Tag: crazy people

Black Friday Or Bust

~ humoringthegoddess ~ 2 Comments

todayIt’s that time again.

Almost as obnoxious as the primaries, but on a yearly cycle, the biggest shopping day/weekend is only a few days away. I dread it. Yet I can’t wait for it.

I am a late bloomer when it comes to Black Friday. All my life stores were closed on Thanksgiving, and the most important thing of the weekend was what you were going to wear on that day and if there would be enough stuffing for everyone.

Nowdays we are shopping weeks before we even catch sight of a turkey. The whiff of money outblasts any scent of turkey or baked bread.  I’ve seen a dozen ads now for Black Friday on the Monday Before, Pre-Black, Pre-Cyber Post-Black, and so on. Even my own employer is trying their hand at it.

Too much chaos and madness made me stay home all these years. Scenes of people punching each other out on the sales floor for a Cabbage Patch doll or stepping over someone who was unfortunate enough to lose their footing is NOT how I wanted to spend my vacation day. Lines wrapped around buildings and down parking lot aisles and once inside did a double wrap around the store.

Nuts. They were all nuts.

Then one Thanksgiving all the cousins and grandparents and kids pulled out the sale papers after dinner and I took a peek. Oh! I love that movie! How much? $1.99? No! And my mixer — it does make a weird noise every time I use it. What? Here’s one for $7.99? No! Temptation took hold. Suddenly I found myself wanting all sorts of things. Things I needed, things I didn’t need. Things I thought about but not really but there it was more than half price!

Needless to say, the madness couldn’t match my pocketbook, so I wound up putting back half of my cart. Good thing. My drawers had more than enough fuzzy pajama sets and socks and my cabinets didn’t need anymore glasses or blenders or industrial gloves.

I’ve learned a lot since those first couple of shopping considerations. I’ve got friends who won’t come within 30 miles of a shopping center or store that day. I know others who get up at 4 a.m. so they can hit the place when the doors open at 5.  I know people who hate the crowds and some who just laugh at them.

Whichever category you fall into, know that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are gimmicks to get your money. All the hype makes you believe you need whatever they’re selling — especially with such big discounts. Stores place the most innocuous things along the aisles, hoping you’ll toss a few into your shopping cart as you move along. Ten innocuous things later — surprise at the checkout. You get my drift.

So my advice for this upcoming fiasco is simple. If you go shopping, have fun with it. Take your time. You don’t need to be anywhere at the crack of dawn.  If you’ve been waiting to purchase something big, and you’re in a financial position to do so, go and buy it. Just that one thing. Don’t be tempted by the fantastic deals sitting right next to it.

If you go shopping with no particular deal in mind, limit your impulse budget. Take a second and decide exactly where you will put this new treasure. If you don’t have room don’t buy it. Take a list. If you’re Christmas shopping, stick to the list. Don’t let the buy of the hour distract you.

And if you’d rather stay home, by all means do it. That way you can hit that pumpkin pie you “forgot” to bring out for desert the night before.

Besides — you didn’t need those polka dot jammies anyway.

Everyone’s Life is a Best Seller

~ humoringthegoddess ~ 4 Comments

Did you ever think your personal life had enough twists and turns to put Scarlet and Rhett to shame? Did you ever think that your cousin Teddy or your Great Aunt Miriam would be fodder for a story that would be passed down generation to generation? What about that celery-and-water trick your dog does? 

 Everyone’s life is a best seller. If only we could get our story into print, onto the big screen, everyone would see how unique our out-of-whack our family and friends really are.

The funny thing is,  if you take a look around you, you’ll see your story is not so very different from the person next to you.

 Take the world of the working stiff. Ninety nine percent of the people you talk to have someone they work with that drives them crazy. There’s always a co-worker who talks with gum or food in their mouth, has a vocabulary made up of five or six words, or leaves a trail of potato chip crumbs from their desk to the bathroom, or squeaks their chair back and forth and back and forth back and forth.  There’s someone who knows someone who knows someone who can get you a great deal, is sick twice as often as you or whose symptoms are enough to scare the hair off a rabbit.

Then there is the world of family. A labyrinth of people, traditions and bloodlines that, for better or worse, are with us all of our lives. We have kids that cross the line between naughty and nasty, mothers who are martyrs, fathers who are dictators, spouses who are inconsiderate. I imagine we all have a brother-in-law or sister-in-law who is linked to the planet Mars. We have the sister that collects Beanie Babies, and the uncle who makes his own vodka from potatoes in his garden

 There is always fodder for stories in everyday complaints, too. All the whining, cajoling, and caterwauling we do to ourselves and others is enough to make a bartender quit serving alcohol.

I’m fat. I’m stupid. My brother-in-law is fat and stupid. I should have said grilled, not fried. I could have been prom queen. I should have been prom queen. My husband’s friend from bowling is the prom queen. We have enough dirt on ourselves that we could give Jackie Collins a run for her money.

 I listen to myself enough to know that one of me is enough in this world. I enjoy laughing at my own jokes, getting my own innuendos, but I think a book full of me would be too much for even patient readers.

That is why everyone should talk about everyone around them who march to the beat of a different drummer. Best sellers come in everything from books to paintings to arts and crafts. Their popularity hooks into the unusual. Unusual yet familiar.

I’m sure there are fishing stories and the worst wedding ever or There’s Grandpa with his howling hound dog Bubba, and your best friend who can quote all of the dialogue from Spaceballs. We have girlfriends with childbirth stories that make us shiver and in-laws with enough fishing stories to fill a library. I have an irritable acquaintance? You have five irritable acquaintances. You have a cat that sings? A kid that’s into mud sculpture? Talk about it! 

The world is not as big as you think. We all have people in our lives that we adore, all have people we could do without. The loves in our lives may be special and personal, but the irritations we experience are universal. Perhaps that is what connects us all. Our idiosyncrasies are their idiosyncrasies. My pain is your pain.

We all walk through life on thin ice, isolated, thankful for the little things. So to counter our fear of isolation, we fill our history book with memories of amusing personalities and odd family members whose unique experiences bring us larger-than-life characters.

Everyone’s life is a best seller. Have fun with it.

Sometimes there are no scientific explanations for the phenomenon of friends and family. Write about them. Talk about them. People are strange. Be proud of those who color your life.  It is the spirally, pretzelly people in the world that make it interesting.

Just know that your strange is no stranger than my strange.   We’re just all different cracks in the same wall of life.

It’s just that some cracks are wider than others.