Wednesday, October 31, 2007

What I learned today at My Meeting

· In a room of just about 30 men there were 7 women
· White socks with black shoes and black pants – highly fashionable amongst engineers
· Have to check the back of our hair for the hoc-a-lugie staplah man in much need of mucinex
· Alternative medicines – does that include caffine pills?
· The man behind the curtain – the Great Oz conducted the meeting
· The call it ‘wellness’ meaning “we want you to be healthy”, in other words there are fat people in this room that need to lose weight!
· Sitting in the back of the room makes you focus on the backs of people’s heads and notice their bald spots and thinning hair
· Sage green was the popular shirt color today for men
· How are birth control pills considered maintenance drugs? We’re not maintaining anything other than not dropping eggs!
· Basically a healthy employee is a safe employee – if you are fat you are clumsy.
· Key words: Dr. Zing Zong and ‘launching point’
· There is never enough food!

Other noteworthy points by attendees:
· You must add that same sex marriages or marriages that have an affidavit are considered domestic partners however what we consider as ”normal” marriages they cant. I was shocked that he even stated the word “normal”
· The word “y’all” was used heavily

Butterflies?

What are butterflies in your stomach? Why do people say that? If anything ‘butterflies’ should mean that you can’t eat anything, that you can get sick to your stomach over severe anxiety from anticipating something happening or something that is planned, you know, like a first date, a blind date, a date-date, or seeing someone for the first time from ages ago, going on an interview, whatever. Gosh, sometimes I’m even nervous to make a phone call. But I can see how shortening it to just ‘butterflies in stomach’ fits. I still get ‘butterflies’ but its different than that, its from excitement of actually getting ready to go out somewhere, putting on that little black dress to impress. Taking the time to look good takes time, I don’t wake up looking like this – LOL and I definitely save my pheromone sprays for the weekend. And you get butterflies too, but you won’t share that with the rest of us who all get nervous and anxious over practically nothing and anything. I have to admit, I like the ‘butterflies’, it’s a short lived adrenaline rush for me, at least the first couple minutes until I finally settle down. And again, its 11:11 am and I’m writing as usual. It must be this time of day that is a trigger. A trigger to share a little piece of me with you guys, my audience and I have no idea who is listening. Today I don’t have butterflies just yet, the day is almost half way over and I don’t anticipate anything anxiety related happening later…but you never know.

Performing Exorcisms

We all have favorite songs, songs we love to hear, songs we haven’t heard in a long time that we forgot about. Songs that we play for our moods, to put us in a mood or not, or get us out of a mood. Its just music with lyrics, it means nothing right? Wrong….”there’s always something there to remind me” and if I can associate anything it would be a song to a person, place, scenario, movie, time in my life, etc. Aside from past ghosts that continually haunt me in song, the ex taxi driver boyfriend that 2 certain songs remind me of him and I can’t listen to them anymore, I have to vanquish the present demons that I have heard lately. Listening to a song in a different context whereas before I had loved the song now makes me think of something else entirely – and that is not good. Amazing how easily the symbolism of a song can change in a snap at least for me. If I hear Air Supply’s “Making Love Outta Nothing At All” I revert back to the summer of 1993, down the shore, a cassette tape, and my ‘daisy dukes’. Now if you ‘sing me a song you’re the piano man’, it better give me a good memory and not spoil how I already feel about the song, because once its spoiled I have to go thru an exorcism and get back its true meaning, create a new one or hope that someone else gives me new meaning to the song. I go thru this phase of lighting candles in complete darkness and chanting to the higher gods hoping that maybe Curt Cobain hears me and that Chuck Berry’s ghost comes to visit and does a rendition of “My Ding-a-ling”. Well, that’s a little far-fetched but it’s a cool thought.

In all seriousness, I relate songs to people differently now, and although GNR’s “Patience” reminds me of 1989, drawings of roses, the acoustic version sung by some female is a memory of a dark lounge, a glass of wine and my brown leather boots.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Family Ties

I have this thing with family and how they should be when you are in a relationship – which generally speaking is seen but not heard. My family is great, we may not speak to each other every day but we have an equal respect of personal life and privacy. For example, my Mom doesn’t call me every time she has a make-up issue, or something of a not so-emergency context. She waits, asks my step dad or figures it out for herself. She doesn’t load on the guilt trip either. Maybe its how I was brought up, maybe its just my family and how understanding, realistic, and modern we are.

What I’m getting at is this…when you are in a relationship (that means there’s 2 of you), your significant other/husband/wife is first..then your family. Not your family then your SO/H/W. So for instance, your dad has a computer problem so he picks up the phone to call you because you are more techy savy than he, but this doesn’t happen once a month, it happens once a week, twice a week, and you continually drop everything to go to his rescue. In a perfect world, dad should have bought into the helpdesk feature when buying the computer or signed on with the Geek Squad, knowing that you have a life and can’t jump thru hoops every time there’s a semi disaster. There’s even schools locally that offer adult ‘computers for dummies’ courses that are pretty cheap. We’ve lived without computers before, we can sure as hell do it again. I think some of us are pretty self sufficient, we can put up a shelf, shovel snow, clean a sink drain, pull nails out of the wall, but if you are married/attached, who do you ask for help? Do you call your Mom or Dad or do you call your husband/significant other? I know I’d call on my H/SO first before anything else, even after I attempted it myself. I wouldn’t call family unless I really needed to and by then it wouldn’t be an emergency anymore, I could survive without it because its not the end of the world.

I find it amazing how many people jump thru hoops for their family when in turn their family won’t do the same for them. I understand the concept of ‘family’ but if you scratch their back, they should scratch yours, its not a one way blood line. Anyway, when you visit your parents, do you just walk right in? Do you just show up? Or do you respect their life and give them some notice or at least a phone call…because in the real world, you never know what you could be walking in on and they should do the same. I was brought up to always call first, not to just ‘stop in’ just because I was in the area or happened to be driving by. And for holidays are you told where to go? Or do you make your own itinerary? I know if it was up to me, I’d have all my friends over on Thanksgiving and go on vacation for Xmas, but so far that hasn’t happened yet. But I do decide where I’m going for the holidays and if they can’t accept where I’ve decided to go, then its too bad. To me holidays are just another day for dinner and traveling anyway, another blog I have yet to write.

I’m no expert, and definitely not a psychiatrist, but I’m also not pulling this out of the sky. If you don’t put your SO/H/W first, there could be major underlying problems because the family will never get the hint and they will continue to manipulate you and never respect your life for how it is now. They need to understand that you are a grown person, that you make your own decisions, that you have a life and that you can’t go running to their rescue all the time (especially if they are married then they have a spouse to take care of their problems and not you). You won’t cut them out of your life but you now have another one to live.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

What Chains Us Down Makes Us Stronger

Original date: August 27, 2007
What I’m about to tell you is a true story, you might not know, you might already know, you may not want to know. You have a choice to sit and read this or just walk away.

I am a strong woman, I keep reminding myself that everyday. Everyday I open my eyes and realize that the ones I’ve loved, my family members have been taken from me and I cannot say the things that I want to say, I cannot go back. They were taken all too soon of course, too soon to see me where I am today and to see the person I have become, too soon for me to tell them once again that I love them. I finally have made peace with the man upstairs on why my father was taken from me at such a young age and have learned from going thru all the on-going legal mumbo jumbo that I am stronger than I think. There are some demons that haunt me still, as they would for anyone.

I am still a strong woman for continuing to persevere on and fight the toughest battles, whether they be between friends, family, co-workers or even my innerself. My friends have come and gone, and I have recognized who my TRUE friends this year. The ones who offer you a shoulder and support, call you occasionally just to shoot the breeze, the ones who no matter where you are in life or haven’t spoken to in a long time, can pick up the conversation where you left off. The ones who don’t judge you and who encourage you to fight the tough fight. Those are my friends. I don’t battle with my family, they are a bunch of characters who love me for who I am. I may not speak to them everyday, but we are close, are always there for each other and have an equal respect for personal life and privacy. As for work, well, its no longer a tough fight for me as I am doing what I enjoy and have security in a paycheck and somewhere to go 40 hrs a week. I am strong here at work, fought through truth and loyalty between co-workers who were friends and bosses who were friends. Truth is, can you separate the two and still be friends after a work issue? I learned that the hard way and my friends here at work ARE my friends. They are not just co-workers. I have met their family, been to their house, gone out to dinner with them, remember their children’s birthdays (as best as I can). Those are friends, not the ones who come in on Monday and ask you how your weekend was just because they want to live vicariously through your life since theirs is nonexistent. The ones who don’t interrogate you at lunch time and then talk about you behind your back to everyone else. You may think they are your friend, but in hindsight, they are just oxygen to feed the plants.

What I’ve learned this year is who I truly am (I got ‘me’ back), what I want and that I will fight to get it. The word ‘regret’ is not in my vocabulary anymore, I don’t sit here today thinking I could have done that yesterday or why didn’t I. I just do it! I had lived a life mostly with the ‘if only’ concept, but don’t misinterpret me, everything I did, I did because I wanted to, no one was forcing my hand. Before, I might have put things off, shoved people to the side and yes, I regret that. It’s a tricky line to walk but if you don’t walk it, you’ll never know.

Now, I’m trying to mend friendships from the past, realizing that I had left some of them behind to conform to part of another world that the real me wasn’t accepted in. The only way I can explain that is like this…we have a different personality at work during the day, then we leave work, we might hang out at happy hour, we might just go out with friends. We are someone else, our other personality (the not so PC, quiet-conservative one) comes out. Imagine me, quiet, conservative, not shooting from the hip, actually thinking about what I was going to say before I opened my mouth. It is easy for me to switch back and forth at work, but in real life having to shut me ‘off’ for a substantial amount of time brought me down and I brought it upon myself. I can’t go back and change it. It took a lot of digging to figure out what made me miserable and it had been me. It was entirely my fault for ‘hiding’ and being passive and I am owning up to it. If you don’t know me, I’m not wild, um not that wild, but I do know when to ‘simmer down’ and take it easy, I’m not always ‘on’ but I can’t be ‘off’ forever.

And I’m still strong and the simplest things still make me smile each day - the smallest comment, an email, a text message, a glance, a memory, the slightest touch. It took a life changing event for me to realize who I was, why I was hiding, what I truly needed and had wanted all along. It was one moment, one instance that I will never forget for the rest of my life.

Friday, October 26, 2007

Places to Go, People to See

Did I tell you I had a list of things to do? Not a typical list of chores, but of places to go, things to do, places to revisit. Things that I’ve always wanted to do and see but never did, which got shoved to the side because at the time it didn’t mean a lot to me, but now it does. I spent a lot of time getting ‘me’ back this year and I couldn’t be happier, but that is entirely a whole other story. I always thought that if you are in a relationship with someone and say they want to see a NBA game but you’re really not into it, you’ll make that one small sacrifice and go see the game with them right? Get my point…? January started off with a list, and things are slowly getting crossed off like “Go back to Vegas”, “Try to Play Golf”, “Go Bet on Horses”, yet there are a ton of other things not done yet, there is still time, I’m not going anywhere. There are plenty of places to go, people to see that haven’t made the list probably because I have never thought of them before now. I just have to find the right person to see them with even if I have to make a small sacrifice such as watching a Yankee game.

All Blogged Out

I am pretty exhausted from what I’ve written lately and would love to beeatch and moan about the same old things but I don’t want to embarrass anyone or name names. But besides that I’m waiting for the day I go back to cheer on the horsies and ward off the small Joe Pesci’s. In staying true to my promises, I will not be including a certain someone in my posted blogs, because I have unposted ones that don’t make the newsstand.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Frogs and Princes

After much needed girl talk, topics of discussions prompted this long overdue blog. I’ll be as nice as I can possibly be throughout the carefully chosen words about true life experiences so sit tight, relax and enjoy. You might learn something today.

Depending on when you started dating and experimenting with ‘boys’ I’m sure you’ve kissed a lot of frogs and princes or princesses, whatever it may be. You’ve swapped gum, mints, different flavors across the tongue lines, you’ve kissed in the rain, in the snow, in the dark, in a closet, at a red light, at a party, during a game of truth or dare, wherever, whenever and you have stories just like I do. For me, a kiss is like a light switch, it either creates a spark or it doesn’t and if you’ve ever read any of these it is all about the spark with me. I’ve kissed a lot of frogs, the ones where you need a towel afterwards because they drooled all over the front of your mouth and you try to run the next time they go for it because as of now, your sleeves are wet from wiping the doggy drool. The ones who jam their tongue down your throat and when they continue trying to dig out your tonsils and you try to push them away they think it’s a game of foreplay. Those who have no rhythm to their pursuit you wonder if you should’ve asked them to moonwalk first then you’d have made a run for it. The ones who don’t change the way they kiss, it’s the same thing over and over again, it lacks passion and adventure, pure boredom.

Then I’ve kissed a few princes, I can rank them too, one no one can compare to. But most of all it’s the memory of the kiss, how passionate it was, how it was the 2nd, 3rd, 5th time if you are counting. You can tell a lot about how a person feels thru a kiss, especially if you both are on the same page. I’m not saying kissing is a game of winners and losers, but it’s a connection that has to be in psync. A good kisser creates a pause in time, transports you to another place, makes you feel like you two are the only people in the room (at times you are), creates depth to the kiss that makes you anxious to find out what happens next. Kissing them is like a buzz, an addiction, it makes you into a kissing whore, you want to do it all the time, you can’t stop. Well of course you can stop, I think you know what I mean. But seriously now, (ha ha kudos to my cousin’s Greys shirt) can u survive a relationship with a bad kisser? Does it, can it get better? Can you deal with the possibility that you could be kissing a Retriever for the rest of your life (that’s if everything else with the package is fantab)?

Regardless of what happens afterwards it all starts with a kiss and ends with a kiss and I will never kiss and tell /winks.

Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind. – Princess Bride

Monday, October 22, 2007

Weekenders

What is a weekender? In my terms a ‘weekender’ is someone who comes in on Monday and asks you how your weekend was just because they want to live vicariously through your life since theirs is nonexistent. It could be an email, it could be passing by in the hall, but it’s annoying. Today I was particularly aware of my surroundings and figured out someone’s pattern – every Monday the weekender asks me how my weekend was. I no longer give details, not like I did before, but my answers have changed and I only answer the question posed because its really none of their business – my life is none of their business. You would hope that the weekender would get the hint and not press on for more information. But nooooo, they have to pull questions out of the sky to continue the conversation which today of all days, completely pissed me off. It’s just a trigger I have, if you cross that line and push the wrong buttons week after week, then I’m on to you. You don’t care about my weekend, you are making small talk because 1) you want to be seen talking to me, 2) you want to think that you can talk to someone like me, 3) you want to spread stories about me to your buds or your lunch pals because you want to look good, 4) your life sucks. If you are a friend of mine, then sharing weekend stories is fair game, but don’t be interrogating me about my weekend if I don’t talk to you on a daily basis because you don’t need to know. Next time the weekender poses the same old stupid question, I’m going to make up something really good. Don’t be surprised if you hear thru the grapevine some stupid thing I might have done like parachute off a building or get a tattoo on my ass, cuz I might just say that to prove a point.

Do I or Don't I? - sometime last week

Something off cuff happened, unexpectedly, unplanned, not according to horoscope and no, I’m not telling you what it was. [It's my little secret] It was one of those ‘do i? don’t I?” scenarios, where if I didn’t, I would probably have driven home thinking ‘dang I should have!’ and I did, and it wasn’t so bad, it was just a spur of the moment, on the fly, ‘hey how ya’ doin’, ‘I’d like fries with that’, drive down the shore in the middle of the night kinda deal. Don’t think that I didn’t drive home thinking ‘what the hell just happened?’ as I shook my head a few thousand times cuz I did and it continued when I got in. But if I didn’t, then I would have been thinking that I should’ve, and that is just not acceptable.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Place Your Bets

My girlfriend and I have a little bet going. If she wins she gets a Poland Spring Waterbottle, filled of course. If she loses, she gets nothing. She came up with a scenario within a time frame and of course, she won, but decided it was too easy of a win so is going to extend the scenario to include something else, like a side bet. Of course, now I have to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut, to remember not step in the groundhog holes along the way, that way I get to keep my bottles of water and the odds get a little more difficult. If you want in, that’s fine, but I’ll never tell you what its about.

Soundbites from the Office

What I heard in the Office this week:
- I have to go spiffy diffy in the toilet
- Cheers!
- We’re having tea and crumpets at 3 pm to de-stress?
- American women look better with the lights off
- I don’t think I can take the army men on the plane with me, customs would love that.
- Oh, no like dat place for car repair, they charge too mucha money. Four-tee dolla over ‘dere.
- Hope that was clear as mud
- I have to do a PAP
- Is he a dwarf? Does he play the organ? Look at his chair, is he a midget? A little guy?
- I have 4 things to do
- You took 3 slices – and half the people around here didn’t get any!
- I forgot my kilt!
- The Boss never comes to Scotland
- Brilliant! You don’t say
- I have to deal with who? NOOOOOO!
- I hope nobody’s showing X rated films over there
- He’s having a baby tomorrow
- Cuz he’s pretty boring I gotta tell ya’.
- You guys can’t spell
- Someone was drunk and they got the ‘u’ and the ‘r’ mixed up
- You better crop his foot out
- If you listen closely you’ll hear chickens
- We’d never kill anybody either
- If you put ---- up front, you’ll have everyone asleep before you get to the end of it
- I thought they were the queens guards
- I need some reinforcements
- Looks like someone thru bleach on her head
- You know, you really should condition and cut your hair
- If you added a white collar you’d be Father ___
- The tunder it shuk my house!
- …a drink in each hand
- Dead on
- Kick me if I’m loud
- I wanna be able to walk home without a sore bum
- Deutshbag – I like that word
- Knickers
- En dis woad is faw way

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Scenes from a Newsletter

How can a newsletter about work sound like an ad for eharmony or any other one of those sites? First, limit and eliminate the business technical terms such as “team player”, “meeting”, “value added”, “profit”, “goals”, “implementation”, “organization”. Second, add a few personal stories and key words such as “acquaintance”, “high school”, “family”, “marriage”, “friendship”, “renewed” and instant advertisement. There had to be a one personal story per page limit and of course, a page limit due to printing restraints due to cutting costs and distribution, so any true facts regarding business-to-date had to be shortened to accommodate the human interest story. In summary this is how it reads:

“With the new year comes new plans and energy
Merging together
Flash forward
Parallel lives…emigrating to a new world
On the first full day of togetherness
Old acquaintances may have been forgotten
Thank you for all that you do”

“Flash forward” – not sure what the “flash” was about besides maybe the camera that took the heartfelt reunion picture.

First 3 months is free, money back guarantee if not re-acquainted with high school sweetheart in another location. Thank you for giving us your credit card number and personal information so we can snail mail you other advertisements and blast your email to our sponsors.

**Disclosure – not saying eharmony ever gave away personal information, in fact, I wouldn’t know, I don’t have an account.