A brush with greatness

Great Memorial weekend spent in Nashville. There were many high points, but Jo and I agreed the best was seeing Gillian Welch in the produce aisle at the grocery store. Pretty cool. It took a lot of self control not to stop her and say "ohmygodiloveyourmusici'myourbiggestfanyouaresoamazing." But, we didn't.

A sort of kitchen

All this time that I haven't mentioned my kitchen, you've thought oh, it's finished. Everything is back to normal and shorttina is happily cooking calzones and key lime pies. Well, you're wrong, but we are getting so close I can smell the baking dough.

Driving home from work Friday, I thought to myself that if my appliances were still in my living room when I got home, that may be the actual last straw that would lead to some extreme behavior. I'm not really a shoot-up-McDonald's kind of girl, but there would have been some kind of measures. Probably throwing of things and slamming of other things.

Fortunately, I got home and the appliances were nestled in their customary nooks in the kitchen. My first thought was wow, my living room looks so big and empty. My second thought was I can do laundry this weekend. Stove and sink/dishwasher are still mere figureheads--plumber comes Wednesday--but I moved all the dishes, pots and pans, all the mini appliances and baking tools, the teacups and spoon rests and dish towels, all of it, back to the kitchen.

A few of my least favorite things

1) When people use the word "journey" as a metaphor for life, as in "I've enjoyed our time together on this journey."

2) When people are dishonest with you about their feelings, as in when a man tells you for three years that he's not ready for a relationship with anyone, and then two months later he lets you know he's been dating someone.

3) Getting upsetting messages (see #2) at inopportune moments -- on your first day of a new job; five minutes before an out-of-town work training session begins; at 10:45 am on a Tuesday at work when you're beyond swamped and training a new assistant.

Thinking pleasant thoughts

Well, I feel like shit today. I mean really--the kind of day when you seriously consider running away. But, I don't want to talk about it right now and you surely don't want to hear about it (it's mostly the same old crapola anyway), so I'll talk about something pleasant.

I have had the pleasure over the last few weeks of seeing a very old friend from college. I'm trying to think if I've seen him since he graduated in 1995. Maybe not. He was in SC for a while, then Russia, Kosovo, Iraq. I like to try to make him admit he's a spy. Actually, I think he just worked for government contractors specializing in development/rebuilding. He'll be off again soon, but this time he's settling down--marrying a Swede and moving to Stockholm.

I find that my friend has hardly changed since college. He was always one of the gentlest, kindest of my male friends, and he's still very much the same--low-key and a bit shy with a wonderful sense of humor that mostly pokes fun at himself. Obviously, he's different, too. He's travelled all over and lived in some pretty tough situations. But it's been so nice to slide into an easy familiarity with an old friend. He hasn't talked too much about Iraq except to say it's pretty disillusioning. I'm glad he's not going back.

Meanwhile, this weekend I saw an even older friend, a guy I knew in junior high. Again, he was one of the sweetest boys in the class at a time when everyone was at their most vicious. I knew him a bit in high school too. He went to a different school. but we had some arty, goth friends in common.

Anyway, he is about to be ordained as a priest. He was at Mass last Sunday and did some of the readings and prayers. I was really struck by the resonance of his voice--there was such a quality of confidence and strength in the way he spoke. It made me think he'd be a good priest. I talked to him a bit after and he was the same old guy, joking and goofing around, and then he switched back into priest mode to give me a blessing and ask that I pray for him. My own faith comes and goes, takes up different forms and is colored with a bit of skepticism. Talking to him made me more aware of it. Talking to him, I realized perhaps it's also an ongoing challenge for priests. Can't really explain it beyond that I felt happy for him, and yet was aware it must be difficult.

So, it's good to see old friends around. Seems like we're all grown up now.

Time again for pleasing words

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transition

It's a sad time on campus. Graduation is tomorrow, so all the parents and families are arriving, going through the motions of parties and engagements, ferrying and being ferried about, packing, moving, staying in cramped hotels, eating bad food, etc.

The funny thing is, there's little difference between these family units and the ones that arrive in the fall to drop off the first-years. They're all a bit more seasoned now, I guess. The students are a little wiser, a lot more tired out from late nights of cramming and partying.

I feel most sorry for the parents. For them the transition is just a matter of degrees. If they thought they were losing their kids to college on Orientation day, now they're losing them even more, to the stirrings of adulthood.

Drugs?

This morning I kept thinking to myself that it's getting increasingly hard not to scream at or assault someone. It seems all the contractors in my life -- the web site people at work, the kitchen people at home -- have had massive personnel upheavals, and I have all these new people asking me the same old questions. And relatively speaking, both projects are in their crucial, do-or-die phases. So let's get with the fucking program.

In addition, there's the joy of managing a band of 8 students + various other folks who I purportedly will train to build 1500 pages of a web site this summer. Details are forthcoming.

With all this in mind, I am beginning to cultivate chronic insomnia, which makes me go around during the day wanting to kill people. I was sitting at my desk this morning thinking jeez, I've got to find a way to calm down. And then it occurred to me, this is why people take drugs. I guess I need some drugs.

Or maybe just a couple of beers.

A happy ending

Well, the site search debacle turned out to be a minor bump in the road. It's more or less resolved already. Just a lesson in perspective--what looks insurmountable Friday at 4:30 may well be a 10-minute task on Monday.

The rest of the day was a wash, though. It's high-stress time for everyone, which means instead of doing work people want to stand around and complain (myself included). I dropped off a form at someone's office and got caught in a 15-minute diatribe about the woes of the world. I kept inching toward the door--even had it open a while and the monologue didn't stop! It was quite the Dilbert moment.

Then the speaker's daughter arrived, and it turned out she has the gift of gab, too. I could picture this family in their living room, telling stories for hours. The sun would set and they'd be sitting there in the dark, talking too much even to turn on a lamp. That's a nice aspect of southern culture, the storytelling--except when you're just trying to survive deadlines.

The desk jockey rides again

Just another Monday. Friday afternoon, I discovered one of those big mysteries involving the web site, which involves how the site search engine is set up. The gist of the situation is, nobody knows! Sometimes I'm amazed by the lack of documentation left by my self-professed "information packrat" predecessor.

Yeah, she kept a whole lot of shit and most of it is useless. On days when I have nothing to do (oh, those distant days--haven't had one since last July), I go through files and throw stuff out -- printouts of web sites from five years ago, specs for software that no longer exists. But I can't find acccount info for our search engine.

Anyway. I've managed to do something horrible to my back, so just when my sprained ankle is mostly healed I'm hobbling around like an old lady again. The pain dates back to a drunken fall in college, aggravated by years of popping my back. And now the debt is coming due. Kids, it's true what your mother tells you -- don't pop your joints or you'll be sorry later.