A Capital Offense

Wenceslas Hollar - Larger capital letters on a hatched background- A & H (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Between my day job and my blogging, I do a lot of typing.  This has created an intimate, love-hate relationship between me and my keyboard.  My biggest gripe is with the “caps lock” key.  Whoever put it where it is on the keyboard deserves the Darwin award in engineering. The key is in a prime location, right near the “a” and “s” keys, and yet it’s rarely used. Because of that, I hit it all the time when I don’t want it. The ratio between the number of times I actually want all caps and the number of times I get them is the same as the number of women who want to be with Brad Pitt and the number who actually are.

I taught myself how to type the summer my best “neighborhood friend” dumped me for cooler girls and then took typing in high school, I pretty much stick to the hunt and peck, or at least the "looking at the keys” school of typing.  So when I’ve been on a roll, typing like a beaver, I don’t know what I’ve done until I look up at the screen.  Half the time when I do, I discover that my sedate essay on the importance of hyphens is blaring its Upper Case lungs out at me like trillions of teeny Beliebers at you-know-who concert.

The CapsLock effect makes the most innocent message sound like it came from Charles Manson:

WHOEVER LEFT THEIR KEY ON MY DESK, PLEASE REMOVE IT OR I WILL HAVE TO GIVE IT TO RECEPTION.

WHERE DO I GIVE THE $5 FOR SUE’S PARTY?

THE WOMEN’S BATHROOM RAN OUT OF SOAP: NOTIFY MAINTENANCE.

Each time the CapsLock button is accidentally hit, I have to re-type the entire message in lower case, like a granny telling those young people to pipe down. The irony of the whole thing is that, by the time I get through going back and re-typing what looks like maniacal tirades about the need for more staples or the fact that I will be out on Friday, I am so incensed I feel like RE-TYPING THEM AGAIN AS MANIACLE TIRADES. There, that felt better.    

So, what to do?  Keep on re-typing like a maniac, or change jobs?  I could compose those teletype messages about breaking news at the bottom of television screens, or write those scary legal clauses that give whatever website you want to join the right to your first-born child, or, if you don't have a first-born, your second born.  Or maybe I could just become a VERY EXCITABLE PERSON. 

Capital idea.

Careful What You Wish For

NYC Subway 6 Train (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I married late, and spent years dating and hoping to find The One. One weekend, after I moaned about my single status even more than usual, one of my more philosophical friends said "it could be worse." I was not in the mood for this crasher of my Pity Party and gave her The Look.

That Monday morning started out like any other. I was on the subway, as usual. It was packed, as usual. The train came to an abrupt stop and someone bumped into me, as usual. I said nothing, also as usual. Then came something unusual. Or at least uncommon.

     "Say excuse me!" said a male voice.

I did what I always do when there’s conflict on the subway. I looked down at whatever I was reading, which, in this instance, was my shoes. (This was in the days before mobile devices.)

     "I didn’t touch your girl!" said a different male voice.

While focusing intently on the "current events" page of my reading material, namely, the new scuff mark on the toe box of my pumps, it began to dawn on me that this exchange was happening very near me…and…just possibly, was about me.

     "You knocked right into her!" said Male Voice #1.

I turned my head surreptitiously and saw, out of the corner of my eye, two men, quite near each other and, more important, me, glaring at each other.　 More disturbing, everyone else in the area was watching, some openly and some by "reading" their shoes, a la Me.　

　 "I told you, I didn’t touch your girl!" Male Voice #2 shouted.

The two men were now practically touching noses – not to mention the aforementioned toe box.

MALE VOICE #1: "I saw you! Apologize!"

MALE VOICE #2: "I TOLD you, I don’t got nuthin’ to DO with your girl!"

As I exited the train, I actually felt kind of good. Not because the only show of gallantry I’d ever experienced just made me feel violated, and certainly not because I had just gotten off seven stops early. I felt good because I finally appreciated how wise my friend had been. Being single still sucked. But it really could be worse.

PICTURE THIS

I got my first smart phone recently and went a little crazy taking pictures with it.  Here are some of my favorites that I took in Central Park:

                                                    Shadow Wedding

                                                    Office Upside-Down Cake

                                                    Shadow Couple ask for Directions

                                          Archway to Heaven

SUBWAY READING

NYC Subway 6 Train (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I board the subway every morning.  And when I do, I'm frequently not in the best frame of mind.  Blame it on the cheap instant coffee I drink or the hoards of people around me sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, but I'm not always the happiest of campers.  I always bring reading material with me, but if it's too crowded, I don't have room to read it.  As you can tell from that last sentence, when I read, it's real stuff, like newspapers or books.  That's because I refuse to read anything longer than an email address on a screen the size of a postage stamp. (For those of you too young to read anything on a screen bigger than a postage stamp, "postage stamps" are little colored pieces of paper people used to put on bigger pieces of paper when they wanted to send messages to other people without having to put them in a bottle and throw them out to sea.) In fact, sometimes it's so crowded even the postage-stamp-sized screen-readers don't have room to hold up their postage-stamp-sized screened devices. Sometimes we're squeezed together so tightly we all look like overweight, overdressed versions of The River Dancers without the rhythmic stomping (and a lot of unrhythmic toe stomping). 

On those days, I entertain myself by reading the ads on the subway car walls. Some days, it can be as involving as a novel.  To show you what I mean, let me take you through the ads that I saw on just one morning a couple of weeks ago. The ads will be annotated with the comments I made about them in my head, which is where I most frequently make comments.

Ad #1
Ad: "The Gift of Happiness - Jobs come and go,"
Me: Do they know something I don't? (My morning haze tends to make me a little paranoid.)
Ad: "physical beauty fades,"
Me: Give me a break! It's 8am on a Monday morning!  (See paranoia reference above.)
Ad: "markets rise and fall,"
Me: I wouldn't know. I never have enough money to invest in them. (Before my second cup of coffee, my self pity runs a close second to my paranoia. After my second cup, it's self righteous indignation alternating with juvenile humor until I clock out.) 
Ad: "but the benefits of philosophy last a lifetime."
Me: Really?  'Cause I know a lot of philosophy majors who have even less money to invest in the markets than I do.
Ad: "The School of Practical Philosophy"
Me: Talk about a contradiction in terms. Maybe instead of Plato they teach how to unclog drains.

Ad #2
Ad: "At age 80, who doesn't need a face lift?"
Me: Ok, now this is getting personal. (Continue to see paranoia reference above).
Ad: "We're refurbishing the F and G stations."
Me: Nice try, but I'm not buyin' it.(Continue to see paranoia reference above, coupled with self righteous indignation.)

Ad #3 This was actually part of the MTA's "Poetry in Motion," with posted poems.
Poem:"The Good Life - When some peope talk about money, they speak as if it were a mysterious lover who went out to buy milk and never came back..."
Me: As if?!
  
Ad#4
Ad: "Spinlister, the global bike share.  Let your bike pay for your dates."
Me: Great! Now I have to flashback to my single days?

Ad#5
Ad: Protect-A-Bed.  Beware of bedbugs! Protect yourself!
Me: More flashbacks to my single days?

Ad #6
Ad: Bramsonart College - create you own games!
Me: Will these references to my single days never cease?!

Ad #7
Movie poster: "Love is Strange"
Me: Now I have to be reminded of married life?

Ad #8
Ad: Finger painting  play dates in east Village are tough. Bounty is tougher. New York tough."
Me: I'll tell you what's tough. Being called old,poor, possibly unemployed and with a checkered past in front of a bunch of overweight, overdressed unsynchronized River Dancer wannabees before I've had my second cup of coffee. If I see one more annoying ad, I'm going to do some very serious, motionless glaring.

Ad #9
Ad: Do you smile in your selfies? If not, come see Arnold Jankowitz, DDS.
Me:Oh, I'm smiling. And glaring. Seriously.

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FATE WATCHERS' KARMA COUNTING

English: High priest offering a sacrifice of a goat, as on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur; from Henry Davenport Northrop, "Treasures of the Bible," published 1894 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. So it seems an appropriate time for a blog that's a bit more philosophical than usual. Even though I was raised with a good Jewish education and continued to practice my religion as an adult, years ago, when I was having a tough time of things, I looked into eastern philosophy. I found its emphasis on things like love and tranquility very comforting. But there were other concepts, like karma, that were a bit more difficult.

According to one school of thought, karma involves not just the moral consequences of a person's behavior, but a general balancing of positive and negative experiences. Thus, for every negative experience a person suffers that is not a consequence of bad behavior on their part, they will eventually experience a positive experience that they did nothing to earn in order to "balance" their karma. Conversely, for every positive experience a person enjoys that they did nothing to earn, they will eventually experience something negative that was not due to their behavior to balance that karma. One book I read stated that even small things, like a person saying "thank you" or smiling, or, conversely, frowning or being rude, could be forms of positive or negative karma.

When I first read the book, I didn't think much about it. But soon, my pre-eastern thought processes caught up with me. I had always been a big, if not obsessive, "counter." Would that piece of cake be "worth" its 380 calories? That dress be worth the month's salary it would cost? My fiber cereal clean my intestines well enough to justify eating a breakfast more depressing than the newspaper it tasted like?

Once the wheels began turning, I zealously applied them to this tantalizing new concept of karma. I began trying to calculate exactly how positive and negative karma in my life would balance out. For example, if the coffee guy smiled at me and said "good morning," would that be balanced by my bagel having more calories? If a saleslady suggested the perfect outfit as soon as I walked into a store, would some bozo have to "balance" that by spilling coffee on it on the subway ride home? If my husband told me how great I looked, would I now have to pick up the dry cleaning even though it was his turn? (Ok, that wasn’t a hypothetical.) If the IT guy wasn't incomprehensible or condescending, would it take him two more hours to fix my computer? (If he charges by the hour, that’s not a hypothetical, either. Also, even though I bought into the whole karma thing, the idea of an IT guy I could like and understand was just too "out there" for me.)

In short, in my obsession to get the best karmic "deal" (as I said, I had a good Jewish education), I created my own "Fate Watchers" karma counting point system. I got so paranoid about the opportunity cost of receiving positive karma that wasn’t "worth" it, I freaked out when people afforded me the barest of common courtesies. If someone thanked me for anything more than once, I’d tell them to stop it. If they insisted I deserved the credit and started to thank me again, I’d hiss "Stop it. Please!" (Two can play that game.) When I found myself profusely thanking a guy on the street corner for telling me I was going to burn in eternal hell, I knew something was wrong.

So I decided to get back to my Jewish roots. These are the gems of wisdom I found:

Proverbs 27:1:  Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.

Job:11:12:  But a stupid man will get understanding when a wild donkey's colt is born a man!

Genesis 3:19: From dust you were made, to dust you shall return.

My mother (she's Jewish, so this counts):  For someone so smart, you can be pretty stupid. 

What did it all mean?  To me, the message from Above was pretty clear: "You're dumber than the mud I made you from, so stop trying to 'game' me and just behave yourself!"  Humbling as it was, I knew that this tough love was right, and then and there, I gave up all attempts to keep track of my karmic account balance.  Unfortunately, the guy on the corner never got the memo on that.

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STOP THE MOTION, I WANT TO GET OFF

Bugs Bunny's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve never created animation (does a wheel with three pictures on it and a pin in the middle count?) and I’ve generally thought that, as an adult, I no longer had any interest in cartoons.  All that changed last week, when I went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.  Most of the exhibits there involved animation, covering both the technical and creative sides of the field.  Chuck Jones, creator of many classic cartoons like Road Runner and Bugs Bunny was featured prominently. What I realized when I went through the exhibit is that the classic cartoons, whether the Road Runner, Bugs Bunny or Bullwinkle, are not just for little children, but for big ones, who (allegedly) are much more discerning and  better behaved.  Several of the cartoons were showing, and as I watched, I realized how smart they really are.

I even had a chance to become an animator – well, a stop motion animation maker – kind of.  There was a section at the museum that supplied some backgrounds and movable pieces that one could place on a computer screen and take 12 consecutive shots.  The computer would digitally edit them together,and voila! You had your own home (or museum-) made stop-motion film!  The films were a lot of fun to make (I made two), but had an interesting feature.  After clicking the “record” button, if you didn't move your hand away fast enough, the shot would show your hand moving the pieces. I had to do one of my films over twice before I had the timing down well enough so that my hand didn’t show in any of the shots.

The museum had another fun interactive feature.  It would record a sort of video of a person moving and then make a flip book out of it that the person could purchase.  For those of you who don’t know what  flip book is, it’ a book with a series of pictures that, when you flip them, give the optical illusion that the figure in the pictures is moving.  I had a video of me throwing a kiss at the camera.  Well, that’s what it was supposed to look like.  Instead, it kind of looked like I had just coughed or sneezed and was throwing my germs out to the camera. What can I say.  I don’t have a lot of experience being Miss America or a winner on American idol. I was going to purchase my flip book anyway, but forgot to.  Then again, had the salesperson seen it, museum personnel might have tried to quarantine me.

Just to show you that I wasn't making up my two brilliant stop motion films, here they are (don't blink or you might miss them):

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