Making Sense(?) of Things

I used to tell people I'd never lost anyone close to me. I've been to plenty of funerals over the years: several great-grandparents, a cousin that I didn't know very well, some high school acquaintances, a work colleague, a friend from college, the father of one of my best friends, the grandfather of another, even a student I taught last summer. But in every case I was just far enough removed from the loss to experience more empathetically than personally; or, the person was far enough advanced in years that the loss was expected and somewhat easier to deal with in that regard.

And then my daddy died.

It's funny... in the just over two weeks since he died, that's how I've come to refer to him: "Daddy." A title which, ironically, I barely ever called him in life. I don't remember; perhaps that was how I addressed him as a young child. But for as long as I can recall I merely called him Dad - with one specific exception. In 2004 I fell down a flight of stairs. The first several hours in the emergency room were a gradual progression of worsening events, as they first thought I had merely banged myself up pretty good but eventually came to discover that I had lacerated my liver and needed immediate emergency surgery. I'd been on the phone with my dad on and off all day, keeping him updated, and called him one final time as they were prepping me for surgery. As soon as he heard that word, he started talking about making arrangements to get to Chicago as quickly as he could - more difficult than it sounds because at the time he did not have a car that would make the trip, so it was going to require my sister to drive him 90 minutes to Waterloo where he could rent a car. I said, "Daddy, you don't have to come!" But as I hung up the phone, I realized that my unconscious use of the word "Daddy" was probably a sign that yes, he did.

I've been up and down the past two and a half weeks. There are moments where I get immersed in something I'm doing and feel almost normal. Then I feel guilty for feeling normal. Or for laughing. Or for realizing that I haven't thought about my dad for 30 minutes while I was immersed in something.

But you HAVE to be normal, no matter what people say. I'm getting lots of advice along the vein of, "Take the time you need. Everyone grieves differently. Do what you need to do." But the problem is, I can't just not go to work. It's not an option; mainly because as an independent contractor, if I'm not there, I don't get paid. I was already in an extremely fragile financial situation before this, and then I lost almost $700 in wages during the few days I went home to arrange my dad's funeral, and now most of the up-front estate expenses are falling to me as the oldest. So I go to work. But the problem is, when you show up for work, people expect that since you're there, you must be "okay enough" to be there. And even though most of the people at my various jobs, even most of my students, know what's going on, it's not like I can sit there and cry through rehearsal. So I suck it up, pull through the rehearsal or class... and end up unintentionally giving people the impression that everything is much better than it really is. And the more "okay" they think you are, the more they start diving back into a regular routine; piling more work on again, making more requests, expecting you to have all the time you had before.

But the reality is, I was too busy before this. And now, on top of all my regular commitments, I'm the administrator of my dad's estate, which is going to require hours of going through paperwork, multiple trips back to his house in Iowa, and heaven only knows what else. And what about time to mourn? I don't even know what that means, or how to do it. It's not like you can set aside an hour for "grieving" each day in your calendar, it doesn't exactly work like that. In fact, as I experienced yesterday, the dormant grief seems to sneak up and take over when I have the busiest day and can least afford to take a break and just cry.

Gorillas, Elephants and Common Usage, Oh my!

When I worked in corporate America, a couple colleagues and I used to entertain ourselves during long internal sales meetings by observing the overuse of the current business catch-phrases, idioms and metaphors. Over the course of a two or three day meeting, these words and phrases would begin to gradually morph and combine into misuse that was often more entertaining than the mere overuse. One example: During open discussions within our sales group, it was common for someone to try to add on to a colleague's point by using the segue, "And to piggyback on what Joe just said..." Trying not to overuse that one, a couple creative folks starting saying instead, "I'd just like to dovetail onto what Frank was saying..." By the end of the meeting, at least one person had morphed this into, "Let me piggytail on Susan's comments..." Highly entertaining.

I've always been hyper-aware of proper usage, particularly of idioms and phrases such as these. Yeah, I'm that person. The one that will cringe visibly when the wrong use of they're/their/there, your/you're, or its/it's is found in someone's writing. The one whose friends roll their eyes when I unconsciously toss out a correction of what they just said without even realizing I've done it. A few years ago I begged for (and gleefully received) Garner's Modern American Usage for my birthday, and it proudly sits on my desk, always within arm's reach, beside my Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus and Webster's Grammar and Punctuation Handbook.

But I'm not really the grammar police. I can't be - I didn't get a very good grammatical education myself. I didn't realize this until I spent two months studying in the Dominican Republic during college, and took daily Spanish classes. The teacher was trying to explain to me that the verb she had demonstrated on the board was the present participle... and I realized I couldn't translate it to its English equivalent because I didn't know what the present participle meant in English. I didn't learn a lot of the basics of grammar growing up. I don't think it's because I just checked out during those classes - I just think it didn't get taught, or taught well enough. (Please note the proper use of "its" and "it's" between those last three sentences. ...Sorry, couldn't resist.)

But I digress. The purpose of this post is not to talk about why I should or should not serve as the grammar police. It's actually about a very specific misuse and amalgamation of two common phrases, a misuse that drives me absolutely bonkers every time I hear it. In fact, it was hearing this misused phrase spoken by a newscaster on the radio last week that led me to create this blog in the first place. As I was stuck in traffic and I heard the idiomatic violation so offhandedly thrown, not into a casual conversation of the uninformed, but into the newscast of a well-respected reporter on a huge Chicago talk-radio station, I sat stewing and composing my rant in my mind. And then I thought, "I should start a blog, and this will be my first post!"

Okay, so it's actually my third post, and by now I've rambled so long that I'll be surprised if anyone actually makes it far enough in this to even learn what oft-combined phrases have me so aggravated. They are: "The 800-pound gorilla" and "the elephant in the room".

People. Those are the phrases. No combination. No variation. However, it is quite common to hear "the 800-pound gorilla in the room." AAAAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!

To understand why you can't combine them, you need to understand what each means. "The elephant in the room" refers to some a problem or controversial issue that’s obviously present but which everyone ignores or avoids mentioning, usually because it’s politically or socially embarrassing. Or another way of describing it: a situation where something major is going on, it's on everyone's mind and impossible to ignore, but no one is actually addressing it. For example, one might say, "Bob's recent divorce was the elephant in the room that put a slight but perceptible damper on the holiday festivities."

As for "the 800-pound gorilla", this phrase actually has its origin in a joke: "Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants!" The phrase is used to mean a business entity that is virtually unstoppable or impossible to compete with because of its sheer size. For example, one could say that "Apple is the 800-pound gorilla in the MP3 player market." The phrase is most commonly used in this business-world context. There's a great further description of what it means here.

As you can see, these idioms have very different meanings. Their various forms of amalgamation (the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the 800-pound elephant, etc) only serve to muddle the true definition of either. Additionally, I've seen the elephant phrase further destroyed by being blended with other phrases: "The pink elephant in the room" or "the white elephant in the room". ("Seeing pink elephants" is a euphamism for drunken hallucination, and a "white elephant" is a valuable possession of which its owner cannot dispose and whose cost (particularly cost of upkeep) is out of proportion to its usefulness.

Now to play Devil's advocate, one could argue that an idiom only means what people understand it to mean. Neither of these phrases is defined by its literal definition. So if a Chicago newscaster says "the 800-pound gorilla in the room" and the context leads one to understand that he means "the thing no one's talking about", then isn't it okay? Isn't the purpose of spoken and written language to communicate a concept between people? If said concept is understood, isn't it okay if the communicator's message was conveyed through a phrase that is being used in a manner other than intended? Well, call me a purist... but NO!

I'm certainly not the 800-pound gorilla in the world of modern American usage that's going to drive the change here, but the elephant in the room is that many people cavalierly throw phrases into their daily language without really understanding what they're saying.

The Tenant Situation

Okay, okay... I know I'm about six days late on this, but better late than never, right? Lots of people expressed questions/concerns about the outcome of my court date last week to evict my non-paying tenant from my condo in Oak Forest. Here is the story. By the way, I know many of the people reading this have heard me refer to the tenant by his real name; but seeing as this is posted publicly on the information superhighway (do people still call it that?), I've chosen to change certain names to protect the innocent. So for our purposes here I'll refer to the tenant as Ed and his girlfriend as Jenny.

[By the way, I know I said in my last blog post that the next one I wrote was going to be a random rant I'd been mulling over for a while. Well... guess you'll have to keep waiting for that one. Oh, don't worry... it's still coming.]

So just to quickly catch those of you up that may not have followed the story thus far, Ed has rented one of the rooms in my condo since last summer. He's been good about paying his rent, although he was two days late in January. At that time, Jenny emailed me to explain that Ed had been late because his father had recently been diagnosed with cancer and had gone home to Mexico to pursue the most aggressive treatments he could. Ed had emptied his savings and had been sending all available money home to Mexico to help out. Jenny said that if Ed was ever late again, I should email her and she'd help him out.

Ed called on April 1 to let me know he was going to be late. At first he told me it would be the next day, but that led to a series of unreturned phone calls and Ed continuing to not pay. On April 10, I finally served Ed official five-day notice of eviction - in other words, pay in five days or eviction proceedings will be brought against you. I was hoping that this would scare him into paying. It did not.

On April 16, after the five-day period had passed, I filed an official eviction case against Ed (for the low, low cost of $300 in court fees). The court date was set for April 30, last Thursday.

We arrived last Thursday morning in the court room at the Daley center, number 35 on a list of 45 or so cases for the morning. Like traffic court, any case in which at least one side has any attorney gets bumped to the top of the docket, so that the attorneys can move on to their other cases. Neither Ed nor I had an attorney, so we had to wait about two and a half hours until our case was even called.

First, Ed asked the judge (the honorable Diane M. Shelly) if the trial could be transfered to the Markham courthouse, since the property is located in Oak Forest. Judge Shelly said that she had no problem with that, and then asked if I had any problem with it. I said, "Your Honor, my only concern is that I know the extenuating circumstances behind Ed's non-payment. In January I received an email from his girlfriend telling me that his father is dying of cancer in Mexico, and Ed is sending all available money home. My concern with the change of venue is that it is simply an attempt on Ed's part to delay the proceedings further."

Judge Shelly turned to Ed and began to lecture him on the fact that, despite the difficult times we go through in our lives, we still have responsibilities that need to be adhered to. She said that, while she had the utmost sympathy for his personal sitaution, she didn't want to see him make choices now that would lead him to be unable to rent or buy a home in the future, hurt his credit, etc.

Judge Shelly asked Ed how far behind he was, and if he thought he could pay anytime soon. As Ed explained his answer, two vital pieces of new information came to my attention: 1) Ed had lost his job (on top of everything else) about a week prior, and 2) Ed had been booked on a flight to Mexico to see his father, perhaps for the last time, about a week prior to the court date. It turns out that he got pulled over for a seatbelt violation on the day of his flight and, according to him, there is a "flag" on his license related to something from when he was in the military. He didn't explain it, but apparently whatever this flag was, made it unable for him to leave the country that day. (I'm wondering why said flag did not come up when I ran the background check on him, but whatever.) Anyway, I couldn't believe how narrowly I had dodged a bullet there - if Ed had left the country, who knows how my eviction proceedings would have gone or how much they would have been delayed.

Judge Shelly's primary concern seemed to be to get Ed and I to work out an agreement in which I could get Ed out in time to re-lease the condo by June 1 (I already have someone lined up that can move in then), while keeping an official eviction judgment off Ed's record. She asked how long I was willing to give him to move out, and I said as long as he was out by May 24, that gave me a full week to clean prior to June 1. She ruled that we need to come back to court on May 22, and he needs to be completely moved out by that time and relinquish the keys to me in court that day. If he does so, no eviction will be entered against him.

She then asked if I wanted to drop the monetary suit against Ed. I told her that, while I understand his position, his non-payment of April and May and the related court costs were putting me in an equally precarious financial situation, and that I really needed to maintain the monetary suit. She said, "I understand, but given the fact the he has no job, do you really think you're going to actually get the money?" Good point. I asked if dropping the monetary suit now negated my ability to re-raise it in the future, and she said no, so I dropped it. She firmly instructed Ed to do whatever he could to pay me back for the two months and the court costs as soon as he could, rather than waiting me to bring a suit again in the future. He agreed.

Ed did, at the end of the conversation, try to ask the judge what would happen to his security deposit. He started to pull out the letter I'd sent him, telling him I had used his security deposit to pay for some of the overdrafts I'd gotten as a result of him being late on his rent. I'm pretty sure she would have told him that I was entitled to use his deposit for that, but he didn't even get the chance to ask. She looked at him incredulously and just said, "Son, you're breaking your lease, you've lived there one month for free and are about to be there three more weeks for free. I think it's safe to say you've kissed your security deposit goodbye." Ed silently slid my letter back into his folder of paperwork and said no more.

As we left the courtroom, Ed and Jenny approached me and thanked me profusely and genuinely. At first I was confused as to why I was being thanked for throwing him out on the street, but then I realized that it could have been a lot worse for him - I could have pursued the money legally and I could have made sure the official eviction judgement was entered against him. Ed swore repeatedly that as soon as he finds a job, he will pay me back as soon as possible, even if he has to do it in payments or something.

So all in all, I guess this was about the best outcome I could have asked for. I mean, I'm still out $1200 between his two months of rent and the court costs, and who knows when I'll ever see that from him. But, I do have someone set to move in and sublet for the summer, so at least June-August are covered. And, Ed knows officially he has to leave... otherwise I know he was planning on just staying there and not paying until the end of his lease in August.

The one amusement of the morning was watching all of the attorney cases I had to sit through. There were some fun ones. I think my favorite was the woman in five-inch Minolo's with her Coach bag who was suing to evict a tenant from a downtown apartment. The woman and her attorney were there, the defendant was not. Here's how it went:

Judge: How much are you seeking from the defendant?

Attorney: $58,000, your Honor.

Judge: (shocked) How far behind is he?

Attorney: Four months, your Honor. That amount represents four months' rent plus $2000 in legal fees.

Judge: ...How much is the monthly rent on this unit?

Attorney: Fourteen thousand.

Judge: Fourteen THOUSAND dollars?

Attorney: Correct, your Honor.

Judge: Fourteen THOUSAND. Not hundred. FOURTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH?

Landlord: It's in Streeterville, your Honor.

Judge: Ma'am, I mean no disresepct, I'm sure it's a very nice apartment... but fourteen THOUSAND dollars?!? Can I see a lease that shows that amount?

[Landlord hands over lease.]

Judge: Wait, am I reading this wrong? This says $8000 a month.

Landlord: That was the original amount, your Honor. If you look at the addendum on the last page, you'll see that it went up.

Judge: (reading from lease) "$8000 a month in June. $10,000 a month starting in September. $12,000 a month starting in November. $14,000 a month starting in January." When did he stop paying?

Landlord: January, your Honor.

Judge: (under her breath) I wonder why...

Swine Flu

I'm not sure why I've chosen to write my very first ever blog post about Swine Flu. Perhaps because one of my biggest pet peeves is the way the media manipulates our minds and in so many ways creates the news rather than merely reporting it, in this case setting the stage for overreaction and unnecessary panic. (And as I think ahead to my next post which I've already partially crafted in my mind, I'm realizing I should have called this blog "Pet Peeves" because I have a feeling that will be the underlying topic of many of my posts...)

Anyway, I'm not going to make any commentary myself on the Swine Flu panic. I am, however, going to direct your attention to another blog that I read frequently, that of natural and alternative health doctor Jon Barron. He wrote a great post this past weekend regarding what we really need to be worried about (and not), and how to protect ourselves. Read it here.