I blinked

Four Denizens in various states of excitement, denial, and disgust were loaded up and disbursed to their various schools Tuesday morning.

I blinked, and summer vacation is over.

I blinked, and May became August.

I blinked, and my baby became a sixth grader. And my eldest a high school senior. HOW is this possible?!

…omg…in nine short months my baby is going to be a LEGAL! ADULT!

{…crawls into box, shuts flap…not happening, not happening, not happening…}

Sigh.

Time is playing a nasty trick on me these last few years. On the one hand, the individual days often feel interminable; each 24-hour period seems to take fifty hours or more to actually happen, you know?

But at the same time, the daily grind lulls me into a kind of timeless state; each day blurs into the next, simultaneously interminable and yet on the whole going by so damned fast that I am constantly feeling this way. Is it Monday, or Thursday? Wait, it’s Friday already? WAIT. How can it be AUGUST already?! What happened to July? Or JUNE, for that matter?!

Because all I did was blink, and spring became summer became almost-fall.

…all I did…was blink…

Amazon: At the corner of ‘shut up and take my money’ and ‘lol, really?’

So, this is a thing: the Amazon Dash button, which you can stick on the wall next to your toilet paper dispenser and, when you find yourself running short, you hit the button and boom – more {specific brand you chose} TP is on the way.

It’s not an early April Fool’s gag.

It’s an actual thing.

And the ‘Amazon Fresh’ version of it is even scarier, because you can talk to it, like, say, “Apples” and the thing will add apples to your Amazon fresh order. Or scan the barcode from that empty box of Oreos that some treacherous blasphemer emptied when you weren’t looking – bang! Done. Fresh box of Oreos is a go, people.

I know, right?! Holy computerized enabling, Batman!

I feel as though I should be outraged. That I should be dragging out my soapbox and climbing up onto it to deliver a scathing sermon about the dangers and costs and blah blah blah…

…but instead, I swear, it’s like I want to just start screaming “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY!!!” while clicking wildly on the ‘invite me!’ button. Invite me, damn you – INVITE ME NOW! NOW! I NEED THIS, I NEEEEEEEEEED IIIIIIIIIIIT…!

Fortunately, the Amazon Fresh service isn’t available in my area. The single-product-button one doesn’t really trip much emotion inside me, but that Fresh one…yikes.

I can totally see myself sitting here at my desk all day long…and alllllllllll those times throughout the day when I’m working and my brain decides that right now, in the middle of all these work-crises, is the perfect time to go, “oh, hey, psssssssst! you needed {crackers, some specific cheese or other, eggs, milk, crème fraiche, etc. etc. etc.} for that thing you were going to do…”, I’d be grabbing that beautiful little enabler and barking, “Water crackers! Weird cheese, the kind with the little holes, not Swiss cheese, that other holey-cheese! Eggs! Crème fraiche…CREM. FRESH. No. Delete. CERRRRR-REM…FRAAAAAAAAA-ESH. DAMMIT. NO, NOT ‘DAIMLER’, DON’T YOU SEND ME A CAR, AMAZON!!…ooooooo…that…is…is that…a convertible?!…”

…and that would be how I ended up with a brand! new! car!!

(Boom. Next day shipping, y’all. They could probably just drop it into the same box they use for paper towels. I think it would actually fit.)

Anyway, for now, seeing as how the version of this dash-thing that I’m very much intrigued by is straight-up not available in my area, well…I have a free pass on having to actually use willpower to resist this siren’s call.

And, thanks to my geographically-challenged location, I probably have plenty of time to fashion tinfoil hats for myself to ward off the mind control that is clearly in play here.

Not that I will.

Because I remain intrigued by the concept, unsure whether it will be the trumpet fanfare ushering in a new era of copious free time and carefree living, or knells of the cracked bell ringing in our inevitable descent into dystopian doom, wherein our too-many belongings silently and wirelessly order the parts they need to assemble their armies and take us out.

Eh, could go either way, I suppose.

In either case, we do live in fascinating, changing, amazing times, don’t we?

Just TALK to this little token, and FOOD will be sent to your house.

What a world, what a terrifying, amazing, messed-up-but-with-potential-fast-tracks-for-improving world we are building for ourselves, with every passing day…

What EVERYTHING is doing to my brain

It’s funny how you can instinctively know something, and yet dismiss that innate wisdom as being some combination of impractical or not particularly do-able because of {convoluted reasoning that in hindsight is not so rock solid as you initially believed}.

Or say to yourself, oh pooh, you’re all up in arms over something that probably isn’t even a THING.

And you’ll convince yourself of this for the longest time, until somebody does a study that convinces you otherwise. At which point you can proudly say, “I knew it!” and claim to have had this information since long before it was, you know, out there.

Humans. We’re an odd lot.

For a rather long time, I’ve been finding myself less and less able to cope with something that is a fairly inescapable part of my daily life, both at home and (increasingly) at work: Constant input from multiple sources. Noise. Car horns. Train announcements. Blaring music. Conversations shouted over the general noise. Phones ringing. Researching five things at once. Getting sidetracked down rabbit holes while trying to figure out why something did what it did, even though it really doesn’t matter because we’ll never know why, it was a thing that happened because of other things, none of which are there anymore – so it’s like trying to recreate the exact shape and hue of a rainbow from last week’s storm so that we can force it to always have that exact shape and hue. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the guy next to you is watching Netflix on their phone without earbuds. Crying babies. Crying executives.

Kids hawking things on the sidewalk between the BART station and the office. Krispy Kremes, treat your coworkers, only $600 a box, IT’S A FUNDRAISER, DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT {cause du jour}?! We’re really trying to earn enough money to SAVE THE WORLD here…

Take a survey. Answer my email. I left a voice message. Instant messages. Instant messages asking if they can call you ‘real quick’ – which comes through as your phone is already starting to ring. Hey, pay attention to ME. Like, RIGHT NOW. Right now right now right now DROP EVERYTHING AND DEAL WITH ME AND MY STUFF, RIGHT NOW.

All day, all night.

The only tool I have to defend against it…is a set of headphones, through which I pump yet more noise and/or input into myself. Over the top of the Other Noise. Drowning it out with different noise, which (I tell myself) is better noise because it is as least noise of MY choosing.

I’ve been noticing lately that I have less and less resilience around it, too. As if when I get up in the morning, I haven’t recharged my batteries or repaired my armor – instead, I’m instantly just as exhausted, irritable and otherwise frustrated when the very first offense occurs as I was when I finally sloughed off the last of the one more things from the night before so I could crawl into bed.

And I’ve been plagued, day and night, with that vague feeling that I’ve forgotten something. That there is something looming over me. A check I didn’t deposit? A bill I didn’t pay? A form languishing at the bottom of a drawer somewhere? Left the milk out? Batteries?

And I was right. Over and over and over again, I’d run nose-first into a wall completely covered with a Technicolor mural of the thing I’d forgotten. The obvious thing, the thing I totally knew I had to do, or deal with, or move from here to there.

But somehow, forgot until that very moment. DAMN IT.

And I’ve been thinking to myself that the thing that is killing me is that complete inability to actually get some peace and @^*&@ing quiet; to get a little solitude, a break from the constant nattering and nagging, to have even fifteen minutes in a given day that wasn’t interrupted by somebody slamming against my door screaming that they neeeeeed something.

The constant flood of distractions, all of them claiming – vigorously – to be vital, important, super-urgent.

All of them wrong.

And then I learned that there is a book I need to read: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. The focus, obviously, is on the Google-effect – or rather, the email => Google => Facebook => YouTube => Google => Facebook => FailBlog => email => Twitter => GoogleTwitterFacebookWikipediaGoogleGoogleGoogle effect.

Y’all know what I’m talking about, right?

And this little video puts into words exactly what I’d been sensing was happening to me – but couldn’t prove or put into words myself very well.

This is what I’m up against; now, can somebody like me, who is easily distracted to begin with and “eats” information like an out-of-control sugarholic at an all-you-can-eat cake stand, actually do something about it, even if they know what they need to do to help themselves not lose their ever-lovin’ minds any more than they already have?

I have no idea. But I think I’d better make a strong effort at it, or I’m afraid I really am going to lose what little brain I have left.

Watching the space

Several months ago, a tired, run-down and empty building put brown paper over all the windows, hiding its plans from the outside world. A sign went up that said, simply, Watch This Space.

Almost every day since then, I’ve stopped at some point during my daily grind to stare at it. Sometimes there were rustlings behind the paper. I’ve never seen a person come or go, but sometimes I hear them moving around in there, scraping sounds that could be furniture…or somebody applying drywall…or…something…

Sometimes, the door is cracked open and I can peek inside and see…well, not much, really. Paint brushes on top of closed cans; a floor covered with neatly taped newspaper; ladders leaning against walls and looking oddly abandoned; that kind of thing.

Watch This Space, the sign confidently says.

So I watch. I watch, and wait, and wonder what it will be. When it will be.

Some days, I’m sure it will soon be something amazing; I think of the miracles fresh paint and carpet can bring about, how the application of human ingenuity and affection can breathe such life into mere things, and I look at the brown paper and the Watch This Space sign and envision Boutique d’Awesome, which will have more amazing, almost magical things than can I can imagine.

Other days, I find my attitude to be a bit less sunny. I stare at the motionless place, the hasn’t-actually-changed-in-all-this-time building on the run-down street in this economically depressed town and find myself certain that whatever it was going to be, whatever it thought it was going to become…it hasn’t got a prayer. It’s going to just stay nothing, forever.

 It’s just going to stay like this, promising…well, promising nothing.

 An instruction to “watch this space” doesn’t actually promise a damn thing, come right down to it. Shoot, could just be a big old joke, you know? Let’s pretend we’re going to come up with something GRAND, and see how long we can keep people stopping to see if it’s there yet, hahahaha!

And then I’m rather annoyed, because I feel like I’ve been played.

Except that the next day, or the day after that…well…I’d swear I heard something that might have been somebody installing…ovens? Or moving a piano? An Irish accent, or the chime of crystal.

Definitely there’s…something…coming soon…probably…maybe…

So I keep watching the space. Maybe today. Or tomorrow. Or next month. Almost certainly by second quarter this year, don’t you think?

Sure.

It’s probably pretty close to ready. Almost has to be.

I just need to…be patient. Give it the time it clearly needs. Have a little faith.

A little trust.

Except, it’s taking longer than I’m used to waiting.

And I don’t like that empty building. It’s creepy, and unnatural. And…kind of sad, too. Like it wants to be something glamorous, or meaningful, or useful, or…something.

Something that bustles, instead of just sitting there trying to work up the energy to finish what it started.

It wouldn’t bug me so much if it weren’t my own mind I’m talking about here. Which has been just kind of…sitting there for about three months longer than forever, insincerely muttering “…working on it…” at me every time I’ve asked how things were going, whether it had anything, you know, to share with the class.

It really does feel like I’m a run-down building trapped in some kind of infinite loop of any second now, I’m going to have a “ta-da!” moment, and then you’ll see, I’m pretty sure whatever-it-is that I’m trying to finish coming up with is going to be pretty cool, and you’ll be, like, WOW, and I’ll be, like, I KNOW, RIGHT?! and then…we’ll be HAPPY and BUSY and ENERGETIC again, instead of this weird, tired, EMPTY, I-just-wanna-siddown-and-stare-at-something-that-doesn’t-WANT-anything-from-me thing…

It doesn’t even have the decency to be something dramatic like depression, or significant psychological event, or anything else I could, with a straight face, use as an excuse for the overall meh-ness I’ve been exhibiting for a while now.

OH no. It’s nothing new, it’s nothing meaningful…arguably, it’s even a good thing, a part of a natural cycle of feast-and-famine that puts me in a state of (sorta) rest.

I’m usually a person who can find ways to complicate her life without even trying, and be convinced that it’s a hundred kinds of awesome. But every so often, for no apparent reason, well, my little ship rushes headlong into the doldrums and the sails go pfffffffffth*flutter*flop and, well…there I am. Stuck. Sitting there. Rocking on becalmed seas, waiting for a breeze that feels like it will never come.

I never see it coming. It always bewilders me. No matter how many times it has happened to me throughout my life, I always find myself dumbstruck by its advent. What the…?! Whaddya mean, ‘Don’t know, don’t care, don’t wanna, leave me alone, I’m tired’?! C’mon, let’s do…SOMETHING! Let’s…make…maybe we could…you know what would be cool? Huh? you know what would…c’mon, work with me here, I can’t finish that sentence without you, Creativity, let’s go, OFF the bench…c’mon!...HERE we go…!

And it’ll make a half-hearted effort, rustle some papers around, get out the brushes and the cans of paint, set a ladder against the wall, point at a few items that might do with a makeover…and then while I’m not looking, it just waddles off to the nearest chair, plops down, and flips on a video game or starts a new anime series or buries its nose in a book and refuses to look up.

You know we REALLY need to get the seedlings started for the spring planting, right? I’ll ask.

{grunt!}

Hey. HEY. Talkin’ to you here! I was thinking of casting on a vest or something. What do you think? Maybe I could make…something…you know…vest-y…with YARN?

{shrug!}

So! Um! How about…you know that thing you were…there was, it was, like…? You wanna…?

{glare!}

…sigh…ooookayyyy, maybe not…

Now, I know how this will go down. Just when I think that this time, maybe it’s really forever; maybe I used up the very last of my energy somehow, maybe I’m just all dried up, maybe…oh perish the thought!...I have become a grownup, and this is how they are, you know, just all go to work, come home, yell about chores and homework and dishes and go to bed so we can get up and do it all again the next day…right when I’m starting to say to myself, you know, it’s probably a good thing, because, it IS rather restful, you know, this whole ‘I don’t feel like doing anything, I’m just going to sit here and do NOTHING instead’ and after all, you really SHOULD act your age, because being a goofball is a bit…ahem…well, YOU know, at YOUR AGE for heaven’s sake…you could at least PRETEND to be mature now and then…right about then, as I’m reconciling to being just kind of blah and deciding it’s just fine by me…I’ll suddenly hear myself thinking…

…ever so quietly…but oh so brightly…

…oooooooo…you know what would be COOL…?

And ten minutes later I will be happily overcomplicating my life again, up to my elbows in projects no sane person would ever undertake, complaining about things being crazy then turning right around and going, “How cool is this!” like it makes perfect sense to carve smooshed-together bars of almost-used-up soaps into blobs that look like squashed zucchinis and insisting they are ‘obviously’ walruses and such.

But until then…well…there’s really not much I can do, except believe that something is happening behind the papered-up windows and shut doors, and wait patiently to see what it is.

Watch the space, and wait for it to become a sign.

Aaaaaaaany day now…

(Seriously, any time now…NO PRESSURE OR ANYTHING, BUT, KINDA BORED OVER HERE…)

(Patience: not my strong suit)

Logic: A Case Study

Normal Human Logic: This dress is kind of itchy. Especially on the insides of my elbows and the backs of my legs. Yeah. Definitely itchy. How irritating. When I get home, I’m going to donate it to the People Against Nekkid Rhinoceroses – I don’t think it would bother THEIR skin much.

Knitter of the ‘Wool’ Faction Logic: {scratch-scratch-scratch} it’s not THAT itchy {scratch-scratch-scratch} it’s just 100% {scratch-scratch-scratch} good {scratch-scratch-scratch} REAL {scratch-scratch-scratch} honest! {scratch-scratch-scratch}  wool {scratch-scratch-scratch}

(And that logical thought process is why I hung it back up when I got home tonight instead of chucking it in the general direction of the donation box. AGAIN.)

For the record…

…I did actually take a shower before I went to work this morning. Because I know y’all have been on pins and needles, like, ALL DAY about it.

OK, probably not.

And mostly I took a shower because my eyes were practically glued shut and I thought, Maybe…if took shower I with soap of water maybe a…more wakefully alert I could attain?

Yeah, slightly slow start this morning.

IN COMPLETELY UNRELATED NEWS, guess what I had for lunch? (I know. Next, I shall share my plans for reorganizing the pantry, and perhaps also externalize my currently-internal-only debate in re: should I paint my toenails a festive color this weekend, even though I always end up wearing closed-toed shoes because they are more comfortable/practical/and besides, if the Zombpocalypse were to strike while I was at work, well, that’s a LOT of walkin’ to get back home, ya know? Possibly through broken glass. PLUS, if I have to fend off any zombies along the way and I’m wearing open-toed shoes? I’VE LOST A VERY IMPORTANT WEAPON IF I CAN’T KICK THEM OFF ME.)

Anyway! For lunch, I had onigiri. Which are Japanese rice balls. Which I’d never actually had before, which was why I went, “Hey! I’ve never had one of those, and also I love rice and have been wanting to explore more Japanese cuisine in general! I should totally get some of those today instead of continuing to haunt up and down Kearny like some kind of lost soul looking for a body to snatch or something!”

Which was what I was doing because everything I saw for lunch was some combination of meh or blech or $$!!Ouch!!$$ or I can actually feel my arteries hardening, just LOOKING at that.

And then I saw ‘Onigiri’ (which is the name of the restaurant) and then it said ‘gourmet Japanese rice balls’ and finally, my sad, aimless wandering ended.

Now, it might be that the concept of a “rice ball” sounds like yawn but it isn’t yawn because look at these things.

(The one on top is more than half eaten. The salad disappeared about four seconds after this picture was taken. Also, why do I keep forgetting that I like to snack on edamame? And also I had picked some of the fillings out of the other two because this was a brand new world to me and I was like Jack Skellington charging around Christmastown bellow-singing “WHAT’S THIS? WHAT’S THIS?! THERE’S SOMETHING IN THIS RICE! WHAT’S THIS? WHY THAT LOOKS SO UNIQUE!”)

I learned several things about these today.

One thing I learned is that I love the filing, but the seaweed wrapping was a bit…much for me, and I rather wished there were a lot less of it on these. Not only because whoa, SALTY to the point of ‘I can taste NOTHING but salt right now',’ but because of the distinctly fishy overtones.

Alas, I am still not a huge fan of seafood.

Especially if it is unmistakably seafood – you know, fishy-fish. I can handle the ‘almost-tastes-like-chicken’ fish, but the minute it becomes “flavorful” fish, I start making the blech-face.

Which saddens me no end, because I feel as though there is this enormous gaping hole in my love affair with food because of this irrational rejection of this one particular flavor.

I want to like fish. Or at least tolerate it. I do not want to gag because I accidentally got a bite of sea bass, or because somebody added fish sauce to the miso.

So from time to time, I march in and order up something with fish in it, in tones that suggest I totally know what I’m doing. And I will take my fish-product and I will jab my utensil into it with great confidence, firmly telling myself that this is going to be delicious, just look at all the happily chewing people all around me!, and then I pop the first bite into my mouth and ack, I just totally made BLECH face…!!!

And then I weep inside. So much time is being lost here…someday, I just KNOW I will stop despising fish…!

(Which I must do, because someday, I am totally going to visit Japan. And I don’t want to be insulting people everywhere I go because I didn’t know what the heck I was ordering and ended up with chunks of smoked eel in my noodles or something and then I made Blech Face like a proper Ugly American.)

ANYWAY, where was I? Oh, right. I ended up stripping off most than half of the nori, expecting that this would result in fallen-apart rice balls BUT IT DIDN’T, because the rice proved to be perfectly capable of holding itself together, thank-you-very-much.

Which leads me to something learned not by me, but by my coworkers by way of me learning something else entirely.

In case there was any doubt in their minds (…um…I don’t think there was…), my coworkers are now 100% certain that I am certifiably nuts.

Because as my too-small appetite began to run out of steam (and the fishy-salty nori got to be too much for me), I started picking apart the rice balls because…the rice…it was fascinating me.

(In my defense, I came into this with an already rather over-developed liking of rice in all its many forms – from “plain” white rice with a little soy sauce or butter [or even swimming in warmed milk with a little sugar] to the fanciest of grains, from long, slender, jet-black beautiful grown in the wilds of California to short, jolly grains of ambemohar (have you ever tried that stuff? Dog my witness, it almost tastes like mangos). It’s a bit sad, really, that for so many Americans “rice” means “white flavorless stuff, usually paired with chicken as part of a ‘healthier’ diet or some junk like that.” It’s an amazing grain with an expansive family tree, a rainbow of colors and an encyclopedia of flavors.) (IN RELATED NEWS, the Bean Festival [stop laughing!] is this weekend – my annual spasm of stocking up on harder-to-find bean varieties and [hopefully again this year] small, expensive bags of rice varieties I never heard of is upon us! Dear $DEITY, please let them have moccasin beans again because I almost cried last year when they didn’t…)

Anyway, this rice was definitely something different. It was firm, but sticky. It wasn’t mushy at all, or slimy. It looked like brown rice, but wasn’t “just” brown rice. It had a lot of the characteristics of ‘sushi’ rice, buuuuuuut, it had more character, a definite nuttiness and a sort of I am not just a starch here to make you feel full solidness – but not a jumping up and down yelling and doing battle with the sweet pickled radishes (think ‘butter pickle,’ only, with thinly shaved radishes) (which by the way were AWESOME and now I’ve decided I have to grow radishes just so I can attempt to make some myself).

AFTER QUITE A BIT OF EXPLORATORY RESEARCH, I’m pretty sure it was “gen-mai” rice.

And so are my coworkers. Because of course I shared my findings! Team Spirit and all that.

(Shortly afterward, one of them caught me ‘conducting’ the server in a vain attempt to make a bunch of stuff run faster. This passage is supposed to be vivace, you’re not even at allegro! You’re all, like, adagio and some junk! C’mon, HERE we go, and a-one, and a-two…! Which is why I now know for a FACT that my coworkers all think I am 110% nuts.) (But in a Mostly Harmless sort of way, so, that’s totally OK.)

Now. About my plans for the pantry…!

Raindrops, dry spells and a certain sad mortality

It rained on the way home tonight – an unbelievable wetness after what seemed like endless weeks of dry, pulsating heat. I felt the first fat drop on my face as I slogged from an interminable BART ride and had a moment of stark disbelief as it slowly dribbled its way down my cheek, like an unexpected tear during an NFL commercial break. Really? Here? Now?! But, WHY?!

I left the office at a quarter to four – it was ten after six by the time I made it off the train…and by the looks of the traffic from the station platform? It was gonna be a looooooooong parking-with-frequently-changing-of-position drive home from there.

Meh.

Rain danced new patterns in the dust on the car as I opened the trunk, highlighting how dirty it really is right now. Pointless to wash it until the tomato-and-corn harvest is in, though…the dust, so much dust, from the tractors in the nearby fields, or from the young man riding his motorbike on the little track right over our back fence, or from the other neighbor’s horses having an occasional go at being wild in their tightly-contained arena.

Futile, really, trying to keep the car dust-free this time of year.

Futile, like so many things are futile. A clean kitchen, matched socks put away in drawers, a year without tomatoes that were not quite ripe enough to pick, I SWEAR TO GOD THEY WEREN’T, only moments ago!, flung sodden and already molding while still on the vine into the compost, jewel-bright and defiant like sins I’m trying to forget.

Our train stopped in Lake Merritt station for going on half an hour while medical personnel were summoned to tend to a Fallen Comrade in another car…but, thankfully, not one under another car. As we sat, and sat, and continued to sit, and still not moving…as I wondered for about the third time what on earth could be taking them soooooooo long to get this poor person helped…the awful possibility slithered out from under the seat and hissed, “Hey. You know what takes a lot longer than grabbing a gurney and hauling somebody off a train? Extricating somebody’s remains from UNDER it, THAT’S what!”

My mind loves horror almost as much as my heart abhors pain. It sadistically painted the pictures for me while I squirmed and shrieked inside. Stop it, stop it, STOP IT, CHRIST-AWL-MIGHTY, ISN’T A ‘MERE’ HEART ATTACK BAD ENOUGH?!?!

I sat, and knitted, with my feet tucked neatly under the seat, a composed face with bifocals perched trimly on my nose and my hair up in that ridiculous twisty-bun-thing that looks all fancy but is actually either a case of ‘Tama is two seconds from letting out a primal scream and cutting her own hair with a box-cutter because it is pissing her off today’ or ‘Tama sort of neglected the shower part of personal hygiene yesterday [possibly due to having three daughters who can go through six thousand gallons of hot water and still be in the shower] and thinks that if she puts her hair up, nobody will notice any greasy side-effects of this.’

I must have looked like somebody’s Saintly Librarian Auntie or something, while inside I’d alternate between growing more and more annoyed with why are we not MOVING yet?! and feeling guilty for being that way. Look, Self, you think YOU’RE having a bad time of things? Somewhere very close to you, somebody is having a WAY, WAY WORSE go of it…how about a little @^*&@ing compassion, huh?!

And then I’d say a few words to $DEITY (trying very hard not to end them with and please make the medics hurry the @^*&@ up, hallelujah amen), and think I’m more evolved than that thoughts while somewhere deep inside my mind, the gremlin insisted that there could be severed limbs right under me, that very moment!

…sometimes, I hate my own mind so much I wish I could get a divorce…why will it be so determined to gross or freak me out, to be at best unkind at worst downright cruel, so cynical and uncaring, so willing to view the life going by us as if it were a movie…no reason to actually CARE, it’s just a story, after all…

Eventually, of course, the “situation” (as they like to call it over the intercom) was “controlled” and the crowded, stuffy, BO-laden train full of crabby commuters lurched back into motion.

I wondered what had happened, in that other car. Why did I want to know, anyway? Morbid curiosity? Targeted prayers?

…nah, probably the former, not the latter…and the gremlin laughed and danced and suggested all kinds of horrors that could befall a person drifting through a business-as-usual day, never suspecting that this was THE day, the day that everything changes, the day that they met with Horror in a place so mundane.

Hey, maybe this will be YOUR day, huh? MAYBE, this will be The Day that somebody falls asleep at the wheel while chewing a bagel and texting and drinking a coffee in their Chevy Subdivision and runs RIGHT over your poor little Civic, huh? Could ALWAYS be that day!

And then he laughs again, and laughs and laughs and laughs, and dredges up images from movies to help set the mood…remember that one they showed in high school, remember THAT one, with the girl and the glass from the windshield…?

Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. And that these first spasms of rain make for some of the most dangerous driving there is, as the oil and other car-ooze from summer driving combines with the water to provide a slick, traction-free surface.

Yes, I know, I know.

Odd how lacking in sensible fear I can be. Thinking these things, of high school images of broken, gouged flesh, unspeakable pain, of all the ways in which I had almost no control over whether or not this was The Day my number would come up and I would be taken out by someone I didn’t know, couldn’t avoid, possibly never even saw coming…thinking these things, I hurled my belongings into the trunk, climbed behind the wheel and began to drive.

Slightly horrified, mostly just tired, wishing I were already home, feeling oddly sad over somebody I didn’t know going through…something…that just could not have been fun, wishing that ugly part of my mind would find something else to talk about for a while.

Startled windshield wipers rattling inexpertly across the glass. Crap, you mean we hafta DO something? Already? I think we forgot HOW to get moisture off this thing…! Smearing dust-now-mud so that at first, my vision is infinitely worse than it was before they began.

Why am I not afraid right now, as I fumble for the lever that adds a splash of windshield wiper fluid to the glass, to clear away the dust-mud, to make it easier to see the other cars rocketing around me as fast as they can possibly go, all trying to get where they’re going just as soon as they can? How can I simultaneously be so aware of the fragility, the futility, the terrible delicacy of the web we call life, and how swiftly it can be blundered to pieces by the whim of fate…and yet be terrifically unconcerned about it, hurling myself directly into harm’s way without the slightest quiver, or even a moment’s hesitation?

I don’t believe I’m somehow exempt from the casual tragedies of life; and yet, I just can’t seem to work up a decent worry over them.

They are what they are. Like dry hot spells and unlooked-for rain.

And sure enough, I make it home safe and sound. My bedroom is hot, and dry, and stuffy. Huh. Funny, that…I was cold all day at work today, and rained upon on the way home, and now? I’m too hot and flicking on the fan to move the cooler air from anywhere-but-this-room into it.

The Denizens are bouncing, thundering up and down the stairs, yelling their news through the house, laughing, chattering like squirrels, young and immortal in their thoughts, unburdened by nameless, faceless sorrows that point at their wrinkles and laugh at them. You’re not getting any younger, either, by the way…aches and pains and the threat of medications with Certain Side Effects, screening for cancer and strange-but-common diseases you never heard of before the words ‘as we age’ began to be uttered during routine exams…

Rain drops and dry spells, mortality and continuity. Things beginning, things ending, things changing, things staying the same.

I suppose that’s why I can’t work up to worry. Whatever is can, and will, change…it may seem bad, it may seem good, it probably is actually neither. IT just is, and IT is not the enemy.

Only I can be the enemy, really…and I don’t want to be.

I’m too tired for that tonight, tired of thoughts that think they are being clever when actually they’re just being, well, tiresome. Like people who chastise others (at great length) for holding a wine glass “wrong,” or for not knowing the fundamental differences between avant-garde and art nouveau. Or who think they are being something special when they correct people on the proper use of some archaic word, or issue forth a lecture on the history of sushi. Oh, DO be quiet, there’s a dear…nobody cares, you daft creature, NOBODY. CARES…!

I log into the servers, check a few files that have been loading and counting and aggregating and sorting since about noon today. Ugh, no, not good enough…I create new partitions for the tables and realign the indexes to them, OK!, that’s pretty slick, test query going from 280 seconds to less-than-one, let’s see what that does for me…tradeoffs, storage, indexes, please, just, frickin’ FINISH this tonight, I’m sick half to death of LOOKING at it, of answering the same questions the same way, over and over…I can’t just make the answer BE what you want, it IS what it IS, the only thing that changes it is some NEW input, some NEW variable, something like THIS, done by somebody like ME who knows what the h-e-double-toothpicks I’m even TALKING about right now…

Finally, counts are climbing. Triumph, if only temporary…so I hit buttons that set the main job running, incrementing through the partitions one at a time, climbing inexorably upward toward finished, current day, DONE.

And then I sit and watch it for a ridiculous period of time, refreshing the watcher-query every so often. Ten thousand. Ten million. A hundred million. Twenty-seven minutes to a hundred million rows.

Yeah. That’ll do for now. That’s the first hundred million of the three billion I need to take from here and move to there, to aggregate, sum, sort, order by, NTILE, parse, package and send to military school with instructions to help them find discipline and be all they can be.

Yeah. I’m pink-elephant-seeing tired. Bed now.

Wait.

I didn’t wash my hair again, I got all caught up in the…

…eh…I’ll do it in the morning…

Enter the ubiquitous arguing with myself: You KNOW you won’t, you’ll stay in bed until The Last Second, what is WRONG with you, WHY won’t you do those sorts of things RIGHT AWAY instead of always…?

…eh, who cares, it’s not like I’m still looking for a mate…I can look more hag-like than usual, it’s hardly going to hurt my chances at scoring a trophy husband or anything…

Heh. So many things change in this world, but other things never do. I’ll never be glamorous, or able to hold onto a view that perhaps, a little extra effort in the appearance department is worth trading a little sleep for, now and then.

Plus, sarcasm.

Scruffy + Sarcasm = me in a nutshell.

Check one more time…still running fine, counts still climbing, and climbing fast. Triumph, fleeting…by this time tomorrow, some NEW disaster will have struck, some NEW problem will have arisen, something ELSE won’t be making sense, won’t be running as it should, won’t BE what we WANT it to be… 

Life is good, is it not, to give me the challenges I need to feel as though I’m living each day?

Don’t bother with me tonight, $DEITY, I’m fine, thanks…but do look in on our Fallen Comrade, will You? I suspect that’s a house that could use a kindly visit, while mine spins madly and cheerfully on like a demented top toward whatever Eternity holds for us…

Noble Achievements

Today was Cooking Day – a rather overdue excursion into What should I cook up before it goes bad?

And so it was that two dozen sandwich-shaped burger patties, two loaves of bread, about twenty lunch-sized servings of lamb and lentil soup, two dozen bagels, sixteen BBQ ham turnovers, four dozen each of four different cookies, a coconut meringue pie, a 13x9 pan of coconut bars, six dozen pancakes and four dozen waffles were born, ready to join the other turnovers, muffins, and ‘why did you make those square, aren’t they usually round?’ objects in the freezer. (Well, because. Sandwich bread, I almost always have…hamburger or hotdog buns, not so much.)

I sit here now with my feet and back complaining, fighting an impressive case of The Yawns and trying to remember that hey, all things considered, I did pretty good today.

I always feel like I should have been able to do better. I can find a dozen places where I should have started something else, should have done that first, then this…should have been working on that the day before, instead of this other thing.

It’s very annoying of me.

But at least it isn’t a particularly nasty Interior Critic. Mine is more like a cheerleader, expecting that with a little motivation, greater goals can be achieved. Yay! Go team!

A lot of folks aren’t so lucky. Their Interior Critics are downright vicious, skulking around in the shadowy corners of their minds muttering about ‘uselessness’ and ‘hopeless’ and ‘you stink.’

Mine just has…slightly inflated beliefs around exactly how much can or cannot be done by us within a given period of time. And a tendency to move the bar when I’m not looking, such that if I were to achieve next weekend what she thought I should have been able to do today, well, there will be just one or two more things she feels could have gotten done, if…

Well, I’m sure it’s true. And I’m also sure that I could get just one or two more things done this weekend, before I dive back into another working week full of deadlines and changing requirements, and trying to get things done at work in an environment where everything is broken and nobody can fix it (mostly because of an understandable terror around touching.ANYTHING!...when your whole system is prone to barfing up a hairball and dying for no apparent reason right in the middle of month-close, welllllll, I can totally understand why nobody wants anybody to tinker with things) (even though we could so TOTALLY fix it…all it would take is a little [more] time, a little [more] money, a dollop of trust and maybe a pinch of pixie dust and with a hearty hi-ho-Silver-and-away we could make all those nested transactions stop locking each other [and themselves here and there, for bonus Hilarity Points] into oblivion, can I get an amen?!, BUT…I digress).

I’m sure I could get just a few more things done tonight. Before it’s too late and today becomes yesterday and the deeds are set in the stone of what is past.

But something else I should really get done today? More sleeping. Which tends to be mutually exclusive with getting other things done. Although I suspect I’ve tried. Few other things can fully explain the oddities around the things I find around here the way “I must have been sleep-walking when I did that” can.

TO WHICH END…I am going to bed, so that I can accomplish more sleeping.

WOOOOOO! WAY TO OVERACHIEVE, ME! (<= desperate times call for desperate measures…let us make of sleeping a Noble Cause, and strive for ever more nobility…)

Kindred (anonymous) spirits

I was directed to a little piece called Storytelling on the San Joaquin County Office of Education website, which begins thus:

I have been accused, anonymously no less, of not being able to make a point without telling a story. This accusation is supposedly based upon my previous Outlook articles. This is totally inaccurate and I am actually offended by the accusation.

And it then goes on to…tell a few stories. Because of course it does.

I snickered so hard I almost hurt myself. And then I wished I could call the guy up and say, “Dude. C’mon over for a beer or something. You’re my people, bro!”

Because, well. Y’all know how I am. I can’t even tell you what time it is without doing it in parable form somehow.

Mostly that would be because I like stories personally. I like to observe things around me. I like to focus in on something tiny and commonplace and make a story out of it; I like to notice the weird things, the gloriously red-headed, the magnificently out of step. I like to make of my daily life the stuff of novels – even though in point of fact, my life is only slightly less ordinary than Everybody, and a lot more ordinary than many, many others.

I like to have fun with the words, to see if I can’t paint a picture with them that recreate in the listener’s mind the thing I was seeing.

Which I also feel is a good skill to have, for someone who can’t draw a line even if given a ruler and whose most focused, dedicated attempts at art class resulted in the teacher sighing sadly and announcing that she had never, no never, had a student who could not be taught before now…(yeah, that was an awesome day at school)

Stories also can teach hard things very gently. Let’s face it, a lot of what I have to teach isn’t very fun. It’s a combination of hard work, restraint, more hard work, and how about a little extra work while we’re at it?

We don’t like that truth. I don’t like it one bit. I always want to equivocate, when these sorts of Facts are glaring at me from under the bed at night with those big, red-rimmed yellow eyeballs. Above venom-dripping fangs. And a nametag that reads, “Hi, my name is Bob! Ask me about life insurance!” {shrieks in horror}

And I will definitely start tuning it out when somebody walks up and says, “Hey, if you wanted to get X, you need to Step 1, then Step 2, and then Step 3.”

And then, having tuned them out pretty well…I’ll proceed to the forgetting stage. What was the second part again? Wait, first you…wait, what was the first part…? OH WELL.

…maybe a nice $6 latte from SuperMegaCoffee.com will help me remember what it was I was supposed to do in Step 1…

But stories on the other hand…I like to use them when I’m trying to teach things because lessons are boring prone to being a hint on the accusatory and/or bossy side. YOU should, YOU ought to, YOU need to, YOU shouldn’t, YOU mustn’t.

Stories, on the other hand, don’t generally accuse the listener of anything directly; the story may sit a little uncomfortably when it touches too close to home, granted, but at the same time…I’m not saying you should, you need to, and if you don’t, these Terrible Things™ will befall you.

Instead, here’s a story about this thing that happened to somebody. (Probably me.) (Because when it comes to stories about doin’ it all wrong, HA! I win, baby!!)

Stories lead gently down the path. They make the lesson obvious without slapping anybody upside the head with it. They have a wonderful way of sticking long after we’ve all gone our respective ways – unlike most traditional lessons, which have a way of evaporating from our brains five seconds after the final exam.

Sometimes, stories will even do this miraculous thing where, months or years later, having merely been entertained by it at the moment all that time ago and not having thought of it even once since…you suddenly have a need for that particular story’s lesson.

And then, after having hidden silently in the back of your mind for all that time, it surfaces and presents the words, the thoughts, the feelings, the light and scent of fresh air, to lead you out of the darkness.

Sometimes, my loved ones become a little (cough-cough) annoyed by my habit of answering even a simple question with something that just about begins with once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived an earnest and hardworking shoemaker who had but one child…

And I frequently do have to bring myself up short in normal day to day conversations, when I catch myself about to launch into some possibly amusing but definitely way too long monologue about said shoemaker’s child (or whatever).

And yeah, I’ve even been accused of not being able to make a point without dragging a story into it.

But I humbly submit to The Tribe the following: My point was remembered for a long time afterwards by most of the people listening.

Was yours?

Checkmate, Mr. Just State The Facts. Check and mate.

Lady Bast...

…please welcome Dharma to your realm tonight, and give her a place of honor there. She was as fine a cat as any that ever lived, an example for kittens with eyes yet unopened to wonder upon.

She commanded reverence and respect from her humans. The phrase “I’m catted” was well understood as reason enough to not do anything - after all, to get up would disturb her regal repose.

She got what she wanted by whatever means were necessary; through cunning or charm, as suited the situation. She would act the adorable buffoon for ham, or creep behind distracted humans to lick ice cream left unattended. Who has been licking at my ice cream?! Not I, said the cat.


She fiercely protected what was her own. Invading cats would find themselves most severely hissed and gesticulated at through the sliding glass door, and would run with ears flat to their heads from her wild, would-be attack.

She loved her humans, poor bumbling things. She bestowed upon us her grace and benevolence, and made the house warm with the sound of purring and meowing.

She bore her final days bravely. True to the ways of her kind, she hid her suffering well – and she fought, she fought with the heart of a lioness, to the very last of her strength and beyond it.

The honor and love she earned in this house will never fade.

Please welcome her now, Lady, and give her honor in your house.

She was as fine a cat as ever lived, an example for kittens with eyes yet unopened to wonder upon.

{censored}

A long time ago, in a random place that had nothing to do with bloggers, blogging, or indeed any form of writing whatsoever, someone asked me if I censored myself on this blog.

“Oh, @^*&@ no!” I replied.

But this was, of course, a bald-faced lie. I mean, just look at the ‘@’, people.

Oh yeah. I censor.

I write a lot more than I post. Most of the time, it ends up in Blog Purgatory because I don’t finish it – Life happens, and time passes, and I can’t remember where I thought I was going with this odd rambling thing about…hmm. Well. I assume it was about something.

But other times, it never gets read by anyone else because it’s angry-writing. Unkind rants about my fellow creatures, blistering critiques of the latest political nonsense, a dissection of the lunacy from the latest pamphlet left on my door by well-intentioned $DEITY-worshippers who feel that I would be an awesome fit to the congregation because who doesn’t think celery IS god? Huh? HUH? AM I RIGHT?!?!

Other times, I’m just whining about something…and then I look at what I’ve written and I think, YA KNOW…some well-intentioned soul is going to ask you if you’ve ever tried {something that comes up in the first five Google pages when you search on the condition}.

And then I’m going to write one of those angry things that I never post. “Thank goodness you’re here, Captain Obvious! You’ve saved the village!!”

The neat thing about writing, though, is that unlike a word that has been spoken where there were ears to hear it, I have the ability to review what I’m about to say in writing and go, “Sigh…I don’t really mean that, not at all…” {delete-delete-delete}

…and thus it is that sometimes, there are seemingly weeks between posts around here…

…which, of course, leads me to feel as though I am cheating somehow.

In real life, I frequently don’t use @^*&@ when I mean to say…well…that other word. Which I don’t put on my blog, because every-so-not-very-often, The Lady My Mother reads it. And being as she is pure as the driven snow, she would surely swoon if she saw the word rhymes-with-spit on here.

Because Lords Knows she herself has never used such a word, yea verily, never once.

Ahem.

Aaaaanyway…in real life, I frequently use words I shouldn’t. I can be snarky and sarcastic, too. I sometimes hear myself say something and think, Um…dude? That was a little…over the top, doancha think?!

I mean, I’m not particularly confrontational; I try to stop myself when I’m about to go off on some wild-eyed rant and run it through the “is it helpful, is it kind, is it true” filter before I fire all cannons.

But every so often, one will let loose; I’ll say something hurtful, or even hateful…or thoughtlessly cruel…and only after the words have left my mouth and settled into the ears of others does my brain-mouth processing kick in and go, “Oh, um? Actually? That last one was not helpful, or kind, or even true…yeah, let’s not say that…oh…too late, huh?…uhhhhh…sorry, my bad…”

In real life…I have bad days. Ugly, shamefully self-absorbed, mean-spirited, angry, tired, limping days. And on those days…I basically say, “I don’t wanna talk about it!”

It’s like the difference between what I really want, and something that just catches my fancy at the moment.

If you go window shopping with me, man, my eye is caught by everything. I’m like a crow – if it’s sparkly, I’ve got my face pressed up against the window and I’m going, “oooooOOOOOOO! Lookit! Lookit the Thing!! It haz apps!!!!”

But what I really want is that glorious freedom…the ability to choose whether I will or won’t “have” to get up tomorrow at Wicked O’Clock to resume the madness in exchange for a paycheck; I want it more than all the apps there are, or ever will be.

What I really want is for the world to have more love, laughter and light in it. I want people to find their own Happy – and I want other people to just enjoy that they are happy, instead of trying to force them to be happy in a different way.

Because there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to what is a happy life. What makes me happy isn’t necessarily what makes you happy; what I can do easily isn’t necessarily easy for others, and what others find easy frequently makes me go, “@^*&@, girl, how do you do that?!?!”

I want to enjoy my time among them.

Not be pissy, tired, angry, desperate for soli-frickin-tude, snarky, short-tempered and otherwise you kids get offa mah lawn!!!!

So in the same way that I’ll stare longingly at the tablets and app-store offerings, the fancy dresses I know I’ll never wear (but secretly wish I was the kind of woman who would), the services I’d appreciate and conveniences that would give me more time to enjoy the apps in the first place…and then stick with getting only what I actually need…

…I’ll write something angry, or bitter, or mean…and walk away from it…and stick with what I really want life to be made of: the things that are funny, and/or kind, and/or helpful.

And try to make the words I speak do the same.

And thus shall I fake it until I make it what I want it to be.

Hallelujah, amen.

...and THIS is why I can't quite manage pessimism...

This is classic "my life," right here. Every time I start working myself into a proper funk over something, life likes to do this...it's cold outside and I'm so damned tired, I want coffee (hey, didn't I *just* redeem $25 onto that Starbucks card?) and sure, but I'm still kinda (ooooooh, hey, Godiva, May 31, WAIT! did I get my free monthly chocolate for May yet NO I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT I HAVE!) (sharp LEFT)

Oh well. Career as an emo, *blighted* beyond all hope...guess I'll just have to soldier on, enjoy my chocolate and my coffee and my bonus knitting time as a hopeless optimist...

Not that I'm counting, but...

Statistically-speaking, I have roughly 312,816 hours left with this particular incarnation. And 233,256 hours of working life ahead of me. I should have increasingly-less dependent, yet nevertheless constantly underfoot Denizens around for another 129,888 hours or so. I have another 32 hours of work-for-paycheck to go this week...1777 hours altogether for this contract.

Whole lotta time right there.

And yet...finding the guesstimated 2.8 hours left to finish the knitted-on border for this shawl...seems...challenging.

Ah, time. Such an abundant kind of scarcity...

Crack-BOOM!

I was just packing it in on the old work day when a tremendous BOOOM! rattled the windows and I said to myself, “…wait…was that thunder?”

Friends…this morning, it was a balmy, clear day. Cool, but not cold. Hint of fall, but still summery. And then, just as I was getting ready to head out for Denizen pickup, it started to thunder, and far, far away I could see little flashes of lightning.

I hadn’t gotten two blocks when the water began to come down from the heavens in buckets. It rained cats. It rained dogs. It rained chickens and antelopes. It rained as if it meant it, big fat juicy drops that almost hurt when they hit exposed skin.

The streets filled up fast. Lakes began to form. Driving to get the kids, I could barely see where I was going. Other drivers were apparently unaware of the situation, and were driving like complete nuckin’ idiots they could actually see the road.

Frequently, they would hit roadside lakes at full speed, sending up huge plumes of water from their startled wheel wells.

I got soaked just dashing from the van into the center. And then got double soaked getting back to the van, trying to keep Captain Adventure from rolling in the mud like a happy little pig, trying to keep Boo Bug from dawdling, trying to keep Danger Mouse from pulling out papers from her backpack to show me. Seriously, you are getting SOAKED, in the RAIN…not a good time for paperwork, babe…

I drove home with my senses tingling, white-knuckled and tense, as lightning flashed around us, as the streets got less and less passable, as earth that has forgotten what water even is did its best to deal with the sudden onslaught, as storm drains that had nodded off while waiting through the long, lonely summer awoke to find themselves overrun, trying to remember their training, trying not to panic as the water surged into them…OK! Ya! So, uh, keep it, erm, moving, people! Small molecules first! HEY, NO TREE BRANCHES!!

The lightning began to get closer, and closer, and closer. The crack-boom were nearly instantaneous, the light bright enough to hurt my eyes, the closeness of it setting off the instinct to get out of there.

The lizard in my brain sensed a predator, y’all. A big, invisible monster that was going to nail us if we hung around. {Crack!...Boom!} … {Crack!..Boom!} … {Crack!.Boom!.Crack!BOOM!CRACK!BOOM!!!!}

And behind me, cacophony. Captain Adventure screamed with laughter each time there was a sizzling crack and thunderous boom. Danger Mouse was yelling some complicated story or question or something. Boo Bug laughed with her brother at first, then realized she was missing a prime opportunity for whimpering and switched over to that.

Then we got home, and being the meanest mommy ever I herded them all indoors away from the fun of swimming in their very own front yard…and the lightening, which continued to slash around us from all directions like a demented disco ball.

I watched in amazement as the front planter box filled, and overflowed, and began to crawl up the porch. I watched our court fill, the water puddling and pooling, sending questing fingers all along the curb, looking for a way out of the concrete trap it had fallen into.

I watched a car on the access street hit a new-formed lake at what seemed like about thirty miles an hour, a wall of water shooting up all around it, watched it slip and slide and spin a quarter of the way around, wincing in anticipation of metal on metal, praying it would somehow not crunch sickeningly into the parked cars lining the street…and it didn’t. It collected itself and proceeded onward down the street, perhaps just a little more cautiously now.

And then the rain began to slow. Less than an hour into the storm, the drops lost their rotund shape, the pace began to slacken. The thunder still boomed and the lightning still cracked, but it was moving away, further and further away. The crack and the boom were separating again, one-alligator-two-alligator-three-alligator-four. Four miles now, now five, now six.

Now silent.

The ferocity of the rain tapered down and down and down, until it was barely more than a heavy misting, falling daintily all around.

The water receded, as fast as it had pooled. The pond growing on my doorstep that I’d been eyeballing nervously for ten minutes stopped its attempted conquest of the front door and crept quietly back into the lawn, sank into the thirsty ground…vanished.

The pavement of the court appeared again. The rippling lake was gone, gone as if it had never been there, gone into the drains, into the ground…gone, leaving us staring and blinking and wondering if we just imagined the rising waters, the pelting rain, the drops the size of a quarter…

Mother Nature Says: It’s Fall. And don’t you forget it! {crack-BOOM!}

Endurance

Sometimes, it seems as though my whole life is one big old marathon, as if absolutely everything about it comes down to enduring.

Sometimes, it is kind of irritating.

Sometimes, I find myself wondering why something can’t just once arrive in the form of instant gratification.

Why (I ask myself peevishly at such times) does everything have to require a blend of patience, hard work, perseverance, more patience, more hard work, and maybe just another heapin’ helpin’ of freakin’ patience?!

The thing that makes this question particularly irritating is that frequently, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Take today for perfect example.

I’m working from home today. And it is hot. Hot, hot, hot.

It’s a hair over 100 degrees outside today. Inside, well, that depends on where you are. This house has some of the worst air circulation imaginable; the temperature variances can be…crazy.

Downstairs hallway: 78 degrees.
Kitchen: 90 degrees.
Kids’ bathroom: 72 degrees.
Master bathroom: 95 degrees (!!)
Master bedroom a.k.a. my office: 90 degrees.

I guess when it comes to temperature I’m more like lettuce than tomatoes because I’m dying. Seriously. Dy-ING. I am sweating. I am barefoot, in shorts, sucking down lemonade by the gallon, ceiling fan whirring, floor fan buzzing (but I have to turn it off whenever I get on the phone because WHAT?! I CAN’T HEAR YOU, MY FAN IS ON!!!!!) (so naturally, today is “hey, let’s call Tama and ask about that! At great length!” day)

And here’s the corker: I’m stuck in this sweat box because I am a prisoner to network connectivity. This Satan’s Waiting Room is where the speed is, people. Sure, I could unplug, waddle off to one of the cooler spaces, and switch to my wireless card…and every query would then take twenty minutes to return and my email would be all “wait for it…waaaaaait for iiiiiiiiit…” and we shall not even begin to discuss how long it would take to upload a single Excel spreadsheet.

I can feel my hair turning gray just thinking about it.

Oh, do I have an air conditioner? Why yes, yes I do. Did we have the old funky one replaced a couple years ago during the Great Remodeling Adventure with the uber-efficient model of great air movement? Why yes! Yes we did!

So why am I sitting here sweating my arse off (alas, not literally)?

Because! I have a budget, and it requires my PG&E bill to stay under $275 – which requires that I not crank up my air conditioner just because I am (pffft!) a little hot. I would have to set the air conditioner to something like 70 to get this room cooled off to 80-something…which would still feel “too hot” and would also mean that it would just run-run-run-run-run.

Cha-ching-cha-ching-cha-ching. For PG&E, it’s like hitting the jackpot. You can stand there and watch the electric meter spinning, and actually feel all your month being sucked out of your checking account.

This is one of those moments where I find myself feeling pissy about the ‘endurance’ thing.

I’m putting up with the heat because I have a very clear budget. I have the budget because I have goals – and at this stage in my life, they’re ridiculously large. Grandiose, even. The kinds of goals that my younger self would have just stared at with her mouth hanging open before saying, “Yeaaaaaaaah, right. So, uh, good luck with that and if you need me, I’ll be over here chasing something shiny and by the way attainable…”

Sigh.

Sometimes, I really rue the day I realized that every action I take causes a ripple, that every choice I make has a consequence.

And that each “small” choice is only small in a vacuum – out in the so-called real world that is my overall life, they add up fast.

In aggregate, all those “just this once” and “only a little” and “I deserve it” choices become dream-deniers.

Used to be I could not see the connection between what I was doing now and that whole not having the rent a week or two later.

Now, I can’t not see it. Before my hand can even leave my side, I’m already thinking about our dreams…no more debts to pay, the ability to shift slowly into a less frantic working situation, stepping gradually into a working retirement as the kids start going off to college and from there into their own lives…making less but loving what we do more…

And I can’t do it. I can’t choose being cooler over all that.

So, I don’t do it. I leave the thermostat alone, and I go back to my office, and I drink more lemonade and try not to cuss when my phone rings and I have to snap off my floor fan.

I can endure temporary discomfort in exchange for getting those other things that much sooner.

…don’t promise I won’t kvetch about it, though…

For those who gave all

You went through fire and fear, in places near and far, facing a horror the likes of which we happy beneficiaries to your bravery and sacrifice think we can imagine…but cannot.

You suffered.

You died.

I have a good and peaceful life in this beautiful country I call home, a happy and prosperous life, a life of great plenty and freedom.

Your great sacrifice is silently, invisibly woven throughout the life, the liberty, the pursuit of happiness I enjoy today, and every day.

I thank you, I bless you, and I remember you.

Touch-Speak

One of my new favorite blogs is Cold Antler Farm. Not long ago, she wrote a post about a salad.

As she goes along telling the story of her salad, she ruminates, You know, I really think if every house had a loaf of bread in the oven the divorce rate would go down about 27%.

Oh, I totally agree. Not because of the bread itself, but because of what that sort of thing represents.

You know why a loaf of bread can save a marriage? Not because it’s darned good eats, not because it is “healthier” or “frugal” or because the smell of it brings an indescribable joy and comfort to anyone who enters the home. (Those things don’t hurt, mind you, but I don’t think they would actually cause people determined to divorce to stay together.)

It saves a marriage because the act of making the bread is an investment of time and touch. It’s an act of love. It’s an investment of self into something mundane…and with such things so readily replaced by the automated and outsourced, they have gained even more power than they held when options were few, or none.

Choosing to go through the mess and bother and time to bake bread when it can be had pre-sliced and conveniently packaged in any supermarket (or gas station, for heaven’s sake) says something, loud and clear…and to do it more than just once or twice turns it into an ocean-wave roar and crash, constant and strong.

I don’t have to say a word. The actions of my hands speak for themselves, in a way that is hard to misinterpret…unlike the spoken word, which has a way of coming out wrong or being heard wrong or being just the right thing said at just the wrong time.

Sometimes I say I love you to my family in bread. Sometimes in clean bathroom mirrors. Sometimes in an ill-sewn patch on a favorite pair of jeans. (My sewing skilz, they are not mad.) Sometimes in a knitted sweater or a hand-dyed shirt in “that” green with blue speckles. Sometimes in a handful of weeds pulled on a day when really on the whole I’d rather have been lying inside watching the Deadliest Catch marathon.

Or maybe in a plate of green beans freshly picked from our own backyard, lightly steamed with a little Mason-jar butter…and buttermilk biscuits to use up what the butter-making left behind.

The human touch is a terribly powerful thing, you know. We can throw others into fits of anger with certain gestures…we can show we mean no harm with others. We can soothe a crying infant who knows nothing of language with gentle strokes along her back. We can transfer courage to a suffering friend with an embrace.

We can make the ordinary extraordinary, simply by applying our hands to it, pressing our spirit into it.

It’s easy to say words that sound shallow, insensitive, derisive.

It’s hard to bake a bread that tastes like sarcasm or indifference. Generally speaking and culinary disasters being set aside for the moment…it tastes like warmth and love and home.

It is infused with touch-speak, the subtle yet transcendent language of the powerful human touch.

It’s the next best thing to flat-out mental telepathy.

Even if they come out a little crooked or too boxy or otherwise not perfect, the gardening boxes my husband is building for me will clearly say he loves me…and for that reason they will be beautiful and perfect.

And if I accidentally iron a perfect crease right down the front of his favorite work shirt, the message that I treasure him won’t get lost.

That’s how touch-speak is.

If there were more of that in all the homes of the world, if more of our everyday were infused with it, I’m sure there would be a lot less divorce…and suffering of all kinds. Less emotional turmoil and mental anguish. Less aloneness and wondering what our place is in All This.

Our place is here, with the kin we were born to and the kith we’ve chosen for ourselves, infusing our simple everyday things with our time and talent, with our selves, nurturing and being nurtured, gifting and receiving gifts not measured in dollars or carets, but in depth of spirit, in the quiet assurance of being loved and treasured…and loving and treasuring.

Tall order for a humble loaf of bread or a well-spliced drip irrigation line; but with the power of the human mind guiding the hand behind it, they can be the epoxy that melds a family together.

The Major Minors

There are things in this life that are big fat hairy deals, things worth fighting for, things perhaps even worth dying for. Justice, freedom, my mother-in-law’s homemade peanut brittle, etc.

And then there…things that are…not.

Like, say, cellular signals dropping in tunnels.

Recently, BART stunned us by announcing that they now had signal all the way through the Transbay Tube – which, you know, is pretty wow. We’re hurtling along under the San Francisco Bay, and now people can yak on their cell phones and check their email like they’re not rattling along under billions of gallons of water?

Um…it’s great. Really. Because being able to be on the phone at all times yelping, “Where you at?! No, where YOU at? DUH! I’m on the TRAIN, FOOL!” is just…vital to our national mental health.

Ahem.

But, all kidding aside, it’s pretty nifty for me. It lets me work an extra twenty minutes each way, which gives me that much less time I need to spend either in the office, or trying to catch up at home after Everything Else – which is going to mean I’m staying up too late, which is going to mean testiness.

However. They do not have this astonishing cellular connection through the tunnels leading to and from the Lake Merritt station.

Soooooooo, my connection drops for a few minutes, and I have to go through the whole song and dance and genuflections to the Four Quarters and Solemn Incantations and potion-brewing and wand waving involved in getting all the layers of security back in place so that I can log back on to MegaBank’s networks and keep working.

It can take up to ten minutes when the forces of technology are not with you – which in computer time is, like, a hundred years.

For some reason, this really, really, really pissed me off this morning.

And I’m not entirely sure why, although I suspect it has to do with my perception of the relative difficulty on getting cellular connection in the two areas. (That, or the fact that BART doesn’t allow any food or drink in the “paid areas” of the station, which meant that my almost-full commuter mug of steaming hot ambition coffee had to stay tucked in my backpack. Go ahead, tease the tiger, wave the nice juicy steak in front of her and go, “Neener-neener, you caaaaaaaan’t haaaave it!”…) (And YOU can’t have your ARM anymore! RRRRRRROWR!!!!!)

You’d think I’d know better than to assume what I assume is anything like technically correct. I mean, people do it to me all the time at work.

Me: OK, so, you need information – what do you need to see?

Them: Welllllllll, can’t you just show me everything that’s in the database?

Me: Uh, no. Just tell me what you want to see, and…

Them: But I want to see what’s in the database! Just for my region, of course!

Me: OK, here’s the thing…the database? It’s not like, you know, a spreadsheet. Wouldn’t even fit on a spreadsheet. It’s a couple hundred tables containing millions or even billions of rows of information, joined together by numbers that make no sense to anybody but us data jockeys. If I were to even try to show you “what’s in the database” just for your region, I would be getting nasty-grams from the DBA because I’d be hammering the system so hard nobody would be able to do anything for, like, five days. And then you’d have an insurmountable amount of data, so much data you wouldn’t be able to actually see any of it. We can’t get there from here. That bridge is out. So! Tell me what you want to know! You want to see how many days worth of information, for which departments, in what categories, that kind of thing…

Them: …I don’t see why it’s so hard to just get what’s in the database…Gloria got to see what was in the database last week, and her region is much bigger than mine…

Me: {face-desk}

You’d think, therefore, that I wouldn’t be the sort of person who does that sort of thing to other people.

But this morning? I was all, “The Tube got seamless connections, how come the Lake Merritt tunnels can’t, huh? How hard can it be? I MEAN YOU KNOW REALLY!! The Tube is under water, and they figured it out! The tunnel is just feh!, A TUNNEL!

…dirty rotten no good lazy such-and-sos…they just don’t care about me and my needs…

What makes this particularly funny, of course, is the fact that I’m pissy because something that didn’t exist a few weeks ago anywhere in the BART system doesn’t now exist everywhere in it.

I am one extremely spoiled little brat.

But at least I can finally drink my coffee, now that I’m no longer in a “paid area” of the BART system. (In related news, Contigo vacuum-insulated stainless steel travel mugs rock. Two hours later, my coffee is still hot and it did not spill all over the inside of my backpack. Righteous!)

…ya know, Amtrak lets you have coffee. Shoot, Amtrak has dining cars, where you can buy more coffee, should your cup run dry. Why can’t BART be more like Amtrak, huh…?

(I’m actually posting this from the Transbay Tube. Underwater blogging!…what will they think of next…)

Strength, Weakness, Greatness

Awright, that’s it. I demand that the horoscope writer for The Record admit that s/he is totally stalking me. This is today’s: Remember when you used to draw? There’s something therapeutic and anciently human about putting a seen or imagined picture to paper. Scribble for fun. It will release your playful nature.

Now I suppose it is just coincidence that I have a drawing-related rant yesterday, and this is my horoscope today?!

I. Think. Not.

(Also, I apparently think the universe revolves around me and my blog, which is possibly just a hair on the arrogant side of me.)

Well, Mr(s) Smarty Pants Horoscope Writer…I was never much for drawing. The painful truth is, I really can’t draw.

So, uh, neener-neener?

Sigh.

Actually, the can’t-draw thing is one of those things that has always bothered me a bit. I mean, I am one of those creative-types. I play several instruments, I dye, I craft, I will take on fiddly knitting projects, I love color and scent and texture and have that artistic way of finding myself floored by something like…the glistening perfection of a single drop of dew on an unopened rosebud.

I can stand there and stare at something like that in a timeless place, just imprinting the perfections and flaws into my mind. I can call those images back to me. I can see, hear, taste, smell everything from that moment, including what it was that drew my eye to it in the first place.

But I cannot then draw that out on paper.

I was actually told in high school that I had better just give up because, well, I believe the exact words were something to the effect of, “In over twenty years of teaching, I have never encountered a student I couldn’t teach to draw simple shapes, until now.”

It…kind of stung. Sometimes that moment will come back to me (in vivid Technicolor) and, thirty years on, still make me blush. Everybody else in the class had what could be recognized as a three-dimensional box on their paper.

I had…lines that looked like a kindergartener’s attempt at drawing a box. Flat, out of proportion, utterly unlike the box I had been staring at while drawing it.

It was a shoebox – you know, a rectangle?

I didn’t even get that part right. My lines made an off-kilter square.

Meh.

We humans tend to hold onto our hurts more tightly than we do our triumphs. That same year, I was in a creative writing class. My teacher submitted some of my work to various magazines and newspapers, and three of the pieces I wrote in her class were for-real published. I also produced a four hundred page novel (on a typewriter, because I didn’t have a computer with the ability/agility to handle word processing software).

And my teacher learned that she’d better put not only a minimum number of pages, but a maximum as well on her assignments.

Also, I was receiving all kinds of awards for my mad skilz on the piano. I was doing honors stuff, and passing the Certificate of Merit stuff, and performing all over the place in all kinds of venues for all kinds of reasons – most of them relating to having gotten a rating of “outstanding or better” during recitals.

I ran track and seldom lost. I played basketball and was MVP. I played football with the boys, and I think they were shocked to learn I was a {gasp!} girl.

That actually got to be very unfortunate, because when I started developing crushes on boys and junk like that, they were blithely unaware of the fact that I was, you know, date-able. Also, one of my crushes one time turned to me and said, in the tone of one who has just made a Great Discovery, “Wait, you’re a girl! What do you think I should say to Other Girl Who Was Not Good Enough For Him to make her go out with me?” I could have killed him. Which would have been unfair because I was so firmly entrenched in boy-like behavior that naturally, he never would have seen a sudden fit of actual female behavior coming from me.

The first time I wore makeup in high school, it practically made the evening news. Student long thought to be ‘one of the guys’ turns out to be a girl – film at eleven!

But I digress.

Through the years, I’ve been stunned to discover that I’m not the only person who does that. Sure, nobody likes a boaster and everybody knows somebody who can’t stop blowing their own horn every eight seconds… “I’m so great! I’m so knowledgeable! I’m going to stand here and pontificate, showing off my incredible skilz! Look at me! Listen to me! Admire my greatness!”

They’re really annoying, and nobody wants to be that person, and I think it leads us to downplay our talents and assume they aren’t as big a deal as the other guy’s talents.

After all, he’s the one with the new show in the gallery, right? She’s the big track star. Me? I just doodle around on the piano a bit now and then…

But at the same time, we are amazing. What a species we are! Each individual unique, with their own blend of interests, skills, talents, and dreams. We’re all similar in so many ways, and yet…not at all.

You can draw. He can paint. I can knit. She can do a continual whistle.

We are funny, we are passionate, we are playful.

We are sad, we are fragile, we are lacking.

Our strengths and weaknesses forge a uniqueness that cannot be replicated. Nobody else is you, and nobody else is me, and praise be for it. Flawed beings that we are, we need each other’s strengths to fill in our own weaknesses.

I can’t draw, but that doesn’t mean there is no fine art in the world. Others step in and provide what I lack, and I then do what they cannot and lo…the world is made a better place, a lovelier place, a place full of things that give us those moments of surprised delight.

Wow…I never would have been able to do that, never would have even THOUGHT to do that…

The world would arguably be a duller place if each of us could do everything anybody else could do.

Which is what I’m going to keep telling myself, as my little ones continue producing better drawings than I could ever hope to achieve, and occasionally provide the brutal truth to me in their usual innocent way…Whoa, mommy, is THAT supposed to be a snake? You really can’t draw too good, can you…

Monstrous

This morning, my city is in mourning…because last night, they found the body of eight year old Sandra Cantu.

For ten days, we’ve been hoping and praying she would be found alive. For ten days, we’ve wondered where she was, what could possibly have happened. We’ve speculated and worried and anxiously scanned every small face we passed. We’ve held our own children a little closer, and frankly I’ve noticed a lot fewer kids playing in the front yards of the houses lately.

Because in spite of our wildest hope that somehow this would all turn out to be some kind of misunderstanding…we knew a monster was among us. The same monster that is always there, the monster we protect against with our stern lectures against talking to strangers and going into other people’s houses and how about you just never leave my sight, EVER.

I suppose it is a common thing to say, “This shouldn’t happen here.” Because after all, nobody wants to think they live someplace where it does…and we who have built a nice little illusion of affluence especially don’t like to believe that such things could happen, you know, here.

…it would be counter to the homeowner’s association rules, darling…

No, not here. It happens elsewhere. In dangerous places, gritty dark cities where the sound of sirens and gunshots fill the air. In places where parks are not for children but for drug deals and prostitution, that’s where there be monsters.

Not here, in our little city…where the police blotter is largely full of melodramatic domestic tiffs and drunk neighbors peeing on each other’s petunias.

Not here, where children play in the front yards and wander freely up and down their neighborhood, wandering from house to house in a massive game of tag, following their noses unerringly to the houses where cookies are being baked.

Not here, in a city that somehow has managed to remain a town at heart.

That town’s heart is breaking today. It is embracing her family with shared grief and anguish, the terrible knowledge that we failed this child of our village…that somehow, we didn’t see the monster that walked among us.

It has taken away a part of our hope, our future. It has taken a beautiful child from us, and all the good things her life might have become.

We mourn, and we wait for what we hope is inevitable: The unveiling of this monster. Bring it into the light, let us see it for what it is.

Let it be taken away, and never let it return to stalk another of our children.

It may be cold comfort, but I suppose it is the best we can hope for right now.