WAKE UP LITTLE SUSIE

Last night I dreamed I  was awake.  It was just dumb luck that I didn’t go outside for a long walk in my pajamas.  Of course when I woke up, I had to be awake all over again. Researchers tell us that dreaming is healthy and normal for sleep,“It helps your brain process emotions and 
re-visits memories.”

However, bad dreams can also wake you up and interrupt your sleep.  This is often caused by “high stress and anxiety.” Also as people age, you might get up once or twice a night to visit the bathroom. This activity is  normal—unless you run many times trying to win the Kentucky Derby.  Two cups of cappuccino  after dinner might not be such a good idea.

However, let me not get side-tracked from investigating sleep. It’s something we all do, but some people are better at it than others.  Lynn Johnson said, “Insomnia gives you the misery of staying up all night without the fun.” 

Here’s some advice from the experts:  If you can’t fall asleep after about 20 minutes, get up and do something quiet and dim, but nothing dim-witted.

 Read a physical book,  but whatever you do don’t read it on your tablet or smart phone. The blue lights will  be brighter than you are, and trick the brain to think it’s morning and bye bye melatonin. If your brain thinks it is morning you can get an overactive brain that wonders problems such as:  If  a driverless flying car lands on my roof where’s the liability? And then, it’s time to get up.

If you suffer from insomnia maybe some comforting advice from Anthony Burgess might help,
“Laugh and the world laughs with you. Snore and you sleep alone!”

Of course, you can always try some relaxation  exercises such as heavy breathing or thinking of a random word and visualizing objects that start with each letter in your word. You might start with the word—-Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious…

Good Night and Good Luck   (Edward R. Murrow)

STICKY MUSIC

After running a few errands this morning, I returned home and started humming a song. I didn’t pay too much mind to what I was humming until I stopped and realized, “I am singing, Three Blind Mice.” How dumb is that!  Well, it got not only dumber but extremely irritating, because I couldn’t rid myself of the ditty in my head. Don’t know what precipitated it, unless I was thinking of the voters in the forthcoming election. Nah! It couldn’t be that.

What had lodged in my memory, like a broken record, was an “earworm”---an annoying tune that repeats itself in an endless loop. Scientists who study the earworm phenomena suggest that to get rid of it one should replace the song with more amenable thoughts. They suggest that working on a Sudoku Puzzle or on anagrams (word games rearranging letters) or reading something that will challenge the cognitive part of your brain will do the trick. 

So, I picked up Consumer Reports Magazine and started reading page after page about, “How to Protect Your Privacy.” The article was so depressing that I threw the magazine into the trash and cheered myself up by singing, “Three Blind Mice---See how they run”---and then I forgot the rest of the lyrics which made me feel even worse.

Three quarters of people who experience earworms report unique songs not experienced by others. A western Washington team of scientists found that Lady Gaga was the most common artist to get stuck in people’s heads with pop songs such as Just Dance and Paparazzi. That sounds like much more fun than getting stuck with three mice.

While reading about earworms, I learned that the song, “Put the Blame on Mame”, obsessed Jean Harris, who murdered her lover, Herman Tarnower.
If I remember correctly, the three blind mice had something to do with a butcher knife. Maybe she could have blamed them instead of Mame.

Here are some suggested cures for earworm:

Identify the song playing in your head. 

Well, that won’t work for me because sometimes I make up Country Western songs in my head such as, “I won’t leave until I milk the cow. I won’t leave until I slop the sow. I won’t leave until I mow the hay. I guess I just won’t leave today. ” And those are just the lyrics.

Search the Internet for the complete version of the tune in your head.

That’s impossible, because to do that, you have to know the name of the song.

Play the tune for several minutes and listen to it.

Hooray!  That way the earworm can become a permanent mental soundtrack you can never eliminate from your brain.

After the song is finished playing, go and do something that avoids your mind from wandering.

Impossible!  My mind goes places I’ve never even been.

Replace the earworm with another song.

That’s just what I need---twin earworms.  So where’s the answer? 

“The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind”

Esther Blumenfeld

PERSON TO PERSON

In by-gone days, when customer service was excellent, Rich’s Department Store, in Atlanta, Georgia, was known for retaining their employees for many years until they retired.  These employees knew their customers, and good service developed loyalty on both sides. At Rich’s a customer could return any item for cash without any questions.  That’s why mothers used to tell their children, “Behave, or I will return you to Rich’s.”  

In the days of good service, a customer could reach a knowledgeable employee just by dialing a telephone number.  No one was put on hold or bounced around from department to department before reaching a real human being.  Nowadays, the new rule is, “We’ll get you there eventually.”

Verizon, one of the best providers of bad customer service has hired the worst of the worst artificial telephone operators imaginable.  As far as I am concerned, “If it is artificial, it ain’t intelligent!”   When I called to ask about a large rate increase on my bill, I dialed the support line only left to yell at my phone for 20 minutes—shouting, “Representative!” 

When I finally  reached a human being, she lowered my rate, but said, “Call back in December, and you can probably get a special deal.” When I asked, “Is there a way I can reach you again?” She said, “Hell, NO.”I made up the “Hell” part, however I did ask, “Why can’t they give me the special rate now?” She said, “I just can’t do that, because I don’t know what the special rate will be.” 

I then told her, “Don’t take this personally, but when your Company was called, “Comcast” everyone hated you, so then the company renamed itself, “Verizon.” Now everyone hates Verizon.  She said, “I’m sorry about that,” but I didn’t believe her.  No wonder service is so bad.

Marshall Field said, “Right or wrong, the customer is always right,” but then look at what happened to his store.  Now it’s called Macy’s. I don’t understand why companies spend millions on advertising to attract new customers since they don’t care about keeping the ones they already have—let alone treating their employees well. It can’t be  cost effective to have a constant employee turnover—spending money training people who can’t leave your business fast enough.

If employees are happy and stay with a company, it’s got to be good for everyone—the boss, the employee and the customers.  As Kate Zabriskie, the founder of Business Training Works, said, “Although your customers won’t love you if you give them bad service, Your competitors will!”

Esther Blumenfeld

WHAT'S IN YOUR CLOSET?

Mark Twain said, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

The seasonal struggle has begun. It’s time to switch wardrobes from summer to winter.  Of course, fall is somewhere in-between as well as off-season.  This presents a problem—too cold, too hot—but rarely just right. Then, there’s also the hidden stack—those clothes you hung in the back of the closet for a few years waiting for a fashion comeback. There’s a difference between probable and possible.

Unfortunately, you can always fall into the roller coaster weather trap… when one day it’s summer weather and at the next day it’s freezing outside.Transitioning to winter usually involves wearing layers of clothing. That way you can strip a morning jacket and sweater down to a tee-shirt.  The good thing about this activity is that by afternoon you look as if you have lost 10 pounds.  However, in the morning you look like a weather balloon.

Space in a closet presents another problem since summer clothes are light and airy and winter clothes are heavy… unless they are threadbare which leads us to some sensible wardrobe rules:

If you are a man do not wear suspenders and a belt together—unless you have a really big beer belly.  If so, no one will notice the belt, and you may need the extra accessory to hold up your pants.  In that case they can be stored together. Also, men should unbutton single-breasted jackets when seated. However double-breasted jackets should stay buttoned.  It really depends where you want spaghetti sauce spots. 

So, here are some suggestions when organizing your closet:  

Hang the clothes you wear everyday closest to where you can get to them, and hang the fancy outfits further away unless you are a party girl. 

When purchasing a new item buy something that can coordinate with something you already have. For instance, your helmet should go with your motorcycle jacket.  

And finally, it’s a good idea to color coordinate.  This can be a problem if you are color blind.  My Mother used to instruct me to, “Cross the street when the light turns blue.”

In 1837 Hans Christian Andersen wrote the fairy tale, THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES. The plot involved two con men who posed as weavers and sold, to a vain Emperor,  a special suit of clothes that was supposedly invisible to anyone who is stupid or unfit for their job. The Emperor and his officials could not see anything, but were afraid of looking foolish or incompetent.

Later in the story, the Emperor parades throughout the town completely naked. No one said anything, until an innocent child shouted out, “The Emperor is wearing no clothes!” 

In that case, Collective silence had led to an empty closet.

Esther Blumenfeld

SHOP TIL YOU DROP

 Yesterday’s newspaper informed me that my neighborhood shopping center had been sold—-one more time.  However, this sale was to a developer who plans to replace the shops with houses and office buildings.  I don’t know why he couldn’t just fill it with sand and call it a desert, but developers don’t do that. Someone said, “The fountain in the middle of a dead mall still has coins in it, because people are wishing for the 90’s back."

Shopping used to be fun especially at Holiday Time. A person could window shop and see beautiful items that tugged at the heartstrings and the wallet.  Nowadays, some people enjoy shopping at Amazon.  Sitting alone in a room, staring at a computer doesn’t sound like a great adventure to me—whereas, there’s nothing like taking a two-year-old to a mall, dropping his hand while reaching for your credit card and a then finding him all gone! 

Now that’s an adventure!   It was a heart stopping experience I will never forget—the disappearance of my son, Josh.  I finally stopped yelling his name when I heard music playing nearby.  Sure enough, I found the little fellow dancing in the shoe department.  He had gathered enough of an audience that I could have sold tickets and purchased a pair of Christian Louboutins. However, the first thing I bought was a toddler harness with a long leash.  I could hang on and he could still hide in a coat rack.

Oh, the adventures at the mall.  On a cold winter day, I enjoyed watching the groups of senior mall walkers, who would burn calories walking around the mall and then get them back with breakfast at the Food Court, but fun was had by all.  I miss going to the mall with a friend, having lunch and then going to a block-buster new movie.

I will miss chatting with my favorite  sales associate who liked her job and  would help me with the merchandise. Little did I know that unhappy sales associates who hid from customers was the first indication of the demise of department stores. 

When my son was a pre-teen. he learned responsibility when I took him the the mall and we planned to meet at a specific time and place.  He liked his independence and was always on time, and I knew I could trust him. Years later, it prepared me to teach him to drive our stick-shift car, but it took a long time for me to allow him to get out of first gear. But I digress…

Losing my mall seems so discouraging, but this morning when I turned on the national news. I heard a story that there is a “mall recurrence”  on the East Coast, because people miss what malls have to offer, but the stores will update what they have done before.  I guess I’m not the only person who wants to touch the fabric of a garment rather than the screen on my computer.  Maybe there can be a compromise.

Of course malls will change with the times, but maybe there’s hope left for those of us who still like human interaction.  I fondly remember the little kiosk in the mall where a teen was selling earrings.  I asked her,”Do you have any clip earrings?” She replied, “No, but I can pierce your ears.” I thanked her, and said, “Sorry, but I need at least three opinions before having surgery.”  Where else but a shopping mall can you have an operation with your purchase?”

Esther Blumenfeld