Baltimore Diary

Stress Sucks

The Doctor: [while giving Janeway a quite vigorous massage] You work absurdly long hours under constant stress, eating on the run without sufficient exercise or rest. Your body is crying out for mercy.
Captain Janeway: [with a painful expression] It certainly is now.

—Star Trek: Voyager, "Scientific Method" (10/29/97)

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GF and I are both having a rather stressful week, each of us for different reasons. It's making us get all snappy at each other and that's never good. What's bugging me is that it's making me less able to compartmentalize myself, which is bad enough because it's been necessary for me to take work home lately. And I really dislike having to do that, but sometimes it can't be avoided. But when I'm carrying home work-related stuff along with the work itself, that's not a good situation.

There's a lot of work that will go into putting our Pig Roast together (on top of everything else we're dealing with), but that day will be fun, and we're certainly looking forward to the days off that will follow. Personally I'm hoping to set myself up with just one day where I get absolutely nothing done, before I have to return to work for the summer session.

And now, back to work. It's a little after midnight but I think I'll be done by 1:00.

Contributing Members of Society

The Penguin: [while being bombarded by food] Why is there always someone who brings eggs and tomatoes to a speech?

—Batman Returns (1992)

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Daughter is wrapping up her Junior year. She did respectably on her SAT this year but plans to take it again and see if she can't improve her score, she took the AP exam in English and she's in the home stretch for finals and Regents exams. (New York high schools have the regular final exam that the school issues, and the Regents exam, which the state issues. You don't have to pass the Regents to get a diploma--at least, you didn't have to before No Child Left Behind was passed--but having the Regents diploma is a step higher than your standard-issue diploma.)

I got in touch with her a couple of days ago to see if I could arrange for her to be down the weekend of the 14th, since my brother is coming up from Florida and all. She told me that she'd still be in school at that point, plus she got a job.

To which I replied, "Well, if you can afford to miss a day from school, or maybe we couldddddDDDDUUUUUUHHHWWWWHHHAAAT?"

Yes indeed. My daughter has gone over into the Land of Taxpaying CItizens. She's working as a cashier in a local fruit & vegetable market; one I rather liked shopping at when I lived up that way, although I haven't taken the time to pop in when I visit lately. (At left is a photo of the place when it was on fire back in 2002. I'm pretty sure they've cleaned up a little by now.) So between that, and the fact that she's likely to be taking Driver's Ed this summer, I don't know that I'm going to see a lot of her in the near future unless I take the time to visit Long Island and spend a few days up there. 

Yellojkt is the lucky one because he gets to watch a lot of this stuff up close and personal (plus it makes good blog fodder). Me, I'm a sideline viewer who has to get it when it's not exactly breaking news, and it's 200 miles away. I think this is one of the reasons it gets to me so much when The Sperm Donor Wee One's father pulls the kind of stunt he did last weekend. He doesn't live that far away; consequently he's pretty much squandering his kid's childhood. Early on, I was one of his biggest supporters and I tried to give GF the other side of the story, from the noncustodial parent perspective. But whatever I did, didn't seem to help any and it's pretty irritating that he wastes these opportunities to be with her.

I should make it clear that I do actually buy his story about last weekend. But it also seems to me that something--anything--happens, and he gives up too quickly. A weird noise in the car and the wind blowing the wrong way are equivalent in his head. And his judgment isn't the best, as evidenced by the time he wrapped up a visit a little early. They got to the house before we did, so he simply left Wee One on the doorstep with nobody at home. At least she had sense enough to go to the neighbor's and ask if she could stay there till we got in. Imagine our surprise when, as we returned from dinner, we passed her playing on the sidewalk a few doors down from the house.

Sometimes my frustration with this tomfoolery leaks through. One time Wee One called me on it, asking me "You don't like my dad, do you?" I replied, "I like him fine, but sometimes I don't respect him very much." Not the kindest thing to say but there's only so far you can go when you're whitewashing the truth.

If there's a theme emerging from the posts so far this week, that's merely coincidental. I think.

Get Used to Disappointment, Kid

Mutt Williams: You know, for an old man you ain't bad in a fight. What are you, like 80?

—Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

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Wee One was invited to a birthday party this weekend. It was a big deal kind of event, where there were plans to go to some place in Pennsylvania and spend the night, and there would be swimming and all kinds of revelry for eight-year-olds. Not the kind of party I'd throw for kids, but it sounded like fun.

The bad news was, it was scheduled for this weekend, which is her weekend to be with The Sperm Donor her father. He wasn't going to waste any time going to Pennsylvania (he would have been welcome to come along), and that was the end of that. To make up for it, he got them a pair of tickets to the Orioles game scheduled for today. So they'd do whatever they were going to do Saturday night, spend Sunday at the ballpark and have a reasonably pleasant weekend, even if the party wasn't part of it.

He called on Saturday afternoon around noon to say that he was about to leave. We needed to go visit with GF's grandmother (who recently transferred to a nursing home from the congregate housing she was in previously), so we arranged to meet him there. Since his mother lives in the same complex, and it cuts his travel time by about a half hour, it's good all around. Wee One packed a set of clothes for the game, her Nintendo DS (naturally), and a couple of other doodads that almost-nine-year-olds can't live without.

In the nursing home, GF's phone rang and I answered it. It was SD her father. He was having car trouble. More accurately, he thought he might be having car trouble and decided it wasn't worth the risk. I made some commisserating noises and suggested that he talk to Wee One. I handed over the phone and of course there's all kinds of tears mixed with the almost-not-quite-kinda-sorta-maybe-meaning-it "That's OK"s and such. By now, GF's returned from wherever she'd been, so now we get to pick up the pieces. And how do we do this, you ask? By taking Wee One along on our date night.

Now, we'd pondered going to the May Birthday thing to celebrate with the local blogiverse, even though I'd be a Designated Driver (today's my last day on the Weapons-Grade Antibiotics), but I do have to draw a line with taking a kid into a situation where there's a bunch of grownups drinking, even if it's technically legal for that child to be there. (Pig Roast notwithstanding, ahem.) Plus, she's in third grade, when they start indoctrinating the kids into all that "Drinking is bad, mmmkay?" routine, so now we have a pint-size Carrie Nation on our hands. I hope all you guys had fun, anyway.

Instead, we decided we'd do one of those things I swear not to do: we went to the movies on a Saturday night. Not only did we go to the movies, we went to White Marsh. To see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That's right. We went to that hellhole (as all movie theaters are on Saturday nights) to see one of the top films in the nation.

Without getting too spoilery, I'll say this: The movie clocks in at about two hours and five minutes, and the first hour and forty minutes are pretty good, It's about what you'd expect from the Indiana Jones franchise, even almost twenty years later, and despite Shia LeBeouf's performance. It's that last 20 minutes or so that gives you a little bit of "...the hell?" It was almost prophetic on my part to buy Reese's Pieces at the snack bar earlier in the evening.

We saw the 8:00 show and by the time we got home, everyone was pretty much ready for bed. And sometimes, that's how Date Night goes.

Ecch Marks the Spot

[about the United States' hypochondria]
George Carlin: It's ridiculous and it goes to ridiculous lengths! In prisons, before they give you a lethal injection, they swab your arm with alcohol! It's true! It's true. It's true! Well, they don't want you to get an infection! And you can see their point: wouldn't want some guy to go to Hell and be sick! It would take a lot of the sportsmanship out of the whole execution.

—George Carlin: You Are All Diseased (1999)

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Last week I went to the doctor for my annual checkup, which happens about every 24-30 months. Shut up.

Naturally, there were a few things the doctor wasn't happy with. My weight is up (duh) and despite my good blood pressure, my total cholesterol number can only be expressed using exponents. I had a few issues of my own, however.

I mentioned recently here that my allergies are the worst that they have ever been in my entire adult life, and I shared this with her. That's right: I have a female doctor. My prostate exams aren't so much gay as they are a little kinky. Anyway, she gave me some nasal spray to use, and a drug called Xyzal, which is almost exactly the same thing as Zyrtec.

What's the difference? I'm glad you asked. Very little, it turns out. But the Zyrtec has reached the end of its exclusivity period, which means that you can buy it in the generic over the counter. So they move a molecule from the left side of the compound to the right side, call it a new drug and get another patent. This is an exaggeration, but not by much.

The Zyrtec, however, didn't have the side effect that the Xyzal did, which was to make me dizzy. I know that allergy medications may make you drowsy, but I've never been so whacked out that I was afraid to drive. So I stopped taking the Xyzal and kept using the nasal spray.

Too late, as it turns out. My allergies have developed into a pretty respectable upper respiratory infection, which means that I'm waking up in the morning and coughing up in brilliant shades of green; a green that isn't ordinarily seen in nature except maybe on the planet Fnark during Solar Flare Season.

So I've tried calling the doctor, who appears to have taken a long weekend, and had just about resigned myself to dealing with this until next Tuesday, when lo and behold, Wee One steps on a piece of glass.

GF broke a jar or something in the basement a few months ago, and despite her sweeping and vacuuming, Wee One managed to find a new shard. Worse, we couldn't get it out of her foot. It was almost 9:30 and we figured we were headed for the Emergency Room, when GF remembered a Patient First office nearby and tried to call. Woo Hoo! They're open till 10! Into the car we go to get this glass out of her foot.

On the way, it FINALLY occurs to me that I can get my URI treated while we're there. So while GF is trying to keep Wee One from screaming too loudly at the prospect of maybe having to get a shot for this before they extract the glass, I'm in the next room picking up antibiotics and a cough medicine that I could probably sell to junkies for $10 a hit. Once I'm done I head back into her room and I have to help hold her still while the doctor gives her a Lidocaine shot and uses some cool Doctor-Grade Tweezers to yoink out this piece of glass, which is shaped like a thorn and nearly a half-inch long.

The best part was watching Wee One try to walk out with a numb foot. And since I took the cough syrup shortly before I started typing this, it's definitely off to bed for me.

Inevitable Decline

Niles: Marrying money can have its perils. Ten or fifteen years down the line, after you've adapted to a lifestyle now totally beyond your means, you can find yourself cast aside, a hollow husk, penniless and crushed.
Frasier: Niles, Big Willy's eighty five; he's on his third pacemaker.
Niles: Ah! Mazel tov.

—Frasier, "Where There's Smoke, There's Fired" (4/30/96)

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It's been a hell of a week around my abode. I got a call on Tuesday afternoon from GF that her grandmother had had a fall, and that she was going over to St. Agnes Hospital to get checked out. This meant that I had to pick up Wee One from the neighbors' place and it might be necessary for me to calm her down a little. Wee One was doing OK, although she wondered when her mother was going to get home. As it happened, she didn't get home until sometime after midnight; I'd already fallen asleep.

During the next couple of days, some other details emerged: She'd fallen at about 9:30 AM, but nobody at the congregate facility she lives at found her until around 5:00, when she failed to show up for dinner. By Thursday night they'd determined that the cause of the original fall was a heart attack, and that she needed a pacemaker because her heart rate was so slow.

On Friday they put the pacemaker in—did you know they could do it that fast? Because I didn't. They had to use something other than general anesthesia because there's a very real danger of advancing dementia when you put someone out as deeply as that. Did you know that? I certainly suspected it after my grandfather's surgery, but now they have some hard numbers.

So the bottom line, at this point, is that Granny (what everyone calls her) is still in the hospital because there are other tests they'd like to do. She's also on heparin now, which means that she can't return to the congregate housing. If she were to fall and nobody knew about it, she could bleed out, so as nice as the apartment is—and it is a nice little place—it's no longer a viable option for her. GF and her mother have started the search for a setting with greater supervision (which probably means nursing home). GF's father is predictably dysfunctional (this is his mother, after all), and her brother is...invisible. I had a harsher word there but that one will do.

Me? I've been holding down the fort, keeping an eye on Wee One and offering whatever support I can. Before much longer it will be my grandmother going through this, and my turn. My grandmother lives with my mom in Florida, and my brother lives nearby, so I'm not close to the action as such, but I do try to participate in some of the decision-making process.

When they let me.

Invisible in Petco

Alex Forrest: Well, what am I supposed to do? You won't answer my calls, you change your number. I mean, I'm not gonna be ignored, Dan!

—Fatal Attraction (1987)

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(Warning: this one is kind of long.)

At six-foot-one and over 250 pounds, I may not look like much, but I'm wiry.

OK, let's face it. I'm not exactly tough to spot. So I don't really get it when I'm in a store where helping the customer is not only desired (which would be all of them), but in some cases absolutely necessary. Specifically, I'm talking about the Petco store on Route 40, just outside the Beltway near the Golden Ring area.

As some of you may recall, I have a fish tank that I got shortly after moving to Parkville. These things aren't exactly plug & play; you have to take care of the stuff INSIDE the tank after it's set up. So a few weeks ago, just before Spring Break, I went to this particular Petco to pick up some supplies (vacation feeders, extra dog food for the people watching Keiko, etc). I also still have a problem with the snails, so I was hoping to get some advice there.

Into the store I go, and I'm hovering over the fish food shelves first. I locate what I want, but now I have to find out about the snails. I look around...nobody. I decide to wait a couple of minutes. Nothing.

As it happens, there's a button on a post nearby that you can push if you need assistance. I push it, to no apparent effect.

At least ten minutes go by and absolutely nobody has acknowledged my presence in the store, never mind offered me assistance. For all they know, I could be buying feeder goldfish; I could be buying one of those hundred-dollar marine fish (god DAMN but I want a salt tank). Or I could be a shoplifter. It would have been easy enough; I was wearing my barn coat from Bean. Look at those big honkin' pockets. I could have walked out with half the store and it woudn't have shown on me. But that's not the way I fly. And I'll tell you what: I had a four-dollar bit of vacation food in my hand, but I usually buy other crap for the tank even though I'm about to go on vacation: plants, extra filter media, whatever. This time, I put the food back and left the store. PetSmart got the sale of the fish food AND the dog food that day. (I was still a little too irritated with Petco to buy the other crap for the tank.)

Shortly after the break, I was back in the Petco because, hey, everyone has an off day. There was a sale on some fish I wanted and I was running low on the fishes' regular food. So this time I'm actually in the market to spend some money, and not just the usual food-plus-an-impulse-purchase. This time around I go to the aquatics department, pick up a canister of food, and walk over to the tanks to see the fish that are on sale, plus whatever else might catch my eye. I'm alone at first, but not for long. An employee comes into the area. She's making notes on a clipboard, she's looking into assorted tanks, she's working over by the sink area, etc. etc. etc., but she's not talking to me. She's not said "hi", not asked if I need anything, not nothing. I'm the ONE person in her immediate area, standing expectantly before the fish tanks, with fish food in one hand. Hmmmmm...what could I possibly be there for? AGAIN a full ten minutes goes by (this time I actually timed it). Again I put the food back and went out empty-handed. Time was short, so I picked up the fish food at the Wal-Mart a couple of hundred yards away.

That's right: I bought pet supplies at Wal-Mart.

Now, if you've been with me awhile you might recall that I had some bad customer experiences with McDonald's, and I chronicled the experience and how they handled it. (If you follow that link, be sure to read the two post that come after that one.) I decided to do the same with Petco. After all, this is two sales they lost because of nonexistent customer service.

I went to Petco's website and found the "contact us" link. From there, there is a "Petco store feedback" link, so I followed that. I filled out my contact information, identified the specific store, and then I got to a space that asked if I'd spoken to a store associate.

Son of a bitch. I clicked "no" and moved into the "comments/questions" section. I had 1500 characters to work with, so here's what I came up with:

My job isn't for me to speak to store associates; THEIR job is to speak to ME. Unfortunately this hasn't been the case for my last two visits.  I have a dog, a cat and some fish, so there are plenty of supplies I can pick up at Petco. However, when I go to the aquatics department it's either unstaffed, or the people who are there don't acknowledge me or offer assistance.
   This is NOT a case of me waiting for thirty seconds. On both occasions I've been there for well over ten minutes without anyone even speaking to me. As a result I've left the store empty-handed and gone elsewhere.
  Coincidentally, the day after my most recent visit I received a 10% coupon in the mail. I have to think long and hard about whether it's worth a small discount to go back to a store where the staff basically ignores me.
  From what I read in the news, this is a rather challenging time to be in the retail business; it's therefore interesting to me that the people in your store are so confident in the economy that they don't feel a need to assist customers.
  Incidentally: I've worked in retail before and I know at least as well as you do how much a simple "Hi, can I help you find anything?" can reduce shrinkage in any given store. I was wearing a barn coat with large pockets and could easily have departed with a lot of merchandise undetected. However, theft wasn't the point of my trip. But neither was it going in, only to leave without purchasing anything.
  Thanks for your attention.

That was on a Friday. On Sunday I got this response:

Dear Claude,

Thank you for contacting PETCO regarding your concern with our store at 8640 Pulaski Highway, Suite 104. We are sorry to hear about your past experiences with not being able to find assistance.

At PETCO, we strive to offer the highest level of service to all our customers. I am very sorry to hear that our associates did not offer you assistance when you were waiting in the aquatics department. I want to ensure that our customers leave our PETCO stores satisfied, and as such, I will be addressing your concern with the General Manager of the store so that next time your experience will be more pleasant and complete.

Please know that we care about our customers and what they think of us. By letting us know when we fall short of your expectations, we have the opportunity to address your concerns and to be better prepared to meet your expectations in the future. If we can be any further assistance, please feel free to reply to this email or call PETCO Customer Relations directly at 1-888-824-7257.

Sincerely,

Megan K.
Customer Relations Coordinator

In my head this was a pretty standard, canned response. (Look again at how McDonald's responded.) But what the heck, I figured. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Megan K's email came to me on April 20. On Wednesday (April 30) I gave it one more shot. This was my follow-up email to Megan this evening:

Dear Megan K,

I'm afraid that your discussion with the General Manager of the store had no effect whatsoever. I returned to the store on April 30, again with the expectation of purchasing fish and some supplies for my tank. Again, despite there being someone in the aquatics department, I was not acknowledged, nor was I offered any assistance. At this point I don't think anyone would have attempted to interact with me unless I took it upon myself to treat the aquatics department as a self-service station and tried to retrieve my own fish.

Let me stress that on none of my visits was the store especially busy. The gentleman in the department did help another customer, but it was only after they went after him to get some help. I'm not the sort of person who has a huge sense of entitlement, but I do want to feel as though the fact that I had a choice, and I chose to go to Petco, means something to them. Obviously this is not the feeling I get when I'm in that store.

Since I don't have a receipt from the store (because again I wound up leaving empty-handed), I'll just mention that by way of demonstrating that I was there, someone may remember finding a container of fish food on an endcap among hamster cages, which is where I left it as I departed. If they check the front door recording, they will see me and an eight-year-old redheaded girl, sometime between 7:30 and 7:45, exiting through the entrance and stopping to wave goodbye to the camera.
Thank you for your earlier reply and your attempts to improve my experience. I'm sorry that they appear not to have been very successful.

Sincerely,

Claude

As with McDonald's, I'm not looking for freebies here (McD's gave me coupons for free meals but they went unused because that wasn't the point) because that's not what I want. What I want is for people to understand that there are folks out there who are going to vote with their feet, and their wallets, when a store's employees aren't doing their jobs, and that this isn't exactly the best economy to screw around with that sort of thing.

I've always said that there's really no such thing as a crappy job. You want to flip burgers? Flip burgers, but strive to be great at flipping burgers. I've paid those dues. I've worked in jobs that some would consider menial or unattractive, and each time I tried to do a decent job of it. This doesn't mean that I didn't put in some time slacking off, but when I was asked to make a Whopper with no mayo and extra tomato, that's exactly what came out. I don't think I ever had to do a re-make when I was at Burger King, and the biggest complaint about my work was that I used too much bleach to clean the shake machine. When I worked as a manager at Record World, I had to reprimand people for not being helpful to customers. Even when the customer doesn't get precisely what they asked for, they knew that the floor staff at least tried. Are people really that honest-to-god comfortable in their jobs nowadays that they don't feel the need for customers in their stores?

If I hear from Megan again I'll share it with you. Stay tuned.

Because It's My Job to Educate You

Crowd: We need a cure! We need a cure!
Dr. Hibbert: Why, the only cure is bed rest. Anything I give you would only be a placebo.
Blonde Woman: Where do we get these placebos?
Man: Maybe there's some in this truck!
[the mob pushes over a truck. Boxes labeled "DANGER KILLER BEES" break open, the bees go everywhere and everyone panics, one man puts a bee in his mouth]
Man: I'm cured! I mean, ouch!

—The Simpsons, "Marge in Chains" (5/6/93)

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Learn from me instead of the hard way: If you put a contact lens in your eye backward? That son of a bitch hurts.

That is all.

The Eyes Have It

Donna Moss: Josh, this was delievered by messenger.
Josh Lyman: What is it?
Donna: It's... wait, wait, no, damn. My X-ray vision is failing me today.
Josh: Gimme that!

—The West Wing, "The Leadership Breakfast" (1/10/01)

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That's not my eye over there but it's the same color. Nice, yes? I rather like my eye color. My favorite part is the way they seem to change color from time to time. Sometimes they're more like brown, other times they're definitely leaning toward green.

Daughter doesn't have my eye color, which is sad. On the bright side, she does have this steel blue that she seems to have gotten from my grandmother. A quick Google image search doesn't turn up much, so I'll have to take a digital pic of her and blow up the eye, sometime. Anyway. 

A couple of weeks ago I went to get my eyes checked as part of the biannual thing. And, it's official: I get to wear glasses on a full-time basis. Not that I wasn't doing that anyway.

I'm abnormally rough on my glasses. I push them up on my forehead, then grab them by the lenses to bring them back down, then wonder why I can't see. What's a few fingerprints, anyway? I've dropped them, lost them, chipped them...the only thing I haven't done with my current pair was bend them out of shape, and that's because I sprung for frames that are made of some space-age polymer. I don't think you CAN bend them enough that they'd remain misshapen. But I do have these glasses with the scratched lenses and the chip from when they fell off my face at the Pig Roast last May...it's just sad.

So, since I'm such an irresponsible glasses-wearer, I asked the doctor if I could get contacts. Last time he was resistant because I wasn't supposed to be wearing them all the time. This time? No problem. He ordered a starter kit for me (freebie) and, if all was well, I could order a more permanent set.

For the uninitated: when you buy glasses, you wait a week or so and they call you in. You go, they put them on you and make sure they fit, and send you on your way. With contacts, when it's your first time, you have to go in and be trained in the ways of sticking stuff in your eye. And that was the first question she had for me: "Are you comfortable putting your finger in your eye?"

"Sure," I said. "I do it lots of times. Occasionally on purpose."

It took me over ten minutes to get the first lens in correctly, but I managed it. The process involves holding one eye wide open and basically pulling my upper eyelid outward and then down over the lens. I was told that it would feel as though I had a foreign object in my eye. (What! My lenses aren't made in America? Snerk.) In fact, it felt to me as though I had a stray eyelash bugging me. The left eye didn't take quite as long but it still wasn't easy at first. Then I had to take them out again for her benefit, to show that I could do it.

For today, I was told to wear them for four hours .Naturally, as that mark passed I wasn't in a position to take them out, so they were in for nearly five. I took them out around 8:30 and my left eyeball is still a little sore. Tomorrow they should be in for five hours (maybe I can go six, since I already did five?), and so on until I can wear them all the time, except when I'm sleeping at night.

So here I am, one with the Contact Lens Nation. So far, so good.

A Fine Line, Methinks

Carmela Soprano: He's a good man. He's a good father.
Dr. Krakower: You tell me he's a depressed criminal, prone to anger, serially unfaithful. Is that your definition of a good man?... You must trust your initial impulse and consider leaving him. You'll never be able to feel good about yourself. You'll never be able to quell the feelings of guilt and shame that you talked about, so long as you're his accomplice.
Carmela: You're wrong about the accomplice part, though.
Dr. Krakower: You sure?
Carmela: All I did was make sure he's got clean clothes in his closet and dinner on his table.
Dr. Krakower: So "enable" would be a more accurate job description for what you do than "accomplice". My apologies.

—The Sopranos, "Second Opinion" (4/8/01)

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A friend of mine was telling me a little bit about the dynamics in her family. She's met my family and thinks that our willingness to yell at each other (when necessary) is a little on the weird side. My argument is that it's a reasonably healthy way to go, because at least you know where everyone stands and there's none of that weirdness where everyone tapdances around everyone else and nobody says anything because of how someone will react. You know what? They're going to react anyway, so get it over with.

But something she said struck me, and I've been pondering it for a couple of days, now. She said that "We complain about each other all the time, but we're also very supportive of one another.  I know that I can call any member of my family at any time and they'll come a running."

This was a paraphrase. The idea behind what she'd said was that, even though they bitch about one another, there's also a whole support system going on there should someone who is outside the family do some sort of injury to one of them. The specific phrasing ran along the lines of "my family, right or wrong" and intimated that anything that happens, happens TO them. There is no fault in this family, no responsibility. There are no errors here. There are only outside influences which are going to somehow disturb the family dynamic or some such. I got the feeling that even people who marry into this family remain forever on the fringes, somehow.

(For a "throwaway" conversation that took place a day ago, I thought about it way too much.)

But with this sort of attitude, what happens when a family member does go wrong? How do they handle the one whose activity goes criminal? The alcoholic? The one who doesn't react appropriately to frustration or failure? The drug abuser? The one who refuses to grow up? The one who sleeps around? The bipolar one? 

When does "support" stop being support and become a form of codependence? Where does the distinction get made? And who decides? What if someone in that family unit decides that this is, indeed, an unhealthy situation and tries to break out? Do they become the "black sheep" of the family? Do they wind up with the ties cut off?

It's a curious thought, isn't it.

Starting from Zero for the New Year

Ralphie as Adult [narrating]:  [T]he Old Man loved it. He had always pictured himself in the pits of the Indianapolis Speedway in the 500. My old man's spare tires were only actually tires in the academic sense. They were round and had once been made of rubber.

—A Christmas Story (1983)
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On Saturday evening, GF and I started looking at cars, since my Hyundai (R.I.P.) is about to be torn asunder and its parts sold off. I'd done a little research on the Web to see what was out there, and so it was that we went to Jerry's on Joppa Road. The people there were pretty nice and quite straightforward, once they realized that GF wasn't fooling around with the whole "How much were you thinking about paying every month?" routine, or the "write down a number" bit. They also learned (as did I) that GF's parents are neighbors of Jerry himself, and that one fine evening a few years ago, some of his cows(!) got off the property and were wandering around the road. (Snay, have you seen any wandering cows while on the Franchise job?) They had a fairly attractive offer on a 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt (coincidentally blue), but since it was the first car I'd looked at, I didn't want to jump on it right away.

I wanted to see what Hyundai was up to (the damage to the Accent was my fault, not theirs; I still really like the cars), so this morning we headed over to Schaefer & Strohminger to see what they know. Not much, as it turned out.

I was teetering between the Elantra and, if I could afford it, the Sonata. The first one we looked at was the Elantra. So the salesman went to find a key for one of them. This took several minutes. To be fair, the one they usually use for test drives was already out, so this is why he couldn't locate it right away. Anyway, he located a key and got the car out of its parking space.

I pull the car out of the parking lot and immediately we hear it: "Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa". GF thought it sounded like a flat tire. That's when I noticed there was an indicator light on the dash for the tires. "I guess we have a low tire, or a flat," I said, although it wasn't handling like a flat. I make the U-turn and go back into the lot. The guy goes to get another car. We look around it and none of the tires appear flat, or even especially low. He returns with a second key and fetches the car. As soon as I sit in the driver's seat I see that this car has the tire indicator lit as well. He gets out to get another key, handing me the dealer plate so he doesn't have to keep track of it.

While we're waiting, one of the other salesmen, who didn't realize that we were being waited on, started to chit chat with us. We noted the problem with the tire light, and he started to say something about how cold it was. "It's not THAT cold," I said. "We had rain last night, not snow." His response went something along the lines of "Uh". Thanks, bub.

When the FOURTH car had its light illuminated, that's when I handed the plate back to the salesman, telling him, "OK, I think we're done, here." Either something is substantially wrong with the tire sensors or there's something wrong with the way the tires are mounted, or something. At any rate, I was very disappointed, because the Accent was my second Hyundai, and until today I had no questions about their reliability.

Earlier today, GF had called another Chevrolet dealer (Koons, I think) and they had a 2007 Cobalt with the same features as the '08, so it would have been a few thousand cheaper, so we started to head over there. On a whim, we stopped in at the White Marsh Carmax, which has a Nissan dealership. GF didn't want me to simply jump on the Cobalt just because it was there, so she had me look at the Elantra and the Versa.  The Versa is nice, but just a wee bit too small for me, so we started poking around the Elantras.

Surprise! It's a pretty nice car, and it gets decent mileage (25 city/33 on the highway). There was a small problem with a blemish on the passenger front door that they couldn't manage to buff out, but it was nearly invisible and they offered to knock $200 off the price. How could I say no?

So now I'm up to here with the car payments again and practically zero in the bank (and by "practically" I mean I'm likely to be late on most a few of my bills), but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Another few weeks and I swear I'll be in slightly better shape.