Back to the Flashback: VHS

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I could always tell the caliber of people I was around by their VHS collection. Nevermind what movies they had, I'm talking about the actual tapes themselves. If their tapes had labels and the writing on those labels was printed up in a factory and accurately said what movie it was, then I was in wealthy company. I can tell you for a fact that not one movie in my house had a real label on it. 99.9% of our movies had a blank tape label with the name of the movie written in black magic marker.

I guess I should say movies (plural) because we never used the high quality SP recording speed. That was the one that only gave you two hours time, but the movie actually looked like something. No, we used the EP speed which gave you six hours and you could fit maybe three movies on there. Of course they looked like they were recorded with viewmaster and had all those lines going through it. Sometimes we had a good working VCR with a tracking button that could fix it. Other times, we just dealt with it. Besides, crappy picture was the least of our problems.

If your movies have handwritten labels then you only came across that movie one of three ways: Bootleg, copied from another tape or copied from TV. Every good ghetto person knows somebody who could get them a "good copy" of a movie that was still in the theater. Usually it was the dude in the barbershop, because they'd actually play the movies in the shop like it was Circuit City or something. There'd be some huge out of focus picture on the cover box, and the tape itself may or may not have a fake sticker, but the movie was somewhat clear. Ironic, this goes on today with DVDs.

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Then there were the movies that people copied themselves. Sometimes people were balling like that and had two VCRs. They'd rent a movie, play it through one while recording it on the other. At first that would get you a real clear copy until Erol's Video, Blockbuster and Hollywood caught on to that. Then all of a sudden you'd be sitting in someone's house and the movie would go dark for a second, come back light, turn red...do a lot of weird stuff to deter you from copying their movies. Of course this didn't work because these were the same people watching bootlegs with people walking in front of the camera and half the screen out of focus. The last thing we cared about was some distorted coloring.

Ironically, the most ghetto of all methods wasn't the bootleg from the theater or the badly tinted Blockbuster rip off. The most ghetto was the one that crept up on you. You go over someone's house and start watching a movie. You get about fifteen minutes into it and all of a sudden the bumper from the network comes up and you see a commercial.


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CBS MOVIE OF THE WEEK: DIE HARD! Will be right back

Hold up, did you record this off REGULAR TV?  That's when you start laughing your ass off. I don't know what's funnier, the people who try to pause during the commercial break but just mistime it or the ones who don't even care and just record straight through. My grandmother has just joined the 1990s and has a VCR now. She buys tapes from the flea market. In the middle of The Color Purple a commercial for Windows 95 came on. I'm still laughing over that one.

Flashback: Tapes

I bought my daughter an iPod Touch. She's one and a half. I was twice her age before I got a music player and it was a suitcase-sized Fisher Price Record Player. It got me thinking about how far we've come.

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Remember these? Do you remember scrambling for one when a new hot song came on the radio and you just had to record it? Remember how you used to grab the first tape you saw and do a quick mental assessment of whether or not you could tape over it? This was back before they started playing the same song over and over on the radio. Even though your recording was gonna start halfway through the first verse, you recorded it anyway. Remember accidentally taping over something you liked and being pissed? You get halfway into a song and then hear a new song start playing.

How about wanting to tape something so badly that you stuck a wad of paper in that little hole on top or put scotch tape over it so that you could record over it? Then people would come over your house or see the tape in the car and think it was whatever album was on the label and you had to tell them, "Naw I taped over that. This is off the radio" and nobody had a problem with that. Instead of calling you out on being ghetto, they actually wanted to hear what was on your tape. "Yo, this is a good tape. Can I dub this joint?" Everybody had either a double tape boombox or the dual cassette player that was on the "multi-thing" stereo. You know, the one that had the record player at the top, the radio in the middle and the tape player at the bottom. And all of them had that little three digit counter as if you were gonna sit and calculate how many seconds were in each song. Those were the days...and I do not miss them one bit.

Especially  this:

[caption id="attachment_1584" align="alignleft" width="203" caption="Cassette Tape Rewinder"][/caption]

Soul Sister

No baby book will tell you this, so you're lucky to be hearing it from me:

Children sleep just to screw with you. It's in their constitution somewhere. I'm tired. My job is Daddy Day Care and I do it well, but unlike real day cares, there is no relief person. That means that I don't get to go on break, or take a lunch. The illusion that most people have is that children are small versions of humans. They eat, drink, run around and eventually sleep to replenish energy. Common mistake.

Children run on various forms of energy: Food, solar, nuclear and the souls of others. That last one is what mine is running on right now, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The child woke this morning and I fed her. We then began our day of singing songs, dancing, learning what things are and all the usual child-rearing stuff. Around noon, I started getting tired. Picking up a 28 lb weight over and over again, letting it fall on you, jump on your ribs and scream at you tends to tire a person out. She switched to solar power.

We played for another hour or so before I started running on fumes, so I closed the blinds and tried to put her to sleep. She switched to nuclear power. I got desperate and turned to the electronic babysitter (television) and let her watch Sesame Street while I attempted to make a sandwich. She didn't like that episode so she found me in the kitchen.

I gave up and decided to just go to the store and pick up something for dinner since she had no intentions of going to sleep. I got her dressed (A feat that would make an excellent challenge on American Gladiators) and then we were on our way to the store.  kept saying, "If she falls asleep, I'm turning around." Of course she fell asleep as we were walking in the store. I ran through that store like it was one of those shopping sprees on TV. In and out in under two minutes. I damned-near ran home. It took me 5 minutes to go 10 blocks uphill carrying bags and pushing a stroller. Add that to the two minutes that we were in the store and she slept a total of seven minutes.

Why did she wake up as soon as I put the key in the door? I know I didn't make any noise. I did it so slow and meticulously that you would've thought I was disarming a bomb or something. Strollers and car seats are like those external cell phone battery boosters. You know, the ones that charge the battery in like two minutes. You can be gone seven minutes or seven hours. It doesn't matter;The minute you bring that kid back in the house, they're gonna wake up.

So that brings me back to my original point: She's gone from food to solar to nuclear and now she's feeding of the souls of others...me.

 

Ipod? Touche?

Christmas Eve. It's finally here! That's not excitement, but rather relief. I welcome today like someone from the Titanic welcoming a rescue boat. They--and by they, I mean retailers--started the Christmas season back in July, so naturally I'm a little tired of the guilt trips in the store. Speaking of guilt trips...

I've been wrestling with this all week: Is it wrong to give a toddler an iPod Touch for Christmas? Two years ago, I would've answered my own question with a resounding yes. Now, I'm not so sure. We have a Macbook, iPhone and iPad. All three cost a human organ, so naturally we put them in high places to keep Gizmo away from them. But kids get into things. They're like those raptors on Jurassic Park. They never attack the same place twice...they remember.

One day she got her hands on the iPad while I was in the bathroom. My heart sank, at first, when I saw her with it. Then I noticed that she was actually using it like an adult. She sat it on the ottoman and was standing there looking at photos. Not erratically pushing the screen. No, what she was doing was methodical. I pushed the home button, closed the cover and sat it back in front of her. She opened it, slid the unlock button and pushed the weather app. She looked disappointed, pushed the home button again and swiped around until she got back to the photos app. Somehow, just by watching my wife, she figured out how to use it and she knew that the only real button--the home button--started you over again.

That was two months ago. Fast forward to yesterday and she's sitting on the couch with my wife's phone. She turned it on and then took it to my wife because the input unlock code screen came up. My wife typed it in and my daughter took it back to the couch. She looked at pictures and videos of herself for a second, then went to one of the apps that plays nursery rhymes and a few minutes later she went to the Music app, turned it sideways to get to coverflow and swiped around until she saw Stevie Wonder and started listening to My Cherie Amor. She put the phone down on the couch, got up and started dancing.

Now there are only about thirty songs on my wife's phone since she uses Rhapsody most of the time, but the few that are on there are just songs from my daughter's in the car playlist. I highly doubt she thought, I could really go for some Stevie right now. In all likelihood, she just pushed a random song, but it's the fact that she knows how to navigate to only the stuff she wants that makes me think she's ready for her own iPod Touch.

I've heard the arguments about development and that kids need three dimensional stimulation from toys and real books. She spends most of her time pretending to read her board books and playing with her illogically-expensive brain toys. Back in the mid 90s, all of the commercials for computers showed adults doing spreadsheets, word processing and kids looking at extremely dated games. Today, commercials for Windows 7 show kids doing spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations to ask their parents for dogs. We live in the 21st century. Five year olds use iPads in school now. Is it absurd to see an almost-two year old with an iPod Touch or is it preparation for things to come?

 

Elf Magic

Me: Grandma, do you think Santa Claus will bring me a...

Her: Santa Claus? Your mother aint tell you about that yet? You are too old to still be believing in some damned Santa Claus. We buy all that stuff. There aint no Santa Claus. 

Me: Huh, but where do you keep it?

Her: We hide it somewhere or she puts it on layaway and picks it up at the last minute. That's why she be so tired in the morning, because she's been up all night wrapping that stuff. You aint never notice the handwriting is the same on the presents?

Me: No.

Her: Plus, how does he get in the house. We boarded up the chimney before you was even born. And when yall lived in that apartment, how was he getting in there? You know he aint climbing through nobody window over there. They woulda been killed him.

Me: Why did yall tell me that then?

Her: Because it's special. It's nice to have something to believe in when you're young. But, hell you almost nine years old. You don't need to be walking around here with that in your head. At some point you just look foolish.

I remember that conversation like it was yesterday. I don't know how most kids feel when they learn the truth, but I wasn't really devastated. More than anything I felt stupid for wasting my time writing all of those letters. I was a super nerd as a kid. What's worse is that I didn't have anyone to play with growing up and I was always by myself, so I had a LOT of time on my hands.

I used to write Santa Claus a letter at least once a week. And these weren't your typical letters either. I approached it like I was writing a grant proposal or something. There would be about a page dedicated solely to listing every accomplishment of the week, every opportunity to do wrong that I avoided and a reminder of past good deeds from previous weeks' letters. The second page would be an updated list of what I wanted along with footnotes. The final pages (yes, pages--plural) would be an appendix complete with charts, schematics and concept art for the custom toys that I wanted the elves to build.

I never wanted just the stuff you could buy in the store. Ironically, I felt like my mother could go buy the stuff out of the store, Santa had a workshop and should therefore present me with a custom made gift. So I had ideas for radio controlled planes that turned into cars and ran on AA batteries instead of those bulky D ones. I drew diagrams for what I thought would be cooler versions of the Transformers already in the store.

It used to take me hours to draw these things up and then I'd run to the mailbox and drop in my letter. A guy from the post office came to my school one year and told us that we didn't need stamps on letters to Santa because they traveled by elf magic. To this day I wonder if any postal worker ever saw that thick envelope and wondered who the hell was sending Santa Claus a legal brief.

Please Hammer Don't Hurt Em

I just want to vent...

Facebook is a gift and a curse for the stay at home parent who desperately misses daily social interaction with people who don't ride around in strollers. Today though, I'm just annoyed.

The religious zealots have one mo' 'gin to send me a request for Bible Wars, Bibleville, or Bible With Friends. Also, until you take those half naked club pictures off your profile, lay off the Bible verses inside every status update.

I'm tired of hearing about your relationships:
Day 1- I met someone who is great, praise the Lord.
Day 2- My person is the second coming, praise the Lord.
Day 3- I'm gonna marry this person and devote everything to them even though I've known them less than a week.
Day 4- We're having a baby.
Day 5- My person's ex better stay outta the picture because I'm the new flavor of the week!
Day 6- F@%K these B$#$#(# who don't support our love.
Day 7- I'm in pain.
Day 8- I hate everything
Day 9- I can't believe my ex is a deadbeat parent. I thought I knew my person so well.
Day 10- I met someone who is great, praise the Lord.

I would also like to see some fact checking before posts go out. I don't want to be the one who always has to correct someone. I read something the other day that made absolutely no sense, but how would I look to be commenter #25 who said, You know this is an urban legend right? I checked Google after reading the first sentence of your post and all of that is just BS. That makes not only the poster look stupid but the 24 other people who also didn't think to verify it first.


Okay, I'm done venting.


 

Occupy North Pole

I've been going to the mall a lot this past week and, for the life of me I can't understand going broke for the sake of Santa Claus. I understand wanting to keep the magic of Christmas alive, but I personally think that Santa is the perfect scapegoat for keeping your financial sanity this Christmas.

Feel free to copy the note and apply it to your own child. I plan to print mine out in calligraphic font.

Dear (child's name)
I can only give you one toy this year. I'm sorry that I couldn't do better. Just know that you have two parents who love you and vow to put your needs before their own and that is something many kids do not have. You've been so good this year and you deserve an explanation: This has been a challenging year for me both mentally and financially. After that Amnesty International piece about sweatshops, things just went downhill. We lost a lot of elves to the Occupy movement, some just quit out of principal. Oil prices went up when the Libya conflict began and it made importing goods from overseas just too expensive. In the end, it was PETA that did us in. As I've said on record many times, the reindeer never submitted a formal complaint about the working conditions before! With so many things eating into the bottom line, it was inevitable that the North Pole would be forced into bankruptcy protection. The best I could do was smuggle out gifts from the estate to give to kids who really deserve them. You are one such child. While I remain optimistic that we'll be around next year, just in case, I want you to wish you Merry Christmas for all future Christmases.

With Love,
Santa