Home Alone Revisited - Aug 18, '02
Hi again everyone,
I’m between email clients on about 3 different computers right now. Therefore the family-spam list is fragmented, resulting in several mailings which were a day or so apart. Between mailings I took the opportunity to edit the silliness just a trifle. Later, I realized that a cousin is on more than one list and would have received both versions of “home alone” – she must be terrorized to think she will have to endure being spammed every time I edit a story. One and only one deletion to the lists will be made for her.
The reaction to “home alone” has subsided and I can say that although swift, it has not been pretty nor sympathetic - not that I had expected different. Sharon immediately called to see if she needed to send help – the tone of her concern was “I didn’t believe any idiot would …!” One of the women from work wrote she had laughed so hard at my ineptitude that her dogs downstairs became upset and commenced to bark and howl. One of the non-volunteering cooks has written that if I were hers, she would have simply put a case of Alpo and a bottle of Picante on the counter and then left guilt-free for her vacation.
I was stunned. I hadn’t realized that stuff on the counter was for me – although I had been surprised that our cat and dogs relished the Picanti so.
A member from my crew wrote to explain that I had not been invited over for a BBQ because his wife had other plans. My first thought was that the young man has given up all hope for any future raises but then I remembered that he had mentioned that he and his wife finally had a day off together and school has started. I’ll ignore the slight but I don’t want to hear about the fulfillment of his wife’s plans when he comes in on Monday.
In a more positive vane, one co-worker wrote to suggest that I get a five-gallon bucket of Chlorox and soak my stuff over night. Given Chlorox’s appetite for fabric, I am concerned that his solution might transform my dingy yellow briefs into sparkling white thongs. I’ll live with what I’ve got.
The same co-worker asked that I send the family-spam to his home computer. Perhaps he fears that family-spam might rank right down there along side porn-sites as far as the company’s network Nazis are concerned. The correction will be made.
And of course, I heard from that certain sister-in-law. She started out by assailing my shameful, unlimited capacity for self-humiliation. Next she chided me for failing to meet even the minimum survival standards set by her husband. She travels unconcerned because her husband can fend for himself. His culinary skills include the preparation of cereal, grilled cheese sandwiches, cheese omelets, cheese toast and a mean (cheese?) burrito (the Alpo/Picante cuisine is sounding better!). All that cheese – I love Mike like a brother, so now I’ll probably worry about him croaking from a chronically constricted colon. And finally she closed by pointing out that laundry is not that hard. She charged that with typical stereotypic gender control, men ruin their clothes on purpose in an effort to keep the women doing it for them.
Naw, I did it because I don’t know any better. And her issues of gender control are disingenuous. I have only this old, shop-worn argument to offer: Men are borne of woman, nurtured by woman, reared by woman, trained by women, educated by women (until about the 9th grade when we began to encountered the odd brainwashed male teacher or two) and because of the female’s final say in the mate selection process, bred like cattle by women. In other words, in our species the male is selected, molded and civilized by the female. Therefore, the absence of any critical survival skills such as the culinary arts or domestic sciences in the male must be the result of an intentional, conspiratorial omission on the part of the sisterhood in order to preserve the male’s lifetime dependence upon, and obedience to, the female gender.
I rest my case and now I need to rest my keyboard – to say “Bye” to the spam for a while.
Take care,
Dingy in Phoenix