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New Year in too long on the planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am a sumo wrestler.

I am Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It ought to be a holiday

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

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

So, another anniversary rolls around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

;

When I’m 64 or more

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I help manage one of the worst company softball teams to ever don cleats (well that one guy) or drink a beer at a park after a game. Actually, right now we are in our winningest season, number 2 in the co-ed D League. I ought to thank Facebook, since one of our last wins were some sore losers associated with that bit of the interwebs, who showed up two women short of the required number and cried about their forfeit.

Still and all, we are not good in terms of softball. Some players are athletes, but not so much ever having played team sports. Runners and racquetball players, more like. Others aren't from one of your ball-playing countries, or more correctly the ball they know looks like this one:

The best thing about the team is the people, as the cliche would go. But, seriously, here it's not the awesomeness of people, it's the awesomeness of how surreal the collection is. Hands down, the most enthusiastic player is post-retirement age, like he's already essentially retired from two careers that by anyone's definition were top of the line, top of his field, moving and shaking all over the place. Although, he never will actually retire, I bet.
If I said what his past gigs were here, you could Google him the hell up and say to yourself, “What? He's your teammate?” You'd be like “Seriously, dee-rob, what the fucking fuckety fuck. Why is he hanging with riffraff like you?” You'd say that. I know it, even if you ain't never dropped no F-bomb or said riffraff in your life.
He's so enthusiastic that he regularly shames all us more regular, slacker company softball types into practice. The kind of practice that pisses off Allen Iverson, son.

We practiced. Yesterday, high noon, lunch time, middle of the day, straight up on the old sundial, the clear sky pounded 80-plus degree heat on our backs and faces.

The coach tossed a bag of balls at our waiting bats, and we all critiqued the swing and stance into the required poetry of solid contact. Then we switched up. I lobbed balls to the coach, and he simulated dingers and pop ups into the waiting hands of the fielders who mostly stopped the momentum of rolling balls by any means possible, trying to stave off an imaginary, error-caused triple and relay the ball into the infield.

“Mister, you have an water?” A woman passed with a ragged mop of a dog close behind. Despite the heat, we had none and admitted as much.

More of a pointer than a helper, I directed her to the nearby municipal park municipal bathroom. We got back down to the business of ball playing.

Minutes passed, and she came back into view from alongside the restroom facilities.

“Mister. Hey Mister, I think I need some help.”

A natural-born leader the coach trotted up to her, while I strolled with a little less purpose and the fielders mosied. “I think maybe I have sunstroke, or something,” the very pale and shaky-looking woman stammered, and just as I was walking up trusty cellphone at the ready, she was denying the need for 911.

She stallingly, unsure and worried not trusting her brain and recall, gave me the number of what she hoped was her husband's iPhone number, while explaining that he always had it with him and even stood in line for the latest one, no doubt in the first ever Apple store just up the street. I got his voicemail.

Right about then, I took a closer look. This woman wasn't young. She was well past getting an AARP card, definitely in the Medicare pool, and quite possibly had already eased into the “seniors ride for free zone.“

We sat her in the shade of a tree, the coach grabbed an empty plastic cup from his truck, a leftover from a recent post-game tailgate, filled it up with water, and she drank it down. The color started to return to her face, as we waited to hear back from her husband.

At that point, apparently deciding it wasn't life threatening, the coach and the enthusiast start smacking a few more balls out into the field. I hovered nervously, ready to dial 911, and hoping the woman's husband might actually call back.

At almost the top of the hour, we packed up our gear, and chivalrously the enthusiast who urged us onto the field that day, drove home the sun-addled woman and her hairball dog. The verdict by email a bit later, “she was OK, but she has a smelly dog.”

Many hours later her husband did call me back. Without thanks or worry to my message about his wife being sick, he had that puzzled greeting of the caller ID age “Um, ah, someone called me from this number and left a message.”

A brief explanation from me, and all I got was a “She must be fine, she's sleeping.”

I resisted the urge with every fiber and might to not reply, “Better check her pulse.”

 

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?

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.

Trying to get back on the horse, or some other cliche

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I’ve been mildly and definitely unhealthily obsessed with one person recently. Mostly because she’s an idiot, or boring, or possibly worst of all, both.  
 
I like to play a game in my head — would you rather be stupid or boring? I’ve always wanted to be stupid. Many people might say I have undoubtedly succeeded in that goal.  
 
Imagine the happiness of always living up to people’s expectations, given that they don’t expect much. But, boring, dull, plodding, conventional, plain, run-of-the-mill? Where’s the fun in that?  
  
My obsession has extorted me to act more “normal.” Apart from having my itty bitty feelings hurt, seriously, I did, I kind of just wanted to punch her. It’s a curse, I think, that mainstream folks who meet me feel compelled to give me solid advice like be more normal. Apart from missing the obvious note that I don’t have any desire to be like them, they want me in their camp.  
 
Why? I can’t imagine. I’d truly be a shitty foot soldier in their regimental army.  
 
I had an epiphany brought on this week not just by the woman over whom I obsess, but an equal character who was giving M. unsolicited advice. The aha moment was that a lot of people around our age suck. They suck in a very specific, very boring way.  
  
Here’s the breakdown. 20 year olds, your average young adult set, know how to have fun. Pretty much, drinking, fucking, eating when theyre hungry, getting their first apartments, hanging out, learning how shit works. They are annoying as fuck, because they think they have a lot of answers that they in fact don’t, but they got the fun part down or at least know how to try new things.  
 
Early, mid-30 somethings are maybe a sweet spot. The douchebaggery of 20+ has mellowed, but the going out on a Thursday night, because that’s when the weekend starts, or renting a vacation cabin with relative strangers is still doable. Plus, by then with a tad more security and disposable income, there are many more fun things to do.  
  
And, the seniors, so fucking many of them now are partying it up like life really does begin at 60. I know someone who got her first tattoo at 65. Other folks are taking college classes, traveling, selling the family homestead to keep it light and flexible. I’ve had some great conversations that basically have the subtext of fuck it, I’m old, it’s now or never and let the assholes judge.  
 
What’s missing in that chronology are my peers — lets say maybe hovering around 40 on up to 50 something. Sweet Jesus on a Popsicle stick, we, as a demographic, suck.  
 
The object of my obsession fits neatly in the group. She has a list of foods longer than Wilt Chamberlain’s dick plus another 7 feet that she can’t eat. They are fattening, bad for you, too inorganic, stomach upsetting, have too many ingredients, weird, unknown, new, contain alcohol, cholesterol, fat, sugar, chemical additives, and are gassy, bloated, rich, poor, and just out and out bad. The only thing safe is salad – no dressing – and a cracker washed down with water no ice. Followed by a sliver so narrow of dark chocolate that more calories are burnt in the shaving of the morsel than gained in the eating. Further calories are burnt in the endless recriminations and self-flagellation for tempting the fat fates with such a taste.  
 
I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about someone else’s food hang ups, but by god I wish those people so obsessed would shut the fuck up about it. You know what I don’t need when I’m grabbing an afternoon Diet Coke and M&Ms? Someone reminding me I’m going to die.  
  
 
Better yet, maybe with the bloat and the chemicals, I’m actually puffed up enough like a marshamallow that I’m not as wrinkled as the sour pusses of my peers. Chemical preservatives keep me young. That and the blood of virgins.  
 
I guess the whole point is, why are the miserable, dull folks in the world trying to enlist? They should all stay home and frown over a careful, tepid broiled chicken breast. It leaves more for me and my kind to enjoy