jack and coke, please...

so lately i've been thinking about how there's two things i really want to devote a blog to. the first is my grandma altobelli.

maybe i'll expand more later, but grandma's got alzheimer's, and she's really not grandma any longer. i find it difficult to visit her, because she doesn't know who i am, and being around a large group of people makes her nervous...which is difficult to avoid in our family because everyone travels in large italian-slovenian packs.

anyway, i've been feeling like a bum because when i have the chance to see her--like before christmas--i didn't take it. i squelched out on it. mainly because it's so hard to see her and know that she's not yours, not anymore. it scares me because it's a reminder that perhaps i'm not too far away from assuming my mother's role in her mother's life, so on and so forth. and that makes me feel a strange need to reproduce, if only to further the genetic strain and have my daughter come visit me when i think i haven't had children.

i'll get over it. i know i will. there's probably not a lot of time left, i suppose, in all reality. but the gal i knew, when i was younger, has been gone for a few years now, replaced by this other woman who feels uncomfortable around me--i like my memories the way they are, edited for content, happy and well-fed in grandma ursh's warm little kitchen.

the other thing i've been wanting to write about is dad's one year birthday. on 2.5.05 he will celebrate a year of his re-furbished heart. i haven't been doing very well with dad's low fat diet lately, or exercising more, all those things i promised myself i would do. i try, i really, really do, but then something like last night happens, and a lot of liquor later, i think, that probably wasn't very healthy. i think there was a line in smilla's sense of snow: an overall poisoning of the organism. one drink is good, two is fine, three is pushing it, and by five i should have known better. i think.

anyway it's been a year since my family gathered in that room, prayed to ourselves as they operated. it's hard to imagine that now--that whole day was so surreal, so strange and on edge, and yet there was a lot of laughter sprinkled in the mix. i remember that morning, getting up and dad was already gone from the house, and there was a moment when we wondered if we should shower or not...should we wait, would it matter. so we showered and primped, just because it felt nice and normal.

then we went to the hospital. thought we would just sit in the regular waiting area but they had rooms set aside, with televisions and comfy chairs. it was a good thing we had a door on the room because there was a lot of roaring laughter after my sister brought out her 7th grade papers to read through. the kids were writing about trekking through the oregon trail, but it was hard to keep their modern thoughts--ie, one wrote about stopping at macdonald's on the way--out of the historical context. we watched tv, walked around some, had lunch, generally bothered everyone in the waiting area because for a group of people whose dad was undergoing open heart surgery, we were pretty full of laughter.

i remember the nurse came in and briefed us a few times--once when they started, once when they put him on the heart-lung machine, and then again later, when we were all nervous because according to the previous report, he should have been done. they finished at 245, about three hours later than originally planned. the doctor came down to the room--dr pineda--and let us in on why things took so long. they'd done 6 bypasses, total--and then when he was done, he didn't like the way one looked, so he re-did it. good to know. halfway through his soft-spoken explanation, he got a phone call from a nurse, who was trying to tell him that he needed to come up to the room because a patient was having problems with the iv in his arm. either the dr couldn't hear very well or just wasn't paying attention to her; his cell was so loud that we all knew it was the man's right arm, and there was an issue with his iv. finally the nurse shouted through the phone, after a particularly slow interchange of the dr still not understanding which iv was causing problems, "the right arm, you know, like the one holding your phone." we all stifled giggles.

i remember how long his fingers were. long and slender.

we moved around a bit after that. went upstairs and made short work of the phone list, what with everyone having a cell phone with them. then sat around for a bit before he was moved to icu and we could see him again.

that was the hardest part of the day, and the happiest, too.

dad was all stuck up on this bed, and the nurse in attendence said that he had sparked up when he heard our voices. i didn't cry then, i hadn't cried all day. as i write this it makes me tear up a little, thinking. he didn't open his eyes, had a ventilator down his throat, looked pale and a bit jaundiced, and his blood pressure was very, very low, but he was moving his feet (which is a normal dad thing, he does that when he gets into bed, or while just sitting on the couch, moves his feet around and crosses and uncrosses them) but he was too weak to do much more. mom and i moved over to the bed so we could kiss him, and he got agitated, like he could hear through all the layers of gook he was pumped with, all the knock you out COLD stuff, that we really were there. i leaned over and said: just be still dad, just be quiet and heal. and he nodded.

that was the happiest point of the day. i knew that everything would be okay, then. gave up worry. even if everything had turned for the worst, dad knew i was there, he'd acknowledged, and he calmed down some.

out of all the things in my life, any difference i made, that is the one that i carry with me, that little nod. it was almost like absolution.

we laid around the waiting room some more, talked with another woman whose mother was in icu for something else, and eventually went home, slowly, filled with weary joy.

you measure life differently, after things happen that change you. it's been five years since corey, one year since dad had his bypasses. three years, this year, since i left bemidji, and soon a two years since vickie died, too. it doesn't seem like that long.

yesterday it was one year since i'd seen my friend veronica. last time i saw her was the year end party for work last year. last night was fun, but i missed my friends--serena, veronica. i have new ones now, people who are just as funny and amusing, in a different way. i'm glad i went.

it's just a dichotomy, always--that sense of continuing, with all these aspects within. i think of the earth mother--maiden, mother, crone--three in one. the seasons, turning and turning. world without end, amen.

i'll have another heineken, please.

two minute blog

it takes me at least twenty minutes to shower and get ready to go to work, which means that right now, being 813 am, i need to write and post in two minutes so i can still get ready and be there around the right time.

this week has been kind of a roller coaster. monday was bumpy-ish, tuesday was semi-normal, wednesday was fun, and now it's thursday, and i've no desire to go to work.

tomorrow, however, is our year end party, and that's always...interesting.

the snow is melting outside, which makes me kind of sad. i want it to hang around. it's like a good friend that shows up and then just as abruptly heads back on out. *sigh*

also picked up kim harrison's new book yesterday, while walking around the moa w/ rene, so far so good. if only i didn't need to sleep. (;

and last but not least, i had the medium salsa last night while at chipotle and it was a bit too hot for me. so, note to self, maybe not the hot stuff next time...

one addendum to NATHAN: i emailed you, but it came to my yahoo account...so i don't know if i actually emailed you or not. i sent it from discombobulated site...? any ideas? and i did indeed listen to 89.3 last night, it was lovely!!! nice and refreshing. they played some of everything. i'm keeping it on that station for a bit.

two minute blog is two minutes too long, must run!

comprehension

sometimes
i take that back all the time
it's hard for me to
understand
your mind

maybe i don't have enough
fabric
in my own
the tarp of my brain
can't handle trying to wrap
itself around yours

maybe i've just used it up
maybe there's nothing left
but scraps,
piecework, the bits
and slices

lemons are to lemonade
as mud is to mudpies
that mother speech resides
in my dna.
perhaps the worst is yet
to come.
so brace yourself, bridget.

complete comprehension of life
can be located
at the corner of 35E and yankee doodle road.
perhaps you've been given
the keys
to
joy

snow

i was sooooooooooo beyond pleased on friday.

there were two things i really, really wanted to do--be dumped on by mother nature, in the form of a few flakes, and listen to the dust for life cd. it didn't look like either was going to happen, as originally the forecast was for 1-4 inches and lately that forecast means a dusting. and we couldn't find the dust for life cd anywhere.

so thursday we find the cd. friday morning, it's the only cd in my car, because i still haven't gotten around to putting the car cd thing back in the car after last weekend's foray to the hinterlands. (:

of course, by 330, we're in a winter weather warning. yippee!

so i got my snow, and i got stuck in my car for over an hour on the drive home, with horrible radio reception and just one cd to loop around...by listen numero 4 i was ready for a different cd.

that, in a nutshell, is karma.

wish for something enough, and it's given to you.

teresa used to do callings for things--you make a spell, or pray or just ask the universe enough, and eventually, it will come to you. the how is for the fates to decide, or god, or whoever is on the other end of that spiritual phoneline, whatever you believe.

i asked for snow; it's out there, for the sharing.

these dreams...

was just looking at a friend's blog and she posted a few days ago about a horrible dream she had.

now, for anyone who knows me, i'm a very vivid dreamer. i usually remember all the dreams i have during the night. serena once told me that meant i wasn't sleeping well because if you wake up and can remember the dream, you're not completing your rem cycle. i think. course it's early right now and i'm kinda wonky yet.

anyhow, reading that, i realized that i couldn't remember any dream from last night. stranger still, i know the last time i remember dreaming was when i was in the vortex last weekend.

(which was a great deal of fun. quick synopsis: got up there sat am, hung out with rene and kendall for a bit before kendall's b-day party at the roller rink, which i did not attend...because i stopped over at first impressions and cari took one look at my head of hair, which was beginning to take on its own existence, and told me to sit in her chair. so hair is now fixed. caught some late lunch at tutto bene which is always delish and i'd been jonesing for their spicy tomato soup for a long time, then went back to cari's and drank some wine--i'll not disclose amounts LOL--and then headed over to the northern inn to see michael perform. as usual he was hysterically funny, and we laughed our asses off. his opener was this bald guy from iowa who just wasn't very funny. maybe it was the "red headed little boys are ugly" stuff. i kinda took offense. *sigh* but i did come up with a new swear word while there, due to the iowa guy's set--cookiefucker. don't ask. it's not as good as pumpkinfucker but it has a certain homestyle twist, don't you think? anyway we sat around after michael's set and had drinks, and then stopped down to hard times because i think his name was bill had a hookup or something. then amanda and cari and i had breakfast/dinner at 2 am at country kitchen. next morning i woke up to the peircing cry of tony changing the batteries in the smoke alarm and thought i was going to make a skylight in the spare room...so we watched some evan farmer and andrew dan-jumbo on while you were out and then went to the american legion for pancakes, and then i got in my pocket car and drove to st cloud...was there for about 45 minutes before racing back to the cities again to drop off the car, and then went home and collapsed. which is really honestly what needed to happen because this week has SUCKED!!! LOL)

so. i had this dream while i was in bemidji. dreamed that cari and i were on a bus, a yellow school bus, in france, driving across the countryside with a large group of people. there was another bus behind us, and another in front, but gradually they moved away and it was just our bus, filled with tourists, i think. i was ogling the countryside, which appeared to be straight out of any "french countryside" calendar you've ever seen, so it was very pretty in a soothing way.

the driver turned out to be freakishly old--i'm talking like 150 or something, just this wizened little old frenchman. he maintained that he'd been driving for years--a lot of them, i'd venture--and that he knew the road very well. good thing, too, because there were these huge potholes that made west duluth look positively flat. all of a sudden we take this detour across a field, bouncing and jouncing and it's not as even as the happy green grass makes it look. we at some point exit the bus and the driver continues on and wraps the front around a large tree.

everyone is crying because we don't know when the next bus will be past and no one has a cell phone or there is no range, i don't know. cari and i are cool headed and calm, and we walk to this pastorage a few miles back and gather up blankets and food, go back and find an empty barn and get the troup settled for the night. next day another bus shows up and we're given some kind of commendation for keeping everyone sane, fed and warm. huh?

it was strange but not as strange as the spider dream. turns out that spider hangs up in half price books in apple valley. large, black, stuffed, with neon green stripes on its joints and big pasted on felt eyes. and yes, in the dream i knew the spider was stuffed. but it was the lead up that got me. LOL

quickly before i have to run to work: we're in virginia mn for a party. i'm walking to meet dan somewhere and cursing his name because he's got the car and why should i be walking alone at 3 am. halfway there i come across a man killing a girl, a young asian girl. i fend him off with a stick or something (in the dream i don't have a purse! yikes!) and the cops show up. the girl reminds me that i have to stop by her parents' vegetable stand because they have something for my sister. so i stop by and these two cute parents hand me a plastic bag half full of cukes or something veggie-ish. i troop over to a community center that's under seige, sneak in through the air ducts, and try to give my sister the bag of veggies. she argues that i wasn't supposed to bring them to her, the family needs to sell them more. i try to get people out through the air ducts because the terrorists aren't looking, but sara shoos me out and i go back to the stand. the dad comes out and says that i have to take the veggies to the mother in back of the stand, so i go back and she's trying to kill this spider.

which is the spider that's hanging in half price books. i kid you not. big, stuffed, black with green knee joints, felt eyeballs pasted on its face, and this menacing mouth, also pasted on. it can't even gum a banana, and in the dream i'm terrified. we're throwing everything at this sucker, and it's still trying to come at us. in the dream i had this half-thought that this must be my subconcious laughing at me, and i start laughing, and then i wake up.

dan's dream, same night--he rescues a kitten and we survive a plane crash.

linear thinker versus chaotic thinker. or something like that.

dunno. all i know is this was going to be a quick postie and fuck it all, it's now 745 and i have to get ready for another day of bliss. :P the best thing about today, other than tomorrow i don't have to work? stargate sg1 season opener!!!!!!!! *does dance of joy in computer chair* o'neill and dr jackson and t'ealc, oh my!

so...

rented freedom comes in the form of a hyundai accent, dark gray. i thought it looked tiny (and it IS!) but the inside of the car reminds me soooooooooooo much of lupe that it makes driving easy.

the last car i rented was a 2003 mitsubishi galante and it was gi-huge-ic. i didn't know where anything was, but the plus was it was easy to find everything, being that it was all quite clearly marked.

let's see cons about this car i've got now...teeny enough to fit in my purse, has this overdrive button on the gear shift that i have nooooooo idea of what it means, so i've just left it on. seats feel strange. but then i'm used to my mazda la-z-boys. (; the hood has these strange creases that, for someone who is distracted by life in general, are very distracting. i keep thinking there something on the hood when in all acutality there's really not. also the windsheild washer squirter things (applicators? that sounds too high-tech for me.) anyway they stick up pretty far over the hood, and those are distracting too. *shrug* no cruise but i'm not terribly bothered by that.

pros: it's small, seems very fuel efficient thus far, and is cute in a could-fit-in-my-coat-pocket type of way. it also drives quite nicely, has a pretty good sized trunk, large windsheild and good sized side mirrors. (after driving my car, i got in dan's one day--he's got a chevy corsica--and was appalled that i could see so little in the mirrors. large side mirrors should SO not be a luxury item!) also the mirrors are electric, so i can move both sides from the driver's seat. (which could be a con because it was distracting me...LOL) anyway it's a nice car, for which i'm quite grateful.

when i got here last night--my parents' house in st cloud--it was dark and cold. cold outside, dark inside. mom and dad drove up to virginia this weekend to see my grandma, and my sister beth was at her christmas party. so i went in, called cari, found my phone charger, and then called the car rental place because they'd started my car, and then when i was getting in the guy said here's your other key. i was confused but that's a state of being so i put the key in my pocket. come to find out, i have one key for my car, and one key for a white chevy malibu. hee hee hee. he was very apologetic and glad that i'd called. yay me. anyway i was going to try to wait up for my sister to get home, but by 11 i had such a horrible headache that i just went to bed.

sad that friday nights have degenerated into go to sleep early nights. *sigh* oh, to be a few years younger and have more energy. cari and i were discussing the fact that the older you get, the more like flat pop you become. she said that if i was flat pop, she's made it to syrup.

anyhow...i'm going to go start the gray car and then find something to eat. which won't be hard, considering i'm at home and my mother is italian. god forbid there's not enough food for the mongolian hordes in her kitchen at any given moment. gotta love her. guess i do. (;

cheers, k(:

renting freedom

i'm renting a car tomorrow.

let me explain. (;

so monday i found out that my trainee michael is going to be performing in bemidji this weekend. i email cari and rene and amanda, to let them know about it.

tuesday i get an email from amanda: "are you driving up too?"
wednesday i get an email from rene: "i have a sitter this weekend, it's a sign, drive up."
thursday i call cari on a whim: "i was *just* going to call you and badger you into driving up."

so i rented the car. i think i'll drive up saturday morning, but it'll depend on how late i get done tomorrow and how tired i am.

i also need to stop and see my sister in st cloud because we're trying to plan (long distance planning BITES) a party for my dad on feb 5th--it's his one year bypass birthday! yay dad! he's doing swimmingly, and both him and mom have lost a lot of weight. probably about a fifth-grader, between the pair.

anyway i'm tired, i have a shitload of laundry to do (which is currently annexing the upstair hallway, my apologies dan and eero...and shiva too, even tho she couldn't care less and probably would be willing to sleep and/or poop on said laundry. mainly sleep tho. LOL) and i really, really, really need to get some of the crap off the floor upstairs.

i'm excited to go. i just wish i had more time!!! i need at least another fifteen hours a week, just to keep up with everything that goes on in the world--i guess self-centeredly, my world, my friends, my life.

i need to get my priorities in order and just find a new car so i don't have to rent to travel. but i'm kind of apathetic about car shopping, right now. so i guess it will wait until the following weekend.

i'm also hoping (hint, hint to dan) that we can start his spygame soon. i'm jazzed to play. i have to admit i've been enjoying eero's game a great deal despite not liking the palladium system; i like my character (who likes to make things burn) and i like the story. (:

anyway now i really need to do something! (:

ah, the sound of football...

gently playing in the background, like muzak that starts in autumn and ends in a coliseum in january.

it's inevitable that sundays are taken over by football. television viewing migrates to jamaica and we get peyton manning and randy moss and chris berman, who could. go. all. the. way.

at least i've been with dan long enough to understand the basics--what's a tackle and what's a sack, the fine line between first down and fourth. the touchback. etc.

i couldn't watch a game on my own and get the same joy out of it that dan does, because half the fun of watching football is seeing dan go nuts when there's a touchdown, or play sofa-ref alongside the striped guys onscreen. watching football, just me, myself and i, is somewhat silly, in my mind.

perhaps it's how i was raised. sunday football games were for dad and some guys from the neighborhood. the smell of sour cream and onion dip, potato chips, crisp grain belt beer in cans. we always asked for a sip, and then ran away making faces after the nastiness that was beer made our mouths rebel.

course now i type this having watched football yesterday, beer in hand. strange how eternal life is, in its own circle.

i've been so focused lately on my own mortality, on when the end will happen, for my own life. and then i think about history, how many people have lived and died and lived again, through their children, their contributions to humanity in books and movies and music and thought. i see kids in the world and i think about how, fifteen years from now, they'll be in my shoes, seeing the world through glasses tinted with time--how much time is left? how much? can i forget, day to day, that eventually this whole existence of mine will be for naught, that someday i'll be gone?

it doesn't bother me. i'm not scared of dying. it's the inevitability of it--there's nothing i can do, nothing i can say to avoid it. that part's not scary. it's the thought that i'm not giving anything to the earth at large, nothing of substance.

but if spirit is substance, if your soul has weight, then i give willingly.

i think of christian ideals, of christ saying "take of this body" and as i age understanding that it's not the body he was giving, but the idea of his spirit. or at least that's my take on it. doesn't make me christian any more than agreeing with my uncle makes me a member of the nra; just makes me realize that it's all interconnected. reminds me of the fates, sitting at the loom, weaving lives together, tying them off in neat knots.

behind me the annual festival of men in tight pants chasing dyed pigskin continues, the announcers debate and the commercials ensue, asking me to consider different car insurance while i'm on the planet. it's like my own version of continuation, at this exact moment. it'd go on with or without me, football. the nfl keeps turning. the football in the sky. etcetera.

my existentialist needs to shower. ta-ta, ya'll.

the to-do list that stretches into oblivion

i'm not even going to make one this weekend. i give up. there's too much to do.

and i'm too bushed to do it.

last night i got home, under the impression that i'd be doing one of two things--hitting the laundromat w/ dan and then partaking of my new fave wine, a rosemount shiraz, that's just divine and would take me off-planet after drinking it, or heading down to lakeville for some italian telly with tangee and nicole. however...i got home and we'd been invited to d and c's for gaming.

hadn't been in a while so saddled up the ol' dice and headed over.

now, i love d and c immensely. they're some of the most generous people i know, and some of the most caring, too. but i was sooooooooooooo bored last night that i thought i was going to nap leaning up against the stereo speaker. the concept of the game was fun--you're zero level, you have a profession before you become an actual character class--ie, i started out as a seamstress but am on my way to becoming a rogue and something like a spy. however...the downfall to this is that if i stay in character, it makes it nearly impossible for me to advance into another class. why would a seamstress actually get involved with a group of theives when she's lived a perfectly respectable life till now? d wasn't helping much, in the six hours of gaming i gathered a little gossip and then kind of got forced onto a ship, and then became a seamstress on another island, government employed.

i'm just waiting for dan's spygame, which he's hoping to start soon-ish. he was thinking next friday but i kind of put the kaibash on that due to next friday being the sg-1 season premiere, and be damned if i'm missing that!!!

so we got home at around 230, in bed by 3, and then at 808 i wake up. wide awake. whole day stretching before me. in my head i'm thinking of all the stuff i have to do, and i can't see the end of the list.

nor do i want to. it might be kind of amusing to get up one day and having nothing to do, but i doubt it'll happen anytime soon. i guess life is just one long laundry list of complaints, things to do, and joys. so a quick jot shows me this:

clean up kitchen
take out garbage
look at the snowflakes
take a nap
read my book
relax
clean out the upstairs bedroom
and the garage
and then run to thrift store and drop extraneous crap off.

sleep, eat, repeat. oblivion.

music in my mind

i keep thinking of that line from i think a sarah mclachlan song, "i'm so tired, but i just can't sleep, standing on the edge of something way too deep. funny how you feel so much, you cannot say a word, yes you are standing in silence...you can't be heard."

or at least that's the way *i* hear it. i'm sure it's quite different, but due to the warping inflicted by my one good ear, that's what i hear.

coincidentally, that's also what i'm feeling. think it sums up the week juuuuuuuuuust fine.

now that the back hallway reclamation is well under way, and it looks like we'll get a free professional carpet cleaning out of the situation to boot, life is looking up. dan found a job. it snowed and is pretty outside. i have the chance to do my laundry tonight. found a good new author (jane feather, but it's all romance novels. however they're quite forward thinking, exceedingly well written, and have characters that i just adore--feminists in the early 1900s who have some real spunk. did i just use that word? ugh, to what has my degree come? LOL)
and it's friday, which is a nod that i've made it through another week of year end.

additionally, at work, we were given our vacation calendars for next year, and my supe let me carry over all the vacation i didn't use last year, which means i can take off about a month and a few days instead of just my normal two weeks. not sure when but that vacation is MINE. i don't honestly care if i just sit around and watch my carpet moulder, i'm taking a week off. asap. in february or march. sooner than later.

and i'm going to find a new car posthaste, so that i can drive around not in fear of things falling off, and find a fricking different job.

this week's work crap-i-sode was compounded by the fact that most of the office, being female, was pms-ing at the same time, myself being no exception. all week long i've been starving, angry, hungry, irate, and on tuesday night, weepy. finally yesterday i got to add crampy to that list. days when i long for a dick.

yeah, sounds cheesy, but if you were curled around a heating pad for an hour and had to take a handful of advil to stop the pain (when one or two usually knock you out completely) you'd be singing the same song i am. in fact, if you're a woman, you might be humming along right now.

sorry to be a bit brash but it's been a long week.

monday and tuesday we were short two and three people, respectively. wednesday and through next monday we'll be short another one. it's year end, so it's very busy, and all my calls are cranky-ass people. if they're not cranky when you start the call, by the time you're done and have told them that because they are stooooooooooooooopid and didn't fix someone's social security number last year, oh, say in may when the employee was hired, it's going to cost them about 105 clamshells to adjust and get all new w2s, they get pissy. i actually had one woman berate the company at large for being "efficient." huh? beg pardon?

so anyway, the reps in my department have all been coming in early and staying late. and on wednesday morning we come in to an email from our supervisor (the same one who rolled my vacation over so nicely...can you say: passive aggressive?) saying that our service level has been abysmal and our region basically sucks with a capital S.

i don't think there was anyone in the department who wasn't pissed.

it wasn't "i can see you're all working very hard, and i thank you for your efforts, but we need to address a few issues." nope. nothing like that. just this diatribe about how maybe we hadn't noticed the reader board (tells us how many calls we've taken, and what our service level percentage is for the day) is telling us daily that we just bite.

apparently he felt he hired some illiterate people because he didn't need to point out our service level--we can all see the reader boards ourselves, and while i can be distracted by shiny bright lights, i can see that the shiny bright lights last week were in the shape of a 39 percent. not so hot. i don't need to have it pointed out for me. i already feel crappy and overworked. to be ambushed and acutally TOLD that we're sucking donkey weiner, that was a new low.

so yesterday we were supposed to have meetings with him. which he changed to one-on-one meetings, which for me are death because i clam up and don't want to say the things i might say in a group meeting, where i feel a little more anonymous. (no, they don't bring bags for your head to the meeting. it's just power in numbers type of thing. might just be me. LOL) so i have mine and i think one other person has theirs, and that's all. i don't know if there will be more today or not. i honestly don't care. right now i just want out.

i did get to have cocktails last night with two of my gf's from work, and that helped soothe the savage worker for a while. one of them pointed out that she figured he broke it out into one-on-ones because if he went with large groups he'd be lynched.

to which we all fully agreed would have been the case.

i'm sure that someone pissed on his tuesday, and that's why we got pissed on the next day, but if you're a manager, you want to INSPIRE your employees to reach their full potential, not beat them into submission. have you heard those milk commercials? "happy cows give good milk." happy employees give good work. whooooooooooooooooooa nelly, foreign concept! to the death chair with this possibly excellent and helpful idea! ZAP!

we've all been comparing work to some type of death camp, but lately, the attitude of my superior has gotten to the point at which i'm thinking about leaving because i don't like the feeling of not knowing where i stand--of being hit with one hand while the other gives me vacation days, softens me up with kindness.

it feels vaguely abusive.

hence the music in my head. tired. can't sleep. have all this shit to say, and can't say it to the people who need to hear it. so instead ya'll get me cranky, crampy and confounded onblog. sorry, and again...it's friday. as both my sister and my cari say, sometimes you need to drink a bottle of wine to put the world back where it belongs. i'm up to that task. (;

this could be long...

but it won't be.

i just wanted to post quickly before i get up and get going today--i feel very lucky indeed to live in a world where we draw lines and borders, but are happy to overlook them when it concerns humans in general.