April 3, 2008 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Job? Huh?

Hello! Thanks for bearing with me yesterday. I thought I was going to have more time to blog about it, but I didn’t.

Yesterday I: Was woken up at 3:00 in the morning by a hysterical child, got out of bed for the day at 4:00, was on the road before 5:00, slapped myself repeatedly on the way to the airport lest I fall asleep in the car, boarded a plane, got off the plane, was picked up by a man approximately 5 feet tall who had parked somewhere in the next county and most emphatically did NOT want to chat, put a full face of make-up on in the car while trying not to be carsick, got dropped off at a restaurant whereupon I realized that I hadn’t eaten anything all day and was about to either faint or be sick or possibly eat the next person who spoke to me, sat around chatting with some lovely ladies and had a delicious crab cake and later some goat cheese balls (which were both delicious and are fun to say, because GOAT CHEESE BALLS!), talked and talked and talked some more, tried to look serious while typing on my laptop, finally made it to my hotel, checked in, dropped off my stuff, ran into Kathryn, ate a burger as big as my head (with Kathryn, which I highly recommend), went to a little shindig the Sk*rt ladies put on, and came back here to the hotel and collapsed. (more…)

March 31, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony, Job? Huh?

I did my second stint as a guest speaker in a journalism class this morning, and I am once again reminded that there is no greater privilege than shaping young minds.

Wait, what? Geez, I’m sorry. Sometimes when I haven’t had enough coffee, a large LOAD OF CRAP falls out of my mouth (fingers). It sounded nice, though, didn’t it?

Oh, I love college students. LOVE THEM! I do. Except for how they’re so young and I feel like a senior citizen when I’m around them. And how they come to a 9:00 lecture and take a nap in the back of the auditorium.

Yes, I saw you. And you, too. I know it’s Monday, but there’s this awesome thing I encourage you all to check out—it’s called SLEEPING. In your BED, at NIGHTTIME. Try it, you might like it! (more…)

March 26, 2008 | Retail Therapy, Job? Huh?

There aren’t words to adequately describe how completely ANNOYED I was when I dashed off yesterday’s post, and even as I wrote it I thought to myself that folks would probably suggest I take a nice hot bath or perhaps half a bottle of Xanax and go have some quiet time. But no, it turned into One Of Those Things where my extensive premeditation was “GAH!” and yet it turned out to be a piece that went over really well.

We’ll not discuss the times I slave over a piece of writing, convinced it’s marvelous, and the reaction is a resounding chorus of crickets chirping. It’s a Murphy’s Law application to writing for an audience, methinks.

And we’ll also not discuss the pressure (OH THE PRESSURE) of following up after such a post, when I know deep in my insecure little heart that whatever I say today will not be as amusing as yesterday. Alas. (more…)

February 20, 2008 | Offspring: ecstasy and agony, Job? Huh?

I’m one of those people… you know, one of those annoying “Everything happens for a reason!” types. Now, I never use it as a means to deny the inherent suckitude of a situation, and in fact when I miscarried my first pregnancy I entertained many intricate and violent fantasies of what I’d like to do to the nosy old biddy who was our landlady at the time, every time she assured me that it was fine because “everything happens for a reason,” but on a grander scale, yes, I think things do tend to come together as they’re meant to. (Even when that means ending a sentence with a preposition, apparently.)

So that means, for example, that as much as I sometimes wonder how much less stressful my life would be if, say, a certain person I used to be married to didn’t exist, the bottom line is that I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is how my life was supposed to go. And that can be very comforting, at times. (more…)

December 18, 2007 | Health is overrated, Job? Huh?

Today I am busy bemoaning the fact that I am sick (it was just a little cold until I wrote about it yesterday, at which point the fickle hand of fate gave me a mighty FLICK towards it being something much stronger and yuckier), and this morning after I got the kids off to school I sat down to work. And after about ten minutes, our internet went out. I am tired and cranky and hopped up on Sudafed, so I did the only logical thing: I whined until Otto said he’d take care of it.

He poked and prodded in our office, and then decided that it was indeed the cable company’s fault, nothing we’d done or any sort of hardware problem here. So he called them up.

I listened as he grew more and more aggravated, wading through their various menus. (more…)

November 12, 2007 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Job? Huh?

It feels rather anti-climactic, honestly, at this point. I mean, I got all of my data back, I’m happily running on a much better server through a company with awesome customer support (Fusix! We love Fusix!), and so maybe it doesn’t really matter that WiredHub fucked up royally last week, at this point.

Except that it does. It matters for a few reasons. It matters because they’re a service provider that failed to provide, you know, basic service. It matters because their customer service is atrocious and in this day and age, businesses simply cannot afford to treat their customers badly and not feel the impact. (Well, unless you have a monopoly on a given service in an area, not that I’m thinking of anyone COMCASTIC in particular.) It matters because I was treated like I’m stupid and OH NO HONEY, I DON’T THINK SO.

And it matters because thanks to this little thing I like to refer to as “free speech,” I’m going to tell you all about it. And you are going to tell your friends about it. And they will tell their friends. And maybe my pals at WiredHub will change their business practices, or maybe they will just continue treating their few remaining customers like garbage. I mean, I suppose it’s their choice. (more…)

June 3, 2007 | Job? Huh?

Hey! Know what would be funny? If the “I need a night to sleep on it” from the homeowner turned into a full 24 hours that ended with “Gee, I need another day.” That would be HYSTERICAL. Oh. Wait. Actually, THAT wouldn’t be hysterical so much as that it would cause ME to be hysterical. Small matter of nuance, I suppose.

To offset the sheer joy of being me right now, you may have noticed I’ve been working a lot. Well, there’s another place to find me up and running, now, and I swear not to talk houses over there at all. Well, not unless they’re dollhouses.

April 9, 2007 | Job? Huh?

I wrote my first unprompted creative masterpiece while in the fourth grade. It stood out from my previous writing in that it was long enough to have separate chapters, first of all. Secondly, it featured as a central plot point the fact that the house the main characters lived in had a large hole in the ceiling of the family room which they’d somehow never noticed before.

(See? Twenty-six years of practice and I’m no less verbose, but at least my stories tend to make a little more sense, now. This is why I like to stick to reality; my lies tend to have large plot holes.)

It took me a long time to decide that I really wanted to stop working crappy jobs for other people and instead be an independent. Now I can work crappy jobs for other people and have no vacation and no benefits! (more…)

March 25, 2007 | It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Friends, Job? Huh?

So. BlogHer Business ‘07. I had this awesome post rattling around in my head about the overarching vibe of the conference. I was thinking about it all the long (silent!) drive home, and I was eager to sit down and make sense of it and communicate to you all just how different and awesome it was. Not that this past summer’s BlogHer in San Jose wasn’t also great, because it was, but some of the follow-on from that event was less-than-lovely, and I just don’t see that happening this time, for various reasons.

I was all set to lay it all out and share with you many epiphanies about what made the difference and why and how incredibly great it was, but then I discovered that Liz already wrote the post I had in mind. Damn her! If not for the fact that she is hilarious and fun to hang around with AND let me feel her belly when her baby had the hiccups, I’d probably be annoyed. But read her take, because she nailed it. (more…)

March 20, 2007 | Friends, Job? Huh?

I last went to New York City about twenty years ago. My father took me there for a weekend; I was still, in my teenage wisdom, planning to become the next Meryl Streep, and needed to go to an audition in Manhattan to secure a spot in a prestigious summer theater program. (I was accepted and went and had a great time and went on to win several Oscars. Well, maybe not that last part.) We ate a lot of good food and I spent a couple of hours sitting slack-jawed with wonder at a Broadway show, and best of all, I had my Daddy to protect me from the vermin of the city.

Now I will only have Chris to protect me, which should be sufficient if all I need to do to repel a mugger is show him that I’ve tucked my favorite little sparrow robot into my purse like a talisman. (more…)