It occurs to me that I might be considered a threat to national security with my Listerine Pocket Mist and my water bra.
I’ll give up the breath spray, but damn it, the TSA had best not make me surrender my bra and make me put it in a Baggie for closer inspection.
If someone’s gonna feel up my scandalous underthings, I’d prefer to be WEARING them at the time, thankyouverymuch!!!
I was going through some old paperwork, as I had notes on constructive confrontation that I wanted to share with a colleague who has her hands full.
Anyway, I found something I’d written (as I take copious notes) that threw me for a fucking loop. I mean, we all know I am apt to say fairly bizarre shit from time to time, but I don’t capture it for posterity unless it’ll help or amuse me.
I don’t have it handy, as I threw it across the room, but under a section in a workbook under “what I learned today,” I’d written that “I understand how my unwillingness to conform to very specific rules and expectations and the fact that I like to question why things are done the way they are can be very frustrating to my supervisor, and I must change my behavior.”
Today’s highlights:
Driving into oncoming traffic. Again.
Being approached by my publisher with chocolate remnants (as it’s Chocolate Day!) on my face.
Being approached by the marketing VP with a big ol’ booger hanging from my nose. (Nice.)
Telling someone I shouldn’t have that someone else would be a very pretty girl if she’d ever look like she didn’t have a “fart crosswise.”
Being spotted sobbing in the parking lot before the day began. (Hi, I’m the future of this company. I shouldn’t be the only one weeping!)
Eating no solid foods, instead having three truffles, a bowl of chocolate ice cream, and assorted shit (marshmallow, pound cake, graham cracker and strawberry) dipped in a fountain o’ milk chocolate. I had no desire for the dark chocolate today, oddly, although it looked mighty tasty, as did the other 4,735 pounds of chocolate and sugar in the main kitchen today.
It’s 8 p.m. and maybe now I should start on today’s projects?!?!
The week’s highlights:
Shoveling a forkful of something in my mouth and missing my mouth completely. In a meeting.
Trying to spear an olive from a salad and accidentally beaning the marketing manager with it. (Same meeting.)
Surviving it! (And letting others live, too!)
In an e-mail exchange:
My friend: “I don’t mind going to work, it’s the eight-hour(-plus) wait to go home that’s a bitch!”
Me, on my friend’s supervisor: “Try GROWING one instead of BEING one!”
My friend called to tell me a story about her 3-year-old daughter (the one I was supposed to fly out t see today. *cough* Pray nobody gets on my last nerve today because homicide is justifiable in my mind).
They went to church, which is a feat in and of itself, and the sky was gorgeous. So the precocious little one pointed up at the sun and asked whether God made that. My friend said yes, and the little girl nodded thoughtfully, processing it. She declared, “Good job, God!” and got into the car.
She reminds me of a colleague’s 10-year-old daughter, who wants to sell something to make a profit. She wants to put a note on the flyer that half of the proceeds will benefit the Red Cross. When her mom asked her how she came up with that (as she was proud that her daughter was becoming so civic-minded), her daughter replied, “Because more people will buy it if it means they’re supporting a charity.”
Her mom’s a marketer. The dad had said, “Those are YOUR genes showing through!” And he’s right.
I seriously don’t remember being that smart at those ages. Hell, I’m not that smart at THIS age, either. …
So I get a lovely care package from Mom with a card telling me how sick my grandfather has gotten. I call her the Kathie Lee of the Carnival Cruise Lines for guilt trips for a reason!
And it’s one of those times when I can feel in my bones that I am going to regret not spending any time with my family.
Seems the combination of aneurysm, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and whatever the hell else is leading to renal failure. But he goes to the VA Hospital, which means they think he’s fine and so they send him home.
I can’t even joke that I wish I could lose 10 pounds a week like he has been. (Although the thought has crossed my mind.)
My family’s good about me being absentee at best, although the subtle “He’ll hang in there if he knows you’re coming up to see him” from Mom gets me every time.
I know I’m going to regret all the hours spent at work and not with my family. I am going to regret not finding a way to get a laptop so I can work from there because there is no one to delegate to. And I hate even driving up on a Saturday to come back Sunday; that four hours each way is really not worth the aggravation. Besides, all those errands that don’t get done during the week have to get done on weekends. If I bother — usually I don’t even get to it. (Bills? Don’t they pay themselves? My regular work isn’t going to do itself while I’m away on business doing — gasp — more work?)
I know, I know — I have more excuses than China has rice. I live and die by avoidance. I’m like my cats — I’m hiding under the rug and because I can’t see you, I think you can’t see me. Never mind that my big fat furry tail is sticking out and flapping in the breeze. 😉
Losing my grandfather means an ocean of self-guilt, sure, but also inheriting Mom. That means either moving back to Pittsburgh or finding a new apartment here to accommodate us. Which means searching for a money tree because I’m barely taking care of myself and GAWD I hope to find a permanent man before that happens.
Ever notice that it seems like men live with their parents but women take in their parents? No? Just me? I’m not saying that men don’t take their parents in or that parents don’t take in their daughters; just saying it’s a double-edged perception sword.
I can’t handle these things. Not right now. I’m not sure when. I have to be forced to face reality.
All I was planning to do today was feel sorry for myself that I was supposed to start my vacation tomorrow . Hahaaaaa. Fuck. Holy personally incurred airline fees and headaches to make myself available at work. But alas, it seems trivial now.
I wish I could ditch everything and go be with my family right now. Funny how when you’re young, you can’t get away from them quickly enough but when you’re older, you just want to escape the rest of your 14-karat fuckup of a life to go back to them. …
I try not to post anything, oh, relevant on this blog because honestly, I just don’t care to raise a discussion about current events.
But then, shit like this has to happen. And fuck it — I pay for this space for a reason and it’s not to hide my opinion.
“After a night of drinking, Chytoria Lata Graham … ‘snapped,’ the Erie woman told police. She grabbed the couple’s month-old son and swung him through the air by the legs, using the blanket-swaddled infant as a weapon to strike her boyfriend.”
Full disclosure: I held two positions in the Pittsburgh area as a mandated reporter for child abuse — one from within the county system; the other in a foster care agency. Tiff and I used to consider ourselves a “child abuse speedtrap” when we’d get together outside of work — the times we could have called social services to report questionable parenting practices? Not a low number.
That said, I am so angry I could go bludgeon that crazy-ass bitch myself. I don’t have to get on any moral high horse; I just wonder WTF she was thinking. I mean, she already had four other kids — was this one disposable? I mean, two of her other kids were called in to assure police that the boyfriend wasn’t the one who injured the infant, which means they SAW it happen. ARGH!!!
I admit, I hated working in child welfare. First, my heart couldn’t take it — you were fucking with people’s lives, livelihoods and family bonds. Decisions were never easy. Consequences were astronomical. You never left your work at the office — not when you were dispatching caseworkers to Children’s Hosptial at 3 a.m. to document allegations and ensure rape kits were being done on 7-year-olds before the investigation could begin. You had to find that scared, damaged child(ren) a place to sleep for what little was left of the night, because you yanked them out in their PJs if you needed to — if they needed a teddy bear, tough luck. Sadly enough. We’d have to get them one later.
Aside from the heart-wrenching stuff, I’m pretty damned liberal, but even that field was too barking-moonbat for my taste. We used to have visitation rooms for children to get to spend time with their birthparents on neutral ground, and as we’d installed two-way mirrors, well, we got an eyeful.
I remember when one kid started sassing a parent. Said parent? Doled out a spanking. Whereupon the visit was broken up, the child was taken out of the building and the parent received some punishment — visitations revoked; there might have been some legal recourse or an attempt thereof.
I’m not saying it’s ever right to beat the shit out of a child, but hot damn, sometimes reasoning doesn’t happen. I took my share of licks and believe me, that’s why I’m alive and a fairly civilized individual today.
In any event, I think it’s time to sterilize some of these women. I know, the company I worked for was all about rehabilitiating the biological parents. And good for them. My job was to find funding for the children who found themselves in foster care, to provide them with programs and activities and clothes and food and resources for their caregivers who were pretty poor themselves.
Not all foster parents go into it willingly. Not all foster parents have wealth and space to house a set of siblings. Many do it for the good of not only keeping A family together, but keeping THEIR extended family together. They are the ones who need the most help.
So when I was taxed with finding money to go visit the moms and dads in jail to give them parenting classes, I’d pretty much had it. Not saying it couldn’t work, but I didn’t rank it among my priorities. Which apparently weren’t mine to set, but I’ll digress before that rant starts flowing.
* Bottom line is that we need to somehow create a way to keep these crazy assholes from reproducing (again).
* We’ve got to take care of the kids who are popping out suffering from withdrawal from whatever drugs their mothers were taking while pregnant.
* We’ve got to help the kids heal who’ve been unnecessarily injured, physically and emotionally.
* We’ve got to find a better alternative than group homes for the older kids who are beyond the “adoptable” stage.
* We’ve got to find a way to stop the cycle of abuse and neglect — we’ve got to stop enabling these bad influences to ever get their hands on these precious children again.
* We’ve got to expose these kids to better things, bigger things — education and culture and extracurricular activities and spiritual pursuits and unconditional love. They’re oftentimes sad and withdrawn and embarrassed to be bouncing from school to school or showing up with a black eye (or a neurological disorder) from Mommy’s crack binge. They’re good kids with a terrible set of circumstances to rise above.
Let’s not bring even more of them into the world. Let’s figure out how to help the ones we’ve got already.
We all know I’m pro-choice. No secrets here. But who’s getting the procedure done? Educated women — women who want to be more secure before they bring a child in this world. Even if they aren’t educated, maybe they can afford whatever it costs these days to get it done. Some of the better insurance plans even cover it.
But from my exposure to the child welfare system, these parents deemed to be unfit were young, poor, unaware of their choices, or maybe altogether too aware of their options. Maybe they were trying to trap a man. Maybe they figured they’d pop out the kid and the state would pay for it. (I can tell you stories. …) Maybe they said they can’t have an abortion because God doesn’t allow for it.
Let me tell you something. We’re all buffet-style Christians. We take what we want and we don’t acknowledge what we don’t believe in. I get that. BUT …
Don’t tell me what a great Christian you are, who just cannot “kill” your baby, when you fell to your back and spread your legs in the first place. If you want to play this game, let’s talk about the part where you’re not supposed to be having sex out of wedlock.
(For the record, I rather enjoy sex out of wedlock — I wouldn’t get any otherwise. But if you’re going to do that, then don’t make the argument that birth control isn’t accepted by your church. And no, I’m not talking about that procedure as birth control.)
It’s (some of) these same assholes who tell us in one breath that God wants them to give birth who end up beating the shit out of these precious little angels they insisted on bringing into this world. Ever seen a crack baby in the neonatal unit at the hospital? Try it sometime. I can’t speak for God, but I would certainly applaud the crack whore who terminates an ill-fated pregnancy.
The WaPo reports that Baby Jarron is in stable condition at Children’s Hospital. And that’s good, but I wonder whether the best resolution would be for the child to not make it. Charge nutjob mama with homicide and get her fertile ass offa the streets.
But what about the father? He shouldn’t be punching women or spreading his demon seed, either. It’s likely he probably did deserve to be walloped with a blunt object.
What fries my ass is how difficult it is to recover from a simple life choice mistake or career misstep — yet these two might and probably will go on to have a normal (let’s not quibble over semantics about THAT word) life with their kids and maybe even make a bunch more. *shudder*
You know, the Internet never forgets. It’s not like a halfway-literate kid with a computer can’t Google his parents and find out that they nearly murdered him. Christ, I’m still mad that there’s no Easter Bunny — what else is my family hiding from me that I shouldn’t know about? 😉
A good mother would have fought with her life to ensure that child stayed protected. No mother I know would have done what she did. Was it self-defense? Temporary insanity? (Don’t answer that.) Permanent stupidity?
Bottom line, put these kids in the witness protection program, change their names and reprogram them to forget this time in their lives. I’d suggest donating their parents’ eggs/sperm to the local cryo banks for those struggling with infertility, but I am loath to perpetuate that stunning example of a gene pool any further.
I decided what I want to be when I grow up — a doctor on “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Think about it — they’re paid six figures for putting in 14-hour days. Occasionally, they save a life and it reaffirms their career choice. But more importantly, they do a fat lot of nothing other than having lots of sex with inappropriate partners in inappropriate places.
Sounds like the workplace of the year to me!
So until I get a job being “Meredith Grey,” alas, I resign myself to actually having to work. So pfft. But I have my coping mechanisms. You have to. My mind is a hotbed of unrelated activity — that’s what we mean by multitasking, kids.
Sabre, however, pointed us to an article that claims women only think about sex once per day — opposed to every 52 seconds for men. I admit, I can go longer than a whole minute without thinking about it, but not by much.
I’m not saying boys and girls aren’t wired differently. We are. I get that. I am surrounded by introverted men all day and have tried to mold myself to an environment where I speak as little as possible. Doesn’t stop me from yearning for interaction and brainstorming time that’s not done alone at my desk. So when that article claims women speak 20,000 words a day to a man’s 7,000, I’m not arguing with it. But I also find that they’ll talk when you find something they’re passionate about.
And insofar as sexual fantasies versus talking? I assure you, I’d happily quit flappin’ my yapper in mid-orgasm. Keep ’em (er, me) comin’ and I’m pretty positive that nothing resembling an articulate word will ever be uttered in your presence. …
Oh, what the hell — I have to do it. What girl DOESN’T want a lil designer dark chocolate in her?
I feel better now. Carry on. …
Seen at the lovely Shawn’s over at Everything and Nothing, CocoaBella allows you to handpick a sumptuous assortment of chocolates ranging from Rosemary Caramel to Bananas Foster to Russian Tea (with cloves).
Of particular interest to me: Prairie Thyme Habanero Sauce. With a jar full of that, I suspect that when I utter my usual command of “Eat me,” I wouldn’t get any protest!
In any event, I probably won’t have time to get there when I go to the left coast later this month, but I do understand a field trip to Bittersweet Cafe is on the itinerary. Believe me, it’s not the worst sacrifice/setback I’ve had to encounter in regard to this trip!
Warning: Repressed memories ahead. Skip to a happier blog. I don’t even know why I’m capturing this shit.