Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Disconnected

Twenty years ago, I would talk on the phone for hours. Twenty years ago, I wrote long and thoughtful letters. Twenty years ago, I went out with friends and family and we hiked, camped, danced, listened to music and strolled around Town Lake until dawn. I was involved and engaged… twenty years ago.

Then along came the internet and my first account when I was a beth@ because few people had email and I could be beth@ without many contending for the name. As each year ticked away, I gradually stopped writing, stopped dancing, and stopped listening to music. Today, I no longer see dawn at the end of a long night, but at the beginning of a long day. My letters are email quips, my music is downloaded. I catch up with my friends through Twitter or through Facebook or the occasional website. I don’t share much; I’m content with simply being a name connected to a few short adjectives or a family stereotype; people don’t know me. Today, it’s easier to reach me online than it is on the phone and in fact, it’s my preference. I don’t feel the need to speak. New friends no longer come from work or school or through other friends, but through online connections as a handle or an avatar. We try not to trade in too much that is “real” – first names are rare. A very human connection slips away.

I suppose that’s how things go as we bumble through this digital age. With all this connection there is a very real and palpable disconnection.

How is a particular person doing? I’ll check their status on Twitter like I check the weather. I dip in, read a sentence or two and flitter away to find another distraction.

This works for me until they disappear.

I sometimes wonder, “where is Lori?” I used to have the answer. Her blog lies dormant. Where she encouraged you to follow her on Twitter, there hasn’t been an update in a year. Photos that were updated daily haven’t changed. Google tells me she’s alive and well. Prodding one of her closer friend confirms the same – that she’s alive. She’s living off the internet grid. I can’t relate.

I wonder about people like Mado, Myles Brakken, Tamara Nivens, Corwin and Lillia. I don’t know their real names. I don’t know where they live. I’ve personally never met them. However, for brief moments in my life, they were important to me in some small way and despite the shared laughs and occasional heartaches, I will never know who they really were nor them me.

… and I bumble along. More connected. More disconnected.

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Belleh

I’m not a “girly-girl”. I can count on one finger the number of times I’ve had a manicure and the number of times I’ve had a pedicure (which was such a terrific disaster involving blood – my blood – that my friends now know better than to even suggest it). I’ve never had a massage, a hot rock treatment or had anything made out of vegetables smeared over my face to clog my pores … I mean cleanse, of course I mean cleanse (unless it was an eating accident). My idea of pampering, with my limited world experience, would involve sitting in Washington Square with a slice of pizza while chatting and people watching. In fact, in this moment, I’m there right now; it’s like my own personal brain massage.

The one exception is when it comes to my hair. I LOVE hair day. All capital letters kind of love. I love going. I love blabbing. I love the bad magazines. I love the new cuts and I LOVE LOVE LOVE hair products. In fact, a great day for me would be getting the perfect cut, having it styled just so and walking out with some obscenely priced shampoo or coconut curl activator (the smell is heaven) or clear mousse that if I wanted I could make my hair stand straight up. My best Saturdays are spent this way and as a reward for having a good day, I’ve taken to swinging by Mangia’s Pizza. I get home and sit with pizza in hand and just veg the rest of the day in my post-hair, happy tummy trance.

I should also mention that I love my hair dresser, Kim. I know several people that go to her each one of them comes out with a cute/great cut that really suits them. And every six weeks for two hours, it’s my turn to sit in her chair and monopolize her time. We chat, I catch up on her stories (as you all know I live for a good story) and I read all of the magazines I’m too embarrassed to buy from the store.

This weekend I cheated. My time with my hairdresser wasn’t working out and I was telling myself it was time for a change. I’d find some place closer, someone who could meet on my schedule, maybe entertain me MORE if there could be a more.

Now let me tell you what my ideal salon would look like based on my favorite salon, Daya. It would have natural lighting, tropical plants, dark paneling, soft music and a water feature of some sort that bubbled. In it is someone whose paid to be a professional shampooer who also happens to be a massage therapist and they rub my head until it feels mushy and I’m on the edge of sleep. Did I say Washington Square? I’m sorry, I meant to say Daya.

Anyway, to the cheating. I chose a place across from my office which was in a sort of upscale shopping area – well, at least it’s desperately trying to be upscale, but I digress. I head into the salon ready for my new experience and the first thing that hit me was “Wow, this is BRIGHT” followed by “Wow, this is really LOUD!” Sure, none of the stylists had a decent hair cut, but hey, I can’t rate their skill based on their taste. I sit down and the first gal makes some suggestions about the color. “Sure!” I say, it all seemed reasonable. “Great! I’ll mix that up and send over your stylist.” Umm… ok, so they work in tandem. I’m ok with that; it’s a new place – a new experience. The stylist and I discuss my hair, she insults Kim’s cut (mind you, Kim falls under my loyalty umbrella and insulting Kim’s cut is similar to spitting on me, so she’s walking on very thin ice). She instantly redeems herself by whipping out a picture, it’s exactly what I’m trying to describe and she runs off. So far, this is looking a little promising.

Two plus hours of coloring later, I’m still ok. Sure, that process took forever – longer than Kim would have done it (in fact, I would be out of the door by now), but she’s very precise and those little foils were certainly perfectly folded if not a little on the OCD side of things. The gal told GREAT stories; she’s hysterical. I tried to remember them so I could share them (good stories should be passed around). I asked how they got started and she said they’d been at a corporate run chain salon. Now, maybe it’s just me, but I’m thinking Super Cuts, Cost Cutters, Visible Changes… you see where I’m going with this.

Then I’m shuttled on to the stylist. Now mind you this is 2+ hours into the whole too loud, too bright, too sterile and too muchness of the whole experience. She’s got issues, big issues and apparently most of them would be solved if the state would not penalize you for beating your kids. “Don’t you agree?” Ummm… I don’t get into it, but for the record my Dad is a social worker and was a child protective services worker for years, removing kids from bad situations when needed. I’m aghast, but it doesn’t stop her from carrying on about how beating is just another acceptable form of child rearing. The whole time she’s rubbing her belly on me and it was more than a belly, it was “belleh”. Belleh was slowly squished against the length of my arm, around my back and down the other arm only to trace its path back again – never ending belleh. You know that hugging thing? Its got nothing on belleh. Thirty minutes of belleh. Belleh all over me. Belleh. I still twitch. With each pass of belleh, she’s also pulling out my hair and I feel it ripping from my skull with each stroke as the bristles set every last nerve endings on my scalp on fire. I stopped speaking. At some point I agreed that I had sister with children (I’m an only child). I don’t know why. I just wanted to leave and wasn’t up to clarifying anything about my life. OUCH! The curling iron gets thrust into the bottom of my eye socket. Finally she slaps something on my hair that causes each remaining strand to stick to my head. The colorist and stylist practically cheer, “this is a GREAT look! IT’S A TRANSFORMATION!” then practically high five each other while I’m just silently shuddering while thinking “a transformation into what?” I ask myself, “what would Anna do?” Say something. “What would Rita do?” Say something. “What would Beth do?” Not cause ripples and get out of there as quickly as possible.

We’re over the three hour mark when I go to pay. The price tag is $100 MORE than what I pay for my stylist. Without getting into how much I pay in general, let me say that $100 MORE is a lot of money – like, I could buy a small TV lot of money. Like, I could take my tap classes for almost half a year ever single week lot of money. Like, I could walk out and start shaking because I want to vomit out my insides lot of money. OR like I could have gotten almost half a year of Super Cuts haircuts kind of money. And my hair, the hair that’s left that wasn’t unceremoniously jerked from my head, is just sticking to my face and I did the only thing I could do, I FREAKED OUT. Granted, it was a quiet freak out and I contained it in the car, but I couldn’t stop (or drive) for a long time while I tried to pull my shit together over a haircut.

What I learned? To be more flexible in working out my schedule with Kim. Going in another day at a different time is OK.

What I developed? A new and serious belleh phobia.

Belleh.

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TV vs. East Texas

I have a lot of great reasons I haven’t been writing, most of them boil down to: hangnails, barometric pressure too low, lint on the chair, you understand, but let’s face it – one of the big reasons is that we own a TV. Why am I not outside, milling about, having adventures I could later write about? TV. Chat up a good book? Movie? No, sorry. TV. Want to talk about TV? I thought you’d never ask. How is it I can now find time to write, you ask? Well, I currently don’t have a TV around me. It’s making me a little sad in fact. Could we turn off the camera a minute? I’m having a moment.

My number two reason, which could be the number one reason on any given day, is I own a computer, but this isn’t about the computer, this is about TV. Maybe I’ll vilify the computer at some later date. (HAH! Some days I crack myself up.)

In our lineup of shows which range from Women of Ninja Warrior to the Daily Show and include many rating winners I may be too ashamed to admit I watch is Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs”. We’re not die hard fans, we’ve missed an episode or four, but we’ve seen many a marathon. (Only having to turn it off when the job gets to be a little too “dirty”. My personal breaking point happens to be large amounts of swarming bugs in houses.) The show is followed by “Wreckreation Nation” and really, we watch it because it’s too hard to change the channel some nights.

So, what does it take to get a devoted TV lover outside to have something to write about that’s doesn’t come dressed up as a Jumbotron? Combining themes from shows I like with reality (that thing I try to resist). Is that vague? Then how about “plan a weekend away from home in a small town, discover a demolition derby and attend”? And that’s how I spent one of my nights last weekend in a small town called Nacogdoches where the temperatures were in the low 40’s, the venue was mostly open to the elements and sitting on a metal bleacher waving a checked flag.

Every sense was overwhelmed from the sight of the cars, the sounds of the revved up engines, the smells of fuel wafting through the exposition center and the smoke as it billowed out from the cars (well, not every sense – not taste because I tried to keep from licking things (difficult), but had I gotten up the nerve and licked one thing, I’m sure that too would have been overwhelming – I mean, I saw what was on the ground there and am almost 100% certain my tongue would have been in a complete uproar had licking been involved).


My only complaint (aside from no commercial breaks, no slow motion captures of the more dramatic wrecks and being 4 ½ hours away from my kitchen) is that the actual smashing of the cars could have been a little more exciting – the joyful crunching sounds got drowned out by the engines and then absolutely nothing exploded – I thought this was a demolition derby, doesn’t that imply explosions? – not even one single unplanned flame licked any of the cars. Sure, this one time a car came up the bank and then there was that car that turned on its side (yawn), but couldn’t they throw in a few more loud bangs and at least one flash fire? I wasn’t looking for injuries, just some overly dramatic, car crunching wrecks. Although, tires slowly spooling off was pretty good. Still, I was with the rest of the audience as I made “ohhhh” sounds for each really good smash. This completely beat TV – well, except they didn’t condense the best of the best into a 30 minute to 1 hour format and my tush was exceptionally cold.

My hillbilly trifecta was nearly complete – demolition derby, small town – the only thing missing was the beer (yes, thank you Jess for pointing out my complete failure). I gave it some serious thought, thinking about a picture of me, monster truck in the background and my gloves wrapped around a brutally cold glass of some sad little sissy light beer and it was too much to take. I’ll just have to find another derby in the summer, I suppose.

For future inspiration, I guess I just need to flip the channel as a means of getting out of the house and coming up with something to write about. Hopefully it will be cheap and involve a tacky t-shirt.

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Morning People

I could try and give some lip service (or “typing” service) to “generalizations”, but let’s just cut to the chase – morning people are insane. All of them. I’m not a morning person. I don’t like the morning. I can’t stand the overly chipper, hyperactive, I-drank-my-coffee-with-a-dash-of-speed invigorated types that assault my nerves with their ready-to-serve incessant banter – the kind of people who aren’t deterred by darkly circled eyes, one sided conversations and low growling – the kind that are drawn to you if you’re not a morning person, because of some unwritten code in their brain that drives them to “brighten up people’s day”. This describes all morning people. Every single one of you early risers who worship at the altar of Franklin’s “early to bed…” gibberish (written to make morning people feel vindicated as they taunt we sane folks who embrace 10am as “pretty darn early”).

The problem is that I’ve fooled people into thinking that I am a morning person, that I’m “one of them”, thanks to years of dragging myself out of bed early, heading off to work before dawn and by falling dead asleep by 9:30 pm on most days. The truth is that the whole morning thing is a ruse brought on by my autonomic nervous system. Sure, I can function, I can breathe, blink and occasionally form a simple sentence or two, but until that special synapse fires that jump starts my brain, I’m all but asleep. And for the record that synapse doesn’t even start sparking until around 10am.

From the time my eyes are open until mid morning, I’m strictly using low level reptilian functions in my brain and any attempts to fire up that one little synapse before the pre-programmed time will fail. What that means is that if you’re a morning person and you’re blathering, I’ll blink at you slowly. If you get a little too wild (excessive hand gestures, hollering, or demanding “clap-for-me-I’m-a-fairy-princess”), I might growl. It’s not your fault; you were just wired wrong – all of you.

I realize I’ve brought some of this on myself by stepping into “their” turf of crazy happy morning joy and its certainly caused unnecessary confusion, but really the fact that I look comatose should be a sign that you early types should drive on and chat-up one of the other morning disciples. Sing, dance, clap, jog in circles (like you people do) among the other followers of the dawn, but leave me to drool quietly in my upright position. Until my magical hour strikes, I can’t begin to wrap my mind around what you’re doing, much less participate – and that’s not your fault. You’re crazy.

So, I guess this is a plea – a simple plea for you morning types to ignore me until mid morning. I know its hard, you’re a big bundle of energetic fun that needs hugs and attention, and it’s not your fault – just do your best to pretend I’m whatever it is your overstimulated brains can ignore at that time.

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Facebook

I’m now one of the millions on Facebook, Twitter (where according to my friend Brandi I “Tweet”), Flickr, Classmates.com and MySpace. I came to the sites honestly (peer pressure combined with a dash of morbid curiosity – not sure why it’s morbid). Facebook having been the most recent of my “social networking” experiments.

I really had tried to avoid most of these, because they’re a bit gimmicky and fluffy, but I hate to be one of those people who derides something having never poked at it a bit first. I accidentally fell into Facebook after reading a line from a friend that claimed I was already on the site – and after my initial “wha..?” I showed them by creating an account (yes, I know – brilliant move – showed them). Then I promptly pretended that I never saw the thing in the first place hoping that, without any intervention on my part, the whole thing would be swallowed up and disappear into some binary void for neglected accounts.

A couple of weeks ago I received a notice in my e-mail “you have a message”. Now see, I’m a sucker for “you have a message” – I’m curious to a flaw (I will push the big red button, I will open the thing that has “Do NOT Under Any Circumstance Open”, because what if the big red button doesn’t actually launch some evil something into the air (like red buttons do), and instead erupts into a chorus line of dancing/singing acrobats – I like acrobats! – I’m sure there’s some Twilight Zone episode that covers the downside of this way of thinking, but Rod was a bit of a cynic). When I received the notification, my thought pattern went a little bit like, “what if this is the BEST message you’ve ever received and by ignoring it that windfall you hoped for in this economy doesn’t happen?” Oh sure, it told me who the message was from and so the whole windfall idea fell apart, but still there was at least hope for a couple minutes of mindless entertainment.

After guessing at my password for a bit using all the combinations I could think of, I finally broke in and read my very special note for ME! (It was one of those mental moments where, had it been a real letter, I would have grabbed it, run to the nearest corner, hunkered down and slowly devoured every word – reading and re-reading it.) I’d taken that first Facebook step and decided it would be ok to maybe push some of the buttons on the application. Then I discovered I’d actually received a “friend” request some time ago. Oooh! A friend! I have ONE friend! I pushed “accept” and felt like a true part of the Facebook experience.

The next thing I knew, I had “friends” coming out of the woodwork. It was like a little light came on and they all “knew” (and all the analogies I can make would either have people driving to my house to smack me in the back of the head (ow) or my little friend pool would dwindle – so, let’s just say they “knew” like things (err.. people) who know things suddenly gain that knowledge, which is not akin in any way to the way zombies find the living or that Sam can unearth a crumb of food in the cushions, because those are TERRIBLE analogies that would never apply to actual people that I know). Admittedly, I did seek some out, because I was a little envious of people’s “friends” lists that had more than just the one friend (like me).

Now I have a place where I can share all of the best of my inane thoughts like “woke up early” or another favorite “I have to go to work” (previously this would have just have been a “tweet”, but now with an application on Facebook that pumps my “tweets” into status updates and my status updates into “tweets” – I can let all of my “friends” know about my colds, my wake-up times and work status, too – talk about a dream fulfilled). Plus, I now have a place to share 25 Things that tell you nothing about me, but fall into the category of “harmless facts I’m willing to divulge at this moment”. With Twitter, I’d be limited to 128 characters. With Facebook, I can natter on seemingly without limit.

Now I’ve been pressuring “friends”. Yes, “friends” with air quotes, because as I’ve explained to them “Facebook doesn’t officially acknowledge our friendship until you’ve joined – there are rules, you know.” So far, none have caved and signed-up, but I haven’t given up on them, yet. We can be more than “friends” – we could be Friends ™.

For now, I’ll play around with Facebook until the next big thing comes along that I get suckered into.

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The Second Page

So, I’m obviously stuck – uninspired – what have you and the journal is now hiding under a couple of books I got for Christmas. You know, the one I can’t write in because of my First Page anxiety?

Jay had this brainstorm, though. He said I could actually skip the first page and start on a different page. WHOA! You can just skip a page? Come back to it later? It’s like starting dinner with dessert.

Hrmm… maybe that will be the inspiration I need? Jot something on this second page and then see what happens? Surely, it can’t be that easy.

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My Writing Process

I’m not sure what process everyone else goes through when they write; I tend to wait for inspiration, compose it in my head and then try to make it to the computer before it all disappears. That’s worked pretty well, except the last few times I felt inspired, it was 3am and I also happened to be using it as a tool to fall back asleep. Writing muses + sleeping muses are a bad combo if you want to put something up on a blog. When I got up that morning, really only hours later, I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking about. In fact, we’re now a month away and I still haven’t a clue. My hope was that it would just “come to me”.

My other speed bump is I tend to rely on things to happen and all the things that have happened lately, I actually can’t write about. Dooce has taught all of us that “work” is a taboo, which leaves me with relatives/friends and I’d just end up teasing them to the point I’d get left off wills and not invited to family events or I’d say something that made everyone uncomfortable to the point they’d look around awkwardly and eventually close the page. Err, of course you guys I’m not saying I actually have anything like that to say – this is so hypothetical – like if I “had” something to say about my family… you get it, right? We’re still on for Easter?

I bought a journal, since I actually lost mine – a place where I could try to work out my ideas and possibly shape them into some sort of blog entry, but there’s just this one problem. The first page. It’s THE FIRST. Pressure says I should write something great or memorable on that first page, just in case someone picks it up, because it’s, y’know, THE FIRST and what if what I write is incredibly inane. Hell, I know it’s going to be inane – some drivel that I try to make worthy of a first page, when it should really be maybe the last page or tucked away somewhere in the middle. Really, the pressure is just too much. I think I’ll ignore the fact that it’s sitting next to me. Teach it a lesson for giving me such a complex.

So, that’s where I am with blogging at the moment. Those are a few of my demons dancing about.

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Mean!

So, I may have had someone convinced that the only way to gain my forgiveness was to give me cash. It would have been funny except for the bit where they were actually scrambling through their wallet and apologizing for not having any money on them. They even asked if they could pay me later.

I really feel I’ve missed my calling as a goon.

… and guys, just to let you know – I totally accept checks if cash isn’t readily available or I can drop you by your ATM. I have time.

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Haushaltung

Guten Tag! Es tut mir sehr Leid, aber mein Deutsch ist sehr schlecht.

Aber… Ich will etwas sagen

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Danke, Beth