Icing

I read T.S. Elliot on the way home from work on my phone and was grateful that he wrote. I am grateful my sister is taking after a bear in the winter and has eaten and retired to her bed. Part of reason I have not posted as often is most nights I come home she is sprawled lengthwise across the couch watching Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, and Family Feud. I can't think over the parade of hot messes suing and counter-suing each other and whether the Smith family will be able to answer for the steal and have their chance at 20 thousand dollars. It just sucks you right in. That's how the lowest common denominator works.

Another frustrating day at work. The enemy within is likely the single biggest obstacle to mission accomplishment. These aren't the moles or the saboteurs, these are the people who don't understand their fundamental role in their organization. If you are a lawyer, your job is not to torpedo, your job is to facilitate. There are so many obstacles and risks inherent in the work, why would you pile on with indifference or incompetence? Go work somewhere else, please. My rage against the machine aside, I also had an epiphany about why I am so down of late. I'm icing. I make things better but I am not necessary. Sure it's not the same without icing but it's still cake. It will work. Like a hamburger without a bun. If you had to do without something, you'd do without the icing or the bun, hell, I scrape icing off of cakes and often eat only one half of the bun, mostly to catch all the mess.

So I'm icing. Awesome. I suppose there are worse things than being unnecessary but it's still not a good feeling. I can't think of a single place that icing isn't superfluous. Which means even if I quit this job, I'll keep confronting my lack of inherent substantive qualities. Except for maybe in a bakery. So I just need to riddle myself what the non-bakery professional equivalent of a bakery is and I'll be all set to start my new life somewhere that I matter. Somewhere I actually hold things together and don't just make things sweeter.

Oh blog how I have missed you!

*insert kissy noises here*

I don't know how long it's been but it wasn't a good time to launch into a multi-part story (which evolves still) about my unhealthy relationship with work. I will surely return to that story at some point in a rage-filled spill of words. When I thought about how long I'd been away and how I was in the middle of an emotional diatribe about everything wrong with my job and my boss, I had an epiphany about why the news always sends people out in the middle of severe weather to describe it. Because it's easier to describe a storm you're in than a storm that has passed. Seeing a person's umbrella turned inside out or seeing the snow pile up on their jacket, that's more authentic than an anecdote from someone inside. Since my last post I have actually said the words 'We need to have a talk about boundaries' to my boss, I have written a post still in draft titled 'Boundaries,' and I have purchased tickets to accompany my boss and his wife to a Halloween party where it is possible we will be the oldest people there. It's a work in progress, this boundaries thing.

I have also joined the ranks of the smartphone users and now understand why people talk about the Droid with messianic reverence. Apple can have the iPhone (and AT&T) (she said as she typed on her Mac). Droid makes me happy.

I've been thinking of what my father said to me a while back about me elevating the humanity of everywhere I work. Perhaps it is a cheap coping mechanism but being helpful and dependable and resourceful for the people I work with makes me proud even if the douche bags are incapable or unwilling to formally or even informally recognize it. I lament and complain and sometimes resent being the first-stop shop for both my bosses and my co-workers (and some people I don't even know referred by others), but I also like being that go-to person. I get annoyed when I feel taken for granted or advantage. And in this job I feel both. More on that later perhaps.

I have seen 2 friends repeatedly this year but I have not seen anyone outside of the Eastern seaboard this year. I have not been on a plane. I think my other friends need to move. Trains are so much better and require much less planning ahead. It's much harder to be away from work when I have so much less to show for the time I am there. It has been a very uneven year with unprecedented demands on my time. I hope this is like my last year in Washington which was low and dark with an amazing finish. Got low and dark covered, time for some amazing.

Take this job and...oh, what can I do to help you?

When I don't write, I get overwhelmed with all the stuff I'm not processing. It cycles back for further reflection, angst, or worry at bedtime when my fatigue won't support my typing or when I'm at work and must actually be doing work. Work has been challenging both in its insidious creep into what I once considered my free time and in sorting through the why of the things that upset me. I noted in my last post that I was primarily twisted with a lack of gratitude but that doesn't make a person well up at their desk. I feel like I'm in high school right because I think I have a crush on my boss and that is why the last couple of weeks have been so upsetting. I hate to use that word, crush, because I am not pining for a married man, I want no parts of him physically, nothing at all like that. I feel he has come to find me resourceful and being resourceful is one of my favorite things to be for someone. I like making things as easy for someone else as I wish they were for me. So we have a dynamic between us that I like, kind of a peer-subordinate relationship with a dash of work wife. He's more aggressive than he is thorough and I have long thought the biggest thing between him and taking over the world is his complete lack of organization. If he were McGyver, he would know exactly how to disable the bomb but would have forgotten his twist ties and chewing gum so he would ask me if I had them or ask me to run and get them. He's still the guy dismantling the bomb and absolutely deserves the ticker take parade that follows but it doesn't occur to him to say thank you for helping. No one will ever know if I hadn't been there if it would have turned out differently, the role of a facilitator is hard to measure, but it all came to a head this week when I stopped helping and started yelling.

...to be continued

The God who wastes nothing aka He makes all things good

I've been making resignation gestures and just like the suicidal ones, they are a cry for help. I think of how much the way I work can be traced to how I coped with my father. I don't think it's a bad thing at all. So much of my achievement and personality was shaped by figuring out my own way to get along in what was a kind of oppressive environment. So much of the calm facade was tested and forged in not letting someone I loved shake me. And even more has come of recognizing that my parents were and remain people like me, with their own issues and crosses to bear. Wanting the best for me doesn't mean they have it to give. They can only give me their best. And they did. And I love them for it.

Lots of stuff to catch up on here so a Cliff's notes version follows:

Work

The center of my discontent here lies with a perceived lack of gratitude. And recognition. But mostly gratitude. Ava X has arrived. I am kind of a militant moody cow at work right now.

Men

Such is my current disposition that I actually replied to a guy who writes like people used to when you paid by character for text messages (e.g. lol wat u up 2) and has a profile picture holding two toddler-sized glasses of wine. Yea, I'm sure we would have tons to talk about.

Skittles

Oh. My. God. They have fizzled fruit Skittles now and *sigh*. My mouth waters when I think of them. They might be the most ridiculously useless food on the planet but I ration them out and turn the bag inside out to lick the stray pockets of fizz. It occurs to me even as I type this, that I may have crossed the line of 'how much is too much' to put out there about myself on the internet but they really are that good to me. I have a thing with fizzy. I used to eat Alka Seltzer tablets until I decided that medicine should not be a snack. I even got a box of Alka Seltzer as a Christmas present when I was in college. Next to me on the bedside table is seltzer water. Why don't I have a boyfriend? He could buy me Skittles and I would want to have his children.

Welcome to the gun show

My arms feel ripped right now. I'm pretty sure I will be sore.

New pajama pants

I want to wear them to work. I love them. It makes me happy to even see them crumpled up on my comforter.

Pissed off overwhelmed woman

9:17, tank top, underwear, sitting cross-legged in bed with laptop. Not speaking to sister just because I'm tired of seeing her when I come in the door and I'm tired of being the only one who does anything around the house, and tired of smelling her when I follow her too closely in the single bathroom we share, tired of the ridiculous amounts of her hair just about everywhere, tired that she doesn't think on most nights to walk the dog or load the dishwasher. I'm tired of feeling taken advantage of at work, my kindness having been mistaken for weakness or complicity. I hope to find a mature way to handle it because I'm drifting towards aggression that is only passive because I'm not actively hitting someone in the mouth (though my hope is that that my words, deeds, and gestures feel like just that). I got pissed when the dog walker couldn't keep herself in check and had to throw in a word about giving as much advance notice as possible on scheduling weekend visits. Bitch, I understand that advance notice is a desirable state, hence my apology about the short notice. Don't act like you are doing me a favor. Either you are available or you are not. I don't need your attitude.

On my despair.com calendar this month is Sanity and the caption reads; Minds are like parachutes, just because you've lost yours, doesn't mean you can borrow mine. I think I've accidentally offered my parachute to someone.

Iron Woman

I got up this morning and treated myself to a fancy drink from Starbucks. It's nice to be the only person on the sidewalk early in the morning. The air was crisp, the stars were still visible, and the darkness cloaked my homeless highwater sweats and bra-less trench coat ensemble. I got back in the house, my dog greeted me like I had been gone a hundred years, and I slipped out of my sweats and back into the bed.

I looked up the calorie information for my drink and it has strange and troubling nutritional content. Never mind that even with nonfat milk, it's a pretty hefty calorie count for something you can't chew, it inexplicably has 1000% of my vitamin A, 200% of my vitamin C, 4500% of my calcium and a likely lethal 600% of my iron. All that for 75mg of caffiene. Yes, I still drank it all but I just want someone to know what happened when the coroner is trying to figure out why an active healthy non-pregnant woman has 600 % of the recommended daily allowance of iron in her system. It's not CSI, it was Starbucks.

I'm stressing about the usual things, procrastinating in the usual way, with the usual churning stomach that brings.

I heart

I love the way my girlfriend laughs. It makes me laugh when she laughs. It's throaty and sincere and you don't understand anything she is saying when she tries to talk. I especially like it when I'm not expecting her to laugh and she does. Something delightful about her laugh. And the way she loves people. Fiercely and with abandon.

I love my soul twin because of the intimacy that comes with being soul twins. That you are talking to someone who really gets you and celebrates with you when you do something ordinary like get up and go to work on time. We draw inspiration from the things we see one another accomplish and talk each other up and down from the floor and the ceiling.

I love that I still have petals and buds from flowers my best friend sent me in college for Valentines Day.

I love my collection of photographs, mostly of trees, sky, and Baloo.

I love that I'm at a place in this job now that I laugh when my boss tells me he would like to meet with me while he's in town and further don't commit to making time to meet. When he asked why I was giggling, I told him I didn't know. I really didn't know but I just found it funny. My resignation letter is in my draft e-mail folder so I guess that just brings out my sense of humor at times. It amuses me that my reaction might have put him a bit off balance. Welcome to the club buddy.

Fly Sexy Superstar

That's right. Those of you lucky enough to know me will know what this e-mail from a 27 year old man child is all about.

lovin that smile..... Damn I need a fly sexy superstar like you :) How can we change that?

And he doesn't even know I'm a ninja yet.

I tire of this

My boss usually says that phrase at least once a week around quitting time. A lot went on today and a lot didn't. I've been wanting to get to this more often but the lowest common denominator in my home life, that being the television is usually on now. That means I don't get that opening in my head that allows for thinking/writing until bed when I should be sleeping. I was short with my boss today and I feel bad about it because I like him and he's sick with a cold or something. I hate that I care when there doesn't appear to be any reciprocity. I've got white lines on the inside of my cheeks from clenching and as I wrote that sentence, I felt my cheeks suck in toward my teeth and had to remind myself to relax.

I'll be annoyed with the concept of Sister Wives until it is followed by the Brother Husbands show.

Starring me.

Don't get me started on the ways in which that show annoys me.