Tag Archives: personal

In traffic

people,

Yesterday while I was waiting for my bus to go to work, I watched a woman dressed oddly step off the curb across the street. The street in question is a six-lane major arterial that is nicknamed, among regional transportation professionals, “the little freeway.” It isn’t an actual highway, but it is very busy, and drivers routinely zoom along over the speed limit.

She stepped off right in front of a car. My heart jumped a beat. The driver swerved and missed her (luckily the next lane had an opening for him to swerve into). The driver tapped his horn. Just a quick tap, not a long, angry lean on the button thing. The woman flipped off the car and started shouting.

She did not retreat to the curb. She ambled further, crossing lanes, as cars stopped for the crazy person. She kept yelling angrily, occassionally flipping the bird in random directions as she craned her neck and tried to look over all the cars now stopped for her, as if she were trying to see if a bus was coming (there’s a big bus stop going the other way right across from the one I catch my work bus to).

Still yelling angrily, she ambled back to the curb and started walking toward the corner.

Traffic began moving again.

She got to the corner, and without waiting for the light or even looking, she stepped off in the crosswalk. Again, miraculalously, cars stopped. She crossed, getting honked at only one more time. Once she reached our side, she was still angrily yelling, apparently at some invisible person right in front of her.

I had a brief moment of worry that the crazy lady was going to try to get on our bus (which was one of the vehicles that had had to stop to let her cross). She didn’t; she stalked right through the crowd waiting for the bus, yelling all the way, without meeting anyone’s eyes.

Later, during lunch, I was reading my usual news sites. At about the same time this lady was playing chicken with traffic, in another part of town, a man was seen sitting in the middle of a road. His legs were crossed, elbows on hos knees, and his face buried in his hands as if he were crying. A couple pedestrian passers-by called to him to get out of the road. One stepped off the curb and approached him.

A car came careening down the road. The bypasser who had stepped off the curb jumped back. The car did not stop. It struck the man, killing him, and kept going as if nothing had happened. Police apprehended him a short distance away. The 23-year-old has been booked into jail for driving under the influence and vehicular homicide.

Reading that made my heart skip a beat again, and I marvelled, briefly, that the woman I watched had avoided a similar fate.

In the evening, shortly after I got home, my husband came into the house and told me about his day. The second thing he told me was that he had been run over on his way into work. He rides his bike to and from work. He said he was riding along in the bike lane, when a woman chatting on her cell phone suddenly turned right.

“I was banging on the front of the car after she stopped, trying to get her to back up, because my leg was pinned under my bike, which was pinned under her car.”

He insisted he was uninjured, and I couldn’t prove otherwise. Amazingly, all he had to do for the bike was replace his front tire. There’s a bicycle repair shop right next to his place of work.

He rode the bike home from work.

Three times, yesterday, traffic incidents made my heart skip a beat.

Of the stories, the one that still amazes me most is the crazy lady who was never struck. Not because she did anything to protect herself. It was entirely because a large number of drivers were alert enough to see her and stop.

The saddest is the guy killed by the drunk driver. Why was he sitting in the rode? Was he mentally ill or severely impaired and just didn’t realize where he was? Was there some sort of medical issue playing out? Was he hoping to get killed? We’ll never know.

The one that most frightens me, of course, is my husband’s accident. Unlike the others, he was right where he was supposed to be: obeying the laws, wearing his helmet, flashing lights on his bicycle, the whole thing. He came only inches from injury or far worse because a driver was paying more attention to something other than her driving.

I don’t tell him I love him often enough.

A round-up of mundania

life

Or what passes for mundania in my life.

The last few weekends our friend, Sky, came down to use my poster printer. After wasting several hours trying to figure out why the print quality was so bad, our friend Anthony, who was hanging out with us, showed Sky a dialog box on him computer to select print quality. A real Derpy moment for us all. Still, the posters are gorgeous.

Starting some time before that, Michael (my husband) had been asking what happened to the button maker. He wanted to use it for a project for an upcoming convention. I had vaguely remembered it being in the bedroom, but hadn’t been able to find it. Continue reading A round-up of mundania →

Old shoes

life,

I have a bad habit regarding old shoes. Though it’s really just another manifestation of my packrat tendencies.

I hang onto shoes after I replace them. I don’t intend to accumulate a bunch of unused pairs of shoes. My thinking is usually, “these still have some wear in them, and if my new shoes get damaged or something, I can use these temporarily.”

That would be fine if my next step was to toss the older pair that the now-old pair was bought to replace, but I don’t. One reason is that the old shoes tend to vanish into the closet or under the bed, and I slowly forget about them. So things will trundle on this way for long periods of time until (usually while cleaning out the closet or something similar) I discover a bunch of pairs of old shoes. It’s always a surprise just how many pairs there are in the stash.

But even the hanging onto one pair just in case is a bit silly. There are people who only own one pair of shoes at a time, but I’m not one of them. I try to keep one pair of very nice dress shoes for those rare occasions that one needs to dress up, and a pair of faux dress shoes for the office, a pair of sturdy shoes for those times one is digging in the garden, helping a friend move, et cetera, and a pair of casual, comfy shoes for just general running around. And since I was permanently placed on a no-carb diet by my doctors, I have a tendency to get flare-ups of gout every now and then, so I have a pair of sandal-like shoes that pass for regular shoes, but that I can actually get my feet into when one is badly swollen with gout.

So, in the event that a pair of shoes gets damaged or soaked or something, I have several other pairs of “current” shoes that I can wear until I replace the damaged ones, without resorting to any old pairs.

I know this, but convincing my inner packrat is hard. And when I pick up a new pair of shoes, it’s too easy to worry about getting rid of the old ones later. Which quickly turns into forgetting that they are even there, and so on.

Of course, I think the paltry three pairs of old shoes I discovered yesterday pales in comparison to how many old shoes of my husband’s are kicking around the bedroom, but that isn’t an excuse.

I need to toss the old ones. Then I won’t be standing in a glass house if I mention his. Right?

Too young to remember

life, people, ,

“You’re probably too young to remember…” was a phrase that sometimes I dreaded. Other times it signaled a bit of a history lesson I would find interesting.

I’m not entirely happy with how often I find myself using that line. It’s just a natural consequence of getting older. But that’s the problem. We’re not socialized to be happy about getting older.

I’ve known people who got quite radical and angry when they heard that phrase. “It’s nothing more than an ageist attempt to disempower me for being young!” Which sometimes it can be, but most of the time it is simply a literal statement of fact: you weren’t alive when such and such happened, so you have no personal memories of the event.

I read the phrase this morning on a few news blogs because the man who played the clown host of a morning children’s show that was popular in the 60s and 70s died last night.

I don’t have the excuse of being too young to remember the glory days of his show, but I don’t remember them. It was a show produced and seen only on a Seattle channel, and when I was young enough to be in the target age, I lived far, far away. So I’m just as detached as a bunch of much younger people about this. I can understand, in the abstract, how people feel, but I may never quite get it.

He never completely retired, continuing to make public appearances, raise money for charity, and so on, showing up in his patchwork painted limosine. By random chance earlier this year I nearly attended his final public appearance. I was buying salmon at the wild salmon market at fisherman’s terminal and confused that there was a giant crowd of people, and a bunch were wearing red clown noses. Then, as I was driving home, I passed his limo going the other way.

The memories of some experiences we have sometimes carry far more emotional weight and importance to us years after the fact than we expect them to. And that can be hard to explain to another person. When we describe it, even to us, it sounds silly. So he told some jokes and acted silly on screen. And you watched it every single morning when you were supposed to be getting ready for school. And?

But we all have experiences like that. It might be a family ritual, or a thing we used to do in church, or a favorite food at a chain restaurant.

In the abstract it is no big deal. But the human heart doesn’t live in the abstract.

Rough, manly sport

news, people, ,

On the first day of school my eighth grade year, instead of having each of us go to our final period class at the end of the day, they had all the girls go to the library for an “assembly,” while all the football players went to the gym for a pre-practice meeting. And they told the boys not going out for football to report to the math teacher’s room.

It was a small town middle school: sixth, seventh, and eighth grade totaling a bit less than 200 kids, about half of them boys. There were only eight boys out of that 100 who were not going out for football. So the eight of us sat in the room, not sure exactly why we were there, or what we were supposed to do.

And then the principal walked in.

Continue reading Rough, manly sport →

Esteemages, Self or Otherwise, part #314

life, , , ,

I was having a wide-ranging talk with a friend last night, and I found myself quoting another friend. “There’s a part of me that lives in constant fear that other people are going to figure out that I’m just faking it. That I’m not really all grown up, et cetera.”

And he said he is continually amazed (and somewhat heartened) at how many people he thinks of as pretty accomplished confess to that feeling. “It’s sort of comforting to know I’m not the only one.”

The thing is, there’s another part of me, possibly a bigger part, that is probably the world’s most arrogant man imaginable. That part of me is absolutely convinced that there is not a single problem in the world—heck, in the universe!—that I can’t fix, if I just have the time. That part of me knows it can figure out anything, just given some time to study the situation.

And somewhere in between is a practical part of me that knows some problems are intractable. But it can only reign in the arrogant one with the argument that we have to pick our battles. We don’t have time to solve everything, and besides, we should have some fun every now and then.

I don’t completely understand how the arrogant guy and the “I don’t know what I’m doing!” guy live in the same head, but I’ve had to come to accept it.

This morning I had the following epiphany: I know that there are things I’m really good it. Even “I don’t know what I’m doing!” me knows that we are freaky good at diagnosing certain kinds of computer problems and finding work-arounds. I know it. I’m constantly doing it at work. I receive frequent compliments and expressions of gratitude from other people for helping them with these things.

But, there’s that niggling suspicion that the reason so few other people are good at it is not because it is the result of a particular talent, but more because it isn’t really that important. Everyone else secretly knows that there will always be one idiot savant who actually can fix these weird issues (or at least show you how to recover your work and make the application produce what you need). It’s not worth their time to learn how to think like this and do those things, see?

Objectively, I know that isn’t true, but this comes from that irrational part of the brain. There is always going to be that doubt that these things I’m good at aren’t anywhere near as difficult or important as they seem to me.

There’s also the fact that I don’t want to turn into the arrogant jerk all the time. There are plenty of them out there, already. So the practical me understands the value of that self-doubt. Self-esteem unchecked is bad for myself, people around me, and the world at-large. Unchecked self-doubt is pretty destructive, too. There needs to be a balance.

Acknowledge your own talents. When you do something, do it with confidence, but never forget that you can make mistakes. And when those mistakes happen, don’t despair, don’t deny, don’t ignore. Fix them.

Turn-overs

life, , ,

A couple days ago we learned that our old car, which we traded in the second Saturday of May when we bought the Outback, has apparently been sold.

I learned this because whoever bought it as been driving back and forth across the 520 bridge without a Good To Go™ pass beginning on May 27. So I was mailed a bill for their tolls. Continue reading Turn-overs →

Re-writing

writing,

One of the projects I’ve been spinning my wheels on for a few months is a novel, tentatively entitled The Trickster Entanglement. I’ve completed 7 of a planned 20 chapters, have much of chapter 8 drafted, and numerous scenes meant for later at least partially finished. (And I’ve had a rough draft of the climactic battle in chapters 18 & 19 done for a looooooooong time)

However, Entanglement is a sequel. The first novel in this planned series, The Trickster Apocalypse, has been in rewrite for a while. I had a short list of things I knew I still needed to fix, and then I need to go through the whole thing once more to track remaining loose ends.

So, I spent most of the weekend doing that. And then, in the middle of the day Sunday, I suddenly knew what the missing part of chapter 8 of the second book needed to be. A scene I hadn’t previously thought of that 1) moves one subplot forward, 2) ties said subplot quite firmly to the main plot and two other subplots, 3) points the way to chapter 10.

I think this trick has worked. Now I need to find one for each of the other stalled projects…

Sick and tired, for real!

life,

I keep getting very sleepy mid afternoon at work. Then, each night this week I have gone to sleep at least an hour earlier than usual. Last night it was nearly three hours early.

And then I over slept this morning and had to scramble to get to work.

My symptoms have merely been “bad hayfever” all week, and given the steadily rising pollen count, that’s to be expected. But Sunday’s symptoms were clearly a cold, so I’m assuming I am still carrying a low level infection that is mostly being lost in the noise of the hay fever. Except for the sleepiness part.

Oh, and yesterday I kept making stupid little mistakes at work. All day. So today I’m making little checklists for everything. It slows me down. But I am ahead of schedule on all my current projects, so slowing down to quadruple-check things for a couple of days isn’t going to hurt anything.

This has had the side effect of not leaving me much time in the evening to attack my writing problem or to finish the Omnibus layout I need to complete. Or collect that software I need to send to Mom.

*sigh*

Why I hate hay fever reason #5321

life, ,

I have hay fever. Lots of people do. When I was last assessed by an allergist, the verdict was that it was only mild to moderately severe, depending. Most people with hay fever are allergic to only a few species or categories of pollen.

Not me.

I seem to be allergic to every pollen, spore, and mold there is. Which means that in Seattle’s climate, hay fever season runs from mid- February through mid-December. And even longer if we have an especially mild winter.

So during this time of year I have congested sinuses 7 days a week. It would also be sinus headaches 7 days a week if not for my prescription allergic medication. As it is, I have sinus headaches, itchy eyes, and so forth, a couple days out of every week. Usually brought on by an increase in overall pollen count or simply a new species coming into bloom.

In other words, I feel as if I’m coming down with a cold every single day.

Which means I never know I’m sick (and thus possibly contagious) until many days after it starts.

Sunday morning we both had really bad sinus headaches. I’d had severe enough symptoms to require over-the-counter cold tablets on top of my usual meds for three days leading up to Sunday. Sunday was much worse, as there were also body aches and no energy. I kept falling asleep throughout the day. Which meant I was monopolizing the shared washer and dryer downstairs all day, because I was late to swap out loads again and again.

At one point I felt as if my head was horribly sick–all swollen, itchy, and feverish feeling?–while my body had another ailment altogether, achey and cold, oh, so cold. As if I were a member of the species of the king and queen of the moon from Baron Munchhausen with detachable heads.

I don’t know if I’d been able to do anything different if I had known sooner I was sick. But I’d like to think so…