Counting my blessings

This was inspired by Donna Bowman's recent post, "Lucky Me." I don't know if I'd consider myself as lucky as she is, but I'm still doing pretty OK. A dozen reasons why:

1. When I moved home briefly a few years ago, a major reason was because of my dad’s health. This eventually led to his getting bypass surgery- cardiac, not gastric. Thankfully, there were no complications. A year and a half later, you’d never guess he had heart problems.

2. My mom spent the first fifteen years of my life at home taking care of me and my brother. Once she returned to the workforce, she eventually found a job she loved- working on the ground crew for the Goodyear blimp. She spends most of her summers away from home, but she loves it all the same.

3. All of my grandparents are still alive and alert. They aren’t as young as they used to be, but who is? I still have time to spend with them and, more importantly, they still have their loved ones to keep them company. I can imagine few fates lonelier than weathering your final years without the person you love most.

4. As for me, my health is pretty good, and getting better. Working a set schedule means I have a consistent sleep pattern, and my migraines have mostly cleared up ever since I dropped caffeine from my diet. Plus I recently was able to take my belt in a notch. Which means my tactic of dietary moderation is working.

4 1/2 (just added). All five senses still work beautifully. Watching so many movies has taught me to love my sight and hearing, but lately I've been growing more and more fond of my sense of taste*. This is a pretty great time to be a lover of food, and Columbus is a pretty good place to be to indulge that love, even if like me you're on a budget. There's plenty of different foods to choose from here, running the gamut from old-school to thoroughly modern. Consider that last night I stopped at a coffee shop and picked up some bread pudding**, while today I dropped in at Jeni's Ice Cream and tried one of their seasonal flavors, called Crème de Violet***. If the variety of desserts offered around here is that impressive, imagine the meals one can find.

5. My mind is as active and alert as ever. Even when the task in front of me doesn’t demand a whole lot of thought, I have plenty to occupy my brain. I wouldn't trade my intelligence for anything- not money, not fame, not charisma with the ladies, nothing.

6. I know I complain a lot about my job, but I’m pretty lucky in this respect. I can afford my own apartment, to pay for all my necessities, and still have time left over for the simple pleasures that make my life rewarding.

7. Columbus may not have the formidable amount of cinema and arts options of a New York City, but it beats the hell out of most places. The Wexner Center in particular is invaluable to the cultural landscape of my life.

8. Most of my favorite films are out on DVD, with others on the way. And more as-yet-unseen treasures too, still waiting to be discovered. Yes, I'd love to be able to watch all the greats on the big screen, but being able to see them at all is wonderful enough for me.

9. My guinea pigs are as cute and fun as ever. First I bought Muriel last fall to give me a life to worry about besides my own and keep me company, and a few months later I bought Victoria to keep Muriel company when I wasn’t around. A month later, Victoria surprised me by having babies, and I ended up getting two of them adopted and keeping the third for myself. I couldn’t be happier- Charlotte is as adorable as her mother, and is a welcome addition to the menagerie. And Muriel is as cute and ornery as ever, but that’s OK, since I’m kind of ornery too.

10. In addition to the job that pays the bills, I’ve been lucky these past few months to write for The Screengrab, which allows me to parlay my twin passions for cinema and talking/writing about cinema into a few extra bucks a week. Sometimes I wish I could write about movies full-time, but I’ll take what I can get. As it is, the relatively light writing demands placed upon me by The Screengrab give me an outlet for my love of cinema, plus lend some structure to my weekly routine. When the most difficult aspect of a job is coming up with a new Movie Moment every week, you know you've got a pretty good gig. And being on the same writing staff with Vern is pretty sweet too.

11. My writing has connected me with a lot of other great writers and bloggers online, not just those with a cinematic focus- like this one and this one and this one- but more broad-minded types as well, like this one and this one. You really can’t go wrong with any of the cool cats in the blogroll on my main blog- some post more frequently than others (and most more frequently than me) but they’re all worth reading.

12. I’m young and relatively free. No significant other, no kids. Makes the nights lonely sometimes, but I can deal with it. Even more than when I had just graduated from college, I feel like I have a world of possibilities is open to me. And if one of those possibilities is marriage and a family, then hey, that’s fine too.

* Last year I took my grandma and grandpa out to lunch one day, and my grandma told me that she has almost completely lost her sense of taste. No doubt this is due to a combination of smoking for a few decades and, y'know, being 90 years old, but still, yikes. Much of the enjoyment of eating must be gone if you can't taste your food, and the workmanlike way she shoveled bean soup into her mouth reflected this. Because if you can't taste what you eat, what's left? The texture? The temperature? To no longer be able to taste the foods I love- whether it's a big fat steak or a Galley Boy from Swenson's in Akron- is almost too sad to bear.

** I have a weakness for somewhat outmoded foods (is there anywhere around here that serves a good corned beef hash?) and I'd say bread pudding certainly qualifies. Verdict on this particular incarnation: Not bad, but nothing worth writing home about. Certainly not as good as the place I get bread pudding whenever I'm in Cleveland, which usually uses the previous day's muffins. Usually they would use blueberry, which was tasty enough, but it was a special treat when they had leftover cinnamon raisin muffins to use. Oh great, now I'm craving bread pudding. The only thing that's keeping me from getting it is the fact that it's a 3 hour drive to get the kind I really want. Of such unhappy accidents are successful diets made.

*** Yes, the flavor name is to be translated literally- as in "Cream of Violet." Jeni's uses special edible violets for this flavor, which has a light, fruity taste- perfect for eating in 80-something temperatures. The downside is that they're pretty pricey, but in a way that's good, since a little ice cream is about all I can afford to eat at one time without worrying about packing on pounds. So a small cone has become a kind of reward for a week of healthy eating, which gives me something to look forward to. Next week: Bartlett Pear and Riesling Sorbet!

When 4 and 5 are not the same as 9

Back in grade school, I hated that the teachers graded us on handwriting. Maybe the fact that my penmanship has never been the best had something to do with it, but even then it seemed to me a little unfair that something so contingent on natural ability warrant an official letter grade (I felt the same way about gym and art class). Try as I might I could never manage to get my right hand to make the proper loops on the capital F's, and so on. It seemed to me that handwriting would be better if it was graded pass-fail or outstanding/satisfactory/unsatisfactory rather than A-F grades- after all, an A should be something that's always attainable, and even in my best efforts, I could never manage A handwriting.

(Side note: fuck cursive in my opinion. We got cursive rammed down our throats in grades 2 through 6. Every damn paper in cursive. How much have I used cursive since I graduated? Big fat never. I think even those who aced handwriting in grade school can probably say the same. Sorry for the digression.)

But while today I still sort of question the wisdom of handwriting as an all-out class in school, I respect it more as a discipline. Sure, we type a lot more nowadays than we did back then, but most of us still write things in longhand. Longhand writing tends to be for less formal occasions, such as when we write quick notes for others or even ourselves. While the notes aren't anything fancy, the people I leave them for still have to read them. So I set about to improving my handwriting (manuscript, NOT cursive) so that I wouldn't be misunderstood. That's just good courtesy. AND good communication.

Yet it amazes me how sloppy other people's writing can get. If I find a note written to me that looks like a chimp was trying to doodle, I question why the writer of the note even bothered. What is the point of writing an urgent message for somebody when that person has to hunt you down just to decipher it?

But just like I didn't get in the habit of throwing away my trash after a movie until I toiled in a theatre, I never fully appreciated the value of legible penmanship until I started a job new a few months ago. I work at a bank, and much of my day is spent operating an electronic check processor, one that scans checks from our customers and enters them into the bank's computer system. Ideally, this job would be a piece of cake, and when I say "ideally," I mean to say, "if people took more than 2 1/2 seconds to fill out their checks." The pain in the ass part of the job isn't the scanning of the checks, but the second step of it, entering the check data the processing program can't quite read.

Seriously- if you're paying a bill with a check, don't you think it'd benefit you to write your numbers legibly? How would it benefit you if the 6 you wrote looked like a 0? You could get something shut off for not paying the minimum amount, and it'd be your own damn fault. The worst are people whose 4s, 5s, and 9s are virtually indistinguishable. You'd think it would take some effort to make those look alike, but no. All you have to do is make them all look like cartoon lightning bolts. More common than you'd expect.

There are some other troubles that come with the job (don't get me started on people who write checks in green gel ink), but this is by far the biggest and most common annoyance. I'm sure others have the same problem- consider your local pharmacist, who has made a career of deciphering doctors' scrawled prescriptions. If only the habitual chicken scratchers of the world could be sentenced to a week's worth of remedial penmanship, perhaps working a check processing machine to see what a pain in the ass their lazy, lousy writing is. I'm not asking for "A" handwriting, folks, but how much more effort does it take so that we can read it?