Information [management] Overload

When it comes to e-mail management, there are two kinds of people in the world (for more on “two kinds of people” see my two posts on the subject in May 2011). There are those who quickly scan their new e-mail subject lines, delete the ones that are junk without opening them, open the others, take whatever action is required, then delete the received e-mail unless it's needed for documentation purposes, in which case, they archive it in a folder. Then there are those people who keep every e-mail that they have ever received or sent. They see their e-mail server as a limitless storehouse for information, and they either want to keep all personal e-mails for documentation or reminiscence purposes or, with junk mail, they just don't want to bother with it. They might delete those junk e-mails that are clearly spam, but they will keep—often unopened—all of those e-mails from web sites, services, products, businesses, and nonprofit agencies that they have subscribed to (usually with the promise of winning an iPad) on the off chance that it might be important, and they might want to read it “someday.”

Well, anyone who knows me already knows that I belong in the latter group. I have three personal e-mail addresses. All three are free, web-based providers. Hotmail was my first e-mail address, and I will always keep it because it's the address that people who've known me for a long time know best. I got an AOL address long ago because a zillion years ago, when I first got Internet service, I got it through AOL. I no longer get my service through AOL, but since it's free, I've kept the e-mail address. That's the address I use for subscriptions to the above-mentioned self-induced junk mail. You know, Groupon, livingsocial, stores of all kinds—anyone who insists on getting my e-mail address when all I want is to win an iPad. It's also the one that various organizations have somehow discovered—apparently by scanning the subjects of my incoming and outgoing e-mails—and use to send me their product information, ideological ideas, religious beliefs, and other variously interesting downright perplexing e-mails. Some of these represent things that I do not even remotely support, so it's a mystery to me how they came to know me, but I have learned from past experience that it is absolutely futile, indeed perhaps even dangerous, to try to unsubscribe from these organizations. Unsubscribing seems, if anything, to unleash a barrage of new correspondence from these places, so I just ignore the mail and even delete it (yes! delete!) occasionally. Then I have my Gmail account, which I now think of as my “personal personal” account, as even my Hotmail account has been somewhat invaded by stores and sites that I do business with online. I get almost no personal e-mail on AOL, about 50 percent on Hotmail, and almost 100 percent on Gmail. So, there is a pecking order to my e-mail accounts (though, being OCD, I do check all three every day. Okay, several times every day.)

I am inclined to let sleeping dogs lie, so I just leave all of those unopened Groupon and eBay notices in my inbox, where a bold-faced number next to my inbox indicates how many of them there are. This is usually a very high number, but there are very few consequences to keeping all of those e-mails.

In fact, as far as I can see, there is only one unpleasant consequence to keeping every e-mail I've ever received, and it is this: when I need to find a specific e-mail, say a purchase confirmation or an airline ticket or something like that, I have to scroll through thousands of e-mails to find the one I need. This is hardest in AOL, which doesn't have a search feature, and which is where almost all of my purchase-related e-mails reside. So, on a day like today, when I go in search of the Groupon that I bought for my aunt and me to take an art class, but I can't remember when I bought it, and—more importantly—when it expires. Oh, and it may not have been from Groupon. Maybe it was from livingsocial. Or Half Off Depot. So, you get the idea here. This search could take awhile.

It is during these searches that I get the idea of deleting some of these old, unopened e-mails, just for chuckles. I then spend about the next 56 hours laboriously going through, identifying as junk, and deleting only those e-mails which are clearly useless to me. In AOL, this process is made far more tedious by certain limitations of the service that I won't go into here. Suffice it to say that what starts out as a quick, “oh, I need to find this one e-mail” turns into an obsessive-compulsive slog through thousands of e-mails.

Which gets me to the statistic that I started to post on Facebook this morning, but which I felt was meaningless without all of that prior explanation. I started out with 5,449 unopened e-mails in my AOL inbox. After about two-and-a-half hours, I had whittled it down to 3,056 and had made it all the way through the K's (I had arranged the e-mails alphabetically by sender name).

I figure that if I put about another three hours into it, I can dispense with all of the junk e-mail in my AOL inbox. Then, I vow (as I always do) that I will start deleting these e-mails each day as they come in, rather than letting them build up for about 16 months as I did “last time.” But I will not. Now, you realize that I am talking about only those e-mails that were unopened and had already been deemed, in some part of my brain, as junk. But some of them were the kind of junk that falls into the “that's something I need to keep forever but that does not require opening right now—or ever” category, whereas others fall into the categories of “I might go back and look at that one later,” or “That's just junk.” I do not even deal with the e-mails from the last 14 years that I have previously opened, since opening it signals to me that it is important or personal, and therefore, needs to be kept forever..

Anyway, after I finish in AOL, I can get started on the 8,963 unopened e-mails that are in my Hotmail inbox. And, no—in case you're wondering—that is not a made-up number for the purpose of hyperbole. At least clearing out the Hotmail inbox will make seemingly short work of dispatching the 1,246 e-mails in my Gmail inbox.

If you want to comment on this post, just e-mail me. I'll read it. I promise.

"I Have Bad News" Is a Bad Start

So we went out to dinner for my nephew's birthday the other night, and my mother... (wait, I should say, my 85-year-old mother who has a serious chronic heart condition)...says to me, "Well, I got bad news today." My mind instantly went to the worst possibilities, but I remained composed--as she was--and said, "Yeah?"

And she said, "My cardiologist is retiring."

And I said, "Oh, that's too bad," while I envisioned holding her by the neck and shaking her.

Why does she do this? We all know them--these people who like to present the mildest news in the most alarming, unsettling way.

So, we go on with the conversation without me doing her any bodily harm (which, of course, would defeat the purpose anyway, as my consternation is caused by the fact that I don't want any harm to come to her). Mom tells how she told her 70-year-old doctor that he is too young to retire, and that she needs to have someone as good as him looking after her. He tells her that she is going to get someone good. That he was very careful in picking his replacement, as he wants nothing but the best for his patients.

My sister-in-law says, "What's the new cardiologist's name?"

Mom says, "Something unpronounceable." Now, this is really saying something, given that her current cardiologist's name is Dr. Myrwood C. Besozzi.

All of which brings me to the real point of my post today. Who names a kid Myrwood? Why would you do that to a little baby who has his whole life ahead of him?

09-10-11

Faye McElroy,
Christmas 2000

Ten Years Later


Nana Faye McElroy 

August 27, 1903-September 10, 2001

This is not a September 11, 2001, story. This is a September 10, 2001, story. It's just a simple family story, a story that every family has: the loss of a loved one.  My grandmother died at the age of 98, surrounded by family while in hospice care in my parents' home. I say without exaggeration that she was loved by all who knew her.  Nana died late at night on September 10, 2001. Our family had lost one of its most beloved members, and we assumed that we would be left to mourn her loss quietly over the coming days and weeks. I stayed at my parents' house that night, and mom and I stayed up late into the wee hours of the morning, talking. 

Nana died in one world. We woke up to a whole different world the next morning. 

Like millions of other Americans, I saw the South Tower get hit on live television. My life had turned upside down, both as an individual, mourning a private loss, and as a member of a culture that was experiencing a huge, public loss together. For me, the loss of my beloved grandmother and the attack on America are inextricably linked. Both events forever changed my world.

The following was written as part of my journal on September 8, 2001. I did not know at the time, of course, that my grandmother would die two days later.

The Houseguest

We are all at our folks’ house.  Kelly is installing a new ceiling fan and light fixture in the dining room.  Dad is in his chair, watching a Braves game.  Sharon and Janelle and I are gathered in the kitchen, cleaning and talking.  The kids are playing together and trying to stay out of the way in a tiny house that was not meant for all 19 of us at once.  Nana is in her bedroom, dying.  Michael is in with her, just quietly holding her hand.

We are each playing to our strengths in what is a trying time.  The “boys”--grown men now in their 40s and 50s—try to find some useful occupation for themselves, an easy task around our parents’ neglected home.  The women talk to each other.  Some cook, some clean, some just sit.  Our family is not good at dying; or perhaps I should say that we are unpracticed at it.  In my 41 years, this is only the second death in my family on my mother’s side, which is where I live.  We are a close family: aunts, uncles, cousins, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  We are with each other much, and for the most part, we get along.

We have been grieving her loss for two months now, even though she is still with us.  She is leaving slowly, in bits and pieces, so that I wonder, when the last little bit of her goes, will we really know?  We have already lost so much of her.  Her hearing, as bad as it was when she relied on two hearing aids and a clear mind to understand, is worse now that the clear mind is with us less and less.  Her mind still works, but when we speak to her, she has to come back from a far-off place to attend to what we are saying.  Between returning from the far place, listening, processing, and responding to what we have said, it takes a while to have even a brief conversation with her, and so conversations are limited to the essential: “Mother, do you want some water?”  “Would you like for us to raise the head of your bed?”  “Goodnight, Nana.  I love you.”

Faye McElroy, 1941

What we have left to us is touch; to hold those strong old hands and through our touch to try to convey comfort, reassurance, and presence.  Her hands are about the only part of her that are still pretty much unchanged.  The skin on them is thin, smooth, and well-worn, with the veins sticking out, and every last one of them–down to the capillaries–visible and making a map of her wrists and hands.  But they are a map of time rather than of space.  These hands have been with us for 98 years.  They have changed diapers and snapped beans and wiped away tears and smoothed fabric and canned tomatoes and probably even swatted a few bottoms over the course of four generations.  Now the hands are restless, searching for something productive to do, petting our arms, holding our hands, reaching out for things seen only by her.

Death has come as a visitor to my parents’ house.  He is an unwelcome but inevitable houseguest, and we are slowly making our peace with him, grudgingly acknowledging his presence, but not wanting to make him welcome.

I am not a nurse.  By this, I mean not only am I not an RN, I mean that there are some people who are just good with sick people.  They are not flustered or grossed-out by the things of the body.  I am, at best, a little queasy about anything having to do with our bodies, and at worst I am downright sickened by them.  I sit, holding her hand, and she begins to make that awful gurgling sound way back in her throat that sounds like she is slowly sinking into water, and I want to run from the room. I can’t bear that noise, and yet I must. I must hold onto her hand and remain steadfast and loyal like the others, who don’t seem to react to it like I do. I don’t even want to look at the catheter bag, and the thought of having to empty it, as my mother must do, also makes me want to run.  There is a slightly unpleasant smell in the room, and I don’t even want to think about what its source is.

This has been a dreadful time in our family’s life, but there is sometimes a sweetness to it as well. Each day that we have Nana still with us is sweet. Having family around for support, encouragement, help, and entertainment is sweet. Yes, even now, during this time, we joke and laugh with each other. It is sweet to see everyone getting along and just doing what needs to be done without complaining. It is sweet to see three generations of a family all interacting with each other while we watch over our shared oldest—and perhaps most treasured—member. I try to cherish these moments, knowing that once Nana is gone, we will all have to break up and go to our own homes to try to make sense of her death as best we can. The children among us will grow up, surrounded, I'm sure by stories of Nana that will bolster their own memories of her. We will tell stories about her. We'll laugh. We'll cry. We'll remember.

Can any of us watch what is happening here without wondering about our own ends?  I can’t. Who can be a part of this without wondering: what will my own end by like? I have never known a world without Nana in it. I wonder what it will be like, to wake up and know that she is not with us.

The Itch List

We humans have many bodily functions that are vulnerable to suggestion. That’s what many commercials rely on and play toward. Showing you a big, juicy cheeseburger and some fresh-from-the-fryer french fries makes you want to run out to the nearest burger place. And beer commercials that seem to be commercials for skimpy swimsuits, well....

But there are two bodily functions that I can think of that are more than vulnerable to suggestion. Once the suggestion is made, one cannot keep from performing the function. A person can resist the desire to eat a cheeseburger. A person can even resist the suggestion that she wants to consume chocolate (or so I’m told). And, scintillating as the beer ads are, men can resist both the beer and the urge to run out and, um, “party” with scantily clad babes. But there are two bodily functions that, once mentioned, viewed, or thought about, the average person cannot resist actually performing. Some people might be able to hold out longer than others, but no one can completely resist.

These functions are yawning and scratching an itch.

There is a Dr. Seuss book called simply, “The Sleep Book.” On the cover are two Seussian creatures who are yawning. The adult who is about to embark on reading this book to a child will see the cover and stifle a yawn. However, the reader is about to be bombarded by pictures of denizens of Seussland yawning and will have to read Seuss’s prose about yawning. And the reader will have to actually say, out loud (oops, I just yawned), the word “yawn” repeatedly. I believe that there is something about the very word “yawn” that sets us up physiologically to...ummm, uhhhh, oh, damn!...yawn. I wonder if that’s true in all languages?

I don’t know about you, but I have already yawned at least four times since I began writing the above paragraph.

But yawning was just the intro. Our real subject today is the itch. I was going to do a Top 10 countdown of things that will make you feel itchy. But I could only think of nine. Then, the Top Nine countdown became way too long, so I cut it down even more. Following is my final countdown of six things that make you feel so itchy that their mere mention will compel you, against your will, to scratch. If you are able to resist this urge all the way to the end, I would like to know about it.

And, in case you are curious to the point of distraction, the items I omitted were wool, sunburn, and allergic reactions. This is still way too long for a blog post, so only those who are just itching to know will read on.

The Itch List

6. Mites

Mites do not actually cause itching, as far as I know. That’s why they’re at the bottom of the list. But if you have ever read a bit about mites, as I did in Bill Bryson’s book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” and you become aware of how ubiquitous these microscopic creatures are (and what they look like, when magnified large enough that you can see them), I think that you will find yourself itching all over. They live in our pillows, they live in our bedsheets, they live on our car headrests, and they live on our skin. They look like little alien beings, and they are absolutely everywhere, crunching and munching on detritus. Did I mention that they live on your skin? You know that weird, sudden itch that makes you spasm because it is so sharp and unexpected? I attribute that itch to mites. I believe that you cannot have an actual creature living on you, eating your dead skin cells, without it causing you to itch sometimes. Here’s what Bryson has to say about bed mites:

Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung, or frass, as it is known to entomologists.
Let me repeat: one-tenth of your six-year-old pillow’s weight consists of dead skin, mites–both living and dead–and mite crap. ‘Nuff said.

5. Chigger, mosquito, and other bug bites

Chiggers should actually be much closer to the number-one spot. They are creatures from the eighth circle of hell, after all. But then, you haven’t seen what’s still left on my list.

A few years ago, at the height of summer heat, a bunch of us went hiking. It was the world’s dullest, most boring hike (we didn’t know that beforehand). By the next day, all but one of our party had succumbed to chiggers. I've been on hikes that resulted in chigger bites, but I've at least been able to say that it was worth it. If ever there was a hike that did not warrant chigger bites, this one was it.

Because we were suffering so badly, we did a fair amount of research on chiggers. It turns out that most of what you think you know about chiggers is not true. In fact, not much is actually known about these devilish little beasts.

Conventional wisdom says that chiggers burrow deep into your skin and then remain alive there for a while, leaving a small tunnel up to the surface to give them air to breathe. However, many bug scientists, also known as entomologists, say that there is no evidence to support this theory. They believe that, just like mosquitoes, chiggers bite you once and then take off, leaving an extremely toxic and itchy poison behind.

Conventional wisdom also says that one should paint the bites with clear fingernail polish, as this will seal off the chiggers’ breathing tunnels, causing them to die off sooner. I remember having even bought an expensive topical medical treatment that was supposed to not only treat the itch of the bites but also seal off the tunnels. All such treatments are, according to entomologists, so much snake oil.

At this point, I don’t really know what is true and what is false about the chiggers themselves. But let’s get to the important thing about them: their bites itch like crazy. One of our group of hikers counted something like 54 chigger bites from his waist down. Chigger bites make you want to take up itching as a profession. You feel like you could just sit and scratch your bites for not only 40 hours a week, but you could also go into overtime. Chigger bites take on a life of their own. You absolutely must scratch them. You tell yourself not to, but at the same time, your hands develop an agenda of their own, and at the very time that your brain is saying, in a very aloof, cocky tone, “It’s mind over matter. I’ve overcome this.” your hands are scratching bites like madmen.

I feel pretty much the same way about mosquitoes, which love me. But I’m not going to expound on every sort of itchy bug bite that I’ve encountered (and just think of all of the exotic ones in Africa and Australia and Asia that we haven’t even had any experience with!).

I think that we–those of us who are the favorite meal of biting insects–can all agree that bug bites are pretty bad. And some of those chigger bites can itch for up to two weeks or so. There is just one insect that I haven’t mentioned here because it deserves a number of its own; you’ll get to it momentarily.

I don’t’ know about you, but I’ve been scratching myself pretty constantly for the last couple of minutes. Especially my head and neck. Which brings us to number four.

4. Lice

Separate from other bugs because they don’t just bite you once and then die or leave. They live on you. What I mean to say is, “They live on you.” They don’t just bite you to make you itch. They walk around on whatever part they are infesting. And for the purposes of modesty and the fact that we are in mixed company, I will address only the pain, humiliation, and itchiness of head lice here.

Let’s get back to “they walk around on whatever part....” They are there, living on your scalp (or whatever) when you wake up in the morning, as you shower (which seems to send the little devils into apopolexy), as you eat your lunch, as you sit–quietly scratching– watching TV at night, and when you go to bed.

Bed. Where you lie at night, imagining the lice just pouring off your head onto your pillow, some of them burrowing into its depths as others go marching across the bed, streaming into the weave of every fabric in your home. They will infest the bedclothes, the carpet, all of your clothing, and the drapes. They will get into papers and books and newspapers. If you’ve ever had to eradicate lice from your home, you know that arson is the only real solution. It’s the only sure-fire method for killing them all and keeping them from coming back. And you must not salvage anything–no, nothing at all– from your home that is made from any kind of fibers or has a porous surface, if you wish to truly be rid of this plague on humanity. You must be willing to turn your back on your favorite dress, that sweater that sets off your eyes, your expensive sheets, your children’s kindergarten drawings, your and your children’s hair, the family Bible that documents 12 generations of your ancestors, and the family pet. All must be sacrificed to this scourge if you are to keep from having repeated bouts with them for months after the initial contact.

Maybe you are undaunted by all of this. If so, I can say with absolute certainty that you have never had an infestation of lice. I have had lice. I cannot even think of them now without getting them all over again. In fact, scientists now understand that thinking about lice is what causes lice. They are able to burst spontaneously forth, formed by human thought–sort of like Athena from the head of Zeus–and transformed into viable, living, breathing life forms. It is absolutely vital that you not think of lice. Now or ever. Oh, wait. It’s too late for that, isn’t it?

3. That itch you can't get to

Any itch that cannot be reached is a special torment to its sufferer, and is more than likely the work of the devil. I am referring here to that itch that begins to develop under a cast that you have to be in for three more weeks, painful rectal itch (see item 2 for more on this one), an itch way down inside your ear, and that itch on your back–right in the middle, between your shoulder blades but a little further down, yeah, right there...no, a little to the left, oh yeah...wait, no, a little further down.

An itch you cannot reach is one of the leading causes of insanity. People have lost their minds and been admitted into asylums just because of the itch that can’t be reached. Most will regain their sanity once the itch goes away, but for some, it is too late. Long exposure to unreachable itching will cause permanent madness. For this reason, it does not matter what measures you must go to to get to an itch that can’t be reached, as stupid, crazy, and dangerous as the answer might be, you must go to any length to get to the itch that is plaguing you.

We all know about people taking any long, thin article that they can get hold of to slide down between a cast and their skin to provide relief from the unreachable itch. One of my nephews, when he was little, had a raging ear infection that, it turned out, was causing itching that he was too young to be able to verbalize. He did what any sane, mature, right-thinking person would have done in that circumstance. He tore the wire leg off of a pink flamingo and rammed it straight down his ear canal, puncturing his eardrum and making it bleed. He lost his hearing for a couple of months over that, by golly, it was worth it. He got rid of the itch, and that’s really all that matters.

If you see someone who has backed up against a door frame, the edge of a bookcase, or a fencepost that happens to be covered with rusted barbed wire, heaving themselves up and down and back and forth, just nod sagely, knowing that they are preserving their mental health.

2. Feminine itch

We are in mixed company, and it simply would not do to go into the details of this particular kind of itch. I do not know, and–I cannot stress this enough–I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW whether there is a male version of this particular kind of itch. Part of the pain of this itch is that it falls into that category of “itches you can’t reach.” So, I suppose that, as Saturday Night Live dubbed it many years ago in their “Smuckers” commercial, Painful Rectal Itch is, for men, pretty similar to feminine itch (however, women experience both and I think that all women would agree that feminine itch is worse).

And, I think that I’ve mentioned this, I DO NOT want to be any more enlightened on the male perspective on this topic.

So, just like in toilet paper commercials, let’s talk all around the subject without actually talking about the subject. Speaking of commercials, I am always amused by ads for products that treat “feminine itch” as it has so gingerly been named by marketeers. “Feminine itch.” Doesn’t it sound so delicate, so genteel, so demure, so proper, so, so, so...NOT something that would make you murder someone to get it to stop?

Okay, this is going beyond the TMI standard that I tried to set in the first paragraph on this topic, but I will end with this quote from one of my aunts regarding feminine itch, and which I think pretty much says it all about this kind of itch. “I felt like douching with gasoline and then lighting a match.”

This is why feminine itch is number two. It would have been number one except that it plagues only half of the world’s population.

1. Poison ivy (and the like)

I know that poison ivy (and other poisonous plants like poison sumac, etc.) seems pretty mild compared to some of the itches we’ve examined in this list. It is, I admit, a subjective list, and therefore is ordered by my own experience with each of the itch factors listed. I will refer to all poisonous plants as poison ivy, as that’s the one I’ve had the most experience with.

If you consider yourself susceptible to poison ivy because you have once or twice in your life gotten a blister or two or three after a day of clearing brush out of the yard, then you will wonder why I’ve saved poison ivy for last. If you’ve gotten a bit of a poison ivy rash on your arm, let’s say it left big enough welts that you can clearly see that you touched, say, three vines, then you can begin to appreciate why I saved poison ivy for last, as those three lines of rash should give you just enough itching to make you understand what an all-out poison ivy attack is about.

If, like me, you have been rendered into a leperous-looking, skin-sloughing, blister-oozing, fluid-dripping, Calamine-covered zombie by poison ivy, then you can fully appreciate why poison ivy has won the number-one spot.

My first encounter with poison ivy was on the playground at school. I was in second grade. My little friend, Jill, and I–in spite of our teacher’s dire warnings about this dangerous plant–decided that we would smear the leaves all over each other. Well, you see, the teacher actually showed the plant, which was all over a huge tulip poplar on the playground, to our class. She taught us what poison ivy is, and she warned us, “Don’t touch this plant. Do not get near it, and do not get it on you.” Well, Jill and I discussed this plant. We absolutely agreed that a plant could not be poisonous. Snakes were poisonous. Some spiders were poisonous. But a plant? No way.

So, we hatched a plan. Mrs. Williams had said not to touch the plant and not to get it on us, right? Being little philistines, we ignored those parts of the teacher’s warning that did not suit us. So, that part about “don’t touch it” didn’t enter into our scheme. We concentrated on that part of her warning that went, “don’t get it on you.” We agreed that we would not get it on us, we would get it on each other. So, Jill grabbed a handful of leaves and rubbed them all over me–every bit of exposed skin that she could find. I grabbed a handful of leaves and did the same to Jill.

Guess who was susceptible to poison ivy?

I swelled up like a toad. My arms, legs, neck, and face were thickly covered with big blisters full of poison. My eyes swelled shut. I couldn’t open my mouth to eat. And the itching! Beyond anything that I can describe even to this day. Do you know how helpful it is to have your mother saying to you in a calm, rational tone of voice, “Don’t scratch” when every cell of your body feels like it will burst into flame if you don’t dig into yourself with all of the fingernails you can muster? And calamine lotion. Useless.

I studiously–and very obediently–avoided poison ivy from that moment on. I learned to identify it from 15 feet away, and I tried to make sure that I never got near it again. But something happened, and four years later, when I was in sixth grade, I got it again. I don’t even know how.
All I know is that, again, my legs and arms were covered with blisters that would break and ooze awful-looking, sticky, yellow fluid all over the place. By this time, I understood that I really should control myself and not scratch. One day, sitting in Mrs. White’s English class (my favorite), the combination of the itching and pain, the unfulfilled desire to scratch, and the intense heat in the room (this was before air-conditioning in schools), I dropped into a dead faint. Unconsciousness was bliss. I was brought to, very much against my will, by smelling salts. I resented that. Unconsciousness had been a peaceful interlude, a brief respite–absolute heaven, in other words–from the constant pain, itching, and oozing. I was sent home, where I remained for the next few days, trying to figure out how to reach a state of blissful oblivion again. Sixth-graders, in my day, did not have ready access to recreational drugs, so I was doomed to a state of painful awareness.

Poison ivy will, like the itch you can’t get to, drive you to madness. That’s because no amount of scratching will ever satisfy poison ivy’s need to be scratched. You can scratch at poison ivy until you draw blood, and still it will itch even more than it hurts. Poison ivy will make you itch to the point where you feel like you need to be put into an induced coma for the duration. You do not want your poison ivy rash to be treated with any kind of drug or steroid or lotion; you simply want to be unconscious while it runs its course. But, since most doctors will not agree to induce a coma for poison ivy, you are left alone with the unrelenting itching.

So, there you have it. The Itch List.

The order in which I’ve listed these things doesn’t matter. You might have put them in a different order than I did. That’s fine. You might even have some things I didn’t think of to add to my list (I’d like to hear about them). My main goal was to make you itch to the point where you HAD to scratch. Did it work? Let me know.

Well...yawn. I think it’s time for bed.

The Letter

I found the letter while digging through the free bin at McKay’s Used Book Store. Like all of the other book mongrels, I always feel compelled to look through the free bin, even though the last thing I need is more books.  But these are free. Free!

We all rummage through the bin in essentially the same way. The experienced rummagers can quickly pass over books that they're not interested in.  Who in their right mind wants a 1987 edition of DOS for Dummies? When you can’t see the title easily, you have to pick the book up, flip it around, make a snap judgment (so much for not judging a book by its cover!), and either add it to your growing stack or dump it unceremoniously back into the bin.  It's fun to watch how each person approaches the contents of the free bin, especially when the McKay's guy comes out and dumps more free books into the bin. Perhaps we are more like book vultures than mongrels.

Anyway, the pickings were pretty slim this particular afternoon, and it didn't take the few of us who were there long to go through them. We just had to trade places as we each finished with the books in our section of the bin. I picked up a book that several other people had already rejected.  It wasn't obvious from the title what the subject was, so I flipped it over to read the back. As I did so, I noticed something sticking out of the book, which I at first took to be loose pages. It was an envelope—a thick one—already addressed and stamped.  The stamps were old—several cents off from the current postage rate—but the sender had ensured its delivery by putting two stamps on the letter, clearly more than were warranted by the weight of the envelope. The distinctive cursive writing indicated a recipient in a small town in Tennessee.

Let us now enter into a thought experiment. And let us assume two premises: we do not know the name or address of the sender, and we absolutely will not open the envelope to discover the contents of the letter.

My first instinct was to just drop the thing into the nearest mailbox. Clearly, it was the intent of the writer to mail this letter, and they somehow forgot to do it. It seems likely that they stuck it into the book they were reading at the time, planning to mail it the next day. I could only imagine the flukey set of circumstances that led to the book being taken to McKays—with the letter still in it.  They probably didn't realize that they had given the letter away; maybe they never even realized that they hadn't mailed the letter.

There was, of course, no way to know what the date of the letter was, but from the stamps on it, we are not talking about a long-lost letter from WWII or something like that. Still, it was intriguing. Maybe it had been enough years since the letter had been written that the recipient would be especially delighted to get it. Surprised. Shocked. Grateful. Perhaps it would be a bittersweet letter to receive: written by someone who has since gone out of the recipient's life. Maybe they died in a car wreck. Maybe they wrote this letter just before they left for Afghanistan, from where they never returned.  The possibilities are endless, and I mulled over all of the ones I could think of.

I decided to stick it in the mail the following day, but for the time being, I had to be off to meet a friend for dinner.

As I drove to the restaurant, I couldn't help thinking about the letter. Maybe there was a reason that the writer didn't send it. Maybe it was one of those “I'm going to get this off my chest and then think about whether I should actually send it” letters. Have you ever written one of those, and then, in the cool light of the next day, you realized what a bad idea it would've been to send it? Wouldn't you be horrified to learn that, years later, some jerk, who didn't even know what you and so-and-so had been through, found the letter and sent it?  I shudder to even think about it.

What if it was a Dear John letter, and then the couple had made up the day afterward, before John ever knew he'd been dumped? What if it was a “let's make up” letter and the next day, after the writer sobered up, they realized what a terrible idea that would be? Again, the “what ifs” came flooding in, and I determined not to mail the letter the next day.

Now I'm balancing the guy who went off to war and got killed against the woman who told off her fill-in-the-blank and then decided not to send it. Which of them should get top priority?

I know that you are thinking, “Just open the damned letter and see what it says!” But no. I will not do that. For one thing, I really do have a very strong privacy standard myself. I also won't open e-mails that I know accidentally got directed to me. I delete them, then delete them from my Trash folder, then notify the sender of his or her mistake, assuring them that I didn't read it. They probably don't believe me, but that is their problem. My conscience is at peace. But the second reason I won't open the letter is that it would be just too disappointing to learn that it's just a letter to Aunt Jen, asking how her prize roses are doing, and what the scuttlebutt is around her small town.  I prefer the intrigue.

But, once the intrigue wears off, I'll still have this letter, which I hate to just throw away. Then I have to go back to my dilemma: to mail or not to mail.

What would you do?

Fairy story no. 396

“Will I ever see you again?” the child asked excitedly.

“Only if you believe you will,” the fairy said.

“Oh, I believe! Where, when?”

“If you truly believe, we will meet at twilight, in that time when the first dew drop forms on the first rose petal of summer. Or we will meet on a cold midnight, at that place where, for one moment, past and destiny merge.”

____________________________________________________________

“That's so sappy,” the writer thought.

“That's the way fairies talk,” the fairy snapped back.

Pet Peeves: An Exhausting But Not Exhaustive List

Today, a friend of mine posted a status update on Facebook about a pet peeve of hers. That got me thinking about my own pet peeves, of which I'm afraid that there is an inordinately long list.

Back before Facebook, these lists of questions would go around via e-mail to help you know more random details about your friends. Oh, sure, we know the important things about our friends: whether they're honest, loyal, and can be relied on in a real crisis. That's what matters. But have they ever, say, won the Betty Crocker Future Homemaker of Tomorrow Award? (As my sister-in-law did in high school, just to teach her mother a lesson.) Or have they ever sky-dived? Or been to sub-Saharan Africa? What's their favorite color? What occupation would they pick if they weren't doing what they're doing?

To find out little details like this, people would think up a list of about 25 completely random questions and then would send the lists off to all of their friends, imploring them to answer them and then send them to all of their friends, as well as back to the original sender. You usually even got a chance at the end of the list to name which friend you thought would be most likely to answer you quickly and which one you would never hear from at all.

I was always named as the friend from whom none of my friends would ever hear back when they sent those lists. I hate that my friends found me unreliable in answering their random questions about me, but the truth is not what they thought. They probably thought that I felt like this activity was too frivolous to take up my time; that I felt myself to be above such an activity. That was not the case. The truth was that I do not answer questions well, especially with short answers. I could have gone on at length in answering any of these questions. I also don't answer questions well because I always come back with questions of my own. I have to qualify and quantify your question before I can answer it correctly. Finally, I have to give a lot of thought to my answers to these questions. Some of them—sent years ago—I'm still thinking about to this day. I'm a muller of questions, which is why I don't fill out forms very well. I have to think about it, then ask you a lot of questions about exactly what you're trying to get at with your question, then think some more about your answers, and then, several days later, I might have an answer for you. By then, you'll have forgotten that you sent me this silly little questionnaire, and you will wonder if I'm not a bit dim, coming in so late, and with such serious answers, to something that was just meant to be kind of a light-hearted ice breaker.

Ah, but I've digressed.

The reason that pet peeves made me think about those old e-mailed ice-breaker questionnaires is that one of the questions on the list would often be “What is your pet peeve?”

And I would think, “Pet peeve? As in singular peeve? I only get one?” And this would send me into a reverie—that would last for days—of trying to come up with my top, number-one, most annoying pet peeve EVER. I found that I could not limit myself to just one, and thus, I could never get back to the question asker with an answer.

So, here, today, I'm going to list some of my pet peeves. Not my top ones, perhaps. These are just some that I'm going to think up as I go along. And I'm going to give myself 10; way more than one, yet not so many that I end up looking like a really peevish person (ha!). So, don't go thinking that these are necessarily my biggest pet peeves, they are merely the ones that will occur to me over the next few minutes.

1. When people take up two parking spaces to protect their cars from dings.
2. Bad driving. Which is to say, driving that is different from mine. Actually, other people who drive like me around me also annoy me. (And to those who will feel compelled to comment on this, I'll beat you to the punch: YES, I know that my driving is a pet peeve to all of my family members, all of my friends, and pretty much everyone else on the planet. Just so we set that straight right here: I'm clear on this.) 
3. But ESPECIALLY, people who get in the left lane on the highway and stay there, regardless of how slowly they are going in comparison to other drivers and/or how long a line of cars has built up behind them (which should be their clue that they are not going fast enough in the “fast” lane). Okay, the truth is, I have too many driving-related pet peeves to be able to list them all here. I need a special list just for Driving Pet Peeves. So I won't list any more of them here. 
4. I would like to say that one of my pet peeves is mean people. What I mean is, people who are mean. The problem here is that I'm sometimes the mean person in an exchange and I'm sometimes the hapless victim of a mean person. So what I really mean when I say that mean people are my pet peeve is that when people are mean—except for when the mean person is me, in which case you should just excuse me because I am probably having a Bad Day—I hate that. But if I've been mean to you, I apologize, and I hope you understand that I've just had a Bad Day. 
5. Mean People Suck. The bumper sticker. Yes, mean people do suck. But, see item above. If you are willing to admit it, as I did, you are probably sometimes a bit mean yourself. And even if you're not, isn't a bumper sticker with which you tell some people that they suck kind of, well, mean? Or are you one of those people who thinks it's okay to be ugly toward someone if they were that way toward you first? 
6. Sand stuck all over me. I love the beach. I hate having sand stuck to every inch of my skin. It makes me want to dive into the ocean to get it all off. But then it will just restick to me on my way back to my beach towel. Which will make me want to go back into the ocean. Which will make it restick.... 
7. Okay. I realize that not everyone is born with a gift for doing well in English class. I really do get that. Those people should realize that, if they are going to have a blog, or even post much on Facebook, that they should really make the effort to learn a few things to keep from tipping the rest of us (the literate world, that is) over the edge. Again, I really don't mean to be picking on people who just aren't that good at language skills, as I have my areas in which I'm not gifted, too. The thing I would most like for those people to learn is the proper use and placement of apostrophes in English words (and note that I didn't say apostrophe's. Its and it's; there, their, they're; your and you're. They each have their own place in the English language, please do not treat them as if they are interchangeable. I won't even go on about your spelling if you will just work on your apostrophes. Okay? 
8. The word “utilize.” I just think that there is no place where people employ the word “utilize” where “use” wouldn't sound better and less like you're trying to make things sound complicated. 
9. People who can't count to 15. Whom I only notice or would even say anything about because I get behind them in the express lane at the store, with their—oh, I don't know, maybe—28 items! Oh, wait. Maybe they can count properly. The problem is, they can't read the sign that clearly says “15 items or less.” (What the sign actually means, of course, and we will be kind to the sign-maker, who had limited space in which to write, was “15 items or fewer.”) 
10. Babies crying loudly in public places, especially in restaurants where I am simply trying to have a nice, relaxing meal. Yes, I know that this makes me a horrible person—to say, out loud, that I hate crying babies—but there you have it. I do. I actually don't hate the baby, just the crying. The sound of a baby's cry can just send me over the edge. It completely derails my brain from whatever thought process it was having. I just can't abide that sound. So, please, little babies, stop your crying. And, please, baby parents, if your baby persists in crying in public for, let's say, 10 minutes or more, take that baby home! It's what he or she needs. It is you who wants to be at the restaurant. Do what your baby needs, not what you want. Take that kid home and put him or her to bed!

I am going to stop here today. That's because I think that it is petty and, well, peevish for a person to 1) go on at length about her pet peeves (ha!), or 2) be able to name more than about 10 in one sitting. One should not nurse one's peeves. One should work at not having any peeves rather than nurturing the peeves that one does have. We should strive to be a peeveless people, holding no grudges and judging no one, in spite of how rude, illiterate, or annoying they might be. You can see that I am working on this. But the truth is, I really can't come up with more than 10 at one time. This is probably caused more by a lack of concentration on my part than it is a lack of peevishness.