Everybody Panic!

Too many things are happening to recount right now- hope to get back on the weekend & do that.

That's one reason people are flipping out these days; there's too much going on & you don't get to catch your breath, much less process, before something else goes on.

Halloween is just 3 1/2 days away. I'm not ready- my home is a shamble of boxes and things getting ready for pick up by people who are disorganized. Dammit. I can't even find the decorations!

Entertainment is fab at this time of year. Many TV channels are competing for top scary stuff viewership. AMC has been running a great assortment of movies, the Travel channel has the annoying but compelling Ghost Adventurers on day and night, even the Animal channel runs hauntings that have a dog or cat in the story. My kind of television. So this year, that's how I'm celebrating- watching as much paranormal, horror and silly Halloween broadcasting as possible. When I'm not talking someone off the edge.

Is Everyone in One Movie By Now?

In 1975 I was walking on the upper east side with my friend Peggy Michaels, when we were asked to be extras in a movie. It was a terrible tomato thrower called "God Told Me To." There was a sniper on a roof that we were running away from across 2nd Ave. Never saw the movie, but it's in Wiki, of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Told_Me_To

No star was born, to put it nicely.

Then in talking to friends and family this weekend, it came up that each of us had been in a movie or on television at least once. My sis-in-law had won a jury seat on a soap opera and worked there for weeks, sitting in a jury box looking attentive. My brother the cop and I had been on the news a few times and I did 2 Morton Downey, Jr. shows. My husband was a thug on "OLTL" for a couple of years. A local hero was in "The Man Who Fell to Earth". Even my BFF, in the ski towns of New England, made a commercial for television. I pretty much expect my NYC friends and family to have been on tape somewhere. You can't go anywhere without seeing a celebrity in my old neighborhood. But even people in the sticks who never thought of doing such things have done it.

So was Andy sorta right? We may not have been famous, but we have all been on a screen. It was for most of us, less than 30 seconds, not 15 minutes. Maybe it'll end up being 15 whole minutes when spliced together. I hope nobody finds my Downey Shows.

Update: Everything is on Youtube. I walk on at about 3:00 and cross a street, then nearly knock an old lady down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nMZZc93rUo

It Gets Better

Since I'm entirely incompetent in trying to YouTube myself, here's what I can do to join the "It Gets Better" campaign.

Bullying was real when I was in school, and is real now. In grammar school I was the perennial new kid, so was picked on. By 5th grade I was officially the Fat Girl in class. That stayed throughout High School. I was also a geek, a nerd and probably could have been diagnosed by a mental health worker. Other kids physically attacked me as well as verbally. There is something in my character that won't let me physically hurt someone if they do something to me. I will, however, jump anyone who touches or belittles someone I love, or is bigger than the victim. So I acquired the reputation for fighting. It was terrible. In 6th grade I almost went to a girls' detention hall for cutting school. But my education didn't suffer; I read compulsively. I started writing and arting and discovered parts of myself I didn't know existed. I spent a lot of time alone. Luckily, I had a set of girlfriends that hung together and until High School I had my buddies. Some of us did extracurricular things together- I was on every school newspaper, I ran a Career Day at my school, took ballet and karate. There were only 10 in that group of girls, it wasn't like we were really tight, but it was comfortable. We all went to different high schools and that was the end of us.

High school, even the one I went to, is always a terror to the bullied. There are new issues to be tortured over- zits, moodswings, your clothes, your hair, how much money your family has or doesn't- everything becomes a vulnerability. We didn't even speak of homosexuality then. Anyone suspected was just ostracized. If they were gay and smart or funny, they'd fit in with the nerds who sang or the art crowd. If they weren't, they were alone. I and nearly every girl I knew tried to kill ourselves, but thankfully few of us succeeded. It worries me that these days, kids are even more outspokenly mean. It worries me that kids are so picked on that killing themselves is their option, and that they know better how to do it now. Suicide is not painless.

Please, if you feel like suicide is a good idea, talk to someone. Everyone has at least 1 person who loves them, whomever that happens to be- a best friend, a mother, a sibling, whomever. If you get to that point, please talk to someone. You can even call a hotline and talk anonymously. But talk before you act. They're there. I'm here. Email me. I'll answer, I promise. I do care and I get it, I was bullied my whole life.

There are some great YouTube vlogs about this. Go watch
Perez Hilton http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeEunG9M2s0

Or Bryan Africano Boi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV_EXkjI80A

Or a regular gal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IakHThErgSQ

Or a regular guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlYxv23TSQw

Stay With Us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Linh8AQovWk

The Best of Those I've Seen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kQuvvWCCQ4

And this is the original with lots more:
http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject

It does get better. You won't see these people after you graduate. It's the truth. Just ignore it all you can, walk on and get thru it. You'll have strength they'll never dream of having. And remember, you have all the rights of everyone else. It's not that life isn't good, it's that it isn't fair. Just keep on.

Of Lawsuits, Stupidity and Darwinism

My Sis-in-Law Mac was talking about a funny episode when our nephew Thomas was a kid. Mac gave Thomas a LifeSaver and he sucked it into his windpipe. Her sister, who's good in emergencies, jumped all over him, pounding his back. Mac was watching him turn blue. Their mother Alice, ran out the door into the backyard, and was running in circles yelling, "Jesus. Mary and Joseph! " over and over. Finally, after a big blow to his back, he coughed it up and it shot across the room into the sink. Everyone but Alice is alive today. It became just another Thomas Story.

Now, they probably could bring a suit against LifeSavers for not having a choking hazard warning on them. Then, they chalked it up to stupidity and accident. If looked at with a cool eye, that's just what it was.

So how much stupidity are we encouraging when people do stupid things with products and then can sue over it? And in the big picture, aren't we encouraging the survival of the Too Stupid To Live? Why isn't common sense accorded as a responsiblity of a person? Nobody yells at the kid who does stupid things these days, at least not in front of me. They get fawned over like a crime victim should be. When did it become okay to be stupid without consequences? I'm watching children grow up with full entitlement of all their behavior, no matter how antisocial or plainly moronic they behave. How can that be good?

Thomas, once he caught his breath, was hollered at for doing that. He agreed it was stupid, and he apparently never did it again, because he's still with us. He has even reproduced.

But how many of the mollycoddled will make it to the point where their stupidity alone will kill them? How long will that be? The Survival of the Fittest will have the final word. If we've become a world where the stupid will survive to reproduce, are we breeding the morons of the future? Couple that with the fact that the most intelligent people I've known didn't reproduce. Is Idiocracy inevitable?

Tricky TracPhone

So for my birthday, my BFF gave me a tracphone. It's like a bastard child of a phonecard and a cell phone. You pay for minutes ahead of time, then they try to find ways to waste your minutes. That I expected; it's the way of the world, the Satanic Marketing of now. What I didn't expect was for them to appear to turn off my service so I'd have to contact them and they'd want to know everything but my blood type.

This went on for 4 days; I was recharging my phone at first, when the adaptor plug fell outta the wall. Next morning I see this, replug it and let it charge. Day 2, I unplug it but my tracphone is now dead. Black screen, no power. So I email them (already had had to do that, they had my email addy) and they say I have to call. I don't use menus anymore. I wait til the schpiel is over, then see if a human appears. At tracphone you can't do that. You can't talk to anyone unless you have a touchtone phone and you use the menu. So now I email them again. Day 3, they say I should give them a number they can reach me at and what hour to call. Which I kind of go sideways with- but I do it. My BFF tells me she had the same thing happen but they told her she'd shut her phone off. They told her to take the battery out and then put it back in & it should work. Which she did, and it did. They had called her and left a message for me on her machine that morning. She'd bought the phone, and used plastic, so they already knew an affiliated number. I get suspicious. Day 4, my aide, also a TracPhone user, is bitching about hers when I bring this up & tell her all of the above, and she says, yeah, it's a scam to get info on who's got what number and all your pertinent info. She asks if I've taken my battery out, I say no, so she does, and puts it back.. And like a miracle, it's working like normal. What a coincidence. I called my sis-in-law in Jersey, no problem. Later, the landline rings...it's "Maria" and she's calling to fix my Tracphone. She says I must call her to reactivate my phone. I don't pick up the call.

Cheesy line:"I've got their number".

Creeps.

Epiphany in E Minor

Thinking about the music I'm listening to lately, remembering the first time I heard something.. It's like I'm hearing it all fresh. It's been so long, that now it's like a new experience again. A benefit of 50+ years on the planet? I get to fall in love with it twice?

I also realized that there were certain albums nobody stole and they've been a constant presence thru the years. Nobody ever stole Pink Floyd because everyone already had them. Same rule for the Stones and certain Beatles albums. But the personal favorites that nobody had, those were stolen. And so I lost my Yes, my Bowie, my ELP, my Tom Petty and Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash and John Lennon and every Ramones. There were some albums I'd put notes of deaththreats on, and nobody stole those. I just recently gave the last of my albums to my Faux Daughter. She gets the last deaththreated Patti Smith, Pearl, the best Gershwin ever done, some Xmas from the family days... the surviving Doors and Bowies. All good. But I never missed them, they stayed.

It's good to get a second chance, and a second chance to fall in love all over again.

No Justice and No Peace

There is damn little good to say these days. I helplessly watch while people I love suffer. Terrible things happen, injustices abound, good people who try are pushed to the edge. A man I admire had a small meltdown in front of me yesterday. He's a very good man in a very lousy world. A very lousy man (he's a neocon, as if that's a surprise) is smearing another good man to gain a political seat. Too many people have no morality, yet scream they do. Perhaps we should suspect the screamers....

Really, I haven't a clue, a penny or the strength to do more than hang on right now.

It doesn't help that there is never quiet at this building. This is the time of year that you must leave your windows open in order to breathe. From 8 a.m. til 2 a.m. there is noise. Generators, drills, jackhammers, trucks and car alarms all day, rowdy drunks all night. I might as well be back in NYC.

And so I retreat into music and writing. Can't work on my book- I haven't the concentration, my nerves are shot. But I blog and journalize, which help keep me grounded. And thank the God/desses of music, for an outlet. Everyone, just hang on.