Black Friday indeed

Dear Woman in the Bathroom at Ross:


Last week, I was in the stall next to you. Perhaps you didn’t hear me, or see me, or notice my shoes under the stall. I really want to give you every benefit of the doubt.

It’s holiday season, after all, and maybe you needed to beat someone else to a clearance pillow case that you spotted moments before nature called.

And I know we women tend to be creatures of habit. I understand the impulse to close an open door, shove a drawer closed, or open a public restroom door with a paper towel. Truly, if ever there was a sister who gets habits, it’s me.

But really, could you have maybe stopped for one second and thought before turning the light off when you left?

I don’t know if you noticed, but there are no windows in the bathroom at Ross, which means it’s REALLY dark when the lights are off. I mean scary dark. Like I wish-I-had-never-seen-the-commercial-for-The-Blair-Witch-Project dark.

Trust me, I know that of which I speak.

At first I thought to myself, “Is this what going blind feels like?” I had just that morning been to the eye doctor for my exam, and wondered what he had used in those eye drops. He did say my eyes were aging, but surely he that didn’t mean that I might go completely blind at any given moment.

Then I realized that, no, I had never heard of anyone going blind instantaneously … in a Ross bathroom. This made me start laughing out loud in the dark, because really, why do these things happen to me?

I’ve heard it said that women are their own worst enemies, but a public bathroom does not seem like a fair battle ground. Talk about a vulnerable opponent.

Then I realized that I was the same woman who had given birth to two babies, changed diapers one-handed when necessary, and sat up all night with sick children. Surely I could get myself out of this personal Hades, right?

The first part, getting out of the stall, wasn’t too hard. Because really, we can do this with our eyes closed. But then I had to remember where everything was positioned in the room. Was I in the end stall or has I passed a few? Was I about to walk into the sinks? Was the door on the right-hand side or the left-hand side? Where exactly is the light switch?

When I was recounting my travails at dinner that night, my 16-year-old son said with a smile, “Why didn’t you use the light from your cell phone?” NOW he tells me! He can be a punk sometimes.

But that’s not the point, is it? The overriding question remained: What kind of women turns off the light to a public restroom?

So dear Woman in the Bathroom at Ross (may I call you WITBAR for short?), next time you choose to cast me into total darkness before going to browse the clearance pillow cases, please consider tossing me a bone. Maybe roll a flashlight under the stall before you leave?

Help a sister out.

No 'Keeping Up With the Fezziwigs' from this mom

Okay, I’m putting it in writing before I have a chance to become insufferable: I will not become a stage mom. You have my word on it.

Never mind that I was as excited as my 10-year-old daughter when she found out she got a part in the upcoming production of “A Christmas Carol.” Never mind that the four-day waiting period to hear if she had made the cast was completely unnerving (and she was a little stressed too).

No, I am completely in control and refuse to become another clichéd stage mom, a la the mothers of Honey Boo Boo or the Kardashians. I pinky swear.

And just to ensure that I will not go down that dark path, I have come up with the following Rules to Keep Me from the Slippery Slope that is Stage Momdom (or RTKMFTSSTISM for short).

• I promise that I will not wear a t-shirt that reads “My daughter totally rocks Act 1, Scenes 2, 4, and 7.” In fact, I will wear it only as pajamas from here on in (or maybe under another shirt on performance nights, like Superman).

• I promise that I will not start a standing ovation mid-scene immediately after my daughter delivers her one line in Act 1, Scene 7. However, if YOU can’t help but stand and applaud, I will gladly join you.

• I promise that I will not say my daughter’s line aloud with her while she’s on stage and I’m in the audience. Still, mouthing the line with her is not off the table.

• I promise that I will continue to keep it real by calling her by her given name instead of referring to her as Fezziwig Daughter No. 2 for the next three months of rehearsals.

• I promise that I will allow her to speak in her usual voice at home. However, I think it’s entirely normal to require the entire family to speak in British accents on rehearsal days. I’m confident that my family will happily get on board with this plan.

• I promise that if this acting thing works out, I will never ever let my daughter be on any Disney show whatsoever. I think we’ve seen how most of those careers shake out (I’m looking at you Ms. Lohan).

• I promise that I will not make any odd requests for my daughter’s dressing room prior to performances, such as Perrier water at room temperature or M&Ms with the shells peeled.

Of course I’m joking (kind of) but let’s be real here. It’s pretty darn hard as a parent to NOT get excited when you see your child doing something he or she loves. From her first steps, to her first ballet recital, she really is the best thing since sliced bread. From his first word (Dada, of course!), to his first karate kick, he is the coolest kid you’ve ever met.

So in essence, we all star in our own little plays that we call “life.” And I plan on applauding the loudest for the entirety of my children’s lives.

Bravo!

Eileen Burmeister is a freelance writer who lives in Winchester, Ore. She can be reached at burmeistereileen@gmail.com or you can follow her on Twitter at EBurmeister.

The wind beneath your wings shouldn't hiss

I have this chair at work that is an exercise ball balance chair. It’s one of those Pilates balls that sits in a base with wheels, and it’s supposed to be more ergonomically friendly than your standard Mad-Men-era office chairs. (Between you and me, until this thing starts making my coffee when I get to work first thing in the morning, the jury’s still out on how much friendlier it is.)


I inherited the chair from my predecessor in the office, a yoga instructor who swore by the healing properties of the exercise balance ball. Seeing that my existing chair was torturing my sciatica on a daily basis, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

The problem is that the chair has a tendency to whirl when you least expect it to, making the promised “balance” seem like a wished-for dream. One time I bent down to tie my shoelace and almost ended up in the office next door. Through the drywall, that is.

Plus, my reaction time is slower since I have to take into account the physics of the chair. Let’s just say jumping out of my chair isn’t really an option.

Which is where I was three months ago when a loud, hissing noise was coming from the hallway outside my office. It sounded like a very large snake was warning someone that he had gone too far … not a comforting sound on your average day at the office. It startled me so much that I jumped out of my chair, propelling myself off balance from the balance chair (oh, the irony!) and nearly stumbled into the hallway to figure out what was wrong.

Other employees were out in the hallway as well, trying to discover the source of the hissing. Turns out it was a loose valve of the AC unit in the conduit hoochamajig. (This is why I majored in English and not engineering.) Bottom line, the hissing stopped.

But wouldn’t you know it, it happened again a few weeks ago. As the loud hissing started anew, I sat still this time, learning my lesson from before.

But the strangest thing happened. No one else started to congregate outside my office in the hallway. The hissing was as loud as ever, but no one seemed to mind except me.

Then I noticed something odd.

As I was looking out toward the hallway over my computer screen, the screen kept getting higher and higher as the view of the hallway disappeared. Was my desk rising? Was I melting?

Finally, I looked down and realized that this was no AC valve gone awry. No, my exercise ball had sprung a leak and my hopes of balance were rapidly deflating before my very eyes.

I took the ball home, sad and deflated of any balance it ever offered, and pumped it back up, all the while laughing over how long it took me to figure out what was going on.

I’m back on my perch, so to speak, but I realized that the exercise balance ball is a metaphor for life.

I’ll be sure to let you know what it is the moment I figure it out.

Eileen Burmeister is a freelance writer who lives in Winchester, Ore. You can email her at burmeistereileen@gmail.com or you can follow her on Twitter at EBurmeister.

No exercise balance balls were harmed in the writing of this article.

Chevy Chevette ... it'll (not) drive you happy!

Our 16-year-old son recently bought a car from a trusted family friend. Sure, the car has over 250,000 miles on it, but this 1996 Honda Civic runs surprisingly well. Granted you might point out the dent in the hood from the past owner’s run-in with a deer, or the faded paint on the roof, or the crack in the window. But as far as first cars go, this one is a winner.


At least my husband and I can see that it is a winner, especially compared to the sorry jalopies we’d owned over the years (kids, ask your parents what a “jalopy” is). Of course our son, Nathaniel, wasn’t around when we owned these cars. Ever since he’s been old enough to remember we’ve had sensible and reliable family cars, and we’ve been blessed to be able to afford to get them fixed when they need it. 

He wasn’t around when we were newlyweds, poor as dirt, living in a 600-square-foot apartment and happily accepting day-old bread off of the Safeway truck. We were graduate students in love, and living from paycheck to paycheck. Macaroni and cheese made a complete meal, and date nights consisted of the $1.50 cheap theaters in Denver.

Before our marriage, I had a penchant for truly horrible car decisions. While I was paying my way through college, I grew tired of the beater cars that kept breaking down. As a commuter student, I needed a reliable car to get me to and from the university, so I decided to bite the bullet and buy a brand new 1986 Chevy Chevette. But wait! Why buy one when you can lease one for $10 a month cheaper and save yourself a full $120 a year? (At least that’s how the sales guy put it). Being young, thrifty and foolish I signed on the dotted line and leased myself a Chevette. For five years. With no option to own. Ah, youth!

The car, although brand new, went through three alternators in those five years. At one point, the driver’s-side door stopped opening, forcing me to climb over the console and exit out the passenger door. Then right about the time I was finishing up college, the passenger-side door stopped opening as well, forcing me to crawl through the hatch and hoist myself over the two seats. This was neatly timed with my student teaching at an area high school, making for an interesting entrance and exit each day.

After the “Chevette Lease Debacle,” I got smart and bought a used but reliable Nissan Maxima which I loved. I then started dating my soon-to-be husband. I heard through the grapevine that his last car was a VW van with carpeted ceilings and fuzzy dice. It was a match made in heaven.

Since then, we’ve made some wiser choices, learning from our many mistakes, but we realize that we’re only one step away from a really bad car choice. In fact, I recently passed a Chevy Sprint that had the back hack-sawed off like an El Camino wannabe, and I muttered, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

So now it’s time for our son to learn the hard way how first cars have the power to make your spirits soar and break your heart, all in the same afternoon.

Full disclosure: The Chevette was my SECOND car. My first car was even worse – a ’74 rusted out Dodge Dart. But that’s another story…

Eileen Burmeister is a freelance writer and reliable car owner, despite the dent in the back panel. She claims a deer ran into the car. You can email her at burmeistereileen@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter at EBurmeister.

Ode to the Ellipses

In honor of National Punctuation Day, which was earlier this week, The News-Review is re-publishing this column from 2009.

Going cold turkey on National Punctuation Day

I know it’s wrong to use it in such a way, and I know that it’s become a crutch, but I must admit that I’ve been having an illegitimate love affair with the ellipsis for years now. Surely, I thought, I could find a support group among the many writers who have been similarly led down this particular primrose path of pauses, but alas … none existed.

Not to be dissuaded, I set out and started my own support group called “Ellipsis … Anonymous.” I invited everyone to my house at 2000 W. Maple … a place, I must confess, I bought for the address alone … and I served M&Ms in batches of three.

However the people who showed up tended to trail off midway through their stories, or stopped abruptly before staring off into space, which seemed appropriate but really stymied the healing process. It was … daunting.

I found myself wandering the streets that night, talking to myself, binging on one story after another without end, drinking deep from the nectar of incomplete thoughts until … I hit rock bottom.

It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t pause for breath in my prose without automatically hitting dot-dot-dot. I was ravenous … a wild animal on the prowl for a pregnant pause, a thoughtful moment or a half-baked idea so I could swoop in and get my fix. I was putting ellipses where commas would suffice … ellipses when em dashes would do the trick … ellipses when a yadayadayada would convey the same idea. It was all too much and I collapsed under the pressure.
I woke up the next morning in the gutter outside of a Barnes and Nobles, gripping my beat-up copy of “Love is…” poems and staring in the face of one harsh reality … I needed help.
I got up out of the gutter, flipped open my laptop and started writing … hair of the dog and all that jazz. What I was after was a mantra to get me through the tough spots, those times where it’s just so … tempting to use that one, single punctuation, albeit incorrectly. I needed a higher power to see me through, and … amazingly … this little beauty fell out of the sky like a penny … or coin … from Heaven:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the proper uses for the ellipsis;
Courage to use it when I should and deny myself when I shouldn’t;
And the wisdom to know the difference.

Doesn’t it seem appropriate, then, that today, National Punctuation Day, would be my quit day? I have decided to go cold turkey. No more ellipses for me. I’m clean and sober starting now of course that means I can’t use any punctuation for fear that the pause in and of itself would throw me headlong into a full blown relapse from which I might never recover until I could once again use my beloved and reliable ellipsis just saying the word makes this all the more harder until I simply … break … down.

They say that admitting the problem is half the battle, and I’m counting on that to be true. But right now, I have an inexplicable desire to learn Morse code and eat M&Ms. And besides, as my friend Scarlett once said … “Tomorrow is another day.”

Here's hoping cottontails are allergic to bananas

Our 10-year-old daughter Lily is volunteering at the Saving Grace Animal Shelter. Which is good and bad: Good because it’s giving her an important lesson in volunteerism; bad because she comes home each week wanting to adopt another dog.

Clearly she doesn’t remember our last foray into dog ownership: Puddy, the border collie/beagle mix. We adopted Puddy about six years ago. We named him after David Puddy, the Seinfeld character who played the witless boyfriend of Elaine – a man who was equal parts lovable and stupid. What could go wrong, right?

Within days we realized just how ill-equipped we were to own a dog.

The signs were many. It started out that when I found him on top of the kitchen table, covered in blue ink, munching on a magic marker of the same color. And to add to my infuriation he simply looked at me, head cocked, as if to say, “What’s up?”

Another time I found Lily’s Ken doll (from the storied Barbie/Ken romance) splayed across the rug in Lily’s room with both hands gnawed off well past the wrists.

And it wasn’t just toys and art supplies that drew Puddy like bees to honey. One night I made some homemade banana bread for the next day’s breakfast. I left it to cool overnight on the counter, out of Puddy’s reach.

The next morning I found it on the floor, covered in dog hair, gnawed around the edges. At first I thought my husband Craig had gotten his hands on it, but then I remembered that his hair was different than Puddy’s (thankfully). When I finally spotted Puddy he was curled up in a tight ball, trying desperately to avoid all eye contact. Oh, yeah, he was as guilty as sin.

We tried every trick in the book with Puddy but could not tame the beast. In the end, a friend of ours adopted him from us and then proceeded to move to Cape Cod. We try hard not to read into the fact that Puddy moved as far away as doggedly possible without leaving the country.

Still Lily is a lover of all animals, especially dogs. The day we gave Puddy away, we drove out to Saving Grace Animal Shelter and adopted a kitten named Sabrina. We’ve had her for three years and adore her. Except when she’s spitting and hissing; this is mostly directed at Lily.

We’ve tried to explain to Lily: “When you try to: (1) dress a cat in doll clothes, (2) try to paint a cat’s nails, or (3) braid a cat’s hair … well, let’s just say she’s not going to purr.”

Then Lily reminds me (as she’s shoving Sabrina’s leg through the arm hole of a doll party dress) that I once tried to bathe the cat, resulting in a ripped shirt and claw marks up and down my arm. Touché, Lily. Touché.

So since Sabrina is not willing to act like a dog, Lily persists in asking for a dog. Of course we want to give in, but we are reminded of the debacle that was pet ownership with Puddy. As a result, we’ve encouraged Lily to look toward adopting other, gentler animals to satisfy her desire. And I think we settled on one: a bunny.

Thanks to all of the bunnies at the Douglas County Fair this summer, Lily now has a bunny fund on her dresser, quickly filling with any spare change and allowance money she can earn.

I’m hopeful, but realistic. I’ve read enough Peter Rabbit to realize that our neighbors’ gardens may be in for a treat.

I hope they like bunnies in Cape Cod.

Eileen Burmeister lives in Winchester, Ore. She can be reached at burmeistereileen@gmail.com or you can follow her on Twitter at EBurmeister.

Oxford Dictionary's new words are simply ridic

It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean back-to-school time. I don’t even mean college football season. Of course I’m talking about the time of year when Oxford publishes its list of words added to the online dictionary.

And once again I am left sitting at my desk, head in my hands, weeping for the future of the English language. You think I’m overreacting? Tell that to the tweep with the ridic soul patch who has a hella nerve asking for a group hug. Yes, all of those words and phrases in that preceding sentence are now part of our lexicon at oxforddictionaries.com.

Sigh.

Let’s take them one at a time:

• Date night, n.: “A prearranged occasion on which an established couple, especially one with children, go for a night out together.” Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure we’ve already cemented the meanings of “date” and “night.” So couldn’t we have figured out the meaning of that compound word using nothing more than our wits?

• Hackathon, n.: “An event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.” So it’s like a dance-a-thon only easier on the feet. And less festive.

• Hella, adv.: “Extremely; a large amount.” For example, that’s a hella stupid word you’re adding to the dictionary.

• Inbox, v.: “Send a private message or an email to someone.” Fair enough. We all use it when we’re talking about our email, so I see how this should become part of the dictionary. Well played, Oxford.

• Lifecasting, n.: Defines “the practice of broadcasting a continuous live flow of video material on the Internet which documents one’s day-to-day activities.” I think we call that “Jersey Shore” and “The Kardashians” and they’re horrible. Why encourage more of the same by giving them an official word? If it’s a word or phrase you’re after, I think the more appropriate would be “train wreck.”

• Lolz, pl. n.: “Fun, laughter or amusement.” It was depressing enough when they added LOL (laugh out loud) a few years ago, especially because an entire generation of senior citizens thought it meant “lots of love.” This lead to disastrous misunderstandings, such as sympathy cards that were signed “I’m so sorry for your loss. LOL.”

• Micro pig, n.: “A pig of a very small, docile, hairless variety, sometimes kept as a pet.” Um, haven’t we successfully described that as a “small pig” for years?

• Mwahahahaha, exclamation: “Used to represent laughter, especially manic or cackling laughter such as that uttered by a villainous character in a cartoon or comic strip.” I have no words.

• OH, n.: “A person’s wife, husband, or partner (used in electronic communication).” This one is wrong on many levels. First, as an Ohio native, it’s just confusing. Second, what does OH stand for? It doesn’t say in the entry. Old hag? Ornery hooligan? I’m left with more questions than answers.

• Photobomb, v.: “Spoil a photograph by suddenly appearing in the camera’s field of view as the picture is taken, typically as a prank or practical joke.” In my day, we simply called that “Cousin Jerry being a jerk again.” Now I know the appropriate word to use.

• Ridic, adj: “Ridiculous.” So let me get this straight. Instead of saying “laugh out loud” you say LOL (which is still three syllables, so you’re not making life any easier, I might point out). And instead of saying something is ridiculous, you get the first part out and just stop. Are you so apathetic that you don’t even have the energy to finish the word? Whatev.

And there are more. I just can’t bring myself to go on. You can see the entire list at oxforddictionaries.com if you can stomach it.

Why do I revere the dictionary so much that these additions make me cringe? Because my mom treated it like the Bible. Growing up, if we asked my mom what a word meant, she’d say, “Look it up in the dictionary” in her best Moses voice. It was most-used book in our home. The dictionary held all sorts of meanings, universes, ideas and helped explain the world around us. And I’m not seeing how “mwahahahaha” helps further explain the world around us.

In fact, I think it’s ridic and it makes me LOLZ.

Eileen Burmeister is a freelance writer in Winchester, Ore. She can be reached at burmeistereileen@gmail.com or you can follow her on Twitter at EBurmeister.