heliotrollop

Do you forward "inspirational" emails?

2011-04-06T14:59:00.000-06:00

Awhile back my office was dumb enough to put me on the hiring committee for a new person. We had a list of Human Resources Approved questions that we could ask during interviews. None of those questions were these questions, but these are the ones I really wanted the answers to:

Do you get to work really early? Because that bugs me. So please don’t mention how early you arrived at work or the fact that you were up before sunrise, ever.

Do you drink coffee? If not, please back away slowly. If so, what kind? Will you bring a pint of half-and-half every once in awhile? Do you understand that "flavored creamer" isn't the same thing?

If you are female, do you know what "shrill" sounds like and how to avoid it? What’s your dress and shoe size? How do you feel about lending clothes to co-workers? (Maybe just that awesome jacket you're wearing? Just for a day?) Do you have free shipping codes for any major online retailers?

If you are male, do you understand what a unisex bathroom is? Do you faithfully wipe down the toilet seat after you use it? Do you have any power-trippy issues that will need to be worked out as the result of being in an office of mostly women?

If transgendered, are you at peace with it or do you still have a lot of unresolved issues you’ll need to work out at the office? And if male-to-female, what’s your dress and shoe size? How do you feel about loaning clothes?

Do you carefully wash your hands, with soap, each and every time you use the restroom?

How are you and your significant other getting along? When you’re not getting along, do you need to talk about it? How loudly and how often?

Do you watch a lot of reality television and then talk about it excitedly the next morning while your colleagues are trying to pour their coffee?

Someone brought in a big plate of chocolate chip cookies and now there’s only one left. WHAT DO YOU DO?

Do you wear a lot of perfume or cologne, and if so, would you be willing to stop? Do you understand that most people don’t want to smell a synthesized rainy tangerine orchard surrounded by a jasmine field?

Do you understand that your bestie friend can hear you just fine on the other end of the phone when you use your normal speaking voice?

Give me your best, most inspiring, most unobtrusive pep-talk about why I should go to the gym at lunch.

Now say something reassuring and non-judgmental when I tell you I’m going to stay in and surf gossip websites while trying to keep bits of burrito from falling into my keyboard.

Do you know how to get beans and cheese out of a keyboard?

Making use of lead.

2011-04-04T15:36:00.000-06:00

I unilaterally declared that last Friday would be a "mental health day" and didn't go to work. In truth, I was feeling terribly run down, if not actually sick, and Thursday had been pretty hellish. So poof.

The problem with taking a mental health day, I discovered, was that it quickly became clear just how bad I'd needed it and how, as much as I don't want to admit it, I've reached The Point with this job that I've reached with other jobs. The Point where you realize you just can't keep it up for much longer. All the crap you told yourself about how it's a good job and you're lucky to have one has also gone poof. Now it's just a matter of what's next.

Anyway, the unplanned day off was not a total loss and certainly lots better than being truly sick and horking up terrible things all day. I did this:

Is the photo this bad on purpose? Yes it is. It allows me to tell myself that it's not my drawing that sucks, it's my phone camera. (I like my bubbles intact.) I took that drawing class about a year ago now and my practicing of all that I learned has been, um, sparse. But it felt really, really good to give it a try again. So yeah. Mental health.

Jane Doe

2011-03-30T14:29:00.000-06:00

My embarrassingly lame, totally meaningless name for this blog was all about plausible deniability. I wanted to experiment with having a blog but I didn’t want people to be able to find it or know that it was mine unless I told them. I had a link to it on my Facebook page for awhile, but I removed it as my friend circle started to include more professional contacts who might not appreciate my trashy mouth and half-formed opinions. I can’t figure out whether the new normal is having a traceable internet footprint or pretending like I’m in the witness protection program with pseudonyms for my pseudonyms.

Yesterday was strange. In addition to a lot of other stuff that I really can’t blog about, I was getting emails here and there from both friends and distant acquaintances about the Barry Bonds trial or whatever shenanigans he’s ~~injected~~ up to. Why? Because his longtime girlfriend and I have the same name. Cue the stream of quotes about “our” sex life, “my” testimony about his shriveling nads, and his threats to violently remove “my” breast implants.

Just as I was about to leave work, I checked Twitter and saw that The Bloggess was asking people to PayPal her eleven cents because she needed $1,000 to buy something “incredibly stupid.” Eleven cents. What the hell.

I did it, and tossed off a little comment with my payment. She quoted it on her blog. I sort of feel like I got a shout-out from the Pope(ess)!

It’s the little things, right? Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to obsessively checking my credit report for evidence of identity theft.

image via Entertainment Earth

The Secret Is That I'm Easily Duped

2011-03-22T16:23:00.000-06:00

I hate to buy bras. Hate it. For starters, I generally hate to wear them, but I am “of a size” and, after breastfeeding, “of a sag” that makes bra-wearing an unfortunate necessity. But I’ve always found bras to be uncomfortable. Some are more tolerable than others, but then I have to consider how it looks with a shirt over it. I mean, I generally find sports bras to be okay, but they give me the weird uni-boob and look wrong under my semi-professional wardrobe for my semi-stupid job.

Also, they’re expensive. Annoyingly expensive. So when I buy one, I want it to last as long as possible. I wash them as delicately as I would a baby bunny (I mean, I imagine) and hang them to dry. Before yesterday, my regular, non-sports collection had consisted of two very old nude colored ones, plus a newer black one and red (ta-dow!) one. The nude ones were looking pretty bad, both on me and off, and the final straw was a few days ago when I walked, fully clothed, into the living room and my husband said, “What’s wrong with your boobs?”

I checked the mirror and saw that the failing foam shape and overall structure weakness was making it look like I’d strapped two shaved hedgehogs to my chest. And the bras were becoming more uncomfortable each day. Okay, I surrender.

But here’s another thing I hate about buying bras: Where do I go? I used to go department store lingerie sections, but the department stores where I live are always low on staff and the selection overwhelms me. Racks and racks (heh) of different brands and styles and price points and … ugh. The brands fit differently, so you have to try on a couple of each to figure out what your size is and the next thing you know, three hours of your life have passed and you’re wandering though the housewares section begging a 22-year-old community college dude to ring up your new boulder holders.

So I hate myself for it a little, but I invariably end up at Victoria’s Secret. My size stays pretty consistent across their styles and the whole miserable process, with the endless pictures taller-than-life sexyface models staring me down, takes less time. There’s always a gaggle of 20-something community college ladies with gobs of eyeliner offering to help and digging through magic drawers to find your size. I sneaked over during my lunch hour on Monday and found a couple on my own before I was approached by an Eyelinered One. She breathlessly asked me if I’d tried an “INCREDIBLE BRA.” Well, no! What does it do? Pick stocks? Make airy soufflés? Will I be able to do a standing back flip if I’m wearing it? She told me I just had to try it.

I’m obviously a skeptic, so I tried on the two I’d picked out first. One was okay – not great, but I could live with it if I had to. The other was awful, torturous, hideous terribleness. Fine. Let’s take the INCREDIBLE for a test drive.

And oh … my goodness. So. Much. Better. Instant comfort with lots of padding around the pokey parts. Good shape. Lifts and separates. Prayers answered (if I prayed). Done! Sold! I’d made a decision so quick that I was going to have time to sneak over to Sephora for a new eyeliner, which I suddenly felt I needed. She’d given me a black INCREDIBLE BRA to try on while she hunted down the nude color in my size, so when I found her I handed back the black and told her to find me TWO nudes. While she did, I found a hot pink racer-back INCREDIBLE. These babies were going to mean that I potentially could go years without buying another bra. Mission accomplished, and with a hot pink bonus!

I took them home, washed them lovingly, and hung them to dry. This morning I got dressed knowing that nice looking and comforted boobs were in store for me. After I put it on, I marveled that even the straps on this bra that I hadn’t actually tried on at the store were just about perfect … just needed to be tightened a bit. And that was when the universe started to snicker.

THE VICTORIA SECRET INCREDIBLE BRA HAS UN-ADJUSTABLE STRAPS! GRRAARRGGGH!! How can this be? No little metal thingy to adjust? I hadn’t noticed in the store because I was trying on the black one, which I knew I wouldn’t buy. To be fair, I only wanted to pull up the straps a couple of centimeters, but I CAN’T. I looked on their website to see if I was missing something. Was there a magic word? A remote control? No. Apparently the VS people think this has “self-adjusting straps.” They don’t explain this. How can they “self-adjust” if they don’t adjust at all? My allegedly anthropomorphic bra, that can’t make a soufflé worth a damn, is going to adjust itself? I am not needed for this task? Bitch, please.

I’ve been wearing the damn thing all day, and it’s not like the straps are slipping down. They’re just a little looser than I like. And it’s driving. Me. Crazy.

image via sewthankful.com

If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Just Do It Anyway

2011-03-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve noticed something weird about getting my hair cut: If I walk out of the salon thinking, “Man! Good cut! Good highlights! I’m kind of awesome today!” then I’ll get lukewarm reactions from the rest of the world. Like , “Oh! You went a bit shorter! It looks … nice.” But if I’m sitting in the chair on the verge of tears because I regret what I told the stylist to do or hate the way she did it, I’ll later get “Wow!! I love your hair! Who does your hair because I need to find someone new? I’d love to get my hair cut like that!”

Yesterday I walked out of the salon like I was in a shampoo commercial, tossing my hair around and feeling like the spring in my step could make me take flight. My husband is out of town (and of course the kid didn’t notice my ‘do) so I hadn’t really seen anyone I knew until this morning. Co-worker saw me at the coffee pot and said, “Oh jeez, you look tired today. Are you okay?” Next co-worker: “Oh, let me see … yeah, you sure cut off some hair there!”

I think this is the equivalent of saying that I have a good personality.

I was feeling all grumbly about this today until lunchtime, when I decided to go for a walk. It’s a beautiful day here, and I feel a little guilty saying that given what Japan has just been through. But I walked on over to a second-hand store and found a fantastic dress for $20. Which is good, because before I found it, I wasn’t sure how I was going to find the motivation to come to work on Monday. Now I can wear the dress and the new hair and if one person even starts a back-handed non-compliment, they get a pen in the eye.

image via heartlessmachine.wordpress.com

Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You

2011-03-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

This is why the internet is both wonderful and terrible, but mostly wonderful: I was blog-surfing when I came across this one. And it had a link to another blog. I'll stand by while you look this blogger's contribution to something called Sketchbook Project 2011. (Yes, I just linked to it twice. It's that awesome.)

Fantastic, right? So then I clicked on to find out what the Sketchbook Project was. And it's this super wonderful thing where you send a little bit of dollars, some people send you a sketchbook, you fill it up with fun and send it back, and it becomes part of a traveling art exhibit that I really wish was coming to my town but it's not.

I absolutely love stuff like this. I don't know why, but I do. I've been looking at the Flickr where other Sketchbook Project contributors have posted their work. Tickled, I am.

And the only bummer is that Sketchbook Project 2011 has closed. It's too late to be part of it. Except ...

...I poked around a little more and found The Fiction Project. It's the same idea: Send them $20 and they will send you a bar-coded notebook in which you write and illustrate (or whatever) a work of fiction, which also becomes part of a traveling exhibit and eventually a library. And you can get email notifications whenever someone checks out your finished work of fiction! But who cares! I sort of want to do this! I think.

To be honest, it scares the absolute hell out of me. In a good way.

I had a little conversation with myself when I found this. I mean, I could buy a notebook for way less money and just do this for myself. Aren't I giving in to my problematic impulsiveness again? But! But! This has a deadline. And a feeling of being part of something. Not just me being a dork for no reason -- it will be me being a dork with a group.

Also, it's not quite as intense as NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 words (!) in a month, which didn't cost anything, but which I failed to do.

So I think I'm going to do it. Worst case is that I overpaid for a notebook. And it wouldn't be the first time for that.

Eleanor Roosevelt pic credit

Just Pick One

2011-02-23T15:08:00.002-07:00

In a vain attempt to distract myself from all of the stuff I mentioned yesterday, as well as some stuff at work today that has prompted an ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? response that I can only scream inside my head, I will now talk movies.

First, a little secret about me: I hate “What is your favorite _____” questions. Favorite color, favorite sushi order, favorite book … who can answer this? My opinions change at least hourly and largely depending on my mood. But people who ask these questions are just trying to learn something about you, right? So if asked, I’ll usually play along. Last week someone asked me what my favorite movie was. I sputtered out “Fight Club.” On most days, at most times, this movie is probably in my Top Five. It’s original; it’s creative; it’s subtle in certain ways; and it has Brad Pitt AND Ed Norton. What’s not to like? (I know, the gross house and the soap-from-fat thing. But I love that too.)

But there’s another one perpetually in the Top Five. Allow me to detour for a moment: I had the same roommate all through college. We had the perfect roommate relationship, from the dorms and through several apartments. We were very, very different. We were friends, definitely, but it was unlike my other friendships. Many times we’d end a discussion with both of us wrinkling our brows and wondering how the other could hold the opinion that she did. Because we lived together in close quarters (did I mention the dorms?) I think we knew each other’s deepest darkest dirt, but we held it close to the vest. Sometimes we went places together and sometimes we had our own separate things going on, and it never caused hurt or feelings of being left out. As roommates go, it was ideal.

In any case, we were in our fourth year of living together when she came back from a movie with her boyfriend. She said the movie they’d seen was, hands down, the worst movie she’d ever seen. Worst. She went on and on for awhile about how much she hated it and how she couldn’t believe they’d stayed for the whole thing because it was The Worst Movie Ever.

Flash forward two weeks: My boyfriend at the time and I had planned to go see a movie at the dollar theater (do they have these anymore?), but it was sold out when we got there. The only movie starting in the next few minutes was The Worst Movie My Roommate Had Ever Seen. She’d been so passionate in her hatred that I told the boyfriend that we should just leave, but he convinced me that since it was only a dollar, we should give it a try and leave if it sucked. Okay.

Flash forward two hours and I am walking out of the theater, half sobbing, proclaiming that I had just seen The Best Movie Ever. Best Ever. Stop the presses because I have found my favorite movie! Except first I had to blaze home and tell my roommate that she had zero taste in movies. She took it in stride, firmly believing that I actually had no taste.

Behold:

It was on some TV channel last night. I hadn’t seen it since I watched on DVD while I was in labor. But it made me all weepy again. Yes, I appreciate that no one would accuse Lawrence Kasdan of being overly subtle or nuanced with his message on this one, but I just love it. I love Kevin Kline’s world intersecting with Danny Glover’s and the thing with the baby (sob!) and Mary Louise Parker who I just love in everything and want to be best friends with. I still love it.

And for the record, I feel it’s important to mention that I hated Crash. Crash was a cheap ripoff of Grand Canyon to me and I still can't believe it won Best Picture.

I may in fact need my own planet.

Ragey Spendy

2011-02-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

It’s been a depressing week or so, hasn’t it? First, the House vote to defund Planned Parenthood. I am one of the few women I know who’s never actually been inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, but I’m a longtime donor and supporter. My never having used their services is just the result of luck and idiocy. I either had private insurance, access to a student health center, or when I had neither, I just wouldn’t go to the doctor. That last part is the idiotic part. I was furious – FURIOUS – about the House vote this weekend, but I’m trying to calm down. So I’m not going to say a whole lot about it except this: My friends who have used Planned Parenthood’s clinics have done so mostly because they needed a gyno checkup or … wait for it … primary health care. Like they had a bad cold or a weird rash or something. Even though PP is supposed to be for “women’s health services” they often end up becoming primary healthcare providers. And literally every person who has told me about their experience with PP has been beside themselves with how fair, professional, and helpful the place was. An acquaintance recently posted something lamenting the vote to defund Planned Parenthood on Facebook, and someone I don’t know commented to her that PP was just an “abortion mill” in it for the money. Thankfully, the acquaintance quickly shut this misinformed person down, starting with “It’s a non-profit organization, you dolt!” But I find it stunning that there are people out there who think things like this.

And, okay, I’ll say a little more. I have friends who have received abortions at Planned Parenthood. And they all reported the same professional, caring experience. Because things happen that you don’t plan on, and sometimes an abortion is the most tolerable option out of a few very difficult options. For countless personal reasons that don’t fit into a single cookie-cutter. But people who get hysterical about this seem to forget that Planned Parenthood is chiefly concerned with helping you plan if and when you want to be a parent. Education and birth control and stuff like that. Go figure.

And then they voted to defund PBS. Really? REALLY?? We’re cool with no more Sesame Street or News Hour or Frontline or shows about building things and cooking things and sewing things and planting things on Saturday mornings? We’re okay with being even dumber than we already are? We’re okay with our giant, hypnotizing screens streaming in endless messages from for-profit hosts only?

And now this Wisconsin thing. I heard some spokesperson for Wisconsin’s governor say that in difficult economic times, state and local governments just can’t afford collective bargaining. What?? That makes absolutely no sense, but the only conclusion I can try to assemble from this nonsense is that public school teachers and cops and firefighters make too much money or otherwise just get too much from their glorious, glorious jobs. Like trying to figure out who is defacing the boys’ bathroom and acting as surrogate parents to kids whose parents have abdicated their responsibilities. All while being paid a salary that would be insulting to the average governmental spokesperson.

Honestly, some days it feels like I’m on some strange planet populated mostly with people whose values I don’t understand. It’s not just that I disagree, it’s really more like they’re speaking some other language and operating under a completely different structure for a civilized society.

But … I don’t want to make a too big of a deal about it. So I signed all of the petitions and made all of the donations. And then today I bought some adorable note cards and post cards to soothe my scraped and baffled soul. (I know, I know.) If you want me to send you one, email me your address. I promise to use it only to send you the adorable (opinion-free) fruits of my spendthrift ways.

image credit

This Story Would Be Much Better If I Had Pictures

2011-02-17T11:51:00.002-07:00

I went to a Very Small Town for work this week. It’s a takes a bit over three hours to get there from here and I had to go up on Monday afternoon, which happened to be Valentine’s Day. I knew this when I left, but after three (plus) hours on the road, I sort of forgot.

Just outside of Raton there are several miles of open grassy plains that glimmer spectacularly in the afternoon sun. The dried grass was a carpet of gold, perfectly edged by the mountains in the distance. By the time I got to my hotel, the Very Antiseptic Holiday Inn Express, I was actually feeling kind of zen and peaceful.

Now judge if you must, but after three hours in the car, I wanted to have dinner and I wanted dinner to be accompanied by a beer. These wants eliminated the fast food places as possibilities, if I hadn’t mentally eliminated them already. So I asked the HI Express folks to recommend a place for dinner. They gave me three options – the only non-fast-food places in town, really. The parking lot of the first one was full, so I drove down the block and found the same situation at the other two. Weird, I thought. But then I remembered: V-Day. The exterior of the first place was the best of the three (which is saying very little for it, unfortunately) so I went back there.

It had a little “country store” to walk through on the way to the dining room. As I approached the entryway to the dining room, my visual field was assaulted by the prevalent décor color, mauve, which was dotted with poufs of white hair and hunched shoulders. I had chosen the Oldie McOlderson place. I was starting to politely retreat when a poufy-haired lady wearing a sweatshirt with a pattern of hearts, faded from dozens of washings, moved toward me. I smiled and said, “I was just looking for a place for dinner, but it looks like you’re full.” Still backing away.

She said, “Oh, we’ll find room for you. Would you mind sitting at the bar?”

The bar! Great! That must be different, right?

Wrong. She led me to a small bar in the corner of the large dining room, past a freckle-scalped man who was playing a piano. Ambiance, I guess. The bar, I’m certain, had been made as a final project for the local high school’s shop class many years ago. The outer edge was padded in mauve vinyl. The padded edge was huge, forcing me to contort my upper body and arms over it to reach the surface of the bar.

I chose one of the only things on the menu that wasn’t a 24-oz beef slab and didn’t have “breaded” in the description – fish. And I ordered a beer. And as I sipped it, feeling the bifocaled eyes of the room on me, the piano guy started to play “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”

Really.

As it turns out, the restaurant owners just forgot to mention that the fish was heavily breaded. It was served with a baked potato (still in the foil wrap), a single 1-inch cube of cantaloupe (???) and a side of broccoli stems. That’s right, just the stems. Not a floret to be found. And a big white dinner roll that had obviously been baked at a factory several weeks earlier. I imagined that the elderly dinner guests were speculating that I’d earlier gone home to find a heart-shaped Whitman’s Sampler addressed to another woman, and after confronting my boyfriend/husband, I’d shot him in a jealous rage and heaved him into the trunk of my car. And then I stopped at this place for a final dinner before hitting the highway, Mexico-bound.

Small towns can screw with your head.

I drank the beer, picked at the dinner, went back to the hotel and bought a package of M&Ms from the vending machine. Then I went back to my room, sat on the bed, and flipped through magazines while watching back-to-back episodes of Intervention. Exchanged a few lovey texts with my husband and went to bed.

I don’t think Hallmark makes a card that covers this particular Valentine experience.

image credit

Windshield Work

2011-02-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

In just a few hours I will be hopping in the car, cranking up the radio, and driving to Raton, New Mexico. (It’s pronounced “Ra-TONE” so that its residents don’t have to ponder what it means to live in “RAT-on.”) This little town has a couple of fast-food restaurants, a couple of gas stations, a motel or two, and a courthouse. That last one is the reason I have to go, but the rest of the list makes it possible. I’m kind of worried about the food part though. I don’t do fast food, and many years ago when I went up there with a colleague for a hearing, we ate lunch in the only local, non-fast-food place we could find. He got food poisoning. It was a long drive back.

In any case, I’m sort of looking forward to the three-ish-hour drive. Or trying to convince myself that I’m looking forward to it. I used to have to make drives to rural pits like this all of the time, but with this job it’s pretty rare. So I’ll scream at talk-radio stations (one of my favorite tension relievers!) while I’m still in range, then sing like I’m Beyonce as I zip along the highway that cuts through a lot of open space. I’ll fret about what to eat for dinner, then settle in to my little motel room and read or doodle. And then tomorrow I’ll go to court, lose a hearing, and drive home.

It’s a glamorous life. Happy Valentine’s Day.

I Wish I Was The Moon

2011-02-07T13:33:00.004-07:00

Hi.

I’ve documented time and again in this space that not getting enough sleep sucks. I’m too lazy to link to it right now, so you’re just going to have to trust me. I’m too lazy because two nights ago the Insomnia Monster snuck up on me and walloped me over the head with no warning and I have no idea why. Two nights ago, I got about three hours of sleep before waking at 3:00 am for good. Well, I got back to sleep at about 6:30 before my son woke me at 7:30 to show me the cash left by the Tooth Fairy. And then I went back to sleep between 8:00 and 9:30 after my husband got up. I’m sure these details are important.

Last night I was exhausted when I went to bed … and I stayed awake. There’s a possibility that I dozed off sometime between 1:30 and 3:30, but that’s it. That’s it, people. And now I’m at work and not quite functioning. I will look back at this post sometime in the future and probably paste a note to the top of my computer monitor reminding me to never again write while delirious with exhaustion. But we’re here now, aren’t we?

I have to be at work today because I only worked one day last week after school was canceled for four straight days due to weather / natural gas shortages. My office was closed for three of those days and the fourth I got to take as “vacation.” But now I’m way behind on a number of things and yet here I am, at work and not working. I have a conference call in 3.5 hours and I’m desperately trying to keep the stuff I read this morning in my head so that I can regurgitate it on the call.

Anyway, I have some parenting advice. If you have a kid, never let that kid know what a “birthday” is, or at least conceal the fact that people celebrate them with cake and parties. Because otherwise the following might happen: Your kid might insist on carrot cake cupcakes for school, which you don’t know how to make. So you’ll try to make them the day before his birthday and acknowledge your failure as you pull half-burned, half-bubbling masses of shit-flavored lava in muffin tins from the oven. (I now hate you, Ina Garten.) So then you’ll panic and go to the cupcake store and buy really expensive, professional cupcakes. And then when THE NEXT THREE DAYS of school are cancelled due to snow/freezing temps, you’ll realize that the spendy cupcakes won’t last until school resumes on Monday. So you’ll have to give those cupcakes away to your spouse’s office staff and then buy MORE cupcakes on Sunday and then deliver them to school on Monday. A day you probably shouldn’t be doing any extra driving anyway because you’re so damn tired because you haven’t slept for the preceding two nights. My point is, tell your kid that birthdays are to be spent in quiet meditation and solitude.

I’m having another cup of coffee now, which is sure to screw up any chance of sleeping tonight. All of those insomnia websites tell you to either cut out caffeine completely or limit yourself to no more than two cups of coffee a day and don’t drink any caffeine after 10:00 am. Reee-dick! If I didn’t sleep because of the insomnia, how am I to function during the parts of the day when most people are awake and expecting me to do things? And a new problem: I learned last night that Unisom makes me feel like I’m going to stop breathing at any minute. So that’s not good. The Benadryl / Simply Sleep products do nothing for me. I had an Ambien script last year, but that’s all gone now because ~~my husband ended up taking half of it himself and~~ there is a 60-90 day wait to get an appointment with my primary care doc.

Speaking of health care, yesterday I felt really smart because I spent my time on the elliptical machine at the gym watching C-SPAN testimony about the health care legislation instead of crap TV. The bad news was that after doing that, I became ever more convinced that the individual mandate just isn’t going to fly. But then I started to wonder whether the Obama team knew that to begin with and just put it in there to appease the health insurance companies, and they’re hoping that if the individual mandate is unconstitutional, it will be surgically (heh) removed and the rest of the legislation will stand. And I don’t know how I feel about that, except that I wish we had single payer.

Wait, what was I saying?

image cred

Pains In The Neck

2011-01-31T16:39:00.000-07:00

When I had been a full-fledged lawyer for about a year, a well-respected female lawyer at the firm I’d just started working for told me, “Practicing law is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.” She was completely serious. And I had one of those moments where a tsunami of emotions rushed toward my face. I wasn’t sure if I was going to start laughing or crying or vomiting or all of the above, and suddenly all of my attention was focused on making the flesh of my face hold it back. I mean, I’d only been at the lawyer thing for a year, but I was pretty sure I didn’t like being a lawyer. As a matter of fact, I’d spent most of the third year of law school trying to come to terms with the idea that, while I’d basically enjoyed law school, the thought of being a lawyer was giving me existential hives.

The conversation with the “clothes on” woman was nearly ten years ago. I spent less than a year at that firm, where I would literally fantasize about the building catching fire and burning down, before I was finally rescued by another firm that was much more pleasant. Pleasant in the universe of practicing law, I mean. I was working there when my son was born, took 12 weeks of maternity leave, went back to work for six months, and then quit for 18 months because . . . I just couldn’t do it. I could list a bunch of reasons, but I think the most important one was that I didn’t care enough about being a lawyer to put myself through the hell of trying to do it with an infant. And of course I was indescribably lucky that we could afford for me to freak out and not make money for 18 months.

During those 18 months, lots of people asked me if I was bored, if being at home with a baby all day was mind-numbing, if I missed my job. And I would smile and say that I really missed my friends at work. Which was true. And I missed my income. But that was about it. At least, that was it until month 15 or so, when it started to sink in that if I stayed out much longer, I might have a hard time getting back in. And if I couldn’t get back in, I didn’t really have any other skills and I might someday find myself being an over-educated (and indebted) grocery checker or in-home daycare provider.

So back to work I went. The kidlet was old enough for preschool, and I’d had a really generous “break” from the work-for-pay world. It’s been five years since I returned and three years since I moved from the firm to the public sector. Many days I have looked back at those fantastic 18 months and pined for the freedom. I still don’t like being a lawyer. I've had way more fun, both clothed and otherwise, doing other things. But my biggest complaint these days is that I never have enough time to do anything.

But then the other day I was whining about it all and my husband said something about it being okay if I wanted to quit my job. I’m pretty sure I got whiplash from whipping my neck around so fast. In fact, I wondered if the rapid movement of my head jostled my brain because I thought, I don’t want to quit my job. It’s pretty secure. My performance reviews have been good. The benefits, though pricey, are really good. I don’t run around in the late afternoon spraying lemon scented furniture polish on all flat surfaces to make it seem like I did something productive with my day.

Not that I ever did that or anything.

Gah. Honest self-reflection is brutal sometimes.

Why XY?

2011-01-27T16:51:00.001-07:00

Okay another one.

This will be a quick little review because time is short, but I just finished reading Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D. I have an almost-seven-year-old boy, and how we educate and raise kids today fascinates me. Seeing how my son reacts to traditional public school has been interesting and, if I’m being honest, a little worrying.

But then again, I’m a worrier.

This book starts out with all sorts of mind-blowing information – like the fact that boys don’t hear as well as girls, physiologically, and since the overwhelming majority of teachers are women who typically speak at a lower volume than men, it’s no wonder that boys seem like they’re not paying attention or getting frustrated easily. Boys and girls use very different parts of their respective brains to do the same task. School-aged boys typically retain completely different sorts information from reading fiction than girls. I was eating this stuff up.

But things go downhill. Pretty early on, the author notes that he’s talking about “typical” males – males who like more physical play and engage in risky behavior and relish competition. Every time the author mentions this, he assures the reader that if this isn’t what your son is like, be patient, because he’s going to discuss this in Chapter 9. Chapter 9. All will be revealed in Chapter 9. As it turns out, my son is pretty risk-averse and calm, and doesn’t really like the idea of winners and losers, so bring on Chapter 9, I thought.

Chapter 9 is titled “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Sissy, and Tomboy.” I laughed out loud when I reached it. Way to break it to me gently, doc! To be fair, the chapter discusses how boys who exhibit more “feminized” behavior won’t necessarily be gay, but the boy who is the captain of the football team could be. But the chapter ends with the idea that boys who like to read a lot, who don’t like competitive sports, and who don’t have a pack of friends to hang out with are “geeks” and this is something to be worried about and try to correct early.

Because, you know, what meaningful contribution could a geek possibly make? Or a gay man? Yes, let's "fix" this. I won't rest until my son looks like this guy:

Also, there are lots of horror stories about early sexual behavior; drugs and alcohol; depressed, violent boys; and depressed, anorexic girls.

I guess what I’m saying is that he started off strong and then rapidly descended to a pearl-clutching Good Housekeeping article.

But, you know, I’m glad I read it. I'm sure I'll be forgiven if I’m not quite ready to FREAKOUT because my son doesn’t match a stereotype.

Trading Numbers

2011-01-19T15:55:00.001-07:00

Another book! To quote Seinfeld: It was good; I almost read the whole thing!

The whole thing was The Smartest Guys In The Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. Why this book? Well, I’ve long been plagued by this fear that I’m a moron. Things happen in the world and I don't know why or how and it bugs me. The financial crisis of the past couple of years falls into that category, though lately I’ve been feeling like I understand how the subprime mortgage crisis happened and the ripple effect it had. Sometimes I sort of understand what a credit default swap is. A few months ago I happened to catch an interview with Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, who wrote All of the Devils Are Here: The Hidden Story of the Financial Crisis. It was a really interesting interview and I was all set to march right out and buy the book (full price, hardcover) when I actually managed to stop myself. Honestly people, I’m really really trying to get a grip on the impulsive spending. I told myself to see if it was at the local public library yet. It wasn’t, but The Smartest Guys In The Room was, so here we are.

Let me first say that there is something intensely gratifying about reading about people who irresponsibly, greedily, and stupidly lost billions of dollars in a book you checked out for free.

My criticism of the book is this: Bethany McLean is former investment banker, and I think this may be the reason the book felt a little out of step with what needed to be explained and what didn’t. At one point, the narrative stops to explain to the reader what a “stock” is. I’m a moron, but I know what a share of stock is. But then they would toss around acronyms and banking/finance terms that would bounce right over my head. And since my most reliable reading time is right before bed, it wasn’t like I was going to hop out of the covers, fire up the computer and start Googling. So there were some things I didn’t understand. (And sometimes the book was better than a half-tab of Ambien, but this is also because I’m a moron and have no attention span.)

As I expected, it was not a zippy read. I renewed it from the library twice, then finally returned it last week. I was about 100 pages from the end on the day it was due (it’s 464 pages), so I just read the last 50 before returning it. Yeah, I skipped 50 pages. I am awash in self-loathing.

The most interesting aspect was how Enron ceased to really be much of an energy company well before it went down in flames. It had morphed into more of a financial / brokerage behemoth. Dozens and dozens of people making deals all over the world for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that was collateralized with penny whistles and moon pies. Millions being made, more millions being lost, and all anybody cared about was the stock price. The authors suggest that the people making and signing off on the deals really didn't understand what they were doing either. Enron recklessly manipulated accounting rules to get as far as they did, which was also interesting and horrifying. And a lot of the oversight that should have stopped it never happened because everyone seemed to be getting rich.

A lot has been said about how the only way to become really wealthy (what some would call “fuck you” wealthy) is to invent or create something that is or becomes in demand. Only suckers, like me, work for someone else for a salary and a hope that what I’ve saved for retirement isn’t pissed away by another Enron. If you can’t invent a flying car or a magic pill that makes you look and feel 20 years younger, then sometimes the way you make money is by dancing very very close to the line between legal and illegal. You have to take risks. Or at least these clowns thought they had to take risks. Big, stupid, short-sighted risks.

Two of the most interesting players in the book are Jeff Skilling (Enron’s CEO for six months after Ken Lay left) and Andrew Fastow (Enron’s CFO during the crash and burn). Jeff Skilling was interesting for being, apparently, very smart in certain areas and yet completely blind to the brick wall the company was racing toward, with all of his best people at the controls. Andrew Fastow was introduced as an unbelievable ass in the book, and he ended up taking huge (illegal) risks after he was already making millions of dollars. I don't get people like this: You cross into deception and illegality after you’ve already made millions for yourself?

I suppose that if you’re doing deals for millions (or even billions) of dollars, a few million dollars in personal wealth starts to feel unsatisfying. I mean, I would imagine. I’m just a sucker who works for a paycheck though, so what do I know?

Fever When You Hold Me Tight

2011-01-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

Me on Saturday morning, January 15: Yay! Three-day-weekend! So many things to get done, but extra time, so hear me roar, world!

Wait, why did my child just crawl into my lap and say he was cold? I'm the one who's always cold and I don't think it's cold in here.

And then he said he didn't want to go anywhere. Not even out for ice cream.

And then I felt his forehead.

And so it began. Home with a feverish, miserable-feeling child. I told myself not to worry about it. We had three days! Three days of cooking food he wouldn't eat. Three days of endless laundry. On Sunday, he was still miserable. And on Monday too. Not miserable enough to drag him to a doctor's office and expose him to other miserable kids, but miserable enough that I left the house two times all weekend -- both were kamikaze trips to the grocery store. My son really tries to be a good sport when he's sick, but his one requirement during illness is to be within arm's reach of me during all of his waking hours. This includes the bathroom.

(And let this post serve as notice to his future life partner.)

On Monday, I felt that unique tension in my shoulders and a pit in my stomach that I hadn't felt in awhile. The feeling that came with knowing he wasn't going to be well enough to go to school on Tuesday. The impending stress of trying to care for a sick child while still trying to check on things at work and wonder what was piling up in my absence. A day of feeling like a shitty mother (because he's not getting my full attention) and a shitty lawyer. And exhausted.

The pit in my stomach was bordering on full-fledged ulcer when my son was in preschool. Preschool was where all forms of germs and bacteria met to form their unholy armies. My kid was sick All Of The Time. And I was still trying to be Private Firm Litigator Extraordinaire. I became all too skilled at writing briefs on a laptop as my child whimpered next to me in bed and having my assistant try to arrange for me to participate telephonically as often as possible. I have a husband, but I also have a kid who can only croak, "Moooommmmy" in his weakest moments.

And let's be honest. As progressive as we try to be, my husband makes more money than I do and his job tends to take priority over mine. In fact, he was at work the whole weekend. The prioritization was cemented awhile back when I finally switched from the private firm to the public entity with actual "sick leave" and less day-to-day pressure (and way less money). Believe me, I am very aware of how lucky we are that things worked out this way and indescribably grateful for it. But still, on days like today it's hard not to feel like you're on a waxed treadmill that's been set a few notches too fast.

The good news is that the kid woke up fever free this morning. He's still a little weak and sniffley, but playing and in much better spirits. He'll be back to school tomorrow. And after a few frantic emails early this morning, things seem relatively calm there too. There's a lesson in here somewhere.

Things I Bought Durng My Lunch Hour Today

2011-01-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

(I brought my lunch. You know, because it's more economical.)

I bought these for a friend and loved them so much once she started looking through them that I had to buy them for myself. By the way, I love sending mail so if you want one, send me your address.

This looked fun and inspiring and I really want to get back into drawing. I felt like it was a steal because the MSRP was $19.99 and it was on sale for $6.00. (Also, it makes me strangely sad to see deeply discounted new books.) But now I see that Amazon has it for $4.49. Oh well.

This issue of Rolling Stone, which I now realize is not the newest. I'm trying to decide whether to subscribe or just continue to read Matt Taibbi's blog for free.

These pens, which I love. My office supplies some seriously crappy pens, which I cannot abide.

I'm trying to be more accountable for my random purchases. Oops. On the other hand, I did not buy this book,

even after I walked around the store with it for awhile. I do want it, but I actually had a credit at this store and the book would've put me over the credit. (I realize this isn't really progress.)

I admit it.

2011-01-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Some graffiti makes me smile. :)

Rights. And Wrongs.

2011-01-10T23:36:00.002-07:00

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1791, reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

I'm a lawyer who dutifully and sincerely respects the Constitution, which was ratified in 1788. In 1787, the Northern and Southern states reached a compromise where (black) slaves would be counted as three- fifths of their total number for purposes of apportionment and taxation. And then later it became apparent to enough people that the whole "three-fifths" thing was, well, wrong and gross, and that part was removed. The point is, this country has a sometimes warped history with its Constitution, and as precious as the document may be, it was far from perfect.

In high school I had a civics teacher who'd served as a Green Beret in Vietnam. One day, he split the class into four groups and asked each group to imagine a dystopian future where we would have to eliminate three of the Amendments from the Bill of Rights. Each group chucked the Second Amendment in the first round without agonizing over it. The next day we had to get rid of three more, then two more the next day, and on the final day, we had to choose the one to save. As I recall, all of the groups were struggling between freedom of speech and freedom association because what group of teenagers would want to live in a world where you couldn't hang out with your friends or say whatever you want? When we'd all decided, the teacher asked us what we thought of the exercise, and then politely told all of us that we'd gotten it wrong: the Second Amendment was the one to keep. He said we'd understand someday.

I'm all but 40 and I still think the teacher was wrong. Wrong. Of course I'm talking about the shooting in Arizona, which killed six people and wounded thirteen more. The Framers of our Constitution were worried about a tyrannical government running roughshod over a fragile new country. I'm confident that they weren't concerned with the right of a deeply disturbed 21-year-old to spray dozens of bullets in a few seconds over a crowd of people who'd gathered to meet a member of Congress. A gun he'd purchased legally and carried legally to the gathering.

I happened to be in the car a lot today, and the radio was bubbling over with people quick to blame what someone else had said that incited the violence. But since Saturday, all I can think is ... what if this deeply disturbed individual had only had access to a knife? Or even a simple hunting rifle? What if the same were true of the Army psychiatrist who killed the people at Fort Hood? Or the Virginia Tech killer? People with serious problems will still do seriously bad things, but is the definition of what it means to be an American still so fragile that it would be lost if we couldn't have nearly unfettered access to semi-automatic weapons?

Anytime anyone mentions gun control, a certain segment will shriek that it's unconstitutional. To which I say: Bullshit. The "Arms" mentioned by the Framers bear no resemblance to the sophisticated, powerful, ridiculous weapons available at a sporting goods store or gun show near you. Handguns are for killing people. Period. They shoot faster, more accurately, and with less expertise and physical strength needed by the operator with each new model.

I'm sure that Congresswoman Giffords had things to do after she met with her constituents on Saturday. I'm sure the judge who died had a personal life and a full docket of cases with parties depending on him to carve a path for them through the justice system. I'm sure every person who took a bullet on Saturday had people counting on them, jobs to do, families and friends who loved them and who were planning to see them. One deranged guy was able to wipe that out in a matter of seconds. The same Constitution that allowed him to buy a semi-automatic weapon will also provide him with a lawyer, a jury, a right to stay silent, and a protection against cruel and unusual punishment for his crimes. (I can't really imagine how the almost certain death penalty he will face isn't cruel and unusual, but maybe that's for a different post. Or maybe we don't think it's terribly cruel and unusual, given the ease with which we provided him with a gun in the first place.)

I guess I'm saying that, of the laundry list of rights he will encounter as society deals with him, I don't see all of those rights as equally valuable.

Scotch Guard

2011-01-03T11:11:00.002-07:00

This year, on a whim, I included my email address on the holiday card I sent to my stepmother. Why, you might be wondering, had I never done this before? It's because my relationship with my stepmother is complicated. She entered my life when I was about twelve years old, and she was pretty much the opposite of Cinderella's. Mine was kind and quiet and funny, and she clearly made my dad very happy. This last part pissed off my mother enormously, so blood-covered daggers would fire from my mother's eyes whenever her name was mentioned.

My parents had a very 1980s divorce: My mom had primary custody of my sister and me and we would see my dad on the weekends for the short time that we continued to live in the same town, and once we moved, we would see him for a couple of week-long visits each year, with a smattering of weekend visits here and there. (We lived in different states.) I never lived with my dad and stepmother, although there were many, many times that I wished I did.

When I was 21 my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly. Although I hadn't gotten to know my stepmother super well, during our visits I perceived her to be a gentle soul who'd had her share of heartbreaks before meeting my dad. She was the one who found his lifeless body, and bewildered and devastated as I was that he was gone, it was somehow worse knowing that she'd found him and had to be the front-line supervisor of all things post-death. I have this weird feeling of guilt about it. My sister and I visited her a couple of more times after my dad died, but it was inevitable that the relationship would slowly diminish to exchanged birthday and Christmas cards, which it has. I'd thought about including an email address before, but ... I don't know. I felt like the only adhesive for our relationship was a shared pain over a loss, and really, what were we going to say to each other? I just didn't know her very well. There was barely enough to include in twice-yearly greeting cards.

Further complicating matters was my dad's mother and sister. My sister and I were never particularly close to them, and even less so after my parents divorced. My grandmother especially seemed to blame my sister and me for this, as though it was our duty as children to wade through the muck of a very ugly divorce and make the lion's share of the effort to maintain a relationship that had never been very strong to begin with. To her credit, my stepmother did a much better job of keeping up with my dad's family. Within a few years of my dad's death, the extent of my relationship with my grandmother was her annual drunken phone call on Christmas Eve, where she would slur an indictment of how ungrateful we were for not maintaining more of a relationship with her.

And let's not dance around this: She drank a lot. And smoked constantly. In the years before he died, my dad made half-hearted jokes about how he was having to make sure he called her earlier and earlier in the day, because the window where she was sober enough to keep up her end of the conversation was narrowing.

Before my dad's funeral, the last time I'd seen her for more than a short visit was a week my sister and I spent with her shortly after my parents' divorce. She was living in a Southern California community that was exclusively for retired persons where the average outdoor temperature seemed to be 110ºF all year. She would get up early and work in her little garden, but by 10:00 a.m. the heat was intolerable. She would busy herself inside for an hour or so, then light another cigarette, make lunch, and fix a cocktail. And so it began, until she stumbled to bed at 8:00 p.m. One of the things I remember most from that trip was that when she would lean over the counter to make a sandwich, I could see her large mastectomy scar.

In any case, my last Christmas Eve drunken berating from her was about twelve years ago. Around that time I heard that she and my dad's sister were planning to move to Texas together. My stepmother stopped mentioning them in holiday and birthday cards, and I assumed that my grandmother had died. I mean, the fact that a woman with a serious alcohol and tobacco habit, who'd survived breast cancer had made it to her seventies, when her son and dropped dead at 52, was mind-boggling. And it would have made sense for my stepmother to not want to share the news that she'd died.

But guess what? I got an email from my stepmother. My grandmother has pickled herself to the age of 93 and is still going. I am absolutely stunned by this news. Stunned! I'm angry and bitter that she got to live and my dad didn't, and yet strangely enchanted by the fact that longevity like this exists in my bloodline. If she's not being studied around the clock, medical science is missing out.

Light and Fluffy Pancake

2010-12-29T11:29:00.003-07:00

So I finished a book! And here's why: This one had lots of pictures and very little text.

The book is Soul Pancake by Rainn Wilson. I bought it because buying books is what I do and in real life, I'm a terribly annoying person. I'm one of those who would happily linger at the dinner table, sipping wine and discussing things like why people believe in God/god/gods; what it means to possess and express creativity; why people commit crimes; whether you really do have to be cruel to be kind. Et cetera. Ad nauseum.

Flipping through the table of contents of Soul Pancake, the chapters (such as they are) are titled: The Brain & The Soul; Art & Creativity; Experiences & Emotions. Et cetera. So of course I bought it. (Too bad there was no chapter called "aspirational consumerism." Or maybe that's a good thing because now I can write it.) Also, the introduction was really compelling. Rainn Wilson is, according to the back cover, "best known for playing Dwight Schrute on NBC's The Office." I've never watched The Office so this was meaningless to me, but rock on Rainn. In the introduction, he talks about his upbringing in the Bahá'í Faith* and his transition to the theater world, then mainstream acting world and how he's always been interested in life's "big questions." Me too, me too! After reading the introduction, I was excited! Expand my mind! Introduce me to new ideas! Challenge my belief system! My safe word is okra!

*I'm linking to a website for the Bahá'í Faith because, when Mr. Wilson mentions it in the book he says, "Google it." I found this annoying, but this was the introduction and I was still eager and optimistic. In fact, this tone was all over the place in the book, especially in the little assignments. It was like being at a bar with a guy who thought he was much smarter and more worldly than you and had load of condescending suggestions for how to broaden your mind. I mean, if you were brought up in an uncommon faith and it formed the basis for how you view the world, and now you're (sort of) writing a book about how people view the world, wouldn't it be worth explaining the very foundation for your world view? Or better yet, just explaining your world view instead of dumping the contents of Bartlett's Quotations onto the pages and spiffing it up with some zippy design? But now I'm getting all worked up. I really didn't hate the book.

Alas, it was not to be. The introduction was a big tease. It was like a stupid movie where he took my number and then never called me, but sent me a couple of string-along texts. The front cover of the book says "speak your mind, unload your questions, figure out what it means to be human." Instead, the book is an orgy of graphic design with lots of cool artwork (the best part of the book, actually) but the text is just a bunch of recycled $3 quotes by famous people and a smattering of pop-sociology factoids. Most facing pages will have artwork on one side, a couple of scattered quotes (e.g. "Everyone is in love with his own ideas. -- Carl Gustav Jung"), a factoid (e.g. students who are overconfident have lower reading comprehension and vice versa), and a Big Question (e.g. "How can you be confident without being egotistical?") The book is also chock full of other allegedly probing questions and assignments, e.g. pop in your ear buds, sit on a crowded street and watch people; or blow up balloons, write your biggest worries on each balloon, and then pop them one by one. One hundred ninety-seven pages of this (excluding several pages with the authors' / editors' /designers' mini-biographies.) In other words, a great book for teenage Outward Bound campers, maybe. But if you're really interested in life's "big questions" my guess is that you've already thought about them and don't really need a quote from Albert Einstein or Slash from Guns 'N Roses to get your inquisitive motor running. What you want is to hear what other people really think on these topics so that you can think about whether you agree. Which is not what you're going to get in this book.

I mean, I suppose it could be good for a long road trip with someone you didn't know very well and needed conversation starters for, but nevertheless felt comfortable discussing religion, death, and human virtues with. I've never been in that situation myself, but I'm pretty sheltered. Maybe it happens. And some of the artwork really is great.

On the other hand, the December 20 & 27, 2010 issue of The New Yorker has a really fascinating article about how energy efficiency ≠ reduced energy consumption -- in fact, the opposite is true. (The Efficiency Dilemma by David Owen.) Not exactly philosophical, but I've been underlining the most interesting passages because I want to understand them better. With Soul Pancake, it never occurred to me to get a pen, even though a lot of pages are devoted to "fill in the blank" questions.

(I always hated workbooks in school.)

All He Wants For Solstice

2010-12-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

I'm figuring that by next year, my son will be pretty good at Interweb searching, so this may be my last chance to post all of the things we've gotten him. Some from us, some from Santa.

This is what he asked Santa for: A Lego C-3PO watch. Santa will oblige.

He's totally into planes now and we saw this set in a toy store in November. He almost swallowed his tongue with the begging, but I cruelly refused to buy it ... then. :)

Let's be honest. I want this for me.

The same could also be said for these.

This is for the stocking, and he will not understand it at first. But I'm predicting that it will soon become his very most favorite thing.

The season would not be complete without some violent action figures.

And of course I got him a few books.

And some little cars.

And a jigsaw puzzle.

Too much? I'm feeling an absence of outside toys, but I never found a logical thing to add. And even though I did about a third of the baking I'd planned on and just ordered "Happy New Year" cards because I failed to get "Holiday" cards out in time ... I'm getting kind of excited.

I still don't know what happened to the celery.

2010-12-15T14:23:00.001-07:00

A recipe. Let me know if you think I should audition for a Food Network show:

1. Come home from work tired and disbelieving that it’s only Tuesday.

2. Discover that your husband is working on the plumbing in your house and has turned off the main water valve that supplies water to the house.

3. Ignore the fact that you have to go to the bathroom. Just don’t think about it.

4. Consider going to get takeout, but decide to wait it out because it’s dark and cold and you just don’t feel like going out again.

5. Also ignore the fact that you’re thirsty. And getting thirstier.

6. Ponder what you could make without water: Soup! (Maybe.)

7. Dice the half of an onion that’s been in your refrigerator for an undetermined length of time. It’s a little dried-out, but it still smells like an onion.

8. Dice a carrot. Rationalize that it’s okay that you can’t wash it first because you’re going to peel it and then ultimately bring it to a boil.

9. Look in the fridge for the celery you’re sure bought at the store, and discover that it’s not there. Wonder momentarily whether you just didn’t buy it or whether there might be a bag of celery rolling around the back seat of your car. Decide not to think about it, like the bathroom and your thirst.

10. Dice up a little cabbage instead, because it's sort of like celery. Isn't it? Greenish and crunchy? Peel off the outer layers of the head that were probably closest to the dirt, and play the same “I’m going to bring it to a high temperature” game with yourself since you still can’t wash anything.

11. Saute the onion, carrot and cabbage in some olive oil with a little salt and pepper.

12. When it’s done (softened), put it in a small soup pot. Cover with the leftover broth from the takeout wonton soup you had over the weekend. It’s just plain broth. But since it’s not enough, add a little low-sodium chicken broth too. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to a gentle simmer.

13. Meanwhile, fry some bacon – around four slices. After you put the bacon in the pan, wipe your hands with one of those Clorox wipes. Surely this will kill trichinosis, right?

14. Ignore your husband when he says he’s “almost done,” and keep ignoring your bladder too.

15. Momentarily wonder how stranded people feel when they’re reduced to drinking their own urine, and then put that thought out of your head. Immediately!

16. Open one can of Great Northern beans and one can of Cannellini beans because you can’t remember which you like better. Rinse them with the leftover water in the teakettle that you just remembered was there from the morning.

17. Remember the cooking bacon, which is just about burned now. Drain on paper towels and tell yourself it’s okay – it’s “crispy” now.

18. Add the beans (both kinds) to the simmering veggies and enough broth to cover. Since you’re worried that's it’s going to be too salty, get the cup of water you keep on your nightstand each night but never actually drink and pour that in.

19. Recall that there are some leftover baked fingerling potatoes in the fridge. Give those a rough dice and toss them in too.

19. Bring it all back up to a boil again … just to be on the safe side.

20. Crumble the bacon and sprinkle on top. Soup’s done!

21. Try not to roll your eyes when, at that moment, your husband tells you that the water’s back on.

(The soup was surprisingly delicious. And no one got sick! Well, so far. How long does it take for trichinosis to show up anyway?)

The Social Network

2010-12-14T11:36:00.000-07:00

Oh Facebook. I'm conflicted.

I hate the weird friend requests from people I don't know or don't really want to be "friends" with, even in a sterile social network context.

I love keeping up with people I really do like. And the unintentional comedy.

Like, say, this friend request I just received:

....................................................................................

Gümüşten Rıdvan 14 Aralık 2010, 20:54

u look so nıce ı want to met u ?

......................................................................................

Do I know who this is? No I do not. But it's flattering to have someone see my profile picture and decide he (?) wants to travel back in time with me. Maybe.

Image credit

How Lovely Are Your Branches

2010-12-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

So Friday, late afternoon. It’s been a long week. It’s dark and sort of cold. I arrive at my son’s school to pick him up from the after-school program where he languishes each weekday. He gets his lunchbox from the table and says he’s ready to go. And I say, “Where’s your jacket?”

Jacket?

And so it begins. We look in the lost and found. We look on the playground. He can’t remember where he last had it or if he had it at all that day. (My husband takes him to school, so there’s a slight chance that it stayed in his car. But the mornings here have been genuinely cold, and I can’t imagine that he would have walked into school without it.) I decide that we should go back into the school building to see if, by chance, his classroom is unlocked. It is! His teacher is still there, preparing for next week. Bless her. But no jacket. She thinks it might be in the art room, which is definitely locked.

All right, fine. Jacket defeat.

As we walk down the hall, I hear the teacher call my name. “Yes?” I say. She asks if I could do her a little favor this weekend. Of course I could! I battle Working Mommy Guilt every day! I can do something helpful for the classroom to feel better about it all! But as I’m giving her the eager puppy face, all of the things I have to do over the weekend start racing through my mind: 1) Get and decorate Christmas tree (which we meant to do last weekend, but due to a series of unfortunate events, it didn’t happen.) 2) Bake Christmas cookies. 3) Do a little more Christmas shopping. 4) Christmas cards. 5) Laundry. 6) Grocery shopping. 7) A gazillion other little things.

She wants me to make 20 Christmas trees out of green construction paper. It involves folding and measuring and cutting with scissors. As I stand there with this big, dumb smile on my face, nodding, all I can think is: Do you think I would have gone to law school if I could fold paper evenly or measure things or successfully operate scissors? For just a split second I wondered how many dads are asked to cut out ... no. Don't wonder that.)

Well, I did it. I made the trees. When the other parents get their kids’ decorated trees, they’ll wonder why their kids are having such trouble cutting in straight lines. Or recognizing what a straight line should look like.

We did get our own actual Christmas tree, however. We even decorated it. No more shopping was done, but no one needs any more stuff, do they? And I have all of the ingredients for both cookies and Christmas cards, so maybe they can be completed sometime this week. And we have clean clothes and food in the fridge.

And his teacher emailed me to say that she found his jacket in the art room.

It is a magical season, isn't it?

Two Paths Diverged In A Wood

2010-12-10T15:21:00.001-07:00

Would you like to see a really great blog that is updated frequently with beautiful pictures and thoughtful content? Go here. I can’t remember how I found “moments of perfect clarity,” but her commitment to blogging, and blogging exceptionally well, while still having a job and a family and a great life has been nothing short of inspirational.

Do you like how I’m buttering up the fact that I’m about to rip off one of her posts?

The question leading off her most recent post is, “What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?” When I read it, I got really excited because I don’t know that I would have had a quick answer to that in recent years.

But this year, easy.

In the spring I heard about a job opening. I emailed the link to my husband, wondering if it sounded like something he might be interested in. I didn’t think I was qualified for it. But he emailed me back almost instantly, saying that it sounded like a job for me – a job I was probably more qualified for than he was.

After slapping around my inner doubter for a few minutes, I let my mind play with the possibility that I was qualified for it. I’d initially thought I was out because it asked for more years of experience than I have. Also, the salary range was significantly more than my current salary. But the description of the position was actually all things I have experience with. As Dante might put it … what the hell? I applied. And a couple of weeks later, behold, they wanted to interview me.

Now, this was the first time I’d gone on a job interview when I wasn’t desperately wanting out of my existing job situation. There are lots of problems with my job – lots – but I’ve finally learned that the grass isn’t always greener in the office across the street. And there are plenty of good things about my job, perhaps the best being that I don’t think about it much when I go home. It hasn’t taken over my life or caused an (unusually large) ulcer.

The interview schedule was sort of intense. It took the better part of a day and I met with four different people one-on-one, plus another person from out-of-state over the phone. The first guy made the job sound so bad that I came very close to thanking him for his time and asking him to please let the other interviewers know that I would be running screaming down the street instead of meeting with them. But the next two people were very, very nice. The guy on the phone made it sound like a great job. Then I met the person who would have been my boss.

You know how sometimes you meet people who say all the right things, but who leave you feeling like the room you’re sitting in might have been built over a cemetery for the criminally insane? It wasn’t quite that bad. But still, there was something that was definitely making me feel uneasy.

When the interview was over, I walked out thinking that I wouldn’t be changing jobs. But a week later, there was a phone call and an offer. The offer was good. As in: Hey now! That’s a salary, people! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! And I had the distinct impression that it was their low offer and that I could probably get more without having to be undignified about it. Also, it was clear that the job came with a lot of responsibility and that, career-future-wise, it would have raised the ceiling to Texas-mansion-foyer heights.

But … it was going to be a whole LOT of responsibility. And a lot of travel to really uninteresting places. And I was going to have learn about a whole ‘nother industry really quickly – an industry that I wasn’t sure would be all that interesting.

This led to a week of me changing my mind every twenty minutes. Literally. I’d think, “My current job it okay. There might be some opportunities for growth here. I already know what I’m doing here and it’s comfortable. Plus, if I need to go see my kid be part of Hungarian Folk Dancing Week at school, I can. Money isn’t worth giving this up for. I’m definitely calling back and rejecting the offer.” Twenty minutes later, “How can I turn down this kind of opportunity?! The economy sucks and I’m going to turn down more money? No I’m not! This will expand my career horizons! I don’t even like Hungarian Folk Dancing as far as I know! With this kind of salary, I’ll get a nanny/house manager! I’m going for it!” Repeat cycle. Finally I woke up one morning, feeling the weird, dread-like feeling I’d felt throughout the interview. Before I could give it another moment’s thought, I picked up the phone and turned down the job.

Best. Decision. Ever. After the fact, I learned some things about the job that made me know it would have been the wrong place for me. I have made peace with the fact that I’m not all that thrilled with my overall career, and having a low-intensity job is just the ticket right now. Ultimately, this job has more pros than cons, at least for the time being. And I’ve learned that the mark of a good decision is revisiting the dilemma in your mind and hearing yourself spit out, “Phew!”

On the other hand ...

2010-12-09T15:20:00.001-07:00

If the Obama tax extension goes forward as proposed, I could use my payroll tax reduction (after saving it for a year) to stimulate the economy with these:

[Hums "Proud To Be An American" to herself ...]

This reminds me that my 6-year-old son and I happened to be in the Phoenix airport on Veteran's Day. While we waited to board our flight, a very enthusiastic and patriotic Southwest employee announced over the public address system that he deeply appreciated the sacrifices that veterans have made for our country. To show his appreciation, he says, he's going to sing "Proud To Be An American" a cappella for us. He starts, but when he's about to reach the chorus he's interrupted (and silenced) by the airport-wide PA system with a canned announcement about not smoking. He was an okay singer. Certainly better than I am (everyone is, really) but wouldn't be getting a callback from the American Idol people, if you know what I mean.

A few minutes later, he says he's going to try it again. This time he sings faster gets about halfway through the chorus before he's again cut out by a canned announcement about, ironically, the current terrorist threat level and reporting suspicious packages.

The third time, he's singing so fast that everyone seems to be getting kind of agitated. I was, at least. We were tensely waiting to see if he would get all the way through and getting swept into the awkwardly fast tempo in the process. But the third time was the charm -- he finished. People started to applaud, and my son whispered to me, "I don't want to clap." I told him it was okay, that I didn't want to either. Apparently the I'm embarrassed for you reflex is genetic.

* * *
In other news, I have purchased a Christmas present for my mother (and stepfather)! Restaurant gift certificate for the win! I may also throw in a bottle of wine or some other trinkety business, as my mother has a present-opening fetish. It directly conflicts with my present-wrapping aversion, however.

Off The Cuff

2010-12-08T14:01:00.001-07:00

I was dictating a list of practice spelling words for my son over the weekend. One of them was “cuff,” which he misspelled as “cof” and I didn’t notice it when I checked his work. The paper came back in last night’s folder from the teacher with “cof” circled in bleeding red and a big question mark next to it. So now she thinks I don’t know how to spell it either, even when she provides me with the correct spelling beforehand. It especially stings because the teacher is young enough to be my daughter if this were the 1700s or if we lived in Appalachia. Or, you know, the city where I live.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. You will be pleased to know that I’m here to go on an uninformed rant. I like to think that I pay reasonably close attention to current events. So I had my eye on this whole extension of the Bush tax cuts issue. I was actually hoping that Obama would just let them expire across the board, but maybe that wouldn't have been fair and I knew he wouldn’t do that anyway. So I was really hoping – nay, expecting – that there would be a serious effort to let them expire for people making over $250K.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, everyone keeps their tax cuts, unemployment benefits are extended (good), the estate tax is reinstated at a lower level than it had been (wha..?), and a bunch of other tax breaks are extended. The figure I heard this morning was that this exercise in bending deeply at the waist will cost $600 billionish.

Meanwhile, federal, state, and local governments are facing huge deficits, the health care bill ended up being laughably weak, and a lot of individuals are in a deep pile of doo-doo. And everyone’s acting pretty desperate. It didn’t help that I read an excerpt from Matt Taibi’s new book, Griftopia, which enlightened me to the horrifying new scheme of cities basically selling off their infrastructure to mysterious groups of cash-rich foreign investors as a means of plugging deficit holes.

In the midst of this doom and gloom, I was thinking about how much many of us have. There was a time in my life when my family was worryingly (but not disastrously) poor. My parents had just divorced and my dad abruptly lost his job, and the combination of the two left him to declare bankruptcy, which meant he couldn't make his child support payments for awhile. My mother’s income was simply not enough to cover everything. She worked at a bank and once a week the manager of a fast food restaurant would come in to make a deposit. When he did, he would give my mom a coupon for a free sandwich, plus fries and a drink. On those days, we’d eat at that restaurant. My mom would buy one sandwich in addition to the coupon meal, and then she, my sister and I would share the two sandwiches plus single fries and drink for dinner. One day the manager didn’t give her a coupon and I remember my mom sort of panicking because we had very little food in the house and she was out of money. I also remember that my grades in school started to slip because I was out of notebook paper, afraid to ask my mother to buy any, and having to borrow paper from friends. But I was also super shy, so sometimes when I was out of paper, I just wouldn’t do my assignment. I don’t mean this as a sob story, because the flip side was that we had a place to live and my mom had a car, and she would sometimes borrow money from my Grandma when she ran out. We had options. And things turned around. My dad got a better job and both of my parents remarried.

And this is now: Remember our house remodel? It’s still happening. It’s way too long of a story (and project), but the nutshell is that we added a second story to our existing house, nearly doubling the square footage. It looks great from the outside, but there’s been an ongoing debate about how much of the upstairs the contractor would finish versus how much my husband would do himself, then the contractor got busy on other projects and my husband got busy with his actual job, so we’re still living in the original part of the house with empty, unused space over our heads. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited about the remodel, but I'm very aware that we're able to function pretty effectively without the space we've added.

Another wake-up call in the house saga has been the closet in the original master bedroom. See, we bought the house in 1997, and it was 50 years old then. It’s been through numerous remodels already – there’s evidence of it everywhere – and the worst and most odd one was an attempt to remodel the master bedroom and bathroom. Among other problems, it resulted in a poorly framed, tiny closet with sliding doors. This has been my closet for nearly 14 years. Awkward and dark, it’s basically just two bars, one above the other. I can't see what’s in there very well and most of my stuff comes out wrinkled from being smushed. We finally tore it out a couple of weeks ago and now all my clothes are on temporary hanging racks in the guest bedroom. Now I can see all of my clothes. People, I have a shitload. (Also, we have a “guest bedroom.”)

As I’ve mentioned, I have numerous books I haven’t yet read. My child has gobs of toys with more on the way a la Santa. We have one flat-screen television, two computers, lots of fun kitchen tools, decent furniture, two cars, and an upstairs we’re not using. Technically, Obama thinks we’re middle class. And yet every time I take a load of “stuff” to Goodwill to donate, I’m blown away at the piles and piles of other people’s stuff that the Goodwill staff are feverishly sifting through in the donation area, not to mention the fact that I've just dropped off a Hefty bag of things we just don't need anymore.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the finer economic points of how much tax revenue is the right amount for a government. Governments at all levels arguably waste astonishing amounts of money, but they also use the money for services and things we all need and use and depend on. But if the question is whether we could have afforded to pay more in taxes, well, I have two pairs of never-worn shoes that can begin to answer that question.

Of course our situation isn’t everyone’s and I’m very aware that there are lots of people out there who are sincerely struggling. Parents who are really stressing about what they’re going to put on the table for dinner and maybe kids who are quietly fretting about the school supplies they don’t have. People skipping doses of much-needed medication because they can’t afford it. People who were going to be in deep sand if there hadn’t been an extension of unemployment benefits, and who need all of the credits they can come by on their tax forms.

But people who don’t need anything, who may very well have too much, just got to keep their unfunded Bush-era government boost too. The boost they already had; the boost that hasn't been trickling down. And they kept it with shockingly little wrangling – just a ticking clock. Meanwhile, cities are offering their highways, bridges and parking meters on long-term "leases" to unknown bidders for a temporary budget fix. I just don’t get it.

Image credit

A Painfully Extracted Truth

2010-12-03T15:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, really. I just had one of those conversations with myself and I admitted something to myself and now myself is making me report it to the internet.

You know what really stresses me out the most about Christmas? What the biggest dark cloud is? It’s figuring out something to buy for my mother. If you’ve been here before, you know that my relationship with her is, in Facebook terms, complicated. It’s complicated. And if I could just figure out what to give her for Christmas, I’d probably feel better about the whole things. So this is the situation:

1. She absolutely wants a present. Donations to charity are fine and all, as it’s in addition to her present.

2. Our tastes in, well, everything, are very different. So I have a hard time describing what she might light because it’s so foreign to me. Her home style is very Williams Sonoma, Restoration Hardware, renovated farmhouse in France-like. Nothing contemporary or modern (two words she spits out like they were rancid pistachios.) She has no actual animals, but collects things with roosters on them. Everything must be cute. Everything.

3. Her personal clothing style is Talbots-like. Conservative, matchy, ironed, tailored.

4. Make-up, lotions, bath goodies, etc. are out. It’s been the fallback gift for so long that she’s come out and said she doesn’t want anything else.

5. She has a few carefully selected potted plants, but isn’t really a gardener.

6. She reads romance novels. And her Bible. And that’s all.

7. She’s no technophile. Ipods, MP-3s and the like are out.

8. She and my stepfather do travel sometimes.

9. This is the hardest part: She has everything. I mean, everything. Her house is crammed full of knick-knacks and throw pillows and platters and dessert plates. She has every kitchen machine and cook tool known to humanity. She’s someone who says she likes to cook, but not a real “foodie” or anything like that. She has a huge closet plus extra storage boxes full of clothes, shoes, purses, and accessories.

10. I can’t spend more than $100 on her and my stepfather combined, per an agreement with my sister. So I need one gift good for both of them, or I need a $60ish gift for her, and he’s pretty easy to find a little something for.

So far my best idea has been something like Omaha Steaks.

Help.

Oh Holy.

2010-12-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

How does this happen every year?

On Thanksgiving weekend, I’m just glad Thanksgiving is over and lazily tell myself that I’ll be totally on top of that end-of-December holiday for sure this year, but thank goodness I still have plenty of time.

And then during the work week that follows, the Holy Shit starts to seep in.

Holy shit! I have a lot of gifts to buy!

Holy shit! We have to get a tree!

Holy shit! A party to bring something to!

Holy shit! We don’t have cards yet!

It’s happening again. This year, the kidlet is Pop-Rocks-in-soda excited. I’m happy for him, I really am, but … ugh. This is not helping my mounting sense of overwhelmedness (shut up, I like this word) at all. The thought of putting up a tree inside the house this weekend is just … well, it’s filling me with dread. Sad but true.

As I grew to be an older kid, I started to notice that not all adults liked Christmas. And I thought it was so sad. How could you not like it? Presents! Food! Parties! Magical flickering lights! What’s not to like? It’s strange to me now that I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with me for not liking it. I don’t think it means I’m old or jaded. It just means that I resist and rage against any feeling of being forced into something. This has always been true.

Yesterday I took the kidlet to a party where Santa would be making an appearance. (Santa being a young associate attorney who drew the short straw at his firm.) The kidlet is a couple of months away from seven, and he believes. Oh he believes. He believes that guy, with the beard and the suit (and the billable hour requirement) is sneaking into our house in a few weeks. I love seeing my little kiddo go all in, fully believing in magic, no caution or hesitation, and at the same time I found myself watching him and fearing the fall. How will it change him?

How much will I spend on expedited delivery charges this year?

And now that we have two tiny cars, how are we going to get a freaking tree home?

You dig.

2010-12-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

You know what’s funny? Lots of things. Lots of things are funny.

What’s funny (in the non-laughing way) right now is this: Sometime much earlier this year, like February or March or so, a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of NaNoWriMo, which is basically where you sign up with a bunch of other people to write a novel of at least 50,000 words in the month of November. November is National Novel Writers Month, as I’m sure everyone knows. (Now that is truly funny. A short month with a long holiday dedicated to novel writing.) But the theory seemed to be the same as signing up to run a 5K or a marathon; that is, you give yourself a deadline and train and build up to it.

Now, I was truly fucking excited for this. I had an idea for a novel, one I thought I could really work with, and I started making an outline in the safest, bestest place of all – my head. And then I had some other ideas too, in case the first one didn’t pan out. I imagined myself staying up late and playing hooky from work as I feverishly tapped away. Fifty thousand words, baby! That was going to be something!

Or nothing at all. I wrote zero words. Big, fat, hole-like zero. And I lost the outline in my head. No novel, no blogging. I have lost count of how many phone calls and emails I have failed to return in the last few months, not to mention the dozens of thank you notes I have neglected to write.

Maybe I’m in a funk. I think I’ve figured out how my funks go. I still go to work and I still eat the meals and I still wash the clothes. I’m not like one of those anti-depressant commercials. I don’t mope around in sweat pants staring out of rainy windows on the inside of a black and white filter. Instead I just go into must-do-task-mode. Head down, checking things off the list.

I took the day before Thanksgiving off of work, which meant that I had a five-day weekend. We mostly hung out at home – the kiddo had a cold and I was trying to get it, apparently. It felt good to wallow in my shell. On Monday, I went back to work with a bit of a cough. After about an hour, it became clear that I was not going to be able to do it. I just couldn’t stay at work for the whole day. Just before lunch I announced that I wasn’t feeling well and went home for the rest of the day. I didn’t make any calls or write any emails or notes, but I also didn’t wear sweatpants.

And as uninteresting as this post was, at least it’s some effort to defunkify.