It seems like only a year ago that I wrote a review of the television program American Horror Story on this very blog and indeed it has been nearly a year, but American Horror Story is unlike most television series which follows a line of continuity from year to year. Every season of American Horror Story is a self-contained unit, with many of the same actors, but an entirely distinct plot.
Cruelty because of disability is the unfortunate, de facto, standard of living for anyone who dares to live outside the mainstream of the able-bodied merely by purchase of birth. Janna, a Deaf Woman, and my wife, feels the sting of that cruel indignity every single day with impatient people who refuse to acknowledge her Deafness and who force her to read lips or to use her voice because they don’t feel like writing or finding a common cure that will enable a fair communication dyad that can be understood by all parties.
That inevitable cruelty is part of the daily station of the Disabled, and those of us who love and care for our Disabled friends and family feel that cruelty, too, by proxy, and we do our best to help create a cure of basic human courtesy. We are often unsuccessful.
What fascinates me, in a maudlin and depressing way, is when families of the disabled place politics above doing the right thing. A glowing example of a family member standing up and doing right is found in David Axelrod, one of President Obama’s dearest friends and campaign managers, and the fact that Axelrod is willing to shave off his 40-year-old mustache in order to raise a million dollars for epilepsy research. Axelrod’s oldest child has epilepsy.
We need to have a serious conversation, Trader Joe’s. You know well that my family comes to visit you, on average, about once a week and sometimes more when the weather is nice and we want to take a walk in your direction. You may recall that a number of months ago, you decided to slowly replace your soy chicken-less chicken nuggets with something called chicken-less breaded tenders. At first you had both products at once, but then over time you stopped stocking the nuggets. This has had a negative impact on my family.
Reality Television bores me now, but what really angers me is when television shows pretend to be honest contests when they’re really all a pre-determined setup from the get-go, just as we have indelibly learned this week with Bristol Palin’s horrible — but she’s staying! — routine on Dancing with the Stars; as well as Nicki Minaj’s fake meltdown with Mariah Carey on American Idol… which hasn’t even officially aired yet!
Websites like Vote for the Worst tend to take credit for contestants like Bristol Palin beating the odds and staying when it is really all about contractual agreements set in stone before the first dance begins:
They said it was impossible… She’s by far the worst dancer; She’s has the personality of a rock; She’s as likeable as the plague. But it doesn’t matter as VFTW and The Tea Party have done it once again as not only was Bristol safe, she wasn’t even in jeopardy! Meanwhile, VFTW and Bristol knocked off Joey Fatone, who even as the worst dancer in N’Sync can dance circles around Bristol.
It happens at least once a week — I open up my email and find in my inbox a message from an older family member, always a forward, containing a warning about the dire warning about the crumbling economy, the threat from various terrorist organizations, and computer virus warnings. My reaction is always the same — I go to a fact checking website and find a link to a page that refutes the e-mail entirely and send it as a response. I wondered how it could be that the e-mails keep coming and how the forwards are not questioned for validity before being sent. It is possible that it is related to gullibility which scientists have located in the brain and moreover have determined that people in two age ranges are more gullible. Those are young people and older people.
Green Tea has a dirty little secret — and nothing can be done about it — and that secret is that real, hardcore, proper, unadulterated green tea has, what Janna calls, a “muskiness” that translates into meaning raw, pure-brewed, strong green tea… smells like urine.
Yes!
There.
I said it.
My favorite drink in the whole world smells — and probably tastes like — uric ammonia, and yet I still can’t swallow enough of the stuff throughout the day to keep me satisfied and quenched because green tea, in it’s organic state, is hardy, pure, musky, magical and powerful and I need its healing warmth in my body every single day.
I have over 30,000 songs in my iTunes library and many of those songs were directly purchased from iTunes. I’ve scattered that musical library to Amazon and a portion of it to Google. Lately, I’ve been wondering what would happen to all that music if something happened to me. Sure, my wife could grab it, but should I ultimately plan to donate all that music to a school or sell off bits of the collection?
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