Take just one, please

Last week I was at one of those suites-only hotels that provides free dinner, complete with milk and cookies in the evening.

In general, I love those places, except when the food is so awful I wouldn't leave it out for the rats. Happily, this was not one of those places. The food was, well, good.

Every night, the cookies would disappear about 5 minutes into dinnertime. One evening, I popped into the lobby to snag a cookie...and they were all gone.

Pasta? Plenty. Green salad? Oh, I could have all the salad I wanted. Cheap wine? Abundant. But the cookie jar? Empty.

And then I saw why. One woman sat solo at a table, eating her dinner, plate piled high with pasta and salad. And next to her was a second plate....with four chocolate-chip cookies on it.

Listen, rude-asses, the hotel puts that stuff out for everybody. And you may not have noticed, but they also do not replenish the good stuff -- like cookies.

Realize that you're not the only person staying at the hotel. Take just one, please.

This rule applies whenever you're grabbing freebies -- leave some for the others.

Can you bear to hear me carp about cell phones again?

This one is a bother to everyone within a 5-foot radius:

When you go shopping, whether it's at the grocery store, Target, Kmart, Macy's, the local general store, please look around and note that you are in a store and not a f***king phone booth.

Every time I run errands, there's some dunce either wandering aimlessly among the aisles, blathering away, usually about some interesting-only-to-them personal problem; or some other dunce who walks in yapping on the phone, s/he grabs a cart, and then parks it right in front of the very item I need.

Both are irritating, especially when, as is usually the case, the yapper is loud, and doesn't really care if innocent bystanders have to hear about how her emotionally stunted boyfriend can't commit.

In a store? Here's a novel idea: stash the phone and shop.


* please note that there's nothing wrong with taking a quick call in the store -- sometimes you're needed. But a half-hour blather fest that really should be at home with a glass of wine? Not in the store.

It's not rude, but it is despicable...

Don't you want your kids to have the same basic rights you do? Things that you probably take for granted? Don't you want your kids, your friends, your loved ones to have a relatively stress-free life?

I lived in California for five years. As I prepared to leave my Midwestern home town for the land of the sun, co-workers bade me farewell with such clever witticisms as, "California! Land of Fruits and Nuts!"

If only.

As I walk this great country (okay, it's mostly air travel, but I am a super busy public speaker), everywhere I go, I share with my audiences, "California is pretty conservative."

The reaction: "No!"

My response, "Look at who their governor is."

Their response: "Oh. [pause] Yeah."

One of the aspects I loathed about California was its omnipresent conservatism and hyper-sensitivity -- and this was in the San Francisco Bay Area. The City itself was, of course, more liberal. But one foot outside of SF, and you couldn't sneeze without offending someone within sneeze-shot.

I once had a class full of old hags from Pacific Bell who were pissed off (and told my incompetent boss so in a three-page letter) because in the Intro to the Internet class I was teaching, I had the audacity to actually -- shocker -- show people how to use the internet to find things such as phone numbers. The bitch bags carped that I was causing them to lose their jobs. They never considered the fact that they spent more time gossiping and smoking than they did working as the cause of their future lay-offs.

Then there were the geniuses from one shipping company who got angry because another instructor merely mentioned their competitor. Not in praise, mind you. Just said the name.

Then there's my Cali-dwelling white friend married to a non-white man who thinks gays don't deserve the same rights as she and her husband.

And this, my friends, is horseshit. The fact that Prop 8 passed in CA last week is horseshit. And it's downright despicable.

About two years ago, the love of my life found himself admitted to the hospital with a life-threatening condition. I was at his side every minute; I can't imagine not being able to be by his side to help him through such an ordeal. And I can't imagine denying this basic right to our brothers, our sisters, our children, our friends, our relatives.

I'm almost, no, right now, I am ashamed to say I lived in California. (btw, I got out, thank god, before Ah-nuhld got in.)

If you don't agree with me, especially if you are straight and don't agree with me, answer me this: how would you feel if you were forbidden to marry your spouse, forbidden to have any say in his/her medical-slash-end of life decisions?

I'm lucky, and grateful, that I got to marry the love of my life.

I'm thrilled that I got to see our first non-white president in my lifetime.

I am sure we will see nationwide gay marriage in my lifetime, and, hopefully sooner rather than later, our first female president.

Mr. Obama, are you listening?