Hear What They See

Saturday, November 22, 2003

I came home from work Thursday night and Daddy had made dinner for everyone so I sat down and chomped down some turkey meatloaf and some curry dish and some brussel sprouts braised with garlic and wine. It was something of an eclectic sampling of food, so I ate it. I sit there and mom starts to ramble off all the things in her office for which I am to blame. I haven't worked in her office since July.

I am to blame for the 19-year old that I interviewed and then mom interviewed and then mom hired. The 19-year old is an utter waste. She interviewed OK. Apparently, however, she works like a doped-up teenaged prostitute with a speech impediment.

I am to blame that the laptop I used to use in her office crashed the other day when someone else was using it. Probably because I breathed on it too much and caused it to rust.

I am to blame because people stop by the office to talk to the people who work in the office even though the people who stop by the office to talk didn't stop by the office but for 2 or 3 times when I worked there but now they do all the time when I'm not there. Nonetheless, it is still my fault. And, of course, why would you say anything to the people who work in the office or the people who stop by the office? Much better to say something to me. That'll solve the problem.

And lastly my mother tried to blame me because she donated a box to Goodwill. She donated the box because she didn't know what it was. I was asking her about a portable bubblejet printer leased from the insurance company for whom she is an agent. I was telling her she should give it to a new person she is talking about hiring. She looked at me blankly. The ones we got a year ago? More blank stares. It sat around the TV toom for months? Blink. Then, "I sure as hell hope it wasn't that box I just had your father take to Goodwill." I shrug, dunno. She's glaring at me. Fricking hell! Shit! She's practically frothing at the mouth. She glares at me, "Well, that's just great. You go and order this stuff that I don't even know what it is and then it sits around here forever." glare, GLARE, G-L-A-R-E

I'm dumbfounded. I drop my jaw at her and start to laugh. "Please tell me you're not serious. Please tell me you are not really sitting there blaming me for the fact you told Daddy to take a, and I quote, "box of techie junk" to Goodwill. You're joking, right?" She glares at me some more.

"You'd be pissed too if you had to pay the company for a printer you didn't even know you had!"

Ah-ho, therein lies the rub. She didn't know she had the printer, thus throwing it out would be the logical thing to do with a box of stuff about which you know nothing. You know, because, like, why would you ask anyone what it is, for instance?

Red-cheeked and tight-lipped. She's getting that heart-attacky look. "There's always so much goddamned shit laying around this house all the time, everyone's stuff all over the place, no one ever pick ups (have I told you my mother is one of those ones who cleans before the cleaning lady comes?), everyone just puts there crap wherever they feel like it--"

I interrupt because now I'm feeling defenseless and now I'm pissed and now I feel like my sanity is being stomped on in that way that mothers have of driving their children crazy (and vice-versa)."Look, Jill, (I always call her by her first name, ever since I was a kid and I figured out she'd answer to Jill rather than when I'd say mom or mommy and she'd ignore it) I can't tell you how much I long for our own place, for Dave and I to be able to live somehwere else and not have to worry about stepping on someone else's toes and worry about pissing you off every other day because there are dishes in the sink. I hate it. I hate dealing with being an adult and feeling like I am 6 because I still live with my parents because I live in a county that requires a median income of $350,000 per year. Screw it, I ought to go into massive debt just to be able to get our own place so I can preserves the shreds of the mother-daughter relationship we have before it becomes a rubbish heap." I really ought to know better than to talk to her when she's worried about end-of-year production numbers and I'm working 12 hour days. Shit.

Guess who called me from the office today and told me they'd found their bubblejet portable printer in a computer bag under their desk?

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 4:33 PM

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

dream weaver

So I had another weird dream Tuesday night. I had a dream that the reason I couldn't remember my dreams is that I'd been taking prescription drugs without knowing they were prescription drugs and that the side-effect was forgetfulness. I asked what it was I was taking and they (I don't know who they was, they seemed like medical professionals fom Bavaria) said it wasn't something I was actually taking per se, but rather it was something that I was being given. I woke up before they could tell me how it was being given to me, this forgetful drug. Two dreams in a row, the 2nd referring back to the 1st in a roundabout way. That's never happened before.

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I have to get up at the crack before dawn and drive to the coast tomorrow. God, I would love to just sit in the office for a week uninterrupted. I never thought I'd say that after working for my mom for 3 years where all I did was sit behind a desk all day long, but there y'have it. I am averaging about 80 emails per day, 3/4 of which need answers. Now, I'm used to 80 emails in my hotmail account where SPAM is king because that's my "order crap on-line" email address. I can delete 78 of those 80 emails. But 80 emails when 60 need a reply or attention? Keeh-rist. My fingertips are raw. I've also noticed that as soon as people know you're efficient at answering them, they email you 3 or 4 or 5 more times in succession. About totally unrelated things. Two people did that to me today and I wanted to cry. When I get jokes in my work email they get deleted without the courtesy of a cursory glance. I just don't have time. It's crazy. I of course feel guilty as hell, but I try to shove that feeling aside for the more immediate need of making room in my inbox so I don't get the message for the 100th time that my inbox is too full. Bitch Moan Whine. Sorry.

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My drive home tonight was odd. Odd because for 2/3 of that drive I was the only car heading to Sonoma, as far as I could see ahead of me and behind me. It was uncommon. I kept saying, "Thank you" out loud because it was so nice. Last night there was a BMW velcroed to my tail lights for half the drive home. There were 3 cars ahead of me, I don't know what the little twit thought I was going to do, ram into the cars in front of me? She rode my butt so hard I was sorely tempted to brake just to have the satisfaction of seeing her jump out of her car, ranting & raving, listening to her freak out. But I'm an insurance lady and I'm not supposed to think like that, I'm supposed to epitomize Defensive Driving at Its Best. All I could think was, "Back off, Bee-yatch!" I could tell it was a chick by her hair. So anyway, the drive home tonight was the anti-Last Night's Drive. It was nice. Isn't it funny how simple surprises like that take you unawares?

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This older lady from church invited David & I to dinner at her house along with about 15 other people. She ordered take out from an Italian place in town and got all these different desserts and hired two people to serve and clean up. We all ate on china plates and used lace-trimmed linen napkins and drank from crystal glassware. Her house was immaculate. She's a stiff, ramrod backed widow. She's very matter-of-fact. Anyway, she invited all of us over to her house for dinner and then afterwards we all sat around her living room and someone played piano while we sang these old songs. I didn't know any of the songs (Dave & I were also the youngest people there by about 15-20 years). It was kind of sweet. I didn't feel stupid or judgemental, I just thought it was amazing that a group of 15 people would get together to eat dinner and then sing songs together. It seemed like the sort of thing you'd read about people doing in a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, out on the windy prairie, home an hour-long wagon-ride away.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 10:25 PM

Monday, November 17, 2003

dream a little dream

I had a weird dream last night. Weird, I suppose, because I haven't been remembering dreams much lately. I used to remember them pretty vividly. Not anymore. So I woke up with a start this morning. My alarm didn't go off because the batteries died, but I woke up at 6:20. I looked around. Dave was asleep. I don't know what woke me. It wasn't until I got up to go to the bathroom that this image of fireworks and a huge crash flashed in my head and I remembered the dream.

I stand outside, watering plants. It's dark, but warm. There is a whistling in the air and a green tinge and suddenly the sky fills with a burst of color - green, blue, red, orange, yellow - fireworks. It's not the 4th of July, it's well past or before that date (I'm not sure which, now, there was no indicator in the dream what month it was, just that it wasn't firwork season) when fireworks should be filling the sky. In the green glow of a field not far away, I see the silhouette of a man who is lighting the fireworks. It's confusing, fireworks this time of year? But then it just seems cool, neat to see fireworks when you don't expect them. I watch the sky, oohing and aahing with the neighborhood. Something that looks like a jet is illuminated in the light of the fireworks and it seems like part of a show, like a planned thing. Then there are two more aircraft in the sky, rising together at the same time. And as they rise they are caught by the fireworks, obstructed somehow, and the last two to rise begin, instead, to fall. And all of us in the neighborhood have a collective intake of breath, a horror-struck moment when we realize the two aircraft or crashing back to earth, one right above the other, crossed over one another like a religious symbol. It's apparent that they are going to crash near our neighborhood, that people are going to die down here in the street, in their houses. And none of us even bother running for cover, there's no time. I look to my right where the man tinged in green, in the field, was shooting off the fireworks, but he is gone, disappeared in the smoke of his launching. There is impact and then the reverb of the crash like a earthquake underneath our feet, the earth waving up beneath our feet. People run helter-skelter. We've been spared, there is no one dead on our street. but it means there are people dead not so far away from us. I run east, toward the homes the next block over. There are sofa cushions and glass in the streets. Front doors are blown open, dogs and cats and birds lie in the street, dead or in shock, twitching. There is a yellow house with white trim, a black Lab lies in the drive, twitching, it's head shaking. It raises its head groggily, alive. Through the front door, there are children strewn around the living room. On the floor, across chairs, one half on, half off the sofa. They are all shaking, alive but stunned. I rush through the door and grab the youngest one. A little boy, blonde, shaken but alive. "My ears are ringing," he tells me. All of the kids get up, slowly. Somehow I know their parents are dead although they are nowhere in sight.

I woke up then, I guess. There was an earlier part to that dream that I just remembered now. Dave and I were at a neighbor's house, they weren't home. We were going through their house, looking for something that we were there to do. It was weird, like we were supposed to be there, but we really should have waited til they got home again, but we didn't. Dave was going around ripping pages out of old, antique books. I was making notes. I wasn't thinking about the fact that he was ripping the pages out of the books until one of our neighbor's, the wife who was pregnant, came in and asked if she could help us. She didn't seem surprised that we were there, just wanted to know f there was anything she could do to help make it a little easier on us. I don't even know what we were doing. Dave was looking up sonnets and music. I was looking for quotes. He had grabbed something that look like it came from an album and she took it from him, said she'd written the lyrics for that album. It was weird. What the hell were we doing there? I felt guilty, like we'd been foudn out. But for what?

I never remember my dreams. Maybe the heat was on too high last night or something.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 12:08 PM

Saturday, November 15, 2003

Projecticity

I discovered Lomography right before I discovered BookCrossing. Like BookCrossing, lomography has a cultish following, lomophiles worldwide have joined into this photofrenzy. Following the 10 golden rules of Lomography, lomographers shoot as many impossible pictures as possible in the most impossible of situations from the most impossible of positions. It is addictive. It is enlightening. It captures our world.

I dove into BookCrossing for a few reasons, not the least of which was that I consider reading to be the analog version of entertainment. Which I think is kinda quaint. And cool. And vital. The digitalized encroachment upon our world - television, video games, movies, computers - has taken the place of the written word in the form of books. I can't eschew this world where analog is ever-increasingly replaced by digital. I, in fact, am too hooked into it myself to pretend that I would renounce a world in which convenience and speed are customary and commonplace. But there is a sense of self, of reference, that I do not want to lose. And it is because of that I am caught, hook, line & sinker, by both BookCrossing and Lomography, media by which the marriage of analog and digital can co-exist peaceably (that's how it appears thus far, at any rate...). the lomographic bookcrossing journal is a way of sharing our lomos in an even more analog way, in a book that is passed from lomographer to lomographer, touched, seen, smelled, heard, and tasted by the flesh & blood lomographer behind the lens.

Historically, the best journals, the most vibrant and fleshed out, have been those with a mix of words and other media...photos, cartoons, pressed flowers, hair clippings, maps, tears...Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient references a journal thick with the journaler's life. The books of Nick Bantock are often modeled after journals that encompass art & life within the pages. There is the diary that was published in 1999 of Leonardo Da Vinci's paint mixer, Luigi Cannelloni, with illustrations on nearly every page. A lover of literature, I see a journal's pages as the palette upon which a writer can mix the colors to make their work a reality. Thus this mix of pictures and words within one tome. A collaboration of color and ink.

This, too, is my somewhat shameless way of merging two places that in my opinion everyone who is on-line ought to visit...

the collaborators
(The order of people listed is not necessarily the order the journal will be sent. I'll decide that as soon as I know who's participating. I'm hoping for about 20 people)

Abott - Sonoma, CA, USA
busybooklover - San Marcos, CA, USA
JesseBC - Chicago, IL, USA
rubij - Taylorsville, UT, USA
keycollect - Rapid City, SD, USA
bonniepatterson - Ann Arbor, MI, USA
carmendevos - Lochristi, Belgiam
Lexi - Neubau, Austria
bleeptricity - Nottingham, Great Britain
next?

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 11:08 AM

Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Would you like some crunch with your coffee?

My morning coffee comes in a receptacle of metal and plastic. It contains 1 package fat-free cocoa, sweet 'n' low, and a dash of creamer. It's sweet and thick and my one indulgence in the morning that (if I were keeping track) is 3 Weight Watchers points. Sometimes when I mix in the cocoa, air gets trapped in the powder and I have cocoa floaties until I whisk them in. I even bought a miniature whisk precisely for this task. ~whisk~ ~whisk~ ~whisk~ with a flick of the wrist, your morning sludge is pronto.

(I didn't realize until after I took the pictures that my bumper sticker that reads Orwell Was An Optimist was very nicely reflected in my sludge's surface...)

A couple weekends ago, on a Sunday morn, I was making my morning sludge with sleepy eyes and yawns.
Rip.
Sprinkle.
Pour.
Slosh.
~whisk~ ~whisk~ ~whisk~
I took a sip and swallowed.
Ahhhh.
I took another sip and felt something lumpy in my mouth. Figuring it was a cocoa floatie, I munched down and it was....CRUNCHY.
crunchy??? uhm.....
So, I spit it out and it was a bug body. A brown, striped bug body. A dead bug body, but a bug body nonetheless. My mouth froze. Oh gag, oh gross!
~patoohey!
~patoohey!
~patoohey!
I stirred my whisk around some more.
~whisk~ ~whisk~ ~whisk~
Pulling it out, there was a tangle of legs and a wing. AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Here's the clincher. I was washing dishes the night before. I noticed in the sink a single wing that I recognized as the wing of a Crane Fly. I didn't think anything of it, just rinsed it down the drain with the soap suds and stray rice kernels. Obviously, the missing wing belonged to the crane fly I was chewing on in my morning sludge. How did it get in my coffee? I suppose it may have gotten stuck in the whisk when I washed it, or perhaps the cup I used. Who knows. But how nice to think that my little friend below was in my MOUTH.

Gawd!

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 10:48 AM

Sunday, November 02, 2003

mute

Most of the thinking stays in my head. Putting into cyberwords what my brain says seems too antiquated, takes too long. Some days I wish I had a downloading system wired from my brain to my computer hard drive. I guess I do - it's called my fingers. But the system is too slow. My fingers can't go as fast as my brain. Am I too accustomed to the convenience of this fastfood world within which I live?

I have nothing to say.
I have too much to say.
What I have to say does not speak the language that other people use.
What I have to say speaks a language of numbing ubiquity.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 4:38 PM

What next?

We've been gone for a week. I had to be in Eureka for work, so we stayed at the Eagle House again and I spent the latter part of the week making a movie. Can you believe it? I actually managed to finnagle myself a job where they let me think up a movie idea and put it into action? Wonders may never cease...

Admittedly, the movie was insurance related, but me being me, I had to put a spin on it. How did this come about? Well, one morning I was driving to a meeting at 6:00A and, as I have a tendency to do, I started thinking about seemingly useless fluff. This is how the thought process went:

- My Boss, Anne has curly blonde hair.
- Me, I have curly dark hair.
- I had spent 30 minutes that morning going about the arduous task of straightening my hair (why? hell if I know, just because I can I suppose...)
- Pondering the difficulties of hair straightening, I wondered what Anne's hair would look like straightened.
- Upon ponderment, I giggled to myself that she'd look like a Farrah Fawcett wannabe.
- Our Head Boss in our management office, his surname is Chaney.
- Somehow my brain morphed Farrah Fawcett with Chaney and came up with Chaney's Angels
- Thus was borne the idea of making a short film called Chaney's Angels that we could use as an end of the year funny way of explaining the new insurance programs for our agents in 2004

Everyone I work with actually thought the idea was worth doing and gave me the green light. I spent this past week in Eureka filming and putting the whole thing together (our management office is in 2 locations since our territory is so huge; the office where I work is in Santa Rosa. The office where Anne & Jo work is in Eureka, about 250 miles north of Santa Rosa). I did it in 3 days with about 12 hours of sleep during that time. The finished product is hilarious, an attempt to add levity to an otherwise very boring subject. I just hope our agents don't think it's a waste of time, which is a possiblity that makes me want to tell them all to kiss my big rearend if they should make that possibility a reality. They never realize how much personal time is spent doing business-related work...

Anyway, Jo made the poster. She took a picture of Charlie's Angels from the 70's and Photoshopped out faces into it. Anne, Jo & I were the Angels. Ho ho ho.

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 2:52 PM

Lindsea Update

This is the latest from Susan Friesen, mom of Lindsea:

Lindsea is still status 1A. She is waiting for a heart and won't be able to leave the hospital without one. It is very scary. Kids around her are dying. My husband is at Lindsea's bedside now as I have to be home to take care of our other 2 girls and get their home schooling materials. Ken said that 2 babies have died in the past day, one in the bed beside Lindsea's. It is so depressing!

You did hear that Lindsea almost was transplanted last week? A heart was flown from Las Vegas. Lindsea was in the operating room, ready for transplantation. The doctor looked at the heart and decided it was too large, so Lindsea has been back in the PICU to await the next heart. Keep praying for her, please, and ask others?
Love, Susan

| Mrs. Botton was at it again @ 2:25 PM