Belle Weather (14 page)

When you work from home, you tend to talk to the furniture. No, no. What I meant to say was that you tend to obsess over things that you wouldn’t have time to worry about at the office.

Like how my Internet Service Provider (SOB) has started sticking stupid little advertisements at the bottom of every e-mail I send.

Let’s just say that it’s monumentally annoying to write a heartfelt e-mail to a friend in crisis only to realize that Big Dumb Brother has added, “Want to learn how to send mail for free AND get videos from across the Web?”

Pretty soon, they’ll be selling the space to that creepy widow in the unpronounceable country who wants to split her dead husband’s vast oil well fortune with me just because.

Just yesterday, I was telling filing cabinet that I’m going to fight back. After all, they could put
anything
at the end of my e-mail (“Republicans Rock!”) and I would have no control.

I decided to be Polly Proactive about the situation and I e-mailed my SOB to tell them I found this nasty little free advertising postscript extremely intrusive and to kindly stop doing this.

Now of course I realize how truly idiotic that was because, four auto-replies later, we’re still nowhere, and I could swear lamp just giggled.

The company’s response was obviously computerized because it had nothing to do with anything I wrote: “There is no problem with your computer or account! This is our way of sharing with our customers exciting new offers and services!”

Oh! Well then! Bite me!

Fortunately, they added, my input was valued and “very beneficial.”

Oh, well, that’s nice. No! That’s not nice at all. They’re just manipulating me into thinking they’re nice.

The response continued, “Customer input is the best way we know to provide such great service.”

Such great service? But this was a
complaint
! My brain hurt.

Finally, it got to the point: There is no possible way to delete the nasty little postscripts from my e-mail and their response for now and all time would be, essentially, tough toenails.

My second, third, and fourth e-mails ranged from simply shrill to potentially libelous. I figured that tougher language would ensure that I’d get a human to respond instead of the ever-more-annoying computer-generated mail. I even went so far as to warn that I should not be messed with because it just so happened that I was a famous book writer and a nationally syndicated columnist and they most certainly wouldn’t like me to write about their abysmal customer “service” because tens or perhaps even dozens of people would possibly read it.

This, apparently, didn’t exactly leave them shaking in their cyber boots.

The very next day, I got a generic e-mail from “Dallas” thanking me for “voicing concerns.”

That was it.

I hate “Dallas” and the rest of the computerized response team. And, boy, if you think I’m mad about it, you should see desk calendar.

Despite our fight, my ISP, the SOB, continues to send me little reminders of how hard they’re working to keep spam out of my life.

Before the Internet, there was only one kind of spam, that lumpy, gelatinous pink stuff that came in a can with a key. Which, now that I think about it, is just about the coolest thing imaginable: food that must be opened with a key. And the key would break off sometimes and you’d lose it and then you’d just have to settle for the Vienna sausages, which were neither sausage nor from Vienna, so go figure.

I figure spam—the Internet kind—must be a huge problem because I’ve been getting more of those messages that require me to fill out a form before the recipient will condescend to read the e-mail I’ve sent.

The message usually goes something like this: “I apologize for this automatic reply to your e-mail. To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I have approved beforehand. If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please complete the request form below. Once I approve you, I will receive your message in my inbox.”

Oh, screw it. You’re not worth all that trouble.

Once you
approve
it? Oh lah-dee-dah-dee-dah.

I don’t know why this bugs me unless it’s because I don’t like being lumped into the category of potential spammers such as the long-winded pity-partying rich widow who so desperately wants to divide her immense fortune with me even though we’ve never met.

I also get frequent e-mails from a desperate deposed despot who wants to send me millions of dollars if I’ll first send him a cashier’s check to bail out a relative wrongly incarcerated in a some nasty Thai prison. Like I care.

It’s nutty, I know, but I don’t like the notion of being “approved” or “not approved.” What if I’m not approved? Junior high all over again, that’s what.

Another cyber trend that grates is the auto-reply. Let’s say you send a warm, witty, and well-composed e-mail to an old friend. You hit “send” and in a matter of seconds, the friend has already replied.

So you open it but what’s this? It’s the friend’s auto-reply saying that she is unavailable to read your e-mail. For reasons of vacation or a business trip or gum surgery, you will simply have to wait.

Well, OK. But where does my e-mail go in the meantime? To e-mail purgatory? Will it ever be read or will it float around in space, unseen, like yet another Jason Alexander sitcom?

I get that auto-reply is sent so you won’t think the person is being rude by not acknowledging your e-mail, but I don’t care. I want a real, live Darrin Stevens-on-
Bewitched
-type secretary to tell me that.

And who’s to say auto-reply won’t take over completely one day, protectively saying that you’re out of the office when, in fact, you’re sitting right there at your desk digesting that giant poppyseed muffin you just had to have?

After all, it’s not such a stretch to think your e-mail will start lying for you when it’s already adding intrusive little messages to your personal correspondence.

While I’ve become completely dependent on e-mail (don’t tell my ISP, the SOB), it doesn’t mean that I want it on my cell phone, which is something Precious and duh-hubby can’t grasp.

My cell phone (gasp!) doesn’t even take pictures.

Which is just as well because do we really need pictures of everything right away?

A friend brought her tiny new camera phone to dinner one night and tested it out on all of us.

“Look!” she squealed. “Here you are five seconds ago sitting right beside me! At least I think that’s you. It’s kinda hard to tell on these things.”

She was right. It was either me or a very large and unappetizing block of parmigiano-reggiano.

“I’m going to e-mail this to everybody!” she said, punching a few more magic buttons.

While we waited for our dinner to arrive, she reviewed the 232 pictures she’d already taken on the phone, including several pictures of her toes.

“I got a pedicure,” she gushed.

“I’ll alert
Inside Edition,
” I said snottily. Where the hell was my mojito?

The cell-phone picture show is a modern version of the ’60s slide shows of the annoying neighbors’ trip to visit the world’s largest frying pan, or some such.

“And look here, this is Cammie Sue’s birthday party last week.”

OK, so, “A,” I don’t know Cammie Sue and “2,” I don’t care.

These camera phones bring out the worst in people. The other day, I was waiting in line at a restaurant when the guy ahead of me began to flex his gi-normous biceps.

“Welcome to the gun show!” he said. More like the mo-ron show, if you ask me.

While he posed and preened, a woman gleefully aimed her cell phone at him. For a happy moment, I didn’t realize it was a phone and I thought she was trying to vaporize him but, sadly, she was just taking his picture and e-mailing it to her goofy-ass girlfriends.

Everybody has a phone with Internet access and a little camera built in and fabulous ring tones. Everyone except me.

When my daughter’s nine-year-old friend’s phone erupted with Justin Timberlake announcing that he was bringing sexy back, I said “Enough!”

This necessitated a painful-for-all-of-us lecture on How Music Has Gone into the Shitter Ever Since Along About 1987.

In the mall, cell phones buzz around me with Shakira’s poetic message that “Lucky my breasts are small and humble, so you don’t confuse them with mountains.” Girl, who needs Maya Angelou?

And who can fail to mist up at Fergie’s anthem: “My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps.” Hmmm. “My lunch, my lunch, I swear it’s coming up.”

The Princess’ friend changed her ring tone to something by John Mayer but even that was on the nasty side, I thought.

“I’ll never let your head hit the bed without my hand behind it.” What does he mean? The headboard? And, if so, that’s just about the most unromantic thing I ever heard. Why not: “I will never leave the toilet seat up on account of you don’t like it.”

Still, I guess we can all be grateful that I haven’t yet heard a ring tone for Diddy’s delightful “Young, black and famous, with money hanging out the anus.” I feel ya, Diddy. That’s so beautiful it’d bring tears to a glass eye. Maya Angelou, I repeat, you are
toast
!

While I’ll admit that I’m a tech dinosaur, what with my whinings about computers and cell phones, even I was shamed when the Princess asked me, with pretend innocence, if my cell phone came with its own booth.

OK, maybe it was time for an upgrade. But I swear I will not be one of those tacky people who are forever taking pictures with the thing. Celebrities have zero privacy thanks to this cell-phone stalking that goes on.

You just never know who’s going to snap your picture and splatter it like bird shit all over the Internet. Just ask Kate Moss, if you can get her head out of that big old bag o’ blow, that is.

How
TV Guide
Ruined My Life

Hons, it’s a sad moment when you realize that your true calling, the reason you were put here on God’s green earth, will always elude you.

I refer, of course, to my dream of being the person who writes the program descriptions for
TV Guide
.

The dream died in the year of our Lord two thousand aught six when my beloved periodical, that which hath served as coaster to many a sweaty glass of iced tea protecting my mama’s mahogany drum table for the better part of four decades, abruptly changed formats.

Oh vile corporate America, which takest away my dream! And, paradoxically, giveth me a strange urge to write in some kind of faux Biblespeak.

Enough of that, ye-all.

I just want to up and cry!

No matter where my writing jobs led, I always felt that the Holy Grail would be to write the program synopses for
TV Guide.
It wasn’t my fallback, it was my dream job and, now, verily, it will never be.

As a small and admittedly weird child, I whiled away numerous hours scribbling possible program descriptions for imaginary episodes of my favorite TV series. And I never stopped.

For
Gunsmoke
: “A mysterious stranger threatens to disrupt the annual Calf Rope Festival in Dodge City.” For
Friends
: “Hilarity ensues when Ross and Joey switch identities for a day.” For
Lost
: “The freakish tropical polar bear devours all the island inhabitants except a whiny blonde who is deemed too scrawny to bother with.”

I pictured being paid a big pile of money to watch hundreds of hours of TV before reducing a complicated plot line to a few powerful nouns and verbs.

I practiced by comparing my work with the ones in the real
TV Guide
and usually I liked mine better. Some people are blessed with the ability to cure disease or invent life-saving technology for people in third-world countries. I am blessed to be able to succinctly convey the perfect distillation of pathos and humor in any given episode of
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.

Sadly, as we all now know, my gift will never be used because of the format change which makes
TV Guide
just another idiot periodical that I positively can’t put down.

In making the change, the publishers announced that TV listings would shrink 75 percent, leaving more room for stories about the stars, TV trends, reviews, and other stuff we could get in a gazillion other places. I’m sorry; did that sound bitter?

And what’s with the new inferior
TV Guide
’s obsession with
American Idol
?

It will probably shock y’all to read this but I have never watched a single episode of
American Idol
. Nope. Not one. Never, ever.

Is there help for people like me? People who don’t know but only hear snippets about some nasty Brit named Simon or rumors of loopy behavior by Paula Abdul? And what, pray tell, is a Ryan Seacrest?

The truth is, I need
TV Guide
just to be able to function in polite society and pretend to be an “idolator.” Everyone I know, and I mean everyone, even the old man who smokes through a hole in his throat at the produce stand, is obsessed with
AI.

I’m like, “Are these peppers really three for a dollar?” and he’s like (growly as always) “Kelly Pickler got robbed last night,” and I’m like, “Who?” and he’s like, “You can’t shop here anymore.” At least I think that’s what he was saying.

Perhaps I can’t relate to
Idol
because I’m such a crappy singer myself. Although, and I don’t like to brag, absolutely no one can touch my steamed-up shower version of Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache.” It’s idolicious!

As self-appointed pop-culture high priestess, I do need
TV Guide
to speak intelligently when Mandisa is voted off the island or whatever the idolators do, but that doesn’t mean I like the new format.

The revamped
TV Guide
looks so, well, ordinary. Jerry Seinfeld once observed that no one ever handed anyone a
TV Guide
. The compact little magazine was always thrown. Was there any other magazine you can think of that could sail across a den so magnificently? I thought not.

TV Guide
was, for five decades, incredibly and undeniably aerodynamic. Now we are forced to throw
Reader’s Digest
across the room but it’s just not the same. I’ve tried it. And, yes, I do realize how pathetic that sounds.

So who really killed
TV Guide
? As nutty as it sounds, the magazine did itself in when it provided on-screen program guides for cable companies.

Predictably, quality has suffered. For two weeks in a row recently, I was subjected to this electronic program guide description of my beloved
Days of our Lives
: “Relationships grow and die in the fictional town of Salem.”

That’s it? Are you kidding me? What about something a little more worthy of the very name
TV Guide
? Let’s see if I’ve still got “the gift.” Ah, yes! How about “A frantic Samantha fears her fiancé, Lucas, will call off their wedding when he realizes she was once a man”?

Synopsis: As coaster, as airplane, as guide to freakin’ life, I will always miss the real
TV Guide.

It’s selfish to whine about losing my dream job when so many of the big names in television are suffering just as much.

Poor Dan Rather quit CBS in a huff after the network dissed him by essentially giving the award-winning anchor and watery-eyed veteran of innumerable national calamities an office the size of a Cheez-It with instructions not to use the phone for personal calls.

After all those years, Rather’s famously folksy turns of phrase were no longer welcome at the Big Eye. Which made me madder than a mule chewing on a wasp nest, by the way.

TV can be a cruel medium. Look at the rise and fall of Star Jones, one-time humble McDonald’s fry girl turned brilliant court reporter turned voracious man-eating, weight-losing, fur-wearing Bridezilla.

Barbara Walters, 105, said that she was just sick about Star’s sudden exit from
The View
because she and co-hosts Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar had been planning all along to simply feed the suddenly diminutive Star to
View
add-on Rosie O’Donnell during sweeps month.

“The timing sucked on this one,” said Babs.

When watching
The View,
which I periodically do if dragged into a room and my eyelids are glued open a la
A Clockwork Orange,
I want to feel like I’m with my posse, my gal-pals, sipping Cointreau margaritas and bitching about our menfolk.

I’m ashamed to say it but I liked Star better fat. She bought her shoes at Payless, for heaven’s sake. How much more real and girlfriendy can you get?

But Star got skinny and greedy and committed the ultimate tacky foul by asking sponsors to pay for her wedding in exchange for a few ham-handed mentions on the show.

Celebrities are terrific at mending battered images, and all Star has to do is go on Oprah’s show and apologize for unmitigated tackiness. If that doesn’t work, she can always immediately adopt at least one baby from a war-ravaged country or simply borrow one from the perpetually pregnant Heidi Klum.

And speaking of Oprah, I’m officially Over Her.

Over the years, I’ve sent copies of all of my books to Miss Thang and I’ve never heard pea-turkey-squat back. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t honestly expect to hear anything from O, but I was, as she is so fond of saying, “putting it out there in the universe.”

Sadly, my universe apparently ends at O’s mailroom and I suspect those books never made it upstairs to the Harpo offices, much less to the rarefied jasmine-scented air of O’s personal workspace, which I imagine to look a lot like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory with lots of tiny, little Oprah helpers scurrying about and doing her bidding.

I never even got the pre-stamped autographed picture of O advising me to “Live Your Best Life!” or similar drivel.

That said, it was with no small amount of skepticism that I watched Oprah’s recent show on
The Secret
. I practiced writing a
TV Guide
synopsis in my head just for old time’s sake but it came out sounding bitter: “Oprah reveals the secret to the perfect life based on the rants of author Rhonda Byrne and a panel consisting of a former drug dealer, a recovering slut, and the guy who writes the
Chicken Soup
books.”

Oprah’s panel of geniuses agreed that you can get anything you want in life by simply thinking, feeling, and acting positive.

Shit. All I’d done was use correct postage. No wonder she never responded to my books.

Watching the panel of “Secret” experts, I realized that my negative energy had ensured that Oprah would never read any of my books. My dismal failure to attract O was my own fault. I had turned Oprah into Noprah.

How, you ask?

Well, that’s easy. Hadn’t I said to the woman at the post office, “Here goes
nothing
!” and “Great. Another $5.47 down the frikkin drain” when I mailed them to Chicago?

According to
The Secret,
I should’ve said to the postal clerk: “This book is going to be delivered personally to Oprah Winfrey’s hands and she is going to read it and love it and endorse it and soon I will be able to hire a personal assistant and I won’t have to stand here and wait in this line full of loser assholes and
watch the hair on my legs get longer
….” Oops, sorry, that whole positive energy thing isn’t really my strong suit.

And, because everybody listens to Oprah and has run out, purchased, and is now living by
The Secret,
the postal clerk will smile lovingly at me and say, “You’re absolutely right! Oprah is going to love this book and you are going to have a great life and I am too because now that I have
The Secret
I no longer daydream about plunging an oyster knife into my husband’s ear while he sleeps.”

Well, all righty then.

Bottom line: I’m re-submitting my books to Oprah and happily visualizing them flying off the shelves because, as the former drug dealer or maybe it was the ex-ho said, “like attracts like.”

I’m also taking the wisdom of
The Secret
to heart and reminding myself out loud every day that “I. Am. Phenomenal.” And because I have put all these positive thoughts into the universe, I have become a human vessel filled with gratitude and forgiveness.

Who is going to be really pissed if this crap doesn’t work.

Dang, there I go again with all that negative stuff. My friend and Sunday School teacher, Beth, says that whenever she has a negative thought, she just snaps a rubber band that she wears on her wrist to remind her to shake off the bad thoughts and be more positive. If I’m being honest, Beth’s solution, which costs less than a penny a week, seems like a much more economical solution than buying
The Secret
book, accompanying ninety-minute DVD, and signing up for
Secret
seminars at the local Ramada where everybody is just as big a loser as you.

Watching Oprah carry on about
The Secret
during two entire episodes made me want to shake her and remind her that she’s from “Miss-sippi.” Maybe she’s been living in Chicago too long. In the South, we are innately skeptical of this sort of drivel. We’re still smarting from buying all those “lightning rods” that still sit on top of some of our houses, not to mention those anointed “prayer cloths” that the TV preacher swore would make our bunions go away.

In the immortal words of George W. Bush, “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on you again. Naw, that’s not right; fool me twice and, oh, what the hell, we won’t get fooled again.”

We’re over it; we know life isn’t that simple (we have the bunions and burned-out home place to prove it). To buy into
The Secret
is admitting that I believe that all I got to do to get dinner on the table is to put out there in the universe that I’d like some meatloaf, snap beans, and fresh corn to materialize onto my family’s plates long about 6
P.M.
like we’re the freakin’ Jetsons. Not gonna happen.

To hear
Secret
head cheerleader and author Rhonda Byrne tell it, all we have to do to get anything we want (weight loss, perfect health, fame, fortune, early ’90s Dennis Quaid when he looked really hot, etc.) is to “become that which you want on the inside and you shall receive it in the outside world.”

My big ass.

Speaking of which, why don’t I just
Secret
my way to trading in my lumpy carcass for the the perky posterior of a twenty-year-old aerobics instructor? I’m putting it out there in the universe. Unfortunately, it’s gonna be fighting with the heartfelt wish for a pan of homemade peach cobbler that I also just put out there. Yes, hons, that’s right: It’s a perky ass vs. peach cobbler SmackDown. Then again, why choose? I can have it all, as long as I “ask and believe, I will receive,” says Byrne.

Besides, Byrne says overweight people get that way from “thinking fat thoughts.” That’s precisely the sort of noodle-brained logic I’d expect from a woman who looks like she weighs ninety pounds soaking wet.

No, Sugar, they get that way from eating macaroni and cheese at the Cracker Barrel five times a week and twice’t on Sunday.

Even though
The Secret
smacks of hooey and hokum to most God-fearing Southerners, I’m sure there are a few who are thinking it’s worth a try if it helps them get a husband with a trust fund or a boat slip in the best marina.

Even my best redneck friend, Dempsey, says he’s using
The Secret
to get a new bass boat. Face it, y’all: When rednecks embrace
The Secret,
that tells me that it has done gone mainstream.

“I just sit around and picture me sitting in that bass boat,” says Dempsey, whose wife, Lo-Retta, turned him onto changing the universe with his mind after seeing Oprah on the TV at the Laundromat one fateful afternoon.