Category Archives: Life

Post holiday meh…

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It’s officially the time of year when there’s really nothing to look forward to. I’ve burned off my mountain of annual leave and I’m sitting here looking at a calendar with way too many meetings and far too few days off marked up. There’s something bad for the soul about staring into the teeth of too many five-day work weeks in a row. Maybe it’s time to start plotting where I can sneak off to for spring break. Just because I finished off my undergrad degree the better part of two decades ago doesn’t mean I should go somewhere warm and enjoy the sights, right? Now that I think about it, it’s possible I have something to look forward to after all. Besides, Martin Luther King Day is coming up next week. That’s as good a reason for a long weekend as any.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Moment of Clarity…

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There are few moments in the year more disappointing than when you come back to work after new years and discover that for all the talk about new starts, peace, love, and good feelings, absolutely nothing has changed. Your work is piled just where you left it. The things that bothered you in the old year will be the things that bother you in the new one. None of the problems has been solved while you were away ignoring them.

Maybe vacations work for some people, but if you’re supposed to come back reenergized and more effective, I don’t think they work for me. Whatever restive effect my time off had on me has bled away within 20 or 30 minutes of getting to my desk and plowing through a week’s worth of email. So yeah, for me, it’s back to the grind just the same as if I’d never left at all.

All things considered, I’d have rather stayed home this morning. Then again, I also like getting paid, so here I am.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Back at it…

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You’d think taking a week off from writing would mean that I’d be bursting with things I need to get off my chest. I thought so too. Reality is a little less interesting. I managed to get sick two days after Christmas and since then the most productive think I’ve managed to do is a couple of loads of laundry this morning. Laying on the couch sucking down DayQuil and cough drops doesn’t tend to make for interesting stories and just complaining about being sick has pretty much been over done.

I guess my point here is that it’s a new year and while I’m not feeling 100% yet, I’m better than I wasI think it’s safe to assume that things will get back to normal around here soon. I’ll spare everyone the requisite year in review or year ahead predictions and just say that 2012 will be what it is, good and bad. Unless something changes, I plan on being right here to write about it as it happens.

I hope everyone reading this has enjoyed their New Year’s celebration with family and friends, because the break is almost over. Rest up, relax, and get your head in a good place, because it’s just about time to get back at it.

A Christmas Miracle…

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For every Christmas since I was old enough to buy my own presents for people I’ve been the guy who went on a mad dash on Christmas eve picking up gifts and dumping them in the lazy man’s wrapping paper – the oversized gift bag. I’ve improved a little over time since most things can now be delivered right to my door (thanks for that, Amazon). This year, though, is a high water mark. With a week to go before Christmas, I survived my final assault on the shops, actually wrapped everything with Christmas paper, and essentially have nothing left to do with five entire days left between me and the holiday.

That probably doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment to those of you who start their shopping in August, but for me it’s huge. It means that this year all I have to do on Christmas Eve is show up – which shouldn’t be too hard since I’ll get up early enough to be ahead of all the other lunatics trying to get from Point A to Point B. It also leaves me with an unusual amount of free time this week. It’s unusual, but I’m sure I’ll manage to find some random activity to occupy my attention… because, really, at this point anything is better than more shopping.

Lame…

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It’s good to start the weekend with a closet full of freshly laundered clothes. The fact that laundering those clothes is what I’ve done so far on my Friday night is pretty lame. It would possibly be forgivable if I were going to change into some of those cleaned clothes and go do something interesting, but what’s really going to happen is I’m going to hit the couch with my iPad and read until I can’t keep my eyes open. Then I’ll take the dogs out and go to bed. Probably around 10:00. Yeah. Lame. But I’ll bounce out of bed at 6:45 tomorrow morning feeling rested and reasonably well put together… Which in retrospect is probably also a cause for concern. Although since that’s sleeping in by almost two hours, maybe it’s not so bad, right? Right? *insert cricket chirps*

Boorish…

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I’m sure it was some touchy feely sociologist who first said that people only have the control over us that we allow them to have. That’s horseshit, of course. Some people have power over us because we were dumb enough to elect them and others because their block on the organizational chart is further towards the top of the page than ours. On the other hand, some people have power over us because the law says beating them to death with their own shoe is illegal and would result in us spending much of the next 20 years in prison.

Just slightly behind my abject fear of prison is the lesson drummed into my head as a child to be polite. Sadly, some people take a polite smile and nod as encouragement to continue doing whatever they’re doing while staying happily oblivious to the murderous glare you’re giving them at the same time. Eventually the thin veneer of civilization that separates us from the wild beasts is going to wear through just enough that any normal person can’t help but snap in response. Still, in the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder what it’s like going through life oblivious to the normally accepted social signs that your behavior is boorish and disliked. I half suspect it’s a bit like being the eternally happy, but not very bright family dog.

Reader’s remorse…

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Any serious reader will probably know what I’m talking about here. It’s that moment when you get to the end of a book or a series and realize that you’re going to miss the characters you’ve spent the last few days or weeks with. It doesn’t happen with every book you read, but some of them get inside your head and you devour a hundred pages in a sitting. Before you know it, you’ve read all there is to read. It leaves an inexplicable hole, because even though they only exist on paper – or as electrons in this case – you were invested in these characters; in how their stories turned out, or didn’t. However briefly, you shared extremely intimate moments with them (on the can or before going to sleep for example).

I’m not going to tell you what I’ve spent the last two weeks reading because that would call for the immediate and permanent revocation of my man card. Suffice to say, I’m casting around looking for a new fictitious family to occupy my free time. Thankfully there are a few movies that might help take the edge off my separation anxiety. They won’t be as good as the book, of course, but still it’s better than going cold turkey.

Sure, soon enough I’ll find a biography of Churchill or a tome on the Federalist period to capture my attention, but just now my sense of loss is too raw and bloody to even look seriously at another book. It would feel like I was cheating somehow. So yeah, there’s your unscheduled glimpse of the weirdness that goes on in my head when I don’t think anyone is paying attention.

Wasted Sunday…

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This hasn’t been the sunday I thought I was going to have. Mostly it involved dragging the computer down from the office (not all that hard since it’s a laptop) and spreading out the dozen odds and ends I’ve been putting off around the kitchen table and taking them on one after another. The good news is that I just shredded the last bit of paper and closed the last file. The bad news is that I’ve been sitting here in the kitchen hammering at the keyboard since almost 8:00 this morning. That’s pretty much the working definition of a wasted Sunday. Sure, it’s all stuff that needed done and I’d been putting some of it off for weeks now, but that doesn’t make looking at the tail end of the weekend any easier… Especially when you know you’re going to spend the next five days hammering away at a different keyboard. I’m glad it’s all done, I just wish I could have figured out a way to do it in half the time. You know when going down to the crawlspace to shut off the outside water spigots counts as a break, you’ve seriously misspent your day.

For the time being, I’ll take as much comfort as possible in knowing that getting this particular pile of stuff done now frees me up next weekend. The long break coming after the next two work weeks is definitely a high point. I’ll do my best to live in the moment, but for the record my head is already in Western MD complaining about how friggin’ cold it is up here.

Missing it…

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I really have two minds when I watch the news covering the snow that fell on Memphis this morning and the on my old stomping grounds in Western Maryland tonight. Part of me that would be perfectly happy sitting on a beach watching the palm trees sway 24/7/365 is appalled that it’s only a matter of time before real winter finds me here on the cusp of the Eastern Shore. The other part of me that’s still 15 years old gets immediately giddy at even the mention of an impending snow storm. That would also be the part of me that insists on staying up too late on nights when snow is forecast to start late out of misplaced confidence that I’ll have the next day off.

For the last five years the closest thing I did to preparation for winter weather was grope under the driver’s seat until I found my ice scraper. It occurs to me that this might me an appropriate time to pick up an actual snow shovel or something. At some point sooner rather than later, the moderating influence of the Bay isn’t going to be enough to keep old man winter off the doorstep. For now, though, I think I’ll just be happy with the rain.

Sunday is for soup…

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Some people are domestic by nature. They seem to have a knack for cooking, cleaning, and general homemaking. And I’m not talking just about the chicks, either. Me, on the other hand, I’m domestic by necessity; because I like to eat, wear clean clothes, and not have three inches of dust covering every flat surface in the house. That last part might be more a symptom of OCD that domesticity, but that’s not my point.

A few days ago I was informed that I had a lot of “kitchen stuff”… for a guy. I’m still not exactly sure how to take that, so I’ve decided that I’ll just take it as a compliment and move on. The fact is, I like good food and that has ment that I had to learn to cook. I suspect eating out every night only has a certain charm for people that haven’t had the experience of doing it. By the time a guy has reached tentatively into his mid 30s, I don’t think it should be surprising that he has a vegetable peeler and a couple of oven mits, right? Regardless, I decided it was better for the time being to keep the food processor, vast collection of spices, and collection of cook books and recipes to myself for the time being.

If I’m in a confessional mood, I’ll tell you that I actually enjoy cooking when I have time to really do it. Savory items are really my speciality. Comfort food, if you will. It’s rarely fancy, but more often than not it turns out to be somewhere between edible and pretty tasty. With enough effort over the weekend, I can usually make it all the way to Wednesday just on leftovers. So unlike many of my Y-chromosomed brethren this morning, I’m not preparing for an afternoon of football. I’m prepping to tend to a large stockpot of soup. The perk of soup is that it’s hard to ruin and easy to fix if you do screw it up… and it gets better after sitting for a day or two. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go give some of my abundant “kitchen stuff” a workout… and then stash it back in the dark recesses of the kitchen cabinets before all my secrets are revealed.