TV Time

The television (like radio, but you can see as well as hear what's happening!) has come back into my life of late as cable was hooked up in my house a couple weeks ago. I've never had a lot of TV in my life, so it has always felt like a treat to sit down and watch it. When I was a kid, we were always really excited to stay in hotels on vacation because they had all of these channels with endless programming. It didn't matter if the beach or some museum or national park was nearby, vacations were great because the TV was constantly going when we were in the hotel. It didn't even really matter what we were watching. It was just an exciting source of 24-hour entertainment.

These days, I stick almost entirely to "educational" programs. I put "educational" in quotes because my husband and some others in this world somehow don't view "What Not To Wear" as an educational program even thought I've definitely gotten a lot of ideas out of it and it is non-fiction. The channels that I have memorized what station they are thus far are: 10-History, 35- HGTV, 40-Food, 53-VH1, 59-E!, 60-Style, 271-Investigation Discovery, 272-National Geographic, 275-Biography, 276- History International. That'll give you a rough idea of what I watch.

Things I keep on watching programs about and shouldn't because they make me lie in bed at night terrified: serial killers, UFOs, haunted places. I can't help it because they're so fascinating and they aren't that scary when you're watching them, but man, when the lights are out in the house and I hear a bush scraping on the window in the bedroom...uhuhulllll (that's approximately the sound I make when scared, give me a break). It's very nice to have a husband sleeping next to you at these times, but they're still horrible.

On a completely unrelated note: I hate that on U-Hauls they always have some sort of factoid written on the side of them about the place that's pictured in a full paragraph of small print that is impossible to read if you ever see a U-Haul on the road. I always try, but never get farther than "Did you know...Toronto is one of only two cities that" before it's too late and then I wonder for the rest of my life what interesting thing I could have known about Toronto (for as we all know, I'm kind of a trivia junkie).

Changes

So things are doing okay now. I've had some time to read some books (more on this later) and concentrate on moving details (we're moving to American Fork, more on this later) and work out other things and life is decent enough. I plan on going to UVSC starting in the fall and hopefully finding full-time work for this summer.

And I just wanted to apologize for the ugly state of things on my blog the last few days. I've had some technical difficulties and limited internet access lately. I've just changed over to a new template for now and when I have the time I'll tweak it into something that suits me better (Trapper, I'm still interested in doing background fun with you).

The Day I Got Fired

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I did pretty well with my collections, stayed pretty busy, looked pretty. Until around 5:30 pm. My dear manager asked me to come with her to speak with HR and there were the termination papers and here's a box with the contents of your desk and your insurance is still good until the end of the month and I was out before I even knew what was going on.

I went to go pick up the car (we bought a car a little bit ago, still getting everything insured and registered on it) from the shop where it was being worked on with my box of belongings and just cried for a good long time. I was so shocked. I had to wait for 20 minutes or so at the car place, so I turned on the TV and flipped through the numerous program options until I found the most depressing channel I could (CSpan2) and stuck with that. I don't remember anything that happened on the TV, but do remember that that one "life's like an hour glass glued to the table, no one can find the rewind button now, so cradle your head in your hands" song was playing on the radio where the mechanics were working.

Now most people have never been fired from a job (at least most people who read this blog) so let me explain how it feels. It's exactly like being dumped. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's still how it is. It hurts and you wonder what you could've done differently to fix things and you don't want to find someone/somewhere else and you think about all the future plans that now will never happen and you knew there were problems but thought they were work-out-able and you listen to sad songs and purchase a huge ol' bad of Berry Colossal Crunch and forget which exit is yours when driving because you're so preoccupied with thoughts of loss and loneliness and you read Tess of the D'Ubervilles in one sitting and it's horrible. Well, slightly relieving, but horrible.

I was too sad to go home right away and have to speak to my darling husband about it so after I left the auto shop, I went to the pet store and held a little brown tabby kitten until I calmed down.

So maybe I'll go back to school...ugh, but I hate school. Or maybe I'll get another job...except I hate job searching. Or maybe I'll just sit around and live off the government...but I'll hate been unoccupied.

I was fired for tardiness/attendance issues. And had been so excited because having a car would help that so much. It's easy to be late to work when taking the bus. You miss the bus by a few seconds and it means you have to wait another 15 minutes. I wanted to drive the car to work every day.

I just really loved my job and was planning on staying there for the next couple years and had very little idea this was coming. That's all. Thanks for letting me cry to you.

Someone's little princess is hungry...will you help?

At my place of employment, we are currently participating in a food drive because we of course need to give back to the community that has provided so many suckers who want cheap websites throughout the years. In order to encourage us to donate food to this drive, numerous posters have been posted around the building with sad looking people and messages about how we need to help feed them. I noticed yesterday that, as far as I could tell, every person featured in these posters is white. I'm not really a racial equality activist sort (not that I don't think racial equality is important, it's just not an issue I personally get worked up about often), but I felt for a moment outraged that there were no other races featured on these posters.

I later realized, however, that as noble as my outrage may sound, they reason I even noticed was this: In my subconscious, I was just surprised that the hungry people aren't mostly Hispanic and black. Those are the poor people aren't they?

So apparently I'm the racist here.

Defining Childhood Moment #18

In November 1996, I was a public elementary school student learning to be a good United States citizen by having a mock presidential election. We learned tidbits about Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and then went into the little booths and selected who we wanted to be president of our great nation.

I proudly came home and told my parents that I had voted for Clinton. They told me they had voted for Dole and gave a little speech that was essentially about Republicans being better than Democrats. My parents probably don't remember giving this speech, but it was important to me. It was the first time I recall seriously thinking about politics. I learned that there were people who live solely off the government ("So paying taxes is kind of like fast offerings, that isn't bad is it?"); I learned that there are people who kill their babies before they are born ("There's no way that's legal; it's too sad."); I learned that there are people given jobs or college entrance because they were a race that was needed to meet quotas ("I didn't know anyone was racist anymore..."); I learned that there were males who wanted to marry males and females who wanted to marry females ("I don't know anyone like that, are you sure?"); I learned that some people want drug laws to be more lax ("But everyone knows drugs are bad, right?"). All sorts of things that I had never thought about before.

As my parents are fair people and rarely speak ill of anyone, I don't think this speech was as harsh as I remember it, but it seemed to me at the time that people who vote Democrat are bad people. I was ashamed. I also wondered about the prospects for eternal salvation for the next door neighbors who had an anti-Dole poster on their house. My parents had assured me that they were good people even though the mother was Jewish and the father was Unitarian or something and they didn't go to church much, so I knew they must have something going for them, but perhaps being Democrats would push them over the edge into the category of bad people.

Years down the road, the feelings of shame turned to feelings of pride. I had chosen on my own and gone against my own upbringing to choose who I personally thought was the best candidate. I was in elementary school and already establishing myself as a liberal thinker. Hooray for me!

But when I think about it seriously, I'm not kidding anyone. The reasons I remember picking Clinton over Dole are as follows:

1) He was the incumbent. I had seen President Clinton on TV several times while Dole was just some guy that I hadn't heard of until a few days before the election. I knew life was good at the time, and assumed that Clinton had something to do with that, so I didn't mind keeping him around.

2) I couldn't disassociate Bob Dole from Dole pineapples and one of the girls in our ballet carpool had once spilled Dole pineapple juice on the way to class and it was sticky and the back seat of the station wagon smelled really gross for a long time afterward. (I still can't drink pineapple juice, even though I have returned to my love of pineapple in general.) I could never vote for the horrible-smelling back seat of the station wagon.

God Concept

The other day I was listening to This American Life (excellent program, every time I listen to it I'm like, "Why don't I listen to this more often?") and they had this story about an Orthodox Jew who left the beliefs he'd grown up with because his hockey team lost a game that he had walked 14 miles to go see because it was on the Sabbath and he couldn't drive to get there. It was a pretty good tale, but the part that stuck with me was a conversation he and the person interviewing him had. It went something like this (and I'm completely paraphrasing because I couldn't find transcripts, but you'll get the idea):

Jew guy - I came from a kind of dysfunctional family with an over-bearing father, so when I'd go to Hebrew school and hear "Our Father who art in heaven", I'd be like "Don't tell me there's another one in heaven, he's bad enough at home!"

Interviewer - Interesting, as you say that, and I've never put this together in my life before, but my image of God is exactly like my image of my father, except bigger. Which is: he's usually not around; he'll sometimes take an interest; he means well; but mostly he's kind of like "you're on your own".

Jew guy - That's not mine; I wish that was mine. Mine was a God in Heaven lumbering around half-drunk, yelling at you and making rules that didn't make any sense.

As I was listening to this, I had a moment exactly like the one the interviewer had. I hadn't ever thought of it before, but my image of God is very close to my image of my father, but bigger. He's caring and loving, but sometimes over-bearing. Smart. Sense of humor. Plenty of rules, most of which turn out being good for me in the long run and some of which still don't make sense, but are mostly kept because I know I'll get in trouble. And for some reason, though there is no scriptural evidence for this whatsoever, I've always imagined God as a little stressed out all the time, and I'm pretty sure it's because that's how my dear father is.

I wanted to post this thought because I want to ask a question of you readers: Is your idea of God a pretty close match to your father? It seems to me that most people would find this true, but I need a wider pool to test this out.

Name Googling

So it's important, of course, to google one's own name once in a while to see if anything comes up. Upon a recent check of my maiden name, I found the usual: scholarship stuff, facebook, etc. The state science fair roster from when I was in 7th grade doesn't come up anymore, but used to. So nothing too exciting. Until recently. I found my name in this article. I don't know why this is so exciting to me, as it's obviously talking crap about the company I work for, but it's kind of cool.

I looked up the customer who wrote that post and what happened was he had two accounts with us and sent in a written cancellation request specifically for one of them but not for the other (the email that he quotes in his post was not the first cancellation request he sent in, the initial one was not nearly as clear that he wanted to cancel both accounts). So his other site was up and he still needed to pay hosting until we received a cancellation request for the other one. I got to be the lucky one to call this guy and tell him he was past-due on hosting. Even if he thought we had canceled the other account, we rendered the service of hosting his site and he definitely owed the money. And I'll have you all know that I eventually got him to pay (after plenty of bugging him, but that's essentially what my job is, so there you have it). It was a hard-earned $2 commission or whatever 5% of the small amount he had past-due was.

It's funny, I'm generally much more of a mercy-over-justice-type person, but I love my job.

Another Thought On The Personality Test

In the previous post, I mentioned that I took a Myers-Briggs personality test at work and found that I am an INFP. A certain part of the profile I received makes me wonder: there's a list of famous INFPs at the end. Now, it's safe to assume that they didn't actually have these famous people take the test, but I guess I'm okay with labeling some of them as INFPs, because we have plenty of evidence to support what these people's personalities were like (these include Oscar Wilde, Mr. Rogers, Princess Di, Kurt Cobain, Carl Rogers, and Neil Diamond, in case you care). Some, however, (Mary, the mother of Jesus? Homer? St. Luke? St. John? Virgil?) are quite sketchy. When a person's biography starts out with something like "Legend has it that...", there's no way we have enough information that we can assign one of sixteen Myers-Briggs personality types to them. So dumb.

But I suppose they probably just put these things at the end so that you feel good about yourself anyway ("This person was successful and we had the same personality type, so I can be successful, too!"). It's kind of like the Matchmaker things in high school (remember those, you former Burroughs students reading this?), when they tell you that you are compatible with Josh Hartnett (I'm pretty sure that's who I got one of those years), so that you can feel okay about the fact that everyone on the actual-human-beings section of your list is either a huge nerd or someone you know nothing about.

Man, I think I have my Matchmakers in my old yearbooks at home somewhere. I'll have to remember to look at those next time I'm in Ridgecrest. All I remember is Spencer Witt was #10 on my list in 10th grade and he didn't believe me because I wasn't on his list and I had to explain to him why I could have him on my list but not be on his list and he somehow couldn't get it and it infuriated me. Also, I would always have the Mormon boys, which also infuriated me but I'm not really sure why.

Musings/News

Musings on my Trident spearmint gum:

1. The label proudly declares "Now with Xylitol!" Now perhaps I'm a moron, but I definitely had to look up what the heck xylitol was in order to know why that was so great. It sounds toxic. I hate advertising like that, because you know that the average gum consumer isn't going to know what the heck it is, but they'll figure that since they have it written on the label, "it must be something good, so I should buy that". It's like when shampoos say "pH-balanced" on the label. All it means is that the shampoo isn't going to eat away your scalp and has a normal pH. Every shampoo is pH-balanced or nobody would use it, it's not something to be way proud of. But it sounds impressive. I hate that.
2. I know I won't be able to adequately describe why this is the case, but the new EZ-Close-Pack was really difficult to figure out. Buy a package of Trident gum and you'll see what I mean.

In other news:

1. I finally got around to officially changing my name to my married name on Monday. It feels good. Plus now I can set up direct deposit again (my bank account is in my married name, but my work won't write me a check to that name without documentation), which is so much better than the usual method of having a large check in my purse for days doing no good while the bank account dips dangerously low and then eventually giving in and taking the hour to walk to the bank during lunch.
2. We did a personality-type quiz in our department and then had a discussion about what each personality can contribute to the team in a meeting yesterday. Apparently I'm INFP. After reading the profile for this personality-type, I was like "Yep, that's definitely me," but I sometimes wonder if these sorts of things are really no more than a step above Horoscopes. Everyone has aspects of each personality-type in them, and the descriptions are all vague enough that you see yourself in whatever you end up with. Because when I read a profile of a Scorpio, I sit there and think "Yep, that's definitely me," as well.

Cutting It Out of My Vocabulary

I had a thought today whilst playing Wii Golf that I'm surprised I haven't had before. It will change my life, in it's own small way, and I am forever a different person. The thought is this: "Subpar" is a really stupid word. I've used it many times to describe restaurants, albums, coworkers, etc. But really, in the game of golf (which I believe is the origin of the word "par", though I could be completely wrong on that) isn't it a good thing to be below par?

I thought for a moment that using my own version, "surpar", would be a good idea, but a) it would get weird looks, and b) it sounds like a good thing even though it should be a bad thing.

Last thought on the word "subpar" before I erase it from my mind: is it actually it's own word? My spellcheck tells me it should be "sub par", but after some quick research, it's written as "subpar" on several reputable sites. A google battle shows that "subpar" gets 3 million-something hits and "sub par" gets 2 million-something hits, so maybe both are correct?