Category: Stuff

I Survived to Tell the Tale, Will They?

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

On the first night of my EMT class my teacher, Mr. Williams, spent an inordinate amount of time talking about how hard the class is (he was right) and how most of the students weren’t going to make it to the end (he was right) and about all the possible ways that we might get kicked out of the class (lot’s of people did.)  He was quick to tell us that we weren’t going to be able to get through the class on our own (I did) and if we were smart we would form study groups early and rely on each other (wasn’t for me.)

Mr. Williams talked for a good forty-five minutes about how most of us were doomed to failure in this arena and when he was finally finished, I thought, Oh thank God.  That was ridiculously unnecessary.  Finally we can get on to the business of class. And then the “co-instructor”, Mr. Harvey, got up and said a lot of the same things… with a st-st-st-studder.  This guy went on for a good twenty minutes saying all the same things that Mr. Williams had just said, just sl-sl-sl-slower.  Obviously, Mr. Williams repeated a lot of the things since it took him twice as long as Mr. Harvey to say it.

When Mr. Harvey was finished, I breathed another sigh of relief and looked at my watch.  More than an hour of the first class had passed and we hadn’t really even started yet.  Finally we could get to it.

Um, the TA got up next and, you know,  um, said a lot of the same things, you know, that um, you know had already been said.  Um, he included a lot of, you know, “um”s and “you know”s, you know.  But, you know, um, things were looking up, ’cause, um, you know, he only spent five or ten minutes, you know, talking about it.

This is getting ridiculous! I thought to myself as I consciously instructed myself not to take any of it to heart and not to let them succeed in discouraging me.  I was determined to finish the class and not allow the naysayers to shake my resolve.  One by one, each of the instructors, and helpers and former students and possibly a janitor, anyone who wasn’t part of MY class, got up in the front of the room and told us about how we weren’t going to be able to finish this class and how it was going to be an impossible struggle for each of us.  Finally, everyone had spoken but one.  It had been nearly two hours and I was desperately ready for us to move on and do something productive.  Mr. Williams turned to the one young lady who hadn’t spoken yet and asked her, “Do you want to say anything?”

“No,” she said, “that’s OK.  You guys have all pretty much covered it.”

“Ah, c’mon,” he chided.  “Everyone else has talked.  You might as well too.”

So she did. She got up in front of the class and told us all how this class was going to be the hardest thing we’ve ever done (not so sure about that) and how many of the students wouldn’t make it to the end (she was right) and that we would just have to work really hard to get through (have you read my blog lately?)

That first night, the class, which was supposed to be over at 9:20 lasted until after 10:30.  I left determined to do my best.  Determined not to let him rattle me.  And determined to do everything in my power to prove them wrong.  I also left that night determined that I wouldn’t spend a minute longer dealing with that man than I had to.

~~~~~

On my last night of class, after finishing my final exam and earning a 90% on the 167 question test, I told Mr. Williams that I wanted to come back and “just sit in” on the next class, my motivation being to keep refreshing the information.

Mr. Williams said, “JUST sit in?”

I said, “Well, I guess I could help out, if you want.”

“Good,” he replied enthusiastically.

I walked out of the room that night surprised how much the situation had changed.  I still think his tactics are less than productive and I would rather see him be encouraging and supportive but he’s going to do what he’s going to do.

~~~~~

Mr. Williams seemed to be pleased that I planned to come back and I assume he wants to put me to work with the new bunch of students.  I had assumed that he would contact me prior to the start of the class to talk to me about his needs or expectations and any arrangements that might need to be made, but it’s pretty cut and dried, I guess; show up, work with the new students.  I never heard from him the whole six weeks.

~~~~~

Two weeks ago, I looked at the on-line course catalog to find out when he was teaching so I could be sure and show up to the first class.  It said that this semester Mr. Williams was teaching a Tuesday/Thursday class.  I thought about the first night of my class and wondered if it would be similar.  Mr. Williams mellowed a lot over the course of my class, and I wondered if we’d be dealing with a kinder, gentler Mr. Williams, of it would be the return of Captain Blood.

I didn’t really want to have to make a speech in front of the class about how horrible this is going to be for them, but I remembered the last girl to have to speak in my class and imagined he wouldn’t let me off the hook.  I began to formulate my speech in advance:

“Boy, they made it sound really bad didn’t they?  It’s not really; or anyway it doesn’t have to be.

“If you came here tonight thinking this class was going to be easy, you were wrong.  If you came here tonight thinking you were going to get by just listening to the lectures, but not reading the book, you were wrong.  If you came here tonight thinking, this class was going to be a lot of work, you were wrong.  If you came here tonight think this class was going to be a lot of work, take however much work you thought this class was going to be and double it, or triple it.  It’s going to be at least that much work.

“If you’re not committed to this class, to learning the material you might as well not waste your time.  BUT, if you’re committed to learning this stuff, to doing well in this class and if you’re willing to make the sacrifices for the next four or five months of this class to make sure you do, then you can forget everything they just said.  Just work hard, do your best, and this can actually be fun.”

I imagined giving my speech and wondered how Mr. Williams would feel about it, but I wasn’t going to participate in the fright fest that they tried to create my first night.

I decided to leave work early on the first night, so I cold get to the class ahead of the new students and check in with Mr. Williams and be there for the whole class.  So I left work, yesterday at 4:00.  I went home to change clothes and feed Mischa.  If my class was any indication, I could expect the class to run very late and I didn’t want to make him wait ’til I got home to eat.

I showed up to campus about 4:50 and after running by the restroom and stopping at the concession stand to get a drink, headed into the building that housed our classroom…

And found a sign on the door stating the Tuesday/Thursday class to be cancelled.

I called Mr. Williams.  Turns out they cancelled the class due to funding and he’s teaching the Monday/Wednesday class again…  Which means, I missed the first night of class altogether.

Hat Trick

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

I really should not be writing this.  I should be leaving my office, where I’m sitting at 7:29 on a Friday night.  But see, I’ve posted something every day this week.  That’s something I haven’t pulled off in ages.  I don’t want to drop the ball now.

I can already tell you that today is the last day in the streak.  Tomorrow is laundry day and unless Michelle leaves me alone at her apartment and I get inspired I don’t expect to get around to blogging.  That’s OK.  I kinda give myself a break on the weekends.

You might be wondering why I’m still sitting in my office at 7:30 on a Friday night.  Well, you see, technically speaking, as of 5:00 this evening I am on vacation.  Well strictly speaking I’m on stay-home-and-spring-clean-my-house-cation, but that doesn’t sound nearly as fun as “vacation” does.  Since I am going to be off work for the next week, there were some things I had to resolve before I go and now I have, more or less.  Enough to be safe while I’m out anyway.

Yes for the next nine glorious days, I do not have to set foot on the premises of this God forsaken place where I work and I’m thrilled! Hopefully, I’ll truly be free of this place, but you know, we can never be sure of that…

I haven’t had an opportune time to drop this tidbit of information but, as of yesterday, my [insert unpleasant expletive here] of a boss is gone for 3-6 months.  He was asked to take a temporary assignment helping to establish a handful of facilities which my illustrious employer is opening (has opened?  I don’t even know) on Hawaii.  They have a Facility Services Director there, but apparently he is struggling in some way and needs help to get things up and running, and for reasons that are simply unfathomable to me, they asked my boss to go.  This does not mean a promotion, a raise or even any kind of differential for me, but it does mean more responsibilities.

We have an “acting manager” but he happens to be a horrible little troll that we all greatly dislike and would rather have nothing to do with and I am the not-always-so-proud holder of a company paid (and e-mail enabled) Blackberry, and well, while you might think grown-folks would know better than to contact me, I just can’t be sure of that.  And of course, I realize that it’s up to me whether I reply to the messages, and I probably won’t, but man wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go the whole week without anyone from work demanding my time or attention?

Oh, and of course, you all know that Blackberries don’t have off buttons…  right?

Just the way I am

~ riggledo ~ 5 Comments

Yesterday in therapy, I talked to Deb about the “Amber Alert” from last week.  I was surprised, as I told her the story, to hear the anger in my voice.  I really didn’t realize I was “angry” about the whole thing.  This is just Amber.  This is how she is.  And over the years, we have just grown apart because of it.

This time last year, my mother asked me if  I had gotten Amber’s Christmas card, a photo of her children.  I told  her I had not and she said she would forward me the one she got.  I told her it wasn’t necessary for her to do that.

“Aren’t you guys friends anymore?” my mother asked, astonished.

“Not really,” I answered her honestly.  “I mean, nothing really happened to end our friendship, we’ve just, sort of, disconnected.  We don’t really have anything in common anymore and we haven’t talked in ages.”  I told her the card didn’t mean anything to me and I didn’t have a burning desire to see the picture of the kids.  My mother seemed to find this hurtful in some way, using her “jewish mother” tone of voice to say, “Ooook.  I’ll just keep it then.  I like other people’s kids.”

It seems… maybe… that I might… have seemed a little hostile when talking about this card… maybe.  Deb asked me what it was about the card that bothered me.  At first I really didn’t know what she meant.  I didn’t realized that I was conveying serious displeasure about the subject.  I gave her a few answers:

“What’s the point?”

“It’s a waste.”

“Why do I want pictures of other people’s kids?”

None of these answers seemed to satisfy Deb.  “I think there’s more,” she kept saying.

I told her, I don’t understand why people send out pictures of their children as a Christmas card.  I’ve gotten them from other people as well.  People I don’t really interact with.  People who I’m no longer (or never was) close to.  People who can’t be bothered to give me the time of day for months and years at a time and then one day decide to send me a picture of their kids as a Christmas card, without bothering to personalize it in any way.

“It feels like an afterthought,” I told her, “like they didn’t really care that much.  I imagine them sitting down at their dinner table with a stack of these damn picture cards, a stack of envelopes and their rolodex.  They pick up a card, they right a nice greeting to the recipient and they pop it into the envelope and they send it on it’s way.  They get to the end of their list and there’s one card left.  ‘What should I do with this one?’ they wonder aloud.  ‘Eh.  I guess I could send it to Kevin.’

“The sentiment feels disingenuos.  Like I was nothing more than an afterhought and I wasn’t any more important than a quick flip of the wrist, and off the last card goes.

“I’m not attached to these people’s children, and they couldn’t even be bothered to write a simple ‘Merry Christmas.  Wish you were here.’  What’s the point?”

The answer still didn’t seem enough.  “I keep feeling like you’re looking for me to tell you that I’m some how jealous or envious of these people having families, but I swear to you, that thought has never entered my mind… Before right now.”

That’s when the real irony of the situation hit me.  I told my sister, in October, “I need good quality, non-cell phone digital pictures of the children so I can print them out and hang them on my office wall.”

“I know,” she replied.  “I need to take their picture for the Christmas card anyway.”  The thought crossed my mind that it was a lame card.  Nobody wants a card with pictures of other peoples’ kids.  But at least it would get me a picture of my neices and nephew.  Out of all the “christmas card” picutres of other people’s kids I got this year, the one person from whom I would have liked to, my sister, didn’t even send one to me.

Deb asked me for more.  More explanation why I was so unahppy to receive the child-photo-christmas cards.  Why did it feel disingenuos to me?  The only answer I could give her is that it felt one sided, like people were foisting upon me something I didn’t care about without any interest or concern about whether I was interested; without any interest or concern about me.

“Say more,” she prompted.

“To me,” I told her, “Friendship goes two ways.  Sure, we all want to talk about ourselves.  We all want people to listen to us as we tell them about ourselves.  But friendship?, is about talking about the other person.  Friendship is about asking the other person how they are doing.  What’s new with them?  What, if anything, do they need?  Hopefully, after they have answered those questions they will turn around and ask you about you, but if they don’t, that’s when you can say, ‘OK.  Glad to hear your doing well.’ and then proceed to tell them about you.

“THAT is what I didn’t get from Amber for a very long time.  It’s all one sided!”

“Of course it is!” Deb answered.  “You made it that way.  You didn’t tell her about you.”

“She didn’t ask about me.  She didn’t express a genuine interest about me.  She didn’t really want to know about me.”

“She didn’t?” Deb asked me.  “You said she asked about your love life.”

It’s true Amber always asked the dreaded “when-are-you-going-to-get-a-girlfriend-you-need-a-girlfriend-when-are-you-going-to-get-married?” questions, but she didn’t want to know what I would have told her, had I answered those questions honestly.  She didn’t want to know that I am attracted to strong, healthy, athletic men, preferably with a nice tan and not much hair below the neck.  She didin’t want to know that the kind of relationship I was interested in, the kind of sex I wanted to have, wasn’t going to result in the creation of a baby.  She didn’t want to know that the kind of marriage I would want is not even legal in 45 US States.  So I make sarcastic, sometimes even snide remarks, (“What are you?  My Grandmother?  Would you like to pinch my cheeks and talk about my punum too?”) and she either doesn’t get the point or she pretends not to and continues to push.

“So she doesn’t know the truth and the dialoge is one sided because she feels free to express, maybe even push, her thoughts and feelings and what she believes, but you don’t do the same.  And I think we see this over and over again where you form these relationships where you feel like you have to sit back and allow the other person to force their perspectives on you and you start to feel like you can’t express yourself and be who you are around them.  And then you start to accept this as how things are.  I’m concerned that you make it OK.  That you give people permission to do this to you.  And then you feel more and more like you can’t be who you are and be open and honest with people.”

…..

WELL, DUH!

Dream Weaver

~ riggledo ~ 2 Comments

(Be forewarned.  This gets ugly.)

~~~~~

I’ve been so torn about what to write about today that I’ve frittered away all my writing time not writing.  Dang it!

I’ve got some strong feelings and I’m not sure how to articulate them… Not like that’s ever stopped me before…

First of all, I had a strange dream this morning.  At first it wasn’t too big of a deal.  I dreamed that I was riding, as a passenger, in a small airplane with Lance Bass as the pilot.  It was some sort of celebration for him on his “last day as a member of *Nsync”.  I remember exactly three things from this part of the dream:

  1. Lance and I were apparently already friends.
  2. I asked him, “*Nsync still exists?”
  3. He did an unannounced barrel role in the plane and freaked everyone out.  (Can you even do barrel roles in non-fighter jet planes?)

The dream turned dark and disturbing when we returned to the air field, however.  Upon returning to the air field/airport all hell broke out as there was random and indiscriminate shooting taking place inside the hangar.  It gets weirder.  Somehow, and go with me here, Mischa, my cat, was the  one doing the shooting.  I don’t remember a lot of the details of this part of the dream but I remember that as the scene progressed and there was some “defensive shooting” being done, Mischa got shot in the chest.  Now that he was no longer shooting at people, I made my way over to him and scooped him up…

And took him to the vets office that was conveniently located to the side of the hangar, of course, because why wouldn’t it be?  I rushed in the door of the vets office with Mischa lying limp in my arms and heard his labored breathing as he fought against the air rushing in and out of the bullet hole in his chest…

And I told the vet to put him to sleep.  Without batting an eye or missing a beat, the vet, grabbed a syringe full of whatever they use to put animals to sleep and injected it into Mischa…

And I held Mischa in my arms and listened to his breathing slow and ease until…

I woke up.  Late, as usual, and rushing to get ready for what was supposed to be a fairly laid back day at work, but turned out instead to be one interruption after another.  Much of the day was spent thinking about this dream, until I went for my regular therapy session…

~~~~~

Actually…

I was going to say some things about the conversation I had with Deb, but I’m realizing I really need to mull it over some more, and that I should put that off until tomorrow, and that writing about my dream was a little more difficult than I expected and has me a little disjointed.  I suppose if I was smart I’d delete this whole post and go home, huh?

Sock It To Me

~ riggledo ~ 4 Comments

I’ve had a fairly uneventful couple of days.  And yet, I don’t know where the time went.  I feel like I don’t have a handle on things right now.  Not in a depressive, woah is me, kind of way exactly.  Just, time seems to run out all the time.  I don’t know where the time went and why I didn’t get more done with it.

Friday night I stayed up way too late working on my socks.  I finished them, except for the “grafting” at the end.  I didn’t know what that meant, or how it is done.  I mentioned that to Juana the other day and she said something about alternating knitting and purling and she threw out the name of some technique the name of which I can’t seem to remember, but makes me think of Kussmaul, which isn’t right because that’s the name of a type of breathing that relates to Insulin shock (excess sugar in the system) and has absolutely nothing to do with knitting – Clearly.

I brought the socks in today and Juana showed me how to finish them off.  I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it again, but at least I know who to ask next time, too.

But I stayed up until after 2:00 in the morning working on them and then slept until after noon on Saturday.  That’s a good way to lose valuable time right there.

On Saturday, I got up with a plan which very quickly fell by the wayside.  I ate some breakfast and watched TV while I worked on my menu for the week.  Well, I guess really I worked on my menu for the week while I ate breakfast and watched TV.  It was supposed to be a quick process but I was easily distracted and it took a few hours to complete the menu and my grocery list and head out to shop.  By the time I made the three stops I needed to make and came home with my loot it was after 8:00 and I still needed to take a shower.  My lofty plans of eating a healthy dinner of Salmon and Brown Rice were shot and I ended up eating left over pizza instead.

One of my stops on Saturday was at Bed, Bath and Beyond where I bought a flour sifter.  I had to go there because much to my surprise, I could not find one at Target.  I needed the flour sifter because Sunday morning I made scones.  I have been craving scones like my mother used to make, for years.  Not that there’s anything particularly special about the way my mother makes them, just that they were always hot and fresh and she put about fifteen times more sugar in them than the recipe calls for (which is only about one and half teaspoons.)

It’s not even a special recipe; it comes from the Betty Crocker cookbook.  The problem is, my Betty Crocker cookbook doesn’t have the scone recipe in it and my mother packed up all her cookbooks when she bought her house several years ago and they’re all stored in her attic where she can’t get to them and therefore couldn’t obtain the recipe for me.  Surprisingly it’s much harder to find on-line than you might think and I’ve been without a good scone recipe for years… until now.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, I had some bananas that were on their last leg and needed to be used or go to waste, so I made banana bread.  The recipe I have for banana bread calls for buttermilk.  I love buttermilk food products, but I detest buttermilk, go figure.  The smallest container I could buy of buttermilk was a quart and the banana bread calls for 1/2 cup.  Having a significant amount of left over buttermilk I needed to find some more recipes to use it in.  So I made biscuits.  They were pretty good.  A little denser and less flakey than I like.  I believe I over kneaded them.  I’ll know for next time.

I still had half a quart of buttermilk left and I needed to find something else to make.  I found an app on my iPhone for a recipe finder where you type in an ingredient and it gives you recipe options.  I found several recipes for blueberry muffins and I love blueberry muffins.  I lost track of which recipe was which and soon I ended up with a cream cheese muffin recipe that sounded really good but wasn’t a “blueberry” recipe.  I decided to take my chances and make it blueberry anyway, only not really knowing what I was doing and not wanting to get too far overboard I only used a 1/2 cup of blueberries for the whole recipe.  They did turn out pretty well but I wasn’t sure if there were enough blueberries so when I brought some into work the next day I offered my coworkers some “Theoretically Blueberry, Absolutely Cream Cheese Muffins.”  Theoretically blueberry, because there was a very real chance of someone getting a muffin with no actual blueberries in it.

While searching for buttermilk recipes and finding blueberry muffins, I also found a recipe for scones.  So I had to make them.  And I did.  And they were deeelishus.  And too many of them.  And too fattening.  I ate them while watching Winter Wipeout (which is not something I can crochet or knit while watching if I want to get the full effect) and while gearing up for my afternoon with Lil’B.

I wasn’t really sure what to do with him and I’m running low on creativity these days.  I started thinking about movies and thought he might like to see Tron: Legacy, but I wasn’t sure.  I don’t know that much about it and I never saw Tron so I didn’t really know if it was appropriate for him.  I put it out to Twitter because anytime you need a question answered you turn to Twitter, right? No?  Hmmm…  I asked “Any reason for a 9 yo to not see Tron?”  I got one answer, hours later, which simply said that if he has a short attention span he won’t be able to get through it.  I think the GI Joe fiasco last year proved that’s not a problem.

I arrived at Lil’B’s house to find a herd of people.  His uncle and his family, from Bakersfield, was visiting.  I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been sent away without Lil’B under the circumstances, but that thought never seemed to cross anyone’s mind.  While Lil’B was finishing getting ready some of his little cousins asked me what we were going to do.  I told them I wasn’t really sure and it depended on if Lil’B had something he wanted to do, and then I said, we might just go to a movie.  They started asking what movie and one of them suggested Tron: Legacy.  Lil’B came out of his room, ready to go and I asked him if he had anything specific he wanted to do.  He said, “I don’t know.” (Naturally)  I asked him if he had any interest in seeing Tron and he said, “I don’t know.” (Naturally) And then another of his cousins spoke up, “Ooo. Go see Little Fockers,” he said enthusiastically.  I missed bits and pieces of their conversation but I heard something about “shot in his penis” and this was funny, apparently.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  Little Fockers is rated PG-13 and Lil’B is only 9.  But his mother doesn’t care about such things and he has seen more than a few movies that were rated above his age bracket.  The movie was actually pretty good, though there were things about it that were a bit above his maturity level and I was a little uneasy from time to time.  After the movie I asked him what his favorite part of the movie was and he said it was when Jack and Greg got into a fight at the kids’ birthday party that had them thrashing about in a ball pit.  I asked him if he had any thoughts about or questions about anything that he heard or saw in the movie and he said he did not.  I hope that means he didn’t think much of the sexual innuendo and questionable moments and not that he was embarrassed to ask.

When I dropped him off his cousins and uncle were still at the house and the young boys came rushing up to ask what we had done.  Angel told them we saw Little Fockers and then he went into the bathroom.  The boys turned to me and asked “How do you get a big brother?”

I told them I didn’t really know.  “I know how to become a big brother.  I don’t know how to get a big brother.”

“I want a big brother!” one of them said.

And then the other said, “I want you to be my big brother!”

I was surprised.  “You do?” I asked.  “Why?”

He answered with a big grin on his face, “Because!  You’re cool!”