Watching the Crash From Afar

Someone I love is making a difficult and potentially life-altering decision. Right now. As I type this. I don’t know if it’s the best decision. I don’t know what I think it is. What I do know is that I’ve been watching this person spiral, lose control of things, get into trouble, and second guess everything. We’re beyond the point of saying that something’s got to give because many things have already given. This is the point where something’s got to change.

I’ve never been very good at dealing with change. This is a point that those close to me bring up with relative frequency any time I exhibit even the most remote apprehension about anything. The anxiety leading up to it is often worse for me than the actual change itself, and even when I’m excited for something (my upcoming move, for example), I’m still nervous. I’m still questioning if I’ve made the right choice. I’m still second guessing. The day I turned in my resignation for my first teaching job was completely unexpected. It was something I’d considered, but didn’t plan to do without another job. I found the sign I needed in the form of an email notifying me of a pay freeze that would render me unable to pay my bills. I resigned that morning and spent an hour sitting with my friend in her empty classroom, having a panic attack and crying until my whole face was swollen.

 

You Want a Monocle For That Blind Eye?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we only see what we want to see; how our own feelings about something or someone can skew a situation so that we lose sight of what’s real. It makes us behave in really terrible ways sometimes. We turn a blind eye to a person or a situation because we don’t want to believe we’ve made a poor judgment — of character or otherwise. We lash out at anyone who tries to get us to see the situation for what it is.

Reality can be a real bitch sometimes, and we resent anyone who bursts our bubbles by trying to make us see it.

What got me thinking about this was the suspects’ family’s reaction in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. As it became clear who the men were and the evidence began to mount against them, it seemed undeniable. They’d even told their hostage that they were responsible. They threw explosives at police officers.

The media, predictably, sought out any link they could find, asking friends and family members (or, in CNN’s case, the bombers’ mechanic) to share their thoughts and reactions. An uncle urged the remaining brother to turn himself in and ask for forgiveness. His response was passionate and it was clear that he didn’t doubt his nephews’ role in the events.

But the rest of the family, including an outspoken aunt and the parents, said, “No. They’ve been framed. They didn’t do this.”

It’s understandable that shock might settle in and you might not want or be able to believe it. But to declare vehemently that the government did this to frame your children just seems so outrageous. And insulting.

 

Growing Pains — And Not Even the Kind With Alan Thicke

Is it in your head yet? Show me that smile again… Don’t waste another minute on your crying… (As a kid, I always legitimately thought Alan Thicke was singing that. It’s really just the guy who sang “Rain Drops Keep Falling on my Head” though.)

So I did a horrible job titling this post because Growing Pains isn’t actually even the TV show I’d like to discuss here. I have at least four other things I should be writing right now, but something I read earlier hit me with a sucker punch, and I’ve been mulling over it ever since then. Seemed like I should come here to mull, clear it out, and then get on with my other writing. What I actually want to talk about is Friends (the people and the TV show).

 

5 Things I Wish People Understood About Working From Home

The business world is all in a kerfuffle this week after Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!’s CEO, told all employees working remotely that they either needed to come to work in the office or quit. This is interesting considering the fact that so many businesses are offering their employees the ability to work from home at least some of the time.

What’s the BFD, Marissa Mayer!?

Don’t be like that, girl.

I work from home, and while I occasionally wish I was around other people during the day, I can’t imagine going back into a rigidly structured environment again the way I did when I was teaching — having to be there at a certain time, having an agenda for the day (that never stuck past first period anyway), not being able to leave until a certain time, having to frequently wear pantyhose and heels. For the record, in case you’ve never gone outside to scrape ice off of your car before 7 a.m. while wearing a skirt when it’s 15 degrees outside, it sucks. This is but another of the many reasons I feel so fortunate to be able to work from home.

This conversation about working remotely is kind of timely for me as I’ve been realizing a lot lately that I’m not sure people really get what I do all day. I don’t mind helping people out, but I do mind when they want me to run all over the place for several hours in the middle of the day. “Can’t you just do your work later?” they ask.

Sigh.

So with that in mind, I’ve come up with my own little listy-poo here of things that I wish people understood about working from home.

**Please note that, as always, what I write on this blog is a lot of tongue-in-cheek. Any resemblance to any of my friends or family members is purely coincidental. When I mention my actual family members, that’s not a coincidence, though. Or is it? All references to my dogs are 100% accurate. Got a problem? Please address all concerns to Vanilla Ice (né Rob Van Winkle). He’ll solve it.

 

Don’t Strong-Arm Me (Or, Why Mary Tyler Moore Made It Look So Easy)

The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Image via Wikipedia

It must have been somewhere around the time I was in third grade — when the Disney Channel was something you had to pay for and my parents got it for us for a year — that I fell in love with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. With our Disney Channel subscription, I feel like we also got better cable and therefore access to channels like Nickelodeon, which turned into TV Land at night (the details are fuzzy and could be a story of revisionist history). Regardless of whether it was at night on Disney or at night on TV Land, I remember lying on the couch in our basement family room, waiting for The Mary Tyler Moore Show to come on.

There was something I just loved about it, and looking back, I think it was Mary Richards’ independent nature. My third grade teacher (also favorite teacher and the one who most inspired me to become an educator) was the first I’d had who wasn’t married. She lived in an apartment a few blocks away from my house, and something about Mary Richards reminded me of her. I imagined that her apartment looked just like the one where Mary lived: the 60s-style living room that was a few steps lower than the rest of the apartment surrounding it, a tiny kitchen where she made dinner for herself and a friend who, in my mind, looked exactly like Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper’s free-spirited character).

Over the years, I watched this show any time I saw that it was on. When I got a Hulu subscription a few months ago, I sat and watched seasons at a time. And that’s when it hit me.

 

Your Situation is Probably Not Just Going to Change Itself

Click to enlarge the fancy word cloud for this post.

WordPress has recently notified me that it’s been three years since I started blogging here. I decided it would probably be a good idea for me to commemorate that by writing a new post. Something … er… commemorative would have maybe been good, but I feel like we accomplished that 20(!?) posts ago with Frank’s 100th Post Extravaganza.

So let’s talk about something else, yes? I’ve recently become acutely aware of an awful lot of people who seem to want their situations to change, but don’t really want to do anything about it. Sure, we all know those people who seem to have an innate ability to fall into shit and come out smelling like a rose, as the saying goes. But for most people, that’s simply not reality.

I don’t know about you, but it drives me up a wall when someone wants his or her situation to change, but just isn’t willing to put in the effort to pull a Mariah Carey and make it happen. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to blend into the background, but even I know there are times when being passive/ambivalent isn’t going to do you any favors. I can think of three reasons people might behave like this:

 

… And There’s Reason to Believe

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Like many people in my generation, I’m sure, I get really fixated on this song at the end of every year — ever since 1996 when I was in 8th grade and it came out.

Fun fact! Adam Duritz, the lead singer for the Counting Crows, dated Courteney Cox in the mid 90s (before she found David Arquette on the set of Scream). The letters that she’s reading in this video are actual letters that Adam Duritz wrote to her.

So anyway, the end of every year kind of feels like such a precipice, doesn’t it? You make it through something and you think, “Okay. Time for some changes!”