Tag Archives: writing

Live and learn

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What a week it’s been for the old ego. Here I am a bit more ragged and a bit more paranoid and a bit more raw and sensitive and wounded and pathetic. And, here I am stronger and smarter and perfectly fine.

It all began on a day when I consented to not just listen to others but to go out of my way to solicit their opinions about me, myself and I. An idea born from the bowels of hell, doubtless, or at least from the sewers and muck and mire of man’s meager experiences.

They call it a 360 review. It’s the workplace, salt mine, hell zone, productivity, performance management equivalent of “Do I look fat in these jeans?” You line up a jury of your peers and your not peers and a professional, who voluntarily does that kind of thing for money, interviews them. The questions seem to range from, “Management doesn’t think she sucks, but what do you say?” to “”Seriously, tell me something you hate about her.”

Maybe there were some constructive things in there. I lost sight when the report turned personal.

Here’s what really got to me, though. I didn’t learn anything. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. But I did remember all of the emotions of being a kid, all of the stupid struggle almost anyone with any soul at all remembers.

The report said that the people surveyed thought I was smart, creative, quirky, funny, a good writer and interesting. Yeah, on some days, I manage OK. The report also revealed that some people don’t understand me, and I bug the shit out of some.

Wow. Revelatory. I find myself growing already.

The bitch is, at the suggestion of my manager, and in an open-minded moment of intellectual weakness when it sounded like a valuable experience, I asked exactly those people who I don’t really get along with to participate in my personal witch hunt.

Here’s a fucking bulletin: there are reasons we don’t get along and they ain’t all related to my being a flawed human being.

The same people who don’t like me at the age of 48, are the ones who in junior high told me I was weird. The girl who wanted to marry and stay in our town and have babies and just be normal, subtext unlike me, is now a woman in my office with the perfect nuclear family in a suburban home who works part time for the extra cash to ensure a model life. She doesn’t hesitate to point out to me today my flaws, just like her doppelgänger back then.

My whole life I’ve wondered why folks with the most boring lives are the ones who proselytize others to be like them the hardest.

Every conversation with her reminds me of my junior high crush crush on Greg Maharis. In addition to being cute and well-dressed, he smoked cigarettes and exuded cool. He also looked past my awkward, uncomfortable, unfeminine, uncoordinated, inelegant, ungainly teenage self, and we had some great conversations. Other, prettier girls in my class couldn’t comprehend why he talked to me at all.

Two of my junior high triumphs were via Greg. In another class, when some twat started making fun of me and doing what junior high girls do, he stood up for me and declared me “cool.” My friends who were there and had overheard the conversation in hushed silence assured me of the moment’s epic nature. Then, on a fateful spring evening he crossed the abyss of the gym floor separating guys from gals and asked me to dance.

My suburban colleague in my grownup world today is all of those girls who never understood why Greg would talk to weird me.

The other people who don’t get me today are the competitive ones who didn’t get me then. My whole dorky life, I had an easier time talking to the adults around me. Apart from my close friends, my peers weren’t thinking or reading or interested in the same shit as me. Other kids didn’t read the newspaper, for example, except to cut out items for a current events assignments.

I found myself in conversation with teachers and Blue Bird troop leaders and moms. I like hearing other viewpoints and stories. In adulthood, one of my good friends was almost slack jawed as her own mother told me the alternative, risqué version of her family’s journey from Hungary. A version she had never, ever heard.

Apparently, in today’s modern office I’m a self-promoting douche who curries favors with the higher ups by horrors of horrors, engaging in conversation.

Funny how none of the people deriding me for talking with our president gave a shit that I’m also friends with my buddy who runs the facility. Uppity I very well may be, but I’m equal opportunity in my talking with interesting people. It’s not self-promotion if people like talking with you and seeking you out.

I’m older by a week and wiser not at all. My journey of self discovery told me what I already know.

And for whichever narrow mind labeled me as “immature” and hopes that I grow out of my traits — Sorry, dude, it’s only going to get worse. I refuse to “act my age,” dress like you, stay quite, act appropriate or conform to what world order you deem correct. My job is to to fuck up your order. The older I get the louder I get.

Me, my friends and my tribe, we’re the crazy ones. The disrupters. Artists and dreamers. Our fun is to speak out of turn.

I will never be able to explain to you why a good friend insisted on wearing girls patterned socks with the uniform of a bailiff, a court officer of the Massachusetts State House, and face getting reprimanded. You can’t understand the friends who walked away from solid jobs for love and for travel and adventure. It’s beyond your understanding that what you label as a “normal” life leaves many of us cold or scared shitless.

We don’t want what you have. And you can’t have what we want.

And, here’s the part that I think you can’t stand. People like me. They like my friends and our kind just fine. They seek us out, promote us, thank us and befriend us. They also hate us, fire us and shun us in equal measure. Same as they do for the regular folks, like you, also in equal measure.

But, we have a lot more fun.

Holy, holy, holy

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I really don’t know how to feel, so I’m doing the only thing I ever learned to do. I’ll write. Badly, maybe. Thoughtfully, possibly. With futility, definitely.

Today the closest I ever had to a father figure left this mortal coil. A true mensch, a sensitive soul, my uncle Ron died today.

I thought about writing a euphemism for died, but for all the poets, madman and philosophers seeking the truth, I couldn’t do it. Ron was the first person I ever met who talked about the Beats, Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs. For all of them, the word is death, and today it’s Ron’s word, too.

The first thing I remember about Ron is that he was the first grown up that spoke to me like an adult. I remember real conversations, or rather they were very real to me. Given that I was about 6 years old and he was in his 20s, his mileage no doubt varied on what he got from the dialogs.

I dogeared and wore thin the pages of a picture book he gave me way back when.

That mean man, who shared his chicken pox but never his jelly beans, deserved his score of mean children who made him live unhappily ever after.

It was its non-treacly story and non-kiddie flavor that made it long a favorite after I was past picture books. The book traveled to college and crisscrossed various moves and apartments. I regret not knowing where it landed.

When I came home tonight, I pulled open drawers and scanned shelves to find a tiny gift I never gave Ron over the couple of Christmases we didn’t return east. I meant to give him a small badge from the Beat Museum, an earnest little storefront in the heart of North Beach.

Long before I ever moved near the San Francisco Bay, walked down Grant Ave. to Columbus and by Jack Kerouac Alley, North Beach existed in my imagination. Ron’s love for books and the Beats taught me where City Lights Bookstore and the Condor club are, and I hoped that someday he’d come out here on a visit and see for himself.

As a placeholder for that visit, I picked up the pins from the museum. “Holy! Holy! Holy!” and “Starving Hysterical Naked.” Now they will hold a place of remembrance on the bookshelf by my desk.

I want to say so much more. Ron was the adult who extolled the virtues of “Exile on Main Street” above all other Stones albums. He was jazz records and quoting postmodern analysis of just about anything. He was the babysitter not knowing how to handle an unruly brood of five letting my brothers smoke a novelty cigar. He was nerdy passion for books, art and music in equal measure to a passion for sports, even though a natural athlete he was not.

Coincidentally, my aunt, his wife, told me a story about my father and his influence on her as a kid that I thought I could have said about Ron. My father to Nancy was someone who tried the new, bringing gadgets and food and whatever to her Dorchester, a neighborhood not known for exploration. Ron was that to me in my suburban world.

He listened to rock and jazz and read books that raised eyebrows. He spoke to me and my siblings and his high school students like a real person, including innuendo and jokes. He admitted to having inhaled way before it was asked of presidential candidates.

Ron and my aunt Nancy were Newbury Street in the 60s, urban life and walks in the Public Garden to feed the ducks after reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” I met my first hippies and interracial couples and a gay man through them. I tried new foods, like the exotic pita bread suddenly appearing on store shelves next to the Wonder Bread.

I got to take a sip of wine and beer, and instead of soda was allowed sophisticated drink mixers like Squirt from the corner store.

Every perception I had as a kid in the sixties and early seventies was influenced by what seemed at the time a Ron and Nancy’s counterculture lifestyle to my mom’s post-war mainstream self.

Ron was also after school adventures and schemes with Pat, my mother, as they both used their school teacher afternoons pretty well.

There is a part of the non-conformist me that I think I owe to both of them back in those afternoons. I learned about shy adults with passions bubbling under the surface. Early on I talked about writing with Ron, a closet writer who said his stuff wasn’t good enough to see the light of day. I am sure that he was wrong.

Perhaps most of all, Ron taunted a kind of affection and sensitivity in me, giving me the hugs that were not second nature in my family and speaking out loud about feelings. I modeled behavior that he showed and eventually I’ve gotten better. Ron and Nancy were the most couple-y couple in my world as a kid.

Now, I use his “take care” as a goodbye (which actually works pretty well in California.)

That’s all I have right now, and it’s not nearly enough. Maybe instead, I’ll just re-read Ginsberg. Ron and everything are Holy! Holy! Holy!

Remembering a dream I had

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Recently, I remembered a happiness I could never achieve despite my belief that some can attain it. For me, it will never be a reachable star.

Many moons and a couple of thousand of miles ago, I sat in a classroom. There, in the front, sat color-coded file boxes. They were the slick, good cardboard, shiny like magazine covers. Contained within were shiny cards, a bright color band on top, each with a different story or puzzle or game.

The product was called SRA. The acronym may be for Standardized Reading Aptitude. Or maybe Symbianese Reading Army, as it was the 1970s.

Each kid in the classroom was told what color they were, and they got to cluster around their colored box selecting an activity. As we moved through the weeks and months, we would development and be given access to a new color in the series.

Warren and I weren’t assigned a color. Within that classroom we were relegated to a strictly black and white world, no color codes for us. Black letters on white backgrounds, the text of books.

Together we walked to the front of the class and asked the teacher for our color. She was nice about it, but she clearly laughed at us. “Red, I guess. It’s the last color in e series.” We spent the rest of the afternoon amusing ourselves with a game or two that focused on vocabulary and comprehension skills we already had.

I loved being an early reader. Books brought me a sense of an entire universe that I couldn’t see from my window.

To this day, I remember the special vocabulary lists my second grade teacher wrote out just for me and tucked into new books I hadn’t tackled yet. Most definitely I learned the word “extraordinary” from Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

However, I also noticed something as I occasionally popped my nose above the pages and looked around the classroom. The other kids, the slow readers, always seemed to be having a raucously good time. They played loud and boisterous games, even when we were supposed to be quiet.

I was slower in learning how to make a triangular paper football and flick it over the goalposts of a friend’s two hands.

Worse, I got extra assignments. No matter how quickly I completed my work, the teacher always had a pile more waiting for me. Thin books moved to heavy tomes that tore away at the straps of my book bag.

In my childish brain it seemed so unjust. Purely because I could do my work, I was given more work to do.

My fantasy, therefore, was wishing that I never learned how to read. Or, maybe, more realistically, that I only ever could read at a minimally acceptable level. My whole life would have been different, as teacher after teacher passed me a long but never expected particularly much from me. I’d have more free time to master kickball and twisting a paperclip into the perfect missile to be launched from a rubber band.

Sometimes today, a fully grown adult, I still feel that way.

People expect more from me in some situations. I had a recent spate of meetings in which coming in or going out the door I got buttonholed for a couple more comments from the powers that be.

Meanwhile, I find myself shoulder to shoulder with the kids who never even made it to the red box, the last in the reading series. These kids, now adults, color-coded green or yellow or orange, get to leave meetings on time.

Happily, they go back to their desks. They work next to me, unaware, that I’ve just been handed an extra report to write and don’t understand why I like meetings even less than they do.

I fancy myself a raconteur

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Today, I helped add a little more awkwardness to the world.

One of the many funtabulous, swell things I’ve gotten to do over and over and over again in my daily, pay-checking earning toils is interview people who also want to toil. Lots and lots of jobseekers out there in the world, and coast to coast I’ve had to make with the questions and conversations.

Years ago I got to hear my all time favorite answer ever given to the cliched “Why are you interested in leaving your current position for this job?” The woman being interviewed explained that after the cops had come to her house for the third time for a domestic quarrel complaint they advised her she needed to make some changes. She continued that her current job was so stressful and intense she was forced to work late and would come home exhausted to an angry husband who would fight with her about working late. Hello escalation.

Job interview tip #1: Don’t mention the near arrest.

In all of the interviewing I’ve done or had done to me, I’ve kind of sorted some things. All bristling with management tips and experience I’ve mostly learned interviews suck, but they suck a little less if you have a conversation.

It’s not a conversation, really, but you can try. The problem is the format. Whether it’s television late night, the back of a gossip magazine or a dank interrogation room, the old Q&A is a clumsy o way to keep things moving. I put job interviews alongside interrogations. I’m not into water boarding and like to keep the torture minimal, so if I can get the ball rolling conversationally it seems more humane.

I’ve found, too, that if you can keep someone talking and they get comfortable they say the damnedest things. The violent chick who didn’t get the job that might save her from the police calls piped up after we put her at ease. The dude who once told me he was a “lesbian,” he was kidding, and talked up hanging out with me once he started was way too at a ease. As wAs the young woman who saw my old office and announced her first step in her new job would be to clean it up.

Another fave was the woman who part way through a doubled up interview with my director, a medical doctor, went into excruciating detail about the fun she had watching a new polar bear get loaded into the Stone Zoo. In our meeting afterwards, my director confessed that she stopped listening herself at some point and instead started watching the interviewee’s involuntary tics and tried to guess which psycho-pharmaceutical was responsible.

California hasn’t been as ripe with the forehead smacking interviews. Between the kind of jobs with which I’ve been currently involved and the proximity to a university of some repute, the over the top is more of the insufferable variety.

Today, though, was special, because the conversation I looked for, I pine for, I try so very hard to instigate never quite gelled. It wasn’t my show to emcee, and I let others take the lead. Holy smokes, I didn’t realize job interviews could be so painful. I couldn’t sit still and grasped for some reins to start steering partway into one.

OK, I knew they are almost always painful. These were first, bad date ugly. Stilted would be the discussion.

I learned two things. One, I’m actually not bad at interviewing, I should never ceded the lead. Two, if you never put the person a tad at ease, you get almost no information. I really got to write out a self-help how to book on my wisdom, damnit.

Very little of interest

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No one should really care but me, but I’ve spent the past week moving this website from one hosting site to another. So while no words have appeared in this space, I have been working on the behind the scenes of this weblog.

By way of review, my website was hosted on Bluehost.com, because eons ago WordPress.org, the software on which this page runs, had a promo partnership. It seemed like a good buy, and they were the scrappy new comers in webhosting.

Now, they have grown into suckitude. Once upon a time, if they did an upgrade or wanted you to reset something, the email would be friendly and clear. The other day, they sent one telling me to update my spam protection, and, boom, I deleted a bunch of email that may or may not have been spam based on their instructions. Thanks guys.

When I called the tech line, they offered nothing. Even their “sorry” wasn’t forthcoming, as they went through the steps to determine it was all my fault. There was barely any acknowledgement that their own email lacked pretty crucial information – before doing as we ask make sure everything is all cleaned up over at Postini, because as soon as you do like we’re telling you, you’ll never see that data again.

I think that is what was so frustrating. They turned off my Postini account before I could go through it. Presumably, there my data still sits somewhere in Postini’s servers, unaccessible to only me. I can’t imagine that canceling a subscription equals – POOF! instant data gone.

An email to their founder, Matt Heaton,who implies in his blog that he’s happy to hear from customers, is to date unanswered.

Since my website subscription with Bluehost had only just automatically resumed, I looked around. One thing I found was that I was not alone in my lack of being happy or impressed with their customer service.

The other thing I found, which falls under the allegedly category, and I’m not sure whether it’s fact or bigotry, is that Matt and/or Bluehost may have written some checks in support of California’s Prop. 8, banning gay marriage. He is a Mormon, and the company is based in Utah.

It could just be anti-Mormon rhetoric making the Prop. 8-Heaton connection. Or, it could be true, in which case I’m perfectly happy not giving more dollars out of state that comes back to fuck up my laws.

The only thing people might notice with this change is I’ve added a basic home page at http://dee-rob.com and a new face to my photo gallery.

Other than that, it reminded me that working on websites is a little bit of dorky fun. So, there may be other changes afoot.

Oh, and I’m finally sorting out how to use WordPress.org’s iPad app, so maybe I’ll write more. Pictures like these, look amazing on Apple’s new toy.

Writing the modern way

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Early adopters M. and I are, so here I sit with Apple’s latest gewgaw on my lap. I have to say this little thing is something.

Now, me, I’ve gotten all sorts of portable devices over the years. I had Motorola clamshell phones that let you download weak, little Java or Brew applets. Chunky pixels of solitaire games or calculators that required a whole lot of clickity clicking.

The web, I’ve been surfing that thang for years and years. Normal folks don’t remember the magic of pairing an amber screen of text with a zippy 9600 baud modem and discovered words on bulletin board services that were left behind by other explorers. Usenet was a mystical land.

Gopher. I went down some Gopher holes and found treasures of information. I was a member in good standing with Delphi, and that neighborhood of oracles. I had mastered WAIS searches a year or so before I ended up sleeping with a guy responsible for some of the core code.

Yeah, I’m geek girl enough to sleep with a true geek guy. (In those days it also meant a house full of roommates who not only could code, but could gather up the binary files and make “Simpson” episodes and Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs appear from data strings.)

Hell, I even rocked a Sidekick for long awhile.

But, this, the iPad, it’s not your grandma’s computer. Although, it probably should be.

I think the best thing about it is it doesn’t have much of that computer feeling to it. Not a lot of pesky menus or commands. Just words and pictures that humans might use.

Want a book? Hit the iBooks icon, which looks like a book, et voilà. Want to know what books you have? Tap on the library. Want to buy a new one? Tap on the store. Pretty much the same thing for loading up apps and email accounts and whatnot.

I know for sure if my mother were alive I would buy her one.

Now Pat wasn’t a dumb woman, or particularly fearful of trying something new and different and electronic. Among her computing accomplishments was to not only find on the web a bunch of images of Wyoming when my sister moved there, but to download them and print them up on good photo paper for a collage of framed art. However, AOL and her desktop set up were haunted by various gremlins.

A common call I might get, whilst sitting home alone some quiet evening, was “Help. There’s just a big line or thing on the screen and it won’t go away.” Or, “I click on that thing and it doesn’t make that sound.”

What that generally translated to was an errant mouse drag or two had made a menu bar stretch to half the screen obscuring the menus that could it back under control. Or, maybe in the days of modems, the familiar squeal of the phone line never connected. In later days of cable modems the email window wasn’t crying out “You’ve got mail.”

Hours of our relationship, which ended in one of us dying prematurely, could have been salvaged if Steve Jobs had been inspired sooner and technology had caught up to Pat’s fantasy of how “that damn computer” should have worked.

A lot of people hate the cult of Mac and the messiah that is Jobs. It is in the end a commercial enterprise, and he’s a very wealthy man.

However, I defend him and his products perhaps because of his personal interests and how they are found in his designs. It is the tech company where CEO Jobs stood in front of an image of intersecting street signs – Liberal Arts and Technology. It takes a guy who likes to read books himself to design something a book reader might like.

Mostly, I think computers are designed and made by geeks like me who enjoy clicking around and solving puzzles and don’t mind coded language. For them, and some of the time for me, it’s OK to have to click on and on through a series of Skinner-inspired conditioned responses.

Normal folks, though, and a good percentage of the time myself, don’t want to have to think that hard. In Jobs’ world the computer is a means that should be easy with the hard thinking part reserved for the actual task at hand.

We just want to click on the picture of a book to get there and have the reading be the main event. That the iPad does quite prettily.