Not Entertaining

We took a few days away from town to go to the mountains of Shenandoah County, VA. One of the perks of going away is that there is no TV. We read a lot and watch movies and DVDs of old sitcoms like "I Dream of Jeannie." I find Jeannie to be absurd, but entertaining and it's okay that it's absurd. Jeannie is a genie who has magical powers. She can give her master, an air force Major, x-ray vision and I don't have a problem with it. It's not supposed to be based in reality. It isn't trying to be. It is fantasy. But there are movies and TV shows that are attempting to be entertainment, that are more realistic in their story lines that are so outrageous that they deserve to be banned from the airwaves.

One such example is a loathsome movie I suffered through last night called "Are We There Yet?" This "film du toilette" is about a young man who owns a sports memorabilia store who falls for a woman he sees who happens to be "hot" as my five year old would put it. He decides against pursuing her when he sees she has kids. Then she has car trouble and he rescues her and then begins this ridiculous relationship between them. She continually uses him. He allows it. The climax comes when she needs his help to get her kids to Vancouver where she is working because their father can't keep them. The kids are barbarians. The woman is a hateful shrew. This poor man is abused beyond the scope of anything realistic. Is this really what a family comedy has become? Do we really want:
1. Boys to only think of girls as sex objects?
2. Girls to think it's okay to treat boys like their servants?
3. Boys to be abused and mistreated by woman who use their looks to get what they want?

I truly cannot comprehend why any self-respecting actor would associate them self with such drivel, especially one with children. People who participate in the production of this dreck should be flogged.

On the TV side, there are offerings such as Nickelodeon's "Drake and Josh," the story of a musically talented boy and his manipulative stepbrother. The movie is targeted toward the "tweener's of today. If you have children between 10 and 13, ban this show from your home. I mean it. Here's a recent storyline. Drake or Josh win a chance to parachute from a helicopter (seriously). They ask Mom. She says no. They go anyway. During their ride the pilot gets knocked unconscious, they lose a parachute and end up jumping together into the ocean. Where to begin? First, I may have only majored in History, but I believe that there are a couple problems with the whole parachuting from a helicopter thing. First, if the main propeller didn't chop you into tiny pieces, the one on the tail would and that would only be if you could manage to stay conscious as the helicopter got to a safe altitude for parachuting.

Then there's the jump into the ocean. They just happened to land exactly right so they didn't lose consciousness AGAIN! And they were rescued, even though they had no floatation device.

I get the point that they were trying to prove. You should listen to your parents. They know what's good for you. It seems a pretty distracting way to get that point across to a young child. The point was missed on my ten year old. All he cared about was how cool it would be to jump out of a helicopter!!! "Drake and Josh" is banned from the house now.

I am pretty flexible when it comes to what my kids watch. I try to watch things with them and help them understand any stories that are complex. I don't generally ban movies because of profanity, but I don't believe that it's right to allow a small child to watch an R rated movie. They aren't ready for them. I also believe that it is my responsibility to ensure what my kids watch is appropriate. I also believe that people who produce entertainment for children have a responsibility to them as well. They shouldn't create mindless, slapstick entertainment for my kid and fill it with messages that encourage, sexist, racist and stupid behavior. Kids are smart and deserve better. People who make this garbage hoping to rake in a buck are not smart. They are greedy. Greed is not an admirable quality.

Glue and Heat

My little circle of friends is in a bit of turmoil right now. One of our glue people is awaiting results of a biopsy. This is very difficult to be a part of. I find myself wondering what to do, how to act. You know who your glue people are. They're the ones that hold everyone else together. This comes from the 90's sitcom, "Mad About You." You can search IMDB for more information. I am not meant to be glue. I don't think I want to ever be the glue outside of my own little family. I am more like shiny paper. I hold just fine when the glue is fresh but as soon as the glue dries, if bumped, I am apt to fall right off. But I realize there are times when the glue needs to be the paper or the glitter, or the foam shapes. So I will try to be the glue a little bit.

The weather is miserably hot. We were supposed to go away yesterday to the mountains in Virginia but we postponed our trip because of the heat. The house we are using has no air conditioning and with severe allergies and a little asthma, we decided to let the last wretchedly hot day pass in the comfort of our air conditioned home.

This is not how summer is supposed to end. Summer is supposed to end with fresh fruit and tomatoes, finally ripe, ready to buy and eat everywhere. It's supposed to end with the scent of new crayons and new clothes and new backpacks for Kindergarten. Instead it smells like dying grass and sweat laced with fear.

Say a prayer for my friend.

Right and Wrong

Every weekend, I sit at the pool and listen to an acquaintance complain to me about his spouse. Two months of enduring this agonizing moaning has made me wonder about our perceptions of right and wrong. I'm not talking about the big right and wrong; the ten listed in the bible, the ones that put you away for life, but smaller stuff that can get on your nerves. I pose to you a question: What if you stopped seeing these things as right or wrong and just started viewing them as "alternative?"

Take the dishwasher. Many people have a specific way in which they put dishes in the dishwasher. My husband loads from back to front, I load from front to back. I contend that neither way is wrong because the dishes are getting in the dishwasher where they are automatically cleaned and dried. Front to back, back to front; who cares. Bottom line is, they're in there.

Then there's the matter of putting the dishes away. We have a drawer for utensils but my husband often puts the utensils in the silverware drawer. I used to spend precious minutes searching for missing spatulas until I figured out where they were. I would be annoyed, move them back in a huff and spend a few seconds calling him a bone head or some other such minor insult in my head. Then I unconsciously started looking in the silverware drawer for the missing implements. The placement went from wrong to alternative. I now have identified all the alternative placements that my husband uses when he unloads the dishwasher and I'm much happier for it.

Household division of labor can be a very contentious topic, and I think it's because we are all stuck with this idea of "my way or the highway." How much happier would our homes be if we just accepted that everyone has their own way of doing things? As long as the task is completed, that's the most important thing.

Reading Order

I'm sure someone would say the order in which you read the parts of your Sunday newspaper say something profound about you. Here is my reading order.

1. I read a feature called "Tell Me About It." It's an advice column that is in the Sunday Source section of the Washington Post. I enjoy the writer's cutting, to the point advice.

2. Next I read parts of the magazine section including Date Lab, Gene Weingarten's column, "Below the Beltway," and Jeanne Marie Laskas' column, "Significant Others." Date Lab can be very humorous, especially when the dates are disastrous. Gene Weingarten always makes me chuckle, and Jeanne (I can call her by her first name because I think if she knew me, we would be friends) always hits home to me in her column.

3. I switch to the Style section where I enjoy features like "Reliable Source" where I can read about who was where with whom. I also read "Ask Amy," another advice column. It's comforting to know that some people are so moved by their own lives they feel the need to write to a total stranger and seek guidance.

4. I move to news and read Metro so I can read how many people were slaughtered in DC and PG county overnight during the latest DC Metro Police "All Hands on Deck" initiative.

5. Finally, I get to the front page. By now, it's probably 10:00 pm and I am barely conscious. Probably better that way.

Structural Deficiencies

Imagine, if you will, that someone came to your home once every other year and thoroughly inspected it from top to bottom. Imagine, at the end of one of those inspections, if you were notified that your home had structural deficiencies that put it at risk of falling apart. What would you do? Would you wait two years to fix those issues that put your home in jeopardy? Very doubtful. You would probably take out a loan, or use your savings or hit up your parents and fix the problems as quickly as possible.

Then why doesn't the government act efficiently when faced with a similar situation regarding our nation's infrastructure?

Think about your neighborhood. I live in an association where certain covenants require a level of cosmetic maintenance of all properties. Chances are you do too, or you at least maintain a certain measure of tidiness in your yard so you don't offend your neighbors. You also probably clean your house regularly, paint a few rooms every couple years, clean the carpet, reseal the wood floors, recaulk the tub, etc. You do these things to keep your home safe and comfortable. Businesses do the same thing. Yet the government doesn't.

Our bridges, highways, schools, dams and other municipally maintained properties are old and crumbling. We add trailers on the grounds of our crowded schools to avoid construction costs. We dot our roads with pothole patches to avoid complete resurfacing. I have no idea what scary stop-gap measures are taken to fix other infrastructure issues that affect the power grid or water treatment facilities.

I lived in Minnesota on and off for 20 years of my life. I watched with utter horror on Wednesday when the 35W bridge collapsed. I made my calls to my siblings, especially fearful for my brother who is two years older than me and studying for his master's degree at the University of Minnesota right now. Thankfully, as a family, we suffered no losses on Wednesday. But we all lost a little of our sanity. Who hasn't thought about the number of bridges they drive over everyday and started saying little prayers in exchange for safe passage? The Department of Homeland Security was quick to state that the bridge collapse was not an act of terrorism. I disagree. I am terrorized daily by reports in the news of crumbling schools in the nation's capital, of decrepit neighborhoods in Baltimore, of unfilled promises in New Orleans. Can we continue to fund activity in Iraq to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year at the expense of our own well being?