Here’s the thing I want to write about, but I’m a-scared of writing about. Not scared of writing, or words, although I’ve often thought it fun to have a psychosis that would make me absolutely phobic about words. Nope. Just worried about the closeness to the one taboo in the weblogging bullshit world I seem to have broken in the past life on the East. Common sense would say steer clear of anything in the old-9-to-5, paying the bills, hive of drones and income, aka work.

It ain’t really about work, though. It’s about what happened to me, and work is a geographical location. Maybe a catalyst. Definitely a reason I was in the situation but a bit player.

In a highly fucked up moment of aural voyeurism (is that even possible, since voyeur implies viewing?), I got to listen to a car accident. It wasn’t like a fun campaign-ending fender bender, it was a full-on smash up. (By the way, if you search Massachusetts and political stuff and car accidents, the number one answer with a bullet is “Chappaquidick.”)

My boss often calls from a Blackberry (using a handsfree headset, I might add) in the morning, as she races from appointments and figures out her day’s game plan. The other morning was no different than many others, and so I was on the phone with her as she gave me her estimated time of arrival and we ran down making a few changes to the day. The first meeting was an all-hands training for everyone in my group. She had made it mandatory and, so’s not to get fragged, had to show up herself. Our telephone conversation was mundane, banal, unexciting, verbal checking of a boring to-do list.

Then, I heard a scream. My boss screamed. But, there was a Doppler effect of the sound getting distant, she hadn’t screamed right into the microphone.

Fucking shit, um what? Shit. Pretty much those were my exact thoughts.

I waited. I called her name a few times. I could hear some cell-phone background rustling, like when a pocket calls the last number by mistake and the recipient gets a voicemail message of ambient sounds. I called her name again. I waited.

No doubt, these sounds and the absence of responses all happened real time in under a minute. Of course, my brain calculated otherwise.

She got back on the phone. The voice had an audible tremor and a chunk of the back of the throat, clenched kind of squeak we all control under extreme stress. That voice that lets you know the person speaking isn’t what you would call “all set.” She said the obvious, she’d just been in an accident.

Before the cell-phone haters tsk, she was rear-ended. So, talking, singing to the radio, brushing her teeth wouldn’t have changed anything. A truck ran up her ass in a hurry to make it through the green light and maybe didn’t see the car in front of it just starting up again from standing at the red.

All I knew at the time was “accident,” “bad,” “windows smashed.” But, she was talking. I hung up and left approximately 312 messages on her husband’s cell phone. I tried calling her back. I got nothing.

Finally, again, probably minutes, but mentally hours, she called me back. She had called 911, the cops were just arriving, no one would let her get out of the car, because the ambulance hadn’t arrived. My mental bargain was, “Hey, must be OK if she was able to call 911.” But, the pessimist in me knew why no one would let her out of the car, shit can break inside.

It was my job to make an announcement to the team meeting and to find senior management and let them know. I was basically tasked with letting people know “bad thing,” and that was all the information I had. I didn’t yet know if she were truly OK, I didn’t know “truck,” I didn’t know exactly where, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why. To say I was shaken would be an understatement.

Here’s where the reality of how much I don’t care for the human race started to kick in. I got heckled making the announcement. One dickhead made a joke about the meeting being mandatory. Another person opined on cell phones being dangerous.

My inside my head voice thought, “FUCK YOU. Listen to yourselves.” Seriously, there should be a business, professional phrase one could evoke that clearly expresses “Shut the fuck up, what is wrong with you, have you no sense of appropriateness.” Alas, our language is so lacking.

I gave the hecklers a sense of time and a place for lighthearted banter, and this time not being it, and I left the room. I wasn’t in the mood to sit through the training. And, I still didn’t know if her husband had gotten in touch with her.

The one person who was 15 minutes late for the training and therefore missed my announcement, who one might characterize a bit more than a tad self-involved and self-important, if only for showing up 15 minutes late, required my repeating all that I knew which wasn’t much. She proceeded to grill me for information, providing her commentary, making assumptions and, I feel, generally giving me the impression I had completely failed to sate her need for gossipy detail. Bring back the hecklers, I thought, they were easier.

A couple of hours later, I heard from her husband, who this time had that faint tremor that telegraphed worry and general not-goodness. The car was totaled, I found out, and they were keeping her on a back board in the ER for X-rays.

Throughout the day, there was a clear professional split. Half of the people checking in at my desk expressed concern, caring. The other half wanted answers on how their work, their schedules would be affected. They remembered at the tail end to ask about the person. Like, “oh yeah, by the way, any word?”

In the end, she’s overall fine. Nothing broken anyway. But, what a colossally sucky day for her. And, what a mildly sucky day for me as emissary. And what a wonderful reminder that only about 50% of us give a rat’s ass about other people.

Last couple of nights I’m been meaning to write about a shitty thing that happened and the shittiness of people, but I’m still annoyed. Pretty much I’d just whine, and lord all fucking mighty there is enough to whine about with the human race.

In lieu of writing, I screwed around with Photoshop. M. is on a serious Halloween jag these days. He’s decorating his office at work and buying candy and tossing around fake spiderwebs like creepy fairy dust in his wake.

As a tribute, I worked on his undead self through his soulless existence.

A couple of weeks ago there was a thing announced at work to name something. I work in Silicon Valley for an organization that’s pretty much asshole deep in the history of the tech part of the region.

When they were making the announcement, I leaned over and said the first thing that popped into my head. LAter on I mentioned it to someone else, and they were like “yeah, you should submit that.” I did. The workplace voted. I won. I’m a C-note richer.

Here’s why I feel like a loser, which of course I am, not the good old, cheery, cheer worker bee. Clearly, I can string a word or two enough to come up with an idea. Maybe you’d call that creative. One word, and I’m a fucking giant of making shit up. One word.

Try stringing one into two into three into ten into 40 into 10,000, and I am way the fuck out of my element. I’d give me a full sentence max before creation peters the fuck out.

Actually, the best part is my little journey of self discovery. I can’t fucking believe it, but when I got up to accept my winnings in front of the workplace, and they asked me to explain my one word, my hands were shaking. I haven’t felt that kind of public-speaking nerves for quite some time. Nice remember of how far I have not come.

Not my pic, but a garage somewhere in the valley made of silicon chips, which is where I live.

Technorati Tags: California, comedy, Silicon valley, technology, work

I was driving home from work listening to the stereophonic radio. It was an interview, Terry Gross and author Alice Sebold.

Apparently. in the first pages the chick in her 40s smothers her demented mater. The clear circle of purgatory or hell for many a woman, caring for the elderly mom.

In the interview, they were talking about the essentially societal assumption that I dutiful daughter minds her mother up until, well, forever or death, whichever comes first. There’s the foregone conclusion, and many a woman is postponing or altering whatever happens next to care for mom.

It got me thinking. Got me thinking about Pat, of course, about my life, of course. (Of course, just about everything makes me think of me, possibly even civil unrest and genocide. I think therefore I am self-involved.) Anyway, of course, a selfish little corner of my soul is OK with the bullet I dodged. My whole family for a couple generations doged the bullet.

Thankfully, the generations in my fam tree tend to skew long and old. Three out of four of my grandparents had gone before the cells that split into me materialized. Hell, a school-hood memory from a million years or so ago had a rather unimaginative teacher correcting me for what had to be my misunderstanding. I was the only kid in class who’s dad had been of age to serve during WWII, the big one. (Sure, it was Jersey he protected, but someone had to mind the shore.) Stupider, yet, or so the teach thought, my grandfather couldn’t have really been a doughboy in the first war to end all wars.

Yeah, bitch, I hallucinated with my school-age mind that old picture in sepia tones with gaiters and the Smokey the Bear hat.

Anyway, point is, lot of folks were older when they were old. Even though Pat’s 72 wasn’t exactly aged now that 65 is the new 50 and shit like that.

For comparison’s sake, a couple or three of the people I work with are living the new, modern day, boomer problem. I know some folks who are retirement age themselves caring for elderly parents. A woman my age was telling me about her parents and how she’s started worrying about them, even as her mom’s mom, or some other drandparental unit, needs more constant care. How much must that suck?

Maybe I could change my own adult diaper, but not if I had to worry about someone else’s too.

I think I want to write about my life and the layers of dealing with my own mom, because it was always complex for me. I knew I was the youngest, I knew the parental invincibility started to breakdown on my watch, as the last kid to leave the house. Since about the first time I called home from Syracuse and my liberating college life, when Pat wailed into the phone her loneliness, her mortality, her depression, I figured out a certain level of duty for myself.

Consciously and sub-consciously and without any thought at all, I hung around. I feel like I did delay some parts of my life. Hard not to sit 3,000 miles from that home, fitting in to a different environment and chilling, and not think about my delay in getting started on this life’s phase.

But, Pat was Pat. Like her father before her, she wasn’t gonna go all sweet and gentle into the caretak-ee role, and demand that those around her pic up the slack. My grandfather let my mother, and/or told her to, hire a private nurse, her friend from the local school system, to give him a hand. She would have wanted us to do the same, and she definitely told me as much.

No matter. The truth is, if I did sacrifice (a highly, majorly, hugely debatable assertion), I still got off easy. In my 40s, there is still a long way to go to get started on life. I mean, I might actually reach my newest goal, published by 50 or suicide by 52 to be published posthumously and rake in the big literary dough.

Technorati Tags: cutting, caretaking, death, mothers, aging, generations

M. bought tickets to an Oktoberfest thang in SF. A few co-workers were getting together to drink.

M. has no drinking frame of reference. Luckily the California Highway Patrol (aka the TV famous CHiPs) were in force.

M. had been sharing my beer. He blew 0.0 and the dickhead cop mocked him for not drinking. I explained to the cop I had had what I drink at a typical show. He gave me the follow my finger field sobriety test and warned me I was drunk. The drunk boy next to me explained my eyeballs twitched.

I blew a borderline 0.97. The cop seemed disappointed. The drunk congratulated me. I felt oddly proud to know where I was.

Meanwhile, we ran into our own personal local policeman, who filed my stolen bike report. He wasn’t in uniform save his baby face. Out of uniform is out of context. I thnk he’s stalking us.

Whenever I consider my life’s career trajectories, I consider driving an old Japanese sword into my gut and watching the entrails spill out as my brain tells me to die. Or, maybe I should just get a good old double-edged not always so safety razor blade and commence to some teenage cutting.

Point is, I worked some extra time at work today. Which meant I skipped the gym. Riding my bike is like a distant memory. Too many hours to clock.

I also worried about teaching some other folk on how to do some work stuff, so I wouldn’t have to do it. I also checked over someone else’s work, because it just seemed damn unlikely they would proofread on their own. Then, I helped the boss with some fun spreadsheet budgety things.

The retarded came in later–when I had to meet with consultants and tell them what I do for a living, while they showed me a job description for a position where I helped write the goddamn piece of paper in front of me and interviewed the person who got the job. And, I’m helping to train the person. Um, yeah, arguably that’s not my job on the little piece of paper.

If you start a conversation with the most minimal of shit, you will always sound like a self-aggrandizing asshole if you try to set it straight. “Um yeah, nice consultant people, I wish that were my job.”

So, why again did I work that extra bit tonight? Fuck me and my stupid work ethic.

Technorati Tags: cutting, soulless, tired, vocation, work

For those naysayers and whatnot out there in internetland mocking us early adopters, allegedly worshipping at the altar of Steve Jobs. Yeah, I bought one. Yeah, I like for the first time having a smart phone that’s designed to actually work with my MacBook.

But, I do realize it’s a phone. I have perspective. It’s not like it’s a vibrator, right? (Then again, I can’t check my email on any sex toy I’ve heard of.)

The real sting was supposed to be the precipitous price drop that made the papers. $200 American spent above the current bottom line.

If you are going to be a soulless yuppie, though, consuming and shit, take some advice from someone with a pretty good credit rating and the flexibility to shop as I please. Use American Express. Membership and privileges and marketing, I shot customer service a call. They gave me the hook up with a $100 credit as a good customer looking for some spending assistance.

That and the $100 “early owner” credit, I’m back in black. And I still gots my shiny iPhone.

Technorati Tags: Cell phone, iPhone, consumer, soulless, technology, tired

There’s this thing at work. The week delivery by the Fruit Guys. It’s fruit delivered, apparently by men. Mostly it’s bananas.

Maybe it was my fruit jones from skipping the farmers’ market yesterday. It was a choice, pure and simple, laze in bed on a Sunday morning with the best beau I’s ever had, or get up and buy produce. Fresh, juicy, warmed in the sun produce. Or M. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, I went to work unsated, if you will, without my trip to the farmers’ stands. The fruit at work, therefore, spoke to me. It whispered in a sultry, picked from the earth, sensuous plea, “Eat me.” Particularly, I heard the siren song of the one thing in the basket I didn’t recognize. It was wrinkled and purple and seemed almost dry and neglected. I had to know what was inside.

I sliced in to the mystery fruit. And, you know, you just know, you are eating brave when a chick in your office from another culture know for eating anything, I mean I saw a restaurant once that had a sign “if it swims, we eat it,” if that chick says, “Wow, you are going to eat that, what is it?” you’re on the edge. Out from my crooked slice spilled seeds suspended in an fish-egg-like cluster with enough juice and pulp oozing over them to completely remind one of fish splooge in spawning season.

Fucking, yum.

The juice and pulp had a familiar tang and a few clicks of Google later, I realized it was most likely a passionfruit. OK, then, something of which I’ve heard, o juices that have tantalized my palate.

But the same Google search gave me fun facts like, “a cyanogenic glycoside is found in the pulp of passionfruits at all stages of development.” Yeah, that makes for some good eating that cyanide. And apparently, some scientists some where are trying to work out using it as a sedative. Sweet.

Maybe I’m not really suicidal or playing through a death-wish. Nah. But, maybe I could be a little bit more discriminating on what I shove into my mouth.

Technorati Tags: California, produce, passionfruit, toxic, cyanide, food, poison