I am writing extemporaneously tonight. I could say I am being introspective, but what I really am is overly tired and desirous of sleep.
I have often mistyped something and decided whatever I wrote must be the title of a book the universe wants written. So, I give you tonight’s installment:
Seven Deadly Since…
I was typing a search for an article someone referenced and typed ‘SINS’ as ‘SINCE’. So, my question is…what is the universe telling me? What do you think a book with the title Seven Deadly Since would be about?*
Share your thoughts as you may.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:
*For some reason, my brain is churning out a weird hybrid of Disney’s 7 Dwarves and a Law & Order episode. There would be two police officers hunched over the corpse of a call girl under glass and one of them would say, “I guess we’re looking for a line up of short, pick axe-wielding diamond merchants.” His partner would crouch and look at the apple left in the victim’s mouth, and say “Hi Ho indeed!”
I read a lot of science fiction, chock full of heroines who kick ass and take names…and then grind those names in the dust of a thousand incontinent camels. I was in the military*. I have managed to change a plugged up sink. So, you’d expect that I would be able to face down your basic household pest with some equanimity. You’d be wrong.
I’m doing laundry in the basement. It’s night. It’s dark. The room is full of ominous shadows. I’m wearing shorts and have bare feet. If I were a cute, eighteen-year-old co-ed there’d be someone lurking in a corner wearing a hockey mask intent on resolving some mommy issues with a chainsaw.** Instead, I am a middle-aged frump reaching for a pile of wet towels.
(Cue the horror music.)
I’m lifting a piece of laundry when suddenly a creepy mustache bolts from its hiding place and races like a deranged zipper past my toes.
EeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekK!
(I hit the ‘K’ extra hard, about two octaves above middle C.)
I chuck the laundry and bolt up the stairs. After my heart stops trying to choke me and drops back into my chest cavity, I gird myself (with long pants, socks and shoes—I wasn’t messing around) and tiptoe back down to the cave of the beast. I manage to finish throwing the laundry into the machine, glurg some detergent in and skedaddle back up the steps—leaping a bit in case one of those hideous creatures had laid a trap for me. Relieved to be alive, I celebrate with ice cream. Like Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones from Men In Black, I thought the danger was past.
A few loads of laundry go by and I start to relax.
I’m doing a load of black clothes and I reach down and grab a pair of pants and I’m just going to check the pockets when one of those creepy mother… [expletive deleted] …crawls out and drops into the wash. I don’t have much of a killer instinct. I’ve never hunted despite firing several types of fire arms*** But that sonuvabitch [expletive not deleted because DAMN!] was going down.
I quelled the squeamish notion that I was washing my clothes with a monster and that I’d be wearing dissolved bug bits for days and moved the dial to the ‘Extra Heavy’ setting. I wanted to be sure to drown that bastard but good.
I later asked my eleven-year-old to move the wet laundry to the dryer so I wouldn’t have to face touching the shredded corpse—thus answering the question, “Would I ever implicate my child in a murder in order to hide my crimes?”
The CLAW! For all your laundry emergencies.
I now use the payload retrieval device left over from my surgery to grab each piece of laundry and give it a shake over the utility sink before I attempt to check for crayons. (I deserve a bloody medal for this act of bravery.) Laugh if you will, but I have no interest in become a ghoulish headline:
WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN BASEMENT, BUGS TO BLAME
Neighbors report they heard screams in the night and called police. Upon arrival, the officers found a woman (name withheld pending investigation), wearing full hockey gear and holding a meat mallet, lying in a pool of fabric softener. A can of industrial strength Raid was beside her.
A preliminary hunt for signs of a break-in turned up nothing as the victim was home alone and all the doors were locked.
“It was the oddest thing,” a source at the crime scene reports. “If I had to guess, I’d say they got her during the rinse cycle because that’s when she dropped the Downy.”
Evidence suggests giant house centipedes may be to blame. The crime scene investigators drew straws to see who would have to collect the multi-legged bodies recovered from the scene. The monster-sized insectivores were identified by a local expert. “It’s unusual to see so many of the creepy buggers in one place.” Said Bern “The Bugman” Bukowski, an entomologist attached to the County Sheriff’s office. “They are very territorial. But a swarm, while rare, would make sense if the nest felt threatened.”
A follow-up report revealed massive bruising, which was apparently self-inflicted, to be the cause of death.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*My military service was not the AHOY kind or the HooRaaaaah gung ho kind but the Stand-in-Line-and-Pretend-to-Be-a-Tree kind. I do an excellent impersonation of a Baobob.
**Considering what happened next, I’d have preferred the saw-wielding maniac. Then maybe my brain would have done something productive.
***Firearm training included a grease gun—an odd weapon like a caulking gun with bullets. Slow as the firing mechanism was, I suspect throwing the ammo would have been faster and more accurate.
Admire my kitchen–it will never look this clean again.
You know how you sometimes picture a perfect occasion? Not really? Okay, c’mon! Work with me here. Your brain is crammed with the planning, the vision of how exactly something is supposed to go?* Then the wet fish of reality hits you upside the head? Yeah, that’s pretty much how my efforts to host a tea party this past week went.
First came: The Idea. Last summer whilst my son was at camp, I visited Mackinac Island and enjoyed a sumptuous, if overpriced, Tea at the Grand Hotel. I thought to myself, “I ought to host an event like this!”
Second came: The Recipe. Reading Sarah—A Young Foodie’s—Blog I was inspired to try and make the Foolproof Victoria Sponge.** I had the chutzpah to look at sugary, confection perfection and say, “I can bake that.” Turns out, it wasn’t so ‘foolproof’ after all.***
The recipe itself was fairly basic—if calling for an inordinate amount of butter and eggs. But the numerous British terms had me revisiting my childhood fear of metric conversion and scrambling around my local Meijer’s store trying to locate something called ‘Caster Sugar’. Turns out there is a stage between the coarse granulated grains most of us use in baking and the fine, talcum powder consistency of powdered sugar. It’s called Baker’s Sugar here in the States—in case you want to try making this. (Read: in case you are a masochist.)
The day before the party, I’m cleaning my house like a mad woman, throwing together the makings of three…count them…three kinds of tea sandwiches, lemon zested cookies and the delectable dessert which is to be the crowning achievement of my table. I decided to tackle the sponge first. I’m like a virgin on her wedding night—nervous, but excited. But I’m all, “Bring on the groom…er…I mean, cake.”
“How Hard Could It Be?” (“That’s what she said.” The Big Book of Baking Innuendos.)
Third Came: The Wet Fish of Reality. I pull together my sponge ingredients, painstakingly following the instructions. I slid my pans into the oven and commenced work on the sandwiches…only to discover the bread I had put in the freezer had fused each slice next to the other. While struggling to dissect that mess, the wonderful odor of cake rising in the oven prompts me to peek in and see how it’s doing. (Did you gasp with horror? That’s because you know what’s coming. It’s the slasher flick equivalent of a sorority girl heading into a dark cellar. You are all collectively shouting: “No! Don’t Go In There!)
When the timer finally dinged and I pulled my masterpiece out of the oven, it was to discover that my beautiful-smelling dessert looked like a California sinkhole had formed underneath it. My cakes had fallen. (I’m not sure where the bridal analogy would go in this scenario…but calling my cakes flaccid would be appropriate.)
This cake is like the end of Where the Red Fern Grows–it leaves everyone weeping at the tragedy.
Faced with my Failure Sponge and shredded loaf of bread, did I give up? No! This is where the British came up with the stiff-upper lip-ism. When faced with defeat…we rise to bake again.
Not trusting my first efforts, I find what looks like an easier version on the internet and throw that into a spring form pan and hope for the best. It came out of the oven looking pretty good. I hurdled the stumbling blocks to making the perfect tea party and sallied forth. Tally ho and all that rot.
(Musical Interlude: Cue Verdi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons )
The day dawns, birds are chirping. The house is looking about as good as I can make it—as long as no one opens a bedroom door or goes into the basement. I have a fridge full of prepared food. I have the makings of a dessert. I decide to get my hair cut and styled as a treat before the party. (I was not going to mess up that bathroom.) It was only when the stylist is getting out her blow dryer that I remembered I left the sandwiches in the freezer. Panicked, I text my mother-in-law to take them out. I just crossed my fingers and hoped they would thaw in time.
The hour before guests are to arrive, I discover to my dismay that, sometime in the night, the second cake I made had deflated into a dense, rubbery disc. This is where I learned that eating the failed efforts of the first cake meant I had nothing to fall back on! (By the way, it was flat—but delicious.) With no time to try for a third cake, I slice the vulcanized monstrosity and smother it in fruit and whipped cream and called it ‘Good Enough’.
Everyone was very complimentary. Despite the jam causing the heavy layers to slide apart and the whipped cream to squoosh out the sides when it was cut, the guests called the cake delicious. Which just goes to show—being polite sometimes requires a judicious amount of lying. I don’t regret trying something new. But next time I host a shindig, I am probably buying something instead. Or better yet, I’ll just watch Downton Abbey and laugh at all the perfection depicted.
“EAT ME!”
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*Ask any bride who ever planned her “Dream Wedding” how it actually turned out. (Have a box of tissues ready just in case it turns out they are now getting a divorce.)
**The Victoria (meaning victorious) Sponge—most ironically named dessert of my baking career.
***Here is the recipe, if you feel lucky. Ask yourself, “Do you feel lucky? Well do ya, punk?
Raspberry and Blackberry Victoria Sponge
INGREDIENTS
For the sponge :
1 Cup (8 oz) softened unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing
2 Cups (8 oz) self-raising flour, plus extra for dusting
1 ¼ Cup (8 oz) 250 g caster Baker’s sugar
4 large free-range eggs
4 tablespoons good-quality raspberry jam
300g (about a cup 1/2 each) of fresh raspberries & blackberries, washed and dried.
Preheat your oven to 190°C/375°F/gas Grease two 20cm sandwich tins cake pans with butter, line the bases with greaseproof paper and dust lightly with flour.
Beat the butter and sugar together until very light and fluffy. A great tip is to stop when the mixture turns from being slightly yellow in color to almost white. Add the eggs one by one, making sure you beat each one in well before you add the next, then add the vanilla extract and the flour. Divide the cake mix between the prepared tins. Spread it out well with a spatula and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown and risen and a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool slightly, then carefully turn out on to a baking rack to cool completely.
Whip the cream with the vanilla bean paste and sugar until you get soft peaks- careful not to overbeat it though! Spread the jam and then the vanilla cream over one of the cakes. Place the second cake on top, spreading onto it a thin layer of whipped cream and decorating with alternating raspberries and blackberries. Sprinkle with powdered sugar.
***You Read This Far Bonus***
British Expressions You Need to Know:
Sandwich Tin = Cake Pan
Caster Sugar = Baker’s Sugar
8 oz = means different ‘effing’ sizes because it is a measure of weight not volume, you idiot. (Sorry, this is my dictionary so I get to say it like I mean it.) So 8oz of butter is one cup but 8 oz of flour is two cups. I hate math, have I mentioned this?
Self-raising Flour = Self-Rising Flour (and actually means that in high humidity, your cake is probably going to fall.)
In honor of my summer writing apathy, instead of a brilliantly insightful post, I will give you insight into how I waste spend my off hours. Go ahead, make some popcorn. I can wait…
It Is Totally Worth Going Blind Reading Subtitles
*
I finished an amazing series on Netflix the other day, and now, I am drained. I’ll reference it just so you can decide for yourself whether you’d dedicate twenty plus hours of your life to watching a Korean soap opera based on a novel. The series is called The Moon Embracing the Sun. It is a love lost/love re-captured story set in a mythical court during the Joeson (pronounced Chosun) Dynasty. And it’s entirely in Korean. You have to watch subtitles to understand it. Yeah. That’s how I spent a week of my life. I have no regrets, except that it ended and now I am bereft.
What is it about a gripping story and fantastic cast that weaves a magic spell around the viewer? I can’t say for sure, but I think in this saga it has something to do with life being lived to its fullest and yet always teetering on the brink of extinction. There is love, passion, intrigue, betrayal, death, re-birth and ghosts. Basically it’s the Pu Pu Platter of entertainment with a little bit of everything to please all palates. You like romance? There’s a new one popping up between forbidden lovers every turn—almost all of it is star crossed or fatally doomed—but it never fails to twang the heart strings big time. Do you want action? Sword wielding maniacs will attack to move the nefarious plot along when it gets a little too saccharine. Hate someone in the story? Just wait. Eventually everybody gets what’s coming to them. It is absolutely delightful and yet still dramatically compelling when it does. And I have given nothing away by tell you this.
So, if you too are dragging this summer and don’t know what you want to do of an evening, might I suggest you find out where to activate your English subtitles and prepare to be mesmerized. And then, alas, desolated when the series ends. And then you’ll be on the hunt for a new epic drama to catch your eye. Beware, not all foreign films rise to this caliber. I made the mistake of watching “White Haired Witch” thinking it would compare. It didn’t.* Unless by compare you mean contrast so much as to make you wonder if good film making is possible. If you are a fan of seriously bad movies, watch it, the war porn is well done. Otherwise, skip the confusing mess. There are much better options out there.
Here’s a list of a few of my favorite foreign films:
Eat Drink Man Woman (Vietnamese)– A small family saga about a father and the three daughters who challenge his world view. Lots of beautiful meal preparation because father is a master chef who is now losing his sense of taste. You will leave the movie hungry for more.
Monsoon Wedding (Hindi) Think Father of the Bride set in India. Let hijinks with arranged marriages ensue. Or catch an even sillier take: Bollywood Bride and Prejudice. If you like lots of Bollywood dancing, this one’s for you. Bonus, both of these have spoken English in them.
Kung Fu Hustle (Chinese) Over-the-top fighting action sequences, totally ridiculous plot—on purpose. It is really a parody of Kung Fu movies. Absolute fun. Nice Matrix tie-in moment.
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon(Mandarin) Truly kick-ass fight sequences, compelling battle of good versus evil all filmed on the backdrop of a mystical, magical China. (The Chinese perfected fighting in tree tops long before the Twilight vampires ever set foot in Washington State.)
Like Water for Chocolate (Spanish) – A woman puts her emotions into her cooking. Suppressed desire sends a naked woman running through the desert after her lover. Need I say more?
Atame (Tie Me Up/Tie Me Down) (Spanish) Bondage and Stockholm Syndrome. Warning, explicitly sexual. Make sure the shades are pulled and the kids are in bed…with ear plugs.
There you have it. I highly recommend the occasional foreign film so that you can feel mildly superior to other people about what kind of brain candy you are consuming.** Please make some recommendations of your own. I really could use another fix like Moon Embracing the Sun. This is how I can afford to travel the world–one delightful movie at a time.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:
*Don’t let the trailer fool you. It seems much more coherent when you aren’t trying to piece together which army is which and figuring out who the rebel infiltrators are actually fighting. Critically stupid ending as well.
**It’s gotta be better than watching reality television anyway.
iPhone–so you can capture all of those precious, heart-stopping memories.
For those of you who enjoyed the past holiday weekend…bite me. For anyone else who spent the day at an emergency med center making sure your child hadn’t broken or permanently damaged any part of his body, join me in a moment of reflection.
Can you remember before you had the awesome responsibility of parenting? Can you think back that far? (You could be a parent for all of thirty seconds, and still the crushing realization that you are now responsible for a life beyond your own will be smacking you in the face…hard…like Mike Tyson in the final round, testosterone-flared-nostrils-in-your-face hard.) Do you remember what that life before was like? Seriously, what was it like? Oh, wait, now I remember. It was freedom. That’s what it was. Glorious freedom. Those days are gone.
I don’t mean to sound bitter, but I can tell you, after this past Fourth of July, I’d really like to go back and celebrate what freedom used to mean. B.C.—Before Children—life was a dream. I didn’t know it, of course; I thought I was living a life of drudgery and low-paying jobs. I had no idea I was reveling in the greatest wealth the world can offer: freedom. I was reminded of that this weekend when I decided to take my son to a local parade in our new home town. And what better way to get there than riding our bikes?!
I had purchased a bike this past winter and stared at the blizzards fantasizing about biking around in the summer with my son. It was going to be a glorious, technicolor dream. There would be butterflies and rainbows. Even with my bionic enhancements, my physical limitations make it hard to keep up with him on foot, so I thought, “Hey, if we are both on bikes, then I can enjoy the experience and not worry about him getting away. After all, he’s strapped into it and it weighs about ninety pounds. What could happen?” Saturday, we get on our bikes and head toward the city park where we can watch the parade. Cautiously, we cross the scary, busy road near our house to cut cross the cemetery to hit the bike trail along the river.* It all sounds bucolic and delightful doesn’t it? Wait for it…
We’re tooling along, practicing passing people on the left and not mowing down little kids or elderly people who think I’m kidding when I yell: “Watch out. He can’t brake yet.”** Then we get to the section of the path that is becoming our bone of contention—the fork in the road that is the pain in my… ANYWAY, the kid is behind me and has stopped at the fork. A woman with a stroller is passing him and I call back, “No, Booger…we aren’t taking that route today. We can take it on the way ba…” I can’t even get to the end of the sentence before the berserker rage strikes. My son is peddling for all he’s worth–near missing the baby in the stroller–zipping in a mad dash past me and heading towards trouble. All I can do is watch; it isn’t pretty.
My son rides a very sturdy Ambucs Trike.*** This was a wonderful gift from an organization that helps families to buy special trikes for special tikes. (Sounds sickeningly cute, doesn’t it?) What’s more sickening is the experience of watching your agitated child pell-mell his way into an emergency med center visit. As expected, the “Hulk Smash” rage ended in disaster. Helpless, I watched as my son exceeded safety limits, causing the trike to wobble, and then come crashing down on top of him—face first into the asphalt. The good news is, road rash on all bendy parts, a smashed nose and lacerated lip (inside and out—made me want to puke when I saw it) aside, he is going to be fine. The not-so-good news is we spent the entire holiday sitting in waiting rooms just to determine that he hadn’t broken anything. By the end, all we wanted to do was crawl home and collapse. We didn’t bother with going to any Fourth of July celebrations that evening. As my mother-in-law said after we survived the harrowing experience, “We’ve had enough fireworks for one day.” It was unanimous; we spent the holiday huddling in our house avoiding any further excitement.
So, how do I celebrate freedom now? I cherish the moments that work and recover as quickly as possible from the ones that don’t. I will count surviving the day as a win. I will try very hard not to mourn a time when freedom was as easy as leaving my house and getting to my destination unscathed. And I will be buying knee and elbow pads for any future ventures that might lead us astray along our rocky path to freedom.
*
[Of note, the Bandaids should be coming off just in time for our camping trip to the U.P. later this week. I’m not worried, inclement weather notwithstanding, what could possibly go wrong?]
He’s smarter than your average human.( And yes, I realize this is a brown bear and that Michigan has black bears–deal with it.) Courtesy of http://www.pacsafe.com
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:
*No, this is not foreshadowing. Foreshadowing would have involved an anger management seminar.
**Subtext: you are worth 50 points you old codger, so you’d better get out of the way.
***Sturdy and a bit clunky, these are the Cadillac of kids’ bikes. Solid steel construction—built to inflict the most damage in whatever they hit.
P.S. It wasn’t until after I wrote this that I learned of the terrible bike accident at the Tour de France. I have the sincerest sympathies for the mothers of each and every one of those riders. I am very happy everyone walked away from that one.
Okay…you Google ‘Giant Bush’! See what you come up with.
I sat down this weekend to write. Or at least, I tried to. I reread chapters of my second novel making tiny, infinitesimal tweaks all the while recognizing that a major overhaul was needed. (Why the hell do I have heroes flashbacking what just happened instead of having them do it?) Once you see all the holes in your plot and need a chart to keep track of the characters, the task seems daunting. I am a huge fan of procrastination so instead of tackling my monster opus (three books and no end in sight), I decided to do some work on the garden.
“After all,” I reasoned, “I can always work on the book after dark. I can’t do yardwork after dusk or the vampire mosquitoes will get me.”**
In my glory as a new home owner, I purchased many gadgets unfamiliar to me. Going to the giant hardware stores is a lot like entering a medieval armory. There are lots of shiny metal, sharp-edged tools—in short, everything can be a weapon. Recently I snagged a pair of telescoping hedge clippers. (Scythes of Death.)
Because doing any work tends to be boring, when I go out to battle the crab grass dastardly foe, I like to pretend I am a knight entering a tourney—tilting at shrubbery at high noon. It is a harmless fantasy most of the time. I have yet to figure out an appropriately violent description for mowing the lawn though. It feels more like a Greek tragedy—entering the Minotaur’s Labyrinth never to return.
This day, however, was epically appropriate. I was tackling three massive shrubs that were lush, sprawling, and took up way too much space in my small backyard. (Insert your own overblown metaphor here.) In short, they were in need of editing.
I’m hacking away at these monsters. Mercilessly chopping the unnecessary bottom half; stretching on tiptoes to lop off the heads. Then I finesse my way around the sides to trim the unnecessary foliage and attempt to bring the resultant blobs into some kind of shape. I was sweating and had two bags full of severed, oozing limbs by the time I was done. It looked like an evergreen massacre. It was an ugly job, but it had to be done. And all I could think was, “Why is it so hard to do this with my books?”
This brings up a post I read recently by reviled…I mean revered…author, Chuck Wendig who confronts wanna be writers with the awful truth about why their writing may be going nowhere in 25 Reasons You Won’t Finish That Story. Reading the bald-faced truth of it was painful.*** Especially getting to number 23 wherein he flatly points out: “Nobody wants to hear this, but maybe you’re just not a writer.” Claxon sirens go off. The noise a submarine makes before it dives rings in your brain. Red lights flash. This is the terrible, secret truth inside every single person who sits down with the pretension that they can, in fact, write. The problem with this doubt? It is self-fulfilling. You fear you don’t have what it takes to be a writer. So you don’t write. Yet you desperately want to be a writer. Angsty emotions are yo-yoing away: Will I? Could I? Should I? Stories are piling up in your brain like it’s rush hour traffic on a two-lane highway. And the only weapon you have in your arsenal is the quavering hope that refuses to die no matter how many times you read a particularly awful sentence that came out of your brain. For example:
“She could see the outraged questions forming on her mother’s beetled brow and cut her off before she could explode.”
You read what you’ve written and you want to pick your laptop up and hurl it into the nearest ravine and then fling yourself after it because, at least dying dramatically would feel artistic. But then your internal editor tells you this is trite and formulaic and to get back to the table and come up with a better ending. I’d like to say reading the reasons why my writing isn’t headed where I wanted or expected it to go makes facing the changes easier. It doesn’t. It is hard every single time I sit down. When I write something that makes me want to cry, and not in a good way, it is very discouraging. And yet…it is still better than the alternative.
As Lewis Carroll put it:
“If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both — you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:
*If you are expecting a sexual connotation, you are to be majorly disappointed.
**Face it, mosquitoes are vampires…let’s see Stephanie Meyers make a sparkling romance out of that!
***Almost as painful as reading my writing. But not quite.
In honor of Father’s Day, I offer you a letter I started writing to my pater familias, which turns into a major, hissy fit rant. Enjoy.
I found many disturbing images of woodchippers available online. Be grateful this is the one I chose.
*
Dear Dad*,
I recently purchased a bed through Amazon. Wait, scratch that, I ordered what I thought was a bed through what I thought was Amazon. When, in fact, I received three-quarters of a bed from a third-party seller. The seller—Home and Living—omitted sending the portion of the bed that actually holds up the mattress. (Turns out I have woefully high expectations of the number of pieces required to make a bed.) If you have already had dealings with on-line purchases backfiring on you, you may skip ahead to the picture of the burning bed. If not, steady yourself for an ad nauseum retelling.
BRING ON THE IRRATIONAL OUTRAGE!
Upon discovering the perfidy of the missing ‘link spring’, I attempted to return said useless item or request that the seller send me, free of charge, the part of the bed that was in absentia. Emails and phone calls flew, mostly in one direction. I managed to finagle a $20 credit for the cost of return shipping in one phone exchange with Amazon. Then I found out shipping these items using UPS would cost, at a minimum, $100.76. Did I mention the purchase price of the item was $241.00? (That, after getting a special Amazon Synchrony credit card to save about $40.00.) Or the $75.00 restocking fee the seller wants to charge for grudgingly taking back their non-bed? So, this almost-a-bed which I paid $241.00 for could cost over $175.00 to return. Now, most people at this point would throw up their hands and say, “I give up. Sell me the missing part for $150.” Most rational people would take this approach. I am not most people. Nor am I all that rational when I feel someone has deliberately duped me. Thus commences weeks of my fiendish plan: ‘Operation Threaten and Wheedle’. (This is where working in law offices and knowing terms like ‘misrepresentation of product’ and ‘consumer fraud’ are helpful. And regardless of the situation, Res Ipsa Loquitur always wows a crowd.)
BOIL WITH RAGE – SPIT LIKE A VIPER
First, I bombard the Amazon retail customer service with demands for satisfaction based on their A to Z policy. (Which, I have not read but assume has alphabetical significance hereto.) I politely, but sternly outline my position: “I bought a bed. They did not send me a bed. I want my money back.” I may have thrown the words ‘I hate to be litigious…but’ into one email, I am not entirely sure. In return, I received a form letter from India which stated:
“Amazon is looking into your claim. Amazon has until June 21, 2015 to investigate your claim. Please standby.’ [Does anybody else hear Apu from the Simpson’s voice when reading this?]
So I wait for someone to contact me. And I wait. And wait…After a few days, I send another request for review. And then I make a call asking, “What’s happening with my case?” This is where I find out that further replies came in the form of Junk Mail—informing me that I had three-days to reply before my complaint would be shredded and used to line the cage of a particularly flatulent rodent. (Can you guess how many days too late I was to reply? Answer: enough.)
I am starting to seethe at this point. I am feeling great outrage at the anonymous corporation which has blindly dismissed a small, pathetic customer in favor of profits. I am irritated by the generic customer service form letter factory in India that doesn’t actually read my question but sends responses such as:
This transaction is with a third party seller and before they can proceed with your refund or replacement, they will need to have the item returned.Please contact the seller directly for any further details.
I think I read this sentence in almost every email I received—or at the very least, a running subtext to the effect: “Look, you buffoon, we’re just going to keep stringing you alone until sciatica forces you to give up and buy the damned ‘link spring’ or alternately we force you to pay for your mistake twice over by requiring you to pay the shipping cost, a $75.00 restocking fee, AND demanding your first born child. Mwua hah ha ha ha!” So, I snapped.
Thank you Flickr – here’s hoping this isn’t copyrighted.
I started fantasizing about how I would avenge my consumer outrage by getting a wood chipper and reducing the almost-but-not-quite a bed to so much mulch. I decided this was a bit dramatic, and expensive, whereas lighter fluid and a match would do the job just as well and provide a much lighter pile of ash to ship back to the seller. (Bonus: I could also roast marshmallows to toast the bitter-sweet satisfaction of pointless revenge.) It was at this point that a friend of mine suggested that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t being terribly reasonable about this.
“Yes, they sold you crap. You were screwed, blued and tattooed; but, they aren’t going to fix the problem and you still don’t have a bed. Just go buy the damned support and be done with it.” This is what a rational person would do. (See above regarding rational behavior, and likelihood thereof.)
Be rational? Okay, I could do that. I could suck up my outrage and my ire and submit like a whimpering dog…OR…I could do what I did.
I got all of my facts in a row. I contact the Amazon Synchrony credit card company. They do not offer the option for a consumer complaint and redress of consumer fraud. (And yes, I will be canceling this card just as soon as this is resolved. They are too closely in bed with the pimp who sold me the trashy furniture. Goodbye Pimp Card.) Their customer service rep in India transfers me to the same exact Retail Customer Service professionals I have been tangling with for the past couple of weeks. Operation Smooth Talker to commence in t-minus 10…9…8…
“Hi, I’m Adam. How can I be of service.” A man’s voice purrs to me.
“Ohhh, yeah.” Wait…did I say that out loud?
Adam is my representative. He sounds like a hip young man who drinks Southern Comfort and rocks a bolero tie. He speaks smoothly with a hint of Georgia in his syllables; I want to melt listening to him. “Okay,” I think, “so they brought out their big guns. Two can play at this. I see your Southern Gentleman and raise you an Earnest, Disabled Widow with a Special Needs Child…and a blog”. We both put on our genteel, company-is-coming manners and exchange points of view with sugary assurances that: “Ha ha, I know how frustrating it is…blah di blah blah.” “Yes, I’m sure Amazon is doing all it can… Yaddah Yaddah.”
Our exchanges were terribly polite and, probably, totally superficial. But, once he spoke to his overlords, I did get a promise out of Adam. He would make a one-time exception regarding the return of the item. He was authorized to cover the cost of shipping…but there was a catch. The money won’t actually appear in my account. He is now emailing me proof of a secret credit to cover the expense of the shipping. It won’t be a reimbursement, per se, but the next time I go to spend money on Amazon, a magical amount will appear cloaked by a shield of invisibility until the one true king returns….or words to that effect.
Upon hearing this, I sat up straight. “You mean…it’ll be like an Easter Egg?”
“Ha ha. Yeah. Like that.” Adam says, probably thinking the batty old broad is referring to colored eggs which turn rancid over time. (Not that that would be a bad analogy.) He further reassured me that this money would never expire. It will live on in infamy…but only as a credit on Amazon…and only coming into existence when I spend money. It sounded fishy, but I’ll admit, it also appeared to be the compromise I swore was my goal. Continuing this argument would be small-minded and mean, even if it meant I could listen to Adam grovel so nicely on behalf of his superiors.
As much as I would like to say I was willing to fight the good fight, I recognized a concession when I heard one. I asked a few questions more, and have come up with a list of recommendations for anyone who is even considering a large-ticket purchase online:
Read the product description three, four, maybe even a dozen times. Look for very tiny print in inscrutable language that might possibly be offering you a lower-price at the cost of your soul, your sanity or both. If you read stuff you can’t understand…walk away.
Check out something called the Seller Feedback page. This is where you can itemize exactly where, how and in what creative ways the seller screwed the pooch. (You, being the pooch in this particular analogy. Probably a female one.) A link to the Seller Feedback page can be found in the section of text below the item listed following the phrase: Ships from and sold by (insert scurrilous villain’s company name here – Home and Living** in my particular case).
Lastly, I highly recommend you avoid third-party sellers*** if you can at all manage it. While Amazon promises to back all of the items purchased ‘through’ Amazon, not all third party sellers actually fall into this category. You have to read their customer service policy. If it states that it abides by Amazon’s A to Z policy, then Amazon can work to get you customer service satisfaction—eventually. However, some of the third party sellers require expensive returns, as in my case, and are thoroughly unpleasant to try and deal with. The phrase you want to see under any item you buy is “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com”.
So, Dad, when I finally do get my imaginary money, I am planning on buying you a CD: Bouyer’s Silver Fanfare. Since I know this will be a vile use of funds, try not to grind your teeth into a powder and know that at least I am paying for it with hard-earned revenge. And that’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnotes:
*Yes, I am just that cheap that my entire gift to my father is a letter ranting about online purchases. It’s still better than a tie.
**I will be linking this post to my Seller Feedback–F*ck ’em if they can’t be bothered to call me back. They deserve $75.00 worth of retribution. Feel free to pass this around.
One of the few items I don’t actually have…a Blue Willow Chicken. Feel free to gift it to me as a house warming present. (Easier than catching and painting an actual chicken.)
I have been so busy unpacking my life, it is almost a metaphor.* You have dusty old boxes you have been carting around for years that sentimentality prevents you from throwing out, and yet, the emotional scars they hold keep you from opening them up. Then there are the boxes with carefully wrapped and painstakingly placed treasures. You lovingly tucked them in and worried about their safe arrival. Those were the first boxes you packed. They have color-coded labels and warnings to ‘Handle With Care’. You expected to take time with every one of you millions of items. However, by the time you reach the end of your tether/patience/time-to-move you are shoving possessions in willy-nilly and throwing stuff away just so you won’t have to pack one more damned thing. Case in point, my computer tower didn’t fit into the boxes I had left, so I taped the giant rip which formed when I crammed it into one anyway. I strongly suspect my lack of finesse may be why it refuses to turn on at the new house. It holds a grudge.
After struggling so long to find a place to live, it was almost a relief to move. Almost. I dragged a hundred boxes into a house with room enough for maybe twenty and a few plants. I was careful to instruct the movers to put the furniture in first, otherwise we’d never have made it. As it turned out, the house wasn’t big enough for everything. There are two giant bookshelves and a piano sitting in the garage as proof. It is no doubt very odd for the neighbors when my son goes to practice. I plan on telling them he’s starting a garage band, if anyone asks.
One thing I really wanted to do when I finally got my home, was to unearth my china. It has been ten years since I saw it. I only got to use it once during my marriage. It was always kept ‘safe’ for a special occasion. After my husband died, it became a symbol of all the times we would never get to use them again. After the move, though, I was itching to get at the Blue Willow because I had the perfect place to store it—a built-in china cabinet tucked in my new home. Through the chaos of packing and recovering from surgery, I focused on uncrating my tea service and putting the cups and saucers in a perfect arrangement around the pot—like a herd of blue-speckled chicks around a fat hen. It became a symbol of hope. Or perhaps I should say ‘cymbal’ the way it crashed all around me those first few weeks.
My first act after the movers left was to carefully unbox my brand-new teapot and reach for the door to my shiny white cupboard…only to discover that the paint crew had managed to shellac the door closed. After I yanked and tugged on my glassed-in door to no avail, I allowed myself a massive hissy fit of frustration. I called the painter, who promised to come out and fix it. He never did. I ended up hiring someone else just to come out and sand down three doors that kept sticking too badly to tolerate.
The noise and dust storm that followed coated the walls and floors of the house which had just been painted. I gritted my teeth—not just because of the dust—and stalked to the paint store to repaint the sections exposed by the overzealous use of a circular sander. I knew the name of my paint and asked for “Snowfall White”. Or, I thought I knew my paint color. Because, as it turns out, there are many, many shades of white.** Specifically, there was more than one shade of Snowfall White. I didn’t realize this until after I had re-painted every damned surface into the wee hours of the morning.
I was cross-eyed with exhaustion when it dawned on me that the paint that had dried hadn’t turned into the color that was on the walls and trim in the living room. In fact, it was a hideous shade I would have called ‘autopsy white’ because it was actually a corpse grey. There was some moderate swearing—I may have cursed the Fickle Sherwin-Williams Gods who stole a name from another company. The next day, I trudged back to the store where I’d picked up the outrageously expensive can in the first place. I begged, I cried. I may have troweled it on a bit thick—I think the man gave me the replacement paint so I would leave. I tromped home and looked at the room decided which things absolutely had to be changed and which ones I could live with. (Who cares what color the inside closet door is anyway?) After applying some paint—a touch here, a dash there—I had a sense of foreboding. “Hmm, this seems really light.” I waited for a small area to dry only to discover it was in fact, a horse of a different color. Alternately hyperventilating and swearing, I ended up repainting the entire china cabinet the third shade of Snowfall White. What I think happened is, the original, benighted painters somehow mixed the paint wrong in the first place. I have no idea what color it is—probably something called You-Will-Never-Match-This-Again-In-A-Million-Years White. But I have decided I can live with the piebald walls…as long as I never look too closely and pretend any shadows are a trick of the light.
So that’s what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks. Struggling with unpacking boxes, some which haven’t been touched in a decade.*** And when I am not over-emoting about the zillions of pictures I find, I am trying to white wash my world so that I have a blank canvas to work with. But an artist has to admit that sometime, the paint of a previous work is going to bleed through.
What you can’t tell is that there is actual tea in the teapot. I was drinking a cuppa while writing this post. I ran upstairs to photograph the dishes in situ and just popped the pot back in to take the shot.
Asterisk Bedazzled Footnote:
* Except metaphors don’t usually make you sneeze this much.
**Even more than 50 shades of gray…and a lot more tasteful too.
*** It is like maneuvering an emotional mine field; every item revealed is a bomb waiting to go off. I’m crying over tchotchkes, dammit.
Advisory: the following contains irreverence for Star Trek, reference to bodily functions (aka toilet humor) and nearly-naked photos. You have been warned.
*
Just days before I was to undergo my hip replacement, this arrived in the mail.
ENGAGE!
I cannot tell you the relief of receiving the oddest looking thing ever to grace a commode. My first thought upon seeing my elevated toilet hover craft? “It looks like something from Star Trek.” Embracing my new command chair, I was able to boldly go to Spectrum Hospital and face the unknown. So sit back and enjoy this week’s episode of: Hip Trek. (Not a copyright infringement, at all.)
Spaced-Out: The finale to my front and rear! These are the voyages of the starship Enterpoop, Its six week mission: to explore embarrassing losses of dignity, to seek out new ways of putting on socks, to sleep like there’s no tomorrow…
Star Date: 0413.2015
Acting Captain’s Blog, First Officer Reporting: The captain has been relieved of duty by the medical officer. We arrived at the planet Spectrum for a brief layover to augment the captain’s hyperdrive by installing a new dilithium crystal stabilizer.*
Staff arrived disappointingly clothed in green jumpsuits—a total breach of Hip Trek protocol which dictates that medical personnel wear tight, crushed velvet blue shirts with black pants or mini dresses with Go Go boots. As the procedure would take some time, the captain donned a space suit designed to make her look like a Macy’s Day Float…appropriate considering some of the drugs later prescribed.
As expected, the Captain’s bloated ego becomes more apparent out of uniform.
A nurse—most likely a vicious Romulan—by the name Phlebo ToMist attempted to excavate blood using an unnecessarily pointy object.
SHO’VA SHAK! (Okay, help me out, I think this one is from Star Gate) Let’s try Klingon: Qu’valth! P’tok!
The Romulan seemed disappointed when she finally hit a vein only to discover the blood wasn’t green after all. The captain suffered this all in silence.**
According to tricorder readings, Bones (aka the surgeon)–plotted a star chart on the captain’s hip.
Insert your own ‘map to Uranus’ joke here.
It looked as though he’d trained with Picasso. The captain was relieved to later awake from sedation to discover her nose reassuringly undisturbed.
The side effects of the procedure included a foggy-headed delirium wherein aliens appeared at odd intervals to monitor the implant and offer to take the captain to the head. The captain may have professed love to the anesthesiologist at one point. Fortunately Bones insisted she maintain near incapacitating level of narcotics in her system so any embarrassing details are but a blurry memory.***
Stardate: 0415.2015
Captain’s Personal Blog: Against medical advice, I have resumed my post. I will admit, Bones may have been right and the frag-bickle-lorum suggests I haven’t all my flurguls in a row. I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing he is right though.
It seems as though my body has been taken over by an alien force that requires me to relearn all of my former functions using a variety of odd devices.
There is the sock-o-nator which works only in one direction apparently—which required repeated humiliating lessons before I figured out what I was doing wrong. Fortunately the crew was much less medicated and on hand to help out.
Please ignore the First Officer’s lack of uniform–it was pajama day on the bridge.
I have a new transporter that, while of limited distance, allows me to move my leg from the floor to levitate at a level that alleviates the pain in my port nacelles.
One to beam up, Scotty!
There is the claw-like apparatus I call the ‘payload retrieval device’; it has a myriad of uses but primarily helps me locate the Captain’s briefs.
Panties pictured may or may not actually belong to the Captain–she’s not telling.
Lastly, there is my space shuttle which helps me to drag my carcass from one staggering location aboard ship to another until my body finally remembers how to function as a single, albeit sore, working unit.
I have the most humiliating habit of referring to this as my ‘stroller’.
And now, my moment of reflection must be cut short as we are on course to the planet Vex-Lax; it’s time to resume my captain’s chair and boldly go. Captain’s log out.
Make it so, Number One!
Asteroid Bedazzled Footnotes:
*In other words, to have an anterior hip replacement—dilithium crystal stabilizer sounds much cooler, doesn’t it?
**A total lie, but at least she didn’t scream “Get it out, get it out, get it out” as she did during a past similar hunt for a saline portal whilst preparing to produce her progeny. (This is 100% true. In my defense, the phlebotomist hit a nerve that to this day is funny when touched.)
***This entire post is brought to you by hydrocodone, tramadol and diazepam without which hallucinations such as this would not be possible.
Stay Tuned for Next Week’s Adventure: When the captain gets mortally impaled with a Bat’leth!
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/stockimages
I have been keeping a secret from you. Two really. I think it’s time to come clean. I have been emboldened by Karen Copeland, a writer who shared her struggles about being honest in the blog-o-sphere. Sometimes it is easier to write about that which is funny, or at least funny in retrospect, than it is to contemplate the scary that is the now or immediate future. As most of you know, I have been trying to buy a house…well…find a house first and then buy it. Who knew finding it was going to be the easier of the two prospects?*
I did it. I found the perfect, tiny house in Grandville, Michigan. Perfect in that it was way over budget and still had toxic gas seeping through the floor boards.** (Everybody chant: Mediation is Salvation!) Okay, so it was perfect in that it was still on the market and would actually pass an inspection. Why didn’t I just wait and see what the spring influx of housing would bring? Because, I was running out of time.
I have been juggling two major life changes. I have only told you about one of them because, to be honest, if I think about the second one, over which I have absolutely no control, I want to vomit. So instead, I have focused exclusively on the house purchase to the point of wearing blinders to the other big, scary thing in the hopes it would go away. It hasn’t and it won’t; and the stupid thing is, I knew that. I’ve known it for about four years. What I hadn’t known then was that I would be in a race between buying a house and facing the ‘Big Scary Thing’ and that the race would come down to a matter of days between the two cataclysmic events. Today, they collided.
I have been waiting on tenterhooks for a call from the mortgage company regarding the closing date. And waiting…and waiting… I finally get the call and I am chatting with my broker before he takes off for spring break. Bad news, he’s going out of town. The good news? I get to close this week. Yay! Which is critical because, if I didn’t, my two big secrets were going to meet and it was going to get ugly.*** And then I get the call…
“Hi, this is Shelly from Dr. ReallyDutchName’s office. I’m calling to let you know your total hip replacement surgery has been scheduled.”
I am mid-conversation with the terminally perky nurse who is informing me that my surgeon will be slicing and dicing me open at 1:30 p.m. Monday and that, oh, by the way, I can’t eat or drink anything after midnight the night before…the man hates fat people and this is his way of ensuring I know, at least once in my life, what raving hunger feels like…when my phone interrupts to tell me that my realtor is calling.
I get off the phone with little Miss Ray of Sunshine RN and find out that my closing can take place either Thursday or Friday this week, which would I prefer? So there you have it. Thursday I will be buying my Barbie Dream House and Monday I become the Bionic Woman—thus fulfilling two lifelong goals. Now I just have to figure out how to move into the new house without leaving my bed. The universe is a perverse bastard sometimes.
*Those of you who have read the past few (thousand) whiny posts about my poor judgment in housing prospects are rolling on the floor laughing. In review: Bad House#1, Bad House #2, and Lament for a House
**I got over my fear of mutant radon when faced with the fear of not finding a home in time.
TheDustSeason 