Life in the Slow Lane

This is the post I almost didn't write. And before I can actually write it, let me put in a few disclaimers: This is the life I know. This is not intended as a statement about the lives of others or of how lives should be or even of how my life will be tomorrow. This is right now, in my little house. I sit long-ways on our rocking couch, the laptop topping my lap, my legs resting on the pile of yet-to-be-answered letters I dreamed would be considerably smaller by now, my feet hanging off the armrest on one side and my shoulders hanging over the other side. The toy box is tipped on its side spilling out a conglomeration of toys, baby books, wooden spoons and other miscellaneous kitchen items that worked particularly well as distractions at some point during the last few days. There is a basket of laundry that includes a load of clean, dry towels and clean, wet diapers. The sink is full of dirty dishes, the drying rack is full of clean dishes, and the table is full of everything tha...

This is a rant cleverly disguised as a "how to" article. 1) If you want your email address to contain both letters and numbers, resist the temptation to use “L”s or “1”s. It is probably a good idea to stay away from “I”s, too. (Say "no" to tinkerbell11@domain.com). 2) Remember that your email address is just an address, not everything you want to share with the world. That is what the body of the email is for. Otherwise you have an irresponsibly long email address that will cause everyone to hate you each time they have to enter it. (IsaveOrphansFromMeanStepmothersWhyDontYou@domain.com) 3) On a similar point to number two, if your domain name is extra long, remember the KISS principle. (KISS@happyhappyhuntinghouse.rr.co.uk) 4) Just because you have a favorite letter or number doesn't mean that you can't make good use of non-favorites when crafting your address. If you have to count to make sure you have the appropriate number of keystrokes, i...

I have now been a parent for twelve weeks. This means that I am only moderately less certain of how to raise fabulously well-adjusted and attractively well-behaved children as I was thirteen weeks ago. I have also now been a working mother for five weeks. I work from home three days a week and am in the office the other two. I will let you in on a few secrets: with 473 square feet of living space for two adults, a baby, a home office, and a mostly dead plant, everything but the plant and baby had better be multitasking. The other day S.O.S. and I had company over for dinner and as I was pulling the pasta off of our stove (doubling as counter-top), I quietly asked S.O.S. if he thought we should clear off the dining table so our guests could eat there rather than using barstools as TV tables. He whispered back that if we had wanted our guests to feel welcome and comfortable, they probably should not be witness to the conversion of diaper changing table to dining table. Oops. The bar s...

Cyclone Nargis. Remember that? R___ does. He's writing from Myanmar, sharing about how the cyclone destroyed fresh water reserves and now disease is rampant. His one joy in the four pages of email is of a woman who let him know that she receives hope and comfort from hearing "sweaty Christian songs". He probably meant sweet, but then again, everything in Myanmar is sweaty. C___ just needs adult diapers so she can wheel herself around her village with no fear of shame. The chances she'll get them? With embargoes and poverty? Slim to none. And K___ over in India can't "pasteurize the thought" of people dying without a savior. I can't make sense of that, but there's a lot I can't make sense of. A nation visitors have called "hell -- on a good day" shakes violently, a marriage of 30 years flickers and dies. A grown son commits suicide. 7.0 on the Richter scale. In thousands of places, millions of lives. There are no easy answers....

Buzz words drive me batty. In my informal survey of how a word becomes a buzz word, I have mapped out the approximate path below: 1) Find a word most people don't know the meaning of 2) Make sure the meaning has obscurities and shades of meaning which makes it difficult to translate and impossible to explain to second-language learners. 3) Assign some very important value to the word 4) Use it every time you possibly can to convey the utmost importance to your communications

Today I completed three years at my place of employment. In those same three years many of my peers (and parents, congratulations, Dad!) have worked on adding letters behind their name. All my letters end with my name... I average maybe 125 letters a month. That amounts to 4500 letters. Just some random trivia for my readers.

Please do allow us to the outset of this letter, our most sincerely apology for the quite unforgivable presumption of writing to in this manner. However, we do hope that our letter is not too disruptive on your busy schedule of numerous commitment and obligation or worse an effrontery on good sense. These words were penned by two people imprisoned for espionage in a far away country. Maybe I just bumped into a novel in the making.

I've been working on a special tone of voice to respond to emergencies at work. The receptionist may have just told me that the particular caller is horribly upset and talking about suicide, but the caller doesn't know I've already been told that and I answer the phone speaking as if I were taking a lovely stroll in the park with an iced lemonade. I practice this tone of voice not only with callers but with my co-workers. When they call me from their desk "I need you!" I've learned to recognize their panic in the very way they same my name and then I know to switch to "the tone". The tone could be used to say "That's interesting, usually the Titanic sinks on Wednesdays not Thursday mornings." Other times it more closely resembles "Yes, the Titanic always sinks when you run into that iceberg, but let's find the life boats." After such an episode this morning, my co-worker pleaded... "You can't go on a honeymoon. ...

Yesterday I received an email with an attached document and the request that I translate it and return it. From the start, I could tell there was some weird vocabulary going on, especially as it dealt with a religious order founded during the Crusades. I hop-skipped-and-jumped my way through the text, translating what I could and trusting that what I could get was sufficient information for their purposes. And then I gave up and went to Google. I thought surely I could get some information somewhere that would help fill in my knowledge enough to make sense of what I was translating, and I did. Wikipedia had a lengthy entry on the subject and I began to read through it until it sounded eerily familiar. On a hunch, I visited the Spanish version of Wikipedia and found almost word-for-word the document I was translating. I work with someone who has become well-known for her answer "Let me tell you about this new thing on the web... it is called Google. Everything is google-able....

My fingers are happy today. This week a year ago I was given the task of training up a department around me, and my personal productivity plummeted. But this week I was back within range of my previous records of letter writing, and oo-wow. Does it feel good. In honor of this occasion, I thought I would share a few random facts: I have corresponded with people in over 100 countries. I have won accolades from my co-workers for my ability to tell people "no" (Folks, unlike the anti-people-pleasers might tell you, it isn't just a matter of saying "n" and "o"). I started a collection of foreign stamps because there must be something good to do with them. I have 494 business cards out of a box of 500. And certainly last, but not least, SOS and his violin playing has made it onto the "unofficial optional stories to tell" tour script.

Dear [My one name here], Thank you for your letter… You said you would be willing to assist me, so I am going to take you up on your offer. Please write to the Queen of England and tell her to read… [Seriously.]

That was the entire content of the email. For some of you, perhaps that reminds you of the emails you get from your college-aged children, although perhaps with better orthography. But no, someone in a central African country took all of the trouble to write this lovely message and press "send". It might interest you further to know that I have received similar requests from that same African country, that same city, and yes, even that same PO box before. Different names, of course (or not). I can understand that a number of people might share the same post office box to cut costs, and I can appreciate that since I sent one person a lovely letter and little booklet, all of their friends and relatives and strangers in the street would also want to benefit from the magic "give-me" link in the internet sky. But really. And yet I can't quite just ignore the requests. Because the booklet I've chosen to send is one that emphasizes the worth and value of all m...

Yesterday SOS came an hour before I got off work to play his violin in the chapel. I usually try to stay extra alert when he is there just in case there is someone who is not happy about the surround sound. But no sooner had I gotten back to my desk than the receptionist called and asked if I could talk to a lady who was crying. So I took the call. And with the sounds of magnificent hymns seeping into the arid hallways and walkways, I listened to the heart of a woman whose husband is dying. I made my way to the end of the conversation and hung up, once again becoming aware of my environment. My cubicle mate commented "I am so amazed at your ability to concentrate. The two of us were..." I interrupted, "Oh, no! Are you having trouble concentrating with the music?" "No, no... the music is wonderful... it is just the romantic bonds we can see and feel between you up here and your fiance down in the chapel... it's hard to concentrate!" The other gushed...

I experienced a bit of culture shock last weekend when I was driving and saw a billboard with the admonition to call a seven digit phone number. The number looked so short, naked almost. Where was the area code? At work I've begun to see whether I can remember which part of the country a particular area code belongs to. Zip codes are easy, they go mostly numerically from the East Coast to the West, but area codes? No rhyme or reason, that I've yet discovered. Someday I might even be able to recognize immediately what the area code is for Jamaica or London, Ontario. But then again, perhaps I never will get to the more difficult aspects of zip code braggery because I keep getting stuck on the numbers that come before the area code. Yes, I do mean the "1". And the "9" I have to dial before that when I am at work. It's that whole "at work" thing that gets me confused. Several times now, when I am about to make a phone call on my cell phone, I d...

Sometime in the last month or two a writer from a central African country began writing. He alone contributed more emails to my inbox than spammers did. From the very first he assumed that all he had to do was ask for visas and partnership and we would roll out the red carpet and purchase six international plane tickets for him and his entire family. On Monday he wrote from a new email address which included the name of my organization as his ID. I crafted a firm response denying any and all future contact and demanded he stop using the new email account. And today he replied. Apparently, he, along with his entire country (which shall rename nameless for the purposes of this post) are upset and he demands further encouragement. It's a good thing I am only known by my one name. At least this way if I ever happen to have opportunity to travel to this country, I will not be barred from entering.

My co-workers marvel at my memory, but I am horribly forgetful. Yes, I may recognize the hand-writing of a woman who I haven't heard from in seven months, but I'd forgotten to what extent I'd been saved from the terrors that are at the front desk. Of course I remember in general, but I confess, as time passed I've found myself wondering "It really wasn't that bad, was it? I'm a big girl, I've matured a lot. Surely, it wasn't such a big deal." And then I had ten minutes to reacquaint myself with the many pressures that come with sitting at the reception desk. And then a new surge of gratitude floods me as a person great in compassion takes over and lets me go back to the safety of my desk. It's true... sometimes a taste of what you have been saved from is all you need to appreciate anew your liberation.

This morning I had opportunity to think about how while there is little difference between the questions "Are you going inside?" and "Are you coming inside?" there is a great deal of difference between "Everything's going my way" and "Everything's coming my way." A large tub of yogurt jumping out of the fridge and splattering across floor, shoes, window, and carpet tends to make people get philosophical like that.

Company mugs at my place of work are made of uncolored glass. You know the discoloration that happens when a mug is used repeatedly for coffee or tea? You know the abysmal feeling when you peak into your mug and realize you left something in it over the weekend? I tell you, a little bit of obscurity can go a long way.

My chiropractor now sees me more regularly than friends and family. (Maybe I need to change the heading on the sidebar here to "Family, Friends and Chiropractors.) I walk into the office, she pokes around, gushes about how out of place my neck is and, after what sounds like a 21 gun salute, she sends me back to work. All this to say, I have become very aware of the strange feeling of things not being quite right. Something, somewhere is out and things cannot be normal. Today was like that, only I'm not just talking about my spine. Today was the sort of Monday that gives Mondays a bad name. It wasn't just the irate caller who called half a dozen times and gave bad days to half a dozen people, all the while hoping to reach me. And it wasn't just the project I waved good-bye to a year and a half ago that suddenly showed up on my desk with urgent flags. Nor was it the summer morning that required me to pull my sweater tight as I walked into work or the chance walk-i...

One of my co-workers found a little "Panic Button" which she brought into work. When you push the image, two animated voices, in increasing frenzy shout "Stay calm... stay calm... PANIC!!!!!" So far, everybody who has seen it (and heard it) has loved it. Except for me. And so far, everybody who has seen it (and heard it) has wanted to push it again to better distinguish the words. Except for me. And so far, everybody who has seen it (and heard it) has wanted to push it again to show it to someone else. Except for me. Repeat observation two and three. In. An. Endless. Cycle. Any minute now, someone is going to push it and the animated voice in my head which I have tried to muffle will shout in ever increasing frenzy "Stay Calm, Stay Calm, PANIC!"