Contrary to popular belief, I am far from perfect. For those of you who really know me, you know I am not one to obsess over personal grooming. I wash regularly, I brush my teeth, I am (I think) lice-free. Nevertheless, I am unlikely to comb what’s left of my thinning hair, I don’t always keep my beard properly trimmed, I don’t care if my shoes are polished, and I am anything but a snappy dresser. Of late, I have new grooming challenges: unexpected and unwanted hair has been growing on unlikely parts of my body like Japanese Ivy. I can’t keep up with it! The nose hair is manageable, and I have my battery powered personal groomer, or “nose hair whacker” as I call it, to keep that problem in check. Back hair is a relatively new, more bothersome blight, yet I have learned to effectively address that annoyance as well. Now, there is a new hair plague, and this one really took me by surprise … EAR hair! I used to laugh at those old men I’d see on the street with forests of thick hair growing out of their ears, but now I am beginning to feel their pain. I’m not quite to the “forest” stage yet, but let’s just say I need bigger tweezers. What a cruel and ironic joke Fate has played on me that, as my once wonderfully thick head of hair thins out, sentencing me to an imminent future of Uncle Festerdom, the unsightly hair on the rest of my body has picked up the slack. Aging is not for sissies.
Technology is a double-edged sword, and of late, I am convinced that we are reaching the point where technology is causing as many problems as it solves. I don’t need to watch television on my cell phone (nor do I need to listen to music on it, text message with it, play video games on it, use it as an electric ear hair mower, etc.), and when I do watch television, I want it to be simple. Within the past two years, our cable provider has forced us to upgrade our service to digital, and this has been anything but simple. They notified us in their bill, in tiny print, but we didn’t actually respond until we noticed that our old equipment no longer worked properly. The system upgrade has required new equipment that we needed to pick up, or pay to have delivered, and now our analog VCR does not properly communicate with the new service. We now have switches and buttons and manuals to insure that this works properly. To rub salt into the wound, these “improvements” cost more than our original service. The other day, we got a call from Shauna’s elderly aunt, asking us to help her. A power outage had blown out her old analog cable converter, and she didn’t know what to do. She has one of those old Zenith consoles that will work forever, but which is not “cable ready”. As fate would have it, her cable provider (and ours by default, because it services our apartment building), and a company whom I have grown to loathe because of their atrocious customer service, wrote her a form letter informing her that her new and improved service would require a digital converter box … and oh yes, she would no longer get some of her favorite channels, unless of course, she bought an additional package of bundled channels, which included championship lineups of such “must-sees” as CSPAN, The Accounting Channel, The Chess Channel, Wombat Planet, and of course, everybody’s favorite, al Jazeera (the French version). It used to be popular to hate the phone company, but these days, cable companies have passed them by a country mile.
It shouldn’t be long now, and it has probably already occurred, that some disgruntled customer or employee will soon be spraying automatic weapons fire through the offices of a local cable provider.
I caught a few minutes of Gerald Ford’s funeral on CNN last week. At one point, captured in its entirety on CNN, a piper was playing “Amazing Grace” in the background as pallbearers moved the casket, so badly that someone made him stop halfway through it. The guy murdered that hymn. One final comment: after hearing Kissinger and Brokaw speak, Dubya’s fumblings to follow were glaringly anti-climactic. New rules for Dubya’s speechwriter … nothing over two syllables and NO foreign pronunciations! No President left behind.
We are back up north, perhaps for the last time before our old cottage comes down. The space heaters are blaring and the wood stove is crackling, and outside there is a stiff breeze churning up mini snow tornadoes on the lake. After some annoying hiccups, the Township of Armour has basically approved our land addition, the driveway is in, and the logs have been ordered. There is still much to do, and much to clean out, but hopefully, 2007 will be the year we see the plans of these past three years come to fruition. After all the setbacks of the past few months, I am cautiously optimistic, but count on nothing.
- Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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