Sabotage!

Posted on 3/5/2008 by cheesefairy

Here are the interview questions that I wanted to ask the woman that was hired to replace me:

What is 7 am Pacific time in Ontario time?

(even if you use your fingers to count or count out loud, that’s fine)
(note: “coffee break time” is an acceptable answer, as is “Timmy’s time”)

What would you do if someone asked you why his computer kept erasing the text as he was typing?

(acceptable answers include, “Tell him it’s God’s will,” and “Tell him he should probably go get a coffee.”)

How do you handle repetitive questions?

Do you have any experience with deeply dysfunctional humans?

Are YOU a deeply dysfunctional human, albeit one who sees her own flaws as well as those around her?

Can you lift a jug of water onto the water cooler?

(Ideally ‘yes,’ though it is also acceptable to whine incessantly about how thirsty you are until someone else does it. Or to do it whilst heavily pregnant so that people feel guilty.)

How do you deal with repetitive questions?

Situation: The photocopier says “call for service.” What do you do?

What would you do if someone asked you why his computer kept erasing the text as he was typing?

How do you handle repetitive questions?

Today my replacement, let’s call her Jojo, starts and I will begin training her. I will never again sit alone at my desk, picking at my toes and making faces at my computer. Well, I haven’t been able to comfortably pick at my toes in months but in theory, I would have been doing it all this time.

Jojo seems like a nice woman. It’s a miracle that she will have 3 weeks to train with me before I go; at my office, usually replacements are not found until several months after people leave their jobs. If she is quick to pick up the job, maybe I will leave work earlier than my promised March 28th. I am not counting on this, not because I don’t think she is smart, but because she is coming from the Outside.

Someday, maybe, I will go into the intricacies of my workplace and how they beat you down like a bowl of fresh eggs, but not while I’m still working there. I work in the public service. She is coming from the private sector. There is a steep learning curve. Steep like the hills of San Francisco and icy like a mountain highway. And lined with killer goats.

Everything in that last paragraph is an understatement.

I have no idea where to start training someone like Jojo. Sharing my psychological assessments of the other people in the office is probably best saved for next week, though, right?

Posted in people, whiny | 2 Comments

Some Things Funny and Other Things Dull

Posted on 3/2/2008 by cheesefairy

Yesterday we went for a walk without mittens for young Master. Quite a few blocks passed with Trombone mentioning, offhand, “Mittens…mittens….mittens…Mamanonna…mittens,” implying that his grandmother never forgets the mittens when she takes him for a walk and really, I could take a page from her book anytime now.

At the London Drugs I found a deep-discount bin of ski-type mittens with faces on them and decided to pick up a pair with an embroidered bull face on each hand. Wasn’t till we got outside that I realized I’d grabbed the size 4-5 instead of the 2-3 but whatever – Trombone was amused by his giant, puppet-like hands and also they are super warm.

Then I noticed the wee pamphlet that was attached to the mittens. The “Auclair Kids” company seems to have been inspired by all those wordy bags of chips and body lotions and have created an entirely unnecessary world for their kids’ clothing to inhabit.

“The UFO ARK soars off into space with our first collection of winter travellers they are the embodiments of Winter Sensations,” reads the first paragraph, translated from the French, obvs.

“Our little Ark will travel all around the globe with a chosen group of friends who look for wintertime all over the Earth wherever it occurs. Wintertime is always about to occur, or it is happening, or it is about to end, somewhere on Earth. The Southern Hemisphere has winter in July and August when the Northern Hemisphere has Summer…”

Sadly, the character on the mitten I chose does not get a feature page in the pamphlet. Perhaps he did not go in the Ark? However, The White Eagle, who was the party responsible for choosing the animals to go in the UFO Ark, does get his own feature page, as does Elvis the Elephant. (and his sister Eloise)

“ELVIS is an elephant. He and his sister Eloise are from Namibia, a country in
Africa. This is a warm country where there is no snow. Elvis and Eloise were
specially chosen for this space journey by White Eagle. Many animals wanted
to experience winter fun, but White Eagle chose Elvis and Eloise. There are
not a lot of people in Namibia, but there are quite a few families of elephants. Elvis and Eloise wanted to do winter sports, but like us, they have to put on extra clothes, a hat and scarf, and matching mitts, to keep warm”

Meet the characters here.

It’s a shame Auclair wasted so many marketing dollars on the totally bizarre back story; the mittens are cute and warm enough on their own. But I guess someone out there got to sit in endless meetings and storyboard the UFO Ark and that person is probably pretty proud of his or her work. I hope?

From the same “ideas that probably looked good in someone’s head but got hopelessly tangled and over-manipulated to the point of WTF-ness” manual, I also encountered a Scratch N Sniff Canada board book at Value Village.

I am ashamed to admit I actually sniffed it. (there was a page about beer!) Unsurprisingly, each page smelled only like Value Village. Lucky for you I remembered the website.

We had a nice, dull weekend, after a rather unpleasant, exhausting week. Yesterday after a morning of grocery shopping and slide sliding and toddler wrangling I received a communique from my body, namely the uterine subcommittee. It read, in part,

“You MUST LIE DOWN or you will be a parent of two before the weekend is out.”

Seriously, I had actual contractions for about 45 minutes – not regular ones and not escalating ones, just a bunch of Braxton Hicks in a row that were not just “tightenings” but somewhat uncomfortable. Notable, this, because I did not notice contractions of any kind when I was pregnant with Trombone until the day before I delivered him, when I was at the hospital and hooked up to the contraction monitor and the nurse looked at me and said, “Can’t you FEEL that?”

So I went directly to my bed, a-huffing and a-puffing, stripped off my supa-sexay overalls and slept delightfully for 90 minutes. Presto, no more Braxton Hickses.

Today I got a nice, relaxing haircut at the Master Cuts at Metrotown. The stylist was neither crazy nor angry. That’s two haircuts in 6 months. Not including when I gave myself bangs a couple of months ago. I didn’t mention that? No, I guess not. Pregnant woman cliche; cuts her own hair to take control of burgeoning life and flesh.

On Friday I drove past an establishment called “Ocean Fantasy Dollar Store and Laundromat.”

And I think that’s all I have to tell you.

Which is why I’ve not been writing here as much. Now that February has finally ended, perhaps more interesting things will come out of my brain. And if they don’t – something better will come out of my vagina (if not my belly button) in as few? many? as 7 weeks so The Cheeseblog: Worth Checking Back Periodically if You Like Pictures of Babies could be a new tagline, if I wanted one, which I don’t.

…yay?

Posted in babby, bloggity!, books, clothes, funny, trombone | 3 Comments

Battles

Posted on 2/26/2008 by cheesefairy

You go for weeks without any pain at all, just minor irritation and then suddenly you wake up hurting. Everything breaks at once. My heart hurts because my friend is suffering loss. My head hurts, just on the right side, and has since yesterday. My chest hurts; I slept funny but not funny ha-ha. Saint Aardvark wrenched his back this morning and we tiptoed around each other in the kitchen, my sore head, his sore back, afraid to speak because all the words seemed to be coming out poison-darted.

Last week I picked up “A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey in our office library; the kitchen with a bookshelf where people bring their old paperbacks. All I knew about it was that first Oprah liked it and then Oprah was mad at the guy who wrote it for making (parts of) it up. Both of those factoids were enough to make me avoid it like the plague because I hate that Oprah tells anyone what to read (I know – literacy, book club cameraderie, whatever, I don’t like being told what to do, this goes deeper for me than just Oprah) and I hate Media Circuses About Stupid Stuff.

Opened up the book on the train home and nearly lost my own internal organs to vomiting, so visceral were the first 35 pages. An onslaught of words, hardly any punctuation, images vivid and unrelenting. Vomit, shit, bile, blood, everywhere.

Young hero wakes up on an airplane, not knowing how he got there. He enters an addiction treatment facility and gets clean. He meets a couple of people who become friends and a few who don’t. That’s pretty much it so far.

When I got home I looked up the Media Circus online and found the Smoking Gun’s exposay of the author’s Terrible Lies. Got halfway through the article. Decided to bookmark it until after I’m done the book and read the book as itself, as words on paper that convey meaning, rather than as a true versus fictional work. Whether it is true or not, it is written from a very compelling point of view, with engaging language, with great power.

I think everything is semi-truth anyway. The most fervent of memoirs, the most fictional of novels. All semi-truths.

Of course I have also known a couple of addicts in real life so now I’m halfway through the book thinking: ah yes, I have heard this before. Which is kind of what getting to know an addict is like, in my experience. All gore and flash and excitement when you first meet and then a slow, ponderous, repetitive progression to an ultimate realization: whether that is “I do not want to die” or “I do want to die, after all.” Watching someone else make that decision is by turns mind-blowingly dull and mind-blowingly frustrating.

There is a lot of discussion in the online Media Circus around Betrayal. People, Oprah’s people, they believed in James Frey and his battle and his recovery. They were rooting for him and then – it turned out he hadn’t been fighting the battle they thought, so they felt betrayed, angry. But. Regardless of how accurate his telling of the story, his own story, even if cobbled together with fiction, fantasy, someone else’s story; he fought the battle, at the least, of writing this book. He must have fought a battle or two to write the things he wrote. If I felt like barfing while I read it, he has succeeded as a writer.

And everyone has a battle. And everyone deserves to be rooted for. No matter how huge and blustery and vomit-fueled, no matter how quiet and sorrowful and slow.

Tiny battles, like mine & SA’s today. Big ones, like Sarah’s. Yours, whatever it might be. I think we should all root for each other, even if our expectations weren’t met, even if we think the story isn’t true, even if we don’t know each other. We can still be armour for each other.

Posted in books, media, people, writing | 5 Comments

This Morning

Posted on 2/22/2008 by cheesefairy

Our son is moaning from his crib. He sounds like a zombie searching for brains, like a beached sea lion, like a hospital ward full of tummy aches.

We are ignoring him because it is 5:45 am and the upcoming 15 minutes (and preceding 10) are the only time we get to ourselves.

We are ignoring each other, too, we have a sectional couch just so we can sit each at each end, our laptops buzzing faintly while we pour our first cups of coffee down our throats.

***

At 12:15 am today I was lying in bed, alone, while SA comforted Trombone after a nightmare. Trombone had woken, screaming “No! NO! NO!” and crying. It was one of the most disturbing sounds I have ever heard. I was lying in bed, alone, in the dark, trying to find a comfortable position, feeling as though there was a giant bowling ball in my gut. Feeling as though someone small but powerful was tossing a bowling ball back and forth in my gut. Someone small and powerful whose feet or arms now reach up into my lung’s neighbourhood and whose butt likes to dance against my belly button.

What the hell were we thinking, I thought hazily, picturing us a few months down the road; best-case-scenario another baby with Trombone’s temperment lying by the side of the bed for 3 months squalling every 2 hours for food while its big brother has Chronic Zombie Nightmares until we cut out dairy before bed (the mind does wander a bit at that time of day). What the hell were we thinking! to mess with our delightful status quo not once but, having regained a semblance of it, TWICE.

Maybe, if we could regain its semblance once, we could regain a semblance of that semblance, a mirror image of its photograph. By then, like a game of Telephone, it will have been warped – or positive-spin, shaped into a whole other, new status quo. Yes, I am just, again, coming to terms with The New Normal. Trying not to mourn my past but instead embrace the opportunity to change and grow along with my progeny.

SA came back to bed, having comforted; Trombone having agreed to go back to sleep. We lay next to each other, not sleeping, for half an hour before getting up to drink warm milk and have snacks and sit quietly on our sectional couch each at each end reading internet pages that appeal to us. Thank god for the Internet, up and running 24 hours a day. The hippo tumbled and shouldered its heavy load inside me as I crunched an apple, finally quieting when the warm milk hit. After an hour I trudged back up to bed, wedged my many pillows around me and breathed deeply until sleep came.

***

He has stopped moaning and is now calling the names of farm animals. He is truly awake now; off schedule, off book, who knows why. With a third of a cup of coffee in my gut, I feel warm and lucky and tired and hungry and glad that it’s Friday and ready for another
car ride
bus ride
day
weekend
child

and also not ready at all.

Posted in babby, the parenthood, trombone | 6 Comments

A Corner Has Been Turned And Everything is Going to Be Fine

Posted on 2/21/2008 by cheesefairy

Jim White has [finally!] made a new album. It’s called Transnormal Skiperoo. You can hear songs from it at his myspace page .

Here’s his definition of Transnormal Skiperoo:

‘Transnormal Skiperoo is a name I invented to describe a strange new feeling I’ve been experiencing after years of feeling lost and alone and cursed. Now, when everything around me begins to shine, when I find myself dancing around in my back yard for no particular reason other than it feels good to be alive, when I get this deep sense of gratitude that I don’t need drugs or God or doomed romance to fuel myself through the gauntlet of a normal day, I call that feeling ‘Transnormal Skiperoo.’ Jim White

I can’t add anything to that except that I love Jim White so much I think I might just sit here licking his myspace page until my tongue turns into jerky.

Posted in music | 4 Comments