Tag: anecdote

About Me

Anecdote

Autumn

Back when I was 18, I had a friend ask me to go with her to apply for a job. I filled out an electronic application as well to kill time.

My friend was called in for an interview first, and bombed it. Then I got called in.

I didn’t actually *want* the job, but I played along anyway. On the day of my interview, I drank way too much caffeine and didn’t take it remotely seriously, because I figured it didn’t matter — there was no way I was going to get hired. I ended up pretending to be a completely different person.

Then I got offered the job.

I took it because it paid a bit more than the one I had previously.

Which turned out to be a big mistake.

It became very obvious very quickly that I was a bad fit. I strongly disliked all of my coworkers because I thought they were shallow, materialistic, and bitchy. To top it off, my manager backtracked on what she had said during the interview and was not only unwilling to accommodate my college classes, she scheduled me to work more hours than anyone else. I hated absolutely everything about all of it, and I wanted to bail.

But my parents lectured me about work ethic and blah blah blah, so I felt enormously pressured to stay. I put up with coworkers making passive-aggressive comments about my shoes, tolerated a pushy and demanding manager who was never satisfied with anything, and skipped my lunch break so I could leave early to show up late to my classes.

After a month, I remember standing with my back against a wall as I stared blankly into the room, feeling certain that my soul was taking damage from the toxic environment. I was fading.

Then I found out that I had been squeezed in last minute at a lower pay, and that the new(er) hires were making more money than I was because of a major change with the company — hence why I was given the more demanding schedule. I felt like the victim of nasty prank.

After two months, I couldn’t take it anymore and quit. I informed my manager that I was never coming in again, and that was it. I still hope it ruined her week.

With my next job, I was 100% myself in the interview, and ended up somewhere where I got along quite well with most of my coworkers. I stayed with this job until I met my husband and moved away to live with him.

Lately I’ve been reminding myself of this event in my life.

Reminding myself that “stepping out of my comfort zone” isn’t actually going to achieve anything desirable.

And I’m not going to let myself get chewed up and spat out in a vain effort to pursue my dreams.

About Me

Joke

Autumn

I’ve been pagan for my entire adult life, but I grew up Christian — not only did I go to church every Sunday, I went to the weekday activities too.

My youth group was fond of playing the game, Apples to Apples. For those who have never heard of it, a description card is placed down (eg ‘delicious’), and all the players choose the card from their hand that they think best matches it (eg ‘dessert’, ‘restaurant’, ‘homecooking’). A winner is chosen and they get a point, rinse and repeat.

Everyone else played it straightforward, but I liked to put down the silly cards for the laugh.

I realized very quickly that not only was no one else amused, they couldn’t even tell there was a joke staring right up at them. They were baffled. Why would someone say that kittens are delicious? It didn’t make any sense!

It turned into my private joke. More often then not, I played the ridiculous card, refused to fess up to it, and watched everyone else scratch their heads.

I knew I wasn’t like them.

Every silly card I played affirmed that fact over and over. I waited for the chuckles that never came.

In retrospect, that was one of the earliest things I did to assert myself as an individual.

Honestly, nothing has changed. It doesn’t really matter who I interact with, most of them can’t tell that there’s a joke staring up at them.

But every now and then, when I least expect it, somebody else laughs.

About Me

When it rains…

Autumn

Last October, one of our rabbits was stolen right out of the backyard hutch. Naturally we told everyone we knew, but as time passed by, it seemed like our bunny was gone forever. I wondered about adopting a companion for our remaining bunny, but decided to hold off for the time being.

Completely out of the blue, one of our neighbors told us that she had a white rabbit in her backyard. My husband and two older children ran over to catch it, and sure enough, it turned out to be our stolen rabbit.

Her teeth were badly overgrown and her foot was injured, so we got her into the vet right away.

I’m going to interject here and say that it seriously pisses me off that people will acquire animals then not bother doing a quick Google search on ‘basic care.’ Rabbit teeth never stop growing, so having something to chew is just as important as food and water. Obviously, our poor rabbit was not adequately cared for.

Anyway, the foot injury is bad enough that she has an impending toe amputation, and she’s on painkillers and antibiotics.

That very same night, our cat went into labor.

We didn’t plan on her getting pregnant when she did, but with everything that started happening two months ago, we forgot to pay attention to certain things. We didn’t realize our mistake until she was halfway through her pregnancy and started getting fat.

That morning she was flopped over the back of the armchair, and looked miserable. Having felt that way myself a few times, I knew that she was getting close to the end, but the vet had estimated another week and she hadn’t done any nesting behavior. I thought there was more time.

In the evening, I found her lying on the living room floor and having contractions. I moved her to our bedroom closet, away from the kids, but when I tried to go back downstairs she followed me.

Which is how I ended up sitting on the hardwood floor inside our closet, stroking her back as she pushed out five kittens.

At first, I wasn’t sure how involved I should be. While I was growing up, I had always heard that cats needed to be left alone while they gave birth, and it was something I have never been part of before. However, as our cat grew more exhausted, the more my mama instincts kicked in and I couldn’t sit and watch. I grabbed a towel and helped clean them up.

Unfortunately one of them was much weaker than the others and didn’t survive long, leaving us with four kittens.

This, of course, all happened when my husband had a big deadline with work, and he was stuck at his computer while I kept him informed through text.

So, while I was planning on spending May in a comfortably lazy routine, I’m thoroughly exhausted with a traumatized rabbit that needs medicine twice a day, a postpartum cat and kittens that I’m anxiously checking on all the time, and a pelvis that hurts like @#$! from sitting on the hard floor for too long.

Yet I feel so good about it all.

Having everything happen like that is so wild, I had to write about it.

About Writing

Summer update schedule

Autumn

As much fun as it is to blog every single day, I’ve been finding myself with considerably less mental energy for my other hobbies, and they have tapered off until they became no more. The cumulative effect is that I’ve been feeling more unbalanced and less grounded, since I utilize those fiddly hand motions with sewing or crochet to focus my mind and clear my thoughts. It’s meditative, and I need it.

That, in addition with all the summertime activities that I want to indulge in (we need to go to the pool often enough to justify the price of the membership), has led me to decide that I will update on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and continue with my weekend Inspiration posts as already established. While you probably assumed that the Inspiration posts were just filler (ha!), my hope is that they will help with ‘like meeting like’ in a way that blogging itself can’t accomplish — my main goal is to find others who are like me.

Since I’m going to be updating significantly less, I will make more of an effort to write longer posts with plenty of rambling about nothing in particular, to help you feel like I’m not jipping you out of my wonderful presence. I am reminded of that one time, when the weather was noteworthy is some mundane sort of way that I’m truthfully just flat-out making up because heck if I can actually recollect, when I did something that’s vaguely relevant but also mostly made up, to make you think that I live an interesting yet peaceful sort of life full of adventure and zen, magically balanced in a way that no real person could ever manage to pull off. Ah yes, those were the days. Don’t you just love anecdotes?

Okay, okay, reality is that the CRAZY is always thrashing at the bars of its carefully guarded cage, snapping at any fingers that venture too close, and waiting for the chance to escape. Sometimes it’s fun to let the CRAZY loose and run around screaming, but othertimes I need to put away the clean laundry before the cats rub their fur all over it. That’s the real balancing act.

Remember: Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m off to the pool.

About Writing

Catharsis

Autumn

Once, during a particularly stressful point in my life, I decided to get drunk. I chose an evening when I was alone and not likely to be disturbed, and settled in with my favorite bottles. After four shots of sugary liqueurs, my stomach called it quits.

I spent the rest of the evening hunched over the toilet.

I wasn’t miserable at all. It actually felt cathartic, to purge out all of the sorrows that I had endured in such a dramatic fashion. It was the only time I’ve ever experienced peace while vomiting.

Now, on those good days, when I can crank out over a thousand words in a comparatively short time, feel the same way: a cathartic purge. Those days help give me serenity and sanity with everything that follows.

Those days keep me writing.

Books

Southern Cast Iron

Autumn

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I like to (semi)jokingly refer to myself as a fairy, given my penchant for wild mushrooms and secret acts of mischief kindness. I also have what I refer to as a curse when it comes to cast iron. Ergo, I am a fairy. QED. My logic is flawless.

Cast iron cooking is really yummy, so I’ve decided to make peace with my skillet. Yes, I know, I gave up on you and put you away in storage for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out why your seasoning kept flaking up. No, we aren’t going to talk about what happened to your predecessor.

I settled on this book, because I LOVE Southern cooking. I learned how to cook in the South.

The intro gives a basic rundown of cast iron care, and might have said some other stuff that I didn’t read, because nobody reads the intros. I found all of the recipes to be approachable as an amateur chef, though they definitely require more investment than mixing frozen foods with pre-made sauces.

I made the chicken pot pie.

I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. I brined my chicken before baking it, then used the meat drippings in the gravy. It turned out exquisite, but I definitely used a skill set that was not discussed anywhere in the book.

My complaint is that, although it’s supposed to be heirloom cooking, it calls for shortcuts like using frozen pie crusts. I would have liked to see recipes for pie crusts, biscuits, etc., considering that these are essential elements and have a huge impact on flavor. Seriously, pie crust only takes a few minutes, and Southern cooking is about feeding the soul. You don’t want a frozen soul, do you?

The desserts are even worse, using boxed mixes in lieu of any actual recipe at all.

3/5 starz

At this point, it’s still up in the air if I’ll manage to get along with my cast iron.

[Ed. note: the curse appears to be very real – somehow the contents of this (scheduled) post were transplanted onto a preexisting post, and retrieving it became quite the adventure.]

About Me

Inner Voice

Autumn

I have an extraordinarily loud inner voice, and I took it for granted that everyone had some sort of private dialogue with themselves, until I found out differently a few months ago. Read the title of this article, which says all you need to know. I still struggle with the idea, but it also explains why so many people have assumed that if I don’t say my thoughts out loud, my thoughts don’t exist.

I started off extremely shy, and once I was labeled as quiet, no one wanted to hear anything I had to say. However, that didn’t mean that I possessed an empty mind, so I’ve spent most of my life telling myself all of those thoughts that no one else ever bothered to listen to. In many ways, I was my only confidant during my formative years, and I suppose that my chatty brain is the natural consequence of that.

I often have a monologue going on in my brain. It doesn’t matter if I’m sewing or washing dishes, I’m always chattering away with myself in my head. I can even talk to my own fictional characters as if they were real.  It’s one of those things that I don’t tell most people about, since they aren’t very likely to understand — I’m sure that a psychiatrist would have a field day with me.

Ultimately, that’s why I write: the Voice has to go somewhere. That’s also why I feel compelled to self-publish, instead of keeping my stories hidden away on a flash drive somewhere. At the end of the day, I’m still human, and I still want to feel like someone hears me.

 

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