Category Archives: Social Rules

Behavior, Personal, Social Rules, Uncategorized

Grateful

08/19/2021 X Teri 2 Comments

For karma, I tip each time I buy lottery tickets. It’s given me so many interesting moments with random clerks at convenience stores. If I have a winning ticket, I try to donate a bit more. The lottery is a fool’s game, one which tricks us into miscalculating the realistic odds of winning. That’s part of the reason I like it. In my heart, there’s not a day that passes that I don’t consider how many against-the-odds things I’ve experienced. It not only amplifies my gratefulness for still being here, but it also reminds me that almost everything that turns out to be magical sounds ridiculous to the reasonable mind. Harry Potter? Not publishable. Haruki Murakami? He had a moment like I did, except in his, he realized he was going to be a writer. Demetri Martin? On his way to being one of the best legal minds in the world and just decided that comedy was his passion.

I sometimes find myself contemplating writing a book based solely on the stories that clerks share with me after I tip them and share my karma theory with them. Most of them realize that I will follow through on my promise to give them a million dollars if I hit the jackpot.

A couple of places in Springdale had clerks who knew me and knew I was going to tip them. I miss the surprised looks on their faces when they saw me walking in. I’m certain they are wondering what happened to the tip-for-karma guy.

Springdale feels like another country to me now. I miss it, especially after having walked 1,000 miles on its streets in the last year. I know Jim at the produce stand is wondering what happened to me. As is Güino, my tuxedo cat.

Lately, I’ve mentioned a couple of times that there’s a clerk here near my apartment in Fayetteville who resisted accepting tips. Now, she smiles, knowing I’m going to leave the money on the counter, whether she accepts it or not.

The last time I went in, I said, “tee-me lie kas-to chaw.” I don’t speak Nepali. But I spoke enough, that day.

As I left her the tip, she smiled.

I’m not sure there’s a value in knowing that I made a human connection.

We all miss the place we call home in our hearts.

A few words of memorization for me. And a gong in her head hearing the words.

Is karma real? I don’t know.

But I heard the gong as it sounded.

Love, X

Lemon Moment, New Word, Opinion, Personal, Social Rules, Uncategorized

Hypocritical Lessons Learned The Hard Way #1

08/16/2021 X Teri Leave a comment

Note: everyone reading this will have at least one gong go off in their heads. I’m not sure why, but a muse settled in my head this afternoon. Feel free to tell me that I’m wrong.
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The Botany Rule: Love and nurturing are on Maslow’s hierarchy for a reason. If you don’t bring your water bucket and a bit of sunshine to those you love, they will needlessly suffer the absence of that which nourishes; if possible, they’ll find it elsewhere. It isn’t the plant’s fault. Just because we have reason and consciousness should not fool you into thinking that we aren’t wired for intimacy.
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So much of what ignites us in the minds of others is practiced. Take a moment and tell someone that they’d made your day better. Instead of speaking when motivated by recrimination, find a way to say something positive. People’s ears become deaf to love when criticism fills the air. We have only so many minutes in a day and attention to spare. Choose, rather than react. Sometimes, in silence, hug unexpectedly, and whisper in the midst of shouts.
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Words fade but attitude invades.
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The longer you wait to tell someone an uncomfortable truth, the harder it is to be open the next time you want to. Someone who loves you will respond with hurt, but that hurt will be tempered by eventual acceptance. And if not? They have a disparate image of who you are than you do.
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If you’re in an unequal relationship, and most are, you might as well open yourself and crowd them; the end is as certain as the curtain on Broadway. Take your swing and crowd the plate. Living loosely is a great idea but a terrible way to survive.
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Rare is the couple in which one prefers to dance and the other to sit. They exist and if you’re in one, relish it if it has lasted. But if your partner won’t dance for fear of looking foolish, they’ve placed appearance and decorum over you.
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Love is foolish and its demonstration is seldom appreciated by onlookers; those dancing don’t count the eyes or ears observing them.
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Someone smart said, “Faults are thick where love is thin.” If you find yourself listing grievances, you’ve allowed your inability to honestly communicate to sever a significant part of your intimacy.
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“Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve” is a great example of something that sounds reasonable while simultaneously belying the fact that we are emotional creatures disguised as thinking adults. Look around. We admire smart people who care enough to not care about how others interpret their sentimentality. Those people feed my soul. I think they do yours, too.
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“I would love you more IF” is a thought that should warn you that either you need to work on yourself – or the unstated expectations of your relationship.
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I learned something about myself. If a person can tell me his or her worst secrets, my capacity to love and appreciate them blossoms. If the opposite is the case, it’s very difficult to navigate misgivings as they arise.
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We protect nothing by failing to reveal who we really are.
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The best truths are written in dirt. The best voices are broken. And the kindest souls have learned to turn off their judgment when others fail them.
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Finally, one that is not mine, and I’m sharing it as I found it:
“You sit in sh!t too long, it stops smelling.”

Love, X

Customer Service, Finances, Humor, Opinion, Personal, Social Rules, Walmart

It’s Safer To Get Killed In Traffic (Subtitle: Don’t Use Off-Brand ATMs, Even At The World’s Largest Retailer)

08/06/2021 X Teri 2 Comments

I get zinged for my love and use of index cards. They are both practical and whimsical. I can take notes, make card houses, and draw. I can also use them to quickly leave notes everywhere, sometimes to the disgruntlement of almost the entire planet.

Due to momentary insanity, I opted to use the ATM at Walmart. The fee was low – and so was enthusiasm for driving across traffic to my bank. I knew better but did it anyway. Some people define that as wisdom.

I watched as the machine scrolled through the prompts, indicated it was dispensing money, and then the red light near the bill dispenser flashed. Uh-oh. I took out my phone to record, despite the Fort-Knox number of cameras in the register area. If you didn’t know this secret, Walmart and most stores experience sudden camera failure when YOU need them. A UFO could fly across your head and they’d just shrug. The machine gave me a card, a receipt, followed by zero money. The receipt indicated I’d been had. I meant charged.

It was at that point I realized I had not, in fact, recorded anything. Murphy’s law was somewhere behind me, watching with an evil grin.

I flagged one of the six managerial types standing in the dead limbo zone between the self-checkout kiosks and freedom. You’ve seen them. They evidently don’t do checkout anymore – they instead employ people to leer at us while we do it for them and then act invisible when our kiosk needs attention. He ambled over. “Oh, we don’t own that machine.” (Which turns out isn’t true. They do. They rent the space to the company on the face of the ATM.) He then said the strangest thing: “Yes, it’s been broken for at least a couple of days.” I looked at him with a mixture of incredulity and confused mirth. “Uh, you think an ‘Out of Order’ sign might be needed here? If that’s the case, you are needlessly stressing your customers,” I said, trying to be patient and calm.

We traded comments, me for fascinating information to use later, and he, because he read the wrong side of the customer service training cards when he was hired.

I called the number on the ATM. It went as well as you’d think. Yes, they knew it was broken and likely out of cash, the woman allegedly doing customer service told me. Yes, multiple people had angrily called. “Can you take my information? I’ve had this happen before and I got screwed worse than ________.” You’ll have to insert a colorful analogy there. It was very funny but risque. I could tell immediately that the person on the phone was as interested in helping me as someone who wants to push someone else down the stairs so they’ll get to the bottom faster.
No, she wouldn’t take my information. In her case, she learned her company’s motto: “We’re not satisfied until you’re not satisfied.” I asked about the camera in the front of the ATM, having been through this scenario previously. “Oh, there isn’t one,” she said. She told me that Walmart or corporate owns the machine and her company rents the space. “Who owns the accountability?” I asked. Insert “blah, blah, blah” here. She told me that no one was coming to service or fill the machine – nor to put an “Out of Order” placard on it. Walmart employees wouldn’t do it either, because “it was their job or their machine.”

Before hanging up, I informed the woman on the phone that I was trying to take out $300 for both groceries and meth. That’s how I confirmed she was the most humorless person in the world. I told her I loved her and that I wanted her to have a good weekend. Plot twist: she hung up.

I will admit that because I carry permanent markers, I ALMOST wrote directly on the face of the ATM monitor. I had to really control myself. Instead, I wrote on several index cards and put them everywhere. There ended up being one inside the money dispenser that you can’t see in the picture. You’d be surprised at how often I use my stash of index cards to let everyone else know that something is broken, their tire is low, or that their face reminds me why I don’t ever want to be in a Turkish prison.

As I was leaving, two people were at the Money Center complaining that the ATM was broken.

At least a kind soul took the time to let everyone know the ATM was potentially robbing customers.

Wait! I’m that person! 🙂

But did I die?

No.

So help me, if my money isn’t put back into the account, I am going to be really irritable. I’m not going to do as I did years ago and rant and fight either the ATM company or Walmart. That just wastes my life. No, I’m going to squirt super glue into the card slot every time I go in there. Extreme? Yes. But you only say that it’s extreme because you’ve never had a bank or ATM ‘take’ $400 of your money (twice) and then say it was you who screwed up. By the way, thanks Arvest for the valuable lesson a few years ago. They weren’t wrong: I had screwed up by staying with them after the first mistake.

It’s Friday and if I don’t get my meth, I don’t know how I’m going to watch Masterpiece Theatre.

PS I don’t use meth. That’s just crazy talk. Heroin is cheaper.

Love, X

Eats, Food, Humor, Opinion, Personal, Social Rules, Uncategorized

Cigars and Sashimi

08/05/2021 X Teri 4 Comments

I got accused outright of having a sheltered life earlier in the week.

The accuser wasn’t wrong. I thought quite a bit about it, and to sit and steep myself in the allegation. I indicted myself in agreement with the conclusion.

To be clear, I have witnessed some sh!t in my time. All of us have in varying amounts. Most of our lives probably overlapped a great deal. Thankfully, not everyone had a wild ride of it and each of us disparately experienced what I would label as “fringe” events.

But there’s a lot I don’t know. Obviously. My spell checker reminds me every day, as do my co-workers, neighbors, ex-wife, and even the mailman drops by every couple of days to shake his head in bewilderment at me.

Even at 54, I’m still finding out that there are worlds within worlds all around me. Words, foods, drinks, ideas, a cauldron of ceaseless wonder.

When you don’t eat sushi, for example, the barrage of specific vocabulary one must learn to order it for someone else becomes overwhelming, like signing up for Beginner’s Spanish only to later realize that it was in fact “Belgian Spanish.” I have no problem insisting that I’m ignorant and therefore need guidance. Otherwise, people will be eating a can of tuna and crackers. I won’t even get started on how they price the stuff. The sushi, not the canned tuna.

Food and flavor are 100% opinion.

NO, I don’t care what the various kinds of sushi, sashimi and blah, blah, blah are actually supposed to be called. That you like it is all that matters. I don’t have to like it. I like it that YOU like it. That’s pretty much how all of us should respond to friends and family when they love the stuff we wouldn’t eat if the human race depended on it. I know for a fact that some of the stuff I eat would make Bill puke until next Tuesday. Sorry, Bill. It’s true. Besides, you’re definitely not busy next Tuesday anyway. Yes, I read your calendar, the one by the fridge.

But the prices? I know for a fact that in a dark basement, probably in New Jersey, there’s a really big man who spins a wheel and randomly determines the definitions for both ‘quality’ and ‘price’ of sushi. The worse it looks, the more it costs. (Note: it’s a shame that isn’t actually true for a lot of things, right?)

For those who aren’t around smokers, there are twenty-two million kinds of tobacco and specialty products available now. I remember in the early 70s when you could easily memorize the main twenty or so tobacco products. Now the racks look like Heidi Klum’s makeup room. There are so many adjectives you need to know to ask for the right thing that I feel like I need a thesaurus when I’m around it. Things that look cheap are obnoxiously expensive. Things that look expensive… well, they are expensive too.

The point of this is to forcefully point out that I am very ignorant about more things than you’d realize. I am very knowledgeable about a lot of things, too. But it is a lot of work hiding my ignorance – not that I make much of an effort. I’d need a big box for that.

Because I’m rejuvenated, I’m going to share another vow with you, exactly like the one that allowed me to lose all this weight…

I am going to say, “I don’t know” a lot more often.

I am going to say, “You probably need to show me this again, for the fifth time, unless you’d like a disaster.”

And if you need me to go buy good seafood, lord help you until my ignorance abates.

I’ve always been quite ignorant. You just might not have realized how much. I’m here to help you with that misunderstanding.

Meanwhile, be yourself. Smile, laugh, and growl sometimes if that is what is needed. Eat the foods you love even if your mom vomits, and let everyone eat the foods they love. Take that same acceptance and throw it into all the other areas of life where we encroach needlessly on people’s ability to live freely.

P.S. I have not been drinking. But I am going to have a bit of vodka and homemade sweet and sour.

And those index cards on the floor leading the rocking chair were part of an elaborate ruse that I couldn’t execute today. I have optimism for tomorrow. You’ll note the rocking chair is in front of an open door, leading to a balcony and a whole new world.

Love, X
Amen

Exercise, Humor, Personal, Psychology, Social Rules

Look Up, And To The Left

08/05/2021 X Teri 2 Comments

I have a lot of fun with chalk, odd messages, and tomfoolery.

There are times when I learn unexpected things from doing such frivolity.

This morning, early, I went outside and wrote “Look up, and to the left” in chalk on the dock concrete. In fact, there wasn’t anything noteworthy, neither ‘up’ nor ‘to the left.’ Having said that, there easily might have been. I sometimes go to strange lengths to get an inside joke off the ground. I’ve been known to climb walls, trees, parking garages, and just about anything to pull off something interesting – even if no one ever sees it. I’d estimate a good 75% of them aren’t found for a long time, or at all. A good example? Years ago, I put a laminated note on the underside of a table at Las Margaritas, with my email address on it, indicating I’d pay whoever found it and contacted me $50. I pulled it off myself almost seven years later – though the table had been moved to another spot.

I observed several people approach the chalk, read the message, and then look up. Several of them looked up and to the right. (We all have directionally challenged people in our lives.) A few lingered, their eyes searching the upper part of the dock canopy. A few others read the message and kept walking without looking up. It was entertaining, and I figured many of them hadn’t ever looked up above them in that spot.

It’s those who didn’t look up that give me pause.

Were they in a hurry? Not curious? If I think about those people too long, I draw unfair conclusions. Who wouldn’t want a surprise, even a potentially stupid one, early in the workday? Something new, something interesting.

The other observation, one long known to me, is that most people will read almost anything written in chalk if they come across it. You can use that generalization in marketing, psychology, and tomfoolery.

Anyway, I hope you are the “look up, and to the left” kind of person instead of the “not interested” type.

You never know what might be lurking on the fringes.

A great deal of the world is hidden in plain sight up.

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PS I had picked today as a random day to break my single-day pushup record. Once I started, I regretted the decision. After a couple of hours, I decided to double down and beat my record by noon. I crossed the record with time to spare. Each time I surpass my last mark, I seriously wonder if there is an upper limit and if most of my problems and obstacles are about as accurate as the limit I imagine – until I beat it.

Now, I wonder if the fumes from today’s painting are making me see the giraffe outside. This is a weird apartment simplex, after all.

DIY, Humor, Personal, Project, Social Rules

Today Only

08/03/2021 X Teri Leave a comment

Someone is back at arts and crafts today. Y’all will be happy to know I haven’t significantly injured myself today. I did get my feelings hurt earlier but it wasn’t billable for Blue Cross, so it doesn’t count. Yesterday’s project with the window panel miraculously fit perfectly where it was supposed to. It was spa blue, similar to my car. As I put it in the window, I realized I’d probably always remember breaking a drillbit off on my shinbone while making that board.

These boards are for an old desk. I’d removed the raw wood top off it weeks ago, as it wouldn’t fit through a standard door. Because I’m dedicated to adding color (and more color) to things, I opted for a deep blue. It’s going to stand out like a streetwalker at Sunday lunch once the boards are on the desk. I’d like y’all to know that by the time I put these boards on the desk, I could have bought another desk for the same money. It’s not about the money. It’s about the likely brain damage I suffered as a child. (Insert confused laugh pause here.)

You can also see that I wisely have been painting and sawing (mostly) outside. It seemed prudent, given my approach to painting. It’s kind of like performance art. Residents and passersby alike tend to watch me while I’m out there. I’ve decided one of these days I’m going to go out there shirtless (and/or pantsless?) and just start spraying MYSELF. The lease does prohibit vehicle maintenance but shockingly omits spray painting oneself. Or self-immolation for that matter. I probably should do the landlord a favor and make a running list of things that occurred to me to do but aren’t forbidden.
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PS No matter where you are, take a moment and think of your friends and family and who might need a word of comfort. Reach out and listen. I was reminded yesterday that what we see is no gauge of how someone is really doing. And the smart creative ones are often undetectable in their protective bubbles. It breaks my heart to know that people are in so much pain. I write a lot of nonsense but the other half of me is zeroed into the holes I have – and those I see in others.

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“My mom cursed so much that the Navy paid her to train the recruits how to do it properly.” – X
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I often pause when I read the phrase “SERIOUS INJURY,” as if there is an alternate and opposite “COMEDIC INJURY.” (For the person suffering I mean – we all find humor in watching someone else get hit with an anvil.)
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I don’t know the attribution, but someone sent me this, saying it sounded like something I had written on my blog: “Discipline is cheap compared to how expensive regret can be.”
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I hope you’re happy, wherever you are. And if not, that you run outside right now and laugh at the sky.
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Look up, not down.