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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.

Nothing to see here

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I just don't feel rant-y enough these days, which I think is the death of interesting. Probably a horrible Rorschach of my twisted psyche that I equate anger with interesting.

Let's face it though. Puppies and rainbows just don't grab the headlines like massacres.

The fantastic part of the week was my aunt's visit. M. and I were both proud to show off our little house, our little town, our little lives.

My aunt revitalized me to pay tribute (or tithe) to the dearly departed Pat and try to capture something of her indelible mark on the planet. I had completely forgotten what may indeed be the punchline of one of the best little bits of her house fire saga.

After my mother's house burned just about to the ground, the phoenix rose. Well maybe it wasn't to the ground. The walls and roof were still there, but where decades of life and possessions were accumulated there now lay smoldering ruins. I honestly didn't know dishes, kitchen cabinets and food could all melt and fuse together into one unrecognizable mass dripping from the walls Dali-style.

The days after were baby steps of rebuilding. Until all is lost, you really do not understand how much you take for granted just getting through a day. Underwear, for example. When your house burns down, all you got left in that department is the smoky set of drawers on your backside. One pair of undies while everyone around you can cavalierly put on another pair without waiting for the wash cycle to spin down.

I twisted Pat's arm at Walmart. We didn't just pick up a jumbo pack of multi-colored cotton panties in her size. We picked up two. I think I coerced her into somewhere in the range of a full two weeks' of freshness.

My aunt took her to CVS for sundries. Sundries turned out to be a carefully chosen shade of lipstick and a more impulsive canned ham. The canned ham was punchline enough in the story, and you could end it there.

But, this week, my aunt reminded me of the next tier of that story. The tier that makes the story soar just a little bit higher, and reminded me of how a house fire does destroy damn near everything.

One thing you can't tell from movies or TV shows or news reports about fire is that it smells. Everything smells. Like a barbecue pit of hickory and mesquite, smoke crawls into every space.

The house smells. The air in the neighborhood smells. The clothes on you when you walk away from blaze smell. Smoke gets in your hair, your skin. The odor is pervasive. It doesn't wash out instantly. Especially so if you haven't yet gotten all of the new clothes to wear that you might need and you're making do with what you got.

Pat smelled. Behind her back, my brother took to calling her “Old Smokey.”

So, there they are in CVS examining the lipsticks, my mom and my aunt, her sister.

My aunt began to sense a little unease in the crowd in the store. People in the store had begun to smell smoke and report it to management. There was the bustle and hum of a building panic and emergency effort.

Pat looked at lipstick colors.

As they went to check out at the register, the store was beginning to enact it's safety plan and evacuate the customers. In perhaps the greatest single moment of understatement in the history of the world, Pat left the store saying, “Don't worry, it's just me.”

Grace, as though I know anything

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There are several meanings of the word “grace,” and I'm not good with any of them.

There's the conceptual grace of religion and god and all of that, but I think job one would be, I dunno, totally believing in god. I think the all mighty fireball of power ain't shedding much of the old grace on me.

There's physical grace. I don't even walk so good. If grace is a swan, I am an ostrich.

I had an aunt Grace. I liked her. She seemed tough but fair and kind to me as a kid. You didn't mess with Grace, but she seemed cool.

Then there's what got me thinking about the word and the thing and the concept. Maybe what I really mean is graciousness, but grace-type stuff for sure.

Here's the thing. This summer M. and I have been inundating ourselves with visitors and parties and meeting people. M. even changed jobs, introducing more new people. It's been a melting pot, as the kids say, of old and new friends.

Comparisons are natural, if not always kind or useful. We're trying to figure out if the East Coasters just complain more than the Westerners or if it's simply the people we know.

We're mighty comfortable here. Fat, dumb and happy without a lot of angst or worry about what the other guy is doing or has. For sure, many of the people we know here don't spend a lot of time shitting on other people. Maybe we did a good job of vetting our Cali friends.

Some days I attribute it to the sunshine. If the sun is out, the waves are stroking the beach, and my belly is full of the kind of good food that makes locavores salivate, what do I have to bitch about?

Then there's begrudgery, which I've written about before, and I first heard from my uncle Jerry. Everywhere you go in Boston, you pretty much can find a character complaining about someone or something. OK, full honesty, you can find that everywhere. But Boston is really good at it.

There can be a humor to it all, and I love bitching and wallow in it. My brother walking down the street in my California neighborhood declaring every dude with a goatee or skateboard way too old for whatever he was doing is the grumbly part of Boston I occasionally miss.

(Apropos nothing, best part of my brother's visit: woman with parrot on her head, calling me a bitch in front of her kids for my pulling into the crosswalk too far.)

M. declaring that kids today are soft, because when he was the age of one of our friend's kids he was climbing coconut trees not whining, is the equatorial version of Boston's walking to school in the snow uphill both ways.

We still have some East Coast sensibilities. So maybe it's just the people we know who seem to complain a lot. Maybe we're just being bigots when we stereotype Massholes?

Afterall, as I mentioned to M., there are people like Dot, which brings me back around to grace. Dot is Massachusetts through and through, and I'm happy to report blogging again. She's from AHHlington on the Red Line and everything.

But that one, she ain't no complainer. I think for Dot to waste time trashtalking, you'd really have to rile her up good and proper. I'm pretty sure she even complimented the musical chops of one of those ex-boyfriends everyone has who ends up treating you lousy.

And, that woman, she writes thank you notes, and she's not nearly 80. A dying art the thank you note, but much appreciated. I've wanted to write a note back to thank her for the thank you note, but that could go on into an M.C. Escher meta loop forever.

Maybe she's just one of the good ones.

Probably the reality is we are all getting old. I'm starting to notice here from the vantage point of what I guess is young-ish middle age that choices have to be made.

A couple or several years ago, Norah Ephron gave an interview in which she was recognizing that life changes when you get older. She espoused the notion that basically you just don't know if you're going to get hit by a bus, so maybe you should go ahead with the doughnut today knowing full well it's not health food. She pretty much called it correctly for herself, enjoying meals today before her unexpected bus accident of dying from leukemia.

I'm not going nuts on doughnuts, and I like keep my treats slightly infrequent so they still feel like treats. (A year of working at Brigham's Ice Cream in the olden days taught me one thing — ice cream every day just makes ice cream, that wonderful elixir, ambrosia of the gods, nauseating.) But holy fuck, I want to waste less and less time with that which sucks and spend more time with the good.

In desserts and in meals and in friends, I want deliciousness. Good conversations, laughter, pleasure. For the inevitable nastiness and dark moments of our meager little human existences, I'd rather spend time with someone exploring a new cookie recipe or pretty much doing anything, as long as they are doing.

Anecdotally and tangentially, it seems to me that the folks who complain the most and criticize the most and can spend hours running down what's wrong in the world in their corner or globally, have little or no solutions. Don't tell me all of the stories about what is wrong without telling me what you are going to fucking do to fix it, make change, get the hell out or otherwise act.

Yeah we all long for people, jobs, adventures that are interesting. If you tell me someone is not interesting, though, you better be damn entertaining.

Victims and critics are fucking boring. And, who has time left to be miserable?

Where the fuck am I?

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Dateline: Nighttime. Not in the Serenghetti.

Even without the local labeled wine I drank, thank you Russian River for rolling along next to some grape vineyards, I'm sitting here in 11 shades of crazy.

I may be sleepless from a flock of flamingos yakking it up all night and day. I predict sun cutting in at a sunrise kind of hour, slicing my canvas walls and eyeballs into some kind of daytime. I'm not sure, but I think that's what the sun will do or what it thinks it ought to do.

Before said wine and some huge ass barbecue pit ribs, I watched giraffes. Later the Big Dipper smacked itself onto my retina like a picture book constellation. Straight up, the stars are right where they say they are in the guidebooks.

Where the fuck am I? I am in the craziest place on earth. In California. Nay, in wine country in California, hard by Santa Rosa and Calistoga where folks go to see geysers, rejuvenate in healing waters and drink the local fermented libations, that's where I am. I'm also some place where some other folks imported animals. African animals.

In California. We're all just chilling. I'm smack dab in it. Me, the giraffes, the lemurs, the monkeys we are all from someplace else. But now we are here. Here in California.

You can look it up. Safari West, it's called. I'm not in Africa and neither are the animals from there.

Looks like we all might live.

 

I guess the song is right

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Bette Midler and others have sung about you gotta have friends, and you know Bette’s a sharp cookie. The New York Times also has this ‘blog item floating around on the Interwebs, most especially in my Facebook feed, which got me thinking.

The other things that have got me thinking are our bonanza of visitors this year and a goofy talk with a current buddy. That last bit might be the amusing part of this whole entire stupid thing I’m writing right here and now, in the here and now.

I might be lucky or I might have the personality of a serial killer. Hard to say.

Lucky because I’ve always had some friends around. People who you could maybe call if you needed a jump start or bail posted. Folks who would let you cry on their shoulders, both of them. And, enough acquaintances that I could find something interesting to talk about or do, on those seldom occasions when I’ve felt like leaving the couch.

Social media is an extension of both. In some cases it’s an, albeit light, touch or tenuous hold to people who have been important to me in the past. Episodes of life that will never be forgotten, even as other events, meetings and distances have pushed them physically in another direction.

I might be a serial killer, because I don’t know that I have ever had that one single defining friend through thick and thin that has remained immutable. It all ebbs and flows, and at the risk of shallowness or being feckless, besties have come and gone.

Like lovers, I kind of just assume friends ebb, flow, appear and disappear, as you need. I take the existence of both lovers and friends for granted, that they will be there in some form or another. Foolhardy and arrogant for sure, but for going onto five decades, something’s always worked out, even when I have only ever wanted a hermit’s garret on an isolated island.

I’m probably a big, fat douchebag in that I look back on some people, and it is as hard to pinpoint what brought us together as it is why we drifted apart.

Although, there’s a whole group of folks I found as I was finding myself in a time when I needed the cliché of “finding myself” the most. Grieving, unsure of my future, unhappy with my current life, I discovered my tribe. Writers, performers, artists, musicians and fools. The people I picked, and they picked me, although our only common bond is entertainment.

M., despite not actually going on stage, is part of that tribe for me. He, his energy and his unstoppable optimism and grandiose plans share the ethos of everyone who has ever tried to create.

In truth, I am the worst, and perhaps the most awkward about maintaining and cultivating and reaping and sowing and any other gardening metaphor that group of friends. However, they are the ones who post the most interesting things on the webs. And, they are the ones with whom, if they show up on my doorstep, I feel an instant flow. No time or distance is between us in those moments.

I tested that early in the summer when a working actress crashed a couple of days at our place, while filming in San Jose. The conversation and the wine was easy.

Other friends challenge me.

Have I changed, here in the more frequent sunshine and moderate temperatures of a California coast town? Am I, as my native California friends have mockingly claimed, now more native than they are, barely a transplant, grafted to a foreign tree? Apparently, every time I choose spinach over fried anything a little bit of Massachusetts cries.

Or, have my friends back in my native, birth state changed?

Maybe it’s neither. Maybe the alchemy of time and place is too ephemeral. Remove time or place and the gold changes back into another element. See above and the possibility of my emotional depth as akin to a serial killer.

In all of the wondering about my own shallowness and reading the NYTimes about how other people struggle with friendships, I did have one interesting realization. This section is the possibly interesting and amusing part.

At every stage of my adult life, or adult-ish, I’ve always, always, always had at least one male friend upon whom I thrust any responsibility for my imbibing of frothy, malted, hops-filled beverages. Those might be the friends I love the most, because nothing is too difficult when you have beer money and know how to use it.

I deny responsibility for my own control of sobriety, because the best thing about all of these friendships is my susceptibility to peer pressure. Some nights of laughing and talking would ideally never end, and I happily will get talked into “just one more” to see if time might stop. Although, in more recent years, I have been known to skip a round or two to save my head and growing wide body as long as the jokes still continued.

In high school, it was the nerdy group who later all came out of the closet. Among the players was Jimmy, perhaps my first sexual crush, who served his beer-serving role twice in my life. As kids and into college summers, and then again, we met up years later coincidentally working in the same profession, to people watch and entertain ourselves at an annual convention.

In college, it was Al. Everyone pushed us to date or assumed that we were, but we just talked into the wee hours.

Early post-college, it may have been Kevin, the American version. He’s my longest in years and endurance friend, since we met in junior high and bonded on the 8th-grade field trip to Washington, DC. Apart from a handful of rocky years, we’ve generally been able to enjoy a cocktail and amusing conversations. He too was of the nerdy pre-gay high school group.

Then, late 80s into the 90s, it was the Brits. Biologists, postdocs and beer drinkers unparalleled. Kevin, the British version, and I had game plans and essential daily checkins on how to drink, when to drink. We always kept our eye on the ultimate prize — getting laid. If it were not for his Mephistopheles qualities, several local drummers may not have gotten laid so easily. There certainly would not have been a renaissance of balloon-animal making in pubs, bars and clubs across Cambridge, Boston and Somerville.

The new millenium brought comedy clubs into my routine. Comedy clubs have no shortage of young men willing to hang out, tell jokes, talk, people watch and drink. I couldn’t list all of the drinking buddies I met in my years of hitting Boston comedy clubs hard. And, in those years, some of the guys who shared beers were also women, proving to me I wasn’t a freak of beer-drinking nature.

Today, it’s my co-manager of our company softball team. It is insane and improper and all sorts of things that have to do with decorum for a middle-aged woman like me to hang out in a city ball park once the lights have been turned off and cradle a cold one. But, it’s a comfortable place to be with shadows of summer evenings and nostalgically remembering sporadically mispent time.

Fortuitously, as a work event was under-crowded and they opened the food and drinks up to the rank and file, my current peer-pressurer beckoned me over with an ice chilled bottle on a warm day. As others sat down, it was one of those moments on one of those days where friendship is as hard as swapping stories and reveling in simple, good times.

If I’m emotionally stunted and shallow, at least I find time to unwind. Isn’t that what friends are for?

 

 

Nothing much to say really

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So the point is to reawaken my enjoyment of writing.

How I miss those wild west days of explaining what a ‘blog is. At this glorious time in history, we have reached saturation. Now, almost, the only polite reply is a resigned, “Oh, you have a ‘blog,” said with the vim and élan of “Oh, I think there’s something hanging from your nose.”

Sigh.

In the current age where everyone is a writer, commenter, curator, I am a member of the great internet unwashed.

Actually, i tend to still have hope. I tend to still fine this stuff interesting. How the fuck other than the internet could there be worldwide awareness of a beleaguered grandmother and bus monitor. Karen Klein, a newly minted half-a-millionaire, cried on the bus and the world cried with her, and tossed in a few bucks while they were at it.

Imagine what the intertubes could have done for Rosa Parks.

Through the wonders of modern binary code, I could virtually meet up and submit a story to a veritable stranger about smoking and death, at least one of my favorite topics. Only to find out that the editor not only is into death herself, but she writes about life, end of life and a smidge of afterlife, all of which factored into my little submission.

Whatever causes the human brain to pick up on coincidence and synchronicity, advances exponentially on the web, and how fun can that be.

So, I write to amuse myself. I write, because it’s maybe the only thing at which I feel full on competent (‘cuz I can whip up the correct usage of shit like “at which.”) And, I write, because maybe some fucking day, some other stranger out there will read and understand.

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.

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.

M. and an Impala

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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.