You know your life and your thinking are seriously off track when even your SHRINK gets stern with you.
Just once I would like to hear someone say You know, Gladys, it might not be a bad idea to just say "fukkit". You might feel better if you overthrow your whole life and try something new.
Somehow, no one ever says that.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Do Not Want, Vol. 2
Because Snickers will eat anything--literally, anything, up to and including bits of tile, rocks, wood chips, and other oddities--we are VERY careful of rubber-bands here at the Catastrophe. The mail, for whatever reason, is always laden with them, so every time Tim or I gets the mail, we dispose of the rubber-bands in a cat-appropriate manner.
Or, at least we try to.
Dingbat, a.k.a. Snickers the Incredibly Non-Wonder Kitty, after a day-and-a-half of rejecting cut-up chicken legs at mealtimes, barfed up his (newly mixed) breakfast this morning...plus one rubber-band.
I was not the superintendant of barf-clean-up--Tim gets the worst jobs around here!!--but Tim assures me that there was a rubber-band amidst the mess.
We are on Barf Watch, until such time as I'm sure he's eating properly. He did nibble at a fresh bowl of chicken-mush* a little while ago, and unless he yorfed it up under my bed, he appears to have kept it down--but I'm still apprehensive.
Stoopid rubber-bands. Stoopid rubber-band-eating kitties.
______________________________________________
*There's got to be a better name for what I'm feeding them--"chicken-slaw", perhaps?
Or, at least we try to.
Dingbat, a.k.a. Snickers the Incredibly Non-Wonder Kitty, after a day-and-a-half of rejecting cut-up chicken legs at mealtimes, barfed up his (newly mixed) breakfast this morning...plus one rubber-band.
I was not the superintendant of barf-clean-up--Tim gets the worst jobs around here!!--but Tim assures me that there was a rubber-band amidst the mess.
We are on Barf Watch, until such time as I'm sure he's eating properly. He did nibble at a fresh bowl of chicken-mush* a little while ago, and unless he yorfed it up under my bed, he appears to have kept it down--but I'm still apprehensive.
Stoopid rubber-bands. Stoopid rubber-band-eating kitties.
______________________________________________
*There's got to be a better name for what I'm feeding them--"chicken-slaw", perhaps?
Saturday, May 19, 2007
On the Joys of LOLCats
I'm starting out under an assumption here, which is a baaaad thing to do (as I've discovered this past week....urgh. We'll get there.) and so before I start holding forth, I'll ask this question:
Is everyone here familiar with the concept of LOLCats/cat macros?
If you are, you can skip down to the asterisk. If not, this bit below will explain somewhat. Links will open in a new window, so you won't get lost.
________________________________________________
What is a LOLCat? LOLCats (also known as cat macros) are images of cats (and walruses, and dogs, and other critters) to which a human has added captions indicating what the critter in the picture might say or think under the depicted circumstances. These thoughts or statements are often expressed in an amalgam of English and baby-talk, which has been designated as LOLKitteh. LOLKitteh As A Second Language is not a difficult study, but it does actually have a grammar (although the grammar is often violated for comic effect...same as English.)
My personal favorite LOLCat site is I Can Has Cheezburger?, or ICHC. Other sites devoted to cat macros are Meme Cats, Error: Access Denied, and Cute Overload (although CO is more straightforward pictures, like Stuff On My Cat or Daily Kitten. Daily Kitten also has a really great community of commentors; though the hundreds of comments are often a lot to wade through, it's often worth it--you'll find news items and recipes scattered throughout the "awwww, what a cute kitty!" posts.)
* (This is where to start if you already know about Teh Lolkittehz.)
I've been noticing a lot more traffic coming from I Can Has Cheezburger?, which...to all my lolfrenz, welcome to mine 'umble abode. (Should I hang out a sign that says "LOLKitteh Spoken Here", I wonder? Because...I mean, it IS, but not often. All the same, if your ICHC-dwelling has completely undermined your ability to speak Non-Kittehfied English, you're still welcome to comment here.) So again, to my lolfrenz: Welcome, and feel free to jump right in. Pisser was the one who put me up on ICHC, and I know Elfi and CBSB and Melissa have been here and commented, and I can't speak for how many others have passed through, but anyhow, it's good to have you. (If you're reading and NOT commenting...well, that's no fun, now is it??? Say sumthin', willya?) I generally make it a point to link to commentors' blogs/websites/given URLs, but to be honest, I haven't updated my blogroll in approximately forever, and so there are lots of commentors whose blogs aren't represented, and lots of defunct blogs in that list. I should clean that up, shouldn't I?... Maybe later, yeah.)
I'm not sure, exactly, what the appeal is of LOLcats. I know I personally like them because a) I love cats; b) I myself have some pretty entertaining cats; c) I'm a sucker for cute; d) I have a skewed sense of humor; and e) Did I mention I love cats?? But obviously, there's something more to this phenomenon--it's apparently a huge deal, though I didn't realize that until I saw...
...this. That link will take you to an .mp3 file of a song called "Cat Macros", by a gentleman by the name of Tom Smith. The lyrics are here, at ICHC: Cat Macros - by Tom Smith. If you find LOLcats amusing at all, this song will probably cause you to choke on your beverage of choice. Since childhood, I've had a soft spot for funny songs; I remember being eleven years old, staying up WAY past my bedtime on a Sunday night to listen to Dr. Demento. (I was one of those kids, yeah. I can still sing along with "Fish Heads" or "They're Coming To Take Me Away"--by heart!) I think LOLcats are like Dr. Demento songs for the Internet...but wait--that would make "Cat Macros" (the song) a song about (figurative) songs.....
I seem to have gotten lost in my own metaphor. But what do you want from me, anyway? it's not even 7 AM yet...I got up to give Tim a ride to work this morning, since he needed to be there at 6 AM and he was kind enough to come upstairs last night, at my request, at 3 in the morning, and without complaint, to kill a gigantic millipede on my bedroom wall. I mean....Here's a depiction of the millipede, approximately actual size:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()<
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Except it was MOVING, which made it much worse--all those little X's were rippling and pulsing and CREEPING MR RIGHT THE HELL OUT. So I thought about it for a minute, and then I got on the intercom phone and buzzed Tim, who promptly showed up with a handful of paper towels and a long-suffering expression.
(Why he would be willing to do this in the first place....well, that's a story for another blog post. I'll say only this for now: people are MUCH more complicated than cats, LOL or otherwise.)
Have a happy Catureday, all of you; more later, but in the meantime, I'm going back to sleep!
Is everyone here familiar with the concept of LOLCats/cat macros?
If you are, you can skip down to the asterisk. If not, this bit below will explain somewhat. Links will open in a new window, so you won't get lost.
________________________________________________
What is a LOLCat? LOLCats (also known as cat macros) are images of cats (and walruses, and dogs, and other critters) to which a human has added captions indicating what the critter in the picture might say or think under the depicted circumstances. These thoughts or statements are often expressed in an amalgam of English and baby-talk, which has been designated as LOLKitteh. LOLKitteh As A Second Language is not a difficult study, but it does actually have a grammar (although the grammar is often violated for comic effect...same as English.)
My personal favorite LOLCat site is I Can Has Cheezburger?, or ICHC. Other sites devoted to cat macros are Meme Cats, Error: Access Denied, and Cute Overload (although CO is more straightforward pictures, like Stuff On My Cat or Daily Kitten. Daily Kitten also has a really great community of commentors; though the hundreds of comments are often a lot to wade through, it's often worth it--you'll find news items and recipes scattered throughout the "awwww, what a cute kitty!" posts.)
* (This is where to start if you already know about Teh Lolkittehz.)
I've been noticing a lot more traffic coming from I Can Has Cheezburger?, which...to all my lolfrenz, welcome to mine 'umble abode. (Should I hang out a sign that says "LOLKitteh Spoken Here", I wonder? Because...I mean, it IS, but not often. All the same, if your ICHC-dwelling has completely undermined your ability to speak Non-Kittehfied English, you're still welcome to comment here.) So again, to my lolfrenz: Welcome, and feel free to jump right in. Pisser was the one who put me up on ICHC, and I know Elfi and CBSB and Melissa have been here and commented, and I can't speak for how many others have passed through, but anyhow, it's good to have you. (If you're reading and NOT commenting...well, that's no fun, now is it??? Say sumthin', willya?) I generally make it a point to link to commentors' blogs/websites/given URLs, but to be honest, I haven't updated my blogroll in approximately forever, and so there are lots of commentors whose blogs aren't represented, and lots of defunct blogs in that list. I should clean that up, shouldn't I?... Maybe later, yeah.)
I'm not sure, exactly, what the appeal is of LOLcats. I know I personally like them because a) I love cats; b) I myself have some pretty entertaining cats; c) I'm a sucker for cute; d) I have a skewed sense of humor; and e) Did I mention I love cats?? But obviously, there's something more to this phenomenon--it's apparently a huge deal, though I didn't realize that until I saw...
...this. That link will take you to an .mp3 file of a song called "Cat Macros", by a gentleman by the name of Tom Smith. The lyrics are here, at ICHC: Cat Macros - by Tom Smith. If you find LOLcats amusing at all, this song will probably cause you to choke on your beverage of choice. Since childhood, I've had a soft spot for funny songs; I remember being eleven years old, staying up WAY past my bedtime on a Sunday night to listen to Dr. Demento. (I was one of those kids, yeah. I can still sing along with "Fish Heads" or "They're Coming To Take Me Away"--by heart!) I think LOLcats are like Dr. Demento songs for the Internet...but wait--that would make "Cat Macros" (the song) a song about (figurative) songs.....
I seem to have gotten lost in my own metaphor. But what do you want from me, anyway? it's not even 7 AM yet...I got up to give Tim a ride to work this morning, since he needed to be there at 6 AM and he was kind enough to come upstairs last night, at my request, at 3 in the morning, and without complaint, to kill a gigantic millipede on my bedroom wall. I mean....Here's a depiction of the millipede, approximately actual size:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()<
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Except it was MOVING, which made it much worse--all those little X's were rippling and pulsing and CREEPING MR RIGHT THE HELL OUT. So I thought about it for a minute, and then I got on the intercom phone and buzzed Tim, who promptly showed up with a handful of paper towels and a long-suffering expression.
(Why he would be willing to do this in the first place....well, that's a story for another blog post. I'll say only this for now: people are MUCH more complicated than cats, LOL or otherwise.)
Have a happy Catureday, all of you; more later, but in the meantime, I'm going back to sleep!
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Cat Chronicles—Two Outta Three Ain’t Bad
So tonight, at a really unnatural hour, I woke up (See, most people wake up in the morning. But then, MOST people didn’t find it somehow needful to stay up and watch BOTH showings of “The Music Man” the night before on cable. Even in these first few days of unemploymentosity, things are becoming increasingly clear. I am beginning to think that the universe is bonking me over the head with the notion of “um, HELLO, you’re not an office person, and every single solitary other time that you’ve attempted to be what you’re not, you’ve self-sabotaged in a truly epic fashion. So let’s not get too attached to the idea, shall we, of a ‘steady nine-to-five’? You’re a different creature, kid.”)
So tonight, at a really unnatural hour (sometimes you just gotta start over after a tangent like that) I got up and set about the business of feeding my cats for real.
Raw-feeding cats, while it’s not exactly rocket-science, is no joke either. First of all you have to sift through the roughly sixty-billion pounds of virulently-conflicting literature on the science of feeding cats. Then you have to get the ingredients—quite a task, when you consider that the ingredients are things like ground whole-carcass rabbit/chicken/turkey, with hearts and organs included. Which…okay, I’ll say this once: EEEWWWW. But when you take it out of the bag (the bag which was frozen-shipped directly to me, along with a bunch of other stuff, from www.hare-today.com, which I can wholeheartedly recommend), the rabbit meat looks like ground turkey or pale hamburger. It’s the additive—the chicken-hearts, needed for taurine—that are kinda squickworthy. But I once worked at a chicken franchise, in my younger days, and things went on there after closing that…well, let’s just say once you’ve had a raw liver down your back, organ meats hold no fear anymore.
So: rabbit, egg yolk, supplements (vitamins B and E and fish-oil), a few ounces of hearts—stir well, portion into bowls. Place bowls on floor, summon cats….
…hold breath.
We’ve been, as I think I mentioned, feeding chicken parts instead of dry food for a few days now. There’s a sliding scale of finickiness—Cassidy, easily the least-finicky; and then depending on the cat, the meat, the time of day, and possibly the zodiac sign, Bad and Snick. I was most worried about Snick, since he was the most-recently finicky of the two; all he would eat yesterday, it seemed, was bunny-ears. BadCat was doing reasonably well with drumstick pieces, less-well with chicken necks; Snick wouldn’t touch the necks and would only eat a little of each drumstick. So when I put the bowls down, I had a reasonable idea of what I’d see.
I was wrong.
Snickers looked at the bowl, looked at me, and then back at the bowl. And then he began what is, in a cat, the most accurate representation I’ve yet seen of a Dyson vacuum-cleaner. He INHALED that food. He was eating so fast that I was afraid it would come back up, as it often does when he snarfs like that. But it didn’t.
Meanwhile, Cassidy nosed the bowl a couple of times, then started munching at his usual leisurely pace. Only BadCat gave me the much-feared “PLEH, do not want” look and stalked away in search of something more-palatable.
I gave him a few minutes to make up his mind, then tried a trick I’d read about with the cat-food recipes: if they won’t eat it, take a fish-oil capsule, poke it with a pin, and give the food a little salmon-oil garnish. Apparently it’s very good for the cat, and will also sometimes entice the finicky.
I put the salmon-ized bowl down, and the Cat-Food Ballet began.
BadCat: (ambles over)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl)
CatMom: No, Snick. You had yours. (Picks up Snick and deposits him elsewhere.)
BadCat: (sniffs food)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl)
CatMom: No, Snick. You already had yours, I said. Let him eat. (Removes Snick.)
BadCat: (gingerly extends tongue toward food)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl, snaps up a bite)
CatMom: Snickers! No! Leave him alone! (Removes Snickers.)
Snickers: MEW! (zooms to bowl)
CatMom: That’s entirely too bad. You had yours. (Blocks approach)
Snickers: MEW!! (repeats attack)
BadCat: (looks on in bewilderment, occasionally attempting a bite of food)
CatMom: That’s it. You’re goin’ in Tim’s room, buddy, til Bad finishes his dinner. (Deposits Snick in Tim’s room, closes door.)
BadCat: (after some apprehension, licks food; then eats about half of what’s in the bowl.)
CatMom: (releases Snickers, after being sure BadCat’s finished)
Snickers: (zooms over to bowl, finishes all but two bites of what BadCat left; takes long leisurely bath)
So: Cassidy got a full meal; BadCat got less than I would have liked, but he did eat something; Snickers got about two meals’ worth and seems no worse the wear for it.
I don’t know for sure how they’ll react to the chicken- or turkey-based food, but so far, the Cat-Food Experiment is a qualified success. One less thing to worry about, at least.
So tonight, at a really unnatural hour (sometimes you just gotta start over after a tangent like that) I got up and set about the business of feeding my cats for real.
Raw-feeding cats, while it’s not exactly rocket-science, is no joke either. First of all you have to sift through the roughly sixty-billion pounds of virulently-conflicting literature on the science of feeding cats. Then you have to get the ingredients—quite a task, when you consider that the ingredients are things like ground whole-carcass rabbit/chicken/turkey, with hearts and organs included. Which…okay, I’ll say this once: EEEWWWW. But when you take it out of the bag (the bag which was frozen-shipped directly to me, along with a bunch of other stuff, from www.hare-today.com, which I can wholeheartedly recommend), the rabbit meat looks like ground turkey or pale hamburger. It’s the additive—the chicken-hearts, needed for taurine—that are kinda squickworthy. But I once worked at a chicken franchise, in my younger days, and things went on there after closing that…well, let’s just say once you’ve had a raw liver down your back, organ meats hold no fear anymore.
So: rabbit, egg yolk, supplements (vitamins B and E and fish-oil), a few ounces of hearts—stir well, portion into bowls. Place bowls on floor, summon cats….
…hold breath.
We’ve been, as I think I mentioned, feeding chicken parts instead of dry food for a few days now. There’s a sliding scale of finickiness—Cassidy, easily the least-finicky; and then depending on the cat, the meat, the time of day, and possibly the zodiac sign, Bad and Snick. I was most worried about Snick, since he was the most-recently finicky of the two; all he would eat yesterday, it seemed, was bunny-ears. BadCat was doing reasonably well with drumstick pieces, less-well with chicken necks; Snick wouldn’t touch the necks and would only eat a little of each drumstick. So when I put the bowls down, I had a reasonable idea of what I’d see.
I was wrong.
Snickers looked at the bowl, looked at me, and then back at the bowl. And then he began what is, in a cat, the most accurate representation I’ve yet seen of a Dyson vacuum-cleaner. He INHALED that food. He was eating so fast that I was afraid it would come back up, as it often does when he snarfs like that. But it didn’t.
Meanwhile, Cassidy nosed the bowl a couple of times, then started munching at his usual leisurely pace. Only BadCat gave me the much-feared “PLEH, do not want” look and stalked away in search of something more-palatable.
I gave him a few minutes to make up his mind, then tried a trick I’d read about with the cat-food recipes: if they won’t eat it, take a fish-oil capsule, poke it with a pin, and give the food a little salmon-oil garnish. Apparently it’s very good for the cat, and will also sometimes entice the finicky.
I put the salmon-ized bowl down, and the Cat-Food Ballet began.
BadCat: (ambles over)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl)
CatMom: No, Snick. You had yours. (Picks up Snick and deposits him elsewhere.)
BadCat: (sniffs food)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl)
CatMom: No, Snick. You already had yours, I said. Let him eat. (Removes Snick.)
BadCat: (gingerly extends tongue toward food)
Snickers: (zooms over, sticks face in bowl, snaps up a bite)
CatMom: Snickers! No! Leave him alone! (Removes Snickers.)
Snickers: MEW! (zooms to bowl)
CatMom: That’s entirely too bad. You had yours. (Blocks approach)
Snickers: MEW!! (repeats attack)
BadCat: (looks on in bewilderment, occasionally attempting a bite of food)
CatMom: That’s it. You’re goin’ in Tim’s room, buddy, til Bad finishes his dinner. (Deposits Snick in Tim’s room, closes door.)
BadCat: (after some apprehension, licks food; then eats about half of what’s in the bowl.)
CatMom: (releases Snickers, after being sure BadCat’s finished)
Snickers: (zooms over to bowl, finishes all but two bites of what BadCat left; takes long leisurely bath)
So: Cassidy got a full meal; BadCat got less than I would have liked, but he did eat something; Snickers got about two meals’ worth and seems no worse the wear for it.
I don’t know for sure how they’ll react to the chicken- or turkey-based food, but so far, the Cat-Food Experiment is a qualified success. One less thing to worry about, at least.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Unemployment v. 2.0--Day 1
In the comments below, Elfi (:::waves::: Hi Elfi!) asked me how I’m doing today. At the risk of causing perplexity and confusion in almost everybody else by transferring from my normal writing style to American LOLCat:
I iz feelin full of lose.
It was weird—like waking up from a bad dream this morning, then discovering “Oh, hey, oops—not a dream.” It wasn’t a good feeling. So I went back to sleep for a while, and when I woke up again: still not a dream. Only now, it was a non-dream with a noisy, hungry cat who really wanted his breakfast. (That’s the problem of not free-feeding kibble anymore—breakfast time is now an urgent alarm, not a casual “they’ve been grazing all night, they’ll be fine” kind of thing.) So I went downstairs, chopped up a chicken leg to share three ways, listened to chomping from the older two cats, and received the dirty look from Snickers that said “oh hai, I don think I will be eatin of yr swill--pleez 2 be feeding me sum REEL catfuud…kthxbai.” Which I ignored, as it was rendered in cat, not in English. I’m currently thawing the meat to make their real food; hopefully Snickers will eat that. I’m optimistic, if his demeanor toward the treat I’ve introduced him to is any indication. (I don’t even wanna talk about them, but I will. It’s very hard for me to feed my cat something called “dehydrated bunny ears”—and even more so when you consider that that is EXACTLY what they are. They have fur. You can see where they were attached to the original bunny. And they CRUNCH. They gross me out, and Tim as well, but Snick thinks they’re the best thing since climbable curtains.)
Anyway, what with the feeding of the cats, the fine folks over at I Can Has Cheezburger? and the subsequent discovery of a song that turned both Tim’s and my minds into slush*, we got through the day. I didn’t do anything about a job, or unemployment, or anything else—I foresee a big problem with the Unemployment folks anyhow, since I got fired again AND the Department of Employment seems to think I tried to pull a fast one on them. Apparently I claimed my first week of employment by mistake, thinking the form I’d filled out had sufficed to let them know that I was no longer eligible, and when I got the check I just figured they knew what they were doing and cashed it without thinking. Well, a week later I got a threatening letter accusing me of possible fraud; upon reading what they claimed I’d done, I realized the mistake and wrote them a check for the full week’s benefits, but it hasn’t cleared yet and now I’m going back to them. Red tape being what it is, I am HIGHLY pessimistic.
More later, perhaps….
*If you’ve got LimeWire or Gnutella or any of those, look for “Burger Dance” by DJ Otzi. You should also be able to find it by typing “Pizza Hut” into the search box—but make sure you get the DJ Otzi version, because only that version will bring home the true meaning of “earworm”. It’s in German, but the choruses are in completely comprehensible English, and it will lodge itself in your ear canal and gnaw into your brains, sucking out your life-force in its insane and insatiable need to keep up its own levels of horrifying suckitude.
I iz feelin full of lose.
It was weird—like waking up from a bad dream this morning, then discovering “Oh, hey, oops—not a dream.” It wasn’t a good feeling. So I went back to sleep for a while, and when I woke up again: still not a dream. Only now, it was a non-dream with a noisy, hungry cat who really wanted his breakfast. (That’s the problem of not free-feeding kibble anymore—breakfast time is now an urgent alarm, not a casual “they’ve been grazing all night, they’ll be fine” kind of thing.) So I went downstairs, chopped up a chicken leg to share three ways, listened to chomping from the older two cats, and received the dirty look from Snickers that said “oh hai, I don think I will be eatin of yr swill--pleez 2 be feeding me sum REEL catfuud…kthxbai.” Which I ignored, as it was rendered in cat, not in English. I’m currently thawing the meat to make their real food; hopefully Snickers will eat that. I’m optimistic, if his demeanor toward the treat I’ve introduced him to is any indication. (I don’t even wanna talk about them, but I will. It’s very hard for me to feed my cat something called “dehydrated bunny ears”—and even more so when you consider that that is EXACTLY what they are. They have fur. You can see where they were attached to the original bunny. And they CRUNCH. They gross me out, and Tim as well, but Snick thinks they’re the best thing since climbable curtains.)
Anyway, what with the feeding of the cats, the fine folks over at I Can Has Cheezburger? and the subsequent discovery of a song that turned both Tim’s and my minds into slush*, we got through the day. I didn’t do anything about a job, or unemployment, or anything else—I foresee a big problem with the Unemployment folks anyhow, since I got fired again AND the Department of Employment seems to think I tried to pull a fast one on them. Apparently I claimed my first week of employment by mistake, thinking the form I’d filled out had sufficed to let them know that I was no longer eligible, and when I got the check I just figured they knew what they were doing and cashed it without thinking. Well, a week later I got a threatening letter accusing me of possible fraud; upon reading what they claimed I’d done, I realized the mistake and wrote them a check for the full week’s benefits, but it hasn’t cleared yet and now I’m going back to them. Red tape being what it is, I am HIGHLY pessimistic.
More later, perhaps….
*If you’ve got LimeWire or Gnutella or any of those, look for “Burger Dance” by DJ Otzi. You should also be able to find it by typing “Pizza Hut” into the search box—but make sure you get the DJ Otzi version, because only that version will bring home the true meaning of “earworm”. It’s in German, but the choruses are in completely comprehensible English, and it will lodge itself in your ear canal and gnaw into your brains, sucking out your life-force in its insane and insatiable need to keep up its own levels of horrifying suckitude.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Just For The Record
I?
Am really, REALLY drunk right now.
I don't intend to stay this way, but right now....yeah, it's nice.
(I would also like to ask the Chicago Bulls, in three letters or less, "WTF??????" (Okay, that's three letters and six questionmarks, but...c'mon, y'all. We had a 15 point lead. What happened???? One minute I look and we're winning, the next thing I know it's a 3-0 series. That's not cool, guys. I mean, it's in keeping with the trend for the day, but it's still not cool.))
In case you were wondering: yes, I am a lightweight. This is the effects of <6 Coronas, with lime, consumed on a nearly-empty stomach. So no, those of you who know the history of my addictive personality, I have not been chugging whiskey straight from the bottle, or anything goofy. I've simply chosen a) not to eat, and b) to indulge in a bit more alcohol than is my wont. Don't panic. It was this or Ben & Jerry's, and frankly I was more in the mood for this.
However, Corona also has been known to inspire the "gift" of grammatical license. And so:
I
Cannot
Effing
BELIEVE
Those
Rich-Ass
People
Who
Fired
Me
Today.
speaking of "WTF??????" I mean, seriously. Double U, Tee, Eff. If I ever have a business (Firefly's quote: "You know what this means? This means you have to get going on the bakery, or the book. Clearly you didn't take the hint last time." My reply: "Apparently God has got a hammer and is whacking me over the head with this information.") If I ever have a business, and I have an employee who is not living up to expectations, I will--I know, stick with me because this is a wacky concept, people: I will TELL them. And then? I will HELP them to reach the point they were expected to reach.
Would someone like to explain to me where, exactly, is the harm in this model? Because I didn't see it before I started drinking, and I still don't see it now. So...is it not there? I'm thinking it isn't. What is the harm in saying "Hey, I see you're having problems. Here's some good ideas as to how you might get past them"?????
I'm thinking, just maybe, there IS no problem with that. Generally if I don't see a problem with something in either state--altered or non-altered--that generally means there's not one.
Don't worry. I'm not in the Heroin Place. If I was in the Heroin Place, I'd have acted on it already. It's strange--normal stress, even abnormal stress, does not take me to the Heroin Place. Only JP's memory has ever gotten me to that place. I miss him, yeah. I'll ALWAYS miss him. That's a given. But losing a job? Manageable. Not a huge deal, especially not when I take into account all the other little twinges and dings that this job has given me in the four (FOUR!) weeks (WEEEEKS!!!) that I've been working there. (HOW, exactly, does anyone know that someone's a failure in the space of twenty working days? I mean, either they're judging WAY too fast, or I'm a spectacular failure. Somehow? I'm not-so-much thinkin' it's me, yanno?)
I'm fine. I'll be fine.
I'll be hung-over, is what I'll be.
But I'll still be fine.
Thanks, all of you.
I appreciate it all.
Am really, REALLY drunk right now.
I don't intend to stay this way, but right now....yeah, it's nice.
(I would also like to ask the Chicago Bulls, in three letters or less, "WTF??????" (Okay, that's three letters and six questionmarks, but...c'mon, y'all. We had a 15 point lead. What happened???? One minute I look and we're winning, the next thing I know it's a 3-0 series. That's not cool, guys. I mean, it's in keeping with the trend for the day, but it's still not cool.))
In case you were wondering: yes, I am a lightweight. This is the effects of <6 Coronas, with lime, consumed on a nearly-empty stomach. So no, those of you who know the history of my addictive personality, I have not been chugging whiskey straight from the bottle, or anything goofy. I've simply chosen a) not to eat, and b) to indulge in a bit more alcohol than is my wont. Don't panic. It was this or Ben & Jerry's, and frankly I was more in the mood for this.
However, Corona also has been known to inspire the "gift" of grammatical license. And so:
I
Cannot
Effing
BELIEVE
Those
Rich-Ass
People
Who
Fired
Me
Today.
speaking of "WTF??????" I mean, seriously. Double U, Tee, Eff. If I ever have a business (Firefly's quote: "You know what this means? This means you have to get going on the bakery, or the book. Clearly you didn't take the hint last time." My reply: "Apparently God has got a hammer and is whacking me over the head with this information.") If I ever have a business, and I have an employee who is not living up to expectations, I will--I know, stick with me because this is a wacky concept, people: I will TELL them. And then? I will HELP them to reach the point they were expected to reach.
Would someone like to explain to me where, exactly, is the harm in this model? Because I didn't see it before I started drinking, and I still don't see it now. So...is it not there? I'm thinking it isn't. What is the harm in saying "Hey, I see you're having problems. Here's some good ideas as to how you might get past them"?????
I'm thinking, just maybe, there IS no problem with that. Generally if I don't see a problem with something in either state--altered or non-altered--that generally means there's not one.
Don't worry. I'm not in the Heroin Place. If I was in the Heroin Place, I'd have acted on it already. It's strange--normal stress, even abnormal stress, does not take me to the Heroin Place. Only JP's memory has ever gotten me to that place. I miss him, yeah. I'll ALWAYS miss him. That's a given. But losing a job? Manageable. Not a huge deal, especially not when I take into account all the other little twinges and dings that this job has given me in the four (FOUR!) weeks (WEEEEKS!!!) that I've been working there. (HOW, exactly, does anyone know that someone's a failure in the space of twenty working days? I mean, either they're judging WAY too fast, or I'm a spectacular failure. Somehow? I'm not-so-much thinkin' it's me, yanno?)
I'm fine. I'll be fine.
I'll be hung-over, is what I'll be.
But I'll still be fine.
Thanks, all of you.
I appreciate it all.
This Too Shall Pass...At Least, I Hope So
Well, that was quick…Remember that “great” job?
I got fired from it today.
Apparently, though no one told me this, I was being held to some performance benchmarks which—again, though no one told me this—I was not meeting. Of course, I would have met these benchmarks, had I known what they were, or even that they existed (over and above a vague syllabus that was given to me on my first day, then never mentioned again). But I was never even given an indication that there was a problem; the most that was said was that I was a little behind where I needed to be, with no information given regarding what I should do to improve.
I’m….floored. Absolutely floored. If I went into detail about how this place operated, you would wonder how they could EVER let ANYONE go for ANYTHING; the guy who got hired a week ahead of me is blatantly playing computer games, and there are guys playing putt-putt golf in the office, but somehow I get fired??? Further, I was given almost no guidance at all. I was given the program and the documentation and told to “learn” it. Well, I tried. I fished for feedback, trying to find out what I should do to catch up. And when they told me they were letting me go, I even asked them if I could have one more week, to try to catch up—they said no. So obviously they had their minds made up. (I could, if I wanted to, make a point that somehow there’s only ONE other woman in the department other than the boss…I won’t make that point, because I’m trying not to see myself as a victim here. But let me tell you: it’s tempting. You’d be tempted too, I’ll bet, if you were me.)
I know I will be fine; I know I will find another job, that I am not unemployable, that I am *most likely* smarter than a 5th-grader. I KNOW these things, intellectually.
In my heart, though, I’ve gotta admit: I feel like crap. (I will resist the temptation to describe the qualities of the crap I feel like—I’m trying to steer myself away from the blatantly scatological, but I’ll tell you, this resisting-temptation stuff is hard, especially on a day like this!) I am now engaged in second-guessing each and every decision I made over the four weeks I was employed there, every comment that passed my lips (most especially the ones from that post), every action I took or did not take. And that feeling sucks. It sucks, it sucks, it sucks.
Tonight, I am drinking beer and watching the Bulls.
Tomorrow: back to the drawing board.
I got fired from it today.
Apparently, though no one told me this, I was being held to some performance benchmarks which—again, though no one told me this—I was not meeting. Of course, I would have met these benchmarks, had I known what they were, or even that they existed (over and above a vague syllabus that was given to me on my first day, then never mentioned again). But I was never even given an indication that there was a problem; the most that was said was that I was a little behind where I needed to be, with no information given regarding what I should do to improve.
I’m….floored. Absolutely floored. If I went into detail about how this place operated, you would wonder how they could EVER let ANYONE go for ANYTHING; the guy who got hired a week ahead of me is blatantly playing computer games, and there are guys playing putt-putt golf in the office, but somehow I get fired??? Further, I was given almost no guidance at all. I was given the program and the documentation and told to “learn” it. Well, I tried. I fished for feedback, trying to find out what I should do to catch up. And when they told me they were letting me go, I even asked them if I could have one more week, to try to catch up—they said no. So obviously they had their minds made up. (I could, if I wanted to, make a point that somehow there’s only ONE other woman in the department other than the boss…I won’t make that point, because I’m trying not to see myself as a victim here. But let me tell you: it’s tempting. You’d be tempted too, I’ll bet, if you were me.)
I know I will be fine; I know I will find another job, that I am not unemployable, that I am *most likely* smarter than a 5th-grader. I KNOW these things, intellectually.
In my heart, though, I’ve gotta admit: I feel like crap. (I will resist the temptation to describe the qualities of the crap I feel like—I’m trying to steer myself away from the blatantly scatological, but I’ll tell you, this resisting-temptation stuff is hard, especially on a day like this!) I am now engaged in second-guessing each and every decision I made over the four weeks I was employed there, every comment that passed my lips (most especially the ones from that post), every action I took or did not take. And that feeling sucks. It sucks, it sucks, it sucks.
Tonight, I am drinking beer and watching the Bulls.
Tomorrow: back to the drawing board.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Cringe
One of the hardest things for me is to have someone angry at me, or disapprove of me, or hold any opinion of me that materially differs from “what a nice person she is”. (Which, it occurs to me as I write this, is a rather difficult conundrum to resolve: am I a “nice person” or am I a rabble-rousing challenger of the status quo? Thank god for the printed word, which lets me be the nice person on the outside while the rabble-rousing side of me conjures unflattering descriptions of those who dare to piss me off. If this were a pre-literate society, where everything had to be expressed in words, in person, I’d doubtless be the most maladjusted of my tribe. Supposing the pre-literate society to which I belonged had somehow nonetheless managed the invention of clocks, and the engineering needed to put them in towers, I’d likely be the clock-tower sniper.)
Mostly I hide behind written words, especially to express strong emotions or questionable opinions. Especially in the few situations where I’ve done differently, I’ve usually fumbled it badly enough to generate one of those cringe-inducing memories, the kind that follow me for years. Shortly after September 11th, I made an offhand comment to a woman on the bus who was holding forth on the injustice of all Muslims being judged by Osama Bin Laden, and even though the comment was in agreement with her, I ended up getting a verbal beatdown which would quite likely have escalated to a physical one if I hadn’t decided that discretion was the better part of not getting my ass whipped by an angry black woman and her friends. (Evidently she didn’t appreciate my participation.) Whenever I think of that incident, even five years later, I always feel like an ass.
Well, today I’ve managed to give myself another one of those cringe-ables; once again I find myself feeling like an ass and not sure whether it’s even necessary to feel so. It’s a statement of experience that got me in this trouble, after all, and what’s a more-solid basis for an opinion than personal experience? And yet…Urgh. Ever just want to crawl under the blankets and hope for Armageddon, preferably before the next time the alarm clock goes off? Yeah. Like that.
When I got to work today, there were police in front of the building. Evidently, one of the other offices on our floor had been broken into over the weekend. Nobody knows why anyone would want to break into the place; then again, nobody knows exactly what type of company we’re sharing our floor with, either. We know that they tend to share our coffee supplies without being invited, that they leave the break room messy, and that they’re none-too-friendly when we encounter them in the halls or in the shared restroom. Whatever the temptation was, however, someone took it—hence, this morning’s police presence. Or, as one of my other co-workers phrased it: “CSI (Suburb) is on the scene.” Needless to say, this was the main topic of conversation as everyone came in.
One of my other co-workers, an African-American man, came in during all the excitement, and made some remark about the break-in. “Did they search you on the way in?” I asked. “They DID look at me pretty good as I walked in, “ he said. “Well, this IS (Suburb)”, I replied.
“That’s not correct,” chimes in Co-Worker #3, “and I take offence at you saying that.”
Co-Worker 3 is a nice enough guy, but he’s very strongly opinionated in nearly every case—and in nearly every case, his opinions and mine are at complete right angles to one another. He’s the one who, on the day of the immigration-rights parade downtown, was complaining about the temerity of “illegals” to demand rights—which, after about two minutes, drove me to a colleague’s desk, to plead for the loan of his headphones.
I’d managed not to make an ass of myself that day, but apparently I was not gonna get off so lucky today. “Well,” I said, “I apologize.” “I don’t know if you know this,” he replied, “but (Suburb) was…” Here he detailed this community’s history of progressive racial politics, including a stop on the Underground Railroad. “(Suburb) isn’t like that,” he finished.
“Well,” I said again, “I apologize. But I’ve had very different experiences in several of the areas VERY near here,” I continued. “VERY near.”
“All right,” he said, “though I beg to differ with that, too…” And there the conversation ended.
Now, mind you, the only mistake made here was mine, opening my mouth in the first place; once the words were out, though, nobody was wrong. We were both speaking from experience—he from his, me from mine—and so we were both right, each in our own way. Had he asked—had he wanted to know, instead of just to rebuke—I could have told him stories of my days with JP: how the police one suburb to the south had stopped us with a handful of friends, taken me out of the car for sobriety testing, then taken JP out of the passenger seat and generally heckled him until it was clear they had no real grounds to hold us, other than my slight sloppiness in taking a curve. Or I could have told him—had he wanted to know—about the treatment we’d gotten a couple of suburbs north, one night when I was still married and we were sitting in my husband’s old blue Hyundai on a dark road, both of us in the front seats, just talking. The officer had come fairly close to calling me a whore outright; his implication was clear. Had I been in that same car in the same spot, caught sitting and talking with my Italian-American hubby, we would have been “a couple of kids” and shooed, like harmless gnats, to another dark secluded spot. Because I was with JP, though, he took our names and license info, and gave us the usual hoo-haw about “don’t let me catch you here again.”
And I’m sorry—maybe I’m wrong here, again—but you can’t tell me that driving two miles, or crossing a couple of invisible man-made dividing lines between one municipality and another, can cause a diametrical opposition in beliefs. And there’s always the argument that “we’re not all like that”—an argument I have to accept, since I don’t know everyone in a 25-mile radius. Yes, I realize we may have run into the only two bad apples the North Shore has to offer—but it’s certainly quite a coincidence, if you ask me.
The final call on this one, though, seems clear to me, though maybe not to anyone else: if this town is so good to black people, why don’t any of them seem to live here? There may be a handful of homeowners here who aren’t Caucasian or Asian or Middle Eastern in descent; but mostly here there are a lot of white folks. If you see a Hispanic or an African-American, chances are he or she is here to work, not to relax. I get funny looks when I drive the truck with the windows open at the end of the day and my radio’s playing the 5:00 mix on the station I listen to.
As always, though, it doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong, exactly—I might feel worse if I were proven wrong, but really I’m just going to feel bad, regardless. It’s not so much about race, than it is about class divides; but it’s about race, too. Mostly, though, it’s about me, making an ass of myself, and a memory which, when I think about it five years from now, will probably still make me cringe.
Mostly I hide behind written words, especially to express strong emotions or questionable opinions. Especially in the few situations where I’ve done differently, I’ve usually fumbled it badly enough to generate one of those cringe-inducing memories, the kind that follow me for years. Shortly after September 11th, I made an offhand comment to a woman on the bus who was holding forth on the injustice of all Muslims being judged by Osama Bin Laden, and even though the comment was in agreement with her, I ended up getting a verbal beatdown which would quite likely have escalated to a physical one if I hadn’t decided that discretion was the better part of not getting my ass whipped by an angry black woman and her friends. (Evidently she didn’t appreciate my participation.) Whenever I think of that incident, even five years later, I always feel like an ass.
Well, today I’ve managed to give myself another one of those cringe-ables; once again I find myself feeling like an ass and not sure whether it’s even necessary to feel so. It’s a statement of experience that got me in this trouble, after all, and what’s a more-solid basis for an opinion than personal experience? And yet…Urgh. Ever just want to crawl under the blankets and hope for Armageddon, preferably before the next time the alarm clock goes off? Yeah. Like that.
When I got to work today, there were police in front of the building. Evidently, one of the other offices on our floor had been broken into over the weekend. Nobody knows why anyone would want to break into the place; then again, nobody knows exactly what type of company we’re sharing our floor with, either. We know that they tend to share our coffee supplies without being invited, that they leave the break room messy, and that they’re none-too-friendly when we encounter them in the halls or in the shared restroom. Whatever the temptation was, however, someone took it—hence, this morning’s police presence. Or, as one of my other co-workers phrased it: “CSI (Suburb) is on the scene.” Needless to say, this was the main topic of conversation as everyone came in.
One of my other co-workers, an African-American man, came in during all the excitement, and made some remark about the break-in. “Did they search you on the way in?” I asked. “They DID look at me pretty good as I walked in, “ he said. “Well, this IS (Suburb)”, I replied.
“That’s not correct,” chimes in Co-Worker #3, “and I take offence at you saying that.”
Co-Worker 3 is a nice enough guy, but he’s very strongly opinionated in nearly every case—and in nearly every case, his opinions and mine are at complete right angles to one another. He’s the one who, on the day of the immigration-rights parade downtown, was complaining about the temerity of “illegals” to demand rights—which, after about two minutes, drove me to a colleague’s desk, to plead for the loan of his headphones.
I’d managed not to make an ass of myself that day, but apparently I was not gonna get off so lucky today. “Well,” I said, “I apologize.” “I don’t know if you know this,” he replied, “but (Suburb) was…” Here he detailed this community’s history of progressive racial politics, including a stop on the Underground Railroad. “(Suburb) isn’t like that,” he finished.
“Well,” I said again, “I apologize. But I’ve had very different experiences in several of the areas VERY near here,” I continued. “VERY near.”
“All right,” he said, “though I beg to differ with that, too…” And there the conversation ended.
Now, mind you, the only mistake made here was mine, opening my mouth in the first place; once the words were out, though, nobody was wrong. We were both speaking from experience—he from his, me from mine—and so we were both right, each in our own way. Had he asked—had he wanted to know, instead of just to rebuke—I could have told him stories of my days with JP: how the police one suburb to the south had stopped us with a handful of friends, taken me out of the car for sobriety testing, then taken JP out of the passenger seat and generally heckled him until it was clear they had no real grounds to hold us, other than my slight sloppiness in taking a curve. Or I could have told him—had he wanted to know—about the treatment we’d gotten a couple of suburbs north, one night when I was still married and we were sitting in my husband’s old blue Hyundai on a dark road, both of us in the front seats, just talking. The officer had come fairly close to calling me a whore outright; his implication was clear. Had I been in that same car in the same spot, caught sitting and talking with my Italian-American hubby, we would have been “a couple of kids” and shooed, like harmless gnats, to another dark secluded spot. Because I was with JP, though, he took our names and license info, and gave us the usual hoo-haw about “don’t let me catch you here again.”
And I’m sorry—maybe I’m wrong here, again—but you can’t tell me that driving two miles, or crossing a couple of invisible man-made dividing lines between one municipality and another, can cause a diametrical opposition in beliefs. And there’s always the argument that “we’re not all like that”—an argument I have to accept, since I don’t know everyone in a 25-mile radius. Yes, I realize we may have run into the only two bad apples the North Shore has to offer—but it’s certainly quite a coincidence, if you ask me.
The final call on this one, though, seems clear to me, though maybe not to anyone else: if this town is so good to black people, why don’t any of them seem to live here? There may be a handful of homeowners here who aren’t Caucasian or Asian or Middle Eastern in descent; but mostly here there are a lot of white folks. If you see a Hispanic or an African-American, chances are he or she is here to work, not to relax. I get funny looks when I drive the truck with the windows open at the end of the day and my radio’s playing the 5:00 mix on the station I listen to.
As always, though, it doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong, exactly—I might feel worse if I were proven wrong, but really I’m just going to feel bad, regardless. It’s not so much about race, than it is about class divides; but it’s about race, too. Mostly, though, it’s about me, making an ass of myself, and a memory which, when I think about it five years from now, will probably still make me cringe.
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