OMG I thought I was addicted to the Blackberry before but it was nothing compared to what I have going on now… Before, I thought it was super neat to have access to email and internet anywhere and when I first acquired the new-to-me one I have now it was great but I had gotten over it so much it was like… Eh – especially since it wouldn’t download all my contacts or my calendar and I still had to manage those on my PDA. The two days it took to finally figure out why it wouldn’t sync with my Outlook calendar and contacts last week with my IT folks was painful but I didn’t complain since it is a personal smartphone which they didn’t have to support. And now that I am fully functional? I am like a drug addict who once in a while would smoke pot and then finds the joy of hard drugs… Or at least how I think that would feel like. I can blog from anywhere! I can be on Facebook all day! I can Twitter at a whim! All the things I couldn’t do when my Blackberry was locked down to only work-approved things so I didn’t know about and which are now at my thumb-tips blows my mind. I am one seriously happy and seriously addicted girl albeit more effective at those said addictions. I am rejoicing at all the free-time I will once more have available… Maybe I will get back to some serious writing again!
Sent from my Verizon Wireless Blackberry
Author Archives: terraluft
About terraluft
Full Integration Bliss
Inconsiderate and oblivious
What, exactly, is wrong with people? We were at a local restaurant a few weeks ago and what I observed is still bugging me. So here I am with more ranting and raving. Normally our beef is with the service or the food – why is it SO hard to find good service in the food SERVICE industry? This particular night, however, we had a fabulous waiter who was attentive without being at our table too often. No, the beef this night was with two workers – I think you call them hostesses? – who stood right behind our table performing the menial task of wrapping napkins around utensils. I get that it is a mindless type of duty but if you are standing adjacent to customers trying to eat would you really be as mindless as these two who stood there talking loudly and bothering multiple tables around them who could hear every word? A normal person would probably notice the annoyed stares from the patrons but these two were totally oblivious and carried on for 10 minutes. I wonder though, is it me who is just abnormal and this is what “normal” has become? More often than not the majority of people around me are inconsiderate and oblivious to their impact on others far outnumbering those who are considerate and observant. Is this a type of social evolution similar to where we think nothing of walking around with a telephone attached to our ear and carry on conversations inconsiderately imposing our chatter to others around us where without the technology it wouldn’t be expected? I know I pay attention more lately to how my behaviour is impacting those around me – although is doesn’t seem to be the normal thing to do. What a shame…
Off the Wagon and noteworthy sightings
They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step… After cold-turkey and the ensuing Blackberry withdrawals from my very real habit, I have fallen off the wagon and have my very own little black beauty – I love eBay… – that I will never have to give back to an employer. The best thing is that being removed from the habit for a while I was able to break the Pavlovian cycle of addiction so far as I can tell. Now, isn’t that what all addicts say? My own version of ‘I can handle it’, I suppose. My rationalization seems sound. I no longer have a job where I am required to monitor email 24/7/365 for notifications of system problems and can actually leave my work AT work where it belongs minus the few on-call shifts I have per month. Thus, my mentality about my Blackberry seems much more sane and grounded. I can go hours without pulling the thing off my hip and some nights it stays in my purse where I don’t think a thing of it unless it rings. An addiction broken and a new and hopefully non-precarious balance has been erected. I feel so proud of myself! Of course, now I covet the iPhone and am waiting patiently until it is widely available on my wireless carrier of choice…. Ah, the irony!
On another note, I saw the funniest bumper-sticker I have seen in a very long time yesterday on my commute home. Some background is probably in order so the irony isn’t lost on the crowd…. Up until about 3 years ago I had a seriously bad-ass Jeep Wrangler. It was lifted and I was always getting “fix-it” tickets because the tires stuck out too far and I refused to ruin it with sissy mudflaps. I had personalized license plates that read 4X4GIRL and the requisite “Jeeper” bumper sticker that reads “It’s a Jeep thing… you wouldn’t understand.” I dare you to find a Jeep that doesn’t have that saying posted on it somewhere and you’ll have a pretty hard time of it. So, there’s the setup. I’m driving home and I see this huge sticker that goes the entire width of the rear window of this stock white Chevy pickup and it says…..
“I got your Jeep thing… and now it hurts when I pee!!”
OMG it still makes me laugh! Of course, if I still owned my beloved Jeep I could never admit to appreciating this sticker but… I don’t! So kudos to the creator because that is some seriously funny shit!
The phantom hand
Just when I thought I had figured out a way to deal with the insanity of my high traffic cubicle aisle – all hail the iPod playing very loudly in my ears – another anomaly has surfaced to drive me over the edge. The other day I’m sitting in my cube, working away, attempting to ignore the drivel of the two inconsiderate workers who just happened to stop right there to have a personal conversation and what do I see but a hand hanging over my cube. (reeee reeee reeee) I couldn’t help but stare at it. It had hairy knuckles. It had a watch on a cheap band. I wanted to reach up and poke at it to warn the body attached that someone was on the other side of the wall. The hand still haunts me…
Other than the incredible diversity of people inhabiting the same floor as I do at work – which has really no bearing on what I’m doing there – I am truly enjoying my work at the new job. I have opportunity to grow and am working with old friends and new. And who can complain about a workplace that sets up multiple large viewing screens for the presidential inauguration yesterday and encouraged everyone to come to watch instead of killing the bandwidth in the building. It just doesn’t get better than that!
Where’s Waldo… writing group style
My so-called FABULOUS life: Holiday Bloopers – “Once”ers, can you find the hidden word among all the silly holiday posting?
It’s totally an inside joke… One of my fellow writers put a particular word in his manuscript and now we all are tasked with hiding it in ours. And just like when you buy a new car and then suddenly all you see on the road are ones just like yours, I now see the word everywhere. Like on some random blog by an athlete who went to the Olympics for track and field and then didn’t qualify for her medal race.
In light of the insanely silly season that is upon us, I thought that at least some would appreciate the fun! And those of you not in on the joke, I’m wondering what words jump out at you that could possibly be “The” word. There, now we can all have some word sleuthing fun for the holidays!
Happy Hanukkah, Happy Solstice, Merry Yule, Happy Kwanza, Merry Christmas, etc. etc. Or, in the words of my cousin…. “Merry Christmas or whatever you celebrate”!
New fence, old grass
I don’t know what I was thinking – perhaps that I would swap my old grass for something greener on the other side of the fence? Why is it that people are forever falling for that old adage? While I am loving the new work digs for more reasons than not, today was the first day that I thought the honeymoon must be over… I am now, more than ever before, working in a typical cube farm. Literally my building has 4 floors and with the exception of the squatters from a different company on one of them they ALL LOOK THE SAME with cubicles as far as the eye can seen. The bathrooms are in the same place on every floor, the cubicles are all the same size, shape, color and layout on every floor and even the filing cabinets are in the same place on every floor. Several times I’ve gotten lost and wondered if I was going to have to go back to the elevator (if I could find it) to see what floor I was on and get my bearings. (I don’t know what I’ll do when the holiday decorations come down in my dept because that’s the only way I know which cube is mine – first with the Halloween spiderwebs and now the Christmas tinsel to distinguish it from all the rest!) Today the thing that has irritated me the very most for the very longest time happened in the hallowed new environment like a bad acid trip returning…. The hallway meeting of inconsiderate coworkers! You know what I’m talking about, don’t deny it (maybe you are one who does this!) Two people (or if you’re on a lucky streak more of them!) stop right in the middle of the hallway on the other side of your cubicle partition – it is wrong to call it a wall since it doesn’t even drown out the muffled sound of a cell phone vibrating from two cubes over let alone the mindless banter of the testers in the next row – and decide to have a meeting! One or more of them usually has a puffed up chest and loud, irritatingly obnoxious voice to go with it because subconsciously they know they are being listened to by a captive audience of at least 15 within earshot who have nowhere to go to escape but the shitters – and even then it probably won’t drown out the noise. They talk loudly and at length about things more appropriately discussed in private – or sometimes even outside the work environment! – and never think once about the people they are disrupting with their incessant chatter! (I think I.T. people are the worst at this but it could also be just that it is what I know…) I was the lucky recipient of two of these lovely “meetings” right outside my cube today and I swear I almost stood and yelled at the top of my lungs – SHUT THE FUCK UP OR GET A ROOM!! People, be considerate that there might be folks working all around you before stopping for a “quick” chat… because trust me, there’s nothing quick about the chatter of your bullshit when having to be endured by someone trying to work!
Pushing
The BEST thing about my writing group is…. reading all their work and getting inspired to write better myself! Every one of them have a different writing style, a different genre they are currently working on and something different to contribute to me. And when we get together they will all bring their unique perspectives together to give me EXACTLY what I need to make my current project better than it had any chance of being without them. And I get to do the same for all of them! I just doesn’t get any better than that. I’m starting to appreciate all the acknowledgements that I always skip over at the beginning of a new book I crack open. I always thought it was cheesy drivel but man will that be me gushing about my fellow writers and giving credit where credit is due. (You guys rock my world!!!)
It’s over but it ain’t over yet!
It’s the end of November and the minutes are ticking away on the last hour of the official National Novel Writing Month for 2008. I “only” got 9,665 words written on my manuscript so I will not rise above the ‘Official Participant’ status to the winner circle this year but it is SO not over. What did I get out of my participation? I am officially a writer now – no longer merely an aspiring writer who talks about someday writing or one day I’m going to or any of the other crap I’ve been saying for 20 years. I am still going to finish my novel and one day maybe people will actually make a trip to a cash register or cart checkout screen with it in their grubby or even virtual hands, or download the eBook and read it on electronic readers everywhere. It is hard work and it is like having another job on top of all the other things you do – one that is like an apprenticeship where you do all this hard work and never get paid until the bitter end and then only if you are good enough to get hired. But I’ve come this far so why stop now. Look out world, I AM A WRITER! I AM AN AUTHOR!
It’s harder than it looks…
It probably escaped no one’s notice that it is November… the 18th to be exact. So, at this rate, I should be deep in the middle of writing my much touted and much anticipated novel for National Novel Writing Month that started exactly 18 days ago. If we were being scientific (some could argue OCD) which I am, the daily word count goal to stay on pace to complete with no more effort on any given day than another would be 1,667 words per day. Not a lofty goal when considering one of my longer blog entries can easily approach that number and they mostly just roll off the proverbial tongue. So then, the calculations for daily word count at the end of day 18 would be – 30,006. Where am I in my word count you might ask? (drum roll….) 8,242. No, not a type-o! (Perhaps I should be wondering why it is that here I sit typing a blog entry instead of more words on the manuscript, huh?) So, I have tons of rationalizations – first, I am just barely getting over whatever killer bug I caught that had me feeling under the weather for 4 weeks; second, I had house guests for 5 days where I thought I could burn the candle at both ends and entertain then write late at night and/or early in the morning which didn’t happen; third, and probably most important of all, it’s a lot damn harder than I thought it would be! I got waylaid in chapter 1 and got so obsessive about editing and re-editing so it would be perfect that I let parts of the story slip away from me. In fact, I skipped the second chapter almost entirely instead of continuing with the drivel and am hoping that what goes in it comes back to me at some point soon. Now I’m on vacation where I had pictured lazy warm days spent entirely on the beach with my trusty laptop and tons of inspiration to catch up on the slow start. It worked pretty well yesterday with almost 1500 new words and exciting things to write about again and so I’m trying to keep the momentum alive. My perfectionist and competitive nature is tugging at the bootstraps and keeping me in the race. Hopefully I can actually finish with something worthy of at least editing which maybe will lead to something folks might want to read. I’m beyond thinking I’m going to just upchuck a perfect first draft that will be ready for publishing which was the delusion I started out with. That only happens in fiction after all…. With all that said, I know that if this thing ever actually makes it to print I already have a group of people to acknowledge from my newly-formed writing group. You guys know who you are and I couldn’t have gotten this far without every single one of you, even the non-writing members! Well, let’s be honest, I probably would have gotten this far but it would have been shit without you guys!
A break to talk about the election
I’m taking a break from my novel writing – no, not because I am stuck but because I don’t want to let the moment pass by without commenting on the history that was made tonight in the good ol‘ US of A. Imagine, the first black man in the oval office. Hell, I’m happy enough that it is a Democrat!! Of course, it isn’t the Democrat of my first choice and it is not one above all reproach with his questionable acquaintances of the past but hey, is there really one out there above all reproach no matter which party you look for it in? I’d like to take a moment to address the one point that made me cringe the most when toted by the “flaming red’s” as I like to refer to my fellow citizens of (and I quote) “the reddest state in the Union”. That would be the comment that Obama had no experience compared to John McCain. Please… The facts (which I actually took the time to check!) state that after getting his law degree from Harvard and leading the Harvard Law Review while he was there, he practiced law and did community organizing and then worked his way up in local government before being elected to the US Senate. What does McCain have on his resume in the form of experience? Well, after his stint as a POW in ‘Nam (which yes, is tragic and horrible and noble but does not in any way count as experience in leading a country in my opinion) he was a beer distributor. Yes, you read it right, a beer distributor and then was elected to the Senate where he’s been for decades. No doubt using his POW stories back then to get elected. Now you tell me why one or the other isn’t just as good as the other. Personally I’d rather have a lawyer who knows the laws of the land he is tasked with governing than some beer distributor who calls himself a maverick and continues – election after election – to think that he has anything that the majority of us Americans want. We didn’t want you in 2000 and we don’t want you now. I’m putting my hopes on Obama and look forward to the next 4 years that, at the very least, will not be 4 more years of Republican rhetoric! No matter if upon looking back the “Change” we were promised and that we’re all hoping for actually happens or not, I can say that I was there and paying attention while the things of history were happening!
Medical Insanity
Okay, time for the soap box again…. I am thinking that everyone has gone a bit insane and has forgotten the secret to staying healthy is actually getting sick once in a while so we can actually build new immunities. What has set me off on this topic is the incessant bombardment about getting a damn flu shot I’ve had to endure in the last week. Remember, I work in health care now… Gawd help me! So let’s break things down a bit. First, they spew all these crazy statistics about how dangerous it is to get the flu and how people DIE from it every year and how we must vaccinate against this deadly thing. HELLO, do we live in the dark ages? No, last time I checked it was the good ol’ industrial age still. The reality is, that while there is indeed a very SMALL subset of the population who could benefit, there is very little actual risk to the typical person dying of the influenza virus. Which brings me to the second point. IT IS A VIRUS! Repeat after me, bacteria can be treated with antibiotics but if you go to the doctor and all you have is a virus they are going to tell you to get lots of rest and drink lots of fluids. Why? BECAUSE YOU CAN’T KILL A FREAKIN’ VIRUS! Third, that crazy vaccine that they are injecting you with is last year’s flu strain – which has already mutated as virus’ are wont to do – and will not really protect you from much anyway. Just eat good food – you know, real food from whole plants and stuff with vitamins and minerals and all the good stuff nature intended for us – and you are going to be better off than getting that stupid shot. And if you don’t believe me, remember what happened to those pesky invaders in War of The Worlds… We are building up immunities to everything around us that actually protect us from all the nasty things that are out there but only if we are actually exposed to them! Hey, while we are protesting the insanity, let’s throw out the antibacterial hand crap and even the antibacterial soaps! And what do you say you don’t wash your hands – unless of course you are in a public restroom or in a hospital where you might really catch some nasty bugs. And for the love of GOD, don’t get a damn flu shot!
The Choice
This book by Nicholas Sparks left me so wanting… I guess if you want mindless boy-meets-girl-who-has-hang-ups-and-then-life-works-out-like-a-fucking-fairytale that reads like most of his other books then go ahead and pick it up. However, if you want a book that was written thoughtfully with some actual research (or maybe thought?!?) put into it then I don’t recommend it. The book is supposed to be about the choice of a husband to take his wife off life support or not and yet it gets sort of thrown in at the end. The bulk of the book is about the one weekend when they met and how they fell in love and ended up together – which actually sucked because the female lead character was really a little harlot who cheated on her long-time boyfriend and ends up sleeping with the male lead character after only a couple of days? Come on, Sparks, what do you take us for? The second part of the book, which starts about 2/3 of the way in and is supposedly what it is about, is so jumbled and confusing that you don’t even know what has happened or what the struggle is supposed to be; almost like it was thrown in as an afterthought so he could have a new title and a new book to market. And let’s not forget the blatant evidence of not having done a bit of research for this book that can be summed up by the little “Aztec ruins in Cancun” reference. Hello! They are Mayan ruins, not Aztec! The ending is so unrealistic from both a medical and a personal perspective that I found it insulting. Definitely not something I would bother with unless you are a super duper Sparks fan. Personally, I like my fantasy to be labeled as such.
(OMG, could becoming a writer actually make one a hateful reader? I am a bit worried….)
With all that said, it was still a very lively discussion at book club last week where we talked about all the relevant stuff that the book SHOULD have brought up and actually made a statement about. Why does one bother writing a book with such a political and social topic and then not even bother to make a statement about what you think? Self, repeat after me… When I become a NY Times Bestselling Author I will NOT sell myself short just to write another book on someone’s damn deadline.”
I’m back!
All praise the Internet gods… We now have Internet service at home and the withdrawals are over. Well, that’s not entirely true since I still don’t have a Blackberry. BUT, it is getting easier to live without one and don’t feel like dying because I may not get one for a while. That has more to do with the fact that it isn’t very practical right now when I have a brand new phone and am learning to live without Internet on my hip and constant email activities. I might have had a problem bigger than I have previously admitted and I’m going to just see how long I can take it. Should make the hubby happy anyway.
So, a week into the new job and I’m loving it. Every day I get a bit more info and training and like it that much better. The co-worker from the old job has only called me three times this week so apparently is going to be fairly okay without me. I don’t miss being on call and am relishing the time in training before I know enough to be on call again. Being in health care is a bit weird for me since I swore I didn’t like people enough to ever be in that field. Although I still get to deal with the very impersonal and logical computer system I love so I can’t really say I’m doing what folks who are really giving patient care do. Weird still… I’ve spent my offline days working on the book outline and am getting very excited for the kick-off of NaNoWriMo in a week. And the new writing group is meeting for the first time this week. Life is good …
Terra Luft - View From the Crystal Ball 