Category: Culture

Life Hacks: A Personal Journey

lifehacksI’m not in love with Martha Stewart or anything (that would be weird) but I’m a total sucker for Life Hacks — those simple little strategies that would organize my life.  For example, if you pin your socks together when you wash them, the dryer won’t eat one — plus they’re already sorted and ready to go back into the sock drawer when they’re dry.  This is a brilliant time saver.  Full disclosure: I don’t pin my socks together — doing laundry is a big enough pain in the ass without dickin’ around with pins and socks.  However, I know in my soul that if I did pin my socks together, my life would be way better.

And this sock situation is just the tip of the iceberg.  I know there are thousands of people who take the time to place their electrical cords neatly in toilet rolls — for easy and convenient storage.  They’ve colour-coded their closet to simplify their morning routine.  They keep their pasta in brightly-labelled Pringles™ containers and have a pre-printed itemized grocery list tacked to a bulletin board they made from used wine corks.  These are the people who show up for work in a re-purposed wardrobe, looking as if they just escaped from GQ magazine.  They have a 12 grain healthy lunch they made the night before and a dozen hand-decorated cupcakes to share.  They keep all their business junk in a cute little tote made from old ice cube trays and can find three different sizes of paper clips at a moment’s notice.  I could be one of those people.  I really could.

The problem is I never remember to save my old toilet rolls, or Pringles™ containers or any of the other bits of useless crap these Life Hackers are always using.  I don’t have a handy supply of tacks, staples, string, wire, old picture frames, fabric, wool or canvas.  I don’t have pinking shears, a sewing machine or a grommet maker, and I haven’t spent enough quality time with a hot glue gun to do more than glue my fingers together.  Let’s face it, Life Hacking is an expensive proposition that takes a lot of time, effort and planning.  So even though I know my salvation runs through toilet roll Purgatory, the fact is I’m too broke and too damn busy to actually get organized.

I Don’t Speak English — Anymore

english-22I don’t speak English anymore.  Apparently, for some years now, I’ve been speaking a dying dialect from the 20th century which hasn’t been English since Brad jumped from Jennifer to Jolie.  (And we all know how that worked out.  Just sayin’!)  Anyway, I’m literally no longer literate in my own language and that upsets me.  I see this as yet another stone in the Yellow Brick Road to hell that’s leading my world to extinction.  Culture is tied to language, and language is the canary in any society’s mineshaft.  Once the canary stops singing, it’s only a matter of time before it’s pushing up daisies.  (BTW, if you caught any of those references, you probably don’t speak 21st century English, either.)

The problem is, as a linguistic dinosaur, I have no idea what half the words people use these days mean.  So, for the most part, I guess.  However, as the world fills up with  bromances, bait-clicks, metrosexuals, and binge watching I find it harder and harder to understand what the hell people are talking about.  Here are a few more of my best guesses.

Cosplay — Derived from “costume” and “play,” this word covers a range of meaning, but I believe it’s actually just a euphemism for someone whose life sucks so badly they spend their time dressing up and pretending to be somebody else.

Mansplaining — This one is very complicated.  On the surface it’s a portmanteau word for a man explaining something.  Dig deeper, and it’s a man explaining something in a very condescending way — usually to a woman.  Dig even deeper, and mansplaining actually means some men have not yet surrendered in the gender wars and they still insist on talking about football and automobiles and other boring, technical stuff — like anybody cares about that crap.

Sideboob — “Sideboob” is one of those words that relies entirely on the speaker, and, oddly enough is not actually about boobs, at all.  It’s about the dress and the woman wearing it.  It illustrates our contemporary attitude towards women.  It suggests that the same dress is both sultry and sleazy and that the woman wearing it is attractive, stylish and sophisticated — but probably a skank.

There’s also:

Askhole — Everybody asks stupid questions but me.
Snowmageddon — Our winter was worse than your winter.
And
Plutoed — Nobody wants me around, but I’m here anyway — and there’s nothing you can do about it.

But by far my favourite is

Screenager — This is an all-purpose word for the latest generation’s obsession with phones, tabs and computers.  However, what it actually means is contemporary teenagers are all losers — why aren’t they out at the Drive-in theater, drinking illegal beer and trying to get pregnant, like we did at their age?

As we used to say, ’nuff said.

Another Weird Week

weird-newsAnd the weird just keeps on comin’.  Sometimes I think common sense is a mutant gene that simply isn’t going to survive human evolution.  And I’m not even talking about the Clinton/Trump dog and pony show;  that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  There’re all kinda strange things going on under the radar in our world. Here are just three of them.

Last week, somebody (who wishes to remain anonymous) paid $45,000.00 for Truman Capote’s ashes — not all of them, mind you — just a few.  It seems a bunch of stuff that had belonged to Capote was put up for auction — including his ashes.  Dignity has left the building.  This is pretty tawdry to begin with, but the story doesn’t end here.  The ashes belonged to Johnny Carson’s ex-wife, and, apparently, on at least one occasion, they were stolen from her and later recovered.  We’ve gone from tawdry to icky here, but the significance of the theft is that now there’s actually no way of tellin’ if Capote is still the occupant of the urn!  So, the anonymous buyer may just have laid out 45 Grand for the earthly remains of somebody’s aunt Helen.  Honestly, if I’d just done something that stupid, I’d want to remain anonymous, too.

And speaking of anonymous, a woman in Illinois, known as N.P., has launched a lawsuit against a sex toy manufacturer called We-Vibe.  According to the lawsuit, she bought a Smart phone-enabled vibrator (for $170.00, no less) downloaded the App to her phone, and commenced to vibrate — several times.  Unfortunately, while she was vibrating, the little machine was sending data back to We-Vibe — little tidbits like exactly when she was vibrating, for how long and at what intensity.  N.P. and her lawyers think this is an invasion of privacy, and they’re absolutely right — except for one itty-bitty problem.  The company didn’t do anything underhanded.  N.P. bought the vibrator, set it up, checked all the boxes, agreed to the Agreements and never bothered to either read the fine print or remember that Smart phone Apps are connected to the Internet.  N.P. would have a case if this were the first App ever made and nobody was aware of what Apps do.  It isn’t.  There are millions of Apps circling this planet.  They control everything from your Toyota to your toaster, and most of them are harvesting data from you, the user.  People know this — or, at least, they should — and if they want to have a “private” moment, they might want to do it offline.

But I saved the absolute best for last:

The United Church of Canada wants to get rid of one of its ordained ministers.  The minister in question, Rev. Gretta Vosper, doesn’t want to go.  She’s lawyered up and is fighting the dismissal.  Okay, who cares?  This looks like an internal church matter and not a very big one, at that.  However, the thing that makes this particularly weird is Rev. Gretta Vosper is an avowed atheist.  She has publicly stated, loud and long, that she doesn’t believe in God, Jesus, The Bible, church doctrine or any other religious stuff she’s ever come across.  WTF?  I might be over-thinking this, but it’s my understanding that the fundamental requirement of religion (every religion) is that you believe in God, or gods or some other deity or something.  In fact, I imagine that’s the first question most religions ask, and if your answer is no, the second question is, “What the hell are you doing here?”  Atheists don’t go to church — they’re atheists!  That would be like PETA going to the circus to see the lion tamer after bellying up to a barbecue.  As an atheist, Gretta Vosper should quit The United Church of Canada on principle, and if she not willing to stand by her principles — well — then she’s probably not a very good minister.  So, either way, Rev. Vosper needs to hit the road.

Sometimes, I wonder just how our species came to dominate this planet.