* I went out yesterday and got the catkins (mostly) off the roof. For the back, I hauled out the ladder and climbed up onto the back roof (my sewing room has a flattish roof - it used to be a back porch, I think, that was later enclosed). For the front, I used my pole pruner to hook what I could from the ground and pull it off. I also pulled all the crud out of the gutter and flushed it well with water from the hose. (Which also means I know the hose is hooked up and functional, just in case of stray firework this coming week).
I'm surprisingly sore today but I guess I used my upper body in a way (levering the rest of me up and down from the roof) that I'm not used to. Not sure whether to do the workout I was planning or not...it's also v. humid right now and even in the house it feels a little sticky.
(Added, while this post was still in draft: I did the dvd workout. It was probably a good idea; some of the sore spots are less sore now)
* A lot of talk about the "death" of Toys R Us and while it's a complicated scenario with a lot of moving parts and a lot of stuff involved, I admit I'm still surprisingly sad about it.
Granted, I was a young adult by the time Toys R Us got into the neck of the woods where we were (though we did have Children's Palace, which was similar), the whole idea of a "toy superstore" is one of those things that I just liked the concept of as a kid (and also, as an adult): that when your family takes you there, it is *to get toys.* It is not, for example, being taken to the Gold Circle because your dad wants Turtle Wax or a push broom or something, and you beg to look at the couple of aisles of toys (and you're unlikely to get anything, especially if you don't have money saved up for a specific toy). It's not hoping the local drugstore or grocery store will have something cool on its pathetic half-aisle of toys. You knew the toy superstore would be well-stocked, it would have stuff you couldn't find elsewhere, and you would probably get something if you were going.
A lot has been made of the end of Toys R Us, some discussion that kids don't play with actual toys as much any more, in favor of "virtual" things....I don't know if that's true or not. But if it is true, it makes me kind of sad. I mean, yes, I can see parents LOVING it, particularly a particular *kind* of parent I remember from my childhood - I had friends who were not allowed to take their toys out of their bedrooms lest they "mess up" the house. (We were allowed to play anywhere and everywhere with our toys, provided we picked them up and didn't do things like ram RC cars into the legs of tables and scratch them). In fact, we had boxes for toy-storage (Lego, and Fisher-Price stuff, and other things) in the family room; it was just an accepted fact (by my parents) that my brother and I would want to play there. But again, I knew people who wanted their houses to look like no kids lived there...
I've also talked before about my concerns that if you're just manipulating pixels instead of actual blocks or Barbie shoes or toy cars or whatever, that you're less comfortable with "stuff" in this world - and so maybe less likely to make stuff (cooking is a type of 'making stuff') or be comfortable in lab settings or doing low-level home repairs, or the like.
Also, the Luddite part of me (Didn't Comcast have a big outage this week?) wonders what kids whose toys are all online or in their phones do during extended power outages, or service outages? Or what when the company hosting the "virtual toy" decides to close up shop or stop supporting that thing?
I dunno. I like stuff that is *real*. (I have similar issues with toys in cereal boxes being replaced with a code for some online thing.)
I also wonder, if it's part of what I perceive as a "hollowing-out of the middle" - that wealthy kids, especially those living in fancy parts of big cities, will still have access to cool toystores, while everyone else in the country will have to manage with whatever the local wal-mart deems saleable. (And yes, yes, I know: Amazon, but - you cannot inspect the thing beforehand and I've especially heard of cases of Barbies with questionable quality-control in how the faces are painted and the like just being sent out, and sometimes it's a pain to return stuff, especially if it happens to be a third-party seller, and then there also is the issue of third-party sellers buying up everything that is cool or desirable and re-selling it with jacked up prices. I mean, I guess it's always kind of been such - I remember Cabbage Patch Kids - but it seems to me it's easier to swoop in on the internet and buy out stock and then reprice it, and do so with little labor on you.)
I haven't been in a Toys R Us in more than 15 years (the one in Sherman closed up a long time ago; it is now an Aldi) but still its closing made me sad.
(And, of course, if the trade war really heats up? There may be a lot of families having either "imagination Christmases!" or Christmases where the parents scour the resale shops for things - given that a large proportion of toys sold now are made in China. Perhaps that will just drive more kids to apps, I don't know)
* And for that matter: Why not have fun prizes in things adults use? Little toys in boxes of oatmeal? Stickers under the box lid of laundry detergent? I suppose SOME adults would either feel patronized by that or would complain about "but they're probably charging me more in order to do that*"
(*I am sure the decline in cereal box toys is tied to cost cutting at the companies, and maybe also the rising price of plastic? Though I remember lots of cereal-box toys in the oil-embargo 1970s)
But yeah. I think there should be more fun things about adulthood. Maybe some adults wouldn't be so all-fired serious if their shampoo came with a cartoon character on the bottle.
* Talking with someone (a retired museum director who moved down here because the woman who is now his partner is here) about stuff. Wow, people be crazy: he was talking about how, in the place he most recently lived, he had gotten what sounded like death threats because the museum he was involved with promoted an evolutionary view of life. And also he had a credible threat that a religious group had offered a $20,000 "bounty" to anyone who could adequately "disrupt" a talk/display on dinosaurs.
I guess I grew up in kind of a bubble. Going to a "mainline" (read: more theologically liberal) church and also having parents who were scientists but...I am just gobsmacked. That's not loving your neighbor! I mean, I KNOW there were things, like in pop culture, my parents disapproved of - but their way of dealing with it was to try to make sure *my brother and I* were not exposed to it, at least not when we were at an inappropriate age to be processing that stuff. They found stuff to substitute (so: we saw lots of Disney movies, lots of the older "all ages" type movies....I was, in fact, well over 17 the first time I saw an "R" movie, and even then I was kind of surprised at what it contained...and I admit I went back to the "safer" world of old movies and Disney-type movies, and I still prefer that kind. But I wouldn't try to prevent someone from seeing those other types of movies).
And then I remembered an incident from shortly after I moved here: a group of Tibetan monks were traveling the country, doing cultural performances: they did chant, and they also made the traditional sand-paintings. (And yes, Tibetan monks, so: Buddhist.) The local school was gonna take the kids to see them do the sand painting, but a very small number of parents objected, fearing the monks would "convert" their kids. (nevermind that Buddhism isn't an evangelistic worldview - and it's really more a philosophy than a religion - and nevermind that the monks didn't speak a word of English) and the school system just cancelled. Because of a few unhappy parents. (I remember back in my day? We had a few parents in the school system who objected to Hallowe'en; they were told that if their kids were absent that day they wouldn't be officially counted absent but that was the only concession made; even though I claim the 1970s hated children, I guess that's one case where the school leadership looked at it and went, "Do we want to make 98% of the children unhappy to appease 2% of the parents" and decided, "No")
But really. I think we are maybe beginning to slide down a path where people see something they dislike that isn't directly hurting anyone* and instead of just avoiding that thing, they actively work to get it shut down.
(*Yes, I suppose some of the extremely conservative Christians might argue that accepting that dinosaurs lived long before humans or whatever the concern was puts one's soul in danger but.....most Christians don't believe that our relationship with God is that weak and fragile and I would say a large number of mainline Christians either openly accept, or at worst, ignore, evolution)
I dunno, though. I don't know how serious B. was about the "death threats" bit but...yipes. And yeah, I admit I worry about the occasional student and their attitude, and I worry about things like that extremist "preacher" who showed up on campus, started spouting racist and misogynistic stuff, and when the campus cops said, "Hey, you said you were just coming to pray for the campus, you could be trying to incite a riot here" he kind of got up in their faces about it and it was a few days of ugliness in the news when really my campus was in no way at fault. (And I later on found out that this is a tactic: you go to a campus and are offensive enough you get escorted off, and then you sue, claiming a breach of freedom-of-speech)
I think the pushiest, loudest people are unfortunately going to win because people like me don't really have the tools (or, honestly, the intestinal fortitude) to keep fighting blow for blow.
* Also, I realized something about me, about how I operate, and about how I try to interact with people, and it makes me slightly sad:
I often make jokes (in real life or on places like Twitter.) I try to be clever and funny (and I try not to be mean, though sometimes it happens). A lot of times the jokes I make are either covering up genuine feelings (when I am feeling inadequate, I often use self-deprecating humor) or an attempt to get someone I "like" to notice me.
And I realized, this is, like a lot of other things I do, a legacy of how I was as a kid: I'm fundamentally being the unpopular kid on the sidelines of every group, clowning a little, acting up a little, maybe even smartmouthing a bit (but out of the grownups' hearing, because I'm a goody-two-shoes AND a wuss) and I'm doing it largely out of the desperate hope that the "cooler" kids will (a) notice me and (b) approve of what I've said, and that maybe somehow I will get a few minutes of acceptance.
And the other weird thing is: I think of everyone else as the "cool kids." So if you are reading this, and you have ever felt uncool? Congratulations, because (for whatever it is worth) I STILL think of you as cooler than I am.
I'm not sure how I'd even think of myself if I ever was forced to drop the "deeply uncool kid" part of my self-description....
(And yeah, I have something about "still hoping senpai will notice me" in my brief Twitter bio and I put it in there as a joke, but like a lot of jokes, there really is a kernel of hard truth in there...)
* And edited to add: I also make jokes a lot, or share funny things, because that's one way of me trying to convince myself the world's not falling apart. Like, after the conversation with the guy before church about the "$20,000 to 'disrupt' the opening of a dinosaur exhibit," after I got home, I had to look up (and ultimately share) a bunch of what are sometimes termed "dad jokes"
(example: "Why can't you hear a pterodactyl in the bathroom? Because the 'p' is silent" - and that is one of my all-time favorites)
And in a way, I think it's like the kid (often, stereotypically) the middle kid in a dysfunctional family who clowns and jokes and it's kind of a peacemaking thing - (or else they get in trouble, to deflect attention from whatever tire-fire is happening at that moment) and yes, a lot of the time I do feel like the world is a big dysfunctional family, and like it's on me somehow to try to make my little corner of it better, or to distract people ("Look, look over here! Look what I can do!") from the bad stuff.
And I don't know where that really comes from - my own family was in no way dysfunctional and I was never really thrust into a peacemaker role in it (though I have, at times, been thrust in that role in friend-groups). I do think some of it is ME trying to distract myself from the things worrying me with funny things.
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