So what's been up with you?

I knew it had been a long time since my last post--mostly because I had completely forgotten my Blogger password--but had no idea it has been over a year.  Of course, there really aren't too many things that are different from June 2009. Still in grad school (with this being my last semester of course work, thank the lord), still happily married to TLS, still refusing change unless it is forced upon me.  Yup, same ol', same ol'.

That being said, I have started a new job.  What, you might ask, brought this on?  Well, the prior job had become almost unbearable. Not because of the people (who were great) but because of oppressive management and a general boredom on my part. But me being me, I didn't set out to make a change. I just sat back and let it come to me.  And, almost magically, it did.  A couple of former co-workers contacted me and said that their company was looking for an administrative person and asked if I was interested.  I initially told them that I wasn't looking to make a change because I was getting close to graduation and it wasn't in my new chosen field.  They continued to woo me and we ultimately came to realize that their administrative needs included information needs that I was pretty uniquely qualified to provide.  It has really been a win-win situation.  I guess it just goes to show that inertia does have its upsides--occasionally.

It's good to be back in the blogging world and I hope to be a much more frequent poster, which is really not a very high bar to set for myself!

Farm Livin' Is The Life For Me.. (or How to Major Market Tease Your Blog)

We've had a garden for the last few years. Or, more accurately, TLS has had a garden the last few years. He definitely puts in the backbreaking hard labor and I just reap the spoils. (Love you, honey!!) We normally put in tomatoes, jalapenos, black eyed peas, sunflowers, radishes, onions, and eggplant. This year we decided to go hog wild and plant potatoes, garlic, cucumbers, and lettuce in addition to the usuals. We've harvested the first of the "newbies" and last night had roasted potatoes and garlic along with a salad with our own lettuce, cucumber, and the first of the tomatoes. It was all dee-lish! (If I do say so myself.) I got to use one of the new cookbooks I bought a few weeks ago (Mark Bittman's How to Cook Anything -- highly recommended) for the roasted potatoes and in the words of TLS, they were "almost orgasmic". Well said, honey. Well said.

I took some pictures of the harvest and completed meal, but you'll have to wait for those.

It Isn't Nobel Prize Winning Stuff, But It Did Make Me Feel Good

The caveat to this story is that I know my (teeny, tiny) good deed isn't on par with curing cancer or brokering world peace, but I did do something nice that gave me a glad heart. Oh, but now I'm writing about it so I'm not sure if that negates any of the intrinsic goodness, though.

I have a friend from childhood that I haven't seen in over twenty years that I have reconnected with on Facebook. (Have I mentioned how much I love Facebook? I know that there's no real purpose for being on there but it's just fun to be able to keep track of your friends and reconnect with people you haven't seen in a million years. Of course, I have had a few people send me friend requests that I had to look up in an annual and even though I then remembered them from junior high or high school, I can't recall having had a single conversation with them. Which leaves me to wonder if a) we really were pretty good friends and I just don't remember them (the thought of which makes me feel kind of sad and somehow ashamed) or b) I was somehow more important to them than I know (the thought of which makes me feel even sadder, somehow) or c) they are just trying to inflate their Facebook friend count. But I digress. Again. Shocker, I know.) This friend is a now a licenced personal counselor (LPC) and is in the process of getting her personal practice built up. In order to get enough hours for the LPC, she worked (and still continues to work) at the men's prison. One of the many things she does there is to take the book cart around the pod so that the guys can pick out something to read. She mentioned in her blog a couple of months ago that someone else had given her a gift card to buy books and something about that made me want to help too. Although it took me a while, I was able to put together two (smallish) boxes of books and a couple of gift cards and shipped them off. This action, which really only cost me a half hour or so of time and a little bit of money, made me feel like I was spreading around a little bit of my good fortune. Good karma brought to me by Facebook, who'd a thunk it?

Let Me (Re)Introduce Myself

Hi! I'm Inertia Girl. Nice to meet you.

You may be unaware of my horrible inertia problem -- which usually manifests itself by lack of blog posting. I seem to have been suffering from a severe case of it lately. As I've said before, I often go through phases of not having much to say and the information I do have doesn't seem to be particularly blog-worthy. (I imagine myself writing about it and then I think...does anyone really want to read this dreck?...and then I just keep on not writing anything.) Well, I don't think I've convinced myself that what I have to say is worthwhile, but I did finally decide that it's silly to have a blog and not post anything. So, here goes:

Got my official grades back and I pulled off the 4.0. Eight hours of A's, baby. I'm stoked that the whole school thing is off to a good start. Of course, this means that I'm now committed to grade perfection. No pressure there. Oh no.

I have been feeling neither "holly" nor "jolly" these days. This post gives you my general feeling about Christmas, but I seem to be particularly grinch-y this year. I'm really not sure why. Maybe it was the crush of schoolwork in early December that threw off my whole schedule. I have made absolutely no attempt to get the Christmas letter done this year. Maybe I'll shoot for a New Year's letter. (Hmmm. That has potential.) Today, I made the statement, "I wish they would just call off Christmas this year" one too many times, apparently, as TLS told me to knock it off. He pointed out that the odds of such a thing happening were infinitely small to infintesimal so I'd better just make my peace. Alrighty then. Consider my peace made.

The bright spots in my week were finding out that while a chunk of enamel fell off one of my teeth, that I didn't need any extensive (read: expensive) dental work. Score! I also got the pathology report back from a thyroid biopsy and it was benign. I'll take that as my Christmas present this year.

Merry Christmas to all!

Ta-freakin'-Da!

Well, peeps, the end of the semester is officially here and I am done with my last assignment. Ahead of schedule. And hopefully done well. Go ahead, call me an a**-kisser, brown-noser, or curve-wrecker. I can't help it, I'm just anal. And driven. And competitive. Now, where's the tequila?! Must celebrate.

An actual conversation from yesterday:

Me: So if Alabama and wins today, and depending on what happens with Oklahoma and Texas, it will be Alabama versus one of them for the national championship, right?
TLS: Yes.
Me: Well, in that case, Roll Tide.
TLS: Why?
Me: Because I refuse to cheer for either one of them. (Aside: sorry Chris!)
TLS: And go against a fellow Big 12 conference team?
Me: Phooey on OU and UT!
TLS: You know, you don't get much "phooey" anymore.
Me: I'm bringing "phooey" back.
TLS: Making "phooey" sexy. (pause) Good luck with that.

Random Roundup

I have a feeling that this post is going to be extremely disjointed. Nay, I know that this post is going to be at least somewhat disjointed. Why, you ask. Well, mostly because that is how my mind works these days...disjointedly. I think I've mentioned before about how all the fertility drugs I was taking several years ago would make me loopy, which gave rise to TLS's nicknames for me, such as Lupronia, Follistimia, and Repronexia. Apparently, as it turns out, every single hormone makes me loopy. And as I am now well into perimenopause, I am chock full of random hormones. (Really, Intertia Girl, you ask. You're not even forty, as the giant, green countdown clock likes to tell me.) Yes, perimenopause. I have the hot flashes, night sweats, moodiness, and brains-leaking-out-the-ears syndrome. Case in point: the other day I went into the garage to get in the car to go to work. I opened the backseat to put my computer bag in, shut it, and then promptly walked around the back of the car to the passenger side and OPENED THE DOOR like I was going to be chauffered around like a lady of leisure. What the...?

What was I just talking about? I'm pretty sure that I had a point when I started this whole thing, but heck if I know what it was. The whole disjointed thing sent me off into the hormone tangent and now I'm just lost.

See? Disjointed.

Oh! I got the next section of my giant semester-long project back graded and... DRUMROLL, PLEASE... got a 99. Woooo! I got my grade the other night when I had been suffering from what TLS's family likes to call stuffitis. (You know, when you're too full and you feel ill.) I opened the email with the grade and then ran immediately through the house, sliding into the kitchen where TLS was sitting at the table reading the latest Astronomy magazine. He looked up at me with this weird expression.

Me: I got a freakin' 99!!!!!!!
TLS: Oh, I'm glad. I thought for a minute that you were coming in to throw up.
(Pause)
Me: Yeah, right. Forget running into the bathroom, I'm all about vomiting in the kitchen in front of you.

That's my husband, always keeping it real.

A Post About Two Totally Unrelated Things

Unrelated thing #1:
So the day that I posted last (the date of which I could officially look up, but that would mean that I'd have to save what I've written as a draft and then go into Editing Posts mode and open that post to check the date and then close it and come back to what I have here and lord, if that doesn't seem like far too much work), I got a call from TLS that consisted of this:


TLS: I just read your blog posting.
Me: Yes?
TLS: BOOOORING!
Me: Sorry that I can't live up to your high expectations. What do you think is blog-worthy?
TLS: That my teams won both soccer games last night.
Me: I'll get right on that.


So, TLS, this one's for you. I officially announced to all five of my loyal readers (and a bunch of people all over the world that query Google for pictures of barn swallows - weird, I know) that your teams really kicked some booty. And now that I've written that entire story, I know that I posted last on Wednesday, which would be yesterday, but somehow it seemed like a much longer ago than that. (It's official; I'm losing my mind.)

Unrelated thing #2:
I got my graded project back last night. You know, the one that I spent a bazillion hours alternately writing and dejectedly rolling around on the floor moaning about. I got a 98! Wooo!
And yes, as excited as I was to get that awesome grade (which was pretty excited and involved running into the living room, yelling "I got a 98!", and flinging my arms and legs around in a spaz-tastic way) I was a teeeeny bit peeved to have lost those 2 points. Never happy, I know.

Just Call Me "Inertia Holmes"

At work on Friday while walking down the hall, I found $15 in cash lying on the floor. (It was a ten and a five.) After looking around and wondering if I was experiencing an Easter morality test or some kind of sociological experiment, I went to the office closest to the found money and asked the girl who works in there (I know her) if she had by chance dropped the cash. It wasn't hers, but she thought it might be one of the other campus recruiter's so off we went to her office. No luck. Girl #1 said that she'd keep the money in her office in case anyone came looking. I continued off on my merry way, but apparently my subconscious was "on the case" because as I was talking to someone else, I realized that it was probably change for a twenty dollar bill. Our office is in the midst of fundraising for March of Dimes and with a five-dollar donation per week, we can wear jeans on Friday. I know the girl in charge of selling jeans stickers, so off I went to her desk. I asked if someone had paid with a twenty and been given a ten and a five back. With a weird expression, she said, "Yeah. How did know that?" I explained what happened and she said while she didn't know the girl's name, she knew about where she sat. We went and found the owner of the cash and reunited her with the moolah. It was a Good Friday, for sure.

And the Universe, It Laughs and Laughs

I've filled several different administrative functions at my current employer over the last eight and a half years I've worked here. A few years back they posted a position for an administrative supervisor and I applied for it. There was enormous response from the rank and file because, in general, the opportunities for those types of upward mobility are few and far between around here. That observation isn't a knock, just a statement of fact about the ways of the firm. What I heard back from recruiting at the time was that they couldn't interview everyone and that they were using prior supervisory experience as the "weeding" factor. I'm the first person to admit that despite having a couple of prior job titles that seemed to imply said experience, I didn't have any; so that was that, as they say.

Flash forward to late last week when my current administrative supervisor called me into her office. (I immediately had the thought that I was going to get chewed out for something, despite the fact that I've never been remotely chewed out at any job before. Ever.) She wanted to tell me that an administrative supervisor position had been posted and that she and the other supervisor had racked their brains to come up with names of people they felt would both be interested and capable of the job. And (drumroll please) the only person they came up with was...me. Which I found hilarious, because I haven't magically gotten any supervisory experience in my spare time, at night, before I go to bed.

So, now that I've put myself on the road to a career in Library Science (and don't get me wrong, I'm 100% convinced it is the true and right one for me), I get offered a job I tried hard to get years ago and couldn't even win an interview for. Oh, Universe, what a jokester you are!

P.S. I thanked them for thinking of me, but respectfully declined.

Step Two, Three and Four of Four Hundred and Twenty Seven? Check!

Intertia Girl is on a roll today. In the getting things done file, here is what I have accomplished:

1. Applied online to the School of Graduate Studies
2. Mailed my transcripts and application fee to the graduate school
3. Sent the recommendation forms to my three references

Granted, these are steps two, three, and four out of the approximately four hundred and twenty-seven that it will take to receive an MLS, but I have taken them nonetheless. Yay me!

Now all I have left to complete is the School of Library Science application and to write my one-to-two page essay and then my portion will be done. After that, I'll just have to sit around and obsess over whether or not they are going to accept me. Someone asked me the other day about my Plan B. I barely have a Plan A so I better hope this all comes together.

The Post Where I Use Shame To My Advantage

So in the (extensive) list of things that I've started and not finished, creative writing sits plunk in the top five. I did take a writing class several years ago, which forced me to write a short story a week. (Not an easy proposition, take my word for it.) I continued to write for a while after the class ended, but then I just let it go. This, I know, is just shocking behavior for such a self-confessed slug, but it also meant that I have a couple of unfinished stories lying around. One in particular has been taunting me from the depths of my 1 Gig Lexar Jump Drive. "Finish me," it whispers. "I'm a reeealy good story. People want to read me." I take it out every so often and add a paragraph or two--after which the story gets even more grumpy about being unfinished--but haven't been able to finish the dang thing. So here's the deal. I can't trust the quiet come-ons of my short story about its desireability. ** I need some outside guidance and I also need the possibility of public shame for not finishing it. This is where you, my blog reading public come in. Help me help myself!

** I know that stories don't talk. I may be slightly (or more than slightly) off-kilter, but I'm not--at least that I know of now--crazy. Just pretty much a smart-ass who thinks she's amusing.

Without further ado, here is my partial story titled "THE BRIDGE"

Some days you wake up and wonder whose life you're living. When this happens, you roll around in the crumpled sheets and fret about your lack of job, your perceived ill health, The Significant Other threatening (again) to throw you out of the house. This life couldn't possibly be yours. There must be some mistake, some cosmic mix-up that will soon be corrected and then the six-figure salaried job, gorgeous lover and daily routine without acid reflux or migraine headaches will begin. The thought of someone rectifying this obvious injustice conjures the sound of angels singing a joyful chorus. Then The Significant Other throws an elbow in your general direction and barks out an order to quit your flailing and moaning. No doubt about it, this is definitely your life.

It's any given morning and you and The Significant Other go about your morning dressing and bathroom routine, which is as intricately choreographed as a fourth and long Hail Mary play. As the two of you wordlessly trade positions at the sink or wipe down the condensation from the mirror while the other is in the shower, you notice that you’ve become a little bit like the plastic players on a foosball table--unable to advance, only able to go back and forth and spin.

As the climax of the morning’s event, you both end up at the kitchen counter. You fixing some heavily blackened toast and The Significant Other slurping up Captain Crunch directly from the bowl. The Significant Other usually takes this opportunity to point out, for at least the hundredth time, that you don't have a job and that you'd better get your lazy ass out to make the rounds, network, glad hand and generally debase yourself to whatever hiring director has a few crumbs to dispense today. This reminds you of something one of your college friends once said about job hunting really just being prostitution in a suit. And while the process does make you feel tawdry and sordid, mostly it's taught you that you're a shitty salesperson. You couldn't sell a life preserver to a drowning man. Somehow, this thought makes you feel worse.

You are most likely wearing your best navy blue interview suit--the one with the subtle pinstripes. The Significant Other is surreptitiously making sure the suit is cleaned and pressed, as if you were incapable of being anything other than a cave dwelling Neanderthal. You wonder if just as a joke, some morning you should emerge from the closet dragging a large wooden club and grunting unintelligibly. You decide that The Significant Other would neither get the joke nor see the humor in it. The Significant Other is a proponent of the pinstripe (who says that it conveys a subliminal feeling of power and competence) but not a big fan of comedy.

You assure and reassure The Significant Other that you have places to go, appointments to make and a full day's agenda to keep you busy. Inside, you're cataloging the places that are open at 7:30 in the morning and don't cost anything. It's a very short list.

The final step to the ritual is the kiss; the kiss that is devoid of any warmth or meaning, but the absence of which would mean that this dying relationship is truly deceased and not just limping along. You both are so conflict averse that it will take one of you finding someone else to finally break it off. At this point, you're fairly certain that The Significant Other can't be too far away from this possibility. Who are you kidding? The only qualification to be considered better than you is having a job.

You do have a routine of sorts for leaving the house. You’ve made sure the night before that the trunk of your car is packed with a change of clothes and some snacks for the afternoon. You make quite a show of confirming that the Italian leather briefcase that The Significant Other gave you last Christmas is brimming full of resumes and lists of your current references. While The Significant Other is ostensibly finishing up the last of the morning chores, you back out of the driveway (waving frantically like a pageant contestant) and point the car toward the city’s center. Once you’ve driven to the end of the street, the day’s first decision presents itself. Should you go right, toward the river and the city parks, or should you go left, toward the business district?

Some days you do make a token effort in the job search. You’ve long ago used up any goodwill that you had with your employed friends, so networking is no longer an option. But there are times when you’ve carefully circled ads in the help wanted section, so you dutifully make the rounds of the sleek, glass-sided skyscrapers with resume in hand. You feel like a sort of modern day tinker—pushing your wares around in a decrepit wagon and begging for someone, anyone, to sample something.

This particular day, though, you’ve not given a real thought to landing another job. Waking up with nagging doubts about your life seems to sap all the confidence out of your body even before your feet hit the floor for the first time that day.

You turn the wheel of the car to the right and press the accelerator with particular gusto and decide that you'll stop by your favorite greasy spoon to get a Styrofoam cup full of coffee nearly as thick as mud. You'll banter with the owner, a beefy linebacker type, and ask him for the thousandth time if you can have a job slinging hash. He'll tell you that you're completely overqualified and that he knows you'd bolt the first chance you got. He has no idea that slinging hash just might be your dream job, but you also know that The Significant Other, your parents and the rest of society as a whole would consider it demeaning. For some reason their opinions mean something to you.

You make the rounds at the greasy spoon and it all happens exactly the way you pictured it earlier this morning. The owner slides the morning's paper across the counter to you along with your cup of joe. He always insists that you take it. On the house, he says. He knows how long you've been out of work and that you spend most of your days hiding out. You can't decide if you want to bring The Significant Other here to meet him. It might be just like the Irresistible Force meeting the Immovable Object. Or, then again, you might just want to keep your two worlds separate.

You take the paper and your coffee and have a seat in one of the booths to follow your ritual for reading the morning's paper. This means skipping the front page and immediately pulling out the Metro section. What's happening in the sleepy little town where you live is more important to you than reports of disasters from some far-away land. This is one of the guiding principals of your life—worry about your immediate surroundings first.

The Significant Other doesn’t subscribe to this theory and will spend hours collecting signatures for a petition to ban land mines in Afghanistan, but won’t help the elderly lady next door unload the groceries from her car. You can’t really blame The Significant Other. Someone has to worry about the big, global issues. But no one should misunderstand, you do worry about the decimated rainforests and global warming and endangered spotted owls, it’s just that those things are so much less tangible than what tax measure the city council is going to pass next week.

It’s hit or miss with Metro. Today, the front of the section is completely covered with an article about “THE BRIDGE.” Well, you might be a little guilty of exaggeration. It’s never printed all in caps surrounded by quotation marks, but that’s the way everyone says the words. “THE BRIDGE” is your town’s only claim to fame and it’s been a source of pride for over a century. It was the first suspension bridge built in the United States and has been in continuous use since 1870. As a child, you were a little hazy on the whole concept of what a suspension bridge really was. It was the biggest disappointment of your second grade year when the view from the window of the yellow school bus was of an ordinary bridge, made of metal and brick and very much connected to the two banks of the muddy river below. All the way from school you had been almost delirious thinking that you were going to see a levitating bridge and wondered how people and cars went across if it wasn’t attached to anything.

You’ve come a long way since then and have made yourself something of an expert on “THE BRIDGE.” You might just be the only one who knows the full name of the engineer who designed and built it and who also knows the story of how it was named. A man pulled an entire family from a burning building and then went back in to save the family pet. It was the rescue of the dog that finally did him in. He survived the incident, but died several days later of burns he sustained while pulling the frightened dog out from under the kitchen table. The town was so taken by his heroics that they put his name on the largest and as of yet unfinished structure. His name was Robert Jebadiah Constantino, but who really wants to say, Let’s go down to the Robert Jebadiah Constantino Memorial Bridge? About twenty years ago, the idea surfaced as if from nowhere, to simply call it Bob.

You’re sitting in the booth at the greasy spoon and begin to think about naming a bridge Bob. The irreverent idea to give a landmark a three letter, one syllable name did give you a thrill when you were a teenager, but you have to admit that the nickname doesn’t do much for you now. It seems a shame to reduce the sacrifice of one heroic man to little more than a joke. But 1869 was a very long time ago and you suspect that people forget what the word memorial in a name really means.

Why, you think, are the journalistic geniuses at the local gazette running an article about “THE BRIDGE” today of all days? More than anyone except the sweet, arthritic old ladies at the local historical society, you know that it isn’t the anniversary of anything connected with the structure. You begin to read and note that the article is both exhilarating and horrifying. It does a fabulous job of laying out the history of the bridge and brings to life poor, doomed Mr. Constantino’s actions, but a quarter-page into the story, you realize that only a fresh tragedy or tragedies could be the reason for such in-depth coverage.

The next paragraph hits you like a slap in the face. Two people in the last week have used “THE BRIDGE” as a springboard to the ultimate solution to all their problems. The reporter has a particularly poetic way of assembling a sentence and in your mind’s eye you are standing with the first man, alone, on the railing of “THE BRIDGE” looking at the water below—how it seems like a flowing green carpet, wondering how something that benign looking could actually kill someone. You can feel the gritty bricks underneath your hand but the sensation seems more like a dream than reality and what seems most real to you at this moment is your despair. The misery feels like a living scarf, wrapping itself around and around your neck until you know that falling free into the slow-moving green water would be a relief from its choking pain.

You willfully pull yourself out of your inner view. It has been a long while since you’ve let your fertile imagination run away from you like that. But then again, you’ve always been sensitive, even as a child. The family cat once captured a mouse and you caught him in the act of pinning the poor little rodent to the ground. You could see its tiny heart pounding at the base of its little throat and you started forward to keep the cat from killing it, but your father stopped you with a simple explanation. There are predators and there is prey and nothing you can do will ever change that, he calmly explained. Saving one mouse isn’t going to change the cat.

You’ve spent the last twenty years trying to reconcile how you feel about that one statement with what you know about the ways of the world.

Your mother always described you as a dreamy child and the other mothers would nod along, as if this description was tattooed across your forehead. This one will probably think up the cure for cancer someday, she’d say with pride. If your father was present during these discussions, he’d shake his head with resignation and say that the only thing you might think up was a way to pull your head out of your own ass.

There are days when you believe your mother is the only one who really understands you, but while her belief in your greatness keeps you in the game, it is also your Achilles heel. Your father’s disenchantment with you dimmed long ago. He barely bats an eyelash when you come around for the zillionth time asking for money. This is the behavior he expects, but your mother is another story all together. Each time you talk with her on the phone and you have to admit (again) that you haven’t found a job, you can hear her almost imperceptible sigh as if it were a gunshot—the bullet speeding straight toward your heart.

The next section of the newspaper article is even worse than you could have imagined. The second person to commit suicide was a woman and the writer coolly reports that at least fifteen people watched her plunge to her death. There is a quote from a young man who was playing Frisbee. I saw her climb onto the railing, he said, but me and my friends thought that maybe she was just part of a photo shoot. You get the feeling that what he witnessed was not so much horrifying to him as it was voyeuristic.

You imagine that the girl climbed onto that railing on a cool but sunny early spring day as a sort of an experiment, a test to see how many of the happy automatons cavorting around the park would notice her. Was she the mostly invisible girl she believed herself to be or was she really gloriously conspicuous? Only one way to find out. She hoisted one leg onto the railing and pulled herself onto the flat concrete surface. She rested there for a moment to collect her thoughts and steel her nerves and then in one swift motion stood, balanced as a gymnast. It wasn’t the girl or her position on the edge that caught the attention of the people that saw her before she jumped. It was the crimson coat she was wearing, the bottom billowing and undulating in the wind like a superhero’s cape. You stop to look at the accompanying picture of the victim, stare at her eyes mostly obscured by lank brown hair and know before you read the next sentence that there was no way that coat belonged to her. And sure enough, you’re right. Her mother couldn’t understand why her daughter had taken her best coat—the one she wore only on special occasions and spent most of its days under plastic in the hall closet. She knew that coat was my pride and joy, the dry-eyed mother told the reporter. Why couldn’t she have taken her own ratty old leather bomber?

You finish the piece, the rest a recitation of a few dry statistics and a listing for the local suicide hotline. You’re sick at heart and your stomach seems to be rejecting the coffee you’ve drunk by making it burble uncomfortably in your belly. The thing you didn’t see in the appalling article was an idea of how to keep anyone else from using “THE BRIDGE” to do the same thing. Isn’t this what happens? Someone has enough gumption to actually kill themselves and this success causes others to contemplate taking their own lives. In your experience, it takes a leader to make most people follow.

So what’s your next step? You’ve got that antsy feeling you used to get when you were in college. It always hit when you knew you had finals and term papers and a million things you really needed to be doing, but your roommate or some friend would call needing a battery jumped, a tire changed or their lost dog found. The Significant Other wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that right now the proper thing to do would be to get yourself out of the vinyl covered booth and over to the nearest high rise building to beg someone for a job.

The owner looks at you with a concerned expression as you exit the diner. You normally spend the majority of the morning pouring over the morning paper and bantering with the waitresses. You give a distracted wave and head to the car and then, almost magically, you find yourself at the sitting in the parking lot of the park that includes “THE BRIDGE” and realize that you must have driven here in a daze, as if your car was the equivalent of the hero’s horse in the old westerns. The weathered Mazda just knows the place you most need to go and delivers you with no conscious input on your part.

You step out of the car and wander to the edge of the manicured lawn that is still covered in early morning dew. The Significant Other’s voice comes to you unbidden while you hesitate with one foot still on the concrete and the other poised above the sodden meadow. Do you know how much money those shoes cost? You’ll ruin them for sure and don’t come crying to me for money to replace them. Normally, a thought like this would pull you back in line, but it’s as if The Significant Other’s harangue is nothing more than the buzzing of a fly. A nuisance. Irrelevant. You can almost hear the crescendo of orchestral instruments as the sole of your shoe makes contact with the grass.


Does this story deserve to be finished? trashed?

The Post Where I Promise To Try Harder

I suppose that some of the reason I've started this blog is to try and overcome my tendencies to procrastinate and be resistant to change. So, in that spirit, I've decided to share the ways, big and small (mostly small, I'm sure) that I'm making an effort.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in preparation for application to library school at the University of North Texas. You might be thinking, "Oh Inertia Girl, it sounds as if you haven't procrastinated at all," but you'd be WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. I've only been considering going back to school for this degree for .... oh ... about ten years now.

Now, while that is a great first step, I only have to complete about seven more of them to complete my application. I've at least located the three people that I'd like to write my recommendations and they've given the okay, but now I have to fill out two, yes count them two, applications: one for the graduate school as a whole and one for the school of library science and then write a one to two page essay about why I need to be doing this. Do they have any idea how the thought of writing this essay makes my head spin and my stomach clench? (Would it be wrong to have someone ghost write it? Really? Dang!)

Well, enough of the self-congratulatory yada yada.