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 |  Where am I going, and why am I in this handbasket? |
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Fair Warning: I've upped the rating on this blog. It is now set at GC. |
| We recently had our annual training on ethics. Usually it's a snore-fest, but at least this year’s trainer was into interactive experiences. So, I was partnered with a friend of mine and we were each supposed to identify five words that represent the values that are most important to us. To do this, we were suppose to start by identifying the characteristics we value most in ourselves and then we were to help our partner determine what values are represented by those characteristics. Well, my partner and I had other things to discuss/gossip about and somehow we never go around to the values thing. I got to thinking about it last night though (perhaps because there were all kinds of "value words" being thrown around amid the speechifying) and wondering what words I would have arrived at if I'd done the activity. Perhaps it is my negativity, but I think it would be easier to get at the values by looking at conflict. What are the things other people do that seem to offend my values? Or, as Thea  recently asked her blog entry "Invalid Entry"  , "What is your hottest button?" Right away I know my number one pet peeve. Failure to take responsibility for your actions or admit mistakes. There is a personal value there that is deeply offended by this, but what name do I give it? Hmmm... Fortunately the internet provides a starting point. In addition to seven deadly sins, it seems there are also seven heavenly virtues. They are faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence. Someone will have to explain to me the difference between virtues and values, but I'm going to use this as a starting point. Now, I grew up in a household pretty much devoid of religious training. We were not church goers. Sundays were for football, not God. So... faith? My knee jerk reaction is no. I am naturally curious and questioning. I accept very little on faith alone. So I'm not sure this fits my top 5 values. I'm not giving this a definite no yet because underneath the religious overtones and my disinclination toward blind faith is a deeper level of trust in the grand design of things. I have faith that the rain will come and restore us after the drought. That our hearts will heal after a loss. That things will work out for those who continue to strive... even if they don't work out as we had hoped. And that, I think sounds a lot like faith. Hope... well... I guess that seems kind of lumped into faith. Charity... what a loaded word! It has both negative and positive connotations. I'll stick to the positives of kindness and generosity. Fortitude... Highly valued in my book and a great word to encompass a lot of characteristics I greatly admire in others. Courage, perseverance, resilience... Yeah, I think fortitude is going to make it into the top 5. Justice... Okay yeah this is definitely in. Being the believer that I am in karma or kismet or whatever you want to call it... I believe (one might even say I have faith) in ill will coming back to bite us in the ass - eventually. Temperance... Although a good thing, isn't going to make my top 5. I think of it mostly in terms of alcohol, but I know there is a larger ideal of moderation. Still, it isn't going to make my list. We need people who push the envelope because many of them push on to greatness. Prudence... Another dated word that has acquired negative connotations. I looked this one up in the dictionary to see if it had overtones that I was unaware of. As expected it means cautious and discrete, but there was also a bit about looking after one's self interests. I think I will shelve this one. So what are my five "value words?" Compassion Creativity Fidelity Fortitude Justice Runner ups include love, enterprise, integrity, respect, and humility Who knew? I certainly wouldn't have come up with that list yesterday while working with a partner, but I think it says a lot. I'd just never thought about it before. Try it yourself... you might be surprised. |
| In a fit of silliness on a cold December day, it was decided that we'd all benefit from budget gnomes to help prepare and calculate individual budgets. Budgets and math are vexing to people in human services. People don't enter the field of human services because they are good with numbers. So gnomes seemed like a good idea at the time. The gnome thing stuck and we are all about the gnomes now. We have little gnomes in our offices living in post-it note forests. We have re-done our organizational chart to include the gnome brigade, and our written procedures are starting to include statements like "and then the gnomes do something magical and reconcile all our cost reports." We were told that in the very scary financial reality we will enter on July 1, there will be "buckets of service units" that we will possibly be able to access for our most dire emergencies. Suddenly we're all having a mental image of gnomes with buckets gathering service units from the forest floor. Later they told us there wouldn't be any buckets, and whoever said otherwise was probably on crack - buckets of crack. We're going to let the gnomes keep their buckets though as they seem to like them. We've also noticed fewer gnome "accidents" since instituting the buckets. Also, we like saying "bucket" a lot. Many weeks into the great gnome bail-out (the buckets are handy for bailing too), Colleen walked into my office in great distress. She had just opened and read her email, (Email is bad, and no good can possibly come of it. That is why I've delegated all of mine to the email gnome.) She was in obvious distress and vented to me and E over the latest news about how the powers that be plan to fuck with us. (There is a movement afoot to privatize case management, and they are pursuing the agenda through ridiculous, and unfunded mandates on counties.) Colleen concluded on a big sigh and threw her hands up in the air in disgust and said "I don't know what more they want from us. It's as if they've completely severed their connection with reality." "Dude!" E countered, "you've got gnomes doing your budgets!"  In other news . . . We have a new president. At my daughter's school, they celebrated by giving all the kids a special treat at lunch - fudge pops. I'm pretty sure they didn't mean it to be funny, but it kind of reminded me of the PTA assembly when they had the 1st graders dress up as endangered species and then pretended to shoot them all dead. |
| The other day, Bonnie asked me what I’ve been writing. Since she is the only one who ever asks me this question, I started to speed talk my way through everything I’ve written . . . or read about writing . . . or thought about writing in the past month. I tried to explain to her about the six-word stories, and how someone had published a book of six-word stories about love and heartbreak. I shared my six-word stories, but Bonnie was really more interested in the way the book had come together – how it was basically born from a blog. “Is that something you could ever do with your blog?” “No. First off, I don’t get enough traffic and also because my blog is random. There isn’t a point or focus to it.” My blog is like my dreams. It is a place to dump the garbage of the day and try to make some sense of it. “I have an idea for a book called Advice to my Younger-Self. I think it would be cool to get people to write about what advice they’d give their younger-self if they could.” I had to laugh. Bonnie’s daughter’s are 17 and 19, so she thinks about this topic a lot and knows exactly how advice resistant “younger-selves” can be. But, since I will write nearly anything Bonnie asks, and since one of my six word stories alluded to a piece of advice my younger-self may have benefited from, I decided to write this bit of advice. Dear Younger-Self, My advice can be summed up in six words: Inflammable doesn’t mean what you think. I sympathize with your ignorance because it was once my own, and let’s face it, this is not intuitive. I mean, something that is indestructible cannot be destroyed. Something that inedible cannot be eaten. Something that is invincible cannot be vinced. Okay, maybe that last one isn’t such a great example, but there IS a pattern there, and a presumption about what the prefix “in” means. Do not make this presumption. Seriously, I’d tell you to look up the meaning, but I know you won’t bother to go and find a dictionary. In the future we can look these things up “on-line,” so I’ll do that bit of work for you. You’re welcome. in•flam•ma•ble (ĭn-flām'ə-bəl) adj. 1. Easily ignited and capable of burning rapidly; flammable. 2. Quickly or easily aroused to strong emotion; excitable. [Middle English, liable to inflammation, from Medieval Latin īnflammābilis, from Latin īnflammāre, to inflame; see inflame.] in•flam'ma•bil'i•ty n., in•flam'ma•ble n., in•flam'ma•bly adv. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. So, you see how that works. Inflammable actually means FLAMMABLE and that pretty much makes this the most fucked-up pair of synonyms ever, but trusts me, it ain’t worth losing an eyebrow over. And, while we're on the subject, Jackass, you might want to educate yourself on the difference between flame-retardant, and fire-proof. OR you could just listen to your mother and stop playing with matches all together. The good news is that if you don’t take my advice, you will live to regret it. Sincerely, Your Future-Self Now, what advice would you give to your younger self? Can you sum it up in six-words?  |
| I was up way too late last night to be up with the sun this morning. I have this strange nagging anxiety though, like an ominous foreshadowing. I'm just waiting for something bad to happen so I can say "I had a feeling about that." Of course, now if nothing bad happens, my powers of premonition will be revealed as a sham, but I'm pretty confident that somewhere out there, something bad is going to happen today and I'm remaining vigilant. Apparently it is time to upgrade the servers at work. There have been a lot of issues, but since we are quasi-governmental we must first document the inadequacy, we must gather user data in a spreadsheet to identify the performance issues. Why do the subjects of inadequacy and performance issues make everyone think about sex? Or maybe that's just my job. So like the mature adults we were, we dissected the spreadsheet for laughs. "Did you experience a delayed response time (5 seconds or more)? If so, how long was the response time?" "Describe your activities immediately before the performance problem occurred." Instinctively I scrolled up to check the rating on the spreadsheet, but it didn't have one. I believe my friend Bonnie said it best . . . "Speed wouldn't be the issue if the damn thing would stay up. All day long, whenever I see it's up, I hop on and just hope it'll stay up long enough for me to finish. Most the time it doesn't and that gets very frustrating." |
| Tony jetted off to Indiana this morning. I was thinking it was Illinois, but it turns out I just had Illinois on my brain because of the news. Tony really hadn't volunteered much information either so I remained oblivious. However, after yesterdays air disaster (and let me tell you, if I am ever to be in an air disaster, I want it to be just like that one - except maybe in July when the river is not so cold) I thought I should probably ask what airline he was flying, his destination, and his connecting flights. So Tony is gone, and will be back late tomorrow night. The kids had a 2 hour delay this morning due to "dangerously cold" weather, so instead of being at a meeting in Scranton like I was expected to be, I'm sitting here updating my blog until it's time to put the boy on the bus. Maybe I'll be one of those Moms who drives 6 feet up the road so the kid can wait in a nice warm car instead of standing in the cold and snow. I know all those emissions are bad for the environment and all, but at the moment I'm kind of rooting for global warming. My friend who was supposed to go with me to the meeting in Scranton was NOT happy with me. She is stuck going all by her lonesome now, and I'll be getting guilt-tripped about that for months to come. I felt compelled to point out that she has inconvenienced me in the past too. She was the one who went into labor on the eve of her surprise baby shower and ruined the whole party. Good thing neither of us holds grudges. I guess that's about it, but if you want to see why I never got around to blogging yesterday, go check out this website. http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/ It helps you build cute, but very basic comic strips. I really wanted to make one, but I my brain froze up and refused to render anything that looked even remotely witty or clever when typed into a word bubble. Okay, time to brave the sub-arctic temps and take the boy out to the bus stop. I hope you all have a warm and cozy day. |
| I've been seeing a lot about six-word stories lately. I was reading a bunch of them on a website I stumbled upon the other day, and today as I was flipping through a magazine and saw a blurb about a new book call Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak. I thought I'd try to write my own six-word story, but it isn't as easy as it might seem at first glance - at least, not for me. Haven't opened the rat poison . . . yet. Became immortal. Fell into bottomless pit. We finally uncovered the odor's source. 'Inflammable' didn't mean what I thought. And for Debi Wharton  . . . Spermicide makes balloons taste surprisingly foul. |
| "The early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese." ~Steven Wright I've had several false starts on this entry, and I can't seem to pull my thoughts together so I'm going to stop trying, and just let this entry be a stream of consciousness sort of thing. { stream } On Sunday, I talked about Tony, and I've been feeling a little guilty about the entry. Tony is infinitely reasonable. Recently, he and my daughter have had somewhat of a rift. I was hearing from him that every time he attempted to talk to her he got a lot of eye rolling attitude. Meanwhile, she was complaining to me that he never talks to her without lecturing her. After hearing it from both sides for awhile, I sat Tony down and told him that he needed to step up. Since then, he has backed off the lectures, and their relationship is about as good as you can expect from a thirteen year old and her father. My point is that I can and do talk to him about things, and tell him when we need something different from him. The last time I went to the grocery store, I crossed all vague items off the list before I went into the store, and only bought the items that were specifically listed. When I got home I explained that since I am not a mind reader I'd crossed off all the items that had "mind reading" as a prerequisite. He explained that he would never do it that way. He would "bull his way through," and take his best guess. If he got the wrong thing, so be it, but he wouldn't come home empty handed for fear of making a mistake. This is a good analogy for the way he and I approach things in life, and I am trying to explore that in a positive sort of way because both approaches certainly offer strengths when applied to different problems, and I do believe that our differences are part of what keeps our relationship interesting. My approach to things is tentative and thoughtful. Avoid acting until you've played through the possible scenarios. Keep the options open as long as possible. Hedge your bets. Plan ahead, and remain flexible enough to change directions if needed. Tony approaches things head on. Make a decision. Choose a course of action and stick to your guns. He gets annoyed with my indecision, my flightiness, and my need to point out everything that might go wrong. I get annoyed with his stubborn, inflexibility, and his short-sighted optimism. In the way of relationships, this fundamental difference is incredibly far reaching. He pushes me into a corner because I let him . I acquiesce because he has vision and purpose and knows what he wants to do, and most days I can't even figure out what to make for dinner. So there it is. In a simplified sort of way. And yet I know that if I were to develop a plan and work up some shred of ambition, I could push myself out of the corner. If I told him specifically what I wanted from him, he would make concessions. When I was doing NaNo in 2007, and I had word count goals to meet, he did not have a problem with getting the kids out of the house to allow me time to write. He just needs to see it as part of a plan with an end goal in sight. So I need to figure out the following: 1. What do I want to do? 2. How am I going to do it? 3. What do I need from him to make it happen? I tried it this weekend. I told him on Saturday "These are the things that need to happen this weekend, and in order to get everything done, this is what I will need from you." It worked very well. Alright, enough of that. {/ stream} I remember my mother used to tell me that she never worried that my father might cheat on her. She said "he won't even dance with another woman because he's afraid she wouldn't know his moves." I like that. I like being interconnected with a person I love and care about even if he can be infuriating at times. Thanks to all of you who took the time to offer advice and support the other day. "If you've never wanted to kill your mate, you've never been in love. If you've never held a box of rat poison in your hand and stared at it for a good long while, you've never been in love. ~Chris Rock |
| In the local paper, there was a story about a fugitive apprehension. The fugitive was wanted for crimes in New Jersey, and was hanging out in a local hotel. Somehow he managed to accidentally call 9-1-1. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was when he somehow failed to disconnect. Mistake number three was his choice of TV shows. The 9-1-1 operatator heard "acts of violence" being committed, and responded accordingly. Police were notified, and they arrived loaded for bear. What they found was a fugitive watching The Sopranos, and trying to figure out how to get an outside line so he could order a pizza. He is in police custody and will be extradited back to New Jersey to face charges (as if being sent back to Jersey isn't punishment enough ) Now, don't you feel safer knowing that this guy is behind bars? |
| I was watching a program called growing up Sitka Deer. It was about an Animal Rehab in Alaska, and their efforts to save and raise a new born Sitka Deer after the mother is killed by a bear. After a couple days of being cared for indoors, they take the little fawn outdoors for her first outing. As the sweet spotted creature steps nervously out of the carrier and begins to explore the grass, a series of adds pop up in the lower right hand corner of the screen advertising "Crocodile Feeding Frenzy," "Lion Feeding Frenzy," and finally, "Bear Feeding Frenzy." Insensitive Bastards! And speaking of insensitive bastards, my husband has been promoted. Not at his day job. No. He has been promoted up within his martial arts organization. He is now the regional coordinator for the Northeast which means he is responsible for the instructors seminars. Next weekend he will be going to Illinois to teach a seminar. I, of course, found this out yesterday. I tried once again to explain to him that I, unlike him, work 5 days per week (except in December), and my weekends are already hectic enough. Since all of the instructor's seminars are held on the weekends, it seriously cuts in to my time. He's been noticeably vague on the subject of how much he will be compensated for his time. He has also been vague about how often he will be gone, and I have absolutely no reason to trust that he will put his family ahead of his own ambitions. That is a sad statement to make, but history has a way of repeating itself. He has this vision of the two of us being able to travel together to all these different places, but those visions do not take into account my job, two kids, and a dog who needs twice daily insulin injections, and is whining at me as I type this because he needs to go outside. I'll be back in a moment . . . Okay, I've said a few times that I don't have any old friends. It was true up until a few months ago. I'd lost touch with everyone I'd known in High School and College. Well, I reconnected with some people on Facebook (though most of them were never really "friends" to begin with) and then last week I got an email from my best friend from college. I met Margaret my freshman year, and we lived in the same dorm for two years. We were never roommates though, and that is probably why we stayed friends. Well, I haven't seen her since 2000, and haven't talked to her in ages, but she got in touch to tell me that she is getting married in March, and would like me to come to the wedding out in Colorado. Margaret lives in the same town as Tony's sister, so when he saw the invitation his mind immediately clicked to how much he'd like to go visit his sister. Well now, who the hell invited him? It isn't about him, or his sister, damn it! He takes off and leaves me at home with the kids all the time, and would it really be asking so much for me to go away for a weekend and leave him home to take care of the children? So there ya go. I'm feeling like quite the intolerant bitch. It's all a bit irrational especially since I wasn't planning to go to the wedding at all. I'm still not . . . especially after pricing air fare. Hope all of you are enjoying a lovely weekend. We had 6-10" of snow yesterday and it is still early enough in the season that I can admire how lovely it is. I don't like the inconvenience of the snow or the snow removal, but I enjoy the beauty . . . to a point. |
| My son has abducted the Baby Jesus. I think that is probably one of the odder sentences I've ever typed, but that doesn't make it any less true. Zack is having a tough time right now. He doesn't handle change well, and between going back to school, and then having a snow day, and a snow delay before getting back into the routine, he is stressed out. I didn't realize how stressed out he really was. I was looking at yesterday's snow day as an opportunity to put away the Christmas decorations. Zack was not okay with this. He started with hysterical, heartbreaking sobs that quickly had me promising not to take down the tree. I started packing away other decorations though. I took down the garland and mistletoe, and put away candles and stockings. In the midst of it all, Zack started squirreling away decorations that he could not bear to see boxed up. I noticed the Baby Jesus was missing from the little Nativity set. He tells me Baby Jesus will stay in a safe, undisclosed location until further notice. So according to Zack, He saved Jesus. How's that for a change of pace? In other news, we have a new employee at work. I did a double-take when I got to work today. With the exception of the Annual Volunteer Firemen's Carnival, there aren't a lot of occasions for me to refer to a person's wardrobe choices as a "get-up." The lady would have fit in well at Kim Ashby 's Wild Ass Shirt Party if the rest of the guests hadn't wussed out. Anyway, there was something naggingly familiar about the woman. I couldn't figure out why until this afternoon when it suddenly hit me. She is a dead ringer for Mrs. Roper from Three's Company. Also at work today . . . we brainstormed an idea for a new business. C: Do people really make a trip to the store just for diapers? R: I do when I'm desperate. Me: They should have a drive-up window for that. Like the drive up pharmacy window. C: That's a really cool idea. Like a drive thru diaper service. So that was our idea. A drive thru diaper service. Now, if we can just figure out how to get the babies into the pneumatic tube. |
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