jodyrathgeb

   Nobody has asked me to give a graduation speech anywhere, and it's certainly not likely to happen. But that's not going to stop me from a few curmudgeonly comments in the guise of advice to young people.

   Ah-hem. Graduates, here are some things you should probably already know, but from my observations have never been taught to you.

   1. Don't text and drive. How many deaths is it going to take for this one to sink in?

   2. Don't text and walk. There are cracks in the sidewalk, potholes, traffic and sides of buildings. If you're not looking where you're going, you'll run into one of them. Or you'll get knocked over and lose your precious cellphone to the thief you never saw coming.

   3. Don't text when there's a live person right in front of you seeking conversation. It's just rude.

   4. Enough with the texting. When you do get around to actual talking, slow down and enunciate. Especially if you're working in the service industry.

   5. The proper response to someone saying "hello" is to say "hello" back. Or to at least smile and nod. Or even just the nod. Something to let them know you realize that you share the planet with other people.

   6. When you and your friends are walking together down the sidewalk and someone is coming toward you, bunch in a bit to let the person go by without having to step into the street. It's called common courtesy.

   7. If you don't already have a tattoo, consider not getting one. Aging skin wrinkles, stretches and responds to weight gain. Today's ladybug is tomorrow's turtle, and that tiger will get long in the tooth right along with you.

   8. Read something longer than 140 characters now and then. It will help your mind to see how sentences can connect to each other and express ideas. Wow!

   9. Get uncomfortable now and then. Try a new food, wear a tie, be among people who speak another language. That's the essence of continuing education.

   10. No matter how much you try, things will sometimes go wrong. Here, I defer to the advice given by Bluto to Flounder in "Animal House": My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.

   11. Learn to go beyond the number 10. I know you're used to Top 10 lists and "10 things you should know about the opposite sex" and such, but realize that 10ness is an artificial construct and there's probably something more, and more interesting, out there. Be curious about it.

   Yeah, be curious. That about says it. But really: Don't text and drive, okay?

   I've been taking yoga classes since December, but it's probably not going to last. I like the classes, but I just can't get into the culture. I refuse to go out and buy a special mat and special pants (beach towel and Tom's gym shorts are fine by me), and I haven't learned all these special terms for things, not even the one for those wonderful last 10 minutes when you relax everything and the instructor puts a hot towel over your eyes. I have yet to look up what "Namaste" really means. Maybe they're telling me to go buy yoga pants.

   This is a familiar story for me. I went to college in the 1970s but did not live in jeans, attend even one frat party or smoke pot. I was a restaurant reviewer but couldn't embrace all the foodie virtues of source snobbery and celebrity chef worship; if someone made a great hot dog from questionable ingredients, I still said it was great. I made a lousy employee but thrived as a freelance contractor, following my own uncorporate rules: I don't do meetings; performance reviews are bullshit; mission statements are the ultimate in bullshit.

   It's a wonder I'm still surviving. But yes, there I am on the fringe. Being an outsider isn't second nature for me; it's my primary nature, born of the days when I was the last kid picked for the team, the one girl who wore a dress instead of a trendy pantsuit for the field trip, the woman who wore flats instead of heels because they were more comfortable.

   There were always, however, advantages to being on the fringe. I became the yearbook editor, able to chronicle our class because I was just a step apart from it. My restaurant reviews spoke to the average folks who just wanted a nice night out, and they thanked me for it. My period of living on North Caicos was easier because I expected to be an outsider, not embraced.

   It's possible that a lifetime of being an outsider, on the fringe, is what finally led me to being a writer of fiction. Or not.

   I have a friend who willingly signs up for all sorts of kamikaze exercise classes of the kick-boxing, boot-camp ilk. She loves it all, embracing whatever masochistic culture she gets thrown into. My reaction would be more on the lines of the following:

   No pain, no gain? No, pain means, "Stop that! Right now."

   Embracing it, she's losing some weight and maintaining good health (when it's not too painful). Dissing it, I'm going my own way while learning about the experience through her.

   We both win!

    I used to like Halloween a lot more than I do today. I liked its slapdash simplicity in the days before packaged cobwebs, tools made just for pumpkin-cutting, commercial ghost tours, haunted theme parks and characters out of slasher films instead of witches and ghosts.
    Halloween was then just frivolous fun, a purely pagan ritual for kids and playful adults. Trick-or-treat wasn't an organized event, and everything was mostly homemade. No ceramic pumpkins: We carved real ones clumsily with whatever knife Mom would let us handle. You added some icing and raisin eyes to sloppily-made cookies for "ghosts." And costumes involved creative recycling rather than a shopping trip.
    My mother kept a cardboard box the size of a washing machine in our storage cubbyhole for odd pieces of fabric, old clothing, junky jewelry and broken half masks. This is where costumes came from. That meant that the Knott kids usually showed up at someone's door as hoboes or gypsies, although I do remember Mom once making me into a pretty good mouse.
    It was fun to participate in making these costumes, and we learned from Mom's ingenuity. I felt sorry for the kids forced to wear off-the-rack skeleton and Superman clothes. Anyone could buy a costume; creating one was better.
    I understand that times have changed. You can no longer safely send your kids out unsupervised after dark, even in your own neighborhood, and today's haunted house events are definitely safer than our dares to sneak into a crumbling barn or condemned home. But I would hope for more resistance to all the commercialism and a return to homemade Halloween.
    Ghost cookie, anyone?

    I'm not sure which is worse: listening to the incessant backup beep of the construction lift across the street, or hearing about Miley Cyrus' twerking. Either could be the noise that puts me over the top.
    
    "The world is too much with us; late and soon,
    Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;-

    Living in the city, I am used to a certain level of noise and certain types of noises: 4 a.m. garbage trucks, fire and ambulance sirens, train traffic and weekend revelers. The building across the street, however, has created days of constant din.
    And then there's the clamor of culture: political ads, gun debates, war rumblings, twittering fools, movie trailers and an uproar over twerking (a word I just learned).
    I am so looking forward to being on North Caicos again.
    Oh, I know that the island is not as quiet as we seem to think. There are barking dogs at night, rooster alarm clocks, loud arguments in Creole, preachers who believe their harangues must be shared across the island and Dominican music that apparently can be played only at full volume.
    But it's much easier there to block out the other kind of noise, to unplug. Sure, it's possible to turn off the TV and computer and to leave the cellphone behind here in America, but most people find it too hard because it leaves a void in their lives. North Caicos gives me something else to connect to: a beach, the ocean, night skies full of stars and a local culture that is endlessly puzzling and amusing.
    But why am I writing this? William Wordsworth said it so much better:
    The world is too much with us; late and soon,
    Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;-
    Little we see in Nature that is ours;
    We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
    This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
    The winds that will be howling at all hours,
    And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
    For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
    It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
    A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
    So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
    Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
    Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
    Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

    The headaches for the literate and the verbal just keep multiplying. The latest attack on words? Stickers.
    Stickers, according to an article in the June 12 Wall Street Journal, are "little cartoonish images that the tech-savvy send one another instead of text." The cute communication tools are purchased as smartphone apps and sent to another in place of text to express emotions and share what's happening in one's day.
    They are invariably cute: big-eyed puppies, sweet little bunnies, a sassy wombat, an ice cream cone with arms and legs. Most have names given to them by the app purveyors.
    We should have seen this coming. Stickers are the logical next step after emoticons and emojis. A linguistics professor is quoted in the article, saying, "We're a much more graphic culture than we used to be."
    And so users perk up their "boring texts" with the cute little icons. Says one sticker fan, "People misread texts a lot, but it's really hard to misread a cute bunny holding a heart."
    Oh, really? Here are a few ways I can read that bunny:
    The surgery was a success!
    Did you forget that they changed the date of Valentine's Day?
    Sweetmeats for dinner!
    Help me. I'm having a heart attack.
    I mean it. What is a heart-holding bunny supposed to mean?
    Let's try this out. Here are a few "messages" I might send Tom to keep him up with my day. See if you can figure out what I'm saying.
    1. Cute wombat lying flat.
    2. Cute cat in a kitty curl.
    3. Cute cat with teeth showing and claws out.
    4. Cute lizard lying flat.
    5. Cute dog lapping at a bowl of water.
    Have your answers ready? Okay, here's what was going on:
    1. Yikes! I almost got run over by a GRTC bus.
    2. I've been working in the garden, and I can't unkink my back.
    3. I'm also filthy from all that weeding. Where did you put the nail brush?
    4. Stop the world, I want to get off. Get me to the Turks and Caicos ASAP.
    5. Yes, I started drinking without you. It's five o'clock somewhere.
    What - didn't you get any of them right? Hmm. I guess maybe sometimes a picture isn't worth a thousand words.

    It is said that as we get older, we don't change. We just become more of ourselves. The fussbudget gets fussier, the shrew gets more shrewish.
    Funny, I don't remember being a grumpy child. But grumpiness is my tendency now. Maybe it's because there are so many things to be grumpy about. Following in that shallow magazine tendency to make everything a list of 10, here are 10 of them.
    1. Customer service is mostly nonexistent, robotic, overly fake-cheerful or downright rude. Genuine helpfulness is rare.
    2. Traffic. Even those of us who walk more often than drive can grouse about all the idiots on the road. "Hey, Nutcase! Ever hear of a crosswalk?"
    3. Erosion of social skills. What, when someone smiles and says hello to you, is it too much trouble to return the greeting? Or maybe, Miss Nose-in-the-smartphone, do you not realize that this is how real humans interact?
    4. Weather. It's either too hot or too cold. There's too much rain, or too little. When it comes to the weather, we are all farmers.
    5. Technology. To paraphrase Bob Dylan: How many gadgets will it take till we know that too many apps are useless? And how complicated can they get; remember when ONE on-off button operated a TV?
    6. Politics. All that energy that goes into blaming the other side rather than leading!
    7. Celebrities. Comparing the salaries of teachers and football players, or police officers and Vegas headliners, is a sure route to grumpiness.
    8. Slobs. Hello-oh! Do you really expect someone else to pick up your PBR can or your dog's poop?
    9. Volume. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have a conversation in a restaurant? Or to be on hold (another grump) without being blasted?
    10. Deteriorating written standards. Spelling! Punctuation! Usage! Clichés! Overuse of exclamation points!
    It looks as if I have a fine old age as a grumpy old woman ahead of me.

    "OK, I recognize Justin Bieber, but who's this?" I asked, turning the newspaper so Tom could see the photo.
    "You're asking me? You're better at that stuff than me."
    I looked at the photo again. "Maybe it's one of those girls from 'Girls,'" I said.
    Tom shrugged. Neither of us had ever seen the show, though I was aware of its premise and content.
    So it goes with pop culture at our house. We're pretty much out of it. What we know about television, fashion, apps and current music is miniscule. I don't feel particularly threatened by my ignorance - I doubt my well-being will ever hinge on knowing character names from, say, "Game of Thrones" - but our relationship with The Latest has got me thinking. And so, since I think in metaphor, I've come up with several of them to describe how people know what they know about things that may or may not be worth knowing.
    FROM THE SEA. Some people are sharks, chasing down and gobbling up all the new phenomena. Like sharks, they keep moving to stay alive in a world of bestsellers, celebrities and trends. Meanwhile, there are the anemones, anchored to the coral with polyps waving through the water to gather bits and pieces of the popular culture. The shark knows who Jay-Z is and can quote him; the anemone is aware only that there's someone called Jay-Z who does hip-hop. Or maybe it's rap.
    ON THE MOLECULAR LEVEL. You can let new things into your brain by osmosis, letting them seep through the membrane of your routine, or you can organize a bit and become an amoeba, surrounding them and then absorbing them.
    IN THE GARDEN. A weed is merely a plant growing where you don't want it. Some people weed out the Louboutin shoes, Katniss and whoever's now heading up "The Tonight Show." Others nurture them.
    MUSIC. Your playlist indicates your life, whether it's classical, country, Margaritaville or eclectic. Pop culture is the ad jingle or TV theme song that won't leave your head. Are you going to add it to your playlist or reject it?
    Hmm. Maybe that last metaphor is a weak one. I know I certainly can't explain why "The Ballad of the S.S. Minnow" keeps living in my brain's playlist.