Google is out of control. They clearly have way too much time and money on their hands. Have you checked out their "lab" page recently? They have developed tools and programs for everything conceivable. It sick is what it is. From web searches for the blind to Googlized maps of mars to a tool to plan public transportation trips in Portland (and only Portland), Google has developed it. I love Google Suggest which apparently will offer you real time suggestions on better key words than the ones you are currently typing. Ever get annoyed by Microsoft Office trying to force words on you as you type? Yeah, its like that, for the web.
The one feature they don’t have is the one I was looking for. Naturally. After reading an article in today's paper about these 20 year old girls who were making $100,000 a month in Ad Sense revenue from their website which offers free MySpace templates, I decided to immediately jump on that rickety, overcrowded bandwagon (probably along with the Washington Post's 6 million other subscribers). But first, I needed to know what the hot search terms were so I could create a webpage that would lure them in like hungry minnows.
Except Google refuses to tell me. Unless I am to believe that "Lance Bass" is truly the top search term.
I asked my friend: "Do You think it's possible that Lance Bass is the top search term right now?"
She said: "Who is Lance Bass?"
I said: "You know, that gay singer from N synch that just came out of the closet?"
She said: "I'm so out of that scene"
I said: "look, trust me, Im no n-synch fan, but this was on CNN!"
She said: "I havent had the TV on today"
I said: "It was a couple days ago. Are you living in a cave with Osama?"
THEN she changed the subject. Very suspicious, no?
Well, I guess I should get to work on my "Lance Bass" Ad-Filled Website.
Friday, July 28, 2006
The Benefits of Shunning Diversity
Working in a male dominated company is a mixed bag. While my inner feminist weeps, I have to admit it has some benefits. For example, there is the fun of watching your boss squirm and nervously fidget in extreme discomfort as you calmly explain why you are requesting a private office to express your breastmilk because otherwise you intend to do it in your open cube (note only middle management gets the benefit of "immersion with staff to promote openness". Senior management is locked away in a separate wing with full offices). Lets face it, for a mother returning to work bleary-eyed after maternity leave, and after nursing an infant 52 times a day at all hours of the day and night, your squeamishness on openly discussing breastfeeding fades. In these types of male dominated environments, lactation rooms are not real high on the priority list, though we proudly offer foos ball tables, slurpie machines, and streaming media of sporting events. You have to essentially freak out the men enough to the point at which they say- fine! Take it! Just stop talking about female body parts! (now if you want to *show* me some, that’s a different story). So as long as you can say "engorgement" without flinching, the world can be your oyster.
Another benefit is that there are less people in the ladies room. While two men chatting their way into the men's room is a common sight, there is a less common, awkward pause as a man realizes he has "caught you in the hallway" on your way to the ladies room and you aren’t intending to abandon your trip to chat with him. They tend to freeze with a look of confusion about 5 feet away from the door, as if they have been zapped by a canine invisible fence. This always makes me smile as I sail through the door, unaccompanied. As far as I am concerned, the less people in the bathroom, the better. I can't understand those people that want to make small talk in the bathroom. If I had my way, all bathroom stalls would have those full floor to ceiling walls and doors. Substantial enough that the post office would probably deliver your mail there if you slapped a number on it. Stuck with our flimsy metal dividers, I want to get out of there as soon as possible. I will only talk to people in the bathroom in extreme circumstances, like if I am with friends and I don’t want them to know that I’m neurotic. Otherwise, shut up.
Another benefit is that there are less people in the ladies room. While two men chatting their way into the men's room is a common sight, there is a less common, awkward pause as a man realizes he has "caught you in the hallway" on your way to the ladies room and you aren’t intending to abandon your trip to chat with him. They tend to freeze with a look of confusion about 5 feet away from the door, as if they have been zapped by a canine invisible fence. This always makes me smile as I sail through the door, unaccompanied. As far as I am concerned, the less people in the bathroom, the better. I can't understand those people that want to make small talk in the bathroom. If I had my way, all bathroom stalls would have those full floor to ceiling walls and doors. Substantial enough that the post office would probably deliver your mail there if you slapped a number on it. Stuck with our flimsy metal dividers, I want to get out of there as soon as possible. I will only talk to people in the bathroom in extreme circumstances, like if I am with friends and I don’t want them to know that I’m neurotic. Otherwise, shut up.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Potty Training Report 1: Its not looking good
Now that Jack is 2 and a half, I'm beginning to get concerned that he hasn’t yet woken up one day and decided to potty train himself by dinner time. Which has pretty much been my potty training plan to date. Mission: Wait for Toddler Inspiration.
At Playgroup yesterday, the subject came up, as I'm sure it does in every 2-3 year old playgroup on the planet. One woman said she was amazed at how easy it was. That she made a little chart and the child got stickers for going and the stickers added up to a reward. Within a week, he was trained.
"What kind of reward?" I asked, evaluating just how much funding this reward system approach would take. V-smile systems? High end tricycles?
"Oh, you know, like 5 M&Ms or being allowed to watch a video", she said
Hmmm. I'm trying to imagine Jack waiting for 5 stickers to pile up to earn those rewards. Based on that list, Jack gets rewarded all the time. Like when Mommy wants to read the newspaper. Or when Mommy wants him to stop crying for M&Ms.
Please snip and send any extra diaper coupons you may have, it appears that I will be needing them for a long long time to come.
At Playgroup yesterday, the subject came up, as I'm sure it does in every 2-3 year old playgroup on the planet. One woman said she was amazed at how easy it was. That she made a little chart and the child got stickers for going and the stickers added up to a reward. Within a week, he was trained.
"What kind of reward?" I asked, evaluating just how much funding this reward system approach would take. V-smile systems? High end tricycles?
"Oh, you know, like 5 M&Ms or being allowed to watch a video", she said
Hmmm. I'm trying to imagine Jack waiting for 5 stickers to pile up to earn those rewards. Based on that list, Jack gets rewarded all the time. Like when Mommy wants to read the newspaper. Or when Mommy wants him to stop crying for M&Ms.
Please snip and send any extra diaper coupons you may have, it appears that I will be needing them for a long long time to come.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
No Comment
Hey You! Yes, I’m talking to you. Who are you, how on earth did you end up here, and why aren’t you commenting with witty retorts?
I started this blog 3 months ago on a whim, despite never having read a blog myself and knowing I was unfashionably late to the blog party. I was also pretty sure no one would ever find my blog. I’m an internet addict (I sat in the dark for 5 hours last week because the power went off and I was unable to look up the Power Company’s number online to report the outage… I forgot about the Phone Book), and I don’t recall ever stumbling onto a blog. I sure as heck wasn’t going to tell my friends about it, lest they actually come and read it thus ruining my opportunity to use them and their private lives as subject matter. Anyway, It seemed clear that bloggers banded together and went looking for each other and that was that. Blogging was the “back alley” of the WWW if you will.
Somehow, that all naiveté evolved into me reading blogs every day (that www.dooce.com, she’s so funny. Every time I read her I want to go back and burn my blog.) and actually continuing to post on my own occasionally. While these are both surprising, I’m actually the most in shock over the fact that, according to my sitemeter reader, I have had over 400 visitors. Now granted, 80% of those were probably me, but still that means that at least (argh, math) 80 or so people-who-are-not-me have come to my site.
And of those vistors, according to sitemeter, the average visit duration is “0 seconds”. At first, this got me fairly hot under the collar. What the heck, I thought. Does my site give off some sort of Ebola vibes that causes people to immediately yank their computer power cord out of the wall? Then, in my increasing blog savvyness, I realized that it had to do with page views or something like that which has not yet interested me enough to get me to read the entire explanation. I think am partially afraid it will say at the end, “…unless this is in reference to One Day At a Time, in which case your average visit is truly zero seconds. Sorry”.
And I learned something else through sitemeter- the internet actually tells the pages what you typed into a search engine to get to their page and it will go so far as to pinpoint it was someone in your city typing in “unnatural sex acts, biscuits”. Holy cow. For heavens sake, I don’t want to be anyway affiliated with some of my “queries of boredom” as I’ll call them, even within a 100 mile radius. And trust me, some of you should feel the same way, especially visitor number 256 who somehow found my blog by googling “time of sucker management is done in pineapple”.
In any event, I see many of you are men and women of few words. That’s ok (no its not!). Just because I want to ramble on doesn’t mean you have to (you really should). Really, its reward enough to know that I have connected with so many of you (and mostly me) for those precious 0 seconds.
I started this blog 3 months ago on a whim, despite never having read a blog myself and knowing I was unfashionably late to the blog party. I was also pretty sure no one would ever find my blog. I’m an internet addict (I sat in the dark for 5 hours last week because the power went off and I was unable to look up the Power Company’s number online to report the outage… I forgot about the Phone Book), and I don’t recall ever stumbling onto a blog. I sure as heck wasn’t going to tell my friends about it, lest they actually come and read it thus ruining my opportunity to use them and their private lives as subject matter. Anyway, It seemed clear that bloggers banded together and went looking for each other and that was that. Blogging was the “back alley” of the WWW if you will.
Somehow, that all naiveté evolved into me reading blogs every day (that www.dooce.com, she’s so funny. Every time I read her I want to go back and burn my blog.) and actually continuing to post on my own occasionally. While these are both surprising, I’m actually the most in shock over the fact that, according to my sitemeter reader, I have had over 400 visitors. Now granted, 80% of those were probably me, but still that means that at least (argh, math) 80 or so people-who-are-not-me have come to my site.
And of those vistors, according to sitemeter, the average visit duration is “0 seconds”. At first, this got me fairly hot under the collar. What the heck, I thought. Does my site give off some sort of Ebola vibes that causes people to immediately yank their computer power cord out of the wall? Then, in my increasing blog savvyness, I realized that it had to do with page views or something like that which has not yet interested me enough to get me to read the entire explanation. I think am partially afraid it will say at the end, “…unless this is in reference to One Day At a Time, in which case your average visit is truly zero seconds. Sorry”.
And I learned something else through sitemeter- the internet actually tells the pages what you typed into a search engine to get to their page and it will go so far as to pinpoint it was someone in your city typing in “unnatural sex acts, biscuits”. Holy cow. For heavens sake, I don’t want to be anyway affiliated with some of my “queries of boredom” as I’ll call them, even within a 100 mile radius. And trust me, some of you should feel the same way, especially visitor number 256 who somehow found my blog by googling “time of sucker management is done in pineapple”.
In any event, I see many of you are men and women of few words. That’s ok (no its not!). Just because I want to ramble on doesn’t mean you have to (you really should). Really, its reward enough to know that I have connected with so many of you (and mostly me) for those precious 0 seconds.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Saying Goodbye to Strandings and Strange Engine Noises
It is the end of an era. My husband and I bit the bullet, took the plunge and pulled out all the stops. Yep, we finally got a new car. It was not outside the realm of possibility to think that this may never happen. We are not what you call rapid decision makers. It took us 3 years to buy a house, 5 years to decide on a dining room set and 6 years to have a child. The cars, well at both 11 years old, they seemed a lot of like permanent fixtures. My husband is met-tic-u-lous when it comes to car care, so they still looked like new, even as engine parts fly off and hit traffic behind us. Aside from the obvious benefit of having forgotten what a car payment was, we weren’t really the type to worry too much about what we drove, despite constant jokes from our friends about our antique classics. My husband, an accountant, was very clear on the concept of "depreciating assets" so we just drove and drove and drove on some more.
However, for his car, we have found over the last year that it’s safest to keep it within a two mile radius of home, unless you are up for an "adventure" that you won’t easily be able to walk home from. His lemonmobile was a 95 Chevy Blazer with 170,000 miles, which was probably technically still considered a new car since every element had been replaced at least once. This car was a disaster from the start, yet my husband continued to insist that it "runs good, its smooth don’t you think"? At least we got great gas mileage since the car was usually in the shop.
Well somehow in the space of a week, we went from "keeping the car to at least 200,000 miles!" to my husband finding a great deal on a 2007 Tahoe LTZ at which point the Blazer "probably wont make it until the end of the month, baby". Although suspicious of this rapid change in attitude (I prefer attitudes to shift gradually over the course of a decade or so), I said, "sure, whatever" to the purchase of a new car. Because I’m hip and I can roll with the punches (other than my two hour lecture on the perils of buying another Chevy beginning with: "are you insane?")
So we have to head up North 6 hours to get the new car, because that’s where the super-duper deal is. Again, though the Blazer had previously been slated to go into the mileage hall of fame, my husband insisted now it was barely scotched taped together and wouldn’t go faster than 60mph. Our son kept yelling "Fast! Fast!" from the baby seat, since my husband usually drives in such a manner as to leave me digging my nails in the leather seats and reflexively punching my feet onto the floor in search of a passenger side brake. The kid didn’t know what we were doing in the right lane being passed by bicyclists.
So as not to entice me by this new safe driving, my husband also came up with a rule that I couldn’t turn on the air conditioning, despite it being literally 95 degrees out. I sat melting into the seat, the open windows created a vortex within so that anything not nailed down was sucked out of the vehicle. My son was draped listlessly in his car seat, hair plastered to his face, eyes squinting from the wind. I said, "what happened to this car being so smooth? Are you trying to ensure my support of this new car by making me as miserable as humanly possible?" Finally, my husband relented and turned on the air conditioning. On bilevel low. Whatever.
At the car dealership, we parked next to the new Tahoe and piled out of the Blazer feeling a little nostalgic. We walked around the Tahoe to inspect and admire, and by the time we got back around, the Blazer was gone. These dealers clearly are taking no chances that you may change your mind. I looked everywhere on the lot and it was nowhere to be found. It probably had already been crushed into a little green can.
In any event, the ride back, after a week of visiting family, was smooth and comfortable. Well, as comfortable as you can get when your two year old refuses to nap and kicks the back of your seat the entire time. Still, it's strange not to see the old car leaking oil on the driveway anymore, I keep thinking my husband has gone to the store, until I step into my garage and have to turn sideways to slither by the behemoth that now occupies it. Ah well, onward and upward, as they say.
However, for his car, we have found over the last year that it’s safest to keep it within a two mile radius of home, unless you are up for an "adventure" that you won’t easily be able to walk home from. His lemonmobile was a 95 Chevy Blazer with 170,000 miles, which was probably technically still considered a new car since every element had been replaced at least once. This car was a disaster from the start, yet my husband continued to insist that it "runs good, its smooth don’t you think"? At least we got great gas mileage since the car was usually in the shop.
Well somehow in the space of a week, we went from "keeping the car to at least 200,000 miles!" to my husband finding a great deal on a 2007 Tahoe LTZ at which point the Blazer "probably wont make it until the end of the month, baby". Although suspicious of this rapid change in attitude (I prefer attitudes to shift gradually over the course of a decade or so), I said, "sure, whatever" to the purchase of a new car. Because I’m hip and I can roll with the punches (other than my two hour lecture on the perils of buying another Chevy beginning with: "are you insane?")
So we have to head up North 6 hours to get the new car, because that’s where the super-duper deal is. Again, though the Blazer had previously been slated to go into the mileage hall of fame, my husband insisted now it was barely scotched taped together and wouldn’t go faster than 60mph. Our son kept yelling "Fast! Fast!" from the baby seat, since my husband usually drives in such a manner as to leave me digging my nails in the leather seats and reflexively punching my feet onto the floor in search of a passenger side brake. The kid didn’t know what we were doing in the right lane being passed by bicyclists.
So as not to entice me by this new safe driving, my husband also came up with a rule that I couldn’t turn on the air conditioning, despite it being literally 95 degrees out. I sat melting into the seat, the open windows created a vortex within so that anything not nailed down was sucked out of the vehicle. My son was draped listlessly in his car seat, hair plastered to his face, eyes squinting from the wind. I said, "what happened to this car being so smooth? Are you trying to ensure my support of this new car by making me as miserable as humanly possible?" Finally, my husband relented and turned on the air conditioning. On bilevel low. Whatever.
At the car dealership, we parked next to the new Tahoe and piled out of the Blazer feeling a little nostalgic. We walked around the Tahoe to inspect and admire, and by the time we got back around, the Blazer was gone. These dealers clearly are taking no chances that you may change your mind. I looked everywhere on the lot and it was nowhere to be found. It probably had already been crushed into a little green can.
In any event, the ride back, after a week of visiting family, was smooth and comfortable. Well, as comfortable as you can get when your two year old refuses to nap and kicks the back of your seat the entire time. Still, it's strange not to see the old car leaking oil on the driveway anymore, I keep thinking my husband has gone to the store, until I step into my garage and have to turn sideways to slither by the behemoth that now occupies it. Ah well, onward and upward, as they say.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Telecommuting
My company has been forced to accept certain degrees of telecommuting over the years. You'd think we were based in Sibera with all the trouble we have finding qualified candidates. To mitigate this, we have hired people from other states to work remotely or retained people after they have moved away for whatever reason.
One of my peers decided to move to California in search of better weather (better than DC with our standard 92 degrees with 98% humidity? What a dreamer.). He's an interesting guy. He's married yet I've had extensive discussions with him about sewing curtains, keeping petunias safe from backyard bunnies, and the saturated fat content of olive oil. I think its called being a metrosexual now. Anyway. He wasn’t online today, which around here means you have been abducted by aliens or are possibly dead. We are all online, all the time. I sent him an email to probe.
I said: "Where are you? You're not online."
He said: "I'm either:
1) Moving again.
2) Having my toes done.
3) Watching American Movie Classics all day.
4) Drifting in and out of consciousness in my chair."
I'm totally unsure which one to pick.
One of my peers decided to move to California in search of better weather (better than DC with our standard 92 degrees with 98% humidity? What a dreamer.). He's an interesting guy. He's married yet I've had extensive discussions with him about sewing curtains, keeping petunias safe from backyard bunnies, and the saturated fat content of olive oil. I think its called being a metrosexual now. Anyway. He wasn’t online today, which around here means you have been abducted by aliens or are possibly dead. We are all online, all the time. I sent him an email to probe.
I said: "Where are you? You're not online."
He said: "I'm either:
1) Moving again.
2) Having my toes done.
3) Watching American Movie Classics all day.
4) Drifting in and out of consciousness in my chair."
I'm totally unsure which one to pick.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
PiMPing it up
A few weeks ago, I became a PiMP. Technically, my certification is "Project Management Professional (PMP)" but everyone I mentioned this to said, "what's a pimp?". Can you believe this is the best name they could come up with? Not only is the acronym bad, but the full title is a little dorky too. Why not "certified project manager" or something? I suggest we charter a project to clean up this mess.
It’s hard to believe that the PMP is the new "hot credential" and is what the CPA is to Accounting for Project Management; except the CPA exam is about 10 times harder. Everyone is trying to get their PMP. I will give it to the Project Management Institute (PMI); they have managed to transform themselves from a somewhat obscure association to a highly sought after credentialing body. Back when I was doing full time project management, this certification didn’t exist or at least was never ever discussed. Having been in management for a while now, I've seen a huge upswing in this credential over the last couple years and when the remaining few project managers on my staff decided to get certified, I decided to go along for the ride. I figured I should probably have this credential if my staff did, and I assumed I could breeze through it with my over 10 years of complex project management experience.
So I signed up and then I looked at the materials. To my absolute horror, the materials didn’t relate to "the real world". They were obscure, academic, and focused on a single process methodology, not widely adopted. I think people who had never managed a project would probably have an advantage on this exam since they would lack any context. I sought in vain for a way to back out of this. I definitely had not anticipated having to "study" for this stupid test and was hugely annoyed that I had gotten myself into this situation, voluntarily no less. Having found no way to exit left, I sucked it up, studied the materials and took the exam. At first I thought I had the wrong exam. The exam didn’t reflect the study materials and it didn’t reflect real-life either. I couldn’t believe I was conned into memorizing all of PMI’s processes and nuances and then the test didn’t even cover most of them. Instead, I was stuck in some sort of PMI parallel universe designed to torture people with strange, "out of the blue" questions. But I passed. Maybe strange becomes me.
My parents couldn’t wait to tell everyone that I had become a Pimp. They conveniently leave out that it was a legitimate credential and abruptly stop the conversation after saying that I'm a pimp in Virginia and doing well. Gotta go!
It’s hard to believe that the PMP is the new "hot credential" and is what the CPA is to Accounting for Project Management; except the CPA exam is about 10 times harder. Everyone is trying to get their PMP. I will give it to the Project Management Institute (PMI); they have managed to transform themselves from a somewhat obscure association to a highly sought after credentialing body. Back when I was doing full time project management, this certification didn’t exist or at least was never ever discussed. Having been in management for a while now, I've seen a huge upswing in this credential over the last couple years and when the remaining few project managers on my staff decided to get certified, I decided to go along for the ride. I figured I should probably have this credential if my staff did, and I assumed I could breeze through it with my over 10 years of complex project management experience.
So I signed up and then I looked at the materials. To my absolute horror, the materials didn’t relate to "the real world". They were obscure, academic, and focused on a single process methodology, not widely adopted. I think people who had never managed a project would probably have an advantage on this exam since they would lack any context. I sought in vain for a way to back out of this. I definitely had not anticipated having to "study" for this stupid test and was hugely annoyed that I had gotten myself into this situation, voluntarily no less. Having found no way to exit left, I sucked it up, studied the materials and took the exam. At first I thought I had the wrong exam. The exam didn’t reflect the study materials and it didn’t reflect real-life either. I couldn’t believe I was conned into memorizing all of PMI’s processes and nuances and then the test didn’t even cover most of them. Instead, I was stuck in some sort of PMI parallel universe designed to torture people with strange, "out of the blue" questions. But I passed. Maybe strange becomes me.
My parents couldn’t wait to tell everyone that I had become a Pimp. They conveniently leave out that it was a legitimate credential and abruptly stop the conversation after saying that I'm a pimp in Virginia and doing well. Gotta go!
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Dont mind me, I'm insane
You know those women who freak out when they realize they are beginning to sound like their mothers? I should only be so lucky. The things I say in response to my two year old’s antics make me sound like a lunatic.
My son has this ride on truck that he loves. The seat flips up and he stores all his treasured possessions in there. His match box cars, his cheese its, a sippy cup of juice, rocks he found. If it’s important, it’s in the truck.
Earlier today, he had a little baggie of graham crackers I prepared for our walk. He took his sippy cup of juice/water and was trying to shove it into the baggie and obviously it wouldn’t fit. He was getting frustrated. I was also getting frustrated because he was holding up things. I said, exasperated, “Jack, stop trying to put your juice in that bag and put it in your truck where it belongs!”.
Then I stopped, thinking “In the truck where it belongs?” Oh yeah sister, get a grip, you are just barely hanging on here.
I have also recently found myself advising on why we should not put parmesan cheese on ice cream, what mr. peepee diaper had to say, and that if there was another single can of mushrooms stacked on the kitchen table, he was going to the naughty step, mister.
My son has this ride on truck that he loves. The seat flips up and he stores all his treasured possessions in there. His match box cars, his cheese its, a sippy cup of juice, rocks he found. If it’s important, it’s in the truck.
Earlier today, he had a little baggie of graham crackers I prepared for our walk. He took his sippy cup of juice/water and was trying to shove it into the baggie and obviously it wouldn’t fit. He was getting frustrated. I was also getting frustrated because he was holding up things. I said, exasperated, “Jack, stop trying to put your juice in that bag and put it in your truck where it belongs!”.
Then I stopped, thinking “In the truck where it belongs?” Oh yeah sister, get a grip, you are just barely hanging on here.
I have also recently found myself advising on why we should not put parmesan cheese on ice cream, what mr. peepee diaper had to say, and that if there was another single can of mushrooms stacked on the kitchen table, he was going to the naughty step, mister.
Book Review: And You Know You Should Be Glad by Bob Greene
The last two days I read “And You Know You Should Be Glad” by Bob Greene. I saw it reviewed in the paper and I guess the fact that it was about Bob’s best friend from Kindergarten hit home since my husband is unnaturally attached to his best friend he met in First grade. They talk almost every day. I am a huge supporter of this relationship; having such a close friendship is rare for men, and his friend lives out of town, so it’s no skin off my back.
Anyway, Bob’s books is good, but here’s the deal- a lot of it is walking down memory lane, which for me, never having been a little boy in the 1950’s, wasn’t such a thrill ride. You would be tempted to skip over these parts entirely, except Bob would occasionally come back with some, if not profound, searingly accurate observations. For example, Bob writes:
“It was the first time we had experienced something like that. Later, in the adult world of business and gnawing ambition, we- all of us, everyone who is thrust into that larger and colder world- would go through it time and time again; seeing someone move ahead of us, seeing someone achieve something or be given something that the rest of us can only yearn for. You feel it in your stomach, you feel the sands shifting. Someone has moved beyond you and you are witness. Someone has become something different- something better- than what he or you had been before. And all you can do is watch it happen.”
Ouch. That one hurt a little. I think I’d been chalking some of that up to the Old Boys Club or whatever else. But still, I like recognizing real life in books, so it prompted me to mostly read the entire book. I seem to be getting lazy in my old age, this is the second book I publicly have admitted to skipping parts of.
Anyway, as for the present day story, it’s a tear jerker. I was crying for the last two pages and I don’t even know these guys. Sigh. I always feel so stupid when that happens; completely unsure of how I would explain what exactly I was doing (and why) if someone walked in. Then again, I challenge you *not* to cry, lets see how tough *you* are.
I wish I could find more happy books. These sad stories are like car accidents you can’t not look at. True, it was a story of a beautiful friendship and it made me think about how much I treasure my friends. But it also made me think of all of them dying. Not such a pretty picture. It was a good book. I wish I hadn’t read it.
Anyway, Bob’s books is good, but here’s the deal- a lot of it is walking down memory lane, which for me, never having been a little boy in the 1950’s, wasn’t such a thrill ride. You would be tempted to skip over these parts entirely, except Bob would occasionally come back with some, if not profound, searingly accurate observations. For example, Bob writes:
“It was the first time we had experienced something like that. Later, in the adult world of business and gnawing ambition, we- all of us, everyone who is thrust into that larger and colder world- would go through it time and time again; seeing someone move ahead of us, seeing someone achieve something or be given something that the rest of us can only yearn for. You feel it in your stomach, you feel the sands shifting. Someone has moved beyond you and you are witness. Someone has become something different- something better- than what he or you had been before. And all you can do is watch it happen.”
Ouch. That one hurt a little. I think I’d been chalking some of that up to the Old Boys Club or whatever else. But still, I like recognizing real life in books, so it prompted me to mostly read the entire book. I seem to be getting lazy in my old age, this is the second book I publicly have admitted to skipping parts of.
Anyway, as for the present day story, it’s a tear jerker. I was crying for the last two pages and I don’t even know these guys. Sigh. I always feel so stupid when that happens; completely unsure of how I would explain what exactly I was doing (and why) if someone walked in. Then again, I challenge you *not* to cry, lets see how tough *you* are.
I wish I could find more happy books. These sad stories are like car accidents you can’t not look at. True, it was a story of a beautiful friendship and it made me think about how much I treasure my friends. But it also made me think of all of them dying. Not such a pretty picture. It was a good book. I wish I hadn’t read it.
Book Review: The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult
Last weekend, I read The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult. I’ve read Picoult’s other books, I think I liked them, they are similar to all others in that genre. I started reading the book on a Sunday morning and after sneaking pages in all day in between running after Jack, I was still reading it at 1:00am Monday morning. It was suspenseful and I was reading it like it was crack. I knew I would really regret this in the morning when I had to get up for work, but I couldn’t go to sleep without finishing it. While, despite skimming through a late story line at the end, I did. It was a bit of a “quick finish” where an author tries to tie up 30 loose strings in five pages, but it was done. I went to sleep satisfied.
The next day, I remembered my pledge to start contributing to those forums I visit a lot, like Amazon.com ratings or Allrecipes.com. Damn. Why did I have to pledge to be so consciousnesses? Anyway, feeling guilty, I did go and write a review, giving the book a good review based on how compelling I found it that I read it all in one day.
The next day, I woke up with a major “book hangover”. The more I thought about The Tenth Circle, the more I felt like I had been wearing beer goggles and hooked up with an ugly guy, who had temporarily appeared cute. In retrospect, I don’t think I actually know what the result of the main story line was. What kind of person writes a book where you get to the end and still don’t know what happened? Argh! And geez, that thing on the bridge towards the end, what was THAT about? How unrealistic can you get?!
So I think I have changed my mind. The Tenth Circle is like Chinese food- you’ll be hungry one the soy sauce high wears off. That said, I’m always impressed that anyone has the focus to sit down and write a book from beginning to end, so good for you Jodi. At least you wrote it so armchair critics like me could have something to complain about!
The next day, I remembered my pledge to start contributing to those forums I visit a lot, like Amazon.com ratings or Allrecipes.com. Damn. Why did I have to pledge to be so consciousnesses? Anyway, feeling guilty, I did go and write a review, giving the book a good review based on how compelling I found it that I read it all in one day.
The next day, I woke up with a major “book hangover”. The more I thought about The Tenth Circle, the more I felt like I had been wearing beer goggles and hooked up with an ugly guy, who had temporarily appeared cute. In retrospect, I don’t think I actually know what the result of the main story line was. What kind of person writes a book where you get to the end and still don’t know what happened? Argh! And geez, that thing on the bridge towards the end, what was THAT about? How unrealistic can you get?!
So I think I have changed my mind. The Tenth Circle is like Chinese food- you’ll be hungry one the soy sauce high wears off. That said, I’m always impressed that anyone has the focus to sit down and write a book from beginning to end, so good for you Jodi. At least you wrote it so armchair critics like me could have something to complain about!
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Women are Frigid (and not just if you forget your anniversary)
It is sweltering out. The temperature is in the high 90's. You can see the humidity in the air, lurking; waiting to envelope you as soon as you venture outside. It will jump into your hair molecules to make them stick out in every direction like tiny electrical wires, while ironically, at the same time infusing lackluster limpness. The streets in the distance shimmer with the heat like a mirage. The sun sears the clouds, until there is nothing left but an expanse of empty blue sky. There will be no reprieve from the sun today.
I am wearing a fuzzy white turtleneck sweater. With thick socks and boots. I am almost certain to stroke out from heat exhaustion before reaching my car. Why am I dressed so inappropriately? Simple: I'm going to work. Where no matter the month or the temperature, rain or shine, it's always Antarctica.
I really hate being cold. There is something just very wrong with wearing a sweater in June and still having your arms turn into gooseflesh as soon as you walk through the door. I regularly complain to HR about this "hostile environment" where my nose runs all day and I get back aches from contorting around my space heater trying to starve off frostnip. They insist the thermostat reads 68 degrees for my office. It feels more like 48 degrees.
"Why don’t you get one of those ratty office sweaters like Sally over in Operations?" one of my direct reports suggested. Um yeah. I'm desperate but not crazy. Leave it to a man to suggest such a thing. Men are never cold. Every time I ask my male staff members to come to my office they complain that they become immediately incapacitated by their eyes drying out from my space heater.
Meanwhile, my only female direct report has an identical space heater in her office. I was offsite a few weeks ago for the entire week and she sent me an email: "I took your space heater while you’re gone, I hope you don’t mind. Two is SO much better than one".
At lunch, I race out to my car's black leather interior, which has been super-heated to 800 degrees from the sun. I jump in and shut the door, trapping all the heat as I try to coax my core body temperature to return to at least 90 degrees. Unfortunately, the nirvana point doesn’t last long and once the chill has been chased away, my turtleneck starts to feel a little thick. Then I have to throw operations into full reverse and open the windows and blast the A/C.
Thankfully I only go into the office 3 days a week. If I had to be there everyday, I might seriously consider one of those ratty office sweaters.
I am wearing a fuzzy white turtleneck sweater. With thick socks and boots. I am almost certain to stroke out from heat exhaustion before reaching my car. Why am I dressed so inappropriately? Simple: I'm going to work. Where no matter the month or the temperature, rain or shine, it's always Antarctica.
I really hate being cold. There is something just very wrong with wearing a sweater in June and still having your arms turn into gooseflesh as soon as you walk through the door. I regularly complain to HR about this "hostile environment" where my nose runs all day and I get back aches from contorting around my space heater trying to starve off frostnip. They insist the thermostat reads 68 degrees for my office. It feels more like 48 degrees.
"Why don’t you get one of those ratty office sweaters like Sally over in Operations?" one of my direct reports suggested. Um yeah. I'm desperate but not crazy. Leave it to a man to suggest such a thing. Men are never cold. Every time I ask my male staff members to come to my office they complain that they become immediately incapacitated by their eyes drying out from my space heater.
Meanwhile, my only female direct report has an identical space heater in her office. I was offsite a few weeks ago for the entire week and she sent me an email: "I took your space heater while you’re gone, I hope you don’t mind. Two is SO much better than one".
At lunch, I race out to my car's black leather interior, which has been super-heated to 800 degrees from the sun. I jump in and shut the door, trapping all the heat as I try to coax my core body temperature to return to at least 90 degrees. Unfortunately, the nirvana point doesn’t last long and once the chill has been chased away, my turtleneck starts to feel a little thick. Then I have to throw operations into full reverse and open the windows and blast the A/C.
Thankfully I only go into the office 3 days a week. If I had to be there everyday, I might seriously consider one of those ratty office sweaters.
Monday, June 05, 2006
A Flash of Brilliance
I am a mostly theoretical inventor. My countless product ideas seeming to hit a snag sometime during execution that prevents them from reaching completion (AKA: “what am I supposed to do next with this thing?”) thus they are all still “theoretical”. Until which time someone else brings them to market 5 years later and I seethe and complain bitterly to my husband about people stealing “my ideas”.
Inspiration usually isn’t my problem; sometimes I wish I could make it through the day without thinking of 15 new lines of business. However, I am always interested in another viewpoint, so I eagerly anticipated my son, Jack, beginning to talk. Based on the clever quips I have read in the back of Parenting Magazine, Children say the darndest things. I had a theory that out of their lack of preconceived notions, and in their precious innocence, they would unknowingly toss out a great product idea. And I fully expected to catch that toss and retire on it.
So after much prodding, my son finally began to talk. The first 6 months were pretty much a waste (I think “turtle” has been done), but finally at 2 he began to string sentences together. I went on high alert, waiting for that flash of brilliance, willing it, vowing that whatever it was, I would do it. I had faith in my boy.
Around this same time, Jack picked up a habit of wanting to relate everything in books or songs, etc. to real objects. If we are reading a book about cars, he races over and dumps all his cars in my lap. If the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” comes on, he runs to get his plastic spider. You get the idea. (and beware of reading those “First Words” books during these phases, you end up buried alive under a heap of representative objects).
So the other day, Jack was watching ESPN (how did that get on?) and some golf show started. I wasn’t really paying attention, but suddenly Jack was running around yelling “Egg! Egg!“. He ran over to the kitchen and came back with an egg from the refrigerator (recall, he is already around 11 feet tall), and kept repeating “Egg!”. I thought, “What the heck is he talking about?” Then I turned around and saw it. Jack was holding an Egg up to the TV where, against the dark green grass, little golf balls looked strikingly similar to, well, yes, eggs.
He looked at me, his angelic face looking for his usual confirmation, “Yes Jack, that is a ____ just like in the book/picture/song/etc”. Except this time Jack thinks that you play golf with Eggs. Then I realized the moment had arrived. Playing golf with eggs is definitely a new product. Sunny Side Golf Course. Add 10% for hard-boiled play. I’d have to buy some chickens…
Then again, I'm not really an early bird, nor do I have a background in livestock. I might need to give this one some more thought. Maybe this was a warm-up idea.
Inspiration usually isn’t my problem; sometimes I wish I could make it through the day without thinking of 15 new lines of business. However, I am always interested in another viewpoint, so I eagerly anticipated my son, Jack, beginning to talk. Based on the clever quips I have read in the back of Parenting Magazine, Children say the darndest things. I had a theory that out of their lack of preconceived notions, and in their precious innocence, they would unknowingly toss out a great product idea. And I fully expected to catch that toss and retire on it.
So after much prodding, my son finally began to talk. The first 6 months were pretty much a waste (I think “turtle” has been done), but finally at 2 he began to string sentences together. I went on high alert, waiting for that flash of brilliance, willing it, vowing that whatever it was, I would do it. I had faith in my boy.
Around this same time, Jack picked up a habit of wanting to relate everything in books or songs, etc. to real objects. If we are reading a book about cars, he races over and dumps all his cars in my lap. If the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” comes on, he runs to get his plastic spider. You get the idea. (and beware of reading those “First Words” books during these phases, you end up buried alive under a heap of representative objects).
So the other day, Jack was watching ESPN (how did that get on?) and some golf show started. I wasn’t really paying attention, but suddenly Jack was running around yelling “Egg! Egg!“. He ran over to the kitchen and came back with an egg from the refrigerator (recall, he is already around 11 feet tall), and kept repeating “Egg!”. I thought, “What the heck is he talking about?” Then I turned around and saw it. Jack was holding an Egg up to the TV where, against the dark green grass, little golf balls looked strikingly similar to, well, yes, eggs.
He looked at me, his angelic face looking for his usual confirmation, “Yes Jack, that is a ____ just like in the book/picture/song/etc”. Except this time Jack thinks that you play golf with Eggs. Then I realized the moment had arrived. Playing golf with eggs is definitely a new product. Sunny Side Golf Course. Add 10% for hard-boiled play. I’d have to buy some chickens…
Then again, I'm not really an early bird, nor do I have a background in livestock. I might need to give this one some more thought. Maybe this was a warm-up idea.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
"Don't Like It"
I thought I had dodged the bullet. I've read countless articles where parents lamented that their two year old who's favorite word was "NO!" or they would grab everything in sight and say "Mine!". And yet, my son didn’t. I marveled at his emotional maturity and good nature. Then it struck.
Me: "Jack, eat your toast."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: (confusion setting in, where did he learn this phrase...) "What?"
Jack: "Don't. Like. It."..."No Like It"
Great. Now he was dumbing down his English since it appeared his mother wasn’t "getting" it.
I knew immediately this was bad news. Kids don’t go learning full phrases without a comprehensive plan for incorporating them into constant use. Sure enough, over the next few days, most of our exchanges went like this:
Me: "Jack, time for your bath."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: "Jack, let's read Dick and Jane."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: "Jack, do you want to play with your sidewalk chalk?"
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: (substitute anything I might have said to my son)
Jack: "Don't like it."
Maybe the world wasn’t ending, but it was definitely tettering on the brink as far as I was concerned. I was getting pretty fed up with Mr. Contrary, my son. He wasn't eatting his meals or picking up his toys and was basically fighting me every step of the way (Im thinking: stand aside kid, I'm an "original" on control issues. You're out of your league). So I picked up one of my parenting books, and against all odds, it was the "SuperNanny" book. Yes, as in the TV show lady. It was enough I pulled it off the shelves at the library with other parenting psychology books, but the fact that I was referencing it, well, maybe the world really was ending this time. And yes, and you know what is coming next, I created a Naughty Step at our house. I've only watched the SupperNanny show a few times, but I've seen enough to know that the Naughty Step is central. It shows up every time to cure everything from back talk to hyperactivity to leprosy (I think).
We had a slight glitch in the plan when Jack found the Naughty Step to be a hoot. He loved it. When engaging in his "Don’t Like It" defiance, I would give the prescribed warning; "Jack, if you persist in this behavior I will put you on the Naughty Step". And he would say happily "Naughty Step! Naughty Step!" and run to it giggling and sit down. Not exactly the axis of fear the SuppeNanny described.
Maybe the problem was that I was giving into my son's request for make-up hugs too early ("Hugs? Hugs?"). Lets face it, I'm a sucker for that sweet baby voice and those pudgy arms. After getting really strict and making him wait for a minute on the step, he'd fake wail a bit, get his hug, and…do what I told him. Bet you didn’t expect that! Yeah, me neither. But gosh darn it, the Naughty Step, even when employed incorrectly, seemed to work!
That was the good news. The bad news is that now I have to bear the humiliation of using parenting techniques from a childless British woman who races around in a Plymouth Cruiser saying "I'm on my way!". Sigh.
Me: "Jack, eat your toast."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: (confusion setting in, where did he learn this phrase...) "What?"
Jack: "Don't. Like. It."..."No Like It"
Great. Now he was dumbing down his English since it appeared his mother wasn’t "getting" it.
I knew immediately this was bad news. Kids don’t go learning full phrases without a comprehensive plan for incorporating them into constant use. Sure enough, over the next few days, most of our exchanges went like this:
Me: "Jack, time for your bath."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: "Jack, let's read Dick and Jane."
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: "Jack, do you want to play with your sidewalk chalk?"
Jack: "Don’t like it."
Me: (substitute anything I might have said to my son)
Jack: "Don't like it."
Maybe the world wasn’t ending, but it was definitely tettering on the brink as far as I was concerned. I was getting pretty fed up with Mr. Contrary, my son. He wasn't eatting his meals or picking up his toys and was basically fighting me every step of the way (Im thinking: stand aside kid, I'm an "original" on control issues. You're out of your league). So I picked up one of my parenting books, and against all odds, it was the "SuperNanny" book. Yes, as in the TV show lady. It was enough I pulled it off the shelves at the library with other parenting psychology books, but the fact that I was referencing it, well, maybe the world really was ending this time. And yes, and you know what is coming next, I created a Naughty Step at our house. I've only watched the SupperNanny show a few times, but I've seen enough to know that the Naughty Step is central. It shows up every time to cure everything from back talk to hyperactivity to leprosy (I think).
We had a slight glitch in the plan when Jack found the Naughty Step to be a hoot. He loved it. When engaging in his "Don’t Like It" defiance, I would give the prescribed warning; "Jack, if you persist in this behavior I will put you on the Naughty Step". And he would say happily "Naughty Step! Naughty Step!" and run to it giggling and sit down. Not exactly the axis of fear the SuppeNanny described.
Maybe the problem was that I was giving into my son's request for make-up hugs too early ("Hugs? Hugs?"). Lets face it, I'm a sucker for that sweet baby voice and those pudgy arms. After getting really strict and making him wait for a minute on the step, he'd fake wail a bit, get his hug, and…do what I told him. Bet you didn’t expect that! Yeah, me neither. But gosh darn it, the Naughty Step, even when employed incorrectly, seemed to work!
That was the good news. The bad news is that now I have to bear the humiliation of using parenting techniques from a childless British woman who races around in a Plymouth Cruiser saying "I'm on my way!". Sigh.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
The Surreal Life
After reading another article on the DC Sniper trials recently, I was thinking about surreal events I've been involved with. It's the strangest sensation; you almost feel that you are on the outside looking on as a spectator. Some of the biggest surreal experiences for me include: being in an armed robbery (they call them "home invasions" now) at age nine with my brother and cousins while our parents were at our grandfather's wake. Several cracked-out, ski-masked, and armed men broke in and terrorized us while ransacking the house. We were so naïve we hid in a closet after we saw them chopping down the back door and it took them all of 15 seconds to find us. I was pretty sure I was going to die, and as a result, everything seemed to go in slow and fast motion all at once. Very surreal.
Another big one is of course September 11th. Living outside of DC, having fighter jets thunder over your house, and knowing you were sitting in a global bulls eye was pretty surreal. Just the day before I had finished with an engagement that had me flying back and forth from Dulles to LA every week, which was one of the routes that was hijacked. It was the most beautiful day, am amazing blue sky with the late summer crispness to the air, it all seemed so impossible. My husband was stuck on his "2-day" Northern CA business trip for almost two weeks and I had the radio and CNN on day and night for probably three days straight.
A little over a year later, we were treated to a rousing rendition of “what it's like to live in an unstable war torn country” when the DC Snipers showed up. You haven’t lived until you found yourself writing a will before taking the dog on a walk. Talk about group paranoia. Two guys in an area of 5 million had us diving into our cars and hiding behind concrete pillars on the rare occasion we were forced to leave our house. It seems surreal thinking about it now, but I actually would run in a zigzag pattern back to my car if I had to leave the house. You would have thought I would have felt silly doing this, but trust me, no one noticed since everyone else was either zigzagging or crossing the parking lot in infantry-style guerrilla crawls. You simply had no idea where they would strike next. No where was considered safe. My husband, as is his nature, managed to find the silver lining of the situation and was delighted when the credit card bill showed up and was the lowest it had been in 13 years. Trust me, I’m a dedicated spender, but “final sale” has a whole new meaning, when going out might in fact make it your final sale. I managed to go for an entire month without going to a gas station (My 3-mile commute work commute paid off again!) and when my husband had to go fill up mid-crisis, we had a phone line support system rigged to notify concerned individuals about the successful 98-octane mission.
So what dredged up these memories? In a word, Maryland. Maryland is retrying the Sniper's years after Virginia found them guilty of about a billion crimes against humanity as well as several counts of murder and sentenced them to death and life in prison, respectively (they are also still considering revoking their concealed weapon permits). I don’t want to draw attention to delicate family matters, but Maryland doesn’t seem to trust Virginia, so they would *also* like to sentence them to death. Ironically, Virginia executes a *lot* more prisoners than Maryland, who I believe turned their electric chair into a garden planter in 1999 after seeing a similar project in Martha Stewart Living's April issue. I suppose Maryland might be concerned about Virginia's decision making abilities and may consider the commonwealth's lack of taste to be a warning sign of instability, I can only guess as a result of our State Welcome Sign.
Haven’t given much thought to your state's Welcome Sign lately? Well, we have! Apparently someone pointed out that our sign was "dated" and I believe one quote was (paraphrasing) "it looks like something my grandma knitted and hung in her kitchen in 1950". So Virginia immediately took action and created five other horribly dated alternatives to choose from and put it to a public vote. I first saw the options printed in the Washington Post and again, felt that touch of surrealism. The first thing that leapt to mind was "What? Are these the right pictures?". It’s as if Virginia couldn’t come up with the money for any new clip art software and decided to reuse the Atari-era graphics and fonts they had on file. Furthermore, the only new slogan they could come up with was "Virginia Welcomes You", which wow, bam, talk about impact. What fools we were with the old slogan; "Welcome to Virginia". You can hardly blame Maryland for being wary, I suppose.
Another big one is of course September 11th. Living outside of DC, having fighter jets thunder over your house, and knowing you were sitting in a global bulls eye was pretty surreal. Just the day before I had finished with an engagement that had me flying back and forth from Dulles to LA every week, which was one of the routes that was hijacked. It was the most beautiful day, am amazing blue sky with the late summer crispness to the air, it all seemed so impossible. My husband was stuck on his "2-day" Northern CA business trip for almost two weeks and I had the radio and CNN on day and night for probably three days straight.
A little over a year later, we were treated to a rousing rendition of “what it's like to live in an unstable war torn country” when the DC Snipers showed up. You haven’t lived until you found yourself writing a will before taking the dog on a walk. Talk about group paranoia. Two guys in an area of 5 million had us diving into our cars and hiding behind concrete pillars on the rare occasion we were forced to leave our house. It seems surreal thinking about it now, but I actually would run in a zigzag pattern back to my car if I had to leave the house. You would have thought I would have felt silly doing this, but trust me, no one noticed since everyone else was either zigzagging or crossing the parking lot in infantry-style guerrilla crawls. You simply had no idea where they would strike next. No where was considered safe. My husband, as is his nature, managed to find the silver lining of the situation and was delighted when the credit card bill showed up and was the lowest it had been in 13 years. Trust me, I’m a dedicated spender, but “final sale” has a whole new meaning, when going out might in fact make it your final sale. I managed to go for an entire month without going to a gas station (My 3-mile commute work commute paid off again!) and when my husband had to go fill up mid-crisis, we had a phone line support system rigged to notify concerned individuals about the successful 98-octane mission.
So what dredged up these memories? In a word, Maryland. Maryland is retrying the Sniper's years after Virginia found them guilty of about a billion crimes against humanity as well as several counts of murder and sentenced them to death and life in prison, respectively (they are also still considering revoking their concealed weapon permits). I don’t want to draw attention to delicate family matters, but Maryland doesn’t seem to trust Virginia, so they would *also* like to sentence them to death. Ironically, Virginia executes a *lot* more prisoners than Maryland, who I believe turned their electric chair into a garden planter in 1999 after seeing a similar project in Martha Stewart Living's April issue. I suppose Maryland might be concerned about Virginia's decision making abilities and may consider the commonwealth's lack of taste to be a warning sign of instability, I can only guess as a result of our State Welcome Sign.
Haven’t given much thought to your state's Welcome Sign lately? Well, we have! Apparently someone pointed out that our sign was "dated" and I believe one quote was (paraphrasing) "it looks like something my grandma knitted and hung in her kitchen in 1950". So Virginia immediately took action and created five other horribly dated alternatives to choose from and put it to a public vote. I first saw the options printed in the Washington Post and again, felt that touch of surrealism. The first thing that leapt to mind was "What? Are these the right pictures?". It’s as if Virginia couldn’t come up with the money for any new clip art software and decided to reuse the Atari-era graphics and fonts they had on file. Furthermore, the only new slogan they could come up with was "Virginia Welcomes You", which wow, bam, talk about impact. What fools we were with the old slogan; "Welcome to Virginia". You can hardly blame Maryland for being wary, I suppose.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Libya-US Relations Normalized
Thank God we are restoring ties to Libya. I can finally schedule my long-awaited vacation there, and think of all the Libyaneese products that we can finally get our hands on with the end of the trade embargo. Wow!
Actually the kiss-and-make up with Libya is notable to me, and probably many others raised in the 1970’s simply because they were the “original” terrorists. I don’t know what it is about childhood, but everything seemed more authentic then. Who could forget the white VW van filled with Libyan terrorists tearing through the mall parking lot as Michael J Fox raced to get his time machine car working in “Back to the Future”? That’s real drama baby, the kind that sticks with you and forever defines terrorism.
And it wasn’t just defining the bad guys (or waiting for the Soviet’s nuclear missile to arrive and fry us all) but everything back then seemed more real. As I grew up, things became more of an intellectual curiosity. I’m not sure I ever accepted another President after Carter or Reagan, the rest seemed to be on a trial run, like take your daughter to work day. The years seemed to move impossibly fast after 1980 and the world has become a blur. How was it that the wait for a birthday or Christmas appeared to be several eons long when I was age 10, and now I find myself pulling the Christmas decorations out about three weeks after I finally finished mailing out the “belated” gifts from the year before?
I think the sensory experience of childhood is amazing. The tangibleness of long summers where you weren’t hermetically sealed in air conditioned buildings. How sweet the ice cream was on a hot summer day when you had to beg your parents for a quarter instead of throwing it in your cart at the grocery store. The thrill of Saturday morning cartoons long before you realized that the only reasonable thing to do at 6am on Saturday’s was sleep.
It’s the purity of these experiences that lead people (such as myself) to assume that we had an idealized existence and make sweeping declarations that indicate that their path was naturally the best one. I say stupid things all the time like “I never went to preschool (implication: and look at how well I turned out)” or “When I was a kid, we sometimes could only afford hotdogs for dinner (implication: and look at how well I turned out)”.
Still, it’s good to know we have finally made some progress on Libya. President Carter must be really excited.
Actually the kiss-and-make up with Libya is notable to me, and probably many others raised in the 1970’s simply because they were the “original” terrorists. I don’t know what it is about childhood, but everything seemed more authentic then. Who could forget the white VW van filled with Libyan terrorists tearing through the mall parking lot as Michael J Fox raced to get his time machine car working in “Back to the Future”? That’s real drama baby, the kind that sticks with you and forever defines terrorism.
And it wasn’t just defining the bad guys (or waiting for the Soviet’s nuclear missile to arrive and fry us all) but everything back then seemed more real. As I grew up, things became more of an intellectual curiosity. I’m not sure I ever accepted another President after Carter or Reagan, the rest seemed to be on a trial run, like take your daughter to work day. The years seemed to move impossibly fast after 1980 and the world has become a blur. How was it that the wait for a birthday or Christmas appeared to be several eons long when I was age 10, and now I find myself pulling the Christmas decorations out about three weeks after I finally finished mailing out the “belated” gifts from the year before?
I think the sensory experience of childhood is amazing. The tangibleness of long summers where you weren’t hermetically sealed in air conditioned buildings. How sweet the ice cream was on a hot summer day when you had to beg your parents for a quarter instead of throwing it in your cart at the grocery store. The thrill of Saturday morning cartoons long before you realized that the only reasonable thing to do at 6am on Saturday’s was sleep.
It’s the purity of these experiences that lead people (such as myself) to assume that we had an idealized existence and make sweeping declarations that indicate that their path was naturally the best one. I say stupid things all the time like “I never went to preschool (implication: and look at how well I turned out)” or “When I was a kid, we sometimes could only afford hotdogs for dinner (implication: and look at how well I turned out)”.
Still, it’s good to know we have finally made some progress on Libya. President Carter must be really excited.
Photo Finish
Once you have kids, things change. Naptime marks the mad dash to get everything done in two hours that you used to spread over an entire day, traveling requires a pHD in logistics and coordination (a spare prescription of Lithium also helps), and Saturday mornings are booked indefinitely for the never ending parade of other people’s kid’s birthday parties.
Frankly, I’m not even sure who some of these children are or how their cartoon character invitations make it onto my fridge, but like dutiful parents everywhere I drag my progeny to the party anyways, where he will promptly dissolve in a puddle of tears once he realizes the presents aren’t for him and that he is expected to follow a carefully choreographed schedule of fun. Actually, it’s not the birthday parties themselves that I mind so much. Let’s face it, its not as if they were interrupting a long lazy morning in bed reading the paper and eating croissants, but what I truly dread is the inevitable after party photos, which are usually emailed out to half the world, mere seconds after you leave the premises.
Another batch of birthday party photos appeared in my inbox today and as feared, I flipped through and confirmed that I had been had again. An unspeakably horrid photograph of me, now on display for the entire Internet world. One cannot look at this photo without shuttering. I immediately sent off an Instant Message to my friend who hosted the party:
Me: “Thanks a lot for leaving the hideous photo of me in the album”
Her: “lol”
Me: “I’m serious, if it was you, I would have edited that one out.”
Her: “lol”
Now, you may have to know my willowy tall blonde friend, but may not be immediately apparent is that she knows exactly what she did. And she is a good enough friend not to try to deny it. She didn’t say “What bad photo?”. No, She knew. And she also knew by virtue of including it, the photographs of her looked all the more stunning in comparison. It does not help me that some of my friends are strikingly photogenic. Particularly the one I happened to be standing next to when this specific shot was taken. You can take pictures of this friend immediately after 27 hours of hard labor and think, “my she is lovely”. Or the time I took a picture of her heaving after a night of too much drinking and yet one could not help but look at the picture and admire her fine bone structure. It’s absurd that I should have to put up with this.
See, the truth is, I’m not photogenic. In fact, it may not be a stretch to say that I am the least photogenic person on the planet. Of course, you would never know this from looking around my home, where the casual observer might believe that I am a supermodel. What they don’t know is that these pictures represent only a tiny fraction of all pictures ever taken of me. They have been carefully culled to include only the most flattering pictures, often benefiting by overexposure, to the extent that they usually only have the slightest resemblance to me in real life.
I’m sorry to say that my dedication to showcasing only flattering photos of myself is so strong, that others often get run over in the process. For example, of the many pictures taken at my son’s baptism, one was particularly attractive of me, I’m turned slightly to the side to hide my post pregnancy figure so I almost looked thin, and the lighting made my features soft and glowing. Now, unfortunately, it wasn’t the best shot of my son. Lacking any real neck control, his head wasn’t fully supported and appears to be attached to his shoulders by a wet noodle. Aside from the odd angle, his face is mostly obscured. Still, it was damn good picture of me, so I framed it and put it on a shelf. Being unphotogentic can really bring out the worst in people.
There was some improvement with the advent of digital photography, specifically, the ability to edit oneself out of shots. I recall the days of picking of traditional film based prints from the drugstore. Going through these, I imagine I felt the same as homicide detectives reviewing crime scene photos. Each was usually worse than the last. I would gasp in horror, quickly look away, and wonder who *was* this poor incredibly unphotogetic woman in these shots. Could this really be me? I have a mental image of myself that doesn’t seem to reliably match up with real life evidence of my appearance, and never less so than when photographed. The pictures usually ended up buried in the bottom of a box. I should have thrown them away really but I somehow inherited some sort of depression-era quirk where I have a hard time throwing things away.
Now with digital photos, I can quickly review the pictures and crop myself out when I don’t look good. This, combined with the fact that I virtually never appear to be in photos anymore, works out to be a reliable system. I’m sure generations down the line will assume Jack was raised by a single father, since I always seem to be on the other end of the camera. It’s interesting that when we didn’t have kids, we would be quick to flag down an unsuspecting passerby to take a picture of the two of us, because, really, how lame would a shot of only one of us be? But with a child, as long as there is one of us in the frame, well it’s good enough.
At least I have six more whole, blissfully unphotographed, days before the next party. I’ll take what I can get.
Frankly, I’m not even sure who some of these children are or how their cartoon character invitations make it onto my fridge, but like dutiful parents everywhere I drag my progeny to the party anyways, where he will promptly dissolve in a puddle of tears once he realizes the presents aren’t for him and that he is expected to follow a carefully choreographed schedule of fun. Actually, it’s not the birthday parties themselves that I mind so much. Let’s face it, its not as if they were interrupting a long lazy morning in bed reading the paper and eating croissants, but what I truly dread is the inevitable after party photos, which are usually emailed out to half the world, mere seconds after you leave the premises.
Another batch of birthday party photos appeared in my inbox today and as feared, I flipped through and confirmed that I had been had again. An unspeakably horrid photograph of me, now on display for the entire Internet world. One cannot look at this photo without shuttering. I immediately sent off an Instant Message to my friend who hosted the party:
Me: “Thanks a lot for leaving the hideous photo of me in the album”
Her: “lol”
Me: “I’m serious, if it was you, I would have edited that one out.”
Her: “lol”
Now, you may have to know my willowy tall blonde friend, but may not be immediately apparent is that she knows exactly what she did. And she is a good enough friend not to try to deny it. She didn’t say “What bad photo?”. No, She knew. And she also knew by virtue of including it, the photographs of her looked all the more stunning in comparison. It does not help me that some of my friends are strikingly photogenic. Particularly the one I happened to be standing next to when this specific shot was taken. You can take pictures of this friend immediately after 27 hours of hard labor and think, “my she is lovely”. Or the time I took a picture of her heaving after a night of too much drinking and yet one could not help but look at the picture and admire her fine bone structure. It’s absurd that I should have to put up with this.
See, the truth is, I’m not photogenic. In fact, it may not be a stretch to say that I am the least photogenic person on the planet. Of course, you would never know this from looking around my home, where the casual observer might believe that I am a supermodel. What they don’t know is that these pictures represent only a tiny fraction of all pictures ever taken of me. They have been carefully culled to include only the most flattering pictures, often benefiting by overexposure, to the extent that they usually only have the slightest resemblance to me in real life.
I’m sorry to say that my dedication to showcasing only flattering photos of myself is so strong, that others often get run over in the process. For example, of the many pictures taken at my son’s baptism, one was particularly attractive of me, I’m turned slightly to the side to hide my post pregnancy figure so I almost looked thin, and the lighting made my features soft and glowing. Now, unfortunately, it wasn’t the best shot of my son. Lacking any real neck control, his head wasn’t fully supported and appears to be attached to his shoulders by a wet noodle. Aside from the odd angle, his face is mostly obscured. Still, it was damn good picture of me, so I framed it and put it on a shelf. Being unphotogentic can really bring out the worst in people.
There was some improvement with the advent of digital photography, specifically, the ability to edit oneself out of shots. I recall the days of picking of traditional film based prints from the drugstore. Going through these, I imagine I felt the same as homicide detectives reviewing crime scene photos. Each was usually worse than the last. I would gasp in horror, quickly look away, and wonder who *was* this poor incredibly unphotogetic woman in these shots. Could this really be me? I have a mental image of myself that doesn’t seem to reliably match up with real life evidence of my appearance, and never less so than when photographed. The pictures usually ended up buried in the bottom of a box. I should have thrown them away really but I somehow inherited some sort of depression-era quirk where I have a hard time throwing things away.
Now with digital photos, I can quickly review the pictures and crop myself out when I don’t look good. This, combined with the fact that I virtually never appear to be in photos anymore, works out to be a reliable system. I’m sure generations down the line will assume Jack was raised by a single father, since I always seem to be on the other end of the camera. It’s interesting that when we didn’t have kids, we would be quick to flag down an unsuspecting passerby to take a picture of the two of us, because, really, how lame would a shot of only one of us be? But with a child, as long as there is one of us in the frame, well it’s good enough.
At least I have six more whole, blissfully unphotographed, days before the next party. I’ll take what I can get.
Friday, May 12, 2006
It's All Relative
A few days ago I attended the Virginia Gold Cup with my husband. For those not familiar with Gold Cup, it’s a sort of Virginia based Kentucky Derby where the upper crust flocks to an idyllic pasture in Virginia Horse Country to watch horse races on a beautifully manicured course. They wear fancy dresses, elaborate hats and drink heavily as their $400 stilettos sink deep into the rail-side mud. Naturally, being high-class myself, I also attended, albeit wearing wedges.
This wasn’t our first time to Gold Cup and we’ve learned through experience that it’s certainly more fun to attend on someone else’s dime. This time, we arrived with my husband’s cousin at the tent of one of his company’s vendors. That’s how this works: the corporation pays big bucks for the tent and invites their big spending clients to attend with the intention of leaving them forever indebted so they will spend even more money next year. The downside is every so often you have to shake off a few pesky salesmen who keep getting in between you and the guy who set up the informal (and possibly illegal) pony betting pool or the bar. Worse still, it’s usually the same salesman cheerfully introducing himself for the 4th time in an hour since he started drinking while they were setting up the tent six hours ago.
The downside of going under corporate sponsorship is you don’t know anyone else except the people you came with, and standing like a loser in a small huddle for 5 hours can be a drag and ruin the Gold Cup experience. For some, this quick-make-friends requirement would present an insurmountable social challenge, but for my husband, it’s child’s play. I definitely consider myself an extrovert and I’ve even been called bossy, assertive and aggressive at times (don’t get me started…these are standard terms (of endearment Im sure) for women in management where the rest of management are men), but the point is, I’m no wall-flower. However, if my husband is anywhere in the vicinity, the rest of “extroverts” might as well go take a seat, because extrovertness can be relative and he redefines the very concept. The man is big (size) and huge (personality) and massive (voice). And people love him. He draws them in like a magnet. Store clerks, mailmen, customer service reps, health care workers, strangers in line, you name it- they are likely to be in a full-on animated conversation with my husband within moments of brushing by him and swapping business cards 20 minutes later so they can stay in touch. Universally they think he is in Sales (he in corporate finance, chief bean counter, which is an irony that people often cannot recover from.).
In any event, my super-extroverted husband can present a problem for me. Primarily that in purely in comparison I look quiet and dull. This makes me want to scream: “I’m not an introvert! I’m witty, I’m engaging, I’m…” Ah, but why bother, they aren’t paying any attention to me at all, I’m sort of the silent sidekick of my husband. So we’re at Gold Cup and we’ve secured a pub-style table to set our plates on. Now normally, I’d just assume eat in peace and scope out the potential temporary-friends situation afterwards, but my husband is already waving in everyone he sees walk by balancing a plate with their drink and minutes later, it’s so crowded at our table that my purse in on the grass at my feet, and the centerpiece has been pushed over and is now dropping petals onto my sliced pineapple. He’s even managed to land a couple salesmen at our table, which meant we had to pretend to be interested in their business for a few long minutes.
As usual, there are several people who cannot tear themselves away from my husband incessant chatting and are really warming up. A few times, I try to inject, but it’s difficult, since there is never any dead space and you actually can appear quite rude by forcefully interrupting only to say “yeah, I think so too!” or “I remember that!”. So I typically just put this semi-bemused smile on my face and nod. So this woman says to my husband, “You must be in Sales!” Hahaha. No no. He’s not. And she says, “with your personality, I just assumed” and then she looks at me and says (trying to be kind) “And I think you probably have a spark in you too, you take a while to warm up, but I bet it’s in there”. Ugh, condescending! No offense to shy people, but it makes me feel retarded when people assume I can’t function socially out of the gate. Now to my husband’s credit, he raves about me to most people he meets. I don’t know where this enthralled and infatuated man is when we’re at home arguing about whose turn it is to do dishes, but around most strangers, he has me sainted. I’m beautiful, brilliant, stunning in every way. Then he forces these strangers to agree with him. “Isn't she?! Isn’t she?!!” “oh yes, uh huh!” they agree vigorously, because they are under the spell of my husband by this point, and also lets face it, who wants to tick off a big guy?
Well the downside of 15 happy years with someone is you know the stories. You were either actually there when it happened or after hearing about it so many times, you feel like you were. Mostly, you can’t recall which it was anymore, but that doesn’t matter either. The point is, you cannot help to hear a story begin and think “oh boy, here we go again”. At Gold Cup, the first such incident was when my husband started telling a story about our former dog. Now this dog was the biggest doggie-nightmare there ever was. We are talking about a 110lb, barking, drooling, aggressive, non-house trained, epileptic, ball of fur that costs us many, many thousands of dollars and who we loved completely (but had to ditch in favor of our son). The stories from this dog alone, could easily involve an extended weekend stay.
It was clear my husband intended to use an assortment of dog stories on these people, which isn’t in and of itself unusual, but I admit that even I became concerned when he began going into great detail about how we missed the exit on our trip to get the dog from the breeder who lived three hours away (dramatic glance to me as he noted that his navigator dropped the ball and missed the exit). The specifics of this missed exit were beginning to hit the eight minute storytelling mark (‘and so we had to drive to the NEXT exit, which was Route 88, which I think if you took it South would take you all the way to Tennessee and at the off-ramp…”). Now it takes real courage to attempt to entertain people with stories of a missed exit, I mean, when is the last time you missed an exit and thought to yourself “I cant wait to tell people about this one!” But that is what is amazing about my husband- they were riveted, like he was revealing the location of the Holy Grail and giving tomorrow night’s lotto numbers.
Friends often joke that my husband can turn any mundane event into a lively story just by telling it in his booming voice, with his I-appear-to-be-on-amphetamines enthusiasm. But I let them have their jokes; after all, they are the ones who get to hear the endless stories with subjects like taking the garbage, reloading the dishwasher after his wife’s sub-optimal configuration or getting a monthly bank statement.
Naturally my mind was wandering as the dog stories progressed (are my arms getting sunburned evenly? I wonder what I should make for dinner…), until I hear a woman say in a conspiracial whisper, “you should really talk to that woman over there. She had a friend with a big white dog and it bit her arm off”. Whoa. I perked up. “It bit her arm or bit it off?” I asked. “Off. Gone. Right here” She says motioning to her mid forearm. Well, this has never happened before. I’m now getting all excited wanting to talk to this woman about her friends crazy dog, but just then, the announcements for the next race come on so we all rush off to find the “bookie” and place our bets, and I lose sight of the woman in the crowd.
After the horses run by (for the second time in a row my horse wasn’t even there by the time they passed our tent- what the heck is happening to my horses? I’m getting ripped off!), I decide I just cannot take my allergies for another second. The itching is leading to an overwhelming desire to claw at my eyes (which isn’t exactly a couture look), so I asked my husband to hold my drink and I begin to dig in my purse for my allergies medicine. Finding my little miracle blister pack of pills, I raise my head to reclaim my drink, but my husband is gone- my fault for taking my eyes off of him for 30 seconds. Not in the mood to try to gag down a dry pill, I set off in search of him and my drink. I find him towards the back laughing hysterically with an older blond woman I’ve never seen before. As I approach, I see him absentmindedly drop my drink in a nearby trash can. Argh, I’m going to kill him. After a quick detour to the bar, I head over to meet my husband’s newest best friend. He can’t remember her name as usual and the poor woman will have to tell him 15 times in the next 20 minutes until it sinks it, but what the heck. She finds me as cute as a button and thinks she and I look exactly alike. I’m assuming she means other than the 20 years separating us, but I can’t be sure. I excuse myself to go check if I’m suddenly getting crow’s feet.
Fast forward a couple hours and it’s time to leave. I’m beginning to feel guilty about leaving my son with the nanny for so long and after 90 minutes of priming my husband to leave (“5 minutes baby”, “let me just finish this drink baby”, “one more smoke since I don’t smoke anymore baby”), we actually begin walking away from the tent, cousins in tow. The cousins are not used to my husband’s and my rapid walking pace and every 5 minutes, we have to stop for 5 minutes and wait for them to catch up. We finally make it to the car and I’m designated as driver since I was seen drinking a Diet Coke at some point during the afternoon making me most likely to be sober. Actually I suspected this would happen so I did lay off on the booze in anticipation.
We eventually make it home, after a brief stop at the cousins to switch cars and for my husband to have “one quick drink”. We even manage to take our son for his nightly trip to the playground. I can’t say my husband was pushing the stroller in a perfectly straight line, but he did manage to vow that he was giving up the smoking and drinking and now would just do the drinking. He stopped, realizing his vow wasn’t quite the pledge of abstinence it initially appear to be, and we cracked up.
So in the end we survived another year at Gold Cup. Hope to see you there next year (especially if you are the lady with the one-armed friend, I’ve GOT to hear that one).
This wasn’t our first time to Gold Cup and we’ve learned through experience that it’s certainly more fun to attend on someone else’s dime. This time, we arrived with my husband’s cousin at the tent of one of his company’s vendors. That’s how this works: the corporation pays big bucks for the tent and invites their big spending clients to attend with the intention of leaving them forever indebted so they will spend even more money next year. The downside is every so often you have to shake off a few pesky salesmen who keep getting in between you and the guy who set up the informal (and possibly illegal) pony betting pool or the bar. Worse still, it’s usually the same salesman cheerfully introducing himself for the 4th time in an hour since he started drinking while they were setting up the tent six hours ago.
The downside of going under corporate sponsorship is you don’t know anyone else except the people you came with, and standing like a loser in a small huddle for 5 hours can be a drag and ruin the Gold Cup experience. For some, this quick-make-friends requirement would present an insurmountable social challenge, but for my husband, it’s child’s play. I definitely consider myself an extrovert and I’ve even been called bossy, assertive and aggressive at times (don’t get me started…these are standard terms (of endearment Im sure) for women in management where the rest of management are men), but the point is, I’m no wall-flower. However, if my husband is anywhere in the vicinity, the rest of “extroverts” might as well go take a seat, because extrovertness can be relative and he redefines the very concept. The man is big (size) and huge (personality) and massive (voice). And people love him. He draws them in like a magnet. Store clerks, mailmen, customer service reps, health care workers, strangers in line, you name it- they are likely to be in a full-on animated conversation with my husband within moments of brushing by him and swapping business cards 20 minutes later so they can stay in touch. Universally they think he is in Sales (he in corporate finance, chief bean counter, which is an irony that people often cannot recover from.).
In any event, my super-extroverted husband can present a problem for me. Primarily that in purely in comparison I look quiet and dull. This makes me want to scream: “I’m not an introvert! I’m witty, I’m engaging, I’m…” Ah, but why bother, they aren’t paying any attention to me at all, I’m sort of the silent sidekick of my husband. So we’re at Gold Cup and we’ve secured a pub-style table to set our plates on. Now normally, I’d just assume eat in peace and scope out the potential temporary-friends situation afterwards, but my husband is already waving in everyone he sees walk by balancing a plate with their drink and minutes later, it’s so crowded at our table that my purse in on the grass at my feet, and the centerpiece has been pushed over and is now dropping petals onto my sliced pineapple. He’s even managed to land a couple salesmen at our table, which meant we had to pretend to be interested in their business for a few long minutes.
As usual, there are several people who cannot tear themselves away from my husband incessant chatting and are really warming up. A few times, I try to inject, but it’s difficult, since there is never any dead space and you actually can appear quite rude by forcefully interrupting only to say “yeah, I think so too!” or “I remember that!”. So I typically just put this semi-bemused smile on my face and nod. So this woman says to my husband, “You must be in Sales!” Hahaha. No no. He’s not. And she says, “with your personality, I just assumed” and then she looks at me and says (trying to be kind) “And I think you probably have a spark in you too, you take a while to warm up, but I bet it’s in there”. Ugh, condescending! No offense to shy people, but it makes me feel retarded when people assume I can’t function socially out of the gate. Now to my husband’s credit, he raves about me to most people he meets. I don’t know where this enthralled and infatuated man is when we’re at home arguing about whose turn it is to do dishes, but around most strangers, he has me sainted. I’m beautiful, brilliant, stunning in every way. Then he forces these strangers to agree with him. “Isn't she?! Isn’t she?!!” “oh yes, uh huh!” they agree vigorously, because they are under the spell of my husband by this point, and also lets face it, who wants to tick off a big guy?
Well the downside of 15 happy years with someone is you know the stories. You were either actually there when it happened or after hearing about it so many times, you feel like you were. Mostly, you can’t recall which it was anymore, but that doesn’t matter either. The point is, you cannot help to hear a story begin and think “oh boy, here we go again”. At Gold Cup, the first such incident was when my husband started telling a story about our former dog. Now this dog was the biggest doggie-nightmare there ever was. We are talking about a 110lb, barking, drooling, aggressive, non-house trained, epileptic, ball of fur that costs us many, many thousands of dollars and who we loved completely (but had to ditch in favor of our son). The stories from this dog alone, could easily involve an extended weekend stay.
It was clear my husband intended to use an assortment of dog stories on these people, which isn’t in and of itself unusual, but I admit that even I became concerned when he began going into great detail about how we missed the exit on our trip to get the dog from the breeder who lived three hours away (dramatic glance to me as he noted that his navigator dropped the ball and missed the exit). The specifics of this missed exit were beginning to hit the eight minute storytelling mark (‘and so we had to drive to the NEXT exit, which was Route 88, which I think if you took it South would take you all the way to Tennessee and at the off-ramp…”). Now it takes real courage to attempt to entertain people with stories of a missed exit, I mean, when is the last time you missed an exit and thought to yourself “I cant wait to tell people about this one!” But that is what is amazing about my husband- they were riveted, like he was revealing the location of the Holy Grail and giving tomorrow night’s lotto numbers.
Friends often joke that my husband can turn any mundane event into a lively story just by telling it in his booming voice, with his I-appear-to-be-on-amphetamines enthusiasm. But I let them have their jokes; after all, they are the ones who get to hear the endless stories with subjects like taking the garbage, reloading the dishwasher after his wife’s sub-optimal configuration or getting a monthly bank statement.
Naturally my mind was wandering as the dog stories progressed (are my arms getting sunburned evenly? I wonder what I should make for dinner…), until I hear a woman say in a conspiracial whisper, “you should really talk to that woman over there. She had a friend with a big white dog and it bit her arm off”. Whoa. I perked up. “It bit her arm or bit it off?” I asked. “Off. Gone. Right here” She says motioning to her mid forearm. Well, this has never happened before. I’m now getting all excited wanting to talk to this woman about her friends crazy dog, but just then, the announcements for the next race come on so we all rush off to find the “bookie” and place our bets, and I lose sight of the woman in the crowd.
After the horses run by (for the second time in a row my horse wasn’t even there by the time they passed our tent- what the heck is happening to my horses? I’m getting ripped off!), I decide I just cannot take my allergies for another second. The itching is leading to an overwhelming desire to claw at my eyes (which isn’t exactly a couture look), so I asked my husband to hold my drink and I begin to dig in my purse for my allergies medicine. Finding my little miracle blister pack of pills, I raise my head to reclaim my drink, but my husband is gone- my fault for taking my eyes off of him for 30 seconds. Not in the mood to try to gag down a dry pill, I set off in search of him and my drink. I find him towards the back laughing hysterically with an older blond woman I’ve never seen before. As I approach, I see him absentmindedly drop my drink in a nearby trash can. Argh, I’m going to kill him. After a quick detour to the bar, I head over to meet my husband’s newest best friend. He can’t remember her name as usual and the poor woman will have to tell him 15 times in the next 20 minutes until it sinks it, but what the heck. She finds me as cute as a button and thinks she and I look exactly alike. I’m assuming she means other than the 20 years separating us, but I can’t be sure. I excuse myself to go check if I’m suddenly getting crow’s feet.
Fast forward a couple hours and it’s time to leave. I’m beginning to feel guilty about leaving my son with the nanny for so long and after 90 minutes of priming my husband to leave (“5 minutes baby”, “let me just finish this drink baby”, “one more smoke since I don’t smoke anymore baby”), we actually begin walking away from the tent, cousins in tow. The cousins are not used to my husband’s and my rapid walking pace and every 5 minutes, we have to stop for 5 minutes and wait for them to catch up. We finally make it to the car and I’m designated as driver since I was seen drinking a Diet Coke at some point during the afternoon making me most likely to be sober. Actually I suspected this would happen so I did lay off on the booze in anticipation.
We eventually make it home, after a brief stop at the cousins to switch cars and for my husband to have “one quick drink”. We even manage to take our son for his nightly trip to the playground. I can’t say my husband was pushing the stroller in a perfectly straight line, but he did manage to vow that he was giving up the smoking and drinking and now would just do the drinking. He stopped, realizing his vow wasn’t quite the pledge of abstinence it initially appear to be, and we cracked up.
So in the end we survived another year at Gold Cup. Hope to see you there next year (especially if you are the lady with the one-armed friend, I’ve GOT to hear that one).
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Amazing Weight Loss Secrets
Routine bloodwork results are back and my cholesterol level is… (drum roll, please) 176. Not to rub it in, but that is one-seven-six. And this, despite my forgetting to fast before the test. According to my research, below 200 is normal and below 180 is “optimal”. Now, braggarts are annoying, I know, but the last couple of years my cholesterol has been 205. Not sky-high but high enough to get my doctor’s office to mail me photocopied pamphlets on “eating right” and “exercise” with my number of shame penciled in on a “Your Count Is:” line. Naturally I blamed genetics (despite not knowing a single relative’s cholesterol count), but now that I am one of the chosen “optimal” ones, I have reexamined my position (and mounted my high horse).
The truth is, a few extra pounds creeped on since college and a few more creeped on (and stayed on) during pregnancy. But once the baby learned to walk, all bets were off, and I essentially lost 30 pounds chasing after him. I think doctors are surprised at patients being in the normal weight range now- sometimes when contemplating my ailment, they muss, “well I don’t think you’re necessarily underweight”. Um yeah, not officially and not unofficially. I’m not even close to underweight but you know I was so flattered to be considered.
Friends are often fascinated by my weight loss; they ask how I did it or to give them my “secret”. And the diet industry is a quatrillion dollar deal with books and websites and videos- you name it. People are so desperate for the answer to be anything but what everyone knows the answer to be. I know this from experience, but the collective denial is staggering. Is there anyone who truly doesn’t know that if you eat more calories than you expend you will gain weight? (barring unusual medical or emptional issues of course, I dont want a bunch of underactive thyroiders whose houses burned down the day after their divorces finalized flaming me! I'm speaking to average gal who piled on few pounds that now refuse to vacate) It’s the simplest formula yet people act like the magic is elusive. Now, granted you may rev up your metabolism to burn a few extra calories by not eating carbohydrates, or you may find eating fruit gives you the sense of fullness, or that not eating after 8pm is a golden rule, but that doesn’t materially change the bottom line. Calories – exercise = the size of your ass. Now if I could just add some filler around that equation I could publish myself a revolutionary diet book!
If you are or were overweight, what you find out once you lose it, is that you eat a heck of a lot less- if you are like me, less than you probably thought was required to sustain life. I used to think eating a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and maybe a yogurt or a package of crackers was a “balanced lunch”. Well, its not, it’s a one train to fat city. There is a period of adjustment but once you start eating less you find out that you fill up quickly and just aren’t as hungry. And if you can rid yourself of the desperate inhaling of food, its easier to push the plate away when you are full because you’re done, its not really filling any void (hunger or otherwise) to continue. I often just eat an apple for lunch and I’m full. Or just a sandwich. And breakfast cereal every day (and not necessarily the “healthy kind”- dependant on mood). Dinner is not low fat, it’s whatever I make (and most everything I make is 9/10th butter) but I eat until I’m not hungry anymore and then I stop. And because my stomach is smaller, it’s not that much really. I have a sweet tooth so I always have chocolate or cookies at night, but all in all I probably eat 1200-1500 calories a day. I probably used to eat more like 2500-3000 and felt a lot hungrier doing that.
I will admit here, that my ability to cut back on food had a trigger other than my stellar willpower (haha, if you knew my willpower you'd laugh too). For me, going on allergy medicine one Spring seemed to kill my appetite. I don’t know why, and heaven knows my telling my friends this probably led to a huge profit jump in the manufacturer’s product (note: no one was able to duplicate my reaction), but for me, it just did. Once I went off the medicine, I found my smaller stomach kept up the effect, so I suspect once you get through the 4-5 day shrinking (drug induced or not), the effect kicks in.
So the second part of my “amazing secret” is I walk at least 2 miles a day, every day, to take my son to the playground. Now I always walked a lot, but not this much, and I do a lot less sitting around in general since having a child. Activities are important to kids- doing things, going places, exploring- and I cater to that. Like the rest of the world, I still collapse in front of the TV at 9pm (when he goes to bed), but up to that point, I’m usually on the move.
So there you have it. A free preview my “amazing weight loss secret” so that you too can drop your membership in the “help, my arteries are solidifying but I cant put down this HoHo” club. Unless of course you’re one of those “naturally thin” people (grr), in which case you know not of our struggles.
The truth is, a few extra pounds creeped on since college and a few more creeped on (and stayed on) during pregnancy. But once the baby learned to walk, all bets were off, and I essentially lost 30 pounds chasing after him. I think doctors are surprised at patients being in the normal weight range now- sometimes when contemplating my ailment, they muss, “well I don’t think you’re necessarily underweight”. Um yeah, not officially and not unofficially. I’m not even close to underweight but you know I was so flattered to be considered.
Friends are often fascinated by my weight loss; they ask how I did it or to give them my “secret”. And the diet industry is a quatrillion dollar deal with books and websites and videos- you name it. People are so desperate for the answer to be anything but what everyone knows the answer to be. I know this from experience, but the collective denial is staggering. Is there anyone who truly doesn’t know that if you eat more calories than you expend you will gain weight? (barring unusual medical or emptional issues of course, I dont want a bunch of underactive thyroiders whose houses burned down the day after their divorces finalized flaming me! I'm speaking to average gal who piled on few pounds that now refuse to vacate) It’s the simplest formula yet people act like the magic is elusive. Now, granted you may rev up your metabolism to burn a few extra calories by not eating carbohydrates, or you may find eating fruit gives you the sense of fullness, or that not eating after 8pm is a golden rule, but that doesn’t materially change the bottom line. Calories – exercise = the size of your ass. Now if I could just add some filler around that equation I could publish myself a revolutionary diet book!
If you are or were overweight, what you find out once you lose it, is that you eat a heck of a lot less- if you are like me, less than you probably thought was required to sustain life. I used to think eating a sandwich, a piece of fruit, and maybe a yogurt or a package of crackers was a “balanced lunch”. Well, its not, it’s a one train to fat city. There is a period of adjustment but once you start eating less you find out that you fill up quickly and just aren’t as hungry. And if you can rid yourself of the desperate inhaling of food, its easier to push the plate away when you are full because you’re done, its not really filling any void (hunger or otherwise) to continue. I often just eat an apple for lunch and I’m full. Or just a sandwich. And breakfast cereal every day (and not necessarily the “healthy kind”- dependant on mood). Dinner is not low fat, it’s whatever I make (and most everything I make is 9/10th butter) but I eat until I’m not hungry anymore and then I stop. And because my stomach is smaller, it’s not that much really. I have a sweet tooth so I always have chocolate or cookies at night, but all in all I probably eat 1200-1500 calories a day. I probably used to eat more like 2500-3000 and felt a lot hungrier doing that.
I will admit here, that my ability to cut back on food had a trigger other than my stellar willpower (haha, if you knew my willpower you'd laugh too). For me, going on allergy medicine one Spring seemed to kill my appetite. I don’t know why, and heaven knows my telling my friends this probably led to a huge profit jump in the manufacturer’s product (note: no one was able to duplicate my reaction), but for me, it just did. Once I went off the medicine, I found my smaller stomach kept up the effect, so I suspect once you get through the 4-5 day shrinking (drug induced or not), the effect kicks in.
So the second part of my “amazing secret” is I walk at least 2 miles a day, every day, to take my son to the playground. Now I always walked a lot, but not this much, and I do a lot less sitting around in general since having a child. Activities are important to kids- doing things, going places, exploring- and I cater to that. Like the rest of the world, I still collapse in front of the TV at 9pm (when he goes to bed), but up to that point, I’m usually on the move.
So there you have it. A free preview my “amazing weight loss secret” so that you too can drop your membership in the “help, my arteries are solidifying but I cant put down this HoHo” club. Unless of course you’re one of those “naturally thin” people (grr), in which case you know not of our struggles.
Monday, May 08, 2006
2 is the new...2
I’ve been hearing more and more lately that 45 is the new 35, or 40 is the new 30, or 75 is the new 60- pick your poison. If that’s the case, I’m still in my 20's so I'm feeling pretty good - rock on. Yet it occurred to me, you don’t hear much in regards to the evolving maturity of 2 year olds. It would seem, 2 is 2 is 2. Isn’t it comforting to know we can count on our insane little creatures to uphold tradition even if no one else will?
Forgive me Father, it’s been almost a month since my last blog. Where does the time go? It’s hard to write when you have a two-year old running around sticking lollipops in your hair and incessantly advising you that the letter “B says Bah!”? Ah well, my son is a delightful baby, although I get a lot of feedback when I refer to him as a “baby”. He’s a big boy and I barely get the tags off of clothes before he immediately outgrows them. I experimented in wrapping him in sheets of lycra as an infant as an alternative to packing away clothes that I just bought last week, but I was getting a lot of inquiries on our families "interesting religious garb" so I gave it up and went back to burning money on the alter of the clothing gods. He wears a size 6 at 27 months and his feet are a size 12. The big shoes he has to wear as a result leave him clomping around the house like an elephant with boards strapped to its feet. Poor baby. On the bright side, I’m in pretty good shape from carrying around a 42lb toddler. Sure I have my rough days, but a couple bottles of Advil, a few days in traction and I’m as good as new.
My son, Jack, is actually a hard thing for me to write about because once I start I’m not sure I can stop. I write him a monthly letter for his baby book that captures his life and accomplishments in detail but I will try to stick to the highlights in my blog that no one reads (except for my one "fan" who accidentally stumbled upon this site- yea!!!! At least my personal quota has been met.). Jack is a wonderful child. Especially when he is napping. Haha. Just kidding. He has a sunny disposition and my husband and I, the most unobjective and biased people in his life, find him amazing clever, adorable and smart. He loves the alphabet, knows all the letters and sounds, knows shapes, colors, animal, counts to 100 and even puts away his own laundry. I’m trying to teach him to read but he is pretending it is too advanced for him. If you think I’m pushing him, you haven’t spent time recently as the parent to one toddler. It’s a full time job keeping him entertained. I’m cheating by entertaining him with things he will need to know on his SAT, but kids this age just seem to love learning anything. Its no wonder firstborns have the reputation as demanding and self centered. Seeing the attention we give Jack, I want to go back and be a firstborn myself! I can't believe I'm a middle child. What a total rip off.
However, as much as it pains me to say it, Jack is somewhat of a daddy’s boy. The other night he was playing on our bed and I was trying to entice him to start his bedtime routine by asking him if he wanted to read. “No” he said, definitively. “I see, Jack, what is it you want to do?” I asked. He flopped back on the pile of pillows like a little sultan, a gleam in his eye, and said "remote!”. Curious, I gave it him the remote. He turned on the TV (and it too me how long to figure out this remote myself? My 2 year old can turn on the 11 components as if he was an in utero electronics champion) and I asked “What do you want to watch?”. He said “Footballlllll”. And he was not kidding. Since then I have found myself fighting for control of the remote from my two-year-old who wants to watch ESPN. It’s my worst nightmare. And what with the "hoops" (as my son calls it) championship underway now, I'm about to concede defeat.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Jack shares my husband’s penchant for keeping things orderly. He no sooner drops a grain of rice on the floor than he runs over and gets the broom and starts sweeping furiously. Laundry goes in the hamper almost before you are even finished taking it off, and open doors are most definitely not allowed, they must be closed. (don’t get me started on what goes on with the light switches around here- lets just say I’m often both figuratively and literally in the dark) One of his first words as a 18 month old was “Mess!”. I question how much of my DNA he absorbed at times.
Forgive me Father, it’s been almost a month since my last blog. Where does the time go? It’s hard to write when you have a two-year old running around sticking lollipops in your hair and incessantly advising you that the letter “B says Bah!”? Ah well, my son is a delightful baby, although I get a lot of feedback when I refer to him as a “baby”. He’s a big boy and I barely get the tags off of clothes before he immediately outgrows them. I experimented in wrapping him in sheets of lycra as an infant as an alternative to packing away clothes that I just bought last week, but I was getting a lot of inquiries on our families "interesting religious garb" so I gave it up and went back to burning money on the alter of the clothing gods. He wears a size 6 at 27 months and his feet are a size 12. The big shoes he has to wear as a result leave him clomping around the house like an elephant with boards strapped to its feet. Poor baby. On the bright side, I’m in pretty good shape from carrying around a 42lb toddler. Sure I have my rough days, but a couple bottles of Advil, a few days in traction and I’m as good as new.
My son, Jack, is actually a hard thing for me to write about because once I start I’m not sure I can stop. I write him a monthly letter for his baby book that captures his life and accomplishments in detail but I will try to stick to the highlights in my blog that no one reads (except for my one "fan" who accidentally stumbled upon this site- yea!!!! At least my personal quota has been met.). Jack is a wonderful child. Especially when he is napping. Haha. Just kidding. He has a sunny disposition and my husband and I, the most unobjective and biased people in his life, find him amazing clever, adorable and smart. He loves the alphabet, knows all the letters and sounds, knows shapes, colors, animal, counts to 100 and even puts away his own laundry. I’m trying to teach him to read but he is pretending it is too advanced for him. If you think I’m pushing him, you haven’t spent time recently as the parent to one toddler. It’s a full time job keeping him entertained. I’m cheating by entertaining him with things he will need to know on his SAT, but kids this age just seem to love learning anything. Its no wonder firstborns have the reputation as demanding and self centered. Seeing the attention we give Jack, I want to go back and be a firstborn myself! I can't believe I'm a middle child. What a total rip off.
However, as much as it pains me to say it, Jack is somewhat of a daddy’s boy. The other night he was playing on our bed and I was trying to entice him to start his bedtime routine by asking him if he wanted to read. “No” he said, definitively. “I see, Jack, what is it you want to do?” I asked. He flopped back on the pile of pillows like a little sultan, a gleam in his eye, and said "remote!”. Curious, I gave it him the remote. He turned on the TV (and it too me how long to figure out this remote myself? My 2 year old can turn on the 11 components as if he was an in utero electronics champion) and I asked “What do you want to watch?”. He said “Footballlllll”. And he was not kidding. Since then I have found myself fighting for control of the remote from my two-year-old who wants to watch ESPN. It’s my worst nightmare. And what with the "hoops" (as my son calls it) championship underway now, I'm about to concede defeat.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Jack shares my husband’s penchant for keeping things orderly. He no sooner drops a grain of rice on the floor than he runs over and gets the broom and starts sweeping furiously. Laundry goes in the hamper almost before you are even finished taking it off, and open doors are most definitely not allowed, they must be closed. (don’t get me started on what goes on with the light switches around here- lets just say I’m often both figuratively and literally in the dark) One of his first words as a 18 month old was “Mess!”. I question how much of my DNA he absorbed at times.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Book Review - "Eat Pray Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert
As an avid reader, I've come across some good books (and, of course, lots of losers). I'm not genre-specific, from mystery to "women's literature" to autobiographies to historical, I've read them all. This one, however, stunned me.
As a 30-something raised by former religious-order (Catholic) parents who ended up embracing eastern philosophy, I spent my formative years visiting ashrams, meeting mediums and gurus, meditating- all sorts of non-traditional exposure. My parents had us do the Catholic sacraments and training too. Just in case.
I married a traditional Catholic and honestly wasn't sure what I believed. I admired the complete faith of other Catholics, but I didn't feel it. In my darkest moments, I began to question whether this wasn't all random and maybe in the same way we think a dead bug is just dead, maybe that too was our fate. Gone forever- faith being just a brain-process to protect us from the truth. I sadly thought that maybe I was burdened by being one of the smart ones who was able to see this and I felt cursed that I had the intellect for it.
In recent years, I began to truly feel that existential weight- that I needed to know what this was all for. Time seemed to be slipping by so quickly it began to alarm me. I read all sorts of books from Victor Frankel to Ian Stevenson. I thought I was starting to find a path back to believing in something greater, but it seemed like "information gathering" for me vs an emotional breakthrough.
Then I read a review of this book and tacked it onto my to-read list with a bunch of others. It seemed like a chick-lit type book and those are great every now and again, like eating chocolate chip cookies for breakfast- good but best you don’t make a habit of it . When I finally got it, I checked reviews again and ALMOST DECIDED TO RETURN IT. The review I read said something along the line of: obviously a book written only as an excuse to travel around the world. That sounded dull to me but I started to read it anyway, just to see.
Well, wow. What can I say? Someone commended the author for having the courage to publish such a brutally honest and intensely personal journey of discovery. At times, that's an understatement. This book can be so forthcoming, I almost think I would edit some of the content, even contemplating only in my own mind. However, there is something so stirring and so vividly true about her story, and her humor among the gravity of seeking such divine wisdom. It felt so real. And for me, given my background, I found myself actually shedding tears several times in the book (out of seemingly nowhere)- I recognized things the author wrote that my conscious mind had forgotten. This book has put into words things that I have struggled to define. Over and over again. Its remarkable.
Beyond the deeply moving spiritual and philosophical discoveries in the book, Elizabeth is just a really really good writer. Very funny, very clever, very articulate. It made me insanely jealous of her talent. You could read this book on a "regular" level without the spiritual overtones and still find it funny.
Obviously this book wasn't intended as a religious text, but in some ways it became one to me. I will actually reread this book, which I almost never do, because in her observations I think there is profoundly deep meaning and I don't know if I could have absorbed it all the first time. The best part is that this is someone who I actually saw a lot of myself in and my friends in, not some wacky "new ager" that makes you want to roll your eyes as you find a way to extract yourself from listening to their stories.
And whoever wrote the review on Amazon about this all being about not wanting to have kids? What kind of craziness is that? The author makes brief commentary on being unsure about having kids- which 90% of us go through/went through, but she also has the wisdom to note that most parents seem to find them a metaphysical experience. And I can attest, I think my young son is a lot of the reason I began "seeking" truth because despite the endless sacrifice, there are the moments when I know I am, without question, in the presence of something that is the closest I may ever come to God in this lifetime. The radiant innocence and beauty of a child- it that doesn't break your heart open and set it free, I'm not sure what can.
What a remarkable book, and a remarkable person.
My Epilogue: Eat Pray Love...then what?
As a 30-something raised by former religious-order (Catholic) parents who ended up embracing eastern philosophy, I spent my formative years visiting ashrams, meeting mediums and gurus, meditating- all sorts of non-traditional exposure. My parents had us do the Catholic sacraments and training too. Just in case.
I married a traditional Catholic and honestly wasn't sure what I believed. I admired the complete faith of other Catholics, but I didn't feel it. In my darkest moments, I began to question whether this wasn't all random and maybe in the same way we think a dead bug is just dead, maybe that too was our fate. Gone forever- faith being just a brain-process to protect us from the truth. I sadly thought that maybe I was burdened by being one of the smart ones who was able to see this and I felt cursed that I had the intellect for it.
In recent years, I began to truly feel that existential weight- that I needed to know what this was all for. Time seemed to be slipping by so quickly it began to alarm me. I read all sorts of books from Victor Frankel to Ian Stevenson. I thought I was starting to find a path back to believing in something greater, but it seemed like "information gathering" for me vs an emotional breakthrough.
Then I read a review of this book and tacked it onto my to-read list with a bunch of others. It seemed like a chick-lit type book and those are great every now and again, like eating chocolate chip cookies for breakfast- good but best you don’t make a habit of it . When I finally got it, I checked reviews again and ALMOST DECIDED TO RETURN IT. The review I read said something along the line of: obviously a book written only as an excuse to travel around the world. That sounded dull to me but I started to read it anyway, just to see.
Well, wow. What can I say? Someone commended the author for having the courage to publish such a brutally honest and intensely personal journey of discovery. At times, that's an understatement. This book can be so forthcoming, I almost think I would edit some of the content, even contemplating only in my own mind. However, there is something so stirring and so vividly true about her story, and her humor among the gravity of seeking such divine wisdom. It felt so real. And for me, given my background, I found myself actually shedding tears several times in the book (out of seemingly nowhere)- I recognized things the author wrote that my conscious mind had forgotten. This book has put into words things that I have struggled to define. Over and over again. Its remarkable.
Beyond the deeply moving spiritual and philosophical discoveries in the book, Elizabeth is just a really really good writer. Very funny, very clever, very articulate. It made me insanely jealous of her talent. You could read this book on a "regular" level without the spiritual overtones and still find it funny.
Obviously this book wasn't intended as a religious text, but in some ways it became one to me. I will actually reread this book, which I almost never do, because in her observations I think there is profoundly deep meaning and I don't know if I could have absorbed it all the first time. The best part is that this is someone who I actually saw a lot of myself in and my friends in, not some wacky "new ager" that makes you want to roll your eyes as you find a way to extract yourself from listening to their stories.
And whoever wrote the review on Amazon about this all being about not wanting to have kids? What kind of craziness is that? The author makes brief commentary on being unsure about having kids- which 90% of us go through/went through, but she also has the wisdom to note that most parents seem to find them a metaphysical experience. And I can attest, I think my young son is a lot of the reason I began "seeking" truth because despite the endless sacrifice, there are the moments when I know I am, without question, in the presence of something that is the closest I may ever come to God in this lifetime. The radiant innocence and beauty of a child- it that doesn't break your heart open and set it free, I'm not sure what can.
What a remarkable book, and a remarkable person.
My Epilogue: Eat Pray Love...then what?
Friday, April 07, 2006
The Divorce House
Every street has one, doesn’t it? The house where, for practical purposes, should install a department-store style revolving door- (they can be an extreme sport for the coordination challenged, no?). The For Sale sign went up a few days ago, errected, best I can tell in the early dawn hours. The "Scarlet A" of suburban neighborhoods. Given that we havent been shown glossy brochures of the neighborhor's new house, this means one thing- the Big D---again. Again for the house anyway. A few years back the first neighbors also sold the house amid a divorce. That couple had some pizazz though. Despite being casual wave-as-you-drive-by neighbors, we were awoken one night around 3am with the door bell being run repeatedly and a pounding on our front door. 3am has got to be the worst time for this sort of thing- its so much in the dead zone, that it's impossible to leap from bed and take organized action. Even after I got up, I was sure I was in a vivid dream. My husband, who is 6'7" and 250lbs, grabbed my Victoria Secret robe (full size on me, mini-dress robe on him) in his semi-stupor and raced downstairs. Not far behind him, I looked down the staircase to see him at the front door and mistaking my robe for an old fashioned male nightshirt, thought I was having a dream where he had become Eboneizer Scrooge from A Christmas Story.
Then I saw the bodies roll by the front door in a tumbled mass as the wife and husband tussled over a manilla folder of financial documents. Apparently the wife's late night reconissance mission was discovered and she fled the house with the husband in hot pursuit. Why she decided to seek refuge with us, we have no idea, except my husband is the type who can and will strike up a conversation with anyone and so while I know the neighbors mostly by the dogs they walk, my husband has found himself many times the most unlikely of confidants. He spends a lot of time doing yard work and often I look out the window and see him leaning on his rake, nodding sympathically, while some neighbor is engaged in some sort of passionate story. So anyway, be warned, this is where all that friendliness leads to: 3am referree sessions. Who says all the excitement happens in the ghetto?
Anyway, if you hadnt guessed that couple didn’t make it and divorced splitting the house and 4 kids down the middle, each moving to another smaller house in the neighborhood, which also seems to be part of our neighborhoods divorce manual.
Then, the new neighbors moved in- highly educated, married 20 years, two kids. Two years later, the sign went up. I feel some concern for the families I've seen come to look during the Open House- should I warn them? Then again, I've conflicted. I don’t want to scare off the best prospects- getting a new neighbor is kind of like waiting for your blind date to show up. Will they be the cool couple who hold BBQs and can be seen casually drinking a beer on a hot summer day? Will they be the ethnic family with 27 cars who tear out the front bushes and don’t plant anything in the dirt left behind? Will they be the doctors, highly stressed with the $80,000 cars who seem constantly exasperated with their kids who will probably never measure up?
Then I saw the bodies roll by the front door in a tumbled mass as the wife and husband tussled over a manilla folder of financial documents. Apparently the wife's late night reconissance mission was discovered and she fled the house with the husband in hot pursuit. Why she decided to seek refuge with us, we have no idea, except my husband is the type who can and will strike up a conversation with anyone and so while I know the neighbors mostly by the dogs they walk, my husband has found himself many times the most unlikely of confidants. He spends a lot of time doing yard work and often I look out the window and see him leaning on his rake, nodding sympathically, while some neighbor is engaged in some sort of passionate story. So anyway, be warned, this is where all that friendliness leads to: 3am referree sessions. Who says all the excitement happens in the ghetto?
Anyway, if you hadnt guessed that couple didn’t make it and divorced splitting the house and 4 kids down the middle, each moving to another smaller house in the neighborhood, which also seems to be part of our neighborhoods divorce manual.
Then, the new neighbors moved in- highly educated, married 20 years, two kids. Two years later, the sign went up. I feel some concern for the families I've seen come to look during the Open House- should I warn them? Then again, I've conflicted. I don’t want to scare off the best prospects- getting a new neighbor is kind of like waiting for your blind date to show up. Will they be the cool couple who hold BBQs and can be seen casually drinking a beer on a hot summer day? Will they be the ethnic family with 27 cars who tear out the front bushes and don’t plant anything in the dirt left behind? Will they be the doctors, highly stressed with the $80,000 cars who seem constantly exasperated with their kids who will probably never measure up?
Pending Discovery
I cant help but notice I don’t have a fan base yet. That’s disappointing. I guess "eccentric 80 year old" wasn’t a big search term on Google yesterday. Maybe I should find something more popular-society to discuss. Then again, the only thing I know about popular society these days are from reality shows. I don’t want to admit that I watch those (or that they are almost all I watch). Of course people at work know I do, it's pretty humiliating, since I'm supposed to be smart. But who needs reality shows anyway- real truth is stranger than than reality shows.
Today at work, a vendor who is majorly behind on a critical project which is costing us bazillions and is over a year late said that they were knocking off for the week because they were tired. Then they got on a plane and went home. Things were no better at home where a secret-nanny playdate was nearly discovered by another nanny after an unannounced drop by. Cell phones were abuzz with warnings to take evasive action. I don’t know how this one turned out to be honest- have to get the download later tonight.
Today at work, a vendor who is majorly behind on a critical project which is costing us bazillions and is over a year late said that they were knocking off for the week because they were tired. Then they got on a plane and went home. Things were no better at home where a secret-nanny playdate was nearly discovered by another nanny after an unannounced drop by. Cell phones were abuzz with warnings to take evasive action. I don’t know how this one turned out to be honest- have to get the download later tonight.
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