Fair

I've started several different blog posts lately, but I haven't posted any…I think it's because my mind is changing and shifting faster than I can find the time to actually finish a post and put it in this space. As I look back at my drafts I marvel a bit at what I was thinking that day and wonder how I would have finished the post I started. Sometimes it makes me feel a little bit schizophrenic.

That said, I'll try to finish this one before I get distracted and forget the point I was trying to make.

We've all heard it, and probably most of us have said it, either as a joke or seriously to someone we know: "Life isn't fair."

Obviously that's true—how can life be fair? We've developed rules and regulations in the legal system to create a semblance of "fairness," but really, can anything truly be fair? My friend Aimee and her law school buddies discuss things like this and I listen…changing the location of a trial, for example, to make it more "fair" for the plaintiff in a personal injury case. Does that make the case any less fair for the defendant?

I remember my parents deliberately doing things to make life more fair for me and my sister, but also hearing that life wasn't fair, and that was something I needed to learn. I have great friends who love nothing more than working the system to get a deal, which always strikes me as slightly unfair to people who don't have the gumption or the know-how to skate around the rules, but then again, aren't those opportunities there for anyone who wants to take them?

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Warning: Possible spoiler ahead for those who have NOT finished reading the Twilight series and may want to avoid hearing something to ruin the story.

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So, I've been reading those vampire books, the ones everyone seems to be reading these days—Stephenie Meyer's Twilight 4-book series. I'm in the 4th book, but not very far. The heroine, Bella, is in love with two boys—who happen to be a vampire and a werewolf (don't laugh too hard—I am a sucker for fantastical stories). Most people I've talked to about these books have been rooting for the main character's vampire love, Edward, to win her over and for the two to live happily ever after, but I'm not convinced.

I myself am more of a Jacob girl (Jacob's the werewolf whom Bella ALSO loves, just not in the same was as Edward). For whatever reason, I've found myself on Jacob's side. I feel like Bella and her vampire are silly, and making bad choices, and that she should stop being such a TEENAGER and think about the realistic implications of her choices. I don't know if there is any way for this fictional love triangle to resolve itself so that all the parties (any of the parties?) would feel it was fair. I suppose I'll have to see what I think at the end.

Fairness comes with a bias, and maybe this is what our parents meant when they told us the world was not fair—fairness is in the eye of the beholder. Obviously if I feel I am getting the shorter end of the stick (translated: if what I hope for isn't happening), I'm going to think the outcome isn't fair. I'm going to be more likely to overlook the fairness aspect if the chips fall in my direction.

I still find myself thinking to myself, quite often, "That's not FAIR!" I probably don't say it quite in those words, or say it out loud at all, but plenty of things make me think it: a co-worker being overlooked for a promotion because he or she doesn't know the right people or move in the right social circles; the mistreatment of a dinner companion by a restaurant employee; a troubling late-night email from a friend that causes me angst enough to craft a well-thought reply, only to be brushed off in the sobering light of day.

I suppose part of the problem is that I WANT the world to be fair, albeit from my skewed point of view. I WANT to do the right thing, and be honest and open and thoughtful, and I want everyone else to be that way, too. I WANT people to feel whole and happy, and I'm troubled when I can't do anything to push a friend in that direction. I don't just want things to be fair for me, but I want to make sure that the things I do are fair for others.

Am I wrong to want things to be fair? Is it possible? Can I learn how to stop agonizing over what's fair for everyone, to accept that you can't please all of the people all of the time? How do YOU handle fairness, with your friends, with your family, with your co-workers, with your kids?

Three Decades

6 days from now, I'm going to turn 30.

30!

When I was in elementary school, I remember looking at the high school seniors in the youth group at our church and thinking, "Wow, they have great hair! When I am 18, I will have good hair." When I turned 18, I wondered where my awesome hair was…I felt almost as young and silly as I did when I was admiring those kids from 10 years earlier.

I have never yet felt like a grown-up. Sometimes I act like one, and I bet I fool a lot of people (including my bosses and the bank and people who have given me loans for things), but I don't FEEL like I have become a grown-up, and I'm about to be 30.

30!

I'm not afraid of the number, especially because it DOES feel like just a number. I always wonder what makes a person feel like an adult—it isn't being married, at least not in my case. It isn't owning property or paying all one's own bills. It isn't having a "real" job. Could it be having kids? To my friends with children: does having children make you feel like an adult? Is it not until much later in life, when your own parents are gone, that you begin to feel like an adult?

30 does seem like a milestone, this nice round number, multiple of ten, so I feel like I should do something monumental for it. I thought about buying myself an iPhone, but with the possible enhancements coming from Apple in July, I feel like buying one NOW might make me mad in about four more weeks. There isn't a whole lot I need….so how would you celebrate this milestone, or how did you? Any ideas or warnings for me?

What am I waiting for?

When I'm with my friends and family, and doing things I enjoy, life seems glorious. On the flip side, though, when I'm in "down time" mode, I feel like I'm just waiting for the next thing all the time. Having typed this out on the screen I can see what my problem is…I'm not holding to one of my happiness commandments: Number 7: Be content, not complacent.

I definitely have a problem finding a balance between those two things. If I'm not trying hard enough to find contentment, I get complacent and feel stuck in a rut. If I try too hard, I over-do, and then I never settle in and find that contented place.

Mostly over the past several years, I've allowed myself to be complacent…settling for whatever happened along, rather than manifesting my own destiny. Now I've successfully gotten myself out of that place, where I was stagnant and bored, but I've gone too far the other direction, and I'm not stopping to feel the joy in each moment.

I can feel myself doing this in all sorts of places in my life—from little things like being so impatient for the next episode of a t.v. show or a podcast I like that I don't enjoy the one I'm listening to or watching at the moment to bigger things like letting each day go by worrying about the next day. I had a great time in New Orleans several weeks ago, but it definitely wasn't like my previous trips with my lovely friend Aimee, where I let my intuition and my fancy guide me around Europe.

In France, Aimee and I sat for hours in cafés smoking cigarettes and drinking French coffees, feeling sophisticated and young all at the same time. We ate cans of tuna and peaches on the steps of Sacre Coeur Basilica, fighting off pigeons and reveling in the view of Paris from high on the hill. We ate dinner in an Italian restaurant even though we were in France, because we felt like it. Even stepping in dog crap on the sidewalk near the Louvre was hilarious.

I know I'm older and definitely more jaded, or something, than I was then, but I need to remember how it felt to really just be content in each moment as it happened on that trip, so that maybe I can bring it back to my daily life. Admittedly, traveling to work at the edge of a mid-Western town day in and day out, worrying about bills and housework and such things isn't as glamorous as traipsing around Paris with one of my best friends, but that doesn't mean there aren't moments every day that I shouldn't be reveling in.

How do you find that balance between the things that make up daily life and not letting them get you down and complacent or too hyped up you can't settle down and enjoy the moment?

When I Grow Up

Unfortunately for me, when I see that title, the Pussycat Dolls' latest hit song starts playing in my head…that isn't quite what I'm referring to. Or maybe it is…

Everyone dreams of being SOMETHING as a child, whether that thing is a professional bike rider (10-speed, not BMX), a babysitter, a bird, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, or a writer. (Note: these are all things I have wanted to be at one time or another.)

I started this blog because I've always got something in my head that wants out. It's therapeutic, freeing, cathartic, energizing, and (dare I say) fun to put my words out into the universe. As I write I hear snippets of teachers' voices saying things like "avoid cliché" and "consider your structure" and "who is your audience" and "find your own voice." What I want from this blog is to extend myself, to hear my own voice as I read, and to learn to captivate a reader. I want to explore topics to see if they can grow into something more or if they are dead in the water.

Lately, due to my distracting obsession with celebrities on Twitter, I've been keeping an eye on Diablo Cody. Her story thrills me—she seems to have always done what it is she wanted to do, without censorship. She has multiple higher education degrees, but she has worked as a stripper, just because it was interesting. She isn't afraid to write about something controversial—or rather, she doesn't consider anything controversial, because she's comfortable with herself. She seems to always have an idea in the works. Maybe that's because it is her job to write, but I'd like to think that any writer who wants to write should also always have some smidgens of stories on the back burner.

One of my favorite bloggers is Heather Armstrong at Dooce.com—Heather is another one who doesn't filter, and her posts are always interesting. She talks daily about her triumphs and her struggles, and isn't ever bashful about saying what she's really thinking.

I want to write that way—with abandon. Without concern for what the world thinks. The past 12 months have taken me a long way towards learning that what other people think doesn't really matter. The people who love me will love me no matter what I do, or what is done to me—sometimes all the more so for my inadequacies. The people who don't love me don't really matter; if someone can't accept me for being me, what do I want with them anyway? I'm trying to move in that direction, but my need for approval is always fighting me back the other way.

Part of my struggle is that I feel like I haven't had to struggle. I've had a middle-class, mid-western existence, parents happily married for 40 years (this year!), comfortable, safe relationships, minimal hardship. I've always wondered how interesting I can be if I don't have my own story, if I haven't experienced any of those challenges. Is it possible to be progressive and captivating in my writing when my own life seems so white bread?

It's callous to wish for trouble, isn't it? There are plenty of people in the universe who HAVE faced hard times—are facing them this very moment. I don't want to trivialize anyone else's experience by saying something like "I wish my life were more difficult." That's just a silly thought, but on some level, I'm jealous of someone who can pull from some raw emotion to document something, whether fact or fiction. My emotion has to be pulled from somewhere else, outside of experience, and therefore sometimes (okay, maybe most of the time, at least to me) feels false, or manufactured. I've always felt like my "hardships" were trivial, and therefore I should suck it up and quit feeling sorry for myself on those days where I feel gloomy.

I've added a new blog to my daily reading list—my friend the Dap Queen. It's a little risqué (at least for some portion of my readers) so proceed with caution if you find yourself uncomfortable with the idea of, for example, sex shops. I, however, cannot get enough of Dap Queen's writing style. It's raw, uninhibited, and thrilling. I think the girl could write a screen play that would rival Diablo's Juno, and I'm jealous. I love her turns of phrase, and that she isn't afraid of what a reader might be thinking. If you don't like it, you know what you can do with it.

Anyway, point of all this is…if I claim to want to write, for real—if that is what I truly want to be whenever I discover what a "grown-up" is—I need to take myself a little more seriously. I need to push my own boundaries, stretch the edges of my comfort zone. Maybe to do that I have to take it off-line at first, to flesh some things out, to find a topic and expand upon it.

How do you find yourself, internet? Where do you look for inspiration, and strength? How can you tell when you're speaking in your voice, and not someone else's?

In Someone Else's (Deck-Swabbing) Shoes

What's a pirate's favorite place to shop?

TARRRRRRGET!

Get it?

I went to New Orleans a few weekends ago for a bachelorette party. It was standard fare for a bachelorette party—pretty girls, trolling for free drinks, getting quite a few, and buying their own as well, special shirts for the bride-to-be and her cronies announcing their partying existence in the city, too much food, and stories that can only be partially shared due to their R-rated nature.
All in all, a great time.

We arrived late in the evening (well, okay, late for a Midwesterner, not really late for Bourbon Street) and checked in to the hotel, giving ourselves a few minutes of primping before we hit the Quarter. As the elevator slid slowly from floor to lower floor, three silly girls chattering in the car, we thought we were prepared for anything. Then the floor stopped on floor 8.

As the door opened, we shifted around to make room for new passengers, then looked up to see who might be joining us. And….pirates.

That's right, I said PIRATES. Dressed to the nines, looking like they were ready for an elaborate costume ball—makeup, props such as swords and eye patches and hats. We must have looked stunned, standing there in the elevator dressed in our best "going out" attire, staring back at the pirates.

"Oh, we're waiting for the rest of our party…you go ahead," one pirate said politely. The door closed and my good friend Aimee muttered "wait for it….wait for it…." The rest of us looked at her with wide eyes. Finally she determined we were a sufficient distance from the pirates' floor to blurt out with an ecstatically excited look on her face, "Pirate Convention!"
That's right my friends, PyrateCon 2009 was happening in New Orleans that weekend, and it made the city even more colorful (is that possible?) on our weekend trip. Maybe you're wondering (like I was) what one might do at a Pirate Convention. I've been to work conferences, where the days were filled with sessions about (in my case) technical writing, editing, advances in software, and showing off completed projects to your peers. I've got friends who attend the Star Wars convention every year, and seen both documentaries and parodies about ComicCon—I can imagine that there is plenty to do at those types of conventions.

Well, here's the PyrateCon 2009 schedule, but I kind of got the feeling that the main point of the Pirate Convention was to dress and act as a pirate. We saw pirates with live birds riding on their shoulders, pirates decked out like the Pirates of the Caribbean cast (seriously, you can't get any more creative than Johnny Depp?) and pirates that looked like the undead (I bet you've never heard of a vampirate).

I've told this story way too many times already since I've returned from my trip (you know how I love an audience). The typical response so far has been, "but why would anyone want to dress like a pirate?" This is what I have been thinking about this week.

Well, not why would a person dress as a pirate, but rather, why WOULDN'T one?

My hairdresser would probably assume I was starting a new hobby if I told her this story—she is constantly amused at the variation in my activities from day to day. But really, what's wrong with wanting to dress like a pirate? Why should that be considered weird? When I run down the list of my hobbies, I sometimes feel a little sheepish, because, as I often preface the list, they are sort of a list of the activities of a retired Midwestern woman…knitting, dog showing, fiddle-playing. Recently to that list I have added both indoor and outdoor volleyball. I also consider my obsessive reading and contributing to Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter a hobby.

People laugh when I give them this list—and some people poke fun. Not in a mean way, and I do love the attention, so I'm ready to handle it. When talking about my Twittering last week, a few of my workmates said things like "Twittering? What is that?" and "That's a lame hobby." I laugh, but I also ask them why they would say such a thing? Then I remind them of their own hobbies (fishing in competitions at 5:00 a.m. on Lake of the Ozarks--in a special fishing jersey, with sponsors, no less--or talking incessantly about fantasy sports, or traveling to Tool concerts all over the nation). Why is my hobby (or the pirates!) any weirder, or less acceptable, than any of these other things?

It isn't. We're all weird. My best friend from 4th grade and I used to pride ourselves on our weirdness—embracing the strange and the interesting things that made us different.

I've been thinking quite a bit this week about how hard it is for most of us to step outside of our own experiences and look at life from a new perspective—from someone else's viewpoint. To stand in someone else's shoes for a minute, and understand what the world looks like from a different vantage point. I like to think that I can do that, at least passably well. I'd like to do better.

So, with that, I'll leave you with a few photos of me with some pirates…who you can tell worked tirelessly and for many hours to prepare themselves for their week in New Orleans this year. Oh, and if you need to hire some undead pirates for a party, check out the Dark Dwellers on MySpace. That'd be a conversation topic for your event, for sure.

Vampirate! (Watch out Karen!)

The Dark Dwellers

Celebrity

I bought a new cell phone about a year and a half ago solely based on the fact that I can text from it—like a teenager. I mean, in the middle of dinner, while I wait at stoplights, during real life conversations with people, in the middle of phone calls…I love texting.

Before I bought this phone, I had to use the regular numerical keypad, which is not conducive to fast-paced typing, albeit abbreviated and punctuated with text slang. Some of those new phones, like the iPhone, or the new Google phone, or the Blackberry Storm with it’s clicking touch screen don’t really provide me with the functionality I [think I] need in a mobile device—I like my phone with its wide flip-open QWERTY keyboard.

The problem with loving to text is simply this: I am almost 30. Many people I converse with daily are NOT into texting. It seems like a waste to send text messages to people who don’t answer—it is MUCH more fun when it is a two-sided conversation. When I joined Facebook (I almost typed “the Facebook Revolution” here, because I really feel like it is something monumental I am involved in—is that weird?), I added Facebook Mobile to my phone.

On my text-based phone (I don’t have an internet browser or any cool applications that can run a real-looking version of Facebook), I can get text messages when people send me messages, or comments, and I can comment back on status updates and photos other people post. Facebook sends me text messages all the time, and I love it.

Well, over the past few weeks I have found something even better—TWITTER!!! If you aren’t on Twitter, I won’t try and convince you to join. If you don’t have the right mindset (for example, you hate knowing what other people are doing all the time), you won’t like it. I don’t really care if you don’t like it—or if you think I’m silly for using it. I will point out, however, that not only are all the cool kids doing it, but so are businesses, politicians, and…wait for it…celebrities!!!

I follow quite a few celebrities on Twitter. Some are stupid—their managers or “people” post things for them (that’s what Britney Spears and Ryan Seacrest do) and I am just not interested in the business side of it. However, I LOVE knowing what random things someone else is doing at a given moment, especially if they are charismatic and interesting. Maybe I’m a bit of a stalker…I don’t mind. You know they like it, these celebrities…don’t put it out there if you don’t want me to read it.

I have some followers on Twitter as well—it makes ME feel a little like a celebrity. I know I’m not all that interesting or glamorous, but sometimes I have something witty to say, or something funny, and I can put it out there in the universe. You can read it or not—that part doesn’t really matter to me all that much. A few people care a little about what I have to say, and I like knowing we can communicate in such a cool way.

Someone at work called me “sad” today for “caring about what celebrities are doing.” I thought about that for a little while—is it sad? I don’t think so…it’s something that entertains me. (By the way, I told him that if that’s how he was going to be, we could talk about his love of fantasy baseball or comic books….)

Some of the more interesting people I am currently following on Twitter are Soleil Moon Frye (you may know her as “the actress who played Punky Brewster”), John Mayer (singer-songwriter), Diablo Cody (author of the screenplay for the movie Juno), and Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The Office). They have interesting things to say, in a world that is outside my realm, and I like peering in from the other side of an SMS text message.

You can say what you want—but if you want me to read it you should probably say it on Twitter.

The "New" One

Because you're all dying of suspense...

So, less than 24 hours after my last post, I purchased a car. Seemed almost impulsive after the weeks and weeks I spent agonizing about this decision, but I think it just means that I finally did all the research I was going to do and there wasn’t anything else to consider. (Or, rather, if there was, I was going to consider my brains out for weeks turning into months and NEVER have my own car again.)

I ended up with the Infiniti. It’s a purple-blue color (the girls at work have decided it is “Midnight Blue”), has leather (heated!) seats, a great sound system, a sunroof, and a roof rack. These are pretty much the things I need to be happy in a vehicle. It also rates extremely highly with Consumer Reports and actual owners on Edmunds.com. I feel confident that it was a great choice.

One of the best parts about my shopping experience was Carl. The Infiniti was at a very small dealership in Edwardsville, KS, called JB Motors; it has 4 employees and is out in the middle of nowhere. I found a Honda CR-V on their lot using Cars.com, and was there checking it out when I noticed the Infiniti.

Carl is about 5’3” and has bright blue eyes. He also has a loud booming voice. He referred to every car we discussed as a “nice little unit” and called me “ma’am” every time he spoke to me. He explained in detail the features of each vehicle, along with a demonstration of each lever, button, and switch in the car. He gave great descriptions of the finer points of each vehicle, such as, “This Bose stereo, ma’am, I tell you what, you crank up the volume and it’s like you’re actually at the concert,” or “We got that Honda up and running for you just like new, sparkling like it’s just come off the lot. Really nice little unit, that one.”

He was very polite and accommodating, if a tiny bit overzealous in the way he contacted me (he called me quite often while we were discussing the vehicles on their lot). The key fob was missing for the car, so he told me that I could “go on the computer, you know, and order one, from that place, you know, where everybody goes to buy stuff? You know, on the computer?” I’m still not sure if he meant eBay, but that’s the first thing that came to my mind. (I ended up buying a new key fob from RemotesandKeys.com.)

So I’m happy with my purchase. There is a 90 day warranty, so I’m going to get the car checked out for everything that they cover and make sure I don’t need any work done.

Let me know if you’d like a ride in the “new” car (it’s actually older than my last one).