Hair Bumps and Short Fiction

Just a quick post today, as work seems to be keeping me busier today than usual.

On the way home Wednesday, I went by the grocery store to get ingredients for white bean soup to make for supper. I also was out of deoderant and my husband needed shampoo. The hair products were across from the deoderant and...ok, you know how it's a style (or it was two years ago) for women to poof their hair in mini-beehives aka "bumps" on the tops of their heads? Well, I'm pretty sure I actually saw a product called "Bump Aid" unless my eyes deceived me, that is supposed to help you achieve the hairstyle. I wish I had taken a picture of it but I was unfortunately not thinking clearly about what an amazing find it was. I think I'm going to go to that Bi-Lo again this weekend to see if it's still there, and take a picture.

I would have posted this yesterday but I got sidetracked and started writing a little story for NPR's "Three Minute Fiction" contest. I just submitted it this morning. It definitely made me happy to be creating a story and writing.

Workplace Ennui

Cannot concentrate at work. From where my desk is, I can see an open laptop on a table right outside my cubicle. There's a little circular object floating slowly across and bumbing imaginary walls inside the computer screen.

Yes, this is the exact one. I had to get up from my desk and walk over to it. I'm suprised I didn't get sucked in and converted to binary.


I try to estimate where along the edges it will bump next. Ultimate pleasure is when it will undoubtedly soar directly into a corner, hitting two walls at once - a seriously rare sight.

This is like that episode of The Office when Michael is trying to hold a meeting and he thinks everyone is really interested but really they're so bored that they are rooting for the box to hit the corner on the screen behind him.

Wow, writers of The Office, you really know, don't you.

A word about human contact

I’d like to tell myself I don’t really need anyone but my husband and me, but I would be an obscene liar. Sometimes at work I get left by myself for hours at a time. During these stints of silence and seclusion, just getting up to go to the bathroom is a social event. You’re pretty much guaranteed to meet another human along the way to the place of communal waste expulsion – everybody has to use it. I always find myself, at these times, way too eager to smile broadly at someone, look them in the eye and make awkward joke efforts about how the week is going, the weather, the paper towel machine not working, etc. Sweet, I’ve made contact with the lady from manufacturing on the first floor …corporate America’s conspiracy to make temp Tech Writers fade into their firmament has not taken effect!

I started writing this entry yesterday, but my boss wanted to show me the ropes on a new system and then had me make 120 copies of a presentation. By the time could get back to posting blogs, apparently a virus was rampant in my department and wiped my internet out for the rest of the day. Ho hum. Where was I? Oh yeah, human contact.

On Monday, for the first time in at least a year, I got together with four of my best friends from college. We met at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Greenville called The Pita House (so good), got some food and sat around running our mouths. It was good times. A few of us migrated somewhere afterwards for a drink, and then we parted ways, but hopefully not for long.







On the way home to my husband from hang-out time, I felt the kind of self-confidence you get when the people you’re around are at complete ease with each other. It makes you feel that finally, there is someone else in the world who understands your humor and simply the way you are.

Thanks you guys! I hope you read this. (And you better, after I told you about it. Love the pictures? Hehe.)

Ode to Lunchtime

I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t take at least a thirty minute break and leave work everyday, I’d start disappearing slowly, taking on the shape of my office chair and leaving my eyes inside my computer screen. It wouldn’t be a pretty thing. So here’s to the Lunch Break, the glorious institution!

Lunchtime plan today: Go home to the dog and cat, a grilled cheese sandwich and “Cash in the Attic” on BBC America.

About a Southern death

The funeral was at 2PM on Saturday in Midlands South Carolina. The whole scene - the church, the people, the land - was like something Flannery O'Connor wrote.

In the baptist church pews I sat with my spine grinding on the hard wood if I leaned back too much, and with my husband beside me staring towards the coffin. He never knew his late aunt well, but everyone said she was a good lady. A few people - only men - spoke from the pulpit about Aunt Laura's life. One man recalled her selfless spirit and read the description of "the virtuous woman" from Proverbs 31in the Bible. Another talked about how she loved her family, and then digressed into a sermony speech about expressing how much you care to those you love. I drifted out into my own thoughts a little before he started stabbing at the air with his righteous first finger to the downbeats of his halelujahs.

I'd never met Aunt Laura nor seen a photo of her. And the only part of her I could see where she lay in her box was a cloud of whitish hair peeking above the rim. I looked around the room at the bright-colored, flag-like banners bearing Christian symbols hanging from the high walls. Soft natural light seeped through the stained glass windows like a quiet ghost, and I noticed no one was crying. I realized I was wrong when the immediate family filed down to the back doors behind the casket-carrying pallbearers. Those who would feel her loss most still had tears. The lid had been lowered and the white cloud disolved under it, and I thought maybe I had imagined it there.

I gave the reverence due to the dead and to death, and to the force that balances life with death. We followed the caravan to the gravesite at the cememtery. Saturday was warm, and the first sunny day in weeks. I looked around at the people now, the young, the older and the elderly. My husband held me close to him where we stood among the marble markers of death, and I saw many others also holding their loved ones.

I tell this story because, despite the sorrow surrounding a death, we can be thankful, even happy. I was happy to be there with my husband his family, and thankful that I can feel love as deeply as I do. Aunt Laura, I'm sure, would have wanted us to be thankful for life and feel the sun shining on our shoulders instead of contemplating the end of those things. Though I never knew her, I know she lived passionately and that people loved her as she loved them. With luck and good sense, I'll live in that path.

Inara in my Car

Last night it was starting to happen again, that thing I do where I can't seem to find anything happy enough to smile about. I had just finished a long day at work, as a temp Technical Writer at a major company. My boss has been at a conference somewhere out of town all week, and I was kind of looking forward to a week of being able to get some work done without him giving me new stuff constantly. I was wrong. As it turns out, a constant influx of new crap to do apparently makes the days go by faster. Yesterday was a very long, very monotonous day of me being left alone to get whatever done that I needed. (I did make this blog, though, that was one good thing).

To top things off, my husband, who is a highschool teacher and the boys' varsity soccer coach, held practice until dark and then had to go work on a project for his master's program at someone's house. Because I've been at my desk all day alone with documents written by mechanics and chemical engineers (not the most grammatically informed people), my husband is usually my real human contact for the day.

So I'm driving to a restaurant around 8PM to meet him for pizza and feeling a bit down over the day. By no means am I expressly sad over one thing or another, but my general mood is just not up to what I need it to be to make it through another day practically alone before the weekend. I stick a CD in - All Rise , Inara George - because I had one of the songs from it playing in my head earlier. While I'm driving and listening, I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to write this blog when I can't even find something to be happy about in the moment. And soon, I don't want to think anymore. I just want to listen to Inara's soft, languid voice and let it carry me off.

It just took me not dwelling on what I thought my horribly non-interesting circumstances were, and paying attention to what was happening in the moment to pull me out. The music and the motion of driving my car down the licorice-colored road after dark became a space all my own. And after I realized I was warm and content inside that moment, I remembered the premise of the Pancake plan - to let myself be distracted by life.

Saturday Morning Pancakes

I am what you call a meloncholy. If I don't pay close attention, I can allow myself to revel too much in the beautiful tragicness of life. And if I'm not really careful, I can be consumed by it. This is my plan against such a deadly unhappy thing.

Not so long ago, on a Saturday morning, I crept out of bed over my husband who was still asleep even though the sun was full-on in the window and it was past 11AM. We usually don't have any responsibilities on Saturday mornings, so we do tend to sleep in. On this particular morning, saturated with the childlike feeling of complete Saturday freedom, I decided to make pancakes. And this time, not the kind you get from Jiffy mix and milk. Nope, I was going to make real scratch pancakes. I found a recipe online that looked reasonable and tasty, retrieved the ingredients from the overhead cabinets in our little apartment kitchen, and went at it.

Now, it may seem silly, but just the creative motions of making pancakes and then having a feast of them while watching cartoons with my husband made me glowingly happy. I felt energized, like I could get up and meet life with a newfound spark of passion. It got me thinking: why can't I always indulge my sense of contentment with something as simple as pancakes? It doesn't have to be food, it can be anything from the way the morning sun is glistening on the grass to a fond memory of times with a loved one. The point is, always, to linger on that moment or that thing, and let it lift you above whatever is keeping you down.

So that's the Pancake Plan. Everytime I post on this blog, I intend to reference something that made me stop for a moment and realize how lucky I am to be human and to feel.