Self-Indulgent Ramblings

My boss’s dad has been sick for a long time… and it’s gotten really bad in the last few weeks. Hospice is being bandied about quite a bit. It’s not clear how soon this is all going to happen, but it is clear that he won’t be around for 2007… to say the least. Hearing what she’s going through makes me think back to what my mom went through with my grandparents in the last years of their lives. And, as my friend Justin put it, “Isn’t it weird that this is something we’re all going to have to go through?” And, as my boss put it, “Why does end of life have to be so cruel?”

It really gets to me, when people lose their parents. My {gulp} boyfriend lost his mother when he was 19. I can’t even imagine having to go through that then. I can’t imagine going through it when I’m 50 or 60… let alone as a child. And yet, there’s always that part of me that knows that I’m going to be the one in my family who really goes through it. I’m going to be the one who’s there with my parents through all the horrible end of life issues. And it’s scary. Because I don’t want to see them go through that. And I don’t want to have to go through it all alone. I think that losing your parents must be the loneliest feeling in the world. They are the people who have been there since birth… since CONCEPTION. They have been constant. Any loss is hard, of course… but your parents? There is no lonelier thought.

I know it’s far away for me… I know that. My parents are healthy and fabulous and I won’t have to worry for a good long while. But I know it’s on my mom’s mind. And I can’t help letting it sneak into mine sometimes. Like, when I go home and realize that she is looking older. I never thought that about her until the year after my grandfather died. I remember looking at her and seeing how tired her eyes looked. I had never seen that before.

I suppose it’s natural to personalize these experiences when someone else is going through them… but I wish I didn’t. I just want to plod merrily along, oblivious to the senseless cruelty to come until the last possible moment. I’ll deal with it when I have to. And hopefully I’ll have someone to help me do it. But I don’t want to have to let it into my psyche until there is no choice.

Because it doesn’t belong there.

I think that, in most cases, my first instinct is to panic, to overreact and always to assume the worst. And I think that, in most cases, the opposite tends to be true. It drives my mother crazy. But, as I explain to her on a fairly regular basis, if I expect the worst, then I’m not disappointed when it happens, and I’m pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t.

Yesterday my friend Erin graduated from Cosmetology school. So we took her out for dinner, drinks and karaoke.

I haven’t sung karaoke in about three years… and there’s a reason.

See, I’m a trained singer. I have studied and made my voice into a well-tuned instrument… but all that goes out the window when I sing karaoke. Luckily, that’s true for everyone, so I was in good company. It was fun, we drank too much and sang silly songs. But boy did I feel old this morning, trying to scrape myself out of bed. I can’t stay out that late anymore… and certainly not on a school night! Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m dating an older guy… cuz I think I’m an old woman trapped in a 26-year-old body.

But, to be honest, I’ve been noticing lately that there are just plain a LOT of good reasons for me to be dating the guy I’m dating. Cuz ya know, he’s pretty swell.

I still have a hard time saying ‘boyfriend’ out loud though. I’m not sure why. {shrug} I’m all kinds of crazy.

Okay… so today my friend Megan and I cleared our schedules so that we would have the entire day to devote to QA for this bank website we’ve been working on. It’s been frustrating. The client has missed every copy approval deadline by at least a week… while we’ve been turning around edits in less than 24 hours… sometimes less than 3 hours. Now, the programmers are dragging their heels on getting us the link to the beta site. SO… rather than spending the whole day testing the site… we spent the whole day emailing them, begging them for a link and talking about the fact that we wish we were testing the site. In other words… Jen has done ZERO billable work today. And really, no non-billable work either. Pretty much, I’ve been a complete waste of company time and money today.

Good times.

So… I played with redoing the theme on my blog. See. I’m such a dork.

This is my brother’s blog. He never uses it. Ever.

I talk in my sleep. A lot. Sometimes I realize I’m doing it, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I remember it, sometimes I don’t. Apparently, sometimes I sound like I’m speaking German, sometimes I don’t.

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of reality-based dreams. Nothing too outlandish. Just a lot of everyday situations and realistic seeming conversations. There was one where I thought my boss had found this blog (where I spend a lot of time complaining about my job) and her feelings were enormously hurt. There was one where I was driving with my {gulp} boyfriend down Main Street, and we passed a car that belongs to one of my coworkers, and it the front end was all bashed in (she’s something of a party girl, often known to have to call in late with “car trouble…” which actually means that she forgot where she parked her car the night before). And last night, I seem to remember having a rather serious and emotional relationship discussion with my {gulp} boyfriend. And I’m curious as to how much of it made it out of my real mouth and into his real ears. He said I didn’t say anything particularly interesting… but who knows? I mean, it wasn’t a fight or anything… I’m just wondering.

You know how tired I get of people being all distracted by the next, newest, shiniest thing? New is better. Whatever we were doing and whatever we already have are immediately complete crap simply because there’s something else out there. Let’s drop everything and admire the shiny thing. Creatives are SOOOO prone to this. And in a company run by creatives… all that ADD is at its peak. I’m creative… but I know how to focus. I wonder why it’s so difficult for most people to merge those two. And I’m not even really asking for a complete synthesis here. I would be happy with an occasional glimmer of linear thought. But instead, everything is extreme… and the second something shiny floats by… we have to hit the reset button on any given conversation or train of thought.

That’s my pissy rant for this morning.

Today is CRAWLING by. Seriously… I feel like the day should be over by now… and it’s definitely only 2:10pm. Yup. That’s just under 3 1/2 hours left of work.

Blah.

As I said… I had a busy weekend. (For busy weekend, read: I sat on my ass and watched a lot of movies). Here is my updated list of Oscar movies - the ones I’ve seen are in italics, the ones I hope to be able to see before the awards are in bold:

Batman Begins
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Cinderella Man
The Constant Gardener
The Corpse Bride
Crash
Good Night, and Good Luck
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
A History of Violence
Howl’s Moving Castle
Hustle & Flow
Junebug
King Kong
Match Point
Memoirs of a Geisha
Mrs. Henderson Presents
Munich
The New World
North Country
Pride & Prejudice
The Squid and the Whale
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
Syriana
Transamerica
Walk the Line
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
War of the Worlds

Okay… it was President’s Day on Monday - a day when we take time off work to reflect on presidents BEFORE this one… cuz this one can’t pronounce the English language. But hey… I don’t care who we were reflecting on… as long as I had a three day weekend. It was The Vagina Monologues… which went great on Friday, okay on Saturday. It was watching a lot of movies. It was brunch with friends, it was watching Taming of the Shrew with friends, it was GLASS SEATS at the Greenville Grrrowl game, it was more movies… it was a big fat relationship talk (which has really got me thinking… I don’t think I’ve ever really had a big fat relationship talk before. Hmm.). Busy weekend.

And you know, it’s hard to come back to work after a long weekend. And it’s hard to look forward to the next week… which is a full week. I want four day weeks every week! Which, of course, would lead to wanting a three day work week, which would… well… eventually it would be no work and all play… and I am TOTALLY down for a hedonistic society.

Now, why don’t the hedonists form a political party? That’s a ticket I could get behind.