HERICOT VERT

Today I ventured into uncharted territory to improve my microwave vernacular. I pressed the “Instant Action Frozen Vegetables” button on my microwave oven’s touch pad with intent to cook frozen haricot vert (French green beans). This was a big deal because before today I had never pressed anything except “Time Cook”.  Why green beans, you may be asking? Full disclosure, we force our children to eat vegetables for dinner before they get any dessert. We are not talking about an entire artichoke, here. Our ambitions are limited to three peas or a broccoli floret with the hope that cumulatively, the kids will absorb sufficient vitamins for survival.

Over the years, my children have invented some creative ways to mask the taste of these few vegetable bites. Among the most innovative was the time my daughter fished an ice cube out of her beverage and proceeded to suck on it until her tongue was numb enough not to taste anything, all the while glaring at me. My son tried to stick a lettuce leaf way in the back of his mouth, behind his taste buds, to what seemed like obvious effect to the rest of us. When he gagged and regurgitated the salad onto his plate, I’m sure you can guess whom he blamed for making him sick. There was a dark period when my son would ask me to pinch his nostrils closed while eating his veggies, under the theory that you can’t taste anything without smelling it. I’m ashamed to admit, I obliged, subjecting myself to observing at close range the fear in his eyes of the incoming beet. It became quite painful after a while, watching my children intentionally try not to taste the food I’d lovingly cooked while hating me for cooking it. The kids don’t perform these oral acrobatics anymore, but they could always regress, and there’s my PTSD to consider. I have noted that green beans have facilitated less of this hurtful behavior than, say, kale. Hence my choice of hericot vert.

The package instructed me to “Cook on High setting for 6 to 8 minutes…Let stand for 1 minute and serve at once.” Well, “Serve at once” was out of the question. I’m sure your little angels hang on your every word, but dragging my family to the dinner table before the meal gets cold is akin to cleaning out the storage room in the basement. Never gonna happen. On a normal day, I would set the microwave for six minutes as instructed, but today I pressed the “Instant Action Frozen Vegetables” button on the touch pad. As promised, the microwave burst into instant action. Though the timer on the screen read “2:40”, I put my faith in the microwave’s override of the package instructions, and an excellent instinct it was. The result was a microwave safe bowl full of steaming green beans, cooked through, yet maintaining a crunchy zip. My hericot vert were magnifique!

I was extremely optimistic as I entered into the next phase of dinner preparation, the hamburger. I would test the “Compu Defrost Ground Beef” button on the microwave. I removed from my freezer one pound of ground beef bearing a sticker that read: “Thaw in refrigerator or microwave.” I have seen these directions before, and I have tried thawing meat the sanitary way in the refrigerator, but do you know how long that takes? If you plan meals two days in advance, then good for you, but I’m guessing I’m not the only one who leaves her frozen meat on the counter to thaw faster. Still, I realized the microwave thawing method presented an opportunity to better adhere to the Surgeon General’s warnings.

The “Compu Defrost Ground Beef” button set the cooking time for “4:30”, and the microwave started up. However, after only a minute, it dinged to a stop. Red words urgently flashed upon the screen in all caps: “PULL APART REMOVE”. I removed, but there was no pulling apart this still extremely frozen block of meat. I pressed “start” again, another minute passed, and then the machine stopped and gave me the same instructions again. With all of this starting and stopping, Compu Defrost’s four and a half minutes were beginning to feel like the last four and a half minutes of a football game. This could go on all day. The meat was still too frozen to pull apart, so I improvised, cutting it into six parts to help the process along. After the final ding of the timer, the six chunks of meat were still frozen, albeit less so. Did the microwave think it was done? This was unacceptable. I was left with two options. Either repeat the process again while babysitting the ground beef through all of the stopping and starting, or leave it out on the counter without any mechanized interruptions.

I chose the latter. The hericot vert were nothing less than a miracle, yet the meat…not so much. Overall I’m thrilled to discover a useful new function on my microwave, incentive to try others. And if I complete defrosting the meat on the kitchen counter, I am 99.7% sure that my children will survive. After all, they have lived through my parenting thus far, and force-feeding them vitamin rich vegetables over the years has certainly boosted their immune systems against food born illness, whether they tasted them or not.

Lesson learned: If you’ve never attempted any of the elaborate commands on your microwave oven, it’s worth a try, as long as your expectations are limited.

IT’S ALL IN THE TIMING

I purchased a fancy sports watch with all sorts of timers, alarms, and other features during a summer a couple of years ago when I thought taking up jogging would be a good idea. I thought I would time myself running laps around the local college track, building up speed and stamina, until I could run a marathon. My help desk husband set the time and date on my watch without the aid of a manual (see my post IF ONLY I COULD FIND THE MANUAL), which I remember thinking at the time was a bit show-offy, though I didn’t complain because the watch was set. I did attempt jogging that summer until the temperatures ascended into the high nineties. Then I decreased my speed to race walking,  then to regular walking, and then finally to thinking about walking while watching the football players work out on Friday Night Lights when I could figure out how to stream it from Netflicks (see my post REMOTE AND REMOTER). I never did learn to use the timers, alarms, and other features on my watch, but there’s no time like the present.

I ran into my first obstacle while studying the decorative, abstract etchings around the circumference of the watch face. Then I put on my reading glasses for closer inspection, and I learned that those etchings were words. At the top were the words “Ironman Triathalon”, a hint at my delusions when I purchased this watch. There was also a bright yellow button labeled “indiglo”. I pressed that button, and the numbers on the watch face lit up for night vision. Yes folks, I had in my possession a tool to train for my triathalon at night.

Toward the bottom of the watch face, I noted that the word “vroom” was inscribed. The help desk doubted that “vroom” was written on my watch, as if I would make up a thing like that.

“Let me see that,” he said. He took a long, scrutinizing look, then announced, “It doesn’t say ‘vroom’. It says ‘WR100M’.”

I would buy stronger reading glasses later, but first, I would identify the meaning of WR100M. I consulted Britt, my friend who runs.

Britt’s response: “I am not the kind of runner who needs a fancy sports watch. I’m the kind of runner who needs resuscitation at the end of the road.”

I referred the question to Ericka, my friend who runs marathons, who told me WR100M meant that this watch was water-resistant up to 100 meters.

“Does that mean it’s waterproof?” I asked.

“Not quite. It means you can swim across a lake, but you can’t wear it scuba diving,” Ericka answered. “So go jump in a lake,” she instructed with joy.

What a watch!

Next, I set my sights on learning to operate one feature of my highly complex, water-resistant watch. My ambition was to set the timer. Through intricate navigation of the “mode” in conjunction with the “set/recall” buttons, I set the timer to go off in one minute. Feeling cocky, I expanded my goal to conquering two functions, and I set an alarm as well, for 7:00. One minute later, the timer went off. Success! Another minute later, the timer beeped again. A number of minutes of predictable beeping passed, and then it was time to turn to the help desk in his upstairs office to figure out how to end the incessant beeping.

“Did you try the ‘stop’ button?” help desk asked.

The truth was, I needed stronger reading glasses, so I couldn’t see a “stop” button.

The correct button was pointed out and pressed, and the relentless beeping halted, but at 7:00PM, the alarm I’d set went off. I pressed “stop”, and then everything went quiet … until 7:00 in the morning, when the watch came alive again. This disruption prompted an effort by a bleary-eyed help desk to deprogram all I had achieved. My water-resistant watch was complex indeed. Even the help desk could not manage to turn off the alarm forever. However, he was able to reset it to what he considered a benign time: Tuesdays at 2:00PM.

If I ever want peace again on Tuesdays at 2:00PM, I’ll have to bury my watch in the garden. Barring that, from now on I plan to stick to the time and date with the occasional visit to “indiglo” if I want to know the time (and date) at night while my arm is submerged in up to 100 meters of lake water. I have documented some technological successes on The Luddite Chronicles, but this is not one of them. Unless someday I reconsider running a marathon (or even a block), I will leave the timers, alarms, and other features on my Ironman Triathalon watch alone.

Lesson learned: It’s okay to use your watch for its original purpose, to tell the time, just as it is okay not to participate in an ironman triathalon.

SLUT FOR FRIENDS

Just to make things clear, I was never a slut in any other stage of my life. As background, back in high school, if you were a girl, you had to wait for a boy to ask you to a school dance. I am not condoning this; it’s just the way it was at my school. I was not invited to the Sophomore class dance, even though as Vice President of the Sophomore class I made copious decorations for that dance, and I was always convinced it was because I did not put out. Then Facebook came along, and I’m afraid my reputation may be shot. I have been shamelessly promiscuous requesting and confirming friends. I don’t know you, but we have two friends in common? Sure! I’ll be your friend. You are serving time for armed robbery? By all means, be my friend. I had a mad crush on you in high school, but you didn’t ask me to the Sophomore dance? Better late than never. Friend me!

I have averaged one hundred new friends per week since I joined Facebook. There is not enough room on my virtual bedpost to accommodate all of these notches.  The worst part is the perverse pride I feel about my slutty behavior.  I have been bragging to my thirteen-year-old daughter about my friend acquisitions, so you know something has gone horribly wrong.  The thing is, now that I have all of these friends, I have no idea what to do with them. Every once in a while, I message someone on Facebook, a medium some people seem to favor over email (see my post HOW FACEBOOK SAVED MY FAMILY). I choose the periodic “like” under a friend’s status update. I make sure to acknowledge birthdays. Otherwise, I am timid about contributing much to the Facebook community.

Yes, I am Facebook’s timid slut. The reason for the paradox is that in my two short weeks as a Facebook member, I have made mistakes. I posted on someone’s public wall once (that I know of) when I meant to send a private message. I tried to link my blog to Facebook, but instead of providing the intended brief, unobtrusive link to the latest post, the entire text of every post I’ve made since the inception of The Luddite Chronicles was broadcast to my entire friends list. I have learned that Facebook friendships can end abruptly by choosing the option “block”. One evening, I friended the wrong “John” (Do you see the pun there?), who was a stranger, and I spent the rest of the night embarrassed. Yet by morning, the wrong John had confirmed my friendship. Obviously, I am not the only one who is undiscerning on Facebook.

A friend IRL (see my post IRL “in real life”) confided in me that when she joined Linked In, she accidentally invited every contact since the beginning of her time here on earth to join her job network. Acquaintances she hadn’t thought about for twenty years sent her emails, some of them not so nice.  This makes her an even bigger slut than me. Which is comforting.

Lesson learned: Quantity does not equal quality when it comes to friendship.

BURNING MAN

My son, the computer game junkie, loves a game called Minecraft in which he builds things with virtual blocks that look like leggos to me. He would play this game 24/7 if left to his own devices. The day before his eleventh birthday, he called me over to the computer where a leggo derivative, “entirely flammable”, giant man he had built was displayed on the screen. The plan was to burn that man before an audience of his friends at his sleepover birthday party the following day.

The entire premise gave me pause for a variety of reasons.  First, it was hard even for me to fool myself into believing that there was any educational merit to this game. Secondly, I couldn’t help but wonder what inspired my son’s impulse to burn a man, and if it had anything to do with my parenting.  Finally, it was a sleepover birthday party. I envisioned the boys awakening at two o’clock AM from fiery nightmares, calling their parents to come pick them up, and the accusatory glares (and potential therapy bills) that could ensue.  I feared this burning man activity could cause psychological harm, gossip, or worse, playdate boycotts. Playdates are crucial because every mother needs a break from her beloved child now and then, especially if he has pyromaniacal tendencies.

On the day of the party, birthday cake was consumed, and then my son announced, “It’s time to burn the man.” The boys gathered around the computer where my techie husband had aided and abetted my son by rigging a device to record the event. What follows is a recap of that recording. My annotations appear in parentheses.

Ominous music is hummed by a slightly off-key child. Towering over a snowy landscape–the giant man. He is smiling. (Little does he know.) Boogledoo, my son’s virtual character, ignites the massive man’s sandals (From Greek mythology, I am told.). As the legs burn, they disappear, yet the torso of the man stays afloat. (“The physics in Minecraft are terrible,” my son explains to me.) On the recording, excitement mounts. Five boys souped up on sugar comment wildly. “The right leg is completely obliberated.” (Laughter at mispronounced word as well as obliteration of leg.) “He is maimed slightly, but there’s a chance of recovery.” (More laughter. There is no chance of recovery. Funny?) “The place where his heart should be is technically burned away…He seems to have heartburn…” (Clever, but at the expense of a man’s incinerated heart.)

Boogledoo enters inside of the man and weaves through a maze of flaming passageways. One child sounds nervous—“Get out, get out!” Someone changes the subject to the shapes of snowflakes falling into the flames. (Perhaps for the benefit of the fearful child.) A thoughtful moment. (I am hopeful. These boys are not monsters after all.) Then my son says, “We’re getting sidetracked.  We’re about to die by fire, and we’re talking about snowflakes.” (Hopes dashed.)  Another child, “Argh, smoke!…everyone fly away.” Boogledoo flies away through the top of the man’s head, which is hollow. “I don’t think he’s very smart,” says one astute party guest. “He’s got a little something on his lip,” says another. (That would be a flame.)

Toward the end of the recording, my son adds blocks of TNT inside the remains of the burning man for a dramatic finale. (Spirited commentaries indicate that death by combustion is the ultimate way to go.) All that remains of the giant burning man is a singed skeleton. Boogledoo is blown up in the process. (My son tells me not to worry about Boogledoo.  “In this game, whenever you die, you respawn.” How does this translate into eleven-year-old reality?)

The activity is a resounding success.  The boys progress to a nerf gun war followed by my son’s favorite movie, featuring fire, war, and of course, fatality. The party theme, it turns out, is violence. I miss the days when the party theme was Winnie the Pooh. The boys sleep well after the mayhem. The next morning, I feed them more sugar in donut form and then hand them off to their parents, who thank us profusely for the night of free babysitting. Little do they know what has been seared in their children’s brains in their absence. However by noon, I have received a phone call inviting my son for a playdate. Despite the death and destruction that went down the night before, there is no playdate boycott. Boogledoo has respawned, my son is one year older, and all is right with the world.

Lesson learned: Our future generation is anesthetized to fire, war, and parents’ insistence that books can be just as stimulating as computer games.

ONLINE SHOPPING: A CAUTIONARY TALE

I bought a swimsuit online from Swimoutlet.com for my daughter two years ago.  It didn’t fit, so I sent it back.  Then I started to receive the emails. “Swim gear essentials starting at $2.95!…Step it up with the latest water shoes!…Our highest rated Sporti competition swimsuits!” And (inexplicably) “Get Lucky this St. Patrick’s Day!” Not only were they overusing exclamation points; they were trying my patience.  I attempted choosing “unsubscribe” at the bottom of an email, but the emails kept coming.  I tried it again, willing to admit that as a technology dork, I had probably done something wrong.  The emails continued to bombard my inbox. When I tried to unsubscribe via email and failed the third time, it was time to take action.

I was, as you can imagine, utterly annoyed. I went online to the Swimoutlet.com shop where I found three contact options.  The first was a toll-free phone number, which I called.  I skipped right over the option “to place a new order, press 1”, and chose “for all other inquiries, press 5”.  A woman with a kindly voice who sounded about twenty max answered the phone.  My rancor fizzled. This poor twenty-year-old phone operator in Nebraska or Kansas probably fielded phone calls all day from irate moms like me who wanted to be removed from the Swimoutlet.com mailing list. I decided not to be bitchy. I mean, what if it was my daughter, having just graduated from college in this economy, answering Swimoutlet.com complaints?  I asked the woman very nicely to please take me off of the mailing list, and she very nicely obliged. Or so she said.

How was I to know that this pleasant young Nebraskan had taken me off of that list? What if she was brand new and hadn’t pressed the right keys on her computer?  I went back online to Swimoutlet.com and chose another option, to “chat online”. I have chatted online before on Overstock.com when I couldn’t tell from the picture if the butter knives I wanted were serrated or unserrated. I think, in retrospect, that the woman with whom I chatted at Overstock.com was most likely looking at the same picture I was.  I have no idea why this mattered to me so much, but I spent easily 12 hours—a full day!– shopping for  serrated butter knives, back in 2010. Now I found myself chatting again.  The transcript from my chat with Swimoutlet.com appears below with my offline commentary appearing in parentheses:

Welcome to SwimOutlet.com! You are now chatting with ‘Danielle’

Danielle: Hello! How may I assist you? (Notice the hopeful exclamation point. Poor Danielle thinks I’m going to make a purchase.  Already, I am feeling guilty.)

jill shulman: Please take me off of your email mailing list. jill@mlcreative.com.  Choosing “unsubscribe” hasn’t worked. Thank you.

Danielle: Sure, please hold for a moment. (I wondered what exactly I was holding for.  Was Danielle placing a big black mark next to my name with instructions to email me twice instead of once daily?)

Danielle: Ok I have successfully removed your email from our newsletter list.

jill shulman: Thank you. Will that discontinue emails too? (A legitimate question, as the Swimoutlet.com emails I was receiving didn’t seem like a newsletter. When I think of a newsletter, I don’t think of an announcement to “Shop the latest lifeguard suits!”  I think of a company putting a little more effort into it.  Perhaps an article on string bikini technology or a breakthrough in maillots with see-through tops for the French Riviera.)

Danielle: The only emails we send out are either newsletters or emails pertaining to order confirmation or tracking. I have removed you from the newsletter list but you would still receive emails for new orders that are placed. (This is just plain not true!  The emails I have been receiving are not newslettery or “pertaining to order confirmation or tracking”.  I am starting not to trust Danielle.)

jill shulman: Thank you very much. (This is me wimping out.)

Danielle: You’re welcome! (Again, the exclamation point, as if I have just bought an entire swimsuit line rather than asking to be taken off of a mailing list.)

There was a third option on the “Contact us” page, which entailed entering my name, email, and phone number before filling in a “comment” box.  I thought twice about entering all of this contact information.  What if Swimoutlet.com began calling me as well?  However, based on my questionable interactions with the potentially inexperienced telephone operator and the potentially shifty Danielle, I was still considering filling out this page. Then I saw at the bottom, just above the “submit” box, that there were only two ways that Swimoutlet.com would respond to my “comment”: “Contact me by phone” or “Contact me by email”. That’s when I realized that regardless of how many ways I tried to unsubscribe, my relationship with Swimoutlet.com could carry on in perpetuity.

Lesson learned: If you shop online, be prepared to enter a long-term relationship.

REMOTE AND REMOTER

My daughter, who is of the generation with the attention span of a goldfish (I Googled it.  Three seconds for both goldfish and teenagers.), flips TV channels each time a commercial comes on.  I’ve witnessed her navigating four shows at once, wielding remote controls with the agility of a samurai, yet I’m lucky if I can even figure out how to turn on the machine. My husband and the guy from Best Buy rigged it, and now it takes five remotes to operate the fifty-inch flat screen TV with surround sound that engulfs our family room. Four plastic boxes with wires snaking out of them are stacked on top of each other on a shelf beneath the screen.  Some of these wires are color coded like a bomb. My family room could be a stage set for the movie Brazil. I imagine feng shui experts would have a field day rearranging this room.

The remotes lined up on the coffee table across from the TV, and the corresponding boxes they control, are all different brands.  This is critical for deciphering what buttons to press on what remote to achieve the desired effect. Please do your best to follow along. The white remote with Wii printed on it obviously corresponds to the small white box labeled Wii at the top of the stack.  Swishing around the little cursor hand on the Wii yields doctor’s office music, Playmobile people, and sixty-four episodes of Friday Night Lights. “All on” is the operative button for my purposes on the silver Comcast remote, companion to the silver Comcast cable box, second in the stack. “Play” and “pause” are my buttons of choice on the Toshiba DVD remote, corresponding to the third box labeled Toshiba that bears a slit for sucking in romantic comedy disks for my daughter and Lord of the Rings for the five hundredth time for my son. Another remote manufactured by Yamaha controls the sound box at the bottom of the stack, upon which the “volume” buttons are useful.

That takes care of all four of the boxes, but it leaves one remote manufactured by Samsung still lingering on the coffee table.  The big screen TV is a Samsung, but I wondered, what was the purpose of this final remote?  There were volume buttons on it, but Yamaha had already taken care of that.  There were channel buttons, but wasn’t that a job for Comcast?  There were VCR and DVD buttons, but that function was spoken for by the Toshiba folks. I asked my techie husband what was the use of this Samsung remote, and his eyes gleamed.

“Watch this; you’re going to love this!” he exclaimed.

What is it, what is it?!” I responded, piggy-backing on his excitement.

“It’s P. size!” he answered.

My intuition told me that whatever would happen when he pressed the “P. size” button would not elevate my heart rate to quite his level.

“It changes the aspect ratio of the picture,” he explained.

I saw no discernible difference when he hit the button.  However, I knew what I must do. This moment warranted exactly the same response I gave my husband when he eagerly suggested, “Let’s go camping!” As a supportive wife, I feigned enthusiasm about “P. size”. And because I love my husband, I will not jettison that fifth remote.

Lesson learned: Television can strain or enhance a marriage, depending upon how you play it.

IRL

When I joined Facebook a couple of days ago, I felt like I imagine it might feel to die.  After scrolling down for about five demoralizing minutes to find my birth year among the options, I was signed up.  Then I landed in a netherworld where ghostly voices from my past wafted toward me.  “Welcome…We’ve been waiting for you…You’re finally here…,” the disembodied voices heralded.  I half expected my deceased grandparents to post on my wall. I knew there was an alternate universe over there on Facebook, but I didn’t know it was quite so spooky.

Facebook is visionary.  Facebook is the future.  But Facebook has complicated my already multi-layered life by adding yet one more stratum to it. Now I don’t know where to turn when I want to organize a carpool.  Do I call?  Do I text?  Do I email? Do I send a message on Facebook? I know my teenaged daughter will not answer a phone call, but she’ll answer a text or a Facebook message (see my previous post HOW FACEBOOK SAVED MY FAMILY).  However the other Precambrian Moms, like me, can’t text on their antique phones, much less access Facebook on the internet while driving a minivan.  Soccer practice involves both the teens and the Moms, so I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what is the best intergenerational communication option.

Friends IRL (in real life) have suggested that since I’ve opened myself up to Facebook, I should now join Linked In and Twitter.  Here I am behind on inputting schedules into the Google family calendar, blogging, fielding Facebook messages and emails, fulfilling my previous IRL responsibilities, and now you want me to join two more online networks?  Hello!  If I can squeeze a half an hour out of my day, I’m going to try to get some exercise.

For years, we’ve maintained a “no screens during the week” policy in our home that is becoming harder and harder to enforce, especially now that my middle school daughter needs to check assignments and grades on an online portal.  However, last night, on the eve of the first day of school, we shut off our screens. The kids and I snuggled in the big bed in the master bedroom with our books, and it was bliss, I tell you.  IRL bliss. Facebook fun can’t compete with this.  And I’m guessing Linked In and Twitter wouldn’t rival it either.

Lesson learned: Virtual hugs and emoticon smiles can never replace the IRL variety.

HOW FACEBOOK SAVED MY FAMILY

I have avoided joining Facebook like I avoid shaking hands with the guy who has a wet cough.  Everyone who knows me understands that as a luddite, I have defiled Facebook repetitively for years.  But then we had a family emergency.

My husband (who allowed me to publicize this event for the common good) was in the bathroom, in the midst of business therein, when he looked over and observed that the cardboard toilet paper roll hung from its holder without a square of toilet paper coiled around it.  Now, I will not go into detail here about how I’m the only one in my family who ever seems to notice this phenomenon and remedy it.  Suffice to say that in this particular instance, my husband was not thinking ahead.

However, never underestimate my husband when he gets into a pickle.  He is as resourceful as anyone I know when it comes to using the tools he has at his disposal in an emergency.  No, he did not use a towel. He first attempted to use his voice.  He yelled for our daughter, who he happened to know was the only other person in the house at the time.  He yelled as loudly as he could so that his voice would reach her all the way on the other side of the house where she was, as is often the case, staring at a screen.  No footsteps creaked down the hallway to rescue him.  There was no response at all, so he whipped out his iPhone, which is always attached to him like another appendage.  He used that iPhone to call our daughter, but her cell phone rang and rang.  He texted her.  Nothing.

My husband was at the end of the line. He was sure that our daughter was online checking her Facebook account while he was suffering in the master bath. He did the only thing that was left in his arsenal. He typed upon her Facebook wall, “Can you get me TP pleeeease?!!!!”  He waited.  Then he heard footsteps creaking down the stairs.  He heard the bumping of the downstairs storage closet opening and closing.  Then footsteps thumped back upstairs and down the hallway.  A gleaming white roll of toilet paper appeared through a crack in the bathroom door.  Because of Facebook, my husband suffered no more.

And that is why, after years of heel dragging, I am the last American, and possibly the last worldwide, to subscribe to Facebook.  I feel that it is my moral obligation as a mother to acquire every tool possible to save my family in the event of another emergency.

Friend me.

Lesson learned: A (Facebook) friend in need is a friend indeed.

20 MINUTES OF FAME

The following post has nothing to do with technology, but it is a testament to what technology can do to you.  It can make you greedy for stardom.  I never thought this would happen to me until I was invited to be a guest blogger on katiekerrclarke.wordpress.com, which is the blog of my friend Katie who is battling breast cancer.  The experience of making a guest appearance made me feel like a celebrity.  Not “A” list like Kate Winslet or Sarah Jessica Parker.  More like a celebrity who might sit inside of a Hollywood square or report the local weather, but still. My 15 minutes of virtual fame left me hungry for more, so I’m extending it for five extra minutes (more than my fair share, I realize) and re-posting here.

HALFWAY THERE!

Hi, I’m the guest blogger and college roommate, Jill, reporting in after accompanying Katie to her third chemotherapy treatment.  Again, it went swimmingly, with minimal side effects for the moment, which left me without much to report.  Then Katie suggested that I write a little bit about my observations, and following the lead of my dear, undaunted, optimistic friend, I started thinking (which is always a dangerous pastime for me).  For those of you who don’t know me, please be forewarned that I am a humor writer, and irreverent humor is my way of coping with even the most difficult circumstances.

MY OBSERVATIONS: 10 SURPRISINGLY FABULOUS SIDE EFFECTS OF CANCER TREATMENTS

1. Everybody tells you how fantastic you look all the time.  You can roll out of bed (no “bedhead”!), throw on sweats, forego the makeup, and everyone you run into at Starbucks will say, “You look wonderful.”
2. You don’t have to plan or cook a meal if you don’t want to.  There is a wait list for people to bring meals to Katie and her family.  A wait list!  I had the pleasure of mooching two of these dinners during my visit, and let me tell you, flank steak, ceasar salad, pasta from Machiatos, and homemade cookies are side effects I wouldn’t mind having on a regular basis.
3. In addition to all of the amazing meals friends and family bring you for dinner, you can buy dirt cheap, weirdly good food at the hospital.
4. You get to show off the organizational skills you have honed over the years as a mother.  Katie can add to her resume, “Organized numerous medications, exercise regime, doctor’s appointments, and visitors while managing entire lives of four boys (JK Patrick) including curriculum nights, carpools to sports practices, and homework supervision.”  She can use me as a reference.  I was exhausted just watching her.
5. There are multiple opportunities for accessorizing.  Can we talk about Katie’s new scarf collection?  I covet the silk number Katie wore to chemo this week.  Katie told me it was given to her by a neighbor friend.  (Hey neighbor friend…yoo hoo…I live in Western Massachusetts if you want to send a scarf like that my way.)
6. More on breast cancer fashion.  When you wear a compression “muscle” shirt, a do-rag and jeans, you look like a rock star.  When Katie picked me up from the airport in this ensemble, she looked like she was on her way to play a set at a nightclub. I have also heard that you can purchase an exercise sleeve that looks like an armful of tattoos to complete the look.
7. The entire town clamors for walking dates with you. Katie, as queen bee, has had to resort to a “first come first served” policy for walk reservations so she can be that girl who is popular because she’s nice to everybody instead of the popular mean girl who gets to be prom queen because everyone was too scared of her not to vote for her.  (You know you remember that girl from high school, who clearly was not Katie.)
8. For a limited time only, it’s your prerogative to play the “cancer card” when you feel the situation warrants it.  Ie: “I had a minute to call because I’m at chemotherapy right now, and I was just wondering if you had any spaces suddenly open up in the Tuesday dance class for my daughter who really, really wants to take it?”
9. The “honey do list” is taken seriously as a working document.  And for those of you who don’t know, if you utilize child labor, no one will arrest you throughout the duration of your chemo treatments.
10. People who have said they were going to visit for the last decade but never came finally book plane tickets.  (Granted, this is only a benefit if you actually want these people in your home.)

Well Katie, you asked for my observations!  Obviously, I was one of those people to which number 10 alluded.  Because my hosts were so gracious, I will never know if they gritted their teeth while I commandeered their son’s room for a couple of nights (thank you!), but spending an amazing few days with Katie reminded me that with or without her do-rag and compression shirt, Katie really is a rock star.

With love and admiration, this is your guest blogger Jill, signing off.