Back from Vacation!

On September 12th, I headed south to North Carolina to visit my sisters, mom, niece, and nephew. I also got to spend an afternoon with my bestest friend!

I took The Pomeranian, Sammy Bear, with me and I was utterly shocked at how well he behaved. He rode for 12 hours (!!!) in the car on the way down without complaint. He dined on french fries, chewed ice cubes, and pooped on numerous grassy areas across five states. He raised his little Pomeranian back leg as high as it would go and marked the corners of upward of 10 different McDonald's parking lots. I was so proud!

My mom and sister live WAY out in the country. In some ways, this vacation crushed some long held dreams for me. Like my dream of living WAY out in the country. I don't dream that any more. I could not live that far away from a real grocery store. At night, there are no lights. NONE. I discovered that I require intermittent street lighting. I require some level of noise that indicates life continues despite my slumber. I need diversity and I need to be among people who do not stare with hostility at everyone who does not look exactly like them.

I drove by my old house. And felt nothing. I felt no twang of longing, no guilt, no bitterness, nor sadness. It felt like I was looking at a house I'd driven by many times but not like I was looking at a house I'd lived in for 8 years.

I had pictures taken with my sisters, I taught my niece some belly dancing moves, and I listened to some tall tales from my nephew. I got to spend a day with my mom, just me and her. I got to spend a day with my best friend and finally meet her dogs and her new husband. I ate twice at my favorite NC style barbeque restaurant.

I had a great vacation and I missed power outages and roof repairs. But more than that, I missed my husband, my house, and my other dogs. I want very much to live closer to my family but mostly, I want to be home.

On Choosing to be a Waitress

This post is really just to give people something to think about.

Now, I've been called a liberal, like it's a bad word. I'm okay with that. I'm sorry that people are so polarized in their stances that they villainize the other side. But calling me a liberal is like calling me white bread or cracker or crazy white bitch. I just fail to be insulted because I am not ashamed of who I am.

So, there's some information for you. You're reading the blog of a stinkin' liberal, tree hugging, left wing...err...whatever else "they" call "us".

Now on to my story. Long ago, there was a group of my coworkers that would go out to lunch together now and then. Our favorite spot was a Mexican restaurant just up the street. They had great food and good service, which is important when you're going to lunch from work.

One woman in our group simply refused to leave a tip. Ever. I asked her once why she felt it was okay to not leave the waitress a tip. Her feeling was that she'd paid for her food and she wasn't obligated to supplement the woman's income. I asked if she understood that the waitress made $2.00 or so per hour. She responded that it wasn't her fault that our waitress chose to be a waitress.

Before the waitresses of the world descend upon me, let me say that I am very thankful for wait people. I've been a waitress. It can be a very tough job and expectations from your patrons, your boss, and the cook are very, very high. You have my utmost respect and I will always leave you at least a decent tip, even if you didn't meet my expectations. This is because I understand that much of your ability to perform your job well depends a great deal on things beyond your control.

So now that the waitresses of the world understand where I am coming from, I'll tell you what I told my coworker right before I told her I wasn't going to any more lunches with her.

I don't know anyone who dreamed as a child of being a waitress. Oh, we PLAYED waitress and it was fun! But we didn't dream of spending 8 to 12 mostly thankless hours mostly on our feet, running our asses off for two bucks and change an hour. We didn't study Flo on Alice, trying to pick up hints on the best way to tell patrons that the prime rib was sold out and still score that big tip. We didn't imagine our hands red and chapped, lifting 50 pound bags of milk, making elebenty billion pots of coffee, or hung over old men swatting on our asses as we passed by with a platter of pancakes.

Here's the deal, people. Not everyone makes it through high school, let alone college. Not everyone was encouraged, let alone expected, to get decent grades and get into a good school. Some of us got very little information about the possibility of college. Some of us were discouraged from thinking we'd be good enough for post secondary education. Some of us were told there was no money for such extravagances as additional education that we wouldn't need anyway because we were going to get married and have babies and support our husbands by keeping a clean house.

Among those who grew up in even the middle class, not just the upper class, there seems to be some confusion about how poor people got to be poor. That somehow, poor people really choose to be poor or they are just too lazy to do anything to change their situation. There is some belief that everyone has the same opportunities as everyone else. There's some idea out there that if you just work hard enough, you can be anything you want. And I think that is bullshit. I think until you are out in the world without a safety net, you will continue to buy into that bullshit - and I think it's because it helps you maintain the illusion that YOU could never be truly poor.

Not everyone has the money, the support, or the options that YOU have had. Some of us have had no safety net. We ARE the safety net. There are no parents with some money tucked away for emergencies for some of us. There's no house to take out a loan against. There's no savings account to send us to college or pay for our glitzy wedding or make the down payment on our first house. There's no credit line, hell, no credit! to cosign a loan.

Every now and then, one of us low lives born to poor people escapes. Sometimes it's because of extraordinary intelligence, a teacher or mentor who saw beyond our stringy hair and hand me down clothes, a fortunate mistake, or some other crazy glitch in the system. We get out of the grip of poverty - we finish high school, we manage to NOT get pregnant, we zig when others might have zagged, and we find ourselves with money left at the end of the month. And we stare at that bank balance in AWE!

But not everyone has that miraculous misstep that leads them out of their parents' fate. There's a reason why everyone doesn't hold a college degree. There's a reason some people are janitors, cooks, truck drivers, pharmacy technicians, mechanics, book binders, paper makers, golf caddies, hot dog vendors, soldiers, and waitresses.

And it may not be because they are fulfilling a life long dream. It may be that they didn't have the encouragement or the support others seem to take for granted and pretend we're all entitled to.

Be generous with your time and money and be stingy with your judgments and preconceived notions. And tip your waitress!!

The Best F**ing News Team Ever

I prefer my pseudo news low and to the left.


Be Careful What You Say

And dammit, blogger won't let me embed it here and viacom made Youtube remove it. It's the MAN and he's trying to KEEP ME DOWN!

Nostalgia - The Bad, Part II

So, on June 1st, 1985, I found myself in uncharted waters. I had escaped the fate of my mother and my grandmother and many of my numerous cousins. I was not married to a coal miner; I would not awaken long before dawn to make coffee and sandwiches six days a week. I would not send my man off into some pit or onto some mountain top all sparkly clean just to have him come home some 10 or 12 hours later, hands and face coated with coal dust, so that the whites of his eyes popped out at me.

No, I was a soldier's wife. I would awaken before dawn, squint, and fall back to sleep. I'd wake up around mid morning and wonder what I was going to do to fill my day. Sheer boredom granted me the cleanest rented mobile home I have ever stepped foot in (and I've been in some that have never even been lived in). You could eat off my floors and drink out of my sparkling white toilet bowl. I kid you not.

At some point, I got a job I could walk to. I worked at a dry cleaner's, where I learned how to sew the little tags on the Army guys' uniforms. I learned exactly where everything went on the shirts and on the Army Class A's. There's an Air Force base near Ft. Bragg so I would occasionally get one of those. It wasn't much and it didn't pay much but there was almost no pressure, no stress. I'd give it a B- as far as unskilled labor goes.

But things started happening in my little love nest. My man started not coming home. Checks started bouncing. There were bills I couldn't pay. My roller rink honey had always loved some decent weed and I thought being in the Army would cure him of that. But it's funny how all the pot heads can find each other, even in the Army. And that's exactly what happened to my honey. He apparently hooked up with every pot head in the 82nd Airborne sometime between Christmas 1984 and June 1985.

I can remember being at the mobile homes of other Army wives on Saturday nights. All of his buddies had newborns, it seemed like. We'd be playing cards and someone would light a joint. Pot has always just immobilized me; I'd get the giggles and crave Doritos but I just couldn't move. I'd watch in amazement as the Army wives changed diapers and made bottles and fed babies; I knew I would never be able to do that. I knew I couldn't bring a baby into this situation, knew that my roller rink honey wasn't going to pull it together, knew that I was going to have to find a way to pull us out of this.

So, in February 1986, I joined the Army. We desperately needed the money. I desperately needed to have a life with more in it than what we'd seen thus far. I really only meant to join the reserves. You know, maybe be a medic and be gone for 8 weeks for basic training and a couple months for medic training. Then I'd be back and we'd have this extra income every month.

But recruiters are slick, you know? I got kick ass scores on their tests; I could choose any profession I wanted, almost. So I picked pharmacy technician, I think because some girl I knew in school and could never stand was going to be a pharmacist. How's THAT for a way to choose a career path?? I'd be working in a pharmacy and she'd still be in her second year of college. So there! Hah!!

But there was a hitch, you know? If I wanted to be a pharmacy technician, I had to join the real Army. For four years. And I'd have a life long trade when I got out. And I'd have a full time job with a full time pay check. And I could come back to Ft. Bragg, once I finished training and signed a waiver saying I didn't want to go to Germany like my orders would say I was going. And I would be gone for about 6 to 8 months but that's not SO long, really, you know?

Oh, my man was PISSED!! I thought the top of his head was going to explode. But then he lit a joint and I knew I'd made the right decision.

Nostalgia - The Bad, Part I

So, a long time ago, I was in the US Army. I was only in for 4 years and I never left the country. In fact, I was practically a civilian most of the time because I was a pharmacy technician (91Q hoo-ah!). I worked in a hospital.

There was a time when I thought I would go to college and become a high school English teacher. If you've read anything I've written, it is clear to you that I either became the worst English teacher ever or the truth reveals to you that dream was never realized.

I'm not bitter about not having been able to live my childhood dream. That's probably because so many other very cool things have happened to me. I did eventually get to college and I did get a degree. I just have issues with following society's prescribed sequence of events and that's not on purpose. It's just how things shake out for me. At any rate, not to spoil the ending or anything, just keep in mind, that given all of the things that might have gone another way, I'm happy with how things have turned out so far.

My path to the Army presented itself during the summer before my freshman year of high school. I went roller skating nearly every Saturday that summer. I couldn't do any tricky moves but I rarely fell down. It was a grand summer, I recall but the details are very fuzzy. Had I known that the events taking place that summer would have such a huge impact on my life, I'd have paid much closer attention!

There was this boy at the skating rink. He was just stinkin' adorable and he could skate really well. He really preferred to play video games though. Oddly, I don't think anything happened between us that summer. I don't remember us skating together or kissing or even learning each other's names. Maybe I just stalked him. I just can't remember.

In the fall, I was anxious about going back to school. I was pretty smart and I got good grades. I thought maybe I was a big fish in a small pond and I was about to become a small fish in a big pond, if you know what I mean. So, I was worried about all that and the idea that maybe I wasn't really all that smart at all. I was also worried about being not very pretty, being incredibly shy, and now I was certain that I might not be very bright to boot. I was pretty insecure walking in those doors.

But there was this boy, from the skating rink. I was running into him all the time. He was everywhere, it seemed. And he was funny; he made me laugh. Next thing you know, I have a boyfriend! I'm dating! Well, sort of dating...we didn't actually GO anywhere but we were "going together". Maybe that was my first clue. About not going anywhere. But who could know? I was 15 and I was IN LOVE!!!

There was a lot of stuff in between that would make this story way too long (like it isn't already!). He graduated a year before me and by fall, he had joined the Army. I had a year left in school. He'd be gone. It was unbearable to consider. I thought I'd lose him to the world and I think he thought he'd lose me too...to what, I can't imagine. Good sense?

So we did what any pair of 18 year olds would do in this situation in the mid 80's, in Eastern Kentucky. We got married. On Christmas Day. He went off into the world (aka Ft. Bragg, NC) and I stayed with my mom and finished high school. Graduation night, I stuffed the car he'd sent money for with all our worldly possessions. The next morning, I was on the road to North Carolina. A new adult life, a husband, a little mobile home waiting to be filled with towels and sheets and groceries. I was escaping and I could barely wait to get started with the rest of my life.

More soon.

Nostalgia, The Good

I am reading about kundalini meditation and the author writes about when we are children, how we experience our kundalini energy often. He encourages the reader to think back on their childhood and remember a time when you experienced this energy.

I was a very imaginative child; I was a singleton until I was five. I think because I had no built in playmate, I made up stories to entertain myself. Most of the stories I made up when I was three don't make sense to me now. I remember feeling like I was on an adventure every time I played, though.

I wish I could remember more of the details. Like, I can remember "escaping" to the park (much to my mother's dismay) and I spoke to the squirrels as I walked, explaining to them that my father was away on business (I don't recall his profession at that time but he came home every evening). Then a helicopter flew overhead and I told the squirrels, who were of course simply enthralled, that my father was in the helicopter on his way to his job. I waved to him and encouraged the squirrels to do the same.

And then Mom found me (I know the park was too far away for a 3 year old to go alone but really, you could see it from our backyard and there were no streets to cross to get there). She was very upset that I'd wandered so far. I must have scared the crap out of her! (which was also a lot of fun!)

So, it was those sorts of days that I thought of when I reflected on blissful moments from my childhood; when I felt uninhibited by society, when I conversed out loud with squirrels, and waved to helicopters. The time before responsibilities, convention, needing to explain myself or defend my thoughts. It was all very simple and rich.

Saturday Ramblings

I don't know what is spewing pollen this time of year in Cincinnati, but it is kicking my allergic ass. I have been congested and coughing for nearly two weeks! I did go to the doctor (and believe me, that means I feel like crud!) and she thought perhaps I had a sinus infection. I completed a course of antibiotics but my symptoms still persist.

This is putting a serious damper on my ability to do stuff! Stuff like, think clearly. Breathe. Not to mention sleep, sex, work - not necessarily in that order.

I am going to get my hair cut today at a salon I haven't been to before - la petite salon & spa. I hope I don't cough at the wrong time and end up having to shave my head to even it out. I'll let you know how it goes!

Then I am going to Kohl's to do some shopping. They're having a sale and hubby has a credit card there. Woot! Maybe then I will feel up to some lovin' time with hubby!

All of this is a diversion so that I do not think about all the serious stuff at work. On Monday, I will complete a matrix that details what I do all day, explain why that work is relevant and important, and whether I have capacity for more work and what I'd prefer that work be or not be. I felt somewhat encouraged that my initial response to receiving this form was annoyance that I didn't have time to fill it out because I have relevant and important work to do!

For now, I am off to guzzle some more generic Robotussin DM, shower, and hope I have something clean and presentable to wear to the salon. Have a great Saturday!