Livin’ in a Mom-ish Paradise

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I have nothing against moms. I’m not one, but I have no beef, overall, with the institution of motherhood. We’ve all had a mom, in some capacity — be it a nurturing, lifelong presence or simply our vehicle into this mad, mad world.

So, moms are good — as a rule. There are some circles of moms — like any community — that has its peccadilloes, but to label all moms X, Y or Z would be unfair. My best friend is one (twice over) and I love her kids. And I still love her after 18 collective months of talking about baked ziti and back pain.

I’ve considered being a mom, but it’s not my jam, I’m afraid. Or maybe I am literally afraid. I don’t know, but I’ve got my hands full of bunny right now and if my eggs turn to fossilized Raisinettes in the meantime, so be it.

In the last few years, the internet and the world, really, have been deluged with the mom movement. Moms are a force to be reckoned with — on the internet, in marketing, on TV — they’re everywhere. There are hip talk shows based on them, hosted by them, and written for them. The internet has got a mommyblog in every nook and cranny. There are mom-related conferences from here to Botswana. A majority of our business over the last 9 years has been from moms. So, I can, without a doubt, say I am definitely not anti-mom.

But — and I don’t think I’m alone here — the whole “add a variation of mom to any word and make it the hot new lingo” trend must die. Please, 2012, please… make it stop.

(I actually feel this way about a lot of these portmanteaux, not just the mom ones, but they’re funnier and resulted in the following conversation.)

Me: I’m so over everyone being a ninja and a rock star.
Kathy: haha… and a mom
Me:  I think I’m just super sick of words, like “mom”, being twisted into new words. Like Safemama, that’s two words, it’s descriptive. I’m talking about things like…
Me: Momversation
Me: and Mommavation
Me: and Momiversary
Me: and Momisvere
Kathy: Momstipation
Me: LOL
Me: Momstruation. Momgasm. Momicon. Mompocalypse! MOMMAGEDDON.

I wish I had some tidy way to wrap up this post, but then our conversation went on to talk about how someone guessed “donkey punch” as an answer on Jeopardy last night — which pretty much trumps any amount of humor in this post.

GoDaddy is Holding Me Captive

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As you may have heard, recently GoDaddy caused a big hubbub when it was discovered they supported SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).  Anyone who supports the freedom of the internet should NOT support SOPA, especially an internet-based corporation! In addition to being ridiculous, it could hinder the livelihoods of anyone working on the internet and everyone’s access to valuable information, among other things.

Anyway, when I found this out, I, along with a lot of other people, moved their domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap or another registrar. (I picked NameCheap because they seem much more transparent as a business, their prices are comparable, their customer service was really awesome and they are openly anti-SOPA.)

Once I cleared out and transferred all our domains from GoDaddy for both my personal account and our Moxie account, I tried to close my accounts. You know, delete them. Like you should be able to since they were your accounts to open in the first place. But guess what? Apparently, you can’t.

I searched high and low on that site and found nothing. I did Google searches. And finally, I called their customer support and was informed that I cannot actually delete my account. Their recommendations are as follows:

  • Remove all your products and domains from your account.
  • Disconnect any payment methods.

That’s it. So your account just sits there, with your personal information in it, just in case you might ever want to return.  But what if you don’t want to return?  I just want to delete my accounts!

I asked the customer service person — quite nicely, actually — if there’s someone else higher up I could speak to about this. They insisted no, there wasn’t and bid me a nice day. Seriously!  She said, “I’m sorry, no. You can’t delete your accounts with GoDaddy and there’s no one higher than me on this subject. Have a nice day.”

Apparently, this woman is the Grand Poobah Empress of GoDaddy Account Deletions.

I hung up and went about my day, but now I’m still getting GoDaddy emails with no access or link to unsubscribe at the bottom. And the real pisser? They close every email “Thank you for being a GoDaddy customer.”

That just frosts me. I AM NOT A GODADDY CUSTOMER and I DONT WANT TO BE and STOP ACTING LIKE I AM. It borders in harassment.

With all the recent accessibility issues regarding GoDaddy, I’m concerned that accounts with our business name, personal information and usernames are just sitting there, empty, waiting to be exploited by hackers or GoDaddy themselves. This is unacceptable to me. It has my name on it, I want it deleted. It seems unethical and maybe even illegal to deny that, no? (I don’t know about the legality, but if it’s not, it’s certainly FISHY.)

I wanted to login and change my username and email address to something fake, but it wouldn’t let me. It said you have to verify the email address change — obviously I can’t do that if the email address I entered is fake.

So you’re just stuck. I suppose they probably expect us to just sit on it and forget, but I’m not forgetting. I’m going to raise a stink. I will call and demand to talk to supervisors until someone can pull their thumb out of their ass long enough to hit “delete”.

GoDaddy, you may have changed your tune about SOPA, but that was only because you were scared of losing business, which you did — a lot of it. It has nothing to do with your business ethics, which are questionable, at best.

Some might see it as no big deal, but I care about what happens to my personal information. I admit, I sign up for a LOT of stuff on the internet, but if I don’t use it, I try to go back and delete the unused accounts. I don’t like all my cheese hanging in the wind, so to speak.  (Who thought of that expression?)  This is no exception.

Dramatic as it might seem, I feel as though I’m being held against my will and it pisses me off.

Don’t Call Me Grandma

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I’ve been thinking about my grandmother a lot lately — my maternal grandmother. I’ve written about her before, but she’s been on my mind more often than usual. She passed away in 1992, I believe it was, and we were estranged for most of my teen years due to some complicated Dynasty-like drama between she and my father.  But before that, she was my best friend.  She lived across the street from us in San Diego, where she’d moved  from Redondo Beach to be with my mom after she was diagnosed with cancer.

In retrospect, I’d say my grandmother was “a character”.  She was what some might call “feisty” or “spirited” or even “eccentric”.  I just knew she felt like my other half.  I loved being with her and we used to laugh so hard at things. As an adult, having spent time with kids under 10, their senses of humor are still developing and can be a bit dodgy, so you laugh with them because they’re cute, but it seems my grandmother genuinely found me funny. I thought she was hilarious.

I’d sleep over at her house quite often and once we were lying in the dark, giggling and thinking of all the words we could for throwing up. Hearing your grandmother, who despite being eccentric, was pretty well-to-do and uppercrusty, say things like “barf” and “upchuck” and then laugh with you about it — that was awesome. It’s a weird memory to cherish, but I do.

Before my grandmother and my dad were at odds, she adored him. She used to wear a t-shirt that read “Jerry’s Mother in Law”, back when having your own t-shirts made was all the rage in the early 80′s.

My grandmother appreciated the finer things, but that didn’t stop her from liking chili from a can and beer in a glass.  Often we’d have Dennison’s chili for dinner with saltines, I with a Dr. Pepper (her other favorite thing), she with a beer poured into a tall pilsner glass. We’d have this fine dinner, she in her leather wingback chair, I seated on the floor beside her, using her ottoman as a table while we watched T.J. Hooker.

My grandmother had the most delicate hands. They were old and touched with arthritis, but they were soft with backs that were purple and thin-skinned, like bruised berries under a phyllo pastry.

My grandmother often got wrong numbers. Apparently, it was just one number off from the San Diego Fish Market, so she’d often get calls at early hours asking about mackeral or halibut or whatever. She also used to get calls from someone with an accent who, upon my grandmother saying hello, would demand, “Stat Choo?! Stat CHOOOO?!” in a thick accent, which always amused her. Sometimes she’d reply in turn and they’d go back and forth for a minute or two before hanging up.

One of my favorite quirks of hers is that she hated to be called anything but “Grandmother”. Grandma was too casual, in her opinion and Granny was downright vulgar. Nana was geriatric, she said, but Grandmother was refined and respectful, so that’s how she rolled.

I miss my grandmother sometimes. She’s one of the few family members I can say I felt I knew as a person and not just as an authority figure or parent.  I’ve been dabbling a bit in genealogy lately and when it comes to her, I’ve hit a dead end.  There was always some “family secrets” and stuff we didn’t discuss and I knew her sisters were her half sisters, so it’s made me even more curious about her past and my overall family history.

I won’t see her in heaven, because I don’t believe in that, but I can say that I sense her with me sometimes — usually when I’m drinking beer from a glass.