Monday, August 30, 2004

found poetry

"The multitudes were packed as dense as broccoli florets..."

It doesn't *really* count as found poetry, like that bizarre shopping list I once found on a discarded napkin, but it was stuck in the middle of a New York Times article, and therefore, since it was obviously lost, I now consider it found...

Ok, so it's almost Bulwer-Litton-y, but in the New York Times? You have to love it...

vicarious thrills

Every time we go to Central Market for lunch, my friend and I see the same woman. She's tall, thin, African American (in the sense that she doesn't seem like she's been in the states very long) and she has *totally* gotten the hang of how to eat in the US.

Every day, as my friend and I share a sandwich (they're huge) and drink our unsweetened iced tea, this woman sits down and decorously eats a pint of Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk.

The whole pint.

It's really a joy to watch...

Sunday, August 29, 2004

doing well

“He’s doing good.”

There are some rules of grammar that I can forgive when they’re spoken, but hearing this come out of the mouth of my son’s second grade teacher was more painful than a date with an Epilady. On the plus side, by the age of 7, my son had developed his own impatience with the public school system, took control of the situation, rolled his eyes and muttered, “Well.”

I would not have been as gentle.


I admit, that who you are has a great deal to do with how pissed off you will make me with your grammatical or vocabulary ignorance. Joey from Friends is almost charming having brought “supposeably” into pop-cultural English, but when the CEO of a major corporation uses the similar “undoubtably” at a press conference it makes me take a second look at my financial portfolio. And, there is little doubt in my mind that the rest of the world misunderestimates our fine country when our leaders fabricate words like “securitize” or “hypothecate” in public. (It should be noted that “nucular” in a Georgian accent is, for some reason, less offensive than in a Texan accent.)

I had a friend in college who we teased for his use of “acrosst” and “anyways.” He was cute, was from upstate New York and had only one eyebrow (“I used to have two, but I shaved the top one off”) so we forgave him. However, had he ever muttered “irregardless,” I, for one, would have beaten him over the head with a Webster’s unabridged.

If you’re interested in keeping me from flinging hash browns at you at the breakfast table, there are a couple of simple rules of English that you can follow. First, never, ever assume that there is any consistency in the language. Just because there’s a “width” and a “depth”, let me assure you that there is no “ttthhh” on the end of “height,” and if I hear one, I’ll pull the fricative right through your teeth. “Heighth.” Bah.

Second, don’t listen to teenagers. Sure, kids are our future, language is dynamic, bla bla bla, but it sure would be nice, like, if, like, in the future, like, sentences didn’t, like, sound like some, like, happy, perky person with, like, happy, perky Tourette’s syndrome. Like. And when describing a conversation, just eliminate EVERYTHING that sounds like “and so he goes, ‘like, I don’t want to,’ and then she went, ‘like, that’s too bad.’” Trust me, you sound like a moron. Like.

Third, don’t try to sound like William F. Buckley, either. “I” is a subject; the object is all about “me.” Just like that. I promise you, it’s OKAY to use the word “me.” Using the word “I” saves you only one letter, no syllables, and it’s just plain wrong when you use it at the end of “just between you and…” And, only use “I feel badly” if you’ve been having some trouble identifying your child from your toaster oven by touch. If you’ve got the guilts, trust me, you feel bad. Apologize. Sometimes it helps.

Finally, you don’t have to have taken Latin in 7th grade to be able to pick out the roots of words. You can probably figure out what a lot of words mean by breaking them down into simpler parts. I’m talking to the good people at Oracle when I say this. Go look at your web page, folks. The part where you describe the classes you offer? You know, where you break down the preREQUIsites into “REQUIred” and “suggested”?

That brings me to the other face of “bad English” that pisses me off. What is the deal with business people? Are they in collusion to form their own corporate Esperanto? Some global language that comes with the global marketplace? That bizarre business lingo that is so ubiquitous it has resulted in the creation of the globally recognized game, Buzzword Bingo? HR folks! Do me a favor, and just orient your new people on their first day in the office, ok? If you want to have a little fun, put a blindfold on them, spin them around and disorient them. But, for pete’s sake, don’t “orientate” them. That sounds like something you do to meat before you put it on the grill.

I do a lot of corporate business writing myself. I’ve had to do the marketing fight for several years now. Oh, sure, I could just play along and use “disincent” as a verb in a sentence as if it were an actual word, or as if the language would benefit from it becoming an actual word, but I don’t. In fact, I’ve taken it as my purpose to become Champion for the Real Word. Spokesman for Truth, Justice and the American Noun.

I build or create. I do not architect.
I motivate. I do not incent.
I show how a business grows, not how I grow a business.
I bring everyone to the same level. I do NOT – never, ever, ever – level set them.

I refuse to make every verb I type a bullet-point action verb as if I first learned how to write in a resume building class.

I sometimes talk about the cutting edge, the leading edge, and the bleeding edge because those terms are able to segue nicely into non-corporate sounding metaphors that I pepper throughout my writing. However, value chain, value proposition and core competency are all expressions that I invest a lot of time finding more illustrative replacements.

I do find myself having to partner with other service providers but it is against my will. I occasionally have no choice but to create Centers of Excellence and touch on Thought Leadership, but only because the concepts are so nearly vacuous that I could hardly be bothered coming up with better terms.

Finally, I concede the use of leverage as a verb, BUT ONLY because I know I can describe the physics behind the concept and point out that where you place the fulcrum is far more important to business efficiency than the amount of brute force applied at the pushing end.

So, you see, I do my part. It’s up to you to do yours, or you may find yourself repurposed, utilizing your skill set in a customer-focused manner that highlights your core competencies and allows you to work smarter, not harder as you take ownership of someone else’s bottom line.

Then you’ll really be “doing good.”


(sorry guys, this one is recycled, but it was begging to get out into the light of day again...)

Saturday, August 28, 2004

pieces of string

I have two books on reducing clutter.

Two.

I'm not sure if I need to describe the irony of that, but let's just say that I could seriously use some help implementing the ideas of either of them.

It's not that I'm a packrat. Well, ok, I'm a packrat. But I *have* had some experience in getting rid of things, and it's not emotional attachment that keeps me from throwing things out. It's really just inertia. Not even *my* inertia. I have a lot of crap. It's pretty inert.

I have had two garage sales in the last year. I have donated $1000s of dollars of furniture, old clothing, jewelry, books, videos, linens, and kitchenware. When the books on clutter didn't work, I bought books on Feng Shui, thinking that the simplicity of asian spaces in general was what I was aiming for. You know, a single bamboo plant in the middle of the table, a display dish with some rocks in it, a candle...

After 6 weeks of decluttering (all part of the Feng Shui way) I got one table in my house to look like that, and, not surprisingly, several months later, next to the bowl of rocks is a box of old photos, a half dozen candles that migrated from the top of the air conditioner because they made vibraty noises when it was on, three rolls of film, and a stack of blank videos that I use to tape Monk for a friend of mine who doesn't have cable.

I have paper coming out of my... ears. My ears, my nose, my desk drawers, cigar boxes, wicker baskets, falling off tables, stacked on the TV, slotted next to the toaster oven, and on the floor under the mail slot. I have things... just things... like hand weights, and power tools, and electrical wiring, and scissors (I have like 8 pairs of scissors lying around my house... I don't know why....) with no place to put them.

I want to get rid of it ALL. (Well, maybe I could keep one or two pairs of scissors. One for paper, one for cloth... You know...)

I have lots of photos, and I like photos, so I'm going to keep them regardless, but I have ceramic ducks, and shaped candles, and bowls of pot pourri that have accumulated seven years of dust because I could care less about pot pourri, but I like the bowls and I have no idea what else I could put in them. Well, rocks, I suppose. I have a basket of remote controls, most of which I don't use, or belong to equipment I no longer have. I have books, and books, and books, and books, and like my photos, I have no intention of getting rid of them, but I sure would like to have them stored in a sustainable way.

I have fantasies of my house burning down. I mean, not really, but it sure would be convenient because I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS BY MYSELF!!! I want to hire someone to declutter my house. I know these people exist. I'm willing to pay. I swear.

Someone, please, help me! I have magazines that I throw away, but, I don't know, it's like they come in the mail or something, and as soon as I throw them away, they come back. CATALOGS!! BILLS!! MAKE THEM GO AWAY!!!

Yes yes yes, I know, "only touch it once!" meaning, pick up a piece of paper and immediately do what needs to be done with it. Pay the bill, file the insurance thing, throw the catalog out. I try, honest I do. I'll make it for a week, but then I forget for a day, and another day, and then I've got piles again.

Ew, no, not like that.

Well, yeah, actually, they're a major pain in my...

Anyway...

cookbooks. boxes. business stuff. incense burners (incense burners?). dog treats. dog hair. It's all gotta go.

My only hope is that because my house is on the market, I will, one day, have to pack and move. My only fear is that when the day comes to pack, I will get so panicked that I will just throw the garbage in a box and transport the junk from one habitat to another, and when I unpack, I will, like a gerbil, tear it into bits, fluff it up, scatter it throughout my cage, and call it my nest.

I really need to feel like I'm not doomed. Like I'm not going to end up an old maid in a house with old newspapers stacked like walls forming pathways from the front door to the back door. Where the candles have melted into place, and the pot pourri looks like it was raked in last October. Where coffee mugs have been hidden under the magazines for so many years that they're supporting their own microbiocultures.

A friend of mine once told me about his grandmother whose house, after she died, looked basically like what I've described above. Now, in spite of my statement to the contrary, I won't be that stressed out if, in my various junk drawers and hobby boxes, my heirs dig up two dozen pairs of scissors. Scissors, at least, in their various forms, are still useful. I just need someone to stop me before I get to the point that my friend's grandmother was at.

The point where, among my relics, I have a cigar box labelled, and I'm not making this up, "pieces of string too small to use."

Someone please help me before it's too late...

Thursday, August 26, 2004

language and thinking and writing and speaking

There is something wrong with my speech center, I'm sure. Whether it's the ADD or some other neurological dysfunction, I lose track of what I'm saying, or forget the word I'm supposed to use, right in the middle of a sentence. It's one of the reasons I prefer to express myself in writing. A) I have time to edit before anyone gets to see it, and b) I don't lock up quite so much.

In any case, my lack of ability to finish a sentence sometimes drives my friends crazy. Actually, it just sometimes drives my boyfriend crazy. Most of my friends know me well enough to just know where I'm headed and finish the sentence in their heads for me, which is a great time saver, but my boyfriend just sits there and waits and looks at me like I should be put away, either deliberately not following me, and wanting me to work for it, like I'm just being lazy, or unintentionally missing the rest of my communication efforts that are not currently involving my vocal cords. Sometimes I think it's because he's in a cranky mood and wants to make me cranky with him that he does it. Sometimes I think that he just doesn't read my mind like other people do. I think I depend on that a lot for communication...

(Oh. I need to note that it's entirely possible that my other friends may be just as irritated by my lack of sentence finishing, but they're too polite to say anything... I tend to think of it as a charming eccentricity, but I'm biased...)

I mean, verbal language is just one very specific tool that we use to communicate, and unfortunately for me, my brain sometimes loses pieces of it in much the same way that my socket wrench set is scattered throughout my garage. I can be trying to say something very important, and get stuck, and have to say, "...you know... Noun. Something. You know. Anyway..." and then I stare into space for a few seconds before I am brave enough to go on to the next sentence, hoping my audience has just simply followed me blindly assuming all will be revealed by the end of the verbal paragraph.

Language is just not a tool my mouth is very good with. [ed. note: I realize that this is a huge opening for many of my friends/readers... keep it to yourselves...]

My fingers, on the other hand, have a much better grip on it. At a keyboard, I don't forget words, and if I do, it's just part of the equation to hit a few buttons and end up at an online thesaurus, and jog my memory quickly and efficiently and barely lose a beat. At a keyboard, I can keep whole thoughts in my head after thinking them and while expressing them. I can continue typing about one thing while my head is off making connections to something else completely. It's like my visual brain is allowed to function independently when I'm communicating with my hands, but when I'm talking, it has to timeshare.

It's a drag.

And you know, now that I'm thinking about it, I think I have the same problem with language input. I read visual clues, and body language, pick up on incidental data, and to me, that forms a broader picture of a conversation. Can I quote people? Hell no. I can't remember specifically what someone said to me 5 seconds ago. But I can probably tell you what they were feeling in a general way, and give you a decent paraphrase of conversations I've had years ago.

Writing is just different for me. I think when I write. Actually, what I mean is that I think *better* when I write. By the end of this post, I will have a much clearer understanding of the specific point I really wanted to make in the first place, and I will go back and edit the whole of the contents to make it seem like it clearly and efficiently led up to that point.

I can't do that with verbal language. My arguments are not preformed, just sitting there in the verbal part of my cortex, just waiting for an opening. My thoughts are pieced together word by word, pretty much as they're coming out of my mouth. It's actually not quite *that* bad. I have some editing capability. But my verbal buffer only holds about 128 characters. I'd need a conversational buffer of about a gig to, say, bring a morale problem to my boss. I'd need a terabyte buffer to have an argument on the phone with my ex-husband. (He can out-talk me, but I can out-write him, so on a multi-media playing field, we're evenly matched. Luckily, we don't argue all that often anymore, 'cos it's tiring...)

So, instead, I opt to write. I write, I think, I edit, I rewrite and then, eventually, I communicate.

Meanwhile, I still have to have conversations with my boyfriend, and when that happens


Wednesday, August 25, 2004

late bloomer

I was 30 years old when I stopped going to school. That same week my son *started* school, so until this year, when my son moved in with his dad, I've been dealing with teachers for 36 years straight.

Don't tell me that doesn't just suck.

But, that's not what I was going to write about. Dealing with teachers and administrators for the modern urban school is worthy of it's own entry, and once the willies wear off, I'll put the strap of leather between my teeth and start to recall my own adventures with the people who say things like "62% of our school is gifted and talented"... * s h u d d e r *

What I was going to write about was that apparently I'm a late bloomer. Not only did I save my "real world" virginity until I was 30, in a week or so, when my barista moves out to take a job in a different city, I will be living on my own, for the first time... EVER.

Remember. I'm almost 40. I've never lived alone. EVER.

I immediately panicked, thinking, "oh, shit, all I'm going to do is eat Macaroni and Cheese (Kraft - it's the cheesiest) and watch Law & Order reruns..." Then I thought, "oh, shit, I'm going to be one of those people who buys all their food from the "prepared food" section at Whole Foods." Then, "oh, shit, how am I ever going to remember which day is recycling day?!?"

It took about 24 hours, but now I'm thinkin'... WHOO HOO!!! I get to eat Macaroni and Cheese and watch Law & Order reruns whenever the fuck I want to!!! WHOO HOOO!!!!!

Ok, I'm really not that excited about it, but I *am* trying not to be depressed and freaked out.

See, I don't like being alone. It's not that I dislike my own company, or I need someone else around to keep me company. I just know what some of my bad habits are, and being alone is just going to exacerbate them.

  • I will get addicted to several computer games and play them until all hours of the night.
  • On my "work from home" day, I will not leave my bed (because my cable reaches up the stairs) and probably not even shower.
  • I will never put away my laundry. It will go from the clean pile to the hamper.
  • I will start to talk to the dog. On the plus side, she'll be a happier dog.
  • I will seriously eat M&C a lot.
  • I will probably only leave my house when necessary.
  • I will probably never turn the tv off.
  • If I had cats again, I would probably be "that crazy lady with the cats and the loud tv."

I like having someone to live with. I think at this point it my life it would have to be someone I'm also sleeping with, or gave birth to, but I'm a pack animal. I like the company. I like having someone to push me out of my ruts. I like having someone I can wrap my arms around when I wake up from a bad dream... I like having someone to keep me vaguely socialized.

It's really sort of bumming me out.

On the other hand, apparently it's shocking to everyone I know that I've never gone through this rite of passage, and they've all told me that it's going to be good for me. "You'll get to walk around naked! Watch what you want! Fart at will!"

(I promise you that if I asked 100 men and 100 women what was great about living alone, only men would mention the farting thing. And I bet it would be more than one...)

My problem is that I know a lot of people who've gotten used to living alone, and all I can say to that is, "Crap. I don't want to end up like that." Rigid, crotchety, cranky... Shit. I'm already enough like that, I don't need to be annealed. I'd like to think that the living alone thing is not a permanent thing. That one day I'll be back to living with someone. I like the idea of waking up with someone who you'd kiss even before they brushed their teeth. This does not, by definition, include my dog.

But, it's not like I have a lot of choice in the matter. My son is in New Mexico. My boyfriend is soon to be in San Antonio.

So, there it is. I'm almost 40, and I'm about to live alone. Who knows. I'll probably cave and get a housemate eventually. $5 says it'll be a teacher...

the songs i'll never write

If any of you out there are songwriters, here are the songs that I would love to write, but probably never will, so feel free to write them for me.

1) Don't Look Down - You know how the Coyote always runs off the edge of the cliff, but he never falls until he looks down? It's about that. Except bigger and more metaphorical. Work with it.

2) Walkin' Away - This would be a country western song, dedicated to most of the men who've entered my life briefly. The chorus would be something like, "Some men are breast men, and some men like legs, but you must be an ass man because you only want me when I'm walkin' away..."

Makes you all teary, doesn't it?

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

my kingdom for a door

I dunno. Maybe I'm a big wuss. Maybe I suffer more from anxiety than I realized and I just need to up the dosage on the meds. But, I swear, this whole cube environment sucks really extra hard.

I get teased a lot about my apparent inability to be happy in a job. As much as I'm a sucker for a confidently spoken phrase, and as much doubt as I let myself feel because of it, deep down I don't believe it's true. Yes, I'd much prefer working freelance for myself, sitting on my couch with Law & Order as white background noise, (it's noise if you've seen all the episodes 3 or 4 times...), or working from 10pm-3am when the rest of my personal, solipsistic universe is asleep, writing marketing materials for high profile companies that pay well, taking the afternoon off to go to a cheap and uncrowded movie, or hanging out catching a few afternoon trains with my buddy Kirk.

Sure, that's great, but I've been happy in real jobs before. Really.

I swear.

Honest.

Ok, I've had a total of... hang on... (mumble mumble 3 years here... mumble mumble 2 years there... mumble freelance... mumble miserable cubes mumble mumble...) 5 real jobs, and one 3 month contract position, and I was happy in at least 3 of them. There are 2 common threads among the pre-freelance happy, long-term jobs. 1) I had an actual office, and 2) I hadn't learned yet how nice it was to work for myself.

Even after deconvolving the affect of #2 from my job joy factor, I'm left believing that there's a real connection between my happiness on a job and the amount of privacy I have.

Cubes drive me crazy. Literally.

And here's why:

1) Cubes are loud.

During my three months at the Horrible Company From Hell (heretofore known as HCFH), I worked as a writer in a cubed room with 4 other writers and 4 account managers. First of all, I need to say that this was an ad/graphic design agency, king of the cutthroat industries, and home of every shallow person on the planet. Image is everything. Obey your bulimia.

So, there *were* other issues...

Every day began at 8am. After morning yoga (Ok. I exaggerate. Yoga was only a Wednesday morning thing.) the first set of discussions would be about the previous night's reality TV shows. Not really giving a shiny rat's ass about reality TV (and particularly the people who enjoy watching other people humilated) and having plenty of work to churn out in the next 10 hours, I had a hard time ignoring the inane, high volume chatter. Telling people to shut up, even nicely, was out of the question because the owner and staff manager both got deeply involved in these discussions. I was outmanned and outgunned and really really annoyed.

Account managers (almost missed the 'o' in account... how freudian...) have no sense of... well, they just have no sense. One, who I fondly nicknamed "the moron", would place speakerphone calls to writers who worked no more than 20 feet away from her. An interesting stereophonic effect, to say the least. Another, not so fondly nicknamed "the bitch", would scream and kvetch all day at the top of her lungs about her client and her projects and the fact that she was NOT chosen to be on The Bachelor, in spite of the effort the company made in producing a video audition tape for her. (No, not making that up.)

When I suggested to the staff wrangler (her business card actually reads "zookeeper") that it was a little loud, and maybe we could encourage some quietness, her suggestion was to get a boombox and keep the headphones on. Well, that would be great, but I can't work with music piped directly into my head either. Ambient, maybe. Earphones? No way.

Both other cubelands I've been in and have commented on the noise level, the suggestion has been "get a boombox and keep the headphones on." Argh.

2) Cubes foster (almost wrote 'fester'... I am very freudian today...) paranoia.

At HCFH, the girls would get together one cube over from me, and whisper. Ok, maybe they were trying to be considerate volume-wise, but given that they were not considerate people in general, I find this unlikely. To make things worse, they would occasionally look over at certain people, and continue whispering.

Whether or not they were actually talking about other people behind their backs is irrelevant. The fact that it was *possible*, and that anyone watching was aware of it, made me nervous. Were people talking about me? Why was I suddenly not getting the projects I had been getting before? What did "the bitch" say to "the moron" that caused them both to look my way and giggle?

It was like being in a Twilight Zone episode. You know. One of the ones where the video montage kept growing more and more druglike and distorted, and the main character eventually goes insane... Yeah. That one.

3) Cubes cause physical anxiety.

There's something about small motions in my peripheral vision when I'm trying to concentrate that makes it absolutely impossible to control my "fight or flight" reaction. Maybe it's just a side effect of being a fair bit ADD, or again, maybe I'm predisposed to a great amount of anxiety, but even someone just coming to sit at the desk next to me, I react. I look up. I jerk my neck around. I sometimes even jump. I need to know what the motion is in case I need to attend to it. It's like being a freakin' jet pilot in a dogfight. Aaaaa! 8 hours of tension. Every day. Ack.

Even in the high rise cubes I work in now, where I can't see anything in front of me, I still have people walking around behind me to get to other desks. In the dark spots on my computer screen, and the dark spots on the picture of my son I have on my wall I can see moving reflections. Joy to those who can turn the reaction off, but for me, JEEEZ, let me tell you that makes me edgy.

4) Cubes mean never having to close your door.

Ever have a less than wonderful day? Brink of a divorce? Child having problems at school? Finances in ruins? All three? Add a dash of PMS? mmmm....

Sobbing and sniffing within earshot of co-workers sounds like a party in a box to me, but really, it's not. "Oh, you can go to an empty office to make private phone calls if you have to..." You mean those empty offices with the big picture windows? Fab. Where to you go to just put your head on the table and cry your fucking eyeballs out? Oh, I'm sorry. That's not professional. Just leave your personal life at home.

Well, ok. I can't do that.

So, maybe it is just me. Maybe my ADD and my emotions do prevent me from thriving in a work world devoid of doors, but I tend to think that I'm not the only one.


Who knows. Maybe one day, the peasants will revolt, the cube walls will come down, and we'll all get our doors back...

Sunday, August 22, 2004

hung up

I got hung up the other day writing about something that turned out to be bloated and boring. So, after continued, but failing, efforts over several days, I decided to ditch it. At least for the time being. It may show up eventually, but after it's sat decomposing for a little while, it may just be too smelly to post.

Plus, and this is a moment of confession, I got hung up playing a stupid computer game. My addictive personality is working against me. Some days I'm addicted to writing. Sometimes I'm not.

Today is a not day.

Forgive me. New stuff coming soon. Meanwhile, I've got to beat that damn Zuma....

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

casket kiosk

Down aisle from groceries, Costco selling caskets

Really nothing spectacular about this article, except that I think "Casket Kiosk" would make an excellent title for a novel.

If you ever watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit!, you might remember their
Death episode and feel a warm fuzzy at the concept of costco selling caskets.

I can't sleep. Someone sing to me.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

training

Went out training last night for the first time in a while. When I say "training" I don't mean it in the educational way. I mean actually fishing for trains. It's a weird practice that involves a lot of driving around through iffy neighborhoods, listening for whistles, trying to interpret track signals and carrying around spare change to mush on the tracks.

There are at least three things that I really like about going training. One is that I get to hang out with my buddy Kirk and hear him talk about the underside of Houston. I always imagine that taking the tour of the sewers in Paris is a lot like driving around Houston with Kirk. He knows little things. He knows the people who live in the weird houses and he knows that they have no showers and when it's nice they step outside to bathe with the garden hose. He knows where to look near the steel plant to find a bohemian urban gardens where moms bring their home-schooled children to help grow communal veggies. He's taught me that there's so much involved in the inner workings of a city that you can only see it if you peel up the veneer and crawl underneath. And it's not just the history of Houston that that I enjoy listening to or the tweaky little urban oddities that I enjoy finding. It's also the story of commerce that I've osmotically picked up. In some revelation of the obvious, I discovered that commerce drives the metabolism of our country. Trains are the blood vessels, industries are the major organs, and we're just little fat cells, getting bloated on the transported oil, chemicals, cars, and gravel. This isn't the kind of stuff I'd have ever learned in a classroom (even if I had given a crap about social studies 30 years ago...)


The second is the feel of power you get when you're standing 8 feet from a rushing locomotive. Not that *I* feel powerful, you understand. It's the feeling that power is around you. This huge unstoppable metal object hurling past you at 30 or 40 miles an hour (out of the city it's a lot faster) giving you a feeling of vertigo when you stand close. It's probably like the rush tornado chasers feel, only, let's face it... they're really wacko. Trains stay on tracks for the most part. Tornados are a little less committal about direction. The worst you can say about a train chaser is that they're eccentric...

The third thing is that I've developed a real fondness for industrial architecture, and you get a lot of that around train tracks. Dead old train yards. Steel mills. Chemical plants. Manufacturing buildings and warehouses. Recycling plants. Old buildings, reused and repurposed (a corporate term that I usually hate, but it fit the cadence...) Years of patina, piles of unrecognizable old parts, and dirt roads carrying dumptrucks and bobcats.

A lot of that is going away, though, and it makes me sad. The rush to the inner city has driven up the price of land in our area causing developers to tear down these fabulous old structures, scrape the land, and put up acres of townhomes that will soon be owned by people who are going to complain about the trains. Soon those iffy neighborhoods - those untouched ghettos where you find watermelon stands, chickens running wild and people still sitting out on their porches talking with their neighbors - soon they'll give way to urbanized, cookie cutter townhomes. Young, daring professionals on an adventure to the inner city will move in and the people who've lived there for years will be displaced.

We've already lost a metalworks company, where we could watch the graveyard shift lathe out a bunch of stainless widgets, leaving telltale shiny curls piled in the dumpster. We've lost the anonymous manufacturing company that never had more than 10 days in a row of accident free work according to the posted sign. We've already lost rows of historic rowhouses, covered over in kudzu and probably housing major rat populations.

I miss them already.

But, it's not going to stop me from enjoying the chase. I'll just have to keep my eyes out for little pockets of history, and I guess I'll just have to start carrying my camera with me.


Along with a lot of change to mush on the tracks...

Sunday, August 15, 2004

sinus haiku

pressure in my skull.
hot stick in my right eyeball.
where's my sudafed?

the age thing

I got carded the other day.

>Beam<

I'm actually not sure if the guy at Whole Foods was 100% serious, but he asked if I was old enough to be buying the wine in my basket. I looked at him, perplexed. I mean, I'll be 40 in a couple of months, and tho' I look young, it's been awhile since I looked *THAT* young.

Eventually, I just laughed, figuring he was just being funny and nice, but then he said somewhat earnestly, "Well, you fall into that group that is sort of on the line..."

Get. Out.

I took out my license for him. Eyebrow raised nearly above my hairline.

"Really, I just need to check."

"Hey, whatever. TOTALLY fine by me."

It's probably been about 4 or 5 years since I was carded with any real enthusiasm, and quite frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about it. Some of me is a little disappointed that I no longer fall into that "looks like late 20's but let's check just to make sure" range, but another part of me is thinkin', "Hey. I worked damn hard for the wisdom and experience that comes with these almost 40 years, I want them to be acknowledged, dammit!"

But, see, I dress casually, I don't wear makeup, my hair is minimally coiffed (by minimally, I mean, it's long and straight, and if I brush it after I shower, it means I'm going for an interview) and I really just look young. And, at the same time, I don't look old.

I know that sounds like the same thing, but it's not. There's a difference between looking young, and not looking old. See, I don't look like a young 40 year old. I just look like I couldn't possibly be 40.

You're probably thinking, "Shut up with all this complaining about looking young. It's worse than complaining about having a good paying job! Jeez!" But, as esoteric as it seems, it's an actual issue for me. By not looking my age, I don't get the same deference that other 40 year old, made up, highlighted hair, manicured nails, put together women get. Since I don't *act* like a 40 year old, I don't get treated like one. And, usually, that's ok. In fact, usually, that's great. I mean fantastic. Way way way cool. I like being one of the kids, one of the fray, one of the guys, one of the crowd.

But, sometimes it comes and bites me on the ass. I find that without the practice of acting like a 40 year old all the time, the people that I *DO* want to recognize my experience, and treat it with some respect, don't see it either, regardless of how much confidence I carry myself with. The guy at the car dealership (although that could be a "girl" thing), the salesman at the fancy watch store, my bosses... It's a peeve of mine, being treated like, -pat pat pat- aw, isn't she cute?


I know it'll happen when it comes time to buy another house, get another loan, deal with the title agency. They'll all be looking around for my father... Even my similarly aged relatives sometimes forget that I've aged along with them. Like I'm permanently 14, while they've managed to cleverly acquire the wisdom of age. It is so aggravating to be patronized. It makes me want to dye my hair grey and tattoo my birthdate to my forehead.

But, somehow it doesn't make me want to wear skirts and pumps all the time, cut my hair short and spend 45 minutes gelling and styling it in the morning and spending 15 minutes putting on make up.

So, I'm in a quandary. Which do I want more? Low maintenance, or respect?

Honestly? I guess it boils down to the fact that no matter how much it irritates me, if I can't get respect without trying to look my age, then I don't want it. It wouldn't be respect for what *I* offer. It would be respect for the image, and quite frankly, I don't think it deserves the exalted status it's already getting.

I guess I'm just going to continue to be culturally disobedient. Fits in nicely with the whole commune thing, anyway...

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

walden

There's something wrong here. There's all this talk about sustainability regarding our natural resources, the way we farm, the way we harvest energy, the way we fish, the way we treat our planet in general. But, I think we're missing something else. I don't think we're even living sustainably.

No, I don't physically exhaust myself each day by dragging a plow over 40 acres of land, or hunting for meat or gathering berries, or chewing hides into useable leather for clothes and shoes, or harvesting grain, or herding sheep... I sit on my ass all day in front of a computer. For 8 hours, plus or minus, I sit and I "develop information" for other people to use so that they can better sit on their asses for 8 hours, plus or minus, doing other things to perpetuate this whole ass-sitting thing.

It sort of sounds like we have it good compared to the hide-chewers, right?

But we don't. We sit in a tightly clustered group of people who are vying for raises, promotions, advancement, acknowledgement, praise, whatever. We sit with our backs open in a cube system, listening to every conversation everyone has with their father, sister, or gynecologist's receptionist. We stare at a screen that makes our eyes hurt and gives us headaches and bombards us with radiation that probably isn't so bad for us, but I still remember my mother saying, "DON'T SIT SO CLOSE TO THE TV!!", so I have questions. We are measured on a scale of productivity that is slippery to define and highly subjective at best. We are held to standards of personality that allow little room for creativity. Our privacy is non-existent and our anxiety is rising.

But, we make a lot of money, don't we?

Don't we?

Well, yeah, but I don't know about you, I have to spend it, too. Almost all of it. Sometimes more of it. I have to actually *buy* my food, and I can't chew hides into leather for shoes, although I can buy them cheaply at Target if things are tight. They're probably not as comfortable as the chewed ones, I'm guessing, but hey, they'll fall apart soon enough and I'll buy another pair. I have to buy my clothes and pay for electricity and water and gas, and pay to drive the miles to work because there's no way I could be lucky enough to live within walking distance of any place that would pay me well enough to afford a house. I have to pay my mortgage. I'm almost done paying for my education that I finished many years ago, whoo hoo. Partay.

I have to pay for my doctor, well, what's not covered by insurance which I also have to pay for. I have to go to the doctor a lot because, well, the job causes me stress and I have pains in my shoulders and elbows which may be related to sitting in front of a computer all day with my arms on my desk and my ass in a chair.

I'm not really putting any money away because I'm paying off debts that I incurred when I couldn't find a job for awhile, which caused me lots more stress and created tension for my family, making spending time with them additionally stressful. Even now that I have a job, and I'm paying off those debts, I still come home tired and don't have a lot of energy left with which to enjoy my family. And, it's not that I'm physically tired, I'm just drained from spending 8 hours in a row doing something only vaguely satisfying that has no direct benefit to my life.

I eat terribly and expensively because again I'm too tired to come home and cook a healthy meal. The ass that I sit on all day is increasing in size because prepared food is rarely balanced, healthy, or of normal proportions.

I have to pay to exercise.

Someone tell me why we do this again?

There are a lot of days that I'd rather be hitching up a plow harness around my shoulders or keeping a vegetable garden, some chickens and a goat, living among peach trees or apple trees or orange trees. There are a lot of days when I wish I had energy for more than just flipping through channels trying to find something less offensive than "Reality TV" on to bide my time until sleep. There are a lot of days that I'd rather be creating a future instead of saving for one.


I just don't feel like I'm living sustainably. Hell with the forests and the oil and the overfished rivers. I don't feel like I'm doing right by my own body.

I take vitamins because I eat fast food. I have to spend extra time in my day to exercise because I don't do anything more than move my fingers around at work. I breathe terrible air because I live in a city where you can't possibly walk or bike anywhere, and even if you did, no one else would, so you'd be biking through lousy air.

What the hell are we doing to ourselves?

And why?

What's with the push push push? Drive drive drive? Hurry hurry hurry? Why do we live to work instead of work to live? What's with the endless cycle of discontent? What's with "more than enough" being the new "enough"? Why aren't people like Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow and his wife, Bill Gates, and any other CEO making more than 40 times what their lowest paid employee makes satisfied?

What do I want? I want to be happy. I don't care about making a lot of money. I just want to do something that I'm passionate about. Something where at the end of the day I am exhausted but proud of my accomplishments. So I live in a smaller house or an apartment. So I don't eat out every night. So maybe I don't have every cable station known to man.

But, maybe I'm not so tired so I can hang out in the evening and do things like play music, or talk about politics, or read a book. Maybe I can even live so sparsely that I can take a little time to travel. Maybe I don't need to stay in a really nice hotel. Maybe the important thing is what you see and who you talk to and what you learn when you travel, and not the amount of silk stretched out in your accommodations.

Am I nuts? Sometimes I feel like an outcast. Even my own mother tells me that I can't give up my high paying job to take a lower paying job that may give me more life satisfaction because I'll soon discover that I'll "Need The Money More Than I Think." But, really, all I end up with when I actually have all that extra money is stuff that collects dust and a sleep deprivation problem.

(Don't get me wrong. At the moment this is purely theoretical because I have a gazillion dollars in credit card debt from being unemployed for much longer than I wanted to be, and I can't possibly give up my high paying job unless I win the lottery or you all get together and send money to my paypal account, which I'll let you if you really want to.)

Anyway, EVEN at a theoretical level, I can't get many people to even understand what I mean.

Doesn't anyone else have this fantasy? The one about finding a piece of land not too far from a town with a few reasonable jobs. The one where you grow your own veggies and fruit, and you raise a few chickens for eggs and the occasional beheading. The one where you have few sheep to sell their wool and maybe a goat or two named Chloe and Daphne for some specialty hand-crafted chevre. (Ok, that's not my fantasy, that's a friend of mine's. I borrowed it for literary purposes.) The one where you share the land with a few other like-minded friends who grow different things and raise different animals and have different specialties. Friends who've learned how to blacksmith, or can build furniture, or make beer, or stitch up a nasty cut. The one where you live and share your goodies and good conversation together.
The one where you get to keep your cell phone, broadband access and maybe even netflix.

So I'm a little spoiled.

I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's totally ridiculous. But I still think that a subsistence commune with a few good friends would make getting up in the morning a whole lot easier than getting up to go sit on my ass with my back exposed and worrying about the price of stock.


It's just not sustainable...

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

cow pms

It turns out that the other week was the week the calves were taken away from the cows, and the relentless mooing that kept me awake was just part of "how they get" at that time of the year...

Hormones. I totally get it.

changing dicks in mid-stream

Ok, so what's the deal with the Dick York/Dick Sargeant thing? I mean, say you're nine or ten, and you come home after school to watch the season premiere of Bewitched, and you find Samantha sleeping with another man, AND SHE DOESN'T KNOW IT'S NOT THE SAME GUY!! It's like the Sixth Sense or something!

I'm going to take a moment to wallow in my victimhood, and decide to blame my whole misguided adulthood on the fact that my moral compass hit a magnetic anomaly when I watched a near family member trade her husband in for a better looking one.

Larry, fix me a martini.

Sunday, August 08, 2004

pms

I am shockingly not creative when I have PMS. Oh, yeah, I come up with curse words I've never used before, sure, but when it comes to having something clever to say, nope. Not there.

Plus, I'm cranky. Mostly I feel like curling up in a little ball and sleeping for 4 days. Don't get me wrong, I did quite a bit of that this weekend, but I just don't feel like I'm done yet.

I'm at my most fetal, most infantile, most needing to be wrapped up in a blanket and rocked to sleep when I have PMS. If you've never had it, you can't understand it. You know how when someone cuts you off on the highway, and you have to slam on the brakes and hit the horn and your adrenalin squirts into your bloodstream and you get red in the face and you use words you usually only hear on the Sopranos, or, similarly, on NJ freeways? Well, that's sort of what PMS is like -- except there's no guy cutting you off. Emotion without context. Mm mm good.

In fact, you could be making eggs and you're swamped with this, this, this, bbblllluah, nameless emotion, and you want to cry and yell and stir all at the same time. See, when someone cuts you off, you understand completely why you're pissed. Your passengers don't even mind if you take it out on them for a few seconds afterwards because they understand that you've just got some leftover anger that you've got to vent, and that's cool. Hell, sometimes they're angry too. Bastard didn't use his signal! Fucker. But when you're making eggs, and you suddenly feel the need to put your fist through a wall, and you vent at the guy grinding coffee beans next to you, he's more than likely to be a little confused.

Worse, you're more than likely a little confused. You know you're upset, and usually when you're upset there's a reason, so presumably there's a reason this time, too. But, where is it? You swish the eggs around a little, looking to see if the reason is in there, but it's not. So, you start looking elsewhere. Surely you can't be feeling these emotions for no reason. Dammit. Who has pissed you off? Hey, that guy next to you grinding coffee beans might have done something. Maybe you don't know precisely what, but if you think about it carefully, you can probably put together a few microscopic incidents that, TOGETHER, make a real good reason for your adrenalin to be pumping. Hey, didn't he roll the other way when you tried to kiss him good morning? And... yeah... didn't he not want to watch the movie you wanted to watch last night? He hates you. He wants nothing to do with you anymore, and THAT'S why you're pissed off.

Phew. At least you figured it out. Now you can feel good and justified being pissed at him. All day. Kick him if you need to. He deserved it. He didn't hug you when you clearly needed to be hugged. It was all over your face. Damn him for not reading your mind. Fucker.

Unfortunately for our barista, he has no clue what the fuck is going on. The more perplexed he is, the more distant he gets. After all, he's now dealing with a crazy person. The more distant he gets, the deeper the hole gets, 'cos the more of that information spackle you use to explain the increasingly cranky mood you're in.

Do you know about information spackle? When you've got gaps in your data, and you're trying to reach a conclusion, you start filling them in with information spackle. It's made by DuPont, I think. Whatever it is, it's not the kind of stuff that occurs in nature. Manufactured polymer information spackle.

Hormones suck. Yeah yeah, I know there are people out there who don't believe in PMS. That it's just an excuse women use to be bitchy on a monthly basis. Some women don't like it because it gets used against them in a dismissive way, like, "Oh, don't worry about her, she's just got PMS, now about that executive decision..." But for me, I know. *I* get PMS, and I get it bad, and I'm a raving lunatic when I do. I should be locked up and not allowed to interact with other humans.

Particularly the guy who makes my coffee in the morning... I'm sorry, babe...

Thursday, August 05, 2004

plate of shrimp

My cousin Stuart and I have an ongoing discussion about God and his existence. (Gimme a break. I'm just picking a pronoun. I don't believe anyway, so why not make God a man?)

Today, I wrote to him the following:
...yeah, but *I* don't think I'm fucked. See, my expectations are kinda low. You go in the ground. The worms eat you. If you're lucky, your children/students/people you've met take what you taught them and keep you around for a little while in today's equivalent of legend. If not, not. Eat the good food while you can. Have great sex. Meet as many interesting people as possible. Make as many people laugh as you can. Drive fast when you can get away with it, and accept your speeding tickets like an adult (got one 2 days ago... I didn't argue. I was speeding. Sure, I'll pay a lawyer to fight it in court, but I treated the cop far better than he treated me...)

Then again, if there *were* a God, I think he'd be wise enough to realize that one of the blessings (and I don't use that word very often) that he gave to his children was the ability to make their own decisions, and to feel confident in their own beliefs. Whatever makes them happy and good. What's it to him if we believe in his omnipotence? Does he need some sort of validation? Bah. Maybe I don't believe in God as he's described in current judeo-christian religions because he's the only one doling out treats and punishments, and requires us to behave well NOT because it's the right thing to do, but rather because we'll be rewarded in the end. Sounds like encouraging greed to me, and it doesn't sound like the kind of God I'd want to believe in. Plus, it makes the believers (and I'm thinking of Bush right now) forget that most of our treats and punishments come directly from the people we interact with daily. God does NOT bless America. God does NOT recognize political boundaries. It's probably THE MOST repugnant bumpersticker I see on a daily basis. It's up to US to make America worthy of friendship from other countries. And, we're doing a pretty shitty job. I would think that in this case God would go out of his way to throw down a few plagues. We're worse that the freakin' Egyptians.

So, I'll rephrase my belief like this: maybe there is a God, but if there is, it's my belief that he's hoping that we grow up to the point where we don't need him to supervise us or ask to use the car or tell us to take out the trash. He's waiting to spend his days playing golf and feeling content knowing we can act like mensches without bugging him all the time. Trusting that we have learned that if we do good, good comes back around. Eventually.

I'm leaving the guy alone. He needs a break from babysitting...

I was happy to note that it's sort of consistent with the aether thing. God really just takes too much personal responsibility out of the picture. I still dig the aether. And, if you recall, by design, it has a global snarky sense of humor. Way cool.


happy birthday Zack!

It's my kid's birthday today. He's 14. Which means he left to live with his dad just in time for him to learn how to drive, go through wicked puberty, and discover that adults are stupid. (Actually, he's known the latter for a fairly long time...) I'll take him back when his insurance rates drop, he's got a girlfriend, and has discovered that adults actually know a thing or two...

Love you kiddo!!! Miss you a lot!

-mom

Sunday, August 01, 2004

moo

"Moo" is a totally inadequate transliteration of cow talk. I know this. I spent all night at the Country House (capitalized so you know to pronounce it with a upper-crust, lock-jaw accent) listening to complex cow conversation.

In fact, most cows sound startlingly like deaf-mute prison inmates complaining about their accommodations.

Really loudly.

I got up and went out back stark naked, 'cos, a) that's how I sleep, and b) you can do that at the Country House without much risk of anything but a cow, horse or goat seeing you. I was looking for the cows, wanting to tell one or two to shut the fuck up and let me go back to sleep, but there weren't any back there. That made me a little nervous. They'd been mooing from the back of the house, dammit, they should *BE* in the back of the house. Was there someone in the woods, perhaps an escaped deaf-mute prison inmate, say, complaining about his accommodations? I didn't know. I was extremely naked, sadly lacking in cow targets for verbal abuse, and now on the lookout for a moving orange jumpsuit.

I wandered around the deck to the side of the house. This felt a little sketchier. I mean, there was still very little chance of anything but the above mentioned fauna to catch a glimpse of all the extra bits of me that have been accumulating over the last couple of decades, but I had less protection from the house. Now I was visible from the road...


Ok, dirt road. Driveway, really. Whatever.

It's moo(oooo)t anyway. All that was out front were a bunch of cows. And as I made myself known, they all turned and stared. If you've never been stared at by a bunch of cows, you can't possibly know what that feels like. The first thing that happens is you look behind you to see if someone with a barbeque pit is warming up the mesquite. Second, after you realize that they're actually staring at YOU, you anthropomorphize their thoughts. "What the hell is that?" "I don't know, I've never seen anything like it before!" "Ew. Needs fur." I took a moment to reflect on the diversity of nature, then yelled "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" to the white cow standing closest to me. It looked me up and down, turned, and bolted across the creek.


Ooh. Ego crushing. I need to start working out again.

I did my best to shoo them away, but those cows are damn stubborn. They stood, steadfastly mooing, complaining about their accommodations, and questioning my presence.

I left them to their complex conversation and went back to bed.