Virtue is its Own Reward

Quick story - we were walking home from school yesterday and in front of the school we found an earring. It had dangling mother-of-pearl circles and it was obvious it was an earring someone would miss. My daughter was thrilled at finding it, but I explained to her that it looked special and that someone was probably looking for it. She could see my point and was a little disappointed, but agreed that someone must really love the earring so we should go to the office and leave it with Lost & Found.

So she gave it to the school secretary, who congratulated her for being honest and turning it in. She told her it was great that she did the right thing, and filled out a "wonderful ticket" - put her name in a jar for a drawing at the end of the week.

Typically, my daughter didn't say a word through all of this, just looked wide-eyed. Then we left and started walking home again. Before we'd left the block, she found a broken rubber band on the sidewalk and said, "Mom, it looks like somebody lost their treasure! We better go turn it in." On the way home we found lots of this type of "treasure" - a candy wrapper, a flower petal... By the time we got home my pockets were crackling with treasure. Those ten blocks between school and home got a nice cleanup!

I titled this anecdote "Virtue is its Own Reward," which seems odd if you consider that Wini was actually rewarded with a Wonderful Ticket. But I didn't mean her, I meant me. It's not like I went through some moral quandry about returning the earring, but I certainly reaped the reward of seeing Wini experience that feeling of having done a good deed.

The Next Stop on the Cheesy Reality Show Monorail

Big Brother is wrapping up, but the cheesy silliness of America's Next Top Model is already calling. I emailed my contact at UPN to ask if we can conduct interviews this cycle, and she enthusiastically responded that she remembered me and already had me on her list. It's nice to be remembered. The girl (Chelsea) sounds about thirteen years old on the phone; I picture her as fresh out of college with a Communications degree assigned to the lowest press contact position on the totem pole. It's not like the journalists are going to be trying to sneak in hardball questions.

Meanwhile, it's almost certain that Ivette or Maggie will win hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which is worse, the nurse who enjoys watching a patient "code" (i.e., go into cardiac arrest and die) or the young, immature Cubana who lives in her own insular existence of her shallow friends and their petty concerns?

What can I say about Maggie? She has vile personal habits, such as peeing on the toilet seat and not wiping it off for the next person. And yet, she doesn't feel comfortable using the same toilet as her fellow houseguests because they have germs. She says she's a nurse, but advises Ivette to put mayonaise on her burn. She thinks aspirin is evil. She thinks Janelle was lying about playing the flute of all things. She's got a lot to say about the people she hates, yet doesn't stand up for her own teammates when push comes to shove. In a conversation about the tragedy of Waco and the innocent children who were forced to live there as the offspring of cult members, she shrugged off their firey deaths, saying they were all "inbreeds" anyway. She isn't looking forward to going back to her job because she hates most of her patients, and is tired of "shoveling shit out of assholes." Oh, and her language is filthy; she routinely calls Janelle the C-word and refers to the bathroom as "the shitter." Lovely.

And then there's Ivette, who has turned out to be the most oddly intense houseguest since that guy who held a knife to another houseguest's throat. Ivette - well, this girl feels things deeply. Unfortunately, she thinks that gives her an excuse to act on every emotion that crosses that tiny brain of hers. Someone eats the ice cream before she gets to it? She's ready to burn the house down. She leaves her lotion in the bathroom and frets incessantly that one of the evil ones will notice it sitting there and tamper with it. She wins POV, and runs around the yard screaming "el tres final" and making an ass of herself humping the lounge chair cushions. When April tells her she's offended that Ivette would celebrate what amounts to April's demise (which is a bit snotty of April if you ask me - Ivette won fair and square), Ivette mopes, whines, and cries for hours. Yes, they had a verbal blowout, and Ivette can yap a mile a minute - but it was the endless aftermath of whining that truly defined Ivette as someone who just cannot see herself as having done something wrong.
What I really hate about Ivette, though, is her bigoted views about Kaysar. At her insistence, Kaysar sat down with her and discussed her problem with him. She told him that he didn't belong in the Big Brother house because he is devoutly religious. I'll spare you her arguments, but rest assured that they made no sense. I'm appalled that anyone growing up in the United States - which was founded on the principles of religious freedom - would espouse such a view. Add to her angry descriptions of Kaysar as, oh, a camel jockey would be the nicest epithet she liked to throw around, and you've got one ugly person. She and Eric had this bigotry in common; they liked to sit around and trash Kaysar, talk about burning the Koran, calling him Saddam and Osama. What's especially galling is that Kaysar had already shared one night in the house that his uncle had been killed by Saddam Hussein in a particularly horrific manner. The Republican Guard left his body on their doorstep with a bill pinned to his jacket for the cost of the bullet that killed him. So nicknaming him after his uncle's killer takes a special kind of cold hardedness that I'm glad I've never encountered in real life. Kudos (I guess) to BB for flushing out the worst cockroaches of humanity imaginable on this season of Big Brother.

Nearing the End

It's so depressing to have Howie leave the Big Brother house. I tried to think of some creative questions that would get past the CBS censors and provoke some sort of genuine response for a change. Beau's interview was crap; he skipped over his own hypocrisy and gave me snippy answers because he caught on to my disapproving vibe. I think Beau is one of the hamsters who thought that what happened in HOH, stayed in HOH. Wrong! The cameras were watching when Beau purposely flashed his teammates in the shower. Gah! I wish I hadn't been watching that night.


I've been in situations before where people band together against a common enemy. I've been in sticky roommate situations; I've lived in coed dorms and in student groups abroad. I have never, ever seen a group of people descend into such vile trash talk as this year's "Friendship." Not only do they tear down everyone in the house not on their team, the instant one of them leaves the room for a bottle of water they get their jabs in at their own teammate. They trust each other so little that they sleep together in a group every night, even if it means sleeping on the floor when there are a dozen beds to choose from. Deep down, each one knows they are untrustworthy...so they take no chances with letting one of their own be alone too long with the enemy.

I can't figure how they can stand each other. As bad as they are now, they were worse in the beginning, when Kaysar was the subject of their constant hatred. At least with Janelle, they hate her for ridiculous reasons like the fact that she's put on a few pounds and still looks like a drop-dead gorgeous leggy blonde. When Kaysar was still around, they mocked his religion. April flat-out told the others the praying was an act so that Kaysar could get more screen time - which is a perfect example of projecting her own inner motives onto someone else.

Ivette is confrontational, so she told Kaysar to his face that he didn't belong in the BB house because he is religious. It floors me that someone in this country can espouse that type of discriminatory views one moment and insist that Kaysar doesn't respect women the next. We never got an explanation as to how Ivette came up with her theory that Kaysar disrespects women, but that was the one statement that really seemed to get under his skin. Rational, respectable people don't like being told they are sexist bigots, Ivette. Meanwhile, what gives a lesbian holding a Catholic rosary the right to say someone else doesn't belong in the game because they respect their religion more than she respects her own? It's an argument so irrational and offensive it defies understanding. I can't wait to call her out on this when she's evicted - hopefully this week!

Tellme More!

Nick works for Tellme, a company that wants to hack your phone, dude. They had a paper airplane contest at their company picnic. Actually, the picnic was a blast! They held it at a campground designed for fun called Saratoga Springs.



The DJ ran a few games, and Wini was happy to participate in the paper airplane contest. Here's a few shots of us having fun at the picnic. That's a cable car ice cream bar Nick is eating...otherwise, I'm sure he would have resisted temptation. *snicker*





We're watching the reports of Hurricane Katrina anxiously. It sounds like New Orleans is flooded everywhere. Industrial Canal had a levee fail. I know Grandma's house must be in jeopardy being right on Bayou St. John's. I'm betting the French Quarter does fine; that close construction has withstood many hurricanes over the years.

Nearly There

I came close to giving up on the hamsters entirely. I'm supposed to be analyzing their cess pool of filth, filtering out the sex talk, and retelling humorous anecdotes about their antics in the Big Brother house. In reality, I filter out the sex talk, sure, but the hot topics of the house are bodily functions and other minutia related to grooming, exercising, eating, sleeping, etc. It's so freaking BORING. How many times can they happily share the news of their bowel movements and think it's funny? An infinite amount, it seems. Cheesy reality show or not, there's some kind of psychological force at work here because it happens every damn year on the feeds. At least there's not a nose picker this year like BB4's Ratbert.

We've been getting into Geocaching as a relaxing family activity...sort of. Wini's five, so she gets a little restless until we reach the point where we actually leave the car. She's learned how to read a compass since we started. Not only that, she can tell what direction she's facing by the placement of the sun in the sky. I never expected her to be interested, but she's quite good at it.

I haven't been on the geocache site enough to figure out if people just lie and don't put it up when they can't find a cache or if everyone in the world is cleverly sniffing out the hidden treasure with perfect efficiency, but we are at about a 60% find rating. We make silly mistakes, like dropping a digit when we scribble down the coordinates or forgetting to put the GPS in the car in the first place. We wandered around downtown Redwood City last Saturday for quite a while before we realized we were missing a digit in the coordinates. On the plus side, we learned that RWC had a slogan contest. The winner? "Redwood City: Climate Best By Government Test". Cool.

Nick's company had a kick-ass company picnic this year at a fabuloso spot: Saratoga Springs. We played in the pool, painted faces, made paper airplanes for a ad hoc contest, ate BBQ, waded in a stream, won a Spongebob Squarepants at carnival games, and watched Wini dance by herself while the rest of the company ate dinner. It turns out you can tent camp there, so maybe we can make a short camping weekend before the cold weather hits.

Saturday, we went to yet another five-year-old's birthday party. I've been to a slew of these now, and I appreciate the ones that are done right - like my friend Sonia's, who hired an entertainer for the kids and treated it like a BBQ for the adults. We had a blast and actually got to socialize for a change. Then there's the one we went to on Saturday. First off, a fairy party at the beach is a bit of a challenge because the beautiful outfits don't mix well with the dirty sand of a beach on the SF bay. But whatever, the kids had fun running around in their fluffy skirts and wings.

But why did the father have to pull out the cake before lunch? They decorated the empty sheet cake with all the girls watching, then took a hundred pictures of their kids posing by the cake while the guests got more and more antsy. During pictures, the birthday girl leaned over and started taking candy flowers off the cake. Other kids reached in but all of us normal parents stopped our kids from touching the cake. The birthday girl's mom thought it was funny, so she just laughed and watched as her daughter pulled off every flower, gave it a big solid lick to make sure it was hers, then threw it in a pile on the table. All the other girls watched in misery as the pile grew bigger and bigger, but her parents never said a word.

Finally, they cut the cake and passed it out to the girls - who had been watching the cake get decorated and mauled for a good 20 minutes by now. They had put tiny plastic butterflies all over the cake, and each girl got a few...until the dad walked around and took them back. Can you believe this bozo? It's not like they're going to use them again next year, is it? These were not special decorations, they were akin to a plastic paperclip. My daughter very politely asked if she could keep one of them, please - the dad snapped, "No. Sorry." and whipped it out of her hand. Jerkface idiot!

Another oddity: not long after we arrived in the park, Nick noticed a small squirrel shivering and covering himself with his tail. He didn't run away when people approached him, and you couldn't help but see he was ill. What with the wild press stories about the bubonic plague hitting California, we decided we should call animal control. Poor little guy.

The truck took its time getting here, of course, and a little while later I spied (to my horror) one of the dads at the party petting the sick animal. I was on the phone but I ran over and told him we'd called animal control as the squirrel was obviously sick. But he just petted the poor terrified thing and said he just needed "a little love and affection." In a while, the squirrel made a break for it, and he ran off to hide in the parking lot, dragging his hind legs. There was something very wrong with him; maybe he'd even been hit by a car, but thanks to that goober he was hiding in the parking lot where he was certain to be hit soon.

I never saw the truck come by, but Nick saw them pull away. He went to catch them but the dad who had been petting the squirrel had seen them first and told them it was a baby who just got confused and went off to his mother. *smacking forehead* So if the plague hits San Mateo county, we know who to blame!

Confessions of a Reality TV Recapper

It's nearing midnight, and instead of writing a recap I'm starting this blog. Hi, I'm Susan, mother of one precocious little girl who started kindergarden this month. I'm married to Nick, who's the linguist, programmer, and train fancier I call my best friend.

I watch Internet streaming video of the contestants in the Big Brother house, then write recaps of what they did that day. They don't have anything to occupy their time - no television, books, knitting needles or even a pencil to pass the time. And yet, I'm watching them, so who's the one wasting their time?


My daughter is known for inventing jokes. Example:
Daughter: Mom, what does a cat say when you give it a shot?
Me: Huh? Um, I don't know, hon.
Daughter: Meowch!

Here's another:

Daughter: Why is the toast sitting by the trash can?
Me: It broke and we can't fix it.
Daughter: How come it broke?
Me: I don't know, it can't make toast any more.
Daughter: We should give it to someone who doesn't like toast.

'Night!