News from the Great Beyond

Musings... Working on my Birthday

Every year that my birthday falls on a weekday, I get suggestions from friends and coworkers to take the day off and enjoy myself.  So far, I can't remember one year that I've actually done that.  In fact, seven years ago today I started my new job at CM#1 (we're #1, yay!).  People thought I was nuts for not waiting a day and starting on the 28th, but my birthday was on a Monday and it made sense to me to start the job on a Monday.  *shrug*

This year is no different - I'm off tomorrow and Friday, but today I'm at my desk and (kind of) working as usual.  It never occurred to me until yesterday why I do this.

Hubby-head has to work today, as do all of the friends that I might have wanted to spend the day with.  If I took the day off work, I'd just be sitting around by myself, playing on the computer and watching TV.  Or doing housework, which is just not a fun birthday.  Or perhaps shopping, but this year I am planning to splurge tomorrow on my makeover, so I wouldn't be spending a lot of money today either.  But in any event, I'd be by myself.

At work, I can spend the whole day waiting for people to say the usual "Hi, how are you?" so I can announce "I'm great!  It's my birthday!" and get all the Happy Birthday wishes.  I can get taken out to lunch by my coworkers.  I can still get my birthday e-mails from friends and family, check my mail when I get home for more birthday cards, and spend quality birthday time with the Hubby later.

There's nothing more depressing to me than having a birthday go by without getting birthday wishes from as many people as possible.  One of the worst birthdays I can remember (not the worst, mind you) was 8 years ago when I got a card from my parents and my grandparents, but other than that, not a single phone call or "happy birthday" from any of my friends or acquaintances.  It was a Sunday, and none of my friends at church said anything either.  That was a lonely day.

Now, the worst birthday I can recall was two years ago.  That was a Sunday also, and our pastor had called a day of prayer and fasting.  We were allowed to have fruit juice and water, but no food until after our evening prayer service.  After the evening service, we'd planned to go to Village Inn together as a large group and break the fast.  I think I was on the praise team for both services that day, and I. was. miserable.  I had a splitting headache all day, and was so light-headed that I thought I was going to faint during the evening service.  I believe I found out a couple of weeks later that I had a kidney infection, which probably caused most of my misery that day.  Anyway, after the evening service, we did the Village Inn thing, and since I was feeling awful, I just ordered their cheddar cheese soup.  As soon as they set it in front of me, I was hit by a horrible wave of nausea and barely made it to the bathroom before everyone at the table became acquainted with my friend Ralph.  Happy barf-day to me.

Tell me your birthday stories!  What's the worst birthday you can remember?  How about the best?

The Cake Story

Sissy at And What Next... is having a surprise birthday, you might say... her grandmother sent her birthday present a month early.

She poses the question, does this mean she can have cake and ice cream today AND in a month.  Well, I would.  But then, she's in the middle of this competition with Boudicca and VW, and I don't want her to think I'm trying to take sides and sabotage her or anything.

But it did make me think of a story from college.  I love telling stories - can you tell?  This one involved a buddy of mine from the Radio/TV program who also did quite a bit of Theatre (my minor), so we saw a lot of each other my senior year.  His name - one R. Paxton Guy (I'm actually using his name because I figure hey, he'll probably wind up finding the blog at some point if I talk about him, and I want to say hi!).

At the time, fall semester of my senior year, Pax and I were both working professionally in our field.  I was the morning news person at a local oldies station, and he was the morning DJ at our direct competitor an hour's drive away.  We were among the elite few in the R/TV program that were working at commercial stations and not just at the public radio and TV stations on campus, or even less prestigious, the student-run college station.  So we were kind of a clique.

What made our attitude even worse, we were taking a class in News Writing, which is what I did on a daily basis, and something he found obscenely easy.  The instructor gave us weekly quizzes on writing style, which often involved taking a paragraph of some text or another and rewording it to make it clearer and more concise.  We did this whole exercise over the course of a couple of weeks in which we read a chapter from The Closing of the American Mind and summarized it... then the teacher shuffled our papers and handed the summaries back out and had us rewrite those to be shorter and clearer.... and then he did it again... Pax decided at some point that this exercise was fairly lame, so he decided to edit his assigned summary by sifting through the paragraphs and crossing out selected words to form new sentences with entirely different meanings from the remaining words.  Our favorite was this gem: Rock music exposes students to cheap fruit.

Anywho, one week the instructor gave us a short quiz with about ten individual sentences that we were to correct according to Strunk & White's Elements of Style, or potentially to note if the sentence was correct as it was written.  I, having been a grammar cop for years, decided to show up the teacher at one point.  One of the sentences in question was "Polly loves cake more than me," which most of the students automatically corrected to "Polly loves cake more than I." 

I piped up and informed everyone that it depends on what you mean by the sentence which word is correct.  Because it could be "Polly loves cake more than I (love cake)," or it could be "Polly loves cake more than (she loves) me."

Pax, feet up on his desk and leaning back in his chair, chimed in... "Actually," he said, "the correct sentence is I love cake more than life itself."

Ahh, Pax.  He's still working in radio out in Southern Illinois - I found this photo of him at a radio station event signing autographs for his adoring fans.  At one point when we were both out of work our senior year, I gave him a tip that netted him a good steady radio job, and he promised to have my puppies.  (It sounded less painful than having my baby.  OK, you had to be there.)

And that's my cake story, all thanks to R. Paxton Guy.

A Tale of Friendship

About 18-1/2 years ago it was, and that makes me feel old... early fall of 1986, a week or two into the school year.  It was my sophomore year in high school, my first year at a large public school, recently moved to a new city, and the first time I'd ever ridden the school bus in my life.

I'd been in small Christian schools until that year, and so I was deep in culture shock by that point.  My bus passed through the projects before picking me up, so my ride to school was as different as it could be from anything I'd experienced before.  I had, however, made a friend - a quiet black girl named Zhamel, who offered me a seat next to her that first week, and became my bus-riding buddy throughout the year.  Our bus arrived at school about 20 minutes before the doors were open, so Zhamel and I hung around in a large crowd of students waiting for the first bell.

One day, something caught my eye.  An auburn-haired girl who had a class with Zhamel was standing around with us, and I noticed she was carrying a bookbag imprinted with "The Book is My Bag".  I had a copy of "The Book", the Living Bible translation, so I recognized the logo and struck up a conversation.  She commented on my olive-colored army jacket, which had belonged to my grandfather from World War II.  My uncle Chuck had worn it for a time as well, and so above the pocket on the front it said "CHUCK".  She thought that was amusing.

My life has never been the same since.  Cherry became my best friend that year, and even though I moved nearly 100 miles away after that school year, our bond has remained.  We were sisters at heart.

We used to daydream about finding a pair of identical twins to marry - but when she married her love in 1994, I thought that dream was unlikely.  Her husband had a brother, but he was five years younger than I and still in high school at the time.  Little did I know that God had plans for us, and 7 years and 11 days later, I'd walk down the aisle with her brother-in-law and we'd get to be sisters for real.

Cherry, my sister, my friend... Happy birthday.  You are a gift from God to me.

A true friend is one soul in two bodies. - Aristotle.

Butterfly Kisses

You know the song - Contemporary Christian Music veteran Bob Carlisle recorded it, and it became a huge crossover hit.  It's been played to death, especially at weddings and receptions.  I, like many others, have become rather sick of it, so when it came on the Sirius satellite radio feed I was listening to today, I barely listened.  I thought I was immune to its tear-jerking properties.

Until that last verse... you know the one... the daddy and his grown daughter at her wedding.  Walk me down the aisle, Daddy... Daddy, don't cry... and the tears just welled up.  It happened again just typing those words.  You see, as I've hinted at before, my dad didn't get to walk me down the aisle at my wedding.

It was 6 weeks before my wedding day and I was in the throes of final preparations when my mom called me at work with the news that my dad had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.  At first they thought it was treatable.  He had surgery a week later - his instruction to the doctors was to make sure he would still be able to walk me down the aisle.  That was everyone's goal.  I was Daddy's little girl, and no way was he going to miss that big event.  He'd been looking forward to walking me down the aisle ever since I was old enough to think about getting married - of course, he always said he wasn't going to let me go...  His hair was shorn for the surgery, so one of the women at their church presented him with a black baseball cap with white stitching to wear to the wedding, declaring him to be "Father of the Bride".  They got as much of the tumor as they could without affecting his ability to walk.

Two weeks before the wedding, my good friend Paul was getting married about 30 miles away from my parents' house, and Hubby and I made a point of being there.  It was a short, whirlwind trip, but we were very glad we made it...  We went with Dad to one of his radiology appointments, and made a trip out to the Carterville Dairy Queen (the best in the area, everyone says so) for chicken strips and ice cream.  We went to church with him and heard him sing "Blessed Assurance" to start the service.  I held him tight during a small seizure.  I kissed him on the cheek through the van window at the airport and told him I'd see him in a little more than a week.  But I was wrong.

The Playground Incident

Elaborating on #58 in my "100 Things About Me" list...

The week after my college graduation in '93 (has it been that long?), a group of friends from the Baptist Student Union and I decided to go blow off some steam at Giant City State Park.  For non-Southern-Illinoisans, Giant City is a beautiful wooded area, 4,000 square miles, famous for some great bluffs for climbing and rappelling... and contains one specific picnic area with a playground - complete with swingset and a giant wooden jungle gym - which was where my group was kicking back that afternoon in May.

I had been talking to one of my friends, who was sitting on a platform behind me and a bit higher than the one I was on, so I decided to push myself up to their level.  I kicked off strongly with my legs, but the bulk of the work was being done by my (considerably weaker) arms, and I didn't have quite enough momentum to get all the way up... and found myself falling forward.

I fell from a height about 6 feet off the ground, face first into a fat wooden balance beam about 3 inches off the ground.  On my chin.

My sunglasses (and my baseball cap) went flying.  My bottom teeth went most of the way through the skin just below my lower lip, which hooked around on the permanent retainer behind my bottom teeth and got stuck.  Stunned from the fall, bleeding profusely from the mouth, and unable to get my teeth un-stuck from my lip, I was just a bit too freaked out to do anything constructive.  One guy from the group was pre-med, and happened to have a towel in his car, so he ran to get it and I stuffed it up hard against my face.

Everyone was aghast at how quickly it happened (and the sight of so much blood).  I turned to my friend Thomas, who had been begging me to let him drive my Daytona for weeks, and informed him that this was his one and only chance - he could drive me to the emergency room.

The ER docs got my lip untangled from my retainer, but as I had feared, I needed stitches (see #10 on my "100 things" list).  The worst part was the novacaine shots - Thomas had to hold my hand while tears leaked out of the corners of my tightly shut eyes.  I had seen the needle coming toward my face and nearly hyperventilated.  The actual stitches went pretty quickly, and my chin was all kinds of numb by that point.  I think I had to have a tetanus shot (again, Thomas held my hand)... and then they gave me antibiotic ointment and a prescription for Tylenol 3.  Along with the line of stitches about 1/2 an inch under my bottom lip, I had a shallow gash on my chin and I'm pretty sure I had a minor fracture.  I think I let Thomas drive me home, but I don't remember how he got home from there.

I was on a clear liquid diet for 4 days to prevent infection.  Thomas went to the movies with me the next day.  I couldn't wear makeup (except for eye makeup), my chin was horribly swollen and bruised, with stitches and a nasty cut.  With my sunglasses on, Thomas told me I looked like I had been in a fight with Rocky - from then on (until I moved to Phoenix that August), he called me Rocky.  In return, I called him "Mountain Goat" - but that's another story altogether.

Shared Treasures

In the absence of something profound (or not so profound) to say today, I thought I'd share a poem I wrote for my best friend.  Thinking of you today, Cherry....

Shared Treasures

We stood on the edge of the world together
Laughing and daring time to steal our joy
"What's beyond these trees?" you asked
And our adventure began
"Come along, I'll take you there" I cried
And so we drove, not really sure of where we were going
Or how to get there
Not that it mattered

"An adventure!" we cried as we sped through the snow
Though the world was bitter cold and icy
We were warm... we were happy
A faint scent of incense hung in the air
Conversation was light, deep, inane
It wasn't so much where we were going
As the trip that mattered

We stood in the park and laughed with the stars
Breathing the sweet music of nature
Dance with me, shout with me, live with me
It cried
And we opened our souls to the simple experience
"Groovy" you said
And somehow it was perfect

The smallest things bring it all to my mind
A whiff of incense, bubbles, candles
A warm car on a snowy drive
A playground, a song, a sign on the highway
Or the beauty of nature at night
Just one of these memories is worth a thousand lifetimes

We stand at the edge of the future together
Laughing and sobbing and daring time to steal our joy
"Where does this road lead?" you ask
And our adventure continues
"Come along, we'll see together!" I cry
And so we move on, not really sure of where we're going
Or how to get there
But it's the trip that matters.


den 8 nov 91
for Cherry
i owe you so much, dear friend
for all those treasured times
and you've made me a richer man
having had you in my life

Scarred for Life

I hate my forehead.  Seriously, I have an extra-high hairline, as does my brother.  There's this broad expanse of skin above my eyebrows that I absolutely have to cover.  It's an obsessive need.  For instance, I've realized for the last 3 or 4 days that I really need a haircut.  My bangs are getting too long to hang nicely right around eyebrow level.  Today they decided to part in the middle, and nothing I did (hairspray, curling brush, or threats of violence) would convince them to cooperate with me.  I have forehead peeking out right in the middle, and it's distracting me.  I can feel it sitting there, bangs hanging on either side, taunting me.

When I was a kid, I never used to worry about it - I'd wear my hair however it fell...  Until one day in 5th grade.  I was at recess, playing with some friends, and one of the kids made some crack about how with my (relatively new at that point) eyeglasses and my hair swept back from my face, I bore a striking resemblance to Benjamin Franklin.

Wait, these jerks were my friends?  What was I thinking?

Ever since, I've worn bangs.  I wore them feathered in junior high, curled and teased a bit in high school and college, and as a flat fringe for the last several years.  I've struggled with each and every hairdresser I've used to help them understand the perfect length to trim them - they shrink up when dry, and my cowlicks send them springing in odd directions sometimes, so it's a bit of a tricky proposition.  I've cut my bangs myself in a pinch, but my current hairstyle involves blending my bangs into the sides of my hair, and that's just too tricky for my untrained self to do with a pair of Fiskars in the bathroom mirror.

I look at people who have normal hairlines, and I envy their ability to wear a versatile hairstyle.  I'd love to part my hair or pull it back in a clip sometimes, but there's that huge, glaring forehead of doom staring back at me in the mirror.  Mocking me.  Hey there, Ben.  How's that kite flying thing going?

Unfortunately, Hubby-head's hairline is relatively high as well, so our children are probably doomed to high-foreheaddom.  And when my ten-year-old daughter comes bawling brokenheartedly to me that some jerk in her class told her she looks like an 18th century inventor and politician, I'll pull my hair back from my giant forehead and commiserate for a while before I take her out to get her first haircut with bangs.

Man, kids are cruel.

Happy Days (Phoenix, 1981)

Alas, I have nothing to say (at least, that I can develop in the time I have to post today)... so in the absence of something deep and meaningful, I thought I'd share something poetic instead.  This poem was written for a college poetry course I took, and is based on actual events from my childhood as I remembered them - some details may be skewed, but 11 years or so does tend to blur the memory a bit.

Musings... On Cars

My car's odometer rolled over 100,000 miles this morning.

This isn't the first time (by far) I've had this happen to me, but it is the first time it's happened on a car that I still owe money on. This is a bit unsettling to me, and I blame it entirely on the fact that I've had to commute nearly 40 miles each way for the past two-plus years.

Of course, such a milestone brings to mind other cars I've driven, several of which have met an untimely end...

My first car was a 16th birthday present from my parents: a tomato-red 1981 Dodge Omni Special Edition (ooooh....). Basically, it was an Omni in a Dodge Charger body, with a fancy Italian name on the dashboard. It was also prone to regular breakdowns and frequently required replacement parts. Dad got tired of fixing it for me, so he bought my mom a new car before my senior year of high school, and I was given charge of her 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais.

Musings... On Coining a Phrase

You can get really deep - or really strange - as college students while drinking coffee deep into the night. During my 4 years at Southern Illinois University, my closest friends and I spent many a night over appetizer samplers and strong coffee, rambling about all manner of topics.

One night - and I don't recall if this was a "coffee at Denny's" night or a "wine coolers at the park" night or a "diet Coke at my house" night - my friend Pablo and I were pondering the act of coining a phrase.

You know, those hip sayings that get made popular by a movie or recording - they have to have originated somewhere. Someone, somewhere had to be the first to say it, and their friends heard it and picked up on it, and somewhere along the line it was overheard by a writer who plugged it into a script, and next thing you know everyone's saying it.

We wanted to coin a phrase. We figured when it ended up in a movie script, we'd have accomplished something. But it needed to be unique enough that we'd recognize it as being "our phrase" when it cropped up as the next new hot thing. So we thought long and hard, and finally decided on a sufficiently unique saying.