Crusty bread. Cheese. Wine. Strawberries and whipped cream. Apples for the tiny deer. Crackers and mustard and summer sausage. More cheese. Reservations for a room overlooking the sound. Someone to share it all with.
A GPS system so we don’t get lost getting there.
A fine way to end the year.
If you don’t have a journal, you get to the end of the year, and you can just assume that you accomplished every last one of your resolutions. A year is a long time, so surely there was enough time to do everything, and anyway, who can remember that far back?
However, if you have a journal, and you are short-sighted enough to record your resolutions, not thinking about that day when you’ll look back and realize you did nothing the entire year, you don’t have the luxury of assumption and lack of written proof otherwise.
I always think new year’s resolutions are dumb, because why wait until the end of the year, when you can change your life any day you want? However, I tend to forget to make the little changes, until suddenly, it’s a whole new year and then I remember. (Big changes aren’t as hard to remember to do, as they’re like huge waves that overtake everything in their paths. And then you think, oh right, here’s this gigantic wave. I’d better learn to surf REALLY quickly.)
So, I made some resolutions and I wrote them down for the world to see. Had I remembered them during the year, I might have accomplished more of them.
I did OK at doing more things that scare me. I rappeled down a cliff and flew down a zipline in Mexico, even though I was completely paralyzed with fear and was sure I would plummet to my death. I even went back and the zip line again when I didn’t die the first time. I tried jellyfish, even though I definitely knew in advance that it would be horrid and squishy. I didn’t realize just quite how horrid it be though, truthfully. I may not have put it in my mouth had I known. I even went to the top of the Space Needle, even though I’ve made a point of avoiding it ever since I moved here, and have even refused to bring visisting friends who would never have the chance to go to the top again. Of course, that took several margaritas and a crowd of friends forcing me to the elevator, but still. It counts.
I did not, however, buy new slippers. I can’t even tell you how smelly my old ones are now.
I was still pretty bitchy too. I honked at someone just today. Bitchiness is a hard state to overcome. I can really only suspend it for short periods. But I think I’ve come to terms with that, and that’s just as good. Right?
I did drink a lot more wine though. P. and I spent my birthday driving through vineyards and tasting wine. And we saw stars through a huge telescope and then had more wine.
I also got a cool new job that changed a lot about the direction of my career. And I bought a house with someone who I fall more in love with every day. The house is pretty great too.
In spite of the smelly slippers, it was a very good year.
After our scary movie Christmas tree excursion, I was determined to have magical Christmas morning. P.’s family was staying with us, so I had visions of coffee and hot chocolate, waffles and omelettes, opening gifts by the light of the tree.
I woke up bright and early Christmas morning… to a loud explosive bang. P. and I jumped up out of bed. As we heard another explosion, we saw a bright white light in the distance out our bedroom window. At that same moment, our entire house lost power. We watched as the trees in our backyard bent completely sideways in a massive windstorm, one that apparently blew out the transformer that brought wonderful power to my coffeemaker.
I had to face to coffee geyser of doom. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy at my stove for being gas or angry at it for not being electric and saving me from trying the boiling fountain again. I made P. make the coffee for me.
It was only after I’d had some coffee that I realized that a lack of power might hinder our ablity to have breakfast, tree lights, and Christmas dinner. We walked upstairs. Apparently the explosions had woken P.’s parents from their early Christmas morning slumber. And his dad also wanted coffee. I was worried we were tempting the evil coffee gods at this point, but sent P. back down to make some more.
As if the wind and the explosions and boiling coffee fountain weren’t enough for a magical Christmas morning, we discovered that the tree had fallen over in the night. Not to worry that we broke our ornaments or anything, as we only have two and neither are breakable.
P. spent the next hour and a half on hold with the power company, dancing to the muzak. We had rolls for breakfast and opened our gifts in the natural light, by the slanted tree that we propped up against the wall. About four and a half hours later, the power came back on and we spent the rest of the day cooking.
And propping the tree back up.
Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from the power company. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means… the explosions are minimal, there are no fountains of scalding coffee, we have muzak to dance to, and a polar bear to top the tree.
I’m really not that great at snowboarding.
I whine and I complain and P. throws snow at me until I shut up and board already. The first time on the lift, I am positive I am going to slide right off and fall to my death and then when I try to get off the lift, I grab on to P. and drag him down with me and screech as I fall on my face. Then, I am positive I have forgotten everything since the last time I went and am too afraid to board down.
Eventually, I warm up and manage to get down the hill without falling and even end up having a lot of fun, but clearly, I am not that good.
Except when I go with P.’s family. I love going up with them because they make me feel like I could be on one of those Warren Miller videos. This is not because I do better tricks than they do or spin around them or jump off cliffs without dying like the boarders in those videos do. It’s just because I can stand up in my boots without falling.
I think this was my last chance to feel like a snowboarding goddess because I got the feeling they plan to never go again. In fact, I think they are secretly plotting our demise for driving them to the evil land of snow and hills. I was careful to pour my own beer, I tell you that.
But even if they’ve given up winter sports, I can still find a way to feel like I’m an extreme princess of the slopes. There’s always a toddler or two just starting out who I can feel smugly better than. At least for an hour or two until they start skiing circles around me.
I’m getting P. new snowboarding boots and bindings for Christmas. I say “getting” because that’ not the kind of gift that you can really buy a person in advance, sight unseen. The best snowboarding boot is the one that is most comfortable for your foot, and it’s difficult to sneak out with a person’s foot and shop for boots without that person knowing.
We stopped by a snowboarding shop today so P. could keep his feet attached to the rest of him. This was a shop staffed by true snowboarders. I expected them to tell me their boots were gnarly, dude, except probably no one hip actually says that in 2005. The guy helping us had hurt his leg the night before when he and some buddies had dumped a bunch of snow they gotten at an ice skating rink into some parking lot and gone boarding.
You’d think I’d feel extra cool, shoppping in a place like that, but mostly it made me feel old. Until the guy told us about how a 1/2 inch of padding is packed into the boot, but once you’ve worn the boot for a while, it packs down to 1/8 inch. “So, you end up with um, 7/8 of an inch more room!” He looked at us. “That’s not right, is it?”
“3/8 inch?” I suggested. And then I instantly felt like a tool — the old lady, correcting this poor kid’s subtraction. He looked at me, beaming. “3/8!” And then he high-fived me. I wasn’t a tool. I was bonding over math.
We didn’t end up buying any boots or bindings, because we have to do the adult thing with research and reviews first. But there’s a least a little part of me that’s not so adult, that fits right in with the gnarly dudes at the snowboarding shop. The part of me that does math.
It’s good for couples to have something in common — something they can share and that can bond them together. A couple is made of two very different people: different pasts, different feelings, desires, and needs. But with at least that one thing, you understand each other. You look into each other’s eyes and know exactly how the other feels.
With P. and me, the thing we share is an absolute lack of any sense of direction. I should have known he was the one for me when way back before we ever started dating, he told me about how he got lost driving home.
The one constant in our life is all the aimless driving around we do. It’s an adventure every time we go out. You might expect that he would get mad at me for telling him to go the completely wrong direction or that I would get mad at him for driving the opposite way of where we were planning to go, but we would never get mad — we understand each other. The directions he gives me when I’m driving are just as wrong as the ones I give him.
But all that’s about to change. For Christmas, P. gave me a GPS navigation system. It is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. It knows exactly where you are and can tell you exactly where to go. And it’s portable so we can use it in either car. We tried it out for the first time today. “I’ll never get lost again!” I told P. Minutes later I passed our exit despite the machine’s repeated attempts to get me to change lanes. But the difference was that the machine gave me an alternate route. I wasn’t lost, just alternately navigating!
She has the best irritated voice when you miss a turn. “Recalculating” she says, and you can totally hear the sigh in her voice and the silent, “despite my impeccable directions and reminders to TURN LEFT HERE YOU IDIOT.”
P. told me that he thought of my gift the entire time we were driving around lost, looking for the magical Christmas tree farm. Maybe the company could use that for their next marketing campaign: “Car navigation — give the gift of freedom from chain saw-toting Christmas tree workers who have gone crazy from too much Christmas cheer”.
We drove around for hours and our machine of driving nirvana only had to “recalculate” three times. Of course, every place we stopped at was closed, so we didn’t actually accomplish anything, but the important thing is that we made it to those places at all. Every single place on our list. Which is really unheard of between the two of us.
I suppose this means we’ve lost our one sacred bond. But now we have the Voice of the Truth Path. And with her, we can build an even stronger bond. And turn left in point five miles.
It’s a most magical time of the year. Our first Christmas in our new house. Our first tree in our house together. Our first magical, wonderful, sparkly tree. And I found the perfect place to get our tree. The web site promised hay rides and free cider, candy canes and cocoa. Hike through the magical woods and chop own own. Trees displayed in water. We weren’t sure what was up with the trees displayed in water part but the rest of it seemed the perfect blend of holiday spirit and cheer.
We set out like a Christmas carol in a wintry fairy land. Outside the snow was falling, sleigh bells were jingling, chestnuts were popping. It was just lovely weather for a sleigh ride together. Wonderful things we’ll remember all through our lives!
Except that by 5pm in Seattle, it’s black as midnight and in place of sparkling snow, we had rain pouring down in sheets and our sleigh was a Dodge Ram. But other than that, exactly like Courier and Ives. Exactly.
OK, and instead of sleigh bells, it was more like,
“What’s the address?”
“I don’t know. It just said that once we get to this road, it’s about a mile down. It’s a big white barn.”
“I can’t see anything. Do you see a barn?”
In the pitch black night and the pouring rain, driving down a dark and lonely road with no street lights, “a big white barn about a mile down” was not as helpful as it had seemed when I originally read it on the web site.
But we merrily drove along, full of Christmas spirit, surrounded by the joyous sounds of carols, eagerily anticipating our magical tree. And by “carols”, I mean Led Zeppelin on the classic rock station, but it was similarly joyous.
We thought we saw it. We saw a big sign that said “free cider”, but no sign of trees. Or lights. Or people. We kept going. It was a beautiful sight, we were happy tonight, driving down the dark road, trying to see through the windshield as the rain showered down on us.
As we turned a corner, we saw colored lights lining the road. And orange cones along a driveway. Orange cones almost always mean this is the place. We saw a banner that read “fresh Christmas trees!” This had to be it. We had found our holiday cheer. Our tree of wonderment. Our Christmas moment.
We got out of the truck and walked down the festive, fantastical lane. Although it seemed remarkably like a scary, dark driveway. And we didn’t see any trees. Someone was driving away as we walked up. He pulled over and asked us if we needed help. We told him we were there for the trees. He motioned to a dark house. Told us to ask for Ruben. Tentatively, we edged our way towards Ruben’s house. Filled with holiday spirit. Or possibly fear and dread. We walked past the garage as the sounds of an angry dog frantically barking and snarling filled our ears. Cujo-style jingle bells. When no vicious attack dog came rushing out to greet us, we carried on, towards the cheery, welcome door, which was cleverly disguised as a dark, silent pit of foreboding.
And then I saw the cat, glaring at us, unmoving. I suddenly had this strong sense of deja vu. Not that I had been here before, but that I had seen this exact scene many times. And every time I wondered, as I munched my popcorn, what the hell those people were thinking, when they so obviously were going to be hacked to death by the psycho killer who lured his victims with the “fresh tree” sign.
We turned around and briskly walked back to the truck. Visions of sugar plums, or possibly our own viscious deaths, danced in our heads.
We drove back the way we came and thought we’d give it one last try. One last attempt at a magical winter night. With hay rides and cocoa. And candy canes. We pulled into the parking lot that promised free cider. It was apparently a (closed) apple farm. We turned around. An forged ahead for our Christmas miracle. We pulled into the driveway of the only white(ish) building with a parking lot. Sure enough, we saw trees. No people though. And nearly no lights. And not a hayride in sight. We slowly got out of the truck, ready for jolly elves or psycho killers. We squinted as a man appeared from the darkness. Holding a chain saw.
He told us that the cut your own tree section was closed, but we could have a cut tree if we wanted. Squishy mud is a little like magical snow when your vision is completely obscured by tumultuous rain. I sang a little carol in my head. Or maybe said a little prayer that the nice man with the chain saw was in a good mood.
We found a tree with a $96 price tag, and sure enough, it was sitting in a little tray of water. Which I’m sure gave it the edge it needed on top of the huge flood around it. Our chain saw friend said we could have it for $35, so we didn’t mention the lack of hay rides, cocoa, candy canes, etc. He put it on a shaker and chain sawed the lower branches and we were on our way.
And then we realized that the best kind of magical, merry Christmas is the kind when you don’t get viciously murdered by a psycho killer in the darkness of the 5pm night.
My first mistake was answering the phone. I knew it was my mom, but I answered anyway.
“I’m trying to print something, and there was an error. So, I couldn’t print.”
Aha. A printer problem. I can deal with a printer problem.
“So, Sarah was over and she couldn’t open something in fox fire and so she did the internet explorer. But then my favorites were gone. All my favorites! They weren’t anywhere in the internet explorer.”
This was sounding suspiciously not like a printer problem. In any way.
I considered attempting to explain why Firefox bookmarks wouldn’t show up in Internet Explorer, but I decided to take a shot of tequila instead.
“So, then I tried to print and it said there was an error. And I didn’t know why I couldn’t find my favorites. So, I deleted fox fire.”
I hoped we had another bottle of tequila.
“So, where are my favorites? I can’t find them.”
“Um, you deleted them?”
“So, where are they? How can I get them?”
“Um, you deleted them? So, they’re gone. That’s what “deleted” means.”
“But it was all my favorite sites and I don’t know how to get to them anymore!”
“OK, well, why did you delete Firefox?”
“I don’t know. I just thought it would be a good idea.”
The sad part is that she somehow knew enough to delete Firefox from Add/Remove programs and didn’t just delete the shortcut. I went through great lengths to make sure it didn’t still exist somewhere. And if you’ve ever tried to troubleshoot computer problems over the phone, I don’t have to tell you how much tequila this took.
“So, click your Start menu.”
“With my left finger or my right finger?”
Eventually, I got her to install Firefox 1.5 and amazingly enough, that restored her bookmarks and fixed her printer problem.
I’m really drunk now.
I have a crazy mom. When I mention this (which isn’t a lot, because how often does “so, my mom… she’s a crazy person” come up in a conversation?), people say things like, “oh, my mom too. She knits me bunnies every Easter!” Or, “my mom’s forever trying to fix me up! Crazy!” They assume I mean that she’s regular crazy like all parents are crazy.
(No offense to parents out there, but probably your children all think you are crazy in one way or another. Other people don’t think you are, but your kids? Think at least one thing about you is just a little odd and vow to their dying breaths that they will never do this one particular odd thing. If I had kids, I have no doubt they would think the same of me as they got older. “My crazy mom,” they would say, if they existed. “She always bangs the shot glass on the table before she shoots tequila. And where’s the salt? Forever the lime but never the salt.” They would say when they were much, much older. I’m not saying that as toddlers they would question my tequila-shooting skills. I’m sure they would be in high school at least before they understood the finer points of tequila shooting. You see why I don’t have kids. Never mind.)
But my mom is not crazy like regular moms are crazy. She has cornered her own little market on neuroticism and is selling how-to books. If I were pondering my mom and my relationship with her in a serious, constructive way, I would say that she would be well served by both medication and therapy. But after lots of therapy of my own, I’ve realized that it does me no good to ponder her in this way because she doesn’t want to change, likes her style of crazy, and wants the suck the world down with her. And I’ve decided not to be sucked down.
She doesn’t believe in therapy or medication, actually. When I was making use of both during a time of particular emotional turmoil in my life when they were the only things that kept me sane and from sobbing my eyes out 20 hours a day, it hurt her feelings because that meant I was keeping secrets from her and didn’t want to talk to her about my life. And also, since therapy is all about the injustices of childhood, all I was doing was bashing her and how she raised me to my therapist.
I’m not sure how she thought that would help, since any conversation with her consists of her talking about her. Anyone else in the conversation is there to listen and tell her that her outfit is pretty.
When my sister and I were growing up, we didn’t know from crazy, so we thought she was normal. We’ve only realized differently as we’ve gotten older and seen her in context. And had conversations with other people. Conversations with her go something like this.
“Hi mom. How are you?
“Well, I haven’t eaten in three days and I haven’t slept in a week and now I’m scrubbing out the bathtub with a toothbrush. Hopefully, I’ll be finished later tonight so that I can haul pallets of bricks across the lawn on my back. This toothbrush must make me seem fat over the phone because you haven’t said anything about my outfit.”
If you have the benefit of therapy, as I now do, your response to this is, “that’s nice. I’ll talk to you later.” And then you hang up. Quickly. Before she can tell you that her sister is secretly poisoning her tea. But she has to drink it because there’s no other tea to drink.
You don’t ask how you can tell anything about her outfit over the phone, much less why the hell she needs to haul around bricks. These are questions that can never be answered. You just must accept them.
Everything she does and says is an attempt to get everyone around her to think she is a wonderful, loving person, here to care for everyone other than herself. And that she looks mighty cute at the same time! She will never admit to eating, sleeping, or resting, because being starved, sleep-deprived, and worked-to-death are more sympathetic traits. And God help you if you don’t give her a compliment within the first three seconds. The minute you see her, you must instantly start scanning her body for something attractive unless you want to spend the rest of the day answering questions about what you don’t like about how she looks.
And forget getting information about anyone else.
“Hey mom. I heard grandma was in the hospital. Is she OK?”
“Oh! The hospital. So, we went over to see how grandma was and the nurse told me I had a pretty bracelet. You know, that one with the green stones? I told her that I picked it up for almost nothing since I am dirt broke and then I showed her the matching earrings.”
You think I’m exaggerating, but when my sister was pregnant and her water broke at 4am, she called my mom to drive her to the hospital. Then she (my sister) called me an hour later to say that mom still hadn’t shown up and when she called to find out what was keeping her, my mom said that she was still putting on her makeup.
Which is to say that I called my mom today, I mumbled sympathetically for a while and told her that I was sure her outfit looked fabulous. And I didn’t ask a thing about that pallet of bricks.
I was listening to the radio the other day, and the show hosts were asking people about the best decisions they ever made. Something came to mind right away. I pushed it aside, thinking surely there was something else.
But then I thought about it. Most decisions that turn out really, really well end up being more blind luck than careful planning. And most decisions that change your life are just a fluke. You smile at that cute guy and end up marrying him. Someone mentions a job opening and you find your dream career.
I love my current job. It’s absolutely perfect for me. And I agonized about whether to take it. I had another job offer that seemed better and I remember standing in an airport bookstore after my interview, skimming the self-help books about making decisions. After careful thought and consideration, I decided to take this job because the other one would require me to take the bus downtown, walk past the methadone clinic, go down the street where the homeless guy spit in my eye that one time, and get to the other side of the public restroom that has a door that flings open after fifteen minutes in a fruitless attempt to discourage its use as a drug haven.
Not my finest shining career moment, but it worked out OK.
I also love my current career. Did I research all the jobs out there and interview people in the career and do an internship to make sure I liked it and explore every option? No. I was nearing the end of college and realized that I was about to end up with an English degree, of all things. What the hell was I thinking? And then I saw that the company I was working for had an opening in their corporate office. This job had three things going for it:
That third thing really cinched it for me.
I chose a good school though, right? Well, I had gotten accepted into my dream school and had picked my classes, had a dorm room, had exchanged letters with my roommate. I had nearly a full scholarship, and only needed to come up with about $1500. My parents were moving across the state right after my high school graduation, so I had arranged to stay with my best friend for the summer and work full time so I’d have the money.
Only at the last minute, my mom decided that since I wasn’t 18, I had to live at home until I went to college and I had to move with them and thus had no job and no $1500. And if you think my parents gave and/or loaned me the money, you’ve probably never met them. So, I ended up doing a super-late application to a nearby school that was just as good as my school of choice, a school I specifically did not apply to because I didn’t like someone who went there, and I got in with a full scholarship and had an excellent education. But I wouldn’t necessarily call that a result of good choices.
None of these things came to mind when I thought about my best decision. What came to mind was deciding to get a divorce. Which looks ugly and horrible typed up. Because it still, after all that therapy, seems wrong to me that it could ever be the right decision. And it was so fucking hard to do something that seemed so wrong. But it changed my life in ways that all those other decisions didn’t. Because it changed who I am, inside. It changed who I can be. I don’t have to live my life for other people. It’s OK to do things that make me happy. I was on this unstoppable train that had jumped the tracks and was plummeting down a mountain. I tried to stop the train. I kept thinking, if only I could stop the train and get it going in another direction, everything would be OK. But I couldn’t stop it. That was the hardest thing. Realizing I couldn’t stop it. And if I didn’t want to keep going that direction, I had to get off the train.
So, I jumped.
I jumped even though I couldn’t see beyond the train, couldn’t see where I would fall, didn’t know how I would move without the train.
And it was the best decision I ever made.
I’m still sick, so I’m mostly limping along, trying to get work done so I can take off a bunch of days, and trying not to think about everything I need to do around the house, because I just have no energy to tackle any of it yet. The cats still need that teeth cleaning. Seriously.
Today I just crashed. I have a lot of work to do, not the least of which is my self-appraisal annual review thing, which is very late already, so hopefully promptness is not a consideration for raises. I abandoned everything early this afternoon and came home and napped. I’m convinced that cold medicine is trickery foisted on an unsuspecting sickly public. We’re willing to believe anything, so we hand over our $8 for shiny, colorful pills that do nothing.
I left for work this morning with soaking wet hair, which probably didn’t help. It was 31 degrees outside and everything was covered in a thin layer of frost. I regretted getting out of my warm, comfortable bed the minute I stepped outside. My brain is foggy and I’m feeling behind. I’ve already started getting Christmas packages and yet I haven’t shopped for anyone yet. I haven’t even thought about what I might shop for.
I dream about taking a triple vacation: a week to get caught up at home, a week to get caught up at work, and then a week to recover from it all. Tom Peters thinks that if you tell him what you spent your time on today, he can tell you what you care about. But I don’t know. I think that only works if you actually have time to think about organizing your time, if you can get to a place of being proactive rather than reactive, if you have an administrative assistant to schedule your meetings and register your car. I’m driving around with expired tags and I napped all day. But I care more about complying with vehicle registration than having a cold.
Maybe that was a bad example. Maybe I should take another nap.
A few weeks ago, I was on a panel at a women in technology luncheon being asked questions by women who were studying for computer science degrees. Mostly, the questions had nothing to with gender, but rather, what’s it like to work for my company, do I work night and day with no sleep, what’s the best way to go about networking and finding a job — normal stuff like that.
But then, one student asked me if I ever had trouble as a woman in the software industry. I thought about that before I answered. I gave her the short, positive answer, and it was mostly true. But of course, there’s more truth than a two minute answer can really say.
I told her that no, I don’t notice discrimination or have problems in my job because I’m a woman. That I did when I was first starting out, but not anymore. My first real job after college was in the home improvement industry in the early 90’s. You don’t get much more male-dominated than the world of lumber and power tools. I had a tough time as a woman. A manager once told me that people would pay more attention to me if I wore tighter jeans. And he meant it.
I didn’t actually tell her about the tight jeans thing, just that I’m not sure if times have changed since then, or if the software industry just doesn’t have the baggage that the home improvement industry did, but I don’t experience that kind of thing any more.
What I didn’t say is that part of it could also be that I’m no longer young and inexperienced. And I’ve learned not to let people walk over me or dump things on me. And that I don’t know if young and inexperienced men have to fight as hard for respect. Maybe they do, but I’ve never been a man starting out in the workplace so it’s impossible for me to know
I also didn’t say that when I look around at my coworkers, I mostly see men, and that even now, I feel a little out of place and wonder if any of my male coworkers take a little more time to accept and respect me because I’m a woman. I don’t think they do, but how can I know for sure?
My company works very hard to seek out qualified female job candidates. They work so hard, in fact, that sometimes women who work there joke about being the token woman and hope that our coworkers don’t assume we got hired because we were women rather than that we were qualified. As hard as they work, we have a lot more men than women in engineering. But we have a better ratio than other places. I was talking to a coworker today who told me that at her last job, she was one of only two women on an engineering team of 500.
I don’t know why there seem to be so few women in engineering. Since only a minority of computer science graduates are women, it makes sense that the ratio carries over into the workplace. As for why so few women study CS in the first place is a whole other issue with its own set of theories and studies. My two minute answer period was way too short to get into that.
At P.’s holiday party last weekend, all the women I met were wives. They were all there because this was their husband’s party. None of them worked. It felt a little odd to be at a table full of couples when I was the only woman talking to the men about technology and all the other women were talking to each other about kids.
So, do I feel discrimination? No. Not really.
But I do feel a little glad to be going to my company’s holiday party tonight, with P. in tow. At least at one one holiday party this year, women as technology workers will be represented. Which sounds a little stupid all typed out like that, especially since I’m mostly going for the open bar.
Maybe it’s a good thing my two minute answer couldn’t squeeze all this in.
For the past couple of years, P. and I have spent Christmas at his parents house. This year, his family is coming here. I thought it was a great idea at first. It’s our first Christmas in our house and it means I don’t have to get on a plane. I can entertain with cookies and festive drinks and cook a Christmas feast and … wait a minute.
When we’re at his parents house, we’re far from our own house, full of laundry and remodeling and cleaning. And work. And all we have to do all day is eat and drink Godiva liqueur-spiked hot cocoa and cuddle under warm blankets in front of the fire. We are interrupted only by snacks and wine, and possibly gravy stirring.
What were we thinking?
For some reason completely unknown to me, I always have this vague sense come December that online shopping will take all my worries and cares away. I don’t have to push my way through irritating crowds or find parking in lots full of dumbass, clearly non-spirit filled drivers, or wade through piles of merchandise thrown around by shoppers even crazier or more stressed than I am. I can just sit on the couch and peruse the web. And the gifts will come right to my house.
Every year, I am burned by this clearly irrational, completely unfounded faith.
This happened just recently when I ordered Monk DVDs from Amazon for my mom’s birthday. I paid extra for quick shipping because Amazon told me this would get the package to her the day before her birthday. (Yes, I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute, but I blame the idealistic dream of hassle-free shopping online that lured me in with its lies and its mythical, mirage-like comfort. Anyway. I soon as I finalized the order, Amazon told me that actually, my mom would be getting her gift three days after her birthday and sadly, it was too late for me to cancel my order or to even change it back to regular shipping.
You would think I would have remembered my folly, but my memory sucks.
I ordered something for P. that the merchant sent via FedEx. Apparently FedEx came, and since no one was home, left a door tag. I foolishly expected them to leave the actual package. But apparently, the idea is that FedEx only delivers actual packages to people without day jobs. The door tag did include a place for me to sign my name to say that it was OK to leave my package that I paid for and wanted, but someone had written “VOID” across it. That same person, in the same large magic marker, wrote the item contained inside the (theoretical at this point) package across the door tag. Not the company the item was coming from, but the specific item I ordered.
The grumpy FedEx elves have so much holiday spirit that not only do they refuse to give you your packages, but they want to be sure to spoil the suprise for the person who won’t be getting a gift.
I made the vital mistake of having hope. Surely, many people work all day. Surely there is a way for these people to get packages. I called the FedEx number left conveniently on my door tag. I was presented with several options, none of which were “talk to a person” or “get your package even if you work”. One option was “schedule pickup”. Aha! That’s exactly what I want to do. Of course, I had to speak it, not press a button and I don’t even want to get started on speech systems, although as someone who used to work on the development of interactive voice response systems and wrote documentation that told companies how to best design their implementations, and as a person who stutters (and I don’t think I’m the only one in the world who does), I could rant for a really long time about this. I will only say that companies should at the very least offer an option that lets callers talk to a live person and an option that lets people type in an account number if they so choose. But I digress.
I said “schedule pickup”. As it turns out, this did not mean I could schedule to pick up my package. It meant that if I already had an account with FedEx and they already came around to my business regularly to pick stuff up that I wanted to ship, I could tell them to come pick something up. The infuriating voice asked for my account number. It did not provide any other option. I could not go back to the previous menu. I could not tell it that I had no account number. I couldn’t talk to a person. I started yelling random things at the voice. “I don’t have an account number, you dumbass.” Its response, “If you don’t know your account number, enter the phone number associated with the account.” “I. have. no account.” “Please begin your response with the three digit area code, followed by…” I hung up.
I tried again, this time choosing the only thing remotely like what I might want (as I did not want to order supplies or find a copy center location), “track package”. However, this only told me that they had been to my house today and would come back tomorrow. Tomomorrow being another day when I work all day. They did give me a handy delivery window of between 8am and 4:30pm so I could better plan my day. The door tag said I could pick up my package at the service center but that I had to call this number first to make sure that my package was actually there (and not, for instance on a truck). However, the evil voice from a demon dimension did not offer me this choice.
Finally, I said, “operator”, although the devil voice had never mentioned this as an option. Note this magic word if you are ever trapped in FedEx phone tree hell.
This miracle word brought me to a live person. I still had a shred of hope so I was pleasant and curteous. “You tried to deliver a package to my house, but I’m at work all day, so I need to arrange something else.” She told me no need for that, they’d try again tomorrow! “Right, but I’ll also be working all day tomorrow. Can you change the shipping address to my office.” As it turns out, no, she couldn’t. She apologized. “OK, can you arrange to leave the package at my door?” No, she was so sorry, but she couldn’t.
So, does this happen a lot? I asked her. Don’t other people work all day and have this problem? Are they no options for them? Oh, but we have many options, she told me: you can either be at home or come to the service center after a delivery attempt. They’re open until 6 (although the package is on their truck quite possibly until 4:30) and are at least an hour away from me with rush hour traffic. Do most people work next door to the service center? Is this really easier than going to the mall? (Which, by the way, is ten minutes from me and has the item I ordered in stock.)
So, I asked if she could stop tomorrow’s delivery attempt since I was pretty sure I was still going to have to work tomorrow and instead, I could try to get there at lunch later this week. Yes, as it turns out, she could do that. She didn’t offer it as an option, but apparently, it’s like the “operator” hidden voice menu. I asked how long they would keep the package. She asked if I was coming tomorrow. I certainly will try to come tomorrow, but if I get pulled into a meeting, all bets are off. At this point, I was begging the operator, who I am pretty sure had the same voice as the satan-inspired voice menu. “Just tell me what your policy is. How long do you hold packages?” She offered to hang on to until Saturday. At the latest.
So, now, with my holiday spirit properly beaten down, I will drive the 20 miles to the FedEx service center at my earliest convenience. And will drive to the mall for all my other holiday shopping needs. At least there you have more than six predefined choices that serve exactly zero of your needs. I understand now why people take up knitting. Next year, everyone is getting scarves.
I can’t be sick right now. I have to finish a bunch of projects at work and make good on my promise to go the gym every day and cook healthy food for dinner all this week and get the house ready for people coming to stay for Christmas and do my Christmas shopping that I haven’t even thought about starting yet and take my cats to the vet to get their teeth cleaned because the bad breath smell is permeating the entire house and we can barely breathe in there and clear off the huge branches that are covering our driveway, deck, yard, and roof from the last windstorm and finish sanding the walls and make little Christmas cookies and sweets and be a generally happy person in the holiday spirit.
I can’t be sick.
I was browsing the journals at Holidailies and noticed someone say that they’ve once again waited until the last minute for shopping and now, once again, they’re in a panic. And at the time (yesterday), I thought, panic? Why would anyone panic yet? It’s not even time to start thinking about shopping. Only now, I understand. What if you get sick and all you want to do is stay in bed with the covers over your head and instead you have to brave the scary stores? Or make your brain work enough to buy things online? Maybe it’s time to panic after all.
There’s no positive spin to being sick. You can try to dress it up by saying it’s your free ticket for laziness, for watching TV and making people bring you stuff, but that’s all crap. You can’t enjoy the laziness or the bringing of stuff and TV is generally not all that great anyway. More hours of Ed the Plumber on DIY network is not going to improve my life as much as one might think.
Medicine doesn’t seem to help much either. At least, we don’t have anything useful at our house and I’m in no state to browse the drugstore aisles. We have lots of medicine — all kinds! For colds, flus, migraines, anxiety, you name it. However, most of it expired several years ago. We spend a lot of time debating just how old medine can be before it actively poisons you. I’m in the “throw it away” camp. P. doesn’t like to waste things. We have the same problem with food. “I’ll just try it. I can’t hurt,” is always his initial response in these situations. “Well, it could KILL you,” I tend to think. It’s hard for us to find a compromise position.
All I have to look forward it is Ed the plumber and toxic drugs. I just really can’t be sick.
The one vital thing in life is coffee. OK, also air. And water.
The three vital things in life are: coffee, air, water.
In that order.
We are out of coffee. That is, we are out of senseo pods. We have a bit of actual ground coffee and we have regular cofee makers somewhere, packed away in a box. We also have this kettle-looking thing that brews coffee and steams milk all at the same time on the stove.
Since I hadn’t had any coffee this morning, I was obviously phsyically unable to garner the energy to go the store, and P. was off at the gym so I couldn’t make him go get some for me.
I tried using the stove-top device. I poured the water in the bottom, and put in the filter and added the coffee and screwed on the top and added the milk and locked in the little stopper, all the while thinking that whoever manufactured this was insane to think anyone could do this properly without already having drunk a large amount of coffee.
Every time I make coffee in this thing, I get a little nervous. If I put too much liquid in, it starts boiling out the spout once things get going and then it’s just a mess, plus I’ve gone through all that work for nothing as my coffee is all over the stove rather than in my cup. I was ready for it this time.
I watched it carefully. I peeked into the top part to make sure that nothing was foaming over. I could hear the coffee perking up, but nothing seemed quite ready yet.
Suddenly, I heard an explosion and the coffee started shooting STRAIGHT UP at the ceiling. It was a fountain of hot, boiling coffee, bursting from the kettle and into the sky, drenching everything around it and falling back to the open flame, which was now dancing, eager to leap away from the confines of the burner and onto the rest of the house. My first instinct was to get out of the way of the boiling liquid, shooting up all around me. It was like a Vegas fountain show only with coffee, which was hot, and in my kitchen, which had very recently been clean. I looked back at the burner and realized I had to find a way to turn off the stove. So, I crept in, under the coffee geyser, and turned off the heat.
Everything stopped. All I heard in the silence was the slow dripping of a thousand coffee drips. All over the walls. And the vent hood. And the stove. And inside the stove. And on the floor. And the mixer. And the salt and pepper grinders. And the kitchen scale. And behind the counters in those little cracks you can never quite clean out.
And all I could think as I surveyed my coffee-soaked kitchen was that nothing was left to drink.
At my first real grown-up job, I thought one of the job requirements was to look like a bona fide real grown up. I wanted people to respect me and take me seriously and treat me like a real grown-up professional. I wore a lot of short skirt/jacket combinations. With nylons. Seriously. I wore nylons every day.
Now that I’m older, I have realized a few things:
I now work for a software company. When I wear jeans, it’s not because it’s “casual Friday”, it’s because I’ve decided to dress up a little beyond my regular choices of yoga pants or sweats. (Today, it was yoga pants.)
I’d rather my coworkers respect my work than my short skirts anyway. And see absolutely no reason to ever wear nylons.
I work with engineers. They wear: jeans, shorts, t-shirts. Most of them don’t even realize that casual Friday is anything more than an urban legend. P. also works for a software company. He doesn’t own clothes other than jeans, shorts, t-shorts.
Both of our company’s holiday parties are semi-formal.
Rewarding people by throwing a party that requires that they wear clothing that they took jobs specifically to avoid makes absolutely no sense to me.
What I do know is that I have to somehow, in the next twenty minutes or so, find clothes that are not designed for the gym and that actually fit me.
I may end up in a paper crown and a leather mini-skirt. I have definitely given up trying to be a grown up.
Work travel is this weird reality limbo.
On the one hand, it’s work and you’re away from home and really busy and all you do is run from meeting to meeting and rush trying to find your conference room and it’s not in any way like a vacation. On the other hand, since you’re not at home, you don’t have to remember to load the dishwasher or fold the laundry and you go out to eat and if you do manage to leave the mass of meetings in time to do anything other than sleep, your only choices are to lay around and watch TV or go down to the hotel bar and have some wine.
Unfortunately, my first meeting yesterday was at 8am, and then I didn’t leave the office until 11pm, so there was little time for the TV or wine, but theoretically, I could have done those things without feeling guilty that I should be sanding walls or cleaning off the driveway.
Things would be less frantic for me if I planned longer trips. But despite laundry-free days and theoretical wine-filled nights, after about three days, I’m absolutely ready to go home. I miss P.; I miss my bed; I need to get some actual non-meeting work done; I really need to get to sanding those walls.
18 meetings in two days is plenty anyway. I’ve had so many meetings this trip that I’ve gotten entirely too lazy to even type up notes. Instead, I’ve been using my camera phone to take pictures of whiteboards. When I get back to the office and start to act on all this stuff, it’ll probably go something like:
“Hmm… that fuzzy part - that looks a little like a coffee cup. Maybe this meeting was about how I should drink more coffee. I’ll just pop over to Starbucks. OK, I have my latte. What now? This squiggly line might be saying I’m supposed to design and document a whole new system, but maybe I just didn’t get the whole whiteboard in the picture. I bet that line points over to some other team and they’re going to be doing all that work. Excellent. I’ll just drink my coffee then.”
The phases of learning how to snowboard (note that these phases come after learning how to attach yourself to a snowboard, and walk with it, etc. which is a tutorial all on its own):
I am currently working on the turning part.
The first year I went up to the mountain, I sat in the warm lodge and drank hot chocolate. I would sometimes glance out the window and laugh at everyone outside in the cold, wet snow. I also would laugh when someone would come in, covered from head to toe from an obvious unplanned meeting with the ground. This is the version of snowboarding I recommend most.
The second year, I went snowboarding about 20 times. I only got around to working on turning about the 20th time. How did I turn the other 19 times? I didn’t. I swooshed back and forth and tried not to fall or go to fast or fall on my head and tumble all the way down the mountain to the parking lot. I was very proud of my success.
And then the snow melted and I lost my learning to turn momentum.
The third year, it didn’t snow. All winter. I got to try and fail to turn only one day.
We don’t seem to be having a problem with snow this year. It was even snowing at our house, so we decided to skip out of work early yesterday and head up. I was scared and nervous and stressed. I whined. A lot. Like always. And I practiced my turning. All afternoon. “I can’t do it,” I’d whine. “You’re doing it,” P. would tell me patiently. “You just need to practice.”
Here’s the thing with snowboarding. I see the young guys flying around, whooping and yelling, having a good time. I’m not having that kind of fun. What I feel is a sense of accomplishment when I actually manage to figure parts of this out. Snowboarding is like any complicated thing that looks like chaos until you work out all the individual pieces. Like C++ code, football, knitting. Once you see the patterns and break it down, you don’t feel completely lost and overwhelmed. Well, that’s what I assume. Knitting still seems pretty overwhelming to me.
Snowboarding is still too chaotic for me to just swoosh down the hill and enjoy, but finally, after all this time, I’m beginning to work out the patterns.
And if you follow these simple steps, in four quick years maybe you too can enjoy snowboarding.
I just have been too tired to write lately. Which is sort of a problem since what my employers pay me for is, er, writing. but it just hurts my eyes to even look at the screen and all I want to do is curl up with a warm blanket and nap. Part of it is that it’s getting so damn cold outside. And it gets dark at about 4. But it’s also that I’ve been working way too much. For months. And working nights and weekends for months, even when it’s work you enjoy, gets really draining.
In the last few years, I had gotten really good at not taking work personally. You know how at your yearly reviews, you have to come up with weaknesses to work on? When I started out in the working world, that was my big weakness. I took everything personally. I couldn’t separate business life from my life. I cared about everything, even when “everything” was making sure electrical parts in plastic and cardboard containers that cost 75 cents were all hanging correctly on their pegs. I cried all the time. Why wasn’t I better at keeping the pegs aligned? It was ridiculous.
Over the years, I separated my work product from me. If the business was heading a different direction, I headed along with them. That’s what they paid me for. I didn’t cry about why they didn’t care about my peg alignment problems.
However, I have noticed that working too many hours has made me touchy. When things head in a different direction, I think, well, fuck. What the hell did I spend ten thousand hours on that for then? Possibly you could have not asked me to do that if you were going to then totally change your mind and head off in some random direction because then I could have had some SLEEP.
Which is better than crying and taking things personally, but is still ridiculous from a business sense. Work is work. You work on things; you work on other things. That’s just the nature of it. And if you’re too tired, then maybe, as an adult, you need to choose sleep over work every so often. (And by “you”, obviously, I mean “me”. You probably are already smart enough to choose sleep.)
In any case, it’s certainly not my employer’s fault I make bad choices and can’t set priorities. After all, who the fuck cares if the pegs aren’t aligned?
I’m talking about metaphorical pegs. My job doesn’t actually involve peg-filling inventory at this point. See the pegs just represent the little things that I should let go. And not obsess over. It’s like.. .oh, never mind. Forget the pegs. There are no pegs.
Anyway, you would think that being tired wouldn’t keep me from writing. After all, mostly it consists of sitting on the couch with my laptop and moving my fingers. But my brain just doesn’t want to come up with words. Mostly, my brain wants to rest inside my head and do nothing.
And although more coffee would normally help, amazingly enough, there is actually a point at which coffee ceases to matter. Or, at least, it ceases to wake up your brain and puts you into a vibrating fog. Which should really be more fun than it is.
Things that are actually important:
I think those are about all the goals I can handle right now. I’m too sleepy for more than that.