Category: Ruminations and Crackpot Theories

Observations on life in general.

MJ’S Musing: The Allure of Jeans

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When I was a teenager, I loved jeans. Even as a young adult, jeans were my wardrobe of choice. Lately…not so much. I guess I’m getting cranky in my old age.

At Day Job, any day we can wear jeans is greeted with much elation, especially among the younger set. But I don’t find jeans comfortable anymore, maybe because I purchase my professional wardrobe to be comfortable.

The more I think about it, the more I realize jeans have never been comfortable. They bind. I remember when I was able to abandon snow pants for jeans–and discovered jeans didn’t really keep you warm in the snow. They’re too hot to wear in the summer.

So what is the allure of jeans?

MJ’s Musings: Rituals from My Childhood

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My mom had Saturday night rituals for us that I haven’t thought about in years. I have no idea why I stopped doing these things. Maybe modern materials don’t require as much care as things did back in day. Maybe we took better care of our belongings because we had to make them last.

We polished, then buffed our shoes every Saturday night. There were three or four colors of shoe polish and/or paste on the upper shelf in the bathroom. My dad had a large shoe brush. According to Amazon, shoe brushes are still a thing.

The other thing we did every Saturday without fail was wash our combs and hairbrushes. I can still smell the Prell shampoo we used. My mom had a dedicated fingernail brush we used to get between the teeth on our combs.  I sometimes used a toothpick.

Yes, I still clean the hair from my brush, but my comb isn’t dirty. Is my scalp cleaner than it was when I was child because I wash my hair more often? 

Do you have childhood rituals you abandoned?

 

MJ’s Musings: An Observation on “Healthy” Food

Many of my friends and most of my extended family have dietary restrictions. One person recently made a “cookie” she shared. I would never hurt her feelings, and I understand completely why this cookie met her food requirements, but I did not want another one.

When I’m grocery shopping, there are frequently people pushing free samples at the customers. The most recent one was a cookie in the health food department. Or maybe it was a “power bar”.

All I know is I stopped eating sawdust when I was about 3. Yeah, we used it as a “cooking ingredient” when we played house when I was an older child. But we also cooked with mud, gravel, and milkweed pods. Oh, and there was that disastrous experiment trying to make the cat eat a combo of Snowy Bleach and Oxydol. But like the cat, we never actually put the stuff in our mouths. (OK, we smoked cattails behind the barn, but that was different.)

So why does so much modern, “healthy” food remind me of my extreme childhood, sawdust-eating days? Particularly the sawdust part?

MJ’s Musings: A Thing I Don’t Get

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There are many things in life I do not understand. Movies on a first date. Cars that are more elaborate than homes. I’m not saying those things are wrong. I simply don’t understand them.

Here’s another: you walk/run 10 miles a day, pride yourself on your physical fitness…and need an electric can opener to open your can of garbanzo beans. What?

And riffing off that, I don’t understand electric can openers. Why?

MJ’s Musings: “Do You Have Change for a Twenty?”

I dread having someone ask me this question.

People like me, who use ATMs, always have too many twenty dollar bills.  I’m fortunate that my bank’s ATM has an option with $5 increments, so when I withdraw cash, I make sure it’s $35 or $55 or $75 dollars. (If you take out $95, you get a $50, which sucks worse than a $20, especially since the McDonald’s next door will no longer accept $50 or $100 bills .)

So yeah, I usually do have change for a twenty in my wallet.

But if I make change for you, then I’m stuck with your $20, which defeats the purpose of my banking strategy.  And lately, it seems as if I’m asked if I can break a twenty a lot.

I need to start lying, and others need to change banks.