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Adventurous Weekend Waiting

01 Sunday Jul 2012

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I bet I’m not the only one who sometimes gets a little anxious or jumpy – impatient even – while waiting for something.  Or someone.  I’m a mostly good-natured person, but I find my patience continues to wane the older I get.  Hmmm, I wonder how I’m going to behave when I’m elderly…Lord willing I live that long.

On Saturday I forced myself out of bed a little earlier than usual.  I’m heading out of town for a few days later this week (woohoo…road trip!) and I knew my car was overdue for an oil change.  I also had a spa appointment later that afternoon – hmmm, maintenance time for both my car and me, too funny!  I knew I needed to get the oil change out of the way first thing, otherwise there was a slight danger I’d procrastinate getting it done yet again.  I know very little about cars but I DO know ya gotta change the oil regularly.   Thankfully I use synthetic oil so I only need to change the oil twice a year.

Now, if there ever was an evil vortex where time slows to a painful crawl, it’s at Jiffy Lube.  And no offense to the nice people who work there, for they are very friendly and personable and do their best to get customers taken care of quickly, but for me I’d rather scrub my bathroom floor 10 times with a toothbrush.  I just DREAD waiting for my car to be serviced.  I feel like a complete sitting duck stuck in a frozen moment of time.  And for a while now they have had these windshield repair guys who “piggy back” and inspect each car’s windshield while it’s getting serviced.  I think they are sub-leasers or something like that.  So not only do I have to sit and wait for my car to be serviced, but I now have some other dude trying to sell me on getting the tiny rock dings and chips in my windshield replaced.  It just feels creepy and weird to me.

Typically I bring a magazine from home to pass the time, as the reading material provided is usually not very appealing to me.  This time I’d forgotten, even though I put the latest Marie Claire right smack on my dining room table near my purse so I wouldn’t forget.  Oh well…thank goodness we have phones, right?  I checked out stuff on Facebook, texted a few friends and even immersed myself in some email newsletter reading.  For the last couple of years I’ve been reading and dabbling a little in learning about Arctic/circumpolar issues – climate change, the indigenous peoples, environmental issues…just a tiny taste to intrigue me and dream of a future trip to Svalbard.  I read through the latest University of the Arctic newsletter and mentally escaped from the dreary orange and brown Jiffy Lube waiting room.

Before I knew it, my car was ready to roll!  I’m so glad I saved those newsletters in my email – I’d considered canceling my subscription as I never seem to have time to read them but I definitely won’t now!  I got the car radiator flushed and filled too – they said it was overdue per my car’s guidelines and I figured OK what the hell, couldn’t hurt.  My car is a champ at 13 years old and I know it’s going to continue to need a lot of care to get the most out of it for as long as it’s worth spending the money to do so.  And I remember one of my brothers (the one I bought this car from) telling me, “Take good care of your equipment and it will take good care of you.”  Makes sense!

I called L out of the blue yesterday, probably while out on the road running errands.  I have a new Bluetooth headset so I’ve been calling people a lot from the road to get feedback on the audio quality and volume as I get used to it.  So far I’m very impressed.  And it even announces when I have a new text message and will read it to me!  How cool is this?  I hadn’t heard from L in a while and I figured he was probably super busy with work – which is great!  Turns out he was on business in Chicago and was planning to fly back the next day (today) and asked if I would pick him up at the airport.  We planned on grabbing lunch somewhere and just getting caught up.

Evil time-slows-to-a-painful-crawl-vortex Exhibit B:  The Sea-Tac airport cell phone parking lot.   My God, if there ever was a sign of how times have changed with air travel, this is one of them.  I’m old enough to remember my folks driving me to the airport just to go watch airplanes take off and land – no kidding!  So fun!  And when air travel meant dressing up.  Even my youngest brother at around age 5 was in a suit and adorable little clip-on tie when we’d go visit relatives on the east coast or on family vacations.  This was the late 1970s, by the way!

The last time I was in the cell phone parking lot was…oh man…over a year ago when I was picking up the guy I was dating at the time after he’d been in Australia for two weeks.  What a difference a year and some makes!!  Now here I was – with that issue of Marie Claire I’d forgotten to bring along for the oil change – waiting for my guy BFF’s flight to arrive.  If you have not yet read my post about L and me and how we got reconnected after a gap of several years you really do need to check it out here.

Every woman needs a wonderful, straight male friend in her life.  L is gold to me.  He opens up and shares the most mind-blowing and amazing things about who he is and what’s going on with his life and his passions, dreams and goals.  I feel so honored to be a safe place for him to be able to open up like that.  I know how different men and women are…as women, we thrive on deep, emotional connections and revealing a lot with each other right away.  With men it’s very different…the warrior is wired to instinctively conceal, not reveal.  ‘Tis true!

One of the things I love about L is how so spontaneous he is.  He helps me lighten up (I tend to be a planner and envy those who just fly by the seat of their pants).  When he asked if I was hungry I said YES and we talked about where to grab a late lunch as I sped us back up the freeway toward Seattle.  As I was parking my car he noticed my extremely dusty dashboard and playfully wrote “dust me, bitch” and his name.  Hilarious!  OK, OK, I get the point…the car dashboard is dusty!

We ended up at the Hale’s Ales Pub in Seattle.  It’s right in between the Fremont and Ballard neighborhoods.  And WOW, the memories here run deep.  I’d not been to this place since probably the late 1990s.  I was living in the Magnolia neighborhood and working downtown, commuting by bus.  Oh how I miss those days sometimes.  Anyway, a lot of my co-workers became pretty tight friends back then, and we were always hungry for a new spot to go out to eat and drink.  We pretty much LIVED at Hale’s once we discovered it.  And now fast forward 15+ years, here I was with L.  It was just how I remembered it!

And I must have been hungrier than I thought…L chose a Reuben sandwich with Jo Jo’s, and I had a small cup of smoked salmon clam chowder (LOVE this stuff – L grabbed an extra spoon and tried some too), a burger and a small Caesar salad.  Polished off with a damn good Bloody Mary for me and a Holsch beer for L.  I sure won’t need a full dinner tonight!

L told me all about his Chicago trip – seeing his parents, client visits, potential new business, etc.  He also wants to get back to work scraping the popcorn ceiling in my townhouse – a hellacious, messy, laborious project if there ever was.  He’s a saint for helping me.  He wants to get back in the gym regularly and even asked me, “so when are you going to get back in shape, fivenineteen?  You’re a beautiful woman.”  I blushed and said thank you. Just to put this in context, L and I first met about 8 years ago when I was, well, 8 years younger and about 35 lbs slimmer, after a 6-month journey of lots of walking to drop weight.  Long story, but life goes on and the pounds creep up.  Playing hockey once a week does not do the trick for me.

Maybe I’ll make a vow to myself to start hitting the gym again this summer while it’s their slower season.  Oh wait…it IS summer…it’s July 1!  No more excuses.

The Ugly Crescendo

27 Monday Feb 2012

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I felt like something ugly and draining snuck up and tried swallowing me whole this week.   And by the time I realized it was happening it was too late.  Call me One Big Trainwreck.  Stuck in quicksand.

This past week was midwinter break for a lot of families.  And while the company I work for does not observe the President’s Day holiday, many people take that day off anyways because the kids are off from school.

Burdened, alone and sometimes overwhelmed.  Those were some of the things I felt last week trying to get through work and covering for others.  I am always honored when my manager or another co-worker asks if I (a consultant who is not a permanent part of the team) wouldn’t mind being their backup contact while they are away, should others in the office need something urgent.  It feels good to be needed.  But I don’t like feeling alone.  I like having people around me, which is part of the reason I don’t like working from home.  I enjoy the constant interaction.  So when hardly anyone is around in the office it’s eerie.  And while I can handle just about anything that comes my way and speak on others’ behalfs while they’re out (mostly), it is draining.  I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders.  And it gets really heavy sometimes. 

Perhaps I am even a teensy bit envious of those who get paid vacation time.  As a consultant I am only paid for hours I work, and typically my work engagements are a year or less in length.  So it is not always a good idea to schedule a leisurely vacation.  It might be during a crucial point in a project – a major milestone.  And I may still be processing the last residue of pain from my unemployed stretch a couple of years ago.  Meaning, don’t bitch about work.  Just DON’T.  And WORK, fivenineteen, WORK.  It is a privilege to work, not a right.

Jealousy be damned.  I am not a jealous type, so when it does leak into my being like it admittedly did thinking of everyone enjoying their vacations, it catches me off guard.  Sneaky bitch.

So while I am the queen of to-do lists, the big stuff didn’t get done this past week like I had hoped.   I mistakenly assumed that I would have a lot of catch up time on my hands in the office to tackle some more high-level, strategic work that’s needed attention.  But that was not the case at all.  Lots of Littles popped up.  Unexpected situations that needed attention.  Nothing too difficult to fix, but still time consuming.  And sometimes exhausting.

I think by Wednesday I was feeling a little ‘off.’  Hard to describe but I felt weighed down physically and mentally.  A little jittery, even without coffee.

L texted me sometime Tuesday or Wednesday asking if he could crash at my house Thursday night.  He has client meetings near my house sometimes and lives a ways from here and has done this on a couple of other occasions, on nights we’re not doing any of that popcorn ceiling scraping.  One time it was because there was a gas leak in the house he rents and he needed to stay elsewhere while the leak was being contained.

L is a wonderful friend for sure.  But it’s a very different dynamic having a guy over at my house just hanging out who truly is a great friend and nothing more.  I’m learning this very quickly. He just crashes on my couch and either leaves early in the morning to beat traffic or stays to get some work done at my house and leaves a little later and locks up.  On Thursday, the night he wanted to come crash at my place, I had dinner plans with a girlfriend and told him I won’t be home until late but would leave a house key hidden for him. 

Little did I know how the world would all come crashing down around me that Thursday.  Held off briefly by some incredible sushi and a couple glasses of wine with my dear friend T at Izumi.  Hands down the best sushi in the Seattle suburbs.  Mouth watering and spectacular, with a very charming sushi chef at the sushi bar who is a great conversationalist.  I could subsist on sushi there every day, even though it would be a little hard on my wallet. 

My mind started to wander during dinner and I felt preoccupied and restless.  Here I was having a fun night out with a wonderful friend and I was having some sort of anxiety thingy wash over me.  I knew when I got home that L and his friend’s dog would be there.  And I felt like that was going to be an invasion of my space that night, even though I’d told him a day or two prior it would be OK.  It was starting to feel like it wasn’t going to be.  And why was I feeling this way?  What’s the big deal?  IS it a big deal or is it kind of weird when a male friend wants to just randomly crash at your place occasionally?  I don’t know about you but I’ve never had a platonic friendship with a (straight) guy that went to that level.  And come to think of it neither with a gay guy friend either.  Why was I letting this upset me so much?  And oh yeah, once I got home I needed to start filling out some paperwork that an escrow agent sent for a neighbor who is selling his townhouse.  Stuff like that you cannot delay, and we’re a small, self-run HOA…and….and…And ahhhh, there I went.  Questioning my feelings and getting overwhelmed all at once.  Let the downward spiral begin.

Have you ever been so tired that you couldn’t relax and fall asleep?  I got home and L was chilling out watching TV with the dog.  My head hurt.  So much for great sushi, two glasses of wine and great friendship.  It all went *poof* once I got home.  For I knew I needed to get upstairs, fire up this somewhat creaky of a laptop (6 years old and showing its age; that’s another post for another time) and crack open the documentation the escrow agent needed filled out.

Of all times for my laptop here to act up.  I had a devil of a time getting applications to stay open without hanging, and trying to edit the .pdf that they sent us.  Why realtors and escrow agents use Acrobat Reader for their documentation – that needs editing – instead of something like Microsoft Word is beyond me.  Pain in the ASS.

I felt bad for neglecting L and went downstairs periodically to see how he was doing.  My eyebrows were feeling tightly knitted together and my whole body felt clenched up and tense.  He seemed fine, but that didn’t help me relax any further.  Just seemed like a lost cause.

By 11pm I was a wreck.  I’d done all I could on the documentation, sent it to our HOA treasurer for him to finish and decided to crawl into bed.  Hugged L goodnight and went upstairs to sleep. 

What happened next was surreal.  Keep in mind I am typically a very sound sleeper, so when I get clonked with a dose of insomnia, I freak out.  Which only makes it worse I’m sure.  I thought I had been sleeping but turns out it was just some tossing and turning and dozing.  Around 1:30 am I realized what it was.  L had gone to sleep with his iPad on with ESPN news feeds or something.  And the sound actually carried very well upstairs to my bedroom.  I thought I was losing my mind as I crawled out of bed and drifted downstairs.  L was blissfully asleep, snoring steadily.  After a few attempts to wake him he woke up, apologized and turned off the iPad.  Ahhh, finally.  I think I tried going back to sleep again but then realized I was too wound up despite being so tired.  I went downstairs yet again to grab a glass of water. 

And I sat on my living room floor and just sobbed.  And sobbed.  “I’m such a fucking MESS,” I blurted out.  What is WRONG with me?  Poor L was half asleep and groggy.  He mumbled “I’m sorry, ” and went back to sleep.

I went upstairs.  NOW what do I do?  Do I read a book?  Take a bubble bath?  I don’t have sleeping pills in my house because I don’t need them.  And I am a pharmaceutical whimp.  Even “non drowsy” allergy medicine gives me a super bad buzz.

I probably went to sleep – sort of – around 5am.  I probably cried a bit too because when I had to get up for work my eyes were all puffy.  Yeah, going to work with 2-3 hours sleep at the most.  Ugh. That was when I actually felt glad most of my co-workers were out of the office.

Somehow I made it through the day – hats off to coffee and adrenaline.  But by mid afternoon my vision was blurred and I knew I needed to finish up a few reports and head home.  To crash. Hard.

I felt ANGRY most of the weekend.  Angry for letting myself get all wound up and freaked out over things that really aren’t a big deal.  Questioning my emotions.  A (thankfully) rare night of insomnia that took 2 days to recover from.  And thinking ahead of how much more work there is to do with the townhouse improvements.  Tons more popcorn ceiling scraping upstairs and down, then sanding/priming, and repainting a few other bedroom walls.  How long is my townhouse going to be in a state of semi-wreck meanwhile?  And why the hell am I having a mini breakdown over things that aren’t really a big deal?  What is WRONG?  Why can’t I be one of those easy-breezy, laid back types who don’t let anything bother them? 

Well, it turns out the Universe always brings us what we need.  What I needed to bust out of this funk was a heavy dose of HOCKEY.  And that came served up hot and fresh on Sunday. 

I have not played two games in one day in years but this was exactly what I needed apparently.  I skated mid afternoon in a charity game benefitting the Seattle Ronald McDonald House.  The annual Hockey Challenge, in its 14th year has raised over $4 million dollars for the local house here and for this we could not be prouder.  It is a privilege and honor to skate in support of the House and I relished every moment today.

Later that night it was my regular league game.  Yeah, both games were losses tonight but only by what the scoreboards said.  It felt amazing to get out there and skate.  For when I’m on the ice, nothing else matters.  I have no mental room to multi-task and worry about anything else than what I am doing on the ice at that particular moment.  And you know what?

THAT is relaxing.  I should sleep very well.

There’s this thing called the "other" folder…

23 Friday Dec 2011

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It’s been quite awhile since I’ve had a double shot post week, so why not now?  Something about the holiday season, shopping rush, the solstice…my whole world just tingles with good (and restless) energy.  There’s a mad scramble at work to get stuff done before the office pretty much goes quiet this week and next as people take vacation over the holidays and into early January.  And for those of us still plugging away over a hot desk and laptop, well, there’s that funny struggle of wanting to get more done while it’s quiet, but there aren’t enough people around to truly get it all done or all the right decisions made…ah, the classic dilemma, at least where I’m working right now.  Years ago I used to work in the retail service management industry, and this time of year for vacation was a big ol’ fuhgeddaboudit given the peak shopping season.  Nope – all hands on deck save for Christmas Day and New Years Day.  And today I sit here and think oh crap, I’ve gotta head into the belly of the beast tomorrow (meaning The Mall) and finish some last minute gift shopping. 

So anyway, last week I was on Facebook.  Now, how often have you read that or heard someone say that and think oh no. Right?  Well, as I said when I first launched fivenineteen over two years ago, my interpretations and musings on reality are better than anything I could possibly make up.  You might want to go pour yourself a glass of your favorite beverage for this one.

OK, back to Facebook now.  Last week on some ho-hum Wednesday night I happened to be browsing around and saw a post from a woman I know from the church I used to attend years ago.  Haven’t seen her in probably 10+ years, which is kind of sad, but I don’t attend that church any longer.

Her post: “You have two inboxes with facebook. You get notified of your messages; but you do not get notified of the messages in your “other” message box. Go to messages and click on it. After you do there is now the work “other” under your messages. (on the side bar). Click on that and see messages sent to you from people not on your friend list.”

I thought OK, what the hell, I’ll peruse over there and find this “other” folder.  Man, I love Facebook but it’s hard for me to keep up with all the changes and learn all the nuances and whatnot.  By the time I’m home from work and on my home laptop, my brain is pretty much full and fried.

So there was the elusive little “other” folder, a tiny subfolder on my left menu bar.  I clicked on it and up popped a very long list of what looked like notifications, spammy type stuff and one email from some random weirdo dude who really likes my profile.  Uh huh, whatever.  Delete!

Then, there they were. Not one but TWO messages from a guy I was great friends with years ago who I was no longer in contact with.  Basically saying hi there, it’s been forever, I’m about 92% sure this is you and would be great to catch up sometime.   Oh. My. God.  I about fell out of my chair!!  And then I about fell out of my chair again when I noticed he had sent these emails to me back in freakin’ JULY!!  Holy moly…had I not seen that random post from my church friend I never ever would have even noticed that “other” folder in the Facebook message section!

My fingers flew on the keyboard.  I wrote him back, still in shock to have found this folder…and his emails from months ago!  Yes, yes, it’s me, I’m alive…!!   

So what’s the story with this guy, you may wonder?  In short, he is the closest guy friend I have ever had.  We met online I’m guessing around late 2004 or early 2005ish.  I had been in a relationship with another guy a good chunk of 2004 who I’d met through hockey.  He broke up with me that fall and I admit it broke my heart and put me into an emotional tailspin of sorts.  Hard to explain, and now with it being 7 years later the memories can get a little fuzzy and mushy both.  While I’m not typically the type of girl who always has to have a boyfriend, something about that breakup triggered something within me.  I immediately started online dating – on two different sites at the same time actually – and I THINK that might have been my first time ever doing that.  Nowadays meeting people online is not anything weird, but back then it still might have been a little odd given it had not been around that long.  Or maybe that’s just my interpretation.  

I started going out on a bunch of dates and kind of having casual, not too serious mini-relationships of sorts (and yes, hookups) with a couple of guys.  I felt lost and hurt after getting dumped and was just looking for some reasurrance that I was really still desirable to men.  In that timeframe, I met L, probably for coffee and dessert or something.  We had hockey in common and I just remember him being nice and friendly with an offbeat and awesome sense of humor.

We went out on a couple dates and talked on the phone a few times (this is the olden days before texting became so commonplace) and somewhere in all of this we somehow realized we were better off as friends rather than dating.  I’m giggling right now, because if he happens to read this at some point I’m sure he will let me know if my memory of all of this is correct or not.

Let’s just say 2005 was a hell of a year.  A lot of Life happened and it was intense.  My grandfather passed away in early February, a month short of his 94th birthday.  13 days later my niece was born.  My Dad retired.  I was growing restless at my job – a company I had worked at for over 6 years at that time and I really loved it – but my new Director and I were butting heads quite a bit.

And in the spring of that year, I went through a very dark season in my life.  There was legal drama involved in it too.  I am not going to delve into that in here, but just know it was a very bad time for me and given I am an expert at beating myself up, combine that quirk with dark drama and I just felt very lost.  I felt like my world was turned sideways or upside down…like my reality had just snapped, shifted and toppled over.

I felt lost but not alone, thank goodness. L was there for me through it all.  An amazing friend and confidant he was for me.  I confided in probably only my uber close friends circle and my family about what I was going through.  L listened and helped keep me laughing when I needed to and gave me advice.  He helped me with a few projects around the townhouse here and just was a great shoulder to lean on.  And in the funny, small world we live in, it turns out another (female) friend of his has a beach house not far from where my family has had one for 3 generations.  The 3 of us even went down there together one weekend.  Can’t help but laugh at the Threes Company-ish thing it was, but it was great. 

Now somewhere in all of this, L and I started up a mini episode of Friends with Benefits.  Ummmm…yeah.  Don’t judge, people.  Yeah, whenever I hear about people getting into dealios like that I used to judge and think I’d NEVER do that.  But definitely no regrets…and he and I later talked about it and agreed we would not cross that line any longer.  And we didn’t.

As my dark drama was finishing up that fall, I met another guy online and it got pretty serious pretty quickly.  L and I shared our dating stories all the time, and he was genuinely happy for me when this one started taking off.  And I was very open about my friendship with L with my new boyfriend.  Nothing to hide.  

But he would have nothing of it.  He didn’t want me to be around L and didn’t want to meet him or anything.  Nope.  And I got grilled with ten billion questions about him too and the nature of our friendship.  Now, side note here – as I’ve shared this recently with a few close friends – friends I’ve met since that era who never knew L or my boyfriend then – it’s amazing the wide variety of opinions that come out.  Some friends say well, you should have run the other way when your boyfriend got controlling and possessive like that early on.  Others say yeah, I can totally see why he wouldn’t want you having a close guy friend still in your life as you were focusing on a new relationship. It’s all water under the bridge now.  But I tell you, I’d never been in a situation like that before and I haven’t since.  

L gradually faded from my life.  I’d made the decision to focus on my new relationship.  He and I may have gotten into a couple of spats while this ‘transition’ was happening too.  Again, fuzzy and mushy memories.

When I walked away from that boyfriend in spring of 2007, I kept moving forward and never reached out to L.  I had great memories of our friendship and time together but never made any effort to try to track him down.  Sometimes people are in our lives for a short while to make a difference, help us and then move on, and I chalked him up to being one of those.

And…life moved onward.

So.  2 days after I discovered those emails in my Facebook inbox last week I was on my way into Ballard to meet L for dinner.  My God, had it really been six years?  It was like no time had passed.  I cannot tell you how great it was to just see an old friend and pick up right where we’d left off.  Definitely no hard feelings or regrets.  Just hours of talking and catching up.  And a brief interlude between restaurants to walk his friend’s dog – the one with the beach house near my folks’.  Even seeing that dog again brought another wave of great memories whooshing back.  Wow.

What a wonderful end of year surprise!  Oh, and he and I are Facebook friends now, of course.  He says, “hey, let’s try staying friends this time, OK?”  

I think that’s a GREAT idea.