Author: eastbaywriter

Losses

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I know this is all over the Internet and every news channel by now, but I heard that Steve Jobs died today on my way home from work, and it saddened me.  That it saddened me somehow surprised me, too.  It’s not like I knew him, and despite his reputation as a genius in product design, his perfectionism was known to make him brutal to work with.  I probably couldn’t have worked for him, but I certainly did respect him.  As someone who has been into electronic gadgets for years, is a student of business and leadership, living in the Bay Area, where Jobs was more of a legend than anywhere else, and working in technology for so long, perhaps he was a bigger figure in my unconscious than I realized.  I don’t know.  I’m puzzling over it.  As I read the news tonight, I followed a link to the Commencement address that Jobs gave to the 2005 graduating class of Stanford.  In it, he discusses death, having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the year before.  I have some issues around death – it’s a rather long story, so I won’t get into it right now, but suffice it to say the topic is generally on my mind more than I’d like it to be.  I’ve included some excerpts from that Stanford speech below.  At the moment – for me, at least – these words from Steve Jobs seem as big a tribute to humanity as any.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

…

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

…

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

…

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Timelines

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Another exercise suggested in Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories has to do with timelines.  The idea is that you create timelines for various years in your life.  He suggests jotting notes in a box for each month of the year you are digging into.  I took a slightly different approach that suits my super-organized way of doing everything.  I used Excel.  On each row, I entered the date in one cell, then a description of some event in another cell.  This way I’d never run out of room in any given boxes for a period of my life, and I can just keep adding to it as I find time to work on it, periodically resorting the list in chronological order.  I then went through a lot of files I keep.  The two that were most interesting were my old taxes and my medical records folder.

My timeline file has only 57 events in it so far, but by going through my old taxes (I had copies of every year from age 17 on), I was able to reconstruct the jobs I had when I was younger.  I’ve had a lot of jobs, which I will talk about in another post – but my timeline showed me just how many jobs I had during the few year stretch immediately out of high school – from factories to dive restaurants to department stores.  It was fascinating to look back at how little money I made, and how often I changed jobs.  I also moved a lot.  There were three years where I filed taxes in more than one state because I was moving around so much.

The medical records were eye-opening, too.  Since I live far from home, I must have requested copies of my records from the local hospital where I had a few surgeries and other health encounters that landed me in the ER.  If you can get your hands on copies of your medical records, you should.  Not only for practical reasons, but to read what these people actually wrote about you.  It’s really interesting to read about the actual procedures in medical terminology, and the opinions the doctors have of how you presented to them.  I will find something to share one of these days, but to get back to the point of sharing my first experience with the timelines exercise, it really did do a lot to jar my memory of different events.  I’m kicking around the idea of writing a piece just based on the medical mishaps of my youth.  I recommend the timelines exercise to anyone that wants to take a different angle on remembering their past.

Workplace perks and Max Headroom

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It has been well publicized that many tech companies offer crazy perks to their employees, probably for a host of reasons.  Pool and foosball tables, video game rooms with PS3, Wii, XBox.  Some of the flashier employers in the Bay Area offer meals, even on-site dry cleaning, haircuts, chair massages, and fitness facilities.  Some people say these perks help keep people at work longer, while others say they are necessary simply to attract the best talent.  When I started my new job, I didn’t expect any perks like this because it’s still a small company, and I was right – there are no relaxation lounges, spinning classes, or laundry facilities, but, they do give us a few things – Starbucks coffee with a variety of extras – milk, half and half, raw sugar, sweet & low, etc.  Friday mornings bring bagels, cream cheese, fruit, and lox, and the fridge is always stocked with Coke and Diet Coke.  I think there might even be orange juice.

I rarely buy soda to drink at home, but I have long been a fan of Coke – I never did like New Coke as much as Classic Coke, except during the days of Max Headroom, when it was cool to take the taste test between Pepsi and Coke in the mall.  If you picked New Coke, you got a Max Headroom poster and other junk that I used to decorate my bedroom walls, along with cutouts of Ralph Macchio and Kirk Cameron from Tiger Beat or whatever the teen magazine of the day was.  Anyway, now I drink coffee all morning, but switch to a can or two of Coke in the afternoon.

It reminds me of my uncle.  I have never known anyone that likes Coke as much as he does.  In fact, his son’s first word was Coke.  We were all sitting at the dinner table, and my young cousin was somewhere around 2.  All of a sudden, hands flailing in his high chair, he yelled, “Coke!” in the sort of clipped voice of a newly talking toddler.  The rest of us laughed, so he repeated the phrase over and over and over.  My cousin is now out of high school, and I have no idea if he turned into a Coke drinker, but I’d be surprised if he didn’t, what with all the Coke my uncle always had in the house.  I do believe that nothing beats Mexican Coke, though.  They still use real sugar instead of corn syrup, and it is so much better.  Not to mention that drinking from a glass bottle is more reminiscent of youth and hot summers, whether or not you actually drank Coke from a bottle back then.

And more first lines

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I’ve looked at first lines a couple times in the past, here and here.   Below are some others from books on my shelves…

The Stone Gods, by Jeanette Winterson.
This new world weighs a yatto-gram. But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge.

I like this opening because it evokes senses, but not quite images.  That makes me want to read further.  After looking through my notes and finding this blurb, though, I realize I’ve been unconsciously copying the hyphenated phrase style she uses here.  I am a big fan of Jeanette Winterson, so it doesn’t surprise me a ton.  What I like about this approach is that it alters the pace of the sentence itself.  Often, writers talk about pace in the context of a whole work, zooming into a scene and providing lots of detail and dialogue, slowing down the pace versus summarizing larger chunks of time passing with narrative.  I thought it was worth looking at pace within a sentence based on the use of language and punctuation itself, though.  The other thing I like about this style is that it’s a way of creating a new word when the right word doesn’t quite exist.

The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy.
My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.

I think these two lines work because they immediately introduce paradox.  When I think anchorage, I think home.  Comfort, familiarity.  When I think wound, pain and discomfort come immediately to mind.  I think this is a great introduction that at the very least, explains to the reader that place will be important, and the narrator’s association to that place will be complicated.

From My Father’s House, by Sylvia Fraser.
My father’s house was a three-story, frame building on a shady street in Hamilton, Ontario

I don’t like this first line that much.  It gives a bit of information, but it doesn’t hook me, beg me to read more.  Having read the book, I can say it is very well written, and a worthwhile read, and with the benefit of retrospect, the important element of this first line may be in its references to a large house – that can evoke a spooky feeling, especially from the perspective of a child.  The use of the word shady introduces a dark element, too.  When I read this the first time, though, those things didn’t mean anything to me yet.  To me, this is an example of how a great book can live without a great hook, though.

Middlesex, by Jeffery Eugenides.
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

This opening line tells the reader exactly what the story will be about, and the subject itself is unusual and promises to be intense.  References to place and time help set the stage for the inherent struggle the narrator will have in dealing with gender identity.  Most of the language is straightforward, unadorned, though the first four words imply the significance of the subject matter.  I like the combination of the gravity of the first phrase, and the almost boring everyday description of the remainder of the line.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen.
Only three people were left under the red and white awning of the grease joint: Grady, me, and the fry cook.

“Only three people were left,” – this part of the sentence implies that we’re joining the narrator at some later point in the story – I expect to hear what led up to there being only three people left.  The terms “grease joint,” and “fry cook,” both make me think of lower class characters – people that don’t have much money.  The line isn’t earth-shattering, but it sets the stage a little bit, and the opening words make me want to read more.

When I can’t find the words

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When I started this blog, I thought long and hard about the tagline for it, finally settling on ‘me and my battle with words.’  I probably should have spent more time thinking long and hard about the title of the blog itself, but I’ll save that for another discussion.  In any event, sometimes words come to me and sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes they just feel right, and other times I fight with words, trying to bend them to my will.  I have noticed that I don’t work so hard at finding the right words when I speak, though.  I used to worry about this a little more, thinking it was important to remember the right word, especially the name of something – a store, a person, an object.  A long time ago, a friend of mine had a particular boyfriend that had no memory for the names of things, and he just used whatever descriptive words came to mind when he couldn’t locate the name in his brain.  For instance, he called Payless Shoes “cheap shoe.”  We all laughed at the time, but really, I think it’s brilliant.  Just call things what they are – it’s actually more memorable.  In fact, in the middle of writing this post, I could not remember the name of ‘Payless Shoes,’ myself, as I’ve also come to think of it as “cheap shoe.”

I find that when I’m tired, I’m least likely to remember to use the right words.  Luckily, my partner is OK with this, and will generally sort out what I’m saying without too much trouble.  We use one of our cell phones as an alarm clock, so on the way up to bed, I ask if she has her clock.  When she takes too long to run through her bathroom routine at night, I holler to her that she’s late.  If the light is too bright in our bedroom, I’m apt to say I’m being blinded by the sun, especially when she finally finishes flossing her teeth and I’m half asleep having been waiting a long time for her to show up.  I’ve also taken to just leaving out some words that seem unimportant to the whole statement I’m trying to make. Why say an extra word if you don’t have to?  “Can you shut the light?” gets the point across just as well as “Can you shut off the light?”

There are a few Italian restaurants near our house, and they are often among the default places we go when we’re too tired to cook and need a menu a 7-year old will approve of.  We refer to them as “the dark place” and “the light place,” based on the difference in interior lighting.  Barney’s Gourmet Hamburgers is a popular small chain with a few locations in the  Bay Area.  Sometimes, “Barney’s” just doesn’t come to me, though, so I’ll call it “Frank’s burger,” or “Jack’s burger.”  All I really need is anyone’s name in front of “burger” and she knows what I mean.

I had to look up the name of a tiny tree we have planted in a garden in front of our house, because I call it the Harry Potter Tree.  It’s really named the Henry Lauder’s Walking Stick tree.  I love it because it’s so twisty.  I’d take a picture of ours to show you, but it’s dark outside right now, so this stock photo will have to do.  There are many more where these came from, but I am getting to be pretty tired, so they escape me at the moment.  What’s your shorthand?  Do you search for the right words or just use what comes most quickly?

A Friday birthday

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Finally, Friday is here!  It was a long week, but a quiet day at work today, which is good, because I had to rush home to get birthday stuff together for my partner’s sixseven-year old.  He was thrilled to get a sleeping bag and a Donald Driver jersey, among plenty of other things, like Harry Potter Legos and books.  When he and his mom discussed what he wanted to have for dinner for his birthday, he said turkey.  This is particularly interesting because until almost a year ago, he was vegetarian.  For some reason, at his uncle’s house on Thanksgiving, he decided he wanted to eat turkey, and fell in love with it. If you asked him two months ago whether he’d also like to eat chicken, he would crinkle up his nose and say in a defeated voice, “No, I don’t like chicken.”  This summer, though, he spent two weeks with his grandparents, and he asked to eat turkey with them, too.  Unwilling to cook a big bird for just the three of them, his grandma bought chicken and called it Small Turkey.  He loved it.  So, we eat Small Turkey around here every now and then, and had it for dinner tonight.  Well, his mom still had fake chicken, but having more than one meat eater in the house is kind of nice.

When his mother asked him what kind of cake he wanted, he decided he wanted a double-decker chocolate cake with strawberries and vanilla frosting in the center, but chocolate frosting around the outside.  I am no baker.  I am a pretty decent cook, but I can’t bake to save my life.  Well, I can manage a cake from a box, but then decorating is not my strong suit, either.  My sister, on the other hand, has missed her calling in life.  She make the most unbelievable cakes ever.  Like Ace of Cakes quality, given that she doesn’t use power tools and wood to build the framework for them.  For the purposes of example, I include images.  Guess which one my partner and I made tonight…  Yes, you’re seeing right – the top layer is sliding its way off the bottom, riding a sticky, goopy, kind-of-like-an-oil-spill slick of vanilla frosting slime – with some strawberries floating in there for good measure.

I admit, it is my fault that this young California native is a Green Bay Packers fan.  If only we were actually in Wisconsin, he could get some brilliant version of a football cake, probably a perfectly sculpted life-size helmet or something.  Instead, he gets this drippy mess.  Warning to other baking challenged people – if you want to put strawberries between the layers of a cake, you probably should avoid putting frosting in there with them.  That, or hire my sister for some lessons.  Note:  Images blatantly stolen from my sister’s Facebook page and re-posted here without any permission, whatsoever.

        

On workplace lingo

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So, the lingo at my new job is kind of amazing.  I have worked in technology for more than fifteen years, so you’d think I would not be surprised by the language I hear at a software development shop.  That is so not the case!  I find it highly entertaining, so below are a few terms, phrases, and general oddities of speech and language that I’m hearing on a daily basis.

My boss, the one that walks barefoot, managed to use both the phrase “think outside the bun,” and the term, “quiesces” in the same sentence yesterday.  He was responding to someone else’s question about what we might do if a particular solution to a problem we have didn’t work.  He said, “Well, then, we’ll just have to think outside the bun, and if the application quiesces, it will all be moot, anyway.”  He seems to have a real penchant for sayings.  I know I should come up with a better descriptor than “sayings,” but I just can’t quite classify what he says as analogies, metaphors, similes, or euphemisms.  To my mind, they just don’t fit perfectly in any of those buckets.

Then, today, we had a “lunch and learn.”  For you non-corporate types, that’s just a way of saying everyone has to work through lunch to listen to someone explain something you may or may not already understand because the powers that be cannot justify taking away from your normal work time to do something entirely internal, which is not billable to some client.  This lunch and learn was about how to present the company if you were manning a booth at a big software trade show.  Part of the presentation was to discuss the various “messages” we would want to convey to the innocent people that wander too close to our booth.  We are considered a very high-end software consulting company, and we don’t operate like many other consulting companies do – where some big company calls on the consulting firm, and the consulting firm ships a person or three over to the client’s location to do whatever work they need done.  Instead, we build long term relationships, and we do all our work in-house.  That background is only important for you to have some understanding of what my boss tossed out as his opinion of what our company is – or is not.  He said, “We are not a body shop!  We are project based!  Give us your tired, your hungry, your poor……Mm Hmm”

Some other terms that have been bandied about in the past week and a half that are interesting…

When someone’s availability is in question, you do not say, “Does so-and-so have time to do this work?”  You say, “Does so-and-so have cycles.”  And in my case, I received an email that asked not only if I had cycles, but if I “had enough to prosecute this activity.”

In the information age, it is a common problem to have way too much information lying around.  Often, the information is out of date, or there are seventeen versions of some document, none of which tells the whole picture, and some of which completely contradict each other.  My new company’s way to handle this is to insist that a core value is to only recognize a single version of the truth.  I haven’t yet decided what cult-like comparison I can make on this one, but what it really means is that we are all supposed to put information only in one place, and we should worship that place.  There are actually multiple places when it comes down to it – document storage systems, project status forms on a website, time tracking entries in an accounting system, project plans on a server.  My boss calls these “first-order artifacts,” and I can’t tell you how many times I hear the phrase, “one truth,” or the phrase “single truth” every day.

I have begun jotting down the amazing phrases I hear every day, because I know I would forget most of them otherwise.  All I can say is that I’m thrilled that I will not only be making money working at this job, but I will also be expanding my vocabulary, significantly, it seems, on a daily basis.  More on this as it develops…

New people

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So, at my new job, I’ve certainly met some interesting new characters people.  If I were the wuc, I could write amazing and hilarious things about my new coworkers.  In truth, I know I will never be so funny, but, here are a few anecdotes, anyway.

My new boss is a slightly quirky guy.  He sometimes digresses into a personal conversation with himself while he’s talking to someone else.  He does so mostly under his breath, and eventually says, “But, that’s neither here nor there.”  He also ends practically every conversation with, “Mmm Hmm,” even if there is absolutely nothing to affirm at the end of the discussion.  Last, he walks around barefoot a lot.  Well, not completely barefoot – he wears socks, but must not be so fond of shoes.

On Monday, two new tech guys started working with us.  I’m not positive what their titles are, but that’s besides the point.  One of them is clearly from the I-live-in-a-basement-or-some-other-such-tech-nerd-cave tribe.  In technical discussions, training sessions where he is being introduced to new things, even – he is eager to talk and talk, but if I picture him in a social setting, I imagine he says few words – at least without drawing puzzled stares from listeners.  He could stand to wash his hair.  He is a stocky guy, has a very round face with quite small glasses that don’t seem sufficiently big to cover his field of vision.

The other is a very small guy – short, petite, I’d almost say.  He has an accent I have yet to place, is less gregarious in meetings, but asks a lot of questions – probably a good thing when you’re trying to pick things up.  When the answers seem sort of obvious, he tends to try to make clear that is exactly what he assumed.  He, too, wears glasses, but his are really, really big glasses that seem almost as big as his small head, and they are strong.  When you look at him face on, they magnify his eyes in a buggish sort of way.

DISCLAIMER:  In the unlikely event that any of my coworkers ever discovers this blog, and then discovers that I write it, I share these descriptions with the utmost sense of professional affection and absolutely no intention of offending anyone.

Any characters you’d like to share?

Interference

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I knew it was coming.  This new job is draining me of most of my energy, not to mention my time.  I shouldn’t complain – there are still way too many people in the world that can’t get a job these days.  But, I’m sitting here yawning endlessly, determined to get at least a quick post out, and realizing how much harder this is going to be to keep up with.  It’s not that I dislike the job – at least not yet.  It’s only been a week.  It’s that there aren’t enough hours in the day.

So, lacking anything of substance to share tonight, I chose to surf a few weird news websites.  I’ve mentioned before how odd some of the news stories can be from the corner of the country I hail from – Wisconsin.  I used to get my fix for these improbable stories at Odd News, but they don’t have a search feature, and that annoys me because I want to be able to search on Wisconsin, or Sheboygan – which currently has a mayor that refuses to leave office although he recently went on a drinking binge, got in a fight, and passed out in a bar in a nearby town.  Tonight, I stumbled on NEWS of the WEIRD, which looks very, very promising.  One search on Wisconsin, and I found so many brilliant stories it was hard to choose which one to share here.  Here’s one that ties in nicely with Sheboygan’s drunken mayor, though.

“Prevailing medical authority 20 years ago warned that few humans could survive blood-alcohol readings above .40 (percent), but in recent years, drivers have rather easily survived higher numbers (curiously, many from Wisconsin, such as the man in February in Madison, Wis., with a .559). (In 2007, an Oregon driver was found unconscious, but survived, with a .72 reading.) The plethora of high numbers might indicate mistaken medical teaching, or nonstandard machine measurements — or an evolutionary hardiness in American drinkers. [Star Tribune (Minneapolis), 2-15-2011]” (copied from http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw110508.html)

In Wisconsin, I’d have to say I vote for “evolutionary hardiness” – how else do you expect people to keep warm in the winter?

Any great stories from your neck of the woods?

 

Gratitude

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I titled this post Gratitude because I’m truly grateful for having been recognized with some more blogger awards from a fellow writer, Julie Farrar, who writes at Traveling Through.  I’ve been doing this for just over a month, and loving it the whole time, due in large part to the people that I’ve connected with through my writing and theirs.  Julie tagged me with two awards, The Stylish Blogger, and the Versatile Blogger.  Julie’s comments about my writing put a smile on my face, and I’m thankful that she shared them.

“It’s an anonymous blog, with language and stories I envy to no end.”

In keeping with the spirit of the awards, here are seven more random things about me:

1 – Stylish is another term those that know me would never use to describe me (though, again, I appreciate the shout-out from Julie, regardless of the name of the award!).  I am the kind of person that buys 8 of the same shirt in different colors.  6 or 8 short-sleeve T-shirts, 6 or 8 long-sleeve T-shirts, 2 pairs of jeans in slightly different washes.  I can never manage to have more than two pairs of jeans at a time.  I generally wear one pair of shoes until they wear out so badly I really can’t wear them anymore.  As the shoes or jeans approach this point of disrepair, I panic a little at the thought of having to find a new pair.

2 – A few years ago, I found myself at the end of a 9-year relationship, and though I wanted to get out and meet new people, I had pretty much forgotten how.  Actually, I never really knew how.  A great friend told me, though, that all I needed was a haircut and a new pair of shoes.  I had been wearing sort of outdoorsy shoes because I have the flattest feet ever recorded in the history of flat feet, and I need really wide shoes.  I was informed that these shoes would completely impede my ability to get a date, so with the help of another good friend who is fanatical about shoes, I started buying tennis shoes that apparently have some style to them.  A few weeks after I bought my first pair, I was out for drinks with the friend who had coached me into this pair, and a random stranger on the street stopped and said, “Oh my god!  Where did you get those awesome retro shoes?!”  My shoe coach (a.k.a. grass-phobia girl), was prouder than a peacock, and could barely wait until the stranger was out of earshot to proclaim her brilliance.  In the end, my current mate wouldn’t have cared whether I wore the geeky outdoorsy shoes or these new retro-ish sneakers, but the coaching of my friends gave me a new confidence I sorely needed at the time, and for that, I will be eternally grateful.

3 – When I was a kid, my favorite food was mashed potatoes.  Luckily, I grew up in the Midwest, where potatoes are part of practically every meal, but I even loved the sticky, gloppy, made-from-dehydrated-flakes-in-the-school-cafeteria mashed potatoes.  The stickier, the better.  I have a vivid memory from 4th grade, going through the lunch line at school.  The woman whose job it was to dish out the mashed potatoes asked me if I wanted butter or gravy on them.  I was paralyzed with trying to decide.  They were both so enticing!  I held up the line forever, deep in thought about which I might like more, and she finally just gave me both so she could get me out of her hair.  Today I still have a horrible time deciding what to eat at restaurants.  I have to imagine – visually picture – myself eating each thing under consideration, and even then I sometimes hold up the ordering for a long time.  Unless I’m at a restaurant that serves tapas or small plates – then I just order a little of everything.

4 – When I was fifteen, I wanted to be a cowboy.  I was already a tomboy, so it wouldn’t have been too great a leap.  My grandfather took me to Wyoming on a hunting trip.  It was my first foray out of corn and dairy country, and the second I saw the Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota, I developed my own weird version of the romantic West.  When we got to Wyoming and met the people that lived there, I only got sucked in further.  We first stayed in a seedy motel near the ranch of a couple named Everett and Fredda Lou, around Lusk, Wyoming.  There were few paved roads in their neck of the woods, and they managed over 100,000 acres of cattle ranch.  Later, we stayed at my grandpa’s long-time friend, Melvin’s.  Melvin was a big, stocky guy, with a mustache that trailed down past the corners of his mouth to his chin.  He always wore a light-colored cowboy hat with a dark sweat-stained band just above the brim of the hat.  He taught me how to properly shape a cowboy hat over steaming water so you could take the “new” out of it right away.  It was very important that a cowboy hat be original, yours, and never look new.  He let me ride his ATV, and I couldn’t stop myself from going faster and faster, even as I started to lose control now and then.  Once, a tire jumped out of the rut on a dry dirt rode, changed my course, and I drove straight through a wire fence at high speed.  Probably lucky I didn’t kill myself.  I sometimes wonder whether it was really some primal draw to the rough and tumble area of the West we were in that made me love it so much, or whether I’d have had the same reaction to any place I might have gone outside the Midwest.  Regardless, those are memories I treasure, even if they expose my inner dork.

5 – I moved out at 18, and after two not-so-great roommate experiences, I finally got an apartment with a guy who is still one of my best friends.  We were really broke, though.  We could barely pay our rent, often had to have friends bring us leftover food from the restaurants they worked at, and never had cash to spare to go out and do much of anything.  We did one of three things.  If we could spare a couple dollars, we would sit at IHOP, sometimes for 8 or 10 hours at a time with random friends dropping in and out, drinking that never-ending-cup-of-coffee or bottomless-pot-of-coffee, or whatever it was they called it, and reading Trivial Pursuit cards to entertain each other.  If our cable wasn’t turned off, we watched lots of talk shows – Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer – you know – the classics.  We tried to come up with ideas that might get us on those shows.  When we missed the talk shows themselves, we watched Talk Soup late at night to get the lowdown on what we missed.  Finally, when neither of those were options, and I’d managed to convince my grandparents to let me borrow their car, we’d sit in the parking lot of our apartment building in the car, listening to a very cheesy love songs station on the radio, singing sappy songs, laughing, and lamenting about our poor lives.  I often miss those days.

6 – Before my first car ( a 1980 Mazda 626) ended up in a metal graveyard, which precipitated the borrowing of my grandparents car mentioned above, it had some unusual behavior.  The car either had issues with the electrical wiring, or was possessed by the ghost of a gremlin.  I could turn the car off, take the key out of the ignition, get out, walk ten feet or more away, and then the doors would lock and unlock themselves in a frequent stuttering rhythm.  It was like watching popcorn pop.  My sister’s boyfriend once offered to fix the car for me when something went wrong – a bad starter or cylinoid, or something – I don’t quite remember what.  When he gave it back to me, the car would no longer go in reverse.  My roommate and I often had to sit in our seats with the doors open, each pushing with one leg hanging outside the car to back out of our parking spot.

7 – I think I’ve made clear by now that I am not a girly kind of girl – I grew up complete tomboy-style, loved to knock down boys, am a pretty good shot with a rifle or a shotgun – you get the picture.  That is why I find it particularly odd that the first thing I ever stole as a little kid was candy lipstick.  I don’t think I meant to steal it, but perhaps I’ve fooled myself into thinking that because I just can’t handle the shame of it all (the lipstick part, not the stealing part).  I was five, and when we got home and my mother realized I had the candy lipstick, which she had not paid for, she screamed at me, tossed me back in the car, drove back to the store, and made me go in with my tear-streaked face and my barely audible shy kid voice to apologize and pay for my pinched lipstick.

Now, to pass on the recognition to some fellow bloggers…  Enjoy!

Bottlecaps and Broken Bits – Besides having a great title for his blog, this guy writes some awesome stuff about food, drink, and travel, accompanied by his photography.  He is currently recording his travels in Thailand, a place I have visited twice, and would highly recommend to anyone.

The Wandering Atavist – Check out this blog whenever you need a good laugh.  The Atavist describes himself as a “fish out of water,” and you will likely agree as you read his hilarious posts about trying to be a normal functioning member of society, especially when he’s around anyone of the female persuasion.

Grammar Divas – This blog is great at dispelling grammatical myths and giving practical pointers on writing.  I check it regularly and you should, too.

bassasblog – This is a highly entertaining blog from the perspective of a shepherd dog.  I have to admit I found this blog from someone else’s listing of blogs they love, but since then, I’ve enjoyed every single post, so I’m going to share it again.

Dick Bishop’s Blog – This is a new find for me, but after reading just a few posts, I am enamored with Dick’s writing.  He offers a unique perspective, and posts that have some meat on their bones.  Lots of “tip” stories about blog writing say you shouldn’t write posts that are too long because people will get bored and skip them – I think Dick’s blog proves why you should not censor yourself to any given length, but you should write what you want to write and end it when it ends.