On a clear late summer night, the woman sat on the edge of a field outside of town to watch the moon rise. In another age, she would have been known as a seer among her people. But times have changed and there’s no demand for seers anymore. Instead, she spends her days performing the dull, essential tasks that modern life demands of us all. … Continue reading Pareidolia
Last night I went to the local grocery store and saw that Mary had dyed her hair. I was a bit surprised. Mary never struck me as the hair dying sort. The cigarette smoking, beer drinking with her family sort, yes. Mary works overnights at the local grocery store and she kind of intimidates me. She’s not like the nice, cheery ladies who work during the day. Mary doesn’t look at you and she doesn’t care if you found everything you were looking for. She wears prescription sunglasses inside, is thin as a rail and moves like a man. I always think she hates me but I’ve watched her with other people and either she hates them too or that’s just the way she is.
I always try to talk to Mary. I hate how unfriendly people are around where I live, so I make a point of talking to people when I’m out. It’s my little protest. And I just think it’s right to be friendly. However, I’m actually pretty shy and easily intimidated. So when I run into someone like Mary I have to work up the nerve just to say “hi” and ask how it’s going. I don’t always make it. I feel like she’s so fiercely determined not to look at you and keep her mouth set in a straight line because she doesn’t want anyone to talk to her. But if I don’t even try to talk to her, I’m convinced that she thinks it’s because I’m a stupid, fat cow who thinks she’s to good to talk to a person like her. Which right there is a good demonstration of why it’s not healthy to try to put yourself into the head of a stranger. You’re just making crap up. Continue reading “Mary the Grocery Store Lady and Me, Me, Me!”
by·word/ˈbīˌwərd/
| Noun: |
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My children know one of my old classmates by name. Not that they have ever met her. And it’s not even because I have told them stories about her. I have told them stories about lots of people I have known without bothering to add in their name. No, I’m kind of ashamed to admit that they know her name because when I was a kid, her name became a byword to me. Her name stood in for a set of behaviors which I associated with her and wanted desperately to avoid myself. I called it “Sally Ruthersbrodt* Syndrome” (*Not her real name!) My kids and other people who were very unlikely to ever meet her know her name and what it meant to me. In my mind her name meant thinking that people liked you when they didn’t.
I’m not even sure how that became such a big fear for me, but it was. I got that not everyone was going to like me and I was cool with that (eventually). But what if the people who seemed to like me didn’t really? That was an intolerable thought to me. The idea of thinking that you were safe with people who weren’t really safe freaked me out. And like any good geek, I believed that gathering as much information as possible was the solution. Because then I could figure out how to avoid this perceived threat. So, to that end, I applied my powers of observation to watching the people around me looking for signs that I might be turning into a Sally Ruthersbrodt.
Unfortunately for me, if there is a disorder which is the opposite of Asperger’s that makes you inappropriately hyper-sensitive to non-verbal social cues, I have that. Continue reading “I’m a byword for neurosis”
One of the worst things I ever did in my life was pull my sister Shannon’s hair. Well, it wasn’t just the hair pulling; hitting her repeatedly just before pulling her hair was pretty bad too. I was in my early teens and had been left to babysit my younger siblings, including Shannon who is 8 years younger than me. I have no idea what started it exactly, but I do remember that she was refusing to do something or another that I had told her to do. So, I hit her. And she laughed. Which enraged me. So I hit my very slight little sister again harder. And she laughed harder. Completely besides myself with frustration and anger, I hit her again and again and she laughed at me again and again. Finally, I yanked hard on her hair and she suddenly started sobbing. Which shot right through my anger to the part of me that can’t help but feel empathy towards someone in pain.
Saying that it was one of the worst things I ever did is a bit of hyperbole. More accurate would be to say that out of all the things I have ever done, this was one that I felt worst about. I had lashed out at someone smaller and weaker than myself in anger. I love her and had been entrusted with her care, but because I had not been able to control myself, she had wound up being hurt – emotionally if nothing else. As an adult, I went and apologized to her for this incident and learned (not too surprisingly) that she has no memory of it. Honestly, I’m quite certain it wasn’t the first time I had hit one of my siblings in an attempt to get them to do what I wanted or needed them to do. But her hurt this time was so raw it made a huge impression on me. I was married before I ever let myself get that angry again. Continue reading “Drinking Anger’s Poison”
“There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – Shakespeare
I picked up this quote back in my senior year in high school while reading Hamlet for class. When I got to college, I wrote it on a piece of paper and taped it to the wall above my bed. It’s on my facebook page right now.
This quote has always spoken to me about the importance of perspective, responsibility and choice. It says to me that the way I see something – the emotions I associate with it, my analysis of what is going on, the assumptions I make about motivations – is a choice. If one of my kids says something which is unintentionally rude, I can chose to laugh or be offended. Sometimes I might have a good reason to be offended, but if I can, I’m going to laugh. It’s a choice. And that extends from the biggest things to the smallest things. I can choose how to view things rather than just go with random gut reactions. Continue reading “Thinking Makes It So”
I have a tendency to be very hard on myself. I had to learn to stop being my cruelest critic and become a friend. To do this, I started thinking of how I would talk to, support and encourage a friend and applied it to myself. I would never tell a friend, “well, you’re sure an idiot. No wonder no one likes you.” I don’t … Continue reading Making Friends With Me
Of all the epitaphs we throw around “lazy” is probably the one we see as inexcusable. Which is funny because we all have a tendency to be lazy. We were made to need rest. And sometimes what we call lazy is genuinely struggling to do something we’re not good at and find really unpleasant. It’s a normal part of life. And feeling bad about a … Continue reading Laziness
Adam Saveage of Mythbusters famously likes to say, “I reject your reality and substitute my own!” Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work so well in real life. While it is true that there are many ways of looking at life, there are 3 basic facts of life which one must be reconciled to at some point: 1. Life is hard. 2. Life is not fair. 3. … Continue reading 3 Immutable Laws of Life
This past summer, I was showing a man and his son how to look for monarch butterfly caterpillars so the boy could bring one home to raise. I walked right up to the long grass to point out what milkweed looks like (the only food monarch caterpillars eat is the leaves of plants in the milkweed family). The dad came to a stop about 5 … Continue reading Looking in the tall grass
Once upon a time, a dastardly villian took a girl out to sea and left her there in the water, in the dark. She knew she was in a struggle for her life. Although it was night and she could see nothing, she couldn’t tolerate just waiting. So she took off swimming in the direction she thought land was. She swam though the night until … Continue reading On Treading Water
