piecrust promises

I know I should be grateful but...

I am so completely beyond miserable sitting at work all day that I can't even get anything done.  Yes, I am even writing this as a way to burn up another 10 minutes of the slowest moving time of the day.

I hate sitting here.  I hate the droning noise of the people around me.  I hate the meetings and the pointless chatter.  I hate the mission statement and the vision statement and the statement statement.

I don't belong here.  I wasn't supposed to spend my years editing PowerPoint slides and pretending to give a shit about road alignment or carrying capacity or buffers or whatever other nonsense that has been filling my head over the past 3 years.

I couldn't be more bored.  I couldn't be more jaded.  I couldn't be more screwed...because there is nothing I can do about it.  No where else to go.  And I'm too tired to go looking anyway...and the truth of the matter is that I don't want to find anything else.  All the other jobs will be exactly the same...they all are just one long soul suck.

It's a crime and a shame that I spend more time with these other so-called "professionals" than my own child.  I see my child for about 5 hours everyday vs. the 8-10 I spend with my coworkers and let's not even talk about the 2 hours stuck in a car everyday.

Sigh.  I don't have any answers.

I don't have any plan. 

But damnit...do I ever need one.

Maniac.

I just got back from screaming at my next door neighbors...again.  This was not the sort of new hobby I was looking for.

Tonight, I was over there because their poorly chosen, unimaginative techno music was causing such vibrations that I had frames in danger of parting company with the wall.  The last time I was over there was because they had thrown bags of garbage out into their driveway...four days before trash day...and the next morning (predictably) animals had ripped the bags open and scattered dirty diapers and bloody maxi pads all over our driveway. The time before that was because their fire alarm had been going off for hours (HOURS! and these hours started at 1 in the morning) while they sat and looked at it...waiting for the battery to die.  The time before that was because they were cooking what suspiciously smelled like roadkill in their garage (IN THE GARAGE. ON A HOT PLATE. A FUCKING HOT PLATE)...again...like they had every other night of that month.  (As you can probably tell...that really, for some odd reason, pissed me off.)  And then there was the very first time I ever went over there...about 2 months after they first moved in...the time where I had asked very politely if they could please, pretty please, mow their grass...as it was in danger of peeking over the top of the fence.

And every time it has been the same....well, almost the same.  They always have the same reaction. They act as though they have no idea who I am...the face that answers the door always looks politely puzzled over the fact that someone has found reason to ring their doorbell.  And then the puzzled look turns to innocent confusion...because as soon as I've finished explaining (once again) that I live right next door, they pretend that they don't speak English.  Not a single word.  Which is very funny...considering that each time, as I make my way up to their porch, I can understand every word of the idle conversation emanating from their house perfectly.

No, their reaction has stayed the same...it's mine that changed.  I started as the friendly neighbor asking if they needed to borrow a lawn mower for a little yard TLC since they just moved in and must not have gotten around to getting one yet.  Then I moved on to the slightly annoyed neighbor who inquired as to what the hell was wrong with their oven inside their house.  Then it was the worried neighbor coming to see if their house was on fire, looking to see if anyone needed rescuing or a glass of water to put out the blaze. Then it was the angry disgusted neighbor who tried to mime the contents of her driveway.  But tonight, I suppose the culmination of things just got the better of me...and I was over there not ringing the bell...but pounding my fist on the door..."I know you're in there, you've only got seconds to flush the drugs" style.  And then as soon as I caught the first glimpse of that puzzled expression...I lost it.  Even someone with a lifetime grasp of the English language would not have been able to understand me.  My two minutes on that porch were nothing more than a long stream of screamed profanities.  I think I said the f-word at least 12 times in that span of time.  

But that didn't feel like enough...it was as though I had this big jug o' angry buried somewhere...and this was only skimming off the top.  I walked back up my own sidewalk and onto my front porch shaking with anger...and now...nearly and hour later...I'm only starting to calm down.  I did, however, admit to Joel that I had handled the entire situation badly...and then yelled at him for not going over there instead of me...since he's so much better at holding his temper than I am.  I don't know if it's my neighbors that caused this giant vat of anger, or if it has been there for a while, just waiting for an excuse to spill on someone.  

I feel alright now...perhaps even a bit remorseful for my behavior...but if I hear even a single note of techno...

All bets are off.

Conspiracy!

 

Someone in this photo has been eating my blog posts.  There have been a collection of smudgy fingerprints and suspiciously short hairs found all over www.piecrustpromises.com.  The investigation is still underway.

I'm now weighing the pros and cons of simply giving up and forgetting my year-ish long foray into the world of blogging...or do I refocus and try it again?

Jury is still out.

Redundant

So this morning I am attempting to merge onto I-4 from the 408 (that would be where the road to purgatory intersects with the road to hell in case you aren't from around here) and there is a long line of cars waiting to budge in where possible.  The majority of people are doing the correct thing and letting a car in front of them and then moving along with their lives.

But then it's my turn and I've got my blinker on and I do the standard eye contact agreement with the car I'm about to get in front of in my side mirror. She looks back at me with no sign that she is about to turn into some interstate asshole with a serious love of road rage, freak breaking habits, and a passion for stomping the gas at inopportune times.  It looks like I'm about to safely merge onto the road...no harm, no foul.

But nooooo.  This fucking woman in a goddamn beige Taurus speeds up. She SPEEDS UP and nearly hits my bumper...so I've got no choice but to go back into the merge lane. (And I only mention the fact that the car was beige because it's just a sign of her normally dishrag personality gone wrong...who thinks that someone in a beige Taurus is going to suddenly be anything other than that blah friend that you get to do things for you without ever really having to put much effort into the relationship...kind of like the public library.  Now don't get me wrong, I love the public library...my point is that you don't expect something so meek to suddenly turn all bitchy on you.) (This analogy sounded good in my head.  Let's just forget I mentioned it.)

And then!!  And then...she flicks me off.  SHE FLICKS ME OFF.

Uh...really?  You're flicking me off?  Seriously?

I think you already managed to do that...cutting someone off is pretty much as big of a "fuck you" as one could muster.  But that obviously was not enough for this woman.  She needed to do a double fisted fuck you to make her feelings on merging known.

Maybe she just doesn't like Volkswagens.  Or babies in the backseat.  Or people with good car karma who are just trying to get to daycare before they stop serving breakfast because OMG it's pancake day and there is a certain child who will pull out her own eyes if she misses a single drop of the maple crack syrup.

Or maybe she was just tired of being a dishrag who drives a beige Taurus and she figured that a girl with pigtails driving a VW would be the least likely person on I-4 to pull out a shotgun and blow her rude ass away.

Well...she was right.  Shoot you for being a complete jerk? No.  Whine about you on the internet? Yes.

Take that!

It's Official: I'm My Mother.

So my mother and I have, what you might like to call, a so so relationship.  We've mostly gotten over that span of about six years when I did a lot of drugs that she didn't know about my rebellious teenage years. She hasn't accepted my lack of the Catholic religion...but she's dealing with it. (Or at least she's stopped openly talking about the baby spending eternity in purgatory and me burning in hell.) (I once had a nun explain purgatory to me like this....it's like having all the pancakes you could ever want, but with no syrup. The pancakes are still good...but not quite what you wanted.) (This is why I am so fucked up...my formative years were spent with a bunch of loonies comparing eternity to breakfast foods.) (Side note...Hey JD! Sister Myra told me that...remember her?) (Moving on.)

My mother and I have a once-a-week, 15 minute max, standing phone call.  It's like taking off a bandaid...you don't want to make the call but you know you have to...and then you do it as fast as possible with the biggest grimace on your face...but you keep saying out loud that it's no big deal.  So these phone calls generally consist of filler...like what she watched on TV that week, which one of my wonderful full members of the Catholic church elementary school classmates she saw in the Safeway, what the baby has been doing (with mumblings suggesting that maybe the kid wouldn't climb the bookshelves or keep stealing the remote if she had a bit more of the Lord in her), etc.  This past week she was talking about something that she heard on the radio...something that she heard on MIX 107.3 to be exact.  This is a station that I know well...non-offensive Top 40's with a little bit of cleaned up pop from the 70's, 80's, 90's, and today!  It was all I was ever allowed to listen to when I was a kid.  It's the quintessential Mom station.  And it's the type of station that I've been avoiding for years...heaven forbid my dial land on that sort of station!  Oh the embarrassment!  Or so I thought...

So I'm driving in the car this morning...and I'm listening to the morning show that is a blend of some music, some talk, some news, some contests...and then I hear it.  "You're listening to MIX 105.1!"  I'm listening to a mix station.  I'M LISTENING TO THE FLORIDA EQUIVALENT OF MY MOTHER'S RADIO STATION...FOR WEEKS! And I never noticed.  There I was every morning...laughing along with freaking Scott and Erica!  Playing along to the $25 Pyramid!  Yelling about how Florida is full of idiots...obviously the category is "Alternative Names for Wombat Dung!"  Singing along to Leona Lewis (KEEP BLEEDING! KEEP KEEP BLEEDING!) and fucking Daughtry.  DAUGHTRY...as in AN AMERICAN IDOL WINNER! WHY DO I EVEN KNOW THAT!? And the entire time...my sweet, innocent, naive child sitting in the backseat...dancing and clapping when they play the pick-me-up song of the morning...laughing at mama yelling at the voices.

When did I become a pre-menopausal woman?  I don't even consider myself to be a woman yet...I refer to myself as being a girl...not a woman.  Women are old and wrinkly and serious and listen to mix stations.

Now I've been struggling with this whole age thing for a while...but this seems like the beginning of the end.

And then this lead me to another line of thought...everyone has a musical expiration date...a time when you stop keeping up with current music and you just stop liking anything new.  New music sounds like noise..."those damn kids don't know what good music!" is you say...and you mean it.

I think I've hit this time period.  I used to listen to all sorts of music...now I just want to hear things from 1994. I've been trying to pinpoint when my musical preferences stopped evolving...luckily iTunes is good at helping out with this sort of thing. 2002. 2002 was the end for me. I pretty much stopped adding in anything new in 2002. I was only 21. I peaked musically at 21.

How soon before I peak at everything else?

So tell me...have you reached your musical peak?

Disaster!

After three years of loving service...the iMac G5 is no more.  It survived two moves, getting poked at by a former PC user (Joel), severe neglect when the baby was born, and it had to suffer through the indignity of having to share a room with said baby for nearly six months.

It's been acting funny for the past couple of weeks...I blame this on me using it to look at newer models...and the baby using the keyboard as both a teething device and a musical instrument.  And then one day...it just stopped and didn't want to start again.

So back to the mothership we went (aka...the Genius Bar at the Florida Mall).  And the diagnosis was just not good...it needs a whole new hard drive...a hard drive that would cost more than the computer is worth...but that also means a glimmer of good news...it means that Mama gets a new computer!  Hell yeah people!

 

Now...as some of you might know...I am a former Apple employee...and dear lord do I ever miss that damn place.  Getting a job there was like finally finding my field of bees (obscure Blind Melon music video reference)...and to famously quote Jason from our opening day, "This is more than a store, this is more than a job...I love each and every one of you...now get out there and sell some shit!"

 

*Wiping tears*

 

Anyhoo...so I am getting a brand spanking new computer...now the only thing left to decide...what to get.

 

Do I get another desktop and spend an obscene amount of time chasing the baby away from it...or do I get a laptop that I'll spend an obscene amount of time holding above my head so the baby can't get to it.

 

And fingers crossed people...I was smart enough to do backups of the iMac...but not quite smart enough to remember when the last time it was that I had a backup scheduled...so here is hoping that I still have 15 months worth of baby pictures...including ones showing her torturing the now defunct iMac...ahhh...memories.

 

 

Worst blogger ever...

Yeah...that would be me.

Lemme tell ya'll...this new job is kicking my ass. KICKING MY ASS!

I don't think I have ever sucked at anything so bad in my entire life...and that includes the time my mom made me do gymnastics...even though I was the fattest eight year old in a leotard ever...so fat that my mom had to make said leotard. You would think that it would be easier for someone so round to tumble...but it just wasn't so.

So anyways...this new job. And don't tell anybody...but...well...I kind of hate it...and I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about work...something I was avoiding.

I’m a fake graphic designer. Well I was a fake graphic designer...but more on that later. So what exactly makes a graphic designer fake? Well I don’t get to do awesome ad campaigns or create excellent packaging for new products.

Oh no...I get to decide between Times New Roman or Arial for the title of reports. I suffer over the perfect shade of navy and which version of beige, sand, or tan I should use as the accent color. I mull over aerial maps and determine if all the major roadways should be 2 or 3 points wide. I shift around mathematically determined blobs that represent wetlands, future development, current development, property boundaries, county boundaries, city boundaries, and a million other statistics that are simplified and shown in a range of neon colors. I fashion page long legends and scale bars of all sizes. I choose from thousands of photos of people walking, people in cities, people bicycling, people at work, people at play, people living. Happy people...or unhappy people....it depends on the project. And that’s what graphic design really is...a million insignificant decisions....decisions that don’t matter much on their own...but decisions that make a giant impact when grouped together...at least if you do it right.

So when people ask what I do...I just say that I’m a graphic designer...which I suppose is mostly true. But it’s not the type of designer that I had envisioned being back in art school. But it pays the bills and gives me a place to go all day...so who can really complain?

But like I was saying...I was a graphic designer. Now because of some company shifts and a troubled economy...I’ve got shifted around and my job got split in half...and now I have double the work, triple the responsibilities, quadruple the headaches. The powers that be gave me a “choice” as to whether or not to take on an entirely new position on top of my old one...but after having witnessed a few too many layoffs...there really was no “choice” in the matter.

So now I am sort of an administrative assistant on crack. I’m now the property of one person instead of a whole group of people. He travels constantly and does workshops and lectures and makes decisions all over the country...and all over the world every now and then. So I’ll be his graphic designer, his admin, his travel agent, his marketing department, his report maker, his contract negotiator, his everything...his...his...well...his bitch.

That's what this comes down to...I'm someone's bitch. No one thought it was humorous when I asked to get that put on my business card.

So all of these new responsibilities are seriously cutting into my blogging time. I mean, seriously. Doesn't work know that I've got three readers who really need new material?! Geesh.

So stay with me here while I figure out how to deal. It's not like when I was 23 and could just quit whatever job I had and just say fuck it. Now things are different...now I've got two mortgages and a baby that really likes to eat.

Life's hard...wear a helmet.

Down with the sickness...

So I am sick. Again. Since Amelia was born, I've had five ear infections, countless runny noses, three upper respiratory infections, and a nasty two day stomach virus that made me experience one of my biggest fears (vomiting) multiple times. (Vomiting is just wrong. It's your body defying the laws of GRAVITY. Listen here vomit...gravity is the law for a REASON.)

I've basically become the destination for busy viruses and infections looking to get away from it all. The baby is obviously selling timeshare property in my upper respiratory track. And all these viruses are telling their friends and bringing their Aunt Mabel and their cousin Howard on these visits, because I am SICK ALL THE TIME.

There is only one upside to all of this sickness...Dr. V. at the walk-in clinic in Clermont. Now this particular walk-in is totally out of the way for me to go to...but the one closest to me is ghett-o. So take my advice women of Central Florida...go to the Clermont Centra-Care. It's totally worth the trip...hell...I might be feeling down enough to mosey on over there today...

Oh Dr. V...if only we didn't have to meet with mucus acting as a chaperone. Sigh.

Even Joel agrees that he might just be the dreamiest doctor he has ever been to.

I don't know exactly what it is about Dr. V. Maybe it's because he let me sob all over him when I was pregnant and had the flu and he wouldn't prescribe me anything because of the slightest chance of harm to the baby. Or maybe it's because he actually looks at you when you are talking...even when you've got pink eye and have all sorts of goopy shit on your face. Or perhaps it's just because he's so tall and handsome. Who knows...my fantasy dreamland doesn't need to be rational.

So at my last visit that was fueled by an abundance of mucus (I wrote and rewrote that line at least four times...trust me here...there is no good way to talk about snot)...I finally got up the courage to do something I almost never do...ask for help.

And here comes the confession. I'm a (wait for it...wait for it...) smoker.

Since the age of 16 I've chugged down at least half a pack a day of Marlboro Menthol Milds...and then after I had the baby...I slowly returned to being a half a pack a day smoker. Somebody call the bad mother line...we've got a live one. I don't know what it was...getting to have a ten minute break away was what I needed...and before I knew it...I had a habit again.

So I asked my beloved Dr. V. about what my options were...I'd already tried the patch, the gum, my own crappy willpower...I was ready to turn to the sweet world of pharmaceuticals.

That was when Dr. V. informed me that I would need to speak to my primary care doctor about that. What? But Dr. V....you are my primary doctor...hell...you're my only doctor!

And this was when Dr. V. and I broke up...if he couldn't see how hard this was for me...well then I just didn't think we could make it. And just like that...my doctor fantasy went poof. (Well...mostly...I am the forgiving type you know...next time I've got more boogies than I know what to do with...Dr. V. and I might have a little rebound action.)

So now I'm off on my quest to find a primary care physician! Know any good ones in the Orlando area? I especially like the ones who never have cold hands...and ones who don't keep you waiting for forever...and if they happen to give out lollipops that's a plus too. Not that I'm picky or anything.