RELEASING THE KRAKEN. HOLY! WHAT?

I’ve learned a lot of new words during the pandemic.   In a thundering moment of poetic vigor the government has created these soulful phrases. Here is what I thought they meant and what the government tells me they mean.

Shelter in place:  

 

Me:  this is a variation of Musical Chairs. If you are out and there is an earthquake or you see a tornado coming, or you come upon a turf war  shoot-out, each person runs  into the nearest house and hides in the coat closet.

 

The govt.  From now until forever, you have to stay inside your own  house and everyone who lives with you has to stay there, too.  You have to do this every day, all day, all night, even week-ends.  After a few days, you will have a disturbing understanding of what you’ve settled for in life but was too busy to acknowledge.  The guy at the liquor store doesn’t have to stay home. They call him an essential worker.  He delivers. 

Intubation and extubation:  

 

Me:  A needlessly formal way of saying you’re going to take a bath and then get out of the tub.

 

The govt:  If you can’t breathe and you need a ventilator they hook you up and intubate you.   When you get better, they extubate you.  Our New York governor told the president he needed 40,000 ventilators.  The president didn’t believe him but got General Motors and General Electric and all General companies to stop making cars, refrigerators and toaster ovens and make ventilators.  The president said Obama had not left him any ventilators.  Now we have so many ventilators stockpiled, we are ready for the next pandemic. I hope they don’t get rusty.

 

Food insecure:  

 

Me: I thought this meant you weren’t sure if the salmon you bought yesterday smelled fishy or it was just – you know – salmon.

 

The govt: Food insecure is when you lost your job because your company had to shut down and you still had some food but worried that when the food you had ran out you didn’t have the money to buy more food.  Then you found out that you could get free food but the lines were so long you worried there wouldn’t be any food left when you got to the head of the line.

 

Out of an abundance of caution:  

 

Me: When I heard this I thought the networks were cancelling all sit coms where the husbands were stupid and the wives were in permanent side-eye mode and the kids were insolent and obnoxious.

 

The networks:   This peculiar phrase was something the networks said all day long as an explanation of why their programming was all whacky and we were getting the news from Gayle King’s den or Maurice du Bois’ basement. 

 

Social distancing.  

 

Me: This definitely reminded me of all my worst psychological problems where I had a litany of social gatherings that made me uncomfortable to the point of scratching my skin into tatters:  cocktail parties, New Year’s Eve parties, picnics, shopping with other people, barbecues, baby showers, bridal showers, going away parties, shaking hands in church.  Anything and everything where you have to engage with other people.

 

The govt: To my surprise and delight, social distancing means all humans have to stay at least six feet apart.  As one of my smart alecky children says, “social distancing and sheltering in place are just another Tuesday for my mother.” 

 

Releasing the kraken

 

In the last two days I’ve heard a phrase that is so wild and wooly and promising of absolute chaos that I had to go back to this blog after many months of silence and make sure you have heard it, too.  That lady lawyer who looks like my Aunt Georgette said she is soon going to “RELEASE THE KRAKEN”. HOLY! WHAT???  It sounds like all hell will break loose (another interesting phrase because you’d think hell couldn’t really break loose because it is mired in some gunk way down. Down.

 

I began to imagine what Releasing the Kraken might mean. It sounds like a good snack like pretzel bagels.  By the way, pretzel bagels aren’t that great.

 

Releasing the Kraken might mean letting some wild bird out of a cage.  Or maybe it’s releasing all those industrious people that “got cracking,”  Telling them to stop being so darn industrious and go home.  

 

According to the Urban Dictionary where the young uns go to find out stuff, Release the Kraken means: we are at the end of our rope and now we are going to kick your ass from here to New Jersey.

 

So there you have it.  Poetic language to describe a power grab by politicians we wouldn’t even invite to dinner.  We learned far. too much about Nancy Pelosi’s freezer and her hair beautification. Andrew Cuomo had a soothing winning style early on but is getting cranky.  Mark Zuckerberg drinks water like a little bird. What’s to become of us?   I don’t know.  For me, it’s just another Tuesday.

(this is not meant to promote any political point of view.  Just going for a bit of humor)

I've got your back. It's who I am.

What do you hate?

I hate it when people rush to distance themselves from a social idea and say, “That’s not who I am.” I am flummoxed to hear that anyone has parsed all their private and public values and know who they are.  I have no idea who I am and sometimes when I’ve done something questionable, I will look in the mirror and say, “Who are you?”  Joe Biden used the phrase the other day speaking for himself and all  the citizens as if he is our Uncle Joe.   He said Americans wouldn’t want to keep illegal immigrants  from crossing the border because that’s not who we are. 

Gayle King, repurposed Oprah friend, uttered the sentiment (once removed) about Meghan Markle.  The Duchess re-gifted her baby shower flowers to Roses Repeat who gave them to the homeless, the cancer ridden and the elderly.  There was a picture of a young girl - her head bald, her leg in a medical boot, holding an elaborate bouquet.  Gayle said, “I thought it was a very sweet thing.  It just speaks to who she is.”  Hmmmm.

Truth is, our core personality is in the grip of a subconscious secret game plan hatched when we were a year old and didn’t know the difference between a pebble and a Cheerio.  It’s almost impossible to get a copy of the dossier of who we are and discover our m.o. 

Anything else?

I hate it when you’re going somewhere or doing something and a non-reflective dolt will say, “Have fun.”   Fun is personal and infrequent.    You only know you’ve had fun after it’s over. Fun is so impromptu that it makes me hate fun. Sometimes, in order to preserve fun you have to cut it short. A lot of times people will say “that was fun,”  Usually, they mean it was a passable experience that didn’t totally depress them. 

 

Is that it?

No. When a naif says someone “has his/her back.”  It's  a buzz phrase on the airwaves.  CarShield has my back, this woman says.  No. They don’t.  One man is certain that The Hartford has his  back. No. They don’t.  The only situation where someone might have your back is if a friend went with you to the emergency room for a sprained ankle and the doctor misread your chart  and decided to take out your gallbladder.  So when you were alone, the friend put all your clothes back on and helped you hobble out of there and drove you home. The only person who might have your back, in other words look after your interests with anything more than casual curiosity, is your mother and that will end when you are about fourteen and  she realizes that your interests are opposed to her interests.  No one has your back.  Have fun.

Is there anything you do like?

I used to like the expression, “I’ve got this.”  It’s smart nuanced quick talk.  “Don’t worry about that difficult  task.  I’m going to take it off your hands and do a good job.” I wouldn’t mind saying it myself but  I don’t want to take any task off anyone’s hands.

There’s one other thing I like a lot.  Michael Phelps, the gold medal champ in swimming, didn’t have a warm personal image.  Now he is my new very interesting hero.  In a public service spot he  talks about being in the pool hour after hour and it’s just Michael and his thoughts and the bottom of the pool.  He was prone to depression and anxiety.  He didn’t know how to talk to people.  All he knew was how to swim and win gold medals.  He got help.  He talked to someone.  And it helped.  See?  When you are authentic and don’t go on too long, people like you.

Then there's this.  I thought I was too old to have a crush on an actor but I have a crush on Jon Tenney who plays the love interest to Kyra Sedgwick on The Closer.  I think it takes a particular kind of man to tease a woman gently and she is comforted by it.   Fritz (Jon) teases Brenda Lee (Kyra) gently.  When she (reluctant to have him move in) asks “How do I know after you move in that you won’t stop liking me?”  He answers, “Because if I was going to stop liking you, it would have happened by now.” I like that.

Too much. For mercy’s sake. Too much.

Things we use too much of;

Shampoo. We use at least three times as much as we need every morning in the shower.  Some shampoo directions urge a second washing, six times as much.  That acid mantle of protection on your scalp?  Say goodbye to it. 

There is an entire movement against washing your hair with shampoo. I read the book “NO MORE POO” and didn’t wash my hair for a week.  My hair didn’t care.  Not only did my hair look flat and listless, my thoughts were flat and listless. I went back to Ivory soap, my go to cleanser, scent-free.  I just heard you shudder.  What? Not good?

Toothpaste. That big swirly inch long thing?  That's a week’s worth. You only need a pea-size amount and it probably has arsenic in it so the less, the better. They found arsenic in baby formula from China.  I wish Trump had asked the Chinese guy, "Just out of curiosity, why arsenic in baby formula? Was that a spite thing?"  

When they reported that brown rice BROWN RICE!!!! had more arsenic in it than white rice and it might be better to eat white rice, I had to sit down.  How did arsenic get anywhere near the rice?  Don’t you have to make arsenic?  Did the farmer say, I think I’ll place my rice paddy right next to the rat poison plant so my rice can benefit from the arsenic run-off.

Dish detergent – if a dish just had bread or celery or a peach on it – does it need twenty-three chemicals to make it usable again?  Hot water will do the trick.

Laundry detergent.  Who of us has believed the recommended capful is enough?  Who of us has not waited for a cover of suds to feel satisfied?  Who of us has washed 36 loads with a 50 oz jug of detergent? Who of us has not gifted their psyche to the market research people and refused to believe (as they planned) that 3X concentrated means you only need 1/3 as much?  As much of what?

Paper towels.  I use paper towels for everything.  This is wrong. I once had to pay $2500 to get a tree removed so maybe it's revenge.  I sometimes get the shorter sheets to assuage my guilt.  Wait.  I really don’t have guilt about paper towels.  

In order to save the earth, I tried the toilet paper without the inner stabalizing cardboard cylinder.  The entire roll was smushed and misshapen from shipping and there was no good place to put the roller in.  I had to dig around and ruin about half of it.

The word “so.”  Many sentences, especially answers to questions or general informational sentences,  now begin with “so.”  It’s as if we are in the middle of a saga where a snowstorm has overtaken the wagon train and everyone (including a suckling baby) is about to freeze to death.  “So the travelers huddled together for warmth and prepared to meet a stern God.”

The phrase “for sure.”  This slipped into conversation about three years ago and I blame it on re-runs of “Little House On The Prairie.”  A lot of television guests slip in “for sure,” instead of saying “yes.” They think it makes them sound Sarah, Plain and Tall.  I took off all of my clothes in the movie but I’m a shy Amish prude in real life.  For sure.

When my kids were little I use to caution them like this:  “Mind the high step.  Mind, your fingers where the door closes.” I was pretending to be British and have British children otherwise we would have fallen apart.  The “for sure” disease is the same thing.  With ever more depraved behavior filling the airwaves, we hold together by talking like puritanical hardscrabble folk.

Off-topic

I’m too lazy and self-involved to be an activist.  BUT the story of Flint Michigan is ever on my mind. I lay out all the facts and can’t figure it out.   Even after they found out the people, the children, were getting seriously sick.  Even after the governments - local, state and federal - knew about the water and how it had become a horrid lethal weapon pointed at innocents.  Even after there was clear evidence that the poor people – and many of them were poor – continued to be irreparably harmed, THEY DIDN’T DROP EVERYTHING AND RUSH TO FIX IT AND GIVE medical aid to all the victims and get down on bended knee and beg forgiveness and give them all a good house with clean water and new hope. Why didn’t Oprah or Ellen go there with a big Shutterfly check and new vans?  I don’t get it.  It still weighs on me.

Deconstructing Uptown Funk. 'Take a sip, sign a check Julio, get the stretch'

I have no right to be humming Uptown Funk all the time and even mouthing the refrain under my breath 'girls hit your halleluiah, girls hit your halleluiah'  I don't know what the heck it's talking about. It says, 'this one for them hood girls' and I'm just a  middle class nerd who should stick to Celine Dion.

Here is a very good example of how a kind of scattered non linear sequence of ideas can hot wire your brain while the laborious ordered sentences of politicians melt into the ether.  When Bruno Mars says, "cause Uptown Funk gon' give it to you" my emotions go haywire and I feel as happy as a butterfly in Martha Stewart's flower garden.

Marco Rubio said to the electorate, “Let’s dispel this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing,” If instead, he had turned to Chris Christie and said, "I'm too hot (hot damn), called a police and a fireman. I'm going to take Uptown Funk straight to the White House and it's gon' give it to you and all the country. Uh, uh, uh, UH!," he would he at the top of the leader board instead of back in his precariously mortgaged house scratching his head.

I'm not sure what Uptown Funk is gon' to give me but it makes me feel included in a way that no political promise does. Mark Ronson, the composer, has figured out that you don't need to make sense to everybody, if you drop a string of captivating phrases and finish off with uh, uh, uh, uh. I'm too hot (hot damn), make a dragon wanna retire man. Nonsensical but kind of adorable. 

You know how Hemingway figured out that you don't need a bunch of adjectives and adverbs to write persuasively and emotionally?  Well Mark Ronson has figured out that nuance is a bigger motivator than logic. He's figured out that the mind is like a xylophone and you just tap this strip and that strip and you have a grip on the entire country. 'Take a sip, sign a check, Julio, get the stretch.'

Hillary, start rapping!

 

WHUCK???

WHUCK?

This is my new favorite word.  My old favorite was Wait. What?

Whuck says the same thing but with an edge.  Whuck is weary of all the trash that goes down.

Today and all week, for instance, my local Waldbaum's had no Earthbound organic greens.  " I don't know why but they haven't come in," said the greengrocer.  Whuck????

Am I late for the party?  Did you already know about this word?

I hope you like it, too, because undoubtedly it will be used here.

If life was perfect, we wouldn't need irony.

If life was perfect we wouldn't need irony.  God gave us irony to deal with a reality that is sometimes intolerable and often annoying.  

What is irony?  Here are some dictionary definitions:

1. The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.
2. A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

For the true ironist that doesn't come close. Good irony is a powerful weapon. It's a stand-off.  You on one side - the offending reality on the other.  You say, "I'm going to take you down."

If we had the time to sit around and think about life, some of us would be a little bitter.  God didn't want a group of bitter people so He thought,  I'll give that group irony.  If they can make fun of everything they'll be fine. What do I care?  I made them, too, you know.  So who is the ironist here?

The dictionary gives these synonyms for irony: sarcasm, cynicism, sardonicism. I don't think so.

Sarcasm is crude.  Irony is exquisite.  There is no hope in cynicism.  Irony on the other hand is optimistic.  It's problem solving.  Look,  here's a way to turn this around and make it fun.

Sardonicism a word only used in old historical novels, is more like sarcasm.

There are people who never use or have a need of irony.  They see life as a sunny, faith driven garden of delight.   I don't discount this one bit.  It can happen. I know how to talk to these people and even like them.  I park my irony at the door and engage sincerely.

On the other hand,  when two ironists meet and recognize each other, it is a  sight to behold. They will go back and forth, giggling and nodding.  I have a friend who comes to my house when he can't find irony anywhere else.  It's like going to your favorite pizza joint.  You need a fix, a compass point, to set your path and send you back into the world.

There is a store near me called The Irony.  It's on a highway and not easy to visit but I wanted to see what I would find there.  Would there be bins with menus of ironic statements for all of life's vicissitudes? Alas, no.  They make decorative fences, gates and objects out of metal.

The United Overstates of America

(This is a re-issue of a post titled "Thank You So Much."  It's resolution making time.  I thought we might revisit the land of "so much.")

Everybody does it.  Prince William did it when he was out in California with Kate. “Thank you so much,” he said in his fabulous British voice.  Even with that upper crust delivery I was disappointed that he, the standard bearer of all things subdued and traditional, had to add ‘so much.’  He had me at “thank you” and then lost me at “so much.”

‘You’re welcome’ is a perfect response but frequently I see the word ‘most’ squeezing through to leach some solidity out of ‘welcome.’ The physical equivalent is if someone takes your hand in both of theirs and squeezes it as if they are wringing out a washcloth instead of using a regular handshake.

The United States of America is now the United Overstates of America. Why?  Oh, wait, I know.  We overstate to cover up for lack of emotion and real engagement.  How do we really feel about anything?  We don’t know how we really feel and does it even matter?

We say: “Your guacamole is awesome.”

We mean, “I can’t get excited about anything you do but I don’t want you to dislike me.” 

We say: “That dress looks amazing. “

We mean: “Who cares how you look but if I don’t quell your insecurity, we’ll be here all day.”

"I worked my ass off" and "I was blown away," would both, if true, have terrible consequences and do not elicit the approval you are seeking.

Drew Barrymore was and is appealing.  She stood on David Letterman’s desk, pulled up her sweater and flashed him for his birthday. But sweet Drew led us down a wrong path when every third word out of her mouth is ‘amazing,’ or ‘awesome’.  Thanks to Drew and her ilk, many perfectly good words have been downgraded in the tsunami of “this rocks,” and “you rock.”

A “thank you” without frills means:  "I've proven that I'm polite,  now leave me alone.”

Nice means bland and boring

Good means tolerable or it is used like a period to end a conversation.

Pretty means “I've given the opinion you are after now let's move on.”

Pleasant means "In my present and future this (event, person) is invisible."

Satisfactory means “This is disappointing but what else is new?”

“Good morning” still means “Good morning.”  Let’s leave it that way.

Thank you so much!

Everybody does it.  Prince William did it when he was out in California with Kate. “Thank you so much,” he said in his fabulous British voice.  Even with that upper crust delivery I was disappointed that he, the standard bearer of all things subdued and traditional, had to add ‘so much.’  He had me at “thank you” and then lost me at “so much.”

‘You’re welcome’ is a perfect response but frequently I see the word ‘most’ squeezing through to leach some solidity out of ‘welcome.’ The physical equivalent is if someone takes your hand in both of theirs and squeezes it as if they are wringing out a washcloth instead of using a regular handshake.

The United States of America is now the United Overstates of America. Why?  Oh, wait, I know.  We overstate to cover up for lack of emotion and real engagement.  How do we really feel about anything?  We don’t know how we really feel and does it even matter?

We say: “Your guacamole is awesome.”

We mean, “I can’t get excited about anything you do but I don’t want you to dislike me.” 

We say: “That dress looks amazing. “

We mean: “Who cares how you look but if I don’t quell your insecurity, we’ll be here all day.”

Drew Barrymore was and is appealing.  She stood on David Letterman’s desk, pulled up her sweater and flashed him for his birthday. But sweet Drew led us down a wrong path when every third word out of her mouth is ‘amazing,’ or ‘awesome’.  Thanks to Drew and her ilk, many perfectly good words have been downgraded in the tsunami of “this rocks,” and “you rock.”

A “thank you” without frills means:  "I've proven that I'm polite,  now leave me alone.”

Nice means bland and boring

Good means tolerable or it is used like a period to end a conversation.

Pretty means “I've given the opinion you are after now let's move on.”

Pleasant means "In my present and future this (event, person) is invisible."

Satisfactory means “This is disappointing but what else is new?”

“Good morning” still means “Good morning.”  Let’s leave it that way.