Monday, September 26, 2005

Monday: it's Depravity or Corruption time!

I was muckin’ around with topics for a post-of-the-week the other day. I threw out some ideas of things I might write about were I to do this kind of regular feature. But I wasn’t serious. Still, several bloggers followed up and told me that if I did not do “Vice of the Week” here on Ocean, they would do it on their own blogs.

I hate it when the competitive spirit pushes me to do things I would not otherwise do. That may be a vice in itself. I could not swallow the idea that Vice would meander over to another blog. It had to happen here, on Ocean, or not happen at all.

This week-end I reviewed my vices of the past week. They were either terribly boring or terribly conventional. I do have to say there was a lot to choose from.

All got rejected. Blog feature was about to die.

But then, a teeny tiny vice crept into my day today and the Monday Vice (of the Week) feature was born.

Oh, it’s not exciting. I did not engage in sex to gain favors, I bribed no one (that I can recall at the moment), I did not torture small animals [though I repeatedly told Tonya to donate her pooch for science or, at the very least, send her out on a boat in the middle of the lake and see if she swims home (I meant Lake Michigan, not Mendota)].

But know that by definition, my vice does not have to be filled with pathological acts of cruelty and mental imbalance to qualify (though even there, my own mother could find enough fodder in my daily life to make this work – though that may be more a reflection of how she regards me than how I regard myself).

The online Webster’s says this about vice:

a : moral depravity or corruption :
WICKEDNESS b : a moral fault or failing c : a habitual and usually trivial defect or shortcoming

So you see, a very small bitty little act could qualify. And I am going to start small. In fact, within one hour of waking up today, I had myself a vice. Here, see for yourself:

In the past weeks, I yet again have refused to pick up the mail from my mailbox on the theory that it looked boring. And when I did retrieve it, I shoved it in an obscure spot (under the bed perhaps?) and promptly forgot about it.

So that when I picked up the phone this morning to find out if an email message in my Inbox was spam or for real, I found that my newly established phone service at the loft had been shut off for nonpayment of the very first bill (that apparently came some 30 days ago).

(Personally, I think they should have sent at least one warning and allowed me to redeem myself, but hey, I am not the CFO of SBC and so I cannot tell them how to run their business.)

What is pathetic and vicey about all this is that it was my very first bill in my “new life” at the loft and I fucked up (oh, sorry, I guess we have ourselves vice number two, all in the same day! How sweet!) right from the start.

Bet you can’t top that.

P.S. The phone service is up and running. To compensate, I sent them a check and then, full of shame and remorse, called and gave them my credit card number. In effect, I paid twice, but hell, who cares. I needed to feel like a whole person again.

10 comments:

  1. oh, that sooo beats my lying to a boyscout! you are definitely more vice-ridden than I at the moment. especially now that I've stopped smoking and all.. i love the feature, monday vices! yay!

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  2. Ah well, my brother had, by dint of bad (or absent) legal advice, put his evil ex-fiancee's name on the title of their house, even though they weren't married and he was paying for everything. When they broke up a couple months ago, the evil ex-fiancee had agreed (verbally) to sign documents removing her name from the title, in return for my brother shouldering the transfer tax (several thousand dollars where they live) and moving her stuff out at his expense.

    Well, the move out was supposed to have been last Tuesday, except she had the movers come on Monday, and not unsurprisingly she helped herself to a few items that they'd verbally agreed would stay in the house.

    Then, before her appointment to sign the transfer paperwork, she demanded $25,000 to sign, else he could fight her to the end of the world or until he tried to sell the property, whichever came first. In the end, she was bargained down to $15,000, which was about what it would have cost to have taken her to court without certainty as to the outcome.

    Seeing as my brother, like me, started with nothing but a decent education and worked his ass off trying to make a home for their would-have-been family, the evil ex-fiancee's behavior is, I submit, vice per the "moral depravity or corruption" definition. Good fucking riddance to the evil ex-fiancee.

    BTW, my brother really needs to meet a better class of potential mate.

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  3. Um, Tom, I think that the idea here is to write about your own vice of the week, not someone else's.

    Howevver, if it turns out that I am wrong and it's okay to tattle on other people's shitty behaviour, then I'll dish about all the wicked things Jeremy has been up to.

    I, of course, have been a good girl and have nothing whatsoever to report.

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  5. Tonya: Far as I can tell, Nina's looking inwards for a trivial "vice of the week," doesn't (well, didn't) stop me from uncorking someone else's doozy of a vice when challenged with "bet you can't top that."

    But this is Nina's site, so I'll let her judge how badly I've broken the "rules."

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  6. Hmm. First the link to Ocean from Jeremy's web page tries to direct me to girlygirls.com, now this? In the words of my dearly departed Grannie, "what's the world coming to?"

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  7. All vices welcome, though people tend to be shy about going public with their sinfulness. Have no idea of why that should be the case, but there you have it. Me, I have so much to choose from that I can reach back and select that, which still seems (semi)appropriate for public display.

    Kim: I checked JFW and indeed, according to that site, Ocean is no more -- it has transmogrified into the girlygirls site. Maybe that's my punishment for not giving Jeremy back his book in a timely manner.

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  8. Love, love, love the new feature! As of late my vice is a failure to update my blog.

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  9. Steinbeck, in his description of his good friend Ed Ricketts in the book Log of the Sea of Cortez, describes how Ed *never* looked at any mail, on the theory that if something was important enough to send in a letter, sooner or later it'd be important enough to call or stop by about.

    Personally, my (small) vice is similar: I never answer the phone and refuse to get an anwering machine.

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  10. The vice is in the fact that you know that you should (answer the phone, pick up the mail) and yet you do not. Of course, with the phone you begin to develop a reputation and so people stop calling and use other ways to track you down. But what justification is there for not attending to bills? None. My excuse is that I grew to hate the task so much in the last year that I developed some bill-paying disorder. Let's just hope that awareness truly is 80% of the cure.

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