Or, as it would be celebrated in my house, national banana nut bread day. I must confess, more than once this month I’ve given in and bought a banana nut muffin from the cafeteria downstairs in my building. They’re expensive as far as muffins go, but as an occasional treat, so worth it.
I haven’t made banana bread in a very long time. For one thing, my bread pan went missing after my last move. Also, I have a hard time waiting for the bananas to ripen. That’s just as well. I don’t need a whole loaf of the stuff sitting around my kitchen, waiting to be eaten.
It may be a little late to plan to make banana bread today, but if you love it half as much as I do, put it on your to-do list for the near future.
If you’ve ever lived in an apartment, you’ve gotten mail for previous residents. Some people leave without forwarding addresses, and some mail comes after the forwarding has expired. When I first moved into my apartment, I got a ton of it.
The problem is, you can’t just throw it away. It’s a federal offense to do so. A felony. And in case you think they never prosecute, according to some attorneys, they actually have on occasion, when, say, it’s a summons that’s ended up in the trash. Now, I don’t know if anyone has spent the maximum time in a federal prison (five years), but that’s not a place you want to spend any time in.
I did some research on other laws you might be breaking without knowing it, but I won’t bore you with them since most of them you won’t be breaking if you have any common sense. But I was shocked today when, after mentioning the “wrong mail” law to some of my colleagues, they launched into a conversation about laws they’ve broken while being fully aware of what they were doing. Not just talking, but bragging. I left the area. I didn’t want to hear it.
Okay, the statute of limitations probably applies to most, if not all, of what they’ve done, but really.
Which brings me to this point: don’t talk in public about things you don’t want posted on social media. When I got home tonight, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and saw that one of these braggarts had, in some detail, listed one man’s, shall we say, youthful indiscretions. Okay, she didn’t name names, and I didn’t know who she was talking about. I’d done my best to forget what I heard, and frankly, I don’t know most of the people involved, but goodness.
We live in an era where anything you say or do could be reported, or worse, recorded, and there’s not much we can do about it. Some of that works in our favor. A friend of mine accidentally left her wallet at the checkout in the grocery store, and when she went back to get it just minutes later, it was gone. She called the police immediately, and discovered that not only did the store security cameras identify the person who took it, but a middle school-age kid taking random videos (he was bored) caught the thief in the act. His mom had called the police to turn over the video.
The world is moving so fast that I can’t keep up with it. The mail law I described above I’ve known about for years, but I don’t know if there even are any governing social media specifically. I know the industry has taken steps to self-regulate, and my guess that is in part because they don’t want government stepping in and telling them what they can and cannot do.
That was the motivation behind the Hays Code of the 1930s, which regulated what you could and could not say or do in moviemaking. It, in part, led to the Golden Age of Hollywood, when, in my opinion and that of many others–including some top filmmakers of today–some of the greatest films of the 20th Century were made.
Self-regulation is a good thing, if not always reliable. Take Twitter, for example. It self-regulated, then was sold to a man who doesn’t seem to think the rules apply to him. Frankly, a lot of social media is too big to regulate. I don’t follow Tik Tok, but I know it’s huge. Probably beyond regulating fairly, to be honest.
Be careful in today’s world, and do what you can to be fair. That’s the best we can do in some situations.
Thirteen years ago began the most painful period of my life. I won’t go into it, except to say people lied to me, people lied about me, and judgments were made based on those lies.
After it was all over, I heard this over and over again, “there’s a reason for what you went through.” I still say, yeah, the reason is some people are just plain evil. However, some good did come out of it, although on the balance I’m not sure it was enough.
The main thing that happened to my benefit is I’m less likely to get pushed around. Before this, that happened on a regular basis, especially at work. I remember one of my bosses saying, “you’re one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with–maybe too nice.” This on a job were I was accused of being too blunt by some others.
Of course, some of that bluntness came from differences between the way northerners and southerners address issues. I was trying to be nice and fair, but learned the hard way you don’t say “no” to a southerner. You say “maybe” and never address the issue again. For example, I had a co-worker who asked if I had time to help her with a project. I didn’t, and said so. I was told later by my manager I should have said “maybe” and left it at that. You say “maybe” in the north, and it’s interpreted as, “I’ll do what I can to help you.”
But I digress. Like I said, I was pushed around at work on a near daily basis. It was painful for me and painful for the people on my job who cared about me. They’re the ones who came to my defense when lies started spreading about me, and to this day we remain friends.
But after what I went through on that last job, the place where all the pain began, I toughened up. I’m still a nice person, and I catch myself being “too nice” from time to time. But not nearly as much. My manager on my current job is a fair person–she understands, for example, that there are two sides to every story–but she can be blunt, which is difficult for some people. It doesn’t faze me.
Once upon a time I would have assumed she didn’t like me because of that bluntness, and would have done everything in my power to get her to like me. The problem is, that kind of obsequious behavior generally has just the opposite result. People lose respect for you, and tend to, yes, push you around. Now I’m not saying I know my manager would do that, I’m making a general statement, but I can bet she’d lose respect for me.
If there is a reason for what I went through, something that would balance all the pain and cost to me, my family, and my friends, I have yet to see it. Maybe it helped someone else, I don’t know. I believe good can come out of evil, and I believe God works all things together, but I don’t believe it justifies what people are capable of doing.
Today’s Bloganuary prompt is “What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?”
When I was about eight, I was taking swimming lessons. The final requirement was to jump off the high dive, something that made my eyes grow wide with fear. I tried to get out of it, but there was no way they were going to let me off the hook. So I climbed the ladder to the top, crying the whole way.
When I reached the diving board, I walked to the edge, looked down, and froze. I stood there for an eternity until a very kind high school boy walked out to meet me and told me he’d hold my hand as I jumped. That didn’t really allay my fears, but I knew I had no choice. So we jumped.
I’d like to say that leap into the deep end of the pool was exhilarating and made me want to race up and jump once more, but it wasn’t and didn’t. Instead, I never went back to that pool again.
These days I don’t think of the high dive when it comes to things I’m afraid of, although I doubt you could get me to climb up and jump. It’s sky diving that comes to mind. I can’t imagine what would get me to jump, unless it was to save my own life. However, I don’t see myself getting in a small plane equipped with sky diving gear to start with.
Fear of heights is really a fear of falling, I’m told, and that makes sense. After 9/11, I had frequent nightmares that I was on top of one of the twin towers and had to jump. I always woke up at the point I realized I was going to die. It makes me think about those for whom that jump became a terrible reality. I already knew I could never work in high rise, but that tragedy reinforced my belief.
I don’t even think I could go up in a hot air balloon. I’d be on the floor of the “basket” the whole time. What are the other high-in-the-sky sports? Don’t even mention them to me. A friend of mine dated a pilot for a time. and he took us up in his small plane. I wasn’t much fun on that excursion.
Yes, fear of falling is the thing I’m most scared of, and you’re not going to get me that high off the ground without knocking me out cold. And that’s that.
My World With Words 
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