Category Archives: Related to toil

Another year older and deeper in debt

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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.

Clearing a blockage

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In the distant haze of a distant past, there is a very fuzzy memory. It is of a little girl named Tamara or Teresa or Tammy or Tatyana (well maybe not Tatyana, as I didn't grow up in Moscow). Let's call her Terry.

Terry somewhere in the years of elementary school and junior high branded herself a poet and marketed hard. In what could be my largely inaccurate memory, she read a poem at every assembly the schools ever had. Her crowning achievement was an award and inclusion in a scholastic something or other meant to reward young Byrons and Yeatses in utero.

What I also remember of Terry was that the poems were bad. Or given that my literary criticism skills at the age of 10 match my literary criticism skills today, that is, non-existent, maybe she was OK for a kid. However, seat upon auditorium seat of us children squirmed and groaned in unison. Even those friends of Terry's in the crowd found the poetry excruciating.

To this day, I fear being Terry.

When I perform stand up comedy, write, even ask a question at a meeting, my inner critic sweats giant pulsing rivers of flopsweat. Thankfully, it's invisible flop sweat of the mind, an internal anxiety, else I'd carry a towel and have to have suits fashioned of terry cloth.

I thought of Terry when talking to a professional person who is charged with helping to make me a better professional person. She checks in with me on my professional goals, and I try earnestly, vigorously to absorb and enact the rather practical, but perhaps a tad touchy feely, advice and actions she provides. Coach she is and kindly is paid to listen.

I told her about Terry. I also told her about an another voice I allowed into my writing head, who didn't belong there in the crowd of other voices. I may have made mention before of the dark noise I heard and credit for locking up my efforts to write for what's now years.

In a moment of a kind of intellectual enamor, I shared some writing with a member of the ivory-towered, ivy-covered halls. He, older, ostensibly wiser, definitely better educated had encouraged me, even as I was doing light editing, tech support and formatting for a tome he was writing on a Macintosh computer.

He kindly asked about my aspirations, somehow sensing my typing and word-processing skills maybe had other uses beyond office monkey. Naturally and happily, I shared what I had been up to creatively, eager to have someone ask. Nope, more than that, eager to have someone with a collegiate pedigree ask, like somehow, the words of the elites mean more or differently than the words of us plebeians.

In retrospect, where my brain should have gone was to the wise voices of my kind of people. Tony V., great Boston-based comedian, has (had?) a bit about Harvard. Not wrecking it too bad, the point of the bit is that they have the same books with the same words as everyone else, and everyone can access books; Harvard doesn't have a secret trove of information that is theirs alone.

In the end, the professor (actually he was a dean emeritus from a major powerhouse school) deemed my writing technically good and lively and funny. OK. On that we can possibly agree (on the days I'm not full of self-doubt and loathing).

However, he ultimately belittled me by asking the question possibly every person who ever feels like writing or creating or reaching beyond some kind of smaller purpose asks themselves – Why write? Why is it important? In his mind, and in the words that seeped from his mouth over Arnold Palmers at the Faculty Club for lunch, he decided I had enough working where I work, doing what I do to earn a paycheck, and shouldn't I think about that?

The question was posed as a value judgement on the status quo, which he deemed fine. Really, he held my gig as administrative support very high in both importance and my fortune in having it. In contrast, he asked me to consider the value of my writing and if it had any, and why I was not more satisfied with the status quo.

Sigh.

I thought about that conversation, as I had an entirely different sort of conversation about my writing with the woman who helps professionalize me. Again, I was asked what I wanted and why. This time, though, the point was to get me to chose and press for what I value. No judgment.

In the end, if I'm not Terry and just godawful, and if I just might have something to say that amuses another human, maybe that's enough.

;

Dawn of the kind of dead

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I have never been what you would call a morning person. In fact, I'm definitely more of a night crawler.

Most of the dawns I have seen in my life, I have seen on account of not making it to beddy by the night before. I've seen a few dawn's early light by virtue of not sleeping at all.

But, here I am today having snapped this photo after waking in the dark. Complacent, middle-aged me is trying a new thing. It's a new thing that circumstance has foisted on me, and goddamn it I am tired right now. I saw dawn by waking up and greeting it, not meeting it from the other side.

If things play out, I'll be experimenting with the old circadian rhythms. I'll be all up in the early to bed early to rise lifestyle. I'll undoubtedly fall asleep on the couch by 8 p.m., if not face down in my plate at the dinner table. Although, I've been known to fall asleep on the couch on a normal day.

If you see me writing more, it's because we are down to one car at the moment. Whilst saving the environment and carpooling, I am spending a bit of time thumb twiddling, as it were. M. has to get into work early. My place of employment is on his path south to that work. So, I get dropped off early and picked up late.

They say the elderly sometimes need less sleep. Maybe this month is the week I cross over and become one of the early rising elderly. Damn-it, I want my AARP card and movie discounts now.

More on money, but not mine

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After a 20+ “career,” or something like a career, I guess the kids call them “jobs,” working in non-profits and grant management, I ended up in a strange little niche. Instead of looking for money, I help give it away.

The environment is greater than first world conditions, it's privilege and quality of life and life-work balance.

Smack dab in the world of the richies, my poor self works.

Life is literally a buffet, at least on some days of the week. And, almost every damn day, having been trained as the accomplice to my mother's many capers, I have to squash deep down the desire to tuck a free bagel or yogurt or two, wrapped in a reused plastic bag, into my purse.

In honor of Labor Day and not getting screwed by the man

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Lately, when I've had idle ranting thoughts, I've really wanted to post about “kids today,” and how they don't know nuthin'. Like I know people in the real world, not just the scary internets world, who shit on unions and the word feminist.

Here's what the whippersnappers don't know. Life is fucking hard and the people with the money and the power and the means to fuck you up can and will. Not only is there no free lunch, but keep an eye on the other hand if you see a hand out.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s. In my lifetime, a lot of women didn't own shit like cars and houses. My mom, educated, working, a widow with five kids, had stories about banks looking for co-signers on her mortgage and car payments, because the lady folk needed a hand and couldn't be expected to maintain good credit.

Just barely beyond the span of my life, in 1963 when Congress mandated equal pay for women, it was A-OK to pay a chick less, you know, just because. Up until the '80s, airlines fired female flight attendants who got married.

Civil rights happened, because for some reason African Americans thought they should be treated like all other Americans with jobs, decent pay, fair working conditions, voting without dogs growling at you, regular stuff. People died trying for a better deal.

We didn't eat grapes as a kid, and in our church we prayed for grape pickers not far from where I live now. Turns out it's better, but it isn't good. To this day, the fight goes on to regulate common sense and decency. Should farms really have to be told to provide adequate shade and water to workers in triple-digit heat?

So, I sit here in a house with my name on the paperwork. My crockpot dinner is largely from the local farmers' market. I sit in complacent comfort knowing I make a decent wage, my job treats me fair, my house is livable, I have health care and probably will have a couple of bucks in retirement. I get to use birth control. I'm educated.

When all of that comes together, here's what I know. Other people fought like hell for all of that to be possible for me today. None of that came together by the grace of those people born better off than me and mine. No one gave anyone their rights on a silver platter.

Someone fought for every right and privilege. Collectively, they fought more strongly. It's a continuum, and when we forget to stay organized, vote our own interests, speak out, fight, we'll have failed everything our predecessors sought to make better.

No one is a god; I am not a buddha

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In my life, particularly the shit part that takes up 40 hours a week and allows me to pay the bills, I've been working toward Nirvana. Nirvana would be the buddhist path of taking it for what it is, no more, no less, no drama, no bullshit.

I do my work. I do it well enough to not have my warped, over-performing brain, tell me I am inadequate. And, well enough for the folks who care, you know, to not care. Then, they pay me. Simple. All folks involved seem to think Nirvana is possible.

My simple, buddhist path, my simple buddhist sensibilities, my simple buddhist yearnings, (does the Buddha ever yearn?), these things are waylaid. Waylaid by my inability to let go of the non-buddhist ways of others. Buddhas are not petty. I am petty. I am not Buddha.

One type of homo sapiens that has always tripped me up in every job everywhere is also a source of fascination. Fascinating in a rubbernecking car wreck way. Fascinating in the how the fuck do people buy into voting against their own interests kind of way.

To whit and behold: The Legendary Co-worker. (Note: this is an archetype, not a real person. No one will ever read this tripe, but liability and disclosure-wise, if you see yourself, that's on you.)

The Legend is that person who always is firing on all cylinders, running at full speed, burning up. The Legend cannot take a lunch hour. No, there is work to be done, and alone the Legend must not dally. We, the great unwashed, the peons, the lazy, slackers, failures and mere mortals, we eat at a leisurely pace, we chew our food as though tomorrow will come and the project will get done. The Legend, she knows better, 10 minutes of sustenance crammed down her throat and she's off to produce.

At every meeting, the Legend, she must be late. Time is a luxury, and it cannot be wasted Better to have others wait, stacked up, airplanes circling her tarmac of attention. She will land all safely, the Legend knows, and we all await her attention from the tower.

So, in more prosaic terms, these self-important asses blaze into any meeting late, rushing in, gurgling how unbelievably busy they are, how much they are doing, but yet here they are ready to hand you a few minutes. The key is unbelievably busy, because, I don't believe you, jackass. And, your being late, well that just fucked the clocks of everyone else in the room.

Even with time at a premium, the Legend does have more than sufficient time to extoll her virtues, to explain how she is occupied better, faster, harder, smarter, sweeter, bigger, more awesomely than you.

That's all the narcissistic annoying part of the Legend, nothing much then mild workplace friction. That's not why I am fascinated. I'm fascinated by how these same folks are always able to build up a fan base. They are goddamned beloved in some circles.

I worked with a guy who for many years lived off of the work of his subordinates. His main occupation in any business day was selling himself as the go to guy for any circumstance. He always presented as overworked yet eager to take on new projects for the good of the company.

What his staff knew, and apparently management didn't, he never actually did any of the extra work. He masterfully delegated, spreading everything out to many hand, many weaker hands without the forum to advertise themselves or speak up at all really.

He took not doing his own work to creative levels. Even confidential hiring forms that were his responsibility were farmed out to be completed by an underling, because she had nicer handwriting.

He sat in his office. In the ample free time he had after outsourcing every scrap of work he had, he created his own cottage industry of filling out online coupons and rebate forms and reselling the crap he earned. He literally made money on the web, using company resources from paper to the guys in shipping and receiving. Perhaps noteworthy, he did this moneymaking while ensconced in a non-profit organization.

He may not have been beloved by the toiling hordes who did his work, but a fairly good chunk thought he was a nice guy. They were grateful for the opportunities to try new things, not realizing that life doesn't actually reward on extra credit projects, and he was schmoozing on their sweat equity. Like Tom Sawyer painting a fence, they were happy to help.

He sealed the relationships with generous gifts of worthless tchotchkes he received for free and couldn't sell through the web. His fans gushed at his kindness, even as they threw away the scented candles that stunk.

Management thought he was great. They loved his can-do spirit, ready smile, pleasing demeanor and other bullshit displays. Any complaints against him were read as bitter, sour grapes. Work was getting done and his face was there, always there. Moreover, he rose (or sank) sycophancy to new, brown-nosed levels, and the weak-willed caved at his flattery.

No one ever suspected any of his scams, which included approving computer equipment to be delivered to his own house “for testing,” and being sure all catered events were overordered where he waited with Tupperware. (Ho ho ho, the holiday cheer, the night I went to his private house party, where I was treated to the identical hors d'ouevres menu from our departmental party.)

Another Legend I've met created such an intricate net of important details that she alone knew, I'm actually impressed. It's impossible to know if she deliberately didn't write anything down to create a feedback loop for her alone to act and be the super hero or saviour, or if she was just an idiot.

I'm voting idiot with a sidedish of self-importance. Her fans, they vote her omnipotent, omniscient, truly a god who graced us with her work. Now if only I could find a copy of that project that she alone had the skill to complete, because I want to read her brilliance and who doesn't love vaporware?

Me, I lack finesse.

Legend, I am not. Buddha, I am not.

I mewl and whine, despairingly. I know my work is that of a frail human. I know my skills are replicated a billion times over and alone I can accomplish very little. I ask questions. I admit mistakes. I let others take a turn. Some days I don't work hard at all.

I'm loved, hated, tolerated, regarded neutrally and with amusement at work at approximately the same levels I have in the rest of the world. I have friends and detractors both, but the vast bulk of humanity doesn't know I draw air and doesn't care one way or the other.

Perhaps my buddhist path is simply remembering that as long as I know my limitations and respect the contributions of others, karma is on my side. The Legends, they will always be. It is not my path.

Maybe without the marrow sucking

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
— Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau has been running through my head, although it’s really not in line with his Walden fantasy. It’s more like the reality, when old Henry David would take a break from living deliberately to scam a meal over at the Emersons’ house. Instead of the woods, I’m living deliberately in the halls of a place literally valued in the billions.

Anywho, here’s the dealio, a professional coach has recommended I journal to focus and reflect on some daily interactions and communications. You know, like I could try writing stuff out to think about it. Now why ain’t I thought of that.

Nah, the point is I’m trying to really pay attention to some of the mundane interactions during the day to learn how to handle it all better. I plan on being the zen master of office communication, a meeting ninja, another martial arts cliche of epic proportions for giving and receiving feedback. To that end, here are some thoughts from the world of thought experiments.

Observation 1: I don’t have any idea how to handle other people’s internal dialogs. Like the woman who always phrases a question like it’s a game show challenge. “Am I in charge of this invoice?” Um, I don’t know how to rule paper, as it were, so none of us are in charge of it. Let’s Roshambo for it.

Similarly, if you launch into something and I have no idea what you’re talking about, because like maybe I haven’t yet read the email that just came in two seconds ago, the look on my face isn’t meant to convey anything but confusion. Please don’t ascribe a mood to my furrowed brow, I’m just busy thinking, nothing more or less, until you give me a chance to say, “Huh?”

The paragraph above also pertains to when you walk up quietly and I’m reading. The look on my face — Startled. It’s not personal. When I’m on the way to the kitchen — Hungry or thirsty. Also not personal. About to talk with someone else, and you stop me with your question — Momentarily unfocused. Not personal.

Here’s a secret prayer for the person most apt to walk up to my desk when I’m in the middle of something and start speaking just at the right time to make me jump. Start talking a little sooner and a little less abruptly and if I’m staring at my screen or typing fast, you might want to ask if it’s a good time.

Here’s my ninja coping strategy, as my prayer goes unanswered. Smile. Ninja’s don’t show their pain.

Observation 2: Since people drop by and ask for my help or for feedback already, I’m not feeling too corrective. I think I’ll just avoid the people who don’t want my help any way. Win win.

Observation 3: Sometimes I think people are waiting for me to say things at meetings. Sometimes I think people are waiting for anyone else to say something at meetings, and then to stop saying things. Meetings aren’t really communication.

Observation 4: Man, humans can put spin on anything, and personal insecurities can amplify that to 11. There’s a person I know that a hefty portion of conversations sway from what I think is an amusing anecdote to her set of worries. “Hey, this guy said this funny thing to me about that.” “Oh, really, do you think he was suggesting that the world as we know it is off kilter?”

Oops, yeah, nevermind. Note to self, ninjas don’t share amusing anecdotes.

Observation 5: The “open” questions my coach says are a nice trick for negotiating a conversation don’t work for everyone. I’m not saying those folks want to be led, as much as maybe they are rehearsing for a revamp of Abbott and Costello. “What do you think we should do?” “I’m not sure, I thought you’d know, do you?” “I’m OK with whatever you think, will X work for you or do you want Y?” “Do you think Y is better?”

Time might be infinite, but my life is limited. I don’t know if we both have time to passively consider every course of action in the known universe. How’s about we just decide and keep it moving?

Observation 6: It doesn’t take me any different amount of time to write a vaguely interesting or amusing email than to keep it straight. I tried both this week. But the amusing ones actually get a response.

Addendum to above: A lot of people are shitty writers (and maybe don’t know it) or struggle with writing. Those folks don’t understand the possibilities, but I’m guessing that it’s not a good target to cater to them.

Addendum two: People who shave off prior chunks of an email should either (1) start a fresh email and give enough info to start anew or (2) stop shaving off the prior chunks of email. You know what’s confusing? “See below” when there’s nothing down below.

Subpart to this addendum: those people are also the ones who don’t cc everyone who needs to know stuff.

Observation 7: Mindlessly playing with my iPhone keeps me from biting my fingernails at meetings. Putting away my electronics, because other people think it’s disrespectful, means after a week of meetings, I have hangnails and a couple of bloody cuticles.

Observation 8: Mostly, I work with some cool people. The ones that aren’t, well, whatcha gonna do?

Observation 9: All of the above — Problems of the privileged and whiny. I wonder if Thoreau hated himself a little at the end of a day, especially if he encountered some of that there meanness.

The more things change

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First things first — I opened this here writing program, and the first thing I saw were these words:

After a tiring week of having to deal with members for the human race, I’m a tad disappointed that today’s solar eclipse isn’t a harbinger of the earth’s destruction. Sigh.

I have decide to thoroughly dislike a fellow human.

Clearly, I was having a bad day.

Now, days, if not weeks later, I am a goddamn font of contented calm. I’m so fucking zen, I could snatch the pebbles from the sensi’s hand at the same time as I leapt from my good leg to the bad one that was swept by the Cobra Kai and kicked some ass. I’m centered and my chi is on FI-Ah.

Here’s the crazy shit of it all. My historic working shelf life ain’t been grand to tell the truth. My best, most serious jobs have gotten to the five to seven year mark, and I have managed to fail in epic, truly epic, proportions. OK, maybe not epic like Odysseus tying himself to a mast while sailing over rough seas, but as epic as a cube (or in the case of one job, supply closet turned into an office) dweller can live it. I’m not Greek after all.

I had my whole manifest destiny vision quest just over seven years ago, when I moved here to the Golden West. Shortly thereafter, I got my paying gig that contributes to the mortgage and keeps my addiction to munching on groceries alive.

In fact, it’s seven years this week that I started this job. I’ve crossed the Rubicon.

Only this time, it’s a whole other ball of wax, a new ball game, a freshly minted cliche. Unlike the job where the director was banging not just one but two women in our office, blessedly not me; unlike the job where a back-stabbing asshole, who incidentally had stolen some computer equipment, used his work email for sex classifieds, and was an all around weasel, convinced HR I was a violence risk, unlike the job where everyone was convinced the top two execs were likely embezzling at worst or reporting fraudulent data on federal grants at the best, unlike all of them, I seem to be coasting just fine.

No, not just coasting. I’m doing just fine. Like in a crazy, are you sure, no way this must be a trick, doing just fine. Fine like is Allen Funt going to come walking through the door and telling me it’s a joke? Fine. Or maybe in these modern times, Chris Hansen, will explain it all.

Here’s the skinny, which I hesitate to write about, in case there is a weasel waiting behind a cyber door ready to do me in, but I’ll take the risk. Although, I won’t get into enough detail that said cyber door weasel can bite me.

I now have a professional coach. Someone who actually is meant to prod me into achieving shit. And, one of the goals I’m meant to be achieving is doing more writing and pushing myself to actually do what I keep promising myself and then managing to self-sabotage. I’m bound and determined to not let this opportunity pass me by, and I aims to have something that looks like a book in the end.

It may be a shitty book that no one ever buys or reads. But I if it’s three dimensional, or even virtually so with animated pages on a tablet screen, I’ll be feeling alright.

And the bloody miracle of my checkered work life is unlike my last gig, the folks in charge of my employment are A-OK with that side project. I’m practically being begged to forego my workaholic ways, put in no extra hours or thought, watch the clock and slide down my dinosaur the minute the whistle blows at the end of the day at the plant. Like you’re done for the day, go forth and write.

At my last position of stressful employ, not only did those folks in charge tell me I couldn’t be a “real writer,” whatever the fuck that is, they told me I was throwing away opportunity by not giving up my dreams for my corporate welfare. Yup, no dreams of my own just their image of me as a good worker bee content in the hive.

Don’t fucking pinch me, because I don’t want to wake up yet. I’m planning a summer of cutting out of work in time to see the sunset drop over our oceanside town, forcing myself to write and listening to the boss, when she tells me to take it easy.

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.

What the hell am I?

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In a timely coincidence, this image has been making the meme rounds in Facebook and whatnot:

 

I don’t know the exact source of this version of the list, but it comes from this article by Linda Kreger Silverman.

It’s timely because I just got the results back from a Myers Briggs personality assessment. Happy to say this time around it was paid for by work, but I’m still all working and employed and shit. Unlike the last official “personality assessment” on my permanent record this one was all warm and fuzzy.

Anyway, turns out I have a personality. Of sorts.

Here’s the timely of the timely part — heretofore, I tested as INTP. I totally have thought of myself as a giant, big old, introverted “I.” I love being alone. I love processing shit my own way in my own time. Better a couple. of great friends than a crowd, yada, fucking, yada.

Then, round about a decade ago, probably longer, I decided to come out of shyness with a vengeance. Now I totally dig that Carl Jung wasn’t saying introversion is the same as shyness, but I never got “my energy,” as the pop psych crowd would have it, from crowds. Holding back seemed like a fine response to life.

Only thing was, I had journals and private writings. I had words I wanted to say, thoughts rattling in the brain pan. The older I got the more I realized that the world was going ahead without me.

Like a terrible version of the crazy that was G. Gordon Liddy overcoming fear by eating a rat and tying himself to a tree in a lightning store, I took an adult ed class in stand up comedy. To overcome a fear of public speaking, to bring my writing public, to speak out, to shake my own personal status quo, to step up and out, I thought going on stage would be a good idea.

I almost puked and shat myself the final night of class, when we stood behind a mike at an actual comedy club. I didn’t try again for two years, when I screwed up the courage and took another class.

Ultimately, I whacked away at it for a while and got comfortable(ish) on stage. Comfortable enough to combine most sane people’s two biggest fears, getting naked and standing alone on stage with nothing but my jokes. The butterflies and/or gurgling fear of evacuating my bowels stopped.

I have no scientific proof, but I feel like I took the skills acquired on stage to other settings. The stage and writing cliche is that I found my voice.

Turns out that voice had other things to say besides jokes. When I moved west and interviewed for a job, I was outspoken and direct and more outwardly reaching than I remember being back east. Whatever made me get in stage sunk in and stuck

So the other day, I fired up the interwebs in my workplace and took the Myers Briggs dealio on account of some professional coaching I’m doing. Well, I’m not coaching. I’m subjecting myself to a little coaching action on account of wanting to be a better person and cog and all.

Lo and fucking behold, my trusty reliable “I” is now and extroverted “E.” This time around the test says I’m ENTP.

I don’t know how the hell it happened, but I turned into somebody else.