Procrastinating Consumer

Have you heard about the 270-pound man who was trampled to death a few weeks ago?

No, he wasn't working the rodeo. It wasn't cattle that trampled him.

It was shoppers. At a Wal-Mart. On Black Friday.

Two thousand of them broke through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart and stormed the poor security guard who was trying to keep them back. I'm trying to wrap my head around it-- trying to understand how it's possible to put your foot down on top of another human being and just keep going. To feel the squish of his body under you. It's clearly not floor you're walking on. It's a human being. Didn't they notice? And it wasn't just one individual who did this, but enough of them to stomp out a life. Do the people who killed him even know what they did?


I doubt that any of those shoppers woke up that morning thinking, "I'm gonna kill a guy today." Let's give the tramplers the benefit of the doubt. Some of them had been waiting in line all night long. They were restless. They were grumpy. Maybe the people who actually walked on him had no choice. The crowd probably moved as one, people pushing from behind, jostling from the sides. The tramplers may have been locked in position and had no choice but to walk on top of the security guard.

As Lenny on the Simpsons said, "We're going to give the word 'mob' a bad name."

I understand that some people really look forward to the day after Thanksgiving as the "busiest shopping day of the year." That it's the busiest day is actually an urban myth, but the day does have the cultural significance of a Super Bowl for consumerism. Shoppers really get into it. So much so they will trample anyone who stands between them and a few hundred bucks off a flat-screen TV.

For me, being forced to participate in Black Friday would be one of the circles of my own personal hell. I really can't understand people who get excited about this kind of thing. It's like making an event out of scrubbing your toilet. I hate shopping. I hate crowds. I hate traffic.

On occasion I do like to buy stuff, but I'm really not a very good consumer.

When it comes to buying stuff, I procrastinate. I'll consider something for months, sometimes even years, before I finally get the inspiration to actually buy it. The reason that I blog about so many of my purchases is that I don't do it very often. I thought about buying a new car, and even printed out some pages from Consumer Reports, a full year before I bought my Prius. The new vacuum I bought last January was for my new apartment, which I had moved into five months earlier. (I've had this post in my Blogger queue since then, so for the past year I've even been procrastinating about writing about procrastination.)

If I go to the store with a list of five things to buy, I might end up buying two. The other things I look at and think, "Eh, I don't really need that" or "that can wait til later." It's the opposite of the Impulse Buy. It's the Impulse No-Buy.

So it's really hard for me to imagine why people would put themselves in a position to trample a guy to death on the way to buying something. They weren't hungry and clamoring for food. They weren't being oppressed and demanding civil rights. They weren't trying to get on the last helicopter out of Hanoi. Hell, they weren't even waiting to get exclusive concert tickets.

They wanted to buy shit. The same shit you can buy any other time of the year.

Restless Charity Syndrome

This is the time of year when my college does its Combined Charities Campaign and I have to decide which charities I'll donate to over the next year.

There's a booklet that lists hundreds of eligible charities. It's funny to me all the different ways you can define "charity" by flipping through the book.

• There's the traditional sense of giving to those less fortunate than you. Organizations that fight against hunger, disease, homelessness, and child abuse, for example, are pretty straightforward. I don't think there's much controversy about donating money to help starving abused homeless children with AIDS.


• And then there are the partisan charities. Organizations that diametrically oppose each other. For example, I could contribute to gay rights organizations or Christian organizations (ahem, the Mormon Church) that fight against those rights. Planned Parenthood vs. Catholic Charities. Is it really "charity" that I'm doing if someone else is funneling just as much money into stopping my cause?


• There are charities that support jazz, dance, art centers, zoos, gardens, museums, even public radio and TV. I don't have a problem with supporting these things, but it's hard for me to call a donation to public radio "charity." For me, it's more like supporting something that I enjoy.

I usually select four or five charities and have a set amount deducted from each paycheck to go to them. I take this all very seriously and spend quite a while flipping through the booklet trying to find the best balance for my donation dollar. I don't want to give it all to one cause, or even one type of cause. So I'll usually pick one environmental cause, one civil/human rights cause, one housing cause, and one international cause.

While I was looking at my options, scanning things about AIDS, cancer, animal rights, hunger, conservation, adoption, autism, and food banks, one cause jumped out at me: restless leg syndrome.

Are you kidding me?

For all I know, it may be a serious and debilitating condition, but of all the hundreds of ways to donate my money, you want me to consider something that sounds like an affliction from a Monty Python skit?

Oh, Restless Leg Syndrome, do you have any idea what you're up against?

Stinky Cat

A quick inventory of my cat, Katya:

• Her kidneys are failing
• She's losing weight
• She has arthritis in her hips
• Her intestines are inflamed
• She's puking a lot
• She no longer eats anything but tuna, and that only in small portions
• Her weight loss is getting more and more dramatic
• She's getting pooptail.
  
• She has an abscessed tooth
• She's leaking something out of her mouth that smells like death
• She's 14 years old
• She's still the Best Cat Ever
  

In her prime she weighed over nine pounds. In March of this year she weighed in at just below seven pounds, a pound lighter than her last checkup, so the vet did some blood tests. Her kidneys were starting to fail. But this is normal in older cats and they can live a long time with substandard kidneys.

In October she had another checkup. She weighed in at just under six pounds. She'd lost another pound since March. The vet was concerned and did blood work and gave her an x-ray. It didn't provide any conclusive answers, but they did find arthritis in her hips and feared intestinal swelling. The doctor gave me some pills to help combat that.

I gave her the pills every day, which was torture for both her and me. She didn't want to swallow them, and I hated the person I had to be to get them down her. Even so, it only worked about half the time.

I put her on a weight gain regimen. I bought her half a dozen different types of cat food, then added cans of tuna and baby food. I threw every type of nutrient at her. She would eat something for a while, then decide she didn't like it. This phase was accompanied by frequent cases of puking, diarrhea and poop tail. (Hermione, my other cat, was puking because she was eating too much. She was catching all the nutrients I threw at Katya. Katya's sickness turned Hermy into a bulimic kitty.)

At her next weigh-in, Katya was down to five and a half pounds. She'd lost another half a pound in three weeks, despite my efforts to overfeed her. Because of the problems with the pills, the vet gave her a shot and told me to bring her back in a week for another weigh-in.

A week later, she'd lost another third of a pound. She was 5.15 pounds. I decided to take her with me to Indiana for Thanksgiving. I rode with my brother and his family for the three-hour car ride, holding her on my lap. At my sister's house, I put her in my niece's room, where she disappeared. I checked on her just before dinner and couldn't find her in the room. I thought my nephew and nieces had let the door open, so I initiated a panicked search of the entire upstairs. On my fifth sweep of my niece's room I noticed a hole in the fabric under the box springs. She had climbed up in there to hide.

Several hours later I coaxed her out and she ate some leftover turkey. That night she puked four times and wouldn't touch the turkey anymore. She ate a little bit of tuna, but not much.

Sometime over the next two days I noticed two things: she smelled awful and her face was misshapen. She looked like she had the mumps on one side of her face. She reminded me of Glenn Quagmire on Family Guy:
And she smelled rancid. I could only describe the smell as death, even though I don't know what that's supposed to smell like. I tried giving her some squirts of a pet spray bath that my sister had, but the bottle was old and that made it even worse. Now she reeked of alcohol, perfume, and death.

Right as we were about to leave to go home, I felt her face and noticed there was a lump on her chin. That's what made her face look weird. The smell was almost unbearable on the way home. I noticed she was leaking a yellow liquid from her mouth, and when I dabbed it with a tissue, I realized that's where the smell was coming from.

When I got home on Saturday afternoon, I went straight to the pet emergency room to have Katya's face looked at. I was bracing myself for The End. She weighed in at under five pounds. The ER vet suggested doing a biopsy of her jaw, and I agreed. But when she got a better look, the vet said it was just an abscessed tooth. That could be taken care of with antibiotics.

Now I have to give her antibiotics, which is in liquid form rather than pills. As I tried to jam her mouth open to shoot the medicine into her mouth, I wondered if the abscessed tooth was caused by me trying to pill her a few weeks ago. Did I make things worse?

Although the growth and smell are not as serious as I thought, having a sore, painful tooth is still yet another impediment to eating. And she's still wasting away with each new weigh-in. The vet had mentioned the possibility of intestinal lymphoma. If she's wasting away because she has cancer, why did I pay $100 to treat this abscessed tooth?

Because I don't want her to die looking like Quagmire and smelling like rancid pus.

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In other news, I woke up this morning with a bad cold/flu. I must have caught something from my nieces. Kids are always carrying germs they pick up in school. I had to postpone a Silver League tennis match I had scheduled this afternoon. I've felt like shit all day.

When I checked Katya's face a little while ago, it seemed less misshapen than before. And I don't think she stinks as much, although it's hard to tell with my nose stuffed up.

Now if I could just get her to eat.

Memoir Juggling

I got a notice from the public library that a book I ordered was in.

So, like I do several times a day, I scribbled a note to remind myself to pick it up.

This is what I wrote:



It says: pick up Loose Girl at CPL.

After I read what I'd written, I put "Loose Girl" in quotes in case I got in an accident on the way to the library and the note was found on my body. I don't want to give the coroner the impression that I troll the public library for women.

Loose Girl is a memoir about a promiscuous teenager who was in high school about the same time I was, in the 1980's. While she was having lots of sex, and not particularly enjoying it, I was having absolutely no sex (with other people), and also not particularly enjoying it. So it's nice to see all the different ways people can not enjoy their teenage experience.

It's one of three memoirs I'm reading right now. I have one on my night table for bedtime reading, one that I read during breakfast and lunch, and one that I'm listening to during my commute. The other two are Running With Scissors, about a boy whose mother had him live with her psychiatrist's crazy family, and Failure, which recounts an entire life in terms of its failures. It's a good book to read while going through a divorce.

As you can probably guess, I love memoirs. It's not only the kind of writing I like to do myself, but I'm also really interested in people's stories. I don't much care for people, but I love their stories.

The challenge to reading three memoirs at once is that I often mix up the stories. Which one had the distant, alcoholic dad? Which one had the crazy mother who abandoned them? (Oh, wait, I think they all did.) Whose mother was the poet? Which one snacked on dog food? Which one tried to be gay but couldn't do it? Which one stole cocaine from their dad's dresser?

Mixing all of these stories up makes for one huge-ass amazing tale of dysfunction.

Get Your Shush On

Every time I have to ask someone to be quiet in the library, another piece of my soul dies.

Shushing people is the only part of my job I hate, and I do it an average of 3-4 times a day. We have a Quiet Study Area right near my desk. I know that not everyone needs a quiet area to study (especially Millenials who grew multitasking to music, TV, computers, and cell phones all at the same time), but this is the only place on campus where people who do need quiet place can find it. Unfortunately, the building has terrible (or great, depending on your perspective) acoustics and you can hear conversations from the other side of the building.

So several times a day I have to deliver "the speech:" Sound carries really well in this building, and this is a quiet study area [make sweeping hand gesture to indicate said area], so if you could try to use your inside voice that would be great. Thanks! I say this with a smile. Most people are embarrassed and apologize. They didn't realize they were being so loud. Some get pissy about it, or ignore me, and the second time I ask them to quiet down I'm not as nice. The third time I suggest they go to another building, where they don't have to worry about being quiet.

I suppose I am the right person for this job. Even when I was a student, I had no compunction about asking someone in a computer lab next to me to turn down their headphones. Why should I have to listen to their music? I was also the annoying neighbor who would ask people to turn their music down. I didn't ruin the occasional party or anything like that, but if someone played loud music every day, at all hours of the day, I wasn't shy about getting on them. I once had a neighbor in an apartment building who turned her music up in the middle of the afternoon so loud I couldn't hear my TV. When I pounded on her door, loudly so that she would hear it, and then asked her to turn it down, she asked me not to pound on her door because her baby was sleeping.

So I'm very good at asking people to be quiet, even if I don't like it. What I really hate are those rare occasions when someone brings a baby or toddler into the library. Lots of times the kid is fine. At first. But it's impossible for a child that age to spend any significant time in a library and not have a meltdown. And I cringe whenever it happens. My experience has been that parents of small children are the least understanding about the quiet zone.

One lady told me that she had to kill four hours before her ride came. So she came into the library to use the computers. With her baby. Who eventually started crying. She couldn't go outside, because it was too cold. When I suggested that maybe she go to a computer lab in a different building, she looked at me as if I had told her she should just eat her baby. We hate you breeders, so leave! I understand how hard it can be to raise a child and go to school. Child care is an unrelenting responsibility and I sympathize. This is why I always hate to approach parents with loud children. But this particular lady wasn't studying, she was on her MySpace page. Her response was, "He's just a baby, he doesn't understand." Yes, but you should.

Every year there's a new group of regulars in the library that I have to keep a tight (sound-dampening) lid on. This year it's a bunch of international students who gather at a big table. Especially when there's a lot of them, they get excited and the noise level increases. I've given them "the speech" a dozen times already, and they understand it and try to abide by it. But they forget. It's to the point now that all I have to do is walk past their table and they quiet down. Sometimes all I need to do is look over at them and they will start shushing each other.

When people are clearly just passing through or on their way out, I don't hassle them about the noise. One phenomenon I've noticed is that people always get louder when they take their leave. Saying goodbye always ratchets up the volume. They may get louder, but I know it will be gone soon and I don't stress about it.

But sometimes they linger. They'll be standing there, about to leave, having a loud conversation. They inch toward the door. And talk some more. Even louder. I consider saying something. I wait for the conversation to finish. But it doesn't finish. It keeps going. Every time the cadence of their speech appears to be wrapping up, it starts again.

Finally, I get up from my desk to approach them, and then they leave.

And it's once again quiet and calm in the library.

Order is restored to the universe.

Until the next time I have to get my shush on.

Voter #249

I yelled at John McCain in my bathroom this morning.

It's okay-- he couldn't hear me. The only ones who could hear me, my cats, just rubbed up against me in a gesture of comfort and sympathy. Or maybe they just wanted to be fed.

On the radio they played a soundbite of McCain repeating his cutesy line about Obama "already measuring the drapes in the White House."

Aside from the fact that Obama has shown no public interest in interior decorating that I know of, Obama has been very clear in his public speeches about not getting ahead of himself. He's still using language like, "If I'm elected...", not "When I'm elected..." like so many other politicians do. At one campaign event, the crowd started to get on him about it, and he replied, "I'm superstitious."

That's one thing that I love about him. Because I'm superstitious too, and it's refreshing to see a politician with the same cautious and humble sense of optimism that I live my life with.

So, Senator McCain, I can assure you he is NOT measuring the drapes, or ordering cable, or filling out change-of-address forms at the post office. He knows that the race isn't over until election day.

So, please, old man who refers to his opponent as "that one", STFU already about the drapes.

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When I fed my ballot into the machine this morning, I was voter #249 in my precinct. Considering I had to stand in line for 45 minutes, that seemed awfully low. This is my third presidential election in Champaign-Urbana, and I've never had to wait more than 10 minutes before. Usually I just walk right up to the table and vote.

It made me 30 minutes late for work. I really think Election Day should be a national holiday. I know long lines and a high turnout are good for Democrats, but think of all the people who can't vote today because of work, especially in precincts where the lines are 3-4 hours long.

I'm stoically optimistic that Obama will stay away from the tape measure until the votes are counted.

Slothfest

The biggest Timicist holiday of the year goes by many names: Pluggathon, Slugfest, Couch Potatotopia, Slackerday. Not being a very devout Timicist, it's the only one of the holidays that I've consistently celebrated over the past six years.

It's a day dedicated to getting in touch with your inner sloth and not doing any work. In a perfect world every weekend would be like this, but there always seem to be chores and niggling little items that I need to accomplish before I can do fun stuff.

On Slackerday, I don't do any of it. I get out of bed and plop myself down on the couch and let myself be entertained for an entire day. It's the one day of the year when I actually clear out the Netflix DVDs sitting on my TV.

Here's what I did today:

• 9:00 am : Woke up and put on my Slacker t-shirt, the official uniform of Slugfest.
  
• 9:00 - 8:07: Since we switched from Daylight Savings to standard time at 2:00 am, I changed all the clocks in the house back to 8:00 am. Some people may consider this a chore, thus violating the spirit of Slugfest, but for me synchronizing all the clocks in the house is a fun leisure activity. Besides, it's my holiday and I get to make the rules: Synchronizing clocks is not work.
• 8:00 - 8:30: Ate breakfast and watched last Thursday's episode of The Office on TiVo.
• 8:30 - 9:00: Watched 30 Rock
• 9:00 - 10:15: Watched a Netflix DVD: The God Who Wasn't There.
• 10:15 - 12:00: Ate mid-morning snack and watched Netflix DVD, Click.
• 12:00 - 3:00: Football. Watched Bears game.
• 12:30: Ate lunch-- leftovers from Indian restaurant from night before. (Leftovers are an essential component to Slugfest. All meals should be heated up leftovers.)
• 1:30: Showered during halftime of the game. Traditionally, showers are considered work and discouraged on Pluggathon, but I was feeling pretty gross and really needed to wash the Indian food residue off my greasy face.
• 2:00 - 3:45: While watching football, I organized and cleaned out a bunch of files on my hard drive. This may be another activity that other people would consider "work" but I'm a librarian and organizing stuff is more like play for me.
• 3:45 - 5:45: Watched Netflix DVD, Capote.
  
• 6:00 - 6:30: Watched Simpsons on TiVo and ate dinner-- Another helping on Indian leftovers followed by an orgasmically good Ghirardelli (or was it Godiva?) carmel dark chocolate bar that I bought just for this occasion.
• 6:30 - 7:30: Watched the last of The Daily Show and Colbert Report from last week (TiVo.)
• 7:30 - 10:00: More NFL football. Watched the Colts game.

On paper it was a great day. I didn't do anything I didn't want to do, both the Bears and the Colts won, and I accomplished something in organizing my computer files.

Aside from the morning, where I started off the day watching TV and saw two Netflix, it wasn't much different than most Sundays. But I had kind of a crappy antisocial feeling as I went to bed. I realized that I hadn't communicated with another person all day long.

So I guess I can add HermitDay to the list of names for this holiday.