Black holes -
Another post that feels like the previous ones; dropped off into the void of outer space, where they float, unseen, weightless and insignificant. But what the hell. Maybe like stars that collapse inward or sun flares, there's an impact, waves of significance but not detectable to the human experience.
A motto I adopted earlier this year claimed 2006 was going to be my year.
I had a life changing experience at work and determined to make the best of it. Mixed results there.
I vowed to do things to make myself more marketable. Learn Spanish. Improve my writing and reporting skills.
No official progress in either category. I haven't taken any Spanish or continuing development course for writing and reporting.
but while the transformation has been slow and bumpy, I think I'm getting the hang of it. I've seen my area of strengths, finding stories, make the jump to this new job.
It has been stressful as hell.
As always, I feel left out in that black hole without an anchor from management. I felt left out to dry by different people for different reasons ranging from too busy to help to deliberately steering me wrong.
Fuckers. But they haven't killed me or run me off. Mainly because I'm a survivor and I have no where else I want to go.
I'm going to start being more organized. The first thing I will do is start making lists. That's key.
But I'm rambling and bored with the blog so I'm pushing off.

Breaking up is hard to do . . .
Especially if it's a long time friendship. Like 20 plus years long. It's almost like breaking up with a guy in that you're obsessed with analysing it, replaying every word and action that led to the last episode that caused the rift. There's the defensiveness, the rush to get your side of the story out first, with the favorable spin, the spliting of friends and places, just like the break up with the boyfriend.
But with the girlfriend the possible fallout is like a Civil War cannon ball, buried deep, covered with years of detrius shed by the forest, the fields and their inhabitants but yet for all that, still potentially dangerous, even more so because of the lack of certainty that comes with pulling the pin of a grendate, pulling the trigger on a rocket launcher or an automatic weapon. A few months ago, a man in Georiga blewhimself and his grandson up while trying to cut open a civil war cannon ball. They lived but the granddad got some major face damage.
Girlfriends know all the secrets, even the ones the boyfriends don't.
So there's that about ending long term friendships.

But sometimes the glue that holds a relationship together dries and cracks out of the pressure of attempting to fuse together something that as incompatiable as fish and fowl and sometimes as toxcically opposed as the boa and the rat. One is bound to swallow the other one.

There's grief about the relatkionship, any relationship, good or bad, leaves a hole that we creatures of habit miss. We are inclined toward the easy way, the comfortable way, even when it's bad, it beats making an effort, sometimes.
But this break up has been a better learning experience than the actual friendship, which could have been a place to learn about about ourselves, bad and good, in a comfort zone that gives both of a chance to look in the mirror and fix what they see.
Friendships can be a warm, loving place, where you can admit your secret shortcomings, the ones that people know about but hurts you to own up to. Inside a warm, loving relationship, those kinds of things can be faced down and the individual is strengthened.
But some relationships, in all kinds of relationiships, are just plain bad. They are dsyfunctional buecause two people who do not know how to have a healthy relationship have found each other and out of habit and the comfort zone - don't have to break in a new person or keep up a front for the casual/social aquaintances - stay together.
But this change gives me the chance to examinewhy I stayed in something that more often than not made me mad.
First the source of anger was really at myself but before I knew that I directed it at the other half and acted awful. That gave support to her image of herself as the "good" friend.
Me - not good at confrontation, not good at speaking up when something hurts or offends. ergo shit piles up and when it hits the fan, everybody gets dirty.
Even with these "a ha," moments, I'm still fuming. I guess I want one good screaming, cursing, dredging up every offense fight before I completely let it go. :)
But that won't happen for several reasons: one she's even more loathe for confrontation than I and she believes that she is the good friend who is being wronged by the unappreciative, hateful friend.

And that's an analysis based on 20 plus years of playing the supporting role in her drama where she had the starring role and all of us, her kids and husband inlcuded, were but bit players on her stage.
ob la de, ob la da, yeah

You give love a bad name . . .
I had a date. After many years and many boyfriends, I had my first blind date set up by a co-worker.
We got along fabulously on the phone. Our machines loved each other.
yet when we met in person, it was two people meeting who hold themselves inmuch higher esteem than probably they should.
And now I am tempted to call and ask: what was it? did i look older than you expected or hoped for, althought I am six years younger than you? Did the extra pounds around the midriff put you off, even though you had the skinniness of an old man and the thinning hair to boot?
Or was it that I didnt' wash my hands before we had lunch and you did?
It's questions like these that I would like to ask, for informational purposes, but have to weigh: could my ego and self esteem withstand the answers?
And would you answer truely? I know I wouldn't.
But perhaps truth would be the greatest kindness. Perhaps not.
I would have gone out with him again; he had a sense of humor, which I find attractive. I did not find him physically attractive.
So not being hot for him makes it easier to take his rejection. I can shrug it off, nothing lost. No desire thwarted or worse, spurned.
So does this mean I'm through? Had my fill of men? Or do I lie dormant, waiting for a spring that, when or if it comes, shows its path clearly and cruely, on the face, the skin on the hands, the jowl of the check. And then to believe in "love" versus that which drives us all?

Who cares?
So I read about all these blogs and I get the impression that nearly every blog on the Internet catches someone's eye.
Hmm. Apparently not.
I guess the irony would be if I wrote something really interesting or personal I'd get tons of interest and lose my job.
Ah fuck that.

I recently read Loud and Clear by Anna Quindlan. I really like her stuff, I started reading her life in the '70s and even though I didn't have kids and career then I could relate to a lot of her stuff about feminism and then late family and work.
When she left a great job at the New York Times, she wrote about how everything thought she was crazy, I felt a little envy and a lot of admiration.
What balls, I thought. Of course in any great story, most of the boring detail is hacked away so only the good stuff is left.
Not taking away from her talent at all but not everyone has the same opportunities as she.
As a single parent, I found myself charged with putting food on the table and a roof over the floor. Ms. Quindlan had a husband to assume lion's share of the that burden. Not that I think raising children and keeping the house is not an important, albeit non-paying, job. But following your bliss is a lot easier when someone else is footing the bills.
And one essay in the book was clearly a commencement speech, the one that all speakers give about doing what you love.
Notice how losers never give commencement speeches? Or even just ho hum, run of the mill people; people who have little choice but to work, whether it's something they love or not.
anyway.
i hate those kinds of speeches. It's almost arrogant, condescending and out of touch with some strata of society.
okay, enough venting.

Walking the line - I had been thinking about creating a blog. I've got a new computer with lots of capacity and thought blogging would be a good way to pull me into the world of techno geeks and Internet hipsters all at the same time. (More on the mixed success of that effort later).

Around the time I was thinking about a blog, I picked up a copy of the University of Tennesseee's communications department publication and read about people getting fired because of their blogs.
both had posted job-related photos, one a flight attendant perched on the top of seats in a plane, showing a lot of leg but nothing really bad, and the other was a loading dock at a Microsoft plant, with pallets of Apple computers on it, with the comment that "everybody wants macs," or even Microsoft wants G-3s, or whatever.
but the "comments" from their employers were not very favorable.
So one friend strongly advised against a blog. I say I'll write about a beautiful rainbow I saw recently, leading another friend to predict a very boring blog no one will read.
Maybe she's right. But I bet there's tons of boring blogs out there, so what the heck. Even boring people crave validation.

I made my first entry and tried to send a link to some friends. They couldn't find it and I couldn't find it for a while.
I think I will keep this up, though. I'll follow the advise of one friend: never to blog after my seocnd beer.
Maybe someone will come up with a breathalyzer that will lock up the blog if the user blows over a pre-set BAC.
Cause, of course, that's one of the dangers of blogging. We feel a certain anonminity from the idea of the faceless, teeming world wide web and then add in some liquid courage and next thing you know, you've posted your pix of the boss with the janitor in the mail room or your, in your opinion, hilarious impression of the boss's eating manners or whatever and bam, there you go, out the blog.
Might be a more interesting blog after getting canned but J.C. Penney's and the gas company probably would fail to see the humor.

So July 2, 2006. My first blog entry, if I can figure out how to do it.
I decided to start a blog this year because I had several significant things happen to me.
I'm middle-aged (I'm in the 45 to 54 bracket and that's all I'm saying about that except to note that by calling myself middle-aged I'm assuming I'm going to live to well past 100).
Sometimes it seems like stuff happens to people or they have ephianies at mile stone birthdays, like 40 or 50.
but this year is an off year in that regard and I've had some changes happen to me that are leading to reflection and planning, (see blog) and a desire to have change that is caused by me.
After five years in a particular job position, I was unceremonously moved into another position.
Caught completely unaware, it happened on a Friday, the day before my birthday on Saturday.
So not only was I moving along in the age bracket, I was blindsided by work, left gasping like some pitiful goldfish whose tanked was kicked over.
I put a good face on it at work (I think) but I was feeling pretty sorry for myself that day when I left.
I didn't have anyone at home to commiserate with me and I wasn't ready to tell my family - my parents and my adult child. I needed some time so I could tell them without crying about it.
I was also having some health issues, which were bringing me down because I was like: Damn, I'm getting old and falling apart.
My blood pressure went out of whack and I had to wear a heart halter for a weekened.
just before that I had my first MRI on my knee and saw that if I had to have one on any other part of my body, I would have definintely had to be sedated to go into that tube.

but back to Friday. I left work and stopped at the Mr. Zip on the way home. It had been storming like hell all day.
But I went in and got my 24 oz (to freedom, sublime likes a 40, but I can't drink it before it gets to hot).
When I pulled out of the parking lot, I looked to my left and there in the sky was a perfect rainbow.
Unobscured by clouds, it went completely from one side of the river to the other, and showed all the colors in its range.
It was beautiful. If I had seen a perfect rainbow before, I don't recall.
People were stopping on the streets to look at it.
My daughter and her boyfriend stopped where they were, across town and my mom told me she saw it.
everybody talked about it.
It had to be a sign, though. It's been over a month since I saw it and I still haven't interpreted the sign. I'm still open to the meaning, maybe it will come in a dream or maybe something else will happen that will put it all in place.
but I've decided to become more computer literate, hence the blog, and I'm going to learn more about digitial photography, I have a camera and video camera and I'm going to start publishing photos and stories online.
I won't make money but I won't be rejected either. Maybe.