A friend of mine recently met me at my office after work so we could go for a walk in the park up by my old apartment. On her way to my office she got stopped by a canvaser, and when I emerged from the building, I saw her but was held up by another canvaser.

When we had extricated ourselves, we went up to my office for her to change, and upon emerging were hassled by a third, and exceedingly pushy, canvaser.

I had long been of the opinion that, hell, we’re in public. They’re as welcome to be out as I am. So while everyone else griped about them, I shrugged my shoulders. I would just smile, say no thank you, and keep walking.

But as of late I’ve been less and less pleased with them (I know it’s just a crappy job – I don’t mean “them” as much as the situation).

See, I like to interact with people in public. I like to make eye contact, and smile. I like to be friendly, and to the best of my ability, I try to help out strangers. When they drop something, I’ll pick it up and hand it to them. If someone asks for directions, I’m happy to provide them. And the thing is, as hippie-y as it sounds, it’s really exhausting to avoid eye-contact like the plague or interact with someone and have to refuse them what they’re asking for over and over again.

So, being that my office is right smack dab downtown near all the shopping, the corner outside the building usually has at least three canvasers at a time. At least. This means that if I go a few blocks away to grab lunch at a food cart, I probably am faced with five canvasers on the roundtrip (since they’re not just on the corner in front of my office, but all the other high profile corners too). It’s completely exhausting. They grab your hand or stand in your way. The girls are self-righteous. The guys use their job as an excuse to flirt like drunk frat boys. It’s exhausting.

So as my friend and I hiked up to the park, we were discussing this, and she explained that canvasing was the only job she could get when she got into town, and she worked off commission, and it sucked. So she tries to humor them a little (though she also said that she had made an effort to pinpoint those who worked on her turf and avoid talking to them since she knew they’d probably had enough of it daily).

So this week as I’m coming out of the library, some guy says, “Hey you, pretty girl with the green shirt.” He’s the third canvaser I will have passed since leaving my office at noon. I use my normal line, “I have time, not money. Do you need volunteers?” He brushes that off, so I say, “I’m sorry, but I’m not giving away any money.” And he assures me that he won’t ask for my money. So. I humor him. I listen to his ridiculously long spiel. He’s from Greenpeace. There’s this horrible paper company cutting down old growth trees to use for toilet paper. They’ve tried appealing to the company, but it won’t budge. So consumers need to take action. Great, I say. Tell me again the name of the company, and I’ll happily boycott them. He says that’s great but rushes on to say that the only way to make change is through organizations like Greenpeace. I stop him to ask if Greenpeace wants my money. He said, “Yes, but I’m not asking you to give money to ME. See. I didn’t lie.” Which outright pisses me off.

Does this really work? Do people stop and get cajoled into listening and then say, “Ok, I’ll give you money even though you just tricked me.”? I highly doubt it.

I repeat that I’m not giving money. He asks why. Again, I humor him and explain that when I give money to charity, I do so after having sought and researched the cause myself – not just because some stranger asks me on the street. He says, dripping with self-righteousness, “That’s great. Those are nice shoes you have. Did you research them before you bought them?”

Not ever knowing when to shut up, I answer honestly and say, “No” (I bought these $7 flip flops at a 7/11 in a tiny town this past Memorial Day when we were on the beach and all I had were sneakers.) But quickly follow with, “I’m not arguing with you,” and turn to walk away.

He says to my back, “I’m not arguing with you. I’m just trying to show you the error of your ways…” Not even feigning a sincere desire to be helpful – just dripping with disdain.

And first of all, Greenpeace, that is some bullshit tactic you have of getting money. And not only is it abhorrent, but I highly doubt people go, “Oh! There are errors in my ways! Oh my god. I hadn’t realized. Here – have a twenty.”

Second, I just kept walking, but it was fifteen minutes later, back at my desk, when I stopped wanting to march right back to him and say, “Hey, Punk. Did you research those industrials you have in your ear? Do you know where the metal is mined from? Or are they bone? Do you know where the bone for those earrings comes from (most come from irresponsible farming)? Oh, and you have a really nice faux-hawk. Did you thoroughly research the mousse you used? Do you pay to be a member of Greenpeace? Do you have any idea if the TP in your apartment is made by a subsidiary of Kimberly Clark?”

That’s what I thought, punk.

In addition to complaining about whatever I please, recounting stories of minimal importance, extending past the confines of my living room in my quest bore others with my vacation pictures, and a slue of other utterly disconnected and random topics (if one can call them topics), I’ve decided to add “tech blog for the not-so-advanced” to the list, because this dood is SO my hero. Comments are closed on that post so, since I can’t say it there, I figured I’d say it here. Plus, maybe some small percentage of my readers (so a small percentage of my small number of readers would be, what, uhhh…. 0.15 of a person?) will think I WANTED TO KNOW HOW TO DO THAT TOO! NOW YOU‘RE MY HERO!

But anyway, in keeping with the (see above re: disconnected and random topics), let me now take the opportunity to tell you what bothers me. Or rather, since a lot of things probably bother me, what REALLY bothers me.

It REALLY bothers me that, most often, at least when dealing with large bureaucracies and corporations, the only point at which you are provided good service is when you turn into a giant, whiny, entitled brat.

FOR EXAMPLE.

I recently spent a lot of time on the phone with Medicare trying to resolve one client’s account. When I say recently, I mean more like over the course of some five months. And no, I am not exaggerating. And what happens when you call Medicare, because I know you’ve been dying to find out, is that you wait on hold (and…wait…yes…in fact I think I might have mentioned the hold music) you wait on hold until someone answers the phone. And that someone is somewhere in a different time zone and is one of eight bazillion people answering that phone number, none of whom have identification codes or callback numbers so it’s not like you ever speak to the same person twice. And they ask you for information. And you fax it. Except it takes about three days to fax any information to them because they have ONE FAX NUMBER. For all of Medicare. Just the ONE. And then you finally get your information through. But they never “find” it. Or it never gets processed. Or whatever. So you send it again. And then you wait the sixty day processing period because if you try calling (hold music) before the sixty days are up “just to check on it”, you are simply told that it won’t register in the system until the processing people have processed it. And that takes 60 days. And no, they don’t have any incoming phone lines in the processing room of processingness, so you can’t speak with them.

And then, when sixty days have passed, you call again (hold music) to check on it. And they say it’s processed and in the mail and to wait a few more days. And then you call back (hold music) after a few more days. And they say to wait a FEW MORE. And you say no, please send it again. And they say, ok please hold (hold music), but then they come back and say it’s not in the digital system yet so they can’t send it again. So please wait a few days and call back.

And then you wait a few more days and call back (still with the hold music and the going crazy, by the way, in case that pattern hasn’t presented itself to you yet), and THIS person tells you that, oh…no…actually that thing that they said was completed on time (on time being a relative concept when it takes 60 days to process a letter) and already in the mail was just a copy of something they’d already sent and the thing you are waiting for hasn’t been processed yet because instead of what you said in the letter (two and a half months ago) about charge one and charge two, you have to PHYSICALLY CROSS OUT AND CIRCLE, respectively, the charges you’re talking about on the ledger and send it back again because describing the charges by the name listed on the ledger is just too confusing, apparently. So please start again.

So (are you still reading?) you circle and cross out with fury and re-fax (another three days to get that through). And then you call back (hold music) and are told to wait the 60 days for processing at which point you say

(in your head) HOLD. THE FUCK. UP. (and out loud, with only the tiniest edge of insanity) May I please and ever so kindly speak with your supervisor? This dude assures you at least four times that while you can speak to his supervisor, she will have no ability to speed this process along for you, but you insist and so you are asked to hold (hold music) and you wait a full twenty minutes before….

A saccharine sweet lady gets on the phone, apologizes profusely, listens to your saga, asks you to hold (hold music) while she checks out the issue, comes back and says, “Actually, ma’am, I see that none of these charges are related. I will get out a letter to you to that effect this afternoon.”

And you receive that letter later that week.

And would you believe me if I said that that is the SHORT version of the story? The version where I don’t even bother to mention at least five other times that I called (hold music hold music hold music hold music hold music)?

And so MY QUESTION is, people, my QUESTION TO THE WORLD, is how much of a dent could we take out of the national debt if we were to replace:

1. The money spent on wages for roughly ten (I’m being generous here) phone calls, roughly seven minutes each (including data entry), PLUS
2. The money spent on all the phone lines for people like me to HOLD…again, PLUS
3. The money spent on health care for people like me who just might go crazy from the experience

TIMES the number of people who have had this experience (raise your hand)

with

A small fleet of people with half a brain who evaluate and handle (simple…such simple) issues as they arise and in a timely manner without creating a paper trail storm of useless notes that convey no information at best.

How much? I dare you to guess.

Primer for today’s unsolicited opinion can be found here.

The caveat should be offered that I have not seen the curriculum change that is in the process of being adopted. I don’t know, specifically, what it means that teaching tolerance towards homosexuals is being folded into the curriculum. But from the sound of it, the goal is to foster tolerance for people of different beliefs and lifestyles, and, more concretely put, to ensure that the kid with two moms or two dads isn’t hated on.

My personal belief is…what’s the big deal. I was fortunate to be raised in an environment where tolerance for most things was the norm, especially for gays. I don’t see how someone being gay threatens you, Mr. Homophobe, and I don’t see what opening up to different kinds of marriage does to sully your relationship with your wife. But that’s just me. So when I first read this, I tried to do the devil’s advocate thing. I tried to put myself in the shoes of some hater parent. And I tried to recognize their rights to raise their kid however they see fit.

But do you know what? It didn’t take. I just can’t see that side of the argument from any angle. Because if my reading of the curriculum’s intent is correct, then this lesson has to do with families and not with sex or the various alternate sexual positions a gay person might find more useful than missionary. It has to do with understanding that there’s nothing wrong with having two mommies or two daddies (or one aunt and two grandparents, or one big brother, or whatever for that matter) instead of one mom and one dad. It has to do with love, and understanding that families are groups of people who love each other. Despite the massive numbers of people who don’t know how to love or are afraid of love, you’d be hard pressed to find a parent who would fight curriculum because it included I’ll Love You Forever And Like You For Always or some other such children’s book.

The problem here is that we, as not-so-innocent adults, associate love with sex, and we project that onto our kids. But your kid doesn’t associate love with sex (unless s/he does, in which case the cat’s out of the bag and you have no argument for sheltering them from it). If you want to keep your child sheltered from sex until s/he is 35 (can you tell how I feel about that one?), by all means do. This shift in curriculum will do nothing to stop you.

And besides all that, folks, how uptight do we need to be? Shelter your kids from sexually transmitted diseases: yes (by educating them). Shelter your kids from violent sex offenses and power plays: yes (by teaching common sense, respect, and self esteem). Yes. Do those things. But shelter them from the concept of sex itself? From something we’re hardwired to do, on which the survival of our species relies, and that they’ll figure out on their own anyway? Really?

I got an email from a friend about a festival that I’d sure never heard of called Honen Matsuri. It’s a fertility ceremony.

Now I have no idea who took this photograph, and normally I would refuse to place a photograph I didn’t take in my posts, but I have no idea who took this and it’s too good to pass up. So if you took it, by all means shoot me a message and I’ll give credit where credit is due.

But, come on folks:

[Imagine that what you see here is a picture of a shellac-ed, erect, wooden penis, at least twelve feet long and two feet in diameter, next to which a mother holds her two-year-old up to 'pet' the penis while they pose for a photo. I took it down because this particular post was getting way too many hits from people I don't know all over the world and I never obtained permission from the unknown photographer (or its subjects) to post it in the first place. I know. What a kill joy.]

Ok. First, yes, I have to admit I totally giggled. And that isn’t even the best picture. It’s just the one that best illustrates making my point:

If these people can be so far beyond a puritanical moral crisis that it seems to have not even occurred to them that some might find it wrong to put their two year old daughter up to petting a giant phallus, maybe it’s time we take a teensy little step back from our massive shit fit.

Maybe it’s time to shift our energy towards having a shit fit about the fact that while your kid hasn’t ever seen a breast on television, thank god, he has watched hundreds of characters get shot or beaten to death instead.

Or even maybe, MAYBE, we just put the shit fit away for awhile. No?

Sometimes I read something or do something and it gives me an idea for something excellent to write about. But I’m at work or on a bus, so I make a note to myself or save the link.

Then, eons-in-thought-years later when I sit down to write something, I pull it up and scratch my head wondering what the hell I can do with it. Not because I don’t see the excitement in the topic anymore, but I just don’t see how to express it anymore. It’s kind of an odd phenomenon.  It’s similar to audio capture challenges I find myself running up against these days: if you need to go back and overdub something, no matter how carefully you recreate the environment you recorded in previously, chances are you will have to dress the new sound up to match the old.*

So today I was going to write about how my brain is binary, but instead I’m going to throw more bullshit onto a heaping bullshit pile. I have recently started reading enough blogs, often enough, to claim that my toe has been dipped in the pond of increasing numbers of nerds who fully comprehend the concept of the blogosphere: a virtual community of people of all different shapes and sizes, often with opinions larger than voices since they can proclaim anything and deal with the wrath in a delayed comment response system instead of in face-to-face interaction, who all incestuously refer to each other (whether or not they have ever met) as if they lived in a small-town neighborhood ruled by its grapevine. [Is there a prize for creating a sentence with almost 100 words?]

The hot topic on the grapevine last week was blogging for a living. I’m not throwing in my two or eighty cents because I blog for a living or am any authority on the subject whatsoever – because I clearly don’t and am not – but because I have an opinion and blogs are for foisting opinions on unsuspecting, if not willing, victims.

[I'm sounding negative, so let me be clear that I haven't named these opinions bullshit because I think they are worthless.  I mean more that unofficial sources of information (i.e. personal blogs) can only get you so far.]

And what I have to say on the topic is that the issue has very little to do with this particular hobby/profession and its degree of lucrativity (that should totally be a word), and a whole lot to do with a more general habit that we (humans? 21st century-ers? Americans?) possess. Fast money and getting something for nothing are common themes. And beyond materialism, we dream of notoriety that we stumble upon, instead of sweating for. We hope happiness will be dropped in our lap. In short, we would prefer to get what we want, when we want it, without trading anything for it.

I once worked on a show that shared crossover space with a larger, professional theater. A world-renowned Russian ballet was performing in the large hall while we performed in the smaller venue, and as I walked through the hallway from the wings to backstage, lanky-but-sturdy Russian men would whiz by, giggling while carrying wispy girls as they rushed to get from their dressing room to stage left.

At one point, the stagehands kindly invited us into the wings to watch the performance from the sidelines. Standing by the rails, I watched a ballerina on teeny tiny tiptoes twinkle her way across the stage, graceful, twiggy arms outstretched and head bowed to the side like a long-necked bird. The industrial lights bathed the stage in a glow, small specks of dust filtering through the beams and flashes ricocheting off the sequins on her tutu. But for her incremental inching to the left, she could have been an inanimate statue – you could not see her breathe. She made it look so gracefully easy.

Nevermind the years of arduous training at dawn. Nevermind losing your childhood to the adult world of The Business. Nevermind starving yourself to stay thin and trekking thousands upon thousands of miles from your home to entertain thousands upon thousands of complete strangers. Nevermind all that. For this one girl, this life was a breeze. Watching her from the audience or the wings, drifting lightly across the stage like a leaf to the sound of the orchestra swelling, we could all think her life was magnificent and glamorous. All the accolades! So pretty! So sophisticated! What a life…

But then comes the part that the audience doesn’t see. The part that instantly bursts that grandiose bubble and reminds you that nothing is for free. The very second that the last edge of her tutu has disappeared into the dark of the wings, she collapses into a heap of starched mesh, almost disappearing inside of it. And the heap heaves dramatically like a monstrous haystack come to life. Two or three very round old Russian bubbe types rush to her with wooden hand fans and do their best to circulate the air and help her breathe.

After a moment, they lift her up and help her out of the wings to make room for another spent dancer.

Though my example may be dramatic, such is it with all dreams of something for nothing: they are a fallacy. Sure, there may be a very small number of exceptions floating around out there, but they will land on random and unsuspecting beneficiaries and nothing you can do will make your odds of receiving them any better, so best to forget about it.

The ballet dancer’s illusion in the blogging world is that (the few) bloggers who make a living doing it are sitting in their pajamas all day, loafing around and very occasionally, and at their leisure, sitting down for a few minutes to write something. That may be how blogging works for me, except that when I would be loafing, I am working the job that actually makes money. That is not, however, how blogging works if you do it full time.

So if you like to write a blog, write a blog. And if you like to dance, dance. If you need to pay your rent, find a job. And if that which you enjoy ends up making you money, more power to you – but you’ll be working hard for that money. But stop looking for free money. There is none.

*Bonus: Can you tell where I lost steam on this one and had to pick up a few days later?

You must be kidding me.

Sperm bank sued under product liability law.

My jaw is agape and my brain is confused.

What jury would ever even be able to wrap their head around this case? Are they going to call a panel of philosophers as experts?

When I first started working at the firm, the world of law dealt quite a shock to my psyche and required a fairly substantial adaptation. The first and main vehicle for this learning curve was a wrongful death case involving a five year old girl. I had to rearrange many of my brain’s data stacks on The Way The World Works in order to accommodate burned memories of the photographs of a lifeless five year old girl laid across the double yellow on a highway. It was one of several benchmarks in my life that drove home, beyond a superficial degree, the reality of the concept that life is not fair, it owes you nothing, and there are zero guarantees. Nothing a five year old could ever do would justify this fate.

That was enough on its own, but the additional blow from learning that her case was valued at a relatively small number due to her uncertain earning capacity (whereas a wrongful death claim for an adult would hinge on their earning capacity based on employment history) was mind boggling to me. Sure, how do you put a price on ANY life, young or old, but I do understand the concept: I get that civil cases are an attempt to make one whole after they are somehow wronged, and due to our inability to travel back in time and stop Wrong, we have to rely on monetary compensation to make someone “whole”. When someone accidentally drops their piano on you, we can’t undo your broken bones, but we can give you some money to repay you for medical bills and lost wages (economic damages) and pain and suffering (non-economic damages). Pretty bunk system if you ask me, but I can think of no alternatives. But to “repay” someone for losing a child with anything less than one bagazilljillion dollars was something I did not understand at all.

As a result of this exposure, I have slowly come to terms with the way law works, cold and pragmatic as it may be. It is with this in mind that I say the following: LEGALLY speaking, I could fathom how the mother of a learning disabled sperm bank baby might be able to sue the sperm bank or donor under products liability law. I can fathom it. It would be cold and cruel – because how do you tell your child you’re suing for money to be reimbursed for dealing with him or her? That’s pure crap. But legally speaking, ok. You paid for a product, and due to it’s tarnished nature, you have ended up with the “pain and suffering” of a learning disabled child and costs for specialty care. That is, of course, if you can somehow find a line to draw between acceptable genes and unacceptable ones – because we all know there is no such thing as a set of flawless genes. Impossible. But supposing one could get past that argument, you might have a case.

But THIS, at least according to the article, is a lawsuit being brought on behalf of the child who resulted from this faulty product. So…let’s just backtrack for a moment here. See above where I explain that the purpose of civil suits is to make someone “whole” after they are harmed in some way. That is the idea. It just so happens that most often, money is the best we can do. But the spirit of the idea is to undo what was done. So…if the harm this child suffered was being handed a set of genes that were a bit screwy…well then wouldn’t she be made whole by being NOT born? Aren’t they basically asking for someone to say, “So, shall we put her out of her misery? I think euthanasia is legal in such and such a place…” It’s absurd. She is only ALIVE because of these genes. And to suggest that she is owed money because of those genes is to suggest that she’d be better off dead.

::throws up hands in disgust::

Case closed.