Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: January 2008

• The Beauty Queen I Ain’t

  Posted at 6:28 am by kayewer, on January 30, 2008

  On Saturday I was insulted–albeit innocently and unintentionally–by a seven-year-old.

  We were gathered at a friend’s house to celebrate a young lady’s birthday.  Because she already had been feted by a gathering of friends her own age, we adults got together to have our own party with her.  It gave us an opportunity to enjoy each others’ company after only having been out once the entire year.

  So we were sitting around the kitchen table playing “I Spy,” when the object in question was something red.  The birthday girl circuited the table, zeroing in on the red in question using our prompts of “hot” or “cold.”  As she came around to my end of the table, I did have a red object, but she asked if it was my spots on my face.

  I’ve had acne since I was 12.  I’ll probably die with acne.  I cover it as best I can without dooming my poor facial skin to premature aging or glop that has to be chipped off with a crowbar, but I still look splotchy most of the time.  Some people, I’ve been told, go into seclusion rather than go out in public because of the stigma attached to not being pristine.  It’s not that acne is a plague spreadable by casual contact; it just stands at the top of the list of aesthetically unpleasant stuff nobody likes to look at or acknowledge.

  What happened after the comment was made?  We had a laugh about it.  I laughed, too, though I did have to momentarily suppress a wave of discomfort.  The words I used to get hurled at me in high school crept into my subconscious:  pimple-faced palsy was at the top of that list, as were the commonplace zitface, scuzzface and the lot.

  Of course I realize that the age gap between the young lady and me is wide enough that I can pass off the comment as being non-malicious.  She meant no harm, really; another friend’s gingham blouse was the topic of humor as well, so it wasn’t just a matter of my mug being singled out for a light jab.  However, since adults tend to be more quiet about bringing such shortcomings to light in public, I hope some time will pass before I hear another reference made about my face that reminds me of how imperfection can be so painful in life.

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• American Idle

  Posted at 2:47 am by kayewer, on January 20, 2008

  We spend a lot of time in our lives just sitting down.  Everything we do is based, to some degree, on being able to sit all or some of the time.  It begins when we get out of bed in the morning, which requires a least one second of butt-roll time just to leave the mattress behind (bad pun & unintended).  We sit in the bathroom.  We sit at the table for breakfast (or in front of the television), then plant our glutes in the car to drive to work, the market, the doctor’s appointment.  School is often spent sitting in hard chairs, on bleachers or on the floor.  It’s a never-ending part of daily life.

  The people who don’t stand for considerable periods are grocery store clerks, tollbooth operators, street workers and (dare I say) streetwalkers.  They often wind up with swollen feet or ankles or get dog tired from prolonged standing, so I guess sitting is a necessity to give the body a break.

  Sitters, though, get flat behinds.  This is especially true of cubicle rats like me (and you while you’re probably reading this sitting down).  The need to exercise to keep the buns from deflating gets us on our feet long enough to appreciate just how lucky we are that we can sometimes sit down to recuperate from a hectic life.

  Yeah, I did quite a lot of work this week, all of it from a seated position, but boy am I worn out from it.

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• Performance Anxiety

  Posted at 2:16 am by kayewer, on January 13, 2008

  This week it was time for me to evaluate myself at my job.  Does anybody really enjoy either trying to write about their entire year’s worth of toil in the cubicle kingdom or reading those self-aggrandizing exploits?  For one thing, telling the truth about yourself is nearly impossible, and over- or under-bragging never really seems to change the way the boss sees you (plus you already know the raises are capped and impossible to change anyway).  For another, it’s a matter of one human being sending their view of the workplace to a totally different human being who may not see it the same way.  You’re always in danger of toppling the entire process against yourself by saying what you’re supposed to say and having somebody read it the wrong way.

  The appraisal process in my office is all done on the computer.  The questions don’t really ask what I did for the past year (in fact, there were few questions needing an “I” answer).  There is no mention of whether I was on time or sick, or if production went up because of me or in spite of me.  What it did have was a box to hold a set amount of my text, and a spelling checker.

  I did my human best to make the system work for me.  I dug into my mental storage boxes to find highlights from the past 12 months (I gave up trying to find five minutes to chronicle what I actually accomplished each day via one of those nifty $200 planners months ago), and tried to find someplace in which to list my actual production figures.  There was none.  I could mention that I’ve had perfect attendance for 20 years on the job (I’m not kidding you; really I have), if there was space for it.  There was no place to mention that carpooling a total of nearly 70 miles per day helped the environment, or that I had adopted every little job that nobody cared to do.  The questions were closed, static and meaningless in terms of how they capture who I am when I put on my business attire and wield my pen every day.

  The evaluation my boss will provide, on the other hand, will have my name all over it, followed by sentences of excruciatingly detailed feats and faults that somebody, somehow, managed to gather.  I can just hope they are positive enough to matter.

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• Five Days In Already?

  Posted at 2:17 am by kayewer, on January 6, 2008

  So 2008 is five days old, and everything is back to normal.  Folks called out of work, the traffic picked up, the stores rolled out the old junk from before the holidays and tried to pass it off as new junk, the networks are in reruns. . . .oh wait, that’s the writers’ strike. . . .football season is winding down, basketball season is winding up, and the bills and income tax forms are starting to show up in the mailboxes.

  Fortunately I didn’t buy anything in the stores during the holiday season, so the only charges I’ll see are for shampoo and gas.

  January is a bleak month.  Even though we’re on the gaining side of sunlight, the cold weather is officially set in and temperatures will make any sunlight seem like a cruel spotlight on our misery.  Add to that the end of month/week/year reporting everybody has to do in one way or another, and the days drag on endlessly.

  Anybody who made a resolution to diet probably didn’t get far, since leftovers still have to be eaten, and it’s doubtful that anybody’s pantry was devoid of high calorie snack foods as of midnight on December 31st.  Can’t we just start dieting in February instead?

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