Month: May 2018

I’m a decade older than both of them, and I’ve had a Twitter account for several years.  Here’s the thing:  it’s really easy to eliminate a dumb tweet.  Just go over to that arrow at the top of your tweet, click on “delete,” and  voila! The stupid tweet is gone forever!  Do these people not edit their own posts? Do they have failing eyesight?  The average person reading these weird and offensive  tweets  shakes their head and wonders if the bizarre tweeter is on something.  Medication? Substance abuse? or maybe it’s due to just plain senility. 

Perhaps it’s a problem that Trump and Roseanne didn’t grow up with social media, or understand the power of it for celebrities like themselves.  Now, if I had made such an inane tweet as the two of them,  probably nothing would have happened.  My followers would simply have shrugged it off as the ranting of an old lady.  Possibly, someone on Twitter would have spotted it and gotten me suspended or kicked off Twitter for awhile.  But I do actually read my tweets after they are posted, so I’ve avoided that problem.

Trump seems to have gotten away with some of his wackier tweets, at least for the time being. But the cancellation of the Roseanne show probably put numerous of people out of work.
I hate to say it, because no one monitors my tweets and I don’t want them to, but maybe, after a certain age and you’re a public figure, perhaps you should give a responsible person access to your account so it can be edited.  Like maybe, your little grand children?

I misplace my phone a lot, but it’s usually just a phone call away on my landline, and I can hear it ringing somewhere in the house.  That happens more often than I would care to admit.  But yesterday, I had a  panic attack because I thought I’d lost it in a parking lot, and being the low techie that I am, I had no way of finding it with a GPS.   My phone also has a strange habit of going on mute all by itself.  So, when I tried to call myself,  a message came across that I was unavailable.  Yikes!   Worse yet, I don’t have one of those messages on my phone that a stranger could use to call me.

I read something by a psychologist who said that the worst thing you can do at that point is to panic. You must, he admonished, take a deep breath and calm yourself down, trying to retrace your  steps  from when you last remember having smartie with you.  I did try that yesterday—for a minute or so—but then I didn’t want to waste time breathing when I might be finding my phone.   So, I jumped in the car,  went running all over the parking lot and into the grocery store where I’d stopped for lettuce and—no dice.

Most people lament losing their phone because it’s expensive to buy a new one.  I wasn’t panicked about the money, so much as three years worth of stuff of my phone.  Photos I haven’t backed up on Dropbox.   All those messages I want to save. The telephone numbers. The way I’m signed in already to my favorite websites.  The apps I’ve downloaded. No, I did not want to start over.  It was hard enough for me to figure all of that out on my current phone, much less on a new one.  At any rate, I came home with knots in my stomach.  And guess what?   My husband met me at the door, holding my phone.  He had found it in the laundry room.  So, the psychologist was correct; if I’d calmed myself down, I would eventually have recalled where I left the phone.

Did you know that 2.5 billion people own smart phones, and the average person loses their phone one time a year?  That means that at any given time, someone, somewhere in the world, is having a panic attack over a lost cell phone.   So I figured out a low tech way to increase my chances of finding a lost phone.  I took one of those return address stickers you get from charities, slapped it on the back of my phone case, and wrote  my landline number on it.  If a Good Samaritan finds it, he can easily contact  me.  But  if a thief finds it, I’m going to be out of luck, anyway. And the next time I see my grandson, I’ll have him  fix my phone up with all that other stuff.  

Women have been polishing their nails since 3,000 B.C, but it’s not for everyone. My fingernails have always been brittle and thin.  Every time I tried to wear nail polish when I was young, a  nail would inevitably break, or the polish would chip, even before the day was over.  I longed for beautiful nails, but finally I gave up.  Clean and filed is about as good as it gets for me, although I envy those who enjoy the luxury of perfectly polished nails.   I do paint my toenails when I wear sandals, just because I think toes are kind of ugly, and toenail polish doesn’t chip so easily.  In defense of my bare nails, I will report that in all my years of dating and marriage, I never had a boyfriend or husband ask me why I didn’t wear nail polish, or express the feeling that I should.

Now, I’m amazed at the elaborate manicures I see on young  women everywhere.  Especially the receptionists in doctors’ offices.    Maybe it’s a sign of good times–more and more working women can afford manicures. Also, it may be a cultural thing, whereby women of means are expected to have polished, manicured nails.  Other women may do so in order to compensate for some perceived deficiency elsewhere in their appearance.  After all,  almost anyone can have pretty fingernails. (Except me).

What is worse than no paint on your nails?  Chipped nail polish is tacky.  Bitten-to-the-quick nails make you look nervous.  But if I tried to wear nail polish all day long,  it would always be chipped because I do my own housework and gardening, and I swim twice a week.  Sometimes I put on a thin coat of pale pink polish (ala Queen Elizabeth) if I’m going to play cards for a few hours.  Wouldn’t want people to think I was too lazy to do my nails!

Generally speaking, I view women who maintain perfectly painted nails as having a lot of time and money to spend on their appearance.  Does that mean they’re vain?  Insecure?  Wealthy? Or simply well groomed?  Not sure.   It could mean their husbands do the dishes!

It was depressing today to see the first lady’s surgery announced all over the media.  Okay,  it was some type of benign kidney problem.  But, what if she’d had a breast biopsy?  Or been treated with some potentially embarrassing surgical procedure?   I can’t imagine how the public is entitled to know about such personal things.   Such types of stories (often not true)  used to appear in the National Enquirer, not in the mainstream media.  But that’s all changed now.

Perhaps the White House chose to make this announcement, thinking it would put to rest any speculation by some nosy reporter.  But why is it the business of the general public to know about every medical condition of the POTUS family?   Isn’t there such a thing as patient privacy? Or is the first lady excluded from this policy?   Last time I worked in a hospital, you’d be in big trouble if you revealed anything about a patient –even the fact that they were there, at all. 

Just shows how much the honor of the media has deteriorated in the past few years.   The press kept FDR’s polio withered legs from the public for four terms.  JFK’s serious back problems were covered up, and lightly dismissed by showing him in a rocking chair.   I will admit Betty Ford went public with her breast cancer , but that was her very heroic choice, made to encourage other women to get mammograms.  Many people prefer to keep any medical condition to themselves.  I know a woman who didn’t even tell her best friend she was dying of cancer until the very end.   People handle bad news in their own way, which is their right.  I cringed today when I saw that information  about Melania Trump’s surgery  headlining  across  my phone and desktop.  And then, of course, it was on the evening news.  Way Too Much Information, no matter what the source.  And I would doubt it was the first lady’s idea to have her privacy invaded.

Enough already.