Author: Maria Johnson

Do the Laundry, the other RPG

Having read about the sci-fi series about a clean-up detail, I’ve decided to create my own RPG game about doing the laundry.

If any game developers are interested, go ahead and contact me — I’m sure we can make a deal.

Here’s the premise: harried wife and mother has all kinds of  adventures in the cyber world, from podsquatting, to blogging, to actually working on a book. All of these activities, her joie d’vivre if you will, are thwarted by an ever growing pile of laundry that must be tackled on a daily basis.

The pile seems to replicate itself constantly. Just as the last vestiges of towels are taken care of, a new pile of jeans and dirty socks emerge to once again interrupt the player’s mission of writing The Great American Novel (with apologies to Philip Roth).

Players choose avatars that look like them (if they are harried moms, frumpy moms, or sexy moms with initials I won’t use here, but if you know what I’m talking about–let it go)) or can choose other avatars, such as snarky husbands (this species also has an avatar in a French maid’s outfit), unruly children, or mud-tracking pets.

The object of the game is to finish a 300-page novel before you die, while dodging dropped internet connections, cooking dinner, transporting children all over town in a mini-van in need of an oil-change, and of course, the never-ending pile of laundry.

Players level up as they complete a page of the book. Along the way they can collect bonus points for not burning dinner, remembering to pick up a child before the police call child services, and managing, of course, to do laundry.

Power pellets and health points can be picked up by consuming cups of coffee. Extra experience can be gained when coffee consumption leads to delirium.

There are ribbons for achievements in washing hot, cold, and warm cycles, drying, folding, and bonus levels for putting away laundry.

There are completion sets for matching socks in all colors and sizes.

Only serious investors need apply.  All others, particularly members of the immediate family, will be put to work on the spot.

the cardinals…again

One of the most popular posts I have ever published is this one, clickie here. It was just a little pun –a picture of some birds (cardinals), and some priests (Cardinals).

That is all — just a little fun in the afternoon.

Spring comes with a vengeance around here, and once again my yard is absolutely teeming with birds which reminded me of that post. Anyway, evidently “cardinal” is a huge search term, because it drives a lot of random traffic here.

I’m sure that the bird-lovers figure out rather quickly that a) I am not a bird-lover, and b) this is not a tree-hugging site but a rather random Catholic hodge-podge of my personal psychosis of the day.

So, if you get the joke, enjoy the pictures. Evidently someone who didn’t get it thought it was smart to tell me that in the comments. LOL. That’s funnier than the cardinals. I wonder what would have happened if I had referred to them as Princes?

more of the human condition…

There’s something about getting a book as a gift that absolutely delights me. Holding the package and feeling the weight of it, and seeing by the shape that it must certainly be a book inspires all kinds of conjecture on my part. What could it possibly be? I’m very rarely disappointed, too. Any book is good!

When I was a little kid I used to get history books for Christmas. It’s a little weird, I know. Don’t hate on my parents. 🙂 I still have one of those books, so old that it just barely includes the moon landing. The contemporary history (by that I mean the last 100 years) isn’t as interesting to me as the ancient cultures, so as far as I am concerned, the book is timeless. A part of me is also amused that some of the language in the book might be quite dated and politically incorrect. Score one for clarity (I can’t stand political correctness).

My favorite part of the book, as I said, is the section on ancient cultures. I could read about the cave dwellers forever. The Neanderthals fascinated me. The Cro Magnum amazed me! From there to read about the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Phoenicians was an exercise in pure joy. I probably know more about the Egyptian and Nubian cultures than is useful, even after watching an episode of Stargate.

I suppose that my interest in history led to an appreciation for anthropology and sociology. Even though my field is in literature, I cannot escape the influence of history (and sociology and psychology) on literature. In fact, it is so tightly intertwined that often I don’t see where one leaves off and the other begins.

I often come across some random readings while I am working on lesson plans or research. I forget that even though cultures are old and times have changed, we are bound across the years by the bonds of our humanity. I ran across this piece this morning, and it has weighed on me all day:

“It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul.” W.E.B. Du Bois from The Souls of Black Folk

I get it. I often talk about the human condition, here, because it’s what I love to write about, but in my literature classes, because what else is going to capture the human condition but the art with which we express ourselves? It amazes me that no matter what era, what culture, what continent, we struggle with our place in the society, and alone, with our place in the universe.

Du Bois, to place him in context, wrote at a time in American history when the Black man was considered no man at all. Part of the rationalization that led to such a condition was the focus on the group, the mass, rather than the individual. We can do much to dehumanize by not seeing the individual. Perhaps that is why gifted photographers eschew the big picture in disasters and tragic events, and focus instead on the eyes and the close ups of the victims. It humanizes the experience.

I am amazed and really not at all surprised that 100 years later, Du Bois’ words still ring true.

Why I still have a flip phone…

On April 3rd, Apple is going to release its iPad and here I am contributing to their marketing plan and I’m not even going to buy one. I’m not going to say never, but if I were to be buying any Apple products, it would be to replace my stolen MacBook Pro. Yes. I said stolen, right out from under my nose. It resides in the boy’s bedroom across the hall these days.

But I digress. This little reflection is about my awful little flip phone that chirps like a Star Trek communicator. Every time I pop it open to take a call (I still do that) or attempt to text (nearly impossible—thank heavens for opposable thumbs) I have a giddy moment of Trekkie joy.

Every time. I’m not lying; it’s fleeting but true.

Lucky for me I am surrounded by Trekkies and Trekkers (you can follow the political debate about the names here), but over the years I have gone somewhat underground with my fangirl obsession. It’s not that I am ashamed of it, I just sadly realized that fewer and fewer of my students were getting the cultural references. Part of me feels that perhaps they are just living in silly little vacuums of ignorance, but my own children look at me funny when I suggest something reminds me of Trek, any Trek.

Except that maybe Chris Pine has done a lot for the franchise. They know who he is, but again, that’s just another distraction from my point isn’t it? See what I mean about being a fan? The mere thought of Star Trek sets me into ramble mode.

I was talking about my flip phone – the antique mess from Samsung. Yuck. Its only redeemable quality in this world of smart phones is my continued delusion that I am 8 years old and pretending to be on an away mission (in any color shirt but red, of course).

I may have to turn in the faux communicator for a real 21st century phone soon. Even when it was new it was a terrible phone, but I’m not in a great big hurry to get an iPhone or a Droid (if I tell myself that maybe I’ll believe it). I’ll miss flipping it open and cherishing that moment where life imitates art.

Of course, if they ever figure out how to turn my pretty gold brooch into a communicator, all bets are off.

The Manicure

from a twitter challenge by @10MinuteWriter to do the unthinkable – 10 minutes of uninterrupted writing:

I didn’t understand the need for the right manicurist until I found her. It’s true – I can possibly be that shallow.

It’s a shocking revelation to me, too, but I suppose I always knew the truth of it. When I was a little girl, living in Pastorita and enjoying a slice of Cuban-adapted Americana by leaving the house in the morning and not returning until lunchtime, I often caught a glimpse of what our mothers were doing while we were out plotting playing.

I never really gave any consideration to what my mother might be doing or need beyond my personal needs – wasn’t she supposed to be clinging to my every need? Of course she was, just as my own children expected it of me.

So to imagine that my mother wanted – no – perhaps, needed a manicure every once in a while was beyond me. Who wanted to be girlie, anyway, when there was a great stickball game going on in the big field behind the houses? But there she was, sitting at the aluminum kitchenette with the plastic seat covers while one of her girlfriends gave her a manicure.

I remember the emerald green of the Palmolive dish soap as she soaked her fingers in the warm sudsy water, the smell of acetone mixing with the heady smell of the nail polish, the laughter, often cut short when we’d run into the kitchen in search of Koolaid, and the pretty red of her nails when they were done.

When I got older and discovered that maybe having pretty nails was a worthy pursuit I followed my mother’s model. When I got together with my girlfriends we did each other’s nails. It was always good enough. After all, within hours they’d be chipped. We may have been old enough to admire the color on our nails, but we probably weren’t mature enough to know how to handle ourselves as young ladies.

I, for one, was pretty likely to find myself caught up in a three-on-three game of basketball or calling dibs on the winner for a ping pong match. My nails were doomed even before the paint had dried.

It didn’t matter. Nail polish is a pretty forgiving commodity. If I chipped the paint, I’d slap another coat on the nail and move on. What in the world was so ceremonial about those afternoons that my mother spent playing manicurist or getting manicures?

I discovered it many years later, after I was grown and had my own family. The ritual of the manicure, at least for me, has less to do with looking good and more to do with getting out of the house and doing something for myself. It’s something that we often forget to do, especially when we are in those years with the little ones running around clinging to us, and expecting us to be an extension of them.

That’s when a little escape, even if it’s just to slap a little paint on the nails, can be a big break – a little vacation for the sake of sanity.

I don’t need that escape anymore – if I find myself needing some time to myself I just ask for it, or close a door. I’m not likely to have my children’s fingers reaching in to me under the door anymore. If one of them did at this point, then they’d deserve having their fingers stuck.

But I still enjoy a manicure. It’s an escape that never loses its allure, even if I go home and chip it right away when I put away the dishes.

the fridgerfrater

My refrigerator always had my kids’ artwork and school work and every other kind of important document produced for them and by them stuck at precarious angles by weak magnets and ready to slide off if I opened the door too quickly.

If it was a rite of passage for them to have their masterpieces posted there, it became a rite of passage for me and the empty nest to see them slowly start to disappear.

These days my expensive stainless steel refrigerator, a symbol of my now “grown up” house, has nothing posted on it (partly because it won’t hold magnets, but mostly because the kids are grown).

Not today. Soldier Sally has sent us a beautiful coloring book drawing. Of a weird unicorn thingie with turtles on its back. And a crazy butterfly intent on flying toward dragons.

It’s better than a Rembrandt.