Yin Yang the Flowerpot Woman
I come home from work today and find a message on my door that something is violating my apartment complex's standards (standards I was unaware of, but oh well); a mysterious handwritten addendum - "potting pot" was an ambiguous clue, but I don't know if they mean: the mint I am growing that I hung from my little piece of dividing fence that runs next to my stoop, or the potted plants I have on what I thought was a window-sill (an unoccupied level surface anywhere in my vicinity is fair game for something to be out on it as far as I'm concerned), or do they mean the old plastic flowerpots I was going to throw out but are still next to my door because I'm lazy? I hate these little mysteries.
Even more I hate those stupid Enron commercials - the one with all the "whys" going on in the background. I hate them all with the heat of a thousand burning suns, but the one I hate most is the one with the neo-mime in the tin suit staggering around some city's streets. Oh how postmodern and ironic a commentary on... I haven't the faintest idea since I have no idea what Enron is (and I'm not about to go web-searching to find out) - I can't tell from their cutely unintelligible ads.
Mr. Bob O'Reilly is still very exercised over "freak dancing." Well, I can't stand the sight of teenagers (and preteens) pawing each other either. Which is why I don't watch much TV. (Hah! He mispronounced "St. Augustine"! Anyway - and it looks as if the only people who write emails to the show are from Florida. Orlando, St. Augustine, and Marco Island were some of my state's towns whose denizens had their emails featured tonight.) Anyway, he had some woman-spokesperson-something-or-other on who was rambling on about "dialogue" and "expression" and I tuned her out. I don't even see what the problem is here. Twelve-year-olds simulating back-door-action at a "school dance" should be separated forthwith and sent immediately to military school. If there are such institutions left and if they have not been turned into Wholeness-in-Diversity Nurturing playgrounds where the only "lessons" consist of getting boys in touch with their inner girls and girls in touch with their inner lesbians.
This year's Mom-From-Hell quota has finally been filled: some wack-job named Andrea (oh great) Yates (sp?) apparently dispatched all five of her brood. It seemed she was suffering from "post-partum depression" and was "on medication." What medication, LSD? Now, I don't mean to disparage people suffering from mental illness - oh hell yes I do. What is it with women these days? In the bad old pre-feminist days of the frontier, when women were having fifteen live children and ten miscarriages each, and working on the farm dawn-to-dusk chopping wood, carrying water for miles, cooking meals over blazing hot fires, etc., etc., etc., and with nary a Spokesperson fom N.O.W. in sight to Offer Support, and their lives were run by White Men With Guns - and how many actually went haywire and slaughtered their family members? Not many, I'm guessing - sure, maybe it happened here and there, but it was more likely that a tornado, disease, starvation, or bandits were more of a threat than a bummed-out mom. Now, with every mod-con available to help them with their kids (short of anti-gravity lifting devices and robot helpers that look like Hayley Joel Osment) it seems as if mothers are going haywire right and left. Well, the usual media saturation certainly makes it seem so. But excuse me if I think that "I'm depressed" is not a sufficient reason to drown your kids in the bathtub. And I find it hard to believe that she gave no indications that she really couldn't stand it anymore - didn't she even grind her teeth in her sleep? Oh well, what do I know - maybe she just snapped after the three-hundred-thousandth request by one of the kids to watch "The Little Mermaid." And then again, maybe we should go back to treating people with mental problems the way we used to - by "putting them away for a little while." Medicate-and-back-to-normal-life doesn't seem to be working - I am thinking that maybe these drugs "help" depression by ratcheting up the "you're-really-irritating-me" chemicals in the brain. After all, irritated people certainly are more energetic than depressed people.
Speaking of irritation, that is the third time in two hours they have played that Enron commercial. Rrrrrrr..........