Money and Timing

I understand so much more now:
why accountants worry about rules
why bill collectors are quick to anger.

Product delivered
long before,
yet no word and no word and no calls back
I reached further to the cahootant accountant
who hubristically said,
"Your check is in the mail!"

I check the mail
today and today and tonight and tonight
week, 'nother week, week-week.
And my check is not...

"The postal workers are slow and bogged down!
And Presidents' Day last week came to town!
Your check, just keep looking, check the mail and you'll see!
Your check is in the mail, it is, trust me!"

Now I understand why we need contracts
and laws and lawyers and the threat of them.
I know how to fight, but I don't like to.

The check, finally retrieved by hand
the money is in my account,
the client is history.

My karmic lesson:
Don't make people wait for their money.
It's rude.

"Do you like my hat?" "No. I do not." "Good-bye." "Good-bye!"

A year ago, I went to Manhattan for the first time. I liked it there, once I relaxed and stopped asking myself, "why are all these people here?" It was cold. I wore a hat, gloves and a coat while outside.

One day, my friend and I were walking up 5th Avenue, and we passed someone famous. I kept my awareness of him a secret til he was a safe distance away, then I told my friend, "Ah! That's who it was! I just saw the blonde guy from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy!" It had taken a moment to place him, but I recognized him by his profession first, because of the look on his face, now and forever etched into my memory, as he observed my hat, looking askance, absorbed in it. Either he loved my hat, or he did not like that hat.

I decided that if in about a year, everyone was wearing a hat like I had on that day, it would figure he'd loved my hat. I do not see blue barets abounding. I do not think he liked my hat.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Miss You!

Some people, when they say they "I miss you!" don't mean they want to spend time with you, it just means they miss you. They miss lots of people, but that doesn't mean they're going to stop what they're doing to spend time with them. This personality type is simply interested more in the singular path than the mutual.

This public service announcement brought to you by the person who just figured this out.

Spelling Out Sports

I know sports make people happy. I'm not against sports, I just don't like watching them (but playing can be fun). In an email to me, Blue Green Power Plant pointed out that sports are at least fair and relatively peaceful compared to the news. BGPP is right.

My absence of appreciation for sports is that the reality they set up is so arbitrary and yet people take them so seriously. What is this connection with a group of people from (or sponsored by the economic interests pertaining to) a particular city that makes that city better than its antagonist? Does one city have better sanitation, parks, or police or fire response time than the other because of the sporting team's performance? Nay!

But speaking of things being arbitrary, indeed the same is true about everything. BGPP's comments motivate me to introspect further. I have discovered this: Sports throw me into existentialist angst. To manage this, my mind goes soft and I fixate on color schemes and physiques, the layout of the game venue and ideas like whether spandex still be the top choice in athletic fashion fabric as the 21st century develops. Will nanotechnology affect team gear significantly so that players can sweat and yet never get wet?

I like the human dynamics that sports can illustrate though - win, lose, try, fail, fight back, back off, strategy - but must I sit through four hours of color comentary and crashing helmets for this?

Maybe I need it spelled out for me without all the clamor: get to the point. Beneath all the rattle and roar and clash and spit and rah rah and war drums: What's this game really about?

Show me the human drama and make the game a metaphor. Give me mooring against the bleak expanse between being and nothingness.

Give me sports through a movie like, "The Longest Yard" or "Karate Kid" or that one about the teenagers in the bike race on the high school track that starred the kid from my math class in Jr. High who grew up to win an academy award last year. Oh what is the title of that movie or that actor's name... Maybe BGPP remembers.

Absentum non Chasem

OMG! I missed the superbowl!

"If it's so important for them to get the ball over the line, why don't they just take turns and get it over with?" - me, age 6 +/-

Glazed

My friend Poncho (not his real name) came to visit me this morning. He was half way through a piece of carrot cake and also had an apple-filled, "huge bearclaw!" in hand.

Poncho is a fit, handsome, self disciplined, health-conscious man, but since the holidays he has been off his game. He says he's been craving sugar and fats, mostly. He had a cold recently and craved greasy fatty food, which he ate, and which helped him sleep - a lot.

He is going back to his healthy lifestyle Monday, after the Superbowl has passed. I think after he finishes that bearclaw in about ten minutes, he will be sick of bad food. He gave me a bite. It was delicious. Now I want a buttermilk donut and a cup of coffee.

When we eat healthful foods, we crave them. When we eat junk, we crave that. This is a fundamental law of human physiology.

Con carina,
Ponchita

I said Pranna, Not Piranha!

Ideas of interconnectedness,
the chaos theory
and the man in the moon
who sees all at once
separate us
from the moment
of exactly now.

This was written ten years ago now.

Happy Musical Fun Thing!

Video: "Menomena: Wet and Rusting"

This just makes me happy every time I watch it:

http://www.blogotheque.net/article.php3?id_article=3433

Greed Kills - Tell Your Friends!

The Cheesecake Redundancy

They bought a cheesecake, plain
served out of the box already sliced
waxed paper separators, exact sized wedges
so there was no question whether
each of us got what was admitted in the Nutrition Facts
(read after the fork had been licked clean)
and I am not exaggerating or
using my poet's licence to embellish the truth of the matter:
Serving size: one slice
Fat grams: 39
Calories: 500.

Fatty and filling and the only part worth savoring; the graham cracker crust
the cake itself: too rich, too heavy, too thick, too much a glob;
obesity on a fork - too dense to experience with any genuine awareness.
I have concluded cheesecake is indeed and certainly not worth the bother,
now that I know
the numerical
facts.

Happy New Year 2008

No one should have to strive for a sense of belonging at home;
it should be given freely embedding a sense of worldly welcome.

Baseball's Giant Arms

I have just enough of the sports gene to enjoy playing a friendly game of h-o-r-s-e- or softball or a little football if there's no sprinklers embedded in the lawn, and even with this, far less sports gene than fans who follow scores and points and personalities and weights and measures and big arms and MPH of pitches and batting averages, even I could tell athletes using steroids in professional sports is the new norm.

What I can't figure out is how anyone is surprised by this. How else would a baseball player get an arm the size of a leg? But we want 'em faster and bigger and stronger. They are swept up in our culture of gluttony! Hard to say no, I'm sure.

Newnorm. Hm.

The Two Dogs Story Ever Present

On a Friday night well past midnight after rain my sister and I were driving home, distant cars' lights and some shimmers of neon shop signs reflected on the the wet boulevard.  I was about seventeen, she was around twenty one.  I lived with our parents, she was on her own already and was taking me home. In the soft light from the corner streetlight my sister saw them first. The context was too wrong for me to make sense of it right away, but there in the slow lane a German shepherd was down. An alert doberman lay protectively beside him.

We pulled over, got out. We checked the shepherd but he was gone. We picked him up carefully and moved him to a soft place beside a tree, taking a moment with him. The doberman followed. These were the days of pay phones. Neither dog had a tag so we called animal control to come for him and guided her to come with us.

I snuck the doberman into my bedroom. The hours were too small to wake anybody up for discussion, so I made her soft place on the floor and brought her some water and food. As I got into bed, my whispers to lie down did not take effect. She paced then rested her chin on the edge of the mattress. This was a time when dobermans were deemed the breed to be leery of. The lore was they could turn hostile in an instant. But she'd taken a chance on trusting me so an "okay!" and she was up, rolled onto her back and nestled into me. This must have been how they slept every night, she and her mate and their human.

In the morning when we got up, my parents already knew she was there. How long had they known? Was it their habit to make sure I was home alive after I'd stayed out late?  It occurred to me I'd never thought about that before. My dad sat in his chair drinking coffee, the doberman sat a few feet in front him ears back, eyes steady, listening as he tried to explain to me, or to the dog, that since we already had three dogs, four would be too many. It looked like the doberman had the situation under control, so I went to the kitchen for coffee. I could feel my parents' discussion though I couldn't actually hear it. It may have been one of those wordless ones.

When I came back into the room my dad said, "If we can't find her person, she'll have a home with us."

He took her to the animal shelter to give her a chance of being found. I called the shelter an hour after they'd left the house. Her human had already come and taken her home. The man at the shelter said the owner was there first thing in the morning saying his doberman and German shepherd had gotten out through an open gate the night before and that he'd looked for them in the night. I hung up the phone comforted that the the dog and the man still had each other. Then I drove back to the intersection to make sure the shepherd was not there.

The sunny shiny morning was slightly too bright as if the rain storm had washed the streets a glaring white. The shepherd was gone; it seemed nothing had happened there at all. But some thirty years later I still see that moment we rounded the corner. I see the posture and expression of the doberman beside her shepherd under the dull streetlight, watching, waiting in love and trust.

-This story was revised on April 16, 2012

One Thousand Years

The skinny man scientist
born after I graduated sixth grade says
if we eat these special foods and drink these
special drinks and exercise these
special exercises we can live to be
one thousand years old!
One thousand years old, generations alive today he thinks
can stay alive one thousand years!

My first reaction to this:
don't give me the special foods don't give me the
special drinks don't show me the
special exercises so I can spare myself living a span equal to
a life begun in the time of the Norman invasion of England
to extend half a dozen years past what would, from this moment, be my
hundredth birthday, given I had
eaten the special foods and drunk the
special drinks and exercised the
special exercises.

Even if the body recalibrated due to the scheme,
how could the human personality endure a time span so vast
as the changes of a thousand years on this earth (or worse bleak space or colonial moon!)?
How could I learn that many new tricks how many
special nutrients could I possibly consume to feed
curiosity or sustain enthusiasm let alone interest for
one
thousand
years?!

Walking, I thought of you, my Love.
A thousand years seemed short.

Now Gets Here Before it Arrives Now

Why does there have to be so much going on at once? The world is a busy place, yes, and we know more about everything everyone is doing more than we used to, sure. News that took months to travel 200 years ago takes seconds now, uh huh. So we apparently are compelled to know all immediately and pluses and minuses inventoried and studied and brain cells counted and neural pathways determined and redetermined and speed of light ridden on and trails of comets and sticky footed insects math and hip hop and a dictionary where you don't even have to learn the alphabet in order. And there was that Twilight Zone about the time traveller from the cowboy days brought to modern 1950's Manhattan and the noise was so much from outside the hotel window he, holding his head hands over ears, bounded down the stairs, ran mad into the street and got hit by a car dead. This, a bitty poem, no need to panic; merely the emulation of manic but, do you wonder, don't you ever, about our why our kids are plumpening up like those big New York Thanksgiving Parade balloons and what it means toward soothing a heart to romance our peace of mind?

Slash and Backslash: Finally, Clarification

This is a slash: /

This is a backslash: \

A slash leans its head forward: /

A backslash leans its head BACK: \ It is called a backslash because it leans its head back.

Slash: / lives in the lowercase of the question mark key. It is easy to reach and more commonly used.

Backslash: \ lives in the lowercase above the enter key. It is a bit up and out of the way and less commonly used.

A slash is called a slash because it was the first of the slashes to arrive on the scene. When the backslash arrived, someone said, "Ah, I see there is another type of slash!" And someone else said, "Yes, but that one is leaning its head back. Let us call it the 'backslash'."

As computers came into being, the lexicon supporting their coding included the slash, and less commonly, its slightly daunted sibling, the backslash.

Sometimes people announcing URL's (radio, conversation, instruction) make the mistake of calling a slash a backslash. They think they are showing off how much they know about slashes; they feel very official - you can hear it in their voices.

They are mistaken.

Witnesses

"War is Hell!" said the man.
He'd been there.
He said it in a time when the only witnesses to war
were participants,
in some way or another,
so the naive
really were.

Now in the world
cameras everywhere enough to make us all witnesses
Hell expands to ever greater territory
as each and more of us
defer concern,
delay action,
pretend ignorance.

Simple Notes for Job Interviewers

1) Ask questions of the interviewee. She may be interviewing you, too, but you invited her into your workplace to ask her about her professional experience. That means you need to let her answer the few questions you have come up with in between rants about your properties, your furniture, all the people you fired when you started being the boss, how it's tough that to build your new empire you have had to "break bones" but that you are such a good leader when you "set them."

2) Don't badmouth the places you've worked before or the people you fired when you started your new job. Don't keep the interviewee in your office listening to your rambling babble for one hour and forty five minutes, making her struggle extra hard to maintain decorum for that last fifteen minutes fearing her car might be towed before she gets out (time limit posted at the parking spot you reserved for her).

3) Don't have everything in your office either black or grey and then wear a dark blue suit and pearls (what century is this?!) so the only vivid colors in the room are your pink face and yellow hair.

4) When someone knocks on the door and interrupts with some important papers you had asked them for, introduce the interviewee to the person. When the worker behaves pleasantly and like a "normal" person, do not shun the worker, who, by the way, stayed late to give you the papers you asked for.

5) Remember: the interviewee is there because you were recommended by a colleague. Out of respect for the mutual colleague, the interviewee will stay til you end the meeting. Do not abuse her patience.

6) Do not yawn while you're talking, repeatedly, apologize, yawn again, apologize some more, and take sips of your water, especially if you have failed to offer the interviewee some water.

7) Do not try to minimize the rudeness of your yawning by explaining that you woke up at midnight the night before and couldn't get back to sleep. Next time you have insomnia, drink a nice warm cup of tea and at least lay down and watch TVLand and relax so you are rested and ready to be respectful to the person who took off work, lost pay, and spent gas money to see you.

8) The interviewee may answer your questions and then choose to back up her statements with examples of ways she implemented the decisions she made as a professional. These little images she creates in your mind are not meant to send you off on lengthy tangents about your commute, your stereotypes about what ethnicity uses the bathroom stalls as phone booths most, or what type of rabble may live on the other side of the mountains where you would never buy property because there are - god knows what color you're afraid of - apparently not dark blue or pearl - people living there who are so stupid they accepted Adjusted Rate Mortgages and now they can't afford their houses but you wouldn't even want to buy them up because the neighborhood is just not as good as the one where you have two houses already and are thinking of buying a third but are just perched waiting for the real estate crash to get worse in about five years.

8a) While stating the above, do not form your little hand into the shape of a cresting wave, first knuckle bent on each of the four fingers. This just shows off your apparent disdain for manicures.

9) When notifying the interviewee of your call-back schedule, do not insult her by telling her a second interview will consist of a writing test, especially if you are holding the following items in your lap:

• her three professional writing samples;
• her resume showing that she has a Master's Degree in English/Writing and specific professional training in the style of writing required for the position in question.

Further, do not drive the point home by explaining that others turned in writing samples as good as hers but failed the writing test, thereby accusing the interviewee of plagiarism.

10) When you finally see your way clear to letting the interviewee leave, do not walk her to the door of the building. She will be grateful to have you say goodbye at the office door.

Note to the interviewee: If such as the above ever happens to you: at about the twenty minute mark it is okay to stand up, say, "sorry, my time is up," and leave. No matter how much you like the colleague who sent you here, remember: she sent you here!

Dancing!

These are some of my friends. Someone did something to the settings on their camera that slowed the shutter speed. When I took the photo, I thought I got nothing worth saving. Ah, but non! C'est magnifique, oui!?