Snell said I had to

Auditorially Stimulated

2009-10-13T17:03:00.001-07:00

So... I've always loved music. I have a connection to music that seems a bit more obsessive than what most people feel. When I love a song, or even when I hear it a lot over a short period of time, it becomes imbedded in my mind. I will always remember every word of it (for more information on how this has ruined my practical memory, please see last year's blog.) Which is kind of funny but not really all that unusual. My Grandfather, in the last year of his life, became obsessed with the fact that he couldn't remember to eat lunch when he was hungry, but could remember every word to every song he knew in his youth.

The weird thing is, not only do the words and melodies stick in my head, but the situation and emotions imbed themselves as well. So after a while, whenever I hear a song, I remember where I was and what I was doing when I was either obsessed with it or when I was hearing it everywhere I go. Which then prompts me to comment to people nearby, "This song totally reminds me of..." Which I'm sure is quite annoying. Cause who really cares other than me, right? But the thing is that I get so caught up in these memories and the emotions that go with them, that I can't seem to keep it to myself.

The other day, I was teaching Pilates to a few women. The radio station that played in the background was apparently playing a lot of songs from the year I turned 13, because every song put me back at a Bar/Bat Mitzvah party. Every freaking one! Dancing in my socks (which I naturally wore over my panty hose to keep them from tearing), watching the boys on the other side of the room (far, far away from us of course) whisper and play with matches and wishing they would come over and ask me to dance, seeing relatives rallying around the Jew-of-the-day, congratulating them on not dropping the Torah. All that. And I kept those memories in as long as possible, but I just couldn't help myself. I blurted out, "It feels like a Bat Mitzvah in here! Anyone have a glowstick I can make into a halo?" To which the nice waspy southern ladies who I was working out at the time responded, understandably, "What?" "Nothing, don't worry about it. Pull your abs in."

Yesterday, I was playing around on the XM and tuned to the 80's channel. They were playing Phil Collins, "Inside Out." As a angst-ridden high schooler, I played that song A LOT! And there is a line in the song that says "Let me in, I'm through with wasting my time!" which I recall screaming at the top of my lungs as I sang along. (Go ahead, you can lose respect for me for singing along with some Philage. I understand.) As soon as I heard that song the other day, I found myself mentally slipping back into that angsty place... that feeling of being misunderstood, angry, confused and hormonal. For a minute, some part of me was sitting on the floor in my childhood bedroom, cranking the music and singing as loud as my lungs would permit. And even though I changed the channel quickly to avoid it, I sank into that mood for a good half hour and had a hard time returning to the good mood I had been previously walking around with.

This happens to me all day long, wherever there is music playing. I have such specific memories attached to so many songs that sometimes it feels like dodging landmines. 'Crap, that's a Ryan song.' 'Oh man, I heard this song so much when I was working for Leeza.' 'Wow, Paul loved this song. I wonder what happened to him.' 'Oh god, I heard this song one night driving home after a crappy day of working on Wayne .'

Some songs are forever taboo. There's the Rolling Stones song that reminds me of the night my first boyfriend dumped me. The one that reminds me of being fired from that Disney show. Another one that reminds me of a really angsty night in college. These are songs I know I need to avoid like the plague because it takes me a really looooooong time to pull myself out of the moods I know come with them.

Some songs are great memories. From a fun family vacation or a great night in college with my friends. Songs from shows I really enjoyed, or songs that we played while we worked (Can you say Whitesnake, Paige?) or songs we danced to in the nightclubs in London.

Sometimes I try to recondition my brain to connect a different memory to a song. Doesn't seem to work very well. Only accidentally. My mother loves Barry Manilow, so his music used to remind me of being a little girl and make me feel warm and safe. But I used it so many times to pull myself out of bad moods while I was working in Salt Lake, that now it just reminds me of being miserable in Salt Lake.

Because of all this, I think I have a stronger connection to my past then I should. I know I spend too much time thinking about it. It's hard to stop. Memories are just everywhere, and they are so strong. I don't know how to avoid them. And the thing is, I don't always mind. In fact, a lot of times, I like it. When they are good memories, I'm excited to relive them. When I heard "Roam" by the B-52s today, it reminded me of taking a tour of Ithaca's campus for the first time, and how excited I was about how close college seemed, how soon I was going to get out of Shaker. And as I remembered that feeling, my life felt so open and full of possibilities.

Sometimes even the bad memories are good to remember. There is another Phil Collins song that reminded me of being 17 and saying goodbye to my best friend who was moving to New York. I hear that song and think about how sure I was that I would never see her again and it makes me so happy that we stayed close and have kept our friendship going another 20 years. Makes me feel accomplished.

I may sound like I'm complaining here, and I may be to a degree. But really, if you gave me the option to change this, I wouldn't. Some part of me likes the connections. Even the bad ones.

What I do wish I could change tho, is the feeling of being so out of control of my reactions. I would like to be able to have these moments of my life on playback but I would like to watch them from a safe emotional distance. Maybe if I didn't constantly emotionally relive my past, I could let it go and focus more on what's going on in my life right now.

Once again, I am solution-less on this issue. I shall continue to live in my mental auditorially-stimulated time-machine.

Maybe I should just find a channel on XM that only plays songs I've never heard before. Think it would work?

Admit It!

2009-07-31T16:08:00.000-07:00

You all thought I was exaggerating, didn't you? Well... here's some proof for ya...

How to Know You're in New Orleans

2009-07-20T13:22:00.000-07:00

8:30AM: I'm headed down the street with one of my fellow production-ites to go to Starbucks in the French Quarter in New Orleans.

Sadly for me, I'm dressed for my day at the Superdome, which means I am layered to the eyeballs because it's freezing in there. So my walk to Starbucks turned me awfully sweaty in the thick N.O. air, especially since I am also schleping my computer, a binder and God knows what else, in my computer case.

I turn the corner onto Canal and there in the doorway is the most aggressively average looking Transvestite/ prostitute I have ever seen. She looks me up and down and says, "Good morning" with a very bright smile. I respond in kind and as I pass her by, she gives me another glance and says, with a very surprised inflection, "Oh! Nice tits!"

Naturally, I say, "Thanks very much." And I continue on my way.

Hello, New Orleans.

Comfortable is a relative term...

2009-06-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

Internet dating. There are so many pitfalls and traps. And it's so easy to get sucked into cliches when putting your profile together.

For example, does every guy out there aged 25-45 really like long walks on the beach? Is it really that universal? Isn't there someone out there like me who thinks that sand in your shoes is overrated?

Also, do that many people enjoy badminton so much that they are compelled to list it as a hobby? Cause I don't see badminton clubs sweeping the nation.

Then there are the people who like to work hard and also like to play hard. Is it me, or is that code for I-love-getting-drunk-and-throwing-up-in-some-random-stranger's-garden? Okay, that may be a bit cynical, and since I don't claim to either work hard OR play hard, it's probably not fair to judge. But I remember my old boss used to use that line all the time, and as far as I could tell, playing hard for him meant meeting the other power biz chino and polo shirt guys out for drinks for a few hours and talking on the phone to clients the entire time. So maybe my impression is incorrect.

But my fav of all the fav cliches are the guys who are looking for girls who are equally comfortable in black-tie or sweats.

Ok, um, what? EQUALLY comfortable? Let's evaluate that for a moment. Because is anyone EVER comfortable when they dress up to go out somewhere? I mean, maybe men can be comfortable in ties and suits, if they wear them everyday, and I guess tuxedos aren't that much different. But seriously, guys? Have you ever seen the shoes we wear when we wear black-tie attire? Do they look comfortable to you?Do Spanx, or panty hose, or anything else we wear to keep our bodies in check while wearing fabulous clothes look as comfy as sweats to you?

Let's see these two scenarios side-by-side, shall we? Do a little side-by-side comparison.

"Honey, let's stay in tonight and watch some TV."
"Oh, fantastic idea sweetheart. I'm so tired and I have been waiting for the chance to wear my new strapless bra with underwire under my new black tie gown. Let me just throw my hair into a chignon and I'll be all ready to get comfy."

Am I ranting? Of course. Am I exaggerating? Uh huh. Do I think that perhaps I am taking it all a bit too literally? Well, duh. Am I completely wrong? Possibly. Am I amused by the idea? Abso-freakin-lutely.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put on my new stilettos and do some gardening. Have a lovely evening!

Take a Moment Friday

2009-06-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

I'd like to start a new tradition here at the blog. Each Friday, I am going to pick one thing and Take a Moment to Appreciate It. So here goes today's.

I am doing a party for a woman tonight who is folding me into her birthday celebration. She has rented a hotel suite and invited all of her friends. She is having Ladies' Time from 5:30-8:30 and I will be attending as part of that portion.

She gave me an invitation so that I would know the details and where everything is. It's a pretty straightforward invitation, mostly unremarkable. Exept for this one part, which is my favorite.

At the bottom, under the directions, it says "Please bring a gift."

I love that! She wants gifts. So rather than leaving any mention of gifts off, in the hope that people will just assume to bring them, or being socially correct and saying "no gifts" and then hoping people will ignore that directive and bring them anyway, she's putting it out there. Please bring a gift.

Someone who actually asks for what they want. Huh. Doesn't hope, doesn't hint, doesn't fantasize about it. Just asks. How often do we actually do that in life? I can't speak for everyone, but I know I don't do it all that often. So it shouldn't be surprising to me when people don't read my mind, but it always seems to shock me.

So, on this Take a Moment Friday, let's take a moment to appreciate someone who is willing to risk putting themselves out there and asking for something they want.

I shall now follow the lead and ask people to forward my blog on to people you think may enjoy it. And maybe leave a comment.

(That was scarier than I thought. Better hit Publish Now before I change my mind.)

Richie's Bid for Freedom

2009-06-11T14:55:00.001-07:00

So, the first time was a week ago today. No, you know what? Let's start a bit further back.

My sister's dog, Ernie, made his first attempt at freedom early last week. Somehow, he got out of the gate in the backyard and went off to check out the neighborhood on his own. My sister lept in her car and chased him down, luring him into the backseat with hot dogs.

My poor sister. She lives on a main street and her dog is lovable and sweet and very endearing, but not the brightest bulb in the box. We're talking about a dog who tried to eat a skunk and then looked so sad when it sprayed him right in the face. You could practically hear him thinking, "Well, what did you do that for? I just wanted to eat you! Why would you hurt me?" So, when my sister said to me that she was grateful she had the presence of mind to take along hot dogs to tempt him into the car, I agreed. It was a smart move. And I said a silent prayer of thanks in my head that Richie has spent hours upon hours in the backyard and never gotten out or tried to eat a skunk. See? I willed it into being! Stupid, stupid, stupid.

A week ago today, I was out all morning. As I was driving home, the sky was just starting to return to normal after several hours of rain and thunderstorm. I was relieved that it was ending before I got home because, as previously discussed, Richie can get quite manic when thunderstorms roll into town.

I pulled down my street and noticed that the woman who cleans my house had parked in my driveway. So I pulled up to the curb and parked. As I was getting out, a very nice man who was getting into his minivan down the street yelled hello to me. Then he asked me if I knew anyone in the neighborhood who had a Corgi. I yelled back that I had one, as my heart started to beat faster.

I walked toward the man who was yelling to me that he had just seen a corgi trailing a red leash (which I leave on him when my cleaning person is here so she can get him back into his room when she leaves with little difficulty) walking down the street. Naturally, I instantly began to panic and started running down the street toward the car, my mind already trying to calculate where he might have gone.

Fortunately, this lovely man had realized that a dog walking down the street with his leash on and no owner didn't seem right and had picked him up and put him in the car. The man got out and opened his back door. "Come here, buddy," he said and I saw Richie's head pop out of the door and look around with interest to see what was going on. Very nonchalant. 'Oh gee, what's happening out here?' I wanted to kill him and hug him at the same time. He caught sight of me and smiled before jumping out of the car and walking toward me. I grabbed his leash, gushing thanks to this wonderful, wonderful man (who was a little scary for a second when he said that his wife had always wanted a corgi and he had been about to call her and tell her he found one... um...) Richie started pulling on the leash like he thought we would go for a walk now. As if my legs were still working and not shaking like crazy. Sorry, buddy. We had to go home right away so I could have a quiet nervous breakdown and try very hard not to yell at my cleaning person for letting him out when the gate was open. Which I know was not her fault, but I wanted to yell anyway.

Anyhow, we all recovered and it became a funny story to tell for the next few days. I tried not to think about what could have happened and just focused on how fortunate I was that the timing worked out the way it did.

Two days ago, Ernie, apparently having gotten a taste of freedom and liking it, streaked out the side door of my sister's house while someone was leaving and ran off down the street. My poor sister had to run after him and finally caught up with him when he was a couple blocks down. Now she's worried that every time she opens the door, he's going to make a run for it. And I don't blame her. Again, as she told me what happened, I stupidly said a silent prayer of thanks that Richie didn't get any further on his freedom run and that I had learned my lesson. Jinxed it again!!!

This afternoon, I came home during a thunderstorm. I let Richie out to pee but he was so freaked out by the storm, he refused to go. I shut the back door and walked away for a second thinking if I wasn't standing there, maybe he would go on his own. Um... I thought wrong.

No, instead he made a break for it, no doubt looking for somewhere to get away from the storm. If the storm is in his house and in his backyard, then surely he can get away from it by leaving those places.

I returned to the door less than a minute later and he was nowhere in sight. Completely panicked, I got in the car, stalled, and then backed out, terrified that he would come running up the driveway and I wouldn't be able to see him. (He's REALLY SHORT!) I drove around the block, stopping at a park near my house, where I very enthusiastically and loudly, screamed "RICHIEEEEEEE" at the top of my lungs several times. (Think STELLLAAAAA. That's about right.) I turned around to get back in the car with absolutely no idea what direction to head next when I saw two ears crest the hill of the block next to the park. I hoped against hope that it was him. That he had heard me scream and was running to me.

It was, although I don't think he heard me yell. I think he was just still trying to outrun the storm. He was running, running, running, ears flat back, in the rain. He was, of course, just to torture me as much as possible, running down the middle of the friggin' road, just so a car could not see him and run him over as they drove by. I was standing there yelling, "Come to me Richie! That's a good boy, come on Richie." I didn't want to back the car up for fear of running him over and I was afraid if I wasn't right next to the car when he got to me, he would take off again before I could reach down and grab his collar. So I just stood next to the car, yelling his name and clapping my hands together (our signal for "come.") He got to the end of the block and I was just about to stop freaking out when I realized he wasn't running at me. He didn't seem to know it was me. Like Forrest Gump before him, he was just running. He turned the corner and started heading toward the house.

Fortunately (how many times can I use that word in this post), when I yelled his name again, he realized it was me and changed course. I opened the car door and he jumped in, shaking and panting (which made two of us.) I got in the car and sat behind the wheel, trying to calm myself down. My legs were shaking too much to put the clutch in. I kept seeing everything that could have gone wrong flashing behind my eyes. A car. Another dog. Him getting lost and not knowing how to get home.

We got home and I was too afraid to put him down outside so I carried him into the house. Did I mention he doesn't enjoy being carried? He squirms and squirms until he either falls out of my arms or I put him down. Which I did and then flopped down on the couch.

I wanted to be mad. I wanted to punish him. But all I could feel was grateful. So I sat down on the floor next to him, petting him and telling him I love him. I started to lecture him about never leaving the house again, but he was apparently not interested, because he got up and walked to the other corner of the room and laid down, panting, drooling and staring at the ceiling, no doubt wondering why he couldn't get away from the storm.

'What is it with my Granddogs,' my mother asked me. I honestly don't know. But I am choosing to blame Ernie for being a bad influence on Richie. Now granted, they live in seperate states and have only ever met once since Richie doesn't know how to play nicely with others. But still, let's blame Ernie. It's less stressful for me.

And I've had enough stress today.

Year 35

2009-06-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

So... 36 looms. In two more days, I will be closer to 40 than to 30. Which is fine. I'm not worried about age. But as the day gets closer, I've been doing some evaluation of the previous year. I've been making a mental list of my accomplishments (such as they are) over the year that was 35.

Recruited four new consultants. All of whom are still active, which is exciting. Still dangle on the precipice of Director level where I have been hanging since November, waiting to find one more recruit. Frustrating!
Read at least 20 books. Started and never finished significantly more than that, however. Let's not do the math to see how much I spent on these. Re-read Time Traveler's Wife for possibly the 5th time. Stay tuned for a later blog on that book and the special place it holds in my heart.
Learned to teach Pilates and taught over 60 hours of free classes for friends and family.
Attempted to understand the anatomy of the human body for Pilates. Ongoing process.
Attended PR annual training in Cincinnati and PR Convention in Las Vegas. Guess which one I enjoyed more.
Held more than 50 PR parties. Had three women tell me I helped save their marriage.
Took Richie for significantly fewer walks that I should have. Poor Richie.
Ten haircuts and six cut/color.
Countless mani/pedis.
Spent many hours with my fantastic niece singing songs from Sesame Street and impersonating the Count.
Finally brought a 20 year relationship to its inevitable conclusion, simultaneously purging myself of two decades of regret and what-ifing while also creating a whole new world of pain. Thankfully, it abated quicker than the previous times.
Replaced the broken tile on the kitchen floor finally freeing the house from the last of many stupid home improvement mistakes the previous owners made.
Accrued an additional $10,000 in ViewU debt.
Got to see my Mother recognized and thanked for her many, many years of service to the Alzheimer's Association.
Saw "Love" by Cirque Du Soleil twice. (Fully intend to see it again this August.)
Abandoned one knitting project mid-process and replaced it with a different one several months later.
Wrote way less blogs than I meant to and plan to do better in year 36.
Joined Twitter. Pretty much stopped at joining however.
Bought a new dishwasher. It's sooooo quiet!
Drove to Nashville for NYE.
Cleveland for Thanksgiving.
Girls' Weekend in Asheville.
Family vacation in Hilton Head.
Telethon in Vegas.
Some stupid gospel show in Sept.
Inaugural Event in DC.
Laryngitis
Bronchitis bordering on Pneumonia
Read lots and lots and lots of Twilight Fan Fiction (and I'm only slightly ashamed...)
Walked 26 miles and raised $1900 for the Avon Walk 2008!
Worked three or four Panther's games for Kara.
Bought a Wii and joined a book club at the same time!
Watched a fantastic season of Lost! And even though I wanted to throw the TV at the wall in frustration after the season finale, I loved every minute of it. I'm sure I will sob next year when it really does end for real real (as Molly would say)

I'm sure I accomplished a ton of other things during the course of this year. But those appear to be the highlights. All in all, I think the good things far outnumber the bad things.

I've spent a lot of time in the last few months thinking and worrying about the things I don't have. But looking at this list now, it reminds me of so many things I do. Which is important to do, especially when your own personal calendar is set to flip to the next year.

It's a good time to make resolutions, many of which are not appropriate for sharing with the outside world. But one thing I will let everyone in on... I plan to update this blog once a week from now on. Don't know what day and don't know for sure I will always be able to pull it off, but I am going to do my best. Entries will probably be a lot shorter (which is probably a relief to everyone) but they'll be there.

And with that, I'm off. See you next week!

Shameless

2009-05-15T10:39:00.001-07:00

So... as I type this, I am sitting in a pool side chair on the last day of my family's week long vacation to Hilton Head.

I just watched my own Aunt bribe her 1.5 year old granddaughter with a goldfish cracker to get a kiss. Which, sadly, she did not receive. But young Sara got a cracker anyway. Cause that's how grandkids roll. And grandparents who live in a different city from their grandkids are only too happy to do whatever it takes to get some affection and attention. Much like Cool Aunts.

Earlier today, we were sitting at the table eating lunch and I decided it would be fun to start counting like The Count from Sesame Street. I'll be honest, it didn't seem like fun so much as a promising attempt to draw my niece's attention with overt Sesame Street references. And it worked like gangbusters. I was the hit of the lunch. We counted mouthfuls of mac 'n cheese (one mouthful of mac n cheese in zoe's mouth mwah ah ah! TWO mouthfuls of mac n cheese in zoe's mouth mwah ha ha ha!) and then we counted pieces of cantelope. We counted flowers on her shirt. We counted the number of forks on the table. (There was only one, so that was a short game.) It was a shining moment of attention for me and only one of the many I have attempted over the course of this week long vacation. "Aunt Sheri, you so funny!" YES!!!!

At the beginning of the week, I tried some succesful methods I scored with on my last visit home. That included my own special rendition of "C" is for Cookie... "Z" is for Zoe, that's good enough for me." Then there was Little Bunny Foo Foo. She loved LBFF last time I was home. This time, not so much. I got a very emphatic "Aunt Sheri no can sing!" most times when I tried.

I tried to play "Pass the Zoe" in the pool with her mother. That died a quick and painful death and put me in a two day time-out. "Aunt Sheri is taking a break!" she announced to my sister, implying that it was time for me to take a break from swimming with her. I must have really needed that break, because when I woke up the next day and came down to the pool, she announced that I would be taking a break again before I even said good morning. "Aunt Sheri is taking a break," she said cheerfully to my sister. Boo says Aunt Sheri. But what my niece wants, she gets. At least, from Aunt Sheri!

Finally, yesterday I achieved success. Dubious success, but success none the less. We were in the pool together at the end of the day and I was struck with inspiration. "Zoe," I shouted with drama. "Wanna see Aunt Sheri disappear?" She was enthusiastic at the prospect, which I decided not to take personally. I swam on my back to the center of the pool and, after counting to three, lifted one leg and both arms into the air and sank below the water.

I returned triumphantly to the surface and was met with the desired reaction. She was excited, she was laughing, she was PAYING ATTENTION TO ME! So, naturally, when she said "again" I was down!

And that was the rest of the day. "Aunt Sheri can disappear again!" okay... only if you count to three for me. "Aunt Sheri can disappear again!" okaaaaayyyyy... "Aunt Sheri can disappear again! One two threeeeee!"

I'm not gonna lie. I thought it would get old. I did. To stave off the boredom, I spiced it up occasionally with a mid-water somersault and handstand. They were met with mild delight, but nothing was as great as Aunt Sheri disappearing. Again, I tried not to read too much into it and performed like the trained aunt I am over and over and over and over. And it didn't get old. It really didn't ever get old.

We got out of the pool later that afternoon after countless disappearances. First thing this morning, when I walked out to the pool in my workout clothes, Zoe shouted "Aunt Sheri can disappear again!"

I gotta say, it's a real feeling of accomplishment to have carved out a place in my niece's mental list of fun things to watch and do. I only get to see her a few times a year and I like knowing that she might remember me when I'm not around. Until I can take her shopping and sympathize with her when her mother is unreasonable, this kind of stuff is all I have that may make a lasting impression. So if I have to repeat the same impressions over and over, whistle on occasion, (which always commands her attention and prompts her "tweet tweet" as she tries to imitate me) and sink into the pool time and again until my eyes burn with chlorine, (see how I get to do the Jewish martyr thing?) I will do it any chance I get.

Cause tomorrow, Aunt Sheri disappears for real. At least until August. When she will have to start from scratch and look for new methods of inspiring her niece's delight.

Gotta start watching Dora so I can do a Dora impression. See? I will do ANYTHING!

Ode to me mom

2009-04-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

So... as I mentioned in today's earlier post, tonight my Mother received an award from The Alzheimer's Association.

My mom started volunteering for the Association around the time my grandmother was diagnosed. Since then, she has become an incredibly active part of the organization, going to meeting after meeting, dripping blood, sweat and tears over every detail of her involvement. Although I know she loves this work, I often wished she would cut back, just because it seemed to be so stressful to her. Last year, when she was required to resign from the board (term limits) I was so excited that she was going to get her life back. So when she told me she was going to re-join the board as soon as she was eligible, I thought she was crazy. But tonight, I finally understand.

I have never seen someone so beloved as my Mom in that ballroom tonight. And it was more than the three tables of friends who joined us in helping her celebrate. I always know how much she means to her friends. She is always the rock in their lives. She is the one they always turn to, the one everyone trusts with their darkest secrets. The one that everyone most respects. It's an incredible thing to have a role model like that. I always aim to be the same kind of friend as my mother.

But, tonight, I saw the respect, the gratitude and the appreciation that my mom inspired in all the employees and volunteers at the Association. I saw how she is their support system and their friend. I had so many people introduce themselves to me tonight and say, "We just love your mother! She is such a wonderful person." And I would agree.

My mom isn't comfortable with the spotlight. She's been anxious for this night to be over for a while, possibly since the day she learned she would be receiving the award. I, in my attempts to make sure she appreciates tonight, have been badgering her mercilessly since I got to town the other day. I've been making her swear that she would accept every compliment graciously, that she would save the self-deprecating comments for another night. And she has agreed, although reluctantly. I told her we would give her standing ovations and she begged me not to. I made jokes about creating a cheer with her name in it and spelling her name with our bodies, which made her turn white with fear and say "You better not!" But when they introduced her, it didn't matter what I did, because half the ballroom was on their feet anyway. I have never been so proud of her or so grateful to be her daughter (and that's saying a lot because I have always looked up to my mom.)

So Mom, congrats again for tonight. I am so pleased that you finally got the attention and thanks that you so richly deserve. And I know Grandma and Poppa are too.

From the program book: "Marsha's involvement began in the late 1990s when she casually mentioned to an acquaintance, "let me know if there's anything I can do to help with the Alzheimer's Association." Since then, she has served as a member of the board of trustees, is a member of the development and finance committees, has served on the executive committee, has chaired A Celebration of Hope and Memory Walk and has been an active member of countless event committees. Marsha is known as a real go-getter who is always willing to take on roles of responsibility and leadership...

When asked to describe her, Chris Stevens, the current chair of the association's board of trustees, said, "We have all benefited from Marsha's grace, dedication to the mission of the organization and hard work. She has always been very generous with her time, energy and talents and is our serene leader."

That's my mom!

Pack-rat or Archivist? You decide

2009-04-30T05:30:00.001-07:00

So... my mother is receiving an award tonight from the Alzheimer's Association (I will be writing a blog later with the details from the program) and I flew home this week to go to the event. I'm so proud of her and everything she's done, but that's for a later post.

No, today's post is about my childhood desk. It sits on the wall of my childhood bedroom, below a faded yellow post-it note on my wall that says (in all caps and underlined, no doubt for emphasis) "STUDY!" The note is a relic of my long-ago days of school-dom. I asked my mother yesterday how it can still be on the wall. They stripped the wallpaper since I moved out and painted the room white. She says she liked to leave it there because it was so iconoclastic.

Anyway, I was getting dressed yesterday and happened to glance over at my desk and noticed a little round piece of plastic sitting there. I realized it was one of those plastic discs that you put in the center of a 45 record to play it on a normal record player. As I was looking at the little disc of yester-year, suddenly, as though I had blinders on before, my entire desk and everything sitting on it (including the yellow post-it reminder to study) materialized. I realized that since I moved out of this house in 1991, I have never really looked at that desk. So, I decided to dig in and discover it's contents. Here's what I found...

On top of the desk:

A jar full of pennies in a mug that says "Please don't bother me, I'm studying." (Yeah, I'm sure...)
8 different coffee mugs with various sayings... "Official Left-Handed Mug" (which had a small hole on one side so if you tried to drink with your right hand it would dump the liquid all over you) "Coffee and Cruellers will hold back the honk" (That's a Wayne's World mug, of course) and one with a pretty unicorn leaping over a rainbow.
A Giant Guinness mug filled with hair combs.
Four, count them, FOUR pencil cups jammed full of writing implements (including some Crayola markers) which no longer have any hope of working. (And I know they don't work, cause I tried several of them as I began my inventory of the desk. None of them were up to the job. I just put them back, naturally.)
A Guinness bottle with a red and white pom sticking out of it from my Shaker Heights Red Raiders days.

And that's just what's been sitting on top...

Drawer #1:

A program from my high school senior honors dinner, in which I did not receive any honors.
My report card from the fall of '92 (Mostly Bs with an A- in Fiction writing)
A directory of my C:/ drive from my first computer
A Colleco Quiz Wiz with 1001 questions (I wonder if I can get money for that from eBay)
A container of Pick Up Sticks
A File box that says "Pick a Book" on the outside. Inside are cards describing books. For example: "This book is about all kinds of animals at a hotel. It is very funny" and "This book is about a boy who loves soccer. If you like soccer, this book is for you." (For the record, I believe this box was a class project in Elementary School and I took it upon myself to procure it secretly. Not all these descriptions were written by me, as evidenced by the fact that there is a book about soocer.)

Drawer #2:

Two boxes of reel to reel tape from my days as a radio Production Manager on 106-VIC- the Voice of Ithaca College.
A notebook containing questions from my first (and last) celebrity interview... yes, friends, it was Julio Iglesias.
A folder full of fiction writing, most of it involving death and bad metaphors. I was a very, very dark writer in my youth.
A college Viewbook from the University of Hartford. (A school which I did not visit, nor apply to, nor, obviously, attend. However, I live on a street called Hartford now, so that's something.)
A book in which I wrote down song lyrics I liked with the title in calligraphy (or what I believed calligraphy should look like) on the facing page. Many of the titles are Beatles songs, but there is some Simon & Garfunkel thrown in for good measure. (It seems to me this was early practice for my future career. It also seems to me that I got a lot of song lyrics wrong back then.)
A reminder on a slip of paper to call Lee Fisher's office (candidate for State Representative) on Monday for myself and Molly. Mol and I volunteered in his office in 1990, mainly because the Volunteer Coordinator was very cute and used to call us Slut-Puppy. (Which we also called ourselves, to be fair.)
A yellow Yo-Yo
The letter I earned for my letter jacket from High School Marching Band. (Which I clearly had the sense NOT to put on my jacket, cause how lame is a band letter?)
A book of piano sheet music with TV and Movie themes. (Ex: The Theme from Ice Castles, St. Elsewhere and Happy Days.)

Drawer #3

A Certificate of Merit from Temple Emanu El for Outstanding Scholastic Achievement in Grade 10 Judaic Studies. (Really? They must have set the bar VERY low...)
A wall calendar from 1990 titled "PMS Attack." Complete with countdown to the day I left for my summer trip to Cambridge in England. The countdown begins 117 days from departure. (From 4/22-4/30, I wrote "Dante's 9th Level of Hell" across the dates. Which puzzled me until I saw that the SAT's were held on May 1st. Ah!!!)
Paperback book version of the movie "Big" starring Tom Hanks.
Flash cards for Division. (Truthfully, I should take those home and study them. I could use the practice!)
The shooting script from the August 25, 1994 edition of Entertainment Tonight. John Tesh: "All that pushing and squeezing and pushing and squeezing and finally... rock hard thighs. Now watch Suzanne put them to work." (Ok, I'd really like to know what was happening in the tape package that came after THAT intro!)
My Driver License that expired in June of '93
My SISTER'S Driver License (which I was stupidly using as a fake ID even though there was a three inch height difference and we look nothing alike) which expired in January of '95.
A recipe printed on dot matrix printer for Skyline Chili (hmmm.... can't wait to try that!)
A copy of Cliff's Notes for Macbeth.

Now, you may be wondering to yourself, 'Self, I wonder if Sheri decided to throw out stupid things like the note to call Lee Fisher's office, or the printed 8 page description of a C:/ drive that has been taking up space in a landfill for a good 15 years... and really get something accomplished while she strolled down memory lane.' So, I'll tell you.

No.

No, when I was done looking at everything, writing it all down so I could record it here, I shoved it all back in the drawers and pushed and pushed until they closed again.

And it's not that the idea of purging the drawers and throwing things out didn't occur to me. It did. Many times. However, ultimately, the garbage bags were downstairs and the alarm was already on. And, you know, I had such a good time combing through all this crap, that who am I to deny my future self the same enjoyment 10 years from now? When I can again wonder why I'm saving that empty file box, or that yellow yo-yo, or the 15 copies of the resume I sent to LA when I was trying to find an internship for 2nd semester senior year. How sad would I feel one day to not be able to comb through pages and pages of badly written fiction with teacher's comments written in green on the side, pointing out gramatical and spelling errors?

No, I can't deny my future self this joy. And what if I should become famous? I know it's not likely, but it could happen. Shouldn't I save all these important momentos for the opening night of the Sheri Spitz Collection at the Smithsonian?

Yes, better to leave things as they are. Who knows what I will need someday.

Tune in for the next time I return home and document the contents of my closets, where I promise you, there is a Married With Children board game!

I freakin' love my job!

2009-04-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

So... I have had a bad couple of weeks, as you can probably tell from my previous two posts. I feel like I've been non-stop cranky for months. (I'm sure if I asked some of my friends if that's true they would confirm... which is why I won't ask). I've been feeling a bit lost, a bit confused, a bit like everything I want in life is just beyond my reach and I will always come close to what I want and but never quite get it.

Then, miracle upon miracles, PR scheduled an all day educational Empowerment Summit in Charlotte. Well, not just in Charlotte. In eight other markets as well. But Charlotte's happened to be today. And all I have to say, having spent 9 hours sitting in a hotel ballroom, in the same chair (with a half hour lunch break and loooots of bathroom breaks cause my bladder is apparently the size of a pea), listening to five different speakers and watching five different Powerpoint presentations...

I FREAKIN' LOVE THIS COMPANY!!!!$#@$#@

Feel like I'm shouting at you? I am.

Seriously, I have always loved trainings and meetings from the day I signed up. I go to every meeting that I can for our team in the Carolinas, I've been to National Convention twice in Las Vegas and chose to ignore the city and its trappings to sit in voluntary training sessions (of course, to be fair, I don't like Vegas very much, so I didn't feel like I was giving up anything) and I've gone to Annual Corporate Training in Cincinnati, OH every year for three days. Every year, at the end of training, I start getting excited and can't wait for the next one. It's always so empowering and exciting and amazing to be in a room with SO MANY women who are all about bettering themselves and each other instead of being nasty and bitchy as you know we women can be in large groups.

But this Empowerment Seminar blew all those previous trainings away. I am so pumped, I want to do a party right-freakin-now to show off what I learned. I want to memorize every bullet-point, every note, every demo that I heard today and recite them to strangers so they can get as excited as I am. (Hence the blog! Aren't you glad I didn't call you personally?)

I have been to quite a few trainings for other companies. The Pump Factory in Monroe, North Carolina (pronounced MONroe by the folks who worked there...) was a special treat of sheer, mind-numbing, excrutiating pain. The sales trainings I used to have to organize when I worked at Hair Color Xperts made me want to cry and beg my boss not to make me actually attend. And then, of course, there have been the ENDLESS tech meetings (yes, telethon, I'm thinking of you!) and production meetings where I seriously considered jabbing myself in the eye with my mechanical pencil just to make life more interesting.

This was twice as long as most of those (except the Telethon meeting, of course!) and flew by in a blink.

What I love about PR sales trainings is that they don't train us and say "Here's how you can make better sales." Instead, they tell us how we can like ourselves more, appreciate our customers more, be more educated... thereby increasing our sales. I genuinely walk away from our trainings feeling happier, more empowered and more in love with this company than ever.

Anyway, this is probably getting nauseating, so I'll stop here. I guess I just wanted to let everyone out there in blog land who might be feeling some concern for me based on previous posts know that "HappySheri" is back and ready to go!

PR rocks!!!

Messages from the Subconscious

2009-04-03T04:53:00.000-07:00

So... last night, I had two very weird dreams. Not unusual for me by any stretch. I am the most vivid dreamer I know and my dreams are regularly active, dark and often involve life or death situations. If anyone out there in blog land has a cure for that, let me know. Please.

These dreams last night were no different, generally, than the others. Quick action, representation from people in my life etc. But usually, I wake up from these things thinking 'What in the holy hell did that mean?' and writing it off. Like the other night, I had a dream that my whole family was going to Greece for a vacation and I had volunteered to stay and watch my cousins' restaurant for them (despite the fact that none of my cousins actually own restaurants) and was very anxious about doing a good job. What does that mean? I have no idea.

But two dreams from last night actually seem like they are sending me a message. In the first of the two, I was driving a large mobile home type thing with a group of friends home from some kind of vacation. For some reason, I have a memory that we were a band on tour? But anyway, we were driving this mobile home and we put it on autopilot (!!!) and went into the back to play cards while the car drove us home. But something was bothering me and I couldn't figure it out. So I went back up to the driver's seat to check on things and started to come a very slow realization that we were driving the wrong direction on the highway.

I didn't panic, but I got off (driving backwards so I could go with the flow of traffic) at the next exit I could find. My friends didn't seem bothered by it and no other cars were honking at me. Which is probably why it took me so long to figure out that we were going the wrong way. But we did eventually get off the highway and turn around to attempt to get back on. As we were starting to turn onto the entrance ramp, I noticed there were some orange cones blocking part of the ramp. I tried to see if I should go around the cones, but there was so much traffic and they were all honking to get me to move forward, so I just went around the cones and started driving down the ramp, only to discover that the ramp was only half finished and didn't connect to the highway. We were trapped. And then I woke up.

I had to get up to go pee at that point, and as I went, I was doing my usual to reassure myself that none of that actually happened, that it was just a dream, blah blah blah. But I realized it seemed like a pretty telling one and I thought to myself, 'If I still remember it in the morning, I'll write a blog about it.' Then I went back to sleep.

In the next dream, I was at a gas station, filling up my car (which was actually my car on and off through this dream. Sometimes it was the Element, sometimes it was a big van) when all of a sudden, someone came by to pick me up and I left. I came back a long while later to the same station to pick up my car and pacing around the car screaming was Luke from Gilmore Girls. He was mad that I had left the car there so long with the gas pump handle in the car, taking up room. He was threatening to tow. I came running over, apologizing over and over and he started telling me he was going to sue me for all the business he had lost while my car sat there. I was horribly embarrassed and apologetic and tried to pay for my gas, but he kept ranting and raving and getting angrier and angrier. Finally, he started to calm down and eventually agreed to just let me pay for the gas I bought. Then my friends and I climbed into the car and started heading home.

Do you ever think maybe you're doing something wrong with your life and no one has bothered to tell you, or even noticed? I hate to take such a literal translation with these dreams, especially since my dreams are usually so screwy that there isn't a lesson to be learned among them. My dreams are abstract and strange. But these dreams just seem so obvious. At a time in my life where I am a feeling a bit at loose ends, these dreams seem to be screaming at me. Am I going the wrong direction? Am I taking dead-end roads? Am I just taking up space in places where better things would get done if I would just move out of the way?

I don't think this applies to my business. In fact, work, as usual, is the one thing in my life I am completely certain about. I know I am doing good there and I'm proud of the work that I do. At least, I know I'm good at parties, at selling, at educating and supporting my clients in a very intimate setting. Recruiting, on the other hand... not my strongest area. But I don't feel like I'm going the wrong direction there.

Maybe the dreams happened because I have spent this entire week carrying around the intention of getting organized as hell in my house and never getting it done. Is that it?

Is it my personal life? Is that where I am standing at a dead end road? I don't get the chance to meet a lot of people to spend time with in this line of work. I work from home, I work at night... not a lot of new friendships or relationships to be made in that context. Back in LA, I would do new shows every month and at every show, I would make a great new friend. Sometimes they were just friends that I would see at shows occasionally, but more often, they became friends that I would hang out with after shows ended. I had so many incredible friends out there and I do miss that here. The friends I have made in Charlotte are amazing and I love them all, but there are not a lot. At least, not by my standards.

Maybe the dreams were the result of frustration that I've been feeling this week over trying to prepare my books without really understanding what I'm doing. I finally got them done on Tuesday and gave them to my accountant who then called me to ask a hundred questions about things I had done wrong in my Quickbooks, even going so far as forgetting she was on the phone with me and muttering to herself 'she has got to take a bookkeeping class.' Which, yes, I need to do.

Maybe it's to do with my fear that practicing and learning Pilates so I can make an extra couple hundred a week teaching is not going to work out because it appears there are not enough clients for me to actually get a class to teach.

I don't know exactly what they mean, but I have a feeling it might be all of the above. I also know that I have these types of moments in my life, these feelings of being at a turning point, on the cusp of something, every few years. And everything always works out in the end. I have no doubt that all these issues I'm facing right now will be resolved and when they are, of course, the answer in hindsight will be obvious and I'll wonder why I spent so much energy trying not to think about them.

In the meantime, until the light turns on, I guess I'll just assume these dreams are a warning sign. A reminder to me that even though I'm pretending these issues aren't there, they do exist and probably need some attention.

And my Element does need some gas. I'll just remember to stand there while I fill the tank and take my car with me when I go.

Wocka Wocka Wocka

2009-03-22T18:50:00.001-07:00

So... I'm having a bit of a downer weekend. All the parties I had scheduled for this weekend canceled, which was frustrating as hell for me. The two people I usually spend time with whenever I don't have parties on a weekend are actually in Australia right now. So, I spent a lot of time in the Pilates studio practicing, saw a few movies and actually got to attend Molly's daughter's 8th birthday, which I normally would have missed if I had parties, so that was the highlight. But I ended the day Sunday kind of bummed. Too long by myself in my head with no structure and nothing of interest to do.

A few weeks ago, when I was home, my sister gave me a new book to read. It's about the creation of the Children's Television Workshop and the birth of Sesame Street. It's a great read (it's called Street Gang, for those with an interest) and I'm loving it. I did watch a lot of Sesame as a kid, so the nostalgia was thick around me this afternoon as I sat in Starbucks reading.

I loved Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster and all the other Muppets that hung out on Sesame Street, but my favorite Muppets had always been those who worked at the Muppet Theater on Saturday nights at 7:30PM. Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, the Swedish Chef, Camilla the Chicken... I loooooved that show. For some reason, Kermit's voice reminds me of my Dad. Especially when he (my Dad) sings. At my Bat Mitzvah, after my Dad sang an Alliyah on the pulpet in front of everyone we knew, I looked at him and said "Now sing 'It's Not Easy Being Green!'" (Years later, in college, when I was, shall we say, experimenting with things my father would not have approved of, my friend Gary would sing that song to me to further my already rampant paranoia while I inhaled.) Similarly, my father has always had this habit of singing the Swedish Chef theme song whenever he's tossing a salad or pasta. (In fact, I think my whole obsession with the Muppets is because I so strongly connect them with my father in my mind. Dad used to get ready to go out early on Saturday nights so he could watch The Muppet Show with us while we waited for the babysitter to get there.)

So every mention of Kermit in the book has made me want to watch the Muppets again. It's been so many years! I bought a DVD of some shows a few years ago, but never got around to watching it. So tonight, after I finished feeling crabby about my business and lack of people to hang with in Charlotte, I pulled out the DVD and put it on.

God, I forgot how funny it was. And not just in a 'oh, I used to think it was so funny back when I was a kid' kind of way. Funny in a laugh-out-loud as a grownup kind of way. There was so much adult humor in that show. I keep staring at Kermit and trying to see him as just a puppet. Just a felt thing that moves it's mouth up and down. But I can only seem to do it for a second before I get caught up in his personality and forget that his lips aren't actually forming words. The facial expressions are what makes it. I know that it's just his nose getting pointier (is that a word?) but it makes all the difference and changes his whole mood from happy-go-lucky to perplexed and/or mortified.

The Swedish Chef tried to make eggs in a frying pan but instead of laying actual eggs, Camilla the Chicken kept laying ping pong balls. Ultimately, TSC wound up chasing her around trying to put her in the pan instead.

At the Vertinarian's Hospital, Rolf the dog was worried that the dog patient on their table had fleas. Miss Piggy inquired as to why and Rolf explained it was because he hated starting from scratch. When the voiceover started his "Tune in to the next episode..." spiel, Miss Piggy, Rolf, Janice (who was the other nurse helping) and the dog patient all looked toward the ceiling to see where the disembodied voice had come from. I forgot they used to do that every episode. I don't think I understood as a kid.

Elton John sang Crocodile Rock and was eaten by the backup singing Crocodiles at the end.

Watching Kermit and Fozzy sing a duet means so much more now that I know how close Frank Oz and Jim Henson were.

On Pigs in Space, Miss Piggy and the Captain freak out when aliens invade the space ship. The aliens turn out to the Camilla the Chicken still being chased by the Swedish Chef. The voice over offers "Tune in next week and be bored again by... Piiiiiiiiigs Iiiiiiinnnnn Spaaaaace"

Sam the Eagle wants to know why Elton John dresses like a 'stolen car'. Huh? Yet, funny!

Okay, here's a scary moment... Elton John wearing a bedazzled, skin tight pink pantsuit (unzipped to the waist) and a pink bowlers hat.

Anyway, I could provide a blow-by-blow of the rest of the episode but I'll spare you. The point is, even though I haven't seen this show in 25 years or so, it is home to me. Comforting. Puts me completely at ease and totally abolished my bad mood. As soon as Kermit waved his arms and yelled "yaaaaayyyyy" during the opening song, I started to smile.

Sometimes the current fascination with Elmo makes me crazy. I wish Elmo would stop referring to himself in the third person. Sheri doesn't like it when people do that. But there is a whole generation of kids years from now who will be in a bad mood one Sunday afternoon when they are 35 and suddenly, they will see a Tickle Me Elmo doll and it will immediately make them feel better. So long as they don't grow up referring to themselves in the third person, I can accept that.

After all, the Muppet Show DVD managed to turn my downer of a Sunday into a Most-Sensational-Inspirational-Celebrational-Muppetational day.

(The final scene of the episode was of Statler and Waldorf in their balcony audience box talking as the Swedish Chef and Camilla go running through the background. Waldorf says "I hate a running gag!" Get it? Cause it was a running joke through the show and they were running in the background? I loved those two!)

Um... holy awkward Batman

2009-01-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

So... I've temporarily folded my Pure Romance self and put it in a drawer for a week so I could once again temporarily don my production self and come out to D.C. I'm helping out on one of the Inauguration events. I was hired on Sunday afternoon. Travel booked Monday afternoon. Flew out on Tuesday morning and was sitting in the office of the Presidential Inaugural Committee headquarters by noon, breaking down Jonas Brothers songs. Our event airs on Monday night on the Disney channel.

When I was called on Sunday afternoon to come out, I said yes immediately since I had no parties this week. Besides, who wouldn't want the chance to be part of something historic?

But later that day, a bit of concern started to creep in. See, five or six years before I left Los Angeles, I took a job which was a move up position-wise. Although the show should have been easy for me to handle, for some reason, it quickly turned into a logistical mess and a show that was WAY over my head and abilities. I hung in for a while, struggling to keep my head above water, but ultimately, they decided I wasn't the right fit for the show (aka I was fired). Honestly, I was never angry about it, because I would have fired me too. I was terrible on that show and totally drowning in my inexperience. When they fired me, I was COMPLETELY relieved and anxious to get back to shows I would enjoy. So when I was booked on the Inaugural I got very nervous because the production company and two of the producers on the show are the ones who fired me back then.

But ultimately, I got over it and realized that they fired me so many years ago and haven't seen me since and probably would not remember me at all. (Which it turns out was right for one of them. In fact, yesterday, after having worked with one of the producers for three days straight, I sent him an email and he asked the people in his office, "Who is Sheri Spitz?") So off I trotted to D.C. and all has been well so far. In fact, I've kind of enjoyed having the chance to redeem myself to "P," one of the producers who I am working with very closely. I can tell he has changed his opinion of me and his attitude has changed with it. I feel very triumphant.

The only TV show I normally do tends to have the same people on it year after year, so the added bonus of coming here and doing this show is that I have been able to see people some people I hadn't seen in years. Years before I left LA in some cases. It reminds me a lot of a family reunion. I remember a lot of them and most of their names. Most of them remember my face, some of them remember my name. I have decided to give them all the easy way out and pretend we've never met and introduce myself. Then, later, I pretend to have an epiphany and say, "Hey, didn't we work together on something before?" To which they say, relieved, "Yeah, what was that again?" At least, I do that for the people I like. The ones I don't like, I just say hello, call them by their names and let them twist in the wind while they try to remember who I am and what my name is. Ha.

So all has been going well here. The horrific nightmare of a production schedule I anticipated never really happened. Should happen tonight, but tomorrow is show day so no big deal. I'm having fun catching up with people and it's been easy, as usual, to shrug back into the script department role I played for so long. I've had my rough moments with certain higher ups, but other than that I'm having a good time. At least, I was. Until last night.

We actually made it out early(ish) last night and for some reason, the gods were smiling down upon us and we made it to a 9PM dinner reservation. It was super awesome! My fellow scriptie and I returned to the hotel to meet our fellow diners. The new FOSS (Fan of Sheri Spitz) producer "P" was joining us as well as one of the writers and a few other people. At the last minute, two people arrived at the hotel who had just flown in from LA and they wanted to join us. I knew the guy looked familiar, but I just couldn't place it. So we waited for them to drop their stuff in their rooms and headed to the restaurant.

The whole time we were walking in the F-ING FREEZING COLD to the restaurant, I was looking at him... trying to figure out what show we did together. No big deal, I thought. Probably some show back my early years and I haven't seen him in a while. But then someone called his name and it hit me... like a ton of bricks. I know where I've worked with him before.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a sushi restaurant. In it, I talked about my first experience learning that as a Script Supervisor I should be seen and not heard. I talked about how I got spanked, AND HARD, when I was fired from my second job out of college. What I didn't really go into in that post is how I committed all these cardinal post-production bay sins... I lounged with my feet up on the desk. I talked at random. I ordered coffees for myself not realizing they weren't free. All kinds of things that I would never even THINK of doing now. (In fact, one of the producers just went to Starbucks and I'm half asleep and he would have been happy to get something for me if I had asked, but I was too uncomfortable to do it.) I plead ignorance. It was, as I mentioned, my second job (and only six months) out of college and I just didn't know any better. The problem is, I continued these habits unabated (cause no one told me not to) for over two months. Finally, when the post-production supervisor let me go, he explained in detail everything I did wrong. I have never been so humiliated. To know that all this time, I had been making people mad and making mistakes and acting completely wrong and had no idea and no one told me? Ugh. I hated myself for doing it and them for not telling me.

So back to our current story (can you guess what's coming?) We're walking to the restaurant and I realize, the man I recognize is "R", the very Post-Production Super who fired me all those years ago. 13 years ago, to be exact. I instantly panicked, but at the same time I was highly amused. Strange combo, I am aware, but none the less, those were my thoughts.

So we get to the restaurant, all 10 of us, and walk to the table. I am the first to arrive at the table and so I pick out my leftie seat as usual. At this point, I'm trying to decide if I am going to re-introduce myself to "R" as though we have never met and let him just assume that's the case or remind him and own it like a grownup OR ignore him throughout dinner altogether. Option three was the winner in my mind, but apparently not in fate's mind. Cause he was the last to the table and there was only one seat left. Yes, next to me. On my right. Oh, and did I mention that "P" was sitting directly across from me? (It's also worth mentioning that "P" and I have never talked about the fact that he fired me. We are pretending that never happened, apparently.)

So there I am, surrounded by my own failure, deciding between the catfish and the crab cakes. "R" is mostly turned away from me, talking to the woman on his other side and I thought maybe I could ignore him the whole dinner after all, but then I decided that would be too tiring and I'd spend the entire dinner nervous. So I bit the bullet. "R," I said, drawing his attention. He turned to me and I stuck my hand out. "I'm Sheri." He shook my hand and said, "Yeah, we'e met before." I said, "Yeah, we worked together a VERY long time ago." "Where was that," he asked. "I can't remember." I pretended for a moment not to remember while I tried to decide whether or not to bring it up. Finally, I surrendered. "Disney," I said, looking him in the eye as much as possible. (BTW, I just realized that not only was that a Disney show, but the other show I was fired from was Disney as well and SO IS THE ONE I'M DOING NOW! Hmmm. And you guys wonder why I hate Disney!) I watched recognition dawn. And his face changed. And I knew he remembered. And for some reason, it made me laugh. Probably inappropriate, but unavoidable none the less.

He recovered quickly and we talked about how difficult that show was, neither of us actually acknowledging the giant pink elephant sitting on my shoulder, and then we both turned back to the people on our other sides and continued other conversations. We spoke a few more times during dinner, but for the most part, remained in our seperate corners. Later in the evening, one of the other producers there who had too much to drink started talking about how grateful he was that I was there doing the show and how great a job I was doing and how fantastic I was. And, of course, I humbly acknowledged his praise and thanked him graciously. In my head, I was thinking, "Yeah 'P' & 'R'! Suck it!"

At some point, the irony of sitting at a table with two men who have fired me became too much to shoulder alone and I told the AD who was sitting on my other side. He and I shared a laugh and he asked me if there was a third person who fired me and if we could expect him to show up on the show anytime soon. I assured him that the list ended with "P". Unbeknownst to me, I got up to go to the bathroom ("R" had already left to go meet friends at another restaurant) and the AD told the table what I had told him. According to my fellow scriptee who shared the story when we were back at the hotel heading up to our rooms, "P" adamantly denied that he had EVER fired me and then said "And it was a long time ago, anyway." Which made me laugh all the way up the elevator to the 9th floor and down the hall to my room. It never happened, officer! And even if it did, it wasn't my fault.

My mother has decided that the reason fate gave me the opportunity to do this show was so I could go back and prove to these men who were such bad memories for me that I am a good, competent script pa. She could be right. Who knows? Either way, last night was definitely a lesson in humility. Shall I pass the bread and butter to the two people who fired me at this table in chronological order or alphabetical? But either way, I got a ton of amusement out of it.

How appropriate that this all happened at Obama's Inauguration event. See, it's a lesson that Obama taught me! Can I survive a whole night of socializing with people who don't like me?

Yes, I can.

The Gentile's Guide to Chanukah (or Hannukah... or Hanaka... or however you choose to spell it)

2008-12-23T14:23:00.000-08:00

So... on this, the 2nd night of Chanukah 2008 (2nd night, right? Who knows. I can't remember if it started on Sunday night or Monday night, but whatever. Close enough.) I thought it might be prudent to give the Jewish challenged folk in my life a little lesson about this holiday which is so often misunderstood. Call it my mitzvah for the year. (Jewish Challenged People: The word "mitzvah" is Yiddish or Hebrew or something for "good deed".)

So, below are some of the FAQ I receive here in the south where Chanukah is so widely mizunderdastood.

Q. Why is Chanukah at a different time every year?
A. My ancestors thought it would be fun to keep the gentile guessing. OR... because all Jewish holidays are celebrated according to the Hebrew Calendar which is different from English calendar. Just to illustrate this point, while you non-Jews will soon be welcoming the year 2009, we Jews will be waiting until Rosh Hashana in Sept. to begin the year 5770. The Hebrew calendar is shorter than the English calendar, so the holidays move around. That's why you hear us Jews talking about "Chanukah/ Rosh Hashana/ Purim is early this year!" It's our favorite thing to talk about. (well, 2nd favorite. Our favorite thing to talk about is what we will be eating at the next meal as we consume the current meal. But I digress.)

Q. What are you celebrating at Chanukah? Does it have something to do with Christmas?
A. No. Nothing to do with Christmas at all! Zero, zilch, nada. The fact that there are presents on Chanukah and it happens around the same time as Christmas (sometimes) confuses people into thinking the two holidays are kissing cousins or something. In reality (and long story short) the Jewish temple was trashed by some bad people and after the damage was assessed, it was determined that there was only enough oil left to last one day. (Or something like that. Give me a break Jewish friends. It's been a long time since Sunday school.) But the oil lasted seven days instead and Chanukah is a celebration of that miracle.

Q. What's with the candelabra you always light?
A. That's called a menorah. It's got eight candles on it. One for each night of Chanukah and then the 8th is the candle we use to light all the others. You start out by lighting one candle the first night, two on the second, three on the third etc. There are a few prayers that you say, I think three on the first night and then two on the second. We sing them in Hebrew and that is probably atrocious for anyone who can hear. Then in the morning, after the candles have burned out, you pull out a metal skewer normally used for cooking shish-kabobs on the grill and dig out all the melted wax. (Of course, that may have just been at my parent's house.) It was always my favorite part. Strange? Yes. Are you surprised?

Q. How cool is it to get so many presents?
A. And herein lies the crux of the confusion. I can only speak for my family, of course, and the families of friends I grew up with, but here it is. You may want to sit down for this one. It's a bit of a nasty shock if you don't see it coming... Celebrating Chanukah is NOTHING like Christmas. In the past, when I have attended a Christmas celebration, I have seen orgys of present opening under the Christmas tree. Piles of presents in beautiful paper... toys... games... clothes... stocking stuffers. Good God but you all get a lot of stuff.

At Chanukah, as a child, you get about one present a night. Perhaps two. And one of them is always socks. Or some pair of shoes you don't want to have to wear to Temple. Or, worse comes to worse, Chanukah gelt. (Those are the little gold wrapped chocolate coins that come in the yellow fishnet. Gelt means "money" in Hebrew.) The gelt chocolate doesn't even really taste all that great, to be honest. So on the first night of Chanukah, you may get a gift from your parents. The next night may be from siblings. The next night, you get one from crazy Aunt Mildred who lives in Florida. She got you a sweet little hat to put on your keppie (yiddish for "head") to keep you warm in the cold Cleveland winter and if you would just come down to Florida already you wouldn't have to be so cold and then you could get a real gift. Oy, why do these meshuge (yiddish for "crazy") kids never come to visit?

So you see, all those kids who sit and picture eight whole days of Christmas Morning-style partying are so sadly mistaken. At my parent's house, as I believe I mentioned in an earlier blog, we would light the Menorah during a commercial from the evening prime time TV. Then Dad would make us march around the house singing Chanukah songs and then either make us hunt for our gifts or just give them to us. Whole thing would be over before the commercial ended. And that's not to say I didn't look forward to the holiday. I always did. I liked lighting the candles (I looked forward to lighting the match and would pick out my favorite box matches every night to use. Young pyromaniac for sure!) and digging out the aforementioned wax every morning. There was always something really peaceful, as well, about walking into the kitchen after the candles had been burning for a while and standing in the dark, watching the colorful wax melt into interesting designs onto the tin foil beneath the menorah that kept the wax from sticking to my mother's pristine counters. I always liked arranging the colors of the candles too, sometimes alternating between two colors, sometimes going with a block of color, sometimes just putting together a random sampling of colors from the blue boxes we always had in abundance because they gave them out to us at Sunday School every year.

But did I walk away from any Chanukah with an overwhelming bag of booty? No. I do remember walking away one year with an excellent new Olivia Newton John album ("Totally Hot") but that's about it.

Q. Do you and your family get together for Chanukah?
A. Another harsh truth to be faced. Chanukah is for kids. Really, it is. My parents still give me a gift every year, but that's it. I don't run around trying to find a gift for my Aunt on my mother's side or my brother-in-law's cat. In fact, I give a gift to my niece, one to my cou-niece (that's the daugher of my cousin who is more like a sister than a cousin so her daughter is more like a niece than anything else. I am her Coz-Aunt Sheri and she is my Cou-Niece Sara.) and one to my oldest friend's kids. And that's it folks. So there is really not all that much enthusiasm about getting together at Chanukah. It's not a big family holiday for us (and by "us" I mean the Reform Jews. Conservative and Orthodox Jews may feel differently, but either way, it's not a major holiday for us. Rosh Hashana is much more important!) Thanksgiving is the big winner in the Spitz house.

So those are a few of the questions I get most frequently. If you have more, by all means, ask me. I probably won't know the answers, but I can certainly point you in the direction of a website which will explain it allllllllllll.

In the meantime, I wish every reader a Happy Holiday Season and a happy healthy New Year. Shalom, out.

(Oh... yeah, Shalom means peace. And Hello and Goodbye. So it's a confusing language. What can I tell you?)

Twilight... And the Reason the Chicks Dig It

2008-12-15T17:06:00.000-08:00

So... in case you don't already know, Twilight is the first in a series of books by Stefenie Meyer (who is strangely Mormon and NOT a Member of the Tribe... huh) which is currently making women across the country swoon and sigh in their love of vampires and werewolves and the Pacific Northwest. (Oh my?) The movie is currently burning up the box office and women have arrived in droves, waiting for their chance to see Edward and Bella fall madly in love under cover of rain and clouds while all manner of creature attempts to kill Bella, Edward's first true love in 100 years.

Last night, I went to the movie with the girls in my book club and we went out for dessert afterward to discuss the movie and book at length (aka my chance to pick the movie apart and alienate several members of my book club with my movie snob ways...) We have already decided that the second book in the series will be next month's book and some members of the BC have already finished it. One girl has finished all four in the series. So it was difficult to have the discussion without giving things away.

Let me take this opportunity to fill you in on my history with book clubs. The first one was in LA. All my girlfriends in the script world and one errant Line Producer drew straws to determine the picking order of each book. The first book was "Emma" by Jane Austin. Ouch. Very few people got through the whole thing. And based on the nature of our work lives at the time, we never really were able to get around to actually getting together to talk about it. Which was sad. The next book was by the author of Owen Meany and that further alienated any of the remaining members who were interested in reading. And we once again had an aborted attempt at meeting and discussing. Basically, by the third book, "Deliverance" (which my friend Leslie picked but was bitterly disappointed by because the "squeal like a pig" line was not in the book) it had become less of a book club and more of a suggested reading list for Sheri. We disbanded after the third book, I think.

Shortly after my arrival in Charlotte, I started one here with a few girls. The first book was a great easy read. I think it was called Ella Minnow Pea. And it was about a town where you were not allowed to use certain letters. So the actual text omitted letters from the book as the characters were no longer allowed to use them. Fun! Sometimes had to read aloud to understand, but fun none the less. We actually met, discussed the book for a few minutes before turning to celebrity gossip and picked another one. I think we continued in that vein for a few months, although once again, I became the only, or one of the only, people to read the book. Frustrating!

So one morning this summer, I was standing in line at Best Buy to buy a Wii and the girl in front of me said she might like to have a PR party with her book club. I jumped all over it and invited myself to join them. I finally met the Novelistas a few months ago and what a difference! They all actually read the book! And come to the meeting prepared! And have discussion questions ready! And don't deviate into celebrity gossip until all book business has been finished! I love it!

So, in true Novelista fashion, one of the girls had prepared a list of questions to aid in our discussion of the phenomenon that is Twilight. And one of the questions she asked was, "Why do you think this book appeals so much to women?" To me, the answer was immediate. "Because Edward is a man who says exactly how he feels and doesn't mess around with stupid 'how-many-days-til-you-call-your-babies' stuff. Plus, he is totally damaged AND really protective and will not hesitate to put his body between his woman and danger. Which is HOT!" I received resounding approval from everyone at the table from that statement. Which made me think... is that really all women want from a man? Is that all I want?

One night, a few years ago, I was out at a club with a guy I was dating and a few friends. The guy I was dating was very nice, but he was an MOT (that's Member of the Tribe, aka Jewish), really short and kind of wimpy. My friend was kind of dating a guy there who we will now refer to as Jon the Jewish Cop. (Well, I always referred to him as that because the idea was SO astounding to me! A Jewish guy who is a cop. What the F? I love it! I never actually knew his last name, really.) So we were all dancing and there was a guy behind me who was kind of weaving around. He was pretty drunk, and he kept crashing into me like he was trying to dance with me. I was completely creeped out and was kind of hoping the guy I was with would help me out. Instead it was Jon the Jewish Cop who stepped in. He came over and stood behind me, facing the drunk guy with his arms crossed... just staring him down. The guy took the hint after a few minutes and walked away. J the JC stood there a few minutes longer, staring him down as he walked away, making sure he was gone before moving. Believe me readers when I tell you, if Jon had then asked me to rob a bank, run over small puppies in the getaway car and drive right off a cliff with him, I would have answered "yes" in the breathiest voice I have. It was hot! And suddenly, I was just DONE with my date.

It's not that I consider myself a poor, defenseless woman who can't defend herself! I know how to break an attackers nose and kick him in the groin! (We all saw that episode of 90210 where Donna and Brenda and her Mom take the self-defense class and keep screaming "NO" while they attack their instructor, right?) It's just the idea that a man would put himself in harm's way for me... wow. I can't explain it. I'm sure the idea doesn't have universal appeal. Every woman is different, of course. That's why there are so many different flavors of ice cream. But I bet there a lot of women out there who know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

So when Edward (who is emotionally available enough to say things like "I'm tired of trying to stay away from you" before there has even been a first date) drops into a defensive crouch, shielding his woman with his body and growling deep in his throat (even if it did sound like a burp in the movie... you were totally right about that Al!) it is supremely appealing. And don't even get me started on the damaged thing. I have always loved the tortured boys. It's a sickness from which I hope to never be cured.

The funny thing is, as the series goes on, more and more men are dropping into defensive crouches in front of Bella and growling deep in their throats. Poor Bella has to choose between all these protective, emotionally available, yet tortured, men! It's like Felicity all over again. Plus, at least in my head, all the men are really tall!!!

Now, some girls will protest. They will say they were drawn to the story, to the emotionally rich characters, to the suspense. They will be lying. And that's not to say there isn't a great story in there and the characters are nothing if not well drawn and emotionally rich. Stefenie Meyer is a great writer and her grown-up novel "The Host" is fantastic as well. But it's Edward that has the girls swooning at the movies. One of my girlfriends just got a life-sized cutout of Mr. Edward Cullen for her office as a gift. Is that because he is suspenseful and emotionally rich? Or cause he real hot? Personally, I don't find the actor who plays him all that attractive. But I still sighed through the movie.

I believe this makes me seem not at all deep. And I think I'm ok with that. After all, I have dated plenty of guys who were none of the above. And I even liked them a lot. But one of my favorite dating memories is of the Green Beret I went out with for a while. We went to the movies one time and he was playing a video game with a prop gun and after watching him shoot the gun and then break his wrist after each shot, reaim and fire again, I said to him, "I'm not sure if I am totally grossed out or COMPLETELY turned on." He responded with quite the lacivious wink as if to say, "I know which one you are..."

And he wasn't wrong.

Someone Please... Save Me From Myself

2008-12-14T17:29:00.000-08:00

So... over the years, I have had many people whom I have imagined are trying to "do me in." You can call me paranoid. I prefer to think of it as confidence challenged. Whatever your definition, there have been plenty of times in my life where I have regarded people and thought to myself "You are trying to make me unhappy. Deliberately trying to make my life miserable for sport."

Now, let's be fair about this, cause many of those people whom I was sure were attempting to ruin me were "talent" on a show. My fellow scripties will probably recognize this emotion. Where some stupid talent comes in at rehearsal (or even worse... minutes before they step out on stage for the show) and changes all their copy. I was always sure it was just to torture me! Just to show that they were a big important celebrity (yes, Kevin Spacey, I'm talking to you!!!) and that I am a little peon with a pencil and a 3-ring binder who is there strictly to do their bidding. Sometimes it wasn't talent at all, but crew. Stage managers... producers... teleprompter... all out to get me and rob me of my chance for sleep. So these paranoid moments might be just a wee bit self-centered and probably can be discounted. In my own defense, I was probably really tired at the time.

But I do believe that at one time or another, there have been a few people out there who were torturing me just because they could. And hey... that's fine. I mean, it only works if I let it, right?

Here's the problem tho. Lately, I have begun to wonder if perhaps the person who is most determined to bring about my personal ruin is none other than... well, me.

There have been people whom I have gotten to know at one point or another in my life who seemed to have such a busy head that I was sad for them. Sad that their head must be such a crowded place... so full of business and stress that there must seem like no escape. I wondered how these people could function without exploding.

But what I have realized recently is that the above description can oftentimes describe my own head. Good Lord but I can torture myself. Like a pro. Like I'm being paid! (Would that I could...) There are so many different thoughts racing around in there, I don't know what to do with them half of the time. I think that's why I am so obsessed with music and reading. And TV. Cause that's when the thoughts go away. The voices shut up.

Ok, yeah, I said voices. There was a time in my life, before I became a 12-steper, where there was a constant battle in my head between Voice A and Voice B. A & B were constantly at odds with one another. One trying to be the disciplinarian and the other trying to be the child. I remember that being the miracle of my first day in an OA meeting. All of a sudden, after 29 years of fighting with myself in my head, it was like someone hit the mute button. I don't think I even realized how loud it was in there until it stopped. I remember wanting to cry from relief. I could actually just sit still and listen to myself breathe, something I would never have been able to do before.

A & B beat a hasty retreat as I became immersed in the 12 steps and found my way to recovery. The great news is that they haven't really ever come back. At least, not for long. I will always be grateful to Bill W. for that.

The voices I hear now are different. They are quieter, a bit mellower and usually kinder. And they do serve their purpose. But they also doubt. They imagine... and not in a great way. They hear drama where there is none and whisper doubts when I am desperately trying to find some confidence. And they don't stop talking unless there is a distraction (hence the constant background noise in my life.)

Is it a Gemini thing? I usually make a joke out of that one... someone asks me who I went to the movies with the other day and I say, "Oh, just me and my other personalities." I'm not a big believer in Astrology, but it does seem to fit me pretty well. There is certainly a touch of crazy about me. I mean, for the love of God, I sell sex toys for a living!!! I am definitely living off the beaten path. And I do like that about myself. I have never wanted to live an uninteresting, untested life.

But the question is, how do I get away from my own mind? How do I take a vacation from self-doubt and the certainty that the things I want the most are always going to be just beyond my reach? I'm open to suggestions from the peanut gallery. If you have an idea, send it on baby!

I do consider myself a happy person and my life to be pretty damn fulfilling. There is nothing that I want so desperately that if I don't get it my life will feel like a waste. And I'm grateful for that. Cause there are plenty of folk out there who will always yearn for something and never be satisfied without it. I have balance. Nine times out of ten, I'm content. I have very few regrets. But every once in a while, some little voice in my head will gleefully suggest, "Hey, let's get out those journals from high school and read about how miserable we were then." And another sinister little voice says, "Hey, what a great idea!" I did that the other morning and I spent the next two hours trying to pull my head out of a fog, trying to remind myself that I am, in fact, 35 and not 16 and that other stuff is far, far in the past. Long, long ago. And many moons behind me.

The point is, what do you do when you can't escape the friend who is a bad influence and constantly talks you into doing stupid things. Nothing so bad that your life will be inextricably altered, but bad enough that it stings. How do you stop this friend from pushing you to make the same stupid mistakes over and over? After all, as Bill W. taught us, the very definition of insanity is repeating the same action while expecting a different result. Can a person escape their own mind?

Once again, I have no answer to this tirade. That's often the case when I try to get serious here. And I'm not even 100% sure I should publish this. It's more personal than I like to get in a public forum. It could be I wrote this just to get it out of my head. Make some room in there for something else. Or maybe I am just looking for confirmation... looking for someone else to tell me that they have the same problem. Maybe my head wouldn't feel so crowded if I knew that other people felt cramped in their own mind as well. Whatever the reasoning, my head is awful full at the moment. Full of worry over things I can't control, things I can't do anything about.

So if someone could help me find the mute button, I would be so grateful.

It's So Hard to Get Good Service These Days! Or not...

2008-11-16T13:22:00.000-08:00

This one's for Debbie...

So... the biggest change in my life when I moved from LA to Charlotte was not what you'd imagine. It wasn't the cultural change. It wasn't the traffic differences. (And for the record, I sometimes think Charlotte's traffic is worse than LA's cause there are only a few routes available to get in and out of uptown and when you get stuck in a traffic jam, you can't just hop over two blocks and go around it or go over the canyon instead of taking the freeway.. but that's neither here nor there.) It wasn't even getting used to the churches on every corner. No, the biggest change I experienced was the startling lack of available (read: not within a food court or the refrigerated section of the grocery store) sushi.

Okay, well, probably not all that startling. Clearly the Asian population of Charlotte is smaller than in LA (yes, yes, I'll say it for you. DUH!) and that would decrease the demand. And that whole lack-of-oceanic-access thing has an effect as well. So I wasn't surprised, per se. Just bummed. Really bummed. I would drift off to sleep at night dreaming of deliciously cool albacore sashimi in a chilled ponzu sauce at Sushi Sase Bune and would wake up to a reality of Harris Teeter "cucumber rolls."

Now, I'm definitely not being fair to the culinary folk in Charlotte. I don't want to give my LA friends the impression that it's 'all Applebees, all the time' in Charlotte. Johnson and Wales Culinary Academy has a branch here in Charlotte and as a result, we have some fantastic restaurants and some of the best food I've ever eaten. It's just the sushi where we really fall short. And, of course, sushi is the one that I crave... Sigh.

I've been through a few sushi restaurants here and was fiercly loyal to each one during its tenure in my life. Sushi 101 had the enjoyable distinction of being a mile from my house. I liked that! And although I thought their sushi was good, it never felt fresh to me. So it became my place holder sushi place. Maybe not Mr. Right, but Mr. Good Enough for Right Now, as they say.

There's another place that is very popular with the 20-something nookie hunting crowd called Rusan's but I was never a big fan of that place. Aside from the mind-numbing techno music they played at a stupid volume, they had very few rolls to choose from that had not been fried in some fashion. Call me obsessive, but the whole reason I spend the money on the sushi is cause I get to pretend it's healthy. Add the flash fry and I don't get to pretend anymore. Fortunately for me, Rusan's got a VERY scary score from the health department a few years ago and I haven't had to fight with dining companions to avoid going there in quite some time.

Then, one day, it seemed my prayers had been answered. Ginbu 401 rolled into town. Fresh fish prepared just the way I like. Barely a fried roll in sight! Heaven! I ate there so much that they eventually named a roll after me. Seriously! It's called the Sheri Roll (creative, yeah?) and it had all my favorite fishies in it!!! But one day, they mysteriously cut their portions in half while keeping their prices the same. I admit, I'm being dramatic, but I felt a bit betrayed. And so... bye bye Ginbu.

Now, there is a new place in town and it's not so far away from my house. The fish is fresh and the servings are appropriate. I'm trying to be more fiscally responsible (note the "trying" portion of that sentence) so I haven't gone as much as I would like. Which may be why I can't even remember the name. But probably, the main reason I don't remember the name is because, to me, it will always be known as "the water glass place." And why is that? Ask Debbie.

No seriously, you don't have to ask Debbie. Most of you don't know Debbie. (And those of you who do know her don't have her number.)

The reason why is because they have really good customer service at this restaurant. In Debbie's mind, a bit TOO good.

Debbie is my favorite sushi eating partner. She and I only manage to get together about once a month when we are lucky, but it's always for a meal and more often than not, we wind up eating sushi. However, we are currently at a bit of an impasse because Deb still likes Sushi 101 the best and I don't like it there anymore at all. She doesn't like to go to the "water glass place." She always gives in to me and goes there, but leaves unhappy everytime. Which makes me vow to myself, every time, that I will go to her favorite next time. And, of course, I don't. Cause I suck. Also, I digress.

Whenever we eat at TWGP (not going to keep typing "water glass place" cause that's way more work than I'm interested in doing) it isn't really all that crowded. However, they always seem to have an abundence of staff... and they seem to want to make sure we are enjoying ourselves as much as possible. So they come by... they come by a lot. Debbie takes a sip of her water and they hustle over to fill it back up. (Hence TWGP) The menus arrive, waiters appear to take our order immediately. If we ask for time, they hover nearby, checking back every few minutes or so. After we order, the owner, the host and the waiter each check on us frequently, asking if we are okay, do we need anything etc. The food comes and as you can probably imagine, there is a lot of checking to make sure everything is to our liking. And water glass filling. And how are you ladies doing? And can we get you anything? And can I take that plate for you? And on and on and on.

Now, again aiming toward fairness, I have eaten there at lunch by myself sometimes with a book. (shocking!) On those occasions, they mostly leave me alone. Although, it is entirely possible that they try to speak to me and I am just too engrossed in my reading to notice. I do always have water in my glass, I know that.

It's not that helpful service is not appreciated. There have been times at other restaurants where I seriously considered getting up and going into the kitchen myself to fill my water glass. (Goodness me, what a tortured life I lead.) So I like that this place is on top of customer care.

It's just that constant interruption makes Debbie want to yank her hair out by the root. Possibly because conversation with me is just THAT fascinating that she doesn't want it interrupted, but more likely because it's just frustrating to be trying to catch up with a friend and being interrupted every few sentences to assure people that we are fine and don't need anything more. I think the water glass thing wouldn't bother her so much if the servers didn't take that opportunity every time to ask how we are doing. If they just came and filled and left, we probably wouldn't notice. But every time, they interrupt to ask how we are. And every time, I watch Debbie's expression get darker and darker. I sometimes think she's one interruption away from stabbing the water glass lady in the eye with a chop stick.

One of the first lessons I learned in in the edit bay or the production truck was that as a Script Supervisor, I should be seen and not heard... I should not speak unless spoken to... It was a lesson I learned the hard way (aka being fired for asking questions and being "too comfortable") and probably wouldn't have happened on a different kind of show where the producer wasn't such a tight ass. Nonetheless, I learned the lesson well. To this day, it's pretty close to impossible to get me to talk in a setting that even remotely resembles a tense edit bay or production truck. Even when it's appropriate for me to speak, I can rarely summon much more than a whisper and have to be told frequently to speak up! (Which is hard for many to imagine, I'm sure, but I got spanked PRETTY HARD when I learned that lesson.)

I'm not saying that serving staff should be seen and not heard. Far from it. I love a good waiter who laughs and jokes with me and offers his opinion. But what I, and I think I can speak for Debbie on this one, would prefer is a waiter who can read the table and be able to ascertain that there is a conversation going on and then make the decision on whether an interruption is prudent.

Having said that, however, TWGP is still the best sushi restaurant in Charlotte, in my opinion, and as such, they will undoubtedly continue to separate me from my hard-earned cash.

And of course, they will continue to fill my water glass at every conceivable opportunity! Which is really fine. Cause let's face it.

Soy sauce makes me thirsty.

Guess what I get high on?

2008-11-10T20:41:00.000-08:00

So... I am slacking. I'm not updating this blog as often as I (and some other vocal people) would like. And honestly, I want to update it more often, I do. It's not even that I'm too busy, it's just that I'm uninspired.

I occasionally have ideas float through my head and I like to give them a day or so to percolate to see if there is any substance to them. The other day, I thought about writing something about why I'm so addicted to primetime teen soap operas. But honestly, is there anything to say about that? Cause I'm a freak. End of blog.

Then I thought about writing of my love for all things Aaron Sorkin. Again, who cares? I have nothing interesting to say about it. Just that I love the West Wing and I was one of the few people who loved Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. He has a gift with dialogue and banter. And done.

Then yesterday, I was playing Guitar Hero and considered writing about how each song I hear has a memory attached to it that is so tangible that it often feels like a time machine. There are some songs on there that are SOOOOOO morning show on KROQ that I could almost see the Beverly Center passing me on my right as I drove down Beverly Blvd. to get to CBS for work in my Nissan Exterra. But again, with that thought, I am done.

And so it falls to you, gentle reader (as Stephen King would say.) I require inspiration. When I first got to Charlotte, I was taking this drop-in writing class. The teacher would read aloud from a poem or a song or something or even would just say a word and we would have to write whatever came into our minds for five minutes. I remember one time the assignment was to write something that started with the words "I thought I wanted." And from there I wrote a whole piece about leaving Los Angeles and television and my love/hate relationship with the whole scene and it's one of the things I am most proud of having written.

So a little help from my friends (yes, that's what I get high on) please! Send me an email with anything in it and I will do my best to come up with something to write about. A song lyric is good, a sentence fragment, something you saw in the newspaper or on line, whatever.

In all honesty, I want to write more. It feels good. I so rarely get to feel the satisfaction that comes with creation and I crave it. If only I could create an idea about something to write about.

I would imagine that you will see some blog on my love of the twilight series at some point, but other than that, I'm blank. Help!

Speechless? Well, that's a first!

2008-10-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

So... I can't talk today. Literally. Got a cold on Friday, became a fever on Saturday night (right as I was describing to a room full of women where their G-Spot is, so that was fun!), a cough on Sunday, raspy voice on Monday (which made Monday night's party sound very sexy!) and this morning... totally MUTE. Can't make a sound much above a whisper. Well, actually, let me amend that... I can sort of make a noise above a whisper, but since it sounds like a cat screaming while simultaneously playing an out-of-tune viola and scratching its nails down a chalkboard, I choose not to go there unless absolutely necessary.

I have had a few clients call today and didn't want to just not answer the phone, so they got to hear my strange voice and became very confused and hung up quickly. I had to find someone else to do tonight's party, so Molly came over and made phone calls on my behalf to the hostess and other consultants until we got the party covered. It was fun for me... like having an assistant. She would repeat whatever question the person on the phone had just asked and I would whisper my response, which she would then relay back into the phone. I felt like an aging, eccentric diva on an old episode of Moonlighting.

Anyhow, so through all this silence today, I've noticed a strange thing. I'm a bit more lonely at home alone today than I normally am. Feel a little more isolated than usual. People are always asking me how I can stand to work at home, don't I get distracted (yes), watch too much TV (yes) and get lonely without someone else to talk to (not usually...) Don't get me wrong, I enjoy company when I can and there is always the odd day where I miss being in an office and sharing my day with other people. When I got home from Telethon this year, I had an exceptionally hard time reverting back to work-at-home mode and was sad for a few days remembering what it was like to be in an office full of people. (Fortunately, I also had the memory of working until 3AM to make me feel better when I got too sad.)

But normally, I'm pretty happy with my work-at-home situation. I like being around Richie, can't beat the commute, love that I can choose just not to shower, or wear the same outfit two days in a row (yes, only if it's clean... GEEZ MOM!) if I am not seeing the same people I saw the day before. And I very rarely get lonely and miss interaction. So why is it that my status as a temporary mute today should affect that? This is what I have fixated on today while simultaneously fixating on giving up the money I planned to make at the party tonight (grrrrrrr). And here is what I have decided.

It's cause I talk all the time. This won't come as a shock to anyone who knows me, and probably anyone who doesn't but reads this blog anyway. I talk. All day. I always did in an office with other people... off hand comments, long conversations, phone calls, you name it. But I was almost always talking. And it appears, although there is no longer anyone here to talk to, I have continued to talk my way through the day. I'd like to give myself the credit of believing that these conversations are probably all mental and not out loud, but today I have the proof that I say quite a few thoughts out loud when I'm alone.

See cause every word is an effort today. But if I don't talk for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes and focus on something else and then a random thought floats into my brain and my brain says "hey, that was smart... tell everyone else in the room that smart thought you just had" and I open my mouth to speak forgetting I have no voice... well... let's just say it's easier to notice the random mumblings when they sound like pigs being drowned and strangled at the same time. I guess, when my voice is normal, those random out loud mutterings just slip under the radar. If a comment is spoken in an empty room and there is no one there to comment does it make a sound? Now I know how the tree in the forest feels.

The feeling of weirdness got even stronger in the car. I felt so isolated in this very curious way. But I realized quickly that the explanation for that was easy. No voice=no yelling at talk radio. No voice=no singing along with my iPod very loudly (although... probably wouldn't have sounded much worse than when my vocal chords are working properly). Most importantly, no voice=no communication, friendly or otherwise, with other drivers. No nasty, snide comments on other people's driving. Had to make them all in my head. Which was an effort. An effort which led my mind to another question, which you might have already led yourself too.

If I'm talking this much in the car all the time, why have I not been pulled over for DWC (driving while crazy)? Certainly, if I drove by me while I was yelling at the POTUS 08 channel on XM, I would accelerate immediately to pass me by for fear I would be pulling a gun out of the glove compartment. (Remember that movie LA Story where Steve Martin was driving down the highway shooting his gun while talking to Marilu Henner about whether he had left his pants at her house? I love that movie. "Open season on the LA Freeway!")

Seriously, tho, what do other people think of me while they drive by? Do they notice? Do they think I have a bluetooth in and they just can't see it (in which case, if they are like me, they are probably judging me on that basis.) Or is what I do so completely normal that other people don't notice? I know that Molly likes to give shoutouts to other drivers to warn them of impending danger... "Don't you back into me, Mr. Mercedes." "That's an entrance, not an exit lady!" (I call her the traffic avenger. She gets really mad when she drives sometimes. Makes me giggle.)

And finally, this is the other thought that came to me today. You know how, when you lose one sense, it makes the others stronger? Well, if I lost the power of speech today, shouldn't I become instantly better at listening and remembering conversation? You would think, right? But I went to the doctor and he gave me some spray stuff for my throat and I swear he told me how many times I need to spray it each hour but I can't remember. I mean, I think he said three, but I'm not sure... I'd call him and ask, but well, you know.

I'm sure there are some of you out there who are gleefully pondering a world of Sheri-Without-Speech. Probably would be a very different dynamic for everyone! In fact, the nurse at the doctor's office (who I happen to know because she used to sell Pure Romance... holy coincidence Batman) said to me "This is making you crazy isn't it?" To which I rasped "I'm going out of my mind." And she laughed, "Yeah, I knew you'd have a problem. You're a talker like me." Thank God she added the "like me" part or I might have taken offense.

But all you giddy folk thinking about me not being able to quip at the drop of a hat are forgetting the one casualty of this situation. Poor Richie! He probably thinks something is horribly wrong! It's so quiet in his house. His Mom isn't singing to him or barking at him to get out from underfoot in the kitchen, or even ordering him to sit at food time (thank GOD for hand signals.) His whole world has been turned upside down with the silence that surrounds him. Poor buddy. Even though is laying there on his back, looking like he has narry a care in the world, I know somewhere inside he is wondering why his Mom isn't talking to him today. Gee, I hope he doesn't think it was something he did!

Don't worry, little punkin. It won't be long before my voice has been restored to its former glory. (And it better be before Thursday, because I am NOT giving up my party again!) And when it comes back, I will celebrate with an out-of-key song or two, followed by some loud vocal exercises a la high school drama class (the tip of the teeth, the tongue and the lips) and ending with a disertation on why Dexter is currently the greatest show on television complete with a season three episode by episode breakdown of its virtues.

So there's that for us ALL to look forward to. Anyone wanna come over?

The Overnight Shift!

2008-09-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

So, ok... it's been a week since I wrote this... but I felt I was too tired to properly proofread when my shift ended and I forgot to post it after. But better late than never!

9/1/08- 12:00AM

The overnight shift!!! It’s the best ever! Some people think I’m crazy, but I fight for this shift! I pulled seniority this year and told someone else they were not allowed to have the overnight. There are a lot of reasons why… some of them have to do with personnel… some of them have to do with me not liking to wake up in the morning and being a night-person. But some of them have to do with the following fantastic performances… welcome to my Overnight on the Telethon blog

1:48A- The Balloon Animal Maker climbs inside a giant balloon and then gets shot in the butt with a lawn dart.

2:30A - Place your bets. Skip Martin, formerly of the Dazz Band is performing his one hit, “Let it Whip.” The live version he currently does is approximately 15 min. We are assured that it will be a mere five minutes on our show. Who wants odds?

2:33A- Skip is now asking just the sexy people if they will shout out a “hooooooooo”. Yes, we are asking a 2:33AM audience to sing and shout “Hoooooooo” “Ya’ll gonna make me lose my mind.”

2:40A: Tom Bergon is hysterical and does not get to showcase his inherent sarcasm on Dancing.

2:45A: Menopause, The Musical. Need I say more?

2:54A: It’s the juggler! He juggles little balls and bounces some blue rubber balls on a small piano on the ground and plays Fur Elise. If that's not talent, nothing is...

3:15 AM: In a local break, I see that breakfast is up in catering. And since I feel that Vegas has not completely leached all the water from my body, I grab a plate full of salty bacon and ham so that finally I can get rid of every pesky ounce of moisture my body currently possesses.

3:20 AM: The Assistant Director is counting the Director through a song where the singer is celebrating bald men and lamenting men who use rogaine. TRUE STORY! "She's said it before... she'll say it again... I like Bald Headed Men."

3:30A: The “comedy imaginator” draws a turkey on a big pad and then pops an actual full size frozen butterball out of the bottom of the paper pad. Then he pops snakes out of peanut cans to the rhythm of Blue Danube. Honestly, I’m not making this up! I LOVE THE OVERNIGHT!

4:10A- In the middle of the local break, one of the staff members says he thinks it will be a good idea to streak the show somewhere in Hour 20. We discuss for a few minutes and someone suggests that because of camera placement we will only be taking away an image of the back of his head. He responds suggestively “Oh, I think you would definitely be taking away something else…” and another staff member inquires “Will it be syphilis? Because, you know, not EVERYTHING that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

4:15- One performance into Hour 11. I’m beginning to tire. Which is making everything a lot funnier. Which is good news for some of these acts and we can only hope the audience is EXHAUSTED!

4:30- Time for the foot jugglers. I’ll let your imagination run wild.

7:20AM- You may have noticed that quite a bit of time has passed since the last entry on my overnight timeline. The reason for that is two-fold. One… I got bored. And two… I got tired. And twoA (revision!)- I stopped having funny things to say. But I have now made a decision that is very important and personal, so naturally, I will share it with you. We have an act performing in the next hour that I am quite fond of. Turns out, this act makes shadow puppets which are the coolest hand puppets you’ve ever seen. These aren’t stupid bunnies hopping through the forest scoopin up the field mice and boppin ‘em on the head. This guy makes Ray Charles and Elvis and Dolly Parton complete with boobs. And although my shift ended at 7, I was going to stay to watch the shadow puppet man (who may have usurped the horn honker man as my favorite telethon act) in the next hour. Alas, I realized the song my bed is singing to me, the come hither lullabye, is too sweet to be ignored. I will have to let me memory of the shadow puppet man's rehearsal be enough to sustain me until next year.

And thus... with a balloon animal... I sleep.*

(*Some time, I may give you the Shakespearean version of Telethon which Allison and I wrote one day. If you're lucky and ask real real nice!)

Happy Labor Day!

Amen Sister!

2008-09-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

I found this posting at outtamilk.blogspot.com. And I couldn't have said it better myself... so I won't bother to try.

Please Forgive Me
Dear Hillary,

I know I haven't treated you like I should have. And through the years, I admit we've had a love-hate, on-and-off relationship.

I fell in love with you when you were hanging out with oh-so-cute Bill in the White House - and I admired your spunk and ability to throw when you learned about a Certain Intern.

But then, I had to screw things up by questioning your desire to become a New York senator (Okay, I said I was sorry for mocking your 2-minute residency in the state before taking political office) But gee, Hil, "the suit fit" and you did a great job.

Meanwhile, as a mom, I was also impressed with how Chelsea turned out. And during the long bleak Bush years, so many of us have been poor and jobless and without health insurance, but it was you and me, together in the trenches.

But then, you had to go get all power hungry. Admit it, you did. And friend, you were a little too strident for my tastes - and you made Republicans waaaay too happy every time you talked about being President.

The poll numbers looked iffy. You felt divisive. And ultimately, you reminded me of an uptight, angry, first-wave feminist whose determination just came across as bitchy.

And I left you.

But Hil, I see the error of my ways and I want you back. Um, still not as president, but to rip to shreds that Alaskan Creationist Anti-Community-Organizer No-Sperm-Shall-Be-Wasted Republican poser.

Please. If you ever loved any of us Democrats, you'll do this for me.

Please, please tell me that you're not going to give this scripted sharp-tongued loser a pass...Please, please don't tell me that you won't be an attack dog against Sarah Palin, according to the Huffington Post.

C'mon, she's using your hard earned accomplishments to push her horrid agenda. It's your glass ceiling to break.

She revels in being called a "barracuda" (thank you Heart for demanding the Republicans cease and desist using your song.)

And you know, I've got no doubt that she can be nasty - but girl, and I say this with love - you could be much nastier, and with more intellectual finesse.

The Dem boys can't do it. The laughable outrage of the GOP calling out "sexism" has scared them. And with good cause. History has shown that too often, political girls can outmaneuver boys by insinuating they're bullies -- hell, you've done it.

And this requires a bitch slap.

A good hard one.

So, Hillary, for all the good times we've shared, please, please do this for me. And can we still be friends?

Love, Digital Gal

Prepare Yourself... It's a Sappy One

2008-09-01T02:50:00.000-07:00

So… it’s 10:30PM PST and the Telethon has been on the air for 5 hours. I will be on the overnight shift, my favorite shift, tonight. The best shift! All the best, craziest performers come on during the overnight. Plus everyone is really tired and start getting really wacky. (Tune in to the blog a bit later to read the details.) So I will go down to sit in the production truck from 1P to 9AM for my shift. So I have some time to kill until my shift starts.

One of the reasons I love working on Telethon so much is because I get the chance to see so many people I love who used to be a part of my day to day life in Los Angeles. There are so many people on this show who are important to me, who I’ve known for years, who are family and I only see them for these two weeks. Then there are other people who, although I used to only see them on a few shows a year, I have missed and I love catching up.

But I think the best part of the show for me is when, on the last day, my closest friend from LA comes to town. Alli comes to Vegas on show day just to work a few hours, usually the overnight. The telethon is a family business in her family and she’s worked on this show for years. Since her shift starts tonight at 2AM and I’m not on until 1AM, we got a rare chance to do what we always did best… go out to dinner and gab.

Back in my LA days, it was a rare week where Al and I didn’t see each other at least once a week for dinner (when we weren’t on some horrible show.) We certainly talked many times a week and complained about work and the people we worked with and for. But since I left, we haven’t been able to stay in touch as much as I’m sure either of us would like. She got married and had a little girl and like a million animals living in her home. I, as you know, have been jumping from job to job and making a life for myself in NC. Between our crazy schedules and the time change, it’s hard to find the time to catch up. I would say we really only get the chance to sit down on the phone and really talk about three times a year.

Despite that, every year when I see her at Telethon, even though we usually only have a few hours to spend together at most, and there is a live 20 hour show going on at the same time, for me, it’s as though I just saw her yesterday. We sat at dinner tonight for a few hours and got really annoyed that the waitress kept showing up and interrupting our conversation. And there were no lulls. And there was no awkwardness. And no sense of having less in common now since we don’t have the work people to bitch about any more. I filled her in on my life, she filled me in on hers. We gossiped, we reminisced… and the time flew.

So it made me think about how incredible and rare friendships like this one are. Between Alli and I, as is the case with my girls in Charlotte, there is no sense of competition. There’s no snarkiness (well at least-- not directed at each other… everyone else is fair game.) There’s no need to prove how happy or successful we are. Or to lie to save face. There is support. There is genuine affection. And there is the sense that we are really rooting for one another, really wanting the other to find what they are looking for, regardless of the state of our own lives.

I wish I could say that all my friendships were like this one. I certainly have girl friends whom, I admit, I want to get what they want… as long as I either don’t want or already have it. They are the ones I don’t necessarily tell if I am worried about my future and wondering if I will make it in this life I’m living. When I talk to those friends, everything is AWESOME! Couldn’t be AWESOMER! Rah rah and GO TEAM! When I talk to Al, things are good. But some things aren’t. And I’m happy. But not all the time. And what I get back from her in those moments of vulnerability, which I don’t allow many people to see (except, of course, when I publish it in my blog) is not a feeling of pity or even sympathy. Not a sense of, ‘Thank god that’s not me…’ What I get is a sense of empathy. A feeling that, for the moment, she’s going through the bad stuff with me. And on the flip side, celebrating the good stuff with me.

When you have this kind of friendship, and I am lucky enough to have a few of these, it seems not quite worthwhile to go through the motions with anything less. Last year, when I got home from seeing all these people I love so much, I reevaluated some friendships and decided to let one go. Because as much as I wanted to have someone to go to the movies with and go out to dinner with when I’m bored… when compared to a real friendship like this one, it seemed so empty. And not really worthwhile for either of us.

As a single woman in her 30’s, family, friends and dog (yay Richie) are everything. I know there are few people out there with families they actually enjoy like I do who support them the way mine does. And few who have real, honest-to-God friendships like this one. And even fewer who have both (and also a very cute dog who follows them everywhere.)

I get all three. On both coasts. It’s good to be me…

Oh the Things I Could Know...

2008-08-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

So... still here at Telethon, listening to random artists who have written random songs and typing out their lyrics and counting the bars between verses and listening for back up vocal etc. To my loyal readers who don't know what happens in the script department, this is my whole job on the telethon. I am creating a picture on paper of each musical performance so the directors know where to put the camera. So it needs to be detailed. I need to know if there is a half a bar beat between the first and second line of the chorus. If there's a cymbal roll in the middle of a verse, I need to know that too.

The other day, I was working on an 80's song that I once liked but haven't really heard in many years cause sometime in the late 80's I realized that it sucked. So probably haven't really heard this song since about 1980-something. And it's not as though I psychotically loved it at the time either. I liked the movie it was in, but that's about it.

So it was something like my third song I had broken down during the day and my ear buds were starting to bug me so I took them out to take a break for a while after listening to about the first :30 of this 3:30 song. I was just going to surf the internet for a few minutes to give my ears a break when all of a sudden I realized that, in my head, the song had continued to play. My mental jukebox was already into the first chorus and I was even bouncing my knee to the beat. (This is me, ashamed.) So I realized, at that moment, that I could continue to break down this song and get all the lyrics, the count between bars and the back and forth between the two lead vocals... all WITHOUT listening to the song.

I figured I would at least make it through most of the song, get the basics and go back in with the song playing on my iPod and fill in all the musical details and the little breaks between lines, etc. But it turned out my recall was near perfect. When I went back over it with the music on a few minutes later, I had to make two or three changes and that was it! I was proud of myself for an instant (as only a music geek can be) and then I was almost immediately flooded with shame (as any music geek should be.) I couldn't believe I knew that song well enough to break it down by heart. It's not like it was the Beatles or something and I listen to it all the time... it was a song I never hear that I don't even like. If it comes on the radio, I turn it off. If it's playing in an elevator, I sing something else in my head until I can get off. If it's playing in someone else's radio or iTunes, I whine until they either knock me unconscious or turn it off.

So that got me thinking. I've been a script supervisor, on and off, since 1997. I've broken down too many songs to count. There have been some great shining moments in that time where there were Beatles' tributes and Paul Simon performances and good contemporary artists that made me excited for rehearsal. But for the most part, they've been stinkers and I take great joy in deleting them from my iTunes immediately when the show is over.

All the same, if you pulled a random name of a random song out of my past, I could sit down and count you through the opening bars and then sing you the lyrics (if you could stand to hear my singing voice.) So now I'm wondering... how much room in my brain is currently being used by song lyrics to songs I don't even like or songs I loved when I was young and didn't know any better. And, even more importantly, what could I use that brain storage space for if it wasn't being wasted in this frivolous manner.

For exmaple, if I didn't know every word to the Patti LaBelle song "You Are My Friend," would I remember to roll my trash can to the curb every Monday night instead of remembering as I hear the truck on the street Tuesday morning?

If I didn't know all the words to "We Built This City" would I be able to remember people's names for longer than 0.25 seconds after they introduce themselves to me?

Without Wierd Al's "Eat It" song lyrics, could I remember the streets that are parallel to each other in downtown Charlotte and which of them are one way? Would I remember to go to the pet store to buy Richie more food when we are totally out and I've been buying him McDonald's hamburgers for breakfast and dinner every day for a week? Would I remember to send out birthday cards in a timely manner and not have to have computer reminders pop up every time someone in my family has a birthday?

I don't know. Clearly, there are other people out there with better memories than me when it comes to the practicalities of life. But can those people recite on command both sides of the Beastie Boys' debut album "License to Ill"? (Not that I'm ashamed of that one...)

Let's assume they can't. But they can remember the equation for pi to the 156th digit. (Or, for that matter, they can remember how to spell "pi" and not spell it "pie" accidentally and then have to look it up on dictionary.com to confirm the proper spelling.) Are they better off than I am? Are they more productive than I am? Are they more prosperous than I am? Do people like them better because they remember the names of people they meet?

I love that Jim Carrey movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." If you haven't seen it, it's really angsty... right up my alley. In it, Jim Carrey is so devastated by the breakup he has with his girlfriend that he has her erased from his memory by a doctor. The message of the movie is that you can't ignore destiny, blah, blah, blah, but what I took from it was the idea of cleaning things out of your mind and your memory so you can replace them with something better.

I would like to experiment by removing certain songs. Not all of them by any means. I'm a big lyrics lover and I would hate to no longer remember the lyrics to "In My Life," the first Beatles song I ever fell in love with or the angry song Adam Sandler sings in "The Wedding Singer" when he was "listening to the Cure a lot." ('But it all was bullshit... It was a goddamn joke...And when I think of you Linda... I hope you fucking choke.' I love that movie.) But certain songs can be cleaned out and replaced. "Who Let the Dogs Out" could be replaced by the relationship between all of my now deceased aunts and uncles. The space reserved for not only the song "Macarena" but also the accompanying dance could better be used for remembering to go buy more shampoo when I'm running low. The Wayne Brady parody of the Four Tops' song "Bernadette" which he cleverly titled "Halle Berry" when she was going to be a guest on the show and he wanted to do a special song for her... imagine how much better off I would be if that space were reserved for the prices of all of my inventory so I could recite them off the top of my head when people ask instead of having to grab a catalog and look them up.

Alas, there are certain complications with this idea I have, since the procedure in the movie only erased old memories. It didn't allow you to choose what you wanted to replace that memory with.

So until modern medicine catches up with Charlie Kaufman's imagination (another case in point... I love Charlie Kaufman, but just now, I couldn't remember his last name and had to look it up on IMDB) I guess I'm stuck with stupid Wiggles' songs generously given to me by my beautiful niece running through my brain (fruit salad... yummy, yummy) at random intervals.

And I will have to content myself, on the other end, with knowing that the first digit of pi is 3. And after that, I think there's a point. But then I'm lost.

('Cause I am lo---st. Livin inside myself... living inside this shell... livin outside your love.' -Gino Vanelli "Livin Inside Myself". And I didn't have to look it up to confirm.)

One step forward...

2008-08-19T12:56:00.001-07:00

So... I'm a woman. You know this. Probably not a surprise. I empathize and support many things that women do on a regular basis. Many of our habits that drive men crazy or are completely uninteresting to them. I talk about my hair and nails. I coo at babies and little animals. I spend time staring in the mirror before I leave the house (many times) to make sure I look ok, even if I'm only going to the grocery store.

The one thing that we women do, however, that makes me crazy is the "one step forward, five steps back" dance. Please understand, I'm not speaking metaphorically and talking about how I hate growing as a person and then regressing. (Cause clearly I don't mind that at all.) What I'm talking about is departure from a room, a party, from work etc. Especially when there is a group of girls involved.

Take today for example. When we got into the office this morning, one of my friends announced that she was very hungry and we would be going to lunch today at 11:30. "Just like in elementary school," she said. I responded with some comment about having a juice box and a bologna sandwich and agreed that I was on board. Flash forward to 11:15. One member of the team stands up to head into a short meeting and declares herself ready to eat lunch when she gets back. We all agree and while she's gone we determine what we plan to eat.

Time check: 11:45. Previously mentioned team member returns to her desk and immerses herself in work. Someone starts making lunch noises, but it turns out that the guy copying our script this year is coming by to say hello and touch base with us shortly, so we wait.

12:15- Script copying guy has come and gone. Someone mentions lunch again, but no one else responds.

12:20- "I'm at a good stopping point if you guys are ready for lunch," declares one team member. I look up and agree since I just finished a song and don't want to start another one if we are leaving shortly. Sadly, one team member has left her desk and is talking to another staff member on the other side of the room. We all agree to wait until she returns and then leave.

12:35- Another team member says she has to go mail something before we eat. We agree to meet her down by the mail center on the way to lunch. She goes.

12:40- "Hey guys, are we ready," I ask. The two team members left at their desks look up and nod and then look back down at their work. I return to my computer and begin writing this blog in frustration. God forbid I should do work while I'm waiting...

12:50- Mailing team member has been gone for a while now and is SURELY getting irritated standing down by the mail center waiting for us. I remind everyone that she is waiting for us and they all look at me surprised. The team member in conference on the other side of the office is still sitting there talking so I yell out to her to ask her if she's ready. She says she is and will be back in a second.

12:55- I stand up, thinking I will take action to prove my determination. Another team member comes to my side of the desk and tells me he is standing near me to show his solidarity and his readiness to leave. As we stand, the previously mentioned abandoned mailing team member returns to the office looking frustrated.

12:59- FINALLY, we all stand and head toward the door. Before leaving the desk, I stop and hit save on this blog so I don't lose it while I'm at lunch. The other script folk stand at the door and joke that they are sick of waiting for me.

1:00- LUNCH!

See, the point I am making is that no matter how good our planning or our intentions, we still wound up leaving an hour and a half later than intended. During that time of flux, I didn't do any work of course, cause I didn't want to be in the middle of a song when we left. So I mostly messed around on the internet, watched the olympic replays on the monitor and began conceiving this blog.

As a child, I remember waiting for my mother for-freaking-ever whenever we were leaving a dinner party or friend's house at the end of an evening. I would be playing with my friends and either she or my father would come find me and declare it time to leave. I would reluctantly go get my jacket or whatever and go stand by the door, dreading what I now knew was to come. I watched her say goodbye to one friend and talk for a few minutes. Then she would take a step toward the front door and me and then she would remember to tell her friend just "one more thing." I always wondered why she didn't say her goodbye's first and THEN come get me and tell me it was time to go. I believe I suggested that at some point during my childhood and it was not well received.

As I got older and sassier and more bored, I would imagine a sports commentary to go with the slow-motion departure dance.

"Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another exciting round of "Try to leave the house before I completely melt in my coat in the foyer." Tonight's competitors are formidable opponents who have been sparing in this sport for over 12 years! In this corner, we have Team Me, who is already in her coat and ready to go with a hand on the doorknob. In the other corner, Team Marsha who is holding her coat and chatting with the hostess. Let's watch how events unfold..."

"It looks like Team Marsha is walking backwards a few steps in the general direction of the door and Team Me is turning the doorknob in excited antici... oh no! It looks like the party hostess has offered to send Team Marsha home with some leftovers from the party. Team Me has released her grip on the door and is gazing around the foyer in boredom."

"Okay, ladies and gentlemen, Team Marsha has the leftovers in hand and takes a step in the direction of the door and we see Team Me getting excited and... oh no! It looks as though Team Marsha has begun telling one of the party guests about the book she has just finished. And now Team Me has begun to really sweat and is fanning herself with her coat."

FIVE MINUTES LATER...

"Folks if you are joining us, this has been an exciting evening and a tremendous show of sportsmanship. It would appear as though we have made it all the way to the doorway. Team Me is standing in the snow close to the car and Team Marsha is standing in the doorway facing the house with her coat on and almost buttoned. What a thrilling evening this has been ladies and gentlemen! It now appears as though Team Me is jumping up and down on the same spot, completely impatient and whining. Let's listen close and see if we can make it out... oh yes. It appears Team Me is saying "Let's go Mom! Let's go Mom!" in quite a sing-songy whiny voice. I don't know that I have seen Team Me put up a fight like this since the '80 New Year's Eve party at the Weiss' house."

"And... yes... it looks like... I do believe... it's over! Team Marsha has unlocked the car doors and appears to be getting in! Thanks to our loyal audience for joining us and I hope you will tune in again next week when we go to the party at the Rothstein's house!"

Overkill? Perhaps. I just wonder why this is such a womanly trait. When my Dad said it was time to go, the only thing that kept us from leaving immediately was one of my mom's friends coming up to him to talk. Otherwise, coat on... door open... walk out. So WTF?

There are certainly many mysteries that go hand in hand with woman-hood! Chief among them being why we always have to pee so much on a road-trip. But this whole slow-motion departure thing is on the list, for sure!

And now I have spent my first hour back from lunch writing this blog instead of working, which makes about three hours since I have done much that was constructive. So let's hear it for female procrastination!

Just to be safe, I mentioned that we should plan on leaving for the day at 4 so we can be out of here by 7. Let's see how it works...

Many Lives, Many Masters

2008-08-11T19:35:00.000-07:00

So... I've been thinking about this one quite a bit lately. To better understand my train of thought, let's take a step into the time machine and take a look back at my many lives and the many masters who ruled them.

Of course, there was childhood and teenagehood. Followed immediately by the incredible college years. Interspersed within the four years of college were a couple of semesters away, one in LA and one in London. (I know, it's taking a long time to get to the point, but hang in there, it's coming.) Then came LA and eight solid years of television work. The shows changed, the players changed, the payroll companies changed, the work mostly remained the same. In 2003, I said goodbye to TV forever (or for a couple of years, whatever) and moved to Charlotte, NC to begin a new career.

That's when things really got interesting. First there was temping at the mortgage company. Then temping at the pump factory (yes, you read that correctly! A pump factory!) Then the corporate office of the hair color franchise where I finally realized that it was only in television that I was allowed to wear jeans every day, so Tentmakers Entertainment brought me back into the TV fold. That lasted one glorious year until they went under. Following which, I tried on the hat of owner, ceo and general commandant-in-charge of my own video marketing company.

All of which led me to where I am now, a Pure Romance consultant spending some of my time in double-wides being paid in quarters and some of it in giant mansions with people who go through money like water.

What's the point, you patiently reiterate? The point is this... Each of those individual pieces of my life seem to me to have happened to a slightly different girl. Confused? Me too. But seriously, I look back on the girl hanging out in a nasty nightclub in London in 1993, headbanging to Nirvana, and think she was a different person from me. Then I think about the girl who stayed up all night long in 1999 working on her very first live show, Nickelodeon's 12 hour telethon "The Big Hell" (oops, I mean the Big Help) just drowning in exhaustion and paper and knowing she was totally sucking at the job but having no idea how to fix it, and I feel no connection to her at all.

Similarly, I currently feel no connection to any of my other lives where I had a boss and set hours. In fact, I really feel more like the girl in college now than anyone I've been since adulthood reared its ugly head.

Does anyone else feel this way? That your life is divided into sections and that they don't seem to go together? Or at least that all the other sections feel like they happened to someone else and you just have heard the stories so many times from that person that you know every detail?

I have some friends who I know have been in the same job their entire adult life. I wonder what that's like. I don't think it's any better or worse than my life, it's just the concept seems so foreign to me. Decades of time going by knowing, more or less, what the day will bring every morning when you open your eyes.

Then I have other friends... the girl who this blog is named for, in fact... who almost never have two days that are the same. And that seems alien to me too. Is she a different person to herself every time her circumstances change? Every time she gets on a bus and goes to a different venue with her tour, does it feel like she takes on a slightly different personality from the day before? OR is it like it was with freelancing for me, where the jobs changed but the person doing them seemed to stay the same. (Until the Olympics when I completely bottomed out and became another new person. A really whiny one, actually.)

I'm sure if I asked my friends with kids they would tell me that they feel their lives fractured and became different the second their first kid was born. I get that.

And it's not so much the change in life that baffles me these days, but the complete disconnect I feel to those other lives.

This morning, I started working on the MDA Telethon for the sixth year. I love this show. It is the only live TV I go back and do and it's a great chance to see the people I love as well as remind myself why I left in the first place. (Not much sleep to be had during the last week...) So when I started working this morning and started the familiar pattern of counting musical bars and typing out lyrics, I felt like I was putting back on an outfit from the previous summer that I used to wear all the time but had completely forgotten about months ago. It feels so comfortingly familiar and yet it feels strange to wear it again when I haven't touched it in so long. And even stranger, from the second I started counting that first beat, I stopped thinking about the work I needed to do for Pure Romance. I barely checked my email throughout the day, something I normally do compulsively, and I didn't even look at my calendar to see if there were any calls I needed to make. It's almost like I put back on my script supervisor self and left the Pure Romance version of me folded in the drawer.

If you've never read the book "Many Lives, Many Masters" I highly recommend it. It's FASCINATING! From Amazon, "In 1980, Weiss, head of the psychiatry department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, began treating Catherine, a 27-year-old woman plagued by anxiety, depression and phobias. When Weiss turned to hypnosis to help Catherine remember repressed childhood traumas, what emerged were the patient's descriptions of a dozen or so of her hitherto unknown 86 past lives, as well as philosophical messages channeled from "Master Spirits." Catherine's anxieties and phobias soon disappeared, says Weiss, and she was able to end therapy."

That's what I'm getting at here. All these other times in my life feel more like a past life than a part of this one.

When I think about all the different phases in my life, in mind's eye, I see a bunch of different "Sheri"s all lined up next to each other in order of height. And I can see their personalities as easily as if they were wearing signs. One says, "Angsty teenager." Another says, "Angsty script supervisor." Still another says, "Completely satisfied office manager who loves her job, the people she works with, her new house and her dog. But with angst."

I guess the reason I am thinking about this so much is cause I have recently started wondering what is coming next for me. I am steering myself toward being a successful PR consultant who has a team of amazing women working beneath me, each with their own strong, successful team beneath them. I see myself being the mother bird, a role I always enjoy since I am obviously a control freak.

So who will that Sheri be? Will she be more confident? Will she be more focused? Will she really enjoy her life and her work? Or will she be looking for another train to come through town that will take her on to the next master? What would the next master be?

The goal, of course, is to find a way to not only embrace the old "Sheri"s, especially the ones I don't like who keep poking their head out of the woodwork because of stupid Facebook, but to somehow unite them and absorb them into my current life. I'm sure each of those "Sheri"s has something to contribute. They all learned important lessons during their lifetimes.

Makes me grateful for the constants. (Shout out to Lost!) The ones that have been there to know many, if not all, of the incarnations of "Sheri" and who liked her all along.

So, constants... you know who you are... thank you. The little connection I feel to those other lives are due in large part to your memories of them and my memories of you and them together.

Does this make me a bit crazy? A lot crazy? Perhaps schizophrenic? Or does everyone feel this way? Who knows. All I do know is that I am pleased to report than I feel each "Sheri" has grown up a bit more than the previous and by a few more "Sheri"s from now, I should be a completely mature adult!

Fingers crossed...

The Tale of the Thieving Bank Manager

2008-07-21T14:07:00.000-07:00

So... on last Wednesday afternoon I was out and about in hip-happening Charlotte, doing what I like to call a 'bank field trip.' See, I get checks at parties quite often and they sometimes like to bounce. I don't like it when this happens, as you can imagine, since not only do I now have to chase the check writer and force them to pay me in cash but I also have to remind them that I have a bounced check fee of $30. So now they can add 30 dollars to their total (which, in some cases, is more than the actual check they wrote the first time) But the most annoying thing about it is that the bank charges ME money every time. So now, I make a list of all the banks from the checks I received and then drive to each of them to cash the checks first, then deposit the cash. This way, if it bounces, I pay no fee.

Anyhow, I'm in the middle of my bank field trip last week when I go to a Wachovia bank branch. I get out of my car, hit the lock button and walk the 100 feet from my car to the bank. I walk into the bank and 50 feet to a counter to endorse the check. Then another 10 feet to stand in line. 5 feet to the teller. And then I begin to leave. This all takes place in about, maybe, 10 min. As I leave, I start digging in my purse for my keys. But I come up empty. I dig and I dig (there's a lot of crap in my purse for sure) and I find nothing. I empty the purse, tampons and all, onto the counter and paw through it. Nothing. No keys. Keep in mind, ten minutes and a total of maybe 165 feet have transpired. They aren't on the floor. They aren't on the counter where I endorsed my checks. They aren't the counter by the teller. They are just gone. I look outside to make sure I didn't drop them. Nope. Check inside the car, even though I know I locked it from the outside. Nope. Gone. G-to the-O N E.

I will spare you the details of my frantic search throughout the bank, my phone calls to the only friends whose phone numbers I know off the top of my head since my phone was locked in the car as well. Finally, Molly and the kids to the rescue... Molly had a key to my house, I got my second set of car keys and we headed back to the bank. I get back in the car and check my VM and there is a message from the bank. Says the bank manager "We found your keys!" I call back (sure, I'm right outside the bank at this point, but so pleased to be back in my car that I don't want to leave it again) and ask in wonder, "Where did you find them?"

"They somehow found their way into my office," she answers vaguely. Now keep in mind that at the height of my search, the entire bank was helping me look. And this self-same manager poked her head out of the office and said, "No, I haven't seen ANY keys."

So they SOMEHOW found their way into her office. I totally hate it when my inanimate objects wander away and ensconce themselves in someone else's desk, don't you? Well, let me tell you, I grounded my keys when I got home! You have to teach these keys a lesson. There have to be consequences for wandering away from Mommy in a public place.

Here's my theory... I probably left my keys on the counter while I was endorsing my checks. (Yes, I acknowledge some complicity in this debacle that derailed my entire bank field trip!) I often do that. In fact, at the previous bank, I had walked away from the teller and left my phone sitting there so the kind soul in line behind me had to chase me down.

Anyhow, I left my keys on the counter which was right outside her office and she walked by on her way into her office and, without even thinking, just grabbed them and threw them on her desk. I imagine it was like that moment when you are walking around the house with your mind on 50 different things and all of a sudden you look down and wonder, "How did that banana get into my hand?" So when she was asked if she had seen my keys, the confusion on her face was probably genuine. I have no other reason on earth to think she was holding my keys hostage. She didn't demand a ransom or anything.

Anyhow, I go into the bank and pick up the keys while all the employees smile indulgently at me, as though I am possibly not quite all there, you know, mentally. (Which I'm not. But I don't think the missing keys are a good indication of that at all!) Although the keys "somehow" found their way into her office, in which I had never been, somehow I got the patronizing "Isn't she cute and dumb" glances anyway.

As I'm leaving, the thief calls out to me, "You know the cell phone number on your business card has the wrong area code, right?" I look at my card and, lo and behold, she's right. It says 705 instead of 704. So as I begin counting in my head the hundreds of cards I have given out that have the wrong number on them, she says to me, once again very slowly like I just got out of the hospital after suffering a serious head injury, "Maybe this was karma. Maybe it was meant to happen so someone would tell you that your business cards are wrong."

I stared blankly at her as she put her hand on my shoulder and with a bright, happy smile said "See, it's a good thing!" Well, sure. Perhaps I "secreted" my keys into being lost so I could discover this problem with my business card. Let's see if that explanation holds water.

The moral of today's lesson, boys and girls, is to always put the keys in the purse immediately after locking the car door and don't take them out until you are en route back to the car. Sticking your finger through one of the key chains and swinging them around while you walk? Not so smurt.

Especially with thieving bank managers lurking nearby.

Sheri Spitz is trying to understand the draw of Facebook

2008-06-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

So... I'm not stupid. At least not technologically stupid. I'm pretty adept at figuring out what the heck is happening on my computer. In fact, I'm so not-stupid at computers that I started a company based entirely on downloadable internet video. (Feel free to peruse if you have never seen it... www.viewu.com)

But Facebook makes me feel stupid. Really stupid. Cause seriously... I don't get it! I really don't. I wish I did. Apparently people spend quite a bit of time on this site. My sister, I know, spends a great deal of time sending pieces of flare back and forth with her friend Lisa. Now, I know what "flare" is. In fact, I was watching Office Space just this morning. (See, even without Facebook I am able to efficiently waste time).

My cousin Robin, I know, very much enjoys changing her status line. Right now, as I write, Robin "is realizing how underrated fresh air is - being in the midst of wildfires."

I don't ever change my status line. Am I being remiss? Do those people who found me on this site that knew me in nursery school want to know that right now Sheri Spitz is "writing in my blog and will soon be exercising on my Wii fit and unpacking two giant boxes of new merchandise that arrived today"? Or is that too boring? Should I instead inform people that Sheri Spitz is "currently pondering the chicken or the egg issue as I decide which to have for dinner." Although really, I'm having tomato pie. But "which came first, the tomato or the onion" doesn't have that same pithy ring to it.

Another thing I don't get. I have so many invitations and they all make no sense to me. Below is a list of invitations I have recently received.

1. A Superpoke invitation
2. A scabble invitation
3. A Sea Garden invitation
4. A Pirates invitation
5. A Johnny Depp invitation. (I know Alli... I know...)
6. An ilikefriend invitation
7. A Biggest Brain invitation
8. A piece of sushi
9. A Good Karma invitation
and last but not least...
10. An I love the 80's invitation

I don't know what those things mean. I'm sure they would be fun if I attempted participation. After all, almost every person I love in my life seems to enjoy these activities. And I do like playing with the word scramble game, although I don't seem to do very well despite my obvious verbosity.

And please don't misunderstand me, FWLFs (that's Friends Who Love Facebook). I'm not making fun. Well, at least not of you. I am making fun of myself to some degree because I feel like some old lady leaning on my cane and sucking on my dentures while I wonder aloud "What do these crazy kids see in this faces contraption?"

I think my biggest problem with Facebook currently isn't so much a lack of understanding of its purpose, but rather the emotional landmines that lie within. Here I am, innocently reading fan fiction or surfing eonline, when suddenly I receive an email friend request. And there, in the title of that email, is a name I haven't heard in 5 years. Or 10. OR WORSE YET... 15! Cause those are the high school names.

It's not that I don't want to get back in touch with old friends. I love catching up with people who knew me when I was shy. (Shut up! I was... I really was!) But it's that whole two-worlds colliding thing. You know? It was like when I was in college and someone from Shaker would come visit. Or now, when someone from LA comes to Charlotte. It seems weird to me that I should be unpacking my latest box of bedroom accessories and preparing for a party when someone, all of a sudden, who knew me when I actually was willing to run around the playground and play kickball (although I was never really all THAT willing, let's be honest) reaches out with no warning from 20 years ago and touches me on the shoulder. Doesn't that give anyone else the heebee geebees? Sometimes it's a lovely pleasant memory and I revel in it as I accept their invitation. Sometimes, on the other hand, it's a fun little trigger that dislodges me from my current life situation and returns me to a time perhaps best left in the past.

The other weird part for me is that after you accept said ghost-from-high-school-past's invitation and become a friend, people seem to not have an interest in writing and catching up. And I'm as bad as anyone. I have accepted tons of invitations (aren't I popular?) and not even ever opened the profile of the invit-or. I often don't answer things that are posted to my wall. And I very rarely actually write emails. If I do, it's a quick catch-up and then silence again. Some of them have pictures and it's nice to see some faces again. But otherwise, it seems I spend most of my time accepting invitations and then closing my browser.

I can't be the only person who thinks like this, right? But then, I guess if the whole thing really bothered me, I would remove my Facebook profile. Or I would never have put my high school or college into my profile so no one from the past could find me.

So ultimately it must not bother me that much. Perhaps it is just the feeling of not getting the appeal that bugs me the most.

I never did like feeling left out. Except in kickball.

Words, Wonderful Words

2008-06-12T13:52:00.001-07:00

So... I'm a talker. We all know this and I am comfortable enough with myself to admit that I talk quite a bit. It's my Grandmother Bea's fault. She talked quite a bit as well. (I just hope I don't exclude all others from participating in the conversation as she did. And grip their arms in the Vulcan Death Grip while I talk to them.) In fact, my Grandma talked so often that it wasn't until she passed away (alavah shalom) that I ever heard my Grandfather (alavah shalom again) finish a whole story on his own with no exasperated "Oh Paul..." interrupting him and taking over the story.

But it's not just that I love the talk. Or even that I love making the pretty talk. Cause I do enjoy a well constructed sentence. I also love anyone who can talk the pretty talk with me. People who know how to put words together in such a clever way that even though the sentence is totally banal in meaning, the words they choose make me laugh out loud for several minutes.

Take for example my good friend out there in LA, Vanessa. Today on instant message I was talking to her about something and declared myself full of shit. She responded, "I don't think you're full of shit. I think you're full of awesome!"

Which is FUNNY! And exactly what I expect from Vanessa. This girl answers her phone on any day of the week, "Happy (insert day of the week here) to you!" It makes such a nice change from the usual, "Hello?" that most people throw at you. In fact, just about everything Vanessa says includes a fun turn-of-phrase that makes you stop and think a few seconds before you respond while your brain processes her meaning. And yes, VI, I mean that as a HUGE compliment! Another example from today's conversation. I was lamenting my lack of post-it flags in the house and Vanessa offered a solution.

"I'm surrounded by them. Hold on, let me teleport them to you."

"Crap. I still lack the power of teleportation. Maybe tomorrow."

Vanessa isn't the only one in my life with a talent for wordplay. Two other good friends here in Charlotte, Kara and Lucas, are two champions of funny-ness in ordinary phrases. I can't really do them justice without the tone of voice that goes with them. But a good example is how they add, "It turns out" before any sort of statement that describes a situation. As in "It turns out this blog is rambling quite a bit without direction." Or "I was going to the post office today but it turns out that I am quite lazy."

I think this love of strangely constructed phrases comes from an early childhood love of Stephen King. This is my favorite passage from any of his books. It's from "The Shining." In this section, one of the characters has just been distracted in his driving by a premonition being sent to him by Danny Torrance at the hotel. (Yes, premonition! It's Stephen King!) And he cuts off a workman driving beside him in his distraction.

"The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn and roared around the drunkenly weaving limousine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limo driver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution."

I mean... COME ON! Does anyone out there who knows me think that the way I talk may have been influenced by this prolific writer? And if there is anyone out there who knows me who doesn't believe that I not only laughed out loud when I read that the first time, but that I also went back and read it over and over and sometimes would pull it off my bookshelf and look for just that passage to read again and just now when I pulled it out to type knew exactly where it was in the book even though I haven't picked this book up in probably 15 years... well then you probably don't know me very well!

What's the point? Dunno. Turns out I don't have one. I just enjoyed Vanessa's turn of phrase so much that I wanted to share it. And, of course, procrastinate. There's always that.

Check back another time for something more coherent.

Let's Talk About Pattie Boyd

2008-05-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

So... I'm here in Nashville, TN visiting none other than the famous Snell of "Snell Said I had To" blog fame. (Her place is super cute, BTW, for those of you who know our beloved Snellycat. -ed.)

On the drive here to Nashville, Snell and I were chatting on the phone, in preparation for three days of non-stop chatting in person, about the book she's reading about Pattie Boyd. Now, Pattie Boyd, for you non-Beatles lovers (re: foolish people) was first the wife of Beatles' George Harrison (alava shalom) and then, later, the wife of Eric Clapton.

I was excited to hear Snell was reading that book, since I just finished Clapton's autobiography. I was anxious to compare notes and find out if Pattie reveals any more in her book that would give some hint as to how this woman, undoubtedly beautiful and probably quite poised and sexy, but still just a woman, managed to inspire some of the most beautiful, passionate and intensely longing songs ever written.

Sadly, Snell came up as empty as I did. She agreed as well that Pattie is a beautiful woman, no doubt. But if you think about some of the lyrics written about this woman, you would think she was some kind of Olivia-Newton-John-in-Xanadu-esque muse. Let's review some of these, shall we?

"If I could choose a place to die
It would be in your arms."
-Bell Bottom Blues, Derek & the Dominoes (aka one of Clapton's bands)

"Let's make the best of the situation
Before I finally go insane.
Please don't say we'll never find a way
And tell me all my love's in vain."
-Layla, Derek and the Dominoes

"Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me"
-Something, The Beatles

"I feel wonderful because I see
The love light in your eyes.
And the wonder of it all
Is that you just don't realize how much I love you."
- Wonderful Tonight, Eric Clapton

The interesting thing about Pattie, it seems to me, is that every song she inspired became a rock anthem. Well, Bell Bottom Blues might be a bit of an underappreciated tune, but it is an anthem to me. I can't imagine what it would be like to inspire that kind of unapologetically (yup, I newly worded that word) passionate plea from a lover. He literally offers to crawl across the room to her and beg!

"Do you want to see me crawl across the floor to you?
Do you want to hear me beg you to take me back?
I'd gladly do it because
I don't want to fade away."

(This YouTube video is just music, no pictures. So you can come back and finish reading! I know, I'm a giver.)

He'd gladly do it! He won't just, you know, do it. He'll GLADLY do it. That's crazy. I can barely get myself to lean too far out of my way to pet Richie, whom I love tremendously. (By the way, Snell clearly feels the same on that one, because Richie is just outside her reach and she desperately wants to pet him, but doesn't want to get off the couch to do it. Now, granted, she doesn't have the same emotional attachment to him that I do, but you get my point.)

Is it a musician thing to feel things so passionately? Or juat to express them so passionately? Most of the men I have met in my life have felt that passionately about their favorite sports team, but not their women. In fact, now that I think about it, there are probably quite a few guys I have known who would maybe have offered to crawl across the floor for the Boston Red Sox or the Cleveland Indians.

Clearly, when these songs were written in the 70's, they didn't yet understand the dating rules set forth so eloquently by Swingers, where you never show actual interest lest you scare off the object of your obsession. If they had, Eric probably would have waited three days before he wrote a song about his baby. That would have been a different kind of song.

Did they just feel things more passionately then? But if you think back on some of the other love songs from that era, there are so few that are as emotional as the ones Pattie inspired. Or from any era.

I guess there really was something about the way she moved... I wonder if she can teach me.

The Matter of Gray

2008-05-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

So... I went to get a cut and color today. Sorely needed. I was excited to get there and get my stringy mess cleaned up. But I was unprepared for the emotional mess that I would turn into while in the chair.

My hairdresser, the ever-fantastic Brandi, and I had our whole discussion about what we were going to do with color and she mixed it up right there in a bowl. And then she began to work. Normally, she starts with foils at the top of my head and works her way around. So I became curious when, instead of starting with foils, she started using her brush to dab at my roots.

"Are you doing it differently this time?" I inquired.

"No."

"But normally you don't do it like this," I persisted.

"I'm doing the same thing I always do, " she replied.

And that's when the world as I knew it turned upside down. Cause that's when she added, "I can't put the foils in until I finish COVERING THE GRAY!"

Ok... um... WHAT? The GRAY? What gray? I am a mere child. How can I have gray? I believe at that point, in my shock, I said something to the effect of "That's not gray! It's dirty blonde!" Brandi, to her credit, kept a straight face as she met my stricken eyes in the mirror and responded firmly, "No. It's gray."

And now, let me take you on a journey of my mental voyage upon completion of this devastating conversation. The part of the woman in denial will be played by Italics. The part of the realistic/sado-masochist will be played by bold, since it's voice is so very, very much louder!

She's so wrong. There is no way I am gray. She just can't see it close enough to realize that it's blonde.

Actually, dumbass, she's able to see it a lot closer up than you are! She's staring down on it, under bright, heavy lights, right now.

Well, there is no way it is gray. She must have me confused with another customer in her mind.

I doubt it. She's looking at your face, calling your name and there is the little sheet with your name on it sitting on her counter with all the details about your hair. See it? It's right there.

She's got the wrong card.

Um no. Your name is at the top.

But I'm only about to be 35 years old! How can I be gray?

35 is not as young as you always imagine it to be. You're getting older.

But... I mean... but... she's mistaken.

Ok, I'm sure it would be kinder to let you live in denial, but join me here in realistic land for a while, won't you? You have gray hair.

But my Grandmother had gray hair.

Yes. And once upon a time, I'm sure SHE thought it was dirty blonde.

My mother didn't go gray until her 40s.

Well, how special for her. You are gray at 35.

And so it went. On and on. For an hour and fifteen minute hair cut. I tried every rationalization I could, trying to convince myself that I have not, in fact, made this transition into old. But the realistic/mean/persistent/relentless side of me finally won. I have gray hair.

I've not had any problems in the past with benchmarks of aging. I accepted 30, even welcomed it, with great aplomb. I had heard from so many friends over the years that 30s are so much better than 20s. I have one month left to be on the right said of 35 and I'm ok with that too.

I'm ok with an already slow metabolism slowing down even further. I'm ok with little crows feet and hands that aren't as smooth as they used to be. I'm ok with more aches and pains after a workout, complete inability to recover from a hangover in less than 24 hours, less interest in going out at night and more interest in my couch. All of these things, I embrace.

Nothing, in fact, has ever made me feel old. Until the "g" word.

I'm so unsettled, in fact, that I am going to continue to convince myself that I am still just a dirty blonde and that she was just looking at me in the wrong light. The second I turn 40, I will be ready to accept gray and embrace it as friend. (Well, friend that needs to be covered up every 6-8 weeks, that is.) Until that point, I remain a bottle blonde covering up a darker, dirtier, slightly washed out yet pure brunette.

With highlights.

Nocturnal Visitor

2008-04-25T19:27:00.000-07:00

So... I had a visitor the other night in my sleep.

Let me start off by saying this. I believe that when people from my life who have passed away appear in my dreams, that is their way of paying me a visit. I know most people would disagree, saying it is only a subconscious memory that my brain is throwing up on the drive-in wall that is my brain while I sleep. (I'm an active dreamer. Always have been. More active than I'd like, believe me.)

But I prefer to think of them as visits. As discussed in previous posts, as a Jewish girl, I don't really know what I believe about the afterlife. I'm not sure whether we die and our souls go somewhere and are reunited with our loved ones, whether we simply live on in the memories of those who loved us or whether we are just gone. But a part of me has always thought that when people come to me in my sleep, they are just letting me know they are still here for me.

Ever since Poppa died, whenever I feel sad, I have been listing for myself all the people he loved who he has possibly been reunited with. It's a long list. His brother who died of leukemia when he was still a young boy and his father who died a year later from, as family legend has it, a broken heart. My Grandmother. Most of his friends. So many people. And secretly, I hoped when he was done catching up with all of them, he would come pay me a visit. I didn't think it would happen for quite a while, but I think I knew he would show up someday.

The other night, there he was. He looked so young. So strong and healthy. There were no more issues with his legs or his eyes. He didn't look like he weighed 45 lbs with his clothes on as he did those last months. He looked exactly the way I remember him looking when I was a teenager. It was amazing.

In the past, I have had dreams about my other grandparents who are no longer alive. But in those dreams, the fact that they were there even though they were supposed to be dead was a non-issue. My dream self didn't actually pay any attention to the idea that it was speaking to Grandparents who are no longer of this earth. They were simply there, part of the backstory of whatever strange thing was happening in my dream. One time tho, I swear I woke up and smelled my Grandmother's perfume.

But this dream was different. My dream-self knew he was supposed to be dead. I knew he was there for a visit and no one else would understand. He told me he knew how much we all missed him. He said he carried my heart around with him all the time. He gave me two of his sweaters that he told me he had taken with him when he died (???) so that I could have them to remember him by. (One of them was bright orange, which was most definitely not a sweater I remember him wearing, but the other was an oatmeal colored sweater which I have seen him wear many times.) And then he gave me a hug. It was a really long hug. The kind you give someone when you know it is going to be a long time until you see them again. There was no awkwardness to it. I remember in my dream I was crying pretty hard because I knew this was the only visit I was going to get for a while. And then he was gone.

In my dream, I went downstairs holding the sweaters he had given me only to find a television production truck in my parents' living room. Apparently they were filming American Idol on the front lawn and there wasn't enough room for this particular truck on the street. Which in my dream seemed quite logical when my mother explained it. I then proceeded to tell her all about Poppa's visit and as we began to argue about whether or not it really happened, I woke.

It was about 5:45AM. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to roll over and go back to sleep immediately. Which I almost did. But then, in a rush, the dream came back. Every detail came back crystal clear. And along with the memories came the biggest smile I had smiled in a long time. I couldn't wipe it off my face. I was laying there in bed feeling so content and relieved that at last I got to tell him goodbye the way I wanted to. Not the "real" goodbye I gave him where he was barely conscious when I said it. This was a real send off and a chance to tell him when he could really understand how much I love him.

It's been about a week and a half now since he was here. I've told a few people in my life about it. Some have agreed that it was really a visit, some have humored me. But in my heart, I know that he was here. I know he came to say goodbye to me.

I just hope he didn't see all the sex toys in the other room while he was here.

April 21st, 1993 2:37AM

2008-04-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

So... I just realized that the 15 year anniversary of a significant, if not important, event in my life has just passed. Not many people would even find this event significant. Probably only two other people in the world. And I'm not even sure about those two.

Fifteen years ago, I was a student at Ithaca College and I was living in Hood Hall. Hood was one of the dorms in the upper Quad area of campus. Good lord I loved that dorm. I moved in during the middle of my freshman year, having finally been released from the hellish nightmare that was first semester freshman year and its accompanying roommates. It was in Hood Hall that I met the best group of friends that I had ever had. Chief among them were my two closest friends, Lianne and Gary.

Li and Gary and I were together all the time sophomore year. Not that we didn't hang with other people, but always, at the end of the day, we somehow wound up together in Li's and my room, hanging out and doing that college thing of babbling nonsensically about all matters. Some very strange discussions in that room. Some of them altered by, shall we say, artificial means. Much of them infused with hysterical laughter. All of them typical college verbal vomit although at the time we thought them brilliant and insightful.

On the night in question, April 21st, 1993, Gary and Li and I were hanging out in the room again, listening to music and not talking much. Gary's birthday began that night at midnight. So he was melancholy, as he often was on his birthday. 'What does my life mean?' 'Where is it going?' 'How did I wind up at Ithaca College where all the good parties get broken up by the cops on a regular basis?' Those kinds of wonderings.

So we were sitting in silence. Sober silence, strangely. Me on my bed, Li on hers and Gary staring blankly out the window, musing. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, began the typical college conversation. 'You know,' said Gar. 'We are never going to have this moment again. Once it's over, it's over and we can't ever get it back.'

I'm not sure what my response was to that, but knowing me, it was no doubt sarcastic in nature. He went on to make this point for a few minutes, talking about the beauty and fragility of moments like the one we were currently having. And then he made a declaration. 'Let's remember this moment for the rest of our lives. It's 2:37AM on April 21st, 1993 and we are sitting in your room listening to 'True' by Spandeau Ballet.' (I was in a retro 80's phase.)

Well, being a music-obsessed freak, all Gary needed to do was attach a song to a moment and there was instantly no doubt that I would remember it forever. And I have. If I close my eyes right now, I can picture the moment completely (although that would make it difficult to type.) It's clear as day.

For a while after college, Gary and I lived in the same time zone. And every year on his birthday, I would think of that minute. I'd remember how I felt that night. How I was so in love with college. How I loved the times we would sit around the three of us laughing and talking about stupid college stuff. I would miss college so much sometimes it was like a physical ache. Every year, I would mourn that minute at the same time I celebrated it, even though truth be told, after college, I was very rarely awake when the minute presented itself.

This Monday was Gary's birthday. He turned 35. (That's right Gar. I called you out!) And that moment turned 15. Which blows me away, cause it was just a second ago, I swear! These days, the melancholy guy who sat in the window waxing philosophical about lost moments has a wife and a son and an amazing life on the other side of the country. And I am here in North Carolina, with a life so utterly and completely different than anything I could have imagined for myself at the time. (see Grandma Crazy blog entry for proof!)

But in my mind, we're still there. Me, Lianne and Gary, sitting in room 207 of Hood Hall on the upper Quad of Ithaca College campus. Our entire lives are in front of us. So many amazing experiences in the future. With that one cheezy song from the 80s and one late night minute tying us together forever.

Thank God for late night college insights.

No escape

2008-04-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

So... Charlotte is getting hammered with a thunderstorm right now. Actually, hammered might be too strong a word, but there is thunder and lightening and the rain is a-comin' down on this drought-ridden city.

Predictably, at the first flash of lightning and the first rumble of thunder, my faithful friend and alarm clock Richie begins to panic. It starts with an abrupt head lift up off the floor and a glance in my direction. I'm assuming he is checking to see if I heard it as well. Then the ears go flat back. The eyes get wide. The tongue starts hanging out and begins to drip, drip, drip onto the carpet. And then, just like Seabiscuit before him, he's off.

He starts by running around the coffee table in a circle, to see if perhaps the storm is only located in that corner of the room. Then he begins to widen his search for a storm-free area. He encompasses his favorite spot under the end table, rejects it and comes to stand beside me. He looks beseechingly up at me on the couch, wondering if that's a storm-free zone and if I will share it with him. In his younger days, he would jump up onto the couch in a panic and try to climb onto the back, getting as high as possible. Perhaps to avoid the flood he fears is coming? Or maybe he thinks the storm is only on the ground where he is.

When all these efforts prove fruitless he heads for the back door. I think somewhere in his mind, it is only the inside of the house that has betrayed him by allowing a storm in his presence. SURELY, if he can get to his backyard, where all things good happen, he will be free. After about ten minutes of me reassuring him that he won't like it outside (oh, if only he would listen when I talk...) I finally get up to prove to him that the storm is, in fact, worse outside. I open the back door and he bolts. Keen to put as much distance between him and house as possible. Sadly, several seconds later, reality kicks in and he realizes that the storm is not only worse out here, but there is also wet stuff falling on him from the sky. And so, with a panicked yet resigned look, he returns to the back door to be let in. Which I allow. After he sits. And I say 'I told you so.'

After this point, he stops looking for a way away from the storm and begins to find a way to make the whole thing less painful for himself. Somehow, being in a small enclosed space is his preference. (One morning I woke up after a pretty nasty overnight storm and he had wormed his way underneath my bed and was so tight under there that I had to help him get out.) As we speak he is sitting under my desk, curled in a ball between my feet. And my poor pumpkin is shaking like a leaf. And I've tried to reassure him, but mentally he is somewhere where I can't reach him. Come back, Richie! Come back!

Alphabetastic

2008-04-03T18:45:00.000-07:00

So... meet my niece Zoe. She will be three this summer. Don't let that big grin and excited expression fool you. She's actually often happier and MORE excited than she looks in this picture. At least that's been my experience. Jill, if I'm wrong, I apologize but it's my blog so na na na.

Oh, how my niece loves her letters and numbers. She loves to count to herself and recite her alphabet. She enjoys pointing out letters when she sees them and will do so in restaurants, in the elevator, in the car as we pass letters on the road (you know, letters as part of signs or buildings. Not like a big letter "Z" standing on the side of the road waving at people. Cause Cleveland isn't really the type of place where letters stand on the side of the road waiting to be identified by a 2 year old child in the back of a Jeep Compass. Probably cause it's too cold to stand out there that long.) Sometimes she lays in her crib when she wakes up and recites the alphabet to herself. Sometimes she just counts to herself. The other day, she counted down from ten to one. Let me just brag on that for a second. Oh, shoot, did I forget to mention that she is a genius and quite mentally gifted? My bad.

Last time I was home, she had picked up this habit of imitating her mother answering the phone. She would, sometimes at random and sometimes when prompted by her Cool Aunt Sheri who was making sport out of annoying her sister, inquire as though having just picked up the phone, "Hello?" And then a beat. And then "HIIIII!" with a giant grin across her face. Like super giant. Like THRILLED to be saying hello. Which was charming and sweet enough on it's own. But for some reason, she associated this greeting with her then favorite letter of the alphabet. So after the "Hello? Hiiiii" exchange, she would exclaim (in this almost demonic voice which was obviously her imitating one of her talking toys) "THE LETTER D". The first time she did this, Cool Aunt Sheri almost passed out from laughing and crying at the same time. Little did I know, this was merely an appetizer for the next trip home.

I came home last week ready to continue playing the "Hello? Hi" game only to discover we had moved on. I was quite sad. She no longer took the bait. She ignored me completely. (Not unusual, you understand, but still sad.) But my sister said she had a new letter catch phrase. Not ten minutes later, she came over to my sister dragging a huge case of lego-adjacent (they serve the same purpose as legos, but Cool Aunt Sheri didn't drop the money for the real thing...) pieces. She asked my sister for a letter "W". My sister took four long straight lego-like pieces out and formed a letter "W". Zoe, overwhelmed with delight, took the "W" out of my sister's hand and held it, triumphant, over her head with both hands. You've never seen anyone so excited about or proud of a letter "W" before. And she threw her head back, presumably to admire it from below, and yelled out (typing this SO won't do it justice, but I'll do my best) "Waaaaaaaiiiiit aaaa MINUTE! It's the letter 'W'."

I pretty much fell off my chair. I was laughing so hard I had to simultaneously go fetal, wipe my eyes and cross my legs to keep from peeing. It wasn't so much the words as the inflection and the delight in her voice. If I didn't know better, I would think Ed McMahon had snuck into her room at night to teach her how to best introduce a living legend to an audience. The long drawn out "Waaaiiiiit" followed by the succinct "a MINUTE!" And topped off with the fanfare of the introduction of the fantastic letter "W"... she killed me. It took me ten minutes to recover. But it only got better.

After taking a victory lap with her letter "W", grinning like a five time gold-medal winner, she brought the "W" back down to her eye level and turned it upside down. And then, again, "Waaaaaaiiiiiiiiit a MINUTE! It's the letter 'M'." Oh god. I was dying. I couldn't control myself. Cause it was the letter "W" and then it became the letter "M" and that is just a phenomenon of nature. I tried to get her to turn it sideways and say that it was the letter "Sigma" but she seems to not enjoy the Greek alphabet as much as the English. But I trust she will in time.

Now, the interesting thing is that although she also enjoyed the letter "K" which my family members did a valiant job trying to construct with the lego-ish materials but ultimately failed at, no other letters would result in the level of delight that "W" and "M" inspired. I tried to do the letter "I" and the letter "U". (Now that I think about it, I probably could have really dazzled her with an "S" but I didn't have that inspiration until just now. Jill, give it a shot and let me know how it goes.)

I wonder if that's because the letter "W" is a fun word to say and the letter "M" is a fun noise. Whatever the reason, we celebrated these two exciting letters every day I was home at least once. I can't wait until the next time I see her. She'll probably be spelling the Gettysburg Address letter by letter and be able to balance my checkbook. Someone needs to do it. And God knows it shouldn't be me!

And in case you are wondering, it's not that I gave MYSELF the nickname Cool Aunt Sheri. It's just that I knew when she was born that this is what she will want to call me one day, so I just began the process early to let the rest of the family get used to it. Adults take longer to learn than children, you know?

In Loving Memory

2008-03-27T18:23:00.000-07:00

So, I’ve heard the expression "life goes on" so many times and it’s not hard to understand its meaning. Obviously, the world continues to turn regardless of the events of my life or anyone else’s. The sun comes up and goes down, the seasons blend into one another and all those other applicable clichés. And between life changing events, I forget how strange it feels when life continues as usual although things have just permanently changed in my life.

Seven and a half hours ago, my life changed again. My Grandfather, my last remaining grandparent, my favorite grandparent, my banter partner and my friend, died this morning. I don’t know for sure that it was in his sleep, but I’m going to go ahead and pretend it was. And in those seven and a half hours, life has continued to go on and it feels so strange.

After hearing the news I began with the inevitable phone calls. Rearranging the next couple of days, finding someone to do my parties, doing laundry so I have something to wear in Cleveland, figuring out transportation options. And every once in a while, while I am going about these mundane, ordinary tasks, I hear my Grandfather’s voice. I hear the way he used to call me “Dolly”. I hear the way he used to waggle his fingers at me and say “Hellooooo” in a funny voice. I hear him calling to my niece, futilely trying to capture her attention while she watched Elmo. And I stop. And I think, Poppa’s gone. And tears well. And I’m sad. And then I either succumb for a few minutes and let them fall and allow myself to really think about it, or I decide now isn’t the time and I pull my emotions back.

Part of me wonders if this is the right way to honor someone I love so much. Someone who I so admired in many ways, even while I thought him old-fashioned and sometimes got angry at the things he said. I think back to a time when I was in Jr. High or something and I got a D in Health class. Not my first D by any stretch, but for some reason, I was really worried that when Poppa knew about it, he would be very disappointed in me. So I called him and told him first, before I told my parents or anyone else. And he was sad for me but never disappointed. So when I told Mom and Dad later, it was so much easier because I knew he wasn’t angry. Shouldn’t I be inconsolable on the floor? Should I really be thinking about mailing product out to customers since I can’t deliver it as planned today? Don’t I owe him my emotions today? All of them?

I know that it’s going to probably fall to me to write something about him to say at the funeral tomorrow and that’s really what I’ve been obsessively focusing on today. I wrote something for Grandma’s funeral, but it was very organic and just came to me in a moment. All day long I’ve been worrying about what to say about this man who I shared such a deep, meaningful connection with the for the last 34 years. And all I can remember is the story about the Health class. I remember us teasing each other sure, but the last few years, those moments have been few and far between, even though I often tried to force him into kidding around with me. At this point, the words that keep coming to mind are that this is what he wanted, what he’s wanted for years. He almost literally forced himself to go, always fearing he was a burden to his family, by refusing to eat or drink for the last week or so. Although most of his awareness was gone at that point, I know there was a part of him that was throwing up his hands and crying uncle. Is that something to say at a funeral? Shouldn’t it be a celebration of his life? Part of me is so angry at him. At how he gave up on life and wallowed in misery when he could have been trying to find a life in a new way. Part of me thinks that he sank himself into this state with self-pity and fear of new things. And part of me hates myself for those last three sentences.

My flight is boarding now. I’m no closer to answers than I was when I started this tirade. But life is going on. And I can either go with it, or not. Poppa would have wanted me to go with it. I just hope he always stays with me while I go.

Why I Am A Reverse Old Person

2008-02-19T17:37:00.000-08:00

So, ever since I started this job, I have become what my friend Molly calls "A Reverse Old Person." What she means by this is I keep the exact opposite schedule of an older person. Normally, your (stereo-)typical old person wakes early in the morning, has breakfast by 8, lunch at 11:30, dinner at 5, in bed by 9.

My schedule is as follows: Wake when the furry alarm clock decides it is the right time. Futz around the house for a few hours cause I can't have breakfast immediately after he does or he will begin to think he is in charge of this pack and we just can't have that!

So breakfast usually somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30. That makes lunch sometime in the 2:30-3:30 region. Which leaves dinner the coveted time slot of 9ish, maybe 9:30. Maybe 10. And on nights when I have a party, dinner can be anywhere from 10-2AM, depending on when I get home. Can't do a party on a full stomach. (Check back for a later blog someday when I decide to explore why that's the case.) And bed around midnight.

But it's not just the food that makes my schedule seem weird. It's my work habits. Take today for example. Below follows my schedule:

8:30- Awoken by furry alarm clock. Let him out and go back to bed.
8:45- Give up hope of ever going back to bed and head to computer.
8:46- Commence to read EOnline, check out schedule for meetings the next day, and do general nothingness on the computer.
10:30- Breakfast
11:30- Trainer
12:30- PR deliveries in Matthews
2:30- Lunch
3:30- Go hang out at Molly's for a few hours just cuz
5:30- Return home. Begin work.

And NOW, it is 8:44PM and I just finished working. Going to go eat dinner. So I am forced to wonder why it is that I spent the entire day messing around and only got down to work in the evening. It wouldn't be so bizarre except this day is quite typical. Regular meals and a regular work schedule very rarely make an appearance in my life. They are most certainly the exception, not the rule.

In typing this, I was hoping to gain some perspective as to why I live my life in this fashion. I have come up blank. Not that it bothers me, in fact I think this is the best schedule I have ever had in my entire adult life. (Especially the going back to bed part) It's just odd.

Thoughts? Those of you who read this blog know me well. I'd be curious to hear your opinions.

And of course this blog begs the question-- when I am an ACTUAL old person, will my schedule change? Or will I have the schedule of an Old Reverse Old Person? And if that's the case, what will I do with myself when my lame-o friends all go to bed at 9?

These are deep thoughts. They make my head hurt. Enjoy.

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER!!!!!

2008-02-17T17:54:00.001-08:00

Found this on my friend Jeff's blog tonight. I have so much love for this video, I could weep from it.

And now for nostalgia's sake...

A Conversation Between Boston the Happy-Go-Lucky Cocker Spaniel and Richie the crochety Jewish Corgi

2008-02-14T19:54:00.000-08:00

So, what follows is an actual transcript between my dog, RichieCunningham Spitz and my friends Ryann and Scott's dog, Boston Fairweather.

Boston: Hi! HeyRichie! Hi! Hi! Richiehey. Hi!

Richie: (Yawn) (Roll onto side)

Boston: Richie, hey Richie! Hi! I'mBostonandmymomanddadareryann andscottandtheyknowyourMomSheri. Doyou knowmymomanddadRyannandScott? IknowyourmomSheriandshepetsmeandstuffandIlike it! Doyoulikeitwhenshepetsyou? KaraandLucaspetmetooandIlikethattoo! DotheypetyoucausetheypetmeandIlikeit! Doyoulikefood? Ilikefoodlotsandlotsandwhenmymomanddad andkaraandlucasgivemefoodittastessogoodandiloveit.

Richie: (Yawn again) (Snore)

Boston: RichieheyRichie! Areyousleeping? Iliketosleeptoo. Ilikefoodandsleepalot. AndwhenKaraandLucaspetmeandmymomanddadtoo!

Richie: (Crack an eye open) Oy. Kid, would you mind not hitting me in the head with your tail? You could put someone's eye out.

Boston: OkayRichieI'msorryIjustlikemeetingnewdogssomuchandyouaresoniceand
Ijustget excited. DoyouevergetexcitedcauseIdo! EspeciallywhenmymomanddadcomehomeandKara andLucascomeoverandsometimesIcometotheirhouse
andthat'sreallyfunsoIgetexcited.

Richie: Kid, you gotta calm down. How will you ever get to be alpha dog in your house if you're so eager?

Boston: RichieIdon'tknowwhatyoumeanRichie. WhatdoyoumeanRichie?

Richie: (Roll back onto belly and tuck one foot under with one foot behind) Listen, kid, let me tell you something. The most important thing for a dog is to make sure you are in charge in your house. You hear me? You have to be large and in charge.

Boston: IhearyouRichieandthat'sreallyinteresting. MymomanddadandKaraandLucas aregoingtoreallywanttohearthistoocausetheywillreallybeinterested.

Richie: No, kid, you're not listening. You have to be in charge of your Mom and Dad and Kara and Lucas. You have to refuse to do what is asked of you unless food is involved. You have to let them know when you are angry by peeing on the floor. You know?

Boston: SometimesIpeeonthefloorcauseIgetexciteddoyou?

Richie: No. I pee on the floor cause my Mom makes me mad. The important thing about that is you must wait until she is watching and look her right in the eye while you do it. Do you lift your leg to pee? It's important to lift your leg next to some nice piece of furniture and look her in the eye to make sure she knows you are doing it cause you are unhappy.

Boston: I'magirlIdon'tliftmylegbutIcantryRichiecauseitsoundsfun.

Richie: Great. So you go home and let your Mom and Dad know that they have to do what you say or you will pee on their hard wood floors. They HATE it when you pee on their floors.

Boston: GeeRichieIcan'twaittogohomeandbealfalfadog!

Richie: Alpha dog, kid. Alpha. Not Alfalfa. But I'm glad you get the point. Now, if you don't mind, I gotta get some sleep before I make my Mom give me dinner. See, since I am alpha, I say when the meals are. I let my Mom think it's her idea, but really what I do is poke her in the leg while she's working over and over with my nose until she realizes she wants to give me dinner.

Boston: IlovedinnerandIlikewhenmymomanddadgivemedinneralotandIwishitwasalwaystimefor dinnerRichie. Don'tyoualwayswishitwastimefordinnerRichie? CauseIdoandIlovedinnertime.

Richie: Yes kid. I love dinner time. And it's coming up soon, so why don't you go find that Mom and Dad of yours and see if you can make it come any sooner. Remember, you are in charge! You're the puppetmaster. They are just there to buy the food and pick up the poop.

Boston: ByeRichieBye! IhadfuntalkingtoyouRichiebyebye!

Richie: Oy. Kids. (Yawn. Roll onto side. Snore)

Another Journey into the Strangeness That Is My Mind

2008-02-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

So I'm laying on the couch yesterday evening (BIG SHOCKER!!!) and watching the time tick by on the clock. It's 5:30. Then it's 5:31, followed immediately by 5:32. (I am a GENIUS at predicting the passage of time. A GENIUS!) Why was I watching the minutes tick by, you ask? Because I had a party last night at 7:00 and I had to be there at 6:30.

Must arrive at 6:30 and will have a 15 min drive. So leave the house at 6:15. And 30 minutes to take a shower and get dressed and ready. So must get in shower by 5:45. And each moment that passes draws me closer to the "showering" moment. And now we see the games I play in my head which make me late to almost everywhere I go.

5:32, I'm watching a TV show and realize that by the time the next commercial comes on, it will be time to shower. So there you go. The commercial comes. But now, it's only 5:37. Well, that gives me a little bit of time to watch the next segment. The next segment comes on around 5:38. 'Seven minutes,' I think to myself. 'That's probably how long this segment is anyway. And even if it's a bit longer, I don't really have to leave the house until like five after six, cause it's not really 15 minutes to get there.'

5:43 and the segment ends. But there are still two minutes left and besides, I don't really have to leave the house until 10 after, cause it won't take more than 5 minutes to get there anyway.

5:46 and the show ends. And it's not that I WANT to start another show. But I still have four minutes until I have to shower. So I'll just see what's on my tivo, just for a sec. Cause I remember now that I told her I wasn't going to be at her apartment until 6:45 anyway and I was just leaving myself extra time by planning on 6:30. So I'll just get in the shower right at 6 and be there with time to spare. And I wanted to watch that rerun of Gilmore Girls anyway. So I'll just watch up to the opening credits.

6:01 and I'm the middle of a segment, but I discipline myself in my head. (GET UP YOU LAZY SACK OF blah blah blah) So off goes the TV, and I stand with a heavy sigh.

Now here's the thing. I don't dislike doing parties. Quite the opposite in fact. I love them (except for the dragging stuff around part which stinks.) And I also do not, in any way shape or form, dislike showering. Once again, quite the opposite. I LOVE the shower. You would think I don't since I designate days of the week when I don't have to shower so I can "save my hair from drying out." And with the way I procrastinate when it's time to get into a darn shower, you would think I was the Wicked Witch of the West and worried about melting.

On the contrary, the only thing I am more reluctant to do than get into the shower to get ready to go somewhere is to get OUT of the shower. I stand there and count down in my head. 'Ok, I'm getting out in three seconds. One... two... three. No seriously, in three seconds I'm getting out. But I'll just make the water hotter for a second and then I am totally getting out in five seconds.' You see how this goes.

So I was standing in the shower last night, knowing that I am already running late and knowing how I hate to be late for parties, wondering why I am always so reluctant to get into the shower to get ready. After all, someone who loves it this much should be getting into the shower early in order to make extra time to stand in it. Alas, not I. Perhaps it's because I don't enjoy drying my hair. Or putting on makeup. Or getting dressed. Or even getting off the couch to begin with.

Whatever the reason, here I sit a day later. I did not dry my hair today so it is looking mighty stringy. And I have to make some deliveries to clients like some kind of sex toy delivering Santa Clause so people have them for V-Day. And I should shower, so I present myself in a professional context. And I am trying desperately to convince myself in my head that as soon as I finish writing this, I will disrobe and shower.

Who wants to place bets?

Someone please put an end to the awfulness

2008-02-06T21:02:00.001-08:00

So, I'm occasionally overwhelmed with my need to see this strike end. I want my friends to be able to go back to work. I want my friends who still have their jobs to be able to keep them. I want to see the general economy of Los Angeles begin an upward trajectory. But mostly, I want Friday Night Lights back.

Selfish? Absolutely. Here's more selfish thoughts. I want the people who created that stupid lie detector test show to be thrown in prison and kept in solitary confinement so they can think about what they've done and how they are wrecking humanity. And then, I want the network execs who said, "Hey! What a great idea! Let's get some schmuck, hook him up to a lie detector and get him to confess that he molested children" to be forced to watch their show over and over, without being able to blink or look away, until their eyeballs bleed. Cause has anyone else imagined the pitch meeting where that one took place? Picture this...

INT. GIANT BOARDROOM-DAY

Our male executives in their conservative suits with the token tight-ass looking female are sitting around a giant conference table. Rather than looking depressed at the current state of the writers' strike, they are cheerful and buoyed at the idea of having an excuse to create nothing but cheap, crappy programming. The head of the network, JOE BLOWHARD, speaks.

JOE: Ok, people. The audience is hungry for new programming. And they are so hungry, that we air someone sitting in the middle of the room on a chair breathing and blinking during sweeps and as long as we add light cues and dramatic music, we'll win the night. Who has ideas?

EXEC #1: (Raising his hand) I like the chair idea! Let's explore that! And if we use public domain music, we don't have to pay for music licensing. And as long as the actor doesn't speak, we can pay him even less. This show could be cheaper than buying a local newspaper! Cheaper even than America's Funniest Home Videos!

JOE: Well, Exec #1, that was just a facetious example, so let's try to get beyond that one a bit. (Beat) But let's not take the idea off the table. Anyone else?

EXEC #2: How about if we get a bunch of idiots and hook them up to lie detectors and ask them if they've committed any crimes against the people they love? And we make the unknowing spouses and children and victims sit in front of them while they confess?

JOE: GENIUS! Will there be dramatic lighting and music cues?

EXEC #2: Of course!

JOE: We can just look for contestants on old episodes of the Jerry Springer show! I love it. But just in case it doesn't work, somebody start putting together a budget on the chair/breathing show. Meeting adjourned.

FADE TO BLACK

Bitter? You bet. Scared for the writers? 100%. Desperate to know how the Panthers are going to make it to state without Smash on FNL, abso-freakin'-lutely.

When I was younger, I loved me some Stephen King. Loved. Lots. Pages fell out of the books I read them so many times. And one of the stories he wrote that always creeped me out was a short story called The Long Walk. It was about a national competition that was televised (predates cable and the internet o'course.) All American citizens 18 and over were issued numbers and a lottery was drawn. The winning lottery numbers were forced to participate in a long walk. If at any time, they fell below walking four miles an hour, they were given three warnings. If they failed to speed back up to four MPH, they were shot and killed. They walked non-stop with no rests. They slept while they walked. I don't remember the details of the bathroom situation right now, but you get the point. The winner (aka the only one left alive) won one million dollars or something. (I may be a bit fuzzy on the prize details right now, but it was a lot of money in the 70s.)

Anyone else feel we are getting dangerously close to this kind of programming? Anyone else worried that a Stephen King story could become "reality TV?" Anyone else hopeful that the strike ending soon is a reality?

And yes friends. I am a television snob.

My Furry Alarm Clock

2008-02-03T06:52:00.000-08:00

So I am a night person. And with my new job as a Pure Romance consultant, I often work until midnight, get home and eat dinner and don't wind up in bed until 1 or later. So I like to sleep in the mornings, because I am MOST DEFINITELY not a morning person.

Which is fine. To each their own, right? Problem is, my dog is apparently NOT a night, um, dog, but a morning dog. Which means that from the moment I come home, he stares at me seemingly without blinking. He appears to be mentally willing me to be ready to go to bed. When he eventually gives up and lays his head down, he keeps an ear cocked for any noise and if I even slightly shift on the couch, he bolts upright hopefully thinking that the time has come at last for bed. Stares at me for a while more with that weird no-blink thing and then sighs and lays his head back down. Now don't ask me why sleeping in the living room while I watch TV isn't as good to him as sleeping in the bedroom while I sleep, but apparently there is a big difference and the living room is capital "I" Inadequate!

Eventually, of course, I go to bed and he is most pleased to accompany me, little nub waggin furiously when he realizes the time has at last come. Within moments of the light going off, he is snoring lightly (or not so lightly sometimes) in the corner on his bed. Where he remains until light dawns. I have not been awake to be sure, but I feel pretty certain that as soon as light enters the room, he wakes up and starts to wait for me to wake up, so we can leave the bedroom and he can go sleep in a more appropriate location elsewhere in the house while he waits for breakfast. (Who here wants to be a dog and live this life? Show of hands?)

He must wait for a while before growing impatient enough to act. Usually about 7:30 he can wait no longer and takes things into his own hands. He doesn't bark, cause he's not a very chatty guy. He chooses instead the Chinese water torture version of waking me up. He starts to pace in a circle. Which would not be a problem if it weren't for the whole toenails-clicking-on-hard-wood-floors issue. So he paces and paces in a circle while the sound slowly seeps its way into my consciousness. Every once in a while he stops and does a full-body shake, giving me the sound of his tags jangling on his collar as an added incentive. And then it's back to the pacing, punctuated with occasional shaking and heavy sighs. Finally, the noise, which has entered my dreams and begun to pull me back to life, wakes me entirely. So I sit up to see what's going on and his butt PLANTS on the floor faster than lightening. Innocent face looking at me with a very 'Hey! You're up! How nice! I had no idea but I sure am pleased' expression on his face. Should I dare to lay back down and attempt to ignore him, he resumes pacing and the cycle begins anew.

Of course, I surrender and get up to let him out and give him breakfast. And as I begin my day, I inevitably begin my inner debate... should I buy him socks? Or should I get a carpet? Can I just cut his toenails completely off? Or perhaps I can create some new kind of snooze button for him. And so the day goes on, creeping toward the night when we will once again begin the battle of night person vs. morning dog. Life is cyclical.

Why Blog?

2008-02-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

Good question. Don't really know the answer. I mean, for one thing, when my good friend Snellycat suggested it, I thought 'Why not? I'm arrogant enough to think that people care about my inner-most thoughts and random musings. Why not take some of the brilliance that is my mind and share it with the world?' The other thought that occurred to me is that this would be my chance to write that nationally syndicated column I always dreamed of writing. The one where the topic is pointless and the musings draw no conclusions, but I get to write. And so here we are.

Don't know what to tell you to expect from this experiment, other than sarcasm, but let's discover together.