Goody Two-Shoes and the Enablers
Mamacita says: I am no Goody Two-Shoes, but I am basically a kind person. I would lie down in the road if I thought that would help some people. I work overtime to help students. I still do my children’s laundry, and I feed them whenever they visit. I would do the same for you. If ever they (or their friends) (or you) need a helping hand, I’ve got one at the end of each arm. I have worked really hard all my life. The thing is, I think everyone should work hard. All their lives. I think everyone should look out for everyone else. I think everyone should use their own hands to support themselves and help others. I have little patience with lazy people, or people who choose not to work. If you need me, all you have to do is ask. I’ll bring you food. I’ll do your laundry. I’ll shingle your roof. (Yes, I can do that!) But if you’re just lying around waiting to be waited on, or feel in any way, shape, or form that the world owes you a living, I will tell you exactly what I think of you.
That being said.
Look, I’m no Goody Two Shoes. I can be really snarky. Nobody can out-horrify me in Cards Against Humanity. I have little patience with adults who consistently make poor decisions, but I also think some people get far more sympathy than they deserve.
Here’s the thing. I am feeling a little bit guilty because I can’t seem to conjure up much sympathy for all these celebrity addicts who seem to be dropping like flies – by their own hands..
When I have students who can’t go fifteen minutes without dashing out to the parking lot for a smoke, and when I have coworkers who NEED a break every half hour or even sooner because they NEED a break. . . well, I can’t help but wonder where the “fair” factor is. Those who work through other people’s frequent breaks are the good students and good workers and the people I would trust with important things. Those who allow their desire for a ______(insert drug of choice here) to interfere with their responsibilities make me kind of, well, disgusted.
Hoarders. Methies. Smokers. Drunks. Hormonal wonders. Life is full of so many choices; why do so many people take the gutter route? And please don’t lecture me about poverty and illness. So many people pick themselves up and
rise up out of the ashes of other people’s messes and make a success of their own lives; why can’t more people? So they might have to walk eight miles uphill to get an education – do it! So they’re madly in love and their hormones are nuts and that guy with the good job at Taco Bell is getting more and more insistent that “if you really love me. . . .” hey. To do it or not to do it is a choice, too.
Honestly, people with no self control puzzle me. I just don’t get it. Horndogs, gluttons, people who feel they have a right to stink up a building because they WANT to, people who are better drivers after a couple of beers. . . What the hell, people?
“I can’t help it” is the feeblest excuse in the world. Yes, you CAN help it. You can choose not to. It’s your CHOICE. Nobody is forcing you. Whether you do it or not is entirely up to YOU.
If you are so weak that even knowing what might happen if you continue to choose the nutjob path, you still choose it, you are committing suicide and I think you know it.
“But I can’t help it.” “I can’t control myself.”
Why not. Others can.
“I don’t think I can give up the huge pile of my own human shit on the bathroom floor or the 4,000 almost-empty bottles of shampoo in the 
shed. As long as there’s a quarter inch of liquid in each bottle, it would be wasteful to discard them. Besides, I NEED them.”
No, you don’t. There is something horribly wrong with you.
You are committing slow suicide with your extremely wrong choices. This or that. And you choose that. And you are simultaneously choosing your personal preferences over everything and everyone else in your life. You are harming the innocent because you are completely absorbed in yourself.
People make these awful inhuman choices all the time. Boyfriends over children. Alcohol over relationships. Nicotine over cleanliness. Big pile of bloody underpants in the kitchen sink over normalcy. Girlfriend over family. Meth over decency.
All because these choices make a person feel, personally, better for a little while.
The worst and most disgusting choices of all? Any of these things over life, and the others who love and need you even though you’ve put them absolutely last and yourself absolutely first.
Me me me me me.
For shame.
I fully understand how addiction can grip someone and be really hard to pry off. I also believe that if a person really wanted to be free of said addiction, that person would move heaven and earth to rid him/herself of it, which does not include cooking it in the front yard, buying 50 pounds of it and storing it under the bed, walking out the door and getting in a lover’s car, stepping in poop to get to the sink, dropping your drawers for every cute Taco Bell guy (but he’s got a steady job and he loves me!). Sometimes when I hear about the awful things people with no self control do to themselves and to those who trusted and loved them, I fear for the human race.
Feel sorry for these people, yes. Of course. They’re sick.
But if they continue to do nothing whatsoever except demand sympathy, exceptions, and breaks because of their negative choices, then they’ve gone way past deserving sympathy or breaks or exceptions of any kind.
If they’re not actively working really hard to rid themselves of the demons that have been invited to possess them, then the time will come when the locks must be changed and the abandoned loved ones must move on to someone else, preferably someone who cares more for a spouse and a child than someone who chooses himself/herself every time.
In the old days, such people were locked in a room and required to dry out, cold turkey. Perhaps, in the old days, the right things were done.
It hurts? I’m sweating? Oh the AGONY?
Ask these people’s friends, families, and employers if they’ve ever hurt, sweated, or been in agony over this guy’s choices.
That’s what I thought.
Bring it on.
Remember, I’m sorry for these people. But I’m a lot sorrier for their abandoned, used, lied-to not-very-loved ones.
Grow up. Make good choices. FORCE yourself to do the right thing. (the fact that some people must be forced to do the right thing is pretty sad, too.)
I know that those of you who believe addiction is 100% beyond any one person’s control will consider me a monster with no heart.
I’ve dealt with victims of other people’s addictions for over thirty years. Maybe if you’d seen what I see regularly, you’d have less sympathy for the addict and more sympathy for his/her innocent victims.
Small Vocabulary = Small. . . . . Brain*
Mamacita says: A person who advocates censorship probably has a small vocabulary. People with small vocabularies don’t have the understanding nor the schema to comprehend things that people with big vocabularies have no trouble understanding and applying.
I can’t help but wonder if all this brouhaha about dumbing down the vocabulary in classic literature right now has at least part of its origin in the sad fact that many of our parents and teachers can’t understand the big words.
This isn’t funny; it’s unforgivable.
The more words we know, the better able we are to communicate with others and to understand others. Literate people have three vocabularies, as I tell my students each semester. One is relatively small; one is medium-sized, and one is quite large. Think “The Three Bears.”
Our smallest vocabulary is our speaking vocabulary. The middle-sized vocabulary is our writing vocabulary. Our largest vocabulary is – or at least, is supposed to be – our reading vocabulary.
That is, our reading vocabulary is large unless the dumbing-down PC police have stuck their white-out pens into other peoples’ business.
The only person who has the right to change a piece of writing is the writer. Period. If you are so over-sensitive and culturally illiterate that you are offended because back in a certain period of history, people spoke and acted in a particular way, and you don’t want anybody to know about it because it hurts your feelings even though it was quite ordinary for the times, and you’re unable, due to your low brain cell count, to create a valuable lesson with such facts, you’re sadly and selfishly stupid. I pity your poor children. I hope you’re not a teacher.
And if you belong to the school of thought that still thinks that “soporific” is a word that small children can’t handle and you want it removed from Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” there are no words in any thesaurus to adequately describe your ignorance.
I despise you. I try not to, but I do. You’re an intellectual coward. You yourself don’t understand something, so you straightaway condemn it. Unforgivable.
I’ll tell all of you something else I tell all of my students: put a thesaurus in your bathroom. Learn a couple of new words with each twosie. Two new words a 
day, say, or maybe three, times seven days a week times 365 days a year equals a lot of new words. Do it. You can get a thesaurus at the Dollar Tree, a good enough edition for a bathroom. You’ll be replacing it every month or so anyway. I hope you do, anyway – nobody’s family is that clean.
* As for the title, it’s absolutely true, and such people’s brains aren’t the only small body part they’re sporting. This is, of course, an opinion, but I firmly believe that people who advocate censorship are considerably unendowed in every other area, as well. The first punch is almost always thrown by the person with the smaller vocabulary. He/she runs out of words and has to lash out in the only way left to them, exactly like a toddler who runs out of words and melts down in frustration.
Censorship comes in all kinds of guises, all of them disgusting. Equally disgusting is our population’s growing lack of cultural literacy. We learn by exposure.
Bad Ending? No. Just, No.
Mamacita says: My nerves can’t take a movie with a bad ending. It’s to the point that I will usually check out the ending online before I go to the theater rather than chance another notch on my “bad ending” belt.
What constitutes a bad ending? An ending wherein every possible plot isn’t resolved to my satisfaction. An ending wherein someone awakens from a dream. An ending wherein all the wrong people end up together. An ending wherein the bad people win. An ending that isn’t an ending at all – unless it’s a movie version of a beloved book series that is too long and complicated to be completed in only one movie. There are many possible bad endings, and they are all a matter of opinion. My opinion. In case you were looking for some kind of logic here, there isn’t any. My blog – my opinion. Works for me.
It’s a bad ending if I say it’s a bad ending.
There is a point of origin to this madness, of course.
Several years ago, I had the misfortune to see three movies in one week, all of which had a bad ending. The first one made me lean back in my chair and go “Oh NOOOOOOO.” The second one made me lean back in my chair and go “Oh SHIIIIIIIIIIIIT, not AGAAAAAAAAIN.”
The third one traumatized me to the point that I’m now Movie Spoilers‘ most frequent flyer. I just can’t deal with bad endings. I can’t do it. I don’t WANT to do it. You’re not my mother and you can’t make me. (Mom, if you’re reading this, I don’t live with you any more and you can’t make me do ANYTHING now, and I know you’re not going to guilt me into watching a movie.)
I also can’t deal with non-super-hero violence, gore, gratuitous blood and guts, intense suspense, police drama, criminals, kidnappers, torture, and murder. In other words, I don’t go to the movies much any more.
I still have nightmares about movies or TV shows I saw thirty years ago. I am still trying to rewrite, in my head, every movie with a bad ending that I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t help that I tend to insert myself into every book I read and every movie or TV show I watch or have ever watched.
I’m normal. Shut up.
