Sunday, April 18, 2010

Welcome to my blog!

As far back as I can remember, say from about second grade, when the boy who sat next to me all day would eat his crayons, goofy stuff has really annoyed me. I mean really, how much colored wax does one have to ingest to determine that red tastes the same as green, which tastes the same as yellow, and so on? And none of them tastes GOOD. Did he have any idea how repulsive he looked with bits of crayon between his teeth? I wonder if he's worked up to burnt sienna yet...? This took place so long ago that they may actually have flavorful crayons now; but if so, I really don't want to know. That would just set me off on a whole new path of annoyance.

Over the past ten years or so, the bar for what it takes to make me want to hurt myself or someone else, keeps being lowered at an exponential rate. The goofiness factor of everyday stuff has gotten so big, I'm afraid I'll find myself falling into the abyss of goofdom, never able to climb out again. I've tried ranting and raving at it, but that just makes me hoarse and tired. I've tried ignoring it, but after three or four days, I really must pull my head out from under the covers, get out of bed and move around a bit. I finally hit upon looking for the humor in it, trading seizures involving foaming at the mouth for seizures of falling-down laughter, and it has almost made me look forward to running into goofy stuff. Almost.

Take the mail for example. We won't even go into email for now, just "snail mail." I went away to visit my parents for a while. When I returned home, I had a pile of mail to sort through, and in all of it I found three interesting, albeit somewhat intimidating, documents. They were, in order of presumed arrival, a letter from the US Census Bureau informing me that my 2010 US Census Form was on the way, a larger envelope containing the 2010 US Census Form, and finally, a postcard reminding me to complete and mail my 2010 US Census Form as soon as possible or someone would be knocking on my door to collect my information face-to-face. I was only gone ten days!

I was annoyed by this ridiculous waste of my tax money, not wanting to imagine how large the paper pile would be, not to mention the cost of postage fees, if what I received were multiplied by the number of households in the country. I'm sure someone out there knows how many times the stack could circle the globe. Fortunately I don't, or I might want to hurt somebody...(grrr!) After what I considered an appropriate number of days to allow for procrastination, I again picked up the three documents, and decided to just get over it already and respond. So I opened up The Form. I used a black pen as requested to mark my responses. I put it in the prepaid, pre-addressed return envelope, as instructed. Then I took the initial impending-arrival letter and wrote, "Thank you for letting me know!" across the top in large letters with a red crayon and inserted that into the envelope. Finally, in burnt sienna, I wrote on the post-card, "The Form is in the mail, please don't send anyone by; I won't be able to answer the door because I'll be in bed with the covers over my head!" That also went into the envelope, I sealed it all up and laughed all the way to the post office...

Welcome to my blog! :)

5 comments:

  1. I thought this was really funny!! :)
    Mark & I felt the same way about the census.
    Then we learned that some people received it twice, and were told if they already filled it out, 'just throw it away'. What?!?! This is a complete total waste of time, $$ and paper. Nessa

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  2. Hmmm. As your daughter in law, I have to say that there wasn't an appropriate"reaction" selection. I'd have to say, I'm a ittle disturbed. Disturbed and frightened that my children share a quarter of your gene pool.

    : )

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  3. Have you ever thought about writing a column for the paper? I think you should share these thoughts with everyone. I love it, can't wait to read the next one. How often will you be posting?

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  4. Yes, actually, I HAVE thought of writing a newspaper column on and off most of my life. Writing this blog is my 21st century attempt at such a feat. My initial goal is to post approximately twice per week. Thank you so much for your comments; they are very much appreciated!

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