It’s awfully quiet around here, isn’t it?
I spend my life looking for a little quiet these days. But it seems sad that the only place I can find it is here.
Call it a trial balloon, call it a second chance, call it doubling down on the first bad hand.
Maybe I should reconsider, and make a little noise. We’ll see.
If you look around a minute, you might notice a thing or two missing.
Or, well, about 544 things.
Every post I’ve ever written – poof. Gone. Vanished into the ether.
Not deleted. Just set to private.
Because it came to my attention today, in a very forceful fashion, that I’m not safe here. Just like I’m not safe at work, or at home, or at the grocery store, or at a Cub Scout meeting.
A restraining order is just a piece of paper, after all. A flimsy remnant of a dead tree, that tells one specific person how to behave, or not to behave. It doesn’t mention their family, or their friends, that get sucked into the whole sordid story with what pass for good intentions.
I was told today, in a very forceful fashion, that this blog is harmful. To me, to my son, to other people in our lives. I was told that it was unnecessary; that I shouldn’t want or need it.
I was told, officially and officiously, to sit down and shut up.
This is my temporary concession to that instruction, but I never have been very good at doing as I am told.
I’ll be reviewing each post I have ever written, individually. Every word I’ve ever archived here under my little illusion of anonymity. Those that seem innocuous, safe enough, superficial enough, will get reposted publicly. You know, the ones that can’t possibly misconstrued to have been about you, or you, or even you.
The rest will just have to stay buried beneath the rubble that is all that I’ve left of my privacy and my dignity.
Watch this space, kittens. I never did know when to just lay down and die.
Oh, and P.S?
No one would have ever known that they were about you, until you started screaming it out loud, in public.
Well done.
Oh, Wednesday morning that only comes every other week, how I love my midweek day off.
Getting to it sucks – six day stretches of 12 hour days aren’t for sissies. But this Wednesday, and the one two weeks ago, and the one two weeks from now? They’re totally worth it.
I always stay up too late the night before, because I’ve been working my butt off and I’m married to a night owl. So we stay up, and spend time together, and then I drag ass the next morning, but it’s the next Wednesday morning, so it’s worth it.
I’m sitting on my couch, with my feet up, watching the two hour premiere of my favorite springtime show in utter quiet, not having to hit pause to navigate mom stuff, not having to get up and down to let dogs in or out (they’re all unconscious around me), no conversations or discussions or logistics. It’s heaven.
Or Broadway, which is the same thing if you ask me.
I’ve got a million things to do today, but it all seems possible when I’m sitting here, being a lazy lump, and with the whole day stretched out in front of me.
Realistically, I’m completely aware that I am not going to get to it all. Something will fall by the wayside. At some point tonight, I’ll remember something I meant to do today, and swear a blue streak. But whatever. That’s later tonight.
For now, I’m going to wallow in silence that bears no demands on my emotions or mind.
Have a happy Wednesday, y’all.
It’s February 2.
Which, in the land of big box home improvement, means it’s Spring Hire Time.
The caps are intentional.
This means that I have 26 days left to hire 35 people. 30 of those are seasonal, which means they are only of use to me for six months from their date of hire.
Which means I bleed and sweat and work my ass off 70 hours a week for the next three weeks…
In order to fire most of them, five months from now.
I’m having a bit of trouble with the cost/benefit analysis on this one, I gotta say.
The way my schedule works (because it’s still retail, so there’s no such thing as 8 – 5), I work a six day week, am off Sunday, work Monday/Tuesday, off Wednesday, work Thursday/Friday, and then am off the next weekend. What that means is that I don’t track my life week by week, but on two-week cycles.
Which means I lose track of time and days easily, and often.
Moreso now that my usual 10 hour days (no, really, I’m scheduled 7:00 am to 5:30 PM on eight of my 10 days in a cycle), are stretching to 11, 12, and occasionally 13 hours at a pop. Add to that my Little League board member schedule, the fact that Sharkman is bridging to Boy Scouts, and that the actual baseball season is what seems like minutes away, and you get one very tired and frazzled Jolie.
This was my six-day week. I rolled in the door about an hour and a half ago, twelve hours after I left home this morning. In between running background checks and drug screenings and closing out the last payroll of the fiscal year and reconciling accrual balances (that means making sure people didn’t use more vacation than they earned, which a shocking number did) and trying to set my schedule for next week and catching up on the filing that I didn’t have time to do this week…
Wait. Where was I going with that?
I have no fucking idea, that’s where.
When my ass catches up with the rest of me, I might have more of a clue.
In the meantime, I’m going to sit down and not think for the next hour or two before I finally lose consciousness. I have to get up tomorrow, finish magically creating a set of books from a pile of receipts from last Little League season, and try very hard to be good company for my boys while they watch a Super Bowl that I honestly couldn’t care less about.
Maybe I should procrastinate in the morning so that I can play with my receipts while they watch a game I couldn’t care less about.
I heard on the radio today (or maybe CNN? I dunno. It was this morning, about a week ago) that everyone watches the Super Bowl for the Puppy Bowl (which I had never even heard of until this morning, but apparently it’s a thing) and the commercials. A) I loathe commercials on regular tv, so I’ve never understood the glamour of more commercials, much less subjecting yourself to an entire five hour televised event just to watch commercials. B) I’m such a pop culture moron that I didn’t know there was such a thing as a Puppy Bowl, so I just don’t think I’m going to be mustering up a whole lot of enthusiasm in the next 19.5 hours.
Did I also mention that every interview I do has to be transcribed in enough detail to recreate the interview if I’m ever audited by the Feds? This means that I spend half an hour writing, as in with pen and paper, for each interview. Have I ever told you, bois and grrls, that I have horrific carpal tunnel syndrome, diagnosed almost 20 years ago now, when I was still a teenager?
My right hand has been numb for a week. And not even from something fun, like too much vibrator time.
(This is where Rhett snorts indignantly at the idea that I would need a vibrator these days…)
Somehow, I think I might have allowed my original train of thought for this post to be derailed.
My dinner’s ready. I’ll go looking for the right track later.
The very first post of TSOC went up on January 26, 2009. If you type that date into Wikipedia, or Google, you’ll learn that there was a solar eclipse, a downturn in the job market, and a war beginning in Malagasy.
What a day.
I never would have believed that I would document (most some of) four years of my life in a blank white box on a computer screen. Much less that the documentation would include meeting the love of my life, watching my career implode, seeing an ex survive an unsurvivable diagnosis, helping imprison a woman I hero-worshipped, or trying and failing and trying again to be this thing they call a writer.
In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that the beginning of one more little blog, by one more little woman trying to make sense of a very big and very crazy world isn’t really much to shout about.
But looking at it from that perspective grossly undervalues what blogging has brought into my life.
I have four years of evidence that I was here, that I had a voice and an opinion and the guts to send that voice out into the void, wondering what I would get back.
That’s priceless.
So this is my love letter to TSOC, for the sanity and hilarity and tragedy that it encompasses, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way.
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