I think this is racist.
When your phone rings at 3:30 AM, the news is never good
I’m visiting my parents for the holidays. It’s 3:30 AM. The phone rings. The answering machine gets it before any of us pick up/get to a phone. Caller ID is blocked.
When your phone rings at 3:30 AM, it’s never good. It’s horrible, life-changing news, it’s a wrong number, or your idiot night owl daughter sat on her Blackberry and pocket-dialed you (ahem).
The answering machine picks up, and sleepy and confused, we listen. It’s a woman who sounds like she’s in her twenties, drunk and slurring her words:
“Hey, it’s me. I just found out I’m pregnant. So when you get this, call me back.”
On the off-chance that you placed this phone call, please don’t be mad at the intended recipient when he (I’ll just go ahead and assume it’s a “he”) doesn’t call you back. I really would have called you back to let you know if I had any idea who you are.
I am somewhat turned off
I went to visit my parents back in July, because I had the week off from work and my parents missed their grandpuppy. There’s a generational split here: I never watch local news. I have a TV, and I watch entirely too much TV while knitting or working, but I don’t watch TV news. It just isn’t interesting to me. But my parents do watch news, and since I’m usually visiting during holidays, I get to see the same holiday/slow news day stories repeat over and over, three times a day. There are worse problems to have.
What I also get to see are godawful local commercials. Oh, the bad animations, the jingles not updated since the ’80s, the business owner’s kids appearing in the ads…they’re the same everywhere. So this sticks out. Apparently it’s been airing for a while, but I’ve never seen it. Maybe they only run it in the summer, so I missed it last year?
It really bothers me. I can’t quite pin down why. The footage is lovely, but the music! And the voiceover by a child for some reason that makes no artistic sense!
The Malls of my Youth
Tri-County Mall in Baldwinsville, NY got its name because the developers thought people would come from the entire surrounding area to visit it. And they did, back when it had a real department store, a grocery store, and an interesting variety of shops.
Up until the mall finally closed and was torn down, back when it only had two or three stores still operating, it had the best pet store in the area: I thought it was better than the big-box pet stores. Especially for buying fish.
One of these years I’m going to write a new history of it for Deadmalls.com. (“It did SO have anchors! Well, in 1977.”)
