Beth's New, Improved Austin Bloggery

Three Little Words

2011-11-17T22:58:00.003-06:00

"Seriously?!" exclaimed my next-door cube neighbor in disgust today. "I think developers just select words at random to use as street names. I just got a literature request from someone on Technology Forest Drive." We all laughed - cubicle walls don't really exist in our office etiquette-free environment - and she added, "Really, it could be anything. Flute Potatoes Avenue."

I didn't laugh as enthusiastically at that one, because frankly, I was kind of jealous I didn't think of it first.

We complain - or at least I do - about words being used without regard to their meaning. Yet I'm rather forcibly reminded, by a recent episode in my nineteen-year-old daughter's dating life, of how certain words have lost a great deal of the impact they used to have for me.

Katie has a new boyfriend she was very excited about a week ago, and is thinking about breaking up with now (assuming she hasn't already). A few days ago she came to me with a furrow in her young brow. "I told Jake I love him," she said, troubled. "We were at a party and I'd had a couple of drinks. But I really don't love him."

I didn't particularly see the problem, but Katie felt the need to call Jake the next day and clarify that she was, in fact, not in love with him. "Are you breaking up with me??" he asked. "Oh, no," she said, "just I don't actually love you, that's all." "Oh," he said.

Personally, I would have just let it go. Saying "I love you" to men you don't actually love, I tried to explain to my innocent young daughter, is just a normal part of the female condition, and probably male as well. You say it. You didn't really, really mean it. Worse yet, you say those tender yet insincere words to someone who responds with something awkward like "Ummmm," or a little more debonair, such as "Awwww" or "That's sweet" or "Thank you." Which is what Jake did (I believe Katie told me he is an "Ummmm" man, and I can respect that; awkwardness is not a quality I disparage in any way).

But it's funny, now that I think about it, because when I was in my teens and twenties, those three little words seemed to matter far, far too much to be uttered in vain. And that's not just a girl thing. My first serious boyfriend, my sophomore year in college, once took me to a Moody Blues concert at Zilker Park. They sang "Nights in White Satin." We clung together throughout the song and he sang along softly in my ear, and it would have been only THE MOST ROMANTIC THING THAT EVER HAPPENED ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH, except that every time the chorus got to "I love you" he switched to humming. Words meant things.

Now that I'm past 40, "I love you" doesn't seem quite so untouchable, so sacrosanct. I don't say it dishonestly, but there are so many kinds of love, aren't there? As in, I care about you - or it would be personally devastating to me to do something that would cause you significant pain - or I hate to see what you are going through right now - or I know you well enough to be truly comfortable with you, and being comfortable feels so good. I remember somewhat the fiery passion of "True Love," but it never really worked out in the end, did it? Maybe it turns out that, like every other expression of human language, "I love you" refers to some unspoken middle ground between what the speaker and the hearer believe it to mean.

So do you spend your life stressing about whether you really mean it when you say "I love you"? Or do you teach yourself contentment, and settle down with your sweetheart and your thirty-seven cats in a cottage with climbing roses and a white picket fence on Flute Potatoes Avenue?

I have no clue. I'll have Katie figure it out and get back to you on it, in about 25 years.

The 99% Likes Opera, Too

2011-11-06T00:16:00.004-05:00

Is it just me, or is the basic message of "Die Zauberflöte" that women are dark, scheming and evil whereas men are wholesome, honest and good? Because Mozart can stick his magic flute where the sun don't shine, if you catch my drift. Or is that an awful, vengeful thing to say? Well, Bill Gates is paying a visit, so I can't be held accountable for my irrational female behavior.

I don't know if the Austin Lyric Opera will ever top their production of "The Bat," but their "Magic Flute" had some cute modern touches and very good singing, particularly by Sarastro and Pamina. The sets were overly minimalist, I thought - I mean, it's fine, it works, but you really should actually have a dragon of some kind onstage at the beginning. Even an extremely tacky rubber one would be acceptable. I did like the touch of having Tamino run out of arrows and, in desperation, heave his bow at the invisible beast.

Unfortunately, FunFunFunFest is also going on just across Riverside, and the Long Center is not completely soundproof. So at least on the very very back, top row, I was a little distracted by the deep bass thumping from outside shaking our seats - loud enough to drown out the Queen of the Night, who was more precise than powerful. It's a typically Austin experience but not necessarily a happy one, though I expect Mozart would have found himself more or less at home in a mosh pit drinking canned beer, the misogynistic bastard.

After the show, Katie and I teetered across Barton Springs to have Whataburger while the parking garage cleared out, and got made fun of by drunken 4F goers who may not have realized that we could hear them, inasmuch as they were the only ones shouting. (Katie pointed out that their tickets cost about twice what ours did.)

All that said, of course, any night you get to go to the opera is a good night - uncomfortable shoes and all. Going tonight was Katie's idea. That, coupled with the fact that today my son brought me a vanilla hazelnut latte from the coffeehouse where he works, gives me a sense that my decision to have children is beginning to bear fruit, so to speak.

Now if I can just bend them to my nefarious will.

On Your Feet!

2011-08-07T13:37:00.007-05:00

Don't take it sitting down!

Inspired by Anna's post on IKEA Hackers, I decided to make myself a reasonably economical standing desk. Not, perhaps, as economical as Anna's, but still a heck of a lot more affordable than most of the options out there. The Anna in the IKEA hacker post is not to be confused with my own ten-year-old Anna, who is, don't get me wrong, brilliant and creative, but has not yet to my knowledge invented an item of furniture of any kind. Give her time, for crissakes, she's only ten. Sheesh.

I used my existing desk as a base, though I'll probably replace it with another Vika Amon 23.5" x 45" tabletop ($19.99) and four of IKEA's $3.50 table legs. It'll look a little more uniform, and anyway, my old desk is a cracked and peeling piece of crap.

So the thinking here is that I spend most of my waking time sitting at the computer, which is a polite way of saying that I spend most of my waking time sitting on my ass. I've read a few articles about what a bad idea this is, and it only makes sense, doesn't it? Standing at the new desk, I tend not to stand still; I shift my weight from foot to foot, idly lift a knee to stretch one leg behind me, march in place, dance around a little bit, in a fidgety way. It's about four hours a day - quite a bit more on weekends (this is my home workstation) which was spent in almost total inactivity, now spent in light activity.

So here's what I used to make my desk:

1 - cheap ass cracking peeling piece of crap old desk - $0.00, tax included
1 - Vika Amon 23.5" x 45" tabletop in black finish - $19.99 plus tax
1 - 4-pack 8" Capita legs - $14.00 plus tax
1 - Ekby Jarpen shelf - $9.99 plus tax
2 - Ekby Tore brackets - $5.00 each, $10.00 plus tax

Note that the shelf and brackets do not include screws, which is kind of weird for IKEA, who usually provide not only the hardware required, but many of the actual tools needed for assembly. Fortunately, I have a pathological inability ever to throw away anything that looks as if it might possibly be useful in the future, with the result that I was quickly able to get my hands on the screws needed to assemble my shelf without ever leaving my house (again - IKEA is in Round Rock, or possibly Houston). There's a lesson in that somewhere, but it probably isn't a very good one.

So that's $54 to convert my desk from sitting to standing. Once I add another Vika Amon tabletop and the Curry legs, the total will ratchet up to a whopping $88. Not really too shabby!

I did also spring an additional $30 for a barstool at Wal-Mart (I'm sorry, I realize that I've just contaminated this post beyond all hope of usefulness to anyone) so that Anna (my ten-year-old, not Anna from IKEA Hackers) could still use the computer. She's short, I'm sorry to say, but she's doing her best to amend that fault as fast as she can, eating all her vegetables, etc.

And speaking of height differential, here are a few notes on the finished size of the standing desk. The keyboard/mousing surface is 38" high, which works perfectly for me at 5'5" tall. If you need a lower desk, the Capita legs are also available in 4" and 6" heights, for a slightly lower price. If you need a taller desk, you can buy bed risers/bed lifts, which can add another 4-8" to the length of the legs, for around ten bucks.

A couple of additional notes:

1. I live about one mile from the Congress Avenue bridge, and I have never witnessed the famous bat emergence, which takes place every evening at some unspecified time determined only by the caprice of a million winged rodents. Or not. Maybe they're not hungry. However, in two trips to IKEA last week, one to scope out available materials and one actually to make the purchase, I TWICE saw a colony of bats emerge from underneath I-35 in long, smoky coils. Beautiful! A coworker of mine, who lives in Round Rock, said, "Oh yeah, we call those the 'white-trash' bats. They don't even go south for the winter." And apparently, they are not too proud to show themselves to passing motorists, while hordes of spectators along the Congress Avenue bridge, or even on bat-watching riverboat cruises, every single evening from March through October, may well go home disappointed. Fucking hipster bats.

2. My feet are KILLING me, especially the heels. From what I read online, this is perfectly normal and nothing to be alarmed about. Once my feet and I come to an understanding about who is responsible for standing and who is responsible for being stood upon, I plan to convert my desk at work as well. This would necessarily mean no more wearing high heels to the office (sigh).

I have a couple of different options for this:

a. Go to the doctor's office. Get a note that says I need a standing desk. Wait around in the waiting room (on my ass, incidentally) for an indefinite amount of time, and fork over a $20 copay. Work pays for whatever the actual desk costs, probably a lot.

b. Go to IKEA. Buy the super-cheap white VIKA Amon tabletop, 4 Capita legs, and an Ekby shelf and brackets. Total cost: about $40.

For the time being, I'm about ready to offer sexual favors in exchange for a good foot rub. Or I could get a pedicure at River Salon and Spa for $20, which is probably a better deal, because it includes getting my toenails done.

Stick With "Workplace: Mission Zero" and Nobody Gets Hurt

2011-08-04T20:58:00.004-05:00

As I was walking out of the building where our safety meeting was held this morning, I caught my high heel on a water hose snaking across the landscaping, and nearly tripped and fell. Driving out of the parking lot a few seconds later, I saw my former boss doing the same thing.

Safety, they keep telling us, comes first. Then they prove incontrovertibly otherwise by their official actions. Yet it is not malice that does this, or shoddy work practices, or cutting corners. It just seems to me that reality keeps rearing its undeniable head and making a neat mess of all the plans, policies, programs, and lofty intentions we keep implementing to deny it.

However, I don't mean this bitterly. Our senior management is deeply serious about the issue of workplace safety, to the point where they happily spend a full day with us in an overcooled classroom, participating with joyless loyalty in roundtables, telling tear-jerking stories, trying to discover... what? Why does the workplace, despite the brightly-colored ideals of unrestrained capitalism, fail to conform to the brightly-colored ideals of a workplace Utopia?

They are genuinely sincere. And we want to be safe... right? I mean, every employee, on a personal level, values his or her own personal ability to go home at the end of the day and do whatever he or she does best - be it hug the kids or go out on a massive happy-hour-instigated bender - to at least the point at which he or she would not, by any means, find it a matter of indifference to determine whether said employee might just as well be wiped out by a stray cement mixer.

Are you with me? (As one of our facilitators kept saying this morning.)

Well, we went through exercises and brainstorming, and determined (over the protests of one of our participants, who I'm sorry to report I thought was not nearly as bright as she should have been) that the most important element in incentivizing* employees to implement safety initiatives was to give them ownership.**

So, while accountability is important, said most of us in our group, the most important element is to personalize and internalize the concept of safety, to where the reason people look out for it is because they want to and believe in it, not because you'll get in trouble if someone gets hurt. Right?

But one woman in my group had a lot of trouble with this concept, and kept arguing it. "I'm sorry, you guys, I'm just not getting it," she said. "You have to have accountability. Why are you all arguing with this? It's got to be the top priority!" Others tried to explain the carrot vs. stick concept to her, all with varying degrees of failure; then time was up, and we submitted our inconclusive results with the rest.

More troubling to me, really, was the beginning of the day's exercises. This is a government agency I work for, and the initiatives we implement today ought to be not merely for the good of employees, but for the general public. So I was deeply troubled when an official representative of the meeting organizer stood up and began our day with an official prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the success of our endeavors today.

Yahweh, Ashtoreth, fickle Fate, lucky chance, or whoever assist us, please, in the preservation of human and animal lives to their full and healthy span. But ordering a roomful of employees, of whatever religion or lack thereof, to bow their heads and participate in a sacred convocation in the name of a particular deity whom many do not observe, upset me a lot. Keeping everyone I work with, including the public, is sacred to me. But invoking a prayer as an opening ceremony which excludes many of us from the get-go is a very bad, bad thing indeed, and I hope to get this addressed by the appropriate, responsible parties.

I've been away for umpteen months, so you shouldn't expect this to be funny. However, if it's any consolation, I'd like to point out that at least we didn't have to watch "Highway to Certain Death," largely concerned with the individual employee's responsibility for avoiding the blind spot of a cement mixer, today or at any threatened point in the immediate future.

Peace, blessings, and workplace safety to all.

------
*You will never be able to pay enough to earn what it actually cost me, on a personal level, to get me to use that word... never.
**This also once meant something.

Read At Your Own Risk

2011-03-27T18:11:00.003-05:00

Running, I sometimes think, is overrated. I say this partly on the basis of having seen people run who are even chubbier than I am.

They're never smiling. Never. Neither are the skinny ones.

Today was the Capital 10K race, about which I know very little (and will not even bother Googling it to see if I should spell it "Capitol" or "Capital"); but we shared the streets with some 22,000 runners today - largely without injury!

A friend with a kickass bluegrass band had sent out an invitation to come see him play at 8:30 this morning at the Farmers' Market at 15th and West, a straight shot across race-congested downtown, and just two miles or so north of where I live. Well, would you even try driving, under the circumstances? Most major thoroughfares were closed. And it's not like I couldn't do with a bit of exercise. So we decided to hoof it.

Have you ever set out for a destination without being entirely certain where you were headed? Surely you have. No matter what your name is. You must have done this from time to time. "Zognitz and 94th? Sure, we can get there in 48 minutes! Just be sure and take Dowsydip Drive, so you can avoid the crosstown traffic!" And then, after hiking seven miles to Zognitz, you suddenly realize, with a painful sinking feeling, glancing at your walking companion, who is sweaty, panting, tired, and verging dangerously close to grumpiness, that you might just possibly have confused your destination with one on at Zbignab Drive on the other side of town. Furtively, you belatedly consult GoogleMaps on your iPhone. "Oh, hey... wait, hey, um..." you say.

I have always relied on the good-natured patience of others.

Still, from my point of view, the walk was a wonderful one - from our home neighborhood of Travis Heights through the office parking lot at Riverside and Congress, which had evidently been set up as Potty Central for the jogging horde, up South First to Auditorium Shores, along the hike-and-bike trail to the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge, where for some reason I can't entirely understand there was an upright piano.

It was cabled to the railings of the bridge, but the plastic sheet intended to protect the piano from today's anticipated light mist had blown off, the wooden dowel at its end not sufficiently heavy to keep it in place. Well, by God. I may not be much of a hero - in fact, I go to pieces at the slightest suggestion of conflict, forget about anything remotely resembling an emergency - I have never done what I felt to be an adequate job of protecting my children, when they were small and helpless, against the varied onslaughts of unsympathetic teachers, bullying classmates, and neighborhood toughs. But damned if there isn't a bit of backbone in me after all, and what it takes to bring that out is a defenseless piano on an ominously cloudy day.

"Waitwaitwait," I said, "stop, come back, we have to cover this up."

So we straightened out the plastic sheeting, pulled the wooden dowel back into place, and tucked the bench in over it - the bench then unprotected, but it was the only way to keep the plastic sheet from blowing off again - and made sure all was secure before we left. An hour or so later, it began drizzling. I can't help wondering, rather glumly, if the piano's owner will come back, find the finish on the bench ruined, and blame the stranger who uncovered it, not realizing that the cover wouldn't stay on otherwise. I really hope not. It was the first truly good deed I feel I've done in a long time.

At any rate, we rescued the piano, continued on our hike, had breakfast at Sweetish Hill, saw many beautifully elegant Old Austin homes, enjoyed the sensation of seeing on foot many fascinating sites that we've always missed before because we're always in car, discovered that West Lynn Drive is not West Avenue, backtracked a couple of miles to the proper spot, and saw our friend play half of the last song of the truly awesome Blacktop Bend's set, before heading back for lunch at Hickory Street and home.

At the Lamar underpass under Third Street is an art installation - a mural or two, the infamous stupid blue highway-sign thingies, and a written manifesto of sorts, profoundly meaningful and deep, several paragraphs in block letters on a white background on the support structure of the bridge. I stopped to scan it, having driven past it often; but my eyes gravitated towards a Sharpie'd inscription at the bottom:

"TL;DR"

Ha! Touché.

They Go All the Way Up

2011-01-26T21:54:00.004-06:00

"Do you prefer your floor high, or low?" asked the front-desk clerk as I was checking in.

I was a little puzzled, because I had never really thought about it, but I guess I'm happy as long as it touches my feet. Are we talking 1970s-era conversation pit sunken living room here? Or those elevated white plastic paneled floors, like they had in mainframe workrooms of the same period, which served the dual purpose of keeping the circuitry cool and hiding the wires? I probably stared at her for too long, and she's had excellent hospitality training, because she smiled without a hint of condescension and added, "Do you prefer to be on a higher or lower floor?"

Ah. Yes. The eighth floor will be fine, thank you.

When you travel a lot, I'm given to understand, you sometimes have trouble sleeping, and that could explain the overall sluggishness of wits that could lead you to think a hotel clerk was offering you platform flooring. But this was my first trip in over a week. Moreover, I generally find that I sleep better in hotels, because hotels tend not to issue you flailing, kicking bedmates with sharp fingernails - at least, not respectable hotels.

This trip was to Arlington, to visit the location of our big annual conference held in April. It will be great; they always are. But I'm beginning to find that more and more of my focus is on the quality of the bed - sort of an unattainable object of desire during the conference itself. The Sheraton has rather magnificent ones. They are soft, and the bedding is fluffy, and the pillows are plentiful enough to make yourself a little nest out of... aaaaahhhh. But I won't see much of the bed during the actual conference, because the stern summons of work comes well before dawn, and the siren song of the hospitality suite drowns out the gentler call of fresh white linen.

I'm afraid that one year this will not be the case, and then I will know that I am old.

Arlington will be playing host to a little football game in a couple of weeks, I'm given to understand. That's not really any of my concern, but the locals seem to take a certain amount of interest in it. Perhaps their team is one of the participants. No? Oh well, maybe another time.

They do seem to know a thing or two about contraflow, though.

Did you know that the Ripley's/Palace of Wax in Grand Prairie was modeled after a royal palace built in the late 18th century for a dissolute fop later to be portrayed by Hugh Laurie? It's in Brighton, but is not quite as brightly colored as the building it inspired:

I'm looking forward to our visit at conference this year, because they've remodeled the lobby since I saw it last. They may have done some exciting things with the floors.

But What Price Freedom?

2011-01-06T21:25:00.004-06:00

There are people in the world who take a lot of pride in their automobiles. Their cars are always shiny and smell new, the upholstery is plush, and they never let you eat Cheetos when you ride with them.

Then there are regular people, who have regular cars. Maybe a dent and a scratch here and there. Maybe a little dusty. Maybe there are a few unidentified loose interior trim pieces rolling around under the driver's seat, and maybe there are a few random other things, too, which may be sticky.

And then there's me. If I had set out from the infancy of my driverhood to possess only cars with what we may charitably term Character, cars that require, nay demand, a humorous cartoon soundtrack to accompany their questionable progress down the street, then I would have made a smashing success. But there was never a conscious effort on my part. It just happened. Oh, sure, I covered my last VW in silk daisies, taped a magic wand to the antenna, affixed frog and rainbow and peace sign stickers to the windows, superglued three plastic martini glasses to the dashboard, and hung a purple disco ball from the ceiling, but that wasn't an attempt to make the car silly. It was only an acknowledgment of the silliness that already existed, and put more of a positive spin on the billowing clouds of white smoke that obscured the immediate vicinity every time I started it up.

I still have the poor thing. I haven't driven it in probably two years. The clutch was getting a little iffy, and my environmental conscience was suffering pangs over the smoke issue, and then someone smashed the driver's side window to steal the radio (as if it worked!!), and I kind of lost heart and stopped driving it. It won't start now, of course, because it sat for so long the battery is dead. I assume the clutch didn't just need a nice long rest to get better, the tires are flat, and the amount of smoke it would probably give off if I did manage to get it started might permanently alter the delicate balance of the Earth's atmospheric gases. Perhaps I can trick a local charity into accepting it as a donation.

So now I drive this large, bouncy thing my friend Diane sold me, on ridiculously easy terms. I like it fine. Parallel parking is of course completely out of the question, and filling up the gas tank will give you apoplexy, but fortunately I don't drive so much that I have to put gas in more than once a month.

It has not yet sprouted any flowers.

But it SCREECHES. I nicknamed it "the Behemoth" shortly after acquiring it, but it's becoming "the Banshee," because it just gets louder, and louder, and louder. One time it stopped screeching, and it turned out that was a very bad thing, because it meant that the alternator/water pump belt had broken. Fortunately, I was only a couple of miles from a Pep Boys, where I was able to get a new belt, which made the car screech again. Embarrassingly. People turn and stare.

I started it up in the parking lot at work today, and a guy I know slightly from another department signaled for me to roll my window down. "That sounds like a serpentine belt," he said. "It's bad. It shouldn't do that. It could break."

"Yes, I know," I said. "The old one did break. This is the new one."

"Well, it needs to be tightened, then," he said, "and I know somebody who works here who can help you - he's a mechanic. I'll call him tomorrow, and ask him to take a look at it for you. No, no, don't worry about it. He's cool."

There's this coworker of mine that I'm dating, and that's probably just about enough said about that. Not long after we began going out, he came into my office rather perturbed. "I'm not sure how to handle this," he said, "but there's a guy I know who keeps asking me about you, since we work together. He keeps asking me if you're seeing someone. The thing that really bugs me is, he could be competition! He's a mechanic..."

Our relationship being clandestine as far as work goes, he never told this guy that yes, I was seeing someone, and in fact the person I was seeing was him.

So now my car is getting looked at tomorrow by a guy who doesn't know that I know that he was asking about me, unless I can think of a polite excuse for begging off - but then my car really is exceptionally screechy.

Speaking of which, Katie has recently turned eighteen, and clearly intends to allow no one any rest by night or by day until somebody coughs up a car for her. Maybe I should just give her mine, and flee the country. By bicycle.

Vikings Only Beyond This Point

2010-11-06T23:12:00.005-05:00

It's interesting, the difference between country etiquette and city etiquette.

In the country, you wave to other drivers as you pass - though there are certain subtle rules governing that behavior. Pickup trucks always wave. Cars usually don't. SUVs can go either way.

In Austin, if you tried to wave at every other car you saw, your arm would fall off, and somebody from California would shoot you.

We drove out, the boyfriend and I, to Colorado Bend State Park near Lampasas. The countryside is beautiful, and you couldn't ask for a nicer day - bright, clear, sunny, and cool, and Texas arrayed in its own particularly understated autumn glory, forests of stunted trees a little deeper and softer in their greenery, a gentle pinkish hue over the long grasses and rocky outcroppings of the hills.

Hiking trails also have their own particular etiquette. You can't very well greet every single person you encounter walking down Sixth Street, no matter how many shot bars you've hit up; but strangers on hiking trails not only say "hello," and "how are you all doing today?" but listen for your answer, and occasionally strike up brief conversations before passing along.

"You're going to miss the car show," one man remarked to us in passing.

"?" said my boyfriend.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said the man's wife, laughing and shoving him playfully. "Don't mind him, he's just joking."

But why? We looked at one another, puzzled. Six hours later, I still don't know what he meant. Was something awaiting us at the base of Gorman Falls, the pot of gold at the end of our rainbow trail, from which this couple was returning? Or was he making a joke at our expense? I glanced at my companion to see if he had perhaps inadvertently put on a NASCAR T-shirt. But he looked more or less normal.

Further along the trail was a young family returning from the falls with three small blonde daughters, the smallest perched on her daddy's shoulders. "Hey, how are you guys?" we asked them.

"Doing good, doing good," said the daddy. "A little tired."

"I can't imagine why," I smiled, remembering a hike up Enchanted Rock with two-year-old Katie in a backpack carrier.

"I'll tell you what," said the daddy, warming to his subject - and perhaps welcoming a brief rest - "it gets dark out here, after dark."

"..." (or something like that), said the boyfriend, who speaks punctuation fairly fluently, for a boy.

"We learned that the hard way," added our new acquaintance (I believe his name was "Captain Obvious") helpfully, "last night. You want to bring a flashlight."

The falls themselves, which are beautiful and restful, are reached via a 1.5 mile trail which ends in a steep scramble down 50 feet or so of limestone slope - slippery, so Texas Parks & Wildlife has helpfully installed a steel wire railing to the bottom so you have something to hang onto. At the base there is a small pavilion where you can rest on a bench and admire the falls tumbling from the cliff above. The rocks are newly deposited, soft and porous, and the vegetation springing from them is fragile and fresh, so there's a low fence posted past the end of the trail with several signs explaining that, due to the delicate ecosystem in a state of creation here, you must not trespass. "Restricted Area," says the sign. "No admittance beyond this point. $500 fine."

"Except," was not painted beneath this, "for Vikings."

There was a Viking in the restricted area. He had a giant horned helmet, and a red and white shield, and (this part confused me a little) a kilt. A girl was with him, and a dog. The girl had a large, professional-looking camera. The dog was affable. But what would a Viking be doing in an environmentally sensitive area beside a Texas Hill Country waterfall? "Could this be the car show?" I asked my boyfriend hopefully.

"I don't see how," he said.

I didn't either. We climbed back up to the main trail - and, by-the-bye, that's a workout your butt will never forget - and wandered along to the springs from which Gorman Creek, well, springs. A trail leads you to the creek's point of origin, a small pool of almost invisible clarity which gushes over rocks to form the creek; the springs pool shimmers slightly, on its surface, from the force of cold water bubbling up out of the pebbles at its bottom. Halfway there we met another couple, coming back, who addressed us with the familiarity I'm coming to expect from fellow hikers. "Be sure to follow the trail all the way to the end," said the woman. "You have to cross the creek twice. Be sure you go all the way."

"Yes," added her husband, "there's nobody else there, you'll be all alone!"

We smiled and thanked them and went on our way. "They expect us to have sex, don't they?" said my boyfriend. And sure enough, not twenty feet from the serene and magical pool at the end of the trail is a large, flat limestone outcropping about the size and shape of a king-sized bed. Not that we particularly noticed.

But the sun was lowering, the shadows were lengthening, we were over two miles of rocky terrain from the parking lot, and we'd been informed that after it gets dark, it's dark out there. So we didn't dally - we headed back.

Halfway back we overtook an Indian family, chattering to one another in Hindi mixed with Urdu, small children toted on the fathers' shoulders and folded-up strollers in tow, a portable radio playing Bollywood pop. Half the group stopped for a photo, and we passed them, approaching the forward half who shouted after their lagging companions.

"They stopped to take a photo," I explained as we passed the remainder of the group, leaving their radio mercifully behind us. "They'll be along shortly."

"We needed to tell them they just missed the car show," the boyfriend said to me a few minutes later, as we neared the car. "That was supposed to be passed along."

Here it is, for you: gentle reader(s), you just missed the car show. It may or may not have involved Vikings, who definitely should in any case be assessed a $500 fine. Probably more, considering the amount of damage they've caused throughout history.

At least wave at the next Viking you see. Do it for Texas. Then call the park police.

How To Get Old

2010-10-10T23:07:00.003-05:00

1. Have kids.

Bing! You're done.

Katie turned 18 today, which brings the number of legally adult children I've brought into this world to two.

Do you remember becoming legally an adult? It may be a ways back. Do you, nonetheless, secretly suspect there may have been some mistake?

Certainly I do; but what brings it home for me tonight is not the fact that my second-born is six days short of being able to vote straight Democratic in the upcoming midterm election, dammit. No, it's that her brother, my oldest, who is twenty, came by with his girlfriend to help with the cake.

I'd like it if my adult son had a job to go with the girlfriend, and a household that the two of them were maintaining on their own, but they are not. They are living with my first husband's mother. This is scary because my son is the age that I was when he was conceived, living under the very same roof, with the very same matriarch upon whom he and his girlfriend now depend. Plus ce change...

I talked to him about that a bit tonight, and he assured me no such thing is going to happen with him and Marty, although (as I did point out) nobody ever, ever, ever thinks it is going to happen to them, while much of the continuation of the human race is contingent upon the eternally unexpected.

But do your kids have to make you so old?! It had been a long day with Katie - I took her shopping at the outlet malls; and she was tired too, there's a lot of walking, not to mention the draining salesmanship of a couple of very young guys who are much more profoundly dedicated to the mission of selling you a pair of $165 Uggs than any human being should rightfully be.

But I'm tired, and Katie has gone off with my ex, and there I am with my son and his girlfriend, listening about how they perform in a shadow cast for an obscure movie whose title I won't bother to look up so I can type it out here, and they've eagerly disregarded a few gentle hints I've thrown out about how tired I am and how tomorrow is a work day and so on, until I finally say - and it's not rude, if you think of both of them as my kids: "Well, listen, guys, it's late, and I'm pretty wiped out. How about we all call it a night?"

The girlfriend says okay, and they make their way to the door - to go back, I guess I should add, to my ex-mother-in-law's house - and we all say goodnight. And I hug my son, because I love him. And I hug the girlfriend, not because I love her - I barely know her - but because she's a nice girl, isn't she, and my son loves her, and it's polite, and whyever shouldn't I? And I'm struck by how surprised she is, how unexpected the friendly gesture seems to be.

And this is selfish, but as they leave, I feel with renewed force how I am not twenty anymore. I know - without ever having become aware of learning - how to behave in a way that puts younger people more at ease, that assures someone else that socially, everything they've done is okay. When did I get THAT power?!? Last time I checked, it was all I could do to eat dinner in company without covering myself in spaghetti sauce. And now I am calling an end to an evening and easing the social awkwardness of uncertain youth?! Who the hell died and made me 41?!?!?

Which reminds me, I'd better track down my voter registration card soon.

Embrace Your Inner Turnip

2010-07-22T17:49:00.005-05:00

Here I sit, sipping a glass of wine (against orders) to wash down the green salad I had for dinner (against orders), waiting for my heart to stop racing from the day's events, not to mention the Coke I had at lunch (against orders).

They don't tell you never to watch a Quentin Tarantino movie before giving blood, though. I did keep my bandage on for four hours (per orders). Indeed, it's still on now. At this point I'm pretty sure that when I take it off, a literal geyser of gore will splatter-paint my bedroom walls with crimson.

For one thing, my room is done in burgundy and cream, so bright red would totally not work. For another, splatter-painting is SO '90s. Kind of like, you know, those convertible shorts pants with the zip-off legs that nobody wears anymore. Nobody.

I had lots of time to get phriendly with my phlebotomist today; she was so methodical and careful in her choice of which vein to tap. She called one of the others over to consult with him. "This one right here, I see where it is, it shouldn't be hard to hit," she said, tapping on a vein in my right arm. "But I don't know. I really like this one," indicating my left arm. "It's a side vein, and it runs along the muscle, but it's so nice and plump and bouncy."

"I won't tell you which vein to tap," the other, presumably more experienced phlebotomist said. "You're the one doing it, so it's your call."

They are artists, these people.

Did you know that the veins that run along the side of your forearms, while closer to the surface, tend to shift around when you flex your muscles? They're easier to find, but also easy to lose, or to close off with incautious poking or taping. The vein in my right arm is a safe bet - it's anchored firmly in the comfortable hollow of my inner elbow - but the one on the left, if you hit it just right, will pay off big time. You can drain me in five minutes flat. It's really quite spectacular.

All this talk was, perhaps, more informative than reassuring. However, once she had determined her plan of attack, the insertion of the needle was painless and the blood flowed easily. I was relieved enough to join gigglingly into their conversation, which had turned to the best place to get a good deal on the latest fashions in surgical scrubs. "Do you think," the girl asked, "they had bell-bottomed scrubs back in the '70s?"

"Oh my gosh," I said. "Do you remember those convertible-shorts, zip-off-leg pants everybody was wearing in the '90s?" They did. "Well, just a couple of years ago, I used to work with a guy who wore those, still. Every. Single. Day."

I looked a little nervously over my shoulder after mentioning this, but then I thought, come on. As if Coworker-You-Idiot would ever give blood. Would he? At any rate, he was nowhere in sight. For heaven's sake, I hadn't even thought of the man in I don't know how long.

His name shall never again pass between us.

Five minutes later I was sent to the "canteen" (really, just a handful of chairs set up in a loose semicircle around a table with Oreos, Nutter Butters, Fig Newtons, Sprite, and Gatorade) with instructions to spend at least 10 minutes to recover. In a randomly unrelated instance, a photographer from our agency's employee newsletter had shown up, just as I was finished, to take a few promotional photos of the blood drive. I drained for an extra two minutes or so as a result. Considering the masterful way that phlebotomist tapped my fat, succulent vein, who knows how much extra blood I lost?

I sat down in the canteen. I opened a mini-pack of Fig Newtons. I took a bite.

"Well, hello there!" A new arrival rose from the waiting chairs near the entrance and dropped into the seat next to me, taking my hand. "Elizabeth! How have you been?"

I was a little dazed. "Oh my gosh, how are you?" I said, with unfeigned amazement - since, as I mentioned, I hadn't even thought of him since I don't know when.

"Great! Great!" he enthused. "And you, how are you liking it over in your new division?"

"Oh, I love it," I said; "actually, you know, I work with your boss, Bill's, cousin now..."

"Great!" he said. "Bill went over to Travel too, didn't he?"

I was puzzled. The Bill I was talking about is C-Y-I's boss; and while I've seen firsthand the kind of cognitive limitations C-Y-I may be working under, I guess I still expect him to know, at least roughly, what division his boss works in. But he went on. "Bill, the little guy, the one with the... you know... (he gestured vaguely with one hand)..."

Oh, THAT Bill. "No, he went to a different division," I said. "It was good, he seemed to like it there."

"I was happy to get out of our old office myself," he said. "But I'm really glad I was able to finish up that last big project I had. Man, you helped so much with that. You probably 10-keyed about eight times as much as everybody else who was doing it. You were so good at it."

I felt unprepared to respond to this gallantry. "Ahahaha," I said.

"So, your name changed," he continued, "you got divorced? So you're single now! Seeing anyone?"

And this is the other thing they don't tell you when you give blood: that the recovery canteen makes great hunting grounds for state employees who might prefer a woman a little on the woozy side.

I left, actually - in fact I told him I am dating his boss' cousin (this is true), so he took his leave, and I smiled and waved and left without finishing my Fig Newton.

But I did notice, woozing gently out the door, that he was wearing normal pants. I'm sure there's some kind of significance to this fact. Maybe after a couple more glasses of wine, it will all make sense.

pop

2010-05-20T22:06:00.001-05:00

Your father ties the ribbon round
Your wrist - his fingers sure, and infinitely calm,
inscrutably adult.
You are not that crying little girl,
the other one,
Whose hope and happiness were sucked
up to the blue abyss
of smiling sky;
Ice cream sticky on her mouth
and mingling with tears
From eyes that strain, though she is led,
stumbling and looking back
away
after the hopeful speck
that dwindles to oblivion:
Tethered, safe, your prize bobs overhead
Mysterious, secure, and at one tug, in reach
Shining, magical, alive.
And later then, at night
skating gently
in the silent soothing
currents of the air,
along your bedroom ceiling,
it watches you, with friendly eye:
lulls you now to sleep, to dream
the monsters and the shadows kept at bay.
But morning sunshine finds you
Waking, eager - it is there
but low and sad
it skulks along the floor
as if ashamed
its luster lost
its power dead.

April Fool's!

2010-04-09T21:55:00.003-05:00

Did you know how there's this trend where Japanese guys are dating pillows with a girl's anime face and figure imprinted on them? Did you know how there's now a trend where some of these guys are marrying their Japanese pillow girlfriends? Well, it's true. I read it on the internet.

I did lunch coverage at our visitor center downtown today. This is lots of fun because all kinds of people come in and ask interesting questions. I've done lunch and part-day coverage so many times now that I'm actually almost passable at it - I mean, very few of my visitors get arrested for following my recommendations anymore - but I certainly don't have the kind of stories that the regular staff have. One of my dear friends there sent me a list of some of the particularly notable things she's heard.

"How do I become a senator? I want to become a senator so I can represent my people. My people need and deserve representation! My people, well... they’re gypsies."

"I understand that drag queens have to pee too, I just don't think they should do it in the ladies' room."

"I guess some people don’t know any better because no one’s ever died for Iowa."

The thing is, our visitor center staff are held to very high standards of customer service. We love our traveling public, we really do. And while we hear some doozies now and again, we're polite and respectful, and try never to let our customers know that any boneheaded thing they might come up with could end up being blog fodder. Because nobody wants to be blog fodder. Nobody.

Across the room from our travel information desk is the visitor information desk for the particular historic site where the visitor center is located. It's staffed by a different agency, and I'm sorry to have to break the news that this agency's customer service standards are not quite as high as ours. Let me give you an example. Take Dwight... please.

Dwight works at the other desk; right across the room from ours, he's naturally friendly, and regards me as something of a comrade-in-arms against that greatest of all natural enemies, The Public. "Don't you let them push you around," he tells me, quite loudly, in our large and echoey chamber which is open to the rest of the rooms on the floor, including exhibits and a gift shop. "You've got to stand up to these people. If you're too nice to them, they'll just walk all over you."

He then proceeds to tell stories about how he's told this visitor what's what or shown that other visitor who's boss. He speaks loudly - our desks are about 20 feet apart - and he has a high-pitched cackle which he airs freely when he feels he's said something particularly witty. Which is more often than you might think. I glance nervously towards the open stone arch doorway, because, you know, the public is right there. They can hear you.

Last week he came over and showed me an iPhone app that displays pictures of different guns and knives and makes the sound of them being fired or drawn when you tap on the screen. "See, now, this is how you deal with unruly tourists," he told me. He cackled.

One of my coworkers, who works the lunch shift at least as often as I do, has never experienced many of this, the confidences, the cackling, or the iPhone apps. "I think Dwight has a little crush on you," he told me.

"Dwight is married," I told him; "he doesn't wear a ring, so I didn't know until recently; but last week he mentioned his wife - said his house was being remodeled and that he and his wife were butting heads over it."

My friend and I arrived, I'm sorry to report at almost the same moment, at the startling conclusion that Dwight's wife is actually a Japanese pillow girlfriend.

In further news, I intend to continue blogging if I can still get anybody to read the darn thing.

Moving Along

2010-04-01T17:16:00.000-05:00

I never blog anymore. I'm officially going to give it up for good.

What a Drag It Is Getting Old

2010-03-18T20:37:00.004-05:00

Remember before the Internet?

Well, I do. If you were a quote-smart kid-unquote (i.e your parents were some kind of weird antisocial brainiacs), you were aware of the existence of such things as "personal computers," and possessed a vague foreshadowing that these exotic machines might one day break through the heretofore unbreached frontiers of geekdom and draw Mr. and Mrs. Everyfamily into the warm glow of their electronic embrace.

Then you shook yourself a little and said, "Naaaaaaah."

However, as it happens, the dang thing is just about everywhere these days (unless of course you work for a government agency). What isn't on the Internet? Everything is. Everything.

The quickest example to spring to my mind, just at the moment, is the lyrics to Cocteau Twins songs.

To be perfectly honest, my perception of the universe as I know it (or heretofore knew it) is rather shaken. I guess I was about eighteen, nineteen years old when I first became aware of the Cocteau Twins; but one of the most basic functions of the Cocteau Twins - as I understood it - is to provide lyrics with the profound meaning of which you cannot possibly find any faults, inasmuch as you can't begin to understand what the heck it is that they're singing.

Such was my life, from the time I was eighteen or nineteen until the age of forty; and readily can you believe what a happy, carefree existence it was. Then you go and find out that one of your favorite songs of all time contains such a line as

"Tis the lucky lucky penny penny penny penny"

in the midst of a whole bunch of other words that also don't make any sense, and, well, you get a little discouraged. All those years of smoking pot in college for NOTHING.

O Happy Day

2010-03-02T11:45:00.002-06:00

KATIE (getting ready for school): What are you still doing here - are you going in late?
ME: No, I'm off, it's a holiday.
KATIE (surprised): What holiday?
ME: Texas Independence Day.
KATIE: You suck.

Culture and All Its Prefixes

2010-02-24T23:33:00.004-06:00

Unpredictability is a good thing about my job, a good thing. Without it, well, I'd know what I'll be doing from one day to the next. That would suck.

This last week, I am a - well, for google's sake, we'll call it a visitor advisor. I'm greeting people who are new to Austin, or to Texas, and telling them what they should do or see while they are here. And because I'm nice, my suggestions are pleasant ones; even (I must rather shamefacedly add) things I personally have not done. Go on a free guided tour of the Capitol building. Visit the Harry Ransom Center, where they have a Gutenburg Bible on display, and the very first photograph ever taken. There are also interesting rotating exhibits of cultural artifacts. Currently they have an exhibit called "Making Movies" which really looks quite interesting. And the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum - well, for heaven's sake, you need to go there! I only lived on the UT campus for three years and never did, and to this day never have. I hope to soon.

And yet, it's odd, when we have a little free time to ourselves, to do what we like, we end up loafing around a certain someone's home and Netflixing the Will Farrell remake of "Land of the Lost." That can't be right.

I spent Monday afternoon covering at the Cap, and it was exhausting. First of all, the actual Capitol employees across the way were difficult to begin with. Then the visitors were plentiful and demanding; the last one of the day actually pretty much ordered me to call her a cab. I think she was from somewhere that taxis roam the streets for the hailing, and was tired and frustrated, so it's hard to be upset with her, though I was tired and frustrated (and sick) as well. But how much trouble is it really to pick up the phone and call a cab company? I did it. I hope she got her cab. I went home without worrying about it further.

More tiresome was a group of 15-20 middle-aged-ish people from a conference, who were on an "information scavenger hunt," and who wanted me - an Austinite, as far as they could tell, after all - to cough up on demand a reasonable quantity of interesting, little-known, and pithy facts about my hometown. Try being asked this on the spot as an open-ended question and coming up with a meaningful answer. On the whole, I think I did pretty well, telling people that our beloved William Sydney Porter wrote many of his best works while incarcerated, suggesting a drive-by tour of the original location of Whole Foods Market in what is now a small Cheapo Discs store on North Lamar, and mentioning that you can see Michael Dell's house (unless he's moved, which is entirely possible as I really haven't been paying attention) from Mount Bonnell.

Tuesday was a much better day, in that it snowed all day, and therefore not a single Texan arrived at the visitor center. People from Missouri, Indiana, Wisconsin, and of course; Canadians - mais oui! - came in, but the Texans tend to stay home, once the white stuff hits the sky. We probably didn't have but 30 visitor parties all day. So instead, I whiled away the afternoon reading a book lent to us by an employee of the Capitol Visitor Center across the way: "The Hot Zone," by Richard Preston, which I dug 300 pages into yesterday, and which, for future reference, I recommend against reading while you have a nasty cold.

This book deals with a non-fictional, or perhaps semi-fictional (I'm only 300 pages in, so I don't know for sure yet) outbreak of the Ebola Zaire virus in metropolitan Washington, D.C., specifically Reston, Virginia, where I largely grew up. The location is less gripping than the description of the symptoms, and it's pretty rationally horrifying to think of a virus of this type being turned loose in the "civilized" world - as if it were any less horrible stashed out of (our) sight in the Third World.

I have to go back to the Cap tomorrow after lunch, and if it's not quiet enough for me to finish the book there, I'll bring it home. I'm not watching "Land of the Lost" again, at any rate.

Go see the Ransom Center, the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, and the Elisabeth Ney Museum. Never seen any of 'em, to my shame. I am on my way.

More and Mortality

2010-02-20T00:55:00.002-06:00

Unless they're particularly profound (think, oh I don't know, Schindler's List), movies have no business being depressing.

That's why I Am Legend is right out. I made it perhaps a third of the way through that one tonight, and read the rest of the story on IMDB. I was right to stop watching. Unfortunately, the cheeriest pick from the movies my friend had Netflixed for our evening was Flags of Our Fathers; and at this point, you start wondering, is this guy trying to tell me something?!

Bad things are going down at work. Oh, I still love my job, but unpleasant things are happening. I've been doing lots of extra coverage at the visitor center due to our part-time visitor employee having cancer; so those of us in the administrative offices have to cover for lunch pretty often. Then, last week, one of the two full-time visitor center employees appears to have suffered a mild heart attack. He'll be okay, thank God! But we're now down, for the next week or two at least, to a single full-time staffer, and she kind of needs to have a day off every now and then, so instead of just covering for lunch a few days a week (and the occasional Saturday), we now must divide up entire workdays at the visitor center, being charming to the public.

Being charming is a skill I've been working particularly hard to develop, these last couple of years. I've always described Mom, and Grandmother and Aunt Barbara, as the kind of people who really light up a room when they walk in. My paternal grandfather, too, I've always thought of as someone who had a particularly tangible sweetness and gentleness to him. I think that's become one of my most prized and admired qualities in other people, that sense that you can talk to someone and just see, right off the bat, that they are lovely, kind, honest, sincere, just gosh-darn nice people. Not that you can't be wonderful without necessarily coming off that way right away, of course - and not that you can't be a charming, sociopathic bastard, either. But still.

So it's kind of fun, perhaps somewhat experimentally, to be as outrageously nice to people as possible in a professional capacity. It gets a response, and that response is tremendously rewarding, because you end up feeling as if you'd made a small but measurable impact on someone's day, by extension life, by extension the world, the universe, and the space-time continuum, thereby altering the laws of physics somewhat for the better. You know - playing God. At least it makes ME happy, and I'm selfish, so that'll do.

Mom's definitive depressing movie, as I recall, was Sophie's Choice. If that's on the date night menu for next weekend, I'll know what to do.

Oh No, Not Again

2010-02-11T21:38:00.004-06:00

It's that time of year again, that time when TV, radio and teh internets conspire to convince your man that all those disclaimers you keep tossing out regarding the lack of ostentation you prefer are of course nothing more than so much passive-aggressive bullshit, so if he wants to get any, he better make good with the diamonds, beeYOTCH!

Valentine's Day is nice in principle. Or maybe it used to be.

Other females, do you resent this? It just seems like we've come so far (skinny cigarettes notwithstanding) to be considered as rational human creatures. It seems unfair and downright sexist to have the mainstream media telling our men what we really want, blatantly overriding our own openly stated preferences. It's f***ing creepy, if you want to get right down to it. What's wrong with Mr. Here I Am In The Immediate Vicinity At This Moment tenderly bringing a single red rose to our homes, in appreciation for which we cook him, say, a lasange dinner, maybe bake a nice red velvet cake for dessert - he can bring the ice cream - then watch half a romantic DVD before becoming overwhelmed by runaway emotions on the couch? I mean, that sure sounds perfect to me, and nobody has to shell out any disposable income to 1-800-FLOWERS, Victoria's Secret, or Austin Land & Cattle (fine establishments though these may be) in the process. We won't even get into jewelry, God help us.

Chocolate, on the other hand, is always acceptable.

Will Wonders Never Cease

2010-01-28T22:34:00.005-06:00

About two weeks ago, my state agency received an email through our website inquiring when the best time to see Texas wildflowers is.

Emails from the public are a mixed bag, of course. Human nature being what it is, people don't usually write to a faceless bureaucratic entity unless they're het up about something. A not-insignificant portion of my job involves answering hate mail.

I love it. Not the hate mail itself, but the whole process of coming to understand the other person's point of view; of moving through commingled frustration, annoyance, and compassion; of trying to figure out what can be done either to help the person, or at least to help him or her understand. Forging connections is amazing. The best thing in the world is when you write back to someone who's very angry - with or without good cause - and feel that you've made sense, that you've cleared things up, that the person received at least some sort of satisfaction from your answer. You've made a change in the world, and in someone else, and in yourself - just the littlest tiniest bit, but it's such a good thing.

Usually that's the end of it, but every so often someone writes back to me. Often they thank me. Many times they're surprised to have received a thoughtful response from a faceless, monolithic government entity at which they were, after all, only venting a little spleen. Sometimes they want to continue the discussion further. Obviously I can't answer everything - I mean, I personally sure as heck don't agree 100% with everything my employer does - but on balance, I love the process, and the contact and the interaction with these strangers seeking any acknowledgement whatsoever of their point of view, and get it. It's tremendously rewarding, really.

But this wildflower question just made me completely happy. Of course the inquirer wasn't upset; she wanted to know when the peak of wildflower season is, and where the best part of the state to visit is, and whether we're going to have a good wildflower season this year.

Well, on the last one, who knows. It's looking a heck of a lot better than last year. We had some good rain in the fall, and only one hard freeze so far this winter (till tomorrow and Saturday night, anyway), and it looks like we'll get some nice fields of bluebonnets, come late March to mid-April. Somewhere. You can generally count on east Texas, anyway.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote back to this nice British nature photographer and said that, while it's too early to determine how colorful the show of wildflowers will be this year, there is a fair prospect of a good season; I sent a few links, and had a shipment of Texas travel literature sent off to her, along with last year's wildflower driving tour issue of the travel magazine, whose editor is a friend of mine. She wrote back and thanked me right away.

And today she wrote the friendliest note to say that she'd received all the literature in the mail, thanked me again for being helpful, and promised to send me photographs after her trip.

Do you remember before there was an internet? Can you imagine life without it? I do, and I can't. At this point I'm kind of wishing she'd look me up when she's in town. People are quite lovely, you know. Aren't I lucky to have a job where I get to be friends with so many of them?

Airsick Bags

2010-01-25T17:43:00.004-06:00

If you feel that your life consists largely of a string of disappointing men in unfulfilling relationships, I strongly recommend Fear of Flying. It's insightful, witty, and extremely well-written, and will remind you that (1) you're not alone, and (2) nobody else has figured it out either.

Actually, I've just finished reading the book for the third time, and was discussing it on the phone today with my soon-to-be-ex-almost-boyfriend, who will not quite have outlasted my soon-to-be-ex-husband, from whom my divorce will be final a week from today. I'm thinking the newer relationship doesn't have quite that long. In fact, I'm kind of preparing for the formal end tonight. Rereading Fear of Flying has made me feel a lot better about this, though.

The first time I read the book, I was in college, and about to break up with a longer-term guy who really just didn't get me. I read the book and was blown away. I felt like I could have written it, except I don't write that well, and am not quite as guilt-ridden - or at least not about sex.

I lent my copy to the guy. It spoke to me so deeply, I reasoned, surely he'd read it and finally understand what I was going through. But then we broke up, he still didn't understand me, and I never got my book back.

"So I'm not going to lend it to you," I explained to my friend on the phone this afternoon, "but it really is an extremely good book."

"Okay," he said. He's not into reading anyway.

Which is a lot of what Erica Jong's book is about: why does this extremely intelligent, independent-minded, literary, artistic, beautiful, witty, funny, sexy woman keep setting herself up to be rejected by one inferior man after another? I don't know, and neither does she. She's clearly a lot smarter than most of them. Yet she becomes infatuated, pursues someone who isn't nearly good enough for her, gets psychologically messed with, abused, and rejected in turn, and crawls away feeling like something that feeds off Pat Robertson's toe fungus. It's like looking in a mirror, I tell you what.

Eleven years later she wrote a sequel, Parachutes and Kisses, which I read not long after the first book. I was profoundly distressed to discover she didn't seem to have learned very much in the interim. How do you learn to stop defining yourself in terms of your relationships? How do you break these patterns? How do you be happy?

Hopefully I'll be able to get some practice in.

Jehovah's Witlesses

2010-01-09T16:18:00.005-06:00

'Tis the season to be accosted. Greenpeace can get fairly aggressive on the hike-and-bike trail, which is tiresome as I really have to be sure not to go over my hour for lunch, and I'm not going to give anybody any money, but when someone calls wheedlingly out to me, "Come on, you like trees, don't you?" it's hard to walk stonily past without feeling like a Republican.

I do indeed like trees. In fact, I might never get a live Christmas tree again, now that Jim's not making that call. Fresh flowers I don't mind, but I've always been troubled by the concept of sacrificing a tree's life just for a few weeks' holiday decor. Never mind the mess, the needles that will carpet the back of my car for as long as I own it, the cats' unfortunate tendency to attempt to mask the piney smell with more pungent aromas of their own. No, the worst part is taking all the lights and ornaments down on January 6th and hauling the poor forlorn husk to the curb. I can't even look it in the eye, and wouldn't be able to even if trees HAD eyes, which (unless you're a big Lillian Vernon shopper) they generally don't.

But the City of Austin has a nice program where they at least recycle your discarded trees by grinding them into mulch. You can leave your tree at the curb and they'll pick it up on your regular garbage day, but if it's over six feet tall, you're supposed to saw it in half. Do I look like a lumberjack to you?! So instead, I shoved it into the back of the Isuzu Behemoth which my amazing friend Diane is selling to me on ridiculously easy terms, to help me out through the divorce - Diane is a GOOD FRIEND - and took it to the temporary Christmas tree recycling drop-off at Zilker Park.

Have I mentioned that I love Austin, love it, love it, love it, love it? This morning's experience reminded me that I haven't said so for a while. The dropoff point at Zilker Park presumably had at least a few city employees, but was largely staffed by volunteers. It was extremely well-organized and efficient, with staffers directing traffic into separate lanes and hurrying to unload and haul away trees. And it was bitter cold out, for Austin - just under 20 degrees at the time I went - and, my gosh, they were so nice. Bundled up in coats, hats, and gloves, they bustled competently through their work, smiling and thanking me for bringing the tree in. And as I drove away, the person directing traffic out of the lot gave me a big, bright smile and a cheery wave. I felt as if I'd had a booster shot of holiday cheer to last me through the rest of this cold winter. The scent of pine needles in my car probably helped, too.

Worse yet than Greenpeace, on the hike-and-bike trail, is the short-shorts guy. I write this hesitantly, afraid that perhaps I know him from somewhere and am being inexcusably rude for not responding to his repeated salutations; but if (as I suspect) we've never met, he's kind of a creep. I avoid eye contact with him now, and I have my iPod and earbuds as a legitimate enough excuse for not hearing anything anyone happens to say to me, but he gives it a good try anyway, addressing me two or three times whenever he sees me, and sometimes turning after we pass and calling after me. I've changed my walking route, and may change my lunch hour as well.

And worse yet than the short-shorts guy are Jehovah's Witnesses. Jim came by today to use the Behemoth to move another large installment of his stuff out of my house. Staggering under a heavy armload of his belongings, I found myself face-to-face with a woman and her small daughter. She seemed taken aback. "Is this your mother?" she asked Katie, who explained later that the woman had stopped by and talked to her once before while I was at work.

Katie responded that yes, I was, and the woman asked her, surprised, "Are you moving?"

"My husband is moving out," I told her shortly.

Now, here's where Jehovah's Witnesses are different from you and me. Solicitors of any other product, however noxious, would probably gather from my reply and the fact that my arms were uncomfortably full that, perhaps, now was not an ideal time.

She, however, introduced herself, and attempted to hand me some literature.

But she had a little girl with her, so I smiled, and said pleasantly, "Thank you, but we're not interested," and got back to the business of loading up the Behemoth. And I guess I have to give her credit for not pressing the matter further.

Beth's rating for the week:
Diane: 8 million bajillion stars
Greenpeace: 2 stars
Guy in short-shorts: 1 star, with an option for a possible future restraining order
Jehovah's Witnesses: 0 stars, and a $50 gift certificate to Specs

The Writing on the Wall

2010-01-06T22:56:00.005-06:00

Under the South First bridge by the hike-and-bike today, I noticed a painted scrawl: "Houses are graves for the living."

It's supposed to get down below 20 degrees later this week.

I did wonder, bemused, at the hand and mind behind that sentiment. I thought of my own house, which I've been so enjoying decorating and claiming as my own space. It's a haven from the world, certainly; you leave for work, or visiting, or errands - or to stroll along the Town Lake hike-and-bike trail - and there is your very own warm house to come back to. You can also welcome friends, a delicious luxury I've been missing for many years. So I can't agree with the sentiment at all, though I suppose matters might be different if you hired Morticia Addams as your interior decorator.

Or Martha Stewart, for that matter.

There was another interesting series of graffiti along the South First bridge pedestrian walkway, on the high wall that separates joggers, hikers, strollers, and bicyclists from automobile traffic. "Fuck the laws," read one message; and fifteen or twenty feet further along, the next one read "Fuck rent," then "Fuck the system," "Fuck the police," and then, rather to my alarm, "Fuck this wall."

I was with the author up till that point - at least in a spirit of gentle sympathy for his possibly somewhat naive ideals. But as a trail regular, I'm a big fan of the wall between Austin traffic and my head. It's a lot easier to fight for your principles when you're not pinned underneath a Smart Car. (The irony factor alone would be fairly overwhelming.)

People have believed, pretty much as long as they've been around, that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. Well, maybe it is - though you'd need a fairly large handbasket, really, and who would even carry the darn thing? Heck if I know. Well, activism, and attempting to raise the awareness of others about causes that concern you, are noble enough. But the last two entries in the Bryl-Cream series on the South First bridge wall were "Think!" and "People wake up! Shit is NOT OK!"

And here's where specificity would come in fairly handy.

Not to argue, not by any means, that there aren't a lot of things in the world that aren't okay. I think it works well when people single out a particular cause (or two or three) to support, espouse it, possibly recruit others, but allow other people to follow their own paths as well. I donate a little money to Planned Parenthood through work; I give blood; I get a little long-winded (given the opportunity) on the importance of allowing nature and human instinct to take their course as much as possible in childbirth and parenting. This is a fairly tiny sliver of the myriad issues that need addressing, but it is a Thing, and it's mine. I think it's important to find your own cause and support it, whatever that may be, unless you're into defacing public property, in which case I feel the police are fully justified in arresting you and providing you some rent-free digs in the city jail; or unless you're trying to get Sarah Palin elected in 2012, in which case I hope you get run over by a Smart Car.

A Day at the Park

2010-01-02T20:34:00.005-06:00

Bastrop State Park has gone all high-tech. Is nothing sacred?!?

Okay, so it's not actually high-tech, but they've reorganized the trail system since I was last there several years ago. The trails are all color-coded now, with signposts at each intersection indicating that, to stay on the red trail, you keep to the left. The blue trail is off to your right. The signposts have park maps with each trail indicated by a colored line. It's just like the Metro, only less expensive, and with slightly better odds of reaching your final destination, assuming you're trying to get back to your car.

They also have a cabin camping area. Cabins? We checked them out after our walk, driving among them slowly, scoping out our picks for some future weekend visit. Let me tell you what, those are some nice cabins. They are bigger than my house. They have fireplaces, too, and curtains. I haven't gone camping in several years now, but my dad used to take me all the time, so I know there are certain things that are a part of camping and certain things that are not a part of camping. Camping involves things like canned vegetables, Tang, collapsible 5-gallon water jugs, and (God help us all) pit toilets. It emphatically does not include curtains.

I've always hated pit toilets. I'm intrigued.

"Where would you recommend," asked my companion in the park office as he bought a year pass, "a good barbecue place in Bastrop?"

There was such a long silence that I wasn't sure the staffer had heard him. Finally her coworker piped up. "It's not a hard choice," she said, "there's only two."

"Billy's and Cartwright's," added the woman helping us at last.

"I saw Cartwright's as we were driving in," I said helpfully to my friend.

"Yeah," said the woman who had first spoken, "Cartwright's has a really big sign."

This didn't really strike either of us as a ringing endorsement. "So where would you go for barbecue?" pressed my friend.

There was another long pause. "Lockhart. I'd drive to Lockhart," they chorused.

Or Elgin, they went on to add, so we had dinner at Meyer's Barbecue there. I'd been to Southside Market once before, a year ago, on my work group's fam tour of Central Texas; and I thought it was really quite good, although a coworker of my friend's and mine, who lives in Elgin, was outraged that the tour took us there instead of Meyer's, which she insists is much better. So we checked out Meyer's, and I have to say, their sausage (for which Elgin is so well-known) really is tasty. At least I liked it, and I don't like sausage. But you can't go wrong with Southside Market either. I had a side of creamed corn and discovered that my companion thinks creamed corn is an abomination, which is something of a pity, as creamed corn, from a can, falls rather firmly into the things-that-go-with-camping camp.

But that's okay - so do marshmallows, a fact I don't have a problem with as long as the marshmallows are slowly immolated in flames until they drip, sizzling in sugary agony, into the glowing embers. Then you eat the chocolate and give the graham crackers to your kids: that's my recipe for S'Mores.

Happy New Year! 2010 is off to a good start. I'm looking forward to doing some camping.

Do You Still Believe in Fairy Tales?

2009-12-27T20:56:00.004-06:00

A coworker my age asked me that last week, via email, in an uncharacteristically serious exchange (usually he fires spitwads across my cubicle wall). "I figure I need to seal the deal before I'm 50," he wrote me, "because I look around at my friends, and that's about when the wheels start falling off. I don't care if the woman I marry wins our eventual sag-and-wrinkle race," he went on. "I just don't want to hook up with a gal who's already out of the gate and pulling ahead, because I need at least a few wild adventures to look back on."

My assumption was that he was considering whether to propose to his girlfriend over Christmas. All I know about her is that she has a bad back. But I've been known to leap to wrong conclusions before.

So what do you do when you're 40 years old, divorced (come February 1st, but at least now officially "separated" and living in your own place) and feeling lonely? The issue, touched on by my coworker, is that - while I really would rather not be a cougar, thanks - guys my age are old. They don't want adventure and excitement and really wild things. They want to settle down. They want to move in, and possibly even get married. It's fun shopping for home decor items with them - shopping with straight guys, OMG!!! - but then you point out the bed you've been wanting in your room for a few years, and, first thing, they remark that their feet would stick out through the bars of the footboard. So...? you say. It's MY bed! It'll look awesome in my room! And my feet will fit just fine!

Of course, I've unfortunately also developed a fairly major crush on a guy with a host of health problems: bad back, puny immune system, recovering alcoholic, etc. We can't go clubbing or hiking or dancing. I can barely keep him out past 9. I wrote to my coworker in our email exchange last week about how I'm very much like my mom, but always fall for guys with characteristics of my dad's (domestication, quiet habits) that played a role in their relationship not working out - Mom was a sweet, good person, but she was definitely a bit on the wild side. I find that I'm generally attracted to men who aren't crazy enough for me.

Actually I'm blowing the dust off the old blog tonight, precisely because the guy in question is not boring me today; he's actually doing the worst thing you can do in a relationship, which is making me play the waiting game. He called me last night and said he'd like to take me out tonight - or we could just hang out, whatever. And then today and tonight he hasn't called. I can't call him, because at this point I'm all fretful and shrewish and naggy. But I waited. I made a little soup for dinner, late, in case he was going to take me out. I was on edge all evening. And now that it's probably past his bedtime and I'm almost 100% certain he isn't calling, I'm really bummed out.

I don't want to be old before my time, but how the hell do I quit being fifteen?

Helpful Holiday Tips

2009-12-15T23:02:00.004-06:00

Don't give cutlery as a gift - holiday or otherwise, tradition says. To do so foreshadows (or actually brings on) a severance of the relationship.

But what if you're in a relationship you want to get out of? Is it appropriate to give someone you'd like to be an ex a set of steak knives for Christmas?

This is left as an exercise for the reader.

Gift-giving is a fascinating tradition in any case, fraught with symbolism both intentional and unintentional. What present is appropriate to give a family member, child, parent, sibling, spouse, lover, friend? When is it proper to give an item intended to complement (and therefore make suggestions towards the development of) the taste of someone you care about, and when is it overbearing?

In any case, edible underwear at an office party are generally a bad idea.

It's funny, now that I look back as an adult, how uncomplicated childhood Christmases all seemed to be. No one has any particular expectations from children other than not chewing with their mouths open and not awakening the whole extended family more than two hours before first light on Christmas morning. Gifts have meaning, but they don't have Meaning (until you hit adolescence, at which point God help everyone involved). Times were simpler. Also, it snowed.

Tomorrow after lunch, my boss and I are driving down to Corpus Christi for a site visit for our upcoming annual conference in April. I always love traveling, no matter where to, because it's very introspective, or philosophical, or something. I'm hoping to see a friend or two while I'm down there, but if not, it's no big deal; we'll be back soon. My boss was my secret Santa at our office Christmas party. She gave me a small travel bag stocked with miniature bottles of wine. What does this mean?!?

Maybe my helpful holiday tip for this year is that, if you're too overwhelmed to send out Christmas cards, everyone else will either not notice, or be so overwhelmed with their own holiday guilt that they assume there's a good reason they got cut from your list and will therefore accept unquestioningly your silence on this occasion. I for one would like to make it clear that an absence of Christmas cards on my part only signifies that I am disorganized and frazzled, and does not in any way reflect a lack on anyone else's part.

If I send you some knives, though, that's a whole different story.

Great Things Are Afoot

2009-11-26T21:40:00.003-06:00

Some call them "shoes."

No, actually things are going quite well of late, only I don't feel like writing about anything, only I absolutely have to write tonight because today is the fourth anniversary of my blog, so I'm here to offer you a significant quantity of doughnuts.

You are hungry, yes?

No?

Things to be thankful for today:

Family
Friends
Health
Well-being
Awesome job
Hope, excitement, fun, adventure and really wild things
And all kinds of other neat stuff.

Happy Thanksgiving! Have some doughnuts.

Surely I Must Have Misunderstood You

2009-11-10T17:26:00.004-06:00

The other day, driving around town with the radio on, I heard a DJ repeatedly using the word "effort" as a verb. "He's efforting to get a job there," said the DJ, and followed up a few moments later with, "Well, I've been efforting to -" This was the point where my efforts to change the station bore fruit as, furiousing mutterly to myself, I vocabularied the tuner clean into next week. What is with people?

Granted, you can't expect much from radio DJ's - who are really just salespeople to begin with, and whose only useful function is performed by computer program anyway. (Until recently I would have added, "Except of course for KUT.")

What I don't understand is why, particularly in a language as highly nuanced and rich in vocabulary as English is, these people feel the need to create new terms for concepts which were already so amply represented. Then again, I'm still haunted by the memory of the motivational speaker who claimed that "try" was the most subversive word in the English language, that we should expunge it altogether from our daily speech, and that (as you may recall - though apparently the marketing types at Avis never caught on) when Avis adopted the motto "We try harder," their sales immediately plummeted by some ridiculously implausible percentage.

Or they came out of a slump and finally started to show a profit. Whatever.

Of course, salespeople (and by extension, radio DJs) were designed by evolution to listen uncritically to motivational speakers. Because thinking for yourself? That would be efforting!

Did You Know?

2009-10-24T10:30:00.004-05:00

Purebred horses don't have sex.

Well, thoroughbred racehorses do. This is euphemistically referred to as "live cover," but of course what it really means is that the boy horse gets on top of the girl horse and cheesy 70's guitar riffs play and 11 months later there's a little baby horsey that makes everybody say "awwwww" and then goes on to win a whole bunch of races.

But there are different breeds of horses for far more purposes than simply racing, although I feel I'm using the term "purpose" rather loosely here. There are cutting horses, reining horses, halter horses, etc.; horses which are very specifically and carefully bred to a number of different disciplines that don't really serve any practical use or even entertainment value on any large scale - just hobbies, really, for a small, closed circle of extremely wealthy individuals. It does seem to be a fairly comfortable life for the horses at least. If you don't mind celibacy.

We had a tour Thursday of a reining-horse ranch, given by the ranch's breeding manager, a calm, competent professional whose job I rather emphatically would not want. However, as it turned out later, her job is not quite as dirty as I first thought it was, when she talked about how the stallions do not "live cover" the mares, but that, um, "collections" are taken, and the mares are artificially inseminated. And since the mares whose genes are most desirable are show mares, to be kept in prime condition, the embryos are flushed out after a couple of weeks and implanted in some lesser, sucky mares that nobody cares about.

She led us at last into the breeding barn, with foaling stalls, rows of stalls for the babies (who are born in spring, so these were empty now) and a large, barrel-shaped object on poles. "What I do," she told us, "is, every other day, January through July, lead the stud stallion around through the mares to get him all warmed up and ready to go; then he gets up on this thing here" (indicating the barrel-shaped object) "and it has a receptacle for collecting the semen."

That's right, folks - at its last stop before disbanding and returning home, my tour group was looking at a sex doll for horses. And it struck me as a very great pity that we were visiting out of season, because if we'd gotten to see a demonstration, we could have said our tour had a happy ending!!!

This wildly inappropriate observation was kept to myself, but judging from the snickers and giggles among my group, I wasn't the only one thinking along those lines. It had been a very long week. We were tired.

I drove back to Austin with my friend and coworker Mary, who is one of the staff at our visitor center in Austin - one of the people for whom I occasionally fill in at lunchtime. Mary is possibly the funniest person I've ever met - joyful, sweet, outgoing, and full of hilarious stories she's picked up over the years. It is of course inevitable that two women in a car for three and a half hours will talk about sex - especially considering what we'd just seen.

"I used to work with this guy named Bill who was gay," Mary told me, "several years ago. Well, we had a little limited storage space for travel literature in a funny little closet under the stairs on the bottom floor of the headquarters building downtown. We kept the literature on a few shelves right in the front part of the closet, but if you shined a flashlight in there, you could see the space went back, around the corner, to who-knows-where. It was dark and really creepy. We called it Spider Corner. One time I noticed a box sort of around the corner, just the edge of it in sight, and I took a broom handle and pulled it out and found a whole bunch of copies of this cookbook from 1968, wrapped in plastic. Everybody in the building was all excited and they just went like hotcakes - man, I wish I'd kept one! And who knows what else might be back there? But nobody would ever go in, it was much too scary.

"Well, our boss at the time, he didn't know Bill was gay, and he was always asking him, 'Why don't you have a girlfriend? You seem like a guy with a lot on the ball. Why don't you get married?' So finally, to get him to stop, I told him, 'You know, Bill is gay,' but he turned out to be kind of homophobic and that really bothered him, so he decided he was going to 'cure' Bill. 'Look at that girl, she's awfully pretty,' he'd say. 'You should ask her out, she'd get you set up!'"

"Wow. He sure wouldn't be able to get away with that now," I remarked.

"I know, right?!" said Mary. "Talk about inappropriate! The boss really thought if Bill met the right girl, that he'd turn straight! So he kept trying to get him to date girls.

"So one day after one of these conversations, Bill comes up to me," she went on, "and he said, 'A vagina... a vagina, Mary...'" (in a horrified tone), "'oh, my God, Mary, a vagina... That's just like Spider Corner!!!'"

The only drawback of driving back to Austin for three and a half hours with Mary is that your sides and your throat hurt from laughing so much.

But it sure is educational!

So Many Pictures, No Camera Cord

2009-10-20T16:30:00.005-05:00

Under most circumstances, getting escorted out of town by the cops is not the best way to start a day.

In my job, it's awesome!

Today is day 3 of our north Texas tour, and I'm taking advantage of a rare break to type up a quick post from my hotel room in Wichita Falls, where I have not yet, I'm pleased to announce, quite worn out my welcome. But then, we only got in an hour ago.

Any self-respecting hotel ought to be prepared to issue each guest a cat upon check-in. Who knows - this might not be too far off. Only ten years ago, even high-end hotels routinely furnished their rooms with mattresses made of repurposed drywall. The idea of putting comfortable beds in rooms intended for sleeping is rather a recent one.

Even moderate-class hotels now have plush mattresses, soft, plentiful pillows, attractive furnishings and drapes, and luxurious bathroom fittings. The little things really do add up. Wireless internet is fairly standard too, which means that, in my case anyway, the flat-panel TV never gets turned on. You get shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion. Maybe even mouthwash. Shoe polish, you get. Such extravagance!

So cats, that's where they really need to go next. And actual cream for your coffee. I still can't comprehend how that weird powdery stuff might be considered an adequate substitute.

I'm going to make myself Google-able here, I know it, but have to say that the highlight so far - for me - has been Chandor Gardens in Weatherford. With an intelligent, funny, offbeat horticulturist acting as guide, the setting was beyond beautiful, and the weather's been perfect. Our guide pointed out the bride's cottage located on the grounds. "There are a couple of advantages to this," he remarked. "One is that some guest who hasn't seen the bride since they were in sixth grade is going to want to catch up on everything that's happened over all those years - an hour before the wedding. So the guest will be looking all over the house for her, while she's holed up in the cottage drinking champagne."

He paused, then added, "Plus it's right next to the parking lot, so if she comes to her senses she can make a quick getaway."

Then again, getting a police escort out of Granbury might have been the highlight. That's hard to beat. Or getting to drink actual honest-to-goodness Crazy Water.

The whole trip so far has been wonderful, maybe not quite so much if you don't care for live music revue performed by slightly overenthusiastic Christians, which is not my thing, but everybody else loved it. And I've been happy as a good-sized pile of clams over everything else. I love my job, so much so in fact that I might almost go on Oprah and jump up and down on the couch about it, except that Oprah ranks slightly lower on the Things That Beth Likes scale than even the perkiest Christian musical revue, so forget I mentioned it.

It would be pretty cool if we got to attend a theatrical performance put on by a group of Flying Spaghetti Monster devotees for noble pastafarian causes. Have you been touched by His Noodly Appendage?

I have so many pictures, but I left my camera cord at home - you always have to forget something. Leave it to me to forget one of very few items your modern hotel won't provide.

Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get run out of town on a rail!

An Offer You Must Refuse

2009-10-13T17:17:00.004-05:00

Weird thing about working in government #746: Your negotiation skills will be put to the test in ways you never could have imagined - unless, of course, you were batshit crazy to begin with, which given your choice of vocation is perhaps not completely out of the question.

Situation: I have a fam tour coming up next week for a group of our employees. All of the events, meals, and accommodations on the tour are sponsored, donated by the participating chambers of commerce, museums, restaurants, hotels, etc. All I have to do (aside from prepare the extensive and complicated legal paperwork allowing us to accept the donations, coordinate the myriad travel arrangements of all our attendees, research and prepare educational materials on all the attractions we'll be visiting, make binders, enforce guidelines, answer questions, and forcefully wrest from the tour coordinator as many of the details as I can get him to share with me in case, oh I don't know, some emergency arises, and he has to leave early on in the tour, and I end up in the middle of nowhere with a tour bus full of information center staff, armed with nothing more potent than a few of his notes scribbled on scrap paper, JUST LIKE WHAT HAPPENED LAST YEAR, thankyouverymuch) is show up and enjoy the ride.

And I can't wait! I'll be bringing my laptop. I will blog. It's super fun!

But the travel arrangements get a little complicated. One of our attendees hails from a city with no nearby airport, so she has to drive; but it's too far to travel in one day, so she'll arrive the day before the tour begins on Sunday. Well and good. I asked the tour coordinator if he could get us a room for her at "state rate"* Saturday night.

He responded to me a couple of days later. "No problem!" he said. "The Sunday night host hotel will be happy to provide her a comp room for Saturday night as well."

Ah, but you see, the donation approval we received was only for the dates of the tour, beginning Sunday. If they give us a freebie on Saturday, it's a gift, and that's unethical. So I have to decline. "I expect they'll think I'm completely off my rocker," I wrote back to him, "but can they just give her the room at $85?"

"No problem!" he said; but another week later, when he sent me the confirmation number for my attendee, he once more mentioned that the hotel had comped the room.

I hesitate to call them to straighten it out, because I think our conversation will go something like this:

***

HOTEL CLERK: Hello and thank you for calling the Hotel Espada! How may I help you?

ME: Hi, I'm calling on behalf of Mary Ingalls, regarding confirmation number 8675309.

HOTEL CLERK (checking his computer): Yes ma'am, I have a reservation here for Ms. Ingalls checking in on Saturday and checking out on Monday, two nights, and it's our pleasure to offer the room complimentary as part of your tour group!

ME: Thank you so much! Actually, the thing is, I'm calling because actually she'll need to pay for Saturday.

HOTEL CLERK (confused): No, ma'am, I have your group down for complimentary rooms.

ME: Yes, thank you, that's right, except only that one.

HOTEL CLERK (still more confused): So, only Ms. Ingalls is paying? Isn't she part of the tour? And you are...?

ME: I'm the planner. See, the tour doesn't begin till Sunday, and we have special permission from our governing board to accept the donation of the room-nights, so...

HOTEL CLERK: She needs to pay for both nights?

ME: No, you see, she only pays for the first night. The second night, she's part of the whole comped-room tour group deal.

HOTEL CLERK (a little snippy): It's actually more work for us to do it this way. Why don't we just comp her room for both nights?

ME: I know, but we can't because we don't have directorial approval for the first night. Look, I know it doesn't make sense, but can you please just go ahead and charge her for one night?

HOTEL CLERK (annoyed): All right, then, if you say so. (Checks computer) That'll be $149 plus tax -

ME: Oh wait, sorry, no. We can't pay more than $85.

HOTEL CLERK (slightly incredulous): The government rate is $149, ma'am.

ME: I know, but our travel budget has been cut and our agency's policy doesn't allow us to spend more than $85 on lodging.

HOTEL CLERK: If you're hard up, you know, I did offer the room for free just a few minutes ago.

ME: No, you see, we're not allowed to accept free stuff without directorial approval. She absolutely has to pay for Saturday. Just not more than $85.

HOTEL CLERK: Are you allowed to pay less than $85??

ME: Of course - I mean, that's just the cap; it's the most we can pay; if some place offers a room for less then we pay less.

HOTEL CLERK: Okay. How about $0?

ME: Nonono! Look - please can you just give her the room for one night for $85, please!

HOTEL CLERK: I really don't see why this is necessary.

ME: It's policy! Without directorial approval, we can't accept anything over $25 in value!

HOTEL CLERK: Oh, really? Have you subtracted $85 from $149 lately?

ME: That's different! That's not the same! We're negotiating!! I'm a tour planner!!!

HOTEL CLERK: You certainly could have fooled me.

***

The thing is, I figure, after fifteen or twenty years of working in the government sector, all of this might begin to make real sense.

And at that point, I really hope somebody goes transportational and shoots me.

----------
*Long story. Love your legislature!

You Heartless Bastard.

2009-10-09T20:06:00.007-05:00

In January 2007, a division of the agency where I work published a calendar whose cover photo was a (ahem) husky man lying on his stomach, only the pants of his jeans and his boots visible, investigating a hole in the ground. I was trying to describe this calendar to some coworkers of mine today.

"Oh wait," piped up one, who by God would be three-martini break group material if there still were a three-martini break group, "are you talking about 'the butt calendar'?"

I was.

"It totally reminded me of someone I used to work with!" I exclaimed, getting a few funny looks; so I had to go on and tell the story of the man who fell asleep in high-level meetings, as well as on the floor of his cubicle and in communal work spaces; whose snoring echoed throughout the entire section; who once playfully sneaked up on me in the kitchenette but had dozed off by the time I finished washing my dishes and turned around to find him standing eighteen inches behind me; who finally had to bring in a doctor's note, excusing this and other behavior, on the grounds of sleep apnea.

The thing is, when you work among more or less normal people, it's no longer quite nice to talk about people like this one - who was after all fairly typical for the setting. Try telling straights the quasi-comical horror stories you used to hoot over with like-minded inmates on break, and next thing you know they're glazing at you, smiles politely frozen on their faces, heads slightly tilted. And you realize you've become someone who makes fun of the differently-abled. And you feel like an asshole.

Do you wonder why I never blog anymore?

I recommend not lying around with your head stuck down in a hole in the ground. It limits your options like you wouldn't believe. And it's bad karma to make fun of TPPeople.

The Five-Thing Day

2009-09-29T19:58:00.002-05:00

Six things, if you count going on break.

A friend of mine posted this video on her Facebook page yesterday:

Its message reminds me of the 1981 film Looker. This classic sci-fi thriller features beautiful models who have their features fine-tuned by a plastic surgeon in order to reach market-researched commercial-appeal perfection, after which the marketing firm digitally scans them, and can then project their 3-D digitized images onto studio sets, performing exactly as programmed, so that the actresses themselves become superfluous and can simply be bumped off. Haven't I always told you marketers were evil?

And way to not think outside the box, people. You have the technology to reproduce a living being in faultless holography, and program the reproduction to behave in any way you like, but the concept of photoshop is totally beyond you?

Engaging in lengthy, profound conversation about this movie with a coworker does not count as one of the five (or six) things I did today.

I did even less yesterday, but at least I provided lunch relief for our visitor center staff. This is a task I find a little intimidating, because while I like people on general principle, people who ask you questions - and expect you to know the answers, yet - those people frighten me.

"What's the coolest thing to do in Austin?" a guy asked me. A plethora of wonderful activities - exploring the Zilker Botanical Gardens and swimming in Barton Springs, two-stepping at the Broken Spoke, shopping for Halloween costumes at Electric Ladyland, cruising through downtown on the Dillo, checking out the view from Mount Bonnell, eating a spinach omelet at Magnolia, having your picture taken with Leslie, going on a coffeehouse crawl, sipping a Bellini on the patio at Romeo's, taking in an indie film at the Alamo, catching a set at Continental Club or Saxon Pub or, I don't know, anywhere in town, including the steps of City Hall on Friday afternoons - completely failed to come into my head. "Um," I said.

"Okay," he said good-naturedly (he seemed to think I was cute), "what's your favorite thing to do?"

I like to go to Robbie's, eat cheese and crackers, watch a couple Tivo'd episodes of "The Office," and drink cheap wine. But I suspected this was not what he had in mind. Besides, Robbie probably wouldn't let me invite him.

I ended up recommending either the Austin Overtures very comprehensive, informative 90-minute tour or the fun Austin Ducks amphibious tour - both of which I've done, and both of which are great - but when my visitor eventually left, I believe he was planning to do a self-guided tour of Memorial Stadium. I hope I'm not held responsible when the travelers I assist get arrested.

Today began auspiciously, because I saw a rainbow on my bike ride in to work. The weather is lovely and cool, after our long and wearying summer. I sent an email with some paperwork formalizing an agreement between a local government and my agency. I returned a phone call about a hotel contract. I sent another email with suggestions on the redesign for our tourism website. I provided a coworker with some GIS data. Four things.

Then I went walking at lunch, and saw someone in serious medical distress of some kind on the hike-and-bike trail just below the Four Seasons. Paramedics were at the scene, loading the victim onto a stretcher, so there was nothing to do but walk by quickly and not stare. But a bicyclist coming the other direction shouted "Good Lord!" as he passed me, so I assume it was pretty bad. I hope everyone was okay.

I got back to work and Robbie called, on his way downtown for a meeting, and actually running early. Could he stop by?

He could! So I brought him up to my office and introduced him to all my work peeps. Then we went on break with the remnants of the people we knew at our old job for about half an hour, in the Three-Martini Break Group spot, and it was wonderful.

Back at work I was actually called upon to do another thing before I could go home for the day, and had to write up and send out a set of guidelines for our upcoming fam tour of the Fort Worth area. Five things! Six, if you count break. Not bad for government work.

Tomorrow I'm doing lunch coverage at the visitor center again. With luck, I'll get a bit better at it, the more practice I get. Otherwise, Robbie better stock up on cheese.

But What Price Victory?

2009-09-22T17:14:00.003-05:00

Software approval WIN! I finally got ArcMap installed on my work computer!

ArcMap is great for many purposes related to travel and tourism. It’s rather a pity, then, that after a year and a half of making logical, convincing, nay, even impassioned arguments for approval to get it installed, I can’t remember much about how to use it, have no clue how to connect to the geodatabase(s) I need, and months ago suffered an epic friendship fail with the GIS analyst who was going to help me out.

In contrast, you get all the Novell products you could ever want* just by showing up to work – at least in theory. “You’ll have to call me when it’s ready,” my cube neighbor told someone over the phone yesterday, “my GroupWise is down. Again.”

There was a pause. “That’s our email system,” she explained.

Early in my career at Sematech – which was federally funded at the time – we had something called cc:Mail. What a baffling name for an email client. “I’ll send you a cc:Mail,” people in the office would say blithely to outsiders, who no doubt wondered why the sender wouldn’t simply address it to them directly? Perhaps if you worked for the CIA, you had bcc:Mail.

Before that we had – and I can’t believe I’ve never killed off the brain cells that remember this, while the neurons that know how to use Arc have gone to the big happy cerebral cortex in the sky – an email program in VAX/VMS, displayed in white dots on a screen the shade of blue now reserved for letting you know you should’ve bought a Mac.

GroupWise may be an improvement over cc:Mail, but that’s only because it’s fifteen years newer. It seems to be the system of choice for government agencies. Which makes sense: it’s slightly outdated and sluggish, with a stodgy, joyless interface; it may also have something to do with the state mainframe, which is housed (unless someone in my old division accidentally vaporized it by hitting the F12 key) in San Angelo. What does a mainframe even look like? I picture a dark, massive, Nixon-era hulk with lots of switches and random blinking lights, crouched ominously on the grounds of San Angelo State University, rumbling low in its bowels, occasionally belching out bursts of steam. There might be punch cards involved. I bet it eats microwave popcorn, too.

About a hundred yards to the west-northwest of where I work now is my old building, chock full of people who remember punch cards, eat microwave popcorn, and have a rudimentary understanding of Arc, but – how shall I put this – whose collective work ethic might not always be said to include a strong predilection for service to others. My remaining GIS-using friends have scattered to the four corners of the globe.** ArcGIS is only used by one other person in our division, so our IT guy can’t really help me out; and my pushing so hard for Arc kind of trod on that other person’s territory, so I hesitate to approach him. I find myself therefore unsupported, not to mention insupportable.

But dammit! I got the software!

-----------------
*Assuming you had taken such complete leave of your senses that you wanted any Novell products
**A globe doesn’t even HAVE corners. And they call themselves geographers!

A Day Late

2009-09-20T15:41:00.003-05:00

Try to keelhaul me, willya?

They Won't Stop

2009-09-16T19:01:00.007-05:00

New employee orientation doesn't typically cover the issue of whether you should bring wild animals to the workplace.

Now that I think about it, this might make a certain degree of sense - at least vis-a-vis some divisions of my current employer, where many of the staff might be classified as wild animals - if not for their qualities of ferocity, or survivalism, or adaptation to the world around them, then at least for their smell.

I still should probably have known better than to bring a turtle to work on Monday.

But it had to be done. There he was (or she!), barely larger than a quarter, tucked tightly into himself in the middle of a 20-foot-wide gravel swath of downtown hike-and-bike. To my left, a 10-foot drop led to the lake; to my right, meticulously mowed lawns spread out as far as the eye could see - or to Cesar Chavez, which is over the top of the slope, so it's pretty much the same thing. Clearly this was no place for a naive reptile. So I brought him back to my office.

Not having an aquarium, and feeling somewhat uncertain of my coworkers' reaction were I to co-opt the office coffeemaker carafe for this purpose, I put the little guy in a potted aloe on my desk. The aloe is the only plant in a large, wide pot, the sides of which rise more than four inches from the surface of the soil. It seemed like a safe enough place to put a baby turtle. I gave him some iceberg lettuce, sprinkled with fish flakes, and left for the day.

But yesterday morning? No turtle. I freaked. Within five minutes, everyone in my office knew that a turtle was running amok in cubicle-land, and it goes without saying that everyone knew who was responsible. We had a staff meeting yesterday from 8:30-11; and while not on the agenda, the issue of unrestrained reptiles took up a good chunk of the proceedings.

The funny thing is, after our staff meeting was over and I got back to my desk, the turtle was right there in the potted plant where I'd left him (or her). It turns out turtles burrow. Who knew?! Well, I told everyone of course, and I took the turtle home yesterday, and gave him to a turtle-aquarium-keeping friend today. No one is the worse for wear. Only my professional reputation is slightly besmirched, though not really in a bad way - only an odd, vaguely age-inappropriate one - as if I had a smiley "Good Job!" star affixed to my business card.

New employee orientation did not prepare me for this at all.

So it's fortuitous that I received an email today from a speaker mill with whom my boss and I have worked, in the past, to hire trainers for our big annual conference. Apparently "new employee orientation" is out. You know how brown is the new black, and 50 is the new 30, and chopped liver is the new caviar? Well, the latest and greatest thing in corporate new-employee training, my friends, is "onboarding."

Since you're not subversive pinko commie scum, I'm sure that term didn't immediately bring associations of "waterboarding" to mind, much less cause you to reflect that - though not at all inhumane when you consider the depths to which any organization's treatment of its subject creatures has been known to descend - new employee orientation cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered pleasant; and that while new employees from the dawn of time have been aware of this, new employers have been historically (not to mention indulgently) regarded as being innocently, if perhaps rather obliviously, unaware of this fact, which is somewhat endearing if not necessarily prone to engender respect; and that therefore it is insensitive at best, and sadistic at worst, for management organizations to adopt a term so immediately evocative of the most shameful violations of human rights in the civilized world during the last 50 years at least.

Subclauses get me excited sometimes. Corporate marketing people are complete morons, that's all I'm trying to say here.

Read for yourself:

Start your new employees off on the right track so they stay around for the long haul.

You invest tons of time and money recruiting and hiring the best. Why waste it all on ineffective orientation practices? Keep your new employees around for the long haul by giving them the best start possible — a personalized onboarding experience.

What's wrong with just letting your new employees - the best and brightest minds available, apparently - pick up the corporate culture and expectations from their supervisors and coworkers? Unless there's something wrong with the existing corporate culture. Do you have something to hide? More importantly, do you actually believe that what you present to new employees during training will override their own observations of the way things are done at your organization? Hah!

Onboarding is a new approach to employee orientation that goes beyond just settling your employees in. It engages, integrates, and gets your new hires productive quicker — directly improving retention rates and the overall success of your organization.

You know, there are lots of turtles around the hike-and-bike trail. There are also squirrels, grackles, mourning doves, the occasional snake, pigeons, and a naked cyclist.

Guess what I'm keeping in my potted aloe next?

Non, je ne regrette rien

2009-09-10T21:06:00.004-05:00

Your average normal human being has roughly seven different options when it comes to a choice:

I have to
I ought to
I want to
I could
I'd rather not
I shouldn't
I can't

(We'll leave aside, for the moment, such irrational permutations as "I can't but I'll try anyway" and "I really should but dammit I don't wanna," which render our otherwise peaceable lives such an engaging mess.)

When you work in government - as a faceless bureaucrat, I mean, not a politician - most politicians aren't really in government anyway, they're in politics, which is a wholly unrelated field* - things are much simpler, because there are only two options:

I have to
I can't

Or "everything not forbidden is compulsory," as Wart's ants tell us in "The Once and Future King." T.H. White didn't work in government, but he attended post-Victorian English colleges - probably much the same thing.

The rule simplifies matters, but it's kind of a shame when there's something you feel you ought to do and you'd like to and you could but you don't have to so you can't. Coulda, woulda, shoulda just don't enter into it. But I suppose an aspiring career bureaucrat can't complain.

------------
*Watch a few episodes of "Yes, Minister" and you get the idea.

Nothing in Particular

2009-09-04T22:40:00.003-05:00

This is the first post of September, posted from Robbie's new apartment. His dog is awfully cute.

By the way, if you pass me on the hike-and-bike trail, do not high-five me. I'll miss. We'll both be so embarrassed.

Happy September!

New Frontiers

2009-08-27T17:39:00.008-05:00

It's a really good thing the Ford Escapes in the state fleet have an auxiliary jack you can plug your iPod into. Otherwise I would have had to sing a capella.

I would also otherwise have had Barry Manilow stuck in my head for 723 miles. Or, say, 690 miles - because somewhere between Dripping Springs and Fredericksburg, I passed a sign for a ranch advertising "Showgoats." Some people are just sick.

This week's was my first solo outing for the state: my boss, who was supposed to accompany me, had something come up at the last minute. So I headed out to inspect the visitor center in Langtry all by myself. It's a long way, but a wonderful drive if you enjoy that sort of thing (what luck - I do!). I took the scenic route to Langtry: out 290 through Fredericksburg to I-10 to Junction, where I got lost. First of all, the exit sign for US 377 just says "North" - I guess on the grounds that nobody really wants to go south anyway. So I kept driving west, assuming that the southbound exit came later.

But it was soon apparent - luckily soon, because otherwise I'd have found myself in Sonora - that this was not the case, so I exited, turned around, backtracked, exited again in Junction, headed south on 377, and found a gas station, where I discovered that I don't know how to use the state card provided with the vehicle. (I've always gassed up at a District office.) Ten hilarious minutes during which I thought I'd be stranded forever in Kimble County, an amused convenience store clerk, and a few panicked phone calls later, I got it figured out, but this only enabled me to get lost some more. You have to make a right turn in Junction to stay on 377, otherwise you end up on Loop 481 which eventually deposits you, wailing curses, right back onto I-10 heading east. So be careful!

Eventually I found my highway. US 377 south of Junction looks like an FM (that's Farm-to-Market road, for you non-Texans) - a little two-lane affair with a yellow stripe down the middle and narrow shoulders. The speed limit is 75. Way too fast, way too fast for this road! I thought. An hour later I found myself doing ninety.

When you reach US 90, you turn left to go to Del Rio - and you're pretty much there, just on the west side of town - but you turn right to go to Langtry. Langtry is unincorporated. Although the 2000 census gave its population as 150, it's declined in recent years; and one of my coworkers in the visitor center guessed the current population is around 19.

"What do you do for entertainment way out here?" another coworker said she was asked by a visitor. She laughed. "Heck, when you're my age, a muumuu and an easy chair are all the entertainment you need!"

The US 90 drive from Del Rio to Langtry takes you across the Amistad Reservoir - blue and beautiful in a stark landscape of scrubby brownish-green - through Comstock (don't blink!), and a border control checkpoint (I wasn't the droids they were looking for, and was immediately waved along), through large, lumpy hills with a sparse growth of brush, and across Seminole Canyon and the Pecos River - the US 90 span across it is the tallest bridge in Texas, and the third highest in the United States.

Langtry is on the west side of the Pecos, as anyone familiar with Judge Roy Bean will be aware. The scenery is breathtaking and desolate, not readily captured with the least expensive digital camera money could buy, and the road was virtually empty except for the occasional 18-wheeler, border patrols, and vultures swooping down to pick at the pulped remains of a skunk on the pavement, identiable only by the smell - waiting until the last instant to wing out of the way of the speeding car, flapping away within inches of my windshield. If you don't set your cruise control, you glance down and realize you're doing 100.

Del Rio was not much of an adventure, since (1) I was incredibly tired by the time I got to my hotel room, and (2) going out on the (border) town alone might not be the best idea for a woman in my, um, position. So I picked up dinner, took it to my room, and slept until 5:30 - needing to be back in Langtry by 8am to finish the inspection, wrap up, and make it to Austin for Diane's retirement reception back at work. I drove like - like a state employee out of Langtry. And I made it in time, too.

I love my job. And I love, love, love my iPod!

Click here for photos.

West Texas: It's Pretty Big

2009-08-25T20:51:00.003-05:00

Today I drove from Austin through Fredericksburg to Junction to Del Rio through Comstock to Langtry, worked for four hours, and then drove another hour back to Del Rio where I'm spending the night before following roughly the same schedule in reverse tomorrow. I got to see some things I don't often get to see, like 80mph speed limit signs, and a scorpion on the wall.

I'm too tired to blog about it. At some point I may post pictures. It's starkly beautiful out here, but the tap water tastes like ass.

Overdue Book Report

2009-08-23T20:39:00.004-05:00

The best part of "Lord Jim" is the sentence, near the end: "With these words Marlow had ended his narrative..." But it turns out Joseph Conrad is only fooling. You're not as near the end of the book as you hoped you were.

Marlow is just a character, not really the narrator. But apparently nobody told him that. So he rambles on interminably, his speech embellished with elaborate imagery, profound metaphor, and enough subordinate clauses to smother a rhinoceros.* Every so often, after slogging through several pages, you'll realize that somewhere back there Marlow began relating a story told to him by some other character, and that for the last page and a half you've been reading somebody else's subordinate clauses.

Not that it's a bad story, and even thought-provoking, once you can get past all the damn words. Our hero, Jim, when a very young man first making his way in the world, is serving as first mate on a steamer carrying eight hundred Muslim passengers on a pilgrimage. The boat strikes something, and the rest of the crew, convinced that she's doomed, abandon ship in a lifeboat, leaving their human cargo to a watery grave. Jim, with the most romantic notion of his own courage, coldly ignores their calls for assistance with the lifeboat, intending to go down with the ship - but in one instant his nerve fails him and, after the lifeboat casts away, he dives in after it. His crewmates invent a story that they took the lifeboat down to examine the damage, and while they were in the water, the steamer sank. But the steamer doesn't sink, and a couple of days later, it's found, rescued, and towed safely into port. There's a hearing, and the crew are disgraced and stripped of their credentials. Jim's problem is that he can't get past it, that nothing he ever does can redeem himself in his own eyes. Marlow meanwhile does quite a bit of hand-wringing about whether any of us can really trust ourselves if someone as bright and promising and right as Jim could fail so terribly. He's not the only one - about a third of the way into the book, the fine, upstanding old sea captain who had presided at the hearings commits suicide. Right out in the middle of the ocean, just up and jumps overboard, leaving everything ship-shape with detailed instructions and a written recommendation of promotion for his first mate. Oddly, Marlow is not talking to him at the time.

Not so much out of pity for Jim (whom he meets at the hearing), but rather out of an effort to quell the disturbing questions Jim has raised about himself and all his fellow sailor men, Marlow sets out to help Jim find gainful employment. But the story of Jim's desertion eventually turns up wherever the boy goes, and he flees to some new locale. Of course, after this happens a few times, everybody in the whole dang maritime industry knows Jim's terrible "secret"** - and finally, Marlow conveniently remembers an old friend who has an insect collection, a penchant for armchair psychology, and a job opening on a remote Malaysian island. Jim is sent there to be the only white guy and serve as a lord protector for a bunch of stupid natives.***

This goes simply swimmingly for Jim, who becomes a hero by setting local politics to rights and rescuing a pretty girl from her nasty old stepfather, until Marlow abruptly ceases droning on and his listeners "drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark," and you can hardly blame them.

But Marlow isn't done. A couple of years later, one of his listeners receives a very long letter from him, and wouldn't you know the bastard writes just like he talks? In a rather strange ending, which has the feeling of being tacked on as hastily as the use of about a half-million words will allow, a nasty old reprobate of a pirate invades Jim's island paradise with a view towards provisioning his ship for further plunders. He's surprised and angry to find the islanders organized and capable of self-defense, and his small crew is immediately besieged on top of a hill. So he falsely negotiates a deal with Jim to be allowed to escape. But, through the treachery of Jim's girlfriend's nasty old stepfather (remember him?), he ambushes the forces that have been staged to escort him back to his ship and kills several of them before escaping, including the son of the chieftain with whose blessing Jim's been lording over the island.

The thing is, Jim's people didn't want to let the pirates go, they wanted to kill them; Jim, still trying to redeem himself for his one moment of ignominy years ago, insisted on the merciful approach and gambled the trust of the islanders that everything would go well. The betrayer knew that Jim's hold over the islanders would be destroyed by this. Jim surrenders himself to the grieving chieftain, who shoots him dead. The girlfriend's quite upset.

And with that, my friends, I have saved you the trouble of reading 271 pages (in 6-point type, too) of stuff like this:

"He was silent again with a still, far-away look of fierce yearning after that missed distinction, with his nostrils for an instant dilated, sniffing the intoxicating breath of that wasted opportunity. If you think I was either surprised or shocked you do me an injustice in more ways than one! Ah, he was an imaginative beggar! He would give himself away; he would give himself up. I could see in his glance darted into the night all his inner being carried on, projected headlong into th fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations. He had no leisure to regret what he had lost, he was so wholly and naturally concerned for what he had failed to obtain. He was very far away from me who watched him across three feet of space..."

...and so on. I made myself read 20 pages a day.

So there it is, "Lord Jim" in a single blog post. I was assigned to read this book in high school. It's the only reading assignment that was ever too much for me - the only Cliff Notes I ever bought. The book was in my dad's basement, so I brought it back with me after my visit, determined to read the damn thing or die in the attempt. And here I am!

But it did get me to thinking about human nature, about learning from mistakes, about redemption and forgiveness, about moving on. And fate and stuff, you know. But then, I'm 40. Why on earth anyone would possibly think a high school student would get anything out of this other than a profound desire to punch Joseph Conrad in the face, I couldn't say.

------------------
*Rhinoceroses are noted for their dislike of complicated grammatical structure.
**I like this touch; I tend to think this is generally true. Everbody knows the things about us that we thing are terrible secrets, only nobody else thinks they're that big of a deal.
***Nobody had ever explained the concept of racism to Joseph Conrad, I don't believe.

A Gentler Time

2009-08-21T18:18:00.006-05:00

I've been digging through some old files at work, and darned if I didn't discover today that phishing predates the internet by a long, long time - who knew?

From the monthly newsletter of a certain Texas Chamber of Commerce, Vol 3. No. 4, April 1968

National BB Bureau Warns of “Bank Examiner” Swindle

The National Better Business Bureau warned today that the so-called “bank examiner” swindle – a bizarre con game widely used a few years ago to bilk elderly widows of their savings – has cropped up again in some areas of the country.

NBBB said the most recent case involved an elderly La Salle, Illinois, woman who was defrauded of $1,800 by a fast-talking con man who represented himself as an officer of the local bank.

Typically, the victim was led to believe she was helping the bank lay a trap for a dishonest bank employee.

According to the National Better Business Bureau, with which the local Chamber is affiliated through membership, the swindle was widespread two years ago and may be on the rise again.

NBBB, which first exposed the racket in 1964, said the swindlers, generally two or three men working as a team and posing as bank examiners, security officers or FBI agents, choose their victims carefully.

They often spend time in lines in front of bank tellers’ windows in an attempt to observe account numbers, withdrawals or deposits of potential victims.

In the case of the Illinois woman, the swindler, posing as a bank officer, used a name that was familiar to the victim and cited the number on her passbook.

Convinced that she was being asked to help the bank in its efforts to check on the honesty of a teller, the woman, following instructions, withdrew $1,800 from her account, took the money home, and later turned it over to a man who flashed a gold badge. The woman was told the money would be redeposited in her account and a new passbook issued. When the victim finally began to worry and called the bank for reassurance, it was too late.

According to NBBB, the best advice is this: If you are contacted by a self-proclaimed bank examiner, FBI agent or bank security officer, advise him that you will call back. Disregard the number he provides and contact the local police or FBI office and explain why you are calling.

I also examined the 1954 blueprints (which are blue, I'll be darned!) for a Tourist Information Bureau on a well-traveled highway. The floor plan includes a spacious lobby with window seats and wide double entrances for visitors, a service counter, workspace behind the counter, office space, and a private restroom for the employees. There is no restroom for the public. Apparently that sort of thing wasn't necessary in the 1950's.

You gave travelers a free state highway map. They wrote you a four-page thank-you letter. Even their complaints were polite and constructive, like the one guy who gently suggested striping the center of the highway in some bright, highly visible color in order to avoid head-on collisions at night. He concluded his letter with the hope he had not made himself tiresome. I could kiss him.

Of course, he was probably a traveling con artist.

Is There a Happy Ending?

2009-08-19T18:37:00.005-05:00

What do you do if your neighbor's large trees, within a few feet of the property line, are overhanging your yard?

Enjoy the shade, I'd say; but life is rarely that simple. The actual answer - as far as I have been able to determine from a good four hours' online research today - is that you are entitled to cut back the overhanging limbs, at your own expense, because your property line extends from the center of the Earth into the most infinite reaches of space. (No charging tolls on passing airplanes / satellites / asteroids / alien spaceships / comets / the incalculable array of matter floating through the boundless unknown! I mean, let's be reasonable here.)

But if you cut back the limbs (this also applies to encroaching roots, which are trickier) so severely that it damages or kills the neighbor's tree, your neighbor can sue you for damages.

If your neighbor is behaving in good faith, he may (but is not necessarily obligated to - this is a matter for local jurisdiction or civil action) pay for the trimming, or assist with payment. The neighbor may be motivated to do so because it ensures he has a say in how, exactly, the trimming is performed. You may (as long as it doesn't kill the tree) cut the limbs right back to the property line; imagine a laser beam, one poster remarked, raking straight up from the fence to the sky. If the neighbor finds this aesthetically or otherwise objectionable, it's certainly in his interest to work with you.

If your neighbor's tree drops limbs onto your roof or cars and causes damage, this is actually (unless the neighbor knew the tree to be unhealthy, and therefore predisposed to socially unacceptable behavior) an Act of God - or even, if you've failed to trim back the limbs that overhang your property - a result of your own negligence. You can file a claim with your homeowner's insurance, or sue God for damages. Either course is likely to be equally effective.

Excessive brush due to the incursion of overhanging limbs, and the wildlife dwelling therein, is definitely your own problem.

Do you know, I've worked on this issue, doing the best research I could, for about 8 hours so far. I asked a coworker for help with city ordinances in the jurisdiction in question, and he came back with detailed instructions on how to open a massage parlor.

Then my boss set me to 10-keying travel and tourism stats from the 50's. This is a day in my life. I can't figure out if I'm under- or overpaid. At least I don't have to trim trees.

Ring In the Old

2009-08-13T19:35:00.016-05:00

Just when I'd almost forgotten I work in state government, a reminder dropped into my lap in the form of some righteous blog fodd - er, I mean, in the form of this handy booklet, published during (I'd estimate) the Kennedy administration to train state employees how to comport themselves on that newfangled phone thingummy.

The kicker is that WE STILL USE THIS BOOKLET. I shit you not, it's still distributed to employees who have extensive telephone dealings with the public, apparently on the idea that the guy in the picture above is exactly what you hope people are imagining when they're on the phone with you.

Check out that phone - that is one high-tech piece of desk candy, n'est-ce pas?

Some things haven't changed much since the Kennedy administration, apparently - I swear I've worked with this guy.

And they were some sick little bastards back then too, weren't they? This is a truly disturbing image. The page goes on to tell you what not to say when answering a coworker's or boss' phone (remember that voicemail will not be invented for a few decades yet): he's hasn't come in, he left early, he's on break, I don't know where he is. Or "He was last seen going into the men's room with a newspaper tucked under his arm 45 minutes ago, and if he hasn't come out in twenty more minutes, I'm sending in a HAZMAT team."

Or "He preferred a violent, untimely death to the prospect of conversation with you."

Well, this is still valid advice, I suppose. Have writing materials. On your desk. Where you work.

I don't know, based on Mr. Question Mark's paper cutouts and the fact that this guy can take notes in the accumulated dust on his desk, something tells me the agency that published this booklet didn't have the highest expectations of its employees' productivity. Just a thought.

UR DOIN IT RONG!!!1!11!!!

Einstein? Seriously?? Given the rest of this booklet, though, I kind of think they're being sarcastic. The other guy looks kind of cool.

Um, because I've become convinced that I'm a frog and hopped onto a levitating lily pad, which just happens to pass right outside my caller's window?

The caller has no one but himself to blame; clearly it's after hours.

I keep in pretty close touch with Paoonel Heisii, myself.

Yes. These are detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to talk on the phone. I guess the agency was afraid the more subtle insults contained earlier in the booklet might be missed on its employees, so in one last desperate attempt, decided to make everything perfectly clear on the last page. "Our employees are such morons they don't even know which way to hold the phone," they are saying. "For God's sake. Are you paying attention to what we're saying here? This is the public you're talking to here. They can HEAR you."

Act your extension, not your IQ.

Inbox Intervention

2009-08-10T18:01:00.005-05:00

Geez, take one Friday off from work and come back to find out in terrible, grisly detail exactly what the interwebz think of you. Why, I'm out of shape, undereducated, and lousy in bed - though I could still make untold millions working from home, so that's something. I'll need the money, since my accounts with numerous banks have been frozen; I might also want to rustle up some quick cash through online gambling. But first and foremost, I really need a new watch, because mine is just an embarrassment. No wonder I have no luck with the ladies! I've received several order confirmations, so hopefully a replacement is on the way.

It's possible I have some work-related emails in my inbox too, but I haven't found them yet, because they're hopelessly buried under all the subject-line notifications our spam-filtering software thoughtfully sends along so that I'll know how many spam messages I'm not receiving.

And for some reason I seem to be subscribed to the "Maritime News."

And So It Begins

2009-08-09T21:59:00.005-05:00

Katie and I stopped by the AT&T store yesterday. For about a month, I haven't been able to send text messages, though I could still receive them. It takes time to get yourself worked up to do something, okay?

I explained the problem to the friendly rep by the door and handed her my phone. "Oh, your mailbox is full," she said. "There's not enough memory to send or receive messages when you have that many in your inbox."

"I don't think that's it," I objected, "I can still get texts, it just won't let me send." But I emptied my inbox. "Here, let me show you the error message I get," and I composed a test message to Robbie and hit send.

"Yay!" Robbie texted back, because texting is one of our primary means of communication. The AT&T rep was very nice, and waited until I had left the store to laugh at me.

Katie insisted on loitering a while to play with the iPhone on display. She wants one, which means I get one - I can't very well buy my teenaged daughter a fancier phone than mine - but I found the touchscreen keyboard incredibly difficult to use, and kept missing and hitting the wrong letters with clumsy thumbs, and it doesn't work if you try to press with the tips of your fingernails. "Oh my gosh, I can't use this," I wailed, though Katie (who has a certain vested interest here) kept insisting I'd get used to it quickly.

Someone I once knew said he'd know he was old when a popular gadget came out that he was unable to make heads or tails of. "You know," he said, "like your grandparents with the VCR forever blinking 12:00. When something new comes out and I can't figure out how to work it, like that, I'll know... but I can't wait to see it!"

I hope the iPhone is not that gadget for me, not already, not yet, I'm too young!

Friday I visited a dermatology "medical spa" to have a mole removed, and while there I asked the doctor about how to offset the very beginnings of fine lines around my eyes that I'm beginning to notice. "I've read about retinoid cream, and how it lessens wrinkles by accelerating skin cell turnover," I said, "and I found some at the grocery store, but is there a brand you recommend?"

It turns out there is, indeed - in prescription strength, and they sell it for $83.00 a tube (but with a 20% discount it's only $66!), but the dermatologist, without half a moment's hesitation, cheerfully recommended Botox. "Look," he said, handing me a mirror, "smile, and I'll show you." He put his fingers beside my eyes and stretched the smile-crinkles apart. "Botox will just relax the muscles that squinch up your skin like that."

"I think I'll get the cream," I said, because (1) I think I'd rather get wrinkles than lose the ability to smile with my eyes, and (2) forget my incompetence with the iPhone, thinking of myself as a person who gets Botox would really make me feel old.

Wash Your Hands

2009-08-06T18:30:00.003-05:00

Apologies if this is gross, but I have a complaint to make.

Bitchez need to wash their hands after they go potty! I don't care if it's #1 or #2 (though #2 is worse). But if I'm in the bathroom and I see or hear you leave without washing, I am not shaking hands with you when we're introduced. That's just nasty.

It's not the women I work with, I should add. It's the women from that other division, the ones who for whatever reason prefer to come across the hall and use our restroom instead of the one nearer to them, the ones who always make a beeline for the handicapped stall, preferring a nice open space to spread out in while they do their business, so I end up having to get changed in the little stall.

Last week it happened while I was washing out my coffee cup (a kitchen, like a locker room, is something my building lacks). A woman from across the way flushed the toilet and emerged from her stall. "Sorry," I said, hastily rinsing my cup, "I'll be right out of your way."

"Oh, that's all right," she responded as she opened the door and walked out. I was shocked, frankly. "No!" I wanted to call after her. "No, it's not all right!"

Then it happened again yesterday: I, back from my lunchtime walk, sweaty, in workout clothes, backpack slung over my shoulder, walked into the restroom right behind a small blonde thing who headed straight for the handicapped stall. I sighed and changed in the smaller stall while she availed herself of the facilities, heard as she flushed, opened the stall door, and simply left.

What, was she raised in a barn?!?

The worst culprit I ever knew was the president of the internet marketing company from Hell I worked for in Corpus. She never washed her hands, never, no matter what she'd just done in the restroom. She's a well-known internet marketing personality, too. I could write "[Name of well-known internet marketing personality] never washes her hands in the restroom even after doing a #2!" on this blog, and people who were searching for information about her would read it. I'd get sued, I'm sure. But it would still be true.

Bitchez need to wash their hands!!

The Other Side

2009-08-04T20:04:00.003-05:00

Pet cats have a pretty good life, with certain caveats. You only live to be 16-20, and you have to eat cat food. I don't think I'd enjoy the litter box that much. Yowling at the neighbors at 3 a.m. is probably less pleasant than keeping an agreeable smile plastered to your face while avoiding eye contact, which is how I generally deal with them. Actually the worst part of being a cat - and I base this on the experience of my own well-treated and (ahem - take the hint, honey) amply-fed Peachy - is that of not really having much of any idea who your children are.

I say this, but I can think of ways in which it would be a distinct advantage. Have you ever watched "My Super Sweet Sixteen"? I admire this show greatly, inasmuch as it serves as a cautionary tale for my own sixteen-year-old, Katie, who otherwise might exhibit tendencies in that direction. But I digress. The point, assuming there was one, was that there are situations where it would be somewhat advantageous, emotionally speaking, to forget after a week or so without any contact that your offspring had ever existed.

The unfortunate corollary to this, and it would be fair in my book to call it a deal-breaker, is that a child (kitten) can be introduced to you, and within a fairly short span of time you've forgotten that it is not actually yours. Witness the kitten my abovementioned Katie brought home at the beginning of spring break this year. "My friend just needs us to watch her this week," Katie told me. "We'll take her back after break. "

If anyone on Earth knows how long break can last, you'd think, it really should be me.

Naturally, the kitten was nursing on Peachy within a few short weeks; naturally, the kitten, now nearly as large as her "mother," routinely knocks Peachy over to demand some nursies, or perhaps a tussle. Peach doesn't care. She purrs, but deep in her eyes is that long-suffering look known to all maternal creatures since time immemorial.

"We could get another kitten," I mentioned to my kids, "and after a week or so, Peachy would never know. She'd just be sitting there, nursing it, thinking, 'Why did I go and do this again?'"

I shouldn't give them ideas. Eric, who lives with his grandmother now, recently adopted a new kitten. She's at least 10 times tinier than our kitten. He brought it over to visit. Our kitten gave it one sniff and promptly dashed off to hide behind the stove. She reacted the same way when my friend Robbie brought his young miniature Dachshund over in a crate so we could have movie night. The puppy was whining. My kitten hid from the sound of whining.

I make fun of it, but I'm pretty much the same way about the dentist.

Being a human ain't bad, but my gosh, you end up having to take care of so many cats.

Oenomatopoeia

2009-08-02T10:14:00.004-05:00

This may come as a bit of a shock, but it turns out wine is quite nice, and vineyards are pretty places. Who knew?

Robbie brought his friend Emily and me along yesterday on a hike down the Central Texas Wine Trail. Well, you don't actually hike it, you're supposed to drive, though frankly it would be a lot more convenient if all the vineyards were within a mile of each other so that you could simply stumble from one to the next. But then I suppose there wouldn't be enough room to grow the grapes. Really, how inconvenient.

We started out with a printed map listing the locations of about 25 vineyards within a 100-mile radius of Austin. Emily is an old hand at this - she's been on a Napa Valley wine tour, and is already familiar with many of the Central Texas wineries, and knows that she usually likes Sauvignon Blanc and doesn't care much for Sangiovese. She's fancy that way.

I drink wine out of a box.

We started with Driftwood Estates Vineyard, which is a beautiful place just south of Dripping Springs (the locals call it "Dripping" or even "Drippin'"), where Robbie and Emily favored the sweet plum red and I cottoned to the Lone Star Cabernet.

Have you ever done a wine tasting? See, I never had really. My stepfather and grandmother, sisters and I did visit a vineyard in central Alabama once, where they made wine from muscadyne grapes. The facility was spotless and beautiful, and the vineyards spread out lush and green before us. As far as I remember, they didn't charge anything for the tastings or the tour; but, seduced by the heady beauty of our surroundings, we probably bought more than a dozen bottles among us. We brought it back to my grandparents' suburban Birmingham home. It was just awful. We practically had to pinch our noses shut while we were drinking it.

These central Texas wineries have their act much more together. You belly up to a shiny blond wood bar, or sit at a high table in a pale stone room, dusty with newness. You can also relax outside on sloping lawns overlooking the vineyards in the valley below, or on a wooden deck surrounded by oak trees; and - unlike the place in Alabama - you are far from alone; wine tourism is popular, and though you're out in the middle of nowhere, the place is thronged. Visit two or more wineries on the trail, and you'll spot some of the same customers again and again.

You get about six tastings for 5 or 6 bucks - the equivalent of a glass of wine, more or less. You and your companions compare notes and discuss the nose, overtones, and aftertaste of each sample as if you were an elegant bunch who had never seen a box of Franzia in your lives. Then you order a glass and/or buy a bottle of the one that you particularly liked, relax and enjoy the atmosphere, and eventually - this is a highly leisurely pursuit - you head off to the next winery. There are dozens and dozens of them within an hour's drive. We managed to visit two.

After Driftwood we headed to Woodrose Winery outside Stonewall, close to the LBJ Ranch. Driftwood with its hilly vistas had a Tuscan feel, but Woodrose has a deck nestled in the woods behind it, with an acoustic guitarist/singer (most singers are acoustic as a general rule) providing a little ambience. Woodrose has fixed tasting menus laid out in a particular order, because "if you start with the port, nothing else is going to taste good," the woman explained to us. "Your taste buds will be fried."

This is good to know.

But don't be deceived by the inflexibility of the menu. Our waitress - probably an owner, I'm guessing - overheard Robbie expressing curiosity about one of the reds, and slipped a sample of it in for him before the port (which - this is extremely important - comes with chocolate). In fact she very good-humoredly gave all of us a couple of extra samples. My last tasting was a Merlot and she poured a sample for me twice, simply shrugging at me and smiling when I told her she'd already given me my last one. "Damn, she's nice," we agreed as she left.

My pick from Woodrose was the Wicked Red, so I ordered a glass to enjoy on the wooded deck and bought a bottle to take home, too. It's sitting on my kitchen counter. How it feels about the box of Merlot lurking six feet away is nobody's business but its own.

Here There Be Bugs

2009-07-31T18:45:00.006-05:00

Probably just as well it's Friday.

Our section admin has been dismayed, lately, by an influx of very small, beige flying insects whose chief purpose in life is - as far as I can tell - simply to huddle against the walls, immobile, trying to look inconspicuous. Or so she tells us. No one else has been able to see these "insects."

Ha ha! Just kidding. No, we really do have some tiny tan bugs in our area; so Norma (our section admin) called ABC Pest Control to come out and spray a few weeks ago. They did. The bugs got bigger.

Now, if I were Norma, I think, perhaps I'd call a different company this time. But she did not - probably they have a low-bid contract and she can't. So they're coming back out this evening to try again. "Make sure and mark the places where you've seen the bugs," they told Norma. Do they doubt her?!

I can vouch for the existence of these bugs, but I can't help wondering what exactly the problem is. Here in my house I get those big, flying cockroaches, easily two to three inches long; and occasionally, just for laughs, they alight on your face in the middle of the night while you're sleeping. You wake up instantly at the sensation and fling the crawling thing away from you violently, heart racing spasmodically. In fact, the cardiac effect is so traumatic, I had to double-check my life insurance policy to be sure I had not somehow inadvertently named the cockroaches as beneficiaries.

I had not.

So I'm not sure what the big deal is about miniscule, mild-mannered, apparently non-homicidal beige wall-huggers, but Norma's on a rampage and the bugs have got to go. "Do you know," I said to her before snapping the above picture with my cell phone, "this kind of looks, um. How should I put this? A little demented."

She laughed. She put up some more signs.

"We used to get these incredibly tiny little fruit flies around our plants in TPP," I told her. "You'd see someone in their cubicle, just flailing randomly at the air," and I demonstrated. Later it occurred to me that one good way to tell a transportational state employee from a (ahem) normal one is simply whether anyone else can see the bugs. But in TPP, I don't think anybody could. I didn't tell Norma how I sometimes spent whole days just sitting at my desk, waiting, with bits of Scotch tape stuck to the ends of my fingers, catching fruit flies. I wasn't sure she'd understand.

Perhaps the bugs will be gone Monday, but I'd be surprised. Why should they be? And why shouldn't they be allowed to flourish in the lovely beige 1980s-era office setting we have so thoughtfully provided for them? If I were smart, I'd bring in my cockroaches, too.

Now See What You've Done

2009-07-30T11:29:00.003-05:00

You've pissed off a linguistics major.

"Service," I would just like to point out, is not a verb. The verb is "serve." How hard is this? What's the problem with the word "serve," anyway? Do people avoid it because it carries connotations of, well, servitude?

Our information centers, according to some literature my division publishes, serviced over (number) customers last year. Lucky for me, one of my unofficial work duties is occasionally that of editor, for certain materials anyway. I changed it to "served." Servicing customers does not sound like a proper thing to do at all, unless they're cars, maybe.

They are not.

Do you know, I've gradually come to accept such linguistic abominations as "transition" and "incentivize." I'll accept those, because they fill a void; "to transit" doesn't mean at all the same thing as "to transition," and "to undergo/cause/effect a transition" is unwieldy. "Incentivize" hurts a little worse, largely because the term was coined by sales-and-marketing bottom-feeders. But I will admit that "to incent" doesn't really work, and "to incite" means something different altogether. So, knock yourselves out, bottom-feeders! Incentivize away. I won't so much as murmur.

But "service" is a whole nother thing. "This has been bugging the crap out of me," I said to the pamphlet editor today as I stopped into her cube to make the change. "It makes it sound like we're giving people hand jobs."

The problem with saying something like that in a cubicle environment is that it makes people's heads pop up over their cube walls. There's a term for this, which I won't get into, because I have enough linguistic problems when rodents aren't involved.

This is a quick post, and I hope to make more in the future. My heart hasn't been in it. Too bad, I say: I'm bringing my netbook to my favorite coffee shop and diving back in. But now I have to go, because I'm covering lunch at the information center. Time to go service some customers.

The Nose Doesn't Want to Know

2009-07-07T20:54:00.011-05:00

Smearing expensive goo on your face on a nightly basis is, I suppose, just a natural part of growing older. What I can't understand is why the manufacturer thought this goo should have a smell of any kind. Sure, my moisturizer is only "lightly" scented. But any scent is kind of overwhelming when you apply it to your face, which, last time I checked, is where your nose is.

It's not nearly as overwhelming as my first roommate in college, about whom I was reminiscing to some coworkers today. "I scheduled it so my first class every day was at noon, downstairs, in a classroom on the first floor of my dorm," I was telling them. Wasn't that clever? So it was unfortunate that my randomly assigned roommate turned out to be a pathologically perky morning person with a major aerosol addiction.

After her 6 a.m. shower came clouds of baby-powder-scented aerosol deodorant, faux-Giorgio perfume in a spray can, and - because this was 1986 - at least two cubic liters of Aquanet. Forget about sleeping - I couldn't breathe. The windows in Jester didn't open, but it's probably just as well. After a few weeks I might have been tempted to jump. Thank God nobody ever lit a match.

But the weirdest thing - oh, my God, I said, as I remembered this detail - was that as she got dressed, she'd dump a sizable mound of baby powder into her panties. I guess she didn't quite feel fresh without it. And one of my coworkers asked, "Didn't she leave a little trail everywhere she went?"

"Or little poofs in the air behind her," suggested another, "like fairy dust!"

Do you know, I used to worry a lot about fitting in at my current job. But I think I've succeeded in bringing them down to my level at last.

I stopped by to visit another coworker this afternoon. I used to talk to her all the time when she worked in the gift shop off the lobby, and I'd drop in whenever I passed by. Since she moved to cubicle-land, I never see her. So I came by to talk and admire her new digs. After we'd been chatting for a while, her phone rang, and I busied myself in admiring the many group photos she has on her wall. One surprised me. Standing directly behind her in the shot was someone from my old work section - an old-school state employee of the first order, who, very shortly after Robbie and I started working there, confronted us in the hallway, demanded to know the date of a particular volcanic eruption, and, when we gazed in helpless bewilderment at one another, exclaimed "And you call yourselves geographers?!" and walked off.

What could he be doing in a group photo with my gift-shop-tending coworker? It seemed unlikely that they would move in the same circles. Or on the same planet. "What's this photo from?" I asked her as soon as she was off the phone.

"Oh, that's the Hispanic Activities Council," she said.

I looked again. Sure enough, everyone in the picture, besides the geography aficionado, was Hispanic. "I used to know that guy," I told her, and related the volcano story.

She laughed. "He's kind of strange," she said, "but he always comes to all the meetings. He never talks though."

"Why," I began, and paused, not knowing if this would be an indelicate question. One tries to be politically sensitive. "Why is he on the Hispanic Activities Council?" I asked.

"I have no idea," she said. "I think he just likes Mexican food."

The cubicles in my old division are less than half the size of the ones we have now, so I can testify with some degree of authority that many of my former coworkers were very fond of Mexican food indeed. The sad thing is, our work campus is being demolished in a year or two to put up condos, and the developer (as a deal to get my agency out of its 10,000-year proprietary lease on the prime real estate where it sits) is building us a new high-rise towards the rear of the property. This edifice will house all the workers who currently occupy three buildings sprawled out over a 10- or 12-acre spread, so space will be limited, cubicle size will be standardized, and we won't have the nice big offices we have now, that's for sure. "It's gonna suck," sighed my coworker, "you'll be smelling everybody's lunch, one way or another."

I just hope they don't put my work group on the same floor with my old section. Time to pick up a pallet of baby powder at the wholesale warehouse, or maybe just smear lots of moisturizer under my nose.

Juneau That?

2009-07-05T20:00:00.003-05:00

As we were leaving the birthday barbecue at his house today, my brother-in-law mentioned having seen 30 Days of Night. "Oh, we went and saw that when it came out!" I exclaimed. "My two brothers and I! Because we're from Barrow!"

"Alaska?!" said my brother-in-law in some surprise, because that's where Barrow is. Well, and also (I suppose) because this would be the first time in the 18 years he's known me that I ever mentioned having any brothers.

"Yes!" I said. "So of course we had to see the movie!"

"You're from Alaska, really? Isn't that something? I had no idea!" cried another one of my in-laws. So I had some 'splainin' to do.

Actually, my favorite part of the backstory that Robbie, Justin and I came up with for our 2007 Corpus trip - the one that cast us as a family of tragically orphaned whale-marketers from the northernmost point in the U.S. - is our attempt at preparation for possible quizzing from strangers. "What if somebody asks us who the governor of Alaska is?" said Justin. "I don't know who it is, do you?"

"All I know is it's a woman," said Robbie. "We'll just answer that we disapprove of her politically, so much that we refuse to mention her name in our family. That way no one will catch on that we don't actually know what her name is."

Kind of funny, now, in hindsight. But not as funny as the fact that the whole movie was actually filmed in New Zealand. I don't know when I'll stop being pissed off about that.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my sister and her boyfriend took me out last night. Do you remember being young? I used to be able to go out at 10 p.m. and have a full night ahead of me. Nowadays this is more problematic. We arrived at the club where the band they knew was playing, and found that (1) the air conditioning has gone out, (2) the band was very loud and not all that good, and (3) I am old. So after an hour or two, I ended up ditching my sister and her boyfriend - who had found a good parking space, a commodity not to be sacrificed - and simply walking the 2.4 miles home, by myself, at 12:30 a.m. In flip-flops. I may not be dewy and carefree anymore, but by God, I can still get blisters in my toe cleavage.

Of course, yesterday was the Fourth of July, or the 78704th, as we call it here in my neck of the woods. There was a Michael Jackson tribute car in the 78704th of July Parade, decked out in glitter and memorabilia, someone dancing maniacally in a gigantic Afro wig in the back. No Farrah Fawcett car, no Billy Mays car, no Ed McMahon or Karl Malden (or his nose - alas, USENET! I knew him, Horatio) or Mollie Sugden cars were in evidence. I'm deeply disappointed, and I am unanimous in that.

But the Muppets are always there for you. Thanks Jen of Cakewrecks for posting this. I'm a day late, but my heart is in the right place:

Alaska!

Off the Road Again

2009-07-01T19:48:00.004-05:00

The thing is, I'm not picky. At my last job, I was always thrilled at the prospect of field work. It's so fun to get out, drive for a while, and end up somewhere new and different - don't you think?

In my current position, a work trip entails hours of browsing museums, historic homes, beaches, parks, aquariums, art exhibits, and other attractions, not to mention meeting lots of fun new people. Isn't that wonderful? But it's all icing as far as I'm concerned. I adored traveling for work even when it just meant going to Yoakum to examine pavement.

Last night I came home from a whirlwind two-day trip to Corpus Christi, my old stomping grounds, to begin the process of planning our big 2010 conference. Naturally, our contact in Corpus is familiar with my old, evil Corpus employer. Naturally, our contact in Corpus doesn't think too highly of my old, evil Corpus employer. Naturally, Corpus being the small town it is (despite its almost 300,000 residents), our Corpus contact also knows many of my former-coworker-still-friends in the area. It made for some fairly lively conversation as we drove from attraction to attraction. It's a small world, when you work in the travel industry: everybody knows everyone. So it's a darn good thing I actually am a reasonably nice person!

The trip was tremendous fun. I can hardly wait for next year's conference! I have to say, our hospitality suite setup is a lot nicer than the one we had last April. This probably means I won't be getting quite as much sleep, next time around. What the hell, conference is only a week long, and there are much more interesting things you can be doing, at any given moment, than sleeping. Such as examining pavement!

As much fun stuff as there is to see and do in Corpus (and I'll have to put those pictures up in Photobucket and post a link tomorrow), the most surreal moment of our trip came last night, when we stopped for dinner in Kenedy. We arrived at a little hole-in-the-wall place - my favorite kind! - called Barth's, recommended by our photographer. We arrived around 8 p.m., a little past the dinner rush. "Just go ahead and sit anywhere," a hostess informed us, after we'd been standing timidly in the doorway for at least five minutes. "Smoking's up here, non-smoking's in the back."

Well, of course. We passed the salad bar, an array of iceberg lettuce and pickled beets, wilting sadly in the cigarette smoke, on our way through to the non-smoking room. There were no open tables there. Or rather, there were several tables - but most of them were in a portion of the room where the lights were off altogether. Three of them stood in the lighted room, all uncleaned. We stood and looked uncertainly around us for a few moments. Finally we moved the dirty plates and the cash tip from one table onto another dirty table and sat down. A waitress appeared and wiped our table down. "What would you folks like to drink?" she asked.

We ordered soda, but the gloom that descended after she left was impenetrable. My boss, the photographer, and I were on this trip. We all get along very well, but it had been an awfully long two days, and we were tired. The silence stretched on interminably. The waitress did not return.

"So," says the photographer, Kevin, after a while, "do y'all just want to go to Subway or something?"

We left - I stopped on the way to apologize to the harried young waitress, who was polite, but seemed frankly relieved - and filled up the gas tank, then pulled into a Dairy Queen a quarter of a mile down the street. Here we ordered burgers at the counter, but fast food was apparently not a concept with which Kenedy was prepared to grapple last night. We sat at a Formica table and made awkward, weary chit-chat with one another. After twenty minutes, I remarked, "You know, I think maybe they're inventing cattle."

Eventually the food came. We ate in silence. Kevin wanted a milkshake, and I'm not impartial to Blizzards myself. He approached the counter again. Sorry! The Dairy Queen was fresh out of ice cream. Kevin looked around the room. Several people were eating sundaes.

My boss, undaunted by the "Restrooms closed for cleaning" sign posted on the door, took a chance on the bathroom, and was successful, too. Kevin found the men's room likewise to be perfectly in order. I started wondering if we were all characters in an episode of "The Twilight Zone."

The sensation didn't dissipate after we left. Kevin drove, wending through the darkening countryside as lightning flickered restlessly in the rainless clouds. He and I talked about books and movies, or were silent. Martha dozed in the backseat. We passed three or four other small quiet towns with Dairy Queens, lit up only just enough to showcase the silhouettes of chairs perched upside-down atop Formica tables. There was no ice cream to be found anywhere in Texas last night. I gazed out the passenger window as random discharges of electricity illuminated the sky.

Today we had a division-wide birthday celebration - tres leches cake with whipped-cream icing, plus cookies, yogurt, chocolate cupcakes, and fresh fruit. Life is normal. Sweets and dairy products are readily available. And it's an honest living, too.

Bloody Weather

2009-06-27T21:48:00.004-05:00

Do you know what I miss most about regular, twice-daily meetings of the 3-Martini Break Group? Well, I'm going to tell you.

It was so educational. Billy will agree with me, having only yesterday been exposed to such phrases as "tramp stamp" and "bullseye" for a lady's lower-back tattoo. Me, I just learned what a "shocker" is, yesterday, from Diane. I can't tell you what it is, because my parents are reading; but I was quite shocked (haha!) to discover that Thomas was already familiar with the term. And I thought he was so nice!

It was also from my time in the 3MBG that I learned about crop-dusting, a deplorable practice familiar to many of my friends but never, I hasten to add, known to me in any but the most hypothetical, or at least purely accidental context.

My parents had never heard a more innocent phrase I introduced a couple of years ago, when I mentioned that a clubgoer in a bar my stepsiblings and I visited looked as if she had been "rode hard and put away wet." I didn't get that one from a 3MBG member - why, I've known that phrase for a coon's age - but I was certainly doing my 3MBGly ("threm-BIG-ly") duty in passing the information along to the uninitiated.

Of course, if there's one topic the 3MBG knows more about than practically anyone else in the world, it's the weather, and I'm no exception, especially now I'm in my current job. Any one of us could step up and be a meteorologist. We'd all look quite fetching in front of a greenscreen. I probably need to work on my "push the weather system away" move, but otherwise, I've got it down. So it was with no small degree of authority that I informed Robbie this evening that a weather system, bidding fair to become Tropical Storm Ana, is loafing around near the Yucatan Peninsula - not yet doing anything criminal, just shouting insolent remarks at passing ships, and threatening to spray-paint gang tags on the coast.

"And what hurricane," Robbie asks, "comes after Ana?"

"I don't remember," I said.

We agreed that the next named storm after Ana will probably draw a bead on the Texas coast, moving purposefully towards it, yet never actually make landfall, eventually coldly informing the bewildered coast that it wants no contact of any kind. "Or it will call up at the last moment and say something came up and it can't make it," added Robbie.

"Nonono," I said, "that'd be Hurricane Greg."

Tony gets his own hurricane in - I don't remember which year without looking it up. That'll be a big beefy one. Hurricane Billy would carefully avoid damaging environmentally sensitive areas, ranches and farms, but would completely wipe out every Wal-Mart in the state. "And Hurricane Beth will have two big, beautiful - eyes," says Robbie, who can be pretty smarmy when he wants to be.

I'm glad to have good friends who teach me more than I ever wanted to know. How else would I manage to put up with this miserable weather?

Kitten Farts: Not So Cute

2009-06-25T18:18:00.004-05:00

Noticing a particularly spectacular example and exclaiming "holy chihuahua!" is one thing. Actually hearing the kitten produce the emission is something else altogether, and probably indicates you should buy a different brand of cat food. Check the bean content on the label. And check the fat, because - crowded as my brain may be with generally useless information (a fact which doing a whole book of New York Times Sunday crosswords will tend to point out to you), there are some things that everyone really ought to know - incontrovertible facts, truisms even, pillars which support the very structure of reality as we know it. And high on the list of these is the fact that CATS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE BUTT CHEEKS.

It's also not supposed to be this damn hot in June.

I think I'll just ride my bike back to Syracuse. What's a few hills? I love Austin, but farting kittens and weather from Death Valley? I think I preferred when it was raining frogs.

You Know You're a Texan When...

2009-06-23T20:32:00.004-05:00

...your first thought, upon catching sight of the Atlanta airport control tower, is, "Hey, that thing looks like one of these."

Now I want one. A chocolate frother, I mean, not a control tower, and not an airport, and certainly not the one in Atlanta.

By the Horns

2009-06-14T14:03:00.004-05:00

My flight didn't get into Syracuse until just before midnight last night - not too bad for me, as that's just 11 p.m. my time and I'm a night owl anyway. But my dad normally goes to bed at a reasonable hour. Still he came to the airport to pick me up, and then we sat up talking until two.

Don't you just love flight crews with a sense of humor? I thought we might actually give our ATL-SYR flight attendants a round of applause for the safety demonstration. They were great fun, but definitely a little tired; the guy read off the wrong flight number when welcoming us aboard, briefly confusing a few of the passengers. "I'm sorry, that's the number of tomorrow morning's flight back to Atlanta," he explained, "I'm just looking forward to leaving Syracuse."

"Hey!" shouted someone from the back of the plane. And I understand. I'd rather be in Syracuse than Atlanta, too.

Perhaps the pilot was tired as well. "Please use caution in opening the overhead compartments as contents may have shifted," the flight attendant read off as we taxied to the terminal, adding after a moment's thought, "especially after that landing."

My dad and I talked about a little of this and a little of that, though somehow we ended up with the relative merits of Mahler vs. Wagner (not that there's really any comparison), as well as the relative attractiveness of Austin Lyric Opera company members to members of other opera companies, and especially to the great opera stars of the past, many of whom apparently never heard that trans fats should be avoided rather than, say, taken intravenously.

"Why is it," my dad wondered, "that Wagnerian sopranos always seemed to be so large?"

The answer popped into my head just as I said it. "They had to be," I said, "in order to make it all the way to the end of the opera without dying of starvation." You see, I don't know if any operagoer has ever maintained consciousness through the entire Ring Cycle - or even just "Götterdämmerung"* - but a little-known fact is that Kirsten Flagstad was always a size 2 by the time she'd finished a performance, and was forced to refuel on massive quantities of smorgasbord to get her ready for the following evening. The sacrifices people will make for their art!

And as I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and still much too keyed up, I started thinking what an excellent quick-weight-loss program this would make. The problem would be devoting your life to the study of music and singing so you could become good enough to join an opera company and be cast as Sieglinde or Brunnhilde or Senta or Elisabeth or whoever - and that would take many many years, and I'm sorry but you really need to have already started on it - and then only do one performance, retire from the stage forever, and go have a salad.

You can't do this program in the comfort of your own home. Your helmet would poke holes in the ceiling.

------------
*German for "That God damned ring"

Get Outta Town!

2009-06-13T14:31:00.003-05:00

I'm leaving behind this for over a week of this.*

Oh yeah, and I get to see my parents, too. :)

-----------
*If for some reason you are reading this post in winter, do not, repeat, DO NOT click on these links.

Be What You're Like

2009-06-11T19:25:00.005-05:00

Do you ever feel that you're doomed to miss your calling in life because your basic nature is fundamentally in contradiction to the things you're good at?

For example, I've often felt that my aptitude in the man department makes me a prime candidate for the convent; yet I'm not religious. It's sort of a shame really.

Today I had so much fun conducting my training class that I was wondering if I could make it as a professional speaker. But there's just no way: feel-good corporate motivational tripe makes me want to yarf. I could never pull it off with a straight face.

The only problem really with being a great opera singer is that it's a lot of work, and you often have to sing Verdi, which I really don't like very much - not to mention ear-splitting new works by such internationally renowned fruit bats as Phillip Glass.

I'd be a famous writer, but...

I do get to conduct another training session tomorrow. I wish you could come sit in. I could try being extra-perky and saying "absolutely" a lot. Maybe I'll make a motivational speaker one day after all.

Here Comes Another One

2009-06-10T19:03:00.007-05:00

There's a hole in the ozone layer with my name on it.

Actually, I doubt it. For one thing, I'm not sure that the fumes from printer toner destroy the ozone. They probably do cause some nasty disease I'll come down with later in life due to the months I spent, at my previous state job, with the department's printer in the back of my cubicle. To this day I can only hope I got out in time.

I see a few people from the old place at break now and then - Jason is still there, and Ernest of course, and there's a new guy who's actually 3MBG material - if there were still a 3MBG (sighhhhh). There's still fodder for the group, too; I bump into Coworker-You-Idiot occasionally, though I'm afraid I pretend not to see him. It's not often. I'll pop into the Kwik-E-Mart for a Chronicle, and he'll be there buying State Employee Chow of some kind or another. He's still got the zip-off pants and the antenna coming out of his head, thank God! It's reassuring to know that some things have stayed the same.

As for me, aside from being a little lonely at times, I still feel perfectly normal - but then, I would, wouldn't I?

My recent assault on the environment stems from the fact that I'm teaching a class tomorrow and Friday to a group of employees from other divisions who will come in to help us answer our 1-800 line in case of an evacuation. Most of them are returning, having helped out in last year's efforts, but a few, bless them! are new. This will be our last year to receive their assistance, unfortunately. One of the whimsical outcomes of this past legislative session is that the divisions these helpful people belong to are being removed from my agency and will be set up as an agency of their own.

It puts us in a real bind, because those divisions are really the only ones, besides us, who have direct dealings with the public. Even assuming we could cut through enough red tape to be able to request much-needed seasonal assistance from some other division, I'm not sure we'd want it. Picture Coworker-You-Idiot handling emergency phone calls. You know he'd hit on all the female evacuees. If it were me, I'd take my chances with the hurricane.

So I've done lots of research, I've compiled updates to the manual, I've printed up enough copies that I may now personally be responsible for the destruction of more trees than Ike was, I created handouts, and it goes without saying that I put together a kick-ass PowerPoint. This is the fun part of my job - well, this, and most of the other parts, of course.

Oh yeah, and for the other thing, I can't figure out how you're supposed to put your name on a hole, seeing as how a hole is where something to put your name on isn't, capisce? Still, sorry about the ozone layer.

Why Yes, I Do Call Myself a Geographer

2009-06-01T18:26:00.006-05:00

And suddenly I'm eight years old all over again.

I remember the name of the elementary school in Ann Arbor where I went to the first half of third grade. I used to walk there every day, it was just at the end of my street, whatever that was. But Google-Map the name of the elementary school, and look at the surrounding street names until one sounds sort of familiar, and drag the little street-view guy to about where you sort of maybe remember starting off from, 32 years ago, and... bam.

I didn't remember what the house looked like, but I do remember the railed-in patio above the family room, which is what that sunroom on the right is. My parents rented this house; the owner was a gourmet chef, and had a locally-produced cooking show that was filmed in the kitchen. It was a nice kitchen. Mom loved it.

I remember a little powder room directly off the kitchen, wallpapered in New Yorker covers. It had a laundry chute to the basement. So did all the upstairs bedrooms. My room was blue...

The house was furnished; I thought the grand old wooden hall tree in the entryway was a throne. It didn't suit my stepfather's taste, which runs to Hobbit Post-Modern. (Or perhaps Post-Apocalyptic.) Our regular coffee table was a slice of a knot from a redwood tree, wild and beautiful and (from the perspective of a small child in close quarters) perhaps needlessly jagged. The Coopers had antiques. I think this is about the cutest house I have ever seen. When we left it, my parents bought an A-frame on two acres of land in Ypsilanti, where all the furniture fit right in - though Mom always complained the exterior doors didn't fit quite right, and it used to give her nightmares.

The washer and dryer here were in the basement, where all the laundry chutes led. Oooh, but the basement was scary. It had a looming shadowy cistern, and was dark and dank and stone-walled, as required by Federal law. Wooden treads led down from the kitchen, just behind the powder room.

And I remember the detached garage, and that it had a clubhouse built up near the ceiling in the back of it, accessible by a ladder. (The family we were renting from had boys just a little older than me.) And I made best friends with a girl named Jenny who went to my school and lived a couple of blocks away, because we were exactly alike: we both lived in rented houses, both had clubhouses in the garage, and both of us had stepfathers who used to joke about selling us to gypsies. (Does anybody say that anymore?) Our parents were friends. Later, when we moved to Ypsilanti, and Jenny's family moved somewhere or other on the shores of Lake Huron, we'd still get together every couple of months. Jenny's mom had a baby girl - Whitney - and thus ruined our perfect symmetry, until my own mom got pregnant a couple of years later, and my sister Jessica was born. But by then we were in San Antonio, and I don't know where Jenny's family went.

One morning on our way to school together, I remember, we got distracted by a full-sized igloo in a neighbor's yard. (This was Ann Arbor, remember - you think school was called on account of a couple measly feet of snow?!) We were entranced, and stopped to play, just for a minute, and lost ourselves in fun. The igloo was just packed snow, but the architects had made windows by pressing and steaming up part with their breath until it turned to clear ice. I have no idea how long had passed before Jenny and I suddenly looked at each other and said "Oh shit!" (or the eight-year-old equivalent thereof). We had completely forgotten about school!

It really blows my mind how I could see something like that, on my computer screen at work - I only took an idle look, in a slow moment - and so much comes rushing back. All the changes and losses of the intervening years gone - Mom making chicken marengo or boeuf bourguignon in that kitchen - she was a great fan of Julia Child and used to watch her program religiously. Looking at that picture I can almost smell her cooking.

It's been a rough spring, this year. Funny to stumble across a simple image like that and feel it all blur away.

You Think You've Got Problems?!?

2009-05-30T20:42:00.002-05:00

Katie and I are watching, I don't know what. "I Love the 80's" or something on VH1. Or the 90's. Or the Aughties. Whatever.

A commercial comes on which at first I think is a mascara commercial, except you know it's not, because mascara commercials always show women with what are clearly fake eyelashes; nobody on Earth has eyelashes that thick and long - the girl's packing nylon, hello! This commercial has a woman with what looks like fairly normal eyelashes with a lot of mascara on. Clearly NOT a mascara commercial, then.

"Are you suffering from inadequate eyelashes?" asks the voiceover. It then goes on to tell you that there's a new prescription medicine available that will actually lengthen, thicken and darken your natural lashes! Results in just a few weeks! Clinically proven! By prescription only!

Okay. By prescription only means you're going to your doctor; you're looking him or her right in the face; you're telling this person, in a world with starvation, polio, cancer, swine flu, fungus-infested toenails, and liver damage, that you want medical attention lavished on your eyelids so you won't suffer from inadequate eyelashes.

"My God, Katie!" I said to my daughter, said I, although she was looking at me a bit oddly by this time. "What the hell is the world coming to?!"

"I don't know," said Katie nervously.

"That reminds me," I went on more calmly. "I want to run by Walgreen's this weekend and get some tooth-whitening stuff."

Katie hesitated. "I really don't know what to say to that," she told me.

"Good," I said. Because the last thing I need is a mouthy teenager. God knows I've got enough problems as it is.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

2009-05-28T18:09:00.004-05:00

Today I got home from work to find all the doors locked and nobody home. Don't you hate that?

I have a key, but there's something wrong with the front door lock. So my key has been stuck there since Monday. It doesn't turn the lock, and you can't get it out of the broken lock to use it on any of the others, so it's not like this is a security issue. Still, at some point, I suppose changing the locks might be in order. Someday.

I can fit through the cat flap, but I hate that. It's right next to the cat food dish and the litter box in the laundry room. And you know that thing is all covered with raccoon germs. Plus it's a fairly tight squirm, and I'm all sunburned. So I figured, what the hell. I'll just sit out here, on the porch, in the heat, and wait till everybody else gets home. That way they'll feel guilty!

Mr. Bingo Kitten, however, had seen me arrive on my bike. So he trotted towards me across the front yard, meowing urgently. He's hungry! He came up next to me on the porch, up to the front door. He pawed at the door. He gazed unhappily at me. He meowed some more. Why are you just sitting there, he was clearly wondering. Can't you see I want in? Haven't you got any heart at all?!

So I went around back, crawled through the cat flap, opened the front door and let him in.

The Journey of a Thousand Miles

2009-05-26T17:46:00.002-05:00

Magda and Dumas are safely home in Barrow now. They traveled back with heavy hearts: the urn in which their father’s ancient ashes reposed overturned in the back of Dumas’ car when they hit a pothole in Gonzales, an ignominious scattering for the dignified and stern old Russian. Shaken, his children swept what they could out onto the beach without further ceremony. Their trip back to Alaska was spent mostly in silence, pondering the foolishness of their efforts, and wondering why they had once more made this epic journey, for so little reward to anyone?

But their depression was not destined to last, for on their return, they were overjoyed to find their brother Edwin safe at home; he had survived his sojourn in the belly of the whale, and in due course he emerged from it in the natural way, completely unscathed – only wanting a long shower, and expressing a marked disinclination for sushi.

Dumas is now a changed man: abandoning his dream of bringing a Super Wal-Mart to his hometown, he is now cultivating grapes in a fledgling vineyard where the retail giant was once to set its mighty foot, and looks forward to sampling the as-yet-unnamed fruit of his Bacchanalian efforts.

Magda, meanwhile, is meditating on the myriad blessings of her own personal advantages; loving and supportive family members; kind, loyal friends; a fun, steady job where her useful work is appreciated and rewarded; and the excellent health to continue enjoying all this wonderful bounty for a long time to come. What a lucky creature, what a child of good fortune she is. What could she possibly have to complain about?

Okay, so the sunburn hurts really really bad. But hurts will get better.

The Journey Continues

2009-05-24T20:00:00.004-05:00

There are certain advantages to having a literary alter ego, but occasionally there are drawbacks as well. For example, Magda Silhavy went to the beach today and burnt her pallid Alaskan hide to a crisp, which means that this evening, I find it particularly uncomfortable to wear things that chafe against my skin, such as, oh I don't know, clothes.

The sacrifices we make for our art.

Magda - I - and my brother Dumas are once more in Corpus to scatter our late father's ashes in the balmy waters of the bay; leaving them on the baggage carousel in Seattle, we found, was not adequately respectful to the old patriarch's memory. This is a more sobering trip than the last, as we are mourning the loss of our brother Edwin to one of the very whales he loved and worked for all his life. We are once more struck by the differences between Corpus Christi and our own hometown of Barrow, Alaska.

We don't really get wine festivals back home, but attended one in Rockport yesterday. Dumas suggests that perhaps we could start a winery back in Barrow. What could we call it? We're a little stumped, but frankly, in the wake (so to speak) of the current tragedy, we've gone right off whale marketing. Never mind that we have a three-day growing season. I've seen those tiny wine bottles they sell on airplanes; if that doesn't represent a niche we were destined to fill, I'd like to know what does?

During the course of the evening, the emcee began walking around among the tents and tables, greeting guests and asking what their favorite wine of the day was, and where are they from? Naturally, Dumas and I felt that this situation was custom-tailored for us, and began casually placing ourselves in the emcee's path. We're from Barrow, Alaska! Nobody else here is from that far away!

But he evaded us, so many times in fact that we began to suspect he was doing so on purpose, especially when he singled out a guest drinking Coors Light. We left in disgust.

Another thing we don't have in Barrow is cockroaches. But back at the hotel, dozing off the wine, I saw something moving underneath the notepad on the nightstand. I lifted the notepad to see two German cockroaches, engrossed in one another, tail-to-tail. I slammed the notepad back down onto them hard.

If I'm not having a good time, I don't see why anybody else should.

Also on the nightstand is an evaluation card. Outraged, I scrawled "FUCKING COCKROACHES!" in the comments section.

It occurred to me that clarification was needed. "(Seriously, they were having sex)," I wrote underneath, and added after further thought, "(I squooshed them)."

Also unheard of in Barrow are nightclubs such as the one where friendly locals Omar and Garrick took us dancing last night; nor, as I discovered to my dismay today, is the sun nearly as strong back home.

So it's rather ironic that they don't have whale blubber sunburn balm here, where the need for it is so much greater. That will just have to wait until the next chapter, the scattering of our father's ashes, and our eventual return home.

If only Edwin were here to experience it all with us.

Holy Fucking Shit! I'm 40!!!

2009-05-22T10:41:00.004-05:00

Holy fucking shit! I'm the mother of a 19-year-old!!!!

Here's that model of maturity with his 16-year-old sister, taken last night:

On today's agenda:
1. Pick up new contacts
2. Shop - need some new earrings, an ankle bracelet or two and some toe rings
3. Spa! Full-body massage, manicure and pedicure. Thank you Jim and Katie!!
4. Happy hour with Robbie, Kevin, Thomas, Diane, and a bunch of my other most favoritest people in the whole entire world!
5. Party like a rockstar!
6. Corpus!! Party like a particularly immature rockstar!!!
7. Come home, go back to work and grow old.

Haha! Just kidding. I did want to mention that, seeing as how my twenties were way better than my teens, and my thirties were way better than my twenties, I'm feeling very optimistic about this new milestone.

Of course I couldn't resist taking a 40th birthday vanity shot in the bathroom. I got a few miles left in me yet!

Let's Get this Party Started

2009-05-21T19:01:00.003-05:00

What better way could there possibly be to kick off the 40th birthday festivities, than with a 2:45 afternoon break of epic proportions?

I remember Billy perched on the picnic table in our pavilion, talking dreamily to Robbie and me about a forensics class he'd once taken. None of us were in any hurry to leave: no one watching us and nothing to do. I don't know how long we'd been out before Billy remarked languidly, "You know, we've been out here a really long time."

And yet, you know, I don't think it was much over an hour, hour and a half, tops.

Do you remember the walks to Stevie? Sometimes we'd take them after we'd already been sitting outside a good half hour.

Or some days we'd merely stay in the break spot, relaxing in the shade, talking about everything and nothing, laughing, happy, relaxed; as a group, not particularly conscious of the time, although one or two people might get a little anxious and start talking about going in. The rest of us would mock them. Do you remember? Sometimes we'd mock them so harshly that they'd just go inside, and probably feel fairly silly when the rest of us eventually showed back up 45 minutes later.

Conversation could go anywhere, nowhere, everywhere, and everything was funny. Eventually the "second shift" would show up, a group from Traffic Analysis who generally came out around 3:45 or so. We always knew it was time to go in, though they were friendly, and generally invited us to stay. No: this was the changing of the guard; and we acknowledged the second shift break group as the only other rightful inhabitant of that spot. We were on good terms with them, of course! But it was not our fate to sit and break with them. Their arrival meant it was our time to go back to our desks and work the sudoku puzzle or look at the weather forecast until it was time to go home. Such is the natural order of things.

So, as an early birthday present to me today, Ernest rounded up the people who'd be 3MBG members if the 3MBG had not finally and tragically disbanded: himself, of course; and Jennifer B.; and Jason - poor dear Jason, the only one of our old set who hasn't escaped! - and Butch, who is kind of like the 3MBG's kindly, indulgent uncle; and sweet thoughtful Esther; and Carlos, a new guy. And we went on break. And we took that break. We took a good break. I stayed, and laughed, and talked, and listened, and had a wonderful time, and whenever that little nagging voice inside whispered that perhaps I should think about going back in now, I told it to shut the F up, beeyotch!

The second shift never arrived. I'm pretty sure they still break there; perhaps they sensed something rare and magical taking place, and didn't want to ruin it for us. When at last Jennifer and Esther yielded to the urgings of their ticking consciences, leading the rest of the group reluctantly away in their wake, I was satisfied that it was time: the first real break I've taken since starting my "new" job a year ago February. I got back to my desk today to find no notes on my chair, no papers waiting for me, no emails, no phone messages; and I'd been gone for a full, lovely, wonderful hour.

Tomorrow, we do more or less the same thing, only with more people, alcohol, and no time limit. Then this weekend, Robbie and I are off to Corpus - Dumas and Magda, on our own, since unfortunately our older brother Edwin was swallowed by a whale earlier this week. I'll be curious to see how he gets out of that one.

This is going to be the best birthday ever.

Oh My God Look Out It's Right Behind You

2009-05-20T19:05:00.006-05:00

Today was day 2 (and the final day - thank God - thank God!!!!) of my emergency management operations class. Aren't you happy I took it? Next time a pandemic sweeps the globe, or terrorists murder thousands of civilians in the process of destroying a major cultural and historic landmark, or a tropical cyclone causes widespread flooding in Helena, Montana, you can rest secure in the knowledge that I am immediately able to tell you which unit belonging to the Planning Section of the Incident Command General Staff is responsible for tracking inventory on the mental health professionals deployed to help you cope with the resultant stress.

Was that flippant? I don't mean to be flippant. Actually, I have a high level of respect - reverence really - for the organizational systems created to deal with and efficiently handle large-scale emergency operations. Business-as-usual could benefit a heck of a lot from adopting some of the models derived from these systems. Open, non-territorial communication among government agencies? (Or even - I tremble to think it - different divisions within the same agency?) Readily-comprehensible means of ordering and tracking resources?? Large-scale cooperation towards common objectives???? I can has every day - plees?!?!

No. You can not has. Still, it's rather inspiring to see what public entities actually are capable of, because who'd'a thunk? Never mind that our class was taught by APD cops, who made many jokes at the expense of Austin's good-natured, environmentally-conscious, liberal, happy-go-lucky character. Describing the process for obtaining resources from higher level resources in the event of a disaster (oh by the way, the large-scale devastation in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina was 100% the fault of local and state officials because they were not Bush supporters - just thought you might be interested to know that), one of our instructors mentioned that "Rick" must request a declaration of disaster from - here he hesitated - "Barack, now" - in order to receive Federal assistance.

"I'm impressed you remembered not to say 'George!'" remarked our second instructor.

"I'm impressed I was able to say 'Barack' without throwing up!" retorted the first.

Let's not make any pretense here - I sucked in this class. None of it made much sense to me. I tried to participate, but my brain kept finding other things to be interested in - including, at one point as I recall, the chemical makeup of the construction materials used in the drywall - and I had a lot of trouble finding anything worthwhile to contribute during my class table's hands-on exercises.

This is perfectly normal, and nothing to be alarmed about: I will not ever, nor would I wish to, function in a leadership capacity in an actual major emergency. Thus far, my job has been merely to disseminate information to the folks who are answering phones from the public; and this I can do. Maybe I have to make the occasional call about whether we'll order more port-a-potties. I'll leave the actual life-or-death decisions to the kind of people teaching my class, who have an unquestionably valuable contribution to make to society, without whom I wouldn't feel safe walking down dark alleys (inasmuch as I do anyway), and with whom, were I to be asked to go out for a few drinks and maybe dinner afterwards, I would, let's face it, not. ("Sorry! Have to give my cat a bath that night! So sweet of you to ask! Byeeeee!")

(Not that I would be asked. I strongly suspect that, no matter how much cleavage I don't show and how much my shoes refrain from slapping against my feet when I walk, I have the words "PINKO LIBERAL COMMIE SCUM" tattooed across me in six-inch-high letters that everyone who needs to can pretty clearly see; hence, I never get out of speeding tickets, never.)

I love what I do for a living; they clearly enjoy and prosper in their work: well enough. May our lives cross but once or twice a year. But, just for Karma's sake, I probably won't be drinking a lot of Hurricanes this weekend.

No Wonder I Have Swine Flu!

2009-05-19T19:29:00.004-05:00

Cops, no offense to any who might be eyeing my car's expired registration sticker or noticing that I'm riding my bike on the sidewalk downtown, are pricks.

Complete, utter, lost-to-all-hope, straight-up, down-low, doughnut-scarfing, power-hungry, small-minded, pig-brained, sexists, the lot of them (with the sole exception of those who aren't). Um, not that there's anything wrong with that.

I spent the day today in emergency management systems training, and another full day of the same awaits me tomorrow. Various different state agencies are in my class. Most of them are members (probably not very large ones) of law enforcement groups.

These people are good at their jobs, and their jobs are needed; I don't mean to imply otherwise. It's just that the kind of person to whom this sort of job appeals just so happens to be a complete asshole.

My work, during emergency management operations, has nothing to do with saving lives or making the world a materially better place. All I do is disseminate information about what those big boys are actually accomplishing: I reassure the public that emergency operations are safely in hand, tell them the number to call to find their elderly relatives, or where they might find a hotel that won't turn them away with their dog, or a good resource for getting emergency prescriptions filled if they've left home without paperwork. Really, when you get down to it, it's "fluff" work - though I tend to think of it as fairly noble, when you consider I used to be in marketing.

I don't like being looked down upon, though, it pisses me off. Today in class, we had to brainstorm several different "real-life" emergency scenarios. The others at my table, cops and professional emergency management officials, actually have dealt with this sort of situation before, whereas it's all fairly hypothetical to me. We're all supposed to participate in class, but my silly, hesitant, ignorant suggestions were summarily shot down with a great deal of condescension by the heavy-necked thug next to me - who obviously considered me little more than a fluffy little travel industry bunny.

He was armed, but I bet a stiletto heel would have put him out of commission fairly quickly, if I'd been so inclined. The element of surprise, you know. No one expects to get stabbed by the fluffy bunny!

Especially if I lure them into a false sense of security first by offering doughnuts.

All the World's A Stage

2009-05-18T21:45:00.005-05:00

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

So send in the clowns:

Mal du Monde

2009-05-17T15:13:00.005-05:00

Margie called me this afternoon about plans for my birthday. I croaked weakly at her. "You sound sick. Are you sick?" she asked me, rather huffily I thought. "You're never sick."

"Well, I'm sick now," I said.

"That's no excuse," Margie remarked unsympathetically. "What do you have, swine flu? You swine."

Could I get some chicken soup with that?

Here are the top ten things you should not do whilst recuperating from swine flu:

10. Pick at the scabs on your slowly-healing heart - this is always highly contraindicated, but especially when you're suffering your own personal pandemic. (Doesn't that sound like a menu offering at Pizza Hut? Granted, a fairly gross one - but we are talking Pizza Hut here.)

9. Go to work. You have to anyway, because if you're out more than three days in a row you have to bring a doctor's note, and I'm not paying $20 to sit around in a waiting room full of people with much worse infections than mine, only to be told to stay home and drink plenty of fluids (NOT vodka) and get some sleep, which I already knew. So if you come to my office, be sure and wear a gas mask. Otherwise, you're going DOWN, pal.

8. Take your kids to visit your ex-mother-in-law in the hospital. She's fine, except she has a cracked vertebra from being hit by a VW bus while trying to retrieve a cardboard garage sale sign from the median near a major intersection. However, 30 minutes into our visit, she got a phone call from her daughter-in-law, who brusquely informed her that she has a staph infection and visitors aren't allowed into her room without gowning up. Now, the nurses hadn't mentioned this, and she does have a (gownless) roommate, who also had a (gownless) visitor while we were there.

Frankly, it was too much for my feeble brain and I just decided our visit had been about long enough anyway; but I'm still scratching my head over that one, or would be, except I'm frightened of getting my hands that close to my face.

7. Be the parent of an equally sick child. I'm sorry, but frankly this is just irresponsible. When you're sick, you really can't afford to be up all night bringing water and comfort to a coughing, feverish infant. So cut it out.

6. Read the weekly wildflower report for the state's recorded information line. Your voice sounds all husky from the sore throat, and you'll only give the traveling public the wrong idea.

5. Permit a cool front to bring a line of thunderstorms across the region where you live, dropping temperatures by 15 degrees and reawakening all the mold, cedar and pollen which thought spring was over and were all ready for a long summer's nap, therefore bringing about the worst allergy attack you've suffered in years. That was a dumb-ass thing to do.

4. Entertain Bill Gates with your karaoke stylings.

3. Go to the roller rink with your best friend. This isn't so bad in and of itself, but you need to go when the place isn't full of preteens, because preteens do not fear death, and therefore aren't nearly as frightened of 75-mph collisions as you are. Feel that funny thing your heart is doing? That's probably not good.

2. Plan the mother of all happy hours for your 40th birthday this coming Friday, itself merely a precursor to a full night of debauchery in Austin and a Memorial Day weekend of alcohol-fueled madness in Corpus. I have friends coming in from at least four different cities for the event. I don't think it'll be a proper party unless at least someone gets arrested, as long as that someone is not me, because the number one thing you should never, ever, ever do whilst H1N1ing your sick little ass into next week?

1. Go to jail!

On the other hand, I have been pretty badly in need of blog fodder lately.

Star Trekkin'

2009-05-09T16:28:00.004-05:00

Robbie, Thomas and I went to see the new Star Trek movie last night at the Alamo Downtown.

On a side note, I still don't see how (1) nobody else had ever thought of having a movie theater where you could enjoy real - and not overpriced - food and adult beverages during the show, and (2) while the Alamo was going about delivering this heretofore unrealized necessity of existence to the masses, regular movie theaters decided that they didn't suck quite enough, and therefore that you should have to sit through so many loud, big-screen commercials before your movie starts that by the time the opening credits roll, you just want to go home and have a Tylenol, or perhaps some heroin.

In my college days, I remember, the Dobie used to play artsy slideshows before the movie started. These consisted of photographs with meaningful words or phrases scratched onto them with a pin. OMG. SO 80's.

The Alamo plays features for you before the film starts, but the features are AWESOME. Like, last night, they played a montage of (probably not quite) every instance and configuration in which DeForrest Kelley delivered the "Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a _______!" line, all back-to-back. And they played the "Star Trekkin'" video, which I highly recommend if you haven't seen it. They also ran the popularly acclaimed "worst fight scene ever made," from the Star Trek episode "Arena," where Kirk engages in hand-to-hand combat with a large rubber lizard creature wearing a leopardskin sheath in which Thomas suggested I'd look quite fetching (unless he actually meant the rubber lizard suit, I'm not sure). The fight scene leaves you wondering if perhaps the actors thought the studio would play the clip at double-speed when the episode was actually produced. And they played an Onion spot about how echt Trekkies were all bent out of shape because the new movie has good acting, special effects, and action sequences, and therefore has diluted the brand by appealing to the kind of people who don't even speak Klingon.

(Actually I can relate to that - it's why I don't like the new "Doctor Who." If you can't see the stagehands' feet scampering along beneath the advancing Daleks, what's the point? What's the point???)

And they played this.

Live long and prosper, dude!

Still Putting the "Pro" in "Inappropriate"

2009-05-07T18:17:00.006-05:00

Management has scolded my cleavage into submission, but now it's personal. Now they're after my shoes.

My favorite black sandals are considered flip-flops and are therefore verboten, and I am now officially peeved. I feel like going out and buying a nun's habit in protest, except I don't want to get mistaken for a chorus girl from the ALO production of "Dialogues of the Carmelites." We all know what chorus girls are like!

So first I have to wear boring tops, and now I can't have cute shoes. If they tell me to start wearing cotton underwear, I quit.

The Center of the Universe

2009-05-03T18:24:00.004-05:00

"Look, look!" enthused an adorable little boy in swim trunks - I'd guess he was about two and a half - to Robbie and me, sitting on top of the hill overlooking the Long Center, Auditorium Shores, and the hike-and-bike trail. The man-made hill is crowned by a ring of stone benches surrounding a handsome limestone-and-granite map of Texas. Austin is picked out with a star on the map; several other, less relevant Texas cities are indicated by a dot, and under each dot the distance in miles from this, the sunniest, happiest, most beautiful city on Earth, is given. "Look!" said the little boy, zigzagging excitedly back and forth across the map. "It's the whole world!"

Who could disagree?

The little cutie was drawn to us by Bella, Robbie's miniature dachshund, who responded to his attentions by curling her tail tightly underneath her body and trying to hide under the bench. Robbie coaxed her out and held her in his arms so the little boy could pet her. The child caught sight of Robbie's watch. "Hey, what time is it?" he demanded urgently.

"It's almost four," Robbie told him.

"What's that mean??"

We weren't able to give a satisfactory answer, though, so the little fellow orbited the world a few more times before dashing down the hill to join his mother, grandfather, and brother, who were ambling along the spiral path that climbs the hill. The mother approached us after a few minutes and asked us, smiling, "How old is your son?"

"Wait - he isn't yours?!"

So I stood up and gazed down the hill towards the splashing water fountains until I spied a woman looking around, cupping her hands to her mouth and shouting. I waved to her. "Is that your mom in the red shirt?" I asked my little companion, "I think she's trying to find you." He dashed down the hill to a happy reunion. Awwwww... I guess it's just as well. Robbie's got Bella, and I already have a kitten.

I sat atop that same hill yesterday evening, too, with a new friend, who took me to see a new symphony by Dan Welcher, the Bruch Violin Concerto #1 with the amazing, energetic, and very snappily dressed Sarah Chang, and the Tchaikovsky Capriccio Italien.

The natives were restless - children waiting to splash in the water fountain plaza, which runs through cycles and pauses every several minutes to allow parents to drag away their exhausted offspring; but there were none of those last night. The tense, rhythmic chant of "Wa-ter! Wa-ter! Wa-ter!" was clearly audible from the top of the hill.

My friend has season tickets to the Austin Symphony Orchestra. In most cities, this would entail a good mix of classics and new pieces - and there's really no getting away from the pops concerts (nor from people who whisper to one another loudly during the performance, kick the back of your seat, and shout "Bravo!" at female soloists), but the one thing that kind of annoyed my friend was that a Charlie Daniels Band concert was included in his season subscription. "When I buy season tickets to the symphony," he remarked, quite reasonably I thought, "I am specifically paying NOT to see the Charlie Daniels Band."

I guess that's Austin for ya.

Pawns in Our Own Game

2009-04-30T19:20:00.008-05:00

At conference each year, we tour on three motor coaches. Each coach has a "captain," one of the conference planners, and each captain is armed with a heavy-duty walkie-talkie in order to coordinate with the other two coaches while we're on the road. Are you with me so far?

The captains are not normally armed with tape dispensers - this photo was taken just as I had put all of the the bus signs up. I had the best bus, by the way. Did I mention that I had the best bus? Well, I did. Go Green!

Conference is intense and it's a lot of work. But we have a lot of fun too, and one of the most fun things that we do is the bus cheer. It's funny how these things get started. From what I'm told, there never was a bus cheer until conference two years ago (I didn't work here yet, then), when the host city delegate assigned to each of the three tour buses stirred up the spirit of competition. It was a huge deal, that year. "I think by the end of the week," the delegate from that year's host confided to me last week, "we were just about ready to kill each other."

A few people from that year's host always attend conference, though, wherever it is, so the tradition has continued. My Gator Green bus cheer, last year, was written by an attendee from that city. But this year, the delegate had to leave partway through the week - and we pressed on regardless.

It's funny how things take on a life of their own. She started a cheer; no one much cared for it, and I thought it would fizzle out after she left. My two bosses were the captains of the other two buses, and they thought the whole thing would fizzle out too. But our attendees wouldn't let it drop. One of my bus people wrote us an awesome new cheer. I've told you how we actually ended up rehearsing in my room after hours, thereby ruining whatever reputation as a virtuous innocent I might heretofore have held (but let's not kid ourselves).

All that happened, though, was that my boss mentioned that on her bus - the blue bus - she was surprised at who had written the cheer. He's someone from our office, a good friend of mine. He's a funny, intelligent person, but not exactly someone you'd picture as a cheerleader. His supervisor happened to be assigned to my bus. So it all went down like this:

"Hey, you guys," I told my bus, "I heard a rumor that the Blue bus is really good. I heard they've been practicing. And I heard their cheer was written by a professional writer."

My bus immediately began to murmur. A professional writer? Who could it be?! "Isn't Charles on that bus?" asked one of my attendees, but his boss piped up right away: "Oh, I don't think that's the sort of thing Charles would do."

"I know!" I said significantly, "I wouldn't have thought so, either."

Her eyes flashed, and from that point it was GAME ON! Rehearsal was held in my room later that evening. Here I am with the photographer for whom I sacrificed my reputation, by the way. You have to admit he is pretty cute.

But even egging on our attendees this way - and there is some very strange sociology going on here, I have to admit - neither of my bosses, nor I, really knew quite how it got to be so big, or quite where some aspects of the whole phenomenon started off. I mused about it after the cheer competition, which I still think the Green bus should have won. "Does it ever seem to you," I asked my two bosses, "that we are merely pawns in our own game?"

They looked hard at me. "Well, duh," they said.

Just checking.

Forget the tape dispenser. If only I could dress like this for work every day!

Important Things

2009-04-28T21:51:00.006-05:00

I know there's been a lot of talk about swine flu in the media lately, and it's sad and all, but I don't have time for that right now. I'm having a hair emergency.

What? It's humid.

There's this perfect product I really like, so naturally the manufacturer discontinued it. All you can find out there these days are pomades designed to smooth and straighten out your hair, or sculpting mousse and gels that make it all crispy. Soft, natural curls are apparently out. It's sad when what you have goes out of style, but I guess hair is the least of my worries, as far as that's concerned.

At least I know some straight men.

So I ran out of hair goo, and rushed post haste to HEB to get some more, tonight at about 9:15, figuring I'd pick up a fresh eyeliner as well. Alas! HEB has an odd policy of blocking off the makeup aisle after dark, and I haven't quite figured out the reasoning behind that. It's probably so that vampires, stumbling in sleepily to stock up for a long night of murderous debauchery, won't be able to conceal their true nature from their victims through the artful use of flesh-colored foundation (and will therefore have to rely on nightclub lighting and beer goggles like the rest of us). Or maybe cosmetics get shoplifted a lot. Whatever. At least the hair goo aisle was still open - you can't prohibit vampires from shampooing, that'd be discrimination - but my preferred brand no longer exists; so I grabbed a bottle of something that looked reasonably close and got in the 10-items-or-fewer line.

(The blocked-off cosmetics aisle pisses me off, but I do have to applaud HEB for their "10 items or fewer" checkout lanes. Signs that say "10 items or less" make the baby Jesus cry.)

There was a middle-aged couple ahead of me in line. Now, I didn't count the number of items they had, partly because I think that's kind of tacky and ill-natured, but largely because I wasn't sure I'd have enough fingers. They purchased their items and struggled a little bit with the card swiper - it appeared to be the first one they'd ever seen - and then, as the cashier was finalizing their transaction, the woman noticed the gum on clearance next to the register.

"That gum," she said to the cashier, "how much is that?"

"It's a dollar," the cashier responded.

"Let me have a pack of the winter fresh," said the woman.

Unfortunately, the transaction had already been closed out, so the woman decided to pay cash separately for the gum. But comically, while she was fishing slowly in her purse for a dollar, the cashier voided the transaction. So the cashier rang the whole thing up over again, became confused when the woman attempted to pay for the entire purchase with a dollar, they finally arrived at an understanding, and the man began once more trying to figure out how the card swiper worked. Meanwhile, the woman noticed the price of the gum as it flashed up on the checkout display and began bickering with the cashier because the amount was more than a dollar. The cashier attempted to explain the concept of sales tax. The woman wasn't having any of it. People in the non-express lane one over, who had arrived in line much later than I did, were finishing up and leaving. The haggling continued.

Finally they concluded everything to their satisfaction, completed their purchase, took their bags, and left. The clerk rang up my hair goo, I swiped my card and got my receipt, and I overtook the couple in the parking lot halfway to my car. I strode past them with rather needless flamboyance, I'm afraid. I wanted to make a point. Stupid slow people!

Karma will probably catch up with me either in the form of swine flu or of being sucked dry by vampires, but at least I'll have good hair.

Rain Bath Aftermath

2009-04-27T19:03:00.006-05:00

And so life returns to normal - such as it is.

Yesterday, Tony took Anna and me to the turtle pond at UT. Oddly, I don't remember ever noticing it before, although I must have walked past it nearly every day when I was at school; it presumably existed before I was born, having been dedicated in memory of the 1966 shootings.

Sometimes when you are very sad and missing someone, almost everything reminds you of them. But the fact that the 1966 shootings fall so squarely into that category really ought to give me pause.

Walking back to the car after our excursion, Tony and I passed a guy heading the other way down the sidewalk. He was holding a plastic container slightly above him, at arm's length. "Would you like some Chex Mix?" he inquired as our paths crossed.

I'm not sure what you're supposed to say to this, unless you're unusually hungry. Tony and I politely declined and waited until we were out of earshot to begin snickering in bewildered amusement. Chex Mix: it's not just for people you know!

Back at work today, I sent an email Tony told me not to. It's unlikely ever to get read anyway. Maybe it's the darkness and the rain that make my heart so heavy.

There is bad news about Debby - not that it can really get worse than it already is. Her pain has increased enough that she's now drugged pretty much out of her head. This is probably kinder, as the inside of her head can't be a very fun place anymore, and I guess I'm glad I got to visit and say goodbye while she was still completely lucid. Her little girl has finally been told, which is - well, not good exactly. What could be good? Life is so short, and so often filled with unnecessary hurt, isn't it? Where there's life, there should be hope. But some things are hopeless.

At work, staff photographer Kevin gave me a sneak preview of all the pictures from conference, though I can only look at them, can't have 'em, until he does some editing. And he told me a story. Our CVB contact at conference came up to him Thursday, in his slouchy driver's hat (remember those? In the early 80's, when I was a mere slip of a girl, my more stylish classmates wore those in smart red satin that matched their lip gloss) and said to him, brusquely - she's cute, competent, and lots of fun, this girl, but her manner is very abrupt - "I like your hat. I knew a guy who used to wear a hat like that. But he died." Then she walked away.

Kevin was speechless. If only someone had approached him immediately afterward to offer him some Chex Mix.

I still wish... But what can you wish for? Life is normal, which is to say, as good as you make it. I would kind of like some Chex Mix, though.

Hey Shorty! It's Your Birthday!

2009-04-26T10:54:00.004-05:00

It's good to be back home.

One of the best things about Eeyore's Birthday Party is that everyone is so nice... it's a very happy festival, full of charity and goodwill, not to mention dogs, at least one shoulder-borne cat, a goat, a pig, probably some other wildlife I didn't see, people dressed as Twinkies and bananas, the guy on the two-story bike, drums, smoke (both kinds - the dangerous one and the illegal one), and beautiful girls and boys of all ages and shapes and sizes in various stages of dress, undress, feathers, foliage, and paint. Also, there's beer.

Last time I volunteered at Eeyore's, year before last, I painted faces. The pressure was just too much, though - even though most of my paintings came out extremely well, I was horribly anxious about all of them, and the one silent, solemn little girl whose liquid eyes welled up and spilled over when I gave her the mirror was enough to convince me that this was not a job I was ever willing to take on again, even if nobody asked me to decorate their naughty bits. So this time I sold beer tickets. This is a doable job: insanely busy and fast-paced, and you have to be able to do simple arithmetic in your head reasonably quickly - a weak point of mine actually - but everybody's happy, everybody's nice, and because you're roped off behind a three-foot-tall fence of orange webbing, nobody cops a feel. The organizers give you a special marker that turns yellow on real bills so you can check 100's (and you'd be surprised how many people pay with those). You run out of tickets and ones a lot. It was the fastest two hours I've ever spent - I'm definitely up for doing this again next year!

After our shift, Robbie and I wandered around a bit, visited the drum circle, checked out the egg toss, and then found our lovely friend Diane, in honor of whose 50th birthday the whole festival was actually being held even if many of the partygoers were unaware of that fact. What better way to celebrate?

Happy Birthday, Diane and Eeyore - and many more!

Rolling

2009-04-25T11:33:00.004-05:00

We knew we were whipped when the yellow bus smacked themselves on the ass and started singing: "Don't you wish your bus was HOT like us? Don't you wish your bus was a FREAK like us? Don'tcha!" and then, when they snapped on their sunglasses in perfect unison and started walking like an Egyptian and the audience started yelling and howling, it was pretty much all over.

The green bus was still awesome anyway. So here, since I published this last year, was this year's cheer. I won't tell you what tune it was sung to.

(Clapping) Left my good job at the center,
Traveled on down to San Angelo,
(snapping)Met a lot of people,
Ate a lot of good food,
San Angelo's been so happy to give!
(rolling hands) Green bus keep on turning,
Good times keep on burning;
(rolling hands and pointing to the guys as they sing) Rolling! (Guys sing "Rolling!") Rolling! (Guys sing "Rolling!") Rolling down the Concho!
Rolling! (Guys sing "Rolling!") Rolling! (Guys sing "Rolling!") Rolling in San Angelo! (Guys sing "Rolling in San Angelo," deep and slow, as we girls sink to our knees before them and fan them with our jazz hands.)

Don't you wish you'd been there to see it? Don'tcha?!

But the blue bus just sucked.

Anyway, it's over, it's done, I'm back, it was a success, and I had a blast. Now it't time to start getting ready for hurricane season. Meanwhile, off to Eeyore's Birthday Party to sell some beer! Film at 11.

Day Three: You Learn Something Every Day

2009-04-23T05:36:00.005-05:00

Day Three was yesterday, I'm late, sorry. Been kinda busy.

Okay, so yesterday we started off with a motivational speaker/trainer. I liked her better than last year's, and I definitely liked her WAY better than Mr. Wave My Hand in Front of Your Face Oh Look You're Inexplicably Weakened Now I Can Push Your Arm Down for No Readily Apparent Purpose (who, based on a couple of quick interactions with him on the phone when he called for my boss and he assumed I was "just" the secretary, is also a prick) but let's face it, a motivational speaker is a motivational speaker.

There are four types of people in the world, and if you're one of these, you may have learned to ACT like another one some of the time, but you are by nature and in your comfort zone one of these only:

A Director: Speaks in nouns and action verbs. Makes decisions and gets things done. Focused on the ends.

A Socializer: All about the good times, a dreamer, dynamic, vain, self-centered, fun, talkative.

A Relater: Cares about peace and harmony above all else, will do whatever it takes to negotiate a happy balance among others.

A Thinker: Analytical and detail-oriented, goes nuts if things are out of place or don't go according to plan.

Naturally, the problem with putting people in boxes (even if you do remember to poke plenty of air holes) is that they don't necessarily fit into just one - though, when questioned on it, the speaker insisted everyone does. There are four of us here in my group, as it happens, and a couple of the others eagerly seized on the notion that, hey, we've got one of each! A Director (my overall boss, whom I'd classify as a Socializer, if I had to pick), a Thinker (my immediate boss - good enough, but she's nowhere near as inflexible or as uncomfortable with shifting situations as the speaker was saying), a Socializer (me) and a Relater (our section admin). I tried explaining that I'm actually very shy, but nobody would believe me.

Ah well, it'll all blow over.

After that we were back on the bus for tours, as well as our group photo. Have you ever organized a group photo of 90 people? I bet you think it can't be done within 20 minutes. Well, I did it. (I guess maybe the photographer helped.) I was down there with the group screaming at everyone to divide up by height and maneuver everyone into position (the PA system on my bus doesn't work, so I've done a lot of screaming the last few days) and damned if we didn't get that shot done and everyone on their way back to the buses in 10 minutes flat.

I rock.

We also have to do a big cheer for our bus (the green bus again!) and last night, after all the touring was done, I actually had everybody up to my room to practice. This didn't look suspicious at all. First I had to run down to the hospitality suite, where one of our sponsors poured me a glass of wine. "Here," he told me, "this is a really nice red, give this a try.

"Oh thank you," I said as my glass was filled, "I have to go take care of something. Excuse me." On my way out I caught Kevin, the photographer, who's on my bus but was taking care of other duties during our tours this afternoon, so he didn't know about our rehearsal plans. "Hey, could you come with me for a bit? I need help with something," I told him, and led him off to my room.

Hotel rooms are not all that big, it turns out, when you get twenty excited, giggling people into them. We practiced our cheer several times, occasionally shushing each other lest someone from one of the other, lesser buses might be next door. They must not hear it yet. They must not know how badly their little blue and yellow butts are going to get kicked later today.

And then my phone rang. General panic ensued, but everyone shushed down into subsided giggling and I answered it calmly. "Hello?"

"Oh, hi, Elizabeth," said an unfamiliar man's voice, "Is Kevin in your room by any chance?"

Uh-oh. "Um," I said. "I don't, um. Who's calling, please?"

It was someone I don't know, an industry person in town for the conference. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and gazed frantically at Kevin. "It's [so-and-so]," I whispered, "what do I do?"

"I know him, I know what he needs," said Kevin, "I'll talk to him." So I handed over the phone.

That's my old reputation over and done with, and a whole new one just starting out. Hopefully I can 'splain everything tomorrow after our big debut.

Although when you get down to it, why should I care? I'm a Socializer!

Day Two: I Told You So

2009-04-21T23:09:00.005-05:00

I can't really talk much about it here, but I can tell you that today I learned that Jim Bowie had a big knife... a big knife. Also I learned that his brother pounded, and pounded, and pounded the steel.

I'll just have to explain it later.

Oh hey, we made it on the local news tonight! They got some footage of my group at the bordello.

Day One: Cautionary

2009-04-20T23:09:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I have just literally fled, I do mean literally, the hospitality suite at the hotel where many of my coworkers and industry contacts are boozing it up. I'm one of the planners, a representative of "authority" - it's my job to order everyone to show up for mandatory breakfast at 7:00 a.m. - and I want to party it up just as bad as anybody else... I think the worst part is that everyone can clearly tell that I was made for partying, not for ordering perfectly innocent coworkers out of their beds at an ungodly hour!

And yet - and this is where, I'm not trying to be too immodest, but this is where my actual superpower comes in - I genuinely understand why we have all the fugly stickly regulations, and am prepared to defend them, sympathetically, until everyone else understands them just as well and follows them voluntarily, no matter how much rum they had tonight.

But first I have to perform a James-Bond-esque escape from the hospitality room, trying desperately not to spill my Sprite, zig-zagging down the corridor, reaching the elevator scarcely ahead of my laughing pursuers, and punching the button for my floor repeatedly until the doors close, I heave a sigh of relief, and find my way back safely to my room. Don't answer the phone!!!

Highlight of the day, earlier: dinner at a lake house and boating on the lake, courtesy of the host CVB, went to hell when the boat ran out of gas in the middle of the lake, stranding a dozen of our attendees. I feel bad for the CVB, who did indeed double-and-triple-check with the boat rental company that they had a full tank. Certainly not the CVB's fault. Nothing trumps rampant incompetence. Nothing. Do you hear me? Write it down! You really might need to remember it later.

Tomorrow I have an exceptionally early morning, and no business being awake this late. So good night, sweet, reader(s) - and tomorrow is another day! I brought running shoes for the hospitality room.

Act Your Age, Not Your Sleep Number

2009-04-19T21:52:00.003-05:00

Spring has come to breathe a promise (or a threat) of the coming summer, and I find myself lying alone in a hotel room in San Angelo, trying to find my personal Sleep Number.

That's going to be the first line when I write my Great American Novel.

It's not right. It's an air mattress. It feels like an air mattress. Once you get it soft enough, it feels like a partially deflated air mattress in a box, and you can't really sit on the edge of it properly. The whole dual adjustable sides thing is wrong, too, because I'm here on business and this bed is MINE, the whole entire thing, not just half of it. Hell, I have TWO beds, that's how much I plan to spread out. And when I take a shower tomorrow, I'm gonna use one towel for my body and a whole nother towel just for my hair.

But I digress. All I'm trying to say here is that I'm not all that impressed with the Sleep Number beds, and I don't see why the Bionic Woman is so gung-ho about the damn things. And I wanted so badly, when I was little, to grow up to be just like her...

It's been a road-intensive weekend; yesterday, Tony, Robbie, and some other friends and I went on a day-touring trip Tony planned. We went to Marble Falls, ate breakfast at the Bluebonnet Cafe, toured Longhorn Cavern, visited the Devil's Waterhole at Inks Lake State Park, popped in for a quick peek at the dam on the dismally low Lake Buh-chanan, then finished the day with dinner at Chili's in Marble Falls, on the patio overlooking the water as the sun set.

Then the group separated and Robbie and I went shopping at Walgreen's. For some odd reason, this is one of my favorite things to do with Robbie - though basking on the rocks by the shores of Inks Lake with him like a couple of sea lions is giving Walgreen's a run for its money. But you can't buy (ahem) shoulder massagers at Inks Lake, or if you could you probably wouldn't want to, not that I would want to purchase such an object anyway, seeing as how I've got a Sleep Number bed here to keep me busy.

This is going to be a long week.

San Angelo Ho!

2009-04-17T19:15:00.003-05:00

Who are you calling a ho?!

Do you know, at my old job, I wasn't really expected to show up on time. I still get quite a bit of slack at the new one. The general rule in workplaces seems to be that, if you really get your job done and you're efficient, proactive, and productive, a few minutes here and there is no big deal. If you're a useless schlub who can't produce your way out of the bathroom, you damn well better be there by 8 o'clock sharp.

Why is this? It doesn't really make sense. If you don't actually do anything, what difference does it make what time you show up to not do it by?

Those are musings for another day. Today's pearl of wisdom is merely this: if you're going to ride your bike to work in the rain, bring a change of clothes. And bring a change of clothes if your usual coffee flask is dirty, and you've been forced to carry a rather less waterproof one in the water-bottle pouch on the side of your backpack as a substitute. Mud splatters all over your oft-reprimanded, protruding upper female parts are unprofessional. So is a stream of coffee all down one side of your shirt and around the back of your leg.

Anyway, conference is next week, and as far as I can tell we're ready; every single tiny niggling detail is squared away, though I still have to figure out a way to plan out the group photo shoot (89 people) so it takes under 25 minutes. One of the things I find exhilarating about my job is that I have to figure out how to do things where, honestly. I have NO idea. It's fun!

Using an elephant gun would probably be quicker... however, it might not be a good idea for me to suggest this.

A former coworker, likewise, has been working on the planning of a different conference I helped with about a year and a half ago. I complained, at the time, of having to sit through planning committee meetings once a week for six months. Never mind that we didn't have to plan offsite trips, timing of tours, catering, meeting venues, audiovisual needs, transportation, sleeping rooms, registration fees, or any of the other things that generally make planning a conference complicated. This year, my former coworker told me, they're hoping to cover a great deal of the subject matter via videoconference.

This is amusing. Before I left, I took a crash course in using our videoconference equipment for this purpose. It turned out that using the videoconference equipment to transmit the image of the green-screen, DOS mainframe application my former division uses to perform most of its functions doesn't work. The videoconference trainer's explanation was that the screen resolution didn't transmit well; mine was that mixing mainframe and videoconference technology, if unchecked, will probably cause the universe to explode.

All well and good, except that our mainframe happens to be housed at the University of San Angelo - where I'll be all next week. So wish me luck!

Balancing Attempts

2009-04-15T21:39:00.003-05:00

In high school, I was co-captain of the Scholars' Bowl team.

Yes. Go on, I know you're impressed. I told you I was hip.

Tonight, a few people I know from work went to a trivia night at a restaurant near my house. I didn't really know what to expect, but what the heck - trivia!

It turns out I must have killed off a few brain cells since high school, because my team suffered an epic loss to - well, to everyone else there, first and foremost a table with a guy who was reading "The Fellowship of the Ring" when I arrived.

The universe is still badly out of whack.

At least I've been rocking hard at work, and that makes up for a lot. Conference in San Angelo is next week, and I am all over that like shit on a fly... I am so good. I feel awesome. Of course, it hasn't actually taken place yet, but I would just like to say that, coming into the final stretch, I feel like the most competent person on earth.

If I still feel this way one week from right now, I done good.

Next Saturday I'm selling beer (NOT painting faces) at Eeyore's - come see me! Ask me about San Angelo. And ask me who the first person besides Oprah ever to appear on the cover of O Magazine was. I knew that one.

Chocolate Bunnies

2009-04-12T22:48:00.004-05:00

Life is too short for holding grudges, for unkindness, for ill-will, for being mean. Life is just too short for - well, life's too short, and then you die.

Jim's sister, two years older than I am, has been diagnosed with a second form of blood cancer, in addition to the leukemia whose recurrence was diagnosed in November. It's not just "leukemia" - there are different types, and Jim's mom mentioned the name, but I don't remember what it was. She was cured a couple of years ago, after receiving a bone marrow transplant from Jim's stem cells. But cancer, like the cat, came back. She's far too weakened from double pneumonia (a little "oops" from her chemotherapy) for them to treat the new problem. It's not likely she has much time.

So Jim's family gathered in Houston for Easter, and I went with Jim and my daughters to see Debby. She was the one who introduced us in the first place. I used to work with her, at Sematech, in the 1990's. Cute girl, outgoing, exubuerant, lots of pretty, curly, dark hair, but she was in a lousy situation: waiting for a lease to expire, she was still living with a guy who had broken up with her, so the juxtaposition of our situation on hers is a little ironic, maybe. Short as it may be, life abounds with odd little coincidences. Jim's family has not been told we have been (to all intents and purposes) separated for years now, though obviously they've noticed I never show up for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or other family gatherings. They were surprised to see me for Easter.

Unmercifully, her brain remains clear and alert, though her physical body has become a liability. She can't speak, because she had a tracheostomy to get her through the pneumonia. Her skin is dry, flaking, blistering. She can barely use her hands: they are weak, and shake uncontrollably. She uses a suction tube frequently to remove bile from her mouth. She's in diapers. There are tubes into her nose, her throat, and her arms. But when Jim bumbles into the room, knocking over the box of surgical masks by the door and blowing into his gloves in a ridiculously futile effort to get them comfortably onto his hands, she laughs.

Her 9-year-old daughter hasn't been told that her mom won't be getting better and coming home this time. Debby asked her next younger sister to break the news. Of course, the little girl knows - people know things. This is one reason it's always better to be honest. She refuses to go to the hospital to visit, and it's not hard to understand.

Visiting is hard. It's hard to act normal, to talk cheerfully in a surgical mask and latex gloves, to someone who looks like a caricature of the someone you once went out clubbing with. But it's stupid to talk about little else besides the amusing fart noises you can make with the gloves. So I talk about the kids playing in mud puddles after the freaky Easter morning rainstorm, or about how once I was forced to sit through Oprah and Oprah brought a puppy on her show and proved herself to be, beyond question, the single most annoying human being on the face of the earth. Occasionally Debby tries to join in the conversation and I can't understand her. Cracking a joke? Asking for her blanket? Needing the nurse? Debby is frustrated.

But goodbye is the awful part. I do understand when Debby mouths, "You can go, you don't have to stay." It's late and we have to drive back to Austin. How horrible to leave her there to the nurses and to the sad little thing her life has become. No one deserves this, no one. Debby was a demanding patient from the very first, before she really got sick, tending to overstate her pain and even - to use her own phrase - "playing the leukemia card" to get her way, and the nurses know this. So now, they take their time answering the frequent summons from her call button, and are a bit brusque when they deal with her. I feel like shaking them.

We say goodbye and she cries, and Katie and I cry though we've been trying really hard to project good cheer. "I love you so much, I love you so much," she is whispering. We tell her we love her, and blow kisses - you can't touch her - and leave, stripping off our gloves and masks, to reenter the normal world outside the hospital doors where the bright afternoon sun is setting, where Debby can't go. Driving back to Austin, I glanced at the speedometer several times to find I was pegging ninety. I get to leave.

Life's too short. But knowing that isn't enough.

Life Imitates Kentucky Fried Movie

2009-04-11T22:19:00.002-05:00

Do you watch local news?

I'm sitting in a Comfort Suites in Houston; and while not completely defenseless - I am armed with a laptop, a copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and - in the event of a particularly dire emergency - a choice between the Yellow Pages or the Gideon Bible - I still managed to pick up a two-minute local TV news brief, with an attractive female news anchor who missed her calling on the silver screen. In the 30's. Acting just ain't what it used to be.

"A neighborhood already wracked by crime was shocked when a man was shot in broad daylight in his car outside his home," she informs us in dire tones; the camera cuts to a statement by a tearful neighbor. "And in other news, in a tragic shooting, two children are dead." She goes on without pausing or altering her tone. "Add drywall to the list of hidden dangers that lurk in your home."

I can't help noticing that this hotel room has a fairly high concentration of drywall. Maybe I better start reading that Gideon Bible after all.

Did Not See This Coming

2009-04-07T20:15:00.001-05:00

So apparently we're actually keeping the kitten.

Who knew?

Allegro, ma with a 40% chance of non troppo

2009-04-03T17:17:00.001-05:00

“And today’s weather should be Beethoven-esque,” enthused the announcer on KMFA this morning, “because it’s going to be absolutely gorgeous!”

I don’t mean to be unfair – he didn’t ask to have my alarm clock set to his station; and honestly, there’s probably not a lot he could be saying at 6 AM that wouldn’t piss me off. Still his statement seemed fairly insipid (and if he improved on it any I didn’t hear, because I hit the snooze button). Beethoven’s gorgeous. Brahms is gorgeous. Prokofiev is gorgeous. But they’re hardly interchangeable.

Much of Beethoven’s music has a dark, troubled beauty, better suited to an impending storm than to a bright, warm spring day. Mozart, on the other hand, brings cheerful breezes and sunshine to mind.

Bach weather would be calm and pleasant, without surprises. A Bartók day would be disjointed and jangling. You’d be on your way to the pool to work on your tan and suddenly get lost in a blizzard.

Pretty much all your Russian composers are extremely windy. Shostakovich also has acid rain.

Philip Glass is a long, monotonous, dull Sunday afternoon with nothing to do, and you’d like it to come to an end, but it does not.

Then you have your really heavy composers. If it’s a Mahler or Bruckner day, you probably want to board up the windows and stay in the basement. Wagner weather takes things further: it uproots mighty trees, razes buildings, disorders the universe, and seduces your wife.

I’d get a job as a radio announcer, but you have to get up too early.

Lay Low

2009-04-01T18:06:00.005-05:00

April Fools' Day is a good day to call in sick. Well, except that of course your boss will totally know you're faking.

The only real drawback to my wonder job is that sometimes I have to deal with members of the (eeeewwwww!) Public. Usually it's just via email, and that's not so bad; but it sucks when the Public gets a hold of my phone number.

The Public is very annoying. If you've told it once, you've told it a thousand times. But does it remember? No! The Public asks the same exact stupid question again and again and again. It's enough to get right up a bureaucrat's nose. Frankly, the Public could stand to learn a thing or two about collective consciousness.

So today, my phone rings, and a soft, hesitant voice says, "Yes, hello, I'd like to get some information about travel?"

My friend Tony does this every so often. "Yes, ma'am," he'll say when I answer the phone, "I need some information on -" "OH SHUT UP, YOU DO NOT!!!!" I'll shout. And very lucky I am, I might add, that every time this has happened, it has indeed been Tony on the other end of the line.

This person did not sound like Tony, but he didn't sound like the Public either. "Um," I said.

He addressed me by name. "You do work with travel information, don't you? I need some help planning a trip to San Angelo."

Oh, I don't think so. "May I ask who this is?"

He burst out laughing, and much to my surprise did not turn out to be a friend of Tony's, put up to the task for his unfamiliar voice, but one of my April conference registrants. That little stinker. See if he gets any snacks on the bus!

So I sent Tony a text to tell him about it. He's at a surveyors' conference with Pinche, a coworker of his I dated for a few months, a little over a year ago. We're on cordial terms - though we don't see each other except when we occasionally end up in joint social settings, and greet each other with a kiss on the cheek and make small talk, you know how it is. "Did I tell you," Tony texted me, "Pinche got engaged?"

Whoa. So Tony sent me a few more details; he met a girl online, and they'd only known each other about two weeks, so it was pretty sudden. I wasn't quite sure how to feel - a little shocked - I guess that sort of thing always has an impact. "Tell him congratulations for me," I texted back. "I hope they will be very happy. He's a good guy."

"And guess what else," my phone lights up to tell me, "April Fool's!"

If I'd just stayed home today, none of this would have happened.

Somebody Else's Problem

2009-03-30T21:00:00.001-05:00

About 4:45 today, I found myself lost in a reverie, watching a steady stream of cars whose lucky owners had the foresight to come in half an hour or more earlier than I did, or to take a short lunch. The day was bright and sunny. My cubicle window overlooks the service road between two of our three buildings on campus. It turns off Riverside next to the Kwik-E-Mart, and leads to the back parking lot of the Statesman, and to the hike-and-bike trail. All day long, not only cars, but joggers and walkers (with and without strollers and/or dogs) and bicyclists stream by underneath my window. It's enough to make a desk-bound girl a little punchy.

Have you ever noticed how some people wear exercise gear that's a little too close to their skin tone? So that, if you don't look carefully, you might get the impression they weren't even WEARING exercise gear?

Just such a one pedaled happily by under my window today, making me smile a little. Until I looked a little more closely. And saw some anatomy. And - "Oh, my, God," I said, "Oh, my God!" Yes, cycling down from the hike-and-bike trail and into the back parking lot* of the building across the service road was a straight-up, ain't-no-denyin', no-two-ways-about-it, buck-nekkid dude.

I watched him pedal away in some bemusement. Is that legal? was one question on my mind. Another was, how far of a head start does he have before it's time for me to leave? Because, you know, I'm fairly busy at work these days. When I bike home, I'm actually kind of tired. I just don't think I'd be able to do justice to a naked man at 5:15 on a Monday afternoon.

Then again, I only really saw him from behind.

I Can't Get No Respect

2009-03-28T20:17:00.005-05:00

My elaborate road-trip plans having fallen through today, due to softball tournaments that did not (despite all the frogs in the known universe) get rained out, late-night drinking binges, parental visits, emergency haircuts, and other reasons not particularly worth going into, transpire (read it again, it actually does make grammatical sense), Tony and his friend Josh took me out to lunch today at Magnolia. I'd already eaten.

You can always find something worth having at Magnolia Cafe, though. This is one of the very first echt-Austin establishments I was taken to, at the tender age of 17, by my then-30-year-old boyfriend, when I was a little freshman newbie to Austin and he was the creature of the world, showing me the ropes of the place. At that time, I remember, Magnolia Cafe had a mural depicting (among other things) Superman with a Hitler mustache. I expect that was meant to be a Nietzsche reference. Whatever it was, it's gone now.

So today I had cottage cheese and a flamingo sandwich (tomatoes, avocadoes, swiss cheese, and alfalfa sprouts on grilled whole wheat bread - I removed the sprouts), and the boys had more substantial fare, and polished off my discarded alfalfa sprouts, to boot. They're big muscle men. Of course.

Then we went to Redbud Island. I've lived in Austin - and adored it with my whole heart, which probably goes without saying - for about 23 years now, minus the year I spent back with my parents in northern Virginia, and the two years I had the insane notion of living in Corpus because it has a beach. I'll tell you what: rotting seaweed, dirty sand, the occasional stinging jellyfish, and zero nightlife make for a lousy beach. Go for the weekend, if you will. Several of us will be down there, getting drunk and possibly less-legally impaired, and painting the town some chic and unexpected color, for my 40th birthday in May. But live there? I can't recommend it.

Redbud Island is really nice. I would have liked to be led to know beforehand that we were going, because it's a beautiful leash-free park with decomposed granite trails, plentiful poison ivy, gorgeous rock-studded river vistas, and joyful, exuberant, incredibly wet dogs, and I was in a skirt and high heels. No matter: the views are incredible and the atmosphere is so relaxed. Tony, Josh and I climbed around for a bit, then settled ourselves on a bench in the tree-dappled sunshine, some twenty feet from the water's edge. A guy was resting at the shore about fifteen feet in front tossing sticks to his slightly oblivious dog, which I don't think ever actually retrieved anything. We chatted in desultory fashion about dogs, animals, turtles (Tony's pet of choice), cats, and things that sneak in through the pet door, such as raccoons and possums.

"Oh, you have to watch out for them," chimed in the guy sitting by the water with his dog, "they can be really vicious!"

We got to talking about parallel parking (finding parking at Redbud involved, I might mention, rather a significant amount of obscenity from Tony, despite his Lenten vows); and Josh - about 10-12 years younger than Tony and me - said that he never had trouble, because his Jetta's side mirrors automatically adjusted to point at the curb when he parallel-parked. Tony and I were slightly outraged. When we were his age, we didn't have amenities like that.

"Did they even have cars when you were my age?" Josh teased me; but before I could wind up for a proper smacking, the guy on the shore turned around. "Oh, they did," he said, "but they were the kind where you had to stick your feet out the bottom and run."

Oh! No! You! Di!N'T!!!!!!

We left the park - me, flowing skirt, high heels and all - and got a latte at Mozart's on Lake Austin. Where this thing happened, about which I am about (are you ready?) to blog.

Tony and Josh and I had coffeehouse drinks, and as I was polishing off my iced latte, enjoying the cool early spring weather, a guy at a neighboring table got up to walk inside, but turned and gave me a brief, but fairly dark, significant and serious Look.

"Oh my God," I said to Tony, as the guy walked away and went inside, "that guy is really cute."

Tony turned and looked. "That guy," he said calmly, "looks an awful lot like (you-know-who, dammit)."

"Oh. Shit," I said, putting my head in my hands, because the guy (who didn't really look all that much like him, but had that certain quality of Somethingness by which we tend to group the people we meet in our heads, thereby figuring out in quick order how to deal with them) was unarguably of that type. He looked a bit like a loner, like the type of guy that people tend to misunderstand: intelligent, capable of great insight and humor, defensive, and (as far as my experience goes), perhaps not entirely sane.

Whatever that means. Like I'm claiming I am.

I thought of Agatha Christie, and Miss Marple, and was talking about this still when our neighbor returned to his seat. "Miss Marple's theory," I was explaining, "was that there are really only a fairly limited number of Types of people in the world; and that therefore, as you become older, and get to meet more and more people - however limited the society you live in - you get to recognize and understand them, and to predict the way that the new people you meet will behave, based on the way the people they remind you of have acted in the past.

"And therefore," I went on - probably within earshot of this incredibly fascinating guy, who on second examination did not look that much at all like the person he reminded me of, "we should go ahead and leave, maybe now."

Which we did. As we walked out I turned back briefly and caught his gaze again, and there was that brief electric shock again. Hello, I thought. I had someone to psychologically torture me, and I seem to be fresh out. How about you?

I need a road trip. NOW.

Reign of Frogs

2009-03-27T17:22:00.002-05:00

There’s a massive winter storm up in the Panhandle today. Huge stretches of I-40 and I-27 have been closed altogether due to ice and snow accumulation and blizzard conditions.

Blizzard conditions. In Texas. In April, almost.

Here in Austin, the morning was heavy and black with thunder and rain. This afternoon it’s bright, sunny, and 81 degrees.

What’s going on here?

Ever since starting at my new job (I say “new,” though my first anniversary was February 25th) I’ve been plagued by a low-performance computer. 504MB of RAM, I got. 504MB!! And ever since I started on I’ve wanted to get ArcGIS software installed, because come on, I work in travel – and it just so happens I know how to make maps. Travel. Maps. Hello?! We have a license, it wouldn’t cost anything. But I couldn’t have it, because Arc requires a minimum 1GB of RAM.

This morning I came in to find a sticky note on my computer from our IT guy. “E – I installed 3 more 512s to your RAM – G”

Naturally, this sprang instantly to mind.

And speaking of LOLZ, two years ago, the day after my now-painfully-estranged friend left our old division for his new job in the building where I also work now, I sent him an alarmed email. “You clearly play a larger role in holding the fabric of reality together than I had realized,” I told him, “because today, Bitching Bubbly Smoking Nonsmoker came over and made friendly chit-chat with me for half an hour.”

She’d never really spoken to me without snarling before.

She got fired the same week I started my new job, and I had no further contact with her. But then, two months ago, my poor little friend and I fell out and stopped speaking, and she turned up and friended me on Facebook...?

Coincidence??

Especially considering that Facebook was the final contributing factor in our falling-out?!?!?

I’m glad my computer is a lot faster now, and I’m glad the day is so pretty. But I wouldn’t mind if the universe would start being a little more normal again.

Say What?

2009-03-26T19:52:00.003-05:00

My boss and I went to a hospitality industry mixer after work. Once more we suffer from our agency's insistence on acting like an irreproachable, holier-than-thou goody-goody: the mixer was a wine-tasting. We are not allowed to drink while representing the agency.

We also can't put our business cards in the jar for the door prizes. We did accept, upon leaving, one small jar each of a local seasoning our host is famous for - I hope it doesn't cost us our jobs!

Alcohol really does help, I find, in social settings; without it, I'm too shy to chat up strangers. My boss and I make the obligatory greetings to our hosts, with whom we are at least slightly acquainted. But they have to make the rounds of the room, and can't stand around talking to us all evening. Mostly, she and I talk to one another.

There was someone else there from our agency tonight, who works in a different area. She came and talked to us for a while. She's making a business trip to our hosts' city next month, and talked about how much she's looking forward to it. "I'm so glad," she said to my boss, "you suggested I sleep with the head of the CVB before going out there - he really has helped me out a lot!"

"Oh, good!" says my boss calmly, somewhat to my surprise, as it doesn't seem at all like the sort of thing she'd suggest. "I thought he'd be a lot of help, so I'm really glad that worked out for you."

And at about that point I realized our coworker had said "speak." My boss had suggested she speak with him. Oooooohhhhhhhhhhhh.

Reality has been badly enough out of whack lately as it is.

Because Robbie and Kevin Said To

2009-03-25T19:35:00.004-05:00

...and because Diane complained that my most recent post was making her want a kitten.

Oh, but she is a darling, sweet little thing (the kitten, that is - not to imply in any way that Diane is anything less than adorable, though I've never tried kissing her nosey, and suspect it would not be that favorably received if I did). Last night I woke up to find her (the kitten) sleeping soundly on my pillow, with her toes wedged up against my nose. I kissed her. She arched, purr-mewed, sighed, and fell back asleep in an even more impossibly adorable pose - taking up even more of my pillow, at that.

Hi, I'm Proto-Crazy-Cat-Lady. I'm almost finished!

But another great thing about the pillow-stealing kitten is that she wakes me up from dreams I really shouldn't be having. Last night I found myself in divorce court - peacefully enough, no problem there - but during a long recess I ended up alone in a waiting room with, with - oh, you know who.

At least in my dream he was willing to speak to me. "Hey!" I said to him, "I'm finally moving forward with my divorce!"

He displayed only polite interest, though, and after a few more minutes said he had to leave to go check his Facebook, and took off.

This isn't what is meant by the term "lucid dreaming," but it probably should be.

Robbie took me out on the town last weekend. We went and watched movies at Tony's. But first, Robbie had some shopping to do, which led to a totally new experience for me.

We went to the mall (you know, that place, with all the stores, where everything costs 800 million dollars and teenagers reach levels of inexcusable density) to buy cologne.

This may be more surreal than it sounds. Department stores have big glass counters, all under lock and key, stocked with every incredibly expensive men's scent you've never heard of, and staffed by young women who are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Audrey Hepburn. Our sales representative, for example, did not know how to pronounce "euphoria." E-phoria, she kept saying. I think that's the sensation you feel immediately following cybersex.

We tested seven or eight different scents. The sales representative seemed less inclined to consider my opinion once she clarified that Robbie and I were not dating, because what do your stupid friends know? Still, we narrowed the choices down to one, Robbie purchased it, and we left to look at jeans. But there weren't any without aesthetically-placed holes in them.

It gets hard to find basic items of clothing, had you noticed? At work, I needed a blouse for our upcoming April conference. All four of us in our office wear the same one - we're the conference coordinators, so it's important that we can be singled out in the crowd, or so I'm told. This year two of us kicked up a fuss and insisted on blouses that don't have to be tucked in, because what could be more unflattering to your figure than chopping it in half?! Hello?!?!

We wanted a basic design: a tailored, button-down shirt, in a few different attractive colors, with a straight hem and three-quarter length sleeves. The four of us went at lunch last week to look. We might as well have gone shopping for emu-feather hats.

Not that this is informative or interesting. I'm only posting because Robbie and Kevin said to. And because Diane doesn't want a kitten. No matter how adorable they are.

Maybe next time I'll post some more pictures.

Practical Cats

2009-03-19T20:02:00.006-05:00

It's no coincidence that "kitten" rhymes with "smitten."

Or "bitten," actually, come to think of it.

But this kitten is very considerate: when she's in feisty mode, she holds back a little with the teeth and claws, so she's more tickly than scratchy. And when she is in non-feisty mode? Ooooh! Ooooooooooohhhhhhh!

Actually, I don't know when I've ever seen a young kitten sleep quite so soundly. She definitely prefers to be on or near you; last night I woke up several times to find her settling comfortably down on my face and neck. She stretches in her sleep, gives a subdued little "mew" and purrs for a few moments when you kiss her little nosey.

For a fairly nondescript-looking brown-and-gray kitty with only a stumpy tail, she really is just the most adorable tiny little thing I ever did see. And look! She even does your taxes!

Religious Leanings

2009-03-15T19:33:00.005-05:00

Robbie gave up alcohol for Lent, which means that although we have every bit as much fun running around being crazy as we ever did, we feel a lot less shitty the next morning.

Last night we stopped by Tony's house. "What'd you give up?" Robbie asked him.

(Why do I know so many Catholics?)

"I gave up negativity," said Tony, and again it's a good thing we weren't having wine or some would have come out my nose. Not because Tony has been particularly negative - not at all. I just instantly pictured Easter service as being a great deal more interesting. Perhaps, when it comes time to give the peace to your neighbor, instead of shaking hands or hugging, he'll flip them off or punch them.

Then again, who hasn't wanted to do that?! Hug me, willya... I don't even know you, you damn Jesus freak! I'm just here to keep the in-laws quiet. It may also be worth mentioning at this point that a few years ago, when I first knew Tony, he suffered a badly broken leg from tripping while trying to outrun some little kids at an Easter-egg hunt.

I guess I gave up 3-martini breaks for Lent, although the timing wasn't exact, and I know I won't get them back at Easter. This is one of the disadvantages of not being religious, although getting to sleep in on Sundays outweighs almost every other drawback I can think of.

My cube neighbor's father passed away week before last. This coworker has been such a kind friend to me. I haven't talked to anyone about what, specifically, was going on, but it's obvious enough I've been very down; and he's been so sweet and sympathetic, not asking any questions, but has lent me everything from a book of funny animal pictures to money (when I mentioned in passing that I'd like to go out to dinner with the field office coworker who was in town for training, but that it was the end of the month - state employees get paid once a month, on the first - and believe me, that's a comment I won't be letting drop again!) He just got back late last week, and I was very glad to see him. But he hugged me, and the first thing he said to me was, "How've you been? Have you got your smile back?" I mean, my gosh, his father. I felt awful.

But we were talking, later, and I asked how he was doing, and he said that he was fine as long as he kept remembering how his dad is in a better place now. "It frustrated him so much, towards the end," he said, "being sick, being immobile, not being able to do the things he used to do. I'm fine as long as I remember that he's able to do those things again now. He's better off, now, he's happier."

This is real comfort. When you aren't religious, you don't have that. Death is nothing but loss - relief, perhaps, if there's been suffering; but really the only positive thing about it is an end to pain. In the case of tragic, senseless, untimely death, you've really got nothing. How do you face the losses that rip your heart out, or the certainty that there will be more losses like them in your future, or your own eventual horrifying mortality, without faith? But you can't base your beliefs on the way you want the world to be, either. What do you do?

So far the best answer I've come up with is not to think about it as much as possible, and let's put that down as reason #126,974 not to give up alcohol for Lent. As for Easter eggs, you're on your own. Watch out for Tony!

oh noes!

2009-03-13T17:34:00.004-05:00

Just look what the kid dragged in:

Katie swears she is only kittensitting for spring break, but I'm pretty sure I've heard that one before. Fortunately I'm very hardhearted and not at all fond of cats. So you can't pull anything over on me.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a parent, I've found, is to introduce your seven-year-old to icanhascheezburger.com. Not because it's in any way inappropriate for children - well, maybe, sometimes - but because your child will never let you near the computer again, and will drive you up the wall with her incessant LOLing. Also, she'll insist on reading the captions to you. After five or six of them your brain starts leaking out through your ears.

Today at work I had to send an email out to all our field offices. Normally, our agency is not allowed to accept any gifts, which is unfortunate as the travel industry is prone to bringing us cupcakes, cookies, and other forbidden delights without notice; but there are a few exceptions; our annual conference coming up is one of them. One of our sponsors is giving out something perishable, so they intend to send out their attendee gifts ahead of time instead of handing them out at the conference.

"This is just a heads-up that you'll be receiving something from our sponsor," I wrote. "I just wanted to let you know that it's been reviewed to ensure that it meets our policy and you are allowed to accept it."

"You can has!" I wanted to write (but didn't). "But you can not has cupcake!"

I mentioned the incident ruefully to one of my coworkers. "More road trips," he told me sternly. "Less internet."

This kitten's name is Lola (rhymes with cherry cola), and she's one of five or six small, adorable creatures Katie's friend brought to school today to find only-temporary, just-for-spring-break homes for. Right. Sure. It's embarrassing, what people will resort to, isn't it?

Good thing I'll never fall for it. Ooh! Oooooh! She just yawned! Ooooooooohhhhhh!

I Just Want to be Left Alone

2009-03-11T19:11:00.004-05:00

Well, geesh. So much for spring.

One of the advantages of cold, gray, drizzly days is that I get the hike-and-bike trail largely to myself; and one of the disadvantages of the hike-and-bike trail is that it makes an excellent backdrop for local-news lifestyle stories, student movies, and TV commercials. Fine. Great if you happen to be involved in producing such a venture, as you have a beautiful, free resource at your fingertips. Not so great if you're a miserable peon like myself, who can't even go for a brisk lunch hour stroll without occasionally getting filmed - and not at your prettiest either. Who wants to appear on camera sweaty, flushed, and in gym clothes? After the fourth or fifth time this happens, you start to understand exactly where Sean Penn is coming from.

Today a good-sized crew was filming a commercial under the South First bridge, so there was a motorcycle cop stationed in the road to keep people from driving onto the set, and a cute guy deflecting approaching pedestrians.

I cooperated and stepped aside to wait, uncomplainingly,* though I really don't see how these people get off just co-opting the whole trail at will. The jogger twenty seconds behind me was much less tolerant. "How am I supposed to run then? Huh?!" he demanded, not unreasonably I thought, then jogged angrily off towards the street. Fortunately the take really was just as quick as the cute guy said it would be, so I was back on my way within two minutes. The jogger overtook me several seconds later, still looking pissed off. Bet he was straight. I should have run after him.

Nah, I'm just kidding: no offense to any joggers who happen to be reading. I just don't believe habitual runners are entirely normal.**

For me at least, excessive physical activity is the sign of a deeply distressed mind: I can't sit still for long, but have to get up and move, walk about, pace, like a caged animal. Misery makes a great weight-loss aid. (Unless you're a comfort eater.) I'm not talking about a dull, throbbing ache, or a sense of general purposelessness, or angst or mere ennui: no, but I've always found that sharp emotional anguish does wonders for my figure.

But it doesn't last... mercifully, I suppose. Before you even know it, and long before you would have thought it was possible, the world begins to look normal again and you go most of a week simply forgetting to be unhappy. First you have to go through all the Official Stages™ of Grief: Denial, Anger, Sorrow, and finally Acceptance*** - which would be perfectly fine, if you didn't go through them in sequence five or six times during a single day, which tends to give you whiplash. But gosh darnit if life doesn't just go right along and next thing you know you can't remember quite what you were so upset about. I don't know about you, but it makes me feel a bit like Peggy Lee.

Or maybe Sean Penn. I think I'll maybe take a kickboxing class this fall. That way I'll be better equipped to deal with the film crews and photographers on the hike-and-bike.

--------
*Did I mention there was a cute guy?
**srsly. We're talking compared to me, here. You cannot possibly be offended.
***Your mileage may vary

Welcome to Life!

2009-03-09T19:55:00.008-05:00

Katie and I are both PMSing right now. I thought I'd go ahead and mention that, just in case you wanted to postpone your visit.

Yesterday Robbie allowed me to come rushing up to Georgetown and sweep him away for a random road trip: what fun! There's nothing else quite so therapeutic as just up and leaving. Have you noticed? I think that's why I love road trips so much. Symbolically, everything that bothers me is here at home, or at work, quarantined within about a 5-square-mile area. So it makes me feel a lot better to get in the car, grab a friend, and go to Lampasas. You heard me.

On the other hand, spring seems rather unequivocally to have sprung, and this also is irresistibly therapeutic. How can you be sad about anything when the trees all have tiny, pale green buds? Or when you've spotted a lone bluebonnet in a neighbor's yard? (Bad year for wildflowers this year, I'll tell you that right now.)

It's impossible not to be cheerful, even when last night led into the most difficult morning of the year (at least for those of us who are forced to observe daylight savings time) by keeping me awake, restive, fretful, tossing and turning, and finally allowing me to drop off two hours before six only to send me dreams of being sick, pregnant, bedridden, and attacked by tribble Muppet vampires with very sharp pointy teeth that crunched down into my ribs with much more realism than I thought strictly necessary, then waking me up in a cold sweat fifteen minutes before my alarm went off. And I had to pee.

I should have just called in sick. My boss did. On the other hand, I got a lot done today, and ended up feeling perfectly fine, not at all as if both arms had been ripped off and used to beat me about the head, which is more in line with the way I've been feeling lately. I can't understand these mood swings. I really need professional help - but really, only about two out of every three days, and falling.

And speaking of needing professional help, the Bubbly Bitching Smoking Nonsmoker found and friended me on Facebook (thanks, Robbie!), forcing me to take down the link to my blog in a big hurry. Her latest status update is grousing about how many status updates everyone else is posting, and in fact stopped me from posting a particularly witty remark about how nice it would be if Slappy White would quit knocking all the shit down off my dresser. I may just delete her.

Alas! if we could actually delete people in real life. Well, if only I could, anyway. It's one of those things that only works out if I'm the only one that gets to do it.

So never mind. Here's Robbie and me yesterday - and Lord bless us if we aren't only here on this earth by the grace of B.B.S.N.S. and all the times she never ran us over when we crossed the street in front of her on our way back from Dominican Joe. How can I be bitter?