I'm A Blog Ho

It is certainly no secret that my posting here has become less and less frequent these days. For someone who has a lot to say, I don't seem to be saying too much of it.

The truth is, I seem to be a bit of a bipolar blogger. When I started looking for a new place to write a year ago, I checked out Wordpress, Blogger, and Vox. I kicked Wordpress to the curb pretty quickly, although there was really nothing about Blogger that made it any more special. I just got to the point where I felt like I had to pick one. I stuck with Vox for a while, but sort of gave up on it as I got more into posting here.

But lately, something's shifted. Call it me being fickle, if you will. But I've gotten more interested in Vox again lately. The more The Boyfriend and I play with our camera, the more a lot of the features over at Vox appeal to me. It is just simple and fun there to store, organize, post and communicate with your photos as well as your words. And hey, I like easy.

I wouldn't say I'm leaving this blog. But it's pretty safe to say you're more likely to find updates from me over at Sixweasels than here. So please, visit me there. I know I'm a pain in the ass blogging vagabond, but c'mon ... if you don't, won't you miss me just a little??

I hope to see you there!

There is a Santa Claus ... Kinda

Do you remember how you felt when you realized there was no Santa Claus? To be honest, this wasn’t an overly traumatic experience to me. I just hit a point in my life where the concept of a fat man with a beard crawling down a chimney we didn’t have while a bunch of reindeer hung out on the roof seemed pretty far-fetched, especially when Mom wouldn’t let me go digging in her closet or the laundry room the month before Christmas.

Having a sister who was 8 years my junior made the whole “there’s no Santa” thing easier for me. I went from believer to co-conspirator, helping my parents keep the dream alive for another little girl. Helping craft Santa’s replies to her heartfelt letters, staying up late on Christmas Eve to wrap presents, and making the milk and cookies and carrots for Rudolph disappear was almost as much fun as curling up in bed with my eyes squeezed shut tight, hoping against hope that the Big Man was downstairs dumping a big load under the tree.

But even though my rite of passage into holiday adulthood was relatively painless, I read a blog entry by my friend Nicole over at Vox the other day about her son realizing there was no Santa, and it brought tears to my eyes.

“Why does something that seemed so real have to be fake?” he asked.

Ouch. When you think about it, the crumbling of the Santa myth is one of our first real experiences of the human condition. We all build sand castles in the air, believe in hopes and dreams and a sense of security that we wrap around ourselves like a blanket. And sometimes those castles hold, and sometimes they crumble or just vanish into the night like Santa taking off in his sleigh.

Over time, I’ve asked myself the same question Nicole’s son posed. I didn’t realize that was what I was doing, because I wrapped it up in the complexities and what-ifs that come with adulthood. But the bottom line was still the same.

I sheltered myself in the happy, carefree life that is college for years, sure the world held nothing for me but big adventures and literary success. Then I found myself working a day job and barely making ends meet half the time, and generally far too annoyed and tired for either adventure or much of anything literary.

I cocooned myself in the myth that my marriage, in spite of the fact that it was fraying at the seams, would go on forever. How could you love enough to say “I do” and then turn around ten years later, go ‘nevermind, you know what? I don’t after all” and move on in a cold, scary world, alone and much more broken than you were the first time you faced it on your own?

I phrased my questions at those points in my life in longwinded and sometimes maybe even eloquent ways. But the bottom line is that the sad, disappointed child in me was hurting over the crumbling of a myth, and stomping her foot with tears in her eyes, demanding to know why something that seemed so real was fake.

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen many times. Sometimes it is the crumbling of a myth, other times it is the end of something so real that going on without it makes the person left behind feel almost imaginary. Maybe it is the death of a loved one, the loss of a job that you actually enjoyed, or just waking up one day and realizing that you’re not 21 anymore. Maybe it is questioning the religion that kept you feeling safe and warm all those years to the point that you can’t quite believe everything you were taught.

But here’s the weird thing. Sometimes, we have to give up myths to see the real beauty in our lives. Over time, I’ve come to accept that I’m most likely never going to be a famous novelist. And instead of hating the day job that came instead, there are moments when I look around at the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been because of it and I’m almost glad.

And as for the other great myth in my life? Well, if it had turned out to be true, then I wouldn’t be where I am now. I wouldn’t be a girl who found true love, or who knew that when she had to she could get by on her own. I wouldn’t be this person who looks around at what I have with so much appreciation today because I know, really know, that sometimes what you think is there does a slow fade and leaves you standing in a big pile of “where the hell did my life go?”

And oddly enough, those grown-up realizations aren’t all that different than being the kid who finds out there is no Santa. You’re sad, disappointed, and at first might have a hard time trusting anything you once believed in. If Santa isn’t real, what about everything else you hold to be true?

Then over time, something happens. You realize that even though losing Santa is bittersweet, Christmas still rocks anyway. It’s pretty awesome that Mom and Dad go to all that trouble to see you all shocked and excited and joyful on Christmas morning. It’s downright cool that you have a warm, comfy home and good food and cheerful friends and a tree full of lights and homemade ornaments blinking in your living room. It’s pretty damn amazing that the human mind made up Santa and Rudolph and all that happy stuff.

Without sounding trite, you start feeling really good about the fact that the myth is about what lives inside of you and those you love. And that part – those hopes and dreams and sense of human connection – are real. The myths are just the pictures we painted to express those feelings somehow, and just because they aren’t technically real doesn’t make them less beautiful or worthwhile.

And so you realize all this, that there is no Santa and that sometimes you make big mistakes or life doesn’t end up being exactly what you thought it would be. And the sadness that comes with that makes the happiness that climbs to the surface anyway – the happiness that comes from the smile on your child’s face or the engulfing, tight hug of the one you love or the antics of a ferret … well, it just makes it all the more miraculous.

Growing up hurts. But sometimes, it isn’t all that bad.

Being A Woman

One of my newer favorite reads, Florinda over at The 3 R's regularly writes “10 on Tuesday” posts that I always mean to do myself. So even though today is Wednesday, I’m going to take a stab at the most recent one – “10 Reasons Its Great To Be A Woman (Or A Man)."

Since I’m not a man, I’m gonna go at this from the woman’s perspective. Sure, I think it must be really cool to be able to pee standing up and have less reason to worry about skanky public toilet seats, and not ever having PMS must rock, but I’m not sure if I could come up with a full set of 10 from a guy’s perspective. Since Florinda did such an awesome job in her post (get thee to the link and read it) and her reasons cover much of what I’d say in a more serious mode, I’m also probably going to be a bit simple about the whole thing.

10 Reasons It’s Great To Be A Woman

1. If there’s something creepy crawly in the house or the workplace, and someone with a penis happens to be in the vicinity, removal of the creepy crawly is generally not my job. The Boyfriend knows that extrication of spiders from the bathtub is his territory.

2. I understand the value of a good cry. When I’m having a bad day, week, month or year, I can bawl my eyes out alone, with a girlfriend, or with The Boyfriend and not feel like I’ve done something humiliating. I’m convinced that the reason so many guys get in bar brawls is that they won’t just let themselves turn on the waterworks now and then when life gets overwhelming.

3. If I want to be really sappy and lame and listen to cheesy love songs now and then (or even get tipsy and sing them loudly and badly with my girlfriends), I can, because as a girl I am given a certain bit of leeway in the sappy department. If a guy admits that he gets a little twinge when he hears Air Supply, someone will probably try to beat him up.

4. Although I’ve never been able to take advantage of the flexibility, I like knowing that as a woman if I was able to not have a career, or work at all for that matter, I’d get a lot less flack for it than my male counterparts. I think it sucks that this is the way society is – if I had my druthers we’d all be able to escape the toilet bowl that is the day job and do with our lives what made us happy. And I also think society is getting better as a whole about judging people, regardless of their sex, less on what they do and more on who they are. But guys I know who don’t have a typical ‘job’ still get more sideways glances in casual conversation then women in the same boat. So I’ll take what I can get and be glad I’ll get less of those glances if I ever do get to be a blissful slacker. Several decades of putting up with periods should get us at least that much.

5. Sticking with the work and slacker theme, I’ll be honest. As a woman, I have an arsenal of excuses when I want a sick day that bosses – even female bosses – won’t touch with a 10-foot pole. Having girly parts works wonders for that. I have never, ever, heard tell of any of the men in my life calling out sick and vaguely mentioning issues with their twigs and berries the way I casually and shamelessly throw around ‘girl troubles.’

6. And still on the work theme, I will never, ever have to put a noose around my neck and call it a tie. In fact, in the white collar/office world we chicks get a lot more flexibility in what we wear. In the 90-degree-plus, muggy days of August, I look around at my shirt-and-tie clad coworkers and feel so lucky to be getting away with a carefully-cut sleeveless dress and strappy sandals that I could just sing. I don’t actually follow through and burst forth with song, though, because my sweaty-balled tied-up comrades would probably want to slap me. Heat makes people crazy.

7. In a bar, I can have whatever I want to drink. If I order the standard “fruity girly drink,” no one blinks, because I’m a girl. It doesn’t matter if I choose wine or beer. If I go for some manly shot, I’m suddenly so incredibly cool that Toby Keith would write a song about me. However, there are certain bars, usually those where people have serious 80’s mall hair, beer guts, camel toe and the drinks are served in cans, where there’s a whole list of societal expectations about what a guy drinks. Don’t believe me? Go read the latest from Argentum.

8. I have nothing down there that I ever need to worry about catching in a zipper. And I never have to worry about someone checking out my package in the public restroom. We don’t have packages and we do have stalls. However, when I want my friends to check out my shit – ‘does my ass look OK in these jeans, does this bra make the girls perky enough’ – I can and no one thinks I’m a freak.

9. I can love sports if I want to, but I don’t have to in order to be cool.

10. I can be as sentimental as I want. I can say sometimes I just want to cuddle. I can get all nostalgic because of a puppy’s face on a dog food commercial. I can ask my friends for all sorts of feedback on my emotions and my relationships. I can do all of this without quickly guzzling a beer or farting to reclaim my manhood.

Happy Thanksgiving, gang. Play along if you’re so inclined!

An Introvert's Survival Toolkit

I’m coming to realize that I’m created somewhat ass-backwards.

With the exception of my ability to write a decent sentence now and then, my entire professional skill set is “people-oriented.” Well, I guess writing is somewhat people-oriented too, come to think of it. But my other skills all involve real-time interaction. I’m a good public speaker, meeting runner, discussion leader, liaison, project coordinator … yada yada yada.

Those are my skills. But my personality is that of an introvert. Lots and lots of interaction drains me. Because I’ve let my skills rather than my personality lead me to my way of earning a paycheck, I tend to get screwy in the head at times. Like now.

Between now and the end of January, my job involves sitting in a meeting room with 10-20 people 4 days a week, 8 hours a day. We go through a seemingly endless stretch of reviews and discussions and make decisions by talking our asses off. I’m surviving, but I have to admit that by Wednesday night it is all I can do to stare at my TV, nod at something The Boyfriend is saying, and try not to drool.

Once January rolls around, we move into actually taking all these decisions and putting them into action, building a system and going live with it. That seems far away right now, but once I get there my workdays will be less meetings and more doing. I’ve compiled a little survival list to get me there, and I’m posting it here as both a reference and a way of keeping insanity at bay.

1. Write every morning, even if I think I have nothing to say. Because I sure as hell won’t be writing in the evenings. When not drooling requires effort, crafting words is pretty much a no-go.

2. Remember that just because other people on the project bring more candy to the meeting room than an entire neighborhood buys for Halloween doesn’t mean I have to eat it. But damn … when the late afternoon crash hits, I SWEAR the Reese’s peanut butter cups start talking to me.

3. When my butt gets numb in my seat, stand up and stretch. Who cares if everyone else is sitting still and behaving themselves? If I’m the hyperactive kid in class, then so be it.

4. Don’t feel guilty about not always returning personal calls right away. No one wants to talk to a sleepwalker anyway.

5. Exercise in the morning, even if just briefly. This not only gets the blood flowing, it staves off the negative effects of talking candy and an ass that is glued to a seat 8 hours a day.

6. Reserve Sundays for football, no matter what else may be going on. Football rejuvenates the soul.

7. Do the holiday shopping online. There’s no reason to force myself to deal with even MORE people when I’ve got a credit card and a computer.

8. Drink wine. Wine is good. No, unfortunately, I can’t do this one IN the meetings.

9. Take advantage of having my laptop in the meeting room and read a blog now and then. I am only human, and we all need a break.

10. Remember when doing #9 NOT to sit where my boss can see what I have up on my screen.

That should get me through. I may be a numb-assed, chocoholic wino by the time it’s all over, but I’ll survive.

A Chance Encounter

As a general rule of thumb, I pride myself on not judging books by their covers, or people by their appearances. But the other day, I realized that I’m nowhere near as good at that as I think I am.

I was commuting home from downtown by bus. It was a fall evening, brisk and chilly and just a bit later and duskier than I’m comfortable with when it comes to being alone in a not-so-safe area of the city. The bus stop was empty, except for me, two men and the traffic whizzing by us.

The man to my left was at least two heads taller than me, large but thin and bundled so deep in a heavy, torn coat that you couldn’t see his face. He carried a bag and a bottle, which he made no bones about swigging from freely. He was muttering to himself, random obscenities that usually ended in “fuck off.” He was dancing too, although there was no music in the air. He just moved, alternating between speedy hops and swaying gyrations, and each bizarre dance step was bringing him closer to me. He was obviously high on something much stronger than whatever was in the bottle, and he was freaking me the hell out.

I wanted to move a little closer to the curb, but when I turned to my right I got a good look at the other man. He wasn’t dancing in the street or telling any invisible friends to get fucked. But he was covered in gold chains, a big black leather jacket, and baggy pants.

Standing on my own slice of sidewalk, I realized I was sandwiched between Grandmaster Crackhead, his invisible fuck-off friend, and Pimpdaddy Slick. Just great. All I wanted to do was get home, wash off the workday in a nice hot shower, and relax. Instead, I was smack-dab in the middle of every girl-who-works-in-the-city’s nightmare, and Crackhead was dancing ever closer.

I looked up the street, hoping to see the bus. No such luck. Then I glanced over at Pimpdaddy again, and found that he too was coming my way, heading in from the other direction. They were both heading straight for me. At that point, I was no longer mildly nervous. I was downright scared.

Just then, Pimpdaddy stopped walking, and said “Hey, yo!” I looked at him, but he wasn’t talking to me. He was staring straight at Crackhead.

Crackhead stopped dancing and just stared back.

“You don’t need to get no closer to this girl,” said Pimpdaddy. “You just head on up the road, now.”

Crackhead turned to his invisible friend, and said “motherfucker thinks he gonna tell me what to do. Motherfucker don’t know who he’s messin’ with, does he? You don’t know either. Go fuck yourself.” But while he was talking, he started dancing backwards, and moved far enough away that I felt myself breathing again, although I hadn’t realized that I’d stopped.

When he was far enough up the road to be little more than a heavy-coated, dancing blur, I turned to the other guy – who I’d stopped thinking of as Pimpdaddy, and said “thanks,” a little sheepishly.

“Ain’t no thing,” he replied with a grin. “He’s out around these parts a lot, and he’s always bothering ladies waitin’ for the bus here, makin’ em all nervous and shit. When I’m around, I make sure it don’t happen much as I can.”

He then went on to tell me that there was a time in his life where he was much like that guy, right down to the bottle and the invisible friend. He was there, and the girl in his life stood by him through it all, no matter how much he pissed her off and her friends told her to drop his ass and get on with her life. That was years ago, and he knew he had lots to make up for, but he was trying hard, and she was getting a ring on Christmas day and he hoped like hell she’d accept it.

As my bus pulled up, I smiled at him and said “I hope so too.”

A Letter To Some Asshats

Dear Mortgage Company:

I’m seriously thinking about giving up my career and coming to work for you as a data entry operator. Would you hire me?

I know, it’s hard to believe that someone with a glamorous life like mine would want to throw it all away to come sit at a terminal and peck keys for you. But by my admittedly skewed math, it would be well worth it for me.

See, I’ve had a loan with you for 10 years. Originally, the loan was mine and my then-husbands. A year and a half ago, I refinanced, bought him out, and became the sole loan holder. You were so nice to me then, too. I was really scared about what I was doing – I’d never been a lone homeowner before and was petrified about not being able to pay my bills. The dude you assigned to my case practically held my hand through the whole thing, and never once referred to me as an asshat for being so nervous about something so commonplace. I thought ya’ll rocked. I even told a few friends about you.

Fast forward to now. My divorce proceedings are done, and I’m going through all the fun of updating all my accounts and stuff with my new (well, actually regenerated, I guess) name. The bank was a piece of cake. Electric company and credit cards, easy as pie. Even my work HR office has made life relatively simple, and they normally don’t make anything easy. Then I got to you.

Your customer service rep was smiling when I talked to him. We were on the phone, but I could just tell you have one of those policies that says “smile like an idiot when you’re talking to people, even though they can’t see you, because it makes you sound friendlier.” Actually, just for the record, it made me want to smack him. See, no one should be SMILING when they tell me that they’re going to charge me $100.00 to change the name on my account.

Not the person. Just the frickin’ name. One hundred smackers.

To change the name, all someone has to do is look at my legal documentation, type a new last name into the computer, and hit save. By my estimation, this should take about 60 seconds. Just for fun, let’s say I’m seriously overestimating and you have a slow reader who also happens to be a slow typist operating a very slow computer, and this little thing takes ten minutes. Even with all that, you could process 6 of these transactions in an hour, which would be $600.00 at the rate you’re charging. I know that all doesn’t go to the slow reading, slow typing person, but even so, at that rate they should be pulling in at least $100 an hour.

So yeah. Give me a job. I’ll sit there and type in names all day for that kind of money.

Or don’t give me a job. Just admit that slapping someone with a hundred dollar fee for changing her name back to the one she was born with is pretty suck-ass business practice.

Have a nice day.

Sincerely,
Pissed-Off-Customer-With-A-Recycled-Last-Name.

PS: You bite balls.

Lessons Learned ... Or Polkas and Pants-Droppings

I’ve learned several things this week.

1, Never underestimate The Steelers.

Oh, I was pretty sure they’d win. But 38-7? I was not THAT sure.

2. Realize that sometimes the things you consider normal are downright weird to someone else.

I’m still cracking up because someone I know ventured into the Steelers bar near us during the game. She came back wide-eyed and traumatized.

“Every time they scored a touchdown,” she exclaimed, “they’d play this polka song … and DANCE. A polka? What’s up with that? And then, when that was done, they’d all yell ‘chew tobacco, chew tobacco, spit, spit, spit, if you ain’t a Steelers fan you ain’t shit!”

Having spent years enjoying this ritual, her tale brought back fond memories and I helped her share the spit chant. But when I think about it, I can understand why to a newcomer this might be like observing alien life forms.

Ravens fans don’t polka.

3. Times change. So does one’s ability to work hung over.

Tuesday was a rough, tough, butt-kicking day for me. There was a time when going to work sleep-deprived and recovering from boozy goodness was par for the course for me. But when you don’t use it, you lose it.

Owww.

In fact, so much owww that I passed up on a work crew happy hour last night in part because I still can’t stomach the thought of a beer.

4. Curiosity makes the world go round, but it can also get you mauled.

I’ve never been much of a shopper. I hate crowds and don’t have much patience for long lines and price checks. I think shopping online in your pajamas is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

But a new W@lmart Supercenter opened real close to my home the other day. This thing has been an under-construction promise around these parts for years. You know you’re getting old when the thought of a W@lmart actually excites you. You know you’re getting stupid when in spite of all your inner warning bells going off, you decide to check out this new mecca on opening day.

It was Black Friday on crack. Local wildlife roamed the aisles en masse, pausing in front of the macaroni and cheese to call their spouses and kids and find out what kind they wanted. It was so packed you couldn’t walk in most aisles with a shopping cart, unless you wanted to be permanently trapped between meandering asses of all shapes and sizes. It was a battleground and a war zone, and I was very, very afraid.

You think a Steelers polka and spit chant are oddities? Check out a great big superstore on opening day, if you want to see weird.

Next time I go, I’m wearing armor.

5. People are strange.

As if game time reactions and shopaholics weren’t enough to make this clear to me, I witnessed a man drop his pants this week. Not only drop his pants, but do it at a bus stop in an extremely busy area downtown. And then, he proceeded to ask several passers-by if they had any spare change or a cigarette, BEFORE he bothered to pull his pants up.

In case you’re wondering, this tactic didn’t work.

So, how has YOUR week been?