A heaping tablespoon of judgment

The occupant of the office next door is not my favorite person.  We work in different offices (blended seating, whose idea was it?), so we don't interact much, mostly just nod to each other when we pass in the hall.  Objectively, she's fine and pleasant, and one of my friends is good friends with her.  I find her habit of putting people on speakerphone and carrying conversations on at full volume to be a little irritating, but a lot of people do that.  Personality-wise, she feeds into a lot of cultural stereotypes or cliches to an extent that I never thought possible -- people joke about stereotypes existing for a reason and she exemplifies one.  But she's generally harmless and nice, so whatever.

Anyway, Friday afternoon, someone stopped by and asked how she was, which prompted a twenty minute lament about Mother's Day.  Apparently someone wished her a happy Mother's Day -- and she described it as a stab in the heart, because she doesn't have kids and won't ever have kids (age + cancer survivor) and her stepkids aren't really hers.  That's right, her stepchildren do not count as really being her children.

In a benign light, she maybe meant that she feels that she isn't their mother or the proper recipient of wishes on Mother's Day, that their mother, however screwed up and drug addicted she is, is the one who gets/deserves the love and well-wishes.

But the words "they aren't really my kids" came out of her mouth, and I was appalled.


And now for superficial judgmental-ness. I did not watch "Sex and the City" when it aired on HBO. I've caught a few episodes on basic cable now that it is in reruns. And I have the following observations:

• the "plain" one is really not plain. Duh.
• I do not get the appeal of Carrie -- her clothes look like they came out of a rag bag half the time and her hair very often is styled in a way that does not flatter her face.
• the one who is desperate to get married is just sad
• the appeal of Big is lost on me
• Carrie's "I had to wonder" as a hook for her column got old after two uses

People really liked this show enough to keep it on for several years and to generate two movies?