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mallorys_cameraIn the recent election, much was made over the factoid that electoral districts with at least one Starbucks within their boundaries tended to vote Democratic. Some political wags suggested that the way for Dems to close the 2020 elections might be to build more Starbucks. (Wink, wink; nudge, nudge.)
I suspect there’s a corollary to this: Districts that have at least one Dollar General or Dollar Tree will only vote Republican. I wish I had the money to crunch the numbers that would prove or disprove this theory.
I don’t know what you do with districts that have both Starbucks and Dollar Trees.
Dollar stores are the most depressing stores in the world. I know because I shop in them at least once a week: Dollar stores are where I buy my scented candles. Scented candles, Christmas lights, Tibetan prayer flags, books, my postcard collection, and family photographs – that’s my basic décor.
###
Woke up this morning to news of another campus rampage. Perp has been fingered as a Somali refugee. He didn’t use a gun, so the Second Amendment is safe, and nobody actually died. He swerved his car into a crowd, and then got out of his car and started chasing down bystanders with a machete.
This couldn’t have happened at a worst time for American Muslims, although, since I’m a conspiracy theorist at heart, I think there’s at least some chance that Steven Bannon had Abdul Arban playing solitaire for a couple of weeks in some abandoned underground bunker (obscure Manchurian Candidate reference alert!) and planted him in Ohio because Der Donald loathes John Kasich.
Else?
(1) Ed spontaneously gifted me with a New Yorker subscription because “a person like you needs to read The New Yorker.”
I don’t know why he thinks I don’t read The New Yorker or if he imagines that I’ve survived 64 and a half years on this planet without encountering The New Yorker.
But hey! It’s a gift, right? It means he views me positively. With affection even. And I did subscribe to The New Yorker for many years. I let my subscription lapse because, let’s face it, I’m kind of an intellectual lightweight, and there was no way I could read all the stories. And I could never bear to throw any past issues away – I mean, it’s The New Yorker! – so I accumulated huge piles of them. The New Yorker was turning me into a hoarder!
The New Yorker doesn’t degrade the way other paper magazines degrade either. It’s printed on this super-slick, shiny paper. Cockroaches will be using The New Yorker as a Rosetta Stone long after humans have become extinct.
###
(2) Much merriment yesterday tutoring Imane. I dictated a sentence, Nobody knows… which Imane transcribed No bodies nose…
On that most American of holidays, Black Friday, Imane trotted off to Best Buy and stood on line for five hours to buy a new computer at a $25 discount with her very own money that she earned slaving away at a kitchen scullery maid job that she’s intellectually overqualified for. So I was very proud of her! And regaled her with descriptions of Bard College! How beautiful it is; how happy she’ll be there.
We also talked about Morocco. I’m sure I’d told her before that I’d visited Morocco in 1970 (though I’m sure I didn’t tell her that I don’t remember very much about the trip because basically I spent two weeks in Marrakesh being stoned out of my mind.)
“I’ve always wanted to go back,” I said. Which is true. Now that I’m no longer interested in drugs but in geology, history, and architecture. “I really, really want to see the medina in Fez – “
Imaan’s eyes lit up. “You will come with me in two years! When I go back! My family will treat you like a princess! We will show you the Fez medina!”
Huh! I wonder if that’s even a thought?
(3) C has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Hasn’t been staged yet, and in many instances, physicians don’t even recommend treatment for Stage 1 prostate cancer: My erstwhile brother-in-law has been living with it for many years.
Still…
I’m not supposed to know. L, always remarkably circumspect about her own plans, spills other people’s secrets with an amazing disregard for how those other people might feel about it. Well. We are close friends, and this does impact her emotionally, I suppose.
L is a relentless positivist. I can see how this worked to her advantage in her own life: L is what was called in less enlightened times a hunchback. Birth trauma. She is technically disabled, but one doesn’t think of her as disabled because she refuses to think of herself as disabled. The only time she alludes to it is when she’s looking for parking. “Good thing I have this,” she’ll say and pull out her disabled parking hangtag.
But I can also tell when I overhear L talking to C on the phone that she’s rather overdoing the relentless positivism. C has legitimate grounds for feeling negative and overwhelmed right now.
She’s fluttering a lot more than usual and has forced me to eat lots of leftovers with her. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I hate turkey and I positively loathe stuffing.
I suspect there’s a corollary to this: Districts that have at least one Dollar General or Dollar Tree will only vote Republican. I wish I had the money to crunch the numbers that would prove or disprove this theory.
I don’t know what you do with districts that have both Starbucks and Dollar Trees.
Dollar stores are the most depressing stores in the world. I know because I shop in them at least once a week: Dollar stores are where I buy my scented candles. Scented candles, Christmas lights, Tibetan prayer flags, books, my postcard collection, and family photographs – that’s my basic décor.
###
Woke up this morning to news of another campus rampage. Perp has been fingered as a Somali refugee. He didn’t use a gun, so the Second Amendment is safe, and nobody actually died. He swerved his car into a crowd, and then got out of his car and started chasing down bystanders with a machete.
This couldn’t have happened at a worst time for American Muslims, although, since I’m a conspiracy theorist at heart, I think there’s at least some chance that Steven Bannon had Abdul Arban playing solitaire for a couple of weeks in some abandoned underground bunker (obscure Manchurian Candidate reference alert!) and planted him in Ohio because Der Donald loathes John Kasich.
Else?
(1) Ed spontaneously gifted me with a New Yorker subscription because “a person like you needs to read The New Yorker.”
I don’t know why he thinks I don’t read The New Yorker or if he imagines that I’ve survived 64 and a half years on this planet without encountering The New Yorker.
But hey! It’s a gift, right? It means he views me positively. With affection even. And I did subscribe to The New Yorker for many years. I let my subscription lapse because, let’s face it, I’m kind of an intellectual lightweight, and there was no way I could read all the stories. And I could never bear to throw any past issues away – I mean, it’s The New Yorker! – so I accumulated huge piles of them. The New Yorker was turning me into a hoarder!
The New Yorker doesn’t degrade the way other paper magazines degrade either. It’s printed on this super-slick, shiny paper. Cockroaches will be using The New Yorker as a Rosetta Stone long after humans have become extinct.
###
(2) Much merriment yesterday tutoring Imane. I dictated a sentence, Nobody knows… which Imane transcribed No bodies nose…
On that most American of holidays, Black Friday, Imane trotted off to Best Buy and stood on line for five hours to buy a new computer at a $25 discount with her very own money that she earned slaving away at a kitchen scullery maid job that she’s intellectually overqualified for. So I was very proud of her! And regaled her with descriptions of Bard College! How beautiful it is; how happy she’ll be there.
We also talked about Morocco. I’m sure I’d told her before that I’d visited Morocco in 1970 (though I’m sure I didn’t tell her that I don’t remember very much about the trip because basically I spent two weeks in Marrakesh being stoned out of my mind.)
“I’ve always wanted to go back,” I said. Which is true. Now that I’m no longer interested in drugs but in geology, history, and architecture. “I really, really want to see the medina in Fez – “
Imaan’s eyes lit up. “You will come with me in two years! When I go back! My family will treat you like a princess! We will show you the Fez medina!”
Huh! I wonder if that’s even a thought?
(3) C has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Hasn’t been staged yet, and in many instances, physicians don’t even recommend treatment for Stage 1 prostate cancer: My erstwhile brother-in-law has been living with it for many years.
Still…
I’m not supposed to know. L, always remarkably circumspect about her own plans, spills other people’s secrets with an amazing disregard for how those other people might feel about it. Well. We are close friends, and this does impact her emotionally, I suppose.
L is a relentless positivist. I can see how this worked to her advantage in her own life: L is what was called in less enlightened times a hunchback. Birth trauma. She is technically disabled, but one doesn’t think of her as disabled because she refuses to think of herself as disabled. The only time she alludes to it is when she’s looking for parking. “Good thing I have this,” she’ll say and pull out her disabled parking hangtag.
But I can also tell when I overhear L talking to C on the phone that she’s rather overdoing the relentless positivism. C has legitimate grounds for feeling negative and overwhelmed right now.
She’s fluttering a lot more than usual and has forced me to eat lots of leftovers with her. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I hate turkey and I positively loathe stuffing.
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Before there were dollar stores
Date: 2016-11-29 06:17 pm (UTC)Re: Before there were dollar stores
Date: 2016-11-29 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 03:16 am (UTC)Anyway....... being the government and a 'job center' the management went out of their way to create work for people, in particular their own staff.
The guys who interviewed job seekers wrote notes, which they read into a dictaphone to be transcribed by an admin. The transcribed notes were then printed and I filed them in the case folder, which I then took back to the interviewer so they could read the case notes and make their recommendations. A process that kept two unnecessary people gainfully employed.
The woman who typed up the dictated notes went out of her way to make mistakes.......just to mess with the interviewers, whom she hated with a passion. Every hours or so she used to ask 'why don't they just put their handwritten notes in the folder'? And someone would reply 'if they did, you'd be out of a job'.
My favorite 'mistake'.....
"He only looks for work in the Audication'
I was tasked with working out what the interviewer meant...... I was convinced it must have been an Audi dealership related job..... something like the Audi service station? Perhaps the guy didn't like Ford or Toyota? Since this was pre-internet I had to dig through printed phone books and local employment records.
Eventually, I had to go ask the interviewer - a very smelly man called Stinky Duncan - if I could compare the typewritten text with his handwritten notes...... and there is was...... 'only looks for work on the odd occasion'.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 12:48 pm (UTC)But I guess you're not a sentimentalist like me. :-)
no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 02:17 pm (UTC)I only read an article (online) here & there, and usually by people I already like. Though recently I did read a portrait of Venezuela as a failing state that is the best one ever I've found in all of media.
It is a nice gift.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 02:37 pm (UTC)I just feel... daunted by it.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 08:10 pm (UTC)But We don't want Walmart 'cause it's so low-rent?
Absolutely not.
Although obviously, that's only my own personal experience.
no subject
Date: 2016-11-30 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-01 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-01 02:17 pm (UTC)My gift subscription to the New Yorker turned me into a guilt-ridden & anxious hoarder. Seeing all those lovely stories piled up in my corner while I frittered away my time on the interwebz was just too much. Though it took me years to actually pull the plug!
no subject
Date: 2016-12-01 02:29 pm (UTC)The New Yorker really oughta offer an Internet subscription rate for people who only want to access the magazine online.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-11 11:44 pm (UTC)They're the swing vote: too conservative to be Democrat and too liberal to be Republican, like me. We tend to vote the candidate, not the party.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-12 12:28 pm (UTC)