I am too tired to think about the Big Evils because I am cold

I know I am tilting at windmills and I am exhausted and I haven’t even started thinking about the Big Issues like China, which is EVIL, and how it turns out that a bunch of the stuff that I thought was being recycled is being burned as fuel in Indonesia instead and is poisoning children and adults and they’re shooting protesters in Chile and in Hong Kong and our precious democracy in the US – I can’t even go there – well – I am exhausted with all the misogyny and the crap that affects me personally in such a small, small way and then all the crap that really affects other women globally.

And then I think, Well, let me focus on a small issue so I can get really mad about something – something little – something that maybe I can fix.

Maybe I can have a razor-sharp focus on something – just one thing – and I can FIX IT.

That something is pajamas.

That something is a subset of my Potty Parity, Pockets, and Sleeves platform for when I take over the world.

(That platform has expanded dramatically and I don’t even have the time, but China watch out I am coming for you and your concentration camps.)

Dang. Even writing this, I am starting to feel petty. Can we all agree that we feel powerless about so much of what is happening in the world and that we want to fix it and we don’t even know where to start and that maybe, what I can do here is talk about something small and silly and maybe we can laugh for a little bit and forget about the big issues (although we acknowledge that we are lucky that our problems are relatively small)?

OK then.

Here’s what has me pissed off today.

CLOTHING DESIGNERS HEAR ME.

What is the primary function of pajamas?

Wait.

Let’s back up.

What is the primary function of a clothing designer?

Answer: To design clothing to meet the needs of the person wearing the clothing.

There. Now that we have that straight, let’s go to question 2.

What is the primary function of women’s pajamas?

Answer: TO KEEP ME WARM WHILE I SLEEP.

So.

If the primary function of pajamas is to keep me warm while I sleep, why do you not cover my upper chest and neck? I do not need to expose my collarbone and half my shoulder, that is, I want to cover that part of my body TO KEEP ME WARM.

If the primary function of pajamas is to keep me warm while I sleep, why do you have a cuffed ankle to keep the pants leg down that not only loses its elasticity after one wearing but then rides up to my knee and then stays stuck above my calf, exposing my lower leg? That is, I want to cover that part of my body TO KEEP ME WARM.

If the primary function of pajamas is to keep me warm while I sleep, why do you include pockets? On my pajamas? When I am going nowhere but into my bed? Where I do not need to carry stuff? But in the REST OF MY LIFE WHEN I ACTUALLY LEAVE MY HOUSE, YOU WILL NOT GIVE ME POCKETS? WHY IS THAT?

Why can’t you designers design something to do what it’s supposed to do? Just keep me warm. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

There really is a special place in hell for women who do not support other women. At least I hope there is.

A friend – my friend from 7th grade, Cynthia E, whom I found on Facebook after not seeing her for how many years? I am 56 and we found each other a few years ago and hadn’t seen each other since the end of 8th grade, when my family moved from Lubbock, where my dad had been stationed at Reese AFB, to the Panama Canal Zone – asked what I write about on my blog.

“Things that piss me off,” I told her.

And that’s what I’m writing about now.

I avoid the topic of work on my blog not because work is not important but because I live in a state of fear that I will be discovered and I will lose my job, which I do not do as a hobby, because of something I said.

But I have come to realize that my VP wants me gone anyhow so hey what do I have to lose, right?

Here’s the deal. I don’t expect special treatment for being a woman.

But I also don’t expect the Mean Girl treatment.

Until a year ago, one of the great joys of my job was that I worked with almost all engineers, almost all of whom were men.

That is, I worked with people who were all about the facts and had no interest in DRAMA. No drama. There was no drama. None. From anyone.

And then we got a new CEO.

Who brought in his team.

Including this VP, who created a new group into which I was annexed and suddenly, I was working for this woman who has decided that we are all back in 7th grade and we are freezing people out and we have favorites and not favorites and it is a bloody nightmare.

Until this new VP showed up, I made it my mission to highlight and elevate the women at work whenever possible. We have super smart men and women in this company but I have to admit I am just a tiny bit biased toward the women. And especially the younger women – I want to make sure they get as much support as possible. I want to smooth their way as much as I can. I want them to thrive.

I organize networking events for them. When I need to quote someone or interview someone, I seek a woman.

When possible, I advise them not to help with potlucks or party planning. I told my intern one summer, “Unless you see the men helping set up and clean up from a potluck or company event, don’t you dare volunteer. And don’t bring brownies or cookies to work. You need to be known as Liz, that fabulous mechanical engineer, not as Liz that cute girl who bakes.”

I want the women I work with to be respected and acknowledged as professionals.

You guys, I don’t want to brag, but I am pretty badass. I have made money for every company I have ever worked at. And I have done it, in most cases, by coming up with new ideas and then convincing a group of people to work with me to implement those ideas.

That is, even without authority, I can lead a team to solve a problem that I have identified. And I can quantify the results.

I have done that at my current job. When my previous boss – the Good Boss at this job – first interviewed me, he realized I did not qualify for the job I had applied for.

So he re-wrote the job description so he could hire me.

I am badass.

I came in and did cool things that made things better. I did that for years.

And then this new VP came in and a bunch of us got re-orged and she decided she didn’t really want to know what I do and made up her mind about me and suggested in one meeting that I be in charge of – like, as part of my job – organizing the division’s potlucks.

She also had thought of having me report to my 30 year old co-worker.

Yes. It’s like that.

And I ask myself almost every day, “What did I ever do to you?”

And I think, “If you had just asked, I would have helped make you shine. Because all I want to do is get the job done.”

And I want to say, “If you had just said, ‘Join me! Let’s work together and do great things!’ I would have said, ‘Yes! Let’s go!'”

She has done this to all the women who are older than she is. Rather than use us as allies, she has decided we are her enemies. She has shunned us.

She seems to be unaware that someday, she will be the Older Woman.

 

* Thank you, Marsha Calhoun, for that brilliant line.

But I might leave him for an empty house

A co-worker with a toddler was upset. “Some friends asked if I wanted to go out on Saturday and I realized I would rather sleep than go out!” she said. “When did I get so old and boring?”

Another co-worker, who has two children, laughed. “Just wait until you’d rather sleep than have sex!”

Co-worker #1 was shocked. “That will never happen!”

Co-worker #2 smiled. “Oh just wait.”

She turned to me. “Amateur,” she whispered. “She’ll learn.”

Who among us has not dreamed of a night alone? In a bed alone? In a room alone? Doing nothing but sleeping?

I adore Mr T.

But.

You knew a “but” was coming.

I didn’t get married until I was 43. Or something like that.

Older.

I lived by myself for most of my adult life before I got married. And when I didn’t live alone, I still had my own room.

That is, I had my own space.

Whoa was getting married a shock.

Let me amend that.

Whoa was getting married to an extrovert a shock.

An extrovert who is also a night owl to my not exactly early bird but yeah, when we had our pre-marital counseling, Fr Tim asked if our religious and political differences were going to be a problem.

“Not as much as our differences in bedtimes,” I answered.

And I was right.

Who knew the hardest part of being married was not the disagreeing on politics or on how often the bathroom should be cleaned (more than you think, Mr T – it should never look dirty) or on how long it should be before clean clothes make their way from the drying racks in the basement to the dresser and the closet (“five to seven business days,” according to Mr T, which actually is OK I guess because I just make sure I always have clean inventory of whatever and besides Mr T is the one doing all the work so I am not complaining at all) or where we should set the inventory replenishment level for potato chips (if there is a famine, if you can’t be at my mom’s house, you want to be at ours), but was the GETTING OF SOME ALONE TIME ANY TIME?

I? I did not know this when I married.

I had been living alone for many years when I met Mr T.

I had been doing things my own way.

That is, I had been doing things The Right Way.

When Mr T visited me, he tricked me by sort of more or less doing things My Way in My House.

When I visited him, I did things His Way, even though His Way was Wrong. I knew that once we were married and sharing a house, he would See The Light and Do Things My Way and We Would Be Happy.

And during our visits, we wanted to Be Together All The Time.

Then we got married and started living together and I started working again and work got all – well, you know – things happen and there are corporate takeovers and you are on your third CEO in five years and your fourth boss in nine months, etc, etc.

And when you come home from work where you are suddenly having to deal with people who don’t seem to be very smart AND WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?

For the past five years, you have been working with R&D engineers. And now you are working with people new to the company. They’re not engineers. They’re not – well, blesstheirhearts they just don’t seem to be that bright and they don’t even seem to know that they’re not that bright.

And there is drama.

And all you want when you come home is a room of your own.

All you want to do is sleep. By yourself. In a room by yourself.

Even though you adore your husband, who is wonderful.

Even though when you were 16, you thought marriage was all about all sex all the time but man were you wrong about that.

All you want to do is sleep. For eigh nin ten hours. Every. Single. Night.

That’s all.

Source

 

 

Remember how I visited my great aunt last week and she hadn’t put on her lipstick and I went straight to my grandmother’s funeral?

Well I skipped the part where I showed my aunt photos from our trip to Spain.

So I showed her this photo.

And we had this conversation:

Helen: What’s that?

Me: A cork tree.

Helen: What?! Like corks for bottles?

Me: Yes!

Helen: What?!

Me: I know!

Helen: I always thought they made cork! It comes from trees?

Me: Just when you think there is nothing new to be learned.

Helen: I learned something new today. It’s mind boggling.

Me: Mind bottling.

Helen: Boggling.

Me: Bottling.

Helen: I heard you.

The sassy women whose blood runs in my veins always look good – that part skipped me but I sure do appreciate how they do things – they don’t go out or ANYWHERE EVEN DEATH without lipstick

Last week, I went to the assisted living place to see my great-aunt Helen, who, at 98, is still pretty darn sharp and is fun and interesting. When she answered, Helen apologized.

“I haven’t had a chance to put on my lipstick!” she said.

“I didn’t even take a shower today,” I told her.

I relayed this story on facebook, where my cousin of some degree, A, answers.

A is Helen’s granddaughter, I am Sylvia’s granddaughter, Sylvia and Helen are sisters. I just say A and I are cousins and leave it at that.

Anyhow, A said, “Grandma Helen never walks out of her front door without lipstick. Period.”

Which means Helen is just like her sister. How do I know? Because I saw how my Grandma Sylvia went to meet her maker.

Actually, I helped make sure Grandma Sylvia went to meet her maker in the way she would have wanted to.

Oh yes I mean just what you might think I mean.

I mean that I am one of the women who made sure that my grandmother’s makeup, as she lay in her coffin, was adjusted to what it should have been all along.

Some of you may already know this story from my other blogs because let’s face it – putting lipstick on your grandma at her funeral is a pretty good story.

But that’s not going to stop me from telling it again.

I LOVE THIS STORY.

So. My grandmother died. Which was sad. But she was 97 and she died in her sleep after living on her own at home until she was what – 94? 95? That’s a pretty darn good run.

True, she was widowed in her late 50s, which is awful (unless you have a crummy husband, but she described my Papa Al as having “hands as big as hams,” which, to my 16 year old ears, didn’t seem like a big deal, but now – well, anyway, I always had the impression that he was a pretty good guy), but she remained unmarried after that by choice, if I now interpret her comments to me correctly.

When you’re 16, you really don’t think about it when your grandmother looks up from her cigarette and her National Enquirer and says something like, “Yes, there were plenty of men who would have been happy to marry the widow Sylvia,” but in retrospect, it makes a little more sense.

Plus, my grandma was a hot little number who knew how to have a good time and HELLO LATE 50s IS NOT TOO OLD TO HAVE FUN.

Along those lines, my mom, who was widowed in her early ’50s, has been proposed to at least five times. Marriage (and love and sex) are not just for the young.

Maureen Dowd wrote a column once about how she’s too smart and intimidating for men and that’s why she’s not married and I thought, Maybe but my mom is super super smart but she’s also super nice and she doesn’t try to make people feel dumb and many men have wanted to marry her even though she is not a poulet de printemps.

You can be very smart and not be intimidating is all.

So my grandma died and we were sad.

I flew from Memphis to Minneapolis and stayed with my friend Ilene overnight with plans to drive to northern Wisconsin the next day. Ilene asked if she could come with me. She majored in anthropology in college and had never attended a Catholic funeral and wanted to see one.

My family is very much The More The Merrier and who doesn’t want company driving 340 miles round trip in Minnesota and Wisconsin in January, especially when that company is Ilene, who is fabulous?

We got to Medford and got to the church and my mom and my brother and my sister and my aunts and uncles and cousins were there. Other relatives – great aunts and uncles, second and third cousins were also there. My other grandmother, I think. Lots of people. Small town where people have lived their entire lives. It’s a nice way to send a person off.

My mom, my sister, my aunts, my female cousins, Ilene, and I gathered around the coffin. We looked at Grandma.

She was arranged beautifully. Her nails were painted and she had a ring on every finger and her hands were crossed. I think she had a rosary laced through her hands. I believe the word I learned was ungapatchka, which was perfectly appropriate, as German was my grandmother’s first language and as she knew a lot of good Yiddish words as well.

I didn’t know until I was in college that “Oy gevalt” was a Yiddish thing. I thought it was just something that German grandmothers said.

But our heads tilted as we all looked and realized something was off.

“Her lips are – pink,” a cousin said.

“Pink,” an aunt repeated.

“I’ve never seen her with anything but dark red lips,” my sister said.

“When I cleaned out her room at the home, I found 12 tubes of red lipstick,” my aunt Pat said.

“How will Papa Al even know her without red lips?” asked my mom.

How would St Peter know her?

How would GOD know her?

We knew what had to be done.

“She needs red lips,” said my sister.

We all looked around, seeking the dark magic to make this happen.

Ilene opened her purse. Dug around. “I have some red lipstick,” she announced as she pulled a tube out of her bag.

“But – it has to be put on her lips,” I said.

She shrugged. “I’m a doctor. I’ll do it.”

She opened the lipstick. She carefully outlined Grandma’s lips and then filled them in. She stepped back.

We leaned in.

They. Were. Red.

They. Were. Perfect.

“She looks just like herself,” breathed a cousin.

And she did. She looked just like herself.

She had her lipstick on. She was ready to go.

 

 

 

 

And we will have classes for men on How To Wait

I have told you guys I am leading a revolution, right?

Everyone needs a cause. And my cause is Potty Parity, although I am now more inclined to Potty We Don’t Wait Ever Even If They Do Because It’s Time To Correct For Millennia Of Unfairness.

I used to think I would just run for office with Potty Parity as my platform, along with side planks of Pockets and Sleeves.

I have moved on to Overthrow the System.

And when I do, I will make it the law that there be at least three times as many toilets for women as for men.

There will not be gender-neutral toilets – those benefit men.

There will be toilets for women only.  Read Caroline Criado Perez’s book, Invisible Women, to see the research that backs this up.

If you think about it, you’ll see it for yourself. If you turn men’s rooms into gender neutral bathrooms, most women probably aren’t going to want to go in them. We are not really interested in walking past a wall of urinals with men peeing into them.

Although you know what? I would do it. I would do it just to prove a point, my point being, You want gender neutral? I WILL GIVE YOU GENDER NEUTRAL.

Plus I am sick and darn tired of waiting.

But men will go into women’s rooms. So all we do with gender-neutral bathrooms is reduce the wait time – what little wait time there is – for men.

I will make it the law that there have to be at least three times as many women-only toilets as there are men’s toilets. We are done waiting.

And when I am In Charge, I will also implement free menstrual supplies for girls around the world. If insurance can cover Viagra for middle-aged men who can’t get it up, we can sure pay for Kotex for young women and girls. If we can fund a gajillion wars, we can give girls what they need to stay in school so they are not condemned to lives of ignorance and drudgery and servitude.

And I will force them to build the damn bathrooms in countries where women have to pee in the fields, which means they hold it and get UTIs or go alone and get raped. (Yeah, I didn’t even know this was a thing until last year and it made me furious when I did learn it.)

And as long as I have power, even though I am philosophically opposed to the death penalty – I don’t want the state to have the power to decide who lives and who dies, I will make it a capital crime to perform FGM.

Oh you guys. The older I get and the more I learn, the angrier I become.

What else should I put on the Revolution List? Are you with me?

 

And where the president makes over $1,000,000 a year, making him one of the ten highest-paid college presidents in the US

You know what pisses me off?

Mean people.

You know what pisses me off even more?

Women who do not support other women.

I’m not going to get into work stuff here about Queen Bee women who don’t support other women and who actively work against them – I don’t do that because You Never Know, but I will talk about what’s going on in my college alumni facebook group right now.

An undergrad wrote an editorial for the school paper proposing that the school stock free menstrual supplies in the restrooms.

I think that is a great idea.

There are people who think it is not.

Many of the people who think this is a bad idea are men. I can maybe excuse them because THEY DON’T HAVE AN F*ING CLUE WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT, but there are also women who are all, Oh but you know by the time you are in college, you really need to learn to fend for yourself and get those luxuries on your own.

How nice it must be to have a life where the issue of a few dollars here or there has never been critical.

And how lucky I am that a few dollars here or there has never been critical.

But – I knew people for whom it has been critical.

And even if I didn’t know people for whom a few dollars are critical, I would hope I would understand that it matters.

So there are women – WOMEN – saying that nope, the school should not stock the women’s rooms with tampons and pads because women should pay for their own darn stuff themselves and should learn responsibility and my gosh there is no free lunch and how will these entitled millennials ever learn and get off my lawn.

Women who say screw you. Screw you other women. Women who say, I had to put myself through school I had to work hard why shouldn’t everyone else?

To which I say, I, too, had to put myself through school.

I had a job even before I arrived for my first day of college.

I didn’t even know this was weird until about a year ago. A month before I started college, I wrote to someone in the athletic department and asked for a job as a lifeguard. I included a copy of my American Red Cross lifeguard certificate, which meant I had to go to a copy shop to get it copied. You young people have no idea how good you have things now. 🙂

(Which is a good thing! Life should not be hard when it can be easy!)

But yeah – a friend pointed out to me that this was not usual. That most students don’t do this.

Anyhow.

I borrowed money and I worked 20 hours a week during the school year and I worked 60 hours a week during the summer.

And I see this proposal to stock tampons and pads and my first thought is not, I DIDN’T GET THAT WHY SHOULD ANYONE ELSE?

And I am actually very much a, You don’t work, you don’t eat person.

But I am also, If a person doesn’t have tools, how can she work? person.

So these women who do say, “I had to work hard so why shouldn’t you work hard” – what is going on in their heads?

First of all, the campus jobs we had?

They don’t even exist anymore. I waited tables at the faculty club at lunch and I worked parties there on the weekends. It was the perfect student job.

That job has been outsourced and is no longer a student job.

There used to be students checking IDs at the cafeterias, the library, and the gym.

Not anymore. Now there are scanners.

Second, tuition is now about 40 gajillion times higher than when we were students.

Seriously. It was about $8,000 a year room and board when I was an undergrad. Now it’s $60,000, I think? I came out of school $13,000 in debt. My first job paid $20,000 a year. My debt/salary ratio was 13/20.

Now, students come out of school $200,000 in debt for a job paying $20,000. Debt/salary ratio is 10/1.

Third, WHY ARE YOU BEING SO MEAN?

I mean, really?

Is this your philosophy of life? “I had it hard so I want to make sure everyone else does, too?”

You remind me of Mr T’s father, who was so furious at Thanksgiving one year when my nephew and niece took all white meat.

Not, they took all the white meat and nobody else could have any, but, they served themselves each about four ounces of white meat. From a platter containing 20 pounds of turkey.

• Mr T’s father told my nephew and niece to serve themselves first
• There was a 100-lb turkey for ten people
• Not really 100 lbs – but more than enough white meat for everyone
• Mr T’s father screamed at my lovely sister in law, telling her she was a bad mother for not teaching her children better
• Mr T’s father did not scream at his own son for not being a better father
• Mr T’s father should not have screamed at anyone except maybe himself
• There was enough white meat
• You don’t shame your dinner guests, ever
• You don’t shame your grandchildren, ever
• You don’t scream at people, ever
• Mr T’s father screamed that when he was a kid, he never would have taken the white meat because – I don’t know why – maybe because children don’t deserve the Good Meat?
• Isn’t the whole damn point to give your children a better life than you had?
• A year later, Mr T’s father mused, as he carved the turkey, that he never had liked the white meat – it was too dry. He preferred the dark meat

So, women who think we should not offer free pads and tampons in the ladies’ rooms. Because nobody did this for you is a good reason that we should not do this for the next generation?

Should we not be working together to make things easier for the young women who follow us? Or do we just want to sit here and watch them suffer? What the hell is wrong with you?

Women should help other women. We should do everything we can to help young women succeed.

Can ya believe all dat snow? Or, if you say snow is “pretty,” I will slap you

This is what I woke up to on Halloween.

Fortunately, Mr T had put the winter rugs and the snow brush in the car and had put a snow brush by the back door.

Yes, you have to brush the car off with a snow brush before you can open it to get the snow brush. It’s one of those weird philosophy/word problem kind of things.

And I would say this ruined Halloween, except my neighborhood already had its racist exclusionary Halloween ruined last Saturday by rain.

What? How can Halloween be racist and exclusionary, you ask?

Simple.

• Turn it into a neighborhood association event that happens on an evening that is NOT Halloween so nobody outside of the neighborhood, which is a first-ring suburb of mostly middle-class white people adjacent to a neighborhood of working-class black people, knows about it
• Require membership in the neighborhood association ($)
• Require in-person registration for the event itself ($)
• Require the donation of candy for the event (a race to the bottom of hard peppermint candies if you ask me)
• Require that the registered children use the glowsticks they are given when they trick or treat so people don’t accidentally give candy to Unauthorized Children
• Require that the registered Candy Givers put the stickers they are given in their windows so nobody goes to the wrong houses

So yeah Mr T and I don’t do the neighborhood Halloween.

We don’t even do the city Halloween, which takes place not on Halloween – what? are you shocked? did you even know Halloween could be regulated? IT CAN! – but on the Sunday afternoon closest to Halloween.

Because why would you actually have Halloween activities on Halloween?

IDK.

So yeah. I woke up to a snow-covered car on Halloween. And I had to go to work, which meant that even though I had woken up early and had thought, Well crap I might as well get up because I am not going to get back to sleep but at least I will get to work early and then I can come home early, I had to spend all that extra time I had cleaning off the darn car and then driving super slowly because we have not had time to put on the snow tires.

For those of you who do not live where snow is, I will explain why Snow Is Evil. When you have snow, these are the time-sucking things it adds to your life:

• Brush snow off the car before going anywhere
• Shovel the driveway so you can get the car out
• Shovel the sidewalk so you won’t get fined
• Shovel the sidewalk so the little children can walk safely to the school that is two blocks from your house and so your neighbors can walk their dogs and so the postman can deliver your mail my God you are not a monster it’s not about the fines really
• Shovel again after the plow goes by and throws not just snow but heavily-compacted snow, ice, and dirt back into the apron of your driveway
• Before you even go outside, you have to select the proper winter coat for the situation – shoveling? going someplace nice? is it rain snowing? windy? what’s the windchill? do you need to be able to move your arms? carry stuff?
• Getting dressed before the coat takes longer – how many layers? If you are wearing a dress or skirt (don’t do it), hose or tights are required. It’s not about fashion, it’s about survival, Susan. You have more clothes to put on.
• Putting on the coat is a pain – getting it zipped? Ha! Thank you Kohls, for taking the low bid on the zippers.
• I have to put on my snow boots, which must be laced, which has to happen after the coat, because snow boots have to stay near the door because I don’t want to track the residual dirt that lives in the high-traction soles into my house. But lacing up boots while you are wearing a heavy coat? Not so easy.
• Where are my shoes? I mean the shoes I will put on once I reach my destination.
• Remember to stick the mascara into my bra or my boot. I put it on in the car at a stoplight, but it needs to be warm enough. It’s too cold after sitting in my purse overnight.
• Walk carefully from the back door to the car – the Icy Driveway of Death wants to kill me.
• Drive slowly. Roads are icy and want to kill me.

I had other points to make but now I can’t remember.

Stay warm, my friends.