@ Home in the World

Slappy Shoes!

Who ever said it was okay to wear flip flops in the office?

That has to be the most annoying sound to listen to in your cube. Especially when they walk by your cubical at a high rate of speed. A lot.

Slap, slap, slap, slap.......

Radio Silence. Please.

This was going to be a part of my next sticky-notes post, but I'm riled up enough about it to put up a separate post.

Let's call it Mobil's other pollution problem.

My newest pet peeve is the faux radio stations that "broadcast" over those cheap, tinny speakers at the GAS PUMP. They are set way too loud for the transistor-quality they put out and they go back and forth between the overly cheery advertising bits for their crappy coffee and two-for-a-dollar hot dogs, and really bad pop music. This morning it was "We Built This City on Rock and Roll" which was terrible when it first came out, was thoroughly overplayed, and now is the stuff of brain-invading nightmares. Who needs that? Nobody. I'd much rather listen to the segment of NPR that was running when I pulled into the place. But even though I turned up the volume on my radio and opened my windows before moving to the gas pump, I still could not hear what I wanted to hear. Frankly, I'd rather listen to the traffic going by. No matter if it's my morning or evening commute, I'm likely tired, stressed, and I'm pulling into the gas station at the last possible moment.  For what I'm paying for gas these days, I don't want to also feel like I'm paying to be assaulted with this noise pollution.

I wonder if the advertising industry still considers something successful when it is annoying as hell to consumers. 

I'm afraid of what the answer to that might be so I am now on a mission to avoid these gas stations whenever possible and ask you to do the same.

Steam Pipe

As I've mentioned, I've been heads down in a project at work. A couple of times in the last week or so, my manager has asked me "how's your stress level?"  The first time I heard it, I think my jaw dropped because no one has ever, ever asked me such a thing before.

Long, long ago, just after I had taken a job as the assistant to a woman who then went on early maternity leave and never came back (so I was doing my job and large parts of hers' for the better part of a year), someone commented on how calm I seemed. This was during conference season when many of my colleagues were running around in small circles trying to have everything just right for the major annual conference of our industry. I chalked this up to not quite having as much at stake as the rest of my co-workers (after all my manager's job was not really mine, nor would it ever be), but it also gave me a bit of insight into how I came off to people.  Did people really not know that I was a raging drama queen?

My husband surely did. I would come home and rant and rave about work stuff that, in the grand scheme of the universe, was really pretty meaningless. At home, I fluctuated between relishing the victimhood of the position I was in and despairing of ever doing "great things" in my career. At work I approached the whole thing philosophically - "when this is over, it will have been a valuable experience."

There's a scene in the movie Broadcast News, several actually, where Holly Hunter's character is sitting by herself crying inconsolably and inexplicably. The way the movie is edited, the scenes seem to come out of nowhere and aren't connected to anything. Finished with her crying jag, she picks herself up each time and moves into the next scene like nothing is bothering her. My boyfriend at the time was confounded enough by those scenes to actually ask about it, but I got it right away. I've been there. It's taking pressure off a steam pipe. I'm there now.

This is the biggest project I've ever worked on. This is the biggest project that my department has ever worked on. I've never seen so many pieces and parts of a thing and so many chefs in the kitchen. And, as often happens toward the end of a project, I am not entirely happy about the finished product. I start kicking myself that it would have been so much better if I had only done _________________(fill in the blank), but it's too late now.

On top of that, some of the volunteer work I have been doing around town has gotten unnecessarily contentious. Normally, I love a good fight, but the timing here couldn't be worse.

And it's school vacation week. Never schedule a deadline for week of your school vacation. Even with babysitters lined up, something is bound to go wrong.

All right! Enough with the whining (whinging, as the British say, sounds much better)! I will get through this. Of course I will. And when it is done it will have been a valuable experience. But right now, I just want to cry.

I need a day...

The major project I have been working on pretty much since I started my new job is coming to completion at the end of this month. I have been pretty much heads down on it for weeks. When it is done I feel like I need a serious day off to do as much of the following as possible.

Get a haircut - I'm getting to the point where I need a serious change.

Go to the eye doctor/replace my eyeglasses - My current glasses are five years old and are so scratched that it's like they have a film over the lenses.

Go to the chiropractor - What does it say that I can't find the time for what is essentially a 10 minute appointment?

Find a new massage therapist.

Make some changes to my blog and The Soccer Mom Vote.

But who am I kidding? I can't take a whole day off, any vacation time has to be spent with my kids. As it is, while my neighbors are heading off to Hawaii, I'm begging the boys' grandparents to spend part of the week with them next week so I don't have to take off their school vacation week while I finish this project. This kills me. I have three weeks to ration throughout the year. I'm trying to reserve some for the summer and the week between Christmas and New Year's. It's enough to make me consider supporting a longer school year. God knows we Americans won't be getting any more vacation time in my lifetime.

On a slightly more less serious note: I never thought I'd say this, but I'm considering a makeover. I had to be videotaped for a project I'm involved in around town and when I saw the playback, well.... Man, I'm old!

The last time I saw myself on camera I was 35, and all I can say is that motherhood has the intervening years have taken their toll. I've never been the most put-together looking soul, but now I look even more tired, pale, and puffy.

I'm sure the pale, pink, shirt I was wearing didn't help. I may have an affinity for that color, but it does not have one for me. Must. Resist. Pale. Pink.  Of course, it jumps out at me every time it's in style. Every spring I get sucked in by some variation of it.

The Fairy Blogtherapist speculates that my attraction to prim, ladylike, colors and styles is a subconscious attempt to camouflage the loud, forthright, and decidely tomboyish aspects of my personality. The bolder, deeper, colors are more representative of the true me and I should stop trying to pretend otherwise. 

Anyway, I'm thinking that when this project is done, I need to find a spa or a salon and get a full workup. A colleague of mine is recommending the Aveda salon she goes to in Harvard Square, which means I'd have to do this on a long lunch.

Hmmm. Am I going to have time for this?

"B*tches get things done!"

Count me among the few people on the planet who have never watched Saturday Night Live. Not even back when it was consistently funny (I was in high school then and my mother felt it was "inappropriate"). Well yeah, I've seen a rerun or retrospective now and then, but I was well out of college before I saw that "wild and crazy guys" skit that a high school friend constantly made a fool out of himself imitating. Yes, I live under a rock. These days it's on purpose for the most part.

Speaking of rocks, I've never seen 30 Rock either. Tina Fey got my attention on that American Express ad which I'm starting to suspect she wrote most of. Have you ever seen someone from across a room and just known you wanted to be friends with that person? Call it "like at first sight." That was how I felt about Tina Fey.

OK, I'm not some creepy stalker. I'm not even going to be sending her fan mail. But after last Monday morning, I'm officially a fan.

Now, I didn't see the original Weekend Update skit on SNL. I heard it Monday morning on NPR. Because that's the kind of geek I am. Needless to say, I was blown away.

For months I've been saying that what I like and admire in Hillary Clinton is what everyone else hates. I think it's been that way from the very beginning when she made that "stay home and bake cookies" remark. People who cried foul on that conveniently seemed to forget that it was she who was being attacked for wanting to use her skills in some major-impact way while her husband potentially held the highest office in the land. Why is that a problem?

Never mind that she was positively prophetic on the problem healthcare has become in this country. No, let's talk about her marriage. I once had a conversation with a woman who told me that she would have a lot more respect for Hillary if she had left Bill. Hmm. Let's see. You have just suffered the ultimate marital humiliation in front of the entire world. Do you:

A) Divorce him, become Washington poison (all these years and still nobody likes a divorcee), return to Little Rock, or Chicago, or even New York and quietly practice law, maybe teach a class or two and write a tacky tell-all?

B) Stay with a dynamic and powerful guy, continue to travel the world, continue to have influence, support your family through personal and political crisis, get encouraged to run for Senator, run and actually win, run for President?

They still say living well is the best revenge, don't they?

But that's just my theory of the situation. Nobody ever really knows what's in another couple's marriage.

I'm trying to decide if people's dislike of Hillary is really related to her stint as First Lady, as I posited at Soccer Mom; her failure to leave her husband after the Monica Lewinsky nonsense, or if people are uncomfortable with her blatant desire to be in charge for power.

It's the 21st century, and women are not supposed to want power? Apparently, it's OK if they have power, ala Madeline Albright, or Condoleeza Rice, but they must not be seen as angling for it.

I'm not sure there's any neat way to wrap this up. I have known, and been put off by, women Hillary's age who gained their professional stripes in a time when they were told the had to "act like men" to get ahead. I've known women who were not "nice," but whom I nontheless respected because they were successful and didn't let anyone stop them.

I could understand if it was mostly guys (guys who firmly approve of the current President's smirking swagger and blatant power grab) who were put off by Hillary, but it's not. It's women, lots of them. Now I am not suggesting that all women should want to vote for Hillary because she's a woman, I'm just floored by the number of women who won't vote for her because they don't like her. This makes no sense to me. Just as the average Joe will never sit down to have a beer with President Bush, the average Joan will not be sitting down to tea (or a glass of wine) with the next President. These are not qualifications.

The primary season could be over in a few days. If Hillary Clinton's name is not at the top of the Democratic ticket, I still think that she will have done an amazing thing to advance women in our society. She has made it possible for other women to run for President and be taken more seriously than they would have been in the past. This election has exposed a lot of ugliness about our society that was easy to ignore until we had a woman running for office, things we still need to address.

I once heard Senator Clinton say that if she did not win, she would go back to being the Senator from New York and she will continue to be effective in that role. In spite of the disappointment that would entail, I believe she will.

Like an arrow to the butt

OMG, The boys were up until 9pm finishing their stupid valentine cards, and the Pumpkin started two days ago! This is just another reason that I cannot stand Valentine's day.

Part of this is my fault, granted. I did not have a whole lot of time to go shopping and can't stand those cartoon based Valentines. I made my own. Yes, I'm nuts. Yes this is the last year I'm ever going to do that.

But really, the problem wasn't with me and my working-mother-guilt creativity. The problem was keeping the boys focused on the task. Pumpkin cranked on the cards, but by the end he was getting silly and his handwriting became more and more illegible. Tigger lost his list so I was working from the school directory, which is voluntary. This morning he remembered three people who weren't in the directory so up until the moment I left for work I was stringing ribbon through cut-out hearts, to make more cards. Bleah, what a pain in the butt!

Another reason this is the last year the cards will be homemade - next year Tigger will be of the age where he will probably be made fun of for not having "cool" cartoon cards.

Did I mention I hate Valentine's Day?

Sick is the New Large

"That's sick!" says the neighbor's boy. It takes me a minute to realize that he is actually voicing his approval of my new camera. He's eleven, in the sixth grade, and the vocabulary of cool has begun to enter his speech. I find it jarring, but I suppose that's part of the point.

This is one of those situations where my fanaticism about language clashes with the role of the "cool auntie," who will listen to him and somehow be listened too, even when I am saying exactly what he doesn't want to hear from his parents (I'm pretty sure that his parents will play that same role for my boys one day, and that's okay with me). Sometimes I have to draw the line. I don't, for instance, allow him to call me "dude," and I despair that my language-challenged five year-old has picked up the word "idiot" from him and will. not. let. go.

That adolescent twist of language is really nothing new, I have been through "choice" and "rad" and "gnarly" and the completely meaningless "totally tubular," all with the additional ick factor of what I can only describe as a Connecticut Valley Girl accent; that annoying mix of privilege and pretentious disdain for others. But the twisting of "sick" to mean exactly the opposite of what you would think it means just seems rude to my ears.

Or maybe I'm just getting old. After all, I grew up in the age of "awesome," which slipped into my vocabulary (along with "like" and "you know") without much effort on my part. I'm sure this annoyed my elders. I however, never even thought about it, until one night I found myself at a Harvard party with a bunch of British rugby players who were pondering the ubiquity of "awesome" and what it might possibly mean in the States. I'll never forget the laughter when one of the Brits came up with his best guess: "large."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

And speaking of sick (its original meaning, or closer to it anyway), a couple of things have come across my desk laptop this morning that must be shared.

The first is straight out of the Sopranos, or American Psycho, and I have an eerie feeling it will never be resolved. If you have not read that book, by the way, don't. It is truly puke inducing, and I am not exactly the squeamish type.

The second, and perhaps more directly terrifying might be said to be a result of the Bush administration's cuts to the FDA and its propensity to loosen controls on agribusiness. This is about the food going into our kids and the trust we have placed in the school lunch system. Oh, how dare they?

More of my railings against the Bush administration and other politicians at The Soccer Mom Vote today.

I'm falling apart

About an hour after I published my last post about not having a fever, I got the chills. Piper sent me to bed where I warmed up and fell asleep at a decent hour. In the middle of the night I woke up and threw my back out. In the bathroom. Throwing up.

I think I pulled at least one muscle in my ribs, if not more.  Of course I didn't notice it when I first did it, and went back to bed.  I'm sure that our crappy mattress didn't help. Oh, the pain! Even breathing hurt. It's a lot better now, but for two nights now I've been sleeping at least part of the night pretty much upright either on the couch or "big chair" downstairs. It really says something when the living room furniture is easier to sleep on then your own bed. One thing that really has helped is this Homedics back massager that I picked up sort of on impulse. It was $22, far less than they used to be. Granted this wasn't the top of the line in terms of massage tools, but it has heat (mmm, heat), and, as an added bonus, a car adapter. Of all the things I lost when I totalled the Subaru, I miss my heated seats the most.

I plunked it down on the big chair while watching Peter Pan with the kids, and fell asleep. I woke up an hour later feeling SO much better. Even folded some laundry.

The thing that 's bugging me about this whole illness is that I haven't been able to eat much of anything in days. This is nothing new, when I get sick I usually ask for spaghetti, because the sauce is the only thing I can taste, but even that doesn't appeal to me. In the last couple of days, I've eaten half a grilled cheese sandwich, half an egg sandwich, and half a bowl of macaroni and cheese (the real stuff, Piper made it). I'm staring at a mint chocolate faux-oreo that I told Pumpkin was inappropriate for breakfast - nothing. Sounds like I'd be losing weight, but I don't think that's happening.

I'm just annoyed with myself. I feel like I could have avoided this if I had taken better care of myself. Not so much the getting sick part, but the completely incapacitated part. Back problems run in my family, mostly I've managed to avoid my mother's periodic bouts of bedriddenness with regular visits to the chiropractor and massage therapist. Somewhere along the line the medical savings account gods at PIper's work decided that massage therapy doesn't qualify for reimbursement, and I'm pretty sure that we lost some of the money we set aside for it as a result. I haven't had a massage therapy appointment in almost two years. Before I was working full time I didn't feel like we could spend the money, now that I'm working, I don't have the time.

The one good thing is that I think I've kicked my sleep clock back to where it's supposed to be. I've been going to bed much closer to 10 PM than 12 AM. Before we had kids, we were pretty good about going to bed at 10. Without the structure of a work schedule, and desperate for more quiet time in the evenings, I got out of the habit. I've been struggling with it since going back to work. If nothing else, illness has forced me to sleep.

Church and State - an Update

So, a couple of weeks ago, I posted a bit of my frustration with religion in the political process up at The Soccer Mom Vote.

It was definitely a rant, and one of the commenters said I sounded just like the intolerant religionists I railed against. Probably true. I also got a fair number of people who agreed with me.

Just to show that once you put your words out there, you never know where they're going to go, I found out later that the discussion had moved on to another blog. We had an interesting exchange as you can read there, and I guess that's really the point of blogging, particularly political blogging. Personally, I don't mind the debate. It forces me to think.  I learned long ago not to take any of it personally.

Here is a real professional's take on this church and state thing. It's written from a slightly different perspective - that the intersection of church and state is not good for the church either.

Did We Really Need to Know This?

Back in August, two Boston firefighters died on the job when the roof of blazing restaurant collapsed. The restaurant had been earlier cited for numerous violations, including excessive grease, but hadn't been inspected by a shorthanded Health Inspections department in over a year. When the fire broke out, these two men were among the first in the building. It wasn't long before they were calling for help.

They were buried, and honored, as heros. Fighterfighters came in from all over the country, as they often do, to attend the funerals and say goodbye to brothers they might never have met.

This week, it came to light that one of the men had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit and the other had traces of cocaine in his system. These notations were listed in the autopsy report but not as the cause of death. Along with this news came the implication that survivor benefits for the families could be jeopardized.

Now I haven't been a fan of TV news for a long time, and I only happened to see this because I was working on something when ER got over. Immediately after the report, WHDH Channel 7 began a nearly five minute "report" on their efforts to lift a court injunction prohibiting them from airing this story, all in the name free speech, of course.  I must say the tone of the second segment was at once defensive and self-congratulatory.

I might not have given this another thought except that I recognized the photos of the firemen from Margalit's blog where she wrote eloquently about one of the children who lost his father in the blaze. It was one of those moments when a stranger in the news became real to me.

So now I've been stewing over this for days.... The incredibly tacky local TV news outlets have once again been trying to scoop each other over a personal tragedy. It turns out that autopsy information is not considered public and should not be released without the families' consent. It also turns out that family members learned about the autopsy reports from the news media. The firefighter's union sought an injuncton against WHDH citing privacy rights. In spite of this, FOX News (of course) went ahead and ran the story and which point all the other news outlets picked it up.

The one item I haven't mentioned yet is apparently what makes this a story worth chasing at the expense of the memories of the fallen. Firefighters are not required to undergo random drug screening as a condition of their job. The union has repeatedly fought such a provision. This needs to change. Just as we are starting to better attend to the mental health of our soldiers returning from this war, we need to look after the men and women in the police, fire, and EMT services who see a lot of ugly stuff on the job on a regular basis. Drug testing should be mandatory. Counseling should be available and encouraged.

But this change should have been made without making the autopsies the news story of the night. Mayor Menino's team could have used this information in their negotiations without making it public. Contracts are a matter of public record, but negotiation sessions are not. I certianly could have gone without knowing this. And since the substances don't seem to have had a role in their deaths, why harm the fallen and their families?

Add this to the long list of reasons that local TV news is trash. Rather than informing the public, these outlets seem to think their job is to embarrass the subjects of their stories or frighten their viewers with their overhyped scandals. When's the last time you watched the TV news for anything other than the sports and the weather? How much did you see about happenings on Beacon Hill (or your state capitol)? How much did you see about what's going on in our local schools - unless it was sports or something egregious. How much money do you think they waste sending some poor sap to West Jehosephat to cover a car accident? And don't get me started about their parental scare of the week. Local TV news is the "trans fat" of journalism. It's fast and easy, but it's not doing anybody any good.