stupid meeting

"I'm going to my stupid meeting," I yell at my husband and he's buried in his man cave watching Family Feud.  "Murgf," he replies, his mouth full of cashews.

My place of employment has started a new procedure in training techniques and it's called the ten-minute stand-up meeting.
"What stupid person came up with this one," I email my boss. "Oh, unless it was you than I need to say this is highly creative and inspirational on your part."

Research shows that a group of people needs five minutes to settle in and focus on a speaker which is why speakers use jokes and ice-breakers for those first five minutes, hey, here's my personality, get used to it, I'll be talking to you for awhile. But a ten-minute meeting?  Will there be time for questions?  You know, the questions people spout out who don't want to go back to work. I've never liked those lazy SOBs. They're the ones who sit on the edge of my desk every Monday morning, dawdling, holding coffee mugs that say I NEED A NAP and ask how my weekend went and they actually want to know.

Sara, the little HR supervisor is our speaker. We will be witnessing changes in our buildings the next few weeks, she drones blah blah. There are two men in our group, Dan the Man, our resident social worker and Lance, a tall gay guy who resembles Ichabod Crane, Adam's apple and all and he publishes a column in our monthly news letter. He writes things like, "it was in the opening prayer that the Archbishop's expression of gratitude to those who work the hardest, giving diligent, persistent service every day and I felt he was speaking to me directly and this was especially touching for me as a CNA/Direct Care Professional." Yes, he actually writes stuff like that.

 

When I first knew Lance I accidentally called him Fran, the name of another gay man I knew.  I loved the real Fran. When I ripped my ear lobe from a pierced earring I complained about switching to clamp earrings. Fran said, "you look so sexy when you rub that sore lobe, just like the movie actresses in the 40's." He was a hair stylist and when I asked how I should style my do he said, "just don't let your hair hide your face." How could I not love this man?

Lance did not like being called Fran so he kind of snubs me. I sometimes mock his columns to my co-workers and they find it hilarious but come on, the articles beg for ridicule. Sometimes I need an audience despite the introvert I am.

Dan the Man stands up dwarfing little Sara and rearranges his belt over a bulging belly. Dan, yoo hoo, time to start wearing baggy polo shirts. He is giving a little speech of his own, monopolizing our time and Sara's grin is starting to look a little stretched and ridiculous. She says she will pass his information on to our CEO and then she quickly ends the meeting. As I grab my notebook with no notes I see Dan making a bee line towards her with more of his hype. So glad I have a peon job.



 

huh?

I need to tell you the rest of my jury duty story because by doing that I will impart to you important information on the general population, specifically the behavior of the moron section.

After two and a half days we were ready for deliberation. This young defendant had been arrested for operating under the influence and he refused all four impairment tests that would have proved his innocence if indeed he had been. We had four officers testify to his drunken behavior and we saw video tape recorded in three locations and the young man was stumbling over nothing and slurring his words as he directed his ire at anyone wearing a uniform.

Our foreman asked us how we intended to vote.  I was certain we would be unanimous in our observations about the boy's wrongdoing. Ms. Sequins was seated to his immediate left and when he turned to her she shifted uneasily in her seat, "I don't want to be the first one to go." I interpreted this as she knew her vote might be contrary to the rest of us who had decided not to dress in t-shirts with Harley Davidson spelled out in pink sequins and if she went last she could change her vote to avoid embarrassment from the elitists that surrounded her. And I was correct.

she probably has this shirt, too

In the end there were three people who decided the guy was not guilty, Ms. Sequins and a young girl who lived ninety miles from this city but had forgotten to change her address, and this runty guy with a bullet-shaped head who was always asking for smoke breaks. He was pushy and loud and often interrupted people especially the women so he could get his own point across. He had been divorced twice, picked up for two OWIs himself and  his 16-old daughter had been in a car accident yesterday and had been ticketed for that and resisting arrest.  I hated the man instantly.

He didn't like it that all four officers had given the exact same testimony, he would have had more confidence in voting guilty if one of them had come up with a contrary story. Huh? When the defendant asked the officer at the police station if he was being arrested the deputy answered, "you think?" (video tape) Runty thought this was harassing and abusive behavior and disqualified the man's testimony based on just those two words. And this went on an on. Ms. Sequins added none of this would have happened if  he hadn't been stopped for a faulty license light . . . so it's okay to be guilty, just don't get caught.

Here's my theory. All three of these people were marginal, rebels without causes and I knew they had lots of tattoos under their clothes. They wanted to be contrary to be contrary. And the rational people of the world paid these guys no heed but today we were trapped by their malfunctioning thought processes and we had to sit and listen as they attempted to dissuade us. We could not just shrug our shoulders and dismiss them like we had dismissed so many of their kind before. So we, the sane guys locked eyes across the table and tried to keep our building angers from blasting out at those three stooges. They were having their day in court literally and we had no choice but listen to their ramblings.

The judge called us back and said if we could not make a decision we were coming back for a fourth day of endless courtroom hilarity and the prosecutor was not looking happy. Back we trudged to those hard wooden chairs and the three people changed their votes, just like that. I would never have given up my conviction, not even if I was sprawled on the floor and Runty's boot was poised above my face.

God, I hate people.


 

i hate this woman

On weekends I share the pool with college students who teach small fry how to swim.  I enjoy watching screaming toddlers thrown in the water as much as the next guy but I'm also glad for the distraction. Swimming for ninety minutes does not allow you to do anything productive on the side like peeling potatoes or clipping coupons.

And then Caroline walked in dragging her spawn behind her, an eight-year-old boy with the same albino hair shade as his mother. I hate this woman. I worked with her a few years back at a second-rate nursing facility run by a bunch of Texans who previously  manufactured tires. She was an occupational therapist fresh out of school, first job EVER at a time when therapies first exploded on the medical market, thank you Medicare. I mean you shouldn't have to pay ninety bucks an hour to relearn how to comb your hair. Mothers have been doing this for free for years.

Caroline was 26 years old and still living with her parents and was not responsible for a lick of housework. In the early days when we were still friendly I recommended it was time to move out and begin a real grown-up's life. The next day she bought a $60,000 pick-up truck and couldn't "possibly take on the added burden of rent and a water bill."

She had a boyfriend named Frosty, never did hear the explanation for that one and he regularly made her cry "but he always apologizes later."  I was torn between concern and loss of respect for this mouseketeer.

Her most annoying feature was a lack of professionalism and granted, I set the bar high but I am the oldest Catholic daughter raised by a Marine. Our residents were ancient people and their children were retired and living on the golf course. At care plan meetings Caroline would inevitably say how "awesome your mom is doing and she's so cute, too!!!" Caroline was immune to the cringing looks on their faces. She was only able to interpret a very shallow slice of the action in front of her.

When I tried to talk to her about this she started crying and then jumped management channels and actually called the big wig of that undisciplined facility, some honcho living several hundred miles away who wore a white cowboy hat when he visited us once a year. I was called on the carpet and I realized I needed to work somewhere else where management did the employee damage control and not the cute little social worker I was at the time.

I transferred to another facility and Caroline was actually one of the minor reasons, maybe not a reason at all. And wham! bam! my trainer was no other than Caroline's mother. I could tell by the way she narrowed her eyes at me that Caroline had filled her in on my story and she unfairly had misrepresented me as she had done to Cowboy Bob. "I like your hair," I said to Patricia who was wearing a brown football helmet for a coiffure but it was really shiny. "I was poor when I grew up and I learned to do my own hair," she spit at me. Holy Protective Mothers, Batman and Caroline, grow the fuck up.

 

jury duty

I am driving at a snail's pace behind a car with a bumper sticker that says "You can't be Catholic and believe in abortion." And you know what, that's not even true. I was in San Diego at a farmers' market and there was a group of young people handing out flyers stating they were Catholic and pro-choice. They were an intelligent-looking lot and they wanted me to stick around and discuss all that but I politely declined as I had a date with an Indian food vendor.

I can't be late this morning. It is my first day of jury duty and I'm already in trouble due to the school bus incident. I just figured this was another extension of my punishment for that offense but I had been fairly confident I would be excused from the whole business.

 

I had read an article in a beauty magazine that said women who have olive skin tones should wear green nail polish. I'd gotten my toes painted that very color and the polish was chipped and really quite ugly. I made a point of sitting in the front row where the attorneys could see my crappy green toes and then there was the fact that I had cut my own bangs the day before. "Never cut your hair when you've been drinking," my sister-in-law was fond of saying but after several beers my inhibitions were non-existent. I thought these two physical pieces of evidence would get me off the hook, here is a woman who clearly has impaired judgment issues, but this was not to be the case.

 

On the bright side I got to wear a cool badge but they wouldn't let me take it outside the courthouse but I could wear it as I walked around the building making jokes with all the security guys, yes, I am truly one of you. "Can I take notes?" I asked the bailiff who is actually now called a court attendant but bailiff is way cooler-sounding. She looked pleased that somebody on this jury was taking the whole thing seriously and she glanced disapprovingly over at the woman next to me who had Harley Davidson spelled out in pink sequins across her ample breasts. I was anticipating a regular yellow pad like the attorneys but instead was handed a smaller version of the same tablet. This will never be enough, I sadly thought to myself especially since half the paper was already gone. People were always asking to borrow my notes in college because my abilities in that category were never short of awesome.

The county was going to pay me $30 a day to sit around and take notes so I decided to stay. There's a few more things I need to say on this subject but that will be at a later date.

a blurry sheriff

Don being happy

The headline of my local newspaper reads, "Sheriff says no gun permits for legally blind people." Does this issue even merit discussion?  Sheriff Don is quoted as saying, "If you see nothing but a blurry mass in front of you then I would say you probably shouldn't be shooting something." And this is our sheriff, a hands-on kind of guy making the world safe for blurry masses everywhere.





This is a photo of Sheriff Don and I see him frequently out and about performing his Barney Fife  duties and I gotta say the man's facial expression never changes, never. He does not smile, he does not frown. He does not giggle, wince, hold back tears or laugh heartily. He is a bald Mr. Spock without the pointy ears and sprayed-on bangs, uh-huh I am a trekkie.


Don being unhappy

A long time ago Don was policing an outdoor festival and he came up to me and asked for a date. We had never spoken, been introduced or shared a taxi but there it was. Perhaps he thought he was a masterly macho guy with a gun on his hip and a walkie-talkie strapped to his shoulder but this was not to be the case.

 

I politely declined and that's because a man should have some color in his personality. This is not Don's strong point, he is so colorless he is practically transparent and this would be a boring sphere to inhabit.  If it were mandatory for deputies to have a color Don would be beige, a dirty neutral crayon smudge on the page. But then I had the unfortunate status to know a few self-absorbed men back in the day who had too much color and . . .  I will stop here because husband has not been happy with my last few posts.

I don't know. Don's probably a nice guy but back to the subject of what our newspaper decides to print.  My international son, the one who lives in Japan and teaches 89-year-old guys to speak English expresses great disgust regarding our city newspaper. "Any international news is on the back page in a few short paragraphs and the front page details some middle school principal who gets a creme pie in his face."
 Oooh, what flavor?

coke

First they took away my marijuana and then my cigarettes. They could take away my whiskey and I would grumble just a little. But God help the man who tries to take away my Diet Coke.

Let me edit here just a little.  Yes, I quit smoking but there were a few months when I snuck a quick drag a couple times a week. I was visiting Susan in San Diego and announced I was going outside to smoke and she started knocking on neighbors' doors telling them to close their windows because Dawn was smoking. She loves me but she can be annoying.

I awake from some troubled dream, side effect of the Trazodone tablet I ingest so I don't wake up at 3 a.m. and relive every single issue of my miserable turbulent life.  I get up and take the required leak. I open the fridge, crack a cold coke and my day begins. I smack my lips, eyes roll inward and I say, life is good. This is the closest to nirvana I will ever get.

I have always been addicted to cola. I went through a Pepsi stage, a RC stage and even a Tab stage as a college freshman teaming it with saltines for the worst diet of my life. Eventually, I settled on Coke because it is the true cola, the purest cola, and there is a reason cocaine was in its original recipe, it is all that compelling and more.

 Once when I was dating this real slug of a guy he attempted to force some cocaine on me, jamming his thumb into my mouth coated with the vile stuff. I spent the remainder of the evening hunched over a toilet due to extremely loose bowels and eventually vomited into my purse.  Did I mention I bit that offending thumb, I was never meant for hard drugs.

So here's what you need to know. Happiness is fleeting, maybe not even necessary, aim for contentment, some peaceful thoughts and keep exercising.

where is brooke shields when you need her?

 

I graduated high school in 1970 and since then I have moved eleven times and had two name changes, but somehow they still found me. In my hand is an invitation to my high school reunion.


I hated high school, hated it intensely. The only thing I liked were the cocoa chewies they served in the cafeteria and sometimes I would buy five of them and call it lunch.

I had a few friends, a few, mostly girls from my neighborhood but they were friends of convenience, not intention. They weren't very loyal and we badmouthed each other behind our backs and frankly I found the whole social process exhausting. My mother would crow at me to "go play with your friends" when all I wanted to do was sit under our cottonwood and read the Banned Books list, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Catcher in the Rye and the occasional MAD magazine.

I would go on to make better friends in college and even more so when I left my husband at age 29. I suffered an insane postpartum depression after my youngest boy was born.  I stopped nursing him when they put me on Valium, poor little guy, he immediately developed an intense oral fixation and everything went into his mouth, every little button. They called it the "housewife syndrome" and looked at me like I had advanced leprosy.

The invitation says they are planning a slumber party at a local hotel, good god can it get much worse. I look at the attached page and it is a list of all of us, names, addresses, email info. And under the name column we are referred to as, example here, "Mrs. Arthur Cheeseman, etc;"  In the true Catholic spirit we are just extensions of our husbands and I haven't used the Mrs. title in like, forever, okay never.

Inside my head I see girls in pink sponge rollers and Dippety-do glazed curls on their cheeks. There are huge puffy bedroom slippers and baby doll p.j's.  The record player is spinning, "Mrs. Brown, you've got a lovely daughter . . ."  There is Chef-Boy-R-Dee pizza and glass bottles of Pepsi and a poster on my friend's wall that says, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." For just a few moments I want to go home again.