Sunday stuff

[greatbear]

I was looking over my Amazon order from earlier in the week and I was a bit amused. Some are humorously telling me the item could've been delivered sometime last week but are still on the slow boat from China. But one particular order had me giggling a bit. "Guaranteed delivery by Sunday, November 30." The amusing part of that entry was the delivery method being by US Postal Service. Well, I did hear about Amazon partnering up with the USPS for Sunday deliver in some major cities. But I knew this wouldn't be the case for me because I don't have mail delivered to the house, for ever since I built La Casa Mayhem back in 1988, I opted to have a post office box due to, at the time, the box needing to reside on the main drag rather than in front of the house (private gravel drive 800 feet from the road). When I finally ended up with a real road, I installed a mailbox mostly as a place to display the house numbers and not to look odd without one. The mail was still being delivered to the PO box, where it's safe against theft and weather, and I can let it accumulate when I am away on vacation, etc. I like our little post office, though it's a much busier place these days. Any order I have sent by mail usually takes an additional day to wend its way from the truck to my little box at the PO. So here I was, chortling about a guarantee that Amazon could never keep because things have been going a certain way for 25 years and mail has never been directly delivered to the house and...

*doorbell ringing today at about 3pm, and I see the familiar little white postal truck leaving my driveway as I slowly limp my way to the door*

There is my order, sitting in the front entryway. Damn, Amazon, you're gooood. I knew for certain that I would at least have to head to the post office on Monday to pick up the order, but this, well, I never expected. Amazon will be building at large distribution center in Baltimore next year, and promising same-day delivery for certain items to boot. The downside, of course, is now Amazon had started charging sales tax on orders fulfilled by them since October, a tactic I can assume was worked out to grease political palms, since they haven't even begun construction on the warehouse yet. The upside, there are sill lots of third party outfits that offer the same Prime shipping which are still out of state. I can work the system as much as they can.

This little order had nothing I was in a hurry for, in this case it was an assortment of USB cables plus a webcam for the lab workstation PC. So, while Jeff was still stuck at work doing his occasional manager-on-duty duties, I fired the aforementioned PC and did some needed updates along with attaching the camera. I wanted something I can take pictures of circuits and projects, and this one offered 15 megapixel stills and 1080p HD video. Webcams have come a long way from the grainy, low res output. was I was testing it with closeups of random stuff in the Mayhem Lab, I noticed my eyebrows were again in need of trimming...



When I was a young'un, I had a very pronounced unibrow. Almost as bad as the one Baby Gerald from the Simpsons has. As you can probably imagine, this provided yet more ammunition to those who were already relentlessly bullying me about at the appropriately named Savage Elementary School. Yet one more thing I would hate about myself, I'd nervously pull and yank at my eyebrows as a result, trying to get rid of this apparent scourge under my forehead. Cruel kids would look at my eyebrow (no "s") to see what sort of winter weather would be coming, accuse me of wearing a pipe cleaner over my eyes, you name it. This got added to any number of idiosyncrasies they could muster to make sure their bullying would be incessant. The pulling on my eyebrows would continue until at least middle school, where my early puberty gave them even more things to latch onto. My facial and body hair showing up before everyone else was not only something to pick on me with, it became a chance for me to turn the tables a bit and accuse the hairless children of being left behind in the maturing process. This obviously pricked up a fair amount of envy in many of the late bloomers, and it was where I was first made aware by a sympathetic gym teacher of a condition known as "penis envy" because, in addition to the (at the time, embarrassing) copious amount of pubic hair showing up as I first tripped into my teens, I was also becoming fairly well endowed compared to the bully crew that hounded my everyday life at Hammond Middle School. This teacher had seen the same thing happening with many students over the years, and it was common during those awkward days of early manhood that the underdeveloped among the student body would often feel inadequate. While I had to endure near constant accusations of being gay (hell, I barely knew I was at the time), I was able to flip the tables once again a bit and accuse the little children of being angry at themselves and their hidden desire to keep eyeballing my junk. Life eventually went along, and these days, thanks to the magic of Facebook, I can find some of those original haters and see that the majority didn't turn out to be too much in later years. My vengeance was simply the passage of time. I still have to remind myself to let go of so much of the hurt in the past, because, like so many others that share my traits, I ended up stronger, smarter and street-savvy than those that worked against my very existence back in the early years.

These days, my monobrow isn't as pronounced, most likely from my constant pulling of the hair. Enough of it remains as a reminder of dark times, but also as something that makes me a bit more unique. As age and my Russian heritage has set in, the eyebrow hair has become wild, seeming in defiance of those younger years. Every now and then one of them gets so long it scratches at my eye in a breeze. I will sometimes yank out the offending brow hair, but more often than not I will carefully trim them instead. I don't want to revisit those days of unnecessary mutilation anymore.

Comments

[vicar.livejournal.com]

Those are pretty amazing! Your career as an evil villain though...greatly enhanced!

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Eyebrows of Mayhem!

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

Well done, Amazon, indeed!

As to the eyebrows, just a few stragglers. A snip or two and it's all good:) One of the items that surprised/annoyed me is that as I've aged and grayed, my hair has changed texture and I've developed a couple of cowlicks. The hair on the left side of my head grows upward. Now, that I'm growing my beard for the first time in a decade, I find I have a "beard lick"!! I'm not sure how I'm going to tame it!!! :)

It's amazing to me that any of us survived puberty and the hazing from our peers.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

And it seems only the passage of time and the phenomenon of hindsight would help to allay ongoing personal feelings of inadequacy and such. The bullies often amounted to far less than average, and the urge is there to return some of that bullying now, but it's simply not worth it.

My beard tends to grow down on one side of my face and up on the other, but since it comes out all wiry and wavy, it has no actual direction once it goes beyond a quarter inch. lol

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Ah, more things we have in common. Given some Russian and Polish ancestry, I too am getting Crazy Slavic Eyebrows after having perfectly ordinary ones most of my life. I don't know how I'd have reacted to having a unibrow as a youngster - but I'd sure like to have one now. ;)

Our experiences in gym class seem very similar - my fur started coming in rapidly in Jr. High and it really set off the jealousy of the "macho" bully types who still didn't have any/much. Not just pits and pubes, but I was getting chest hair as well, though the beard didn't show up until High School.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I think this is cosmic payback for making fun of Andy Rooney's eyebrows in the past. What gets me is how fast these wild ones come in. I will either pluck or trim them, and in a few weeks they are back with a vengeance.

[maxauburn.livejournal.com]

I had a unibrow until I started plucking the center while still in my early 20's.

I think maybe only 1 or 2 hairs come back in that area and I pluck them.

I don't miss it. My eyebrows, like yours, are growing long and wild. I kinda like it.

I checked on many of my old high school bullies; sadly for them, nearly all of them died before they ever reached 40. This is indicative of an unhappy life. I remember thinking when I was 15, 16, and 17 that the bullies were the real people, that they had it all together, and God had sent them to torment me.

Now I know the truth- they were simply unhappy teenagers who were venting their misery on me. I met one of them years after high school in a gay bar.

" Now you know why I kept calling you 'Faggot'.", he told me.

He told me he lived with a boyfriend who was a drug addict, and how he had to work THREE jobs to support the man's habit, and of how he himself was an alcoholic.

He called his bf on the phone at the bar- he kept telling his lover that he had just gotten paid and that he would have money for his drugs. The bar was quiet as the jukebox wasn't on, and you could hear his bf screaming at him over the phone.

My former bully left; I walked home, told George about the incident- he'd tried to tell me for years that those who'd bullied me were actually miserable, unhappy souls, but I didn't believe him until that encounter. I cried while I told him about how unhappy the man was. He said that was a good thing, as I no longer hated him.

You, I, and many others survived the bullying; the bullies, however, turned out not to be so hardy a breed. That is sad.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I think I would've turned out far differently if I had support from people rather than bullying. I would've been more outgoing and would also have been far more inclined to engage other people in positive ways. Instead, I kept to myself. Bullying never actually stopped, it just took different forms. Like when people would take credit for my work, or managers would give my credit to others. They ultimately lost, for I would no longer offer my help and knowledge in critical times, instead letting the department as a whole appear less capable. Lots of specialized equipment was outsourced that I would've been able to repair and maintain, causing our costing rate to exceed the level where our services would be cheaper to outsource. The pressure on the department became a constant point of stress, and I simply did my own work to my usual high standards, but nothing more than that.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I was picked on as a kid too, though never truly bullied by more than one or two. One kid, Bob Marshall tried to pick on me in band when we were in the 6th grade and I took no gruff and simply slugged him, it took only one punch and he retreated crying. I was not reprimanded or anything. I don't recall he ever tried to pick on me again.

Bullies are also cowards in real life, and this is their way of hiding it, by being mean. That is, they depends on the victim to not stand up to them, but once they do, it's all over in a flash.

Strangely, I don't think anyone suspected me as gay until was much older, like in my 30's, and one time it was some drunk calling me a faggot, of which I ignored, and 2 people I knew who thought I was and one tried to get me to admit, but I kept denying it. They both were gay, and at the time, I didn't know I was until I realized the truth and came out.

As to the eyebrow thing, I get the long ones too and have to occasionally have it trimmed.

I think I've always have had pubic hair and some armpit hair since at least HS, and could grow a mustache in HS as well. The bear kind came a bit later, though it never has come in evenly. I can grow a good goatee though, and have been able to for a very long time.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I've put the past behind me, though it was interesting to see the abject failure of the worst of the bully set to become anything in later years. While a part of me thinks this was just desserts, a another part of me pities these people. They have no more influence on my life, but I was taught a costly lesson by and from them that only made me more cautious and stronger in later years.

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

Amazon seem to have partnered with the Royal Mail here for 'guaranteed' Prime services...even they sounded surprised when I phoned them and told them, because it was already late and I knew the Royal Mail is now a complete bag o'shite. Sadly.

For a guaranteed next day? Four real days late, Three business days if you count Saturday (I do, they deliver on that day also). And Amazon would like me to pay for Prime? HAHHAHAHAHA.

Have to say, unlike the Capitalist Frenzy, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals here were terrible, you can get better on eBay...or just normal places not taking part. Odd.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I've had some failures of rushed delivery before, but it didn't seem to be anything but odd circumstances on rare occasions. I only pick next day delivery on very rare occasions, in most cases I can get the particular item locally for less cost when the large shipping cost was factored in. The Prime shipping is a mixed blessing, for in many cases the hidden additional cost of shipping added to the item results in cheaper choices, or local store options. Honestly, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals were only slightly better than many regular prices, and except for one item I had ordered for Jeff for Xmas, the savings are continuing all this week. No frenzy of shopping needed. I'm just glad to be able to do it from the comfort of home and not fighting the insanity in local shops. I refuse to take part in that crap. Not worth the stress.