Here's to You Millenials

Over the holidays I interviewed for a job in the City. I haven't interviewed for a job in a long time, but this one really interested me because it was an educational start-up teaching kids through news and current events. Some day, I will get back into news. I don't know how yet, but I will. News is a profession you can grow old in. I often tell my younger friends, think about what you're doing. Because time flies and some professions don't want you when you're older.

For the interview, I went into the City to meet the marketing VP at their offices on 8th Avenue. He is a very nice man, even though he didn't offer me a job. Probably in his early 40's I would guess. Not so far off from where I am. 

He introduced me to his team, all very young people. And I could swear one of them let out an audible gasp when I was introduced, as in I didn't know people could BE as old as you are now. That's part of what led me to this blog about millennials. Hey, my son is one of them. Or maybe even younger. 

Here's what I thought when I heard the audible gasp, though of course I didn't think of it until later. "Good luck with that neck tattoo," I said in my own head much later. "It will serve you well when you're in your 50's." Because nothing looks better in your 50's than a sagging neck tattoo. Good luck with those earring things that are creating giant holes in your ears for what purpose I don't know. Good luck with your impending hearing loss caused by never removing ear buds from your ears. Ever. Good luck with your gigantic thumb pads earned from swiping and texting. 

And then I had this terrible thought. Make it an awful idea. A wonderful, awful idea. Could it be that I'm the Grinch in this scenario? That soon every HR manager I ever meet will have a neck tattoo and something sticking through their ear. That I'm the one who looks strange without earbuds? That my thumb is lacking because it's regular-sized?

"And THEN They'd do something He liked least of all! 

Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small, 

Would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing. 

They'd stand hand-in-hand. And the Whos would start singing! 

They'd sing! And they'd sing! And they'd SING! SING! SING! SING! 

And the more the Grinch thought of this Who ChristmasSing, 

The more the Grinch thought, "I must stop this whole thing!" 

"Why, for fifty-three years I've put up with it now!" 

"I MUST stop this Christmas from coming! But HOW?" 

Then he got an idea! An awful idea! 

THE GRINCH GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA!"

Act As If This Is Your Last Chance

My friend Julie and I had a pretty funny conversation this afternoon, or it seemed funny to us. Through crackling cell phones we had a series of "old people" exchanges as follows,

"I'm hot," I yelled.
"What?" she yelled back.
"I'm hot," I yelled.
"What?" she yelled back.

This went on for at least a minute. A glimpse of things to come. 

At the same time, Will, my son was trying to tell me something about his scholarship money from Loyola in New Orleans. Some extra financial aid had appeared out of nowhere. A gift from the heavens. Great. Fantastic. At last, we can relax.

Then I opened the mail. You, Will,  have 8 absences, of which you are only allowed 12 in English for the entire year.  Or you lose credit and I don't know, maybe lose your biggest scholarship opportunity at Loyola. That's $15,000. 

I panicked. I got mad. It's like all the stages in Death and Dying by Kubler-Ross. Really panicking because it is frightening trying to get a kid into college these days and then figure out how to pay for it. 

I'm trying to be Irish Zen like my friend Lou Lou Mulderrig or my other friend Mike Casey. Just breathe, take it easy and know everything will be okay.  But that's not really how I tend to think. I tend to think the worst, predict the worst, fret about the worst case scenario that I know lies just around the bend. 

Until the worst case scenario happens, and then my thinking switches into another level of panic something like, "What if this is it?" I've experienced these moments under positive circumstances, for example when you see a landscape like parts of Texas and Louisiana, or pretty much anywhere on the Pacific Coast Highway. It's overwhelming, the feeling of smallness and finite and wow. This is really it.

And sometimes it happens in an emergency room, when I see my son attached to tubes and oxygen meters. Or when the vet finds Daisy, our beloved Doodle, has swollen lymph nodes. Or when, or when. It happens all the time. 

Bargaining kicks in. Dear god, I will do this thing, if you'll do this one for me. And the one thing becomes another, and another, until I would sell my soul to have one more chance. As I sit here thinking about how to tell Will that the absences in English could sink his ship, I try to also think of what I would say if I had one last chance. 

"Dear Will," I hope I would say. "It has been my great honor and pleasure to be your mom. You have a kind heart, a wonderful curiosity, a strong body and voice, a magnetism that could work in your favor if used wisely, an oblivious in the clouds nature that I think has to do with the music in your head, crazy confidence, less than exceptional work ethic and organizational habits. You would give a friend your last dollar and way too much of your time, so choose them wisely."

You asked me today how Dad and I raised an awesome kid like you -- not your words but I won't repeat them because you're a teenager and sometimes you say stupid stuff.

I think your dad and I made conscious decisions about choosing each other and not making the not-so-great relationship decisions we'd made in the past. We avoided certain patterns that were not healthy for either of us. We also discussed up front very important issues like how to discipline, how to talk to you, what to do about media (or too much of it), getting outside to build strength, what was important for your development. Most importantly, and THIS IS SO IMPORTANT, we wanted to keep an honest, open relationship with you. So we made a decision early on that if you told us the truth, we wouldn't punish you.

From what I've seen with your friends, this has sometimes been perceived as a positive and often times a negative. Some parents don't want to know what's happening. We do.

Full circle back to my typical worst case scenario thinking. You can't miss any more classes Will or you'll risk your scholarship, or worse, graduation. I'm seeing Poseidon Adventure scenes now in my head - the old one with Shelly Winters. 

But what's really important is to put this in context. I need to spend more time thinking like it's my last chance. When I think that something is finite, when we're in the ER with you because you've been bitten by a dog, fallen down a water slide, are overcome by asthma, then I start to think clearly about what is important. 

Dear Will. It has been my great honor and pleasure to be your mom. 

(NB This is one of my favorite videos of you singing at Greenfield Hills Congregational)

I Love You in Minus 25

Today is Valentine's Day. I sort of forgot. I didn't because I bought a card for my husband and my son. Then I forgot.

It was -5 Fahrenheit today, so that may have thrown me off. That is really cold by the way. It was actually -25 with the wind chill. That's also really cold. My neighbor, who is old school New England, said he walked out of the grocery store last night and the bridge of his nose was so cold he immediately got a headache. 

Valentine's this year falls on a Sunday morning.  My husband and I have our Sunday rituals and one is going to the grocery store. Not big fans of grocery shopping, either of us, especially when  it's -degrees temperature. He went out and started the car to warm it up and we took her for a little spin through the neighborhood to make sure everything was A-okay. 

Down the street, we have a relatively new neighbor. I don't know them but I know the guy is a Dallas Cowboys fan because he has a huge Cowboys star on his truck. No one here in Connecticut is a Cowboys fan except me, my neighbor, and like one other guy I met at the DMV.

Anyway our relatively new neighbor has an older son living with them plus the son's girlfriend. I think this phenomenon is very common with millenials who move back home either because they can't find a job or they can't find an affordable place to live. 

Based on handwriting analysis, I'd say the girlfriend went out in the middle of the night last night -- in sub-zero temperatures -- to write I Love You Messages on her boyfriend's freezing cold truck. And I thought wow, that is true, young love. Getting out in this cold to surprise your boyfriend with I Love You on his truck. 

I don't love like that anymore. I'm not getting outside in -25 to spray paint a love letter to my husband. But I did get a very sweet card from him to say Thank You for all you do. We're not young love anymore, but we are love.

This Apple iPhone Fell Far From the Tree

Dear Tim Cook, CEO of Apple,

A funny thing happened yesterday. Oh wait, it wasn't that funny. 

My iPhone 6 is about 1.5 years old now. It recently started doing weird stuff -- mainly not staying charged during the day so I had to carry around my charger with me everywhere I went. Kind of a pain, but hey I dealt with it. Then the new iOS came out. I tried repeatedly to download it and nothing. Wouldn't work. I deleted apps -- sorry Facebook and LinkedIn. To no avail. 

Yesterday I tried again, this time tethering my phone to my Mac (yes I also own a Mac and Apple stock -- like 2 shares).  Then it got weird. I started getting an error message, error 53. Here is a very interesting article about error 53 entitled Error 53 will kill your iPhone and no one knows what it is. Thank you Mike Wehner from The Daily Dot because you are absolutely correct. No one can explain it or repair it and your iPhone just dies. The only difference between Mike's story and mine is that my iPhone was out of warranty, and Apple will not replace a phone out of warranty EVEN if I had nothing to do with causing the error. I didn't drop the phone, I didn't submerge the phone in liquid and I didn't replace any part of the phone. It just died. But it was my fault. 

I went to the Apple store. Nope, can't help. I contacted Apple chat support. Super cheery support guy named Chris told me, "I do want to point out the price for repair listed, is the price you'd pay to have the phone completely replaced, if they are able to repair it the price will be less." (This is a run-on sentence by the way Chris. I'm a writer. I know.)

My reply, "I see."

Chris' reply, "I just know that price scares a lot of people, wanted to make sure I pointed that out for you." (There are other grammar problems here, but at this point I'm more concerned about the CONTENT of what you're saying Chris.)

You see Chris, I don't think the price "scares" people. I think it enrages them. Because I work for myself as a freelance writer, I need my phone. I don't have a "work" phone. My work phone is my cell phone.

Like a lemming to the sea, I went to AT&T to trade in my phone, but they can't give me a new phone until I pay off the remainder due on my dead iPhone 6 with error 53. A mere $243 later + $40 something in tax for my new iPhone 6 that I'll be paying off for 30 months, and I'm back in business with another iPhone 6. 

Here's the funny part, Mr. Cook. (Aside from the part where I actually bought another Apple phone.) The only thing I can relate this to is the time I bought my first couch as a 20-something. I didn't have $1,000 in cash so I signed up to pay off the couch interest-free for 1 year. I loved that couch in my crappy Raleigh apartment. Until about 2 months into couch ownership, I came home one day to find my bulldog/boxer/mutt had eaten the stuffing out of my new couch. Just destroyed it. Couch stuffing was everywhere. So I had to throw it out. And continue to pay for it as it languished in a landfill somewhere. 

I can't even donate the phone, as I normally would, because no one can get in the phone to wipe my personal info. So I'm going to mail my error 53 lemon of an iPhone to you Mr. Cook. You sort it out. Now it's your $300 paperweight. 

Merry Christmas Eve?

So here's what's happening and why I never have time to write my own blog -- only other people's blogs.

My dog has giardia. Google it. It's gross. It's a parasite. It affects her stomach. We are not getting any sleep here. But it all started as an unresolved case of swollen lymph nodes and we have no explanation for that yet. And that also makes me lose sleep.

Tonight we were attempting a "shoot" of an amateur music video with our son Will. Because who else would be more qualified to shoot a music video than my 51 year-old husband and I on our iPhones?

We will see how it turns out. At least it won't have dog noise in the background this time because I put the dog in the Tiguan while we filmed it. We call the Tiguan her apartment. She loves her apartment. 

I love my dog and I love my kid but I'm about as tired as I can get at this point. There's no more tired.  I'm so tired, I'm contemplating getting my AARP card finally. That's right. Bring it AARP. Bring it Depends and Metamucil and all the other indignities that await me. 

It's okay. I've been in this spot before when I was much younger. Like the time my mom and I had dynsentery at Abu Simbel. But that's another gross story for another day.

In the meantime, merry elfing Christmas all as my husband says. Here's the "music video." It looks like it was made in Yugoslavia.

A Sharp Dressed Man

I'm putting together some blogs for my son about becoming an adult. So if some of my posts seem a bit "master of the obvious" just bear with me. He's graduating this year and I want him to have stories that he can read, or not, about life and lessons learned. This one is about shoes. 

Shoes. Just writing the word makes me want to go shopping. At the Marshall's shoe superstore of course, because I've got a kid leaving for college in a year. Shoes are my Achilles heel.  Even when I've sworn off shopping, shoes will lure me back. My other weakness is travel. For example, this summer I went to France with my friend Sylvie completely on a whim, partially financed by credit card debt, and I'm so glad I did. 

When I was a kid, our family traveled quite a bit. My dad worked for IBM and was very successful, always winning trips to beautiful places like Hawaii. And then we moved to various places too, as all IBM'ers did back in the day. The only trip I recall taking outside the US as a kid was crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico via rowboat. Then small donkeys took us to a tiny border town. I'm pretty sure we made that crossing illegally, but it was back in the 70's when there wasn't a wall.

In college, I spent my junior year in Paris. Lucky girl. I know that now. I probably knew it then, but I definitely know it know. Having a home base in Europe gave me the opportunity to train it to lots of other destinations and I traveled as often as I could. When I got out of school, I continued to travel frequently. My mom planned this wild trip to Egypt and India and it was on that trip that I learned the lesson about shoes. 

I also learned about dysentery. But here's what I learned about shoes. 

We were riding on a barge down the Nile for several days with a group of fellow travelers from England, New Zealand and Canada. One of the women traveling was a headhunter in London. She had a very scary demeanor, even with the Egyptians, that said don't mess with me. And she had one of those classic English hairstyles like the Queen. I have no idea how she kept it so rigid under the conditions we were living in on that boat.

We were talking one night about her job and the interviewing process. She told me she makes an immediate decision based on the job candidate's shoes. If their shoes are scuffed or not cared for, they're out. That's it. Not because they don't have the credentials or the education. She makes a snap decision based on their shoes. 

I thought wow that's harsh. Then she explained that if the job candidate doesn't take care of their shoes that says something about them. Maybe it says this interview isn't important to me or I'm disorganized, I'm sloppy etc... She explained that the shoes don't have to be new or expensive, they just need to look sharp. Today, I have pairs of shoes I've had for years and I make sure when I'm headed out to a meeting or a party, those shoes are polished and look good. Sometimes I take a black sharpie to them to fill in scuffs.

My advice for you Will is to buy the best shoes you can afford and then keep them looking sharp. You never know who's watching.

 

Is Nothing Sacrum?

It's been so long since I've written a blog, I think I've forgotten how. Here goes.
 
About a month ago I visited my mom in Savannah to help with some things around her house. I love Savannah. Man they know how to eat in that town. We tried two new Savannah hotspots, The Grey and The Florence. For those of you who've never been to Savannah, time's a wastin'. What's happening in Savannah is local entrepreneurs and powerhouse art school SCAD are reclaiming dozens of old properties that have fallen into disrepair. They repair them, bringing back their history and add their own dash of cool.

The Grey is the site of the old Greyhound Bus station in Savannah so the restaurant and bar feature classic elements from the original space. As they put it, "Occupying a 1938 art deco Greyhound Bus Terminal that they painstakingly restored to its original luster, The Grey offers a food, wine and service experience that is simultaneously familiar and elevated." Bon Appétit named The Grey the best designed restaurant of the year for 2015. 

The Florence is the work of celebrity chef Hugh Acheson, Top Chef judge and a Canadian who has apparently fallen in love with the South. I googled him - his wife is from Georgia, so yes he is literally in love with the South. Formerly an abandoned ice factory, The Florence is part of a mixed use space that includes a hipster coffee shop and dorm-style residences targeting SCAD students. The Florence bills itself a blend of Southern and Italian food using farm fresh local ingredients. Both The Florence and The Grey are well worth the airfare to Savannah.

Anyway, back to the whole sacrum idea behind this blog. Actually my veering off course to discuss food when I started out thinking about yoga is another perfect example of my ADD brain. And why I can't do yoga. 

On the day of my departure from Savannah, my mom and I took a Barre / Pilates / Yoga class at the Savannah YMCA with instructor Elizabeth. Elizabeth is a local but she left Savannah for a time to pursue dance in New York. So she's got the Southern accent and the lineage but she's not exactly marching in lockstep with the other locals. 

During the class, Elizabeth kept referencing the sacrum, pull in your sacrum or be mindful of your sacrum -- but in my mind, I was thinking what is my sacrum exactly? What does it look like? Are you sure I have one because i can't find it. And this is why I can't do yoga. This is why it's amazing that I can even sit down to write for an hour each day, much less hours every day. Because my mind is constantly racing to the next thing, and the next thing and something shiny that I see out of the corner of my eye. 

The weird thing is my shooting thoughts often intersect as they do here in this blog. Because my sacrum is a bone that supports my upper body which is supporting my food habit which is supported by The Grey. When you go, may I suggest the Red Rice Cakes and oysters if it's an "r" month. We had the Blue Points from Connecticut.  

Formal definition of the sacrum here: The sacrum is a large wedge shaped vertebra at the inferior end of the spine. It forms the solid base of the spinal column where it intersects with the hip bones to form the pelvis. The sacrum is a very strong bone that supports the weight of the upper body as it is spread across the pelvis and into the legs. 

And yes, I have one. I just don't know how to be mindful of it. That's me and my mom at The Grey. Thanks lady bartender for taking our pitcha.