Up the Tree

The funniest part about growing up in Manhattan is that many things people outside deeply urban areas experience, I find exotic. As people coming to the _big city_ enjoy rides in elevators, because they seem exotic if you don’t ride them daily… when you ride them daily it becomes standard.

I like malls.

They’re kind of exciting. Huge monstrosities, built to capture the senses, entice the appetite, and empty the purse. It is the cultural counterpart of the casinos in Vegas. A world where time stops and direction becomes skewed.

Being that my favorite activity is people watching, malls are like _methamphetamines_ for the senses. A smorgasbord of bad hair and tasteless teens, roving like packs of hideously dressed wolves searching for other packs of teens. They swarm about food-courts, talking to each other, passing nervous glances to the other opposite sex groups across the fod-court hugging closely to a Cinnabon.

It eventually becomes overwhelming. The visual pollution, while intoxicating, begins to overwhelm the senses. It begins with a sale sign in the wrong shade red and then the garish reality of your surroundings begins, much like too much sugar, to eat away at you sanity.

It’s a uniquely American experience. Like pecan pie, Fluff, Peanut Chews, and conformity. A representation of truth and the american dream, all laid out for purchase.

We accept Mastercard and Visa.

Our printer has decided after 5 years of service it is taking a rest… permanently. Therefore, as any good american, we are throwing it away. Fixing this thing is far too scary of a proposition, only because the company who manufactured it back in 1998, Apple, doesn’t even make printers anymore. We have no guarantees that after hundreds of dollars of repairs, that the thing will ever work again.

We have opted, instead, for HP’s LaserJet 5100, the industry leader for high-quality laser printers. It features 11″ x 17″ printing, which is standard for the design industry.

The thing about HP which urks me is that if you buy the low-end printer from HP it costs $1,439.00 (MacMall’s price $1,299.00) and if I want to upgrade the memory of the blasted thing by 128MB it costs $869.00 at HP (Kingston’s price $55.00!?). I find this practice of gouging your buyers for memory upgrades completely unethical. A 128MB memory chip shouldn’t ever cost $869! This unreasonable.

What HP is doing is gouging business people for costs which they, unknowingly, pay. Charging 16 times the correct price for a piddley memory chip is ubelivable and should be stopped by such a respected name in the industry.

Following up on my entry about my “peanut-butter that talked my knife into cutting me,”:http://www.upthetree.com/wp-uploads/030915_cut_off.html (One of my most commented entries ever!) I found an article in the New York Times about why “inanimate objects attack.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/magazine/21ONLANGUAGE.html

_I would say more, but I’m sensing my keyboard is annoyed._

I am a sweet person. That is, I love sweet foods. They call out to from shop windows, whispering their quiet descent to my, somewhat resolute, self-control

h4. I Love Sweets.

My mother and father were not sweets people. Rarely, would I find anything resembling junk-food within the confines of my parent’s apartment. The closest thing to a snack in my childhood was a plain rice cake, because it held no purpose outside the peckish impulses both my my sister and I expressed. Simply, we were Cherios(TM) children; that all too common class of New York City children born into upper-middle class liberal families that had read Dr. Spock and enjoyed MacNeil/Lehrer News hour.

We were the tragically un-hip children in school. My younger sister and I were destined never to be popular donned in our sensible L.L. Bean jackets and non-name-brand shoes. We were never the envy of other kids.

bq. “I am not going to get you those [expensive] shoes,” my mother used to say in her staccato german accent “you will out grow them in a month.”

She was right of course, we would have out-grown them too quickly to ever rationalize spending hard earned money on plastic and leather. No child of 10 should wear $50 shoes, but back then it was of little comfort that I would dress in shoes that kids in communist china would have considered “so last year.”

h4. I had Velcro shoes before it was remotely cool to have Velcro shoes.

My sister and I were born to practical parents. Parents who knew the value of a dollar and would never frivolously spend money on such extravagances as expensive shoes or yummy treats. Bet we had a secret fund that we would use to purchase our contraband goodies. It was the gravy-train, known to most inner-city children of non-legal working age as allowance. This magical pot of gold would surface every week and offer a child a temporary spending spree of delectable sweets. This sugar trust-fund should have, theoretically, last a week, but I as weak and left to my own devices could devour a 1 lb. bag of Twizzlers in one sitting.

h4. I had a problem.

For all intents and purpose, I should have diabetes with the amount of sugar I have ingested in my lifetime. This severe addiction lasted well into my teens until, thanks to a hiatus in my deforming acne, I found girls far more intriguing. I had to loose the pudge and swore of candy and took up a healthier diet.

I’m still obsessed with sweets today and regularly have to remove a bag of Twizzlers from my basket at checkout at Duane Read on my purchase of shampoo. They just seem so inviting, small little glossy bags of goodness and I break easy. I am, however, getting better. I almost completely stopped going to CVS after Halloween to buy discounted Cadbury Cream Eggs. I hardly ever buy the seasonal Hershey’s Kisses after Christmas anymore.

I am a reformed candiholic, but it’s still hard, because once I break my candy seal, as I’ve said to many invitations to a chocolate morsel “you’ll find me in the middle of the night, in the closet, with a flashlight, a mouth covered in chocolate and a bag of snickers bars.”

h4. …and unfortunately it’s all true.

Convinced that the *pirates as weather men* thing was funny (and I’m brilliant), I have spent a little more time… improving the point. I’m not going to move on with my life until someone out there laughs at my joke.

_(I’ll also take a chuckle, or giggle.)_

In the meantime, please enjoy some “pirate jokes.”:http://www.stolaf.edu/orgs/privateers/Piratical_Fun/Pirate_Jokes/pirate_jokes.html

and today is also “talk like a pirate day”:http://www.talklikeapirate.com/