Not Much of a Bathing Beauty

Age ^III

People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. 

The rules are the same.  Look for something you’ll feel comfortable wearing

 and allow for room to grow.    –Erma Bombeck (1927–1996)

            I’ve never been much of a bathing beauty.

I’m not shy, I’m modest. One thing that has not changed over the years is that it has never been easy for me to get comfortable going out in public wearing what really equates to fancy spandex underwear.  I failed miserably as a Beach Bunny and as a Surfer Chick

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            Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done plenty of UVB damage.

In one of my yesteryears when I was hanging out at the Jersey Shore with some kids from the Honduras, I spent so much time in the sun that I got phlebitis. My legs swelled up like huge water balloons. Richard Nixon had phlebitis—but Nixon was like a hundred years old and I was just a stupid teenager.  These Honduran kids had skin like hot cho

colate and I stood out like a marshmallow. By the end of the day, I was a red-hot mess unable to sleep, pee, or walk.  I cried all night, praying for something that I didn’t necessarily believe in: mercy. Relief eventually arrived in the form of a Valium and a shot of something warm and tingly. 

Today I regularly check my skin for signs of mercy from my misguided, and yet not regretted, youth.  

When I saw this Erma Bombeck quote I was struck by the similarity to one of my own “theories” in life.  Hey, put enough candles on the birthday cake and you too will have an abundance of theories to keep you warm at night. 

My theory, based solely on observation and conversation, is that some of us (if you’re reading this you are already “one of us”) will take better care of our cars than we take care of our bodies. Think about it. Or maybe it’s just an L.A. thing and I have lost all perspective of the rest of the world.

 For instance, I have a respected friend who is able to keep two cars running, insured, and up-to-date and yet his teeth are literally breaking down. He was lax on the necessary upkeep on the ever important pie hole, trap,yap, blower, word hole, whatever you call it—it’s damn important. My friend is looking at about two to three months of serious work and close to a 40K tug on his bank account. Though oddly, he told me that he’s been saving for this inevitability for quite some time.  If there was a way to calculate, I’d like to know how much he would’ve spent over the past couple of decades (just in dollars, not counting anxiety attacks) to do the necessary upkeep on the 'grill of his ride.’  Just a thought.

As an urban woman I am reminded on a daily basis the pure frailty and challenge of surviving much less having a full set of pearly whites. We are in scary times. Healthcare is a commodity, not a right.  If you really want to be smart, to be politically active, to be on the correct side of left—you need to make every effort not to become a subject of the very system that will eventually consume you and everyone you hold dear. Turn healing over to the machine that sees you as nothing more than a number followed by a series of numbers and the ever important bottom line number and your personhood will not matter.  You will no longer have a voice in the discussion about the quality of your life.

You’re a person not a number. If you’re anything at all like me, and I’m thinking if you’ve read this far we might have something in common, you’ll be mightily pissed off when you get treated like a number.  You’ll want to shout, “I’m an individual, I have unique needs and likes and dislikes. . . “ and on and on you’ll rant, but the numbers keepers do not hear you. Our best option in these tenuous times is prevention. Make our best efforts to prevent a crisis in health, automobile, relations, and anything else that spins your world. Times have changed since Benjamin Franklin’s days—an ounce of prevention could now be worth a lifetime’s fortune.
 

When I hung out at the Jersey Shore, long before Snooki and that gang were born, we didn’t know about sun protection and such stuff.  The closest we got to sun protection was making out under the boardwalk.  I don’t know if anyone makes out under the boardwalk anymore. Our world has become so polarized it seems everyone sits in their own corner with their own view.  We even have good SPF’s versus bad SPF’s.  

I don’t advocate a puritanical life of total temperance, room temperature weak tea and confections in the shade. I’m talking about exercising common sense, free will, and being pro-active with our health. Use the information that has come our way and knock that Snooki on the side of her over-tanned over-teased head with some good sense.  She won’t listen.  I know that because I wouldn’t have listened either.

In certain circles I also hear talk of excitement, adventure, risk, and to love with abandon. That’s all good too. But people are fickle and life can make us cynical so to counterbalance the thinking-about-life game, we mustn’t forget Richard Nixon, phlebitis, and all the other consequences that might await us.

My sun damage is already done and perhaps the dye has been cast on the future health of my epidermis.  That’s okay, I like hats. I like knowing that if my skin turns hard and blotchy I will have earned it the old fashioned way—by youthful indiscretion.  Put enough candles on the birthday cake and you too will have earned perspectives that are unique to the consequences of your youth of sex, drugs, rock, athletics, studying too hard, driving too fast, drinking too much too often, or sitting alone and never taking a risk.  

If Erma Bombeck was sitting here with me right now, I’d assure her that today I look for the same qualities in a bathing suit that I need in a man.  I look for flexibility with my flaws.

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Help Wanted at TSA

The ad said: "TSA screeners wanted." I can do that, I thought. This was way back at the very beginning of the creation of the TSA. I needed a job and they needed a good pair of eyes, or so I thought. The online application for the federal position was easy, straightforward, very short. I received an immediate e-mail response requesting a testing appointment. I accepted the appointment, marked my schedule, and prepared to become a federal employee.

Or so I thought. The testing location was a small, obscure hotel out by the airport. It didn't say as much because the confirmation e-mail only gave an address. There were no courtesy directions, like "immediately look to your right as you're getting off the exit that you’ll be taking at 35 mph or you’ll miss the hotel." That would have helped a lot. I found the location and rushed up to the check-in area about one minute past my appointment time. I already felt like I had failed the test. A young woman sat behind a makeshift desk talking on the telephone, clearly a personal call. I admit I was a bit pushy. I tried to interrupt her conversation to let her know that I was here to take the test. We could both see the test going on in the next room. She waved her finger to indicate that I would have to wait. I waited. I had my confirmation letter on the makeshift desk. She took my paper and tucked her cell phone between her ear and shoulder blade. That move just never makes sense —to turn one's neck at a 90° angle to say "uh-huh, uh-huh." She perused my letter for a good minute, at an angle, and finally said, into the phone said, "Okay, bye." She removed the cell phone from between her ear and shoulder, but she didn't straighten her head until she looked very closely at my letter and at me and then very slowly ran my "credentials" through the time clock. Oh yes, I had already failed the test.

But I had made it this far and I was going to take that test no matter what. I would let them really regret not being able to hire me because I was one minute past the appointed time and I got off on a bad foot with the junior college student behind the folding table. TSA was going to have to think long and hard before not hiring me.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the testing room was that I was the only Caucasian female. This is not the first time this has happened, but I am curious if federal jobs, federal jobs which hold the security of our nation's transportation system in the palm of its hand, have such a dearth of white women. Just curious. And the next thing I noticed was the test had very little to do with language skills, communication abilities, eyesight, nerves, common sense, or integrity. And yet many of the people in the testing room, all who were taking the test, struggled. That really had me wondering.

Oh sure there were some images on a screen to classify, i.e. cylinder shape or square shape or rectangle or flat. That type of thing. There were no big words like octagon or silhouette. It was very easy and straightforward. Maybe every tenth or fifteenth question was a trick ethics question-something like: "If someone offers to give you directions, are you suspicious?" And the question arose again, slightly rephrased: "if you're lost, and someone offers to help, do you accept the help or do you refuse?"

As the test continued, the ethics/principles questions were more frequent and only every tenth or fifteenth question was a test of logic. I found it odd that there were no questions about focus in times of distractions, about making split second decisions. There was no test of nerve. Perhaps that was the next level before being hired. The ethics questions were not so much about character as personality. They were definitely looking for suspicious, non-critical thinkers, who were good at reading directions. At some point, I sat back, away from the test and considered leaving. This is not a job for me. And yet, I worried who it was for.

"If you are stranded in the desert and a stranger comes along with a bucket of water, do you drink it?" I have no idea what this has to do with viewing and quickly assessing hundreds and hundreds of total strangers, strangers who depend upon you for their safety. And any one of whom could possibly blow us all into a new reality. I don't remember any questions about determining an unsafe situation. I did notice there were no questions about people skills and interviewing styles and assessments. "If a blind elderly woman is about to walk into the crosswalk, do you stop her?" was not a question on the TSA test.

And I’m not saying that that question should be on the testing application for the TSA employees. Janet Napolitano’s problems with security breach did not begin in Newark Airport. Napolitano’s problems are more of the bequeathment from the previous administration. More accurately, TSA’s problems are the bequeathment from a mind-set direct right out of Orwell’s “1984,” and some of these genius’ in this testing room were going to be the water bearers for the oligarchy. And TSA’s problems will become our problems.

I have traveled many times since taking that test that far away afternoon, way the heck out in some tiny crevice of the Los Angeles Airport. I have checked out the TSA employees and quite honestly, I think I observe much more about many of them than any of them observe about me. Fair enough, I’m one in a million. I have observed that there are many Caucasian females in the profession (phew, we can rest now) and that most TSA employees stand straight up for long hours, doing some of the most monotonous tasks ascribed to a job description, in full display of the barefoot and cranky public, and rarely do they look you in the eye. I can not say that I blame them I rarely look anyone in the eye when I travel either. But they aren’t traveling, this is their job and it seems that only now are the powers that be, or the powers that have been, realize the delicacy and importance of this gig. I admit, when I took the test I was looking for a part-time gig that might give me some discounted travel opportunities.

Truth is this job is about national freaking security. And the requirements are to not trust anyone, ever. This is not an opportunity to be Donald Trump’s Apprentice. This is national security. The paranoid and dim-witted are scooped up to stand hours upon hours to look at us, to evaluate in one second whether we are safe to be contained on a tin-tank flying in the air for more than a couple of hours. There were problems with the whole approach from the very beginning. The original concept of TSA is flawed. This is not so much about individual security as it is about gathering secured information. And who best to execute such a crime against basic human privacy? That job would belong to the most mistrusting, defeatists, no-hopers available at any moment.

“It's just part of a pattern of we are not vetting these candidates clearly," Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) told Fox News. You’d think he was talking about the general intelligence, people-skills, and qualifications that TSA screeners possess in order to do the job effectively. No. Sen. DeMint has concerns that TSA screeners will unionize. And that would be really bad because it goes against oligarchy. I just don’t see a TSA Union as being anything other than complete compliant with the status quo. TSA has been in existence for less than a decade and they are already status quo. TSA screeners have to know about the long-term affects of over exposure to radiation scanners and they will simply not believe the studies or they value their jobs as being more important than their health. “Would you help a stranger?” TSA screeners are trained to be the new breed of the perfect victim of Stockholm syndrome, wherein hostages or victims have irrational positive feelings towards their captors and feel protective toward them.

It is a scary would in which we live. Let us not forget that we had a hand in creating this world. Let us not forget that we have a hand in creating the future.

I don’t know the answer. Truth be known, I don’t know enough to have a solution. None of us reading this will have enough information to effectively evaluate the situation. So let us begin with what we always begin with- awareness. It worked for Red Dye #5 and seat belts. Be aware that TSA employees can only do what it says to do in the manual. They follow directions without questions, they do not make decisions, and they will never ever utter an original thought. Now could you do that job?

By the time I found my way home from that spec of a hotel on the off-ramp out by the airport, the efficiency of the testing center was startling. I had an email confirming, in their to-the-point manner, the TSA will not be offering me employment. “Good luck with your future opportunities.” Na, it didn’t really say that.