Saturday, October 31, 2015

It's My Brother's Party and I'll Cry If I Want To

This is essentially what my Godchild's sister (also my Godchild) looked like during most of the party except that her hair still looks as though it was painted on like a newborn doll's hair.


Today was my Godchild's first birthday. I showed up at his party about two hours before its scheduled start as I was asked to in order to help with setting things up. I helped with tables and chairs, tying balloons in strategic places, and similar rocket-science calibre tasks. afterward, I helped with the clean-up. I'm a dutiful Godparent. The main duties are to provide gifts for every occasion and to help with stuff such as birthday parties. Today I fulfilled both requirements.

The birthday boy was in perfect form. He didn't cry a single time until almost an hour after the party was over when one of his cousins pulled his hair. I felt like decking the brat who attacked him but I don't usually engage in hand-to hand combat with two-year-olds. Little does the hair-puller know that Andrew will be both bigger and smarter than she is within a year and will be more than able to hold his own if she chooses to continue her aggressive ways. For Christmas I may get him a karate suit and pay for his first year of karate lessons so that he can defend himself at family events. Do they allow one-year-olds in karate classes? He's quite mature as one-year-olds go.

Andrew's little sister, on the other hand (it's not a typo; he really does already have a little sister even though he's barely a year old; his parents have white trash ways), cried more than enough to make up for every kid there who wasn't crying. She's three-and-one-half months old, though she was born about six weeks early so she's still pretty small for her age. She screamed bloody murder pretty much anytime she noticed someone other than her mother or father or nanny (or I) was looking at her. She knows my voice from skyping so I was allowed to hold her and she didn't cry when I looked at her. I almost felt honored. My dad said she has my disposition. I don't think it was intended as a compliment.

One of my aunts who was there illustrated perfectly why some old people should not dabble in technology. She took up violin this year at the age of fifty-something, and she plans to purchase a new violin soon. She apparently put several violins in her Amazon.com  shopping cart simply for the purpose of remembering what models she saw online and liked. She seems not to have discovered Amazon's "Wish List" feature. I told her about a particular brand of rosin that I use and like, so she used her phone to order it from Amazon. Instead of using Amazon's one-click feature, she put the rosin in her shopping cart -- with approximately thirteen violins -- and when she clicked "Proceed to Checkout" and "Place Your Order," she ordered over twenty-three thousand dollars worth of merchandise. Fortunately for her and/or her husband and for her offspring, who would like to inherit at least enough to bury their parents someday, she checked her order a few minutes later to see when the rosin was scheduled to arrive, and she noticed that thirteen or so violins plus miscellaneous violin paraphernalia [that she found interesting and wanted to consider buying later but was too lame to use the "Wish List" feature] also scheduled to arrive in the next week or so. She very nearly had a seizure. My Aunt Jillian's  brother spent the next fifteen minutes cancelling all her purchases for her.

Notice to Old People:   There are still things called stores in most places. You can buy stuff there. You don't have to risk bankrupting yourselves by accidentally ordering twenty-three thousand dollars worth of violins and associated paraphernalia when almost anything you would ever want can be found in stores.

13 comments:

  1. Funny story! Especially the part about violins. That is totally a senior moment at work.

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    1. I think she's deleting her Amazon account. I told her that may not be the best idea because it will still exist and she won't be able to occasionally monitor it for fraud if she doesn't hang on to her username and passwords. I believe she thinks Armageddon has come.

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  2. I used rosin in gymnastics but I had to look up how you used it with a violin. "Players of bowed string instruments rub cakes or blocks of rosin on their bow hair so it can grip the strings and make them speak, or vibrate clearly."

    Did you make a mistake and correct it? I thought that after you wrote $23,000 you later wrote $15,000 at the bottom under notice to old people. Then I was going to say that $8,000 for rosin sounds a little expensive if you ask me.

    If I were your boyfriend you know what I would get for your next birthday? I would get you some type of award that says "world's best godparent." I appreciate how good of a godparent you are. It was funny the way you said "I felt like decking the brat who attacked him but I don't usually engage in hand-to hand combat with two-year-olds." That is much better writing than the friend of yours that got an award for what she wrote to a woman that wanted to go out with her.

    I also like the way you said "his parents have white trash ways." Isn't breastfeeding like a natural way to prevent from getting pregnant? It sounds like something is wrong with Andrew's baby sister. She is not supposed to be crying unless something is wrong.

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  3. Yep. My fingers were in the wrong place when I typed 15 instead of 23.

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  4. I babysat for Molly's baby and he never cried. I could tell that something was wrong with his 6 year old brother, who never ate food, and made sure to get him home right away. I was taking him for a walk. I figured that there was something wrong with the machine (in his backpack) that fed him food and drink.

    One time Molly's son was inside the community center with Molly taking an art class (for the son). I was outside the community center at the playground. I was holding the baby and was talking to a mother holding her baby.

    She noted at how fidgety her baby was holding him while the baby that I was holding was very satisfied like he was having the time of his life. See babies learn how to feel by the way that people are holding them feel. So if they are happy and relaxed, then the baby feels happy and relaxed. If the holder feels really upset, then the baby learns that it is normal to feel that way.

    So besides her mother holding her all the time (Camila?) she should be as happy and relaxed as much as possible so the baby feels that. Donald Trump yelled at a guy on his TV show for using the term "white trash." It was funny the way you used it since I know that those parents are among the elite people.

    Whereas the relatives that you stayed with that made you live in an attic, were not so elite.

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    1. Camille is usually happy at home with just the family and possibly me or the nanny, but if there are lots of people around it bothers her. She's OK in a grocery store because it's not very noisy and mostly people are going about their business. she doesn't seem to like having lots of peopel on her own turf.

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    2. Oh, okay. I love it in crowded stores. Really I do. It is probably because of these personal growth seminars that I did. I remember on the the first one I did not like the process where we introduced our self to new people. Then by the 3rd one I liked them. I did 6th of them. On the 5th one I was a big shot.

      A guy who ran it was getting to know people at it, at the beginning. The women who ran it the other times already knew me. So on this 5th one, the guy wanted to know who did it more than once. I was one of several people that stood. There were over a hundred people there.

      Then he asked if people did it more than twice. I was the only one standing. He then asked me if I did it a total of 3 times. I said "no." He then asked if I did it a total 4 times and I said "no." Then he asked how many times I did it and I said that it was my 5th time.

      Now this was the very beginning of the seminar and people were very apprehensive, not knowing what to expect. So people were on edge. So this guy was talking to me in front of everyone getting to know me and it put people at ease.

      Then he said that he was impressed that I did it 5 times (the seminar is 5 days and you are there for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday evening and Saturday and Sunday all day).

      Then he said that I must enjoy them if I did them so many times. I said "yes" and that maybe this time I will get it. So all the tension in the room was released and people were laughing really hard. People are concerned if they are really going to feel the magic that can happen and they call this "getting it." So all of these strangers knew me because of this.

      The reason that I came back was to say we should give that 50-something aunt of yours a lot of credit for learning how to play the violin. Maybe when you are 50, you will learn how to play the tuba. I thought of that since that would be funny seeing you playing a tuba since you are small and the tuba is big. Remember that my mother used to always say that big things come in small packages.

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    3. Chuck, I know how to play the tuba. I'm pretty good at it, actually. I picked it up in 9th grade when my school band didn't have a tuba player. When i'm fifty i'll take up the cello. The aunt who is fifty-something and learning to play violin plays the tuba as well. She plays piano better, but I think the tuba was her first instrument.

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    4. You continue to amaze me. I never expected you to be a tubaist or tubist. My mother had a good friend, that we called Uncle Mike. He was very intelligent and was married and had kids. We celebrated every Christmas Eve with his family. He was an electrical engineer but loved playing many different kinds of instruments.

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  5. Please note that when my mother said that good things come in small packages, she said it with a lot of conviction since she taught ballet at Joulliard's and was also good at gymnastics and was only five feet tall.

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  6. I am writing to you since I heard an MD on TED-- 18 minutes. Her name is Lissa Rankin. She learned the hard way that a healthy body depends on a healthy heart and mind. In 2 weeks her dog died, her father died, her healthy brother had liver failure, she had a daughter from a C-section and her unemployed husband who took care of the daughter cut off 2 fingers with a saw.

    She stopped practicing medicine and painted and wrote. She practices medicine again but differently. She spent 12 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars learning to practice medicine. She writes in her blog:

    "I write pretty much every day and I love it as much as life itself."

    I want you to learn the easy way not the hard way since I also feel the pain. Listen to her (18 minutes) at:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tu9nJmr4Xs

    Also she talks about cairns (rocks piled on each other) around SF that I have never heard of before. I will write an article on her.

    I already have an article on a woman that fought cancer for 5 years and then she died. While she (Anita Moorjani) was dead she was told by something that her cancer was cured and she could choose to stay dead or come back to life. She came back to life and cancer was gone.
    http://bit.ly/1Bz7dXV

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    1. i don't know much about the cairns in San francisco other than those that are trail markers. my dad said there is some controversy regarding cairns. People build them for no apparent reason, and those not well-versed in cairns ideology mistake newer random ones for the older and more significant ones. then seasoned hikers sometimes knock down the newer ones deliberately as they see them as almost a form of graffiti, which then sometimes causes the more ignorant among us to knock f=down the older ones, which upsets cairns aficionados.it's sad if something older and more significant is destroyed.

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  7. I had never heard of them before. I was going to say this on the next post but I can say it here. It is fine to be prepared for your test by studying but it is not fine to be concerned about it. I will give you an example. I can enjoy having the time of my life communicating with you now. There is nothing wrong with that. But if I start concerning myself with whether or not we will ever get married and how many kids we will have, well I can get into a lot of misery.

    Here is a true story about a counselor. She had tried many years to find a boyfriend and then a husband without success, while her sister had a husband and a kid. Then she was getting close to 35 and finally found someone who may be the one. Then something happened and they agreed to break up. She called me about 3 or 4 times a week for months since she was so upset and crying. Finally she got over him.

    Then she and that guy got married and had a kid. So those 2 were the ones that knew they would never be together and yet they were. But she had to get over him first. My point is that we live life according to an idea how things will go, but really we do not know. We need to live in the present.

    A very famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow said "I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness." He said this many decades before Eckhart Tolle.

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