death than cause an ounce of such pain for someone I loved, or once loved, everyone is different and everyone deals with everything differently, although if the woman I met on the elevator in the college the other day is reading, this one is for you, bitch. Thinking back, I wish I’d grabbed your child and run with him.
(Are there any awards for the longest, most horrible, run-on sentence in the world?)
1. All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. — Oscar Wilde
2. I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. –Jane Austen
3. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. –Oscar Wilde
4. The one who loves the least, controls the relationship. –Dr. Robert Anthony
5. It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes… we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions – especially selfish ones. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn
6. You shouldn’t punish others for your own choices. –Anonymous
7. There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us. — Dr. Laurence J. Peter
8. Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without in himself. –Henry Ward Beecher
9. Modesty and unselfishness: These are the virtues which men praise, and pass by. — Andre Maurois
10. Self is ingenious, crooked, and, governed by subtle and snaky desire, admits of endless turnings and qualifications, and the deluded worshippers of self vainly imagine that they can gratify every worldly desire, and at the same time possess the Truth. — James Allen
11. All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
12. You can’t get unless you give. And you have to give without wanting to get. — T.H. White
13. No man is more cheated that the selfish man. — Henry Ward Beecher
14. There is an ill-breeding to which, whatever our rank and nature, we are almost equally sensitive, the ill-breeding that comes from want of consideration for others. — Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton
15. Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples. — George Eliot
16. Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous. — James Anthony Froude
17. To be selfish is to sacrifice the nobler for the meaner ends, and to be sordidly content. — Hugh Reginald Haweis
18. What can one possibly introduce into a mind that is already full, and full of itself? –Joseph Joubert
19. How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another’s grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon
20. It never enters the lady’s head that the wet-nurse’s baby probably dies. — Harriet Martineau
21. Offended self-love never forgives. — Giovanni Ruffini
22. Formerly thy soul was great, ardent, vast; the entire circle of the universe found place in thy heart. O Charles, that thou hast become small, that thou hast become miserable, since thou lovest no one but thyself! — Schiller
23. Take the selfishness out of this world and there would be more happiness than we should know what to do with. — Henry Wheeler Shaw
24. Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon
25. Being sorry is the highest act of selfishness, seeing value only after discarding it. — Douglas Horton
26. As time goes on we get closer to that American Dream of there being a pie cut up and shared. Usually greed and selfishness prevent that and there is always one bad apple in every barrel. — Rick Danko
27. Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
28. I was surprised by how much I like being a father; surprised at what a decent father I am, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to dump my selfishness. — Michael Zaslow
29. Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible. — Elizabeth Bowen
30. Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race. William E. Gladstone
31. The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. — John Kenneth Galbraith
32. To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature. — Adam Smith
33. Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.
— Richard Bach
34. None are so empty as those who are full of themselves. –Benjamin Whichcote
35. Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself. — Julio Cortazar
36. If you think about yourself then you’ve lost sight of the ball. –Mike Willesee
37. Forgiveness is almost a selfish act because of its immense benefits to the one who forgives.
— Lawana Blackwell
38. Glory built on selfish principles is shame and guilt. — William Cowper
39. We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive. — Lord Byron
40. He who lives only to benefit himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies. — Tertullian
41. If all the people in this world, in which we live, were as selfish as a few of the people in this world, in which we live, there would be no world in which to live. — W. L. Orme
42. The human being who lives only for himself finally reaps nothing but unhappiness. Selfishness corrodes. Unselfishness ennobles, satisfies. Don’t put off the joy derivable from doing helpful, kindly things for others. — B. C. Forbes
43. If you think only of yourself, if you forget the rights and well-being of others, or, worse still, if you exploit others, ultimately you will lose. You will have no friends who will show concern for your well-being. Moreover, if a tragedy befalls you, instead of feeling concerned, others might even secretly rejoice. By contrast, if an individual is compassionate and altruistic, and has the interests of others in mind, then irrespective of whether that person knows a lot of people, wherever that person moves, he or she will immediately make friends. And when that person faces a tragedy, there will be plenty of people who will come to help. — Dalai Lama
44. If you live only for yourself you are always an immediate danger of being bored to death with the repetition of your own views and interests. No one has learned the meaning of living until he has surrendered his ego to the service of his fellowmen. — Beran Wolfe
45. He who is wrapped up in himself makes a mighty small package. — Anonymous
46. Just as a fire is covered by smoke and a mirror is obscured by dust, just as the embryo rests deep within the womb, wisdom is hidden by selfish desire. — Bhagavad Gita
47. You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.
–Anita Brookne
48. That man who lives for self alone, Lives for the meanest mortal known. — Joaquin Miller
49. Love is what is left in a relationship after all the selfishness is taken out. — Nick Richardson
50. The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places. —
Bryant H. McGill
Bonus points if you understood the Secret Garden reference. Me, I always loved Susan Sowerby; she had more guts than anybody else in the book. After all, it was her letter that. . . nah, read it for yourself.
