The Dysfunctional Family

Yeah, This is another one of my bitch/gripe essays. How can I keep up the challenging pace? It’s not easy but I work at it. I try to find something negative in everything I see and do. And it works for me. Just yesterday in AZ everyone woke up to a blue sky and warm temps, but I quickly dispensed with that happy development. All I had to do was walk out on our fake grass and I was hit with one big negative after the other. Our fake grass seems to have been infected with real grass and the two don’t complement each other. So I bitched about that over breakfast and pretty soon I had my husband outside pulling out the real stuff. Boy was he miserable! But I scored again! Then in the afternoon I went to the supermarket, and sure enough, I found something else to gripe about. It’s an upscale store. I mean it’s got a Starbucks, a salad bar, about a million bottles of French and domestic wine…..and a homeless guy hanging around at one of the exits. That’s disgusting. Maybe most people do...

They say it's the little things in life that destroy marriages: he doesn't lower the toilet seat; she never listens to his work anecdotes; he eats with his fingers; she never can find her car keys. The same adage applies to self image or self concept. It's the little things that can build or destroy egos. Although my parents had baby names for me that they used at times--for example, "cookie" and "pussycat," these never morphed into appropriate adult nick names. For instance, no one in my house ever called me Jan. That would have been the most common and appropriate nickname for "Janice," but no one ever came up with it. Was it a severe lack of creativity? I don't think so. In hindsight it said more about parenting style than it did about their opinion of me. My parents ran a rather strict household. We laughed but it was either behind the parents' backs or at a time when my father decreed a joke or anecdote was funny. My point is tha...

You need help. Fast. You have been told by friends, relatives and even your boy/girl friend that you could use some therapy. Even strangers on the street are giving you the hairy eye.. Some of your acquaintances bluntly suggest a shrink; others say you need to confront your demons; still others suggest that you find a sympathetic relative to cosy up to and relay your woes. You give in to the majority. If everyone on the planet, it would seem, thinks you'd be better off seeing a shrink, then by crackee, you'll get the best one  that money and a sad story can buy, taking into consideration his/her pay scale, location, gender, and psychotherapeutic techniques. Nah. Those things don't really count. Just get someone who doesn't laugh in your face or fall asleep. The truth is you want the very best for the very least, and everyone understands that. You're not making a six-figure salary yet and ramen is getting expensive. But while shopping for a shrink (in a perfect w...

I don't like to get into politics in this blog, especially since I respect all points of views. But as of late the political characters playing roles in our nation's shutdown are about as dysfunctional as it gets. The main players seen to be Pelosi and Trump. Imagine if they were kids playing in a sandbox. I know this takes a huge effort, since if you're me, you can't imagine Trump doing anything but goosing women and drinking lots of booze. As for Pelosi, I'd say she was a born nurturer---dull, dull, dull. But it may be worthwhile imagining them as kids to understand how people with tunnel vision can squabble over territory and often mature into big adults who quarrel and make bad decisions. So Pelosi and Trump are in this smallish sandbox. They each have their pail and shovel --Trump's shovel is bigger and redder, but we won't hold it against him--and are having a wonderful time making sand castles and knocking them over. As little children are won...

With all the memoirs of writers, celebs and nobodies floating around Amazon, it's easy to conclude that the world doesn't need another one. After all, what exactly is so special about my life that it might deserve a reading? Have I pursued an amazing challenge like Cheryl Strayed (she hiked more than 1,000 miles across the Pacific Coast Trail )? Not on your life! I would have cut PE in school if I thought I could get away with it. To put it succinctly, I've never done anything physically remarkable if you don't count walking around the Disney entertainment venues until I wore out my best pair of Nikes. You might even call me an exercise flunkee since the only program I never tried was the Outward Bound one where they airlift you to some jungle and you have to use a scythe and a toothpick to build a hovel and feed yourself and three darling macaws. So, forget any physical starring roles! Next on the memoir list: Have I survived an atrocious childhood in which I w...

Every year I make at least two or three resolutions that I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to keep. Why? Because they're hard for me, doofus! That's why What is hard for me may be easy for you and vice versa, but we're talking about me right now, and I have great difficulty keeping resolutions that have to do with relationships, eating, showing gratitude, and a million other weeds taking up space on my crabgrass. So I've decided that the only way to win at resolutions is to make ones that you can keep, easily (so help me god, cross my heart and hope to die). Here are a few of mine. Maybe they'll inspire you to create your own list of resolutions that rock (because you can keep them with little effort on your part)! 1. I resolve to get my money's worth of Netflix and any other streaming services I subscribe to this year. Vegging out at least one day a month should do the trick. 2. I resolve to use the electric toothbrush and water flosser everyday ...

In the Scottish dialect of the old New Year's Eve song Auld Lang Syne, the composer posits the question: Should old acquaintances be forgot? The short answer to this is "Sometimes." One example will suffice. A "friend" of mine emailed me the other day and although she is not a writer, her words spoke plenty. Her first rebuke was that I don't answer her calls, and this is a claim I cannot deny. But the accusation was caustic, mean-spirited--it was as if I had neglected to visit her in the hospital, that's how grievous my omission was. She insinuated so much by those few harsh words. Why did she call? Purportedly to inform me of her physical status and that of her dog Murph. Being the obedient child I still am, I did call her afterwards, and we spoke. Mostly S spoke of her new illness--osteoarthritis of the spine--and her dog's possible diagnosis of valley fever. I listened and listened and listened until I just couldn't take it any more. The...

Don't you just love it when people let go with the expression "we're all in this together." Generally speaking I hate this cliched phrase. I feel like saying, "What exactly do you mean by this?" Of course what they mean varies according to context. If they're using the expression to comment on politics, it probably is valid. After all when officials are elected to govern, they're there for the duration unless they commit treasonous acts or collude with Russia. In short we're stuck with them until we vote them out. And all of us--white and black, stupid and smart, democrat and republican--are going to have to struggle with a national catastrophe (if the government officers suck) or celebrate with a Klondike bar (if the officers do beneficial things).. However if people are using the expression to comment on a social problem, say like the recent news story that kids are turning to suicide more than ever before, then I beg to differ. No, we are ...

Your psychiatrist will never require this of you, but at some time in your checkered career of anxiety and depression management, it would be wise to deconstruct your neurosis--that is find out what exacerbates it and what diminishes the symptoms. I'm deconstructing on a regular basis because it helps me to place blame where it should go. Blame is a big thing in my world because unless I examine the genesis of it, I tend to wallow in it. Yes, self-blame can whittle me down to the equivalent of a toothpick. And we all know where toothpicks end up, right? Yes, dear, it's in the circular file along with my self-respect and self-image. Let's start with genes. My genetic inheritance could be better. First off, my dad was a piece of work. He criticized everyone and everything. Once during a nasty interchange with my sister, she thought she'd hurt my delicate ego by stating that "Dad never liked your husband." This, of course, was no surprise to me. My rebuttal: ...

The holiday season is the time for lists: You make lists of gifts you need to give and ones you'd like to receive, you make lists of New Year's resolutions; and you make lists of future Christmas card recipients. Truth is I don't make any of those lists. There's one list I do make but up to now I've never put into writing. It just floated aimlessly in my brain and once in a while pressed a few buttons and girded me into action. Did you ever realize how much stuff is shoved in your face--stuff you don't need to know? Well, when I hear a fact that has absolutely no relevance in my life, I try to banish it from my mind. Usually I fail because once I hear something, it lingers. For a while. It filters into a brain lobe, curls up in my grey matter and sucks the life out of other data I'd like to store. In retaliation for this gross negligence here are two lists. The first one is Crap that I Can Live Life Without Knowing; the second, "Stuff I want to ...

Once upon a time in a far-off land called New Jersey, a young girl was fortunate to have a middle-aged aunt who was a witch. She was neither a good witch nor a bad witch. She was like a real person only with magical powers. She had the ability to cheer up people with just a well-placed comment or quip. She was not obsessed with her children--in fact she treated them like adults (which actually they were). She was a whiz at card games. She flirted with every man she could--the girl's mom even accused her sister (secretly) of trying to steal her husband while she was in the hospital recuperating from surgery. She rarely cooked. She had an extensive network of friends, preferring them to family members. And she had a tragic loss--her first husband died of heart ailments. The above attributes only added to her mystique and intriguing personality. The young girl really liked her aunt, mostly because she was the only aunt her family was speaking to during her impressionable adolescen...

I''m not a big fan of this time of year. Hanukah, Christmas, New Year's. There are some logical reasons for this. When I was freelancing for magazines, I hated this season because I swore no one was reading my queries, they were being tossed in the circular file, and every editor was enjoying vacation days. So nothing got done as far as I was concerned. Also, if I had to interview people for an article, chasing them down and scheduling them for a phone interview was an iffy business. They were either crowded from work deadlines or like editors, busy shopping and making merry. Now that I'm not freelancing for magazines, I still get the blahs just thinking of the holidays. The first sign of my malaise usually comes when someone in the neighborhood puts up his Christmas lights. This year someone dared to  put them up BEFORE Thanksgiving. That really pissed me off--that someone had broken the implied contract that all decorations would be delayed until at least Black Frid...

What do you do when you get up in the morning and you're irritable? You don't have a specific reason, but there it is: a massive amount of anger targeted at everything and everyone. You're even angry at the dogs, and you love them. And your feeling makes no sense since you can't attribute it to anything tangible such as a bad dream or another rejection of the writing kind. That's how I am today, and I don't know what to do. I don't think I said more than two words to my husband before he left for work. He probably suspects that I'm in a foul mood, but he probably doesn't figure that I'm angry. When I get depressed I'm usually into self blame and that's energy turned inward. But today I'm turning the energy outward. I'd really like to kill someone--then maybe I'd feel better. However the better part of aggression tells me homicide isn't going to be on my agenda for the day. Could be that the nasty feelings come from w...

Are long weekends like the past Thanksgiving Day one all they're cracked up to be? Retailers like them because they help jump start Christmas shopping. Everyone flocks to malls and discount stores or logs in online and spends, spends, spends. After all, there's nothing else to do but fight with your family, eat leftovers, or go to the movies (if you can afford it, they're so expensive nowadays). So economically speaking the long weekend is a boon to marketers and sellers of anything. But what about the physical and emotional effects of a long weekend? Unless you're self employed and can work from home, you cannot even stay busy and calm your anxious mind with work projects. No, no, we're trained from birth that work is bad and recreation is to be sought after. The idea is to make enough money so you can order others to go out there and work their asses off. I'm not good on long weekends. I hate cleaning so I can't depend on that to keep me busy, an...

For some families, taking turns at the Thanksgiving table to recite "Thankfuls" is mandatory before heaping food onto the plate.In other families, dysfunctional ones for the most part, everyone is wearing a pretend smile and feeling sorry for themselves that they're stuck with this bunch of pain-in-the-asses. Which family are you in? That's for you to figure out. I'm in a group that's getting more popular as we age. Both my and my spouse's parents are deceased and no sibling or cousin lives nearby. And we don't fly on T-Day. Just the thought of standing on all the lines and pushing my way through cold, rainy weather sends chills down my spine. So we will eat alone. But don't feel sorry for us. We've got the pets and Netflix, which has truly become the number one distraction among boomers and millennials. It's definitely therapeutic to list a few thankfuls at the T-Day table. For nervous, anxious, or depressive people, it's a great opp...

Sometimes it seems like everyone's a lesbian but me. Once I heard that only 5 percent of the population are homosexual, but I have my doubts. A lot of people still are in the closet so they don't become a part of the statistics. That's why I think there's way more lesbians around than anyone knows. And I kinda envy them. Just a little. That's because most of the celebrities I day dream about are women. My favorite all-time celeb is Sally Field. I know, I know, The Flying Num girl. But the woman can act. And not only that, she gave up Burt Reynolds for the sake of her sanity. I could picture Sally and me going out for the evening and suddenly she becomes one of her other personalities like she did in the movie/book Sibyl. I'd make scintillating conversation with one or two of her personalities and then we'd talk about the California fire and if it impacted her house. We'd sit real close together on the bench she shared with Tom Hanks in the movie Fo...

For perfectionistic souls like myself, there are past events that I regret. One is high school and the amount of studying I did. A waste, tiresome, boring and something that I was psychologically programmed to do. I could not NOT work hard. It was like an axe was hanging over my head, and I had to do whatever it took to hand in an A-plus job. It was a cross that I had to bear or to use another metaphor, I had been given lemons. So I made super duper gallons of lemonade all through college and graduate school. I graduated with a high GPA, but I always wondered if I could have achieved the same honor with less work. I remember enjoying very little of the grind. I hated memorizing facts for exams and felt more comfortable writing papers, researching stuff and churning out original lesson plans, self-evaluations and other useless crap. Little time for the dating dance. It wasn't just the lack of guys in my life that I regret. It was also the lack of FUN. For amusement and diversion ...

I don't know if I really have food fetishes, but I do admit to a large number of exclusions in my current diet. When you compare what I used to consume ten years ago with what I consume now, "radical" is the best word to describe the change. As a fully mature adult, I basically ate anything. Oh there were a few exclusions--for example, avocados and sardines. I know those green veggies are supposed to be healthy but nothing on God's earth will convince me that shoving that greasy mess down my throat will make me heart attack resistant. I can't stand the color, the texture and the consistency of avocados so if I find one that had the audacity to  appear in something I ordered, I just throw it out. Well, not literally. I don't believe in tossing food on the floor like a baby in a highchair, but napkins will do for relocating the avocado. Or else there's always my husband, who'll eat anything except mayonnaise. What else did I not eat a few years back?...

Dear Abby, I'm not much for consulting newspaper columnists about relationships, but I'm up against a wall. I don't know if I should do anything or not, and if action is the correct response, then what action should I take?. Perhaps you need to know all the details first, and then you can yell at me. My friend's daughter is a psychologist with a doctoral degree. She works in NYC. She's in her early thirties and a stunner. So she is not in any way hard up for dates. Her older sister, who is married, tells me that her younger sister has a habit of on-again-off-again relationships with men. I was not aware of this behavior, and frankly I'm surprised since she seems like such a smart, well-grounded person. Now she has announced that she's engaged, but the man whom she intends to marry really does not want to get married. Her sister said, "He asked her what it would take for them to stay together, and she said marriage. So she kinda backed him into a c...

I used to think he would grow out of it. That he was going through a developmental stage--an adolescent time of awkwardness when all four limbs weren't working harmoniously. I thought that explained his sometime clumsy failure to successfully complete a jump onto a garbage can or some other object a distance away. Now he's definitely an adult. A very mischievous, playful feline who doesn't seem to reason things out completely before he commits to them. So he's still messing up occasionally on his jumps-- he's either stupid or gymnastically challenged. I've seen him hanging by his claws, dangling on a surface he didn't quite reach. Yeah, it's funny, but he's not laughing. I've never had a cat so uncoordinated. Most of them when they're young and healthy have no problem with jumping everywhere. I've had cats jump on top of refrigerators, washers/dryers, kitchen counters, and all types of furniture. They usually do it gracefully with a t...