Care for a Sample?

I talk to my sister LM often, and when I do, I always seem to have what she calls “the story of the day.” She’s right about that; almost every day, some little thing happens that makes for good sharing with her but not really enough of an event to write in a blog post. She has been encouraging me to write more, but also to embrace the whole less is more thing. In other words, don’t wait until I have something momentous to share, just write.  Who knows, maybe I will post more often. Maybe I won’t. Maybe you will like it. Maybe I will too.

Today’s story of the day involves the dumber of my two cats, Moshe. Today, I called to schedule his annual exam because Moshe is a bit overdue in the rabies vaccine department. I am never too eager to take him to the vet. While I love my vet, Moshe hates him and puts up a fight that he saves especially for the annual exam. The rest of the year Moshe spends lounging and sleeping and overeating and purring loudly and even allowing us to carry his fifteen pounds around like a rag doll with never even an ounce of aggression. When he has to go to the vet, he turns into a vicious cat beast, hell bent on mayhem and destruction and physical harm, all so he can return to the overeating and sleeping part at home. We both hate the annual exam.

I spoke with the receptionist to schedule the visit. After we went through the calendar and found an agreeable date and time, she asked me to try to bring in a stool sample when we came for the appointment. For the cat, obviously. She said it wasn’t a big deal, but if he used a litter box, it would be easier to harvest one than if he goes outside to do his bizness. She actually used the word “harvest.”

Me: A stool sample? That’s a new one.
Her: You’ve never brought in a stool sample? We like to check for parasites.
Me:  No, I’ve never been asked to. He is an indoor cat, though, so wouldn’t his chances of having parasites be kind of small?
Her: You never know. It’s just easier to have a sample for cats by bringing it in. Dogs don’t mind so much if we obtain a sample during the exam.
Me: I can’t really blame him for that.

We shared a laugh, politely.

Me: Well, the problem is he shares the litter box with our other cat, so I don’t really know if I could be 100% sure it’s his.

This is not entirely true. He, like many boy cats, or boys in general, produces a stink unlike any other. He also likes to leave it unburied, so the smell can really permeate our air supply. 

Her: Oh, that would be fine even if it isn’t his. Chances would be good that if one of them has a parasite, they both would.
Me: Good to know. So here’s another question. I am new to the whole stool sample thing. How, um, fresh does it need to be?

I had an image of myself skulking around the entrance of one of our litter boxes, waiting with a Ziploc sandwich bag at the ready.

Her: Oh, it doesn’t need to be that fresh. It can even have litter stuck to it. You just don’t want it to be hard and dry.
Me: No, I suppose I don’t. Okay, well, I’ll do my best. We’ll see you next week with a small bag of crap.

I told my sister this story of my cat’s appointment and the stool sample discussion.  We went on to discuss further how ironic it is that cats love to show you their anuses, but you can forget about actually touching it in the name of veterinary medicine. I pointed out that they are kind of like strippers in that way. You can look all you want, but if you touch, you are going to need traction.

So that’s how the story of the day works. Because, when you think about it, isn’t every day full of shitty little stories?

Coexist Much?

Well, the kids have been back in school for less than a week, and already, religious intolerance is rearing its ugly head. Normally it takes a few weeks of getting to know each other before the teenagers let their true colors show, but when your true colors are patterned like a confederate flag, well, I guess you feel entitled to show them to everyone.

My family lives in the South, and like many southern communities, the majority of the residents in my town are church affiliated. Christianity here is bigger than college football, which is almost a religion of its own. And when I say Christianity, I really mean evangelicals, those lovely fundamentalists who feel the need to convert or condemn anyone who does not share their beliefs. They do an excellent job of indoctrinating their children with the righteousness and entitlement they feel that comes from their personal relationship with their lord and savior.

I’m not judging them. Everyone is free to believe and practice what feels right, as long as it doesn’t infringe on the next person’s set of beliefs. That’s where it gets a little hazy for some folks.

My younger daughter is in 8^th grade. She has been no stranger to the horrible comments lots of Jewish kids hear. Nothing makes the momma bear in me come out faster than having another kid tell mine that she is going to burn in hell because she is Jewish, but no matter how big the stink I make, another kid will step up to take a turn.  Since 8^th grade is her last year of middle school, most of the kids who know her already know she is a Jew and have shared their prophesy with her, leaving them free to aim it at someone else who isn’t white or Christian.

One of her good friends happens to be Muslim, and she began wearing a hijab this year. It was a very personal decision for her friend, who up til now had not covered her head even when her twin sister chose to a few years ago. These girls, who were born in the US and are therefore as American as the rednecks who harass them, have had to deal with terrorist jokes for their entire middle school experience. They have always risen above the comments and display a level of maturity and confidence that shows more about their religious beliefs then the so-called Christian students. One kid asked S’s friend why she started covering her head. She didn’t answer hi since it was none of his business, so he followed it up with asking if she was a Muslim. When she told him yes, he wanted to know if that meant she was from Islam. She looked at him with what I hope was as much judgment as he showed her and said, I was born right here in this city.

If it were me, I would have said yes. Yes, I am from Islam, you oblivious piece of crap. I happen to know for a fact that the seventh grade social studies classes were required to learn all the countries and maps of the world. I wonder where this future McDonald’s employee thinks Islam is located.

Meanwhile, over at the high school, my older daughter, E, was having her own religious experience. She has a much different approach to her Jewish identity than her sister. She doesn’t really give a shit what anyone thinks, and she is much less likely to be polite about it. Because she is less sensitive, she gets a lot more ribbing than her sister does, which she thinks is funny. Some of it comes from her friends but she gives it back as good as she gets it, so it’s all okay for the whole lot of them.

This week it wasn’t her one of her friends that was teasing her. Some dumb freshman, according to my sophomore child, was following her and another of her friends down the hall. They were having a conversation about the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holidays next month, and the freshman behind her asked her if she ate Ramadan because she was Jewish. Let that sink in for a minute.

E gave him a look that should have made him throw himself off a rooftop, but instead, he continued to follow her down the hall shrieking “Ramadan” at her. Finally, she turned around and yelled, “Jesus Christ, would you cut it out?” The boy immediately stopped and was truly outraged. “You know,” he said, “that’s taking it too far. I was just messing with you, but you really shouldn’t say that. It’s offensive.”

She stared at him and then screamed,” Just shut the fuck up!” The hall erupted in great boisterous laughter because someone yelled the F word. He stopped following her, and that was the end of that.

Both my daughters still tell me stuff, and they each shared these stories with me. While they aren’t really the same at all, at the core they share the same level of ignorance. These aren’t little kids. These are kids who have had at least a small amount of book learning on world geography and different religions and what happens when we don’t accept and respect one another.  Do they pay absolutely no attention to what is presented to them in class? Do they watch no news at all, either on television or the internet? Is there no discussion of different cultures in their homes?

The answer to all of those is most likely no. Intolerance is easy when you surround yourself with your own kind. You go to school and church with white Christians. You wear your bracelet or your Forever 21 shirt with crosses all over it. You might have one black friend or know one smart Asian kid, but you don’t have them over to your house. If all you see is white and Christian, you expect the whole world to be just like you.  Well guess what, even in nineteen of the United States you are becoming a minority, never mind the rest of the world, so it might be time to rethink your position.

When I hear about people feeling their religious freedoms are being suppressed, it just infuriates me. There is no war on Christmas, but there is district testing on the high holy days. Nobody asks you if you are from Bethlehem because you are Christian, but my kids get asked all the time if they can say something in Jewish and if they come from Israel. There is no official religion in our country, yet our biggest holidays celebrate the birth and death of a guy who wasn’t even Christian!

Do me a favor and stop telling my daughters they are going to burn in hell, because guess what, we don’t believe in hell, so there.

Beach Bumming

I grew up going to the beach almost every Sunday. My family lived about a half hour away from the closest beach, and we would make a day of it, whether we all wanted to or not. The day involved a lot of sweating, a bite or two of a sandy hot peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a few pees in the ocean, and a hunt for sharks’ teeth before the sunburn claimed our tender young skin. We would swing by Dunkin Donuts on the way home, which my sisters and I would consume in front of the Wonderful World of Disney, post-bath, in our matching summer pajamas.

My beach experiences as an adult are very different from that of my childhood.  My husband got a steal on a tiny condo at a foreclosure auction, and we stay there several times a year.  The condo is in the same building we have been going to since we met, which means I have been going to the same beach for my entire adult life. While I still enjoy a good pee in the ocean, I don’t have to eat a sandy sandwich anymore. I don’t have to peel my sweaty legs off a burning pleather car seat.  If I get hot, I can take a break in the ocean, or in the pool, or in the sweet, sweet air conditioning of the condo while catching up on my Food Network or SpongeBob viewing.  And unlike my childhood, when I didn’t go back to the next Sunday, I can get up and go again and sit with a book day after day until my husband has to go back to work or my kids to school or I just get tired of relaxing. That usually takes about a week.

My point is, I am pretty much an expert at the beach. I have achieved master beach level. 

Lately, I have witnessed some inappropriate beach behavior, bad beach etiquette if you will, and I feel the need to share it. Obviously, none of these faux pas were committed by you, but perhaps by someone you know. Not every beach has lifeguards or other authority figures ensuring public safety, so it’s up to all of us to do the right thing. Here’s just a few, but by no means all:

·        Stop it with leaving your tent on the beach overnight. When you rent a condo, you aren’t also guaranteed a prime location on the beach. Unless you are at a resort and have reserved a cabana, you don’t get your own personal square of sand. The beach is public and first-come, first-serve.  You people who leave your tent up for a week, you are the very reason most beach towns have outlawed the practice. Luckily, our condo is in a county that still allows tent use in the summer because we own such a tent. It weighs about seventy five pounds. Every morning, my husband hikes through the dune path with that thing on his back, and we all help set it up so he can sit and rest his hernia. When our day on the beach is done, we help him close it and position it just so on his back before he treks it up to our condo. The tent isn’t in the same spot every day because we don’t own the beach, and neither do you, tent asshat. Why don’t you try a little motherfucking courtesy next time?

 

·       Let’s talk about music for a minute. You think the music you like is the best, don’t you? I am a big fan of alternative. I have a friend who would rather listen to heavy metal. His music aggravates my TMJ, and mine makes him start his period. We both can agree on one thing: we hate country.  Why is it that the country music fans always set up their beach party right next to mine? I don’t want to listen to some pseudo cowboy singing about drinking beer while I watch you down a suitcase of Milwaukee’s Best, which, by the way, isn’t good for you. Alcohol dehydrates you, idiot, and drinking more of it isn’t topping off your fluids. Too much beer is not a good reason to crank up the twang; there is no good reason. When I go to the beach, I want to hear the waves crashing on the shore. I want to hear the birds squawking at each other over an old crab leg. I might even like to hear a giggle or two coming from a sand castle construction site. What I don’t want to hear is some off key yokel warbling about Jesus loving your gun toting dog in the back of your honky tonk pick-up truck with your toothless one night stand. You are not in your double wide, so turn it the fuck down.

·       Let’s try to secure our belongings, shall we? I try to be a nice person, but after running after your Tommy Bahama umbrella and your five thousand empty Capri Suns that got picked up by a breeze, I am over you. If I get hit one more time by your wayward raft, I will claim it for my own. If you want to leave your Cheetos bags all over the place, at least have enough to share with the rest of us. Furthermore, the dunes are not your storage bin. They are, however, federally protected land that may just help our children still have beaches when they have children. Let’s stop putting that stack of beach chairs on the sea oats. You can tote them back to your car or condo at the end of the day along with that tent you leave up. Jesus, you sure are lazy.  

·       I shouldn’t even have to say this, but the sand on the beach is not your goddamned ash tray. I want to look for shark’s teeth without picking through the butts of your cancer sticks. It’s just gross. Put them in one of the plethora of beer cans you have scattered under your beach tent that you are leaving up all week. You are such a dick.

·       A friend of mine posted a photo on Facebook last week of some douchebag who was surf fishing in the middle of the day. Noon o’clock isn’t exactly when the fish are biting, if you know what I’m saying. You know what’s happening at noon? Families. Children are boogie boarding. Teenagers are losing their bikini bottoms while jumping over waves. Large older women are trying to enjoy their romance novels in their sand chairs while the waves lap at their toes. None of them is prepared for an ER visit to remove your old rusty fish hook. How’s about instead you fish during regular fishing hours, you know, when no one else is using the beach and the fish are actually biting. There is something that has been biting a lot lately in the middle of the day, and that’s sharks. In the past few months, over eighteen shark attacks have occurred within a hundred miles of where my condo is, during the day, in the surf, not even deep water. The sharks are there because it’s their home. Could you do us all a favor and not invite them in closer for a snack?

The last time I was at the beach, I saw one of those surf fishing assholes, and I got really irritated. I sat there under my tent, watching him cast his line and slowly reel it back, while all around him, children played along the water’s edge. I sat there in my chair and got pissed. PISSED. I went on and on to my bored daughter about how dangerous it is to surf fish with the hooks and the sharks and all, getting angrier and angrier, when all of a sudden, he got a bite! He turned that little crank thing that winds up the fishing line and pulled and turned and pulled and turned until finally, he reeled in his catch. A baby shark. My daughter and I, mid-judgment, hopped up out of our chairs and ran to the small group who surrounded him so we too could see the baby shark. It looked so cute and angry, like a baby alligator, only, you know, more sharky. I even got a picture of my daughter holding it. We headed back to our tent and chairs while the fisherman flung the shark in the water, not quite past the breakers.

That was cool, my daughter said.

Yeah, it was. Also stupid, I said to her. Asshole fisherman.

The beach is perfect as it is. You can’t improve on it, but you can ruin it for everyone else. Try to remember that you aren’t the king of the beach any more than you are the center of the universe, so let’s aim to leave our narcissism at home and instead bring along a little common sense and decency.

And if I see you again, man who surf fished from the safety of your tent while blaring your effing country crap on your knock-off Beats speaker, I will beat you to death with your beer bottles and bait, and that’s a promise. Unless, you catch a shark, or maybe a ray, because I like those too.