WordSisters

Author: cmkraack

  • Fate of the Crumbled Cookie

    Tip of the hat to the Girl Scouts gathered outside stores with boxes of their annual cookies. This blog is not written for them.

    Peanut butter cookies float my boat. For those with peanut sensitives, please substitute your favorite cookie variety. At the local Piggly Wiggly the store-baked cookies are delightful and at their peak for at least five or six days. Soft and buttery, one cookie has to be enough for anyone over the age of daily recess playtime. 

    I carried the last four cookies home near the end of their prime to surprise my husband. Unfortunately, they rested under bananas in the carrying tote. That’s the way the cookies crumbled. Four round sweets became pieces of many sizes in a sealed bag. The 1950s phrase, jokingly exchanged with my husband, stuck in my mind. 

    On Reality Wednesday, the day after Super Tuesday, I responded “this is the way the cookie crumbles” to a friend’s deep unhappiness about voters’ behavior. He asked if I had learned that phrase from my grandmother then suggested I use the appropriate contemporary phrase: shit happens. Which describes what many people hope to avoid during the 2024 election cycle.

    Our discussion made me wonder about how U.S. English slang language transitioned from cookies crumbling to shit happens when describing something bad has happened and a person must accept the way things are.  The 1950s were considered a happy time in the U.S. with the boys (and girls) returning home from war, building houses, starting families and enjoying the life that World War II sought to protect. Cookie references seem to reflect that seventy years ago kind of contented outlook.

    And today’s phrase also seems to reflect the current emotion of our nation.  Fearful, divided, violent, embracing the crudeness of life, watching events too large to be absorbed that must be accepted because people did die or had their lives negatively impacted. We’re not looking forward to a golden era, just trying to adjust to what now exists, and hoping for at least a plateau in our world’s disruption. For some the best times are past. For others the best times were never experienced. 

    These are broad painted observations. Media no longer allows people to remain ignorant of what is broken or underdeveloped in our country or how the physical environment of our world demands attention.  

    I ate some of the cookie pieces and one of the offending bananas. Mustn’t waste. Time to return to the heavy lifting of doing something to keep more shit from happening.  

  • Love of a Woman

    Did you notice many people wearing red February 2 to call attention to the American Heart Association®️ Go Red for Women®️ campaign?  Has anyone mentioned to their doctors the Yale’s Women’s Health Research study on women’s lower outcomes compared to men after coronary artery bypass surgery? Keep in mind that heart disease is the #1 killer of American women and 44% live with some form of it.

    February is National Heart Health month. While political theater would keep female eyes focusing on reproductive health as women’s major issue, most of the true state of women’s health is unknown. Not only is there inequality in how the medical community treats women, but less than 11% of the National Institute of Health’s 2020 budget went towards female illnesses or conditions. Staying with heart health challenge, only 29% of cardiac artery bypass surgery is done on women, with a statistically lower success. Heart disease presents different in women and is often ignored. Select surgeons recommend that more female cardiac surgeons need to be trained to care for female patients with additional research and training on female heart disease treatment. 

    Not need to worry unless you are a woman or love a woman. That includes daughters, sisters, mothers, partners, special friends. 

    The World Health Organization found that although women in the European Union live longer than men, they spend more of their lives in poor health. Prevention is not as high a consideration in women’s health as intervention–waiting until illness has hit, a pregnancy is in trouble, a young mother cannot take care of her family. Research money in pain management is directed toward men—80% of budget while about 70% of women manage long-term pain. 

    Women are responsible for 85% of the decisions about their families’ healthcare. Marketers know a lot about women as buyers and users of healthcare. Sophisticated research can be done today by manipulating data. So why doesn’t the healthcare world know more about the differences between men and women’s bodies?

    For love of all women, healthcare research and care delivery need to immediately update thinking that treats a five-foot four-inch female standing next to a six-foot male as merely a smaller body. Someone you love might depend on more specific knowledge and care.

  • Happy Clean It All Up Season

    Plastic pumpkins should have been stored in the Halloween bin. A pilgrim waits to be moved with the other handful of Thanksgiving decorations. We’ll need at least a half day to put all the Christmas pretties in the basement. The outdoor lights are red and white, so they will wear well until Valentines Day.

    Even after reducing decorative stuff by many storage containers, there is so much stored.  It’s hard to trash or give away generations of ornaments, candles gifted by folks now passed, a goofy collection of singing stuffed animals. No family member wants to add these to their holiday decorations, but no one is really okay with giving much away.

    New Year’s Day I typically want to write, watch football, chill, but also find my hands impatient to empty the family room of gnomes and the singing animals. The dining room table could be stripped of a tablecloth and brought back to its normal size. I am done with the beloved clutter. Toss the poinsettias. Store the candles. Put away the stockings and hangers. 

    Storage bins, filing cabinets, pretty cloth baskets fill ads staging cleaning as invigorating, fun, a natural activity to fill dark winter weeks. With healthy athletic drinks and granola bars also advertised, there is some implication that marketing genius know of a heart-friendly link between snacks and organizing. The whole clean up season is filled with many opportunities to tweak a back moving boxes, many tiny paper cuts or tree hanging hook snags, eye fatigue correcting holiday card lists. 

    Forbes, the Cleveland Clinic, Simple and others cite the link between a healthy mind and a clean house. You must look hard to find anything suggesting a tidy house is sign of inferiority. House tidiness or messiness are both probably in one of those twenty-seven signs of dementia or fourteen indicators that you are wearing the wrong size shoes. 

    Let those who find new bins and organizing systems satisfying spend what’s left of the holiday dollars. If the tree is put away before friends come over for football’s great Sunday extravaganza and the boxes are near the storage area by Valentine’s Day, consider yourself owner of a moral victory. 

    Warning: The Easter Bunny will not leave eggs in red or green felt holiday socks left hanging anywhere in the house. Even those with pastel plastic grass sticking out the top. Do not insult the little creature.