Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Archives for July 2005

Free At Last

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I think one of my favorite things about being in my thirties is the fact that I no longer feel like I have to pretend about who I really am (or am not) in order to get people to like me. This was not always the case.

Back during our first year of marriage my husband, who is himself an Eagle Scout, worked as a volunteer with a Boy Scout troop and I, caught up in the flush of wanting to impress my new husband, agreed to go along on one of his troop’s camping trips.

Important Side Note: If you have never been camping before, I would HIGHLY recommend that your first trip not be with a troop of scouts, because any points you feel you have gained by being “a really cool wife” will quickly fade when you realize that, compared to everyone else on the trip including elementary school students, trail dogs, etc., you feel like a giant, incompetent wuss.

I really should have known that I was in over my head when my husband and I went to the outdoor store to buy me some gear. We did not go there to buy a cool backpack, or a kicky bandanna, or a nifty trail tool. No,we went so that I could buy my very own, neon orange, plastic poo shovel.

Things kind of took a turn for the worse once we had hiked up the trail to the spot where we were going to camp that night. We had foolishly drunk all the water we’d packed, so my husband went down to the river, filled our two plastic bottles with water, ran some iodine through the bottles, and handed one to me. I looked at the bottle, looked at him, and said, “It’s brown, And. There. Are. Bugs. In. It!” He looked at me and said, (and please bear in mind that he had only been a husband for a little under a year and hadn’t yet developed the sensitivity that he has now after nine years of marriage), “Well, the bugs are dead. And we have this lemonade mix to add to it!”

Even now, eight years later, I can’t think of this story without experiencing total incredulity at his response.  And even now, eight years later, my husband insists that we would not have even had this problem, if only he had packed a darker colored drink mix.

Happily I did recover enough from this trip to start going out on day hikes with my husband and our friends. As a matter of fact I was pretty impressed with myself on our last trip, because not only was I wearing my very own pair of official hiking boots, but they were so well used that we had to patch them together with duct tape.

(Yes of course we had duct tape-I was hiking with three engineers! As a matter of fact, the only reason that I didn’t have to sleep suspended in between two trees in some kind of jury-rigged duct tape shelter was the fact that the other spouse who came on this trip was five months pregnant.)

However, there are still some hurdles to overcome before I can consider going on another camping trip, as is clearly illustrated by the following conversation I had with my husband the last time he went camping.

10:00 pm. The phone rings.
Me: “Hello?”
My husband: “Hey, Jenny. I need your help.”
Me: (panicking at all the possible emergencies that could befall campers, and wondering just exactly where I can rent an emergency extraction helicopter at 10 pm on a Saturday night) “Oh my gosh, are you all right?!”
My husband: “What? Oh, yeah, we’re fine. I just need you to get the Almanac so you can tell us the geographical size of Liechtenstein in square miles.”

Silly me-what was I thinking?! These were highly trained, highly capable, highly intelligent men. Clearly the only emergency situation in which they could possibly have found themselves would be to be without immediate access to the geographical data of tiny, landlocked, central European countries.

So anyway, the jury is still out on the whole camping thing, but between you and me I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Things That Make You Say, “What?!”: v.2.0

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

As hard as it is to believe, school will be starting here again in the next 3 or 4 weeks, and it will be time for me to start tutoring again. In honor of my imminent return to work, I offer these “What?!” moments gathered from my own past work experiences.

From my work as a tutor…

Student: “Will you take me to get my belly button pierced?”
Me: “No.”
Student: “Why not? I really thought you would.”
Me: “What?! Why?!”
Me: Performing a frantic mental review of every interaction I’d previously had with this student, wondering how I’d possibly given out the message that I was someone who would accompany teenagers as they voluntarily allowed others to drive very sharp needles through various parts of their body.

From my work as a bookseller…

9:00 am: The store opens.
9:01 am: An outrageously incensed gentleman approaches the info desk, where I, of course, am on duty.
Customer: “Hey! Last night I was reading a book, and I left it on that table over there. Now it’s gone. What happened to it?!”
Me: (assuming my Kindergarten Teacher tone): ” Well, at night, after we close, we put all the books back on the shelves.”
Me: looking slowly around the store to convey the subtle message that we, in fact, keep all our books on shelves and not in piles on the furniture.

December, in the middle of the holiday shopping madness
A customer corners me in the back of the store where I am unsuccessfully trying to blend into the romance section.
Customer: “Excuse me, ma’am, but where is your display of luggage ?”
Me: stunned into silence
Me: (certain I’d misheard somehow) “Um, excuse me?”
Customer: “Your luggage. My son was just up at your other store, and he told me all about the great luggage he saw there.”
Me: struggling so hard to keep a straight face that I’m sure my eyeballs are going to pop right out of my head and drop onto the floor
Me: searching desperately for a tone that does not at all suggest that I am in any way mocking the customer
Me: “I’m sorry. We don’t sell any luggage.”

There was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING I could say to convince her that we, the BOOKsellers, working in the BOOKstore, were not secretly hiding a cache of incredible luggage in the back, selfishly hoarding it for our own present-giving needs. But luckily for me, her poor, embarrassed husband could take the humiliation no longer and eventually pulled her away.

And to close I leave you with this statement, which I was told actually formed part of a company’s “Visions and Values”.  According to this document they were actively seeking employees with, “the ability to make quick decisions in the absence of facts and information.”

Man, I Feel Like A Woman!

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I was thinking about the whole idea of political correctness as I set out this morning to buy some poultry feed. It was kind of an odd thing for me to be doing, given that we don’t actually own any poultry or live on a farm, and doing something so outside of my normal routine got my mental wheels spinning.

From what I can tell, the message of political correctness seems to be that while we respect and honor each other’s differences we don’t actually focus on them when we interact with each other, but rather focus on our common humanity. While this is a nice idea in theory, I have found in my life that I do occasionally need to take some differences into account, especially when I find myself in an extremely masculine environment like, for example, a feed store, and it is painfully obvious that I do not fit in.

My personal M.O. in a situation like this is to morph into “helpless female” mode: big eyes, self-deprecating smile, and a speech that starts out with some kind of comment like, “Well, my husband usually takes care of this for me, but today he sent me and I really don’t know what I’m doing.” This is not at all politically correct, but it is extremely effective. This is why I am able to do things like buy poultry feed, get our knives sharpened, talk to the internet customer service people, and get our car serviced. In these situations I am more than happy to let people who actually know what they are doing tell me what the best thing is for me to do, and then pay them for their services or products.

There are some people with whom this approach doesn’t work, such as one gentleman I met while I was working at a construction company. He firmly believed that because I was female and was working in the office, it was my God-Given Responsibility to make him coffee. Now, I don’t drink coffee, so it never occurred to me to make any (not to mention the fact that I don’t actually know how). Also, I have found that people who do drink coffee can be very particular about how it is made, and it is better to just let them do it themselves. But when I tried to explain this to him, this was his response: “Well, my wife didn’t help me build our house, but she still gets to live there.”

This approach also seems not to work with techo-guys who work at computer stores, as I discovered last fall when my husband and I had to make some technology related purchases. We decided to split up the list and I was deputized to go and get one particular item. I memorized exactly what he told me to ask for, went up to the counter, turned on my “vibe”, and …nothing. Not only nothing, but I was actually passed by at least three different sales guys. However, the second that my husband started walking in my direction, salespeople FLEW over from all corners of the store, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to sell him something. (Not that I am bitter).

It is also fun to flip this around and to not act like a stereotypical female with someone who is expecting it, like my mom. She grew up in the 1950’s when women went to finishing school, wore gloves, discussed etiquette, and always had a hot dinner on the table for their husbands even if they also had a job outside the home. When I was first married she and I had a lot of conversations like this:

My mom: “Well, I’d better let you go now so you can get dinner ready.”

Me: “I’m not cooking.” Or even better, “It’s [my husband’s] turn to cook tonight.”

My mom: Deep gasp, followed by silence, followed by a quiet, “Oh.”

As Shania Twain sings, “The best thing about being a woman/is the prerogative to have a little fun.”

And, I do.

Missed Communication

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Sometimes I think it would be nice if all personal interactions were as easily understood as those between me and my cats.

When they are happy they rub their head against my leg. When they are put out or indignant they poo in the tub. When they want attention they insert themselves in between me and whatever else I’m doing, and stick their furry little hiney right in my face to make sure that I inhale the maximum amount of fur possible and am unable to focus on anything but them. When they’re really angry they come and sit on my desk while I’m working, but facing away from me with their tail switching back and forth angrily, while aiming a malevolent glare in my direction. (Well, as malevolent as a 6 pound ball of grey fluff can be).

But when humans get involved, communication gets a lot more complicated.

I was thinking about that earlier this week as I was having lunch with my husband. He was upset about a news story he’d recently heard. It involved a “hot button” issue, the kind that causes all connections to the rational, logical part of your brain to shut down and instead leads you directly into highly charged, emotional (over)reacting. Which then leads to conversations where the people around you, who are not directly involved in your conversation, could accidentally overhear certain words or phrases and give you concerned looks as they begin to edge cautiously toward the door.

About six years ago I found myself in a similar situation, but due to the extremely different emotional climate in which we were all living back then, this time it was really funny rather than a cause for concern. But it won’t seem so at first, so just bear with me.

Six years ago this summer my family gathered to say goodbye to my grandmother, who was dying of cancer. Her wish was that when she died, she simply be wrapped in a white sheet before she was placed in her coffin. This was simple, and beautiful, and did not at all take into consideration the fact that this would require there to be A Person In Charge Of Sheets. Since my mom is the oldest child in her family, and I am the oldest child in my family, this duty fell to the two of us.

So we headed off to the local Giant Shopping Mart, but unfortunately there was no section labeled, “Linens for the Soon-To-Be-Deceased”, or, “Easy Coffin Accessories”, so we were forced to stand in the middle of the sheet and towel aisle and have the following conversation:

“Do you think a queen sized sheet will be big enough to wrap all the way around her?”

“I don’t know. I think it depends on whether the body is laid end-to-end or diagonally.”

“Will a top sheet be enough to wrap the body in, or do you think we need a fitted sheet too?”

Are you imagining what you would be thinking if you overheard this conversation? Because my mom and I sure were. As if the situation weren’t stressful enough already, we decided to go ahead and come up with a list of all the ways someone could misinterpret what they were hearing and decide to report us to the authorities. (Sometimes being an avid reader with a powerful imagination can actually be a disadvantage).

I’m happy to say that we did survive that shopping trip, but maybe you can see why I sometimes envy cats their simple, direct method of communication. Although I somehow doubt that coughing up a hairball and then rolling over to lick my private parts would really have been an appropriate response to this situation.