Writing, Work and Weasels

I'm A Blog Ho

2007-11-30T12:24:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-27T06:05:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-21T11:21:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-19T10:55:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-16T05:53:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-13T06:03:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-08T06:17:00.000-05:00

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?

Fall and Football, Love and Bill

2007-11-03T06:38:00.000-05:00

It is now that time of year that I love, full of those moments I crave when summer’s rank humidity or winter’s numbing cold get to be a bit much. This is the time of sweatshirts, jackets optional, of toasting your toes near a space heater in the morning if your house is drafty, a time when the morning chill is more invigorating than painful. It is leaves finally turning, swirling and falling and crunching beneath your feet. It is Halloween skies that come after Halloween and coffee tasting even better in the morning, just because your cup feels so good wrapped in your hands.

And it is football, of course. This week, the Ravens and the Steelers meet in the Burgh. Monday night will find me in the family pub with The Boyfriend and assorted friends and family. The Boyfriend and I will revel in our rivalry as he and everyone else in the place cheer the home team, and my mother and I in our quiet way take our lumps from the crowd and send good juju to the Steelers. Tuesday morning and work will come way too early, and one of us will go off bleary-eyed but victorious while the other stumbles workwards half-asleep and sad.

I live for this shit, and I love it. But although fall is my time of year, the period where both my energy levels and positive attitude seem to peak, where game day makes the daily rituals of living that much more fun, it is also a time that makes me immeasurably sad.

To me, this is Big Bill’s time.

Big Bill and his wife have been close friends of my parents for years. But because they fell somewhere in the middle of my parents age and my own, they always seemed more like older siblings to me than “my parents friends.” In fact, my dad gave her away at their wedding celebration.

I have loved them and looked up to them for years, although I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. They worked hard, played harder, and loved each other and the world around them in a way I can only call the realest way I’ve known. They organized coat and blanket drives each holiday season, baked pies and delivered them to family and friends on Christmas morning, and were always at the forefront of any events held by the Steelers fan club. Big Bill was a smiling fixture behind the giant grill that fed the masses that came to tailgate each game day.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. What was even more amazing than their involvement in the world was their commitment to each other. They were lovers and best friends who brought out the best in each other. They were always gushing about their feelings for each other, and didn’t care who thought it was sappy. You could see the attraction, affection and genuine respect they carried in their souls for each other in everything they did, and hear it in everything they said.

Being with them was what told me my own marriage would end, long before we took the steps to actually end it. My husband and I didn’t do things together or share our friendships with others and our involvement in the world the way they did. We operated in our own little silos and when we were at home or somewhere having dinner together, we might talk about them. On the rare occasions we did do things together – usually things related to football – I’d notice the way Bill would drop a kiss on his wife’s forehead or smile at her across a room, and try real hard to ignore the fact that it had been a long time since we even thought about acting that way.

When we finally separated, my world was a strange mix of relief, excitement, sadness, fear and constant anxiety. I wanted to start over, but had no clue how to begin. Sometimes, in the safety of the family pub, my loneliness and sense of failure and fear would come out more than any hopes I might have about how life could be now. In those moments, it seemed nothing I could tell myself or anything anyone else could say to me really mattered. But Bill, in his simple, point-blank way, got through one night when he looked at me over his Irish Mist, pulled me into a bear hug, and said this:

“You deserve to be loved the way I love her. You settled for less than that for years. Now that you know what you deserve, you might know when you find it.”

Bill put it in perspective for me. Being alone after years of not being single was much harder and more frightening sometimes than being complacent and secure, but never really happy. But this starting over was what I had to do if I ever wanted a chance at that other kind of life.

It was probably about four months after that conversation that Bill died suddenly and unexpectedly. That was a year and several months ago now.

And still, even after that much time (which I know isn’t really a lot), I find myself so angry about that. I am outrageously pissed that he isn’t here anymore to share that life with the woman he loved, that life we all look for so hard and most of us never believe we’ll really find. I was supposed to have to start over. But damn it all to hell, she wasn’t. And each day that she does, I am awed by her spirit and her bravery, her heart and her soul, and her ability to smile through tears and live and laugh sometimes and love us all and make our world a better place in spite of what she's been through.

I will never again take love lightly, and I owe so much of that to both of them. They showed through an example they didn’t even try to set – they were just being – what it could be. And what happened showed just how precious and fragile it is even when it is the best it can be, and how you can never, ever take one tiny moment of it for granted.

I have so many memories of Bill. Weekends at my parent’s cabin, brief visits on Christmas morning, summer parties at their home, and countless late nights of laughter, drinks and friendship at the pub. But for some reason, the football season is still always harder. It is our group trip to the Burgh and him manning grills, his cheerful love of our team and congratulatory or better-luck-next-time hugs that were all flannel and the smell of charcoal. Every now and then one of us remembers that in his last year with us, he saw them win the Superbowl, and we still can’t vocalize the thought without tears.

I met The Boyfriend about a month before Bill died. But we were still in that “getting to know you” phase where rather than venture into each other’s worlds, we met somewhere in the middle and did the date thing. So they never got to meet. In part, it was the way, when we really didn’t know each other that well yet, that The Boyfriend would call and let me just talk, talk, talk, or cry, or say nothing at all about this man who was gone that gave me my first glimpses of his heart and soul. I wish like hell they had met, and know they would have been friends.

I miss you, my friend Bill. And each day when I wake with him beside me, or we share a quiet glimpse and laugh in some crowded place, or have a moment of having eyes only for each other even though we know damn well we’ll be going home together and have plenty of time for that later, I thank you for helping me understand what I deserve.

And I’ll never watch a Steelers game without wishing you were with us.

I Realize ...

2007-11-02T04:50:00.000-05:00

Swiped from Golfwidow (http://www.golfwidow.net/), who I seem to swipe things from quite frequently:

I've come to realize that my exes didn’t suck nearly as much as I said they did. Nor did I suck as much as I thought I did. We just sucked for each other.

I've come to realize that I talk to the ferrets as if they were people. I sing to them too. Both my ex-husband and The Boyfriend have witnessed me singing “Hey hey we’re the weasels, and people say we weasel around” (to the tune of “Hey Hey we’re the Monkees, of course.” )I sing badly. The Boyfriend, unlike the ex, has neither begged for earplugs or threatened to have me committed. I think its true love.

I've come to realize that I love a life I always thought I’d find boring. Adventure is overrated when it is all you have. I will take day-to-day commitments, the security of home, and loving and being loved over what I once thought I wanted any day of the week.

I've come to realize that I have serious issues with authority and conforming to other people’s schedules. Neither issue is particularly healthy for my career. Then again, I often think my career isn’t particularly healthy for me.

I've come to realize that I lost my fear of confrontation and/or not making other people happy. A year of divorce, losing a lot of loved ones and finding myself taught me not to sweat the small stuff.

I've come to realize that I hate it when I can’t do what I want to do when I want to do it. It’s that whole conforming to other people’s schedule thing again.

I've come to realize that marriage doesn’t necessarily mean love and love doesn’t necessarily mean marriage. They can go hand-in-hand or be completely exclusive of each other, depending on the people involved.

I've come to realize that, somewhere, someone is thinking that there’s gotta be something more. And they’re right. I just hope they don’t lose sight of what there already is while they’re trying to find it.

I've come to realize that I'll always be both happy I’ve taken the paths I’ve chosen and regretful about what I may have missed by not choosing other roads.

I've come to realize that I have a crush on … hmmm. I haven’t developed any new crushes lately. I have gotten over my crush on Bill Cowher – him all suited and tied and doing the pre-game thing just isn’t the same as the spitting, cursing coach he once was.

I've come to realize that the last time I truly cried was when yet another he-should-be-here-for-this moment hit me and I realized yet again that the friend I was thinking of can never be here again. It has been well over a year since he passed away, and that makes me realize that those moments might never go away, and maybe they shouldn’t.

I've come to realize that my cell phone is as much of an inconvenience as it is a convenience. Especially when I forget it’s on and in my pocket and it rings in the middle of a meeting.

I've come to realize that when I wake up in the morning I will write, almost every day, and doing so will keep the workday ahead at bay for just a little while.

I've come to realize that, before I go to sleep at night, feeling The Boyfriend beside me, either curled around me or side-by-side, and saying “I love you” just before drifting off into slumber really does keep bad dreams away.

I've come to realize that right now I am thinking about the Steelers playing the Ravens on Monday and the fact that I really should go get laundry out of the dryer, which makes me think I’ m not nearly as deep and philosophical as I’d like to believe.

I've come to realize that babies are wonderful, precious and adorable, but that not having ever had one come out of me doesn’t make my life any less meaningful than that of someone who has been through labor and sworn for just that pain-meds-can’t-touch-this moment that she’ll never have sex again.

I've come to realize that I get on MySpace … well, I really haven’t in forever. I’m too easily bored with popularity contests.

I've come to realize that today, I am so much better off than perhaps I’ve ever been.

I've come to realize that tonight, I will come up with ideas for 800 things to write about, and all but one or two of them will have vanished from the brainwaves by morning.

I've come to realize that tomorrow, I will get a good-morning kiss and a cup of coffee, and really, what more can you ask for in life?

I've come to realize that, I really want to be a writer as much to break away from a daily grind kind of life as to get my words out there in the world. And, unlike the idealistic young journalist-hopeful I once was, I’m totally OK with that.

I've come to realize that the person who is most likely to repost this is — I dunno. I wasn’t supposed to repost it, since Goldwidow specifically un-meme’d it. Once again, proof that I just don’t listen to directions.

The Things People Say

2007-10-30T06:44:00.000-05:00

I have a couple of friends who blog over at Vox. So even though I really don’t write there much myself, I often pop over and check out their “Question of The Day.”

A while back, there was a question about stupid phrases. Someone has probably mentioned these, but here are a few that always make me wonder “why do people say that, anyway?”

“Colder than a witch’s tit.”
OK, I kind of get this one, I guess. The theory would be that a witch, being evil and all, would have frigid boobies. But even if it is the case that a witch in her normal state would have ice cube puppies, she’s a witch. Couldn’t she just cast some kind of spell and warm the girls right up?

“She’s built like a brick shithouse.”
This one has been around forever, and I’ve never quite gotten it. It’s supposed to be a compliment. If you’re built like a brick shithouse, you’re the kind of girl men daydream about. But THAT’s the part I don’t get.

I don’t care if a shithouse is made of brick, marble, or frickin’ diamonds. It’s a place people go to … shit. I have a hard time equating a compliment about someone’s physical appearance to saying they look like a building designed specifically for pooping and related activities.

And if we’re going to go with the whole bathroom theme to describe looks, it just doesn’t bode well for the rest of us. If the hotties are brick shithouses, then what does that make the rest of us? Spot-A-Pots? I just don’t want to go there.

“Whatever as shit.”
Staying on the whole poop theme, what is it that compels us to describe just about everything by relating it to shit?

How many times have you said, or heard someone else say something along the lines of the following (I know I’ve caught myself in the act many times):

“It’s hot as shit outside.”
“It’s cold as shit in here.”
“That was hard as shit!”

The list could go on.

We’ve made shit the universal equalizer. It can be hot, cold, or hard. But the reality is, we’re just too lazy to come up with a better metaphor. When in doubt, we compare something to poop.

We can do better than that, can’t we?

My First Six and Happy Halloweasel!

2007-10-29T04:39:00.000-05:00

You can find the first here: http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2007/10/lost-chance.html.

As for the second, she's not a mouse. She's just a ferret who has no desire to have her picture taken with a Pac-man pumpkin. Can you blame her?

Slightly Expanding Horizons

2007-10-26T06:04:00.000-05:00

My blogging has been a bit sporadic lately. Usually, this would bug the shit out of me. In the past, a lack of rants, raves, and slices of life on my little web pages meant that I was suffering a severe case of one of the following:

- laziness
- writer’s block
- overwork
- hangovers followed by more hangovers
- all of the above

This time, though, my erratic blogging actually makes me happy. The reason I’m not writing entries quite as much is that I’ve been spending more of my “word time” crafting other things.

In the last month, I’ve submitted a short story to http://www.glimmertrain.org. I’ve begun spending time at http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/, and will soon have a piece published there. The Glimmer Train experience forced me to craft a lengthier story from beginning to end. The Six Sentences style forces me to put a beginning, middle and end in, as the site name suggests, six sentences, without sacrificing life, meaning or interest in the story. Brevity is one of my challenges, so this is perfect for me.

I’m also working on two non-fiction essays, with hopes of publishing them as well.

This is scary stuff for me. Not the writing part – that, I love. But the act of submitting my work instead of just publishing it myself gets my stomach all knotty with both hope and nausea. Rejection is something I’ve never been good at. That’s why the thought of dating again after my divorce had me half-tempted to become a crazy cat lady.

I can write something for work, have a boss tell me it needs to be redone, and go back to the drawing board without so much as a knick on my ego. But fiction, or personal essays, always carry a part of a writer’s heart and soul. No matter how much you tell yourself otherwise, a rejection of your work feels like a rejection of you. It could be that your writing needs work. It could be that it just isn’t the right style, subject matter or tone for a particular publication. It could be that your timing is just off. But no matter what, a rejection makes you bleed, even if just a little.

In college, I had a faculty advisor who told all us young writer-hopefuls to “seek pain.” He poured his heart and soul out into everything he wrote – investigative articles, editorials, short stories, and longer fiction. He did it all, and spent hours and dollars sending it off into the world, back in the days when doing so was much more cumbersome than firing off an email.

He got more rejection letters than I thought possible. He papered his home office walls with them. I wondered why he didn’t stuff them in a drawer somewhere, or throw them away so that he didn’t have to look at them ever again.

Then it dawned on me. Sure, he had enough rejections to wallpaper a room. At the same time, he was supporting his self, his wife, and five daughters as a freelance writer. They had a modest but more than adequate home, two cars, food on the table, and the oldest girls were going to college without footing the bills themselves. His wife did not work.

The rejections may have poured in. But he was still accomplishing all that and taking care of his family as a freelancer, subsidized only by a few grand a year for teaching a writing course and advising a few university students. In spite of all the rejections, there were enough acceptances to let him live the life he loved.

Framed like that, putting those letters on the wall no longer seemed stupid. They weren’t reminders of failure. They were proof that if you do enough of what you love, you will succeed in spite of some setbacks. After all, he’d purchased the house with the walls those rejections were tacked onto with money earned from his craft.

Now, let’s just hope I remember that when I get MY first wave of rejections.

In the meantime, I may be blogging a bit less, but I’m writing more. I’m letting my blog be one outlet for my writing without making it an excuse not to take my words anywhere else.

And that can’t be a bad thing.

A Plan

2007-10-23T04:42:00.000-05:00

About a week or so ago, the Boyfriend’s cell phone died.

No biggie, we thought. We have A Plan. Not a plan for what to do with our lives or how to save enough money for a vacation, which would be really, really nice. But when we got our cell phone package, we bought one of those “total equipment protection” plans that goes along with it.

Basically, the “total equipment protection” plan means that if you screw up your phone in just about any way, they replace it for you. I walk through most of life without a plan, but learned the hard way that I need one when it comes to my communications equipment.

The first cell phone I had got left in a cab one night when I was out with friends and got sloppy stupid drunk. The second phone I had got dropped in a toilet. Don’t ask.

So when I got our new phones, I got a plan too.

The way “the plan” works is that you’re supposed to take the phone to a repair center and let them take a look at it. They either fix it for you for nothing, or figure out that you’ve messed it up beyond all hope and give you a new one. This sounds like a pain in the butt, but I wasn’t worried. One of the reasons I went with “the plan” is that there’s a repair center just up the road from my house. Easy street, for sure. Or so I thought.

I didn’t have to work on Thursday, so I headed to the repair center late in the afternoon. The friendly salesman behind the counter greeted me, and I told him I had a dead phone I needed some help with.

“Oh, OK. Well our technician is out sick today. He’ll be back tomorrow though.”

“Oh, well, what are his hours?”

“He works 9-5 Monday-Friday. We’re open on Saturday too, but for sales only. The tech is off then.”

Now this was a wee bit of a problem. I don’t have another weekday off for quite some time, and neither does The Boyfriend. Having a repair center right around the corner from your home does you no good if the only times the tech is “in the house” is when you’re off at work yourself.

I sighed. I was a little frustrated, and wanted to whine. But then I thought about all the people at MY job, who rant and rave at our customer service staff. Usually, the bitching and moaning are about things that our poor frontline staff can’t change or control. It wasn’t this guy’s fault that his tech was out sick on the one weekday I didn’t have to work. It wasn’t his fault that the company didn’t consider the fact that most of the rest of the world is stuck at work 9-5 too when planning their techie’s schedule.

Then it hit me. Who cared if the tech was available at that moment? We wouldn’t die without a phone for a day or two.

“Oh, OK,” I told the salesman with a smile. “It’s almost impossible for me to get here during those hours, because I work then. So could I leave the phone so that he can look at it the next time he’s in, and then I could either pick it up or get my replacement on Saturday?”

It was the salesman’s turn to sigh. “I’m sorry, miss. I can’t do that. We’re not allowed to leave customer phones in the store overnight. You know … in case something happens.”

At this point, my jaw dropped just a little. “You mean that you aren’t allowed to let people drop off DEAD PHONES for service, in case something happens to them? They’re already dead, or we wouldn’t need to drop them off. Who cares if something happens!!”

“I’m sorry, that’s the way they do things,” he said, a bit sympathetically.

The former customer service manager that still lives in my brain came back to life then, and I thanked the guy and told him I was sorry for snapping. He looked stunned. I guess he doesn’t get too many annoyed repair customers who realize that strange polices just aren’t his fault. He thanked me and I left.

The “total equipment plan” covers lost and stolen as well as broken phones. But I guess they don’t want the “lost or stolen” part to happen in their own stores.

Just goes to show that even having a plan doesn’t guarantee that things will always go your way.

Jack

2007-10-20T14:44:00.000-05:00

OK, so I know we're a little early. But last night, The Boyfriend and I were watching a creepy ass movie (The Reaping) and chowing on Chinese food (we're thrilling, aren't we?) and he was suddenly overcome with an irresistable urge.

He stepped out into the cool fall night, and lumbered back in with our pumpkin, which is twice the size of his head, in his arms.

The next thing I knew, I had this guy sitting on my kitchen table.

I just love Halloween.

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

2007-10-19T07:46:00.000-05:00

This is just a quick note to assure the 2 or 3 folks who read this and care that I haven't been abducted by aliens. Nor have I hit Lotto and taken off on a Caribbean adventure.

I've just had some internet connectivity issues at home - and here at work ...well, I've had to work. The nerve of these people.

The problem at home seems to be fixed, so I'll be back to droning, rambling, bitching, whining and occasionally having a flash of insight next week. Ya'll have a great weekend!

Pumpkin Rolls

2007-10-16T05:07:00.000-05:00

Tommy is a guy my father has hired on-and-off again over the years. He helps out at the pub by cleaning and stocking the bar, manning the grills during football, mowing the lawn and taking out the trash. He’s in his 50’s, and has fought a mostly losing battle with drug addiction over the years. He’s also a kind, gentle and hard-working man who is more open about his faults than anyone I know.

One of my ongoing hopes is that Tom will kick his habits for good.

Anyway, my ex-husband, although he works now as a computer guru, was trained as a chef, and spent many years in the business. When he left stoves behind for hard drives at work, he took up cooking more at home. One of his specialties was pumpkin rolls. Seriously – these things were melt-in-your-mouth good.

The ex didn’t spend much time in the family bar. But when fall rolled around and our football party season geared up, he always sent a batch of pumpkin rolls with me to the bar. They became a dietary staple for the regulars and the football crowd, as much in demand as the popular shot of the moment.

When I told everyone we’d be getting a divorce, one of the regulars looked at me with big, sad eyes and said “does that mean there won’t be any more pumpkin rolls?” His friend scowled at him and said “at least tell her you’re sorry first!” He said “I’m sorry. Now, will there be any more pumpkin rolls?”

But far and away, Tommy was the biggest pumpkin roll fan. His eyes lit up when I came in carrying the familiar foil-wrapped packages. He’d pass up the burgers, chicken wings or potato salad to leave room for extra pumpkiny goodness. It got to the point where I’d bring in an extra roll for Tommy to take home. I sometimes swore that if we could keep him in constant supply of pumpkin rolls, he might overcome his other addictions.

Tommy stopped working at The Bar shortly after the ex and I split. He came back, in better shape than he has been in a while, a month or so ago. Since he hadn’t been around for more than a year, he hadn’t met The Boyfriend yet. I introduced them the other day, when we went up to catch a football game. They shook hands and chatted a minute, then Tommy went about firing up the grills.

Later in the day, I turned away from the TV to find Tommy standing by my side. “I’m happy for you,” he said. “He seems like a really nice guy.” I thanked him. Then he leaned in, put a hand on my shoulder, and said:

“Is there any chance that he makes pumpkin rolls?”

Some habits never die. I’m thinking that since I didn’t put “must make pumpkin rolls” in my specs for a new partner, I may have to finally learn how to cook myself.

And yes, I’m aware that the pumpkin picture above looks nothing like a dessert product. I’m just proud of the bit of fall going on in my front yard these days. Never fear, those guys are slated to become jack-o-lanterns, not bar food.

Freaky Friday

2007-10-12T04:48:00.000-05:00

One of the stranger things about me (and there are plenty) is that I’ve always wanted to believe in ghosts. I like the idea of them, for some reason, as long as they’re the cool kind and not the creepy ones who are annoyed because someone killed them, so they start throwing dishes and candles all over the old house you just spent a fortune on, possess your kid, and write “redrum” all over your walls.

That said, my personal jury is still out. Sometimes I think there can’t NOT be ghosts, and other times I decide I’m crazy for thinking that.

Just the same, When Christy Z over at Christy’s Coffee Break started her Freaky Fridays (check it out here and play along: http://christyscoffeebreak.blogspot.com/2007/09/freaky-fridays-new-thing-around-here.html), I decided to share a unique experience of my own. I don’t know if this is a ghost story, just an example of the oddities of the human mind, or some combination of both. But here goes:

As children, my parents were both transplanted from their hometowns to Baltimore. My mother was born in Pittsburgh, and my father in a small, rural community in West Virginia.

My father’s grandmother, my Great Grandma Katie, lived in an old farmhouse on lots of rolling land. She and her husband Norman had raised their six children, one of them my grandmother, there. I never met my great-grandfather, Norman, who passed away while my dad was still a child. But my grandmother and father both had plenty of entertaining stories about him. He was a unique character, a guy who loved his drink and telling a good yarn, who teased his kids and grandkids and always commanded respect.

As a child, I often visited Great-Grandma Katie. I’d pore through her photo albums, and in the faded old pictures my great-grandfather was always a rather formidable figure. When I was a teenager, my grandparents took me and my first boyfriend to spend the weekend with Great Grandma Katie. My grandfather dropped us off, and went to stay at his own mother’s (my Great-Grandma Lucille’s) house. We stayed up late into the night, munching popcorn and talking, visiting with relatives and poring through those old photos. I showed Bobby, my boyfriend, my great-grandfather’s picture. Sometime after midnight, we went to bed. Grandmom and I slept in the guest bedroom, and Bobby slept on the couch.

I woke early the next morning, and found my boyfriend sitting outside on the porch swing. He was shivering because he’d been out there for some time, but didn’t want to come back in the house. He told me he’d had a dream, and in it he’d been sleeping on the couch, just as he really was. My great-grandfather Norman had walked into the room, stood over the couch, pointed at Bobby, and said in a stern voice: “Leave my house. I don’t know you, and you don’t belong here.” Bobby was so freaked out that we ended up staying at Lucille’s house the next night, instead of at Katie’s.

The weekend ended and we left the farmhouses and pastures behind us, heading back to the city. By the time a few days of our “real life” had gone by, and our heads were filled with school and weekend plans with our friends again, Bobby and I were laughing about the whole thing. We decided that since my great-grandfather Norman looked rather menacing in those old photos, and Bobby was probably already weirded out by sleeping in a strange place, that he’d just had an odd dream.

We forgot the whole thing until a month or so later. We were hanging out at my house one night, having pizza and talking to my mom. Laughing about how silly it had been the whole time, we told my mother about Bobby’s dream.

Instead of laughing with us, she got a strange look on her face. She was pretty freaked out herself. After a minute or so, she told us why.

She and my father had started dating as teenagers. Shortly after they got engaged, he took her to West Virginia to meet the family there. They stayed at Great-Grandma Katie’s. That night, while Mom was sleeping in the guest room, she had a “dream.” In it, my great grandfather Norman had walked into the bedroom, seeming to appear right through the door although it didn’t open. He stood in the doorway pointing at her, telling her he didn’t know who she was and she didn’t belong in his house, and she had to leave. Only in her dream, even though she was frightened, she sat up in bed and said “It’s OK. You don’t know me, but I’m here with your grandson. I’m the person he’s going to marry.” Norman nodded then, and turned and left the room.

Like Bobby and I did with his experience, Mom had convinced herself that she was just out of sorts sleeping in a strange place and had a really weird dream. She hadn’t thought about it in years, until Bobby told her about his dream and it was so eerily like her own that she had to wonder.

Over the years, many people my great-grandfather never met – grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were born after he was gone – stayed in the farmhouse. None of us ever had strange dreams about Norman. Did Bobby and my mother really just have a bit of a nightmare because they were in a strange place, and had seen a photo of a man who looked like he could be pretty tough? Or was Norman’s spirit somehow able to figure out when someone not connected to him by blood was in his home long after he was dead, and pop on by to figure out just who they were?

I don’t know. What I do know is that in Great-Grandma Katie’s later years, she needed help maintaining her home and her health, and one of my cousins moved in with her to provide support. That cousin, Cindy, told me more than once that sometimes at night, the radio by her bed would come on for no reason, playing old music she’d never heard before and could never find on any stations if she went hunting for them herself.

Who knows – maybe that was Norman too.
------
While I’m not tagging anyone, this was a lot of fun to write. If you’ve got any of your own stories, check out the link above for Christy’s Freaky Friday instructions and join in!

The Elevators From Hell

2007-10-10T04:53:00.000-05:00

For the most part, I’m loving my recent job change. My new office is cozy, the techies on my floor are fun and friendly types to be around, and my new work itself is challenging and interesting.

But I gotta tell you, the elevators freak me the hell out.

I’m not much of an elevator person anyway. But my new workplace is several stories up in a very tall office building, the stairwells are always hot and muggy, and I’m lazy. So every time I arrive at work, go to a meeting in another building, or go grab lunch or a coffee, I brave the elevators.

And these are no normal beasts of office-drone burden. They groan and creak, whether they’re carrying 2 120-pound women or 10 250 pound men. They sound like what I imagine it would be like to be inside the stomach of a person who lived on spiced sausage and black coffee. What’s even worse is that they often stop, for no reason at all, on floors that no one has pushed buttons for. They stop, sit there for a while, make a few gurgling noises, and then chug along again.

One of them did this to me the other day, as I was heading back upstairs with cup o’ java number two. I was in the elevator with 2 guys who were both going to the 6th floor with me, and the beast churned to a grumbling stop on the 3rd floor and just sat there. I felt my hands get clammy and my heart race a little. I didn’t realize my eyes were fixating on the emergency button until one of my co-workers touched my shoulder and said “that’s right. You’re new around here. Relax. It’ll move in a minute.”

We got back to our conference room, and they laughingly told the others how easy it is to tell who “the building newbies” are. “Yeah,” I chimed in. “That elevator had me close to peeing my pants, and these two are sitting there talking about the freakin’ weather like we’re all kicking back in a spa.”

Everyone got a laugh out of it, and assured me I’d be used to “The Towers of Terror” in no time.

I wanted to say “ummm … I don’t think so.” But then I thought about it a minute, and realized that they’re probably right.

When my new boss moved to town and took over “the home office” back at my old location, I thought of him as “Sir WhinesAlot.” He seemed obsessed with the dreary state of things in our building, and how unprofessional everything looked.

We were cobbled together on a shoestring budget. Our furniture was old, mismatched, threadbare and ugly. Our conference rooms doubled as storage space and were cluttered. The building was moldy and our vents blow out heat in the summer and air conditioning in the winter sometimes. The building floods now and then and we’re often visited by ants, spiders and mice.

But yet, in spite of all that nasty shit, I still found my boss’s obsession with how much our workspace sucked a bit perplexing. I, along with most of my co-workers, had dealt with it for so long, while the university looked the other way and gave us no funding to fix it, that we’d just sort of become blind to our sorry-ass state. The dreary, pathetic state of things made us miserable, so we just stopped letting our brains register our surroundings and kind of forgot how bad they were.

Now, when I go back to the home office one day a week, I look around and realize the boss is right about this. The place is a shithole. Being removed from it most of the time opens my eyes to just how gross it is when I go back.

I was amazed at how my new co-workers could stand trapped in a gurgling, squealing, Exorcist-sounding elevator that stops for no reason and not get a little tweaked out. But I guess they’ve all just been there forever, and the elevators haven’t chewed them up and spit them out yet. They just climb on in and don’t think about it.

We can get used to anything, if we’re forced to put up with it long enough. But should we?

Anyone wanna come and take a ride?

Fictional Strengths and Weaknesses

2007-10-08T05:16:00.000-05:00

Once again, the writerly and just plain cool Golfwidow gave me an idea. In a recent post (check it out here: http://www.golfwidow.net/archives/012105.html ) she un-meme’d a meme and listed her five greatest weaknesses and strengths as a writer.

I decided in my ever-present wisdom that this was an awesome idea and I should do the same. Seriously, I think getting this kind of stuff down in writing, talking about it, and keeping both how much you rock and where you could stand a few tweaks in your head only helps you as a writer.

I do all kinds of writing – bloggy crap, articles, work-related stuff. But because where I really want to go these days is into the realm of fiction, I’m keeping my lists focused on that.

My Weaknesses:
1. Sometimes I can’t shut up. I tend to over-explain, or go off the cliff in terms of describing the thoughts and feelings of characters. My fiction can sometimes sound more like a psychologist’s session notes.

2. On the flip side, I have more difficulty describing settings and scenes, and might tend to under-write those. I live in my own head. When I focus outward it tends to be more on other people and their emotions than on things. This shows in my writing.

3. I have a bi-polar writing personality. On the one hand, I have a fear of writing “trash.” I love to read a good steamy crime or chick lit novel, but the thought of having my name on one instead of on something “literary” gives me the heebie-jeebies. Yet I talk like your average Jane Redneck, and in all other aspects of my life run like a cockroach fleeing the person who just flicked on the kitchen light from all things uppity and pretentious.

4. While I try to be “literary,” my sophomoric sense of humor and vernacular way of speaking really get in the way. I’m hard-pressed to come up with characters and storylines that don’t delve into toilet humor or excessive use of the f-word at some point.

5. I cannot write unless I’m alone. I don’t do well with lots of commotion and activity going on around me while I work. Therefore, I don’t write nearly as much as I want.

My Strengths:
1. I have a vivid imagination. An overheard bit of a conversation, a scene at the bus stop, an encounter in the family bar, or the act of doing dishes after dinner are all equally likely to inspire a story in me.

2. I read like a mo’fo. Books, articles, blogs, you name it. I read every chance I get. If I have spare time and I’m not writing, getting it on with The Boyfriend or watching football, my nose is in a book. Other writers inspire both my ideas and my style.

3. I have empathy for almost every character I create, even the evil shitheads. This helps me make them well-rounded and gives my themes a shade of grey rather than a boring “good versus evil” kinda thing.

4. My sense of humor, which I tend to think is quite unique, comes out in my writing and adds a sometimes needed lightheartedness to touchy subjects.

5. Over time, I have FINALLY developed stick-to-it-iveness in my writing. Until recently, I had four or five unfinished stories or essays going at any one time, and usually lost interest in them long before they were close to finished. Now I tend to have one or two things going at once, and see them through to completion.

What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer? I’m not going to re-meme this post, but I would love to hear your thoughts if you care to share them!

Knowing Your Neighbors

2007-10-05T05:34:00.000-05:00

One of my neighbors, E, is about 70, and has lived on our street much longer than me. I had always put her at about 55 – she looks great for her age even though she smokes like a chimney and can put me under the table when it comes to beer-guzzling.

She’s also one of the biggest bar-hoppers in our neighborhood.

I only discovered her age because after the ex moved out, I’d often come home to find her sticking her head out her bedroom window, which overlooks my side deck. She’d be hanging her face out there like a puppy riding shotgun, puffing on her cigarette.

“Wanna go to the bar?” she’d yell, as I was collecting my mail. And sometimes, I did.

All the bar-stool regulars knew her. The sad thing is, they knew her much better than I did, even though I’d lived next door to her for 10 years. It was over one too many and some snack mix that she told me her age, motioning all the while for me to keep my trap shut about it.

“These kids in here think I’m fiftyish,” she said with pride, “and I aim to keep it that way.” Then one of “the kids,” a man not far from 60, asked her to dance to some slow country song that had come on the jukebox, and she winked at me and let him lead her onto the floor.

This always happened when I was out with E. She found her happiness in these bar-room dances. She lives with a man I had always just assumed was her husband. He’s a quiet type, and I think I can count on one hand the times we’ve spoken since I bought my home in 1997.

Shortly after my ex moved out, but before she started whisking me off for mid-week beers, I was outside trimming the vines in my yard. She called over to me from her rosebush and told me it seemed I was doing really well with our split. I explained that we had planned this all for almost a year – had known we were going to separate. Rather than one of us screwing over the other on finances, we had shared our home for 9 months while we got them in order, and then I bought him out.

She nodded. “That’s kinda like me and the old man,” she said. “We broke up more than 10 years ago, and I’m still livin’ here.”

If we’d been at a bar, I would have choked on my beer. I wasn’t quite sure how sticking out shared living space for 9 months to keep from clobbering ourselves financially was anything like breaking up and then living together for a decade anyway.

She went on to explain that she’d never been married to him, they just lived together. When I asked how and why they were still together in the house, she simply said “There’s nowhere else I want to go. It’s his house, so I can’t make him leave. He doesn’t bother me. I don’t bother him. Most times, he’s gone all weekend to his girlfriend’s. I got it okay here, and moving is even more of a pain in the ass when you’re old.”

These days, E and I don’t do much bar-hopping. She mellowed out after a recent surgery, and I’m just more settled and content at home. But we chat over the fence and on the phone more than we ever did before. She is, for all her quirks and oddities, my friend.

I was catching up on the blogs of a few online friends the other day. I’ve never met most of these people, but know some of the more emotional and intimate details of their lives, at least from the point of view they put out there on the web. I comment and support, and eagerly wait for the next update so I’ll know what happens next. They do the same for me.

It struck me that this is now our version of over-the-fence chatter. We share with those who blog in the same places we do, not those who live on our streets. I knew the loves, losses, struggles, heartbreaks and joy of most of these folks within a few months of reading their pages. I lived next door to E for 10 years, so close that when our windows are open I can be sitting in my living room and she can yell to me from her bedroom, and I’ll hear it. But I didn’t know her age, or that the man I thought was her husband was really just an ex-boyfriend who has never kicked her out of his house, probably because he doesn’t feel like living alone either.

It makes me kind of sad that it took a major life change like a divorce to make me get to know my neighbor. Do you know yours as well as you “know” your fellow bloggers?

Football as Foreplay

2007-10-03T05:17:00.000-05:00

Couples show their love in a myriad of ways. Some guys buy cards and flowers. Others scrub the tub and toilet even though they think of such things as “women’s work.” A girl might cook a guy’s favorite meal or put up with his obnoxious friends.

The Boyfriend is actually better at housework than I am to begin with, and a better cook to boot. And I’m the one with the obnoxious friends, being rather obnoxious myself.

So when it comes to the little things that say “I love you,” we turn to football.

He’s a die-hard Baltimore Ravens fan. Makes sense, considering he’s a lifelong Baltimore boy and all. I’m Crabtown born and bred too, but my team has always been and will always be The Pittsburgh Steelers.

Our first year together, The Steelers went from winning the Superbowl to having a seriously shitty season. The Ravens, on the other hand, were pretty damn good. To make things worse, they shut the Steelers out during their first game against each other.

The Boyfriend was consoling, magnanimous, and supportive. He kept his own whoops and hollers to a minimum while I did my best impression of a cute, girly pout. I’d like to think this is because we were new, infatuated with each other, and head-over-heels-and-tummies-full-of-butterflies in love. The truth, though, is probably that it was easy for him to be such a sweetheart when his team was leaving my team’s bruised ass in the dust.

We’re going into our second year together and our second football season. Of course we’re still deeply in love, but we’ve lived together since January. We’ve done each other’s laundry and heard each other snore. We’re in that comfort zone of “love me as I am, baby.”

My girly pouts have been replaced with whoops, hollering, too many black and gold outfits and an obnoxious habit of pointing out that the Ravens are “a bit shoddy” this year. His “they came close, babe, and they didn’t look THAT bad,” consolations are a thing of the past. Now he sits in front of the TV in his purple while the Steelers play, screaming “Sack his ass!!” at whoever happens to be near Big Ben.

When my team is on a roll, I’m a showy little shit. When his team isn’t first in our division because mine IS, he’s no holds barred. Ahhh … love.

This Sunday we both went down. Our family pub had its annual football fest and anniversary party – my father opened the joint in September 2001. Take lots and lots of alcohol, losing games, and a room full of people being ten times as loud as we are, and you’ve got a recipe for bringing out our own inner assholes.

Of course he didn’t want the Steelers to win their game after the Ravens got hosed. But the more he cheered on Arizona, the more steamed I got. When it became clear that this game wasn’t gonna go the Steelers way, I turned to him and said:

“There … got your way, didn’t you? Are you happy?”

Him: “Hey … you can’t blame this on me! Blame it on your boys.”

Me: “You kept yelling at them to sack him!” (ummm, because our voices a gazillion miles away have that kinda power, you know.)

Him (grinning): “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

“Me: “Just because the Ravens suck doesn’t mean you have to trash the Steelers.”

Him: “That’s exactly what it means, sweetheart. But I still love you.”

Me: “I love you too.”

Him: “More than the Steelers?”

Me: “More than the Steelers. But we’re still gonna kick your ass in November.”

At least we still have our priorities straight, huh?

60,000 Images

2007-10-01T05:21:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder what it is that makes you feel so tired on those days you can look back on and go “wow – I really didn’t accomplish a damn thing?”

Me too, and I heard something in a workshop recently that might be part of the answer. The workshop was on leadership, and the speaker gave lots of interesting little sideline facts to ponder.

One of them was that 100 years ago, people could expect to take in and respond (on average) to about 600 images a day. Today, you can expect to take in and respond to an average of 60,000 in the same 24-hour period.

By “take in and respond to” we’re not talking about making decisions, having lengthy conversations, or seeing a mess and cleaning it up. We’re talking about really simple impressions and reactions. You have an itch, so you scratch it. It’s dark, so you turn on a light. The traffic light is green, so you keep going.

But even so, that’s a LOT of shit to process and react to, isn’t it?

I find it hard to believe that so much has changed in such a relatively short period of time. But then again, maybe it really isn’t such a stretch. Cars and other methods of transportation mean we all end up in more places every day, and while there we see, hear, smell, feel and maybe taste a bunch of stuff we wouldn’t have back in the days when to get somewhere was a lot tougher. Then there’s the radio, and the television, and the phone, and the computer, and well … I guess the list could go on and on.

We’ve made our lives much easier. But we’ve also jam-packed them with all sorts of stimuli. It really isn’t hard to understand why we so often feel like our brains are on overload.

Think about the sheer volume of people you interact with every day. Maybe it’s because you have a packed workplace or earn your living in customer service. But even if you don’t “go to work” at all, chances are you interact with a hell of a lot more humans than your counterpart of 100 years ago would have. The place you buy your groceries probably isn’t a little shop that serves a neighborhood of 50-100 people, is it? Relatives, friends, acquaintances and even assholes who would have had to put forth the effort to write and mail a letter a century ago can now wedge themselves into your brainwaves with a phone call, an email, or a text message in 30 seconds or less.

I truly don’t know what it was like to live 100 years ago. Perhaps, from our perspectives, it would be boring as hell. But then again, maybe not. The best I can do is compare it to when I spend a weekend at my father’s cabin on a wooded and relatively isolated mountaintop.

When we go there, we usually park the cars and don’t go anywhere not within hiking distance for a day or two. There is no computer. My cell phone doesn’t get much of a signal, and although there’s a landline phone for emergencies no one really has the number. There’s a TV, but no cable. On a good day, you can choose from 3-4 stations. There are really no people around other than those we’ve invited to visit.

I always come home from the cabin feeling recharged, more awake, and more energized. It’s funny, because we tend to be much more physically active there than at home. But maybe without all that communication and information, the 60,000 things are reduced just enough so that 6,000 or so can actually get all the way in – things like the night sounds of woodland critters, the twinkling of stars, and the smoky, blazing warmth of a campfire.

Every once in a while we need to stop reacting and simply sit back and take things in. Maybe that’s the only way our actions can actually come to have meaning.

Or maybe I’m just trying to turn a neat little factoid into an excuse for the amount of time I spend hiding and navel gazing.

You Know You're Getting Old If ...

2007-09-28T05:22:00.000-05:00

There are many standards signs of aging. Over time, we all get a little grey and a little wrinkled. Stuff we wish would stay upright starts sagging. We either accept this, spend a fortune on cosmetics, or get plastic surgery.

But what about the signs of aging that show up in our actions rather than our looks?

I’m the first to admit that I used to be a party girl. Hell, I still am oftentimes. I was brought up in a family that loved bars so much they bought one. As a kid, I thought of bars as grown-up Disney Worlds. As an adult, some of my fondest memories of times with family and friends have taken place in local pubs and dive bars.

I’m 37 years old. And up until about a year ago, almost every one of my weekends featured one of the following scenarios:

- staying at the bar till closing time, then heading back to The Bachelor friend’s house where my girlfriends and I watched the men in our crew revert back to their 80’s hair-band days. This often involved them jumping on the couches with broom guitars and blaring something like Poison at inhuman volumes. It also often went on until the sun went up and the neighbors who did grown-up things like early morning jogging got their “what the hell” on as they ran by the window.

- staying at the bar till closing time, then heading to some greasy spoon for a 3-hour breakfast where our crew ordered more food than could fit on a table and couldn’t eat half of it, there may or may not be episodes of toast-throwing, and we spent a great deal of time explaining to our friend who didn’t believe in mixing edibles and alcohol that he couldn’t order “three Budweisers and a dacquiri” at 3 a.m.

- staying at the bar till closing time, then retreating to someone’s living room or porch to sit up until sunrise discussing meaningful things like religion, life after death, war, politics, whether or not Jim Morrison was really dead, taxes, why marriage sucks, why being single sucks more, and how much easier life was in college.

- staying at the bar till closing time, renting a hotel because no one could drive home, passing out anywhere space could be found, and finding ourselves woken by what we thought was an explosion and then discovering that the only terrorist activity in the vicinity was our friend’s lethal, fart-ridden ass.

That was my life.

This past weekend, I spent Sunday at the bar watching football with a few friends. The Steelers kicked ass. The Ravens squeaked one out of their own ass. All reasons for drunken celebration, and so celebrate we did.

The Boyfriend and I came home kinda loaded, and proceeded to watch more football. It was still daylight out, but I was soon curled up sound asleep on the couch. This from Ms. Close-The-Bar.

I woke up two hours later, feeling refreshed. But there were no hair-band broom guitar sessions, drunken philosophy courses, greasy spoons or farting friends. Instead, I was overcome with the urge to buy shoes, and so I went online and that’s what I did. Three pairs, actually.

Yep, the party girl now gets drunks and goes shopping.

The good news is, the getting drunk part happens much less these days. My current activities may be a lot more grown-up, but let’s face it. Drunken shopping could be a hell of a lot more expensive than air guitar concerts.

Bearing Bad Management

2007-09-26T04:51:00.000-05:00

Being a supervisor put a few jagged cracks in my armor. I sucked at it, and I don’t like sucking. If you asked the people who reported to me, that’s probably not what you’d hear. The feedback I got from those in my unit was that I was a compassionate, supportive, empowering and advocacy-focused kind of boss.

In spite of that, I knew I was ineffective, and I hated it. Before long, I despised going to work.

Several years ago, I was tapped to be a lead on a project that requires leaving my office 4 days a week for a 2-year-period to implement a major new system. The project was stalled due to budget issues. We re-started this month. Since you can’t exactly supervise a team when you’re only in the office 1 day a week, my group was divided up and reassigned.

I no longer spend my days listening to the issues, concerns and complaints of others. I don’t review leave requests or do performance evaluations. I don’t spend my days keeping my boss off of everyone else’s back.

And you know what? I love it. I will never try to convince anyone that I’m the type of person who gets up and goes “hot damn, it’s Monday! I get to go to work today!” But in this new role, I can at least say the beginning of a workweek doesn’t turn me into a pathetic sadsack or a raging bitch anymore.

At first, I couldn’t entirely understand this shift in my mental state. After all, I still work for the same place, even though my role is different. I LIKE the staff who were in my unit – they’re hardworking and creative people. So what made me so damn miserable about being their supervisor?

Then I thought back to a post I read a while ago at http://www.ihateyourjob.com. Called “Stuck in the Middle: The Bearer of Bad Business,” the post talked about how someone’s sense of value, worth and purpose can be chipped away when their job involves representing a company that offers shoddy products or services, or providing crappy customer service themselves because of the practices of their employer.

You can find the full text here: http://www.ihateyourjob.com/stuck-in-the-middle-the-bearer-of-bad-business/

It dawned on me that this post essentially described my problem, although I didn’t realize it at first read. I have no issues with the service my employer provides (a quality university education) or with our service philosophy (students come first). But I do have problems with a lot of our newly-implemented management practices, and when my job was to supervise others I had no choice but to enact and enforce these practices. Oh, I argued my counterpoints in management meetings and campaigned for things to be different, but at the end of the day I still had to do what I was told.

I’m a strong believer in workplace flexibility, as long as the work is getting done. I approved letting staff work from home regularly, as long as they could show me end results. I agreed to several non-standard work time arrangements (extended days for a day off, working on a Saturday and taking off Sunday-Monday, coming in early and leaving before 5 p.m.). As long as staff took care of their responsibilities and made sure we had coverage, I encouraged people to be creative in getting their jobs done while meeting their personal needs.

My new boss believes in everyone working the standard 8:30-5, with no exceptions. He made me and the other managers under him take that flexibility away from our teams.

He also made us enforce a stricter dress code than we’ve ever had. We’re a college, and our environment has always been casual. It still is across campus. But in our office, everyone now must dress corporate. We’re the only division on campus that can no longer wear jeans on Fridays. It seems like a little thing, but it chipped away at the morale of a team used to a comfortable, casual dress code. It sucks to spend your Friday all dressed up while everyone else on campus looks like they’re heading to a football game.

The bottom line is, I was bearing bad business as a manager. I still believed in the service we provide to our customers, but I didn’t believe in the rules I was required to enforce on either myself or my staff. I felt I was setting unfair and counterproductive expectations for my team, and that made me feel like dog shit.

I’m still there. I still have to adhere to the standard schedule and the dress code. So does everyone who used to be on my staff. I still think it sucks. But at least I don’t have to be one of the ones enforcing it anymore.

We all have to make sacrifices at work. There’s no way around it. But the Bearing Bad Business article is right. When the sacrifices you make force you to question the way you treat others, whether they are customers or colleagues, then they probably just aren’t worth it.

Little Reminders

2007-09-24T05:38:00.000-05:00

I bitch and moan about my job a lot. In fact, it might be one of my top ten hobbies. But every now and then, I grab the remote, turn the channel and notice the good things that go on in the place I earn my paycheck.

My job has shifted recently. I’m on a systems implementation project (don’t yawn, I swear I won’t bore you with the details … at least not in this entry). As part of the project team, I spend 4 days a week off-site in what we jokingly call the war room. In reality, it’s kind of a stuffy little conference room with poor ventilation and seats that make your butt numb.

So anyway, sometimes a few days go by where I don’t even see my regular office crew. The other day, I got to work early and decided to stop in to the main office to see how things were going. There’s a crew of early birds who come in well before the office opens and get everything ready for the day. They were all trudging in loaded down with grocery bags. My office is known for throwing together food-fests in the middle of the week, so I really didn’t think much of it, other than a fleeting regret that I’d probably miss today’s communal lunch. I asked a co-worker what the occasion was.

It turns out the crew weren’t just staving off midweek boredom with munchies. We have a lot of students working in our office. We are at a college, after all. For the most part, our students have the traditional college life. They’re going to class, and some combination of mom and dad and the financial aid office are footing the bill for their tuition, room and board. They work a few hours a week in our office to earn spending money.

But we have one guy who’s completely on his own. He gets limited financial aid to cover tuition, and works to pay his rent and bills and feed himself. He’s doing all this while going to school full-time, and always running out of cash. A few days earlier, one of my co-workers had brought in bagels and cream cheese, and he’d devoured the breakfast hungrily and then asked somewhat sheepishly if he could take the leftovers home to get him through the next few days. He was out of grub until payday.

One of my co-workers boxed up the bagels for him. That night, the crew went home thinking about him. One of them raided her cabinets and surrendered her stock of mac and cheese, pasta and other non-perishables. Another went to the grocery store and stocked him up on a bunch of other stuff. A third whipped up a few heat-and-eat meals. They all showed up the next day lugging the bags I saw, to feed him for the next few weeks and let him save some grocery money.

It wasn’t a huge deal. Nobody saved the world. But the kindness behind it touched me just the same.

Sometimes at work it gets all too easy for me to forget I’m in a place where we can make a difference. My days usually consist of working with systems or sitting in meeting rooms full of management types who spout market-speak and business lingo. Even when I do interact with the students, I tend to see more of those who have the world at their feet, who have the luxury of calling Mom and Dad when the cash runs out and who’s biggest current crisis is whether to go to a morning class or sleep in and cop notes off a friend, or maybe whether or not the guy from this weekend’s party thinks they’re cute. I forget in all this that there are many who are struggling to make their dreams come true.

I’m glad I was reminded.

And while I’m all spouting positivity, I gotta once again say Go Steelers! I couldn’t get yesterday’s game on TV, but the score says it all.

Writer's Block

2007-09-21T07:19:00.000-05:00

A while back, Golfwidow at http://www.golfwidow.net/ posted an entry about writing, writer’s block, inspiration, and other things wordsmithy. You can find the exact entry I’m talking about here: http://www.golfwidow.net/archives/011803.html.

I was surprised and more than a little pleased to see her reference little old moi as a writer who keeps on keeping on, who doesn’t seem to face the monster we know so well as “writer’s block.”

My first thought was “wow, I must be putting on some good face.” Because I have those evil dry spells. I have them so bad I feel like a drunk at closing time, aching for just one more beer. My fiction projects have lain dormant for weeks, months and even years on end at various junctures in my adulthood. I haven’t written an Associated Content article or tried to freelance anything else in a few months now, because the new boss and various shifts in my job have temporarily zapped my will to create. I think wearing professional attire chokes and clogs my brainwaves. I become a uniformed zombie.

That said, I will admit that I don’t experience much in the way of dry spells when it comes to blogging. I post here at least three times a week, and add something to my online diary as well.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated that following habits to keep me from succumbing to blog and journal dry spells:

1. When you write, shut off that stupid little voice in your head that wonders if others will care about your topic.

If something is hitting you as needing to be written, write it. You aren’t on assignment, here. One thing I’ve discovered is that you can’t predict what topics and posts will generate interest and reaction anyway. A post you think borderlines on a literary masterpiece may sit unread and void of comments, while something you jotted down in three minutes about being sick of fashions that show butt cleavage will be linked all over cyberspace and commented on endlessly. Just have fun.

2. When you’re really stuck, chill out on writing and spend some time reading your favorite blogs.

I’ve found there’s no better way to get ideas of things to write about. Someone will post on a topic that reminds you of a story you wanted to tell, or inspire to add your own thoughts on the subject or take it off on a different spin. In the last two weeks, this has happened to me twice. This post was a result of Golfwidow’s writing rambles, and another post I did on the benefits of blogging popped into my head after reading a similar post from Ray at http://www.freshblogger.com/. There’s no better way to let your fellow bloggers know their words have an impact than to run with an idea one of them inspires.

3. Keep a blog log.

No, not a MyBlogLog. On my computer, I have a running list of topics I plan to write about. I make notes in bits and pieces as they come to me, and go back to them later. Just because I don’t have time to write about that thing that happened to me right now doesn’t mean I can’t record it for posterity and go back later. And if I don’t, it will surely get lost when a long meeting at work or one too many jaegerbombs kill another brain cell or two.

4. Stockpile posts that don’t deal with timely issues.

I always try to have one or two waiting in the wings, things that inspired me to write but that I don’t feel need to be slapped out there right away. Every now and then, a week or so goes by where I’m actually ready, willing and able to work on my fiction or an article for something other than my blog or journal. Since I’m an unwilling worker bee who spends too many hours at the day job and also has a house to maintain, a guy who wants a bit of my attention, and a wee bit of a social life, I simply don’t have time to write for my blog when I’m in that zone. Having a stockpile of fun posts lets me take time off from blogging to work on other projects without having my blog sit here gathering cyberdust.

So, you knew I was going to ask, right? Any other tips from the rest of you?

Big Love

2007-09-19T05:16:00.000-05:00

As if I needed another one, I’ve gone and found a new addiction. It’s HBO’s series, Big Love.

If you live under a rock like me and haven’t heard of the show until recently, you can read up on it here: http://www.hbo.com/biglove/

TV rarely if ever hooks me. But when it does, it seems to be something HBO puts out, and it hooks me good. The last time I fell in love with a series like this, it was Deadwood. I actually made plans around the damn show, not going out on Sunday nights unless I was sure I could get home in time for my weekly dose of Al Swearengen. I made one exception to go on a cruise, and actually found myself missing the damn show from the deck of a ship somewhere in the Caribbean.

A friend of mine who was a fellow Deadwood addict went through withdrawal when the series ended. We both did, lamenting the absence of the word “cocksucker” from our lives without Al and company. I cured my tweaks with jaegerbombs, and she turned to HBO and found herself sucked into Big Love, their new drug.

She told me about it, and I have to admit, my first thought was “ewwww.” Why would I want to watch a show about a bunch of freaky-ass polygamists? Yeah, I know, that sounds incredibly narrow-minded. Like so many who haven’t scratched beneath the surface of history or the current media, I have a hard time seeing this practice as anything but strange, cultish and abusive.

But then, sometime after the end of Season 2, the Boyfriend and I were channel surfing and happened to catch the last episode of Big Love. It was a little too touchy-feely for him, I think. How could it be anything BUT touchy-feely, when the main character is a guy who has to pop Viagra to keep up with his marital obligations to his three wives?

I, on the other hand, was hooked. That happened about two weeks ago, and I’ve caught the entire second season on demand since.

Honestly, I expected not to like the show. I thought it would sugar-coat and gloss up a lifestyle that I, for all my “live and let living,” just don’t get. There are people out there who have written far more intelligently than me (here’s just one of them: http://girlinshortshorts.blogspot.com/) about the abuse and entrapment of minors and enslavement of women that is rampant in many polygamist sects. There are probably a few well written examples out there of arguments for the lifestyle, minus the abuse and enslavement, as well.

So rather than say what’s already been said about it, I’ll stick with my more basic, simple, redneck ghetto-girl thoughts. I’m not a sharer when it comes to the person I’m going to bed with. You can show me the joys of having “sister wives” to share the household chores so we can all sit on our butts while our man brings home the bacon all you want. You can tell me that for these women the other wives are a wonderful emotional support system. Ummm …. Okay. My bottom line is still that there’s no way that my “partner” gets to bounce from wife to wife with a woody while I’m stuck home alone watching Seinfeld reruns on my “off nights.”

If that was how marriage and/or commitment worked in my belief system, I’d stick with dating. At least then, I’d be just as free to go out and play as he was, instead of sitting home thinking about what he was doing.

But Big Love doesn’t paint rainbows. It gives you what I think must be a fairly real picture of this kind of relationship between consenting adults. You feel for the “first wife,” who thought she’d be in a monogamous relationship forever but loves her compound-raised husband enough to give his polygamist “calling” a go, the “second wife” who doesn’t have either the clout of the first or the youthful innocence of the third (and was also raised by a wack-nut family who has her sure that this is all there is), and the “third wife” who gets patted on the head and treated like a baby factory. When she tells the other wives she wants more equality, the second point-blank tells her “no way. You get to be the newest wife. You get to be the youngest, and you’re reasonably good looking. You don’t get all that that AND and equal say too!”

What really surprises me personally is that sometimes I even feel for the husband, when they’re all ganging up on him over something they’ve decided they want (or don’t want). He asks his wives for a “7th night off” where he gets to have alone time instead of hanging out with and then shacking up with one of them. Wife #1, who didn’t want to be a polygamist in the first place, tells him “hell no, buddy. You signed on for this. It’s what you wanted.” As an introvert who needs her alone time like water sometimes, I pity the dumb-ass who gave up that right forever so that he could have three wives and lots of kids with him in the Celestial Kingdom someday, even as I’m thinking ‘you go, girl, don’t let him take even more away from you!’

I’m fascinated by all the undercurrents in the series – the friction between the polygamist cult and their neighboring Mormon churches, the relationships between the wives and the husband in the main household, the shady almost mob-like business dealings, and the goings-on at the nearby compound. It’s like HBO took The Sopranos, a halfway intelligent soap opera, a psychology course and a series on cult religion and threw them all together.

I think what I like the most is this that pack of characters who live a lifestyle I could never live and make decisions I’d never make still find their way into my heart.

I look at Margene, the youngest wife (who could be the daughter of the oldest) and think “oh, hell no, even if I was brought up somehow able to accept sharing a husband as my lot in life there’s no way I’d be walking around all fortysomething knowing that he was boinking THAT.”

I’ll admit it – I have faltering self-esteem and I’d totally get a “does my butt look big” complex if I knew my husband was also seeing her naked on a regular basis. I’d fatten her ass up or put Nair in her shampoo or something.

And as for Margene herself, I can’t imagine being 21, free-spirited, people-loving and beautiful – and NOT growing up on a compound where polygamy was the norm - and still accepting that my lot in life was to be a “hidden wife” who stayed home with the babies all day and looked forward to a few nights a week with her husband. Doesn’t she sit back and miss dating, or just going out with her friends, on those nights when hubby is shacked up with Wife 1 or 2?

And then, there’s the middle wife, Nicki. I just want to tell her to dump the long skirts and tightly collared blouses and strut around their mini-compound in a miniskirt like the rest of’em. After all, Nicki’s got a psychotic father, even if he IS The Prophet, and her mother has sister-wives almost young enough to be Nicki’s daughter. Girlfriend needs to get out and live a little. Her character is manipulative, secretive, and tries to make up for all her life is lacking by running up insane credit card bills and gambling. In other words, she’s someone I’d normally think was a dumb bitch, but given her circumstances I can’t help but kinda like her anyway.

Above all, I think I’m fascinated by the family’s teenage son and daughter. They were born to Wife #1 long before the father had his “calling” to follow “The Principle” and live a polygamist lifestyle. In fact, their parents had a traditional monogamous marriage for most of their childhoods. So while most of the other children think their family is the norm, the teenage daughter finds her family freakish, feels her mother has given up the love and life she deserves, and has no respect left for her father. The son, meanwhile, struggles between seeing what their new life puts his mother through and wanting to be just like his father. He finds out pretty quickly that admitting he thinks he wants to “follow the principle” one day too makes keeping a girlfriend in the outside world pretty difficult.

These probably aren’t exactly the reactions HBO was going for when they created the series. But I’m sold just the same. The show is like watching an emotional train wreck, but a train wreck where in spite of all your common sense you think there just might be some survivors.

I can’t wait for Season 3.

Leave A Message At The Tone

2007-09-17T05:14:00.000-05:00

The other day, one of my friends was ragging on me and another of our crew. He came by to see me at work, pointed to the cell phone sitting on my desk, and said “how come you two have those damn things anyway? You don’t bother answering them.”

That was a bit of an exaggeration. At the same time, I have to acknowledge a bit of truth in it. As with everything else, I was one of the last people to jump on the technological bandwagon that is cell phonedom. And unlike so many, I’ve refused to let the thing become a leash.

This friend answers his phone anytime, anywhere. If he’s out having dinner or driving in a car with a friend, he’ll answer it and yammer into it for 20 minutes. Never mind that his dinner companion is staring off into space and playing with her food, wondering why she didn’t just stay home with a good book if “going out” meant sitting around listening to a one-sided conversation. He’ll have someone over, and leave them sitting on the couch while he wanders around the house with his phone in his ear, talking about work, future plans, or who got drunk and farted in public the night before.

If he’s on the phone and another call comes through, he puts the person he’s talking to on hold while he waxes philosophical with the other caller for 10 minutes. Then he clicks back over to the first caller and wonders why they aren’t there anymore.

To him, the little black gadget in his pocket means he can live his life, going where he wants to go and doing what he wants to do, while still being connected anytime and anywhere. But sometimes to me, having a phone ever at the ready is almost more of a disconnect device. We all too often miss the moment we’re in because instead of really being present with the other people in the room, we’re focused on a voice on the other line.

When I first started dating The Boyfriend, he worked nights and I worked days. He had the kind of job where he had to sneak off to call me when a supervisor wasn’t breathing down his neck. I always answered the phone when he called, knowing that it might be our only chance to say more than a sleepy “g’nite” to each other that day. One of my girlfriends told me it upset her a little that I would interrupt our work lunches to talk to him. I explained the situation to her and she understood, but I took her point too.

It isn’t fun to be sitting in front of someone and feel like they’re not even present in the moment.

Now, I answer my phone when I want to talk to the person on the other end. But not answering it doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t want to talk to them. It may be that I’m having lunch with someone else, or just having dinner at home. It may mean I’m watching a good movie or something on TV. Maybe I’m writing, or just talking about my day with The Boyfriend. I always call back, but I’m not about to live on the phone just because I can. If I’m eating lunch with a group of work-friends, I should be having a conversation with them, not rehashing the weekend with a friend who calls on his or her own break. If I’m curled up watching a movie with The Boyfriend, why should he have to sit with the DVD on pause while I yammer for 20 minutes to someone else?

If you aren’t careful, “phonaholism” does more to remove you from the moment you’re living in than to keep you in touch with the people who aren’t there. My chatty friend came to meet me and another one of our crew for lunch last week. He spent the whole meal on the phone with a co-worker who needed to bitch about their company. On the one hand, it was great that he could be there for her when she needed to vent. On the other hand, he completely wasted his time driving up to hang out with us. He missed our whole conversation, his food got cold, and by the time he got off the line with the colleague we both had to get back to our offices.

Even though we see each other face to face at least once a week, I realize now that when I really want to talk to him about something, I don’t do it in person. I call him. The best way to get his undivided attention is to be the invisible person on the other end of the phone line.

I may be a pain in the ass because I don’t treat my cell phone like a leash. But at least if you’re WITH me, I’m there too.

So don’t be offended if you call and get my voice mail. Leave a message, and I’ll call back. If you’re doing something with someone else, or just navel gazing when I do, we’ll catch up eventually. I may be a bit miffed about the way technology has changed some things about our lifestyle, but voicemail? It rocks.

An X-er's Career Advice For Generation Y (Besides 'Hit Lotto!')

2007-09-14T04:39:00.000-05:00

The other day, I stumbled on what I thought was a very well-written article by a writer named Susan Johnston. Susan wrote about what “Generation Y” wants out of the workplace: individuality, engagement, instructions, feedback and flexibility. You can find her article here: http://www.100hats.com/archives/Letterview.aspx?id=536

Hmmmm … doesn’t sound that much different from what I, a tail-end Generation X-er, would describe as my own needs for thriving at work.

That got me thinking, though. While many members of “Generation Y” work in my office, they tend to be in part-time roles while going to school full time. I haven’t given much thought to what advice I’d give a new college graduate stepping into their first full-time position. There’s so many career-focused advice columns out there that I probably don’t have to, anyway. But just the same, a few thoughts came to my head:

Try to understand the perspective of older workers
Believe, me, what I’m saying here is NOT to just blindly accept views that limit change and improvement. But to move your employers beyond “but this is how we do it” kinds of thinking, you have to understand where those limits may be coming from.

Workers who are much older than you probably spent the majority of their working years in very rigid, structured, routine-oriented environments on the job. The boss was the boss, and your focus was on doing your job as instructed and earning a paycheck.

Then there are the co-workers who are a bit ahead of you agewise, but not much. The thirtysomethings like me. We entered the workforce on a major wave of change. Many of us have seen our entire professions re-crafted by technology.

I started working full-time when email as a constant communication method was still relatively new, and when having access to the internet at home was just beginning to be somewhat commonplace. My first work experience after graduation was as a job placement officer at a local trade college. I did not have a work email account, or access to the web in my office.

Today, just 12 years later, the idea of being in the job placement business without these things is completely and totally absurd.

This rapid-fire change has made people of my generation pretty adaptable and forward-thinking in the workplace. At the same time, we carry memories of the way things used to be not all that long ago. When we look at how vastly different and easy technology has made our jobs today, we believe we’ve come a very long way. And we have. But that sometimes keeps us from remembering that we still have miles and miles to go.

Be patient, learn to read others and speak their language
You probably have an endless supply of fresh and exciting ideas in your head. You haven’t yet been jaded by the day-in-day-out drudgery that work can become if you let it. You have priceless amounts of energy, enthusiasm and hope.

The best gift you can give yourself and your employer is to use that spark and creativity to improve processes, services and your work environment itself. But to do that, you’ll need to learn to take the mental temperature of your supervisors and colleagues. You’ll need to learn to recognize those who may fear change, those who are just burnt out and ready for a break, those who are control freaks, and those like you who want to improve both their experiences at work and your product or service. Then, you’ll need to learn how to communicate with the various personalities in a way that gets your message across in a positive way.

By observing and understanding human nature as much as you do today’s technologies, you’ll learn to help those who are fearful make subtle changes little by little. You’ll learn to help renew those with burnout, inspire those who dream like you, and support those who struggle with new things. These soft skills will get you farther than anything else you’ll learn on the job.

Don’t settle for less than you deserve.
More than any other generation of workers that came before your time, you know how important it is to have a fulfilling, rewarding career that also lets you live the rest of your life. You grew up in a time where more than ever before, workers have been able to design workplaces that provide financial security, flexible work arrangements, and inclusive environments where it isn’t just management making all the critical decisions. So you not only know it is important, but possible.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay your dues. We all do. Each and every job will have its boring tasks and rough times. Every company has the rungs on the ladder you may need to climb to get where you need to be. But over time, you’ll learn to distinguish between what is acceptable and what just doesn’t work for you.

If a flexible arrangement that lets you work odd hours or from home is really important to you, and your employer doesn’t buy into such structures, look for one that does. If you don’t feel there’s opportunity for growth and change, or that the career you’ve moved into isn’t resonating for you as much as you thought it would, now is the time to do something about it.

Go as far as you can in terms of getting the rewards you want out of work – whatever they are for you – while you still have range of motion. We can make career changes at any point in our lives, but they are much easier when you’re not yet saddled with a mortgage or other hefty bills and a family to support. Stretch your wings while you still have room.

Develop work habits that support having a life now.
When I started working, it wasn’t possible for me to dial in to work from home. We weren’t yet in a culture of 24/7 communication with the office and/or clients by email and other means. That meant when I left the office, I left my job behind until the next work day.

Technology has given us the flexibility to work from anywhere. That means we CAN have the freedom to work from home, a coffee shop, even the beach. With the right employer, it gives us the freedom to schedule work around life, instead of vice versa. But it can also create an expectation that we WILL be accessible anytime and anywhere. If you want technology to improve your quality of life instead of hampering it, you need to get into the practice of managing this expectation early.

Now that I think about it, we could all improve our work life by doing some of these things, regardless of our age or where we are in our careers. Especially me.

A Little Lip-Lip

2007-09-13T06:26:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine once told me that her cure-all for life’s minor aches and pains is “a little bit of lip-lip.”

By that, she means, “when you feel like shit, slap on some lipstick. If you look better, you’ll feel better.”

I tried it this morning. I’m that desperate. And you know what? It didn’t work. I’m having the period from hell, there’s a pack of hamsters in there somewhere gnawing at my uterus, and there’s not a damn thing a bit of sleek glossy goo is gonna do about it.

Like my sister, I not only get cramps, I get white as a friggin’ sheet for the first two days of my period. There’s nothing I can do about it. I think it’s an anemic thing. For two days a month, we look like we haven’t seen sunlight in a year.

Of course, I have a highly emotive, interactive leadership workshop at work this morning. It is supposed to be a bonding experience for a group of us who are becoming a two-year project team.

I feel sorry for my co-workers, who are going to have to bond with Casper the Bitchy Ghost and her pack of rabid hamsters.

Casper the Bitchy Ghost with lipstick, at that.

The Politics of Love

2007-09-12T05:22:00.000-05:00

Opposites can attract, and they do. I’ve never been one to say the old can’t love the young, the rich the poor, the insane the perfectly sane, and the workaholic the slacker. If love was perfectly rational and came with a checklist, it would be … well, almost as boring as work!

That said, I know first hand that relationships built on being complete opposites are difficult. My ex-husband and I carried one for almost fifteen years. Often, the challenge was interesting and even fun. But over time, it became more of a burden that we shouldered than something that lightened our load.

There were big differences in our lives. Our goals, our dreams, our ideas of happiness diverged to a point where compromise wasn’t even a possibility. It wasn’t that our planning sucked or that we took our marriage vows lightly. We were a case of “you aren’t always the same people you are at 20 that you are at 35.” It wasn’t something that could have been predicted. Eventually, about the only thing we could agree on in terms of where we wanted our lives to go was that we’d never be happy unless we weren’t together.

Life is a funny thing. I’ve gone through huge changes and transitions in the past two years, at work and at home. Sometimes, I look around and think that things are so radically different that it would be almost impossible to pinpoint what makes me happiest.

If I had to pick one thing, though, it might be a stupid little cartoon on my fridge.

When the last presidential election rolled around, my heart was set on waving Dubya good-bye. My then-husband, while not exactly a Bush fan, was anti-Kerry enough to feel differently. That was just one of the many ways our thought processes had changed as we grew.

We didn’t fall out of love based on political differences. Bush and Kerry, and our thoughts on politics in general, were just one of a million symptoms. We joked about it, calling each other “conservative prick” and “liberal douche,” but in the most endearing of ways, sort of like my friends and I are known to refer to each other as “asshole.” We went to the polls together on election day, did our duty and canceled out each other’s votes, then went to work.

When Bush whooped Kerry’s ass, I cried like a kid being bullied in the schoolyard. My then-hubby, instead of gloating, hugged me and told me he was sorry I was so upset.

That was a long time ago now, or so it seems. A marriage’s end, a refurbishing of my home, several promotions at work, some hellish and hilarious dating experiences, and a new love have come into my life since then.

Big life changes. Yet where I’m at today can all be summed up by one afternoon when The Boyfriend came home with a shit-eating grin on his face, pulled a cartoon he’d clipped from a magazine out of his bag, and proudly affixed it to the fridge.

It is a simple cartoon, just a picture of Dubya and Daddy walking along a path. Bush Sr’s arm is around Dubya, and he’s saying “Its okay son. I know too what its like not to pull out in time.”

He found it in a magazine at work, it tickled his funny bone, he knew I’d get a kick out of it and brought it home. I have to be honest, when we met, I really didn’t think I’d found someone who thought like me politically. He’s a blue-collar guy who just comes across as conservative when you don’t know him.

If you’ve ever seen the episode of Seinfeld where Elaine thinks she’s in love and is hesitant to bring up abortion because she doesn’t want to find out the guy is pro-life – that’s one of her no-can-do buttons – you’ll know how I acted about politics in general. I just didn’t want to know. The dating-again thing was too much of a pain in the ass in general, without throwing stuff like that into the mix. So I was pleasantly surprised to learn just how much we really do have in common over time.

The vast and major changes to my home landscape say a lot about where I am today. But that silly magazine clipping, in some ways, says more than the new furniture, the revamped yard, or the finished walls.

Love is not made of two people thinking both Bushes should have pulled out earlier. But thinking the same way about those kinds of things as the person you love, not because you want to or try to but because that’s just who you both were before you came together, is a hell of a lot of fun. It’s a new experience for me, and I like it.

Now, if I could just get him to understand that it is the Steelers and not the Ravens who should take our division this year …

A Black and Gold Girl in a Purple World

2007-09-10T06:45:00.000-05:00

I love this time of year, for the change of seasons and the way fall breezes slowly creep up and shove off the lingering remnants of hot, humid summer. I love it for the sense of renewal the back-to-school time brings when you work in a college.

But most of all, I love it for football.

If you had told me when I was a teenage girl that I would spend my falls discussing touchdowns, interceptions, turnovers, and penalties, I would have rolled my eyes and given you a very disdainful “what-ever.” Back in the day, all football was to me was a reason to be away from the house as much as possible, since there was no way in hell I was wresting control of the TV away from Dad.

Like the seasons, times change.

When I finally did get into football in my early 20’s, I had no hometown team. The Colts had fled Baltimore in the night, and the die-hard fans of the game around here still carried their anger and bitterness over that like shields. Many still do. Those who needed a team to call their own found The Steelers or The Redskins. There had always been a core of Steelers fans in Baltimore, but they were fruitful and multiplied as Baltimorians scrambled for a new allegiance.

This was all about the time the new bar my father owned and operated back then was taking off as a local hangout. He was approached by one of his regulars who also happened to be involved in the Pittsburgh Steelers Fan Club of Baltimore. They were looking for a large venue with plenty of beer, food, big screen TVs and personality to call home. Dad's place fit the bill, and a new era came to be.

Sundays and Monday nights became an adventure such as I’d never seen. Fans came from as far away as the Pennsylvania State Line, and packed our place by the hundreds. Each Steelers touchdown meant the Fight Song played over the speakers and a sea of black and gold jerseys and camouflage pants climbed up on our tables to dance and cheer. Beer flowed merrily with each win and drowned sorrows with each loss. At first, it was little more to me than a wonderful time of people-watching and partying. I was after all, a girl who had never thought much of football.

But over time, something happened. I found myself truly watching the game, asking questions until I figured out what the hell was going on, and feeling the highs and lows intensely. I was swept up in the tide of Steeler fandom. I began watching the games even when I couldn’t go to the bar. I was hooked.

Those were wonderful years. I fell in love with a team and a game. I was mesmerized by the chin-jutting, spit-erupting antics of coach Cowher. Our bar seemed to bring football back to Baltimore. It was the place to be.

Then the Ravens came to roost.

It didn’t take long for us to become, in the eyes of the town, football Public Enemy #1. We had a team here in Baltimore now, after all. What the hell were we doing still hosting this Pittsburgh Steelers crap?

That made it even more fun.

I tried to get into the Ravens. Never once did I think of giving up on my Steelers, but I at least tried to also find a place in my heart for the new home team. After all, the last time Baltimore had a home team I’d thought of football as nothing more than a chance to see the occasional cute ass on the field. Now that I understood the game, a home team might mean something to me.

But that’s when I learned that for a real fan, the place the Steelers take up in your heart is just too big to leave room for anyone else.

In 2000, my father sold his share of the bar that housed the fan club. He had hit a point in his life where he wanted a smaller, neighborhood pub kind of operation more so than a huge restaurant and club venue. A year later, he bought the small local joint of his dreams. Ironically, it happened to be right across the street from the old bar.

His new bar is one of many Ravens Roosts in Baltimore. People gather there to watch the Purple Ones do their thing. There is food and beer flowing, team spirit pouring alongside the drinks, excitement and heart and cheers and curses. Football seeps into your soul there too. Across the street, The Steelers Fan Club lives on and prospers. On days the Ravens and The Steelers play each other fans from each side pour out into the street for some usually friendly and sometimes not-so-friendly taunting. If there’s snow on the ground, snowballs are tossed across the street. In warmer times, fans improvise and make their statements by mooning each other and any random passing cars now and then. Once or twice, a local news crew or two has joined the fray, publicizing the ongoing neighborhood rivalry.

And I sit on our side of the street, in this new bar that I love so much. I am happy to be there. But when football rolls around, my heart is with the Black and Gold on their side of the boulevard. I’ve been known to bounce out the door now and then to cheer with my old friends and the newcomer Steelers fans I don’t know, or to stand in silent sympathy when we don’t have a good day and take my share of the catcalls coming from our bar with them. My town and my father’s bar are now with the Ravens, as they should be. But my own heart is still black and gold.

My separation and divorce proceedings began in 2005. I was scared and stressed, overwhelmed and frustrated. But on game days, that all went to the wayside. The Steelers winning the Superbowl gave me both an escape and a real sense of happiness and hope. They pulled me outside my own head, filled with nothing but problems, and reminded me that life is a hell of a lot of fun.

The Boyfriend is a true Baltimore Boy, and a die-hard Ravens fan. He blends in perfectly with the sea of purple at the bar. We agree on almost everything, but not this. I sat beside him on my barstool and took my lumps last year, when the Ravens trounced the Steelers 27-0. And yesterday, I danced around our living room in my Steelers baseball cap and a Steelers blanket draped around my shoulders like a Superhero cape, watching the beautiful points rack up in their first game of the season, against the Browns, and yelping “how do you like us NOW?”

I should know never to speak too soon. It’s a long season. But when your football history is mine, one of rival bars and being black and gold in a sea of purple, that really is half the fun.

Go Steelers!

RatemyProfessor.com

2007-09-07T05:26:00.001-05:00

Those of you who were college students back when I was probably remember “evaluation day.” At my school, it was the last class of the semester, but before our final exams. Professors handed out sheets and students went to town, rating their instructors and classes. You got to give your two cents about your professor’s teaching style, knowledge of the subject matter, structure of the class, value of the reading and assignments, and general helpfulness.

A student would be asked to collect the sheets and deliver them to the professor’s department. The profs themselves weren’t allowed to touch them. In theory, these evaluations were used in future teaching assignments and in the prof’s performance evals. I sometimes wondered whether they were really just shoved in some department chair’s desk drawer, never to surface again.

Those evals still occur, but have been relegated to second class status. From what the students who work in my office have told me, the real place to share what you think about your profs these days is http://www.ratemyprofessor.com.

At Rate My Professor, students can go online and rate their professors according to several criteria, as well as make comments. You can look up professors by name or by school.

A co-worker and I spent some time on this site the other day. Hey, it isn’t slacking. We prefer to think of it as “getting in touch with the world of the students we serve.” If that means we get to read comments like “all you have to do to get an A is flirt with him a little,” or “he spends his whole class trying to be young and hip” about our colleagues, then so be it.

I have mixed feelings about the site. On the one hand, I’m all for a place where students can leave feedback about their classroom experiences that can actually be read by other students. I think if I was a college student, I might jump online to Rate My Professor at registration time and see what others said about the people I was signing up to listen to (and get grades from) for the next 16 weeks.

At the same time, I feel a bit sorry for the professors. I know some students are perfectly objective, while others are slamming a prof here and there just because they’re pissed that they only pulled a “C” after not going to class all semester and turning in 3 late papers. And of course, there’s the fact that nosy university staff members like me entertain ourselves by going on and reading what gets said about the profs we know. That’s great if the ratings and comments are glowing, but do you think that one guy REALLY wants me knowing his students think he’s an old geezer trying to act youthful?

I think what bugs me most is the chili pepper thing. I can see rating professors on how well you think they teach. But on whether or not they’re “hot?” Isn’t that what that Hot or Not site that’s out there is for? The last I checked, being “hot” was a criteria for working in Hollywood or as a stripper, not for a Ph.d. or a teaching job.

I have a silly mental image of a group of old profs sitting around a computer at a faculty meeting, glasses sliding down their noses as they scratch their beards and the department chair says “hmmmm, Bob. You’ve got an awful lot of comments here about your courses being easy. Step it up.”

Bob, who was staring out the window, jerks to attention and takes a sputtering gulp of his coffee. “Yeah … but … but … look. I got chili peppers, man! Chili peppers!” He points to a colleague across the room. “He didn’t get any chili peppers, and you’re putting HIM up for tenure!”

I’m sure it doesn’t happen that way, but it’s a funny thought.

Then there’s the whole equality issue. Being a professor now means accepting that you’ll be both applauded and humiliated on the web, and that even though you really are a rocket scientist you’re probably going to have a bad hair day or moment of self doubt where you bemoan the lack of peppers in your ratings.

If we’re going to put profs through this, let’s have RateMyDoctor.com, RatemyLawer.com, RatemyLoanOfficer.com, RatemyTherapist.com, and so on. Who knows, maybe we already do.

Chili peppers for everyone, I say.

LCD Management

2007-09-05T04:56:00.000-05:00

I’ve spent the last few weeks adapting to having a new boss. Our completely opposite management styles have made it something of a challenge, but I think I’m starting to get there.

My gut reaction to him was that he was authoritarian, rigid, inflexible, and “bossy.” (Yeah, yeah, I know he IS a boss. Hear me out here). Seeing myself through my own lenses, I think I’m more of an easygoing, flexible, make-the-most-of-everyone’s-strengths-and-keep-the-crew-happy type. He narrows in on the organization’s goals. I try to make staff feel valued, productive and empowered, figuring that if they’re getting all that stuff they in turn will give a crap about what we need to do.

But over time, I’m realizing that assessment isn’t entirely fair. He and I are both rather set in our ways.

As a manager, I make an assumption that everyone is invested in what they’re doing and will do it well. I run my ship with the idea that we’re all professionals, and that acting like some rigid pole-up-my-butt whipcracker will just make the whole work thing even less pleasant than it already is. I give the talented, dedicated folks free reign to do what they need to do, with plenty of room to be creative and exercise control over their own lives in and out of the office. After all, that’s what I want for myself, and I don’t deserve it if I’m the kind of manager who keeps others from obtaining it.

This works great for most of my staff. They feel empowered. They like their jobs and don’t mind coming to work because being there doesn’t make them feel like they’re in prison or at the very least back in high school. They work hard because they don’t want that freedom and flexibility taken away. But the truth is, there are a few who run roughshod over me. They don’t want empowerment or reasonable flexibility – they want to work as little as possible and get away with whatever they can. Because of my management style, they often do.

He, on the other hand, exercises what I call “lowest common denominator” management. He notices that not everyone IS the invested, adult-who-can-manage-their-own-time, professional type I assume they are. He focuses in on the problems – the chronically late types who also leave early and don’t get things done on time, the ones who always have something other than work up on their computer screens, the ones who can’t really explain what the heck it is they do all day.

He zeroes in on them and decides that in order to make them productive he has to enforce strict rules and guidelines on everyone. Those guidelines range from what to wear to when to come in and leave (to the minute) to exactly what to say when you take a call. There is very little flexibility and no range of motion. Flying in the face of trends in today’s workplace, he’s rescinded all flextime or “non-standard” schedule arrangements, even those that have been in place for years.

This give the ones who can’t take control of their own actions and be responsible for their own work the strict operational guidelines they need. They mumble and groan, but they’re present and somewhat active. So to some extent, it works.

But it has left those who already went way above and beyond their job descriptions with a sour taste in their mouths. The professionals who contributed more than expected because they got treated like adults whose lives outside of work mattered in return are bitter and feeling penalized for the actions of the few.

A year ago, I arranged a semi-flexible schedule with a woman who is probably the most productive and creative member of our office. All she wanted was to come in at 7:00 and leave a little earlier than the typical end of the business day, because she likes having time in the morning to focus before the rest of the gang gets to work and starts bugging her. And she likes having an extra free hour or two tacked on to her afternoon. He made me take that away from her, acknowledging that she’s not “a problem” but that we have to go back to the drawing board to deal with those that are.

So yeah, we’ve now got a strict set of guidelines and a watchful eye looking over those who don’t produce on their own. But on the flip side, the ones who already did more than enough feel like they can’t move. Work is no longer a team environment. It is an assembly line. When you work on an assembly line, you go in, do your shift, and go home. You don’t worry about the big picture. You can’t see it from the narrow box you’ve been shoved into.

Clearly, I needed to improve as a manager. I let those who would take advantage of a “grown-up” environment get away with not doing their part. But I don’t necessarily see his way as better. We’re getting more out of them, but less out of the formerly empowered types who ran all the way with their own balls before.

Maybe you can’t manage to the best of them and expect others to follow the leaders. But this lowest-common-denominator crap just leaves everyone watching the clock and looking for new jobs.

There’s got to be a middle ground somewhere.

Ways To Avoid Being The Office Jackass

2007-09-04T05:00:00.000-05:00

Note: This post was inspired by the fact that it is the first workday after a long weekend, and I can't think of a good reason to call in sick.

I recently read an online article – probably one of hundreds of its kind – on the most annoying things about the workplace. The writer had surveyed office drones such as myself, and came to the conclusion that “loud talkers” were by far the thing that irritates us most. We all know one, the fellow office or cube-dweller who yammers to her mother, brother, boyfriend and BFF all day about everything from sex to what’s for dinner.

I have to admit, the loud-talker is high on my list too. Other annoyances mentioned were smelly food eaters and all-day IM-ers who leave their “ding” on, so not only they but everyone around them knows they’ve got a message.

A good start, I say, but I think the list of irritability factors is much, much longer. Because I care, and want us all to avoid going insane while we’re stuck in the daily grind, I present my list of Top 10 Ways To Avoid Being The Reason Your Co-Workers are on Psych Meds:

1. Understand that if you’re a morning person who acts like a teenager at cheerleader camp bright and early on Monday, you will make someone throw up. Probably someone who is hung over from drinking away the thought of returning to work the night before. Morning people should be seen and not heard.

2. If you’re not a morning person, drag your lazy ass in on time anyway. The rest of us non-morning people don’t want to deal with your clients or your boss while we’re trying to infuse ourselves with enough caffeine to remember how to speak.

3. Don’t schedule a ton of meetings just so you can look busy. If you run out of work, go ask the frazzled person in the next office if you can help them out instead. The rule of thumb is “if it can be talked about in email, don’t meet about it.” If you break this rule, you suck.

4. When you do get stuck in a meeting, show up on time. The longer you make everyone wait for you, the longer the damn thing will run.

5. If you pop into someone’s office for a chat and all they do is nod absently, peck away at their keyboard and stare at their computer screen, go away. This is colleague-speak for “leave me the hell alone, I’m either busy or I hate you.”

6. Remember that your life is only fascinating to you. The single childless girl in the office next door does not want to hear about your kid’s day camp or homework for hours on end. The married-with-kids lady down the hall is tired of hearing about your bad dates and drunken hookups – she’s just too nice to tell you that she thinks you're a ho. And the guy who’s son is failing math and got caught smoking pot last week probably doesn’t want to hear about your frickin’ honors student.

7. Oh, and we’re all glad you lost fifty pounds. Now shut up about it and pass me the cookies.

8. If you come in early, stay late and stop by the office on Saturdays, you’re not a shining star. You’re a pain in the ass do-gooder who makes the rest of us look bad. Get a life.

9. We can all agree that the worst part of work is sharing a bathroom with relative strangers. Be kind. Don’t pee on the seats.

10. Don’t poop at work. Ever. Unless you have your own private toilet. And if you must, BYOAF (Bring Your Own Air Freshener).

I Am, Therefore I Journal

2007-08-31T04:54:00.000-05:00

In spite of the fact that I’m always complaining that I don’t have enough free time, I consistently spend quite a bit of what I do have on blogging and journaling. In addition to this blog, I still maintain an online journal that chronicles my daily life and times.

Every now and then I wonder why I still bother with both. This one is the public face that serves the attention whore in me. But specifically for that reason, I don’t quite use it as a diary or journal, and I guess I still need one of those too.

Freshblogger recently had an interesting post on the benefits of journaling (as opposed to “blogging.”) Check it out at: http://freshblogger.com/2007/08/top-5-reasons-for-journal-writing/

He has some great insights on how journaling can help you, both as a writer and in your personal life. I wanted to add a few of my own to the list:

Journaling can make you notice and appreciate the good in your life more.
When you’ve committed to writing in a daily journal, you subconsciously start seeking things to write about. One thing I’ve discovered is that journaling about the frustrating or downright bad things in your life is easy. Screwy relationships and crappy jobs just seem to create pitchers of words to pour on your page. But after a while, you get sick of your journal being one endless bitch-fest, and you start keeping your eye tuned to the good things in your life so that you can write about them. You hold on to the little moments that make your day – an especially good cup of coffee, a chance encounter with an old friend that ends in a bear hug, a laugh in the office, a new plant in your garden, or the antics of a pet. You tuck them away so that you can write about them later. I don’t know about you, but this helps me keep those good memories from getting buried in the landslide of errands and unpleasant tasks that often come with everyday life.

Journaling sharpens your wit and humor.
Maybe this doesn’t work for everyone. But I find that my journal keeps me on the lookout for the humorous and entertaining moments in my life. In fact, it sometimes makes my day an exercise in taking encounters that would normally just be aggravating and frustrating, and turning them into something funny.

My bird shit entry here is one example. A feathered rat dropping a load on me does have a certain amount of innate potty humor to it. Even so, when I first started journaling I probably would have focused more on the frustrating and disgusting aspects of the whole thing. Over time, journaling regularly has altered the way my mind puts bits and pieces of life together. I look for patterns, connections, flashes of insight or something to laugh about, try to put them all together.

Yeah, even with bird shit.

My encounters with my new boss are an even better example. Honestly, they’re upsetting and disempowering enough that they can and do reduce me to tears on a regular basis (not in front of him, though … oh hell no). And I write about that regularly in my journal. Doing so helps me see and record the absurdity of the whole situation. Instead of just feeling the dreadful disheartening impacts of the whole situation, my words make it rather like a sitcom featuring an evil boss. Seeing the ridiculousness of the whole thing doesn’t make it suck less, but it does add a bit of humor to it.

Journaling helps you notice self-destructive patterns
If you keep a journal long enough, it becomes a record of your actions, thoughts and feelings. Looking back through it can help you pinpoint where you get stuck, your less than healthy patterns, and the things that keep happening to you over and over again. You can reread them and just say ‘damn, sucks to be me,” or you can try to figure out why you always end up in that place.

Whenever I’m feeling okay with being a working stiff, I sift back through my journals and see the aggravation, sense of living life on someone else’s schedule, and genuine sadness over not doing what I love. This hasn’t gotten me out of the grind yet. But it does keep me from getting complacent about it, and just accepting that my lot in life is to give most of my days to simply surviving as opposed to living.

I go back to the journaling I did over my single time period and laugh about my chronicles of meeting and trying to figure out one screwed up man after another. In hindsight, I can see that I was a mental furball regarding relationships and life in general, so of course I attracted men in the same disturbed state of mind. I wonder over and over again in my journal of the time about why I’m not meeting someone without serious issues. Looking back, the answer is so simple. “Because someone mentally healthy enough to not invite problems into his own life wouldn’t touch someone in your situation and state of mind with a ten foot pole, honey. Now have another jaegerbomb.”

I could go on and on about the benefits of journaling. But it would be more fun to hear what you guys think. Why do YOU journal, if you do?

More Than Immature

2007-08-29T05:33:00.000-05:00

I’ve pretty much stayed out of the Michael Vick fray in my journals, although it is an almost rabid topic of conversation amongst my family and friends. Most of us are football freaks, and all of us are animal lovers, so what do you expect?

But I didn’t write out my thoughts. I’d like to say that’s because I’m a conscientious blogger who knows that you already can’t get away from Vick on the radio, the TV, or anything else that you read online. If I’m honest, though, I’ve probably just been too wrapped up in my day-to-day life and scribbling about why my job sucks and birds that shit on me instead.

But I heard something on yesterday’s news that made my nostrils twitch with annoyance. A local weatherman/newscaster was recapping Vick’s “apology.” He wasn’t saying he thought the apology would or should be factored into his sentencing. He was just covering the facts of Vick’s press conference. Apparently, Vick admitted that his actions were “immature,” that he had “a lot of growing up to do,” and that he’d been dishonest about the charges.

The newscaster then went on to talk about how if Pete Rose had been upfront and apologetic, maybe he would have made it to the Hall of Fame. He said we’re a forgiving society, and we would have forgiven Rose, so maybe we’ll forgive Vick too.

That was when my “check brainwaves” light started flashing.

Pete Rose bet on baseball. That was probably unethical and somewhat shitty. But he didn’t brutalize and kill living creatures as part of his gambling habit, did he? To me, there’s simply no comparison.

And as for Vick’s apology? “Immature” means you moon cars, make prank phone calls, have your mommy and daddy bail you out of trouble, can’t maintain a relationship, or get in stupid bar brawls over who has a bigger penis. Having a “lot of growing up to do” means you’ve hit 30 and still live in mom and dad’s basement, or that you can’t hold a job or balance your own checking account.

Being immature as an adult means you’re still acting like a kid – in a bad way. If a kid was running a gambling ring that involved fighting and murdering animals, it would not be immature. It would be cruel, brutal and inhumane.

Sorry, but I don’t consider that an apology. There’s no acknowledgement of the abuse involved in his actions. If anything, saying this whole thing was “immature” just makes light of the situation and shows that he still doesn’t acknowledge the suffering of the animals or his own horrific cruelty and lack of respect for life.

Now, if I was to buy a Vick jersey, take pictures of the ferrets crapping on it, and try to sell them on E-Bay, THAT would be immature.

That won’t happen, though. I’m as childish as the rest of them, but I wouldn’t drop a penny on his name.

Birdshit Mojo

2007-08-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

Because I was something of a dork back in my teenage years, I only played hooky from high school once. Me and my equally dorky friend climbed on a city bus and spent the day roaming about the tourist attractions of our hometown. We felt liberated, free, and just a little rebellious.

Then a seagull swooped down and shit on my friend’s head.

While we were in the bathroom, her squealing and me swabbing at her hair with a wet paper towel, an elderly, brightly-dressed tourist approached us and told us that a bird choosing you as a target for it’s ass-droppings is actually good luck.

I’m relatively superstitious, but I didn’t believe that then and still haven’t bought into the theory.

I now have proof that as far as superstitions go, this one is bogus. I was out shopping for work clothes on Saturday, and felt a suspicious plop on my shoulder. Luckily, the offending bird was much smaller than a seagull and missed my hair, but I still got a shoulderful of shit.

After this supposed harbinger of good luck, the rest of my weekend went like this:

- I chose a department store line that included every single back-to-school-shopper mom who was determined to get a price check to save a buck on backpacks and notebooks. I came perilously close to saying “screw it. This isn’t worth two pairs of work-appropriate pants. I’ll just go naked on Thursdays and Fridays.”

- It was a thousand degrees on Saturday, and I hate summer.

- I decided to relieve the stress of shopping and swampy heat by going out for a beer, only to have my efforts thwarted by a thunderstorm that blew out my power for several hours. This happened as I was just-showered and ready to do something with my hair and makeup, which I’m far too technology-and-light dependent to accomplish by candlelight. Scratch that beer.

- The power stayed out for six hours, making my house hot and swampy, my attitude bad, and my weasels and the Boyfriend almost as bitchy as me.

- Once it came back on, it took forever to get my cable and my internet to work again, and everyone knows cable and the internet are essential on a swamp-ass weekend where going outside feels far too much like work.

So, a bird shitting on you is not good luck. It is simply a bird shitting on you.

The one bright spot of the weekend was a damn good showing from the Steelers in last night’s pre-season game. Maybe I transferred that birdshit mojo to Big Ben and the new coach, huh?

Book Review: Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

2007-08-24T04:48:00.000-05:00

There are some kinds of writing that are admittedly easier than others. An obvious example is the romance novel. Girl has shitty life, or good life until shitty things start happening. Girl meets boy. Girl and boy have stupid fight over something because they won’t admit they like each other, and then have sex. Boy loves girl. Girl loves boy. Girl and boy fix shitty things together. Boy and girl have stupid misunderstanding and break up. A well-meaning meddler (usually a child, an old person, or one of their ugly sidekicks) gets them back together, and everyone lives happily ever after.

There are a million story formulas with good guys and bad guys, and heroes who come out on top. They’re entertaining and they make good money for those who write them.

But it takes balls to take a different path, to write a story where good and bad isn’t so clear-cut. It takes even more balls to write such a story on a controversial and timely topic that pushes everyone’s emotional buttons – like a massive shooting spree in a school. But that’s what Picoult has done, and done well, in this novel.

I didn’t always enjoy reading this book. Some of the moments are horrific and heartbreaking. Not everyone finds a happy ending, especially not those who are dead or left behind to live in the aftermath.

Parts of the book take you back in time, and force you to see and feel things you might want to leave shoved in the back of your mental closet. Maybe you’ll recall being the kid whose high school life was an endless series of attempts to avoid being singled out for ridicule by the ‘cool kids,’ of days on end of trying to figure out how to disappear in a crowd. Or maybe it’ll force you to think regretfully of your time as one of the ones who made that kid want to hide, back when you couldn’t think much beyond keeping yourself out of that harsh spotlight.

The book paints frightening pictures of parenthood too. There’s the career-focused, independent mother who realizes she has no real connection with her seemingly perfect teenage daughter, who has become so intimidated by her mother’s success that she can’t open up to her about her own perceived problems and shortcomings. There’s the mother who tried everything she knew to turn things around for her sensitive, loner, misfit son, only to realize too late that it wasn’t enough.

The story is a about an event and a trial. But it is also about teenage love and pack mentality. It is about being a bully and a geek, and about being someone who is just trying not to be either. It is about parenthood, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, fathers and sons. It is about how you look at the people in your community differently once the world is turned on its ass. It is about how coping with devastating loss destroys some relationships, strengthens others, and causes new ones to spring up out of the debris.

It doesn’t condone the behavior of the boy who lashed back at his tormenters with weapons and death. In fact, it shows just how horrific what he’s done is through many different sets of eyes. But it also forces a hard look at how he got there. It doesn’t say “the bullies got what they deserved,” but it does remind us all to think long and hard about what we might be helping to create if we fall into a pack mentality or build up our own worth by defining someone else as “less than me/we.” It leaves you thinking that if you can’t be kind out of sensitivity and caring, if you single out others for ridicule or ostracization just because they aren’t like you, then you should at the very least check your actions out of a sense of self-preservation. Because you never know what will happen inside that person’s head over time, and you’ll never be able to predict how many innocents will suffer when something snaps inside them.

There’s a twist, too. Not a big shocker, but one that makes us think about just how awful and wonderful it is to be 17.

This isn’t a light read, or even a heartwarming one. But it is well worth the pain of sifting through the hard questions.

Concerts, Parties and Football (and Work Still Sucks)

2007-08-22T04:40:00.000-05:00

Five signs that your job is getting to you:

1. You start off your workdays by playing Greenday’s “Minority” and banging around your living room, screaming the line “I don’t need your authority” at the top of your lungs even though a) you can’t sing and b) you crash into walls before two cups of coffee and c) it’s six o’freakin’ clock in the morning.

2. You’ve taken to referring to Mondays as “Deathly Hallows.”

3. You have a calendar in your kitchen where you color in 3-day weekends and mark off the days until you’re old enough to retire, although you’re still a few years away from 40.

4. A co-worker who is also a friend calls you on your day off to chat, and casually mentions something remotely related to work, and you put your hands over your ears and start “la-la-la-ing” until she stops.

5. You can’t look at certain people in the workplace without imagining how good it would feel to throw food products at them. Preferably gooey, gross food products.

Or maybe these signs only pertain to me, because I’m freakish.

So, the concert we went to see last week was awesome. The Young Dubliners, while maybe not so very young anymore, have become a staple in my musical repertoire. I never would have discovered them without the ex, who introduced me to them after his new girlfriend brought them into his life. Reason #127 why staying on good terms with an ex isn’t a bad thing at all.

And then, Saturday, there was the annual asshole party. This is a tradition that started years ago. My mother said there were so many assholes in our circle of bar friends and family who were born in the summer (I’m one of them) that if we tried to celebrate all the birthdays individually the dog days would stretch into one big hangover. So we started doing one summer party, to celebrate the lives and times of us all.

I didn’t get thrown in the pool this year. I did play bartender for a while, which is easy when everyone is already drunk and just wants jaegerbombs. I also collected tons of Steelers loot – a birthday gift from one of the fellow fans in attendance, and got myself one hell of a hangover.

The football season is coming on, and I’m getting psyched. The perverse part of me loves being a Steelers fan smack-dab in the middle of Ravens territory. Well, maybe I didn’t love it so much last year. And I’m certainly in for some serious ribbing this year, since all my closest friends knew part (just part, mind you) of my fandom had to do with a strange and unexplainable crush on Bill Cowher. They’re waiting for me to cave and come to the Dark Side now that my big-nosed, spit-spraying coach has moved on.

Ain’t gonna happen, though. And now that I’ve written of mood music, work sucking, concerts, asshole parties and football, I’m realizing I have no logical train of thought and make absolutely no sense. Must be mid-week.

Online Music For the Techno-Challenged

2007-08-20T07:03:00.000-05:00

I’ll write more on the long weekend festivities, of which there were many, later. Between the concert and what my family calls our annual “asshole party” (remember, we use it as a term of endearment), there’s much to recap.

But first, I want to talk about my very cool discovery. At least, it is very cool to a behind-the-times loser like me.

You can get into the online music thing, even if you are the last remaining person on the planet who doesn’t have an IPOD.

From their web site, Walmart.com offers the ability to make and purchase your own custom CD. You can search music by category and artist, or by song titles. You can listen to snippets of a song long enough to figure out whether or not it’s the one you’re thinking about before you add it to your collection. CDs are priced based on the number of songs you select. You can choose up to 20 songs or up to an hour and a half worth of music. Or, you can just choose those three or four songs you love and never hear on the radio anymore and be done with it.

I love being able to just browse around and stumble into songs I hadn’t heard in years. Where else, other than in my own head (and now on my soon-to-be-delivered CD) do the following songs live together:

“Father Christmas” by the Kinks
“Black Backpack” by Shade 9
“The Freshman” by the Verve Pipe
“Ballroom Blitz” by Krokus
“A Little Respect” by Erasure
“Piss on the Wall” by the J. Geils Band

And that’s just a start. Yeah, I’m like a kid in a candy-shop, reliving my childhood as I blindly wander into songs I haven’t heard or thought of in years, but that trigger a million memories. As I played around yesterday, I was once again the 15-year-old girl who broke up with her boyfriend by throwing his class ring at him in the middle of a roller-skating rink. He worked as the “skate guard” and I’d seen him repeatedly slap the ass of an older, flirty and reputedly easy girl we all called “Wiggles” as she whizzed by him doing all her fancy skate-backwards stuff.

I wonder how Wiggles is doing, anyway? She did me a favor. He ended up knocking up his next girlfriend a few months later.

Anyway, the CD thing. Try it. It’s fun. I’ve got tons of plans. Mix tapes to keep all the bar folk happy at our annual yard party, when we don’t have a DJ. The perfect exercise mix for me, not some generic cute girl in spandex who likes club dancing. Birthday gifts for people with cool themes like ‘non-sucky songs that came out the year you were born.’

What would be on YOUR mix? Now that I’ve found this, I’ll probably never get an IPOD.

A Quickie

2007-08-16T04:36:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note to say I'll probably not post here again before early next week.

We're going to see these guys tonight: http://www.youngdubliners.com/. Then I'll be dragging myself into work Friday, and then embarking on a weekend of festivities.

I'll see ya'll on the flip side. Have fun out there!

Helicopters

2007-08-15T04:43:00.000-05:00

They swoop. They swarm. They hover.

They’re the helicopter parents.

If you don’t work in a college environment, than you probably haven’t heard this terminology before. But it is fast becoming a technical term in our business – one we spend lots of time in conferences and training sessions discussing, debating, and agonizing over.

If you’re in your 30’s or 40’s and went to college, you can probably still look back on those days fondly. You picked and chose your major and your courses. You built your own schedule around work, school, studying and getting laid. You showed your parents your transcripts and called them when you needed money or couldn’t remember how to do laundry.

The times have changed, folks.

Many traditional-aged college students today still do everything in conjunction with Mom and Dad. Parents are involved in choosing majors, courses and schedules. They help figure out where their student will live and how much he or she should work, if at all.

That part is all good. There were certainly times in my college career where I would have made better decisions if Mom and Dad were breathing down my neck or riding my ass a bit more. Maybe I wouldn’t have signed up for all those “special” credit card offers from vendors hanging out on campus. I’d have avoided having spring break bills that I’d be paying off into my 30s. Maybe I would have actually gone to that 8 am biology class, instead of assuming I could just read the textbook and show up for exams.

I’m not saying parental involvement in a college kid’s life isn’t a positive thing. It is. But somewhere along the way, a line between “involvement” and “control” got crossed. Parents call my office for everything.

I’ve been yelled at because a student got a “C” in a course mom thought she should have gotten an “A” in. I’ m not the professor, I just work in the office that manages grades.
I’ve been called incompetent because someone’s 22-year-old “kid” didn’t bother registering for courses until the day the semester started, so the “prime time” classes were all full. Mom declared me and my whole office useless because Johnny couldn’t take “Intro to Psyc” at noon – the only thing left was the 9 a.m. class. And Johnny doesn’t like getting up that early.

Now, positive parental involvement in this scenario would have been “I’m sorry you can’t sleep in all day, Johnny, but it’s too bad. Maybe dragging your butt to this morning class will teach you some time management skills, so that next summer you’ll register when everyone else does instead of sleeping until noon and then staring at computer games all day until its time to go drink beer in your buddy’s basement.”

That’s the mild stuff. I’ve also had parents in my office planning out their child’s schedule for them, turning to glare at their son or daughter if there’s a meek mention of maybe wanting to explore an art, history or writing course instead of adding one more science or math class. I’ve had 20-year-olds in my office in tears because they want to change their major to English, but the parental units won’t help pay tuition unless they stick with business or computer science. I’ve seen good students get in trouble for getting not-so-great grades in courses they were forced into taking, even though their overall academic history shows awesome scores in everything else.

Sometimes, the level at which some parents are involved in their kids’ college lives is scary. They either seem to be controlling the whole deal, or teaching the kid to blame everyone but him or herself when things don’t go exactly as planned.

Part of the whole college experience used to be learning independence. I wonder if these “kids,” aged 18-25, will grow up scared to call and order their own pizza because they still haven’t learned to request a copy of a transcript or talk with an instructor about a missed assignment.

About five years ago, we had a running joke. I had made a comment one day, after a particularly grueling mom-and-dad session, along the lines of:

“What the hell is going to happen when these kids graduate and go to work? Is mom going to call the boss when Little Johnny doesn’t get a promotion, hates his cube or gets told he can’t take a vacation during a particular week?”

That joke isn’t funny anymore, because in some extremes, we’ve heard that’s exactly what’s happening.

Yep, when the children of the helicopter parents graduate, a few of them ARE calling, writing and otherwise involving themselves in their adult, college-degreed child’s workplace.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

My first boss after college graduation was a royal tyrant. But if my mother had called to tell him to stop making me work late, I would have crawled under my desk in humiliation, perhaps never to surface again.

It’s all about striking a balance, I guess. I’m not a parent, but I like to think that if I was I’d learn to be involved in helping my kid succeed in college and beyond, while still allowing him or her to make decisions. I’d coach in how to deal with administrative crap and the business of life, rather than trying to do it for the kid myself. I’d remind myself that this person, old enough to join the military, get married, get a job, live alone, or drink legally, should also be able to get his own lost student ID replaced or talk with a professor about making up some missed homework.

On some levels, I’m just whining. The helicopter parents can be rough on your average college worker-bee. But honestly, I think I feel most sorry for the kids of the helicopter crew. The thought of one day trying to work through a marriage with helicopter in-laws makes me quake in my shoes.

Wake Up Calls

2007-08-13T09:22:00.000-05:00

I won’t lie. Flowers, romantic dinners, holding hands, and all that other traditional stuff make me happy. I am a girl, after all.

But it is the little things in life that remind you just how good your love is.

The Boy leaves the house in the morning at five a.m., 5 to 6 days a week. That’s what he’s gotta do right now to earn a paycheck. I, on the other hand, don’t have to leave until 7:30ish. Even so, during the week I have him wake me up before he goes. That gives us time to have a quick cup of coffee together to start the day, and then leaves me with a little over an hour to write, or at least try to write, before I have to dive into my own daily working stiff rituals.

But when he works on Saturdays, all bets are off. The “wake me up before you go-go” rule goes on hiatus. Saturday, in my line of work, means you don’t have to see the office, and if you’re lucky, may even mean you don’t have to think about it. It also means that I get to sleep in and still have plenty of daytime hours to play with words or do whatever else I wanna do. And sleeping in, to a reformed night owl, is a beautiful thing.

So he didn’t wake me up on Saturday when he left, because he knows better. There are some things that make “sweet girlfriend” morph into “grumbly bitch” in sixty seconds or less.

But he did call me at 6 a.m., from the job, to tell me to drag my ass out of bed to go outside and have a cup of coffee.

I can hear the reactions of those who know me now. “He must be frickin’ crazy.” But the truth is, he gave me a gift. He knew just what I needed to start my weekend off on a great note.

See, I am not overly fond of summertime. I used to love it, when I was a young girl whose only job was to go to high school, and then college, when summer meant days by the pool or the beach and my only uniform was shorts and a lightweight shirt or a bathing suit. But now, summer is several months of suffering through work clothes in a humid, muggy, swamplike environment. I ache for the crisp, caress of fall breezes, for skies that are blue instead of hazy and make you want to turn your face up to the sky rather than duck into your air conditioning.

The Boyfriend and I are kindred spirits with this. He too, is a creature who prefers cooler climates. We both perk up in the fall like wilted plants getting a much-needed drink of water.

He stepped outside this morning, after a week of temps that soared near or over 100, a week of humidity that really felt like you were breathing in more liquid than air, expecting a day of the same. And he was greeted instead by a surprisingly fall-like morning. It put him in a good mood, which is almost impossible when he has to work on a Saturday. And he wanted to share it. He knows our summertime weather well enough to know that the brief respite wouldn’t last, and that by the time I’d normally drag my ass out of bed on a weekend it would probably feel like swamp-ass stew outside again.

So he called, and I got up, and poured that cup of coffee, and sat on the deck and felt cool air on my face and shoulders. And I drank it in and loved every second of it, that brief but wonderful taste of what life will feel like for a bit once we get through one more muggy August.

One of the wonders of love is that you know each other well enough to know when a moment of hope is worth giving up something like a long-overdue sleep-in session.

And the wonder of a weekend is that you CAN give it up, and take a nap later.

What Are YOU Lookin' At?

2007-08-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I'm pretty sure if he could talk, that's what he'd be saying to me.

We humans tend to assume our pets don't have the same things running through their heads as we do. But the past few days have convinced me otherwise.

I'm like a kid with a new toy when it comes to my camera, and so is The Boy. And maybe I only say this because I never had kids, but I'm pretty sure that when it comes to pictures, there's no better object ... ummm ... target ... than a ferret.

But Vinnie and Ginny have proven in the past few days that they're a bit like me. That is, they're camera shy. When someone keeps coming around them weilding a camera, they do anything but pose. They squirm and wiggle, they turn their weasely little heads, they dive under blankets.

Take a look at this:

To the untrained eye, this is just a couple of weasels hanging out in or near a basket of laundry.

But trust me, what you're witnessing here is a conspiracy. If you were in the room and spoke weaselese, the conversation you'd hear would go something like this:

Ginny (in the basket): Dude, I think I figured out a way to make her stop. C'mon, get in. If we hang out in her laundry, she won't take pictures. No woman wants to capture the messy crap in her house on film.

Vinnie: You underestimate her. She has no pride. There could be bras and underwear pouring out of that basket, and she'd still take a shot, just to torture us.

Ginny: Well, smartass, do you have a better idea?

Vinnie: I don't need one. I'm fast. I can run faster than she can click a button.

Ginny: Well, what about me. I'm older, and lazy.

Vinnie: Hmmm .... I dunno.

Ginny: Oh, I know! I'll go shit in the corner. Even SHE won't take a picture of that.

Does Not Compute

2007-08-10T04:42:00.000-05:00

I was chatting with a co-worker the other day. I was frazzled, distracted, and probably a little wrinkled and tousled from a long day. He’d had a long day too, but was still slick, starched and suited up.

This particular guy has his picture in the dictionary under the word “success.” At least, he does if you define success as being a polished head honcho, a VEEP, a go-getter with a title and an advanced degree.

I don’t necessarily define success that way myself. In fact, I’ve kind of made it my life’s ambition to rewrite that part of the dictionary. I think the couple who live on a small farm near my parents’ cabin, who grow a lot of their own food and teach kids how to ride horses for a living, are the best success story I know. They struggle to pay the bills, but they do pay them, and get up with a sense of peace each day, looking forward to the work that lies ahead.

But in spite of our vastly different philosophies on dress code, this VEEP and I do have goals and interests in common. So it’s always interesting to have a few minutes to chat.

Somehow, we got on the topic of his girlfriend’s job. He mentioned that she’d just traveled across the country for a week of meetings, had come home for a brief weekend, and was off on a plane again that morning. I made some offhanded comment about how it must kinda suck not to get much time to spend together.

“Actually, it’s kind of good,” he said. “I can stay here in the office as late as I need to, work as long as I want, and not feel bad about it.”

Huh? My silly little pea-brain started flashing the “DOES NOT COMPUTE” message.

I’m not criticizing their relationship. In fact, it’s probably quite a solid one, because they think along similar lines. In my world, being in love means I want to spend my evenings and weekends with my partner, not analyzing spreadsheets or returning emails. Thinking about kicking back with him after work is part of what gets me through mind-numbing meetings and craptastic client encounters. But that’s me.

I’m a firm believer in working to live, not living to work. I would never say “Yee Haw , I CAN stay here as late as I need to.” Sure I, do it when I must, but it is never an issue of “oh boy, I can!” It is “I have to,” and inside I’m kicking and screaming like a kid doing homework instead of being outside playing (or I guess today, instead of playing a computer game or watching what Mom TiVo’d for me while I was at school).

If he’d said the good part about his girlfriend traveling for work all the time was that he appreciates the limited time they DO have together more, I’d have gotten it. Hell, if he’d said he likes playing bachelor and drinking beer with his buddies, watching sports in his boxers and scratching his balls, eating Cheetos for dinner, and hiring strippers, I’d have gotten that too.

But being happy about the fact that it gives you more time to work? Again, does not compute. We work far too much as it is.

I hope I never get reprogrammed.

Webcam Willy Got Away

2007-08-08T05:03:00.000-05:00

To those who know me best, this is no secret.

I hated dating.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I loved it when I was a college student, single boys were everywhere, and I was sure I was both hot and the writer of the next Great American Novel. But when I had to do it again at 35, after being insulated from it all since my 21st year, it wasn’t so much fun. Meeting new people and deciding whether or not you want to kiss them, have sex with them, or maybe even keep them around is a scary thing when you’re out of practice, stressed by your finances and your day job, getting used to being alone, and not quite so sure of either your looks or your creative genius anymore.

My single friends couldn’t quite understand all the fear and loathing. My long-term married friends totally got it. I’ll never forget the night, shortly after my separation, that one of them put a friendly arm around me and said “Oh. My. Gawd. You poor thing. You’re going to have to see strange penises. I don’t know what I’d do if I woke up with one of them in my bed.”

But in spite of the self-pity and moments of sheer horror, I gotta admit that learning to date again was pretty damn funny. A single girlfriend of mine turned me on to the humor of it all by appealing to the writer in me. She suggested I chronicle my new life, start a column, and get our stories out there. It would be Sex and The City, with redneck bars and factory smoke instead of a New York skyline, and heroines who had never owned a pair of $400 shoes and sure as hell didn’t always wake up looking pretty.

I thought about it. The idea was intriguing enough, and I was surely accumulating the stories to tell. In my short time “out there,” I learned that just because when my ex and I said “we’re getting a divorce” we meant “we’re getting a divorce,” doesn’t mean everyone who says that means exactly the same thing. There are a lot of guys (girls too, I’m sure, but I didn’t date any of those) who mean something totally different when they say that. They mean “My wife and I talk about getting divorced every five years or so, I move out for a month, and then we get back together.” Or they mean “Sometimes I daydream about getting a divorce, and convince myself the dream is true long enough to hit on a dumbass dating greenhorn like you.”

I learned that men who have been married a long time to a housewife, and suddenly find themselves alone, will often latch on to you in hopes that you’ll feed them and do their laundry. And no, they don’t want you to teach them to wash the socks themselves.

I learned that there would be men out there who wouldn’t find me the ideal dating match not because I’m not as perky as I was at 21, but because I’m really not into World of Warcraft. I learned that there are people who consider asking if you want to see their woody on a webcam a perfectly normal “getting to know you” activity. I learned that while I am all for my friends who want them having booty calls, I’m the kind of girl who has trouble sleeping with someone I can’t call at the drop of a hat to complain about my day or just hang out together. I also learned that enough alcohol and time alone can almost make me forget that fact about myself.

So yeah, I wasn’t out there long, but I collected enough stories to have made for an interesting adventure. I could have written something that would have appeal, even if just to other over-thirty women sitting at home with their pets and having their stomachs flip-flop every time the phone rang. You know the flip-flop, right? Sometimes its fear that the creepy guy you were dumb enough to give your number to is calling yet again, and sometimes it is some ridiculous held-out hope that the one you want to call but who never will has finally caved. The flip-flops are for nothing, since the caller is usually your mother anyway.

The stories are universal, at least to those of us who end up in that place. But I couldn’t write them.

It had nothing to do with writer’s block or lack of time, or even fear of putting myself on the line. I’m just too damn nice. Only, I didn’t realize that until recently, when I stumbled upon and read this woman’s column:

http://msn.match.com/msn/article.aspx?articleid=4944&lid=0

She’s a forty-something divorcee who chronicles her adventures in online dating, which she plunges into headfirst after her ex-husband falls in love with a girl half her age. She’s brutally honest, insightful, poignant and sometimes funny as hell. She pokes fun at herself and the guys she meets with equal flair.

THAT was my problem. I could poke fun at myself with the best of them, but I couldn’t do the same with the guys. Oh, sure, in my head the jokes came a mile a minute. But the idea of recapping my meeting-new-people and dating horrors somewhere that they might read them … nope. Just couldn’t do it.

I was too afraid of hurting someone’s feelings. One of the columnist’s regular dates is “Sleep Apnea Guy.” She paints a picture of him I’ll never forget, and it isn’t flattering. I could never have done that, not even to “Laundry Boy” or “Webcam Willy.”

I didn’t want to date them, but I didn’t want to bruise their egos either. I’m not sure if that’s being too nice or a flat-out narcissist. Too nice because you’ll never be a good writer if you can’t be brutally honest sometimes. A narcissist because really, what were the chances that any of them would ever find my little blog column anyway? Unlike the “Single in the Suburbs” columnist, MSN wasn’t beating down my door for my stories.

Guess I’ll never know, unless I get bored or drunk enough to do a “dating retrospective” someday.

Mountain Images

2007-08-06T05:12:00.000-05:00

Even with the haze in the sky, I still think this picture makes it clear why a trip to my family's cabin in the mountains makes me feel so alive and yet so calm and rested. This is where people wave at each other as they pass on a winding country road, and where sometimes your non-human neighbors even pause to say hello:

Life as it should be still exists on a mountaintop. Cell phones don't work so well, and no one wears suits. You can still see the occasional shooting star, even in a summer haze, and when you go to make a wish you actually have to think about it, because in this moment of frog-song and solitude, it is hard to imagine anything more you could want or need.

Everyone should have a place to go where they can experience life as it was before we collectively decided it had to be so damn fast-paced and scheduled. I'm glad I went to mine, this weekend.

Mini-Vacations and Condomtastic Discoveries

2007-08-02T07:49:00.000-05:00

I’m woefully behind this week in both my writing and reading. That’s in part because I tend to lack discipline when summer starts feeling like you’re constantly wedged between hot, steamy butt cheeks. It is partly because adjusting to a new boss at work has been at bit of an adventure. And it is partly because I just need to recharge.

So recharge I will, this weekend. The Boyfriend and I are heading off for our first long weekend with my Parental Units. We’re going to their cabin, which sits on a mountaintop in the middle of Nowhere, PA. Seriously, to get there we drive up mostly-dirt roads that don’t have real names. I love it.

In the early morning hours, deer graze so close to the cabin door that you expect one of them to knock and say “hey, can I have a cuppa joe with my grass?” At night, the stars are brilliant and everywhere, sparkling in full-view instead of half-hidden by smog and city lights. There are no alarm clocks – you just wake up because you want to. The guy who lives down the road brings his guitar up over the hill, plops himself at our campfire, and warns us that he can’t sing before delving into his own beer-soaked renditions of country songs that were well-known before I was even a thought in someone’s head.

I need this little getaway to clear my head, to get out of my rut, to put work behind me for a bit and remind myself that there are landscapes that don’t include piles of dirty laundry or stumbling drunks waiting for buses alongside the harried suits who yammer into their cell phones while the stickiness of Baltimore July melts them inside their image-wear. I need to read by a lake while The Boyfriend goes fishin’. I need campfire stories and good wine, home-cooked breakfasts and shade trees.

But I couldn’t just go and leave those who have been wondering with baited breath. I give you The Condom Tree:

http://www.ppdl.purdue.edu/ppdl/weeklypics/Weekly_Picture7-8-02-2.htm

I thought it was called a “money tree” or a “silver dollar plant,” and for once, I’m not crazy. I can only say it looks even more like a condom tree once it’s dried, although if you look at it here you can get a pretty good idea why.

Thanks to L’Empress at http://www.liscious.net/l-empress/ for finding the ever-elusive condom tree! I googled my butt off, including some of the same searches that she did, but failed to stumble on this. She rocks.

Now, ya’ll be safe out there. See you soon.

Re-Reading Yourself

2007-08-01T07:56:00.000-05:00

Maybe I’m the only blogger or writer who is so obsessed with myself that I do this, but somehow, I don’t think so.

Every once in a while, I get sucked into re-reading my old online writes. It’ll start innocently enough. I’ll be skimming through my archives, looking for what I wrote about an outing or current event that happened years ago. And the next thing I know, I’ve been sitting at my desk for an hour, reading about me, me, and more me.

This blog has only been around since February. But I’ve had my private online journal since 2001, and have actually written in it at least three times a week for pretty much that entire stint. Some of what I’ve written about is pure drivel. But every now and then, I’ll stumble on something in the pages and go “damn, I wrote that?”

In the “pages” of this journal, I have tracked the lives of my friends, my family, and myself. I relive things that scared or inspired us, events that reduced us to tears and made us laugh until we cried.

But mostly, I read about myself. It is a way to look at “me,’ where I’ve been and what I’ve done, the way I would a character in a novel. I want to scream “don’t go there!” at the girl in the pages, knowing full well that she will anyway.

Re-reading your life is a learning experience. And one of the things I’ve learned is that I’m always trying to change something.

Early on in the journal, I was married and relatively settled. So I wrote about work and how much it sucks, and focused on the adventures my single friends were having. My life seemed to be mundane and drab, so I looked for ways to liven it up.

When we started experiencing tangible discontent, I wrote about everything but my marriage. I railed on and on about not being a published writer. I was frustrated with the state of my home. I was tired of not having any money. I promised to change everything but the one thing that most needed changing.

When the husband and I split, I embarked on a year of self-pity heavily marinated in doses of assholery. I needed then to focus on the finances and the house I had obsessed about for the five previous years. Instead, I got lost in the weirdness of thirtysomething dating and my fears of being alone. I wondered over and over again if love existed, and if it did, whether I’d find it or if I even wanted it.

Now that bridge has been crossed, and I again obsess about work. I think I can’t be fulfilled or find true happiness unless I weasel my way out of the standard daily grind. My personal life and my home are coming together, so now I need to fix my career again.

It makes me think. Am I the kind of person who isn’t happy unless she has something to unravel, to work on, to fix? Am I lost unless I’m chasing some out of reach goal? Or am I just a normal everyday schmuck, wired in that human way that makes us all crave what we don’t have so that we’ll grow, explore and change?

In spite of the fact that the bitching and moaning hasn’t ceased, I have noticed a subtle shift over the years. My “why can’t I’s” and “if onlys” will never go away. I am, therefore I gripe.

But ever since the year my marriage ended, when I wandered out into the grass that always looked greener and found it was a bit swampy and buggy in places, there’s been a subtle change. That year also threw a lot of heartbreaking news and tragedy into my circle of friends and acquaintances. For the first time in my life, I really understood what we all mean when we say “life has no guarantees.” I learned to love what I have while I have it, knowing that forever is a relative world.

So while I’m still a bitch on wheels sometimes, my words are now more often than not overshadowed with some basic appreciation of what I do have. When I was alone, I spouted off about bad dates and love being a sham, and in the next sentence laughed about the humor in my friendships or the taste of a good cup of coffee in the morning. Now, I rage like a rat in a cage about work, but always end with how glad I am to come home at the end of the day.

Keeping a journal shows you just how much you complain, and helps pinpoint what it is you really want to change. But perhaps more importantly, it shows you how much you already have.

The Condom Tree

2007-07-30T07:48:00.000-05:00

The woman who runs the customer service counter where I work is always getting little gifts. I guess that’s what happens when it is your job to be nice to people all day. At least, that is, if being nice to people is your job and you’re actually good at it. If I was in her role, I’d probably get bricks and dog crap in the mail every day.

At any rate, one of her recent satisfied customers thanked her with a plant. It is an odd plant, one I remember seeing in my childhood but not since, until now.

It looks like a tiny tree. It branches out, and instead of leaves it is crowned with several round, silvery-white leaf-like things that are round in shape and ringed with a darker band. The leaves feel papery to the touch, and sort of look like sand dollars.

She put this little gift on display at our counter. Trying to figure out exactly what it is has been bugging us ever since. I’ve searched the web, and can’t find it or anything that looks remotely like it. Of course, not knowing what the damn thing is called makes it hard to do a decent search, so we’ve had no luck in identifying it.

Since we can’t determine what it really is, we decided to name it whatever we wanted. We didn’t have to think for long. One of our student staff members came in to work, threw his book bag on the shelf, looked over at the plant and said “hey, where’d we get the condom tree?”

I just about lost the swig of coffee I’d just taken. Because whatever this thing is really called, its true name can’t come close to such an accurate description. It looks like it should be on display in some clinic promoting safe sex. Check in, fill out your medical paperwork, see the doc, and pluck a condom off the tree on your way out. A grown up version of a lollipop for good behavior when the doc tells you to open up and say “aahhh.”

So now, I really need to know what this thing is called. When I get a digital camera in a few weeks, I’ll post a picture and see if any of you have seen one. Until then, just imagine a little plant that looks full of hanging Trojans, and let me know if you’ve know what the heck it really is.

No self-respecting plant wants to be “The Condom Tree.”

Building

2007-07-27T04:40:00.000-05:00

Last night, I looked around my living room. I let myself sink into the soft cushions of my sofa, and rubbed the side of my foot along a warm, freshly laid new rug. The Boyfriend watched me, the way I just sat and took it all in after a hard day’s work, and smiled.

We were newly dating this time last year. He worked nights then, and sometimes came to see me here when his shift was over. It was the only way we had time together, since I worked days. Our relationship was new and budding, and we were willing to sacrifice sleep. We sat on a different couch, hard and scratchy and uncomfortable. We sat in a bare room with walls that cried for fixing, and I remember wondering why he wouldn’t run screaming from a woman who called this home.

What a difference a year has made. My home – our home – is new.

I have not moved. I’m in the same house I’ve lived in since 1997. But it really doesn’t feel that way. When the ex and I separated, we were in the midst of a long renovation project. Practically every room in our house was bare drywall or half-finished paneling. There were no decorations on the walls. Our furniture, where it existed at all, was hand-me down or dirt cheap. Nothing matched.

When the relationship ended, I bought him out of the house and stayed here. He fixed the major things before he left, but in the end I was still living alone in a shell that needed much more than my unskilled hands could give it. Still, I bought him out of the house. He got a fresh start, and I got a mortgage I could afford. I wouldn’t have been able to find an apartment around here, at least not one in a safe neighborhood, for even close to what my mortgage is. I saw is as my best option, and I took it.

But the coming months would prove to me just how incompetent I am when it comes to domesticity and home improvement. I’d look around at all that needed to be done, become overwhelmed, and go drinking instead.

I didn’t know how to do a damn thing myself. Even with the low mortgage, there wasn’t enough left over on my solo income to pay for someone else to do it for me or to replace the threadbare, beaten up or downright broken furniture. The walls remained bare. I was living in a shell, a house full of quiet but disturbing ghosts and not much more. It was all I could do to keep the bills paid, the lawn mowed, the rooms relatively clean, and my brain focused on my job. Adjusting to my new life made me a drunken asshole, because it was only with a hefty dose of jager in me that I could get a decent night’s sleep instead of tossing and turning and obsessing about how much everything sucked and how incompetent I was at fixing it all.

Every ounce of productivity I had got thrown into my job, because it was my lifeline. And so the ghost-house and I existed together and stayed out of each other’s way as much as possible.

Fast forward.

Today, the yard is a carefully constructed bed of flowers that greets me as I walk along the sidewalk after work each day. The grass is green and trim. The walls in almost every room of the house are finished, painted in warm and welcoming colors. The living room and bedroom are brand new, the bathroom and kitchen not far behind them. In the fall we will finish the spare bedroom, and the picture will be complete.

It took time, and money, and elbow grease. It took The Boyfriend's patience with my fear of it all. It took him holding my hand and saying “think of it like those projects you run at work. Don’t let it all overwhelm you. Break it down into tasks, and we’ll take them on one at a time.”

And so we have. And while it is a work in progress, there is coziness and life and contentment here now. Instead of fleeing this scene, I seek solace here now, and miss it if I am gone too long.

I look around a year later, and I am proud of us. I am proud of this guy and this girl who were both so in need of a fresh start, and who found it together. I am so proud of what we have built together.

Waiting for Deathly Hallows

2007-07-25T05:07:00.000-05:00

Don’t worry. I haven’t read the Deathly Hallows yet, so this post contains no spoilers. I wouldn’t do that anyway.

But even though I haven’t opened the book, or even gotten my hands on a copy of it, you can’t go out in the world this week and not be consumed by Harry Potter. At least, not in my world.

My mom and sister each got a copy of the book, although they live in the same house. They’re both close to finished, so I’ll be bumming a copy in the next week or two. At the family pub Saturday night, my sister and I got tipsy and talked Harry Potter. She was dying to tell, and each sip of stupid juice made me more anxious to know. If it weren’t for our mother yelling at us for acting like kids snooping in a closet for Christmas presents, I’d have spoiled it for myself. Sometimes you need your mother to make you do the right thing, even when you’re almost 37.

My fortysomething co-worker with five-year old twins has never read the books or seen the movies, and neither has her husband. But now they’ve bought the first four, and are reading a bit of them out loud as a family each night.

It seems like half the bloggers I visit are either reading Deathly Hallows, anxious to start reading it, or have already finished it and wish the rest of us would hurry up so they can talk about it.

Another co-worker and her husband stood in line at a bookstore at midnight Friday night, waiting to pick up the book for their teenage daughter. She was home, drinking coffee and planning to stay up all night and read the whole thing as soon as her parents put it in her hands. She wouldn’t go with them to get it out of fear of all the drive-by-spoiler-shouters.

My workplace is All Harry, All The Time. I work in a college, after all. Most of the students who have part-time jobs in my office were between the ages of 10-13 when the first book came out. They grew up with Harry. Their coming of age coincided with his. Deathly Hallows, the last book in the series, marks their own transitions to adulthood as surely as it does his.

The other day, one of them actually said “I’m down to the last 20 pages, and I don’t want to finish it. It’s the last Harry Potter, ever. What will I do then? Grow up and get a job?”

That strikes me as a really unique thing for this generation. I can’t recall any series or set of characters quite as gripping in my own teenage years. I can’t remember anyone in fiction growing up with me at such as steady pace.

And overall, I can’t remember anything in fiction bringing such large segments of the population some common ground. Teens and adults of all ages, rich and poor, white collar and bartenders, students and slackers, parents and people going through their second childhood. We all have some connection to Harry, or know someone who does.

I tend to avoid endings. Maybe that’s why part of me can’t wait to start the book and the other part of me isn’t quite chomping at the bit. I want to savor wondering how it ends.

I can’t wait too long, though. Eventually, my sister and I will be drunk again, and my mother may not be around to tell us to go sit in separate corners.

Another Sign of Aging

2007-07-23T05:21:00.000-05:00

A year or so ago, there was a band I used to go see every time they played in Baltimore. They’re a local group called The Remnants (http://www.theremnants.com/). I haven’t gone to hear them in months, and they’re playing downtown this coming weekend. So I decided to pull a crew together.

This led to a conversation with one of my girlfriends that made me realize something kind of yucky.

I’m getting old.

I like to go out and get a good drunk on now and then, although not nearly as much as I used to. Sometimes there’s nothing I’d rather do than go hang out in the family pub with some of my nearest and dearest, drinking ourselves way past the stupid point and discussing universal questions like “wow, wouldn’t it be cool if it were easy for girls to pee standing up too?”

But for the most part, I am a complete creature of habit. I don’t want to branch out and go to new places and do new things, when it comes to nightlife. My interests are basically the family pub, the bar where this band plays now and then, and one or two other local dives where the company is entertaining.

I did the branch-out thing when I was newly single. My girlfriends and I checked out the local hot and not-so-hotspots. And over time, I discovered that there were a few basic scenes:

1. Romper Room. The bar or club where me and my friends were the only people over thirty. If anyone noticed us it at all, it was to comment that we were old enough to be their parents or to hope and dream that if they lived to be as ancient as us they’d be able to go out and drink without wearing Depends.

2. Yuppie Central. The bar or club where everyone looks like they just got off work, the drinks are ridiculously overpriced, ordering a plain old domestic beer causes a “yokel” sign to flash over your forehead, and people actually enjoy talking about their careers.

3. Melrose Place. The bar or club where everyone, men and women alike, look like they spend every waking moment in the gym, except for when they’re getting blonde tips put in their hair or having their eyebrows waxed. The men are all prettier than you, and the women spent more on their purse and shoes than you spent on your mortgage this month.

4. Outcast Island. The bar or club where everyone is wearing black and is paler than my ass cheeks in January. No one smiles, and each drink brings more insight into pain, suffering, and the sad state of the human condition.

My explorations led me to the conclusion that I’m happier closer to home. When I was single and looking, I chanced a stop into these places, because you never knew where you might find someone or something fun. Checking out the local wildlife was a diversion, a way to avoid sitting alone in my house or going to the places where everyone knew me and wondered what was up in my world.

Now, though, I’d rather just stay home or go where I know I can just be me. The places where everybody loves me even when I’m ugly. Where being in my late 30’s doesn’t make me a fossil. Where not looking like I just stepped out of a salon means I’m normal. Where I don’t have to define myself by my career or write bad poetry. Where I’m not packed in like a sardine and can dance like the clumsy white girl I happen to be without looking dumber than anyone else in the room.

My friend who I was talking to about the Remnants show was ribbing me about my going-out predictability. And I said she was right. I’m happy at home with a good movie and my guy. So when I go out, it has to be worth my while now. And worth my while means somewhere that I’m not surrounded by yuppies or college kids. A bit of both are fine, as long as they’re not all the place has to offer.

But I realized as we were talking that I sounded … old. A year or two ago, I had the same conversation with my mom, only I was the one doing the ribbing about getting out more. I asked her why she only wanted to spend her time in “our bar,” where everyone knows our name, the drink menu never changes, and the locals can be identified as “the one who always ends up pulling his pants down and mooning,” “the guy who clacks his dentures,” or just “the asshole.” (There are lots of those).

I get it now. I have officially crossed over to “The Old Side.”

Oh well, I may be set in my ways, but those youngsters at the kiddie bars are right. I can still drink with the best of them, and don’t need Depends.

Book Review: Lisey's Story By Stephen King

2007-07-20T05:18:00.000-05:00

I have to admit that I don’t even feel worthy of reviewing Stephen King. I bow before his crazy brilliance and pine over the fact that I’m not as wonderfully warped and twisted, or even close.

That said, I can’t not talk about how much I loved Lisey’s Story.

This is the tale of what happened to Lisa Landon two years after the death of her insanely brilliant husband Scott, a famous writer. On her own but with him somehow at her side, she comes face-to-face and heart-to-heart with the demons that made him, chased him, called him, inspired him and ultimately killed him.

My cousin started the book, and couldn’t get through the beginning. It didn’t draw her in enough to make her want to continue. My mother and I had the opposite experience. I was sucked in from the beginning, and didn’t want to put it down for anything. To me, it was King at his best. It is his classic storytelling, somehow fast-paced and deliciously slow at the same time. It is a showcase of his unique way of drawing you into something you’d never believe or imagine on your own and making it seem almost normal.

But it is also the study of a relationship, of a 25-year-marriage between soul mates of sorts.

Although I finished the book days ago, I still find myself thinking in Scott and Lisey’s private language. I’ve adopted the word “Schmucking” and made it my own. I hope Stephen didn’t copywrite it.

It is the story of how Lisey spent years “hollering Scott home” from that place where a writer’s soul goes, of how she pulled him back from the edge when she knew he’d gone too far and might be away forever otherwise. I’m no Scott Landon, and I’m certainly no Stephen King. But damn, that spoke to my heart. I may not produce what they do when I go to my place, but I do understand how sometimes, when you are someone who invents worlds and people in your head and live to put them on paper (or screen), it can be far too easy to overlook the beauty, joys, chores, simplicity and annoyances of daily life. You need someone to keep you on the balance beam, someone who lets you wander down your road but who knows how to pull you back before you miss something important.

It is the story of a woman who lived in her husband’s shadow, who to the outside world was the little nobody who came along for his ride. But she knew, and Scott knew too, that their private reality was much different. She wasn’t riding his coattails. She was the one tethering him to reality so that the rest of the world could have its slice of him. Without her, he would have slipped away altogether far sooner than he did.

And it is a story of grief, of a woman forced to go on without her soul mate. Sure, in Lisey’s case she has to face her loss while dealing with corrupt literary collectors, a sister who makes a habit of losing her mind, her own memories of her husband’s horrid childhood, things from some other realm she never would have known without Scott, frequent visits to a place called Boo’ya Moon, and bool hunts. You’ll just have to read to find out what those are. But in spite of the fact that Lisey is grieving in a place that could only have been conjured up by the mind of Stephen King, her emotions are universal.

I’m already ready to read this one again. And that’s rare, even for a bookhound like me.

Dear New Boss On The Block

2007-07-18T05:14:00.000-05:00

After years of having a boss who has been a mentor, a friend, and someone who treated me as an equal while still always taking the helm of our operation, I’m sailing into the winds of change. In preparation for retirement, my rockin’ boss is stepping down and an outsider is coming in and taking charge.

While I know this is for the best – my rockin’ boss deserves his time to live life and go fishin’ – I can’t help but be a little scared. When you’ve been lucky enough to have a boss who both helps you bring on your best professional game and is a friend who wants you to be able to have a life outside the office, building a relationship with a new supervisor is a tall order. As a manager in a large office myself, I get the dubious honor of also helping my staff learn to adjust to our new situation.

When I’m working through crap in my head, I write. It’s just what I do. I’ll never give this letter to the new boss, but getting it down has helped in my own mental preparations.

Dear New Boss:
Welcome on board. I gotta tell you, you’ve got balls. With all the changes coming down the pike here, this is one hell of a time to be putting on the “fearless leader” hat around here. I’m an underling, but I’ve been in this place for a long time. Far too long, some might say, and sometimes I’m inclined to agree. Still, here are a few pointers I’m hoping you’ll consider, for our good and for your own.

1. We’re gonna miss the old guy. He rocked. We’re gonna feel a little sad and a little weird. I used to be able to drop in his office anytime, say “I gotta vent,” and do just that. I could even use my favorite choice vocabulary words, like asshole, while I was doing it. I was always willing to return the favor, too. I don’t expect us to have the same relationship. I’m willing to give you every chance and look forward to hearing your ideas and working to put them in action. But give me a chance too, and understand that I am going to miss what I had.

2. It has been my job to ask questions. That’s what the old boss always expected of me. Whether it was editing his words or proposing alternate ideas, he encouraged and sometimes even demanded that I didn’t just nod and agree. So I’m going to question, and point out the good and bad in just about everything. Please don’t take it personally. I won’t never undermine your authority or refuse to do things your way. My questions are just my way of helping you come to the best possible solutions. They’re part of my job.

I don’t want to take the wheel from you, trust me. I was nudged to consider applying for your job, and I said “hell no.” Well, I said it much more professionally. The truth is I just didn’t want the stress. I think you would have beat me by a mile anyway. You’re more experienced and educated. But that’s not why I didn’t apply. I didn’t even know you existed when I made the decision. I’m here to support you, and part of that support is making sure we consider everything. It will never mean I want your job or your authority, because that kind of shit drives me crazy.

3. When I work from home, I work my ass off. I get more done in an 8-hour day in front of my computer than I will ever get done in the office. There’s something about my own coffeepot, my comfiest Steelers t-shirt, and the grungy shorts I clean house in that just inspires me to get shit done. It might have something to do with having real weasels – with four legs and fur – as office companions instead of the human weasels we deal with at work now and then too.

I know we need to be in the office most of the time. When I ask to work at home for a day, it is because I have something to do that requires concentration and minimal interruption. In my perfect world I’d do it every day, but I know that’s not possible so I only ask when its justified. And I’ll never ask unless I’ve made sure my in-office stuff is covered. Please don’t take this privilege away from me or anyone else in our office. You won’t regret it.

4. I believe we should all form our own opinions of others. That said, you’re going to have a lot of opinions to form in the coming months. If you want some forewarning on who, if history serves as any indication, will be your best allies and the biggest pains in your ass, let me know.

5. Can I have a new laptop?

Kidding on the last one. Kinda …

Eight Things

2007-07-16T05:10:00.000-05:00

I was tagged quite some time ago by Batten (her journal is now locked) for the “8 things” meme. Basically, you give 8 random and perhaps little-known facts about yourself, and tag others to do the same.

My 8 things:

1. Back in my “go out, get drunk and end up at a diner at 2 am for breakfast” days, I ended up in a greasy spoon downtown having pancakes and eggs with a few equally drunken friends. Sitting to our left was a man wearing nothing but his boxer shorts and combat boots. He was reading Thoreau’s “Walden.” The waitress was refilling his coffee like this was the most normal thing in the world. A week later, I went into a convenience store to buy girly hygiene products and there he was, standing behind the cash register. But he had more clothes on.

2. I’ve only changed a diaper a handful of times in my life. The first time ever, I was babysitting my niece. It was thunder storming, and the power went out mid-operation. I took it as a sign.

3. I spent my 18th birthday surrounded by porno flicks. It isn’t as bad as it sounds. I started working in a video store at 15. It was a mom-and-pop shop back before the days of Blockbuster, one with a “back room.” Employees weren’t allowed to go into the back room to clean or shelve covers unless we were over 18, so whoever shared shifts with me always got stuck doing that job. On my 18th birthday, they saved all the returns for me all day long, and made me shelve them. I came of age by putting away “Hung Guns” and “Bad Momma Jama.”

4. I was 26 years old before I got on an airplane for the first time. I have only flown a handful of times since then, usually when I have to for work-related trips. For my own vacations, I prefer cruises when I can get’em. I really hate flying.

5. I have started three graduate programs since finishing my bachelor’s degree in 1994. One was in counseling. One was in history, and one was in designing distance education programs. I have 4.0 graduate school average in 3 different universities. I’ve dropped out each time after a few classes, because I didn’t like working full time and going to school. I’m an asshole.

6. In my world, “asshole” is a term of endearment. We even have what we call an annual “asshole party” each summer at my parent’s house, to celebrate the many assholes we know (including myself) who have summer birthdays.

7. I am a Steelers fan who lives in Baltimore. This means no one argues with me when I refer to myself as an asshole, at least during football season.

8. I once wore parachute pants and leg warmers and had big “mall rat” hair. Hey, I was a teen of the 80’s, a child of the hair band era. A few years ago, my friends and I got to go see Asia perform at a local venue. Afterward, we went to the pub in the venue for drinks, and ended up talking to a few of the band members for hours. I wished I could go back in time and let my 80’s-teenager self see me, because she would have been all squealy and spastic. Chris Slade (http://www.chrisslade.net/NonFlashPages/NonHomepage.html), was playing with them at the time, and made fun of me because I was drinking Miller Lite.

I'm not tagging anyone, partly because I think at least half of my regular reads have already done this one. But if you haven't, and wanna, have at it and let me know.

You Might Be A Writer If ...

2007-07-13T05:12:00.000-05:00

I can expound on the wonders of being a creative soul at the drop of a hat. I can’t imagine life without writing. But every once in a while, you have to acknowledge the bad with the good.

So, rather than waxing poetic on the joys of creativity, I’m gonna flip the coin on myself and acknowledge that “you might be a writer if:”

1. You’ve ever had friends or family respond to your endless booze-induced diatribes on finding yourself with “turn around, grab your ass and there you are.”

2. You spent at least a year of your college career thinking that the only way you could truly understand great minds like Hemingway was to stay drunk all the time.

3. You can lock yourself away for an entire weekend without eating, sleeping, socializing or bathing, because some story has you in its clutches. The fact that others find this unhealthy, antisocial and stinky just reminds you that they “really don’t get it.”

4. You have thought, more than once and only half jokingly, that things like cleaning house, paying bills, going to work, cooking, or exchanging pleasantries were a sad waste of time for a mind such as your own.

5. You have ever inadvertently pissed off a friend, neighbor or family member when they recognized themselves as the man-stealing hosebeast or nose-digging booger-eater in your latest masterpiece.

6. You’re the first to admit that you can be hypersensitive at times. It is all about you, after all.

Most writers, or artists and creative types in general, would recognize at least a piece of themselves in the above. Some of us wear our weirdness with pride. But even those of us who do have to admit that such a list isn’t exactly the makings of either a knight in shining armor or a fairytale princess. Creative types can be difficult to live with, and at times hard to love.

It was with that in mind that I wrote my latest contribution to Associated Content. I have learned in my former marriage, my friendships and even my current relationship that my sensitivity, imagination and need to cram a hell of a lot of writing into my busy life are both a blessing and a curse to those who love me.

And what is there to do, with a realization like that, other than turn it into a piece of writing, one that can be found at (shameless plug noted): http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/290700/relationship_tips_for_creative_people.html

Heebie Jeebied

2007-07-11T04:41:00.000-05:00

The other day, I had lunch with a group of co-workers.

We’re kind of a motley crew. There’s my boss, who is nearing retirement. There’s the two twentysomething singles, one male and one female, who are still living lives not all that different from the ones they lead in college. Playtime with a bigger paycheck, I guess you could call it. I remember it well, and paid off the credit card debt for it into my thirties. There’s the woman who married her college sweetheart and now has two almost-grown children. And then there’s me, the 30-something who still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. Scratch that – who knows damn well what she wants to be, but just hasn’t quite figured out how to get there.

Finally, there’s the one I’ll call Ann. Ann is in a management job much like my own. She spends her workdays – five long-ass stretches a week – supervising, putting out fires and dealing with pissed-off people. But that’s where the similarities between my life and Ann’s end.

She’s a few years older than me, and she and her husband have 5-year-old twins. They both work full-time to pay the mortgage, in jobs that are always going awry and off-schedule. Ann will probably stay with our employer forever, so that her kids have good health bennies and free college tuition. After a day of nonstop “Ann, can you do this?” and “Ann, I have a question” at work, she heads off to pick up the kids, head to community activities, cook meals, read bedtime stories, listen to endless “Mom will you get me’s” and pick up after her family. She drops into bed herself, completely exhausted, at midnight.

She can’t remember the last time she read a book or went out for drinks with friends. She was sharing this all at lunch, and the guy twentysomething in our group said “I’m getting the heebie jeebies.”

The girl twentysomething nodded in agreement. I was right there with them. Ann then talked about how she hasn’t had alone time in months, about how she was as excited as a kid a Christmas when she actually scheduled time to take a Saturday bubble bath. Yeah, scheduled. She told her husband she needed a half hour of luxury, and he agreed to play with the kids. But after just a few minutes with her bubbles, she heard the pitter-patter of little feet and her daughter pounding on the door. Seems Dad was thinking the scheduled bubble bath was more along the lines of a five-minute shower.

It was at this point in Ann’s tale that I turned to my comrades and said “OK, I’m heebie-jeebin’ Big Time, now.” Both nodded in ferocious agreement, and Ann laughed good-naturedly. “Oh, I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” she said. “My children are the most wonderful thing in my life.”

I had to disagree. Not about the kids being the most wonderful thing in her life – that part is beautiful and true. What I said was “Oh, I know you wouldn’t trade the home part. But wouldn’t you give up the work part in a red-blooded heartbeat, if you could.” Ann didn’t have to stop and think. Her “oh, hell yeah” reverberated across the room.

That’s the thing. I am amazed and downright awed by people who go to work all day and then go home at night and give everything they have to their little ones until they crawl into bed. Especially people who go to the kind of jobs where they deal with people all day.

I like to think if I’d ever been in that situation, I’d have done it and done it well. But quite frankly, the whole idea of being an “alpha woman,” which is what I think it’s called this week, terrifies me. Sometimes the idea of motherhood, of being home raising a child, almost appeals to me. Sometimes, in my sicker and more psychotic moments, my career and the challenges it poses are almost attractive to me. But I can’t ever remember imagining a life that included both and going “damn, that would be cool.”

Maybe some of us just need more “me time.” Maybe we’re lazier. Maybe it isn’t a question of lazy, but just being built in a way that lack of time for reflection, writing, or navel gazing would turn us into twitching, drooling idiots.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, in my opinion, all the Anns out there are superheroes. I don’t have the makeup for that kind of self-sacrifice, but I admire the hell out of those who do.

Rockin'

2007-07-09T04:39:00.000-05:00

Yep – that’s right. I’m a Rockin’ Girl Blogger!

I’ve seen this award in my online meanderings, but was surprised to get one myself. What made it all the more special is the Rockin' Girl Blogger it came from.

I’ve never met Golfwidow in person, although I still hope that I will someday. But we’ve been peeking into each other’s thoughts and lives for years. I started journaling in Diaryland back in 2001, and discovered Golfwidow shortly thereafter. She grew up, in blogging terms, and moved her writing beyond Diaryland long before I did.

What I love the most about her is that like me, she writes because she wants to and because she has to. Our lives, no matter how good they may be at any given moment, simply aren’t complete, or even close to complete, without this exercise. And she’s more than good at it. She’s insightful and funny. Her vents leave you laughing while making sure you get just how annoying whatever it is she’s venting about is. She’s a pro at poking fun at life without being sarcastic or mean. She thinks and writes about so many aspects of life that I have promised myself over and over again that one day we will hang out in person and postulate (or just laugh ourselves silly) over tasty alcoholic treats.

So yeah, she’s one of my wordsmith heroines. If by chance you haven’t stumbled on her yet, make sure you do at http://www.golfwidow.net/.

Now, on to the next challenge, which is choosing 5 Rockin’ Girl Bloggers myself. This is tough, because I’m privileged to be a reader of some of the most interesting, witty, insightful, honest women out there. But I’ll pick five of the ones who inspire me the most at the moment.

Paisley at http://why-paisley.com/
I just discovered this blog a few weeks ago. What makes it unique to me is how she manages to combine brutal insight and gentle introspectiveness about herself, those in her world and life in general in almost every one of her posts. She’s an introvert and a thinker who walks her own path proudly.

AWannabeWriter at http://www.awannabewriter.blogspot.com/
Another relatively new discovery for me, she’s one who also seems addicted to the written word. I was originally drawn to her blog because of our shared interest in memoir writing, but have since been captivated by her various thoughts and snippets of daily life.

AWittyKitty at http://awittykitty.wordpress.com/
She is quite simply one of the funniest, creative, imaginative girl bloggers out there, period. I’ve been reading Witty for a few years, and am still always pleasantly surprised at how she can turn the simplest “life moments” into tales worth reading again and again. She’s an artist and a dreamer, and you just want all the best things in life for her when you read her. So, um … go read her!

Batten at http://batten.diaryland.com/
I struggled with whether or not to include Batten, not because there’s any doubt as to how much of a Rockin’ Girl Blogger she is, but because she’s in a bit of blog transition, getting ready to lock down her current writes and/or move them elsewhere. But in spite of that, I couldn’t skip her. We’ve been reading each other since 2001, and met in person shortly afterwards. Our friendship transitioned from online to real life seamlessly, first in my family’s pub and then out and about in our respective hometowns. She’s a sailor, both fiercely independent and full of love and caring for her nearest and dearest, an avid reader, and a loyal friend. Her blog isn’t one with bells and whistles, just heart and words. She’s a talented writer and has an interesting life about which to write.

Nicole at http://nacwolin.vox.com/
Nicole is another wonderful, heartfelt writer I’ve been reading for years. If you drop by her blog, you’ll see for yourself the many reasons she’s a Rockin Girl Blogger. But the one that stands out for me is that she makes me think more about God. Let me explain. I haven’t gone to church other than for weddings or funerals, or wanted to, since I was 12. My weekend worship is more along the get-a-pack-of-assholes-together, have a few drinks, and see what we can get ourselves into at the bar variety. And for the most part, although I never stopped believing in God, I found most people more aligned to traditional worship to be mind-numbingly judgmental and close-minded. Unless they could “talk some sense into me” about my life and my choices, our acquaintances would obviously be short-lived. Not Nicole. She’s a minister’s wife, and her beliefs about God are personal, gentle and as open for inspection as anyone else’s would be. She truly has the gift of sharing the goodness of her faith without making you feel like you’re an asshat if you don’t always get it yourself. And she sees the humor in the rudeness and crudeness of everyday life too, and is as real and funny as any of us could ever hope to be.

So there you have it. My Rockin Girl Bloggers. There are many, many more.

Age and Dating

2007-07-07T05:49:00.000-05:00

A week or so ago, I was reading an article in the 15 Minute Dating Blog at http://www.15minutedate.com/blog/ about the trend of young women dating or being in relationships with much older men. The article was humorous, tongue-in-cheek and sort of carefree. But the comments left me unsure whether to laugh or add one more reason to my ever-growing list of “why people suck.”

A bunch of guys, rather than just saying “hey, I like the young stuff,” vented on and on about how shriveled, bitter, mean, money-hungry, over-opinionated and pushy most older women are. Women ranted about how most men who date younger women just don’t want to have a relationship with “an equal.”

How good we all are at putting other people in boxes. All older women are shrews, and all younger ones are incapable of being an emotional equal to someone older than them, according to these comments. The reality is that I know a lot of shrewish youngsters and quite a few fun-loving, free-spirited older gals. When I was in my 20’s, people in their 40’s and 50’s had a hell of a lot more living behind them, and more experiences on which to frame their thoughts on the world. But I had youth, idealism, inspiration and hope. My frame of reference was different, but it didn’t make me incapable of being “an equal.”

I guess my question is, why do people have to slam insults around to justify who they date or express their annoyance at who others want to date? Why do we really give a rat’s ass what someone else likes, or what someone thinks about what WE like?

Hey, I’m 36, and according to many of the male responders, that means I’m well on my way to mean-spirited hagdom. But I’m still the one reading these posts going “can’t we all just get along?” Who cares if some guys in their 40’s and 50’s are happiest dating 20-somethings, as long as the 20-somethings are just as happy? Sure, the reality is it puts older women at a disadvantage if you’re just looking at it as a numbers game. I’m honest enough to admit that when I started dating again at 35 the idea of competing against women with no laugh lines and perfectly perky boobs was intimidating. If that makes me shallow, so be it. But it didn’t take me long to realize that there were just as many people out there looking for someone like me, and those were the people I wanted to invest my time in getting to know. The last thing I was interested in was a guy who thought a woman over 35 was “over the hill.”

If we all just left each other alone to find our own happiness, with whoever might be happy with us, then maybe there wouldn’t be so much bitterness on this topic. Maybe if older guys who dated younger girls could just say “that’s who I’m attracted to” instead of “women my own age are dried-up hags,” then older women wouldn’t BE as bitter and jaded. Living in a world that makes it clear that there’s a certain set of people who think you’re “throwaway goods” at a certain age can make you that way, if you let it.

I say just don’t let it.

Maybe if we all focused more on feeling young and less on looking that way, more on living life and less on controlling it and putting it in boxes, less on working on professional and financial images and more on laughing, we’d ALL be less pushy and soured with age.

In the meantime, we all only live once, and regardless of our age we have no clue how much time we have left. So enjoy it, be with someone who makes you happy, and don’t worry about what anyone else thinks about you or your choices.

As for me, I’m glad I’m out of the dating game. It was fun while it lasted, but I much prefer being with someone I love, who helps me be a better person without trying to change the core of who I am. The fact that we’re almost the same age is just coincidence.

What We'd Ask in Interviews if We Were Allowed to Be Real at Work

2007-07-05T06:17:00.000-05:00

I’ve lately been feeling work – the fact of having a job and getting up and going to work when they want me there and wearing what they want me to wear, very heavily.

Years ago, I had neighbors I referred to as “The Asscracks.” They were The Asscracks to me because the husband’s was always poking out as he crawled around near or under some motorcycle, boat or car, tinkering with tools and grunting and doing “man things” with his toys, and calling his children “assholes” or “retards” if they annoyed him.

A charming family, for sure. They had a dog, who was always chained to a big tree in their front yard. He’d look longingly at the road, his eyes saying that he dreamed of freedom. If anyone got close to him, even from my side of the fence, he’d snarl.

Work makes me feel like that dog. Chained and tethered, watching the world and sometimes snarling when someone tries to be nice to me, because I’m just so fed up with it all.

It isn’t that I don’t want to be industrious, creative, a contributor to society, a puller of my own weight, a person with money in her pocket. It’s just that the bullshit that comes from working IN a workplace is usually counterproductive, an absolute hindrance to all that.

It’s funny. I started my worklife in 1994 as a career counselor type. I gave workshops on writing resumes and going on job interviews. I talked about how the art of interviewing lies as much in what you ask an employer as in your responses to their questions.

In my happy alternate universe, where real talent or dedication or the ability to do something well mattered more than dress codes and image, corporate speak and willingness to sacrifice quality of life for “the job,” I would be able to travel back in time, smack my 24-year-old self upside the head, and say “self, stop telling these college students to ask about the strengths they’re looking for in a worker and opportunities to learn and grow on the job. Quit promoting that wankerspeak. Instead, make it clear that the top five things to ask in a job interview are these:”

1. If you’re lucky enough to convince me to work here, how much of my life will be wasted in meetings?

2. Who is the most annoying and obnoxious person on your staff, and how close will my veal-box … I mean cubicle … be to his or hers?

3. Does the “stress management support” you offer to employees include a policy that encourages, or at least permits, shooting spitballs at anyone who utters corporate buzzwords or phrases like “running lean,” “where the rubber meets the road,” or “soup to nuts?” What the hell is “soup to nuts” anyway? You don’t make nuts from soup. And while I’m at it, if my boss asks me to “give him a whitepaper” on something, will I get fired it I print it out on blue paper, or better yet just email it?

4. Does your management understand that if torture devices like panty hose and ties are really required to further the company or organization’s image, then all your “image” says is “we too are lemmings?” Who performs at their peak with a noose around their neck or their legs stuffed in sausage casings, anyway?

5. Are you aware that the saying “the customer is always right” should be amended to “the customer is always right, unless he or she is a foul-mouthed, nitpicky, whiny person with a sense of entitlement who gets off on being mean, because mean people suck?”

Clearly, I’ve had a long week, even with the holiday thrown in. Maybe my current situation is my penance for that year of standing in front of classrooms, helping to prepare wide-eyed innocents to go out and land their own purgatories of dress codes, meetings, buzzwords, snarky customers, cantankerous co-workers and morning people. Or maybe I just need another vacation.

A Writing Update

2007-07-03T05:15:00.000-05:00

I promised myself I’d make this blog at least in part a place to keep myself and the two or three people who care updated on my writing projects.

The short story is going well. It’s funny, though, I’m beginning to understand why I have been afraid to actually take my fiction seriously enough to set it aside and then come back and do edits and re-writes.

It appears, my friends, that I am a bit of a nitpicker.

I have changed, moved, killed, re-created and rekilled more phrases in the last week of reading and tweaking than I think I ever have. I actually think I should go look in the mirror and make sure I’m still here, because all this redoing coming from someone who lives by the last-minute, spur-of-the-moment inspiration rule is a bit scary.

It makes me wonder, though. I know editing and rethinking are critical. But I’m also a believer in intuition, gut-reaction, and the way words pour when you’re in a zone. I remember a few times in college, back when I was paranoid about my abilities. I had come from a high school best known for teen pregnancy and potheads. So of course, I was the apple of my English teachers’ eyes. I thought this was because I was The Shit. Turns out it was mainly because I was one of the few who was more interested in what they were teaching than in hooking up with my baby-daddy or toking up by the lake.

But it didn’t take long for college to show me I was just one of many eager little turds floating around the “wanna-be-a-writer” toilet. Anyway, I became the Editing Queen in college, to the point that sometimes I took perfectly good papers and chopped them into mincemeat.

There’s a fine line between improving your work and second-guessing your intuition, an art to paring things down without destroying their uniqueness in the process. I have to re-learn to walk that balance beam.

So anyway, lots of reworking and relearning.

The idea for the story actually came from my delving into the blogging world. It is the tale of a man who feels trapped in a passionless, dead-end marriage and a humdrum job, who can’t figure out how to recapture what he had with his wife and who isn’t sure he wants to. He passes his time online, and becomes captivated by the blog of your average-everyday woman, whose words lead him to believe she’s in a very similar situation. I’m no romance writer, because phrases like “throbbing man-sword” make me giggle, so don’t worry, that’s not where this goes. But that’s all I’m sayin.’

In the meantime, I’ve stumbled on a writing contest that has caught my eye.

One is here: http://www.firstpersonarts.org/other_programs-contests.php
It’s a memoir writing contest. Memoirs are my thing. So I’m already thinking about what I’d like to do for this one, and whether I’ll go the funny or more sentimental route. Guess we’ll see.

Moments, Choices and People

2007-07-02T05:09:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, I stumble across a meme-type blog entry that strikes me as a worthwhile exercise. I found such a thing in Bunny’s diary at http://bunny828.diaryland.com/index.html, so I’m having a go at it myself.

10 defining moments in my life that changed me

1. Writing down a collection of my grandmother’s childhood stories, the ones she’d told me on countless long car trips and around campfires, and presenting them to her as a Christmas gift when I was a child. Watching joy light up her face when she unwrapped her presents and found that little notebook full of kid chicken-scratch made me realize just how much I wanted to be a writer.

2. The morning in my 15th year that a friend and her mother knocked on the door to my family’s townhome at 6 am to tell me that a healthy, active boy-man I had just had begun dating had suffered a debilitating stroke after a party gone awry. I learned that day that youth and seeming good health are no guarantee of immortality.

3. The night just before my graduation that I cried buckets and returned the engagement ring my high school sweetheart had given me, knowing that I’d never live my dreams if I chose the path the two of us would have traveled together. I learned how much it sucks to break someone else’s heart, and how powerful your own dreams can be if you let them.

4. The day just before I turned 18 that my father risked everything, leaving his steady job and pouring every penny he had into buying his first pub, knowing that if the venture failed he was beyond screwed. I learned that if you want to follow your dreams, you’d better be prepared to take risks and get your ass kicked.

5. The day my college newspaper advisor, a wild-eyed man who climbed on tables and shouted to the world when something one of his student wrote inspired him, critiqued one of my articles and told me I was writing stuff worthy of only a PR hack. I learned how it feels to be a small fish in a big pond after years of being “the shit” in high school when it came to writing.

6. The day a year later that the same advisor climbed on a table and shouted to the world, and then ran outside and kept on shouting, with pure glee over something that I had written.

7. The day I sat on a rock on the beach in Ocean City MD and accepted the marriage proposal of a man who would share almost 15 years of my life.

8. The day not quite two years after our wedding that we drove up a quiet dead-end street to a “for sale” sign and found the tiny house that would become our home – the house that is still mine.

9. The day we stood in ex’s cubicle at work and admitted that our marriage was a dying thing, that maybe we were just holding on because neither of us knew where we’d end up if we let go.

10. My 36th birthday, when I sat on a pier and looked out over the harbor of my town, with my boyfriend beside me and a steaming cup of coffee in my hand, and I realized all over again that you have to take risks to end up where you really want to be. I still feel that moment each morning when I look at him.

7 Critical Choices

1. Going to college full-time, even though it meant a breakup with a high-school love who wanted me to get married, move in with him and get a full-time job.

2. Moving out of my parent’s house to a college apartment. It is through living there and being in the right place at the right time that I met most of the friends who are still in my life today. It is also where I learned to be an asshole (the good kind).

3. Going to work full-time after college rather than going on to graduate school. This is a choice I still regret. I was so anxious to “not be poor” anymore that I didn’t think long-term, and I’ve never been able to motivate myself to do grad school and work full-time at the same time, or to set myself up in a position where I could get by with a less demanding job so that I could focus on school.

4. Getting married.

5. Getting divorced.

6. Not having children

7. Letting myself love again

Five Pivotal People (Only 5 … sheesh. I could go on forever if you’d let me!)

1. My father, for following his dreams and making it, even when it means breaking the rules and admitting that you don’t want or need to be like everyone else. He taught me how to relate to the rest of the world.

2. My mother, for believing in me and for teaching me to be quiet and introspective. She taught me how to relate to myself.

3. My boyfriend, for helping me learn to follow my heart and intuition, to keep believing in them though they’d failed me before.

4. My ex, for growing up with me and making it through a series of successes and failures that taught us both that we’d make it, even if that wouldn’t mean making it together.

5. S & S, the two friends I made in college who are still a part of my life today. And yes, I know listing both of them in #5 is cheating. But they are flip sides of a coin to me. She’s inspired me to stretch my horizons in the world. He’s taught me to stretch the horizons in my head.

I'm not tagging anyone, but would love to read other's "Moments, Choices and People," so if you decide to do this one give me a shout!

The Horror

2007-06-29T04:48:00.000-05:00

As a kid, summertime was swimming pools and steamed crabs, flip-flops and ice-cream trucks. But it was also the Season of Movies, horror flicks in particular. Three months of no school, and we actually got three whole months back then, meant slumber parties and sleepovers. What was a sleepover without a good scary movie?

The biggies of my adolescence and teenage years were of course Freddy and Jason. Now that Jason’s been to outer space and Freddy and I were up-close-and-personal for a while, they’ve both lost their edge. But back in the day, they were some freaky, scary shit.

I say the horror kings of my childhood aren’t scary any more, but if you ask my mom she’d tell a different tale, at least when it comes to Jason. The hockey masked serial killer traumatized her.

My parents took my sister and I, and one friend apiece, to the beach for a week every summer. Except for one year, when we decided to rent a house on a lake in the woods with my aunt, uncle and cousins for a week instead. We didn’t know it until we got there, but our home-away-from-home was completely and totally surrounded by trees. It was also at the top of a hill that required a hike up what seemed like a million wooden stairs. It was woodland isolation at its best.

For Dad, that vacation was fishing and boating heaven. For me and my sister and cousins, it was swimming and woods-play, exploring and campfires and staying up late. For my mother, it was a week of waiting for Jason Voorhees to jump out and grab her. It started when she realized there were no city sounds at night, nothing but bugs and frogs having their regular singalong. My city-girl momma listened to the cricket song, waiting for that familiar “chi chi chi …hah hah hah” sound that meant Jason was a’comin’. I don’t think she slept much that whole week.

Then she wandered down to our dock one day and saw that someone had etched “Jason” into the wooden deck. Some previous vacation renter with a pen knife leaving his mark, for sure. But to Mom, it was a sign. She wouldn’t sleep, and didn’t want us out of the rental house after dark.

My Dad decided she needed some time out of the woods, and took her to a bar in the little resort town one night, leaving me and sis with my aunt and uncle. They met a local man at the bar, and as my whole family is apt to do, spent the evening chatting with him over several beers. “It was nice to meetch’all” he told them at the end of the evening. “And by the way, my name’s Jason.”

Mom was never so ready for a vacation to end.

The Nightmare on Elm Streets movies couldn’t hold a candle to Jason in my mother’s eye, but they scared the heck out of me. That was, at least, until I turned 15 and got a work permit and an after-school job at the local video store, where we had a life-size cardboard Freddy Kruger advertising the movies. At first, I couldn’t look at the damn thing. But there was no way not to, so over time I got used to him. I had to share my space with him for 3 hours a night, four days a week, and after a while I developed a Freddy immunity.

Saying I grew fond of him is a bit of an overstatement – a bit – and it sounds creepy anyway. So I won’t. But I did bring him home for a visit.

In fact, I brought him home when my sister had a slumber party for her 9th birthday. She’d asked me to give her and her friends some kind of surprise scare, to make her sleepover the event of the summer. So Freddy came home, or rather I took him to the house of a friend who lived across the street. When I had the crew of girls set up with their popcorn and chips, sodas and scary movies, I went upstairs and gave my friend our bedroom-window-go-for-it sign. He dragged Freddy across the street and propped him in front of our door, knocked, and dived behind a bush. The girls threw open the door to find Freddy staring them down, a big old smile on his face. To me, he looked like he just wanted some popcorn, but they almost peed themselves.

They still talk about that night, these girls who are now in their late 20’s. And my sister and I haven’t learned to keep our horror flicks on the TV screen. We both watched “Wrong Turn” a few years back. Killer mutant hillbillies are a must, you know? After seeing it, we were sitting at our father’s bar one night. In walked a pair of tall, unwashed, hairy, scary guys, accompanied by a woman who matched them dirt-stain for dirt-stain. The guys leered at us and everyone else as they made their way to the bar, muscled their way in between a few people and ordered up with scowling mouths and vacant eyes.

My sister leaned over and whispered “oh my God. It’s Wrong Turn.”

Later, she went to play the jukebox and one of the guys edged up behind her. “You know, I seen that movie …” he said, stared her down and walked away. With a gulp, she returned to her seat.

These were no ordinary rednecks, ya’ll. They were Killer Hillbillies with supersonic hearing. I’d barely heard her, and she had been whispering to me. (I know, I know, drunk whispers are hardly whispers. Don’t ruin my story.)

We much preferred our encounters with the cardboard Freddy, for sure.

What, besides the fact that its summertime, made me think of all this? Nothing other than someone telling me he had a “Jason zit” on his nose. Slow on the uptake, I said “Jason zit?”

You know, he said, all exasperated-like. “Hard to kill.”

Out and About in Cyberspace

2007-06-27T04:42:00.000-05:00

Rather than continue doing a Blog O’ The Week (or every two weeks, as it became), I’ve decided to take time at least once a month to highlight some of my fab finds. This is part of my conscious effort to balance my day job, keep a blog that entertains at least me, and still devote enough time to my lengthier writing projects. Call it a little less structure while still giving credit where credit is due.

First, if you’ve ever been in a workplace or ever might be, go add Bob Sutton Work Matters at http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/06/the-no-dick-rul.html to your favorites.

I wrote a ramble last week about discovering “The No Asshole Rule.” Bob, the author, found my little corner of cyberspace and left a comment that led me to his blog. I’m still grinning like an idiot over the fact someone who is both a published writer and an advocate against workplace assholery (both, as ya’ll know, are high on my list) thought enough of “Weasels” to quote me in his corner of the net.

But that’s far from the only reason I’m highlighting Bob here. The blog, much like I imagine the book will be, is full of honesty, solid advice, humor and anti-workplace-jerkism. In Bob’s “15 Things I Believe” sidebar, he states among other kernels of wisdom that “In organizational life, you can have influence over others or you can have freedom from others, but you can’t have both at the same time.” That pretty much sums up the struggle I’ve been facing since I accepted a management role a year ago, and gives the reason I often regret that decision much more succinctly than I could have stated it myself. And there’s much, much more. Just go see.

Next on the list is a ride on Whit’s Honea Express at http://honeaexpress.blogspot.com/. I just recently started reading this Dad’s blog. We are generally drawn to reading about lives that are similar to our own. Obviously, since I have neither children nor a penis, I’m not a Dad. But you can’t read Whit’s parenting-related entries without feeling a sentimental twinge. And even if you’re a hardhearted bastard who can, there’s so much more. The guy is funny as hell, whether he’s Dr. Suessing or reminding us of the fact that even 80’s few-hit wonders take a shit now and then. And in spite of my lack of children or a penis, we do have much in common, as he’s mentioned both Cory Hart and jager in his rambles.

Last but certainly not least is David B. Dale’s Very Short Novel blog at http://davidbdale.wordpress.com/. I love this concept. Basically, the blog is a collection of stories told in 299 words. And David does it well. I’ve read quite a few, and there are many more left for those days I need a mini-escape at work or just want to take a lesson or two in developing enough character, plot and interest to finish the deal without excess words.

So that’s where I’ve been lately. Any more for now, and I’d start to sound like a blog slut. We can’t have that.

La Cucharocha Comes to Dinner

2007-06-25T04:52:00.000-05:00

I think every suburban area has that little restaurant. You know it well. It’s the one you and your family just jump in the car and go to when you decide last minute that it’s too hot to use the oven or you’re too tired to make a meal. The food isn’t spectacular, but it’s good enough, and because they serve a mish-mosh of whatever rather than specializing in everything, there’s something on the menu for everyone. No need to figure out whether the majority wants Italian or seafood.

In my neck of the woods, that place is near my parent’s house. My friends and I have been going there for a few years now. It’s never crowded, and the waitresses know us well. We’ve got a history there: meals before heading out to the bar, and hung-over lunches the next day.

The owner, an older guy with caterpillars for eyebrows, always flirts with one of my friends. He tells her about his wife and his mistresses and invites her, wiggling those caterpillars the whole time, to add herself to the latter. The waitresses, meanwhile, have always made google-eyes at my bachelor buddy – even after the time he took a big dump in their bathroom (he swears he couldn’t wait) and everyone knew what he was doing because he was gone from our table for fifteen minutes.

We’ve got memories there. And it’s always been the ready-made solution for those times where we just don’t feel like giving food much thought. So this entry is a funeral of sorts for what is now just a (not-so) fond memory.

Yesterday, two of my girlfriends, The Boyfriend and I spent the afternoon at my parents’ house, taking advantage of a rare thing around here – a non-humid summer day to just hang out at the pool. Later, with rubbery swimming limbs and sun-baked faces and brains, we were a bit hungry but far too lazy to do much about it. The solution, of course, was to stop at “the place” on the way home.

So we did. The Boyfriend and I just wanted a sandwich. One girlfriend was craving something pasta-ish. The other is here from out of town and was dying for Maryland crab cakes. Again, that’s what ruled about this place. We could all meet our needs, without a reservation or a wait.

We sat perusing the menu all but my out-of-towner friend knew by heart. We made our choices. A waitress came and took our drink order, two waters and two iced teas. She vanished into the kitchen, and we talked about what we were getting and how the fact that the next day would be Monday sucked frog balls (do frogs have balls?). Then it happened.

The Boyfriend looked down and saw something big and blackish-brown scuttling across our table. “Holy shit!” he proclaimed. He waited just long enough to make sure the rest of us had seen our uninvited dinner companion, and then flicked it away.

The cockroach flew off onto the carpet and vanished. Yes, I said ‘the cockroach.” La cucharocha. On the table. Just hanging out waitin’ for some scraps.

I’ve never worked in the food service industry. But my family’s in the bar business, I used to make a living at a culinary school, and the ex was a chef for years. I know the realities of the biz. I know bugs happen.

But when bugs – bugs of the roachy variety at that – are happening on your tables, you’ve got issues.

“I’m not eating here,” yelped one friend. The rest of us were already lifting our asses out of our seats. We walked out without so much as a “See ya.” There was no one around to tell, since it was a slow Sunday and our waitress showed no signs of emerging from the kitchen anytime soon. And the heebie-jeebies had set in bigtime.

Maybe we should have left a note on a napkin. “Sorry, but it seems the table you gave us was already reserved. Give our iced teas to Papa Roach.”

Looks like its time to find a new restaurant.

The No Asshole Rule

2007-06-22T06:24:00.000-05:00

As a general rule of thumb, I avoid books that have anything to do with management or improving the workplace. I know that as someone who writes workplace and management articles herself, this makes me something of a hypocrite. But articles? I read tons of those, really.

I like my work-related reading to come in smaller doses. Kind of like I wish the workweek itself would.

But a while back, one of my closest friends told me about a book she was reading. She’s in worker-drone hell herself, one with even more devils and pits than my own. Her company uses phrases like “running lean” with pride, as if any employee with half a brain wouldn’t realize that translates into “working your butts to death and scaring you into doing it by laying off your co-workers.” So she’s been reading, and the book she mentioned to me is called:

The No Asshole Rule: Building A Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert L. Sutton.

Once, at my father’s pub, we had a particularly raunchy crowd of drunken, loudmouth idiots. One of our regulars took a piece of cardboard from a beer delivery box and a magic marker, and scrawled “Asshole-Free Section.” He stuck it on the corner of the bar where we were sitting, and we entertained ourselves for an hour or so saying “hey, didn’t you bother to read the sign?” to anyone who came to sit with us.

Too bad we can’t do that at work.

In a bar, everyone calls everyone else an asshole. That’s because if you spend enough time there, you will become one at some point. Your friends will love you for it, and everyone else will be glad they’re not you.

But I’ve always said that in spite of the drunkenness and the mooning, the quarrels and brawls and stuff people say that would never have come out of their mouths before that third shot, I’ve met more bona-fide assholes at work than in the bar. An asshole in a suit and tie is still an asshole, just one without an excuse.

So I found it refreshing that the author of this book actually admitted it in writing rather than deliver a helping of “Chicken Soup for the Working Stiff’s Soul,” season it with a heavy helping of corporate buzzwords, and throw it out there as a survival guide for those of us who go to work. I made a mental note to get the book or borrow it from my friend when she’s done. She only mentioned it, after all, because she knows I have a peculiar attachment to the word “asshole.”

A few days later, I got an email from my ex. It was a link to this:
http://electricpulp.com/guykawasaki/arse/

Go on, read for yourself. You know you wanna. It’s more about the “No Asshole Rule” book, but you can also take a test to determine whether or not you are one.

Hey, I know what you’re thinking. Hmmmm … her ex sends her an asshole test, what’s he trying to say? But he sent it to all his friends, so there.

My usual advice to people stuck living most of their waking hours in offices is to not think about it when they aren’t there – to invest their time and energy in pursuits that make them happy and hope that something will click to get them out of it, or at least reduce the amount of time they have to spend there. Thinking about work, and reading about work, when you aren’t working just gives it even more power.

But when it comes to this one, I’m gonna make an exception. I can’t wait to read The No Asshole Rule.

Oh, and by the way, the test says I’m not one.

Book Review: Promise Not to Tell

2007-06-20T04:37:00.000-05:00

Promise Not To Tell by Jennifer McMahon is a book with many things going for it. It’s a short read, the kind of book you can finish in a few days time, or faster, if you’re lucky enough to have few-hour stretches to sit on your bum with a novel in your lap. It has compellingly imperfect characters – in fact, they’re all sort of assholes in their own ways. It follows a formula that always leads to a good read: a troubled adult is forced to take a trip down memory lane by returning to a home and family she’s left far behind. We all know where that leads … at least in fiction.

Promise tries to do a lot in a little bit of time. It is part memoir of a unique and captivating if somewhat disturbing childhood. It is part woman-struggling-to-find-herself-by-visiting-old-ghosts. It is part ghost story, part crime novel. And it even manages a few flashes of humor.

The basic storyline is that a woman returns home to deal with her aging mother’s dementia. As soon as she gets back in town, a murder occurs … one that mirrors the murder of the childhood pariah of her own school days, The Potato Girl. She weeds her way through all sort of emotions, including guilt about her own past and her part in the Potato Girl’s life and death, as she tries to figure out what’s currently happening in the small town.

I was easily drawn in to the memoir part of the novel. The story of a girl torn between her fascination and strange friendship with the schoolyard outcast and her own desire to be liked, accepted and popular is age-old and poignant. The image of a town that turns a tragic death into an ongoing ghost yarn is picturesque. The main character’s unique childhood, growing up in a commune, makes for an interesting read and cast of characters. And the whodunit is interesting enough. But for some reason, the outcome and the supernatural elements of the novel fell a bit short for me. I wasn’t able to suspend belief and actually see them happening. This is from a person who can be very easily transported to another world by the likes of Stephen King, so I don’t think it was lack of imagination on my part. It worked, but it didn’t grip, if that makes any sense.

Promise Not to Tell is still more than a worthwhile read, though. Especially if you’re talking a poolside summer day or patio summer evening kind of read.

Committing (To A Couch)

2007-06-18T05:08:00.000-05:00

I am a person who has an overwhelming fear of commitment.

Not of love. I can give my heart and be with someone else, and not wonder whether I should have held out for something different. But even there, I had to live and learn. I had to understand what not being able to fully open your heart leads to, and realize I didn’t like it and the grass wasn’t greener on the other side. In fact, it was a bit muddy and overgrown.

But in life, the business of daily living, I am not a committer.

I love to go out and socialize, to be with friends and family, out in the world seeing things and making memories. But when my social calendar fills, when I look at it and see this-is-Saturday and this-is-Sunday for the next three weeks, you’ll be going here and doing this, and of course we all know what Monday-Friday is, I get panicky. My brain says “hold up – what if you don’t want to go here and do that? What if you want to sit and write and be instead?”

So I have a hard time making commitments. I guard my writing time like some sort of rare gem, like Gollum with his precious. My friends wonder what the hell is wrong with me sometimes – how saying I will “for sure” go to that happy hour or this festival could possibly feel like work to me.

It wouldn’t feel like work if I wasn’t at work most of the time, of that I’m sure. If I didn’t spend my days in people-filled spaces, I would crave more interaction.

And then there’s work itself, and my inability to commit to it. I do my job and I do it well. But I plan my financial obligations in such a way that I could flee – maybe – could give notice and leave and go work somewhere mindless and freeing and still make enough to get by if I start feeling too … choked by it all.

Sure, I have a mortgage. But I keep it intentionally low, stay in my little house in my so-so neighborhood even though I daydream of something bigger, more modern maybe. A downtown life with a rooftop deck, perhaps. I daydream, and I could sign myself away for some version of that – I make enough on paper. I’m a good risk, a bank would say. But I don’t, because that would be chaining myself to my desk. I won’t give up freedom, or even the vague delusion of freedom, for my sunset over the harbor or a house big enough to have its own laundry room instead of a stackable washer/dryer unit in the kitchen, one that whirs and buzzes and drowns out the TV in the living room.

I broke down and ordered a new couch this weekend. I have been studying this couch for a week, pondering it like an algorithm. I have imagined its soft brown cushions and arranged its pillows in my mind. It isn’t that expensive, as couches go. And I need one, since what we have right now is a futon on its last legs, a futon that has served its purpose but now gives you ass-cramps if you sit on it too long.

So I pulled out my credit card and got the couch, and immediately went into a tailspin of sorts. Oh shit. A bill. A credit card bill. A credit card bill means I owe somebody something. A credit card bill is one more reason I couldn’t just say “Hey, it’s been real, but I don’t think this whole manager thing is for me anymore. Say hello to the newest cashier at (insert generic bookstore here). I can help pick my replacement, if you want.”

A new couch. That’s all it is. And we all know I’m too much of a scaredy-cat to actually reach out and grab that freedom anyway. I just like knowing its there.

Bug-Eyed

2007-06-15T06:07:00.000-05:00

I meant to write about many things this morning, the last day of my “Writing Vacation.” Oh, I don’t have to return to work until Monday, but tomorrow is my niece’s birthday party and Sunday is Father’s Day, so the weekend is spoken for – a collection of cookouts and gift exchanges and screaming 10-year-old girls. I’m still not used to the fact that my niece’s birthday means shopping for I-Tunes gift cards and clothes now rather than toys.

The plan today is to tweak the short story, and send it to two of my friends for their opinions. We’ll go from there on where it goes next.

So I’m reading blogs, and stumble on a post about this year's 17-year-cicada invasion at http://www.alloverthebored.blogspot.com/. Now, instead of writing about whatever it was I was thinking, I’m recalling my own cicada invasion.

Although my house is very close to the city, I live on a quiet, wooded hill. It wasn’t so quiet that year – was it 2003 or 2004 when our cicadas yawned and stretched and scrambled to the surface for their suicide dance? I don’t remember the year precisely, but the details stick with me. For a month that summer, my hill resonated with a steady, vibrating tree-hum that reminded me of sleeping with a fan on.

My niece befriended them. She and her neighborhood buddies collected them in jars, the way I hoarded fireflies as a child. I sat with her on the patio and watched her cicadas in their prison, while my parents’ stubby black pug, Otis, clamored for our attention. I looked from his squished, wrinkled little bulging-eyed face to the jar of red-eyed bugs, and thought “Cicada” would make an awesome name for a pug.

We went to a festival at the zoo in the heart of the cicada dance season. “Zoo Brew,” it was called. You wandered the zoo, and finished at an outdoor beer festival. A friend of mine had a booth where he was selling tee-shirts. We traipsed through the zoo, snapping pictures of the monkeys and the tigers and the prairie dogs – my sister, my niece, my mother, my then-husband, a friend and me.

Growing up, I had always loved the monkey exhibits. My father pointed out how the monkeys would pick at each other, removing critters from their family and friends. The monkeys were upstaged that day. All around us, people swirled and squealed in a strange
imitation of the cicada-dance, swatting each other and pulling cicadas out of family members’ hair. The dive-bombing bugs and the zoo-brewing crowd were by far the most entertaining exhibit, and we were a part of it.

That night, a cicada flew threw my sister’s open window as she was driving, sat on her shoulder and screamed at her. Did you know they screamed? She screamed back, and was almost in an accident.

By the end of the following week, the cicada dance troupe was drastically reduced. The humming stopped on my hill, and only an occasional hanger-on could be seen swirling about in desperate loops. I grew careless, no longer on Bug-Watch. As I did my outdoor workout walk one afternoon, I felt a strange sensation and realized a cicada had collided with my boob. I tried to shake him off, and he looked at me with tired, lazy bug-eyes that said he wanted this to be his final resting place.

I did what any self-respecting human would do. I jumped up and down, squealed, flapped my arms and amused traffic. A man actually pulled over and asked if I was okay.

“There’s. A. Bug. On. My. Boob!” I replied, and proceeded to flap some more.

Poor little cicada-guy. All that dancing, and he didn’t even get to die with dignity.

Hillbilly Vogue

2007-06-14T09:05:00.000-05:00

What I’ve been doing with my summer vacation:

1. Started a short story and wrote it through to the finish. By finish, I mean the story has a start, middle and end, not necessarily that it is “finished” in a glossed and edited kind of way.

2. Spent hours poring through various writing sites and writing contents online, promising myself that I’ll get more involved with them. I joined http://www.editred.com/, because it looks really interesting.

3. Went to visit my high school friend who lives in Florida but is in town for an indefinite period of time while her father recuperates from surgery. Her parents are divorced and her mom is remarried. We were sitting at her mom’s house, munching pretzels and cream cheese and admitting that we can’t believe our parents are getting old. Not having kids yourself does weird things to your perspective. She’ll be 38 this year and I’ll be 37, but we still see ourselves as girls. That, of course, means our parents simply can’t have “aging issues” that require operations, right?

Anyway, we must have been getting a bit too maudlin, because her mother went digging for something with alcohol in it and pulled out some homemade wine that looked frighteningly like a bottle of moonshine. Her stepfather, a 6’5 lanky man with a kind face and a shock of grey hair, disappeared. You know you’re far too deep into your own heads when a guy that tall can vanish and you don’t notice.

He re-emerged a few minutes later, wearing a cowboy hat and nothing else but a bright red pair of long johns, and carrying the moonshine wine. He spent the next fifteen minute posing for the cover of “Hillbilly Vogue” and doing the occasional strut dance and explaining how the flap in the back was to make it easy to crap in an outhouse.

And no, he hadn’t swigged from the bottle of moonshine wine first.

We laughed heartily, and left in a much better mood than we had arrived in.

A Vacation in My Head

2007-06-12T12:41:00.000-05:00

Most people take vacation to go somewhere. I do too, although I guess some would argue with me that “going somewhere” requires leaving the house.

See, in spite of my best efforts I have one major problem with my writing. I can spout off articles and blog entries, weaving them around the constraints of my workweek anywhere they’ll fit. The wee morning hours, after The Boyfriend heads off to his job. My lunch breaks, when I don’t meet a friend for gossip or just work through them. The dusky pre-bedtime hours, when The Boyfriend is playing contentedly with his gardens and sprinklers outside and we’ve both got full bellies and I can ignore my phone and the dirty dishes for a bit.

When it comes to these smaller pieces of writing, I can wedge them into my life. Sometimes it feels like pushing a square peg into a round hole, but the peg is at least made of a spongy material that gives if you poke and prod at it enough.

But my dream has always been to be a fiction writer. And no matter how hard I try these days, I can’t work that kind of writing into my routine. Nothing brings on writer’s block for me like a full-time job. Call it stress, call it too much tapping into my mental resources, call it overtime, call it a poor-ass excuse. It’s just the way it is.

So every now and then, I take a week off work to write fiction. This is one of those weeks.

I crave cruises and camping trips, days on the beach with the surf pounding in my ears, bayside sunsets and new sights, sounds and smells. I crave being a vagabond. But I crave the title “writer” even more, and I’m starting to feel rather now or never about the whole thing. I’ve learned between the ages of 20 and 35 just how quickly more than a decade can pass with you going “oh, I’ll get to it someday.” I can easily see myself at 70, wishing I’d taken the time to write that novel back when hours at the computer screen didn’t hurt my eyes.

So this is my week to go – to go inside my own head and see what comes out on the other side. We’ll see how it goes. If the blog entries here are a bit sparse this week, that’s why. I’m trying not to spread it all too thin. I’ll be back when life is business as usual, with a full report on how it went.

The Writing Projects Meme

2007-06-11T05:56:00.000-05:00

I was tagged for this meme at http://awannabewriter.blogspot.com/ last weekend, but I spent last week running around like a chicken with its head up its butt. So I’m doing it now.

The rules are to post the rules, write your meme, and tag others. Simple rules. I like’em like that.

1) Write about the top five writing projects you want to do. Books, short stories, whatever.

2) Post the rules and the link to where you got the Meme from in the first place.

3) Tag people.

My top five writing projects:

1. I want to publish a collection of short stories about the people I’ve encountered and the things that have happened over the years in my family’s bar. I don’t want this to be a Tender Bar-type memoir. The focus wouldn’t be on me, but on glimpses of the many personalities and philosophies I’ve encountered there. The drunken stupid and the surprisingly insightful and the heartbreaking and hilarious. Scenes from an adult playground, I guess.

2. My own memoirs of growing up in Charm City, because for all my poking fun at it I truly love this town.

3. I’d love to start and maintain a blog about personality types. I’m fascinated by tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and how they are used in helping people with everything from work to relationships.

4. A serious essay on how work that doesn’t fulfill us eats our brains and turns us into blithering divots if we are stuck doing it long enough.

5. A creepy psychological thriller involving 17-year-cicadas. That’s all I’m gonna say on that one.

The big barrier to my success with any of these is time, or maybe just my poor time management skills. One thing I’ve got going for me, at least with the first two, is that my online journal already captures and tells versions of many of the stories I’d share. They just need serious refinement.

I’m not tagging anyone, because I’m sure not sure who among the bloggers I read actually might have writing projects and ambitions on some kind of backburner. But if you do, I hope you’ll share. Because I’m curious. Post a comment and let me know if you do play.

Blog O' The Week #7

2007-06-08T05:04:00.000-05:00

Blog of The Week: George’s Employment Blawg

Author: George Lenard

Blog URL: http://www.employmentblawg.com/

Why I Picked This Blog: I’m admittedly a bit biased towards blogs related to careers, job searching, employment laws, management and work/life balance. That’s because I both crave success in my own career yet on certain days want nothing more than not to have one at all. I considered career counseling as a profession. I’m a manager. I strive for work/life balance and fair employment standards and tend to be like a dog with a bone on the whole thing. So there’s lots to be found for me in a blog that discusses HR, employment laws and life in the workplace.

That said, I think George’s Employment Blawg is a cut above the rest for many reasons. The topics vary. The posts are both conversational and full of facts, and opinions are backed up with statistics and documentation. Just recently, the blog has provided in-depth discussions of topics ranging from the Fair Pay Act to the new challenges teens seeking summer work are facing to the expectations of “millenniums” in the workplace.

You’ll Probably Enjoy This Blog If: You have an interest in legal, organizational or life issues related to the workplace. You are or hope to be involved in the human resources aspects of your workplace. You prefer your “legalese” offered up in a personal and conversational way.

Sometimes Writing About Your Butt Works

2007-06-07T04:52:00.000-05:00

I started blogging as a way to talk to myself and anyone else who was interested about writing. It seems these days I talk about anything but. There are just far too many slices of life out there begging to be blogged about, I suppose. And that’s OK, since I guess I tend to write more about writing when I can’t think of anything else to write about. The creative mojo is flowing these days, and in fact is sort of all stuffed up like a pissed-off genie in a bottle, anxious to get out and annoyed that my day job doesn’t leave enough time for setting more than tiny bits and pieces free.

That said, a writing checkpoint is overdue. Just as a checkpoint on my butt was a bit tardy. I’m a multi-tasker, so I combined the two.

I’ve slowed down a bit at Associated Content, although I still contribute an article or two a week on average. I finally had a piece featured – which means slammed on the front page rather than buried in its appropriate category, and the stats aren’t in yet but I’m pretty sure that really boosted my number of overall hits.

The piece that made it to the front lines is here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/256999/looking_and_feeling_great_in_your_summer.html

This isn’t the type of thing I usually write about at all. I’m not a fashion or looks-focused kind of person, for the most part. Truthfully, I dashed it out on a lunch break at work one afternoon. I’d noticed that while all my summer clothes still fit fine, I don’t like the way I look in them as much as I did last year because I’ve fallen into the habit of eating with a man, which means I have real meals on a regular basis, and I hadn’t stepped up the exercise to keep up with the food intake. There’s nothing like putting on your summer wardrobe to spark some serious butt-and-belly scrutiny. So I was thinking about that and started scribbling – or typing. It was pretty much a pep talk for myself.

It’s funny. You labor over some work, and it never sees the light of day or gets buried in archives. And then you do something on the fly, and it hits a chord with someone and ends up being spotlighted. That’s writing, I guess.

Hey, Hon!

2007-06-06T05:45:00.000-05:00

I’m on a Baltimore kick, it seems. Yesterday’s entry talked about our local obsession with steamed crabs. Today I’m thinking about “hons.”

For most people, the word “hon” registers as “Hun,” and thoughts of Attila and history lessons come to mind. But in my neck of the woods, a Hon is something different entirely, although many of the Hons probably run their households with the same iron fists.

Baltimore is a colorful town. One of our local pride and joys is the way the natives greet each other with the term “hey hon.” We don’t go to the beach in the summer. We go “downy’ Ocean, hon.” Diner waitresses with red lipstick and high-piled hair have greeted total strangers with this term of endearment for years.

The greeting has morphed in our collective minds into a name for the women who used it the most. Think beehive hairdos, blue eyeshadow, bright fingernails and flip-flops, big necklaces, cigarettes, leopard print, bright colors, high heels, spandex, and bathrobes, porch stoops and curlers. Those are the staples of the Baltimore Hon. She never left the sixties, and she doesn’t want to.

Why would she, when her words and her unique way of life have landed her a festival all her own?

That’s right. This weekend is the Baltimore Honfest, a celebration of one of Charm City’s finest traditions. Don’t believe me? See for yourself: http://www.honfest.net/about.htm.

I’ve never been. But this year, one of my co-workers and her daughter are participating in the Baltimore’s Best Hon contest. I may just have to go. Who can pass up the chance to see a co-worker in a flame-colored housecoat and a beehive?

I love my city.

Crabby Goodness

2007-06-05T05:50:00.000-05:00

As a Baltimorian, or Baltimoran as some would say, I can’t imagine life without steamed crabs. They’ve been a part of summer for me as long as I can remember. Two of the men I’ve dated, including The Boyfriend, spent one point in their lives earning livings on Chesapeake Bay crab boats.

But if I try to look at our summer ritual of picnic tables piled with steaming, Old Bay covered crustaceans from an outsider’s perspective, I imagine it might even be a little scary. We dig into our steamed crab with abandon, covering ourselves in seasoning, downing far too many cold beers because nothing else will do for this particular meal.

I think of crabs as trip back to childhood. When else is it not only acceptable but required that you make a complete mess of your table and play with your food?

But to those who didn’t grow up on this ritual, we crab-loving Marylanders probably look like a bunch of barbarians chowing down on a mound of spiders. My West Virginian cousins once came to stay with us in the summer, and the youngest one burst into tears at the sight of me, my mother, my father and my sister tearing legs off a bunch of spindly steamed sea creatures. My ex, one of the few Marylanders I know who never developed a summertime obsession with crabs, used to call anyone who ate them a “buzzard eater.” But he would sit with us and pick them to make crab cakes.

What got me thinking about this was our weekend outing for my mother’s birthday. A gang of us went to a local restaurant called The Seaside Inn and had steamed crabs and about a dozen other seafood-type concoctions. We topped it off with far too much beer and cheer.

I’d highly recommend this joint for anyone living in the Baltimore or Glen Burnie areas. There’s no sea to be seen, of course, but you forget that fact inside the cozy confines of the bar/restaurant, surrounded by the smells of Old Bay and the sounds of mallets cracking crab claws. Call ahead if you want steamed crabs – they’re known to run out in the middle of summer’s frenzy.

The Tender Bar

2007-06-04T05:13:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while, you come across a book that makes you realize you aren’t as special as you thought you were. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. What I mean, or at least what I think I mean, is that no matter how uniquely you your life experiences and way of thinking are, there’s someone out there who comes pretty damn close.

For me, that someone is JR Moehringer, author of the memoir The Tender Bar.

I’m not sure everyone will relate to this book. If you’ve never fallen prey to the magical illusions of tight-knit friendships and family that keep the regulars trudging back to their favorite local pub, you won’t get it. If you’ve never sought to lose yourself in the din of drunken conversation, but stand out in the crowd with your whisky-slurred wit and insight at the same time, you won’t get it. If you’ve never had a fellow lost soul staking claim to a bar stool save you, at least for a while, with some flash of humor or insight that would sound completely ridiculous if you were sober, you won’t get it. If the dirty, half-lit, crazy local drinking crew in your neighborhood doesn’t fill you with just a bit of warm fuzzies, you won’t get it.

But you might enjoy the read anyway. And anyone who has ever been so afraid of living their dream that they alternately hid from it and wrestled with it and made the art of failing a success in and of itself will definitely relate to at least part of it.

I didn’t grow up without a father like JR, who sought male role models and authority figures in the barroom. But I did grow up in a bar family, with the pub a magical grown-up place I got a glimpse of now and then, and a mystical and hilarious passage into adulthood. I do relate best to those who sometimes seek clarity a bottle, or at least in the words of someone who has already made it down to the bottom of their own bottle.

I’ve told my friends and family for years that one day I would write “The Book of Assholes.” What I meant was I’d take the years of bar stories and character sketches that live in your head when your family runs a pub, and you’re a natural bar-fly yourself, and turn them into a novel or collection of short stories. In many ways, JR beat me to it.

But we all have our own collection of stories. And our own collection of assholes. I can learn from his, be glad there’s someone out there like me, and still one day create my own.

The BG&E Rate Hike

2007-06-01T05:06:00.000-05:00

A year ago, my local electric company planned to raise rates by 70 percent. As you can imagine, this met with a public outcry. As a result, the rate was knocked back to 50 percent, at least temporarily, and deferred for a year.

The year ends today. Our rates for electricity will now go up 50 percent. No more whining, says the electric company. They’re already in debt from not charging us enough.

Well how the hell did you dumbasses let that happen?

Of course I hate the thought of my bill going up so much. A normally $200 electric bill will now be $300, and so on. That’s a huge rate increase. Of course it is happening as we move into the hottest season of the year, the time when people like me will forego food before giving up their air conditioning.

I hate it, but if we’re not extravagant idiots The Boyfriend and I can handle it. We just have to be mindful of what we’re spending, and the money we’ve been saving for house-things will accumulate a bit slower.

But I know far too many people whose lives will be much more dramatically impacted by this. They can opt to defer on the rate hike until January, but if they do so they’ll just have even bigger “payback” bills then. They way I see it, this only helps you if you’ve got some windfall coming or if you’re planning to land a much higher-paying job between now and then.

I think about those on fixed incomes. College students living paycheck to paycheck and barely making ends meet. Those raising families on small salaries who have little potential for career advancement. Seniors living on fixed retirement and social security incomes. A bill that is about to go up $100 or $200 a month could break them.

When you factor in the rising cost of gas, we all seem to be pretty screwed. I can see the “move back home with mom and dad” trend skyrocketing when younger adults realize if they pay rent and the electric bill and fuel up to get themselves to work they’ve got nothing left over for other necessities, let alone entertainment. I can see the number of elderly people landing in the emergency room due to heat-related illnesses taking a leap too, because they’ll swelter and suffer out of financial desperation rather than turn on the AC during the 90-degree plus summer days.

I guess it is the way it is, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.

It pisses me off. I realize that I’m very lucky to live in a place where my worries about inequality have nothing to do with whether or not the majority of the population knows where their next meal is coming from. But it annoys me that we’re moving closer to having things like keeping a house consistently cool enough in the summer or warm enough in the winter are becoming luxuries of the middle and upper classes.

Quality of life just took a nosedive for many Baltimore residents, especially in the dog days of July and August that lie just ahead.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

2007-05-31T05:16:00.000-05:00

This picture shows what the little garden in front of my house and around my sidewalk stairs and mailbox will look like soon, if all goes well.

Gardening has never been one of my strengths. In fact, to put it quite kindly, I suck at it. Plants run screaming when they see me set foot in a gardening store, or they would if they had feet. Years ago, a co-worker quit and left a hanging plant in his old office. It was green and leafy and vibrant, and I desperately wanted to move it into my own worker-bee veal box to brighten up my space.

“Go ahead, take it,” said my then-boss.

“No, I’m horrible with plants. I’ll just kill it.”

She grabbed it and moved it into my office. “Trust me,” she said, “these things are indestructible.”

It died.

So I never thought I’d be writing a blog entry about gardening. But The Boyfriend is an avid gardener, a former landscaper, and someone who is just generally good at this kind of stuff. Over the past few months, my yard has been transformed. We’ve dug and mulched, played and planted, and scoured the Home Depot and web sites for ideas. We’ve read and researched and learned to speak the language of “full sun” and “partial shade.”

We’ve planted hostas and impatiens, and a beautiful red flower called a zinca, which I’d never heard of before.
This weekend we were sitting around observing our (mostly his) handiwork, enjoying the front yard and the cardinals and robins that have made it their all-day diner. I felt more at peace and hopeful than I have in a long time. Even the neighbor across the street who supposedly pees out his bedroom window couldn’t screw up my view.

My mother always told me that gardening and flowers bring peace. And while I’ve always enjoyed other people’s efforts, I’ve never felt the calming satisfaction of prettying up my own little corner of the universe.

It makes me feel like I’m coming home, even though I never left.

The Balancing Act

2007-05-30T05:04:00.000-05:00

My neighbor is going back to work after a long hiatus. She’s as excited as a schoolgirl, and her face lights up when she talks about it.

We all know that a part of me has secretly longed for a stay-at-home life. Or maybe a part-time job life, I don’t know. I joke that my weasels are jealous of her weasels (these particular neighbors have ferrets too) because she’s around to play with them all day.

Anyway, we were chatting over the fence the other day, and she was telling me about her offer, and how she feels like a new grad jumping into the workforce again, since it has been years since her last job.

“I feel like I’m going to be a person again!” she grinned.

Meanwhile, as she gets ready to re-embark on the SS Worker-Bee, I’m interviewing people at my job for a temporary summer office clerk position. I was surprised by one of the women who came in to interview. She’s currently in a job making quite a bit more than I do, and is a respected professional in her field. Of course I had to inquire about why she’d want to leave that behind for a temporary clerical job making a so-so hourly rate.

Her answer: That she wants to feel like a person again.

Her life is entirely defined by her job. Her commute and the expectations of her company that she’ll work late whenever needed (and apparently it is needed quite a bit) leave her no time left over for herself, her friends, her family. It’s the nature of her profession, so she’s getting out of the game. She’s taken the last few years to pare down her debt and set herself up in a situation that lets her do just that.

It struck me how odd it was that I had these two conversations within days of one another. Both women are in their early fifties. One hasn’t had to work, and has spent her time defining her place in the world with other activities, but feels that it isn’t enough. So back she goes. The other has that identity-providing career so many seek, and she can’t wait to get out of it so that the rest of her soul can shine through.

Balance. It sounds so simple, but really is such a tricky thing to find. I see myself in both of them, and hope that I too find my way.

The Local Fortune-Teller

2007-05-29T05:09:00.000-05:00

Not far from where I live there sits a small, cozy inn. I’m not sure exactly how old it is, although I know it has been around longer than me.

I’ve been frequenting the place since I was a kid. My father and mother would take me there now and then, when we had a bit of extra cash. It was a good spot for sports on TV, cold beer and reasonably priced home-cooked food.

Even back then, I remember getting occasional glimpses of Ms. Betsy.

Ms. Betsy always seemed old to me, but it was the kind of old that didn’t age. Her full head of white hair and kind weathered face stayed the same whether I was 13 or 30. She was a working psychic who had made a corner of the inn her private office. She’d sit in a far corner of the small dining room under the light of a hanging lamp, her tarot cards spread before her on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and peer into the future of the local diners.

Some came to the inn just to have Ms. Betsy read their fortunes. The innkeepers never seemed to mind. Other diners who had wandered in for a plate saw her there and let their hot roast beef or chicken dinner grow cold while they edged their way to her table and asked her to predict what their tomorrows held. Ms. Betsy never had to wait long for a customer. She was a local establishment.

I never had my fortune told myself, by Ms. Betsy or anyone else. I guess I’ve always wanted to sort of let it unfold on its own. But I loved watching the joy, hope or fear flit across the faces of other diners as she looked into their worlds.

She was there when my father’s team won softball games and we’d stop by to celebrate. She was there when as a young college girl working a summer job in the city, I brought a 20-something suited professional I’d met there for dinner on a spur-of-the-moment date, hoping to impress him with the cozy quaintness of the inn and fast losing interest when I realized he thought the place was trite and redneck. She was there on many sad occasions, when I huddled at the inn with friends and family for a drink during brief escapes from mourning loved ones at the funeral home across the street. She was there during many meals with my ex and my friends, brief escapes from a long workday or refueling sessions after too much fun at the pub the night before.

The Boyfriend and I dined there recently. It was a spur of the moment walk up the street from our house, to get one of their famous salads loaded down with fat shrimp. We sat at a table – still red-and-white-checked, not far from where Ms. Betsy always held court. As we waited for our iced tea, I heard a waitress tell another customer that Ms. Betsy had recently passed away, and talk about how missed she is by all the locals.

Her table sat empty in spite of being one of the best seats in the house.

I don’t know if I believe in fortune-telling, although I’m pretty sure I don’t entirely disbelieve. I do know that Ms. Betsy brought hope and encouragement to many residents of this small one-horse kinda town. And I know that if there is such a thing as ghosts, hers is probably sitting in the lamplight at that corner table, just waiting for someone to ask about tomorrow.

Blog O' The Week #6

2007-05-25T05:28:00.000-05:00

Blog of the Week: The Road to Freedom

Author: SJRod55

URL: http://alex-roadtofreedom.blogspot.com

Why I Picked This Blog: "Road to Freedom" chronicles an experience that most of us will never be able to imagine. The author has been working for over a year to adopt and bring home Alex, a 13-year-old boy from Ethiopia. He chronicles everything from hardship and hope to bureaucracy to the joys of his interactions with Alex to Alex’s current life and environment to trying to get inside the head of the adolescent whose life is waiting in the wings.

It is an amazing journey, both heartbreaking and inspiring. And I can’t wait to read about Alex’s discovery of and adjustment to life in his new home.

I discovered “Road to Freedom” a few weeks ago, and each time I read it I am inspired. When I think things are rough with my “Office Space-ish” job or my never-enough finances, I read about the roadblocks Alex and his new family have encountered in this journey and their perseverance in moving forward, and I know that human beings can do anything if we love and care enough.

This is a critical time in Alex’s journey, so I hope you’ll visit.

I Think, Therefore I Am

2007-05-24T04:59:00.000-05:00

I’m a Thinking Blogger! At least, that’s what they tell me. Well, what AWannaBeWriter tells me. See for yourself over at http://awannabewriter.blogspot.com, where I’ve won the Thinking Blogger Award.

The idea behind this seems to be pretty simple – it’s a chance for bloggers to acknowledge other bloggers who make them think with their entries. Or at least, that’s how I’m taking it.

Here are the rules as borrowed from AWannaBe’s entry:

- If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.

-Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.

- Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

Since I've started "Weasels" and joined MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, I've come across some very thoughtful, interesting, humorous blogs. But since this award seems to be making its way through those communities quite well, I'm going to branch out a bit - or maybe what I'm actually doing is "going home" for my nominations.

I've been journaling over at Diaryland since 2001. I know that in the blogging community the concept of an "online journal" is something of a thing of the past. And Diaryland has been fraught with issues lately in terms of connectivity and functionality. In fact, it kind of limps along like a three-legged critter in a gazelle race, these days. But that doesn't mean that some of the writing I've encountered there isn't amazing. Some of the most longed-lived and consistently thought-provoking and funny blogs I've ever read, even after venturing out in the larger blogsphere, are right there.

So this is a chance to not only let some of the gang there know I really admire their work, but to also pay homage to my first online writing home. All of the folks I'm listing here have been maintaining their sites for years, and their stories have become an important part of my daily routine.

I'm tagging:

Bluemeany at http://bluemeany.diaryland.com. Em is a soldier in Iraq, and her story and the way she tells it will both make you think AND snarf your coffee. She's got a rare gift.

AWittyKitty at http://awittykitty.diaryland.com. She takes both the simplest and most complex happening in a day and turns them into something well worth reading. Her honesty and sense of humor will keep you coming back. Witty is aptly named.

Outfoxed at http://outfoxed.diaryland.com. It actually sounds like he'll soon be joining the ranks who have moved elsewhere in the blogosphere. But in the meantime, he's there, and he can tell a tale like no one else I know. He doesn't post frequently, but when he does I'm always one of the first there to read.

Argentum at http://argentum.diaryland.com. Hard to describe, but oh so worth the read (and the listen, as you'll see if you visit). He's going somewhere. Don't ask me where, but it's somewhere good.

Nutrageous at http://nutrageous.diaryland.com. Nancy's blog is one about having your life turned upside down and putting it all back together with grace, flair, humor and heart. She's not afraid to admit when the world is kicking just a little too hard, and that's what makes you so happy when she doesn't let it knock her down.

Play along and nominate others if you want to, gang. If not, that's great too. Just know I'm glad you're out there.

Home Sweet Home

2007-05-23T06:50:00.000-05:00

I’ve always said I’ll never live in a “development.” You know what I mean by that, right? One of those cookie-cutter high-end communities where all the houses look somewhat alike, everything is new and green but trees older than my grandparents are nowhere to be found, and “homeowners associations” tell you what to do with your space.

Inevitably, these associations, usually made up of people with nothing better to do than wander around the neighborhood scoping out others’ yards, force you to paint your front door off-white and put up blue curtains, even if you prefer a shade of grey and hate blue.

Now, if you live in one of these places, or even happen to be president of a homeowner’s association, please don’t take offense. This is nothing more than a personal preference on my part, and I doubt I’d ever be able to afford to move to your neck of the woods even if I wanted to. And I’m fully aware that the importance I attach to “freedom of expression” comes with its own set of downfalls. In fact, I affectionately refer to the street I live on as “Hillbilly Road.”

At the moment, Hillbilly Road features the following in terms of neighbors:

- The goobery guy who always looks like he’s drooling just a little, and who enjoys wandering up and down the street poking in other people’s mailboxes.

- The 20-something girl who missed her calling as a stripper, and who lives out her dream by waiting until the local good old boys get shooed out into their yards with “honey-do” lists from their wives, and then proceeds to sashay up and down the street in short-shorts and tight shirts and use lamp-posts and telephone poles as props.

- The Street Stripper’s lazy brother, who lives to watch the neighborhood from his upstairs bedroom window and occasionally just hangs his goods out the window and pees because he can’t be bothered with waddling to the bathroom.

- The neighbor lady who plays in her yard all day and watches all these goings-on with an eagle eye, and reports them to the rest of us.

So yeah, where I’ve chosen to live, I can do what I want with my own space and not be criticized by neighbors who are wealthier or better lawn-tenders than me, unless I go completely overboard and erect an “Ode to the Penis” sculpture in the front yard. But it isn’t perfect, and I can totally understand why others would give up a bit of autonomy and originality in exchange for a community free of wannabe strippers and window-peers.

To each his or her own, I guess.

Crack Kills

2007-05-22T06:50:00.000-05:00

We all need a little motivation to diet now and then.

I think I found mine last night.

We went up to the parent’s pub for horseshoes again. Like I mentioned before, I take the role of spectator in this weekly event. Most of the girls do. A man actually asked me last night why I wasn’t playing, and I responded “because I suck.” Hey, at least I’m honest.

Anyway, one woman did jump into the mix last night. She was so drunk she could barely stand up straight, let alone throw a horseshoe. Even so, I would have admired her bravery for putting herself, suckiness and all, into the game, had it not been for the crack.

She wasn’t a large woman. She was just wearing clothes that were a little too tight for her averaged-sized frame. Her tight white jeans couldn’t get themselves up over her little belly, so they settled below her hips and sort of squished everything upwards, kind of like a stuffed sausage. That was bad enough, but the worst part was that every time she threw a shoe, the jeans slid downwards a bit. At first, she hoisted them back up after every throw. But the drunker she got, the less aware she became of the fact that she was losing her pants.

Or who knows – maybe her buttcrack just told her it needed some air.

At any rate, by midway through her game, all of us who were sitting on the back deck watching had been repeatedly blinded by the glare of a full moon. Judging from the reactions on the other end of the yard, the view wasn’t much better from the front.

Yeah, there’s nothing like the sight of a little stuffed sausage and butt cleavage escaping its tight bonds to remind us to exercise and eat well. Because we all get a little drunk sometimes, and none of us want to end up being crack girl.

Crack kills, after all.

Hiring Your Boss

2007-05-21T05:01:00.000-05:00

I’ve spent a lot of time at work in recent weeks in interviews. That’s nothing new in the world of management. But these interviews have been a bit different.

We’re hiring my next boss.

Our current director is retiring, and by mid-summer we’ll have a new one. I consider myself lucky to have had an opportunity to participate in the process and give feedback to the people who will actually hire this person. The person who comes in next will make or break our work environment. That’s especially true for me because I happen to like working with my current boss.

Even so, the whole experience has been a bit strange. I’m sitting there in a conference room full of suits, listening to candidates sell themselves just like you do in any job interview. At the same time, I’m realizing these particular candidates are giving me the once-over, assessing whether or not they like what they see in terms of me as someone who will be reporting to them. Yep, interviewing your boss is weird.

The writer in me likes when new and strange things happen at work, since the experiences give me something new to write about. I turned this whole experience into an article for Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/244163/how_to_help_hire_your_next_boss_.html

Everything in the article is solid advice. The part I neglected to mention there are the “questions you REALLY want to ask when interviewing your new boss.”

1. So, what are your thoughts on flex-time? (Right Answer: It’s a beautiful thing.)

2. Working at home – good, bad or indifferent? (Right Answer: Good. In fact, working at home is the only thing more beautiful than flex time.)

3. Is the customer always right? (Right Answer: Of course not. In our environment, the customer is often wrong. I support the right of my staff to lay a verbal smackdown on their candy asses in situations where the customer is not only wrong but mean.)

4. What is your management style? (Right Answer: My door is open, but I’m not over your shoulder or up your butt.)

How do you motivate employees? (Right answer: Flex-time, work-at-home-opportunities, having an open door but not being over their shoulders or up their butts, and cold, hard cash.)

No, I didn’t ask these questions in the interview process. But you can bet I was trying to figure out what the answers would have been if I did.

Word-Clouds and Work

2007-05-19T14:10:00.000-05:00

My bachelor buddy is always talking about his employer’s obnoxiously overbearing marketing tactics. Think “in your face” with commercials involving cavemen and lizards, and you’ll know where my buddy earns his living.

Earlier this afternoon, The Boyfriend and I were at Home Depot picking up some flowers, and looked skyward to see one of those “skywriter” planes soaring overhead, leaving word-clouds behind it. After watching for a few seconds, we realized the word-clouds were yet another commercial for this particular company.

Of course, I had to call my friend and tell him to go out in his yard and look skyward, since he lives close enough that if we could see them he could too. In retrospect, I probably should have skipped it. If I walked out in my yard and saw letters advertising my employer dancing across the sky, I’d probably barf.

I mean, talk about not being able to get away from your job!

Bloggy Updates

2007-05-18T04:56:00.000-05:00

1. I usually do my Blog-O-The-Week thing on Fridays. But I’m thinking of cutting it back to once every two weeks. My thinking on that goes something like this:

Say you’re out in the dating world. There’s a guy who tells you you’re hot and smart and the top you’re wearing really accentuates your cleavage. You may smack him for the cleavage comment, even if just because he should realize your cleavage doesn’t need accentuation. But the hot and smart part is a bit flattering. Then you turn around and realize that this guy tells every girl in the bar she’s the next best thing to Angelina Jolie. All the sudden the comment isn’t quite so flattering anymore.

Maybe every other girl in the bar IS hot. But even though you’re in good company, you’d still rather a compliment thrown your way be special.

There are a ton of great blogs out there. Very few of them need cleavage accentuation. I could easily come up with a Blog O’ The Week indefinitely, or even two or three. But if I only do a few a month, they’ll be a bit more special.
At least in my own twisted little head.

2. I recently added an email notification to this blog. It’s over in the sidebar if you’re interested. Personally, I usually prefer to just check the blogs I enjoy reading now and then to see if they’ve been updated, because my email get so full of stuff that I tend to overlook half of it anyway. But I’m trying out different things to see what works. So there it is.

Happy Friday!

Caring For Your P-Ness

2007-05-17T05:37:00.000-05:00

One of my good friends called me on Tuesday with a rundown of weekend activities. There’s a local band playing Friday night that he wants to go see. Saturday is Wine in the Woods, (http://www.wineinthewoods.com/) which is always a great time. And Sunday is a local arts festival that always promises a good time.

I want to do it all. But when push comes to shove, I can’t commit myself to any of it.

I used to be the type of person who loved to plan her weekends in advance. Back then, I had a flexible, easy-come, easy-go kind of job. Now, I’m in an excruciatingly structured, regimented, run-all-day kind of work environment. It isn’t unusual for me to have four or five meetings a day, with deadline-oriented work jam-packed between them. Sometimes I feel like I need to block out time to pee in my calendar.

If you’ve ever taken the Myers-Briggs test (http://www.myersbriggs.org/) or something like it, you’re familiar with the concept of “J’s” and “P’s” or judgers and perceivers. Basically, these refer to one component of varying personality types. J’s are schedulers. They like to make a plan and stick to it. They prefer a structured, rarely changing work schedule and having each day plotted out. They’re the ones who go on vacation with an itinerary.

P’s, on the other hand, are the spontaneous type. They balk at too much structure and scheduling, and prefer to keep things open-ended and flexible. Having a road map for each day makes them feel confined. They’re the ones who think a vacation is just jumping in a car and going somewhere, and figuring out what to do when they get there.

A J worries that if each day isn’t planned, scheduled and structured, not enough will get done. A P worries that if too much time is already blocked out, they’ll miss the opportunity to do something they’d rather be doing because they’re already committed.

I took the test years ago, when I worked in a career center, and my results were, shall we say, rather “P-oriented.” One of the career counselors I worked with was also a “P,” and we used to joke about how our rigid work schedules “cramped our P-nesses.”

And yes, we did this partly because it was so much fun to watch co-workers react to two women talking easily about “their P-nesses.”

My reaction to my friend’s weekend rundown made me realize that my work isn’t just cramping my P-ness these days. It’s stomping all over it.

I love wine festivals. I love catching a good band. I love hanging out in the beer garden with all my local buddies, taking in the sights and smells of a spring festival. But I couldn’t commit to doing any of those things. I took one look at my calendar for the week and decided I couldn’t put one more “commitment” on it for my two days off. I may go to one of these events. I may go to them all. But if I decide I’d rather hang out at my parent’s pub, read a book, work on my yard or write a short story instead, then that’s what I want to do.

You can’t always control what your job requires of you. You can work to change your situation, but if you need a paycheck you also have to live in it in the meantime. And if doing so is cramping and crushing your inner P-ness, when the weekend rolls around you need to take it out and let it breathe.

Does A Bear Crap In The Woods?

2007-05-16T04:45:00.000-05:00

Last night, The Boyfriend and I were kicking back having dinner and catching up on our day. We had the TV on as background noise, tuned into Animal Planet.

They were showing a “Top 10 animal medics” series about critters who either instinctively do things to or just have bodies that somehow manage to ward off common ailments and issues. There were monkeys who steal charcoal from local humans so that they can chew on it to counteract toxins in the mango leaves they eat, and macaws who munch clay for the same reason.

In fact, there were all sorts of interesting critters. But as usual, the foibles of the human mammal were what held our attention. After all, we’re the species that tries so darn hard to be polite, and in doing so often look – or sound – downright silly.

The show came to a segment on bears and how they manage to pack on as much as 30 pounds a week by chowing down on fat-filled salmon, and then go off and hibernate for months at a time. The narrator mentioned two or three times how the bear hibernates for months without “going to the bathroom.”

That phrase is so ingrained in my head that at first I didn’t even think about it. But The Boyfriend started chuckling, and when I said “what” he replied “bears don’t go to the bathroom.”

I was confused. Of course they do. They pee and take dumps just like the rest of us living, moving things. After a moment, though, I realized what was so funny. In order to avoid actually using technical terms like “urinate,” “defecate,” or “expel waste” or more vulgar slang like “drop a load,” or “take a pee,” the show conjured up images of a bear waddling down the hallway in his log cabin, newspaper in hand, and settling himself down on the toilet for a morning confessional. Or maybe wandering down a mountain trail into a campsite public privy, excusing himself as a bunch of shrieking campers locked themselves in their stalls for fear of being eaten alive, when all the bear really wanted to do was take a leak.

No, bears don’t go to the bathroom. The saying is “does a bear shit in the woods?” and the answer is yes.

But we humans are funny things when it comes to our way with words. And now I can’t get the image of a grizzly seated on a toilet and roaring over the fact that someone used all the toilet paper and didn’t replace the roll out of my head.