My Best Buddy Libby

A few months ago my daughter, who is a certified book hound, turned me on to this app called Libby. This app, coupled with your library card, gives you access to a wealth of audio books, all free of charge.

I cannot tell you how invaluable this has been to my morning walks. As seen in my last post, I have walked every day since May 24th, and I’ve yet to miss a day. I owe this all to Libby. Having an interesting story to listen to makes these walks pleasurable! And on top of that, the walks seem to fly by…1.3 miles is done in the wink of an eye when you’re listening to a good story!

I’ve put away at least 6 books since I began these walks, along with close to 100 miles. I wonder how many books and miles I’ll go through before the end of the year?

We shall see!

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Summer Time Walks

I haven’t been very active this year. Sigh.

When my daughter finished school back in May, I decided to take advantage of my free time in the mornings before I have to head to the office, and get out walking again.

A few years back I came close to reaching 1,000 miles walked in a year. Yet after that great year, my walks started to peter out. I got out less and less, until last year, in 2018 I barely exercised at all.

At the beginning of this year I joined Weight Watchers and lost around 30 pounds. I gave it a rest for a month or two and gained around 10 lbs back. When I realized my girls and I were going to join my sisters on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard in late August, the very first thing I did was re-up with WW for another 3 month plan.

And I started walking. When I saw the MapMyWalk calendar begin to fill up, it became a game for me to not miss a day…I used the same “game”  when I quit smoking 10 years ago. Adding one more day on. And then another.

My distances on these walks isn’t anything stellar…just over a mile each day. I’m slowly working myself up to longer walks, but my back tends to ache. With lots of stretching before hand and a slathering of Icy Hot on my lower back, I can usually walk pain free. Usually, but not always. That’s why I’ve been hesitant to make my treks longer.

And here I am, on the last day of June, with 41 miles under my belt. You know how many miles I walked in May? Only 9. In April? A measly 3 miles. In essence, I’ve walked more miles in June than I did in all the months added up in 2019.

And as for my weight, I’m almost back to where I was when I quit WW. Hopefully I can drop another 30 before I board the ferry in Woods Hole.

Hopefully.

The New Radio Nazi

A few years back I posted about a girl in my office who had total control of the radio. I dubbed her “The Radio Nazi” because she had not a care in the world as to what anybody wanted to listen to…only what she had a hankerin’ to hear. One day it was mariachi music, the next jazz.

At least she played a variety.

My new radio nazi has the “I Heart Radio” app, and she only plays two music categories. 80s and 90s. Problem is, “I Heart Radio” only has about 85 songs in teach playlist. So, on any given day, I will hear Toto’s “Africa” 4 times. Or, I may hear a certain Portugal The Man song over and over and over again.

Or Adele. I fucking hate Adele.

During these times, I have to throw on my headphones and blast my music on Spotify….normal music from the 60s and 70s. Music that makes me happy. And if something is getting repetitive? I DON’T PLAY IT!

She’s going on vacation next week, and I’m going to make sure her fucking little app is dismantled while she is away. Two whole weeks with no “Africa.”

Do I dare to dream?

Goodbye, Stranger

Can you tell I’ve watched “Leaving Neverland?”

Let me start by saying I believe these men, and now I think Michael Jackson is a sick, demented predator, and a total stranger to me.

I won’t be listening to much Michael Jackson music anymore, and that’s a tough pill to swallow. The Jackson 5? Sure. I doubt MJ was making 7 year old boys blow him back then. And I may give a pass to his pre-Thriller music.

Emphasis on “may.”

I am also pissed that so many good memories that include his music now feel somewhat sullied.

When I took a semester abroad in Vienna way back in 1984, I used to frequent a club called Atrium, and I can’t tell you how many Michael Jackson songs I danced to during my weekends at that club. I would spin like a maniac to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin'” and slow dance to “Human Nature.”

I think of my sophomore dorm room walls, covered with posters of Springsteen, Adam Ant, Richard Gere and of course, Michael Jackson. The thought makes me sick now.

Do you want to talk about his song “PYT?”

I want to love you (P-Y-T)
Pretty young thing
You need some lovin’ (T-L-C)
Tender lovin’ care
And I’ll take you there
I want to love you (P-Y-T)
Pretty young thing
You need some lovin’ (T-L-C)
Tender lovin’ care
And I’ll take you there

Nothin’ can stop this burnin’
Desire to be with you
Gotta get to you baby
Won’t you come, it’s emergency
Cool my fire yearnin’
Honey, come set me free
Don’t you know now is the perfect time
We can dim the lights
Just to make it right
In the night
Hit the lovin’ spot
I’ll give you all that I’ve got

Now when I hear this song, all I can imagine is his coaxing some poor, young innocent boy into having sex with him. It’s positively repulsive.

This afternoon I forced myself to watch his 1995 song “Scream.” I used to LOVE this song & video. It’s beautifully filmed, and I always suspected it had to do with all the accusations in the media about his love for young boys, and perhaps even the charges that were brought up against him.

Now I’m almost certain that is the case, and it makes me so fucking angry. Knowing full well he was raping young boys, how could he record a song like this? At the very time he was in the studio and filming this video, he was having sex with boys too young to know that they were doing anything wrong.

What the FUCK???? Just look at these lyrics:

Tired of injustice
Tired of the schemes
Your lies are disgusting
What does it mean

Kicking me down
I gotta get up
As jacked as it sounds
The whole system sucks

Peek in the shadow

Come into the light
You tell me I’m wrong
then you better prove you’re right

You’re sellin’ out souls but
I care about mine
I’ve got to get stronger
And I won’t give up the fight

With such confusion don’t it make you wanna scream
You’re bash abusing victimize within the scheme

You try to cope with every lie they scrutinize

Somebody please have mercy ’cause I just can’t take it

Stop pressurin’ me
Just stop pressurin’ me
Stop pressurin’ me
Make me wanna scream

Tired of tellin’ the story your way
You’re causin’ confusion
You think it’s okay

You keep changin’ the rules
While you keep plain’ the game
I can’t take it much longer
I think I might go insane

with such confusionDon’t it make you wanna scream

Your bach abusin’ victimize within the scheme

You find your pleasure scandalizin’ every lie

Oh father, please have mercy
‘Cause I just can’t take it

Stop pressurin’ me
Just stop pressurin’ me
Stop pressurin’ me
Make me wanna scream

Break down:
Oh my God, can’t believe what I saw on the TV this evening
I was disgusted by all the injustice
All the injustice

With such delusions don’t it make you wanna scream
You’re bash abusin’ victimize within the scheme

You try to cope with every lie they scrutinize

Oh brother please have mercy ’cause I just can’t take it

Stop pressurin’ me
Just stop pressurin’ me
Stop pressurin’ me
Make me wanna scream

I particularly like the line when he sings “This whole system sucks.” You mean sucks like holds you accountable for raping young boys? That system? And as for being disgusted by all the injustice, how about we ask the Robson and Safechuck families about injustice?

You fucking monster. Rot in hell MJ.

My Personal Food Inspector

I eat at my desk almost everyday. I pack my lunch 95% of the month, and I just prefer eating and working rather than huddling in the back room over my lunch. The only problem with this is my food is subject to inspection by my own personal food critic.

One of my co-workers is obsessed with food. She asks me every day what I’m making for dinner, or what I had for dinner the night before. This is fine, but her most annoying habit for me is when she performs her ritualistic food inspection of anything and everything edible that crosses my desk.

“Drinking a La Croix?”

“Soup today?”

“Watchya got there? Thousand Island Dressing on your salad?”

While it might not seem like a big deal, I find it annoying as fuck. I just want to sit and eat my food without her play by play of what’s in my Tupperware. Did you ever read Mad Magazine? Do you remember “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions?” That’s what her comments remind me of. That “no duh” sort of observation.

Sees hard boiled eggs on my desk. “Hard boiled eggs today?” Thankfully I’m not her only victim. She makes the rounds and inspects everyone’s lunch.

What’s worse is we are both on Weight Watchers, and she is constantly asking how I am doing with my points. “Use all your points yesterday???”

No, I didn’t; I almost never eat all my points, and I derive a sick pleasure in telling her how many I had left over each day, because I know she never has any left over.

The other day she got a little scary though. I had tried this new deli a few blocks away that touts “overstuffed sandwiches.” They are really expensive too…$14.95 for a basic meat sandwich. I had opted to get half a sandwich and matzo ball soup for only $11.

Now remember, I’m on Weight Watchers and diligently count points. So, I tasted the matzo ball, deemed it not worth the points and threw it in the trash. Ditto for the top piece of rye on my half sandwich. I was still left with a nice, open faced turkey sandwich and a bowl of delicious chicken broth.

She got so mad at me! How could I have spent that much money on lunch and thrown half of it away? (If a matzo ball and a half slice of marble rye constitutes half my lunch) Her disappointment was so intense it was disconcerting for me.

I won’t lie. I’m sort of glad when she’s out of the office during lunch. Then I can “pig out” in peace.

Facebook…My Political Pulpit

I’m proud to admit that I use my Facebook as my political anti-trump pulpit.

I still post photos of my kids, and my cat, and food I’ve cooked, but at least 3 times per week I will post something that points out what a total and absolute fuck up donald trump is.

There was a point last year where I thought to myself, maybe I ought to cool it on the Resistance posts, and stuck to all the mundane bullshit things that Facebook is famous for. Instead, I used Twitter to push all of my Resistance/fuck trump view points

But then the election came around, and I started to feverishly post lots of Blue Wave Democratic stuff. I felt it was important enough to use Facebook to spread the word.

I know I’ve lost “friends” over the past year or two. Hopeless trumplings who can’t face the truth have unfriended me. A recent one was a cousin of my husbands. She made a snarky comment about how my “blue wave” was nothing but a ripple, and rather than snark back, I told her how thrilled I was that so many people of different cultures, religious backgrounds and sexual orientation were elected, and that I was relieved to see that maybe this country isn’t as racist as I thought.

That’s when she accused me of calling her a racist, I guess because in her mind, she voted Republican, so I must be lumping her in with racists. I was stunned to say the least, because I had not said that at all. I was simply trying to point out a really positive thing to come out of the election that she had called a “Blue Ripple.”

She wrote a very long, scathing reply to me basically telling me how nasty I was, and that she had a grandchild that was mixed (a lot of my best friends are black people). I knew this would receive all sorts of backlash from my fellow resisters, not to mention my husband, so I deleted the post. She then posted on my Facebook page, as big as you please, “why did you delete my post?” which I also deleted.

Then she unfriended me. I could care less, personally – she’s not my family. She’s considered a kind of matriarch for hubby’s side of the family, and Facebook was one of the only ways he could communicate with her, and now he can’t. Oh well. Let the baby have her bottle. She also didn’t send us a Christmas card. I guess we are totally written off.

With all the new Russia information coming out, and lies about the wall and the trump shutdown, I feel it is my duty as an American to post stuff on social media…both Twitter and Facebook.

I have relatives who voted for trump, and I secretly always hoped that over the past two years they have come to regret that vote. But I don’t think they have. I think some of them still support trump and I cannot even begin to tell you how much this breaks my heart.

Hopefully soon, Mueller will bring an end to all of our suffering. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting and #Resisting

 

My Travel Tantrum

This morning a Facebook friend of mine posted an article about how travel can make for a more tolerant/accepting individual. She was like, “go get a passport and get out there!”

I won’t lie. This kind of angered me. I found it to be not only elitist, but snobby as well. The cost for a passport is $145.  I’d need to live on the New York/Canadian border to be able to afford any travel requiring a passport. And that’s for a single adult. If my family feels like coming along on some international trek, we’re talking almost $600.

I’d rather blow $600 on Disney…at least I’m getting something other than a little book with a shitty photo in it that I’ll never be able to afford to use.

To tell people who are narrow minded, who have never ventured far from home, to expand their minds through travel is a fucking pipe dream. I’m guessing they’ve never traveled much because they don’t have the money to do so.

I see tons of people I know on Facebook who are always traveling. It’s a mind boggler for me. I get two weeks vacation each year, and each year our family has to select a destination that we can A) drive to and B) afford lodgings for. Plane travel is out of our budget and probably always will be.

So the thought of jetting off to other cultures to open my mind? I’m glad I was able to travel when I was younger. I’m open minded enough. One person responded to her post about visiting local cultural festivals and museums if you can’t afford to travel, and I agreed with that.

My money needs to be earmarked for things like groceries and prescriptions and college funds. Passport? That’s a lottery win extravagance.

 

A Crooning Commute

My drive into work today was quite pleasurable. The weather sucked, and traffic was the same that it always was. I usually listen to Howard Stern on Sirius during my drive. But he was in repeats today, and I could do without 30 minutes of Ronny or Memet.

But what made it fun today was my iPod decided to work.

I have trouble with the iPod I inherited from my daughter. I was used to her Nano, which I could operate with ease, but this iPod is flaky. Sometimes it will play. Sometimes it requires the internet. Sometimes it needs me to put in our username and password. Sometimes it plays songs I don’t remember uploading to the device.

This morning I had added an audiobook from Librivox, and when I got in the car to play it, as usual, the iPod was asking for username and password. But it was also playing. While I couldn’t navigate to the audiobook, I could listen to music.

For my 30 minute commute I shuffled to songs I felt like hearing and belted out lyrics with sheer abandon. And I noticed something. My voice is rusty.  I don’t get the opportunity to sing much. Hubby rarely plays songs I like or know, and if he does, singing along is discouraged. And most times while driving, I’m listening to talk radio or my girls are listening to their music.

When I think back to all my days in the high school chorus and performances in musical theater, hearing all the croakers I hit was a bummer. I won’t lie. So what’s a gal to do other than blast music on a regular basis while alone in the car to give those old vocals a workout.

It’s my 2019 resolution. One of them, anyway.

I’ll Be Back…

WARNING: This blog post deals with matter pertaining to the female anatomy, where I speak openly about menstrual matters. Proceed at your own risk.

Back in July I gleefully blogged about how I suspected I was entering menopause, mainly due to the fact that my evil uterus had not cursed me with a single menstrual cycle since January of 2018.

I spoke too soon.

On November 30th, the day before my birthday, I found traces of blood on the toilet paper. After almost a year of zero activity, I sullenly put on a pad, which segued into the use of a tampon. I only have regulars and slims in the house now for my daughters, because I thought my need for Super+ had finally (and thankfully) ended. The flow was very light and thin, so while I was bummed it was manageable and not the end of the world.

Happy fucking birthday to me.

After a few days it seemed to stop. And then, it started again. But this time the blood was really red, not thin at all. Sigh. And last night I felt that all too familiar gushing feeling…things were really kicking in.

But this morning all seemed in order. Manageable, but annoying. With tampon in and pad on, I drove to work. Once I arrived at the office my co-worker and I were talking about the snow, and I felt it. That more than a gush feeling…that hemorrhaging feeling. While I waited for my co-worker to finish her sentence, I grabbed for my purse and with thighs clenched as tight as can be, waddled to the ladies room.

After a quick hazmat clean up, I hurried down to CVS (thankfully only a block away) and stocked up on Super+ tampons and overnight sized pads. I also texted my daughter to bring me in a black pair of slacks just in case. Sigh.

I’m about due for my yearly gyno check up. I’m curious as to what my doctor will have to say about this.  I know what I have to say. This sucks big time. All year long my husband kept saying to me, “how long has it been? You must be psyched!”

And I was. I really was. Goodbye menopause. I hope you come back to me real, real soon.

Baby, This Ban’s B.S

This recent ban of the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” has me a little miffed. I won’t lie… reading the lyrics in this day and age, one can interpret the situation in a very different manner than I’m sure the writer’s original intent was.

That being said, I now call for the ban of a few other songs that are way more questionable than this holiday duet.

 

 

 

 

 

Blurred Lines
While this is a great song to walk to the lyrics are without a doubt sexist as fuck.

And that’s why I’m gon’ take a good girl
I know you want it
I know you want it
I know you want it
You’re a good girl
Can’t let it get past me
You’re far from plastic
Talk about getting blasted
I hate these blurred lines
I know you want it
I know you want it
I know you want it
But you’re a good girl
The way you grab me
Must wanna get nasty
Go ahead, get at me

Why is a song where a girl saying no is a “blurred line” and that he “knows she wants it” not receiving the same uproar of “Baby it’s Cold Outside?”

Lighting Strikes
I have always questioned the message of this song. All he wants to do in get in this poor girl’s pants.

Nature’s takin’ over my one-track mind (ma-me-aah, ooh)
Believe it or not, you’re in my heart all the time (ma-me-aah, ooh)
All the girls are sayin’ that you’ll end up a fool (ma-me-aah, ooh)
For the time being, baby, live by my rules (ma-me-aah, ooh)

When I settle down
I want one baby on my mind
Forgive and forget
And I’ll make up for all lost time

If she’s put together fine and she’s readin’ my mind (stop)
I can’t stop (stop) I can’t stop myself (stop, stop)
Lightning is striking again
and…

There’s a chapel in the pines
Waiting for us around the bend
Picture in your mind
Love forever, but ’til then

If she gives me a sign that she wants to make time
(stop)
I can’t stop (stop) I can’t stop myself (stop, stop)

 

What the serious hell???? He can’t stop himself if “she’s put together fine.” And there’s a chapel in the pines waiting round the bend….in other words, bang me now and we’ll get married, baby. Maybe. It’s really a sick message disguised around a catchy tune. 

As for me? I’ll still include “Baby It’s Cold Outside” to my holiday playlist. If these other songs are still allowed airtime, I don’t see why that one shouldn’t get the same consideration.