Frank and I believe in the Green Movement. We recycle, walk when we can, and have put fluorescent bulbs in all of our light fixtures. The change from incandescent bulbs to fluorescent bulbs has cut our electricity bill by about a third (the fluorescents save three-quarters of the electricity of incandescents). But today, we lost four months of savings in the span of one second when Frank accidentally broke a fluorescent bulb while changing it.

It all started when I hopped into the shower this morning. The bathroom light started flickering. So I called Mr. Fix-It. Frank appeared, armed with a new fluorescent. Still bleary-eyed from waking up, he took out the old bulb. The bulb slipped from his hand, crashed onto the tile floor and shattered. “Okay, that’s bad. Real bad,” he said, seeming stunned. “Why?” I asked. “It’s just a bulb.” I envisioned picking up the pieces and vacuuming up the rest. “Uh…” he replied, “it’s a fluorescent. This is bad. Uh. Don’t breathe.” I’ve heard this phrase many times from him while in the bathroom, but apparently there was real danger here other than a bad attack of nausea. “I’m stuck here,” I replied. He said, “You need to get out of there, don’t breathe, don’t step in any of this and get out of here.” I complied, but breathed anyway, figuring passing out on top of the broken bulb would be a worse fate.

When I finally escaped from the bathroom, Frank closed the door and turned off the heat. He looked very upset. “I just read about this. This is bad. Mercury vapor and powder are in fluorescent bulbs and are super toxic.” I suggested he look online for directions on how to clean up the mess. He found instructions on the EPA website. What a shocker. (http://www.epa.gov/mercury/spills/index.htm#fluorescent)

If you break a fluorescent bulb, basically, you’re screwed. Your household becomes a temporary Super Fund toxic waste dump. Here’s a Readers’ Digest version of the six-step procedure to clean up a broken fluorescent bulb. First, you open a window and evacuate the room. Turn off the heating system, make sure no one walks through the glass and powder. Let the room air out for at least fifteen minutes. (We didn’t do this. I stood there, dripping wet, and breathed in all the fumes, thereby saving Frank and the cat…) Put on rubber gloves, use cardboard to scoop up the fragments. Throw fragments into a glass jar or plastic bag that can be sealed. Use tape to pick up any remaining fragments or powder. Wipe the area clean with disposable wet wipes, discard into the glass jar or plastic bag.

You can’t use a vacuum cleaner or you’ll contaminate not only the vacuum cleaner, but the entire air supply of the household. Forever. Nor can you use a broom. If the powder or fragments land on a rug or clothing or bedding, you have to seal the bedding and garments and rugs in a plastic bag and throw them away. If you’re in the room when the bulb breaks, you have to wash the clothes you were wearing during the exposure to the mercury vapor. If powder and fragments land on carpet, you use tape to get as much up as you can, then vacuum up the rest. (This is the only instance where vacuuming is recommended.) Then you must discard the vacuum bag in a sealed plastic bag. Then, get this, for the next “several times” you use the vacuum you have to turn off the forced air heat or air conditioning, open a window, then vacuum, then wait fifteen minutes, then you can close the window and turn back on the heat.

Have you followed all this? Is this insane? I read online where a woman busted a bulb in her kid’s room (http://tinyurl.com/d8cfah). She had the room tested for mercury and the place where she dropped the bulb was highly contaminated. She was told to tear out the carpets and throw away all the contaminated objects in the room. She was so freaked out, she sealed off the room and they don’t use it anymore. All these contaminants? From one bulb breaking?

These stupid pieces of crap are supposed to be “saving the environment.” By poisoning it? The bulbs carry a only small warning label on them. They don’t list the procedure for disposal. The label only states that if a bulb breaks, follow proper disposal procedures. For the normal person this means picking up the pieces and vacuuming up the rest. But this will completely poison your household.

How many bloody people know this? And how many people are going to remember to go through this lockdown procedure every time they use the vacuum cleaner after they clean up a broken bulb? Uh, no one. Who is going to throw out the clothes they wore when the bulb broke? No one, except for Frank and I. I also threw out two new bathroom rugs. Frank and I spent an hour cleaning the stupid bathroom. I tracked mercury powder all over my house before Frank read the clean-up procedures online. And these clean-up recommendations were from the EPA, an organization that denied global warming until last year. The most toothless, bought-by-the-chemical-companies, useless public agency in existence. I shudder to think how poisoned my house really is. How much I just shortened my lifespan by being stuck in a room when a stupid fluorescent bulb broke.

After our morning fun, I wanted to banish the bulbs from our house. Frank refused, citing the (same) EPA website that shows how much mercury gets into the air by coal-burning plants and how much mercury pollution is saved by fluorescent bulbs. I reluctantly agreed. Lesser of two evils and all that. But my last question to him was: “Why is any mercury getting into the environment? Why can’t we find clean energy that’s actually CLEAN?” Frank replied, “Money.”

Like I needed another lesson in that.

©2009, Janet Periat

I think, therefore I worry. I realize worrying hasn’t changed the outcomes of anything I’ve worried about nor does it serve any other purpose than to give me something to think about at three in the morning. But that doesn’t stop me. Worrying is my favorite pastime. Here are some of my latest.

Worry Number One: The World Will End. Abruptly. In a large nuclear apocalyptic mushroom cloud of doom. Like on the TV show 24. Now, I don’t worry that I’d die in this massive explosion, I worry I will survive. Here’s my worst fear: I’m wandering aimlessly through a destructive landscape of charred bodies and swirling dirt storms with only Spam to eat. Why do we save canned foods for emergencies anyway? How is this going to make you feel better if you’re the sole survivor on the planet? Not only will you be facing the death of mankind, you have to eat salty fetid meat, too? Note to self: buy more freeze-dried backpacking food. What really worries me is that Doomsday will precede the conclusion of Survivor or 24 and I’ll be wandering aimlessly through the desolate streets without knowing who won the million bucks or whom Jack had to torture to save the world.

Worry Number Two: We’ll run out of money, lose the house and be forced out onto the streets. And the food bank will give us only Spam to eat. (See Worry Number One). Even though I would no longer have to worry about property taxes, a giant mortgage, house insurance, earthquake insurance, remodeling the leaking showers, fixing the roof, propping up the sinking front porch, re-stuccoing the outside walls or replacing the forty-year-old stinky carpeting, this would—wait. Why am I worried about this again?

Worry Number Three: My career will take off after I die. The day my ashes get buried in the Pescadero Cemetery, finally, all my books will sell, I’ll get awarded a freakin’ Pulitzer and my estate will be showered with millions of dollars in cash. That would make me mad enough to rise from the grave. Why do they give Pulitzers posthumously, anyway? The person who cares the most is dead. Dead. Dead people don’t care about sales and awards, they want to be recognized in their lifetime or the achievement doesn’t count. The only people benefiting from a dead person’s success are the publishers and the dead author’s relatives, people who probably sent the person to their grave in the first place. Oh. Money. Duh. Of course. I am so naïve sometimes. I just figured this out (see Worry Number Five). They give awards to dead people to pump up their sales. Added benefit of having dead winners, competing live authors can’t bitch publicly that they were cheated without seeming like total idiots. Still, I don’t want this happening to me. I want all my accolades now. All that money now. Course, what if this is my peak? What if this is as far as my writing career goes? Which brings me to Worry Number Four.

Worry Number Four: My novels won’t sell to a big publisher. After twenty years and twenty-six unsold novels, this isn’t really a worry. This is a condition. This is a state of being. While I win contests and I get glowing rejection letters from publishers, The Big Contract still hasn’t happened for me. Yet I still work diligently forty hours a week, delusional in my optimism. I figure if I go to my grave without selling a book, at least I’ll leave behind a hundred plus unsold novels—wait. Now I’m right back to Worry Number Three…

Worry Number Five: I’m stupid. I mean, really stupid. You know that movie, Waiting for Guffman? It took me three years and four months to get that the title was a play on words of the theatrical production, Waiting For Godot. And I’m a theatre major. Who saw the play about three times. And the movie about the same number of times. Did you know that awards are given to dead authors as a marketing tool to drive sales? I could name twenty other jokes I didn’t get for a year or two and situations I didn’t understand until way after the fact. There are some synapses in my head that work at a glacial pace. Of course, at three in the morning, these lapses all add up to a case of Terminal Stupidity. Thankfully, the only person who’s around when I make these embarrassing realizations is Frank. Oh. And now you people. And I just put proof of my stupidity in writing. Doh!

Worry Number Six: They’ll Change The Formula of Cocoa Puffs. Again. I know this doesn’t really compare to the other worries, but nonetheless it is a valid concern. They’ve changed Trix and Lucky Charms and countless other childhood comfort cereals, I just got used to Cocoa Puffs again and I really like them. Which means they’ll change the formula. Like what they did to Cracker Jacks. Freakin’ criminal.

Worry Number Seven: My cat will starve if I don’t offer him wet food eight times a day. Give or take a few times. Even though I always leave a big bowl of dry food out for him and a huge bowl of fresh water, he’s old. I worry about him not eating enough. Because I am an obsessive cat parent. And he is not obese and I’ve always had obese cats… Oh. Wow. Two huge realizations in the span of one column. Which brings me back to Worry Number Five.

Worry Number Eight: The Christian Right will take over America and I will be killed to silence my big mouth. In every cultural revolution, the first people who get rounded up and executed are the intellectuals. Especially the loud females. Wait. All I have to do is to produce this column and show them Worry Number Five. Whew. Dodged that bullet.

Worry Number Nine: I spend too much time worrying about stupid crap that never comes to pass. Yeah? And your point?

©2009, Janet Periat

With the advent of the aging population, more and more people are finding themselves caring for elderly parents. Anyone in this situation knows it’s an uphill battle to get the oldsters to admit their limitations. And once they let us help them, they never leave us alone. Here are some solutions that should help us all with this growing problem.

Problem: Lonely, retired parents who inundate their busy, working children with phone calls.

Solution Number One: My new invention, the Answer-O-Matic™. This amazing phone system fools parents into thinking they are actually talking to their kids, when in fact, they are talking to a pre-recording! All the child does is simply record some questions into the Answer-O-Matic. For Dad: Dad, tell me that story about when you were in the Army or I’ve forgotten how to use a saw, could you outline the basics? For Mom: Mom, could you give me a recap on the last three Dr. Phil shows? Or the question that’s always good for an hour-long monologue: how’s your health?

Then the user simply records a few basic prompts in the Answer-O-Matic such as: Uh-huh. Really? Wow, things sure used to be better in the old days. I had no idea. I’m sorry, the cat was meowing, could you repeat that last part? Tell me again about that colonoscopy.

When the Answer-O-Matic runs through its entire program, it simply ends the call with: Oh, there’s my other line. It’s probably my boss. I’ll call you back later. Love you! Bye!

Solution Number Two: Outsourcing your parents’ calls to India. This is trickier and requires some pre-planning. Here’s how it works: When you next visit your parents or talk to them on the phone, start using a slight Indian lilt to your voice. Address them as “Mrs. Jane Doe” (it’s important to use their full name). Such as, “I am very happy to be speaking with you today, Mrs. Jane Doe.” Accustom them to oblique questions such as: “How are you my most honored father?” “Tell me about your Army days, please, sir.” Tell your parents you prefer to be called by your new nickname. Try Sanjeet or Raj. This will aid your overseas workers in being able to imitate you more accurately. Supply your new workers with your parents favorite topics, their favorite stories. Include some basic information about yourself, your approximate age, the names of your children and their approximate ages. It is not necessary to supply your workers with extensive personal information since most parents are calling to talk about themselves.

By using my Answer-O-Matic or outsourcing calls, soon your parents will be convinced they have the most devoted children on the planet! Their loneliness will vanish and so will your headache! A win-win situation for all!

Problem: Vain, mobility-challenged parents who refuse to use a walker.

Solution: My new inventions, the Floor Lamp Walker™ and the Coffee Table Walker™. My new devices disguise walkers as ordinary pieces of furniture. This way the elder will appear to be leaning on a piece of furniture, rather than relying on the dreaded walker. For trips outdoors, the elder can use the Trash Can Walker™ or the Mailbox Walker™. This way the old folks can send this message to the outside world: Hey, I’m not old, I’m just takin’ out the trash. Or: I’m not disabled, I’m just mailing a letter.

Just think how easy it will be to sell your parents on the Trash Can Walker when you can assure them that no one will be able to determine their age nor their physical condition. “Hey, Mom, everyone will go, what’s that twenty-year-old doing? Oh, they’re just taking out the trash!” An added feature: The Trash Can Walker also serves as a handy storage device for doing local neighborhood shopping. The Mail Box Walker also has plenty of storage, perfect for transporting Mom’s favorite Pekinese.

Problem: Sight-challenged parents who insist upon driving.

Solution: My new product, the Sim-U-Drive™. This handy device is an actual junked car that has been turned into a virtual reality driving experience. Simply replace your parents’ car with the Sim-U-Drive. When Dad goes out in the morning to wreak havoc on the local neighborhood, he gets in the Sim-U-Drive and starts up “the engine”. Instead of a windshield, Dad has no idea he’s looking at a plasma screen TV! Embedded motors provide simulated driving motion and vibrations. Speakers mounted around the driver’s head provide background traffic noise. The plasma screen displays his normal routes to the store or coffee shop and back. The Sim-U-Drive will fool any sight-challenged parent into believing they just drove to the store and back again! With no harm to either themselves or the local community! No lawsuits! No damage to the car! No road kill!

Problem: Hearing-challenged parents who refuse to wear a hearing aid.

Solution: My new invention, the iHear™. Disguised as an iPod, the iHear looks just like the latest hip music device but in actuality, it is a hearing aid! Tell your parents everyone will be mistaking them for teeny-boppers when they groove to this trendy beat.

If they aren’t keen on the iPod disguise, then try my other hearing product the Cell-U-Ear™. This hearing aid is disguised as a wireless cellphone headset. Tell your folks everyone will think they are important corporate executives when they proudly wear this new device around the shopping mall. It will also cover up the tendency old folks have to talk loudly to themselves, everyone will just think they’re having an important conversation with someone on the end of the line!

Tell your folks that by using one of these devices, not only will they appear years younger, they will be able to keep up the illusion of youth by actually hearing what is being spoken around them. Tell them that no longer will they have conversations like this: Phyllis called, she’s in the hospital. Who? What? Phyliss called! She’s in the hospital! Who called? Phyllis! Phyliss! Phyliss? Phyliss has syphilis?!

Stay tuned. We are on the precipice of more elder denial than ever with the Baby Boomers set to retire. You think it’s bad now, just wait until the Beatles generation starts moving into their retirement communes. My next products include “re-training” wheels for Harley-Davidson choppers, extra strength hearing aids for rock concert veterans, fake ponytails for balding hippies and large print issues of Rolling Stone magazine.

©2006, Janet Periat

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Since this article came out a few years ago, someone STOLE my idea for the iHear™. Just saw an ad for it in VIA magazine or somewhere like that. Hey, it’s a hearing aid disguised as a Bluetooth! THIEVES!!! Proves I’m not the only twisted mind in the universe…

ANOTHER AUTHOR’S NOTE: The above column can be found in my book Confessions of a Pink-Haired Lunatic.

READERS: Here is my proof that I still actually write my advice column. Since CoastViews doesn’t publish both of my columns any longer, I’ve gotten sort of lax on WWJD. But for your reading pleasure, here it is, back by popular demand. If any of you have questions for me, please feel free to use my WWJD contact.

Dear Janet:

My husband of twenty-five years got laid off nine months ago from his job in high-tech. All he does is sit on the couch watching TV and feeling sorry for himself. Meanwhile, I’ve had to take on two more jobs (giving me four total) to cover our basic expenses. Not only isn’t he looking for work, he barely lifts a finger around the house. He says he’s depressed. He looks for work, but only on the Internet and only for an hour or two a day. I snuck up on him yesterday when he was on the computer to see what he was looking at and just as I thought, he was surfing some site on fishing. We got into a huge fight and now we’re not speaking. Before this, he worked solid for ten years at the same company and did loads of unpaid overtime. I don’t understand what happened to my very responsible man. If he doesn’t get a job soon, our kids will have to stop going to college. Not even this will motivate him. What do I do?

Desperate in Belmont
Letter by email

Dear Desperate:

I can’t tell you how many of my friends have come to me with this same story about their newly unemployed husbands. All of the guys are in their fifties and are now depressed couch-potatoes. I think our society does a disservice to men. They’re raised as princes, used to having people work for them, take care of them. Used to having things go their way. So when they run into difficult situations, they have no tools to deal with them. A friend of mine described her unemployed husband as a “princess”. She said he sailed through school, got the jobs he wanted and only now in his late fifties is he dealing with unemployment. He’s gotten job offers but won’t take them because he wants exactly what he had before: the corner office, the great job, great pay and a huge staff. I think your husband may be in the same boat. Basically, your husband doesn’t have the tools he needs to deal with the situation. And he’s afraid. He’s feeling emasculated and lost. He needs to reinvent himself, but simply has no idea how to approach the problem. So he retreats within himself. Which is clearly not the answer.

I suggest couples therapy to deal with your (rightful) anger and his lack of support. I also suggest individual therapy for him to learn how to deal with his fears. In conjunction with therapy, you need to set some limits with him. While his reticence to look for work is understandable, it is not logical. He needs to set his emotions aside for the good of the family. He’s acting like a self-indulgent child, not an adult. Hand him this article.

Here’s my direct message to him: Dude, man up. You want to feel powerful again? Put your family first and your depression last. Step up to the plate and get some money in there. Only six percent of jobs are advertised. You need to talk to everyone you’ve ever met. Find out about the projects the businesses in your field are working on, find out if you know anyone in the company and get an informational interview. You need to talk to people face-to-face. Getting a job is a full-time job. And don’t beat yourself up if you can’t find work right away. As long as you’re doing everything in your power to find work, that’s the best you can do. Ask yourself at the end of the day this question: Did I do everything I could to try to get work today? If you did, relax and give yourself a pat on the back. Then get up tomorrow and get back at it. Just because you’re unemployed doesn’t mean you’re less of a man. If you’re doing all you can, then you have nothing to be ashamed about. Being unemployed doesn’t mean you’re a loser. Only quitters are losers.

And don’t be afraid to take on some part-time work. Whatever helps your family is what you need to do. Good luck, honey. There is a job out there for you. You only have to find it.

Dear Janet:

My teenage son won’t listen to me. He leaves his clothes all over, tracks mud in the house and won’t clean up after himself. He demands I cook special meals for him, but refuses to do anything I ask of him. He plays sports and is getting good grades, which is why I don’t push him. But I’m still sick of being treated like his maid. His father is no help and always takes his side and tells me “to leave the boy alone.” I have a full-time job of my own and don’t get to bed much before midnight these days while my men sit on the couch and watch TV. I’m tired of being a doormat. How can I get them to listen to me?

Maid Not Mom
Letter by email

Dear Maid Not Mom:

The only reason your men take advantage of you is because you let them. No one is putting a gun to your head, forcing you to cook and clean. The reason they don’t respect you is because you won’t stand up for yourself. Call a family meeting. Tell your men what you need. If they don’t listen, stop doing the shopping. Stop cooking for them. Stop cleaning. Take yourself out to dinner. Join a women’s group. Get out of there. You aren’t helping your son by letting him take advantage of you; you’re just screwing over his future wife. You aren’t helping your marriage by taking crap; all you’re doing is building resentment which undermines the bond with your husband. Only you can fix this. Empower yourself. Get in your corner and fight. After the dust settles, I think you’ll finally gain that respect you so crave.

©2009, Janet Periat

Barbie and I both turn 50 this year. Other than our birthdays, gender and skin color (along with one other shared characteristic I will reveal later), this is where our similarities end. Yet Barbie and I have had a very complex and enduring relationship. It started off as unabashed hatred and slowly changed to adoration. In light of our shared semicentennial birthday, I have decided to chronicle our difficult and complicated journey together.

I became aware of Barbie around the age of six. Her atomic breasts are the first thing I remember noticing. They intimidated me. Appearing to me to be roughly the size of a nose cone on a Boeing 747, I remember thinking how alien she was. She represented a sexually active adult roughly the same age of the people who attended my parents’ cocktail parties. While her rock hard, nipple-less breasts were somewhat titillating (pun intended), she represented a future in which I had no interest.

Thankfully, shortly thereafter, Mattel released a Skipper doll. With her flat chest and innocent eyes, this was a doll I could relate to. Problem was, Skipper played second fiddle to Barbie. Barbie was the big woman. The boss doll. Skipper didn’t go on dates with Ken, she didn’t get married, she didn’t work at the Barbie Store. And she didn’t get a Dream House. For all her hard work, Skipper lived in the shadow of Barbie’s formidable breasts. Skipper was powerless. Skipper was inferior. Since I identified with Skipper, I began to feel inferior to Barbie. Which probably fueled my growing contempt for the buxom doll.

My hatred of Barbie culminated one afternoon at my friend Nancy’s house. Nancy had equal disgust for the synthetic brazen hussy. Instead of playing house with the doll, we stripped Barbie naked and stuffed her in an abandoned birdcage in Nancy’s garage. Basically, we created our own Guantanamo and tortured the doll. Short of waterboarding, that Barbie had a very bad day. This is my fondest childhood memory of playing with Barbie. And the last.

After that precious afternoon, I eschewed all contact with Barbie. My attachments to all life-like dolls (not that she was very life-like) was limited. Basically, I hated them. I had no interest in pretending to be a mother. Consequently, as an adult, I have chosen not to procreate. Considering the fate of Caged Barbie, this was probably a good move on my part. Instead, I preferred to play with troll dolls. For reasons I probably need to take up with my therapist, I related more to the malformed, hideous, and less human-like creatures. I didn’t reconnect with Barbie until my early twenties. As before, the contact was fueled by a deep-seated loathing.

When I went punk in 1982, I indulged in punk art, a punk haircut, punk music, punk clothing and a totally punk attitude. Part of this attitude was to reject the societal construct. To this end, Barbie helped me tremendously. Well, parts of her.

During my punk years, Barbie came to represent to me the imprisonment of women. The perfect icon for all that was wrong with the stereotypical women’s role. I blamed Barbie for the oppression of women and the reason the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t get ratified. Barbie was the enemy. And what better way to show my contempt than to attack this heinous symbol of female subjugation and servitude.

My first punk sculpture was Barbie Massacre: a bloody killing scene representing all my anger and feelings of powerlessness at the hands of The Man. After a trip to the local thrift store for materials, I took He-Man and set him up on a plastic tray I’d pulled out of a defunct refrigerator. I chopped up several Barbies: decapitating them, severing limbs and torsos. After gluing He-Man to the plastic tray, I glued Barbie’s various body parts beneath him, then added liberal amounts of stage blood. Voila! Art in Action. Fought the dominant paradigm, worried my new roommate and added a bit of pizzazz to our living room. Three worthy causes all in one shot.

After Barbie Massacre, however, I realized I wasn’t reaching the audience I needed with my grand show of contempt. So I made a collection of jewelry with mutilated Barbie parts. I made earrings out of her severed feet, pins out of her decapitated head and dismembered arms and wore them proudly around the neighborhood. Gilroy has never been the same.

As my punk rage at society became slowly replaced by the realization I needed to actually grow up and take care of myself, I created the last Barbie piece of my punk years: Barbies Under Glass. A twisted combo of nude, de-limbed Barbies tied up with wires with a scattering of miniature skulls for posterity—all stuffed into my grandmother’s bell jar. Received many compliments (and culled many people from my herd) with that artwork.

However, as time passed, a strange thing happened to my pathological hatred of all things Barbie. Somehow, through all this contact with the plastic icon, I ended up falling in love with her. Barbie now reminds me of all those fun, formative, angsty punk years.

As my attitude changed, I began to feel a deeper kinship with the doll. After all, we were born in the same year. I still have Barbies Under Glass displayed in my house. I decided to pay homage to my favorite plastic girl. I also wanted to achieve my dream of looking like an action figure naked (clearly another topic to discuss with my therapist). The only way I could attain these goals without radical plastic surgery was to get the Mattel logo tattooed on my butt. (Costs three beers to see it.) And thus my love/hate relationship with the beloved icon came full circle.

So, Happy Birthday, Barbie. And I mean that. From the bottom of my bottom.

©2009, Janet Periat