Of Pigs and Seeds

Today was our annual Kid's Character Event at the bookstore, this year featuring Olivia. There is always, always a lot of anxiety for me surrounding this thing: even though we have it down to a science, and one just has to color between the lines to make it happen, still, it's an event that brings several hundreds of people through the store, and the responsibility for making it happen is 100 percent mine.

So, the words that would describe me in the couple of weeks leading up this thing are:

**FREAKING OUT***

and that's in a GOOD year.

And this was not a good year, oh no. I've been deathly ill, and in the past week I've been metaphorically worked over by my boss with a rubber hose for a crime that I did not know I was committing at the time (although I did commit it), had the police in my living room giving me the third degree until three AM, AND been ordered back into mandatory counseling!

Well, it came and it went and everything turned out OK, although only thanks to a few last-minute heroes who stepped up to the plate to save me. As it turns out, even though the tickets were not flying out the door in the weeks prior to the event, this year it was HUGE, with at least a third more people in attendance than in the past two years. I ran out of cups for lemonade. I ran out of balloons. I sold out of Olivia dolls (at sixteen bucks a pop) within the first thirty-five minutes.

I wished that my boss was there, not just to see how well-recieved Olivia was, but because she is a steadier and calmer hand on the controls than I am, and she might have been able to smooth out some wrinkles.

Because -- it was REALLY BUSY. Not since Clifford the Big Red Dog stopped by the store four years ago have we drawn a crowd like the one we drew today.

Even if I had been feeling well, I'd be tired right now. As it is, soon as I finish typing this I am headed for the couch and a Nice Relaxing Evening that will most likely feature easily prepared frozen food at dinnertime.

Here's one nice thing: I stopped by the stupormarket on the way home, for quat fud and other necessities, and guess what? The seeds were out! It always really cheers me up when the garden seeds appear in the late winter, early spring. It proves to me that Spring is coming. I bought my first two packages of Nasturtium seeds, and it -- along with the simple fact of having the annual Character Event squarely behind me -- really cheered me up!

-- Freder

One Battle Won

So here I am -- with my hair More Or Less in its current state of Artificial Color.

Here's the story I want to tell you:

The other day, my Boss's Boss, a person who, before I actually knew his name, I referred to simply as "Scary Bald Guy. . . "

-- and get this . . . when he came in during the construction of the New Store looking for my boss, and I said that I'd tell her he stopped by. . . my message to her was, "There was a Scary Bald Guy asking for you --"

-- she ABSOLUTELY knew who I was talking about!

ANYWAY.

Here's the story.

The other day, on his way out from a meeting with my boss, my Boss's Boss, hereafter known as Scary Bald Guy, asked . . . in what I must say was kind of a Mocking, Demeaning way . . . "How's the hair color working out for you?"

I replied, politely, "Well, I'm still not sure that I'm going to keep it."

If my hormones had been up and my ballocks had been flaring, my response WOULD have been:

"Yah. Well. At least I HAVE hair to color.

"Twat."

The fact that what I actually said was, politely, "Well, I'm still not sure that I'm going to keep it" -- THAT'S the battle that I actually won!

-- Freder

Mickey's Gala Premiere

*

. . . is one of my favorite Mickey Mouse cartoons ever -- and, really, one of the greatest cartoons of all time. It has no plot whatsoever. A new Mickey Mouse cartoon is having its premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and all of the Hollywood glitterati -- beautifully caricatured by the Disney artists -- turn up for the event. Garbo and the Marx Brothers are there -- hellfire, even Dracula, Frankenstein and Mister Hyde are there, laughing uproariously at all the inappropriate parts.

But that's neither here nor there.

My boss is the sort of person who will never call any job done so long as she can think of one single different way to do it. This is oftentimes infuriating to me, because I am the sort of person who calls a job done if it looks good and feels "right" and complete -- and it doesn't matter if I can think of a HUNDRED other different ways that it could be done. Everything can always be done differently, but will doing it differently make it better? Sometimes you just have to type the period and move on.

What I'm really typing around here is that my restoration / recut of the family home movies had its Gala Premiere at my father's house yesterday, to strongly positive reviews.

I pushed the job through, staying up until past three-thirty in the morning, because I'm basically seven years old on the inside and could NOT wait another day to get the finished product onto a DVD and watch it on my telly.

You know that you're working with some large honking files when it takes four hours to render them, another hour to export them to the DVD authoring software, and another forty-five minutes for the authoring software to compress them for DVD. At a couple of points I just wandered off and racked out on the porch while I waited.

The computer spit out its first disc a little after two AM, and of course I had to sit down and watch the whole thing, all 72 minutes of it (up from about 45 minutes in its original version).

All of which made going to work the next day a little bit heavy.

Over the next couple days I made ten more copies and packaged them up. Yesterday I hand delivered them to Dad, who, although he didn't know it yet, is my designated distributor to his side of the family.

My father's wife was acting extra weird yesterday. While Dad was updating me on my sister's condition following her heart attack (she's having a rough time of it), his wife interrupted twice to deliver lectures about asian cucumbers. What was that about?

I'd brought pizza makings with me to whip up a quick lunch for the three of us, and when I set the raw crust down on some paper towels to start working on it, she reached right in under my hands and flipped it over onto its top. Pause. I flipped it back. Pause. She flipped it over again. I finally said, "No, that's the bottom," and flipped it back. I mean, who's the pizza chef here anyhow?

All I can think of is that she's not used to having someone else working in her kitchen. I'd brought an eggplant with me to use on her portion. I meant to fry it up before putting it on. Instead, she grabbed it, sliced it -- and threw it into the microwave! Anyone who'd microwave an eggplant hasn't been watching Chef Ramsay as much as I have.

Without even giving me the chance to do it properly, she piled the eggplant so deep on her portion of the pizza (I mean, it was an inch and a half of eggplant stacked up) that all I could think of was "vomit." Sure enough, when it got to the table she took one bite, choked on it and beat a hasty retreat. That's what happens when you interfere with the guy who knows what he's doing.

I don't know how she managed it, but she did come back and choked the whole thing down somehow. She strikes me as the sort of woman who likes to prove a point.

I also learned that she is the sort of woman who, if she sees some job of work that she thinks needs to be done to your house, she will come over to your house while you are away and just do it whether you wanted it done or not. That's another thing that happened this week. I wasn't aware of it until they mentioned it to me yesterday. When I got home, sure enough, there was a metal plate screwed onto the side of my house outside the second floor landing.

You see what I have to put up with?

Moving right along. Dad wanted to watch the movies right then and there, so I had to sit through them again for about the millionth time. I guess my opening scenes were just about as effective as I thought they were, because not more than a few seconds in Dad announced, "I think I'm going to start crying."

Before yesterday, his wife had always refused to watch the home movies on the grounds that they were "his past, not hers" -- fuzzy logic if you ask me. But yesterday she sat down and joined us, and actually paid attention and seemed interested. If it was genuine, and I've no reason to assume otherwise, I call that quite an achievement. After all, I do imagine that there are few things in the entertainment world worse than having to sit through someone else's home movies. If I've succeeded in making them watchable and even enjoyable for people whose past it isn't, then I award myself two thumbs up.

-- Freder.

Smiling Faces

Yesterday, my boss spent some time straightening some books rather flamboyantly within eyeshot of my computer screen.

Hint: She wasn't straightening books. Fact is, she was trying to catch me in the act of "goofing off."

Fact is, I was on the straight up-and-up at that moment, and felt rather triumphant that she was trying to catch me at something that I wasn't doing.

Fact also is -- I never leave my station, except to work in other parts of the store. Fact also is, I eat my lunch while I'm working. Fact also is, I'm entitled to an hour for lunch, and two fifteen minute breaks that I don't take.

So if I want to Fuck Off and type some shit on my blog or Facebook for five or fifteen minutes, that's my right and she can kiss my ass.

The other day she saw me slumped in my chair, gazing in a penetrating fashion at my computer screen, and she accused me of "reading."

Reading what? I don't read books on a computer screen. Fact is, I was perusing the forthcoming books on Above the Treeline, which is not only a part of my job, but a part of my job that she insisted on my signing on to.

All this "policing" . . . all this "trying to catch me in the act" . . . in the act of what? In the act of exercising my rights? There are several bookstore employees who disappear for an hour every day -- as is their right. I don't. I take my time in other ways.

I'm not saying that I have the worst boss in the world, 'cuz I don't. But, for fuck's sake, don't try to make me feel like a criminal because I take my time in unconventional ways.

I'm just saying: GRR!

-- Freder.

One year on...

This may be more than a little bit disjointed tonight. Maybe it'll coalesce into something. Maybe not.

I did not entirely want to stay in the old house, but still and all I wouldn't have moved from there if I hadn't been so forcefully pushed. It's a personality characteristic that I hate being pushed out of my routine, but looking back on it from here, as difficult as it was, I think leaving was the thing that needed to be done.

The anniversary was hard enough to get through here in my new world. Had I to endure it in the old house, in a place that was only a ghost of my home, with her gaping, empty room to walk into every day, it might have been unendurable.

This does not mean that I let my sister off the hook for her crimes. But I feel a lot like how I imagine Tiger Whitestockings does in the photo above, still taking in her New Surroundings: "Huh. Look at that. It's Interesting. It's Nice. It's my Home now. But it's still so new. I hate new."

I see now with a lot more objectivity what a very bad place I was in a year ago today. A dangerous place, within touching distance of death by alcohol. In some ways it got a little bit better after my horrible experiences in the hospital, but my emotions did not begin to truly heal until after the move reached the stage where I didn't have to go back out to the old place every damn day and sometimes twice or thrice on the weekend. Now that it's truly done, with the "cooler" installed here, now that I know for certain that I will never see the old house again, that page not just fully turned but ripped out of the book forever, a strange mood just exactly like what a writer or cartoonist feels when staring at a blank piece of paper is full on me.

At the same time, there's my creative self wondering if I can still hack it. A part of me wants to get back to writing and drawing, but I guess that I'm still in transition: I want to get to work, but a deeper part of me dreads it and fears that I may be washed up. Anxiety being the anathema to doing creative work, I know what has to happen. The desire to work is not enough. The fear of failure needs to be stepped over like a crack in the sidewalk. Step on that crack and the bears will get you. My foot is metaphorically raised and extended over a very deep and wide crack that, when I look into it, as I cannot seem to avoid doing, seems insurmountable.

Today at work, I received my performance review for the year. It was perhaps made better by the fact that in my self-assesment prior to the event, I did not hesitate to tell the truth that this has been less than a stellar year on the job. I gave reasons, and offered specific examples, but did not make excuses. Was I just being honest? Or did I manipulate this scenario perfectly?

In any case, my boss was uncharacteristically generous in her comments, Much more so than in prior years when I actually deserved more generosity than was forthcoming.

It's Reunion time at the college. One  of my biggest weekends of the year. In this time I will work another eleven days straight in a row, without a day off. For me, this is a little bit like Sleep Deprivation, even though I won't really be missing much (if any) sleep. Time Alone, Quiet Time, Solitude -- whatever you call it, that's sleep for me. I know that I'll get through this all right because I'm in a better place now than I have been in well over a year. It's just One More Milepost that will be smaller in my rearview window than it appears now.

Today, an elderly alum who seemed desperately confused and sad looked me in the eye and said, "Have you seen my wife?"

It was the kind of question that makes every potential response into a lie.

How could I possibly know if I had seen his wife?

"Maybe" would have been too ambiguous a response. "Yes" could well have been the truth, but how could I answer the inevitable question that followed?

I said "No," -- and felt as if I was lying.

-- Freder.

The Further Adventures of That Wacky Aspie Guy

I haven't posted lately because I've been , , , well, busy on the one hand and mentally at sea on the other. But something happened just now that's too idiotic not to type, so I'll start there and work my way backward.

I had a premonition about watching The Wrestler that I should have taken to heart. It's well-done and fascinating, and, good lord, Mickey Rourke looking like he's been dragged through a cactus-infested desert behind a Jeep. But I had to turn it off when the staple gun and the dinner fork and the barbed wire came out. Who thinks of this stuff? Who are those people in the crowd who can watch it as entertainment?

That wasn't the idiotic thing.

With the telly shut down as quickly as I could possibly shut it down, I meandered into the kitchen and decided there was no way I was going to hand-wash all those dishes. I loaded up the dishwasher, and went to put the detergent in. . .

. . . and it only halfway filled up the cup before it ran out.

So, I grabbed my bottle of Ivory, squeezed some into the cup, closed the lid, and squeezed some more into the "pre-wash" slot.

As with all of my Finest Moments, I have to type: "You can see it coming, can't you?"

I should get a tm on that line.

I went into the bathroom, and while I was in there the dishwasher suddenly got really quiet.

By the time I came out, water and soap suds were boiling out around the door, looking just like something out of The Blob, flooding the length of my kitchen floor.

Long story short: After two more attempts and two clean-ups and lots of begging with the powers that be for mercy, I got it going again with, to coin a cliche, No Soap. It's happily chugging away as I type this.

On Monday night, I found a ginormous box sitting on my deck. I thought: What the  -- ?? I didn't order another computer while I was drunk, did I?

It was my three lilac trees from White Flower Farm. My first inclination was to wait and plant them on Saturday. Then I thought -- Nah! I've got light!

I planted all three of them around the house, and named them Monica, Nicki and Kristine.

Bet you can't guess, and I'm not going to tell you.

While I was planting Monica, someone from the house of Kaspar the Mad Aryan Gardener crept up on me from behind. It was the woman of the house, R____, who as it turns out works in the Health Center at the same college where I plug away my days. Of all my neighbors, I like her the best: having the common workplace gives us something to talk about, and she was just right: not Forcibly Friendly, if you get my drift, and knew when to end the chatter. She was happy that I have outside cats, and she likes all the stuff in my yard, so that was a plus, too.

The Old Me would have imagined that she flirted with me, just a little bit. Now I understand that this is a delusion of Asperger's Syndrome: we misinterpret the signs, and when a woman is just being Ordinarily Friendly (something we have a hard time understanding in the first place) we mistake it for Interest and Openness to Something More.

Are you out there, L____? Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

On Monday at work, I was just coming to terms with how deeply swamped I was under Purchase Orders and a six-page newsletter that needs to be done, like, now (and which, as it turns out, my Student Worker had only been pretending to work on for me), when my boss came by and handed me a sixteen page order of sale books, hundreds of titles that each need an item card before I can do the PO, and they're going to be here by the end of the week.

They call it Job Security, I guess.

My father and his wife are back from Nevada, and for Sunday I invited them over to my house for dinner. During the two weekdays after I invited them, I looked closely at the house and came to understand what a Horrific Pit it was. I thought about putting them off until next week, but then I looked at the calendar at work and realized that the next solid month is going to be Hell Time. So on Sunday I bit the bullet and gave this place a beating to make it look halfway presentable.

I don't know if anyone else has Anxiety Attacks while cleaning, but I sure did this time. The vacuum cleaner was acting up, I kept tripping over myself, I was agitated about this, that and the other thing, had to keep telling myself to calm down, calm down, but it didn't work.

The actual dinner came off all right, and maybe a little bit better than all right. It was good having them at my place rather than the other way 'round; I felt like I had a degree of control over the situation that I never feel when I have to go eat lunch with them. I cooked chicken and corn on the cob and spinach, and it all turned out well. M_ seemed a little perturbed with some of my methods (like, you have to put salt on corn before you cook it; it brings out the sweetness), but I was able to shrug it off -- my house, my dinner, my cooking. I've been subjected to Salmon (which I hate) at your place -- now it's Your Turn!

Sunday might have been easier if I had done a lick of work on Saturday. But, after five months of pushing, driving, pushing, driving, I think that I hit the wall on Saturday.

I tried to write a post about this and deleted it. The sixteenth of this month marks a solid year that I have been Coping and Dealing, Coping and Dealing, Coping and Dealing.

I'm burned out. It's the reason why I'm in denial about the car, it's the reason why, when I walked into the Studio on Saturday afternoon to work on it, I just avoided bursting into tears and said to myself, out loud, I can't do it, I can't do it.

I said, "What I really want is to just go out on the porch, flop on the couch, and spend the afternoon reading."

Pause. Then I thought, "So, let's do it."

It wasn't all reading. I dozed a lot, too.

-- Freder.

It All Comes Out in the Wash

The last few days have been bags that were too mixed for my taste. I know it can't be helped.

On Friday my new washer and dryer were delivered, so I am back in the washing business again after too long. Finally able to change the covers on both living room sofas, which needed changing badly (I'm doing that today), finally able to change the sheets on my bed after I won't say how long. But when I moved here into the new house, I deliberately did not use clean sheets on the cot because I wanted the cats to have some familiar smells around the place, and until this past Friday they still hadn't been changed out. 

Things are getting much less gamey around here.

The delivery crew were easily the best and most professional people that I've worked with through this whole process, but did they have to be so young? I'm used to workmen being older than me, or at least my age; now it seems that I've crossed the line, these guys looked like college-age kids to me.

It was so cold that day that something had frozen deep down inside the washer, so the water couldn't drain out. I had to wait a couple of hours for it to thaw out. To aid this, I opened the door that connects the laundry room with the kitchen, and it was clear right away that the screen I put up to keep the cats out was not going to work at all. So most all of them got to check out that room, and Whitey was so funny about it. He loved the washer! Was it the loud purring sound that it made? He was spinning around, wiping his face on its corners, whipping his tail about, kneading the floor with his front paws. Whazzup wid dat?

The washer itself is one of those newfangled low-energy, high-efficiency, low water use models. You even have to use special detergent with it. I almost didn't buy it for that reason, because now I have almost a whole box of detergent that I can't use. Then I realized that nearly all the machines were of the same newfangled breed, and the ones that weren't didn't have the capacity I wanted (I have a couple of comforters that wouldn't have fit). So -- eh, what's a box of detergent against the benefits? 

I read the manual while I waited and I was glad that I did. It pointed out that "you might hear different sounds than what you are used to in your old washer."

Indeed. I would have been terrified that I'd broken the thing!

I stayed out there and stared at the washer, like an idiot, for the whole first cycle. It's worse than watching a kettle boil. I kept wishing that I could open the lid to see what was going on in there.

When the first load was behind me and I knew that everything was working, I was hit quite suddenly and quite hard with a terrible depression. Dropped on me just like those 16-ton weights in the Monty Python sketches. I've tried hard to understand these things, but I could not understand this. This was a good, big task to get done. I should have felt exactly the opposite. 

Instead my whole body began to feel heavy, like a load of mud. Is there such a thing as post-washer depression? It wasn't a tearful kind of thing. I felt dazed and sad and burned out. The music I was playing didn't help: the back half of Renaissance: Turn of the Cards is almost unbelievably depressing, but it had been so long since I'd heard the album that I'd forgotten this. I ripped it out of the player and went through about five more disks trying to find something that wouldn't drag me down, without success. Even the cheerful music made it worse.

It was all I could do to keep from reaching for the vodka bottle. I could not stop thinking about it. Only the knowing that it wouldn't solve any problems, and the line that I drew in the sand months ago about not drinking during the day kept me from doing it. 

I did all the right things. I kept busy and made some progress both upstairs and with the laundry. It got a little better by late afternoon, then worsened again in the evening. I meant to go to bed early, but once again got caught up in another late night of tracking down old songs on the internet. One of the scores I made was Nat King Cole's rendition of "Stardust." Possibly the loveliest recording ever made. That helped.

To try and wind down, I took a quick, late-night stroll around the block of my new neighborhood. It was a freezing, bright night. Plumes of smoke rose out of the chimneys of most of the houses, including my own. I walked up and back, past the high school, then down and around to my own home. I stood out there looking at it for a little while. It's tall and somewhat gothic in shape, if not in materials. I like the looks of it a lot.

By the next morning, I was in full anxiety mode about the public event that I was responsible for that afternoon at the store. I was as well-prepared as could be, but the anxiety was strong enough that it made getting through my morning chores that much harder, which only added to the frustration. 

Worry about my boss was part of it. BS (yes, those are her real initials) is such an intense, controlling micro-manager that she drives nearly all of us crazy -- but recently she has been leaving me alone, and for this event she did not involve herself at all, even when I asked for input. In fact, waiting fruitlessly for answers to some of my questions actually contributed to the anxiety factor by forcing me to cut the deadlines dangerously close, and then having to make the decision myself under time constraints and hope that it was the right one. I'm not normally afraid of making a decision, but I am when it comes to BS, and there isn't a single person who works in the store who doesn't understand why.

With anyone else, her sudden and unannounced shift to non-involvement might be considered a show of confidence. But I have a strain of paranoia in my blood, and can't help but think that her motivations have more to do with distancing herself from my department so that she doesn't get cut when the long knives come out.

The first hour at work was a little frantic, but I slowly got my bearings, and my students were mostly wonderfully cooperative and helpful. One of them even brought her roommates to help out, and they did a great job, too. The event came together really well, and the relief was palpable. You can see it on my face in the picture I had taken with Arthur.

But attendance was down over last year, unit sales were down over last year, and by mid-afternoon I was letting all that get to me. Once again last night I was depressed and tired, and once again I stayed up too late scoring music. This time it was Clannad: Past Present (the first CD I ever bought. I foolishly gave it to an old girlfriend only to lose both of them!), and a compilation of Patsy Cline songs. Eclectic is an overused word, but it describes my musical taste perfectly well. 

Today I slept in an extra hour, and have been taking it easy, puttering around with the laundry, writing this post. When I'm done here I'm going to go into the kitchen and make up a big bucket of popcorn, maybe see what's on TCM. Sometime this afternoon I need to run out to the store. 

Next week ought to be easier.

-- Freder.