Reinvention

It's been awhile, I know.

I am not sure if my sabbatical was the equivalent of a summer vacation, or that I couldn't sustain the pace I was trying to keep, or simply that I couldn't hear the voice in my head because of all the background noise, but in the end, I think it's just simply that I've needed time.

Lots of things going on since I last floated my fingertips across these keys. I buried my grandma, got a new boss, changed my hair color (slightly and not actually on purpose), found out my thyroid was out of whack (probably not the technical term for this condition), started learning elementary German on Babble, but most importantly I learned a lot about myself.

On my second to last post, my mother, revealed as one of the most prominent readers of this screed (hey I need all the fans I can get) mentioned that many of my posts sounded angry and it really shook me.

I stood back and took a hard look at myself. And when I began to really measure it and take stock, I was staggered at the sheer amount of negativity in my life. How many times had I metaphorically shot myself in the foot, not believing myself capable of the tasks entrusted to me?

It's hard to change, as a negative person, to begin to embrace positivity. Very. In fact, it's downright excrutiating for someone as diametrically opposed to change as myself.

Sometimes though, you get help along the way from the places and people from whom you'd least expect it. Remember in school when you were getting your schedule at the beginning of the year, how someone would look over your shoulder and shudder and say "Oh Wow, you got O'Malley for Bio!", as if to say, man are you in for it!  But then unexpectedly, O'Malley would turn out to be the teacher you most remember looking back, because even though he was tough and demanding, you found yourself doing better and getting more out of his class, because he inspired you, because he believed you were capable of more than you'd even thought you were.

Remember how I said, I got a new boss. I didn't want one. No indeed, I was going along just fine, thank you very much, but Non-Company decided our team was getting one anyway. And there were a few fraught days where I teetered on the verge of taking my marbles and going home...after all... it's just an assignment anyway, right? I took a few days, went to Connecticut to attend my Grandma's memorial service, and I came back thinking, okay, I'll see what this guy is like.

Mr. New Boss is a very austere ex-Naval officer, incredibly soft-spoken in tone, yet somehow as steely as they come. And just like O'Malley the Bio teacher, he demands a great deal from you, but before he did that, he did something that no one had ever done before in all my days at Non-Company, he told me I was valued. And he conveyed the fact that he believed I could do more than I'd settled for. And somehow for the first time in many years, I was inspired again.

Please don't get me wrong here, there are plenty of stressful moments where the old me comes back the one that says, I feel that I just can't get this or that done, but then somehow I find myself digging deeper into reserves that I didn't know I had, because I don't want to let him down and also surprisingly I find, because I don't want to let Non-Company down. Not because of who they are, but suddenly because of who I am.

In many ways things are the same, but somehow, I've subtlety changed. I'm no longer angry at smart phones, I use one all the time and I love the exasperating little dude, I've embraced Kindle and wheras I once dismissed them as red-neck idiots, I now absolutely love the values and faith of Duck Dynasty. I've been to a food truck and while I still don't completely understand the allure, I won't knock it anymore. In short, I don't feel the need as much to run somebody else down to elevate myself and make me feel better.

I'll try to make it back to regular weekly postings and Flashback Fridays, and for those of you who are still reading this, I thank you...

Reality Bites

The other day, my Mom who counts herself as one of my blog fans, remarked to me that the tenor of my posts seems to come off lately as angry. It was a bit startling to hear this, but after I pondered it for a bit, I came to think she was well, hate myself for saying this...right.
Today, after taking a cursory look at MSN, checking the headlines, stocks, French Open scores, I found the following article, entitled, "The Great Recession Wrecked Generation X" that I am posting a link to here:

http://money.msn.com/now/post.aspx?post=fc1c9c39-1c4a-4223-9ecb-2512551ec4b2

While I know a lot of people, including many in Gen X jib at the title of  'Generation X' or say,
"Oh, I don't buy into that", or "That doesn't apply to me", in my case, I think, this article encapsulates a lot of the anger that seems to be overflowing into my writing lately. Where the author, Jason Notte talks about Gen X since the Great Recession (Depression) being just older, and more tired, but certainly not any better off financially, I was mentally high-fiving him.

Finally, someone coming out and saying it. There were plenty of meglomaniacal posts in the 'Comments' sections from those who say that they weren't affected at all, let's face it there are always exceptions to any rule, but I think many of us, when we matriculated and entered the work force expected so much better. In my case, a crushing workload, which thanks to new cost-cutting measures, I can't even get overtime for, or health benefits, or vacation. When November rolls around, I will have hit the 2 year mark of the longest probationary period in history! And before you say, well you could leave and look for something better. Something better these days usually means another assignment and I already have one of those, a permanent job today is like trying to hit the motherlode in the Yukon!  Because let's face it, the Boomers aren't retiring because they can't afford to, the Millenials want your job too and they are younger, cuter and more wired in, so where does that leave me?  Really tired mostly, but in the more dire moments, staring into a gaping abyss of hopelessness. Believe it or not I used to be such an idealist; I go back and read the journal entries around the time of my high school graduation and my early days of college and there is such an optimistic, hopeful tone, I'm so excited by the possibilities of life, the feeling that everything is just out there waiting to be conquered. Truthfully, I almost can't read them anymore, knowing what I know now.

The thing is, I haven't given up...I care. I've tried to enact change politically, tried to believe that my congressman really does read the emails I send, that the Florida Governor, who I've ardently supported because he promised to bring employment to our state, will keep his promises. I vote even in the smallest elections, I write, I work hard, I pray.

They call us the slacker generation, but I know many of us are doing the same, working hard, voting, praying, hoping beyond hope, beyond what the experts tell us, beyond what the politicians don't do, beyond the promises they don't keep, that somehow we will beat the odds....

Gen X Retro Flashback- "Mr. Roboto" -Styx

This is for my sister Erin. Whenever I hear this song, I wish we could wind back the clock to 1983, lace up some roller skates and make absolute fools of ourselves.

Oh, and of course, grab a few Jolly Ranchers or an Atomic Fire Ball or two to snack on...

Enter The Dragon (Lady)

A new temp started at Non-Company yesterday.

They never take someone around the first day and introduce them to 'the gang'; I guess it's because some temps never make it past lunchtime.

So today after said temp returned for the second day and apparently made it through the first day lunch period without sprinting to her car and re-enacting the OJ Car Chase-circa 1994, they decided 'What the heck?' and began the Non-Company tour of the factory floor, the conference rooms where she will soon attend her first bewildering Justice League Meeting, her first safety training where she will view what I like to call the, 'Reel of Horror' which basically comprises clips of former Non-Company unfortunates who were maimed or crippled for failing to observe safety precautions. If she's lucky she will view it before lunch, unlike some of us other unfortunates, who have never been quite the same since then when viewing the chili dogs on offer in Non-Company vending machines. Then they take her around and introduce her to the various departments.

Her guide on this tour is a semi-nemesis of mine, who flatly seems to disapprove of me, for reasons I've never been quite able to ascertain. Once again, I feel myself called upon to explain things in MASH terminology (I watched ALOT of MASH in my youth, if Pierce Brosnan as Remington Steele and Michael Weatherly as Tony DiNozzo were film savants, I am a MASH savant), in Non-Company parlance apparently I'm the Margaret Houlihan, the dragon lady, old 'Iron Drawers'. For Semi-Nemesis, instead of introducing me with a smile as we exchange friendly banter like she did with the rest of the Non-Com minions, says, "This is Jill, she keeps these guys in line and runs the department, all of your requests go through her first", although in print it seems to come across a lot warmer than it was said. All of the sudden, I picture myself clad in a prison matron's uniform, wearing combat boots, my hair cropped in a crew cut and for some reason a night stick, which I repeatedly strike across my right palm. Which is so far from the reality of me, who has fluffy bobbed blonde hair and wears lots of jewelry and artfully (I hope) applied cosmetics. I can actually see Newbie Temp shrink from me in much the same way she will a few weeks from now, when she views the 'Reel of Horror'. I try to smile warmly, but for some reason it falls flat. Done with me, they move on to the relative safety of my co-workers. Part of me wants to run after them, wailing, "Really, please give me another chance. I...I love puppies, kittens, sunsets, unicorns, ummm...Justin Bieber...okay, actually I loathe the 'Biebs', but I didn't totally hate that 'Baby, Baby..Oh' song...okay I did, but....please, please...."

I go on to spend a great deal of my lunch hour pondering what it is about me, that creates this alter-ego, this Thatcher-esque 'Iron Lady'. Full disclosure is, I am the only female in my department. It's me and seven other dudes (and no they ARE not dwarves!) I've had to develop a tough skin, a fondness for racy jokes, frat humor, to try to stay elevated just enough above the double-entredes so that I keep my ladylike manner but not be a prig either. I bake them cupcakes for birthdays, keep the candy jar filled, get greeting cards signed on all the appropriate occasions, at the same time, I have to be able to judiciously officiate the occasional infighting, while trying to maintain my reports, my own workload, the extra 'secretarial' duties, arranging lunch for meetings, arranging housing for long-term business trips, scheduling meetings, reminding them about said meetings, and that means I don't have time for the office politics crap. I don't sit on committees, and I don't come in sharing all the gory details of my weekends, because here's the thing, while to women drama is mother's milk, guys don't like it so much. I tend to spend my lunch hours away from the office, away from the lunch room gossip, because I so desperately need those 30-50 mins to myself to maintain my sanity, to read, make phone calls, restore my equilibrium. I guess to them that means I'm stuck-up, but for me it's the difference between cracking up and being a sane and functioning human being.

Don't get me wrong, of all the things I might find wrong about Non-Company, my department is not one of them, the guys I work for are gold. You'd be hard-pressed to find a harder working, more dedicated, talented crew anywhere, but it sets me apart from the rest of the company. It's almost like I can hear the whispers, "That's the girl that works in that department with all the guys, yeah, I've heard about her."...

I wonder if it carries over into the rest of my life. One of my Non-Company dudes once said to me, something to the effect of, I was all hard shell on the outside, with a soft center that rarely gets seen. I ponder what makes me like this. Is it hard-wired into my personality, a hold-over from school days where I was shunned by the other kids for wearing thick glasses and reading all the time? For being a weirdo who actually preferred being quiet and listening to music instead of going out partying and socializing. I was so super-introverted that I really never learned exactly how to socialize, to flirt, how to talk out my feelings.  I've heard it before from plenty of people, including an ex-boyfriend who stated, "I never know exactly what you are thinking, because you only share to a point."

I worry that maybe I am Margaret Houlihan, desperate to be included but unwilling to grovel,
"Did you ever once offer me a lousy cup of coffee?"

And I wonder what Newbie Temp would think if I told her how much I envy her this chance to be just that, a new person, cloaked in mystery, someone everyone wants to meet and find out about, not the dragon lady persona I am not even sure how I came to inhabit. But one whose scales I can't seem to shake.

Gen X Retro Flashback- "Goonies-R-Good Enough"- Part 1

Memorial Day Weekend in American parlance has always been synonomous with backyard BBQ, beer, and for some reason Summer Movie Box-Office.

If you mention the word,'Goonies' to most Gen X'ers', they'll probably get a goofy smile on their face, and start telling you where they saw it, and who with. 

And then they'll start talking about, 'One-Eyed Willie', the 'Truffle Shuffle', 'Sloth' and most everything Chunk and Mouth say throughout the film...

In 1985, Cyndi Lauper made a lengthy video in two parts, which are here in two videos. Look for a youngish Steven Spielberg making a cameo, as well as wrestlers Captain Lou Albano, Rowdy Roddy Piper and a very young Andre the Giant, who will forever be Fezzik from The Princess Bride to me.

But the one thing that every Gen X'er knows, is that 'Goonies Never Say Die'! You know I had to say it....

The Me I Am Trying to Be

I used to dream about being an ice-skater.  In fact, occasionally for no particular reason, I still have visions of myself twirling about in figure eight patterns, then leaping up in a perfect triple axel or triple toe loop. I think in those moments, it's as if a latent part of myself is still open to the possibilities of what might be, instead of the reality of what is.

The pragmatist says, "Are you kidding me? You live in Florida, it's not like we see a whole lot of ice down here!"

"I mean c'mon on, you are knocking on the door of 40, my friend, live in the now!"

Obviously, I think skating is a metaphor for the fact that even nearing my 40's, some part of me is still the daydream believer.

Many, many years ago, one summer day in about 1984, if my memory serves, my mother and I, after much whining and pleading on my part, entered a children's bookstore in a small strip mall in a non-descript Central Florida town. This was before the days of Books a Million, the Barnes and Noble Superstores, long before Borders was ever dreamt up to ultimately fail. The most we had was a small B. Dalton and a Waldenbooks in the mall, and I am not sure they were there at the same time.

I remember preferring B. Dalton because they had these faux wood floors that were fastened down with rivets that were the same size, color and texture of pennies. In fact as a child, I was certain they were. I used to just wander through the shop counting the 'pennies'. Because at that time, kids were not the big business they are today. There might have been a small children's section, jammed in at the end of the adult shelves. But there were no huge displays of stuffed animals from fiction, no child size chairs to sit in, no puzzles area or literature based toys. There were simply books, and as much as I grew to absolutely adore them, books were not all that attractive to me, packaged thusly, as a child.

So this children's bookstore was a dream come true. Seeing its sign up for the 'Grand Opening',  I literally could not wait to go there.  Here I sit now, nearly forty and I can even remember where it was, the shopping center. I could drive there now and point out the exact location. In fact, I'm certain that the frontage it occupied was combined with another store front and became the pub where I once spent an evening in the company of a spectacularly alcoholic Englishman.

There in the shop I browsed, looking at books that were written and illustrated just for kids. I remember feeling almost overcome at the variety, the colors, the authors, some of whose names I was familiar and some who I would come to know. It was a brand new world of sparkling vistas, which would ignite a passion within me, that would never subside, up to and until this very day. From that moment on, bookstores became magical to me. Some people find their truest selves when they first sit in front of a piano, some in front of sewing machines, others in-front of a Mac, or a drill press. I found my truest self standing that day in a bright cheerful shop filled with the smell of printed paper and glossy cardboard covers.

My mother, always raised to be frugal, has ultimately failed in her attempts to instill in me the virtues of eschewing book ownership in favor of book borrowing. I think if she were honest, or I could somehow get her to ingest copious quantities of truth serum, it would come out that she actually feels worse about that than me being unmarried at nearly forty! She is a good sport though and some years ago, bequeathed to me a bookmark that is imprinted with an original quote by Erasmus, that states, "When I get a little money, I buy books, and if I have any left I buy food and clothes!"

So it was a big leap for her, when, I pressed her to purchase for me a book of pyschological exercises (for kids mind you) entitled, "The Me I Am Trying To Be".  I think it was the 80's version of  "Free to Be You and Me" (all apologies to Marlo Thomas) and she agreed.

I dutifully read and re-read this paperbound book of riddles, morality stories, injunctions not to be a bully, and I did all the exercises, my answers scrawled in a childish hand, listing my dreams and aspirations for the future, whom I hoped to marry (he, whoever he may be, has apparently lost his way or married a supermodel instead), how to treat 'old people', not to steal, or shoplift, etc., etc. In short, completion of the book was supposed to create the 'Me I Was Meant To Be'. Somehow, occasionally, I felt that I let the book down.

And I question...am I the 'Me I Was Meant to Be'?

For years, I kept the book, returning to it as a superior adolescent, a smug teenager, a scared twenty-something, to smile at it, shake my head with rueful laughter, wonder what possessed me to write this thing or that one. In my thirties, I lost track of it. In one of my clear-outs, I probably decided to part with it for once and for all, rationalizing that I WAS 'the Me I Was Meant To Be'!

In this last appraisal though, I think that I probably found the me I was meant to be standing in the midst of all those shelves in that children's bookstore before I ever did one exercise in that book, the true self who loves nothing more than the printed word, to read it, to write it, to savor it.

Like anything good and meaningful, I think the act of becoming is something you have to work out everyday for yourself, your salvation, marriage, relationships, your occupation.

So for today, be the me you were meant to be, but never stop trying to be the me you are trying to be...

Gen X Retro Flashback- 'Major Tom' - Peter Shilling

Kids, I have to be honest and say that while I have always really liked this track, until today, I'd never seen the video! And it's a video that could ONLY have been shot in the 80's. This song, originally recorded in German, (like Nena's 99 Luftballons) is meant to be a re-telling of David Bowie's 'Space Odyssey' ("Ground Control to Major Tom..."), but for some reason, Peter Shilling spends most of his time in the video sitting in an abandoned car on a pile of other...you guessed it, abandoned cars with... even more incomprehensible...a group of derelict winos. Then for some reason, out of of nowhere appear, a whole gaggle of 60's era carhops skating around...well...space.  Perhaps, I simply am not 'getting' the symbolism!

Apparently, Peter Shilling still has quite a robust career in Germany an an 'electro-pop' artist.
Here from 1983, is, 'Major Tom'