When Words Have No Meaning

Too many words have few remnants of their original meanings these days. Gay, sick, ill, dope, filthy, tight, tweet, chill -- even the word word itself -- mean something other than what you might think. It's hard to keep up, but because I have a young son who stands neck-deep in today's oozing cultural quicksand, I usually have some idea of what things mean just from talking with him. But there is one word I simply don't understand today: Friend.

It used to mean someone you could count on, a like-minded person who shared your life and your values, who wanted things to go well for you, who would do you a favor and could expect you would do one in return if asked. But now, thanks in part to Facebook, even the entire concept has been all but eradicated. Being a "friend" is almost a joke. I suppose it now means something along the lines of, "A person I once heard of who has also heard of me." And for some reason, having lots of these is seen as a good thing, although I can't imagine why.

This morning, it being rainy and bleak and buggy outside and my husband gone for a few hours, and being too tired to do much of anything else, I scrolled through Facebook and looked at the pages of friends from long ago. There they were, all smiling and still alive, except for the dead ones although even a couple of those still are active on Facebook. I remembered the good times we shared, and then of course that final bad time that ended the friendship once and for all. I saw people who I knew always disliked each other but still were "friends'" on Facebook. I saw people I know who have hundreds, even thousands, of Facebook "friends," knowing that they feel very alone despite that silliness.

To be honest, it's a sad evolution of our language. We need a new word for what "friend" once meant.

In My Next Life

If I could start my life over and make any changes I wanted, one thing that I would eliminate for sure is Bruce Jenner. What a dope! And while it's certainly his right to be a dope, why does he have to be one in my face? I do dopey things all the time, but I do them in private and pray that nobody sees me or finds out. But Bruce is openly dopey, and now his stupid man-face trying to look girlish with long hair and silly red lips is going to be on the cover of Vanity Fair this summer! Not that I ever read Vanity Fair, but I'm sure I'll see it since I live and breathe, and also our housemate at our vacation home has a subscription and it's always on the coffee table when we get there.

So stupid Bruce, the former Olympic jock and ladies' man who did not like his God-given gender and is going about the tawdry business of prettying himself up, would be MIA in my next life. And he can take his moronic and embarrassing family with him.

Please Rub My Tummy

Big Lurch presents his tummy for rubbing.

FILM REVIEW: "Aloha"

Just stay home and look at a picture of Bradley Cooper.

If you are planning to see the new movie "Aloha" by director Cameron Crowe, you may want to reconsider. In fact, do yourself and someone else a favor and just give the six or seven bucks to a homeless person on the street. The movie has nothing for you.

Bradley Cooper, looking better than ever and dominating the screen in long, loving close-ups so if he's your reason to see it, go for it, plays some sort of military contractor with a shady past from some deal gone bad we never truly understand. But that's okay, because the entire film is ambiguous and incomprehensible from start to finish. There are some big names here, like Alec Baldwin and Bill Murray, and some pretty women, like Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, but don't ask what the heck any of them are doing or why. It's all a big mess, and it takes place in Hawaii.

The Army is involved, along with a rich industrialist, some secret nuclear warheads and a really confusing rocket launch gone awry. Throw in a couple of love scenes to keep you awake and you've got the picture. Literally.

Without giving too much away, let's just say that this guy over here is that kid's real father, and this other guy sort of still loves her, even though she loves him more. But then, he also likes her and she likes him too, but she's pissed. And for some reason, one guy doesn't talk, so subtitles are needed. There's a little boy who goes around spouting Hawaiian folklore, and some actual Hawaiians who are moving sacred bones from one mountainside to another. There is fog, a dance party, some sacrificial moonlight stuff, and the leading man's extra toe. That's it.

While the overstuffed plot promises to sort itself out at some point, it never does. As my friend Jackie, who suffered -- I mean sat -- through the movie with me said at the end, "Obviously they were all on Ecstasy when they wrote the script." Finally, something made sense.

Ketchup as Muse

I recently saw a commercial for Heinz Ketchup. If you just landed here from Mars you'd think the stuff is God's gift to mankind. We see little kids sitting around a table and squeezing the red sauce all over their food, which consists mainly of French fries and hamburgers. (Hot dogs nestled in buns can be seen in the background.) They draw Smiley Faces on their burgers with the ketchup. They dip and smother mounds of fries in the stuff. They are all laughing gleefully. The tag at the end of the ad reads, "Make Dinner Happier." Who knew?

Ketchup is supposedly red from all the tomatoes it contains, although no tomato I ever saw was quite that color. It also has lots of sugar and salt, and some brands also have high fructose corn syrup. I don't think it is particularly nutritious, least of all when paired with fried foods. Its one saving grace is that it has inspired some interesting art, some of which is shown below.

Claes Oldenberg's 1963 soft sculpture "French Fries and Ketchup"

 Jack Daws: Stacks of MacDonald's fries bonded with ketchup.

Sugar cookie "French fries" with a dollop of "ketchup" frosting.

Self-explanatory sculpture and photo by Caspar Benson

Kawaii Floating Ring by SouZou

Heinz Ketchup Dinosaur: Street art in downtown Pittsburgh

Shoe Shopping

Today I went into a shoe store. I was just looking. In fact, I have plenty of shoes and don't need anymore, but I like to see what's being forced on the public every so often, just to keep current. Without a doubt, the most popular shoe for women in the month of May here in Maine is the sandal, especially the kind with a piece of leather or fabric going between the big toe and the next toe as the major way to hold it on the foot. I hate those, never wear them and never would, even if it meant going barefoot. While I do wear sandals at the beach, I like a closed shoe most other times to avoid stepping on a rusty nail and getting gangrene and possibly losing the foot entirely, among other reasons. (If more women followed my lead, fewer Asian girls would be slaves to the pedicure business, but that's for another time.)

So I went into this store, which is called Lamey Wellehan if you must know, and a salesgirl who could not have been more than 17 or 18 approached me immediately as if I were a giant slab of sheet cake and she was a fly. I said right off the bat that I was "just looking" but that did not seem to matter to her. She proceeded to tell me about their sale items and then offered to measure my foot. I said I am 68 and have been wearing the same size shoe for 50 years, so why would I need her, of all people, to measure my foot. I reiterated my mission of just looking. She followed me around the store like a puppy. I hated her.

Finally I found shoes I wanted to try on. She brought out three boxes, even though I had only asked to see two styles. It turned out she did not have either of the two in my size so she brought out other styles she thought I might like. I didn't. I left the store, and it was all her fault, which is funny when you consider that her goal was to get me to like her and actually buy something. She needs more training, at the very least.

This is why I hate shopping and I hate capitalism. I wish there were one pair of shoes for everyone and they were always available in every size.

Turning Off and Tuning Out

My friend Debra has been insisting I do this for years, but like trying to tell a toddler the stove is hot, I had to learn it myself. Television is evil, the source of fear and loathing, permanent brain damage, laziness, sloth and torpor, and in my case, soaring blood pressure stats.

Living virtually alone, since even when my husband is in town he is usually out of the house, I have habitually turned on the TV to stay connected to the world, hear some voices other than my own, and have a few canned laughs with Frasier or Ray Romano. But lately the box has become nothing more than a dispenser of fear; turn it on and right away you are advised to worry -- about mesothelioma, hair loss, advancing dementia, sudden heart attack, fading libido, gastric distress, robbery, the falling dollar, the rising temperatures, deafness, arthritis, depression, insomnia, children born with no upper lip, dogs and cats suffering from abuse or that growing bugaboo, identity theft.

And those are just the commercials.

Under the guise of news, the editorial content pushes the dark side even more: The advance of ISIS, violent tornadoes wiping out entire communities, dead veterans, living veterans with PTSD, global starvation, rioting in racially-unstable American cities, trigger-happy cops and egregious wrongdoings by Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, depending on which station you're watching.

Today I hit the wall. That's it. No more manipulation by unseen forces. If I'm going to be manipulated, it's going to happen in person. Retreating into my art-infested cocoon, I will from this day forward forgo all brain poison. Right now I will vacuum my dining room rug, which has needed it for some time, and then go to a Feldenkreis class to  realign my body parts and hopefully restore my natural high.

Death Is a Mother-*%?@#*!

Even though we can all die at any moment, at any age, it is still shocking when someone we consider "too young to die" goes ahead and does it. This just happened to a woman in my husband's circle of friends, someone he worked with years ago. I too knew her and would see her at company functions, dinners, picnics and when I stopped in at Mitch's office.  After he left that job, I lost touch with her even though Mitch and she maintained a connection.

Single and childless, Brett was only 45, way younger than me. How come her? I feel guilty now. We learned of her passing last night, and it has blown my mind, bummed me out, laid me low, and any other cliche you can think of.

Brett lived dangerously. When I knew her so many years ago she was living in what was euphemistically called "a changing neighborhood." In Washington, D.C., that just meant "bad." She paid a high price for it when she was violently mugged one night on her way home. Then, as bad luck would have it, the same thing happened to her again months later. Eventually she took off for foreign shores. She went to Bali for a vacation, then went to Turkey to live and work, and then back to Bali to make it her permanent home. Mitch kept me abreast of her adventures posted on Facebook.

Last night he yelled out from the next room, shocked and dismayed. "Brett's dead." She had contracted thyphoid shortly after arriving in Bali last February and never got better. After a long illness and a long hospital stay, and despite several surgeries and ongoing medications, she lost the fight.

There is no punchline. It sucks. No matter what age. Today I woke up feeling like I was given a gift of a new day, but I was too depressed to open it. For that I am sorry, but really, when someone living large dies, you feel it.

Life Is Too Short to Fake Being Tall

I am not sure if this is true, but yesterday's New York Times reported that more than a few women attending the Cannes Film Festival were banned from walking on the Red Carpet, which despite being nonsensical is still something some women enjoy doing, for the "sin" of wearing flat shoes and not high-heels. This is indeed a sorry state of affairs.

The wearing of high-heeled shoes apparently goes back many hundreds of years, and since there have already been scores of scholarly papers written on the subject I won't bother to plagiarize them here. Let it suffice that since historical reasons no longer exist, today it is just plain dumb to wear shoes that are not properly designed for the human foot. The fact that women do this and men do not pretty much sums up why men rule the world and likely always will, at least as long as such shoes are being manufactured. After Armageddon, all bets -- and probably most shoes -- are off.

Despite the growing body of medical evidence that "high heels drastically alter the wearer’s posture, displace the foot and ankle bones, strain the knee joint and tighten the surrounding tendons, leading to osteoarthritis and hammertoe due to the narrow toe box," many women of affluence and influence wear shoes like the ones shown below in the hopes of looking sexy (getting one of those men who rule the world), feeling powerful (by getting access to the bank accounts of one of those men who rule the world), or gaining a few inches of height (to look taller). When I see them trying to navigate the cobblestone streets of Portland's Old Port district, usually slightly drunk since that is the scene down there, especially in summer, I feel sad for all of us.

America's Favorite Pastime

Today my husband and I went to a baseball game. A friend gave us tickets he couldn't use, for great seats right behind home plate. The weather was perfect, with temperatures in the mid-70s and fluffy white clouds floating overhead. It seemed like a very patriotic thing to do, especially on a holiday weekend.

Naturally it wasn't a real game but instead something called "AA baseball," being here in Maine, but still it had all the trappings. The national anthem was sung. Miss Maine was there, wearing a crown and a skimpy red, white and blue outfit. Crowds filled the stands and I noticed that hardly anybody paid the slightest bit of attention to what was happening on the playing field, instead focusing mostly on the purchase and consumption of food, which when it comes right down to it really is America's favorite pastime. This included pizza and hamburgers and hot dogs and fried fish and French fries, fried dough and those big, doughy salted pretzels. There were ice cream sandwiches and ice cream sundaes and peanuts and popcorn and Cracker Jacks. And lots of beer. Wishing I could eat any of the aforementioned without feeling sick or guilty or both, I opted for a Chicken Caesar wrap. It was tasty.

Oh yeah, the game. It was the Portland Sea Dogs against the Other Guys. (I swear I never heard who they were.) This being Memorial Day weekend, it was officially Superhero Day, so Captain America was there, whoever he is, strutting around in his odd costume. Kids were told in advance to dress as their favorite superhero, so there were lots of little Supermen, Incredible Hulks, Batmen and Spidermen running around.

We left at the bottom of the 7th inning with the Sea Dogs trailing, 3-2.

It's All So Complicated

Lately I've been reading a lot about meditation and have learned that there are many "experts" in this quickly-expanding field. Apparently many people feel strongly that their way is the way, and to that end have gone so far as to write articles and books, produce CDs and create extensive websites extolling their sage advice. Stunningly, much of the advice is stuff everyone already knows and is already doing, like, "Breathe in normally and slowly exhale." It is also suggested that one should, "Let thoughts enter your mind as they will." I have been doing this my whole life; who knew I was meditating?

Another quite popular trend is "living mindfully." To live mindfully, you must pay attention to what you are doing. Like if you are eating, eat. Or if you are listening to music, listen to the music. It is actually fairly simple if you put your mind to it, ha ha, no pun intended. Yet there are seminars and retreats and teachers and courses and entire sections of bookstores dedicated to the subject. Many of these "experts" even support themselves and their families by telling other people how to live mindfully!

So I decided on my morning walk that if I presented myself as an expert on walking, maybe I could make a few bucks. After all, I have been at it my whole life. Here are a few of my suggestions, just off the top of my head:

1. Before undertaking a walk, it is best to stand up.
2. For a good result and the least amount of injuries, wearing socks and shoes is advisable. Choose socks that are comfortable and fit you well. As for the shoes, they too should feel good on your feet, not cause blisters, not be too tight or too loose but instead be just right.
3. Decide in advance which foot you will start with.
4. Lift up and then place the chosen foot on the ground in front of you, at a comfortable distance from your body. Gently move your entire body weight onto that foot, taking your weight off of your other foot and raising it off the ground.
5. Now place the raised foot on the ground in front of you, and allow the first foot to rise up into the air and move ahead of your body.
6. Continue alternating the feet in this manner.
7. These individual movements are called "steps." Take as many steps as you can without straining your heart.
8. You may move your arms or not, your choice, however it is best not to keep your hands in your pockets or you may fall over.
9. Practice doing this daily. It is important not to skip a day, unless you are ill or incapacitated.

Congratulations, you are walking!  Over time you should be able to walk without thinking about it, unless you are trying to live mindfully, in which case you should concentrate on each step. For those who are ready to advance to the next level, read my article, "Running: Moving Faster Than Walking."