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This post is intended to insult your intelligence

Here I am, quietly home alone.  OK, not so quiet, considering the Rolling Stones are playing.  And, I haven’t quite nailed Virginia Wolff’s:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

For a few hours it is a room of my own.  And, with my lemon trees in constant bloom and fruit, fluttering with birds, it is a room with a view.IMG_3768

The last few weeks of my employment have brought me closer to the employment of others, or their aspirations thereof.  Yeah, less pretentiously, I’ve been interviewing eager hopefuls for a job.  Not all that eager in truth.  Here are some minimum requirements to keep the conversation not the potentially fruitful side:

  • Know the name of the company that is on the phone or inside of which you sit
  • Know the name of the department, as above
  • Have some kind of vague notion of what it is we do and, therefore, what might be asked of you
  • Don’t make me cry with boredom.

The last one is actually much simpler than you might think, even if I am a bitch.  I love stories.  I love imagining myself in other shoes.  I love picking up tidbits of humanity as I chug along.

I only pretend to hate people.  But I just might be the one who smiles at you and shares conspiratorial chatter in a long grocery line or unruly crowd.

In a job interview, I really, really, really want to like you.  I’m incentivized out the ass — there’re piles of work of both the shit and not shit variety that I’m meant to be covering, because we haven’t met you yet.  I already have a full-time job, so doing yours alongside my own is just the reason I want to hug you and squeeze you and bask in the salvation and glory that your hire will be.

I need you for my very sanity.

It’s a pretty minimal bargain this boredom thing.  A low bar, in fact.

But, I’m not going to write about my experiences.  The universe knows that the gods of Google have not always smiled warmly upon my face and shoulders, so I will leave the above as guidelines only.  As they say in movie land, any resemblance to real people and real anything really is coincidental.  My thoughts from my head.

However, I will mention an experience told to me.  In comparing notes with another person doing an entirely different job search, she mentioned a phrase that has stuck with me for weeks.

In response to the worn, tattered, clichéd intro question “why are you looking to leave your current position?” the person’s response was just the kind of philosophical conundrum that rolls inside my echoing skull for hours of navel-contemplation fun.  The reply about her current gig, and despite the quotes, I wasn’t there, so I’m either paraphrasing or making it up:

It’s OK, but some days it’s like it’s just an insult to my intelligence.

Let’s leave aside that this statement was uttered in a job interview.  While I tend to do well enough I suppose in a conference room full of interrogators (well enough to get jobs, it would seem), I’ve said enough monumentally stupid things in the workplace to not feel like casting the obvious stone.

Instead, what’s killing me, the riddle I can’t fucking solve or information I ain’t parsing — What the fuck really is an insult to one’s intelligence?

OK, OK, reader thus far, there is my prose.  I’ll give you that.  Although, it’s less of an insult to your intelligence and more a cry that you could have done so much better with your synapses and your time than to have read this far.

Earlier today, I put spoons and knives and toast plates and coffee mugs into the dishwasher.  It did not challenge me.  The thoughts inside my head were dull and plodding not glimmering and profound.  Was filling the dishwasher an “insult to my intelligence.”

At work some days I tick little boxes.  I collate.  I answer phones.  I do things for other people that I don’t feel like doing for myself.  I remember things like telling my boss that we should have cookies for a festive little reason.  I buy plane tickets.  I cancel plane tickets.  I spent ungodly amounts of time in Outlook calendar moving squares around in infinite patterns.

Some days I ab-so-fucking-lute-ly hate it.  I have to remind myself that the first world joy of office work is M&Ms and sodas, mini-cupcakes and the internet.  Dear, sweet, timewastingly infinite internet.

And, there are assholes.  Insulted I have been.  But my intelligence, she is still there even when the assholes try to shake my convictions.

So, if you got this far, do me a favor.  Give me an example of what might in the glare of fluorescent lighting and computer screens be an actual insult to your intelligence.

I cannot rest until I know.

The other Mother’s Day

I was reading that it is never ever St. Patty’s Day on March 17. But, today is March 15, and Patty’s Day it is, the erstwhile day of birth of my old, and not quite sainted mother.

Erstwhile, perhaps, because can you celebrate birthdays when the guest of honor no longer stomps the earth?

So many reasons to think of my mother, Pat, today. Not the least of which is being there for the funeral of M.’s mother. The ceremony, the prayers, the food, the people, the rituals so different. Yet the similarities so deep.

Both M. and I grew up with just one parent. My dad died when I was four. His dad and mom split when he was a kid and then dad died young. Now we are both orphans together.

Like for my mother’s wake, a wave of older people came by for M.’s mother. So many people identifying as friends, explaining who they were, where they lived, how lives intersected. For both women, the presence of these mourners spoke to affections and warmth and relationships that we, as children, did not know. Shading into depth the women we knew only as mom, but they knew as a friend.

Comic relief: My favorite old broad who came by to say goodbye to M.’s mom, walked up to him, and I’m told said to him, “If you don’t remember who I am, I will slap your face.”

I hope a long line of people drops by my remaining body to call me friend in the end. Of course, I hope more to have more years of partying it up and making and having friends.

M. and I have talked about our mothers. It seems to me that they were both gentle people bruised by unexpected circumstances and tragedies big and small. Each woman was shy and reserved, sometimes too passive, sometimes just bound to get the smallest piece of pie, shortest straw or dealt the unlucky hand.

Each of them squirreled away pennies, sacrificing their own wants, for their kids.

Consequently, M. and I each rail against an imagined fate, louder, stronger, more resolute than the women who raised us. We don’t save money for cake tomorrow. We buy cake today and enjoy it with gusto.

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Holy shit, I wanted this one to be funny and light. As the kids say — FAIL.

Here’s the manifesto to put the morose and melodramatic bullshit behind.

Every month of March, every year, hell every freaking day, I want to remember and climb on the hand offered to me. Our mother’s didn’t die in vain. Our mother’s didn’t live lives of privation for no reason. Precisely because our mother’s didn’t have every opportunity and real life undercut their dreams, we will live ours.

Don’t wait. Don’t stop. Don’t allow worry and anxiety to be roadblocks.

Dream and more importantly act.

Hate your fucking job? Leave.

Landlord sucks? Move.

Tired of the cold and snow? Relocate.

Today, and I hope every day, if I don’t fucking laugh at least once, I haven’t done it right.

For both our mother’s, who weren’t given the chances to do it all, we will try to cram in the fun we can in the days we have left. Misery is not an option.

Finnegan’s wake without the whiskey

I’d make a terrible anthropologist, I think. Rather than finding the unique and reportable, my thesis would be “people, right, yeah, pretty much the same.”

As the crow, or maybe a toucan or something tropical flies, I’m sitting just under 10,000 miles from my birthplace. All of the funerals I’ve attended have been in New England. The magic has been brought mostly by courtesy of your Roman Catholic holy and apostolic traditions, with the occasional Protestant mass for flavor.

This time around on another continent I was a newly minted family member, daughter-in-law and wife of the elder son. Just as with every service I’ve ever been, it all started with the family convergence, phone calls, the bustle of professional death handlers, friends, neighbors and relations. And in the ensuing afternoons and evenings, something like a party.

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I’m not James Joyce. And, I don’t speak Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, Bahasa Malay or any other tongue piping up among the crowd. So I don’t have any stories to tell.

A bottle of whiskey wasn’t in the coffin. Nor was it stolen and sent around the crowd. No one evilly plotted a cannibal meal. And, no spare whiskey and beer were passed among the crowd.

Still and all, among the chaos, the scene was familiar. Old friends and extended family wandering in and out. Reminiscing about who was where when and what ever happened and how did everyone get so old. It was a wake, just the same as “visiting hours” in the U.S. Like in a not so distance past in my old neighborhood the guest of honor lay quietly among candles and prayers inside the house. And catered food and handshakes stayed up on the porch.

What a week, what a world

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There is absolutely too much to write about.

Saturday was a big bash. Along side local friends, some of my family and some particularly fabulous friends got into planes to celebrate with us. From different places on at least three continents and both the east and west coasts, a bunch of others tuned in to watch us actually do the “I dos.”

The week started on a high, and it ended on a low. Morgan’s mom, Leong Fik Yak, finished her stay on this mortal coil. She was a try gentle and warm soul. We are currently participating with more and different family on sending her off to celestial planes.

When my uncle died, Morgan experience for the first time how the Catholics say goodbye. Now, I am Margaret Mead, trying to stay out of the way, make the right motions and help however I can with the Buddhist way.

For now, my only observation is Catholics and Buddhists both have chants, bells and incense. There is time for old family, friends and associates to talk and remember and in remembering it’s part party with the guest of honor quietly in state.

Maybe I will sort out something wise and insightful about the human condition and death. For now, I’ll go with the flow.

New Year in too long on the planet

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So here it is, the beginning of what will mark half a hundred years on the big, blue marble, that’s half a century or 50 years or a whole boatload of hours and days. Even saying “big, blue marble” has old written all over it. Ah, the ’70s.

I haven’t written in eons. Why? Because I’m lazy. And television has gotten better. Mostly because I’m lazy.

The view from almost 50 years is a tad less melodramatic than past decades, I fear. Good in the long run for mental health, I suppose, but shitty as hell if you’re scouring your synapses for a bit of bullshit to share on the web. I had to will myself into a fury about something, and in the end it’s not so much fury as irritation. Thoroughly mature of me, I guess.

So’s here’s a few words on said irritation. Chafing, if you will.

The sheer torture of the way I have made money to pay the bills the last quarter century is that by it’s very nature the best and brightest and the youngest and the most precious of well-scrubbed spawn of the elite universities come to hover. Turns out the life blood of research institutes and non-profits are fellows, scholars, and eager grads. I’ve even worked in the belly of the beast, universities themselves, where students are unavoidable.

Now the straight up benefit of toiling among these folks is a low bar on all things related to corporate dress codes. Short of naked skin or hole-y pajamas, not the lord’s pjs but ones with gaps between the threads, I think I’ve worn it to work. Above are my current favorite work shoes.

I came to not-profits honestly enough. I temped, matching invoices to packing slips at a teeny improvised desk next to the accounts payable manager. It was a job, and with my mad alphabetizing and counting skills I was a colossus of temp agency legend.

Before that historic moment, however, I had worked in a couple of more legitimate career realms. I started out a transfer agency for a mutual funds company. Since that offers no visual, think any corporation in the universe with the imaginative flair of banking or insurance. Day in, day out, it was a sea of skirts, suits, pantyhose in shades of beige, gray, black or navy.

A friend got taken aside for wearing espadrilles and told by management that she was destroying her chances for success.
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Career suicide. I think the jute was offensive to all that was good in the banking class.

Next up, I worked in publishing, well the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. We were a bullpen of writerly and librarian types, who all dressed like writerly and librarian types. The editors, I think all editors, wore suits. Never did I have a job that was so conscience of the clock (many a morning I faced an inquisition at the coffee maker as Michael the editor inquired as to why I had not logged into my computer at 8:02, 120 minutes past expectations). Never did a job feel so buttoned down in a room of the least buttoned down poets and scholars that could be gathered up and put to work.

One day, the editor just above me in the hierarchical food chain, who may have been called Terry, offhandedly discussed clothing. I believe her intent was directed to me, as I was in earshot matching the description she was providing. The curt upshot – she herself would never wear so much black, as the different pieces never matched properly (and absolutely).

At a non-profit, working away, matching invoices in a little corner of a biomedical research lab in my earnest temp hopefulness for permanent employment was a turning point. The only sartorial concern in a lab that’s affiliated with MIT is not exposing flesh to radiation, biohazards, acids and bases. The dress code consisted of not smelling, and even that wasn’t an immutable law.

At 49 years and almost 11 months on the planet, reams of reading in my brain, thoughts from the Feminine Mystique to Joan Rivers, a thousand different observations, I dress how I feel. I dress for comfort. And, I dress as an extension of the baby shoe steps my mother Pat had taken in choosing footwear.

Now, a billion or so pointless words into this little essay, I endeavor to get to the point.

I work with people in the formative years of their careers. They are delightfully enthusiastic and forward thinking about their own hopes and aspirations. I no longer see myself as a “career gal” on the rise. I see myself as a strong swimmer back floating in the ocean of making a paycheck. A good day at the office has mini-cupcakes and a couple of amusing interchanges with the nicer of my colleagues.

Now my cross to bear, and by cross to bear I mean thing to make me whiney in an otherwise comfortable existence, is the youngsters and their kind advice. No less than three women in my office imply they could help make me over. Well, one of them is not actually young, she’s more of a contemporary, and I don’t think she actually believes I should dress like her. She just likes to bust my chops, a stance I respect.

The others, though, they want to field trip me over to Anthropologie or Ann Taylor or wherever the fuck young women shop. Maybe the dreaded Forever 21, which I vow to put out of business with my own Forever 49 chain.

They want me in the heels I never could walk in at any stage in my life. Now, with the arthritic pain in my spine a constant reminder of my mortality, I would choose even less to teeter in pumps, mules and sling backs.

In adolescence, I tried. I clicked on unsteady legs like a colt. In my 20s and 30s, I couldn’t quite get the rhythm of dressing up in heels with drinking, and opted for flats to avoid skinned knees. Although, at various moments in my own hopes and aspirations, I tried hard to wear the uniforms and dress for success. By my 40s, I embraced flats, boot heels and, under duress, low-heeled pumps for funerals and interviews.

I don’t want fashion advice from adorable 20-30-year-olds. As adorable as they are, they cannot understand that I once was adorable, too.

I haven’t given up. But, if I can choose anything at this age, it is to be myself. So, fuck it, here I am.

Travel log: Malaysia

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I used to live with a guy named Al. Al in many ways was a total freak. The stand out sign of his freakishness was giant bowls of Maypo with frozen blueberries stirred into the otherwise gruel-like meal. It was a meal that could occur at any of the 24 hours in a day and would often leave a blueish gray cast of spills and crusted tableware all over the apartment.

Al also called himself a writer. He would watch and look and examine and write in his imagined grotto. One day I came home to him transfixed by a can opener, which he was twirling to view at every angle and at every gradation of open and closed.

Caught in his study, he explained as a writer one must at all times carefully observe everything, even minutia to a minute detail. All was fodder for greatness.

I think his plan was to be as Melville was to whaling, but his passion would be kitchen utensils.

Al puzzled me.

His contention, his philosophy was that all writing is at its core was observation. He was a watcher. He existed in the square rooms of our apartment never venturing beyond the journeys he concocted between his temples and behind his forehead.

At the same time, I was studying journalism, writing that by its very nature stepped back to observe and report. Aloof from the messiness of human existence, we were taught to remain factual and by extension allowing the story to create its own structure remaining neutral in the telling. I suppose this training had me thinking Al was onto something.

But, my favorite journalists just might be Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. They, in the sense of Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey and The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, got ON the bus.

Many years later, I found my own tribe of writers and storytellers. Not quite out there in the wilderness of the 1960s and 70s, they did not ascribe to stories coming from afar, cool observation. Nope, stories came from going balls in and doing something.

Which, in all apologies, brings us to today. Holy fuckballs (as I like to say in countries where the locals are unlikely to be able to translate, I did take a long-winded path to today.

Today, I had round two sparring with the kung fu master who bloviated that he is one of 10 elite in the ‘hood called Malaysia who can tap out impurities and do something good to your chi or qi or chee (definitely not chia). My qi has positively been beaten into submission.

For a couple of bucks, I succumbed to a type of massage that literally involves a long series of backhand slaps to my areas of arthritic pain. By the way, I grew up hearing the word arthritis and thought of diseases and treatment. In these modern days, it’s medical shorthand for the fact of my cartilage deteriorating and my bones rubbing together, nothing more interesting.

In the spirit of travel, adventure, story telling, sucking the marrow from existence, I figured the investment was worthwhile on two scores.

First, I have back and leg pain and it sucks and I exercise and try to work out the kinks and strengthen my core and it persists and it sucks. Anything that could remove the suck would be fine indeed.

Second is just the awesomeness. I have a story to tell and pictures to show.

I have these:

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I also have this one of my knee. Grace and good sense preclude me from posting the worse bruising on my ass.

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Best of all, we get too bring home magical and mystical and therapeutical bottles of oily elixir of mystery.

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My back and leg are sore as I type this missive. But, if all goes well, in 2 days time I shall be healed. He promised me that soon I could do things with my legs I couldn’t before. I’m hoping that means ballet.

Of all of it, it’s a traveler’s dream of “authenticity.” The master’s rap was solid, peppered with references to the Chinese, qi, cultural superiority and my yin mixing with my yang. Westerners like me, we can’t take pain of treatment like the Chinese can.

The promises were wonderfully rich with self-promotion and mystery. He had skills and powers and training that few possess and to which he wouldn’t give a name.

I can’t decide which experience I like more–His burning my back, literally, with the heated ember of a block of incense, the visible bruising or the manifestations of health represented by the color and texture changes of my beaten flesh. Perhaps it’s the sum of it all.

So I wait, and I’ll report back if I can plie and jete like nobody’s business as the bruises subside and the oil seeps into my wounds.

Random thoughts at 40k

I’m more or less comfortably sitting in my sky chair, going from one side of the globe (California) to the other (Kuala Lumpur). As the crow flies it’s a fucking long ride. Different continent, different languages, different everything and far. That’s how I conceptualize travel.

I grew up packing snacks and loading up a station wagon to cross a state line. New Hampshire wasn’t even 100 miles a journey, I don’t think, but journey it was. A day could be set aside preparing and anticipating. However, if it weren’t for the signage, you really couldn’t tell you were somewhere different.

I yearned for travel as a kid. Plotted my escape from suburban torpor. Imagined exoticism, adventure. If asked at age 12 my retirement plans, I probably would have said a round-the-world ticket that never stops.

I’ve been places now past my wildest imagination. Safari in Africa, whitewater rafting the Nile, street food, temples, snake charmers and even a snake temple in Malaysia, shopping in Bangkok and Singapore, Edinburgh’s Fringe, punk bands in London, the tops of the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, the Golden Gate, and the Grand Canyon. Crunching snow underfoot in Yellowstone, and shooting guns in early summer outside of Yosemite.

It seems kind of fake to me, the one who couldn’t figure out the logistics from my bedroom daydreaming.

But, here’s the dark side of my experiencing some of my flightiest dreams. I am not a comfortable traveler. I ache with erratic sleep and temperature changes.

I never factored in dehydration and back pain while fantasizing.

Fortunately, I can eat pretty sturdily. I only have two gastrointestinal complaints in years of trekking. There was the incredibly tasty, succulent crab in Thailand that carried so much more. Nota bene: the public toilets in Bangkok are unparalleled in quantity and quality.

The less said of finding myself tangled in mosquito netting in a pitch black Ugandan night groping for the bathroom, the better.

But, where food is fine, sleep is elusive. It doesn’t arrive when it should, if ever. Even now, an almost 20 hour flight that took off at 1 a.m. to my body’s clock, sleep should have been a given. I dozed fitfully repositioning myself and never really getting to bliss for about 5 hours, and that unsatisfying stint was with the help of modern pharmacology.

Of course, a soupçon of the sleeplessness could be my hard-wired anxiety. We snagged the easy mobility and ample leg room of the emergency row. It’s a great perk — not only have I had room to do some stretches for my back, but we’re behind the galley and the bathroom. Plenty of water, and an extra snack and easy plotting for personal relief.

“But at what cost?” My brain says. Will I really be able to fulfill my promise to read and follow instructions and help evacuate the plan in the case of an actual emergency? Do I have the strength and dexterity to rip off the door and inflate the slides?

Who can sleep with that kind of pressure?

By the way, I’m wondering about the age of this flying vessel. There’s roughly a million built in ashtrays, on the bathroom doors inside and out, near the galley and around the sides. How the hell long has smoking been banned?

In hotels, sleep is much the same. I lay awake in the downiest of featherbed counting the hours until daybreak. (Back in the olden days when I might have occasion to visit strange beds, not sleeping was a great coping mechanism. I was up and out before the damage could be assessed, a ship sailing out of port and into the horizon before the dude knew what hit him.)

Maybe Morpheus will give me a little something something this trip.

Otherwise, if you ask me now to channel that 12-year-old’s view of retirement, travel dreams have gone to sleep. Now, retirement will be a cushy couch and a fluffy, warm blanket at home.

It’s like a giant, evil bad thing tapping on my eyeballs

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Lately, I had a little free time and read some stuff by some other people of a comic nature. When I read comedy-like stuff in clump, much like when I go to open mike comedy nights, I start hating “funny” people.

I wish I could remember the bit. Chris Walsh had a goofy thing he acted out about similes and metaphors. I think there may have been a wolf involved, but a cartoon wolf, not a killer. Something hungry, maybe, like a wolf.

Anywho, it was like a Sesame Street episode explaining what a metaphor is versus a simile.

When I read “comedy” I start hating similes. I hate them like poison. No, in the spirit of what I hate, I hate them like sumo wrestlers and serial killer clowns eating too much Taco Bell and shitting in my vagina. Yeah, that’s about the kind of sentence I hate.

It’s like somewhere in a comedy writing course in a dark, windowless club with the shittiest beer on tap at the most usurious prices, a teacher is saying “You know what’s funny?” “Funny is unrelated, fantastical descriptions of things that don’t exist and slapping the word ‘like’ in front.” “That’s funny.”

I’m making these examples up, because I’m not like a douchebag filled with pus, but here’s what I mean:
It felt like a sumo wrestler was sitting on my forearm.
Hang overs feel a like tiny, mean leprechaun was taking a peen ball hammer to my temples.
The refrigerator growled like a mouse with a case of diarrhea.
My wife screamed at me like a Sherman tank filled with Fourth of July fireworks, careening through a marketplace in Kandahar.

Back when I learned the fancy talk of formal English and expository writing, similes were meant to tell you something. So, “eating like a bird” was because birds are small and eat seeds. You get some info inside your skull, if you can imagine a bird.

However, “My date ate like a prehistoric rabbit, related to a distant relative of a gerbil, in a desert being pummeled by hail,” imparts no similar information. It merely tells me “Hey, I can write words.”

A lot of comedians go for wacky descriptions to color up an otherwise boring, fucking story. I hate wacky.

In truth, I’ve obsessed about this literary device for the last couple of days. Of course, my obsession grew from my own reality. I’m as guilty as the next clown and equally boring.

The other day, I was expressing the anxiety that is wrought in me by a visit to an equatorial area with 85% humidity and very tiny, attractive family. In simpler terms, we are about to head back to Malaysia to visit M.’s mom, who has been sick.

It’s a good thing we are going, and I like hanging out and eating great food and having a lot of laughs.

However, even at 5 foot 3, I tower over M.’s mother. She is petit and small boned, and I could crush her in a bear hug or unthinkingly kill her with a sleeper hold just by the sheer bulk advantage. In Asia, as my acting out to my co-worker demonstrated, I am Godzilla or Gamera crushing Tokyo’s buildings with my awkward footfalls.

I am a sumo wrestler.

I am Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

I am a red-faced missionary in 1843 bringing my sweaty, sunburnt pastiness to foreign lands, although in my case sans the whole Christianity thing.

The less wacky truth is that, yes, I will wilt in the heat. But, a honking hunk of time, I’ll be lovingly caressed by A/C, or as the locals say “aircon.” I may even need a sweater for some mall walks.

I will be beet red for large chunks of time, and i will drink any and all beverage proffered to me, as I am from a people where snow blows and our thirst is unslakable.

Often his family will ask if I am OK, and they will offer hats, parasols, ice water, hot tea, lying down and showering. I feel helpless when this happens, but I do believe it is kindness not mockery.

I will probably not leave his mother bruised, broken or bloody when I bend down and give her a hug. And, she will likely squeeze me harder than I squeeze her.

Still and all, I am Gamera. And, it is also with some certainty, there is a family member who will allude to my size. But, she will be jovial and polite and not mention my ability to physically crush skyscrapers with the careless wagging of my backend.

It ought to be a holiday

Every year, well more frequently than that, I think about my mother. I think about her on the Ides of March, the portentous day in which Brutus stabbed Caesar and my mother was born. Not the same year, mind you, as I’m not tapping this out on my ancient Roman computer.

Actually, it was portent upon portent for old Pat. She was born on the Ides of March the year of the stock market crash for the Great Depression. She was meant for great things.

So, another anniversary rolls around.

I like to remember the ways in which Pat stood out from the crowd. Or in my warped and selfish and self-absorbed brain, the ways in which Pat affected me and stood out from the crowd.

Today’s memory is tied to the current season of my manual toil. OK, typing and sitting at a desk isn’t manual labor, but some days it grinds you just the same. I got callouses on my tappy type finger tips.

At work these days the pesky little papers (now computer files) that once a year worker drones planet-wide, or at least U.S.-wide, bemoan are due — the annual performance reviews. The neat little report where you and your boss get to write out how you’re “meeting expectations” and otherwise doing what a cog does when one is employed.

You say to yourself right about now, I can hear you breathing and thinking, you say, but how does that relate to Pat. Surely, she was not your boss, apart from the sense in which we are all subordinates to our mothers.

Well, here’s the thing. I might be one of the only people rambling around that has written their own performance “self reports” for the decades that I have been employed as a grown up adult, who got their start years before they were allowed to work.

Pat, enmeshed in some heavy duty politics and just short of Brutus-like backstabbing in my town’s school system, turned her typewriter over to her precocious daughter one fine day and asked for her help in word smithing her review. She had to describe her classroom contributions, and since she floated around helping learning disabled kids within other people’s classrooms, she had to talk about that too.

By nature, she was a mix of fierceness on some opinions and topics (ahem, Catholic molesters) and shy reticence on a whole lot more. She complained to those nearest and dearest, but she was way too polite to complain to anyone or anything with any authority, including a cashier at a convenient store. (Although, the school teacher might pop out at any time if said cashier couldn’t do the math to make simple change.)

Real humility, not the false stuff that often passes for humility, was part of her core, and she could not find any words at all to describe what she contributed. She knew what she did, but she couldn’t spin it to advertise her brand.

I could do that for her and with some nudging to not get carried away with florid prose extolling her greatness, together we spoke about her patience with kids in the classroom. Her vast experience. Her gentle but persistent nature. Her true and deep caring for children and learning and education. Her mastery of basic skills and pedagogies and learning methods. That she could set and meet goals until the sun rose and set a hundred years.

She was a champion to a whole lot of kids fumbling in classrooms with dyslexia, a host of other syndromes and disorders, and simply poor study skills.

Pat was also a drill sergeant. No misplaced modifiers, misspellings (which I incidentally just mistyped), prepositions dangling at a sentence’s end, no math not shown happened on her watch. For the stuff where there is a right and wrong way to do it, by god she was going to teach you the right way or die trying.

All of her skills, the ones that made strangers come up to me in high school and beyond and say they knew my mother and that she was great, they were in her heart effortlessly as a teacher.

But, she did suck at telling management what was up. I helped do that for her. I was a kid and it was a fun writing assignment and in truth I had no feel for the politics or fear of the consequences, so I could write without inhibition. She could not. It became an annual ritual in her later years of work.

Now, about a thousand years later, or maybe just shy of that, I have to do the same kind of reports for myself.

So, I sit at my desk and return to the game that I had done at my mother’s typewriter. I right fast and furiously, and I have learned how to advertise my own brand but temper it with a soupçon of self-reflection. I allow for the things I do not know, and I hammer out my strengths. I find the notes of self improvement that are surmountable and demonstrate my good attitude.

I try very hard not to by cynical. But, for that to happen, I do not dwell, I do not agonize. If I spend over 15 minutes on the thing, at about 10 minutes in, I walk away until my head is in the game and I give it only 5 minutes more.

It’s impossible to tell your boss that in addition to my 25-30 years of doing the things for myself, I might have done 10 years more. We breeze through the things, the virtual online handshake is done and another year will pass.

And my highest proof of mastery were the words of my attorney, the one I hired on account of my work at the time not really feeling the love, the labor lawyer who helped me out of a jam. That besuited gentleman pulled all of my Human Resources records out of the belly of the employment beast, and he went through each paper with the loving care that an hourly fee will get you.

Upon sage and learned analysis, he proclaimed that while many a person had come through his office doors with a sad story to tell about the workplace, almost all of them had some marks in their permanent records. But my file, the years of reviews and meetings, they were a pristine and glimmering example. He said in all his years of lawyering he had never seen such stellar performance reviews.

Another year older and deeper in debt

Here’s my overdue musing on yet another birthday. I can’t believe I’m completely easing into total decrepitude, but 49 is a grown-up, fucking age anyway you slice it.

On the other hand, I ain’t dead yet.

Maybe it’s the baby boomers, of which I think I am one, tail end of a generation and all that. After all dear old dad was in Fort Lee, NJ during the big one, WW2. But, perhaps the baby boomers and their clinging to the old ways of listening to electric guitars, hot-tubbing and refusing to give up capital F Fun really are making a dent in how aging is perceived. 60 is the new 30 and all.

What I realize, as I refuse to go gentle into that good night, is that people really do have strong ideas or pictures in their heads of what middle age looks like. In the golden oldie days of my hitting comedy clubs night after night, I had a joke about being 40 and it not being a compliment if someone tags a remark with “for your age,” as in “You look great! For your age.”

In other words, I’m not sure I’m completely digging all of the times that folks say to me (and to M.) that we don’t look our age. Baby, this right here, this chubby body and all, this is what 49 looks like.

I know it’s meant well and maybe it’s true. After all I know a chick about 6 months younger than me who rocks the mom jeans and acrylic sweaters. But, if you look at her face, she’s not actually decrepit either.

For fuck’s sake, I don’t really know anyone under the age of 90 who looks like the Crypt Keeper, so why is that our image? I would totally make out with Helen Mirren.

And with all of that, my secret will be the launch of the upcoming “Forever 49,” a store for normal people. My jeans will be old school, the way jeans were meant to be, with zippers that are not so short and low they end at your clit. T-shirts will be long enough to not just cover your belly button but reach your hips. More simply, clothes will go back to fitting you well and covering your muffin top, not create a whole other roll.

Here’s to another fucking decade of living. And, when the wrinkles catch up, I’ll just wear my sunglasses indoors.