Race for the Cure

Eight friends, the one, the only, the mothership and of course, me walked the Race for the Cure today along with 9 kabillion other people. Ok, it seemed like 9 kabillion other people, it was actually closer to 20,000 people. Still an amazing number of people to gather together to fight breast cancer. The energy was captivating to me. Saw some kids wearing race bibs marked In Memory of My Mom, my heart caught in my throat every time, even seeing 2 was too many and I saw way more than 2. The breast cancer survivors were easy to spot in their pink shirts and pink hats and their energy was infectious. And the friends, took time out of their busy weekend to be a part of this race, to navigate the logistical frolic - the buses to Bristol Myers, 20,000 people 50 portajohns, do the math. Ok, so there were likely more than 50 portajohns, but there were not 20,000 (but as usual, I digress.) Most importantly we were there to walk for the cure, we did and I'm happy we all did it and grateful for their time, effort and attention, for the time, effort and attention of the people who so generously sponsored us. Why I walked - my paternal grandmother died of breast cancer when she was younger than I am now and when treatment options were surgery and pray. And now we have so much more options and I'm grateful. My friend Mindy died last year and how her four daughters must miss her. My friend Ann underwent treatment last year and is still surviving and thriving.

Marriage?

It fascinates me that the prospect of gay marriage stirs up such a ruckus among the allegedly Christian. First of all, with the divorce rate hovering around 58%, it seems to me that the people that already have the right to marry should work harder at staying married and worry less about who is marrying whom. The old responsibility of a priveleged class deal. Also, if the prospect of gay marriage stirs up this much of a ruckus, and no one has the stones to grant this basic right to gay folks, I propose that marriage for all be banned, grandfather the people who are currently married but that's it. After a certain date it's illegal. And peel away all the tax benefits gradually. That way people can focus on their relationships with one another and their kids and not worry so much about denying rights to other people since that right and privelege will be denied to all. And while we're at it, how about licensing people to reproduce. Since it's the actions of the straights that are producing overcrowding, and the social ills created by un or ill parented offspring license, how about licensing people to breed?

Confession Time

I know the cure for cancer. It's money. Could it be found in the human genome? Maybe? Could in be found in mitochondrial structures? Perhaps. But the only way to find that out is through research and the only way to fund research is with money. For many, many years one of my dearest friends has been A, who is also known as the matriarch of cancer research in NJ. She is crazed with passion about cancer research. I have learned at her knee the value of basic scientific research in the fight against cancer. She is also affiliated with this crowd: http://www.komencsnj.org/. They will have 15,000 plus people walking at the Race for the Cure in Princeton this weekend to raise money to fight breast cancer. For a number of reasons, not the least of which being that I've got two of them not far from my chin, breast cancer is very near and dear to my heart. So if you can, walk, donate but be sure to examine your breasts, when it's time for the squish get it. And get a check up every year.

Are You Kidding Me With This?

As a self observation exercise, I spent yesterday and today observing how many times I posed the question 'are YOU fucking kidding me with this?' Whether out loud or in my mind. So yesterday, I was driving to Freehold and someone pulled in front of me going 35 mph in a 50 mph zone, and I let one rip. Today, I had posed the question 11 times before 9:30am. Not for the faint hearted!

Why I Need Patience...

Because some of the clients find it to be too much of an inconvenience to communicate their new addresses to us, we have boxes of checks that have been returned by the postal service. I was fishing through them because it's one of the things I do, in my spare time, and it's done generally because once we've got 3 or 4 checks back there's a good chance that the forwarding address is not on this plane of existence.

For the others, people will call in their new addresses and then we will mail the check back out to them. Sooooooooooo, one of the prizes asks me do I have a check for Weems. I say what's the first name. John is the response I get. I don't have a check for John Weems. I don't have a check for anybody Weems. Client Services says it's on the list. I say ok, spell the last name. W-i-l-l-i-a-m-s. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Who knew I had to be bilingual for this damned job?

Nemesis

Despite this well-worn air of serenity I tend to give off, from time to time I do get fired up. Especially at work. There’s a lot there to get a girl fired up. My current nemesis is the scheduler, a/k/a that seat sniffing moron. For us to work the magic that we work, it requires a strict schedule that is well planned, oh and makes some sense. We cannot schedule processing activities for weekends, or holidays, because we don’t work weekends or holidays. So someone has got to be fairly conversant in how to read the list of holidays provided on the calendar and of course, one must be able to read and comprehend a calendar. One might think that these would be a desirable skill set for someone whose only productive activity would be writing a schedule for the year.

We issue what we call standard checks the first of each month, then each month we have floating pay dates that we call nonstandard. Nonstandard dates have few requirements, the 1st being that the checks are not dated the first and the second being that no processing events are scheduled for Saturday, Sunday or holidays. So it’s not bad enough that he has nonstandard checks dated 1 May and 1 August but we are running a calculation on the 4th of July. So I had to tell the scheduler, I think fucking not. He doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not up for discussion, nor is it ever prudent to argue with me about this. Which invariably leads to a battle royale, a) because I’m a bitch and b) because I ought not have to babysit this douchebag or listen to his excuses. Just fix the fucking thing, man. And do not let me find any other fuckups in this schedule. Fortuitously for me, my boss’s modus operandi is, if Skull is happy then I’m happy. If Skull is not happy, then we must fix that. Or she's going to hurt someone.

Bureacracy

The point of bureacracy is to be self-sustaining, I'm convinced of it. I know I was taught that it was to provide due process at all levels of governmental interaction, but really it's to be self-sustaining. Picture it, the data processing queen whirls up here to present me a check for $850.57 that is made out to, wait for it, nobody. After Pay to the Order of:, we have a plethora of blank space. As you might imagine this pleases me not at all. So I have to go around barking because this kind of idiocy is why computer programmers have to be clever enough to think of ways to make things idiot resistant. System generated checks with blank payees should simply not be. (yup, more should all over my footwear.) In order to issue a check made payable to someone (and in a perverse turn of events this poor soul is deceased so he'd not have been able to cash the check even were it made out properly.) I have to stop payment on the check, the online system to stop payment on the check requires a payee, soooooooo, I've gotta call the brain trust in Charlotte where for 20 minutes I get ma'amed within an inch of my wit's end about 'our system limitations'. Until patience leaves me and I say "dude, have you got a manual system? Yes, ma'am. Good, try that. Yes, ma'am." It alarms me that only I seemed to have the animal cunning to suggest that solution and we are paying them.

Excuse Me

Ordinarily, I work pretty hard at being civil and polite. It's the compassionate thing to do and it allows people to remain under the impression that I'm a nice person, whether that happens to be true or not. Occassionally, usually when I'm exhausted (okay, or just plain ornery) I will slip. In my travels today I had to whirl into Wawa (the local quickie mart) and utilize the sanitary facilities, there was a certain urgency to my visit so when a woman excused herself to me, I quickly snapped without thinking - "Why? Did ya fart?

Bachelorette Parties

I lunch daily with an extraordinary group of women, they were mentioned in the posting entitled the language of love. (shut the fuck up means I love you in the language we all speak) One of them, N is getting married at the end of the month. This wedding has been a year in the planning and as we come down to the wire the preparatory rituals have commenced. So we celebrated the bachelorette party Friday evening. This involved a visit to a nightclub in PA, this place is apparently known as the biggest wrinkle bar/meat market in the South Jersey/Philadelphia/Delaware suburbs or as my acquaintance D calls it the 4th circle of Dante's Inferno. I will confess to not spending much time in the strange twilight world of the heterosexual, as I am not. And if one is not headless, one can discern this without too much effort. Well, two gentlemen asked me to dance and as this would interfere with my view of my friends cleavage, I demurred. And do think to myself, what are ya blind, buddy? could I look any dykier?

The Depilatory Power of Duct Tape - Who Knew?

Duct tape is widely touted as a product no household should be without. It works wonders in many aspects of home repair and as I overheard in a conversation this afternoon even works as a health and beauty aid. Apparently, one of the women folk with whom I work runs to hirsute. In order to combat overgrowth of her underbrush she utilized the services of a salon’s wax technician. But the salon has changed hands and she is not trusting of the new wax technician, nor the new ownership. She doesn’t want to catch funk from their wax. So she switched her hair removal method to home waxing, which apparently worked just fine for the more readily visible anatomical landmarks, she ran into some trouble in her nether regions and enlisted the handy duct tape. Having wrestled with duct tape during more than one home improvement project I can readily attest to the efficacy with which it can deprive one of hair. So my coworker who we will call Glinda, cut the duct tape into anatomically appropriate slips and went to work. Not surprisingly the duct tape proved an effective depilatory, however, she discovered that she had quite the sensitivity to the adhesive and now has a rash. So much for avoiding funk.

Aikido Metaphor

During a recent Aikido class, I looked around the room and noticed that I’m wearing clothing that’s older than most of the people on the mat. It was a mixed teens/adult class, beginner level and so when the instructor demonstrated the first technique as a Katetori Koshinage, I was quite amused amid the wide-eyed stares of most of my fellow students. By way of explanation, the attacker (uke – the person who ends up receiving the technique) grabs the attackee (nage- the person who ends up executing the technique) by the wrist, pushes her hip/butt into the uke’s midsection so as to drape him over her back and tosses him onto the ground (not gently either). One does not as a rule do a whole lot of koshinage in a beginners class – (koshinage essentially meaning your ass is dangling from a perch atop nages hips and then you as uke get pulled into a roll off of nage’s back which is pretty high up from an ‘oh shit, I’ve got to fall from here’ perspective) because most beginners don’t know how to fall from that kind of a height. In Aikido, it’s essential to learn surrender because if you struggle against gravity you can get pretty badly hurt, where as if you work with the known outcome of gravity (i.e. ass meet mat, mat meet ass) you can generally stay safe. It’s not natural for human beings to surrender to the sensation of falling or having their balance taken from them, you are fighting many atavistic tendencies to do it and to do it safely surrender is key, as is tenacity. Aikido provides many opportunities to practice surrender, being completely in the moment, and taking what life dishes out. The technique we ultimately ended up practicing for the night is called nikkyo, (second technique) with nikkyo nage’s wrist ends up bent in upon itself and the way to maintain balance and connection as well as endure less pain is to turn into the source of the pain and support your center from there. Again, like so many other of life’s lessons this was an Ah-ha moment for me. Avoiding pain doesn’t rid us of it, it just allows it to crop up in more places in life. To face pain head-on and be with it in the moment allows us to maintain some control in the midst of surrender.

Office Adventures

I work in an office (although many days it could be more accurately characterized as an orifice of the crimson anal ilk, but I digress). I whirl in today to the dulcet tones of whining (this is not an uncommon experience). Today’s whine involved the copier and how some people (that work under another straw boss) slam the copier lid down, and break it and leave it broken without telling anyone or calling the service folk. This whine occurs approximately weekly. Apparently, it is assumed that only I have the animal cunning to tell someone to stop slamming the fucking copier or I’ll rip your head off and slam it in it and that only I have the animal cunning to call the repair folk. Today’s solution was to place a sign on the machine that says: OUT OF ORDER, SLAMMING THE LID BROKE THE MACHINE, PARTS ARE ON ORDER.
There’s nothing wrong with this machine but it keeps the whiners and the slammers away from it.

Today’s other adventure involved my friend H. I encountered him as we were waiting to accost our mutual boss, me to sign something that requires top secret approval and H. to recount his adventure of the day lest the boss (F) hear it from the news media. People congregate to smoke by a short wall out near the street. H. smokes, he was outside smoking about ten and saw a small open box with a label bearing the name Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner and it contained what appeared to be specimen slides (for a microscope). Rather than leave them on the wall for some one to break or worse, he brought them into the euphemistically titled security guard in the lobby of our building. He gave them the box, the slides and his phone number. He gets upstairs, his phone is ringing and they want him back down in the lobby. In the lobby, he’s greeted by State Troopers, folks in Haz Mat gear, and firefighters who grill him about the slides. These parties were apparently sufficiently concerned that they were ordering up the portable decontamination trucks when through some official channel they learned that the slides were training slides and innocuous. I surely hope so, but I’ve been feeling right itchy since H told me his story.

Windows

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm having windows replaced in my house. I had to lock up the cats so they do not make a break for it. And Stripe, of course, was rather recalcitrant so I had to toss him in the room, again, and again and again. There's nothing like tossing a 17lb cat that doesn't want to be tossed.

From Time to Time

I think I'd have been better off being born smart rather than just smart assed.
The window folks are coming to replace my windows and need the window treatments removed, not a problem, unsnap the blinds and take them off easy stuff. Well, I do that and then hop in the shower and of course, hop out and go about the business of getting dressed. I notice that I'm putting the twins in the bra while framed in the blindless window for all the neighborhood to see because I forgot that I took the blinds down. Of course, there's a guy in the front yard, mouth agape edging the lawn and I do what any girl does, wave - my hand, not twins. Well, at least not deliberately the twins.

Beautification Rituals

Most days I think I look on the unkempt side of random. But since I'm evading the grey hair fairies pretty strenuously I go in for cut and color religiously every 8 weeks. Last night was the big night and I went for broke and got the eyebrows waxed. Somehow I look a little more expressive while at the same time looking a little more nuts. It's an amusing look for me and it's all about my own amusement.

Is It Work If?

I'm listening to a conversation knowing it will go into this blog or a book or both?

I'm trying to visualize someone as a small child, mostly so I stop visualizing slapping their adult self senseless (and yeah, mainly it is too late as they've already achieved senseless)?

I answer a question with a question - like what the hell are you prattling on about now?

I answer the inevitable phone question, "Who is this?" with "I don't know I can't see you?"