My Buddy
The New York Times Wirecutter column writers test all manner of things and tell you which ones they think are superior. It’s dangerous reading, because I find myself discovering things that I thought I could live without, but now, 2000 words later, I am persuaded that I must have – everything from skin care to household appliances.
The Trader Joe’s Hyaluronic Acid Serum ($9.99) was a good deal and my skin certainly is more moist (I SAID WHAT I SAID, JONNA) and radiant. Well, not exactly radiant, but it does help, and it’s only $10, so I call that a success.
Then there are the larger items. I snort and roll my eyes through the Wirecutter columns where they suggest my next handbag or pair of loafters should cost $750. The $100 socks that they loved will not be nestling in my underwear drawer next to my Bombas.
But they do get me to shell out some money every once in a while. Enter the robovac. Look, I’m a lazy sow, and I have been working a lot of hours, so I was under eminent threat of a dustbunny takeover. The dustbunnies were looking more like, in the immortal words of author Florence King in her classic Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady “slut’s wool.”
So Black Friday sales arrived, and a week later, so did my little carpet-cleaning friend. We had a rocky start, where he refused to charge for a bit and then kept turning on and off repeatedly, playing a merry, tinkling tune each time. We worked through our issues and soon he was off and whirring around my little home.
The surprising part was that I developed such feelings of tenderness for my tiny vacuuming buddy. He seemed so tentative and lost and easily flummoxed. My heart started opening toward my plastic friend as I watched his misadventures.
The bentwood legs of my Ikea Poang chair and the stand for my desk have proved the be his nemeses – he high-sides onto them and sits and spins, wobbling precariously, until I come and lift him off. Half the time he beelines straight back to the obstacle that just derailed him. I know, little buddy, I know. We don’t always do what is best for us. Me, I bought cheetos the other day, knowing that I am absolutely irresponsible in the face of their dusty orange goodness.
I can hear him clunking around in the other room and I start to worry. Is he caught? He can fit exactly under the bathroom shelving unit, but he can’t always extract himself. Is he ok? Is he doing a good job, or is he going to have to be sent out on his mission again tomorrow?
He reminds me of myself, bumbling into situations, trying to be helpful, and causing havoc where I didn’t mean to. I don’t always know where I’m going or what I’m doing. Sometimes I just need a friend to gently lift me off the ledge, even when they know I’m likely to go right back to where they rescued me from.
Happy Holidays, y’all. I hope you are warm and happy and surrounded by love.
Weird Pride Day 2025
The other day while I looking for something else (per usual) I found this old, poorly exposed photo of myself at BlogHer 14. That was 10 years ago but it all came back to me in a rush – the thrift store maternity dress (I was not pregnant, but it fit), the giant Etsy hobo bag with the too-long straps, my flappy bingo arms. And yet despite all my weirdness, there I was, looking happy with one of Luvvie’s tweets, probably the same day I met her and fangirled all over her for the first (but certainly not last) time.
It turns out today is Weird Pride Day! That’s a new one on me. Happy Weird Pride Day, people, my fellow weirdos. You know who you are.
Weird Then, Weird Now
I remember being at Mom 2.0 at some fancy hotel overlooking the Pacific and seeing all the beautiful mom-bloggers looking like glossy ponies with their perfect hair and curated looks, talking about their brand deals and thinking “Yeah, no one is ever gonna want me for that.”
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t really very jealous and it didn’t make me like them any less – it was just a club I knew I could never belong to. I have always been on the side of the weirdos, the oddballs, the quirky drama, band and literary magazine kids. And during blogging, I tended to fall in with those whose blogs exposed their oddness rather than built their brand, same as mine did.
Weirdness is a Superpower
Yesterday at jury duty, during jury selection, the judge asked if anyone had a reason that they would not be able to complete the 3-4 day trial. One man, who I had spent about 30 minutes chatting with in the jury room, said he was worried because he had panic attacks and just wanted the judge to be aware.
It’s pretty brave to say in a room full of 40 strangers that you have suffered from panic attacks, I think. During the next break, a small group gathered around him, talking about how panic attacks had affected them. A giant burly bald dude, a retired female nurse, a guy in a sharp wool suit. His bravery had given them the courage to speak freely about their experiences and to talk about what had worked for them (a peppermint inhaler, in case you want to try that).
That’s the world I want to live in. A world where the things we think of as oddities and weakness become our superpowers to connect people and show them that they’re ok, that we’re all ok if we’re doing our best and not hurting others.
Thank You All
I’m so glad for the weird bloggers I met back then and still love now. Too many to list. You took me under your wing, bingo arms and all, and showed me that, even if I weren’t a glossy pony, I was ok in your eyes. I owe you my thanks and my mental health. I am forever grateful.
The Worst Scammer Ever
One of my side hustles is officiating at weddings. I advertise primarily on Craigslist, province of the looney, quirky, and strange, so these events are often small, informal, last-minute affairs. But I truly enjoy it. I get to see nervous, happy couples commit to one another. I get to write a nice ceremony. And I get paid for something that doesn’t really feel like work.
In early February, a woman named KC emailed me to do a very basic ceremony for her – basically just signing the paperwork. She seemed absolutely strapped, so I gave her a great deal – I would meet her and her party at a local deli and do the damn thing for $75, since I was driving that direction anyway.
I showed up at the agreed-upon time, 2 pm, got a cup of coffee, and waited. And waited. Damn me for not insisting on a deposit, I thought. Stupid Craigslist, I thought. At 2:15, I stood up and walked out, texting KC “I left.” The message showed as not delivered. Whatever.
A few minutes later, she texted me. “For some reason, my last message did not go through. I am on my way.”
“I already left,” I replied. “Find someone else.” Part of me had a little twinge. What if I ruined this woman’s chance to get married? Eh. I was already miles away.
“There’s something wrong with my phone,” she said. “I sent you $100 via Apple Pay. Please come back.”*
I blocked her number.
I got to H-Mart and parked my car. I looked at my messages. There was a message from another number.
“Sue, this is HAROLDLYNN. We sent you $100 via Apple Pay. Can you meet us at the audit office.” (In Washington, for some weird reason, you get your marriage paperwork at the County auditor’s office. But KC had assured me she already had their paperwork, which she would have HAD to to get married that day, since there is a 3-day waiting period. None of this was adding up.)
HAROLDLYNN had more to say. “We can send you more money. Please meet us.”**
I blocked HAROLDLYNN’s phone number.
KC texted me from yet another number. These people clearly had a surfeit of phones. “You need to send us our $100 back if you aren’t going to show up.” I blocked that number, too.
I had realized they were likely scammers, even if I wasn’t entirely sure how the scam worked. I looked it up on Reddit when I got home.
It’s def a scam. If you were to pay them a chargeback would immediately occur and you would be out $100 and the $100 you rec’d thru Apple pay would disappear
I looked in my Apple Wallet. Indeed I had $100 from a transaction from a Chime card. I thought it would disappear but it was there the next day, so I reported it to Chime, where the puzzled CSR said “Well, there’s nothing I can do for you.” I had to try hard to make him understand that all I was doing is letting them know about the scam so they could use the info I had – the transaction number, the many phone numbers – to possibly catch the scammer. “Well, I talked to my manager, and there’s nothing I can do for you,” he said. Man, it’s hard to get good help these days.
Last night – almost a month after the original incident, I got this text:
Apparently they sent me a real $100 and now it is mine and not theirs. Haha! Without even trying to, I scammed the scammers.
It strikes me that they spent a LOT of time to try to possibly earn $100 of ill-gotten gains. I hope the find a job, because I don’t think they are cut out for Apple Pay scams. Personally, I wouldn’t mind someone scamming me like this in the future, because that $100 is still in my account.
*I realized later that she had briefly blocked my number, so she could say she couldn’t get in touch with me, so I would leave and she could then text me and pretend to be frantic and send me the $100, probably from a stolen credit card.
**HAROLDLYNN wanted to send me more money so they could get more money back. Their initial plot was foiled when I offered them such a good deal to officiate their wedding.
Whew, this is complicated!
This is What Democracy Looks Like
Wet. Very loud, cheerful, and wet.
Happy As Kings
“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.” R.L. Stevenson
The pharmacy line at my local Safeway forms in the hair products aisle. From one end to another, hair products. Pomades, dyes, shampoos, conditioners, smoothing sprays, anti-frizz cream, things to calm your hair, plump your hair, fix your tragic hair issues.
Standing there waiting to pick up a prescription, I had a thought.
“Remember soap?” I thought. Remember when the products in the bathroom were just toothpaste, bar soap, and shampoo – and that was it? Maybe a jar of Camay cold cream if you were fancy.
Now the onslaught of things has my head spinning. Why are there so many things? Do all old people feel like this? One minute you have 4 choices of bar soap (five if you count Lava, the soap with actual rocks embedded in it), and the next you have 300 types of hand soap in scents like “Rain,” “Fresh Linens,” and “Spring Morning,” all of which have the aroma of a urinal cake at a biker bar.
For me, I think it started when I went to Grocery Outlet twice in one day. Grocery Outlet is where weird, odd and quirky products go to die. When you walk in, you never know what you are going to find. Banana-Blueberry Cheerios. Vegan cheese slices with jalapeños. Seven varieties of cauliflower crust pizza.
You have to read every product label carefully because things that may seem at first to be familiar products almost always have some twist. You think you’re getting your regular dish soap, and you get it home and find that it is chile-lime dish soap.
It starts to be overwhelming, all of the endless variety. I was in the coffee aisle and I spotted coffee pods that were strawberry chocolate coffee flavor and I broke down sobbing. “No one needs strawberry chocolate coffee!” I howled, clutching my sideburns.
No, I didn’t really, for two reasons: one, because I’m not on an episode of Real Housewives where people have inappropriate outbursts over stupid things in public, and two, because I trimmed my sideburns too short to clutch. But what I did do is shake my head sadly, thinking about the wasted human effort involved.
I mean – someone thought of strawberry chocolate coffee, and got someone to approve making it. They put together a project plan and a budget and got a project manager or two and had meetings and a timeline and a calendar and deliverables and created an identity and picked a color scheme and developed packaging and developed the product and tested it and marketed it and went into full production and packaged it and put it on trucks and sent it around the country and WHY? WHY? It’s strawberry chocolate coffee, people, someone should have stood up and yelled “STOP! WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE? THIS IS MADNESS!”
But no one did, obviously, and now this sad product sits sadly on Grocery Outlet’s sad shelves, selling for $2.99 (soon to be $2.47, then $1.99, then $1.47) and making me sad.
Perhaps I shouldn’t let strawberry chocolate coffee make me so sad. It’s just the sheer muchness of things, so many things, the endless gaping needs we create for ourselves and then attempt to fill. We’re like Navin in the movie “The Jerk”:
“I don’t need any of this stuff. I don’t need this. All I need is this ashtray…and this paddle game…and this remote control, that’s all I need…and these matches. The ashtray, the paddle game, the remote control and these matches – they’re all I need. This lamp…the ashtray, this paddle game, the remote control, matches and this lamp. That’s all I need.”
When I was living in Gladis (my 23-ft Class C RV), I got bounced out of the world of muchness, simply because I had no room. If I wanted a new coffee cup, I had to get rid of one of my other coffee cups because there was no space in the tiny cabinet for another.
I remember walking around a street fair in Phoenix, looking at the arts and crafts and thinking “I don’t need…anything.” Everything was so bright and shiny and dazzling, and so unnecessary to me at the time.
Then I moved into my little single-wide mobile home and it seemed so big, and stuff started to encrust on me like mussels on a pier piling. I have three teapots and one teakettle in this house, for one person. Of course two of them are for sale in my Etsy shop, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are here, taking up space. I battle against stuff, but stuff gets the better of me.
I’m not sure what I’m exactly trying to say. Maybe come over for coffee and we can talk about it. I bought some that is pistachio-coconut flavor that you’re just going to love.
In This Together
First, an apology – yeah, I don’t know what is going on with the comments section. Apparently it keeps kicking people out after they type one letter. And it is so challenging to express yourself fully in just one letter, isn’t it? I went in and fooled around with the settings, so maybe that will help. I was able to post a test comment with no problems. If that didn’t fix it for everyone, we are at the end of my technical abilities. If it persists, I will talk to WordPress and try to get some help.
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I have been thinking about interconnectedness a lot lately. How we all belong to each other and to everything. We think we throw things “away” but there is no away. Our impatient outburst becomes someone else’s bad day. Our happy smile lightens the burden of a stranger who needs one small piece of hope.
It’s enough to flatten you if you think about it too hard. Five hundred years ago, someone went down the wrong street and met the person they would fall in love with, and because of that wrong turn, you are here now, reading this. Whoa, dude.
My sister was the last of the family to abandon California (*sniff*) and I went to visit her in her new South Carolina home. She happened to have moved to the same county where my father’s mother’s family had first arrived in the United States in the 1700s. She asked “Do you want to go visit the cemetery where our ancestors are buried?” and I said yes, of course.
Side note: it is in Laurens, SC, which is not, as I assumed, named after Revolutionary hero and abolitionist John Laurens (who I only knew from “Hamilton”), but Henry Laurens, a wealthy slave trader and rice plantation owner because of course.
Our first ancestor in the US was Edward Garrett. Many of the men in my family still bear the name “Garrett” as a middle name.
This is the headstone of Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth. Look at Edward Garrett’s wife’s name. Ann Owsley. An odd last name. The same odd last name as my best friend from high school in Ventura, California, 2,414 miles away (more or less) from the spot I was standing when I took this photo.
I contacted Benton Owsley and knew he would have his geneaology handy because he is LDS (Mormon) and that stuff is important to them because Mormons like to go around baptising everyone, living or dead, so we can all party in heaven together. Some people hate that idea, but I think it springs from kindness. I mean, if that trick works, by all means, snatch me up into Mormon heaven. The lack of coffee is going to make me mad, though.
ANYHOO, Benton checked the records, and sure enough, my high school BFF and I are cousins from 7 generations ago, all the way across the continent. When Edward and Ann met, they never knew that, almost 200 years later, two teenagers would spend hours racing around in a MG Midget, going to the beach, and eating pop rocks while telling bad jokes.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is. Be a good ancestor? Be decent to each other? You never know what will happen? All of the above?
Do you have any stories of interconnectedness that you can post in the comments section, if the comments section will let you post?
Good luck to you all!
The Art of Being a Pain
I started doing The Artist’s Way again the other day. It is a book on reclaiming your own creativity, a 12-week course with readings and activities. Millions of people have bought the book. It’s very helpful in getting back to creativity you might have shelved due to fear, criticism, busyness – all of the reasons we give ourselves.
My spiritual center offer The Artist’s Way as a course every winter. I chose not to take the course, but, inspired by friends who are taking it, I dusted off my book and started reading it and doing the exercises on my own.
One of the exercises is a weekly artist date, where you take your solo self out to get inspired in some way – by art, music, nature, architecture, antiques…anything to get your brain warmed up. For my first week date, I chose the local art museum, Tacoma Art Museum, for the simple reason that the library had free passes available (bless libraries).
In addition to several floors of paintings, photography and sculpture, TAM also has a floor of art glass. Tacoma is the home of Dale Chihuly and many glass studios, including an incredible glass program for high schoolers that I support by volunteering at their events. The glass exhibit is my favorite part of the museum.
One of the permanent displays is a piece by Anna Skibska, a Polish artist. It’s a large, very fragile random net two pieces made of fine strands of glass, a few feet wide, maybe 3 inches deep, hung suspended. It shimmers, almost invisible, then visible in the light. It’s an incredible, beautiful work.
It’s also, I realized, as I stood there, an incredible pain in the ass. So fragile, so ungainly, practically impossible to move or transport without breakage. It took an artist of some fortitude to create the work and insist on its launching into the world in all of its difficulty. “This is my work and it is worth the trouble,” it says.
I was struck by all the times I believed I was being too difficult, asking too much, feeling pushy – or cutting myself off before I dared to do any of those things.
“Oh, it’s ok,” I have said, over and over. How many times have we said that about our work? Oh, it’s ok. I guess nobody would want to see it/read it/understand it anyway. I don’t want to put anyone out. I don’t want to trouble anyone. I can see the difficulty in my work. It’s not normal. It’s not regular. It’s not something that is going to appeal to many people.
On and on.
And yet, behold Anna Skibska’s work “Two Sunbeams,” hanging there beaming all over the place, being glorious. Being a huge pain in the rear. Both of those existing at the same time. Imagine that. Imagine being that bold and brave.
The work is worth the effort. Believe it.
Drill, Baby, Drill and the Energy Emergency
Have I ever mentioned that I spent the first six years of my life living on oil company land? Or that my dad was in the oil business for over three decades? I have drill, baby, drill in my blood. And yet even my dad told me as a child “We’re going to need to think of some other ways of doing things.” He imagined power coming from the tides, something engineers are working on.
And he wasn’t alone. Big Oil, while still continuing to produce oil and gas at a faster rate than ever, is dropping billions each year into non-fossil fuel production – everything from solar and wind to using algae farms that feed on CO2 and produce energy. Consulting firm McKinsey recommends that they continue these investments. Today, wind and solar comprise 14% of US energy production.
Everyone seems to have gotten the message but Donald Trump, whose reasons for opposing renewables are a wild basket of speculation and weirdness. They include the belief that wind energy is the most expensive form of production (it’s not – it’s the cheapest new source of energy in the US), the idea that windmills cause cancer (wrong), that they kill birds (they do, but so do cats), and that they’re just ugly (I think they look kind of cool, myself).
Trump’s administration might gut solar tax credits promoted by the Biden administration, and the 10% tariff on goods coming from China likely won’t help either – much of our solar equipment is imported from there. But others speculate solar power has become too ubiquitous, cheap and popular for targeting it to be a good policy decision.
Fun fact: the five biggest wind-producing states are red states, and many of the country’s 170+ solar facilities are located in red states as well.
Massive new server farms for artificial intelligence and blockchain operations are creating incredible demand for electricity (estimated to be as much as 16% increase this year). One way to avoid this rise might be to stop using AI for every stupid thing under the sun, like Yahoo generating summaries of my emails automatically (why is this necessary?)
We’re also going to need a lot more electricity for air conditioning as we set new temperature records every year due to fossil-fuel-induced climate change (yeah, that’s a bit tongue-in-cheek).
For all our investment in renewable energy, we have made barely a dent in our greenhouse gas emissions in the US.
We may well be in an energy emergency. It’s just not the kind Donald Trump is talking about.
The “Energy Emergency” and the Endangered Species Act
All of those Executive Orders (EO) that Trump signed on his first moments in office contained horrors too numerous to mention or follow. I decided to look at just one part of one EO and collect the information I could about it. And here I am, sharing it with you.
The EO declaring an energy emergency is first of all, completely unnecessary. US domestic fossil fuel production was at an all-time high under existing laws. Energy produced in the US last year was about 75% fossil fuels and 25% renewables like solar and wind.
An important part of this EO is how it impacts the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA). Both laws were passed as part of the environmental revolution of the 1970s.
Since the ESA passed, no listed species has gone extinct. This is despite the fact that species extinction is happening at a rate estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.
In addition to protecting species, the ESA and MMPA protect the habitat the animals and plants occupy. This interactive map shows areas protected under these acts.
What will the EO do to these laws?
First, it prioritizes energy production over species protection. The assumption had been that endangered species had priority over economic activity, unless there were huge economic impacts, in which case the “God Clause” could be invoked and an exemption issued. This was a rare occurrence. The EO turns this idea on its head.
In fact, it demands that meetings take place every 30 days to put pressure on the agencies involved to grant exemptions to allow energy production.
These exemptions have 20 days for initial determination of eligibility and 140 days total to resolve. So endangered species might be thrown under the energy production bus in less than five months. Even when no exemption requests are pending, the committee must meet to identify ESA and MMPA “obstacles” to energy infrastructure.
Why should we care? These laws helped bring back the bald eagle, the grey whale, the sea otter and the gray wolf. Most of our medicines come from plants. Fewer than 5% of known plant species have been tested for medicinal benefits, and there are thousands of species that haven’t been named yet.
All parts of our ecosystem are interconnected, and each species loss has consequences that cannot be predicted.
Thanks for reading.
Image by Gerhard Bögner from Pixabay
Happy New Year
I just realized that I wrote two posts in 2024 and they both had to do with poop. Let’s turn over a new leaf and try to make 2025 more posty and less poopy, shall we?
How have you been, my people? 2024 was a weird one for sure. I had so many work projects fall through that I was idle most of the year, and I’m not great at being idle. Somehow being busy makes being busy easier, so being idle tends to make me, despite my best intentions, lazy and boring. Also, not having money coming in made me want to avoid spending unnecessary cash, so I stayed close to home for the most part.
I did get to travel to Illinois to pick up my brother-in-law for a road trip to Kentucky to see my great-niece get married. On the way, we stopped in Indy to see beautiful Casey, formerly of Moosh in Indy and presently a kickass sage and all-around decent human. Just like always, we were able to get very deep in very little time, despite not having seen each other for 4 years.
She told me about Recovery Dharma, a group similar to AA, but with a focus on Buddhist principles and meditation, and where all addicts meet together in one group – people who use alcohol, drugs, sex, food, shopping, anger, hoarding, gambling all in one big group of “wise friends.”
“That’s great,” I thought. “For her.”
Fast forward a few months. I had awakened after another long evening of drinking wine and snacking myself into a stupor as I watched Netflix. I thought “Maybe I could use some help with this food addiction problem.” With no meetings in my local area, I attended Recovery Dharma for the first time online.
The Recovery Dharma practice, in brief, is:
- Refrain from addictive behaviors and intoxicating substances
- Develop a daily meditation practice
- Study Buddhist principles
- Attend meetings
- Offer service to others
- Cultivate community with others on the path
- Write detailed inquiries about our addictions
- Keep learning and growing
So in addition to thinking about food mindfully, if I was going to do the program right, that also meant quitting drinking again. I quit publicly on the blog about a decade ago, but that resolve had gradually weakened and gone by the wayside, and many, many bottles and boxes of wine had come and gone since then. I wasn’t thinking of drinking as a problem, but I wanted to follow the practice as closely as I could.
Doing the practice meant sitting on a meditation cushion (ok, a memory foam pillow – I’m not fancy) for a while every day, something, it has turned out, I quite enjoy.
But here’s the thing about mindfulness. It’s a real pain in the ass. You actually have to feel your feelings (eeew, icky, I KNOW) and look at your automatic and repetitive patterns and decide if what you are doing is serving you. All the time. No wonder so few people do it. No wonder it’s helpful to have a group of people on the same path doing what you’re trying to do.
But here’s the other thing. The other day I was sitting at the stoplight on a normal suburban road with trucks and gas stations and electric wires and strip malls. And I was just there. And then the world switched into magic mode, where every glint of light reflecting off bumpers became a beautiful star and where every person in every car was dear and beloved and where the world was filled with perfection, right then and there, 10/10, no notes.
It was like I had become Emily in the third act of Our Town and was finally realizing life while I lived it. Like I had come home into the world, finally.
Of course that revelation faded, but the more I practice, the more I find myself in moments where my thoughts calm and the buzzing in my head subsides and I get some beautiful clarity. These times are like lily pads on a pond. Sometimes I can leap from one to another, but more often I fall in and have to swim for a while. As I practice more, I can trust that there will be another lily pad sooner rather than later.
So as usual, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I think I am doing something right. In the immortal words of Dory, I’m gonna “Just keep swimming.”
Suebob's Red Stapler 