March Madness

March Madness!

The favored team is three points ahead with 33 seconds to go. Make that five points ahead after two additional free throws. The TV camera pans to the audience where people are making their way to the exit. Granted it is only the second round of play but there are empty seats in the arena. The fans have paid a high price for 55 minutes of play. They do not turn around and look at the action as they make their way up the steps to the outside ramps. Getting to the car and a quick get-a-way trumps staying until the bitter end to lend support for the team that loses or celebrate with the one that wins.

Did March madness ever refer to Alice in Wonderland and the insanity of the March Hare?

Did March madness ever refer to the weather, as in like a lion, out like a lamb?

Apologies for the digression.

Four weeks of basketball for a football fan is an eternity. I fill in the brackets, as is required, but mostly I complete the form after the games are over. There's no money involved in getting it right. It just looks good on my kitchen counter, no cross-outs, no tears smudging the newsprint.

This weekend the mood changes with only 16 teams left. Four Ohio teams are still in and the big match-up is between Indiana and Kentucky. I predict that no one will be leaving this game early. Toilets will flush only at half-time and much money will be won and/or lost on the outcome...of the game.

I am a fair-weather basketball fan. I watch until "my" teams are sent packing. My husband watches the last three minutes of any game. Then it's back to real life which in itself can be pretty dramatic and change just as fast as two-point lead with one really flagrant foul.

And that's what I think about it.

Not in My Backyard

I was reading a book on the porch yesterday. Had to get the folding soccer chair out since the porch furniture is still under tarp. Warm breeze, birds singing, can of soda, all the trappings of a lady of leisure. The only thing that marred that idyllic scene was the noise level from down the street and around the corner.

Geese - and plenty of them. Domestic geese, the kind that you buy when they are cute little peeps and nurture into adulthood and then, well I don't know, eat them, I guess. Until the eating part occurs the geese grow larger and louder.

Clipped so they can't fly away they are at a disadvantage, as are the neighbors. Geese groups go wandering through the yards leaving droppings that should, at some point, encourage grass growth but until then, become slimy pitfalls as one tip-toes ones' way through ones' own back yards.

I do not know much about livestock, but of this I am assured. Six home-owners on this street have googled "Goose recipes" on the Internet and have the oven pre-heating for the time that one of these little critters gets a little too close to the back door. Roasted, stewed, or broiled, I see a block party in our future.

And that's what I think about it.

Life Lessons Part 3

Here I am now in adult life having learned some basic and vital lessons along the way to here.

Two more decades to go.

My last decade which ended in October 2011 was memorable in other ways than might be expected. Lessons were learned that might have better served me had they been learned fifty years earlier. Hindsight you know?

Not to sound morbid, but how can this not? Big Life Lesson: I learned that no one gets out of life alive!

While this fact of life is true for everyone, there is an inner inkling for many of us that it is only others who will experience this, that somehow life will go on in its present form for a very long time for the "I" while those 'thems' fall around us.

This is so ludicrous and hinges on stupidity but then many of my life lessons have hinged on idiocy so why should this decade be different.

Sometime, when I have way too much time on my hand, I think about how I will leave this world. Watching TV ads for OTC and prescriptions drugs, I wonder if I'll succumb to a strange yet curable illness and think "Why didn't I buy that product?" Or perhaps get crushed within an automobile that has not passed all the dummy safety crashes. Maybe get sued to death because I carried the wrong kind of car insurance.

This kind of thinking does not happen often lest you think I should have sternly been steered toward professional help but it is an important lesson in life...and its inevitable end. It will end. Whether sadly or with joy is a choice both I and family and friends make. And this final emotion depends upon what we believe about our final decades and thus final day and further, final breath. Is it all over? Is it just beginning? How one answers those two short questions will in large part determine how one lives the last decade of their life. That's the lesson. The homework is optional.

Even though that is/was my life lesson for the last decade, I now have a brand new decade to play around with. New lessons to learn. New worlds to explore. New mistakes to make. It's fun, life. So far, in the first four months of the new decade life lessons have been sparse. I'll keep you posted.

And that's what I think about it.

A friend posted an article on Facebook regarding the lack of usefulness, in the corporate world, for an English degree.

Ah I wish it were not so.

Like fingernails across a chalkboard, the misuse of the language grates on the nerves. Not every one's nerves to be sure, but on those who likewise majored in English or in some past life spoke it well. Too often that is not the case today with the spoken language sounding too often like a foreign one.

The worse offenders seem to come from two different widely diverse spheres: the street and the ad room. Curiously they offend for exactly the same reason: they wish to create a shortcut to either save energy or separate themselves from those 'outside' the language community.

"Wsup?" is answered by 'noh.' Speaking like this, a street gang now has enough energy saved up through two unvocalized syllables to do whatever street gangs do with their unspent energy. Oh yes, that can't be good.

Or is it 'oh no, that can't be good.'

Advertising executives make verbs out of nouns and cute word combinations, like Te-bowing, going postal, greening, fueling (as in 'fueling potential'), lunchables, chewnola (a treat that 'sends your dog to a world all his own.')

So it is not so much that new words are being created to suit and separate, it is that the made-up words are stupid and when we insist upon placing them in our own vocabulary we become dumber.

And that's what I think about it.

The rest of my Life Lessons in a soon to be written posting.