A Year In Review

We come full circle.

I Got Hired!

All my life I've wondered what it was like to be Tess McGill. I would just be a brown version of her with a huskier voice. I would be like my mother in a hosiery club for office decency. I expected to be in a corner office and wave to passerbys. Maybe I could be Mary Jane Paul when she's writing. I too could have a desk drawer with a fifth of vodka. There would be some snarling old man of a boss growling about my presence. I'd be so well-dressed and articulate. I'd be chosen for teams and put on big projects. I'd be able to lean in at the boardroom meeting.  

Nope.

I work in an office with three other girls. The only guests we have are people from IT. 
I am the girl caged by a cherry wood desk.
I am that girl.

It doesn't matter where I went to school because we all did. It doesn't matter who is proficient in Office because we all have foggy moments in Excel. It is fucking freezing. The water cooler is always broken. Someone uses the conference room for working out. There is a plethora of mean girls who dress like B movie actresses. I take my work home with me every single day. I dream in spreadsheets. My boss is drop dead gorgeous and is the epitome of pure evil. She doesn't deny it either. The evil that is. 

I applied to make coffee. I now specialize in severed limbs. On a good day I'll do my hair and put on heels. Most days I am rolling out of bed. If I didn't have time to make a salad I'll scavenge the complimentary snack basket or order Chinese with the masses. No one uses Square because cash is more trustworthy. I can listen to Pandora with one ear bud. I get yelled at 2.3 times a week for things completely out of my control. Email is a more public form of accountability. I caught someone looking at porn in a cubicle my first week. Yes, office life is everything I thought it would be.

Pffft.

In The Case of Dating An Alien: A Tale of Caution and Frustration

When I got out of my situation in late 2014 I promised myself to be happy. For me happiness involves being invested in good people, being loved, sharing insights and living life as intended versus whatever everyone else thinks. I put down my laptop for just shy of a month and I insisted upon meeting someone who could reward me for all my sacrifices. I looked for this said individual under every rock. I also told my mother and family friends that when I found him I would dedicate myself to settling down. I even threatened to marry the first man I met and have a child within one year of meeting him. The day I got back I met someone. In fact, the exact moment. While I was vague with him about my life, he was rather forthcoming with me. He explained that he had been on his own since age 14, estranged from his parents, had come to this country chasing a girl and now worked ungodly hours to make up for lost time. I understood everything. Or so I thought. Within weeks we were dating or "fake dating" as I called it. His European senses made everything so damn formal. I just wanted to get to know him and immediately it had to be dinner over a tablecloth. While it was unusual in my dating experience to be wined & dined, I'm not going to say I didn't like it. I loved it. He showered me in affection, we talked on the phone for hours and I felt I had met if not "the one" but a proper candidate as planned. 

And then the lights dimmed out.

Fast Forward To Now: A Brave New World - Written March 20th 2014

Tonight well this morning rather, I come to you from the comforts of my king sized mattress foam bed. I love how it bellows and coos to my bottom and I just sink down in it with my lappy. I have "American Hustle" to my right and a large BPA free cup of Kool-Aid to my left. The other side of this grossly unused bed is covered in loaned cookbooks and Glamour with my favorite girl on the cover. I'm in for the night. This is bliss. Outside not so far west another storm is brewing. So for now the heat is lowered to 82 as the outside is in the low 40s. Yes, this is the calm before ice storm #3. We have had two of these phenomenons back to back. Yes, since I last went off the grid yet another one of these things took away my access. However, this time I was prepared. I was lucky to have received a nice shipment of magazine subscriptions (it's renewal time) and we shopped well ahead of the mayhem. Tonight we spent about two hours just gearing ourselves up for whatever else may come. At the last store, at the first aisle - a troop of women flocked all talking about storm no. 3. The cashier and I just looked at each other with faces of doom. One woman just had her power restored. Another just finished throwing out an refrigerator of food. I just endured two nights with no internet. 

We have become so attached to our devices and things. Sometimes even a few hours is torture. We become ravenous beasts without our "access" and attempt to funnel our boredom into horrendous behavior. We drink excessively, we binge eat, we hibernate and then we explode. We are so prone to acting out without our tv episode or daily vlog people are working to allow us all of this on a plane … in the sky? Sadly, we've adapted. Today I was forced to go into a public library. I love the library, I really do. I just felt like I had it altogether now. I didn't need these outside resources. Libraries are places for those who have to escape or have no options - safe havens for children, students, the homeless, the lonely, the ill-equipped, the less fortunate. I'm not going to lie, I thoroughly enjoyed the library. They had a computer lab. They had wi-fi. I spent the majority of my time there using my iPhone. Then it occurred to me that there were three entire floors of books. So I put my "things" away and wondered around. Inside my mind I said "one day this will all be gone". I thought about the naysayers and the publishers. I thought about the tech guys and the rationalists. There was no way we could force people to carry around all these books. In my eyes, there is no way you could force me to stop reading real books. I will be that one troublemaker. 

Not even a year ago I was working in a fast paced, high tech job. I was being told to adapt to every single new wave out there. I remember being on-boarded with a triple ring binder and now I was holding an iPad. Yes, the world was right there … at my fingertips. Yet, I would still run in a corner and find that link and copy the white pages by the ton. Sometimes I'd print a fifty page document because some men like to watch the world burn. My only defense when caught was that something tangible was the only way I could connect. The irony was without physical pages, something my eyes could follow and something my fingers could turn - I never quite got it. I'd go to meetings and pretend to follow along to these dismal attempts to get us to "interact" and it just didn't … compute. Now here I am and I feel more disconnected than ever because that box that connects to the thing that gets the signal that powers my modem that connects to the router that signals my phone so I can get on Facebook isn't working! Now I'm all over the got damned place. 

I even wrote this cryptic status about communication or a lack there of on my Facebook. I don't know when is the right time to get back to the people I once knew in person. I don't know how to get through to them, if I am infringing or is there a better way. These are dynamic people of all ages, professions, education. Their lives are so much bigger than mines. I'm not sure if texting is informal, if a random phone call is a nuisance or a card is downright cheesy. I really don't know what to do. However, they spring to me on social media and I'm tripping over myself to stay in the conversation a.k.a. feed. I am doing so much my responses are doubling. Is it the speed of my typing? Is it the elation to have wi-fi after two days without? Is it the information highway inundated with a bunch of disconnected people trying to connect? Is it this lost city full of down trees, power lines and frozen modems? Surely, I can't call you because no one talks on the phone anymore. If I text you its like smoking in your face because I'm potentially killing you. If I write you a letter I'm in prison or I'm a creep. But hey there is always Facebook - right!?

My mother became catatonic. She lays horizontally about 18 hours of the day watching "The Game Show Network". She watches so intensively she noticed the same families wearing the same clothes over and over on the "Family Feud". She is so glued to that box she caught the actual prestige. She now knows they tape like seven episodes in one day. When the cable went out along with the internet she grieved. The generational gap was apparent and you could cut the tension in the house with a knife. Do you want a crossword puzzle? Wanna get a Redbox movie? Should we break out the Uno cards? No, No and a consistent no. My mother wanted to keep watching that mundane crap of buzzers and steals and most popular answers. She had me continually try to make the cable work. It was 20 degrees outside with ice pellets barreling in from the east pummeling that cable box killing the signal and she asked me to try the remote from the living room which is cloned to that specific box and TV set. She needed her fix. She need ed her "feelies". In my opinion, she could be just as fine watching white noise as long as something was on that screen. Sadly anything would do.

Tonight I have over 1300 channels. I also have the wide world web. I just Googled that to make sure it was in the right order. Sadly, I used Wikipedia to fact check. I had to do it because I totally take for granted what this is exactly. I could be buying something or making something go viral. Instead I'm blogging on an archaic platform and about to watch a movie that tons of people saw in a theater with sounds that boomed under their arses for $18. There are people texting, messaging me and I'm not paying it any attention. I am alone and hoping to... connect. Somewhere there is someone not too far removed from my social circle that is wishing they had someone to talk to. My mother watched game shows for over three hours before I asked could I cut it off. She began to pat the bed and grimace because she couldn't stand to see me do it. Finally the remote appeared just below her chin and she beamed the infared just past my face to kill the thrill. What is this world we are living in? What brave new world is this?

When is this storm coming?………..