Category: Relationships

Oh No, Not Jerry Springer

On December 11, 2009

I had a project due today so this is going to be short. What do you mean, “Thank goodness?!!”

The funniest thing I saw today was also about the saddest. I was having my lunch break at home and decided to watch the end of Perry Mason. I always liked the way Perry tricked the guilty party on the witness stand in the last few minutes. You might be interested to know that Perry Mason plays on KPTV Channel 12 in Portland every day at noon, and has been running for 150 years consecutively. It’s still in black and white, and still has a ton of commercials informing people who have been injured in an accident that they need to call the law firm of B. Ann Ambulance Chaser to get due justice in the form of wads of cash, and it doesn’t cost a penny for a consultation, because they are in your court. Nice play on words.

On the way to getting to Perry Mason, I stumbled on Jerry Springer. Common decency told me not to linger, but I succumbed to curiosity when I saw the title of the show, “My cousin left me for a Tranny,” or something like that. I shutter to think what a Tranny is, and I don’t have time to look it up, darn it. Besides, it was the cousin part that caught my eye. Every time I have the misery of lighting on this show there’s always someone having relations with his relations. It’s moms and daughters with the same boyfriend, or a stepson marrying his stepmother.

I could understand it if we all lived on a deserted island and there weren’t any mates except family. But in the United States of American we have a zillion people desperate for a boyfriend. Why do these people have to stick with their sisters and cousins?

Normal people don’t even get along with their families, much else want to climb in bed with them. But still I gazed on to see a little squirrely guy with hair in cornrows and a too big white shirt with a floppy tie trying to incite the girlfriend and the Tranny to get in a wrestling match. The girls were on opposite sides of the stage, and there were about a dozen security guards on alert to standby and watch the fight for a few minutes before breaking it up. The audience was chanting and shaking their fists in the air, trying to incite a riot.

The two women lunged at each other like it was on cue and started scratching and slapping, pushing and shoving. Jerry Springer, who had a big logo on the screen but just in case you didn’t realize this trailer trash display of tempers was his show, he was holding a sign in the hand he held his microphone that said, “JERRY SPRINGER,” was walking around with a bemused smile, hoping for good ratings.

Well, security finally broke up the brawlers, and the little pip-squeak of a boyfriend had a smirk on his face like the cat that ate the canary, and I moved on. Perry was a lot more civilized, and at least I keep my lunch down watching him. And that Paul Drake beats a shrimp cousin any day.

Adventures in the Parking Garage

By Suzanne Olsen

On December 8, 2009

In Relationships

I went to my orthodontist today to get my braces off (YIPPEE), and pulled into the parking garage behind an SUV with a Thule on it (pronounced tool-ee and it’s a long storage gizmo that tapers down in the front and sits on top of the rack on your car in case you don’t live in SUV-ville). The car started under the height clearance sign, you know the one hanging from chains to let you know if your car is low enough to make it through the garage without scraping, and the Thule banged right into the sign – not just touched it but pulled it along for a ways.

I said to myself, I said, “Hmmm, surely that car isn’t going to head up the ramp.” But I was wrong, because it kept going and did fine until the ramp hit the next floor and leveled off. The Thule scraped the concrete ceiling. Still the driver forged on. The ceiling was lower about every six feet, and the Thule hit the next low spot. This time I could see it being pressed down into the roof of the car. The car kept going, but more slowly, and I could actually hear it scraping on the next low ceiling spot. A boy about ten years old sprang out of the car as it inched forward. Finally his mom pulled the car into a parking spot that was in the middle of nowhere – about as far away from shopping and the dental offices as you could get. I passed her and she had a strange look on her face – like she didn’t think there was anything amiss about what was happening.

It was mighty entertaining watching her scraping and pressing on. I thought about it to whole time I was in the orthodontist office (did I mention I got my braces off today?), and here’s what I think was going on. Her husband put the Thule on the car and went hunting. When he came home he didn’t bother taking it off because he was too hung over. I know he was hung over because I used to live in a rural place and rode horses throughout the year except during hunting season because drunken hunters would shoot the horse right out from under you, thinking it was a deer or rabbit or squirrel. I think the wife was spited because her husband was hung over and didn’t take the Thule off the car, and when it knocked into the sign, she just kept going anyway.

Her son, meantime, was freaking out. “Mom, you didn’t clear that sign, stop the car.” To which she said, leaning into the steering wheel, “Those signs don’t mean anything, it will be fine. Besides, we’re running late.”

That was enough to quiet the kid, though he was gripping the door handle with white knuckles, bracing for the impact. She kept going up the ramp, thinking to herself, “I hope we do hit the roof. That’ll show him.”

They were doing fine until the ramp leveled off at the next floor. The Thule scraped the ceiling, and the son started screaming, “Mom, oh my gosh you hit the garage ceiling.” To which she said, “It was just a little scrape. It will be fine.”

When it scraped even harder the second time, the kid screeched at the top of his lungs, “Mom, you’re going to pull Dad’s Thule right off the car. You need to stop.” To which she replied, “A little scrape isn’t going to hurt the Thule. Besides, we’re almost there, it’ll be fine. To herself she was thinking, “I hope it rips right off the roof and takes the rack with it. He’ll think twice about coming home hung over next time.”

When it hit again, the kid sprang out of the car and told his mom he would not get back in unless she parked. Which she finally did, and then I drove past and she gave me that odd look.

I couldn’t stick around to see how the story ended. Did the son get back in the car? Did she rip the Thule off on the way back down the ramp? Did she decide to divorce the worthless bum and take him for all he was worth?

Or was she just the most incredibly naïve woman in the world who thought the garage would accommodate her if she just gave it a chance.

We’ll never know for sure. But one thing we do know: I got my braces off today. YIPPEE!!!

How to Attract a Man and a Publisher

By Suzanne Olsen

On December 5, 2009

In Relationships, Writing

Late last night I wrote about my writers’ group’s dinner with Phillip Margolin. I’ve given it much thought since then, and I think I understand why success just seems to rain down on some people, and other people chase it frantically and never catch it, kindof like a dog chasing it’s own tail, or a dog chasing a stuffed rabbit at the dog track, or a dog chasing a squirrel, or a …well, I’ve run out of examples and if you haven’t gotten the point by now, you must actually be a dog.

Yes, I think I’ve got the answer, and I’ll get to it sooner, or perhaps later, but here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’m a girl. Like all girls (and I’m talking about gender here, not age because I’d probably have to use the word woman which doesn’t seem to make my point as well, if there is a point – we’ll have to wait and see).

As I was saying, as a girl I watch other girls and the one thing you’ll notice about girls is that the ones who want a boy (now here it seems like it would sound better to say man. Odd.). Anyway, if a girl is craving a guy (that works!), she has it written all over her like a neon sign: I WANT ME A MAN AND I’M NOT TOO PARTICULAR, HELL, EVEN YOU’LL DO!

Guys see her coming and they scatter like cockroaches when they see a can of RAID. I love using cockroaches as an analogy, and it says nothing about my attitude toward men. And I’m not doing product placement either. I hate RAID and killing bugs, but this seemed to work and I’m not changing it now. This is a prime example of over thinking something, which is exactly what girls craving a guy do.

Here’s the catch. The girl doesn’t just want a temporary guy, she wants a permanent one. This is what scares guys to death, but the girl is oblivious to this. She thinks that if she puts on a little more makeup, shows a little more cleavage, and gets a little drunker, she’ll be closer to snagging her prince charming.

But guys see right through this. They want a temporary woman – they’re looking for a good time for a short time. Like from midnight to three. This is the manly guy thing that has been proven in bathrooms all over the country. In women’s bathrooms, you’ll see little hearts drawn in permanent marker with Sally loves Billy or LaKeisha loves Muhammad inside them. In a guy’s bathroom you’ll see: For a good time, call…

What a girl’s gotta do is decide she doesn’t want a guy, then she’ll attract them like maggots. This is because guys love a pursuit, yes, but they’re also hard-wired to see women in terms of their relationship with their mother. There’s even an old song about this by Harry Von Tizer and William Dillon (wonder if he’s related to Bob Dylan?) that has a nice, catchy tune and lyrics and a chorus starting with, “I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad.” This is two guys saying, out loud, that they want to marry someone just like their mother.

Which proves my point. If you want to snag a permanent guy, you have to become his mother. How do you do that? Easy. You ignore him when he talks to you, like that commercial for the TV show “Family Guy” where the mom’s trying to take a nap and the son is standing beside the bed going, “Mom, mom, mom, mummy, mummy, mom, mom, mummy, mummy, mummy, mom…” and she finally shouts, “WHAT!” and he says “Hi.” You have to ignore him for a long time, like a few weeks or at least through a couple of sets the live band does at the bar.

Then when you finally acknowledge that he exists, you have to have a laissez-faire attitude toward him. Laissez-faire is a word I learned tutoring – this was on a high school kid’s spelling list, and he’s from Somalia, so he doesn’t realize that the word is never, ever used in the English language in any way whatsoever except on a vocabulary sheet. Other words on the list were caveat emptor and coup d’état – I had to look them up in the dictionary to explain to him what they meant – and just try using them in a sentence!

What I’m saying is, you can’t just let the guy possess you right away, because these days he can do that with any old girl. You have to be special – he has to work to win you over. Or as one happily married guy I know phrased it, “I chased her until she caught me.”

What’s this got to do with success as a writer? Beats the hell out of me. But I think there must be something to it. Somehow we’ve got to play hard to get with these agents and publishers. (Disclaimer: You should have a respect for the rule of caveat emptor when you read anything I write.) Wouldn’t it be a great coup d’état, though, if I, as a writer, could snag a great publisher by using a laissez-faire attitude? I sure wouldn’t use these words, though, because I’d have to look them up again.