So, there I was about to enjoy a good 10–20-minute nap in my female roommate’s bed (boy, were the covers soft) as I couldn’t go to sleep in my own room, thanks to my pet duck that barfed up something awful (what was in the facial cream?).
As I snuggled in under the covers something was pressing against my back. It was a big thick black soft cover novel.
Curious, I turned to page 323 and started reading.
“At the touch of leather, I quiver and gasp. He walks around me again, trailing the crop around the middle of my body. On his second circuit, he suddenly flicks the crop, and it hits me underneath my behind … against my sex … The shock runs through me, and it’s the sweetest, strangest, hedonistic feeling … My body convulses at the sweet, stinging bite. My…WHOA!!!!”
“This is a dirty book,” I say to myself.
No, this is not a repeat of that "Friends" episode where Joey Tribiani (Matt LeBlanc) finds Rachel’s erotic book about a “vicar”. I am not dumb-witted like Matt LeBlanc’s character. I don’t have a pet duck. I have a dog that’s even worse and I don’t live with a female roommate that’s as attractive as Rachel Greene (Jennifer Aniston).
Walking though the Barnes and Noble bookstores the past year or so seeing all the erotic dominant/submissive novels gracing the store’s end caps alongside newly discovered author E.L. James bestselling sadomasochistic trilogy. Fifty Shades of Grey, I almost felt like I was in that Friends episode if I were to browse through her novels.
In case you haven’t heard and honestly, I don’t see no one cannot know by now, the first book, "Fifty Shades of Grey", is being turned into a big screen film due out the day before Valentines Day next year on Feb. 13, 2015.
The film’s studio, Universal, just released a teaser poster with the phrase, “Mr. Grey will see you now” featuring millionaire, Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) looking out the windows of his Seattle office. As part of the studio’s clever film marketing campaign, there is even a bogus website called Grey Enterprises Holding Inc where women and I suppose men, in dire need of employment following college graduation can apply for a position as an intern. I have a feeling if this were a legitimate company Mr. Grey would only be interested in women applicants.
In the film adaptation which may reportedly arrive in both an R and NC-17 version when it arrives on disc later next year, Dakota Johnson ("The Social Network" - 2010) will play a college graduate who falls for the handsome millionaire Grey and soon realizes her new boyfriend has a hobby involving the kinds of sexual activities you might get to do if you got $400 or $500 to blow for an hour or more of sadomasochistic bondage activities with a professional dominatrix.
Unlike the "Sex and the City" movie (2008) which attracted female fans of the show and guys who either have a fetish looking at women in high heels or enjoy wearing them, I predict "Fifty Shades of Grey" will attract everyone from those who want to know what all the kinky hype is about, women and men who engage in the same sexual activities with their significant others as the two characters do in James’ novels, to women fans of James’ books who claim how much this trilogy saved their doomed marriages and boyfriend/girlfriend relationships in the bedroom behind closed doors.
It’s going to be the kind of erotic film pornographic director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) envisioned making in "Boogie Nights" (1997).
“I don’t want ‘em showing up, sitting down, jacking off and splitting on the story,” Horner says. “I wanna make the thing that keeps ‘em around even after they’ve come. My idea, my goal: Suck ‘em in with the story. They’ll squirt their load and sit in it…just to see how the story ends.”
I got nothing against the alternative lifestyle involving bondage and sadomasochistic activity between two people who want to play dominant and submissive so long as they don’t tell me about it.
What I don’t find appealing or even kinky is the way women are embracing a book trilogy in which the female character is being reduced to that of cheap trash and forced by a man to endure the kinds of things she may not normally want to engage in, let alone think about.
Be that as it may, I can already see a number of women who love these books and can’t wait for the first movie to come out submit comments on my blog writing “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”
At the very least, they will probably give me that same tongue-lashing Aniston’s Rachel Greene said to Joey in that "Friends" episode.
“I don’t care! I’m not ashamed of my book. There’s nothing wrong with a woman enjoying a little erotica. It’s just a healthy expression of female sexuality which by the way is something that you will never understand.”
And my comment to them will be exactly what Joey Tribiani said to Rachel as she stormed out of the living room in that episode.
“My doctor said, ‘Look, if you can weigh as much as you weighed in high school, you will essentially be completely healthy and will not have Type 2 Diabetes.’ And then I said to her, ‘Well then I’m going to have type 2 diabetes because there is no way I can weigh as much as I did in high school.”
So said Oscar winning actor, Tom Hanks, 57, when he revealed on the Late Show with David Letterman last October of his diagnosis with Type 2 Diabetes.
I would have said almost the same thing to my parents and grandparents who up until my diagnosis in 2006 with Type 2 Diabetes, told me every time about how if I didn’t do something about my diet and exercise more, I was likely going to get Diabetes or encounter worse health problems later on.
My comment to them would have been, “Well, I am sorry, but I like my pastas, pizzas, pastries, hamburgers, steaks, cokes, eggs with the yellow stuff and anything else that’s likely on the NO list that causes high blood sugars and heart disease. I equate working out with that of going to church. I hate doing both but when I do work out, such as walking, or going to church, I find I feel a lot better after an hour. In short, I am going to get Type 2 Diabetes sooner or later whether I work out or not.”
I weighed 180 when I graduated high school in 1988 and up until I landed an IT support helpdesk job in 1996, I managed to keep my weight in between the 180- and 200-pound mark simply because the brainless under paid assembly line jobs I held involved always standing up and moving around. In other words, I didn’t need to exercise much.
One of the greatest ironies I have learned about Diabetes in what I refer to as a “pain in the ass” disease is I remember back in my senior year in high school my business law teacher, Coach Evans, telling our class how AIDS was going to be the kind of disease where we will know at least one or more people who either died from or have been diagnosed with HIV. The irony is I have only met one person in my lifetime who was HIV positive and that was for a news story I was doing back in the 1990s interviewing someone who got the disease from unprotected sex.
Today, I know more than a dozen people, and I am not just talking about family members, but friends and co-workers past and present who are diabetic. One friend of mine I knew died of the disease before he was 60 and if he were reading this column today, he’d agree the reason he passed away was because he didn’t do anything to keep his symptoms from getting worse. I had no idea another person I knew who worked at the post office even had the disease until I saw his obit picture at the front desk one day and when I asked another postal service carrier what happened, he told me the guy passed away due to difficulties with Diabetes. He looked completely healthy to me in all the years I went there to mail stuff.
As I said earlier, Diabetes, which involves the body’s failure to produce insulin, is a “pain-in-the-ass” disease. Like Cancer, it attacks everything in the body but on a much slower rate. Just because the drugs you are given to take orally during the early onset of Type 2 help bring your sugars down to the double digits between 90 and 110 like they should be doesn’t mean they will work forever. Nor does it mean one should rely on the meds and think they can continue to eat what they’ve eaten before.
Hanks might have been joking about what diabetics must do to fight the disease, but he was certainly right.
“You’ve just got to lose weight and exercise a lot and change everything you eat and never ever ever ever ever have any fun whatsoever,” he said.
I have come full circle on learning such hard lessons. Since 2006 I have continued to assume the meds would keep everything under control and I just have to show up every 3 to 6 months for a checkup. That is not the case. The past seven years, I have seen my weight loss go from 300 to 260 to as low as 240 over the course of 6 months or less. Not because of dieting and exercising but because the medications stopped working and yet, I thought, “How cool is this” that I can fit back into jeans that have accumulated dust in the closet the past few years.
I had vision problems, which baffled the eye doctor because I am nowhere near close to developing Glaucoma. It turned out I got Central Serous Retinopathy which attacks males between 20 and 50 and is brought on by stress and can only by cured if you stop letting everything get to you.
I have sometimes avoided taking my meds simply because the minute I checked my blood sugars the numbers were still in the low even after eating and my taking the meds could only make the sugars go lower which can be a bad thing. That didn’t stop one of female friends on Facebook from giving me a little tongue lashing about staying on my medications.
“You gotta stay on your meds and be so diligent with that,” she told me. “You will kill off every other organ slowly if you don't control that. My dad was diabetic, and a smoker and it was a terrible painful death. Don't you give up on your meds even if it is the one thing you can try to accomplish each day.”
For the past seven years now, my doctor has been asking if I want to consider weight loss surgery in particular the gastric bypass or gastric sleeve as he has said repeatedly, the Diabetes will go away as a result. Every time he has brought it up, I said no. This past November, however, I told him I’d consider it but only after I decide to dedicate at least six months or a year to some weight loss/exercise program to see if any improvement is made. For the time being, my doctor just wants me to silently tell myself constantly, “Weight loss surgery.”
If you’re wondering if there is a point to why I am telling you this, there is. Every time a celebrity whether it’s Tom Hanks, Good Morning America’s Amy Robach’s battle with breast cancer, or the fatal heart attacks that felled actor James Gandolfini and Dallas radio host Kid Kraddick last year, the drive by media go all out with articles about such devastating health conditions in an attempt to educate the public who likely already know about such diseases but do nothing to prevent them.
It shouldn’t take an actor’s diagnosis, or this blog, for that matter to get people to start looking at their own health and consider seeing a doctor to find out if they could be heading in that self-destructive direction of Type 2 Diabetes. People should be taking every precaution to keep from becoming the next number the Centers for Disease Control keeps track of yearly when it comes to how many Americans have been diagnosed with that dreaded “D” word or what I refer to as “a pain in the ass” disease.
A good number of memories came to my mind upon hearing that my sixth-grade teacher, Violet Zetlitz, passed away last May at the age of 81. I was one of Mrs. Zetlitz’s reading and social studies students at St. Louise de Marillac school in La Grange Park, Ill. during the 1981-82 school year. Upon hearing her passing, I began recalling not only her character traits in the way she taught classes but the notable traits of other teachers I had between 1976 and 1984.
“Who will forget “heads will roll”, a comment Mrs. Zetlitz usually said when she got upset with the class wrote Amy Stinson, a former student of hers on the St. Louise de Marillac Facebook page. I can’t say I recall that comment, but I do remember her telling those students who got out of line how if they don’t shape up something bad was going to happen and that it “wasn’t a threat. It was a promise.”
Mrs. Zetlitz was always wearing business type suits and heels like the female CEOs we see today in charge of large corporations. Not a day went by that I didn’t hear the tapping of her high heels as she slowly walked towards her desk at the front of the class five days a week.
The way she ran our reading class was the way that one history instructor in the movie, "Teachers" (1984), ran his. In that film the history teacher sat at his desk while the students walked to theirs. The minute the bell rang the students got their assignments and worked on it the entire period. Not once did the teacher actually say something to the class.
By comparison, the minute our reading class began, Mrs. Zetlitz would walk in through the back of the classroom so she could see what we were doing as we sat at our desks facing the blackboard. We’d immediately start reading whatever books each of us was assigned, then meet with her one on one as she asked us questions about what we read.
I can’t say I learned much since that reading class was self-paced. What I did enjoy was her afternoon social studies course in which she told us stories about the Greek tragedies. She knew how to make such tales interesting without needing a textbook. I got more out of hearing her tell us the story about the fall of Troy and the Trojan Horse than I did sitting through that three hour bore that starred Brad Pitt aptly titled, "Troy"(2004).
Mrs. Zetlitz was not the only grade schoolteacher I had who exhibited a number of unique character traits. I could tell you about my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Dort, for example, who looking back now I am convinced had a massive high heel shoe collection like pop singer Celine Dion. Or my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Collins, who had a cure for students’ hiccups during her class that apparently was so gross she took the student into the hallway to enact the cure. Then there was my band teacher, Mr. Ward, who threatened to have my fingers nailed to the valves of my Cornet if I didn’t stop moving them off while playing.
Were any of these teachers my favorite? No. Their job wasn’t to play favorites with the students. Their job was to teach. From 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Mon through Friday (8 to 3:30 p.m. for me on Thursdays since I was in the band) these instructors and quite a few more were like our second parents in a way. Sure, they joked around with the classes and sometimes made learning fun, but they never let me forget who was in charge. If you stepped out of line, you got yelled at.
I can’t speak for the kinds of teacher's kids have today and whether any of them make a positive or negative impression on them or not. What I can say about the instructors I had in grade school, Mrs. Zetlitz included, is they don’t make teachers like them anymore.
A sad unpleasant thought came to mind last November upon hearing the news that Dish Network, which owns the financially troubled former Dallas based Blockbuster Video, made the decision to close the once powerful video retailer’s remaining 300 corporate stores in January in addition to ceasing the company’s online video subscription service.
Blockbuster Video’s demise was not unexpected. The company, which started in the mid-1980s with just 50 stores and grew at its peak to 9000 in 2004, was unable to reinvent itself when it came to how consumers began getting their entertainment today via the Netflix, Redbox, video-on-demand and online streaming services routes. Despite the fact Dish Network bought the video giant out of bankruptcy in 2011 the company continued closing stores.
“I remember looking forward to making weekend plans, which included spending at least an hour at Blockbuster to find movies to watch and games to play,” said Angela Auzenne, associate dean at LeCroy Center. “It’s just so different now with digital. Something about holding that movie box in your hand, turning it over and standing there reading the movie summary with all the images. They had the best selection on Blaxploitation movies. Blacula. Super Fly. Anyone of those would be my last rentals.”
The depressing thought that came to my mind that November day was the idea of digital downloading which had me wondering how long before such retailers as Barnes & Noble and Best Buy also go out the way of Blockbuster Video despite their attempts to stay current with today’s technology.
I only mention those companies because I enjoy visiting those retailers whether I buy something or not. I like hearing some newly released CD by some artist I never heard of playing while browsing through the magazine section of the bookstore. Were it not for Barnes & Noble, I would have never heard of, much less bought such CDs as Born to Die by Lana Del Rey, Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin, Celtic Woman’s Believe, or another CD of Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits which I really didn’t need but bought regardless because of the one song I didn’t have on my ipod, New York, New York.
Back in the day before DVD got engulfed by Blu-ray, Best Buy had isles of DVD movies old and new for sale as well as a decent offering of music cds. Today, they only carry the titles they know are likely to sell. I can’t rely on Best Buy anymore. I got to pull up the coming soon sections of Blu-ray websites to get a full list of what’s coming out or go to the digitalbits.com for the latest release news. Now if I want to buy a movie, either I got to go to video-on-demand or order them through, yes, you guessed it, Amazon.
One of the joys I got out of going to Blockbuster was whenever all 100 copies of some new release was rented out, I could always find something else to rent as a result of browsing the store’s many categories. It was Blockbuster who advocated in carrying not just the current releases but the obscure never heard of before, straight-to-video titles, even if most of them weren’t worth the money you paid to rent them. Now those days are over thanks to the ease we have to get our hands on anything we want via the digital route.
Call me old-fashioned or a grouch who refuses to embrace change when the new overthrows the old but I don’t get off on this “instant gratification”, “I want it now” thing as a result of digital downloading. I like to browse the bookstore and want to be able to have the book, magazine, or newspaper in my hands, not on some device called a “Nook.” I want places like Best Buy to carry everything for sale day and date I see listed on in the coming soon section of www.blu-ray.com and not have it based on their decision as to what they think will sell. I don’t want to go to iTunes to find out what the latest music releases are and download 30 second samples. I’d rather hear them off of Barnes & Noble’s stereo system if I am in the stores on Tuesdays and should such a song catch my liking, be able to ask the clerk in the video area what CD is that playing?
I’d like to think sooner or later, people will come to their senses and realize the ease in which we get our entertainment now is overrated and prefer the days back when we could go to such places like Blockbuster Video to spend the time in and browse.
