The Schiavo Thing

Like approximately everyone else on the planet, I read the news today that Terri Schiavo had died. And as in every other workplace on the planet, this touched off a long conversation about related matters.

So I listened to Stella talking about what it was like for her to have open-heart surgery, how scary it was to know that her mother's "goodbye" might be the last one she ever heard, and how based on that experience she had decided that, short of extraordinary measures, she would prefer to be allowed to live regardless of her condition.

And I listened to her and Martin and Ruby, who are retirement age, talk about how precious life is, how scary it is to think that in a situation like this, all that could be standing between you and death is the decision of one person who may or may not have your best interests in mind.

They also talked about being willing to disregard the express wishes of a dying friend or family member if they disagreed with the dying person's choices--which, to me, is just as scary in a different way--and then they went off on superstitious tangents about "harvesting organs" and the like.

I was quiet during this exchange, having learned: opinions like mine are better left unexpressed, especially when dealing with older people or people who think they're wiser, or anyone even remotely religious. Opinions like mine are the kind that get you the stink-eye in the hallway and whispers behind your back for months.

Because here's the thing: I'm not afraid to die. I am afraid of the -process- of dying; I don't like scary things or things that hurt--but I am supremely comfortable with the thought of not existing anymore.

"Oh, but each of us is so unique and life is so precious and..." Yeah, yeah, I know. Except I don't entirely buy it.

I am unique. No argument. But would the world be a lesser place without my particular combination of traits? Probably not, is my guess. I am very, very small. My life is one of billions that will begin and end in the life-span of the human race. Who am I to say that my one particular combination of traits is any more valuable, any more worthy of the vast expenditure of resources required to continue its existence, than any of the others who don't have access to the same resources? And if my brain is non-functional, then I am no longer the sum of the particular combination of traits that allegedly made me so valuable in the first place. It just seems like hubris to claim to be so irreplaceable.

"What about the people who love you, though?" Okay, first? That's a small, small population. And I don't mean that in a self-pitying kind of way--even if 100 people would really grieve my death (not the kind of emotion where you cry at the funeral and then go back about your business and think about the person once or twice a year--I mean REAL grief, and I know almost no one for whom a hundred people would feel that kind of pain if they died)--but even if a hundred people would be really touched by me in that way, it's still an infinitesimal fraction of the human race. And second? Not to be callous, but--it happens. We will all die. We will all die either before someone we love or after them--we will either leave them the grief or experience it ourselves, and more often than not we'll do both. Those stories about couples who die within minutes of each other at a ripe old age--well, that's just really good luck, is what that is. The rest of us will either hurt or be hurt by death. So as for the people who love me? I don't suppose "I'm sorry" would cover it, but it would have to be about the only thing to say, under the circumstances.

But that's me. I respect Stella's wish to be kept alive by almost any means, even if I don't agree. It's not what I would ask for myself, though.

Reading that, I'm sure you'd be expecting me to come out on the side of Michael Schiavo--but you'd be wrong. I think Michael Schiavo should never sleep another peaceful night in his life, personally.

My objection to Terri Schiavo's death isn't about the precious nature of life or the irreplaceability of any given human being. My objection is to how it was done and why.

I don't doubt the testimonials of hospice workers as to the "peaceful" and "good" deaths they've witnessed after the removal of feeding tubes in terminal patients.

In terminal patients.

Terri Schiavo was not a woman emaciated by months and years of futile cancer treatment. She was not, until they removed her feeding tube, in the last days of her life and experiencing multiple organ failures.

She was 41 years old--an age at which the rest of us can reasonably expect to live another 25 years or more--and she was physically healthy. She was neurologically compromised--but her body was functional. She could breathe on her own, and her heart was beating.

To starve a physically-healthy person for thirteen days, denying them even hydration--to me, that's neither a good nor peaceful death. True, we don't know what she is capable of feeling--but in a case like that, shouldn't we assume the worst? Shouldn't we assume that on some level she CAN experience pain (and if she can't experience pain, then why the morphine? She either can or she can't--it seemed to me like bets were being hedged here.) If you are so determined that she die, then do at least what we do for the so-called criminals our government allows and encourages us to kill: lethal injection. If we don't permit death by starvation to perpetrators of heinous crimes, why do we allow it to happen to a woman whose worst "crime" was developing an eating disorder?

Then, too, there's the husband. And here I speak only from a gut reaction: I don't trust that man. I don't like the way he conducted himself. I think there was something less than "Terri's wishes" at the heart of his decision-making process. And I thought he treated her family in an absolutely shameful manner. However, since I'm not him, a gut reaction is all I have to go on. But this I know: whatever my stance on extraordinary measures, I think the decision should have been left with Terri's parents and blood relations. Husbands come and go--I speak from experience--and I would rather have life-and-death decisions made by a blood relative. There's not a man on earth I would trust with that decision, if I'd left no written instructions.

(And yeah, should you wonder, I'm a hypocrite--I would have let JP decide for me in a heartbeat. But that was different.)

I hope Terri Schiavo is at peace. And I hope for peace for her family, eventually, because god knows they're not going to get any for a while. I don't think there was a right answer here--but there were a lot of wrong ones.

At Least I Have My Health

My suspicions were correct: I got e-mails this morning letting me know that both positions have been filled.

:::sigh:::

Obviously there's a reason for this somewhere. (Although I must admit, my faith in "there's a reason for this" has never really recovered from the debacle of October 1995.) But honestly? Just at the moment I don't care what the reason is--I just care that it sucks, mainly because it means a) I'm stuck here for the moment, and b) I have to go through the interview bullshit mill again for the next job.

It does not help me, not even a little bit, that today has been probably the most stressful day at work in months. We were given notice on Friday that it might be a good idea to take the servers offline for the weekend, since we were getting lots of hacker activity. So I took our servers offline and went home. I got here at 7:15 this morning intending to have everything up and running by the time everyone got here. I went to the database server and started it up with no trouble; then I went to the main file-sharing server and hit the power button.

And....nothing.

Hit the power button again.

Aaaaaand....nothing.

Swapped out the power cords. Nada. Switched to a different outlet. Not a click, not a whirr, not a ping. Dead like alternative.

Did I mention that this was the MAIN FILE SERVER? No? Well, it was. Is. Whatever.

Pause for panic.

I called the main department and asked them if they happened to have a spare G4 power supply laying around. Of course, the main department had MUCH bigger fish to fry--unlike us, the hackers actually DID compromise three of their servers--so even though we weren't exactly far down on the priority list, we were the thing that was LEAST on fire at the time. And all morning long, from 7:30 til about noon when the main department tech suddenly showed up unannounced with a whole new machine and swapped the old drive into it, it was "Gladys, when are we gonna be back online?" "Gladys, have you heard anything?" "Gladys?" "Gladys??" "Gladys???"

I felt like the mother of three-year-old octuplets in a grocery store.

And I owe the main tech guys from the department a MAJOR lasagna for their last-minute rescue misson.

If anyone's got a spare time-machine laying around, I'd like to go into the future far enough to see that eventually this WILL come to an end, that eventually I WILL get another job, that everything WILL work out and I won't be working here til I'm 80 years old and bitter, going home every night to a house full of cats. Because that's sorta how it seems right now, and I'm not enjoying that feeling much at all.

Getting Hostile Here

To any of you hiring types of people out there, a plea:

If someone comes to an interview and goes through the whole process and jumps through all your requisite hoops and even wears freakin' NYLONS! and MAKEUP! and does everything right enough that you feel the need to tell them they're a finalist for the job...

...please, please, for the love of all that is good and human in this world, do NOT then leave it at that and let the poor person suffer the agonies of the damned for, like, ever. Or even a week. A week is forever when you're trying to get out of an office full of buttheads. And if they send you an e-mail asking, in essence, whether they're still under consideration--ANSWER IT, you vile creatures!!! Like, IMMEDIATELY!!!

(No, I do NOT care that they're probably out of the office for Easter or whatever. I am WAITING here, people, and there is no logic to this type of emotional suffering. "Did they call my references? What did Beverly say about me? Where's my damn flamethrower???" These people are SO giving me massive issues.)

I'm beginning to suspect that I didn't get either of these jobs, which is sorely disappointing.

Pimps In A Blanket

I woke up this morning, walked downstairs, and there it was, sleeping on my sofa: a dyed-in-the-wool, stamped-on-every-link, all-American Pimp.

He's apparently up from Downstate somewhere; he's a friend of LJ's cousin, the one who was stranded with us for the weekend when we had the snowstorm a few months back. They whiled away that weekend pulling up pictures from the Web, of The Pimp and his cohorts at the Player's Ball. And "pimp" is not just an affectation in this case (as it is in so many others). This guy is for real. He actually IS a pimp in the commonly-accepted denotation of the word.

I, of course, assumed that this was some distant acquaintance with whom I would never cross paths. And honestly, that was just fine with me. I make no pretense of judging the choices people make as to how to live their lives, but I do have a problem with the whole pimp ethos, especially since it seems to give a lot of guys excuses to cheat on their women and exploit strangers. CR used to use the immortal bullshit line "Don't hate the playa, hate the game..." but by the time he was out of my life for good, I was more than willing to do both. LJ will tell you: I am not a trusting soul anymore. And in my current state of cynical fragility, the last thing in the world I would have admitted to wanting around the house was another one of THOSE guys.

But then last night, around 11:00, LJ's phone woke us both up; he had a brief conversation, then told me that his cousin's friend was on the way over. Of course, I had no excuse to go downstairs and get into the middle of things, especially since LJ had mentioned that they were going to be talking business (the freelance pharmaceutical distribution business, not the pimp thing.) So I stayed upstairs and just went back to sleep. And this morning, when I came downstairs: there on the sofa, a Pimp. Snoring, might I add, and with the blanket pulled up completely over his head.

They'll revoke my feminist card for this, but I gotta say I was a little impressed despite myself.

I do hope, however, that the Pimp isn't allergic to cats; the blanket under which he was sleeping just happens to be White Cat's favorite binkie, upon which he rests and sheds a thick mat of white fur and allergens, every single day for many hours at a time. And I will tell you, it's taken an effort of will to refrain from inserting an inappropriate cat-based joke in here somewhere.

Update

The individual responsible for coining the phrase "No news is good news"...

A. ...was not waiting to hear about a job interview at the time
B. ...has ZERO credibility with me just now
C. ...is an asshat unworthy of human compassion or consideration
D. ...all of the above.

So Yesterday...

Yesterday, which would have been JP's 36th birthday, I found myself driving with no particular purpose in mind. And so I was actually surprised when I found myself at the cemetery.

I am not one of those grave-visiting types. I went through a short phase where I was; then I wasn't. Then I had no car and couldn't have gotten out there, even if I wanted to, and so it had been a very long time since I'd been out there.

The cemetery is near my mother's house, and I've had cause to drive past it several times when running errands for her in her car. I've resisted the momentary temptation every time, for the same reason I don't drive past the site of our old apartment anymore, or down that stretch of North Avenue that was once the center of our world. I tell myself it's time to move on, not to wallow in the past. I remind myself of how far I've come, as if that was any comfort.

But yesterday I was prepared to wallow, a little, even though I didn't know it, even though the cemetery wasn't where I'd set out to go when I left the house.

The last time I was at the cemetery, there was still no gravestone there. I had lost touch with his family, but I knew there were some financial issues, at least on his mom's side of things. It was always a source of shame to me that I wasn't sure exactly where his grave was; I remembered images from the day of the funeral, but nothing precise.

Well, that was probably a year or two ago, at least, and this time, I found it immediately.

His family did him proud, really. I suspect the old animosity between his parents was probably responsible for the existence of TWO stones, not just one. One was the flat-against-the-ground kind, and the other was the above-ground kind. He's buried next to his grandmother, who died two years later. I was with CR already when she died, all fucked-up in my own special way, and I didn't hear about her death for maybe two years after that. She was a wonderful lady, and I wish I had kept in closer touch with her--with the whole family, in fact. At the time I thought it would be more compassionate to just fade away, because I was not handling JP's death well at all--every time I talked to them, I would be a crying mess. They didn't need that, I figured at the time; now, I don't know whether I made the right decision or not. I do know I miss them too. At one point I remember saying to someone, "You know, when JP died I lost three families: his family, the family he and I had just by ourselves, and the one we would have had together someday."

Seeing his name carved there with the dates--it brought it home, somehow, as if living without him for these past 9 1/2 years hasn't done that often enough. There's a guitar carved above his name, which made me smile. His music was everything to him.

And yeah, I cried; and yeah, I said some sentimental stuff which I will not repeat; and when I got back in the car and started the engine, the radio was playing one of our many songs. And then the next song was another one, and the next--songs I hadn't heard in months if not years, all attached to some memory of that summer.

I laughed through my tears and said "all right, all right, cut it out."

I drove home, back to my house and my man and my cats and my life. I was ready to have a long talk with LJ when I got there, but then someone came over, and the basketball game was on, and...

Things go on as usual, and the mundane generally wins. And in a few months I will be 35 years old, still stuck in a long-ago summer.

Surprise

Remember that interview I totally thought I whiffed?

Sitting in my spam box, as of 4:15 yesterday afternoon (I wasn't even home yet from the interview at that point) was a message stating that I am one of the final two candidates for this position.

First: Wha? Huh??? FUH???? How the hell???? But...okay, I guess...in fact, way BETTER than "okay". Fucking OUTSTANDING, as a matter of fact!

Second: WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! (Okay, I'm done now.)

Third: Oh holy shit--they're gonna contact my references now. Which means Big Boss Bitch Beverly will now know: her pet tech is trying to fly the coop. And Beverly does NOT like it when people leave. She just DOESN'T. She has been known to completely stop speaking to employees once they give their two weeks' notice--seriously. And if they call her--which of course they HAVE to do, since she is my current employer and all--but if they call her and I DON'T get the job? Oh, holy shit.

(But also? Hehehehehehehehehe.....oh, it's gonna be SOME fun there without me, let me just say. Database upgrade happens this weekend and we're right smack in the middle of spring mailing and suddenly I might be LEAVING?? Bwahahahahaha...it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people, let me just tell you.)

Not that I'm counting my chickens, or anything. It's just nice to know that it's POSSIBLE.

Too Much Damn Info

I always DID like Wonder Woman.

Under Construction

While I'm changing things...

Let me know what you think of the new design, hmm?

Changes I'm Making

If it's seemed a little quiet around here lately--quieter than usual, anyway--there's a good reason for that.

As much as I write about my life and bitch about work, about LJ, about my mother, and all the rest, there are certain things I just haven't talked about too much. Mostly those are the things that haunt me--things I know I CAN change, but just HAVEN'T changed. Those are the things I'm ashamed of, I guess. No one can fault me for bitching about things I can't change--the assholes at work, for example, will always be assholes (as they proved most admirably yesterday--but that's another story and unrelated to this Very Special Episode of "The Story of Why") but the things I have just so far CHOSEN not to change....well, to admit to those is a little harder. They don't exactly portray me in a flattering light, you know? And for a woman who's splayed out every little detail of my various traumas and addictions, that's saying something. I guess I'm not so much worried about looking favorable in the eyes of OTHER people, but when it comes to maybe not seeing the things I want to see in myself---well, that's been the Unbloggable. It's a little hard to explain.

For the past couple of weeks, though, I've thought that maybe it might be worth a try--the changing, not the explaining.

One of the hardest things for me to do, in the past year, has been to look in the mirror. I know some of the things I'm seeing--the circles under the eyes, the little lines, the stray gray hairs--are just the consequence of time; I'm not really okay with that, but the reasons for that are far, far deeper than vanity. Every day that passes, every day that I get older, distances me just a little more from the time that I remember being really, truly happy. I've come to understand that I will probably not ever experience happiness like that again, which is hard to accept.

This, though, is different.

I was never skinny. Well, when I was on heroin, but that doesn't count, exactly. My "normal" size is about a 14, which looks pretty good on me. But at the moment, I'm a 23 (22's are tight, 24's are big). Which does not look good on me, at all, and which has played seventy-five thousand kinds of hell with my self-esteem. I take all sorts of abuse from people when I don't deserve it, and let things go that I shouldn't let go. Not because of my looks, exactly, but because I honestly just haven't liked myself very much in a while. My weight is a big part of that.

This came about post-heroin; one of the legendary truisms about junkies and ex-junkies is that most of us have ravenous sweet-tooths. (Sweet-teeth? Whatever. You get the idea.) I was absolutely the prime example of this rule. When Tim and I were sharing the studio, I had a big container of Froot Loops right next to my bed. I would wake up and eat Froot Loops. (I think I'm gonna turn the comments off on this post, since that was just the WEIRDEST damn thing I've ever admitted to.) Along with that, I have an absolutely amazing affinity for Pepsi. Not Coke, not RC, not DIET Pepsi--just plain old all-American Pepsi, in vast quantities. We were going through a case every three days or so, and LJ was absolutely NOT drinking half! I might as well just eat sugar straight out of the box. (Okay, I've done that too. Brown sugar only, though--not the regular kind.) Also, I am a fairly-sedentary animal. I will walk from point A to point B, even if they are a mile or two apart, but only if I was going from A to B in the first place and it was my only way to get there. Exercise, as a concept, is not something I generally consider as part of my life.

Well, I'm tired of looking the way I look. I'm tired of not being able to buy clothes; I'm tired of not getting any interested looks when I walk down the street. (So yeah, I'm a little vain.) And so I've started trying to do something about it. I've been eating better, trying to exercise more--stuff like that. I've even cut down massively on the Pepsi--I'm allowing myself one per day. I know it's going to take a while, but I've promised myself some faaaaabulous gifts at various milestones. (First up: an iPod when I lose 20 pounds. If, in fact, iPods still exist that far in the future. I think if I lose the full 100 pounds I'm going to buy myself a new, kickass Mac--the big, powerful, expensive kind.) I've been doing this for about two weeks, and I can't really say I feel any different, except that a)I'm ravenously hungry most of the time, and b)my kidneys have gone into total overdrive now that I'm trying to drink the recommended 64 ounces of water per day. No wonder people who drink lots of water are skinny--they burn it off running to the bathroom every 15 minutes.

I'm also--as I HAVE mentioned--trying to get out of this job. I had two interviews this week--one yesterday, one today. The one today was the one I really wanted, but I think I totally whiffed the interview. I'm out of the habit of spouting little interview-y platitudes, and so I think I was a little more candid than I should have been. Fuck it, you know? They'd have to work with me anyway; best they find out now. The one yesterday went much better, I thought, and plus they're desperate to fill the spot; my only concern is that I think this one might pay less than I'm making now. However, it's downtown--a big advantage! Even if I don't get either one of them, I'm not staying where I am much longer.

It's got a lot to do with my image of myself, I guess. I've told myself for four years that I can't do any better, that I need this job, that I'm only using it as a means to an end, as if somehow that made it okay for them to treat me the way they do. Well, I CAN do better, and even though I need A job, I don't necessarily need THIS job. In fact, I'm thinking this job needs me more than I need it. As for the "means to an end" excuse--well, the "end" was supposed to be the house. I've GOT the house. What I don't have is the time or energy to enjoy it, and that's largely the fault of the job. I work eight-and-a-half hours, but my day is over twelve hours long if you count the commute. I leave at 6:40, and on a good day I get home at 7:00. And that would be fine, if I liked where I was working and the people for whom I was working--but I don't. I'm tired of being disrespected and underestimated and scapegoated. That was fine when I was just a couple of months off heroin, when I REALLY needed this job in more ways than one--or when I didn't like myself very much, like when I was with CR--but it's not fine anymore.

Since I went public with this blog, various and sundry commentors have mentioned that they think I should write a book. I haven't, mainly because I'm consumed with the fear of having no story to tell, nothing relevant to say. (Though I jabber irrelevantly all the time in this blog, so why I should be afraid to write a book is beyond me. So wags the human psyche, or something.) Anyway, I got to thinking about that fear, and how I've been letting it run me for just a little too long now. It's been at least seven years since I've written anything substantial, and that's not something I'm proud of.

Tomorrow would have been JP's 36th birthday. In October, it will be ten years since he died, and all this summer will be the tenth anniversaries of all our many little adventures together. I have tried to block out those memories as much as I can, since they render me bitter and nonfunctional for days at a time, and even when I've blogged about that part of my life, I've only let myself skate along the surfaces of what I remember. It's hard to let it out, but it's hard to keep it in too. I can already see the cracks in the facade, and it worries me.

Those things together--the memories, the stress of keeping it together, and the beginnings of the knowledge that yeah, maybe I -could- write it (and it helps to have an actual published-every-day type of writer voice agreement to that--you know who you are!)--anyway, all those factors have finally combined to convince me; I've started writing down some of the things I remember about those 18 months that JP and I were together. I'd like to have it finished by the end of October, and I think I can do it if I try. I know it will be hard, and I know it will hurt, and I know I will cry. But it's something I need to do. It's kinda like losing weight, I guess--getting rid of something that's holding me back.

I'll post some of it from time to time, maybe, but then again if I do that I'll lose fully half of its eventual market share, since you will all have read it already and won't need to buy it. So then again, maybe not. We'll see.

Any one of these things is scary to me. All of them at once is just completely unsettling. But each one of them distracts me from the terror of the others, so maybe it's a good thing.

Back in the summer of 1994, when JP and I first got together, we talked about the two years that had passed since our last, vicious argument. We'd talked briefly in that span of time, occasionally, disclosing nothing real; he didn't know how bad it was for me where I was, and I didn't know how bad it was for him where he was. We had kept these things and many more from each other because we had each been told by a mutual "friend" that the other person was still angry and had no interest in communicating. But when that wall had been breached, we talked about our impressions in the two years since our friendship had ended. And both of us remembered having the same thought in the early days of 1994: It's going to be a very interesting summer.

I haven't really had that feeling since then, but I do now.

Next on Jerry Springer

From today's Chicago Tribune:

When Marshall Field's employed a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs theme for its 2004 holiday festivities, the Chicago-born retailer received some complaints that it was promoting the homosexual lifestyle, an executive said recently.

The concerned citizens divined that there was a "hidden gay agenda" in Field's theme "because seven men were living together."

Next on Jerry Springer:

Mother Goose--Got MILF?

Secrets of the Gingerbread Man-- He's Hooked On Confectioner's Sugar

Hansel and Gretel: "We Had A Four-Way With Jack and Jill!"

Goldilocks and Baby Bear: The Shocking Truth!

Jeeeeeez, people. Haven't you got anything better to do?

God Goes Postal

This is Armed Wheely-Jeebus and His Army of Devoted Party-Hat-Wearing Traitor Mice. This is what happens in my office when more than one person at a time is terribly disaffected and chooses not to work. 

Monday Morning

Snapshots from my Monday morning:

Howard El platform. Random homeless guy works the crowd, gladhanding the waiting passengers. As the train pulls in, he pulls out several full-size bags of Snyders pretzels and starts WHIPPING them at various inanimate objects--the billboards, the shelter walls, the train. The guy's got a decent throwing arm, judging from the WHAPs of the impact. Or maybe he's kicking the bags, not throwing them. As I board the train, I see one bag sail along the ground and fly onto the outside tracks.

Northbound Purple Line train. I am sitting in the last two-person frontward-facing seat, next to a completely innocuous woman who figures in this tale only as "the person I was sitting next to". In the seat across the aisle and just in front of me is this long-haired mid-40's rocker-lookin' guy, talking to a maybe-50 black man with dreads. (Now, I love dreads more than just about anything else in this world, but when you're 50? maybe not so much. Or maybe it was just this guy in particular. Whatever. Totally non-hot, is what I'm conveying here. Not that it mattered.) These two guys--both at least a good ten years older than me, let's remember--are, throughout this train ride. removing from their pockets and commenting at great length about their collections of Hot Wheels cars. I mean, these guys were DETAILED. They were talking about such-and-such a car had such-and-such a detail, but the ones that came after it had a different detail and blah blah fishcakes. For the WHOLE RIDE.

Same train, just in front of me: iPod guy. I personally would extract several of my molars by hand if I thought it would get me a iPod, but molars are cheap and iPods are...not. Anyway, this guy is serious: he has his little 'pod, but instead of the Standard White Earbeads, he's got the big whompin' Koss noise-cancelling headphones. "Noise-cancelling", however, apparently only covers the wearer of the headphones; I, sitting almost directly behind him, can clearly hear what he's listening to. Radiohead, I think, which...okay, cool, but not necessarily everyone else's cup of tea. Then the probably-Radiohead song ends, something else comes on, and this man CRANKS it. I mean, if I knew what the song was I could have sat there and sung along and not sounded any stupider than I sound whenever I sing (which is, admittedly, very stupid, but still.) The fairly-cute guy sitting next to Dreadlocks and Hot-Wheels--keep in mind he's now across the aisle and two seats up from iPod Blaster--looks up from his book at the sound, shakes his head, goes back to reading. (I pause in my mild contempt for iPod to drink in the fairly-cuteness of this other guy, who is so clearly-out-of-my-league-and-also-ten-years-younger that it sorta negates his hotness, in a practical sense. Because...never gonna happen.) iPod gets up and blasts his way off the train at Davis, trailing some undoubtedly-hip band noise behind him.

Eventually, I got here.

We won't talk about "here" today, except to say that it is, without question, the last place on earth I'd prefer to be.

Thank God For Stomach Flu

Well, the database upgrade is NOT happening this weekend.

"Oh, Gladys!" I hear you saying. "So they finally decided that your professional opinion WAS worth something after all! You must be so proud."

Um...well...no. Because it had nothing to do with me at all.

Samuel, the guy who's "in charge" of this upgrade--and I use "in charge" in much the same way that George W. Bush uses it when he implies that American forces are "in charge" of the Iraq situation--anyway, Samuel is immobilized by stomach flu. Can't get more than 20 feet from the bathroom. Even THEN they were talking about still doing the upgrade, but Noreen managed to put the kibosh on that. "I don't want him touching my computer!! I had that flu ONCE already this year--I don't want it AGAIN!!!"

Next week: two interviews. I am SO getting out of there.

Please, Stress Me Some More. I Crave It.

It is truly amazing, the attitudes and behaviors we'll overlook when they come from our friends.

News Flash From The Planet Obvious

In other news, I work for a pack of moronic power-tripping jackwads. (Just thought I'd share.)

I thought, once, in my naive and blissful youth, that there was a limit to idiocy. I figured that there had to be a tipping-point, at which the universe would say "ENOUGH"--probably in a booming voice reminiscent of Charlton Heston, or maybe Barry White--and suddenly the gears of the Rube Goldberg idiot-factory would grind to a noisy, satisfying halt.

Oh, what a trusting soul I was.

My eyes have been opened. (Yeah, I know--lucky Gladys, made it almost all the way to 35 without realizing that it's the idiots who run the show. I never claimed to have lived a non-sheltered life.) To paraphrase one of Tyra Banks' little television hamsters, I was in denial, but now I know.

I don't think I have ever been as angry as I was today. And that's saying something. Rage has kinda been my hallmark, a lovely little piece of my identity which I've consistently masked with people-pleasing doormat-ism and a healthy coating of snark. Underneath it all? Make no mistake--I'm pissed. I worry when I'm NOT pissed, as a matter of fact. I see it as a sign of complacency.

I have no such fears today, however. This was like the Vesuvius of pissed-ness; this was the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful, and several other western tourist-attractions worth of anger. This was like the return of "Nine-Inch-Nails-is-Like-Muzak-For-This-Kind-of-Anger" anger. (Last experienced, summer 1994. I used to fall asleep to "Downward Spiral".)

All through this whole ghastly, infinitely-delayed process of our database-upgrade-that-was-supposed-to-happen-at-Thanksgiving-and-it's-now-nearly-Easter, I have had one, single, simple request. Over a year ago, during the planning stages, when the question came up of when to do this upgrade, I voiced that one, single, simple request; to wit:

"Please," I said, "don't do it during the spring marketing mailing."

The spring marketing mailing is a yearly ritual, like the returning of the swallows to Capistrano or the running of the bulls at Pamplona. (And there's less bullshit in Pamplona, might I add, but--as always--I digress.) It is a remarkably complicated waltz of paper, orchestrated and choreographed by Noreen, who has been doing this since approximately before I was born. It involves the printing of many, many different forms in many, many different orders, in varying combinations and permutations specific to our client base. Some clients get one from Column A, one from Column B, an envelope and a form; some get A but not B, or B but not A, or a special envelope, or several copies of the form, or...You get the idea.

It is my responsibility to generate the items for this mailing. I am the database queen, and thus I am the one who gets to craft the queries that will result in the right people being in the right pile when the time comes to stuff their envelope. Unfortunately, I am not in control of this entire process; there is outside data also involved, for which we wait feverishly each year.

What I'm telling you here is: this is DIFFICULT. This is COMPLICATED. This is TIME-CONSUMING and very exacting, because if any mistakes get made we'll have a repeat of 2002, when I ended up sobbing hysterically in Amy's office after being told that because I'd run something off in the wrong order, we were now going to be two weeks off schedule and about $5000 over-budget. And that? Was not fun.

So when we started the planning for the database upgrade, I said "Just please, don't do it during the spring marketing mailing. Any of the other 50 weeks out of the year, no problem--just not during the mailing."

Would any of you lovely readers care to guess what's happening this week? Or when they've decided to do the database upgrade? I will give you a hint: this week and next are the highest-stress point of the mailing, and this weekend is the database upgrade. I cannot concieve of any plan more outstandingly STUPID than this. This is painfully stupid; this is a whole higher level of stupid magnitude. This is stupid-like-whoa.

The mailing will not be done by this weekend. Not even close. As I write this, it's nearly 7 PM and I'm sitting here watching the database chug away at part of the data-processing. I'd be on the way home--or already there!--but I was told in no uncertain terms by Amy: "You might want to think about working late to get some of this stuff done, so you don't have so many problems with the mailing."

Around here, that's practically a threat. This office is full of people who can make the most syrupy-sweet requests in the most menacing tone, and when Amy starts pouring the Mrs. Butterworths on every sentence, you pretty much know it's time to sit up and take notice.

Add to this the fact that no one has been trained--Samuel, the alleged database guy, is in charge of the training and I haven't even SEEN any training materials, besides which he's holed-up with the stomach flu. And the upgrade supposedly starts tomorrow at 5:00.

I tried to tell them again today--no one listened. Amy gave me the whole "I understand your concerns", which sentence, as usual, ended with an unspoken"...but I'm going to ignore them and do whatever-the-hell I want." And what kills me is: I will be the one responsible for dealing with the mess when this mailing is off-track. I will be the one working all kinds of bullshit late hours trying to get caught up when everything goes haywire. I will be the one absorbing Noreen's evil stress-vibes for days--and let me tell you, when provoked, that woman can generate enough bad energy to power Satan's cookstove.

Then, in the middle of all of this, I was given a useless, meaningless busy-work task that did not need to be done at all, let alone by me. I attempted to explain that the numbers that were needed did not change from year to year, but Beverly decided no, I still had to run the numbers which would yield exactly...the...same...result. Which I attempted to explain, but once again--no one listened.

My next job, they will listen.

Hee!

Not to break up the little pity-party here... but this is fuckin' HILARIOUS.

First, read this.

There's no link to the list per se (and for any of you who were wondering, I've learned the location of the Trib's secret "can link/can't link" line-in-the-sand--thanks, EZ, but now do you have to de-link me after that last post?)

Not being a representative of...anybody, I can link to this list with impunity. And of course, you know me: if I CAN, I will!

The List Of Words You Can't Put On A Jersey

What I find entertaining isn't so much what's on this list, but what ISN'T.

Some examples:

As long as you know how to spell it correctly, you apparently CAN put "bestiality" on your NFL jersey.

You can't put "boody" but apparently "booty" is okay.

Though "assclown” and its variants are verboten, “asshat” and “asshelmet”--two of my favorite bits of road-rage invective--seem to be acceptable.

You can’t use “bite me” but “blow me” isn’t on the blacklist.

You can’t have “Dre” and you can’t have “G Unit”, but “50 Cent”—go right ahead.

“Joint”, “Crack”, “Pot,” “420”, “Reefer,” “Roach” and “Dope”: not okay.
“Heroin”, “Smack”, “Crystal Meth”, “Cocaine”, “LSD”: all good.

Items You Wouldn’t Expect:
“Carruth”
“F Toyota”
“Fatso”
“Hell No” (and its partner, “Hell Yes”)
“Idiot” (and also my personal favorite “ID 10 T”, which tech geeks will understand immediately)
“Juggalo” (not that I can imagine wanting THAT on a shirt, no matter the circumstances)
“Mother Love Bone” (rest in peace, Andrew Wood, but not on an NFL jersey)
“OU812” (Bad music references seem to abound here.)
“Pisser” (Dammit, Pisser, that’s just not right)
“Stupid” (Maybe it was supposed to be a public-service announcement.)

And now, thanks to the outcry, you can have “Gay” on a shirt. (But not “Gay Nazi”.)

Not Quite As Functional As I Thought

Today is LJ's birthday, which means he gets to go out drinking with his friends and doing god-knows-what while I stay home. Oh, wait--that's EVERY day.

I'm not as bitchy as that sounds--really. I've just been having a series of revelations about the state of my life and why it is the way it is, and the problem with revelations is, you have to do something with them once you've got them. And I'm just....lethargic, really.

But I have realized that I have a very, very good cause to be angrier than I've ever been in my life.

Not at LJ--he's exactly what I need right now, a man whose main redeeming feature is that he exists and doesn't want to know anything about what's under my surface. I question whether this will be a long-term thing, even though I love him dearly, because I'm not sure he's able to connect with me emotionally, or with anyone else, for that matter. He's just...not like that. Which isn't a bad thing; in fact, like I said, right now it's a good thing. I am not prepared to deal with emotion right now. Not love, not hate, not even consciousness.

I feel like, for the past eight years, I have been balanced on a tiny, tiny beam over a pit covered with benign-looking mist, with horrible screams coming from inside. I can't see the reason for the screaming--but I can't be reassured by the obscuring mist, either, because there's so clearly all this horror underneath. And I'm finding that somehow, I can't stand on the beam any more.

I think back to the two years after JP died. I was absolutely raw, of course, but I had a sense of purpose. Even when I was an addict, I still felt like I had a reason for existing--even if I wasn't doing such a hot job with my life right then, I always thought there was a chance for me to be happy again.

I've been surprised, really, by how little of the past ten years I remember. I mean, I remember pretty much every minute with JP; I remember being in North Carolina, for the most part, though it's kind of a blur of grief, alcohol, and wasted hours. I remember coming home and the summer Lou and I lived together, even though at the time I was doing so much heroin that Lou accused me of trying to kill myself. Which, I guess, I sort of was.

Then I met CR.

He was in my rehab group and he seemed to have a presence about him; he was the center of things, like JP had been, and I saw that as a good thing. Later I found out it was just a front, nothing real at all. By then it was too late.

That was in October of 1997. And there are bits and pieces I remember--getting beaten in the hotel room by his "former" girlfriend; moving into the Ravenswood apartment together, then getting dumped on Valentines' Day; Tim showing up at my front door; buying myself a CD player one day, then returning it the next because CR needed some money. I remember three of us living in the studio, and getting the bigger apartment, and Bertha; and getting married, and him leaving. And, of course, all the things he told me before he left--how unattractive I was, how undesirable, how he had used me for what I could give him, how he'd never loved me like I thought he did.

When he left I told myself I was going to have some dignity about it. I didn't always succeed; I remember begging him to come back, calling him and getting yelled at to leave him alone. I wrote him long, long letters every day, and mailed them. But I thought I was keeping myself together fairly well.

Now, though, when I look at how I relate to LJ, I'm not sure I did as well as I thought.

I don't ask LJ for anything, even though on some level I know he's willing to do more around here, because I'm afraid that if I ask, he won't have any reason to be with me anymore. Because the only thing I'm good for is to work and pay the bills.

I don't talk to him, even if I have something that needs to be said. I tiptoe around the edges of questions that keep me awake at night, and I joke away my doubts about his honesty, his fidelity, whether or not he really cares about me at all. Because no one wants to hear that chick shit, no one wants to hear all that emotional drama-queen bullshit. No real man would be with someone like me anyway, unless he was getting something out of it.

I don't ask for sex, even if I'm dying just to be touched. Because I don't want to be a nuisance, or an irritant, and who would want me anyway? Who would want to touch me, and why would I even embarrass myself by asking?

I look at my life now, and I know I misinterpret some perfectly-innocent things, but there's a little voice inside me that says I can't afford NOT to misinterpret them. I can't take the risk of being made the fool again. I don't even so much care about what might or might not be going on--I care more about losing my trust in myself again. When I was with CR, I let him tell me that things were OK when they weren't, that I wasn't seeing things that I WAS seeing, that my judgements were incorrect and I was taking things the wrong way, and that I was a weak person for being who I was, and a mean person for doubting him. And when he left--when all my doubts and all my judgements and all my observations turned out to be true--not only was I left alone, but I was left with no trust in myself. Because not only didn't he care about me--it turned out -I- hadn't cared much about me either.

Someone asked me, in the comments of a post a few weeks ago, why I didn't work on my blog novel. And I never answered, because I didn't have a very good answer at the time. But I think I do now:

I haven't worked on my novels--any of them--or my poetry, or my business, or the classes I want to take, or my appearance, or my weight, or any of the other ten million plans I have for my life--because to work on those things implies that I have some level of commitment to them. Even just to talk about them is to bring someone else into the equation, to admit to someone else that I have made a plan. And if I do that--if I bring these things up, if I mention them, or talk about them, or work on them at all, in any kind of public way--then when I give up, when my insecurities get the best of me and I know I'll never be good enough to do whatever it is, or successful enough, or talented enough--when those things happen, I'll have somehow let someone ELSE down.

Instead of just myself, which I'm used to by now.

I am tired of this life, this fear, this loneliness. I'm tired of living in my skin, much less inside my head. I see signs that are encouraging--indications that I'm coming out of my shell a little bit--but more often than not I'm just amazed at how much time has passed; amazed that I'm nearly 35 and still acting as though I have all the time in the world.

I know I don't. I know the chances of some great romance are fading. I look in the mirror and I see lines that weren't there before, and I realize: I'm middle-aged. I don't know when that happened. I know I don't want the same things that other people want; but I also know that the things I DO want, I don't think I can have. It makes it harder because I had them once, and haven't forgotten what that's like.

I look back and wonder when I learned to hate myself so much, and I wonder how to stop.