Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

The Beginning Of My Torrid Love Affair With The Blackberry

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(Originally published February 17, 2006)

I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there just are not words to describe just how much I love my Black Berry.

I bought my Black Berry last year as a birthday gift to myself, and I have enjoyed it so much over the past year that sometimes it causes me to spontaneously burst out into verse:

“I think that I shall never see/a poem as lovely as my Black Berry.”

or song:

“Oh Black Berry, Oh Black Berry, how lovely is thy keypad.”

My Black Berry is like a tiny, tangible talisman of love. Whenever I hear it vibrating away as it receives some email I think, “Hooray! Someone wants to talk to me!

Of course to hear my husband describe it, my Black Berry love is less adoration and more addiction, but what does he know? Sure I like to have it near me at all times so as to instantly be able to access my emails, even to the point of keeping it right here on my desk with me as I work on my computer. And yeah, so maybe I did ask my husband to drive me down the mountain on which my in-laws’ house is located on Christmas Day so as to be able to receive a signal, despite the fact that they have wireless Internet connection at their house and I could technically do whatever I wanted or needed to do on my laptop. And yes, perhaps there have been times when I’ve awoken in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and have been seized with the uncontrollable urge to check my email despite the fact that I don’t actually know anyone who emails me important information at 3 am.

And don’t even get me started on Instant Messaging and Text Messaging! (Oops! Please excuse me for a moment while I wipe the drool off of my computer screen.)

But anyway, the point of all of this is that now I can stay in constant communication with all the people I like without actually having to speak with them on the phone. Because, and this has been a deep, dark secret of mine for a LONG time, I am a “phonophobiac”. Yes, that’s right. I am afraid of calling people on the phone.

For a long time I was even terrified of having to place my fast food order into those speaker boxes they have in the drive-through line. But I was soon cured of that because, let’s face it, what doesn‘t an order of McDonald’s French fries cure?

If you’re reading this and thinking, “What?!”, don’t worry. You’re not alone. I’ve only met one other person who understands this fear of mine. Everyone else just looks at me as if I’ve just said something like, “You know, I’ve found that having to breathe in and out on a regular basis is really just too much for me to deal with.”

I recently tried to explain this to my family, but they just gave me The Look. You know, the one that says, “I hear the words you’re saying, but they’re…just…not…making…any…sense.” (Incidentally, this is a look that I am VERY familiar with, as I frequently see this same expression on the faces of my tutoring students.)

“So,” ventured my dad slowly, struggling to understand what I was saying, “is it getting any better?”

“No,” I sighed, rolling my eyes so hard that I temporarily severed important connections to my brain, “the whole point is that I finally realize that I don’t have to get better. It is OK for me to be this way. I am finally coming out as a phonophobiac!”

“So, you’re embracing it,” offered my brother, who is himself a Professional in The Art Of Being Unreachable By Phone.

“Ex-actly!”

And all was well for the next hour or so, until I heard my mother calling up the stairs for me to pick up the phone so I could talk to not one, not two, but THREE people on the phone ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

So you’d better believe that the gods of irony are going to be hearing from me about this, just as soon as I figure out how to reach them electronically. Um, does anyone know how to IM the Universe?

My Declaration Of Independence (Which Turned Out To Be Quite Long)

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I have been in a very quiet, contemplative place lately, watching as some new energy percolates and rises to the surface, and I am now in a place where I am ready to declare independence for myself. I am declaring independence from the belief that I have to make my life match up to anyone else’s definitions of success for my life, as well as from all the places in my mind telling me that my life should somehow be in any way different from the way it is right now.

About six years ago I decided to leave the work-a-day world and go into business for myself. I’ve spent a large portion of those years with different classes, workshops, books, seminars, and programs designed for entrepreneurs. It’s all great information, especially since I was on a pretty steep learning curve. But I’ve reached the point now where those products are actually keeping me out of my life.

I realized that what I genuinely desire, and what the people who produce those products desire, are not the same thing. And I’ve been making myself wrong and feeling guilty for wanting what I truly want, and not wanting what they say I should want. Let me explain.

After six years of trying out a lot of different possibilities, I realized that my goal in life is not to be a worker/earner. If I had to give a name to my “reason for being”, I would say that I am a spiritual contemplative/mystic/writer/professional dreamer. So I like working about 10-12 hours a week, with lots of time left to create a nurturing home, take care of the errands of daily life, maintain my connections with other people, think, observe, process life, and create.

I like that the way I contribute to and help change the world is through working on myself, and transforming my connections to the people around me, one encounter at a time.

Unfortunately, even in the personal growth/New Thought community, that business model is never really presented as a viable option. It seems to me that whenever people are talking about things like The Secret, and The Law Of Attraction, and other principles of Deliberate Creation, the emphasis is always on BIGGER, and MORE. If the concept of “enough” is ever addressed, it only seems to be in the manner of finding a way to temporarily let what you have be “enough”, only so it can move you to a different place where you can finally get MORE. There doesn’t seem to be much work addressing the question of genuinely being satisfied and feeling like you have enough.

And that is where I started to feel disconnected from the popular concept of personal growth, because I could no longer ignore the fact that I am really satisfied with my life right now.

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Thank Goodness For Accountability

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in the form of my husband.

Today before he left for work he looked me in the eye and said, “Remember-you are still recovering from a serious illness. You are not well.”

And it was a good thing he reminded me, because I’d already begun to hear the siren song of a little voice in my head that said, “You know, I bet it would be totally fine for me to vacuum the entire house today all by myself.” And I believed it.

What is that-that part of me that has absolutely no connection whatsoever to reality?

I really don’t know.

All I know is, that part of me will not be vacuuming today. Lying on the couch and watching NCIS on DVD is probably a much better option for me.

Footloose And Fancy Free

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Recently I was talking to my mom about my cousin, who just had her first child. Everyone is fine now, but apparently she experienced some pretty severe complications during and after the birth.

Despite all the problems, “apparently she’s going to do it again one day,” said my mom.

Me (shuddering): No thank you!

My Mom: Well, you can just adopt all your children.

Me: I’m not having children.

My Mom: Well, you can just adopt them like at age 3, after all the messy stuff’s out of the way.

Me: It’s not just the birth-it’s the having them around all the time that I don’t want. I like being free. I like that I can pick up and go at anytime. I’m like a gypsy.

Explosive, hysterical laughter from the other end of the phone.

My Mom (heavily sarcastic): A gypsy with a Blackberry.

Me: I didn’t say I wasn’t well-connected. I just said that I was free.

Help. I’ve Fallen And I Can’t Get Up

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Remember that wonderful commercial from the 80’s?

Remember how we would mock the poor, helpless woman on the floor?

Remember how we become that which we mock? No? Yeah, me neither, until yesterday when I became that woman.

Ten minutes before I was supposed to get on the phone for an important interview regarding the next creative project I’m planning to take on I stood up, my entire lower back seized up, and I was on the kitchen floor. And I couldn’t get up.

I had to crawl on my hands and knees over to the phone to call my husband at work and tell him that, yeah, basically, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

I had to lie on the kitchen floor to put on my pants. My husband had to put my shoes on for me.

But those of you who know me will not be at all surprised to know that I delayed my husband’s homecoming and my doctor’s appointment in order to give myself enough time to complete my phone interview, because DAMMIT, I AM GONNA ACE THIS THING!

The interview did go really well, and I passed with flying colors. Apparently the extra added challenge of having to find a way to support my own body weight that involved neither sitting nor standing for 30 minutes just gave me the extra oomph! I needed to sail right through.

But it is times like these that makes me wonder how I was ever allowed to be the one in charge of, say, a plant, much less my very own, alleged, grown-up self.

Magical Thinking-2, Reality-0

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(For those of you who’ve been following my saga with the imaginary snakes.)

Last week I tried to explain to one of our friends, who also has his pilot’s license, why I just was not OK with him taking my husband up for a ride in his plane:

“It has nothing to do with you (and it really doesn’t). It’s just that deep down in my heart, I truly don’t believe that planes should be able to fly. It really feels like that violates all the laws of nature. I think that the only reason it’s worked so far is that we’re all under some kind of magical spell. And it’s only a matter of time before the spell ends, and all the planes in the world come crashing down.”

Hi. My Name Is Jenny, And I Am A Phonophobiac

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Today I was reading one of my favorite bloggers, Mighty Maggie, and it just struck me that there are so many similarities between us, we could really almost be Twins Separated At Birth.

1. She is a creative person

2. Married to a techno-geek

3. Is DEEPLY passionate about the correct use of grammar and punctuation

4. Feels that their Roomba is their pet. (I strongly feel that our TIVO is the 6th member of our family, and will frequently give my husband updates on its behavior when he gets home from work, especially if I feel he needs to discipline it. As in, “Dude, I think you need to have some words with the TIVO because it was really giving me some LIP today.”

5. And she does NOT like to talk on the phone. She is currently trying to hire someone to fill her position before she goes on maternity leave, and describes it like this: “But there is a reason I posted the job online and only left my EMAIL ADDRESS. There is nothing in the ad implying that they should google my company until they find our phone number, call me up and interrupt my very important blog reading schedule to ask me stupid annoying questions about “what I’m looking for”. Send me a resume like everyone else! GOD! I swear, if these people knew me, they’d know they’ve automatically lost any chance they have just by trying to get me to talk on the phone.”

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Holy Cow-It’s 2 Days Away!

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By the time weeks 3 and 4 of our comedy class rolled around, it was time to get down to work. I’d written and performed about 2 or 3 original jokes by this time, and even if I did not have my classmates rolling on the floor with laughter, I’d realized that it was highly unlikely that I’d actually contract Death By Sucking.

This was hard work. Especially on the days when I’d written what I believed to be the most brilliant piece of comedy ever known to man and the teacher responded with comments like, “That’s the third time I’ve seen that joke and I still don’t get it.”

It was especially hard for me because I so Want To Be Right. And I believe that I am right, and that if I just will it hard enough I can convince the world that I Am Right and They Are Wrong. That my work is funny, and they should be laughing at it. (I’m sure you can imagine how well that worked.)

I finally realized that I had a choice here. I could be “right” and miserable, or I could be willing to be wrong, willing to learn what actually works in comedy, and learn how to write jokes that actually would make people laugh. But I really had to think about this before I could decide. Like, for months.

But I finally decided to swallow my pride (Important Side Note: Pride? Does not taste good, even washed down with regular Coke) and admit that I was going to have to be bad at this for a while before I could learn how to be good. And, I was. And, it sucked. And, I did not die.

And then, one day, a miracle occurred. I wrote a joke, and lo, it was funny, and the class, they did laugh. And it was very good.

Especially since the teacher is just as much of a smart ass as all of us, and every time we grudgingly came around to doing things his way he’d say things like, “Hm, it’s almost as if I know what I’m talking about.”

So I’m off now to the Dress Rehearsal. If I can still form a coherent thought when I get back, I’ll let you know how it goes.

8 Days Left

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The week before I had to perform my very first original joke could be summed up in this way: Extended Nervous Breakdown Accompanied By Painful And Prolonged Migraines.

This was the scariest thing I’d had to do since I had to take my 3-hour oral exam/thesis defense for my Master’s Degree, discussing abstract, graduate-level literature and linguistic concepts in an entirely foreign language. But at least for that I had 4 years of college and 2 years of graduate school backing me up. Whereas with the comedy performance I was pretty much on my own.

And let me tell you something. When you are standing so far out of your comfort zone that it’s not even a blip on the radar, feeling as though you’re about to dive headfirst into the Grand Canyon Of Suckiness with nothing to break your fall, Believing In Yourself and Focusing On The Positive can just go ahead and suck it.

The problem was that I knew what was coming. While I have gotten pretty good at writing humor that people read, I had finally been forced to admit that truly, I did not have the first friggin’ clue as to how to write a joke that was funny when it was spoken. I’d been made painfully aware of this fact by the numerous times that my carefully crafted written jokes landed with all the grace of the Hindenburg plummeting to its fiery doom when I attempted to transfer them into a “humorous” Toastmaster’s speech.

So I was pretty sure that this class was going to be like the military, in that we and all of our old notions about humor would be broken down, in order to be reformed into something shiny and new. (I mean, I sort of assume that’s what they do in the military-I don’t have any personal experience in that area. I’m such a wuss that the only military that would ever take me in would be “The Army Of People You Send In When You WANT To Be Conquered”.)

And I was right. Since everyone was still pretty much operating out of defensive mode, and since we’d received no actual instruction in joke writing at this point, most people tried to go for the “clever”, easy laugh-sight gags, puns, references to sex. (I played it safe by poking fun at my big, bushy hair.)

And after each of us had performed we had to remain standing in front of the class while he critiqued us what (if anything) worked, and what did not. And so the break(ing) down began.

9 Days To Go

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I think for me, the most interesting thing about taking this stand-up comedy class, besides the process of learning how to write spoken humor that will actually make people laugh, has been all of the personality “buttons” that this experience has pushed in me.

And so, being who I am, I decided that it wasn’t enough that I had to-in just 6 weeks-learn how to get up in front of 281 people and deliver a 4-minute, funny, stand-up comedy routine. I decided that this would also be The Perfect Time to take apart various pieces of my psyche, mess around with them for a while, and then attempt to put all the pieces of my mind back together again. Because really-who wouldn‘t?

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