Cheesesteaks and Soft Pretzels

6-Year-Olds are Funny

I'm watching the Devils/Ducks on Tivo. I hear a little voice outside. "Hey! Hey! I know you're in there!" I go to the door and it's neighbor Ben. I ask him what's up (after all, it's after 8:30 and getting awfully dark). "Nothing. I'm just bored. Everyone wants to play with Emily (1-year-old sister). Nobody wants to play with me." [Insert sound of my bleeding heart breaking.] So I sat on the front step and talked to him while he rode his scooter in circles. Some excerpts:

"What's the month that comes after May?" June? "No... Summer, that's the one."

"Everyone makes a fuss about Emily." You know why, don't you? "'Cause she's the baby?" No. "'Cause she's a girl?" No. "Uhhhh... I don't know... why?" Because she looks just like you, and who wouldn't like someone like you? (Big smile, dimples in full force.) "Yeah, I guess you're right!"

"I'm having sausages for dinner. Daddy made them and now he's got them on the recycling. No, wait, that's not the word... what is it? I can't remember, but it makes the sausages good."

[I'm noticing that now it's completely dark outside and he's still talking to me... no one's come to look for him... this is very unusual.] "Mommy's away tonight. She'll be back tomorrow." Ah, that explains it. Daddy's watching him. :-)

"I was riding my bike today at the park and I fell and scraped my arm." Let me see. "You want to see it?" (big old smile, the pride of injury) Of course, I want to see it. Oooh, that looks sore, is it ok? "Oh yeah, it's fine now. I'm tough. I can take it." [Tough boy is delighted to be getting sympathy; I think this might be the highlight of his day.]

"When I was little I used to call my bicycle a 'bi-ki-cle'. You know, the 'c' can make a sound like a 'k'. Anyone could make that mistake. But mommy told me how to say it right."

If I could guarantee getting one like him, I would really consider it. He's just hilarious.

Ever since I got my hair cut last night, I've been feeling like Maria from West Side Story... "I feel pretty, oh so pretty...."

Priceless

Biggie Fries = Biggie Thighs

Alien Babies in Wyoming

The story is from the Weekly World News. Need I say more?

In Flight

C's on the way home from NJ. I know he hasn't been gone long, but I miss him. I guess the whole thing with my grandmother has left me a little more clingy than normal.

Question to Ponder

Why marriage? Why do we form these legal partnerships? I'm not suggesting that we avoid long-term committed relationships, but rather that the involvement of legal paperwork is a really strange idea. It seems much more reasonable to think that you should be licensed to have children than to marry. Marriage is just a relationship between two people, just like friendship or any other relationship, but children are a commitment to shape and develop a life through all of its formative stages. That has to be taken more seriously than marriage, so why isn't that regulated, too?

Why Write?

Does anyone really care to read what others write about? The blog idea is interesting, but you can't tell me that it's not, in essence, a form of therapy. It's like the confessional concept in the Catholic church: tell your story to a stranger behind a screen. Of course, theoretically, someone I know might be reading this, but the likelihood is greater that I'm just writing to myself. Which makes the concept of "publishing" short bursts of fiction even funnier. I feel like I'm sending my words out there for all the world to see, but in reality I'm just creating a journal.

Wrote something last night based on a newsgroup posting about how these writers' conferences are just meat markets where everyone is looking to get laid. So I wrote a story from one woman's perspective. It's on my other computer, so I might post it later tonight.

Whoa

G got laid off today. For two years her boss has been threatening to get rid of her and for two years she's threatened to quit. You can't imagine my surprise that she's finally leaving. I really thought that it would be an eternal hate-hate relationship. Amazing.

As of today, I've officially been here as long as I was at the magazine back in Philly. As of Monday, this officially becomes my longest-tenure job. This is infinitely depressing since I thought I'd only be here for a month. If you told me I'd be stuck here for two years without any hope of escape, I would have laughed at you. I'm not laughing anymore.

Personals

Right or wrong, I'm conducting a little experiment that will help with my writing. I've posted a few personal ads, being completely honest and telling them that I'm married, just to see what kind of responses I'd get. So far I've gotten two replies: one from a seemingly nice guy with good grammar skills (very important to a writer/editor) and another from a guy with kids who writes in ebonics. Interesting.

Hair appointment tonight, finally. Time to switch from this weird reddish color to either my natural darker brown or a lighter golden brown. I hate the smell of the haircolor when it's being applied -- I don't know how hairdressers tolerate it all day long -- but I really like the end result. Hiding gray hairs is critical. I'm not even 30 yet (not for another 22 days, anyway).

Only two more full workweeks before I get to go on vacation to Alaska. I'm deeply fascinated by the whole midnight sun concept, although that will probably wear thin when it's so bright that I can't sleep.

Still feeling restless today. This office really brings out the spirit of my inner caged animal. However, my boss is out today and Monday, so I can spend lots of time writing if I want to. There are worse ways to spend a Friday.

Repulsive

How is it possible that Mike Tyson is walking the streets as a free man? Doesn't he prove that he's a menace to society when he speaks?

Frustration

I'm feeling terribly confined today. The cubicle is too small. The office is too loud. I just feel like everything is an invasion of my personal space. I'm not enjoying it.

I'm supposed to have a project done by this afternoon, but I can't get very excited about it because it's a really lame, half-assed project to begin with. It's not going to make any difference to the company or to our group. It's just busywork. I have trouble buying into busywork.

Things Fall Apart

The end is near for my grandmother, which explains the dreams, at least to some degree. She's back in the hospital with congestive heart failure, and her mind is gone. She kept calling me Barbara and yelling at my mother to move out of the way to let the boy get by (what boy?) because he couldn't spend the day just sitting in her room. I feel her death with the same certainty that I felt pop's death six years ago. We all knew he was dying, obviously, but the night before he died I knew for sure that I wouldn't see him again. I have that same feeling today about my grandmother. Her time has run out.

So without getting into too much freaky detail, I have this semi-psychic thing (I know, it sounds like bullshit) where I can sometimes plug into something -- a feeling, a vision -- and know what's going on. Usually it happens just as I start to doze off or wake up, in that semi-conscious state where you're very relaxed, but not totally asleep, but I've been known to have strong flashes of it even during the day. Like I knew that C had that major car accident when we were back east; I was so certain of it that I was listening to the traffic report to try to figure out where he was so I could pick him up. When pop was in the hospital, dying, I had vision things. When my grandmother had her colon cancer surgery, I saw my grandfather (dead for 20 years) watching over her in the ICU.

Fast forward to today and my conversation with my mother about grandmom's condition. With my memory of my dream (the gnarled hands reaching for me) fresh in my brain, my mother tells me that my grandmother has been lying in bed, reaching out for something that isn't there, her skinny, arthritic fingers trying to reach and grasp for something (creepy parallel), and that she's been calling for her sister who died in 1982. Is she seeing visions of her sister? Is my grandfather there? Yeah, I know, this sounds weird and pathetic, and it's all in my head.

New Day

For the last few nights I've been having really weird dreams, the kind where creepy, gnarled, phantom hands are reaching for you from the darkness, or where you think people are in your room. I have no idea what triggered them, but I wish they'd stop so I could get a good night's sleep.

It's so unusually warm here these days. It was already in the 70s by the time I left for work this morning, so I've done something unusual (for me, anyway): I came to work wearing a dress. I wonder if Miss T thinks that there's something wrongly seductive about knees, too?

I finally have my hair appointment tomorrow night, and I never needed it more. My hair has faded to a color that's way too red, so I need to choose a new color. The only question is whether I should go lighter or darker? Probably darker, it's more natural for me. I don't need to start down the path of going lighter and lighter until I become blonde, do I?

I think I might have done some serious damage to my right calf. Last night, before the game, it was so stiff from hiking. I stretched it out a lot, but it didn't help when I ran. Today I feel crippled again. I wonder if I actually ripped something in there as opposed to just straining it.

We Actually Won!

A rare softball victory, 13-10. I was 1 for 3, which sounds ok, but I was robbed of a beautiful, powerful line drive. So sad.

It was unusually hot today -- 92 degrees for the high temp -- so it was still fairly toasty for our 7:50 game. I was wearing my usual pilates workout wear, tank top and sweat pants, plus my game jersey when I was in the field. Nothing fancy. Suddenly Miss T starts with me. "Ooooh! Look at you, dressing all sexy! Is C away? 'Cause it looks like you're on the prowl!" I was really shocked, because there just wasn't anything sexy about it, unless you consider exposed shoulders to be unnecessarily seductive. It was really very strange.

Since C is, in fact, out of town, I stayed and watched the second game featuring our other company team. It was nice to hang out with everyone, since usually I just hit the road to spend some time at home.

Memories of My Interview

I was just telling someone this story, and it's too good not to share.

When I interviewed for this job, it was a two-step process: phone interview with my boss, then the in-person meeting. The phone interview went horribly -- absolutey no chemistry whatsoever -- so I was floored when I was called back for the in-person interview. I had to meet with three people: my boss, the graphics guy and the web guy. The entire interview, including waiting time in the lobby, was 17 minutes. My boss asked a handful of semi-relevant, fairly standard interview questions, then wanted me to "meet the team". In comes graphics boy (and this is the highlight of the memory). He was significantly taller than I was, with a goofy look on his face and a baseball cap that was sitting on his head crooked (not intentionally so, just skewed in a way that looked like he didn't know any better). I was completely and utterly convinced that he was retarded, and that they had hired him on some sort of community outreach program. The conversation didn't lead me to believe any differently. Then I met web guy. He walked in, sat down and said, "This place sucks. Don't do it. You'll regret it."

That trumps all of my freakish interviews of the past, including the woman who told me I should pursue a career in foodservice, the Dave & Buster's lady who told me I was too ugly to represent the company, and the artificially intellectual woman (she liked to use large words to show how educated she was, but mispronounced most of them) who showed up to interview me with wet hair and a ripped flannel shirt.

End of Life

My grandmother is back in the hospital again. I would say that I think this is it, but I've thought that for a year and a half now and she keeps proving me wrong. I know it sounds terrible, but in a way I'm fascinated by the fact that she's still alive. Systems are failing, her hip is broken, she eats through a feeding tube and she's utterly miserable. I don't know what keeps her going. It certainly doesn't seem to be any sort of will to live. My guess has to be that she's being kept alive by the cocktail of pharmaceuticals that she's been prescribed. I know that we're all looking for ways to live longer, but what about living better? For the last year and a half, I'd argue that she hasn't really been alive at all. She's a withering, frail stranger who can't even muster enough energy to criticize me, so the situation must be serious.

This time it's fluid in the lungs. Is it pneumonia or congestive heart failure? Could be either, I suppose, but I'd vote pneumonia. Of course, we probably won't find out until tomorrow, because they certainly don't move quickly at the emergency room.

What I Miss

Last night I was thinking about thunderstorms. You don't get them in California. I think I've only heard thunder four or five times in the four years that I've lived here. Growing up, I loved to sit on the front porch and watch the rain pour down while listening to the thunder roll in. Sometimes, when there was a good storm in the middle of the night, I'd just sit in bed and listen. There's something about thunderstorms that comfort me, the rhythm of the rain mixed with the blast of the thunder and the flash of light as bright as midday sun. I remember a particularly massive storm rolling through when I worked at Martin Marietta in Camden. The sky was so dark that you couldn't see across the river to Philly. The bridges had vanished, the power had gone out and the only illumination we had came from the flashes of lightning. The rain was cascading down in sheets, enormous drops that instantly soaked through your clothes. The parking lot began to flood and we had to move our cars to higher ground, the parking lot farthest from the river. I took off my heels (I actually wore heels and suits back then) and ran to my car through the ankle-deep puddles. By the time I got there, I was dripping wet, totally drenched straight down to the bone. I sat in the car for the longest time, just watching the storm and hoping that the rain would let up just enough to let me get back to the building. And just when I thought that the storm couldn't get any more intense, it did. And then I saw it: two of the neighborhood kids darting across the parking lot with a shopping car full of copper pipes from the abandoned RCA building. They knew the security guards weren't going to chase them in that weather. They were sprinting through the puddles and laughing like crazy.

Massage, Please!

Two days after my Yosemite hike and I'm still sore. My right calf seems to be suffering the most, but that's probably because I was walking funny after pulling the muscle in my right hip. I went to see my trainer last night, and she helped to stretch me out. It felt good afterwards, but it was torture while she was doing it. So right now, I think that a massage would do wonders for me. Volunteers are welcome to stop by my desk.

H-E-L-L

This must be nostalgia day for me. I'm very glad that I never made it to the national spelling bee.

Days Gone By

When I see articles about proms, I just get get over how delighted I am not to be a teenager anymore. I wouldn't have missed my prom, but I certainly wouldn't have made any more fuss than I did.

Actually, my senior prom was kind of a funny story. I'd had a terrible time getting dates for high school dances. I went solo to the freshman dance, soph hop, and my first junior/senior party. I got a much-appreciated pity date for my junior prom from a friend who already had a girlfriend, and got ditched by Louie for my second junior/senior party because he thought he could score with Bridget. So when Mark, a relatively unknown guy, asked me to my senior prom four months early, naturally I said yes. However, it turned out that there were more than a few conflicts over the course of those four months, and by the night of the prom he wasn't speaking to me. He spent the entire night sitting in the hotel lobby while I hung out with friends and teachers inside. Afterward, the six of us in our limo went to Penn's Landing (why anyone would think it's a good idea to take a waterfront walk in Philly in April is beyond my understanding), and while the other couples walked and talked and laughed, he ran ahead, periodically yelling back, "I'm not giving you my jacket!" Believe me, I hadn't asked for or expected it. As the evening drew to a close, we were stopping at various houses to pick up bags of clothes for the evening (there was a keg party at Kate & Bridget's that night). As we stopped at one girl's house, Mark leaped out of the limo and walked off. Steve leaned out the window. "Where are you going, man?" Mark never turned around and shouted, "Home!" (The funniest part was that his house was nearly a mile away, and he was that eager to get away from me. By that point, I was so annoyed by his sulking that I was delighted to see him go.) So that's the story of my prom. No magic, no goodnight kiss, just a fancy dress, a nice dinner and dancing.

Orange Alerts

Under most circumstances you can pretty much ignore the national alert status, but then you go to the airport and you're faced with flashing roadsigns that scream ORANGE ALERT while you wind your way past the checkpoints of cops with guns and commando gear. None of it makes me feel safer, it just makes me uptight to think that when you say goodbye at the curb, it might be for the last time.

Ok, here goes: my first fiction posting. Remember, I'm not usually this dark. It's just based on a woman I saw on the subway four or five years ago, and the ending is based on a news story I heard later that night; I always wondered if the news story was about the woman from the subway. If you hate it, tell me so, but then you have to track down my true identity and give me a hug. ;-) Here goes nothing....
~~~~~
The clackety-clack of the wheels on the rails, the awful screeching as the train rounded a curve, the flickering lights, the stale smell. These were the sights and sounds of the subway, a holistic experience that I always found to be surprisingly intoxicating. Sitting on the hard plastic seats, I could almost lose myself in the experience, blocking out the crowds around me.

“Sit up straight,” she said briskly. “Look at you. No wonder you’re stuck in a dead-end job. You don’t carry yourself like someone who’s going places. Do you act like this at interviews? Sit up. Smile. And for god’s sake, get rid of that coat. It looks like something from the Salvation Army.”

I sat silently, rocking with the rhythm of the subway. For all of its noise and distraction, uneven light and foul smells, there was something magical about the way it swayed, the sound of the cars clattering against the rails, the screech of metal on metal.

“Are you listening to me?” my mother asked again. Frustrated by my silence, she turned away. No words were spoken for two more stops. A man with an accordion boarded the train at Times Square and began to play for money that he would never get. The passengers all stared straight ahead as though their three inches of personal space equated to an entire private universe.

“You know,” my mother said, turning toward me, “if you just did something cute with your hair, it would make a world of difference… just a little something… like that girl on TV.” She reached for my long, lifeless ponytail, and I pulled away. That didn’t stop her. “They’re always talking about her hair. You could do that, and then maybe you would meet someone….”

“I don’t want to meet anyone,” I mumbled.

“What do you mean, ‘I don’t want to meet anyone?’ That’s ridiculous. Everyone wants to meet that special someone.” She said it in a tone that only mothers can pull off, the tone that implicitly says, “oh, you poor thing, if only you were as worldly and wise as I am, you would know these basic truths about the world.”

“I’m not interested,” I said, flatly. I was hoping she would take the hint and drop the subject, but I should have known better than that.

“What about the man from the dry cleaner? Vincent? I think he has his eye on you….” She said the last part in a singsong voice that sounded to me like nails on a blackboard. I half expected her to break into “Mary and Vincent, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G” like some schoolgirl on the playground.

I tried to keep my voice low, but I wasn’t being successful. “I don’t want to date the dry cleaner, mom,” I said through clenched teeth. “I don’t want to date anyone. Now please, just leave me alone!” People were starting to watch out of the corners of their eyes. Even the accordion man had turned to face me, to see what the commotion was about. I could feel their stares burning a hole in my head. I was turning red
with anger and frustration.

She was crying now, so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything else. “All I ever wanted was a good life for you! Not this! Not living alone in the city in a ratty apartment smaller than your bedroom at home! Not working as a data processor for 10 hours a day!” There was no stopping her now, she was on a roll. “Single at 32! I can’t believe it! You were supposed to be married with kids and living in the suburbs by now!” She broke down into loud, gasping sobs of disappointment. I was pissed.

“This. Is. My. Life.” I shouted as deliberately as I could. “My life! Do you hear me? Not yours!” I was screaming now, yelling with all the force I could muster. Accordion man stopped playing, and people were blatantly staring now, not even bothering to pretend that they were minding their own business. “I can’t believe that you have the nerve to be telling me what to do with my life!”

“But… I’m… your… mother…” she choked out between sobs.

I could feel a lump in my throat as I fought back the tears, but I wouldn’t let it get the best of me. “You have no right! None! Just leave me alone!”

The train came to a halt and the doors opened abruptly, passengers pushing their way on and off the train in a mad crush. Those seated around me had shuffled position, either to move away or get a better view of the scene. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I darted from the train just before the doors closed. I stood there on the platform, winded from shouting, face red from embarrassment. They watched me from the window like a passing circus show as the train pulled away. I can’t say I blame them. It must have been quite a sight to see. After all, my mother has been dead for 15 years.

* * * * *

My mother is forever frozen in time. She died when I was 17 and a senior in high school, so our relationship never evolved past the dictatorial, critical style that often characterizes strict parenting of teens. She never got to see me grow up or make my way in the world, but since I haven’t really made it anywhere, I guess she hasn’t missed much.

She died in a single-car accident on a winding hillside road about six months after my younger brother ran away from home. She couldn’t stand not knowing where he was, and blamed herself and her divorce from our father for the problems that led to his disappearance. I think she knew that he wasn’t ever coming back. So one night, on a random Tuesday, she went out for a drive. She had no reason to be up in the hills, except, of course, for killing herself. There were no signs of skid marks,
no wet leaves or oil-slicked roads. Nothing but a broken guardrail stood between the road and her final resting place, upside-down next to a hot tub in the yard of one of those mini-mansions down the hill. Contrary to what you see on TV, not every car that flips over and topples end-over-end down a hill bursts into flames. The car just flattens out like it’s made of aluminum foil, and the body inside is so trapped that it takes professionals with power tools to cut the body out of the car.

That was my mother’s legacy. I’ve been alone ever since, at least until last month when she showed up again like nothing ever happened.

* * * * *

I’ll admit, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard voices. I’ve heard them a lot over the last ten years. Sometimes they’re friendly voices, like the woman with the coffee craving who tries to get me to go to Starbucks twice a day. Others aren’t so nice. I often hear a man’s voice, and he talks about blood and pain and hate a lot. I don’t like him very much, but he seems to be much more powerful than my coffee lady, so I guess there’s nothing I can do about him.

But since mom came back, the others have gotten quiet. I guess they can sense that she’s the ringleader. She holds a certain level of power that the others can’t quite match. I can only hear the others, but with my mother I can also see her and sometimes feel her hand as she touches my arm or brushes hair out of my face. It’s not easy for me to have a mother again after all this time, especially a mother whose last formative memory was the Reagan/Bush era of the late 1980s. This is not the kind of person you want giving you fashion and hair advice on the subway, or anyplace else, for that matter.

It’s been hard to have mom back. I’m still mad at her for leaving me alone. My brother never did come back, although I suspect that he’s alive and well and living in California, and I never really knew the whereabouts of my father. So with just two months to go until my 18th birthday, I was left totally alone in an apartment in New Jersey, hoping to be able to finish out high school before social services caught on and sent me away to a foster family.

I’ve lived in the city since high school, in the same tiny apartment with the same tiny bed. It looks more like a dorm room than an apartment, really, but it’s all I need. The problem is that there isn’t room for visitors, and mom definitely wants to move in. Ok, so she doesn’t take up that much space and she doesn’t need a bed, but you’d be amazed by how much smaller your apartment feels when you have to share it with a powerful hallucination. It’s just as stressful as having a roommate, and maybe even more so since you can’t kick out a hallucination. You’re just stuck with it, and you can’t even leave the room to get away.

So after more than a decade of menial work, I finally found a good job doing data entry for PriceMarker, a company that actually inputs all of the SKUs from bar codes and sets manufacturer’s retail prices for distribution into one large database for all grocery stores around the country. It’s tedious, I’ll admit, but I don’t have to be on my feet all day, and I don’t have to answer phones, so I think it might be ideal.

I had always been a loner, even when my mother was still alive. I just preferred my own company, I guess. I don’t necessarily remember the voices back then, but I suspect they were there as background noise. After she died, and I was on my own, they became louder. They’ve changed over the years. They’re not always the same person. Shortly after her death, I heard the voice of a policeman, but once I got over that they were more normal voices, ordinary everyday people who wouldn’t leave me alone. Usually the women are fixated on something. There’s the coffee lady, the shoe woman, the old woman who was afraid of oranges – boy, it was a challenge to go grocery shopping when she was around, let me tell you. All through the produce section she’d just scream and scream. The men are angrier, more violent, wanting to wreak vengeance on all around them. They stand up for me, want me to defend myself against slights, but I’m not much of a fighter.

I tried to take a few classes at the community college when I graduated high school, but I wasn’t really interested. I moved to the city and got my tiny little apartment in the Bronx, hoping that someday I’d move to Manhattan and really make it big. It never quite worked out that way. After about two years of living there, working in midtown at a lunchtime café, I met Romero. I’d seen him lots of times waiting for the subway, but I’d never spoken to him. The loud man’s voice told me I shouldn’t talk to strangers. But once you’ve seen someone’s habits, and know their routines, are they still a stranger? We crossed paths at the Laundromat one Friday night. I was watching my colored clothes toss and tumble in the dryer like a cotton kaleidoscope when he approached me.

“You’re the girl from the subway,” he said with his Puerto Rican accent, more as a statement than a question. I nodded, afraid to speak. I didn’t talk to anyone in the neighborhood, mostly because they spoke Spanish and I didn’t, but partly because the loud man wouldn’t let me. “Whatchou doin’ here? Don’tchou have somethin’ to do?” I shook my head no. I didn’t really have any friends, just some acquaintances from the café, and they never invited me anywhere. I think they thought I was weird.

“I been watchin’ you,” he said, sort of cockily. “You don’t live with no one, do you? You all alone in that place above the bodega.” I nodded. “Whatchou need,” he said with absolute authority, “is a man. A real man. Someone to teachou how life’s spose’ ta be.” I nodded, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. “I gonna be your man, ok? I gonna move in witchou. You can be my novia.” I nodded again, not having any idea what a novia might be. “I got my stuff right here, I gonna move in tonight. Now.” I didn’t find out until much later that his other novia had kicked his lazy butt out of her apartment, and that he was just looking for a place to stay. Neither of us expected that he’d stay as long as he did.

For three years we lived together. He did most of the talking and none of the working. I hardly ever spoke, partly because I was afraid of what I might say. I wanted him to get a job, to stop sleeping all day and drinking malt liquor with his friends all night. They would come over and talk in Spanish so I wouldn’t know what they were saying. I would sit in the corner of the bed, curled up in a ball, trying to figure out one or two answers to the New York Times crossword that someone had left behind on a table at the café. That alone usually took three or four hours out of my evening.

One day, there was a knock at the door. Romero was out at the bodega buying more malt liquor and cigarettes, I suppose. I opened the door to find a girl who looked no more than 16. She was arguing with a toddler in Spanish, the child clearly wanting to be picked up and held, but she was unable to do so because of her enormous pregnant belly. “You the girlfriend?” she asked. I shrugged. “You gotta know that your Romero is a player. These are his,” she said, pointing to her kid and her belly. “Inside? There’s two of them. Dos. And I ain’t the only one. He’s been gettin' it on wit that bitch down the block.
She’s havin’ one, too.” I nodded, understanding all too well what’s going on. I still said nothing. She continued, “I just thoughtchou should know that he’s a player. You seem ok. You shouldn’t hafta take his shit.” No, I thought, I probably don’t. She turned and walked away, and I closed the door behind her. The loud man was screaming at the top of his lungs: “I TOLD YOU SO! KILL THE BASTARD!” I didn’t want to kill anyone. I just wanted him to leave, and I told the voice that. But he wouldn’t let up.

Romero came home in the middle of my fight with the loud man. I was screaming back at him, “I DON’T WANT TO KILL HIM! I DON’T CARE WHAT HE DID! I JUST WANT HIM TO LEAVE!” But the loud man grabbed a knife and told me it was time to take action. I screamed that I didn’t want to take action; I just wanted it to be quiet! Romero watched all of this in stunned silence, and then grabbed an armload of clothes lying on the floor and ran from the building, telling me that I was loco and needed help. I slumped onto the rumpled bed, crying, hating the loud man for making things more difficult.

Things were quieter now, and I had more time to work on the crossword puzzle. On Mondays, I could get three or four answers right. I was feeling confident. I applied for a job doing data entry in midtown. I knew nothing about computers, but they told me that their two-week training program would teach me all I needed to know. They were right. I’ve been entering SKUs and prices ever since. It’s solitary work, and I don’t have to talk to other people. There was a nice girl working her way through college with this job, recently engaged and desperately excited about life. There was a middle-aged man who seemed to have no interest in anything other than entering numbers into the database. There was a girl from the neighborhood who also worked there, a shy girl, and we would ride the subway together every day, sitting in silence for the entire ride as I listened to the clatter of the rails, the only sound that could drown out the cacophony of voices in my head.

Things were going well by my standards, and then my mother came back. Nothing could drown her out, not even the subway, but she had the power to make the others quiet. She would nag and nitpick and be so motherly. It drove me nuts. She would criticize my breakfast habits as soon as I woke in the morning, and still be criticizing my apartment when I went to bed at night. For the first time in my life, a voice was making me angry. I just wanted her to shut up. All day long as I sat at the computer, she would talk and talk and nag. She would complain about my posture, my hair, my fingernails, my choice of work. I began to hate her like I never hated anyone else in my life. She just kept criticizing, criticizing. I couldn’t take it.

I always worked through lunch, never interested in eating (she criticized that, too), so when the rest of the girls in the office went out to eat, I stayed behind, with no sounds of typing to drown out the sounds in my brain. This is when mom was the loudest. I hated lunchtime.

“I have the best idea for a new haircut,” she said, touching my long, low ponytail like she had on the train. I pulled away. I didn’t want a new haircut. I liked getting up in the morning and tying my hair back with an old rubber band from a newspaper.

“Don’t!” I yelled, pulling away. “Stop touching me!”

But she refused to stop. “I am your mother. I have the right to raise you as I see fit.”

I was furious. “You weren’t there to raise me! You left! I had to raise myself, figure out how to be an adult! You can’t change that now!” How dare she even suggest that she had the right?

She looked stricken. “I just want what’s right…” she began to cry. I felt incredibly guilty, angry and hopeless all at once.

“Fine, you want me to cut my hair? Let’s do it.” I grabbed the scissors and headed for the bathroom.

“You can’t do it yourself!” She seemed shocked that I’d try.

“Why not?” I asked, indignant. “I can do anything I want.” I began to hack at large chunks of hair, nicking my ear with the scissors in the process. I didn’t feel anything, but I noticed the trail of blood tracking down my neck. “Look what you made me do!” I yelled.

Loud man started to yell back. “Do it again! Do it again! Does it hurt?”

“No, of course it doesn’t hurt,” I said, slicing my neck to prove the point. Bright red blood cascaded over my pale yellow shirt. I felt strong. I felt invincible. I felt no pain.

“Do it again!” he yelled.

I sliced at my neck again, more deeply. The blood began to pulse in bursts with the beating of my heart. I hacked at my hair some more, laughing. My mother was silent. My head started to ache, and my vision began to blur. I tried to cut the hair on the other side – I didn’t want it to be lopsided when the girls came back from lunch – but I was rapidly weakening and my aim wasn’t so great. I started to bleed from that side, too. The edges of my vision were rapidly going black. Just one more cut and it will be balanced, I thought. And then I noticed it. Silence. Complete silence. No voices yelling, no mothers nagging. Just silence. I laughed weakly and slumped to the floor, knowing that I had won.

The college girl found me when she went to use the restroom after lunch. I never heard her screams, never saw the crowds gathered around me, shocked to find me slumped in a pool of my own blood. All was quiet.

Just For Fun...

I got one of those "get to know you" questionnaires from a friend today. Do I care what kind of toothpaste she uses? Should she care about mine? I'd argue no. But there were a few interesting questions in this one.

11. Is there anyone in your past that you still have a crush on?
Yes, two of them. They probably know who they are, and they both make me nervous and giddy when I see them. I suppose it's fortunate that I don't see either very often.

15. Have you ever had a fling with a member of the same sex?
I always viewed that as a college experimental thing, and there just weren't many attractive women at my school.

18. Is it possible to love two people at once?
Yes, but I'm not sure that it's possible to be in love with two people at once. That would be too intense, and I don't think I'd be able to handle that.

19. Do you want kids?
I feel like I'm too young to rule anything out, but I'm just not sure. I think that working at Children's Hospital really put the fear of god into me. So much can go wrong with them. Could I ever handle the responsibility? Should my gene pool ever be allowed to mingle with the rest of the world?

21. Romantically, what's your downfall (bad boys, athletes, etc.)
Blondes. I swear they're not my type, yet I find myself drawn to them. I think it's because they usually have light eyes. A friend once told me that my attraction to them was my biological imperative to perpetuate my recessive genes (thanks to my father, I have recessive genes for red hair and blue-green eyes). There you go, reduce it to biology.

28. If you could live anywhere, where would it be?
I don't just want one big house in one location. I'd rather live simply in a lot of different places. I'd like a place back east (maybe NY or Philly), one out here in the bay area for the weather, someplace in the mountains with a lake like Tahoe or Vermont, a nice beachfront place in Hawaii, and maybe someplace in Europe -- I did absolutely love Amsterdam.

30. Are you afraid of death?
I'm afraid of the emptiness of being left behind when others die. Am I afraid of my death? Hard to say. I don't believe in an afterlife necessarily, so I probably should be afraid. I watch my grandmother approach the grand finale and I wonder what it's like, whether it's peaceful or scary when the time comes. Side note: My philosophy of immortality... touch as many lives as you can, because you only live on in the memories of those who you loved and who loved you.

Reader comments and insights are welcome. E-mail me.

Scott Peterson

I've wondered this from the start: what would we rather believe? That Laci Peterson made a terrible decision and married a psycho killer, or that random killers walk the streets and murder pregnant women on Christmas Eve? I think we clearly prefer A -- we always instinctively believe the husband is guilty even before we hear any evidence at all -- because it makes the rest of us feel less vulnerable to danger. Domestic violence is tragic, but it's someone else's problem, and it won't affect us when we're walking the dog or loading groceries into the car in a dark parking lot.

Why Don't I Build My Own Meth Lab?

We have these friends who, in spite of having a lower combined income than we do, have bought a house that's nearly twice the size and price of ours, furnished it in Ethan Allen, big screen TVs and surround sound, and now have bought a Jeep with a $40k MSRP. I swear, they must either operate a meth lab or print money in their basement. Either way, I think I need to discover this source of money and make the most of it for myself.

Free Time

On my own Wednesday-Friday this week. Maybe with a little luck and hard work I'll be able to crank out some short stories to post. Or maybe I'll just end up sitting on the couch eating cereal and watching Buffy reruns.

Just When I Thought I Might Have Cared...

So earlier, I posted "Just When I Think I Don't Care" and I was having a real moment of renewed commitment through infuriation. And then... I spoke to my boss. It's over. Passed. No longer applicable.

Basically, by getting riled up about the situation and e-mailing some key people to try and stop it before it got out of hand, I evidently trampled on her toes. True, she does own the product and I'm just... well, we don't know what I do. But after being involved with it for the last 28 months, and being the only one of the two of us on the call this morning, I thought that perhaps it was in my best interest to speak for "the team" rather than have her take up the cause after playing whisper-down-the-lane with me. I was so wrong. I was unprofessional. I should show more restraint. I should stick with anonymous and invisible. But this time, guilt's not working. I know what I'm talking about and I know I was right. I'm not the little mini-me that she thinks she's raised. I'm quite capable of standing on my own, thank you very much.

Find Myself? Was I Lost?

I keep thinking about this whole "finding myself in Paris" thing. I'm not sure that I'm opposed to the idea. I'm not sure that Paris is the answer, but the whole thought of getting away for a while and doing my own thing might actually be valuable. I'd like to think that I can do it someplace closer than Europe -- I love it there, but the length of the flight puts a damper on things. Hawaii is only 4 hours away. Aspen. Jackson Hole. Lake Tahoe. Vermont. Why are four of my five choices mountain settings? That's odd, I wouldn't have guessed it.

Right now, the idea that sounds best is someplace where I don't have to hike. Sitting is painful, but not as bad as standing. How could I have possibly abused my muscles this badly?

Online Classes

I've been taking an online fiction writing class from Barnes & Noble University (it sounds cheesy, but the concept is good). I love the idea of the class -- mini-exercises, learning different elements of fiction from examples in short stories, etc. Plus, being online, I get to do it all anonymously, which saves my ego from major bruising.

I'm seriously considering signing up for a real face-to-face, can't-hide kind of writer's conference. The thought terrifies me, but I have to do it if I want to get better, right?

Just When I Think I Don't Care...

Just when I thought I had let go of work, stopped caring completely, and had otherwise written this company off as someplace to pass the daytime hours, I realized with quite a shock today that I can still get totally riled up about things.

It was the standard every-other-Tuesday conference call, a typically usless, boring, "Anybody have anything? Anyone? Bueller?" sort of event. Except this time there was a guest speaker, some guy I'd never heard of who had come in to proclaim his worldly knowledge on the topic of small and mid-size businesses and how we should target them in the future. Without going into too much detail, this is what we learned:

1. A company with 1,000 employees is now considered to be a mid-sized business, with the same needs as a customer with 120 employees.

2. A company with 75 employees has exactly the same needs as a consumer.

3. Our Specifically Designed for SMB product has no place in the new strategy, for reasons that no one could articulate. My guess is that they either a) forgot that we had one, or b) it required too much thought to integrate it.

4. We haven't actually asked customers what they want or need, we just assume that we know because we're so smart (hence our belief that anyone under 100 employees qualifies as "consumer" instead of "business").

5. We have no plan for targeting this newfound segment, other than simply assuming that they'll all come beating down our door, presumably through some form of psychic mind control.

So for the first time in weeks, this actually lit a fire under me, so much so that I even e-mailed the responsible parties and others in the hierarchy, just to ask WTF. I suspect that someone will get pissed off. I don't really care. What would they do, fire me for having an opinion? I seriously doubt it. Within days I'll fall back into my veil of anonymity and invisibility, and they'll forget all about the fact that I'm over here growing cobwebs.

Weekend Warrior

Hiking may seem ok while you're doing it, but the day after brings me to the point of mortal pain.

New Lives

Oh, and lest we forget... my good friend Heather gave birth to a healthy baby boy today, Aidan Seamus Kennedy (no, not Irish at all, why would you ask?)

This is baby #3 for Heather, much to her shock, since it took surgeries and fertility drugs to bring the twins, Ashley and Juliet, into the world. Who would have guessed that this little guy would have been so easy?

I've seen a picture and he's beautiful. In some ways I envy her, but then I think about midnight feedings, scraped knees, childhood illnesses and those god-forsaken teen years and I panic. I really don't know that I'm cut out for that sort of thing, so I think I'll just live vicariously through her for a while.

Writers and Critics

I've been writing nonfiction for years, never fiction until recently (unless you count marketing work as fiction, which is probably a subset of the genre). I've tried to get C to read some of the short stories or character profiles that I've written, but he refuses. He says he's not qualified to judge, and that he fears that his uninformed opinions might influence my writing (side note: he has no problem reading nonfiction articles or papers, so this is a limited restriction). I told him that if that was the case I'd need to get a critic/lover on the side, someone who could offer me constructive criticism, but still hold me and comfort me at the end of the day. He thought it was interesting that I felt like I needed both in one person -- my chronic need for positive support to balance negative feedback -- which led to...

Paris. Evidently C has determined that I need to "find myself", a venture that can't be done with him or near him, and has decided that I need to pack my bags and spend some amount of time in Paris, alone and reflective. I'm not sure why Paris (he says it has something to do with its artsy persona), but I have to admit that part of me likes the idea. But how does one just drop everything and take a month off to find themselves in Europe? The problem is that only the Europeans have enough vacation time to make that work, and they'd much rather go someplace more exotic than their own continent.

So, whether or not I take off and visit Paris, I really should start posting my writing online here (comments and love would be appreciated ;-) ). I have a short story that I think is good, but it's awfully dark and I'm not sure if I should post something sad and tragic as a first effort. Might bias the critics. But it was actually based on a composite of a woman I saw on the subway in New York four or five years ago, and a news story I heard a day or so later. In my mind, the to stories melted together and became my short story. Maybe I'll post it tomorrow....

Holiday Weekend at Yosemite

I'm a big fan of the National Park system, but I have to say that there is no way you'll ever be able to drag me to one on a holiday weekend ever again. It's just a bad idea.

However, today we got up really, really early and did all the things we couldn't do yesterday because of the masses of annoying people with ill-behaved kids. I saw the giant sequoia grove, Bridal Veil falls in its springtime full-flow glory, and got the chance to hike up to Vernal Falls and Nevada Falls, all of which were amazing because of the sheer power of the water that's still coming from snowpack runoff.

I'm not a very good hiker. My instinct is that anyone with half a brain would pull over to the side of the trail, sip their water in the shade and watch the world go by. Why walk up such steep hills? Shouldn't they have put in escalators if this was something worth seeing? But today I was like a woman possessed. I practically ran up the trails, even though I was gasping for breath and wishing that my legs weren't completely burning from the unexpected exertion. I think I was afraid that if I slowed down for any length of time, my weakness would catch up with me, and I wasn't about to let that happen. Of course, the flip side of this is that my feet, legs and back all ache like I just ran a marathon (although I should give myself credit, 12 miles of hiking on inexperienced legs ain't too shabby). I have a knot in my left calf that's the size of a tennis ball, and it didn't make it easy to use the clutch on the way home.

Now, did someone mention that I actually have to go back to work tomorrow? Who made up such stupid rules?

The Way of the Weber

Ever since we bought the charcoal grill, the gas grill just isn't good enough. I barely eat enough meat to be considered a non-vegetarian, and yet I feel a strange compulsion to sear animal flesh on a hot grate. I'm hoping this feeling will pass.

Mini-Vacations

Going to Yosemite tomorrow. I'm just delighted to be going away for a few days, even though the park will probably be mobbed on a holiday weekend.

Oh, the Pain!

I've run out of almond M&Ms.

Cell Phone Ringtones

With all of the new, fancy ringtones available, why aren't there any in a tone that doesn't make me cringe? This is why I stay on perpetual vibrate mode.

Friday Night With My PowerBook

Sometimes I'm astounded by how truly nerdy I can be, sitting on the couch with my wireless internet, blogging away. Some people go to the movies. I bond with my computer.

Funniest Show on Earth

Every time I see my neighbor, Ben, I'm convinced that he is, without a doubt, the sharpest six-year-old on the planet. If you know of others, please do not burst my bubble and tell me about them. This kid is an absolute delight, and I'd like to think he's the most unique, interesting kid ever.

Last week, I sat on the front steps with my PowerBook, checking e-mail while I let the house fan work its magic cooling off the house. Ben was out riding his bike up and down driveways and walkways, talking up a storm as he rode. He pulls up in front of me and stops.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking e-mail," I said.

"You have internet?"

"Yep."

"Why is the sky blue? Look it up." And off he rode, tiny little kid on a tiny little bike with a really big appetite for information.

There will be many more, much funnier stories about Ben as time goes on, without a doubt. He's an endless source of material.

Friday Morning

Fridays are always tough. There always seems to be part of me that thinks that the work week is already over, so every minute leading up to 5 PM on Friday takes twice as long to get through. It would be so much better if I actually liked my work, or gained some sort of intellectual stimulation from it. But instead, I sit here and hold down the chair for eight to ten hours daily.

Here's an example of how busy my days are (which should explain why I've taken to blogging)....

On Tuesday afternoons, I have my weekly one-on-one meeting with my boss. This week she says to me, "I know you've been bored lately [lately? try every day for the last 28 months], so I want to give you a project to work on." I'm practically giddy at the thought of having something to do. Until... "I want you to communicate with person A and see if he's finished the new banner for the homepage. When you get an answer or due date, relay that to person B so he'll know when to post it." Uh, ok, that should take two minutes, maybe three if I walk really slowly between cubicles. So what am I supposed to do with the remaining 2,397 minutes in my week? "Just take it easy, I'm sure we'll have something for you soon." I've heard that for more than two years now. At what point will they realize that I'm contributing nothing to the company (not by choice, really... I'd love to have work to do because I'm afraid that my brain will atrophy under these conditions)?

At what point will they lay me off? I wonder about this frequently, but then I look around me and see the lack of productivity in neighboring cubicles and I start to realize that this company sustains itself in spite of only getting about 2.8% participation from any employee at any given time. I'm reasonably certain that there's one guy who's actually in the negative productivity range. I think that every day he comes to the office, his to-do list actually backslides. Across the aisle, there are four people drinking coffee and searching for Matrix information online. On the other side of the cubicle wall, someone has been on the phone with his travel agent for more than an hour, planning a lovely trip to Tahiti. One woman has walked around the building in circles, dragging her hyper dog on its leash and telling anyone who'll listen about how tonight is the big Final Exam at doggie obedience school. Two-thirds of the people in my cubicle neighborhood haven't even come in yet, and it's 10:10 AM.

Keeping all of this in mind, I guess I shouldn't feel guilty spending my day blogging.

And How Does It Work In Your Universe?

I have a coworker (several, actually, but I'm just speaking of this one in particular), and I'm relatively convinced that she lives in a parallel universe where the same rules and and realities just don't apply.

Recently, I was telling this coworker about the recent death of a friend's husband from a brain aneurism, and the tragedy of losing a young life. She asks, "The brain thingy. Is that serious?" Ummm, it's fatal, yeah... I thought that was obvious when I said he had died. She replies, "Well, at least he didn't have cancer. That can really kill you."

So, if you've lost someone to a heart attack, stroke, medical malpractice or sudden vehicular accident, at least you can take comfort in the knowledge that they didn't have anything that could kill them, like cancer. Especially if you live in her parallel universe.

In the Warm California Sun?

It's not like I remembered. When approached by our facilities manager about joining the company softball team, my mind flashed back to my last memories of playing softball in Philadelphia: brutally hot sun, humidity at 90%, the feeling that your glove was going to melt onto your hand... that sort of thing. But the team was desperate to meet its chick quota for the co-ed league, and I reluctantly agreed.

For those of you who don't live in the San Francisco Bay Area, here's what it's like to play ball in California: fully-lighted fields so you can play ball after the sun goes down in windy, 50-degree conditions. When you're scheduled for the 10 PM game, you can guarantee that most players will be bundled up in sweatshirts, fleece and hats.

But overall, things have been good. We've won twice this year, improving on the 1-23 record of the past three seasons. We're not even remotely good, but when you're playing in a co-ed slow-pitch league, no one is. Anyone with even a shred of competition in their body would have signed up for a league filled with people who actually take this thing seriously.

Wednesday night. We're losing (no surprise), but not by much (big surprise) against one of the better teams in the league. In the final inning, in a moment of sheer on-field poetry, our left fielder comes racing in to catch a pop fly that literally lands in his lap. It's beautiful. After five games, it would be the only play on our highlight film. We were delighted. And then it starts.

The other team's pitcher had been... well... obnoxious. All throughout the game he was yelling at teammates, cricitizing the umpire's calls and generally making an ass of himself. It's a game. It's supposed to be fun, right? So we have the last-inning miracle catch and he starts. "That hit the ground! You f*%#ing liars! Ump! That hit the ground! There's no f*%#ing way that was a clean catch!" And it keeps going like this. And going. So as I'm trotting in from right field, I pass the mound. He looks me in the eye and says in a fire-breathing dragon tone, "So if you can't win, you might as well lie, right?"

I stopped in my tracks and looked at this guy. My dugout falls silent, because of all the people on the team, I would probably be the last on a list of people to start with Mr. Obnoxious. "What is your problem? Are you so pathetic that you have to freak out about this? It's a game. Not even that, it's co-ed slow-pitch softball. You can't possibly be taking this seriously." He says some rather unfriendly things that I won't repeat here, but in essence calling me a liar, among other things. I just shake my head with the best look of pity that I can muster and say, "It's just a game. It's not worth lying about. Really. Truly. You're just f*%#ing pathetic. It's sad." And I walk off the field. The umpire, listening to the whole exchange, is now trying to suppress his laughter as Mr. Obnoxious turns beet red and looks close to a heart attack.

I hope to god that this guy doesn't have kids. Little League must be a blast!