Author: Bev

If you were to hear something like, “I would estimate that we won’t bring the car home from the shop for under $500;” or “My best estimate is that I will gain no less than five pounds over the holidays,” most of you would understand that I am giving an approximation of a figure that may be lower or higher when all is said and done and the task is finished.  Time will tell, eh?

In a previous column I wrote about the broken ice machine in our refrigerator.  Well, the estimate I signed for repair was exorbitant but compared to a new refrigerator, it seemed the more frugal of our immediate options.  The labor estimate was equal to the parts portion of the job.  But, for all we knew it may have taken the technician an hour or hours to install the parts and re-calibrate the freezer panel; so, we’ll see, I thought.

A week hence, two dinged-up boxes of parts arrived and the technician was scheduled to install the hopefully undamaged parts.  Matthew, the no-nonsense technician seemed unfazed by the nasty boxes which contained several hundred dollars’ worth of parts.

Matthew worked for twenty-two minutes and we trusted the shiny new panel would say it enjoyed producing ice cubes and crushing said cubes upon our request, in twenty-four hours or so.  When I asked Matthew if they would adjust the labor costs of the estimate since it ended up being pretty much what I I would describe as a “plug-and-play” job, he said it wasn’t within his purview to deal with that, but I should call billing; he just tells “them” what parts are needed.

So, we were happy with that, and enthralled with our fancy new-like ice-maker and freezer display panel.  Who was it who first said, everything is temporary?  Our happiness waned when we got the bill.

It appears that the Service Center felt that their Estimate was the bill, whether the labor time took three hours or five minutes, the labor cost was “estimated” by job code not time spent working.  It was their argument that since I signed the Estimate, I am bound to pay the amount estimated.   

More than once and to more than four folks on the “help-line,” I wanted to shout, “don’t you understand the definition of the word, estimate?”  “But you signed it,” they repeated like automatons. Honestly, I could have been saying in Swahili, “I love dandelions and there is a meteor coming toward my house,” and they would have said, “but you signed the estimate,” in response.

I learned a new word, presented as word of the day on Dictionary.com.  It’s inspissate, and means to thicken or make or become dense.  I like this word; I think mostly because it has spiss in the middle and somehow that sounds like a venomous but neutral retort fitting for a telephone help-line representative who helps you not.

I can satisfactorily envision myself saying to one and all, “must you be so inspissate about this whole estimate-thing; IT’S AN ESTIMATE, an APPROXIMATION based on the unknown, until you KNOW, then you can adjust the price accordingly!”  I know that using that word that way, stretches its connotation, but they don’t know that and my fantasy vent helps me to cope with the injustice of it all.

My age has mellowed me as to arguing about customer-service type rip-offs, to an extent.  I still retain a little bit of fight in me as to “the principal of the thing.”

So, my calm and final effort to help this “service” company see sense as to their misinterpretation of the word, estimate, was to send an email with my argument laid out in plain, English, step by obvious step.  By the way, it took me about three calls, not counting several transfers from one department to another, to get the correct email in which to send my dispute.

Approximately three weeks, hence, after receiving no reply to my well-thought-out, reasoned dispute, what I did receive was a new bill from the billing department with the expectation that I pay the estimate in its entirety.  After all, I “signed the estimate.” 

I suppose I could retain an attorney, but the principal of the thing can be quite expensive.  In fact, a friend and colleague who was owed an amount in the six figures was advised by his attorney not to pursue it because legal fees would obfuscate the amount owed.  Wowzer.

So, as the due date approached, I had to come up with a few justifications in my brain for how to be okay, dealing with the injustice that seems to be the outcome of this repair cost.  But once it’s paid, I’ll probably forget about it, until the next time something major breaks in my house.

The next time, will I remember the lesson?  And what was the lesson in all of this?

DIY and eBay or YouTube videos?  A different service company?  I think I’ll go with option number three, my son-in-law.  He’s brilliant at everything to do with remodel and repair, but I don’t like taking his time and we refuse to do “family rates.”   I don’t know for sure what I’ll do, but I’m telling myself, “Better luck next time.”

 

There’s often more to the story than meets the eye.  There’s a great mass underneath the visual tip of an iceberg.

I don’t know for certain when I learned the word, paradox, but it has enlightened my life.  So much in life is contradictory.  Unless you dig deeper, look further, or exercise your curiosity, the surface will be the sum-total of your life.

“What you see is what you get” is admirable in the sense that one has no hidden agenda, but in another sense, it is a parody.  There is always something hidden below the surface. 

As the Titanic demonstrated, or any divorced individual will tell you, what you see is not always what you get.  That house that you bought, “as is,” isn’t what you thought it was.  Straightforward, might be straight and it might go forward, but underneath it all  there are unknowns.

After looking in the bathroom mirror recently, I was startled with what I saw for the first time as an asymmetry in my eyes.  My right eye socket is smaller than my left.

I immediately shot off a text to my daughter, “why didn’t you tell me I’m a freak of nature?  I never noticed that my right eye is smaller than my left eye!”  I’ve long known that the universal perception of beauty is based on symmetry.  Since I now know that I missed the symmetry-boat, all of my illusions have been dashed.

Years ago, my sister, Dee said, “You so have Dad’s eyes.”  I think I was startled by her observation, so I looked closely at my eyes.  I hoped to recognize what she saw; Dad’s eyes.

Upon close examination, I discovered something. I’ve never seen my eyes in a mirror!  Isn’t that extraordinary and weird?

I’ve worn make-up since I was a teenager, eye makeup included.  But, until I had to include my eye color on a driver’s license application back in the day, on which I reported, hazel – I had never seen what color my eyes were.

My grown daughter being my barometer, and my husband oblivious to nuances in color, I asked her what color she thought my eyes are.  When she quickly said “green,” I was a tad astonished.  Then, I looked closely to my eye balls – focusing as microscopically as possible, only on their pigment, I saw they are quite green.

This endeavor – my search to see my own eye color – brings to mind an incident many years ago when I taught a human sexuality course.  I had assigned an exercise to my class, to attribute colors to various developmental stages of their lives.

Some students charted rainbows of nuanced color to represent hiccups and highlights in their development, along with other symbols to describe the stops and starts of their lives.  One guy was the exception.  Quite troubled, he said, “I don’t know how to do this assignment.  My chart is all blue.”  He couldn’t conceive of life stages symbolically as color.

He was me, with eye color.  I just don’t perceive it.  From looking into a mirror at myself, to looking into the eyes of my loved ones – what do I see, if not their color?      

Scientists have identified multiple senses beyond the scope of the usual five identified first by Aristotle (sight, smell, hearing, touch, & taste); up to twenty of them, in fact.  There is no hard and fast rule and no real consensus among said scientists as to the number of available senses to humans, that cause some of us to perceive another world within the world of the five major senses.

It’s quite possible that I don’t perceive eye color because my perception automatically goes to the thing beneath, behind, or under the eyes, to the essence of life.  Everything we see with our eyes, everything visible, is a reflection of something hidden, a symbol or image of something invisible or unseen. “The visible is the invisible written down,” from The Roots of Christian Mysticism.

Not everybody utilizes their capacity of vision, but remain satisfied with their imagination lying dormant, in favor of preoccupation with what’s right in front of their eyes. “Yesterday I inhaled a cloud, and immediately my eyes started raining,” Jared Kintz.  Do you have eyes to see? 

What are you seeing in the mirror?

 

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by a barrage of demands for your time?  I know I have and I often shout to no one in particular, but to the universe, “could you please just give me a break!”

Having just read a scientific article about self-compassion, I learned that giving yourself a break is the least likely act of compassion you will offer to anyone.  So, give yourself a break too.

We’re living in a world that presses hard against us to keep up, to produce perfect products and services, and to look good doing it. I’m thinking we need a break to avoid a breakdown.

I believe it’s workplace law that employees are given a break, maybe two in the course of their work day.  So, if you’re self-employed, break free from the grinding demands of your work, and take a break or two throughout your day.  Retired folks, too, live in a culture that expects everyone to keep busy and work at something, even if it’s not an official job, and need a break every now and then.

School children are given a break during the course of their studies, for play as in recess, or at least for quiet, as in study hall. Everyone needs to be cut a break sometime.

After having a break, we often feel able to go about our tasks with renewed vitality.  Studies have proven that mid-day naps are revitalizing to workers.  They come back to work as if it were a new day.  The same can be said for exercise which is both relaxing and energizing.

Separating yourself, even for a moment, from stressful events, the ongoing pressure of work, relationship-keeping, staying on top of the stuff of life, etc. is a remedy to day-time fatigue.  A walk around the block, a visit to a park, even walking down your driveway can lighten your burden.  It’s called breathing space when you interrupt the building chain of events toward burnout.

So, before you crack up, take a break.  A bit of trivia about “cracking up” – we of a certain generation had heard in some form, “she cracked up and went to the funny farm.”  That was well before making such comments landed you in social prison.  At any rate, we grew up saying that hilarious things “cracked me up.” 

I found some roots for the phrase, “cracked me up.”  Apparently, 17^th century makeup applied to a woman’s face thickly would break or crack when she laughed.  So, laughter became associated with having a breakdown, supposedly a funny one.

And fortunately, we’ve “come a long way baby,” since attributing all breakdowns to hysterical women, labeled such, because untrained male doctors in antiquity thought any anomaly in women was directly attributed to her having a uterus (Greek/hystera).  Thus, all women were considered broken and prone to hysteria, cracking up, and potentially destined for the funny farm.  A sad lesson in history which has been remedied a million times over, thank God.

On the contrary, I’m delighted to know of the Japanese Kintsukuroi tradition which in a sense celebrates brokenness. I was reminded of this tradition when in a dream, I preserved a bowl I had broken, in the freezer.  You may have seen Kintsukuroi bowls in works of art.  They repair broken bowls by filling in the cracks (I think of them as faces with wrinkles) with gold, creating a work of art.

And Jesus promises in Luke 4 to have fulfilled the Isaiah 61 prophecy, to lovingly “bind up and heal the broken-hearted.”  In fact, he was known to give preferential attention to broken creatures over the arrogant, self-serving ones who fix themselves, thank you.

I will conclude this tome with the phrase of good tidings offered liberally in the performing arts, break a leg.  Essentially reverse psychology, to appease the spirits of fate, I prefer it with the Yiddish definition of “success & blessing” or Godspeed which offers a break from the universe in the form of success, prosperity, good fortune, advancement, or even generosity. So, break a leg, ya’ll.

“Won’t you please, please help me” (Beatles, Help! 1965).  About help, I’m guilty often of not wanting any.  Do you always accept help when it’s offered?  Or, are you the one wanting to help?

What if you don’t want any help or don’t need any help?  If you decline help when it’s offered, is it rude?  Are you inclined to ask for help when you need it?

Many people with disabilities today, usually don’t want help.  In fact, I believe that it is academic protocol to instruct us to refrain from willy-nilly helping a disabled person to navigate the ableist-world.  Helping a disabled person, because of their disability, is considered not in good form.

I was once employed at a University Psychiatric Hospital, working with a renowned psychiatrist on a childhood depression project.  As in every university department, we were assisted by work-study students.  Long story short, I was once lectured by my boss for asking our work-study student if, in the rain, she wouldn’t mind heading out into the nasty weather to pick up our mail from a next-door building.  “She’s depressed, you should just tell her what you want from her, don’t ask if she wants to help you out, it’s her job and she knows that.”

The biblical Great Commission and so much of the New Testament preaches to help others, but is that help misconstrued in today’s social climate?  If you try to help somebody, does it make them feel lesser than you?

Is help a handout?  Are we so caught up in earning our way through the merit system, that we can’t see the forest for the trees, declining any help, always and forever because it was offered by grace, not earned through merit?

Is help interfering with independence?  Oh, to be sure, we are an independent lot, we Americans.  As we age, however, our independence begins to wane and we discover we need someone to help from time to time.  “Help, I need somebody, Help, not just anybody, Help, you know I need someone, help” (Beatles, Help! 1965).

“I’ll do it myself.” Sound familiar?  Most kids from three to ninety-three assert their independence this way.

 “If I want help, I’ll ask for it?”  Is it the more respectful way to be of help, to respond willingly and with verve, when asked for help?  I find, that sometimes with this tack, the former helper doesn’t want to help when you ask, because who is in control?  Their help is no longer on their terms, it is on your terms.

What happens when you can’t do it yourself?  I guess it’s different if you ask for help versus when you are offered help.  Or, in the wisdom of your age, you find it easier to humble yourself, changed your mind and opened the door to help.  “I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before” (Beatles, Help! 1965).

So, are we to stop anticipating or discerning that someone needs help, our help and just wait for them to ask?  Maybe some folks consider an offer of help, too intrusive or nosy.  How dare you notice that they might be struggling with something and think that you can make it better?  Again, does this make you appear arrogant, that you have the solution that they haven’t already considered and without you they couldn’t get by?

Presumably, the “helping professions,” jobs in which helping others through the social-impact sector, including medicine, nursing, psychotherapy/psychological-counseling, social work, life coaching, ministry, and education are in existence as a form of help to those who need it, and who ask for it.  People who fulfill these official helping roles are professional listeners, facilitators, and sounding boards.  Having gotten lost in empathy and compassion-tired in these tumultuous times, one could imagine that these folks could use a little help from a friend once in a while.

“Help me if you can, I’m feeling down And I do appreciate you being round.  Help me get my feet back on the ground.  Won’t you please, please help me” (Beatles, Help! 1965).  How can I help?

Sarcastically, a character in a British television show we just watched, said, “I guess you think recycling is a novel idea.”  In other words, you must have been living your life in a bunker if you don’t know about recycling.

Around for decades, officially, my mom famously employed her version of recycling since at least the sixties.  She re-used margarine tubs which the family hopefully deposited in a recycling bin somewhere when she passed, leaving dozens if not hundreds of them stored in a basement cupboard. She also sorted trash into burnable paperboard from landfill-bound other garbage.

Not everybody likes recycling.  Some folks prefer to pop everything used into the garbage, and that’s that.

Recycling isn’t just about stuff.    I mean, we recycle ideas all the time.  Memory itself is the epitome of recycling.  You recall something from the past and redesign it for use in the present.

The word-symbol, recycling pops up frequently enough in my dreams to seem, recurring.  Recurring dreams are really unresolved subconscious material trying softly to come out into the light.

What is recycling?  It’s essentially resurrecting something used, potentially destined for the trash bin, and using it again.  Most recycling is also repurposing, or finding a new purpose for that used thing.

Commercial recycling of aluminum cans (think soda, beer, energy drinks, or some cat food cans) make new aluminum cans, rain gutters, or window frames.  Plastic bottles (water, milk, laundry soap, etc.) can become buckets, outdoor play sets and lumber, new bottles, stadium seats, frisbees and other containers.

Glass bottles can become new jars, bottles, or fiberglass.  Steel/tin cans have become car or bike parts, appliances, new cans, or rebar.

Cardboard transforms into paperboard, the stuff your dry laundry soap, pasta, and cereal packages are made of, and in which other boxed items are sold.  Office paper and junk mail can become facial tissue, paper towels, toilet tissue, new computer paper or notebook paper.

So, what have you resurrected from the throw-away pile in your mind, to repurpose in 2022?  Perhaps you’ve buried it deep in the landfill of your subconscious.  How about experimenting with bringing it up into the compost pile, and plant some flowers or a tree into its new, rich, fertile soil.

Ideas usually come to me when I’m doing “something else,” or supposed to be doing something else, like sleeping.  Some of my more fruitful notions materialize in dreams.

Thoughts which become my columns come to me in the wee hours of the night when my desktop computer is asleep, like I should be.  So, the notes section of my cell phone is vastly overused, including its microphone.  It’s a wonder my notes icon doesn’t make the ding, ding, ding noise that signals an overload, that other mechanized items are apt to do.

I also resort to my notes to record thoughts when I’m jogging or hiking outdoors.  Ideas come when they come, at the most random times and they can flee, like a butterfly if I don’t get them recorded somewhere.  Little can frustrate a writer more than an idea, a really good one, that flew the coop.

I might be jogging to music and I’ve got the timer on for my workout, and I don’t believe I can also use my notes to record the ideas that seek my attention at that inopportune time.  I panic just a little and certainly lose my jogging-Zen, thinking, “hurry up before that thought goes the way of 8-track tapes.”

I might be gift wrapping a present when I suddenly think of an alternative way to make that soup, we were thinking of trying.  I was recently paying bills online when I came up with a time saving idea for packaging my homemade cookie gifts.

Ideas for reducing stress in my jaw come when I’m mindful that I’m clenching again.  That reminds me….  To be reminded of something is to rememorate or to be caused to remember.  Somewhere in our mental storehouses we experienced something that we now randomly recall, triggered by “something else” similar that we’d experienced before.

When we’re doing something else, we frequently get reminded of other related things.  Speaking of other – that’s what else means.  Else shares its origins with the words alien, alibi, and alter – otherness.

I don’t recall from what scenario we heard the expression, “what else ya got,” but we usually say this as ventriloquists for our cats when one of them turns up his nose at the food offering given to him or when a new recipe doesn’t pan out.  “Anything other than that, please.”

Alternatives.  Either we have an alternative or we feel our liberty is limited.  Surely there’s something other than this.  If given a choice, I’ll take the other one.

What else?  It’s probably not just men, or all men, but my experience with one man suggests that with the television, he prefers to know what else is on.  Rarely settled with what’s on, he wants to know his options for what else might be on.  “Can’t we just watch this,” she pleads.

Speaking of alternatives, ever since the reign of Queen Victoria in England, commencing in the early 19^th century, the advent of polite society initiated the replacement of vulgar “four-letter words” with polite ones.  This trend spread over the pond to the united colonies, and here we are.

Everybody knows the words that politeness has wrought and most of them are of the four-letter variety, in English.  One of the most prolific is, heck, for h-e-double hockey sticks; gosh for the Jewish preferred G-d; darn, for the jammed up run of water, with another m added for good measure.   Used mostly in the U.K., arse is a four-letter word replacing the crasser three-letter word it is substituted for.  Go figure.

Then there’s the words shoot or sugar for the French, merde, but these are not four-letter words, so we came up with the four-letter word, crap, because polite substitutes should at least resemble the masked cuss word, for emphasis as an exclamation of indignation.  However, some folks in polite society believe that the word crap is just as crass and impolite as the word it is intended to replace.

Cuss itself is probably another word for swear, which is not just considered impolite but ungodly as well.  So, I’m thinking that cussing is like telling white lies, they’re both on a continuum from bad to worse, as words of exclamation go.

But at least most impolite words and their replacements stick with one syllable, whether the word contains three, four, or five letters.  This, supposedly stays in effect for the emotional emphasis these words demand; although there are the full sentence substitutes such as, “gosh darn it to heck,” “not by a darned sight,” “just for the heck of it,” “we had a heck of a good time,” “what the heck?” and “you’re doing a heck of a job.”

No worries, newspapers and most other print media remain firmly ensconced in polite society’s norms and will replace any questionable impolite words with the other word, expletive.  I’ve tested this policy, my natural sarcasm overwhelming my polite facade in just one instance. Most people will quickly fill in the expletive-blank, because we all know the banned words.

Words for excretory functions, do not rise to the level of profanity, even though potty language is considered by most to be impolite.  Thus, the comedy of the Shrek movies offends only a minority.

Something else about our English language use of impolite words and their substitutes is that nearly all of them begin and end with hard consonants, making them closed syllables.  Apparently, this is for emphasis; that’s why we use them. 

Oh, and “something else,” what kind of four-letter word is work, word, love, loss, heap, more, best, sale, home, salt…?

I discovered a fun fact while doing a bit of research for this column.  One of the most far-reaching expressions in the English language is, OK.  Even though its origins go back to 1839, its ubiquitous use rival’s today’s text-friendly, LOL (laugh out loud).

“OK” was first used in a Boston Morning Post article as a joke, making fun of misspelling “all correct,” as “all korrect,” then abbreviating it.  The expression was inched up the popularity scale in “Old Kinderhook,” Martin Van Buren’s reelection campaign of 1840.

The word Jeep is a similarly abbreviated misspelling, for a military vehicle known as a “general purpose vehicle,” GP/Jeep. The Humvee was HMMWV or “high-mobility multi-purpose wheeled vehicle.”

“OK” made it into the Slang Dictionary of Vulgar Words in 1864.  OK, and its meaning as everything being all correct or alright, figured prominently in the 1967 Thomas Harris book, “I’m OK, You’re OK,” the most popular self-help guide ever penned.

Don’t we often say, “It’s OK,” when it’s clearly not.  For example, I tell myself it’s okay that I wasted all kinds of ingredients on a failed recipe experiment.  But it’s not.  I’m honestly kind of bummed that that recipe failed and I wasted a ton of money on ingredients, not to mention my energy.  I hate waste.

If somebody screws you over in some interaction, what do you say when they half-heartedly say they’re sorry?  You say, “it’s OK.”  But is it really all, correct?  No, by golly, it’s not OK.

And when someone asks, “are you OK,” usually we feel an obligation to say, “yes.”  I mean, how ungracious to say, “no, I’m not OK.”  And the former question might just be a passing conversation filler not unlike, “how ya doin,” not a genuine inquiry as to your emotional or physical well-being.

The tiniest troubles can pose the biggest threats to our well-being.  For example, I can climb up onto and over a boulder in the woods with little problem.  I can step onto or over a jutting rock, no problem.  But when my foot pounces upon an acorn or the tiniest piece of gravel, ouch.

Our minds and senses constantly scan the environment, checking against memory, for potential threats.  I’m surmising that’s probably why we notice the negative, the bad things that happen, first, and remember them longest, because they’re potential threats, triggering a physical flight or fight response.  Our minds and emotions try to resolve the resulting agitation by trying to “fix it.”

Don’t we just tend to focus on the little foxes and the negative things?  We can have all manner of wonderful things come down the pike toward us, but one negative nonce enters our life and it ruins our day.

Thank God for Facebook, where we post all the glorious stuff in our lives, our best selfies, encouragement, and prayers.  Meanwhile, we keep the disappointments, failures and cuss words to ourselves and quickly delete the photo-duds.

But we quickly dismiss the good things and positivity because they don’t threaten our well-being.  Speaking of well-being, let’s talk about not being OK. 

A year or so ago a certain royal couple, who left their job across the pond and immigrated to her home country, America, attempted, with their celebrity, to de-stigmatize mental illness.  You see, I thought mental illness was out of the closet years ago.

I’ve been wrong before.  Perhaps mental illness is still not on the table for open discussion in 2021.

Anxiety disorders, depression, substance addiction, bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder are several mental illnesses which come to mind as prolific in the world today.  One in five people will experience a psychiatric illness, each year. 

These disorders exist on a continuum from what the typical guy calls a normal reaction to a stressful world, to the incapacitating disruption of one’s life.  So, if someone asks you if you’re OK, maybe answer gently but honestly and receive a little help from a friend, as the Beatles sang, you’ll “get by with a little help from your friends.”

In a recent dream I was ticking off a list of one bubble-like, temporary obstacle after another, until I finished the list.  Lo and behold, another list popped up.

Does life imitate art, or is it the other way around?  In creative works of fiction, whether cinematic or written, there is no story plot without at least one obstacle or problem to be overcome. 

The logic would follow that without obstacles, we “have no life” or story with which to enhance the world. How does the narrative of your life give meaning to the lives of others?

We need not feel singled out that we have a problem to overcome or an obstacle in our way.  It’s one of the universals of life, so it seems.

The uniqueness we have as individuals is not that we face obstacles, because we all have to tackle problems.  Our uniqueness lies in what attitude, resources, assistance, and spirit we have stored in the bank of our souls to deal with said obstacles.

Even the games that we play, for fun, for challenge, or for competition, involve beating one obstacle over another until we finish – win or lose.  The satisfaction comes from overcoming one challenge after another and coming out on the other end, alive and kicking.

I want to leave you, in my last column of the year, with the expression, “it’s OK.”  You’ve done it.  You made it through another difficult year and whether you feel it or not, if you did your best, then it’s “all korrect,” everything is OK.