Wordjanitor Strikes Again

Sometimes you can't do the things you're supposed to do. I was supposed to go to a memorial for a friend today. I couldn't. They're adding up. It would have been the fourth such gathering this year. Maybe that's not a lot, but it's enough for me right now. I'm tired of loss and focusing on loss. Real loss, impending loss, potential loss, metaphorical loss. There's a lot of it swirling around, near and far. I started running out of words. OK, I had words, but more often than not, they started resembling an unpunctuated string of cursing. I was running out of coherent sentences and paragraphs. I couldn't find them.

You'd think I had a crapload of cash hanging out my back pocket. I had neither crap, cash, nor a crapload of cash in my pocket. I checked. The safest lane for a motorcycle is the far-left lane. Not today. Apparently, a lot of people were in a "20 miles over? meh" hurry. I stopped counting after the 97th car tried to crawl up my, err... tailpipe. (OK, I didn't count. It's just a low estimate.) And the guy who tried to read the label on my jeans for 40 miles, but refused to pass until I actually pulled into a turnout? Charmer. "Perhaps you were riding too slowly," you think. Reasonable assumption -- after all, I'm a girl on a giant tricycle, right? I checked that too. My speedometer was quite clearly in the "this could be pricey" zone. Maybe if they realized I was in the midst of a 310-mile killing spree, they would have backed off. Shown a little patience. Evidence of many satisfying splats.

I went to an event last week where they handed out candy canes with words attached to them. The words, individual to each person, served as the night's conversation topic. My word was perfectionism. My first reaction was just that I was no longer a perfectionist. Too easy. Once upon a time, I was a perfectionist. Or, better stated, I was someone who strove to be perfect. I hadn't actually perfected perfectionism. If I couldn't be perfect, I could try to make everything I did perfect. For example, I worked as a magazine editor. I developed a high set of production standards and a microscopic eye for detail. If there was an error, whether typo, scratched film, misaligned color plate, or some other ant's-eye-view thing, I'd find it. Would anyone else notice? Maybe 1 in 500 people. Would that person care? Maybe a 1 in 500 chance. But it gave me a sense of control where life didn't allow it. It gave me something I could fix and a change I could see.

I have a picture of tornadoes on my refrigerator. Each is a different color and hovers precariously close to the ground, about to touch down. In the midst of all the swirling is a little stick figure with a small umbrella saying "Hey tornadoes, one at a time. Get in line!" Sure, I can yell at a tornado and it will listen! Hmmm... Last week was less than fun. Lots of different dramas emerged from various quadrants of my existence. I had some health stuff to handle;

Somehow or other, I've been back at work for nearly a month. Time flies when you're trying to catch your breath and remember how to tie your shoes . Within a quick blink, it was as if I'd never been gone. Except now I have this weird eating schedule and people keep asking me if I'm better now. Well, yes, better than I was before. Cured, no. But that's just how it is. In the scheme of things, I don't consider the health thing

The first signs that maybe I had the wrong gastroenterologist were sitting in the waiting room when I arrived for my first appointment. The magazines. High-end car, travel, food, and wine magazines. As far as I'm concerned, one of the primary reasons for the existence of magazines like People , Entertainment Weekly , Us , etc., is to entertain patients who are patiently waiting for their doctors. Especially doctors who set their watches according to

I have a very big broom. I have often used it to sweep things under the rug in the interest of maintaining a relatively calm relationship with my mother. We've pretty much always had challenges getting along. I'm told I'm too independent. And not just from Day 1. Stubborn from Day -2, that's me. Apparently I have been a royal pain in the hindquarters since refusing to be born prior to her 30th birthday. Willful fetus that I was, I grabbed hold of her uterus and refused to come out for an additional two days -- not just one, two. Just to spite her. (The things you learn in a shared therapy session at the age of 18.) There were more crimes in my list. I embarrassed her. People often mistook me for a boy. I was a quiet bookish soccer-addicted tomboy instead of a gregarious perky girl. I was shy to the point of dissolving in tearful terror when expected to order ice cream . Oh yes, and willful. I willed my breasts to grow bigger than hers at an age far earlier than ...

"Eat the whole thing, but be careful not to touch the filling," he said very seriously as he handed me a grayish tuna sandwich. Huh? OK, don't touch the tuna, just consume it? That's comforting. As was the fact he was wearing bright blue gloves. You don't want the stuff on your hands, just in your gut? Hmm... My breakfast was in fact a standard-issue hospital cafeteria tuna sandwich augmented with a lovely condiment of radioactive isotopes. Mmmmmm? Or Hmmmmm... Next task, remain absolutely still on a table for two full hours while nice people in lab coats use a screen to track the glow as makes its way through my digestive tract. I have an oddly convenient ability to fall asleep during medical tests. I actually slept through most of this one, until the last 30 minutes where I was fairly convinced my upper arms were going to catch fire from the position into which they'd been forced. (Good news, no actual scorching.) Yesterday's little snack-and-glow was t...

I've spent the first two months of 2010 growling at myself for picking the high-deductible medical plan, given how much time I've spent with the medical community thus far. I like rice and oatmeal as much as the next girl, but there's been precious little variety beyond that since November. Two weeks ago my esophagus and I had a photo shoot (think internal vogue-ing on enough valium to make a horse levitate). I expected to awake to answers, not "We'll have biopsy results in ten days." The concept of biopsy threw me; it somehow wasn't a word I was expecting. But it was less the potential of what it might mean than the nebulousness of not knowing the next step. Boy howdy the Serenity Prayer does come in handy when you're scratching for control you're just not going to get. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the differenc e. I knew I couldn't change the te...

Growing up, I was the smallest kid in class. Not cute, perky small. Just awkward -- definitely not one to fit in. My mom used to take me and my brother to Elmer's Barber Shop so we could get haircuts at the same time. Striped barber pole out front and a guy with a waxed mustache. People always assumed I was a boy until the onset of puberty provided distinctions to the contrary. And at which time my hair went into a freakish Rosanne Rosannadanna phase that is truly best forgotten. All of that ensured I got picked on a fair amount, but it wasn't life shattering. You're small, homely, and painfully shy. You get used to it. You also get used to fighting back or standing up to it. You do the cornered squirrel thing and show your teeth. After the pediatrician announced that I wouldn't break five feet, three days of angry crying sparked some sort of growth spurt. My uncle helped find someone to cut my hair in a way that actually looked good. And my confidence on the socc...

(I'm typing this as my dog is sleeping on my right foot, dreaming, twitching, and barking in his sleep. ) So, there was this tree. And it needed pruning. Not a very big tree, really. But apparently big enough. And I have some killer branch chompers. So I got into the tree. And well, kinda got out of the tree. Abruptly. And since I'd already done some definite damage to the tree before gravity nudged me onto the ground, I landed somewhat tangled in some branches. While flat on the ground, staring at the tree that ousted me and doing the mandatory self-assessment that usually follows such a test of gravity, @ walks over and looks down at me, very seriously. @: Mama, get up. We still have work to do. Me: Why don't we go inside and watch TV for awhile. @: No Mama, we're not done working. Me: Well, I need a little break to ice my leg. @: Well OK, but we're not finished working. Junior Taskmaster, at your service. I had a pretty good bruise on my foot and figured I'd ...

I'm the type of person who gets to the airport early, brings a book, and chills out before a flight. Right now I'm working with the people who breathlessly slide into their seats eight seconds before they close the doors at the gate.

I have fun with Facebook update posts--those odd little things that have taught so many of us to refer to ourselves in the third person. Being a wordgeek, I'm entertained by finding ways to express myself in a sentence--hopefully with some humor attached. Reading them gives me a quick read on my friends--laughing, standing in line somewhere, stressed, vacationing, hospitalized. Heck, Friday I learned DaveBro was (briefly) 40 miles away at SFO instead of the usual several hundred in Texas. (Brat) I sometimes look back at my recent posts for some sort of accounting of the week. Apparently, animals are really causing me stress lately. Wordjanitor... is chillin' in the sunny backyard and checking e-mail for flaming chick ens. would be getting this stuff done if not for the flying monkeys throwing poo. is just having a fine ol' time juggling rabid wolverines and herding tired cats. laughs: "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinn...

I had a money-saving thought: If I could convert my workday stress into electricity, I could power the house and still get a credit back from PG&E. Gas, well that's another story. But with the right diet... Wrong diet? So far, 2009 has been the Year of Working My Tailfeathers Off. Yes, it ends in a preposition and you probably had no prior knowledge that I ever had tailfeathers. Well, no way to prove it now because they're gone baby gone. And if they have any sense, they ain't coming back. The big admission: I have a work ethic problem. It's not enough to get the job done. It's not enough to get the job done well. I have to figure out how to make it better. (Somehow this does not apply to cleaning my house...) Yeah yeah. It's not actually the intensity and long hours, though they're part of the equation. And it's not just in the job I get paid to do. But in the cube-dwelling arena, I have made a habit of seeing beyond the task at hand. I'm defini...

I have my second sleep study tonight. Last week I put on my jammies, gathered up my blanket and pillow, drove across town and they wired me up like a giant lab rat with: electrodes to measure my brain waves and stages of sleep (there are 3 plus REM) movement sensors on my legs, arms, and parts of my face a heart rate monitor belts on my chest and tummy to measure movement when I inhale and exhale a microphone a nasal cannula a second measuring something or other under my nose an oxygen saturation probe on my finger And then they told me to sleep. Oh, and don't forget the camera on the wall with the circle of little red lights that you can see even without your glasses. All night. They monitor and watch, collect a ton of data, wake you up at 6a, rip off all the wires, tell you basically nothing, and send you on your way. I did sleep off and on. I woke up whenever there was noise in the hallway -- usually to hear someone tell the guy in the room across the hall to roll over or to ch...

Rumor has it I likely have sleep apnea. I suppose repeatedly ceasing breathing in the middle of the night is not a habit one should cultivate or continue. So off I went to a consult yesterday with a pulmonologist/sleep specialist. Some people are just too serious. You can almost see their thought processes on a LED readerboard above their heads. I am a doctor. I have a form. I am going to ask you questions on the form. I will scrawl the answers in the appropriate spaces. I will not deviate from this path. Then, based on your answers, I will give you a rehearsed speech about the next steps. I will not deviate from the script. Want to make a doctor of this variety really uncomfortable? Use multiple-word answers. WAIT, I have a box for yes or no. I don't want to listen to a sentence, I wan't a monosyllabic response. How serious was this guy? He's asking me if I'm sleepy during the day. I honest-to-goodness involuntarily yawned. In fact, I'd been yawning since I landed ...

Some office mornings just don't start well. Going directly from parking lot to conference room can be a little frazzling. But having a disembodied, and very cranky, voice yell at a room full of people across two states via speakerphone? Well, it's not pretty. At one point I considered offering to step out of the room to call Barack Obama on my cell phone to ask him to shift his presidential inauguration by a day to better align with this person's preferred schedule. However, I've been advised that "not everyone really understands when you're kidding." When the day starts sour, you know it's going to take a bit of doing to undo the film brought on by that variety of "professionalism." It took a field trip to another building for a lunch meeting, but I found it. Strangely, the best part of my day was an instructional sign above a new-fangled water-saving toilet. A sign over a toilet. And yes, I reallllllly wish I'd had a camera with me. And...

Imagine if you will... It's Thursday afternoon in Cubeville. 3:17: Tra la la la. Sitting at your desk. La la la. Getting ready to leave at 3:45 for physical therapy. La la la. 3:18: A senior VP sends an e-mail to 5,000 people to announce this really great Web project -- you guessed it, the same one you'd been asked to hold until you received her approval. 3:19: Cubedwellers in earshot here a very perky, "Well, I guess that's approval!" Initiate IM search for Web developers. Uh, guys... 3:27: Compose e-mail, "Dear Boss and Boss's Boss, Imagine my surprise..." 3:35: Site is live -- warts and all. 3:45: Warts removed. 4:05: Praising existence of carpool lane on 101, consider personal budget for lavish gifts to Web developers. 4:35: Arrive at physical therapy prepared to get pummeled by 6'2" guy who has to release sciatic nerve tension by thumbs into calf and elbow into hamstrings and glutes. Tra la la. La. LA LA LA!

I found myself in a familiar position yesterday, surrounded by familiar sights and sounds. And calm, but not at all thrilled about it. I spent most of the day sitting in a chair next to a hospital bed while the alarm for the oxygen saturation monitor squawked at me every few minutes. @ had his tonsils and adenoids removed yesterday. The surgery went well, but recovery turned out a bit trickier. We started our morning with an early breakfast-free start and a drive up to Stanford. He had a great anesthesiologist who sang Thomas the Tank Engine songs to him while he drowsed out on the way to snoozeville. The docs had initial concerns about his history of lung damage and recent croup, but everything turned out to be fine and his airways were clear. Original estimates were an hour for the surgery, with an hour or two for recovery, putting us home around 12:30 or so. If there's one thing you learn when you have a kid in the NICU, it's that all estimates are best ignored. @ initially ...

I took today off of work after a particularly challenging few weeks of cat herding for a major product launch. I've worked on launches for several years now, some bigger than this one. But this one? It kicked my butt. Even as I carefully left the catbox at work each night, little furballs would find the way to follow me home. Strange little IM messages. Random e-mails entitled "Oh Crap..." (imagine this with a British accent). Ringing mobile phones. But I kept most of it at bay, which has not always been my habit.