Tag Archives: Life

Between now and close of business…

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I was all set to sit down tonight and hammer out this week’s three-pronged edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week. Then, sadly, I was met with the realization that it’s only Wednesday. Only. Effing. Wednesday. I guess it only feels like each day this week is managing to distort time so that it feels like a week unto itself.

It’s one of those weeks where I put some real analytical horsepower into whether I should just sell it all, load a few bags in the truck, and start driving, how far I could drive before I needed to stop, and what I’d do whenever I got there. I like the roof I’ve got over my head too much to ever let that be more than a passing thought, but still the thought was there. I don’t really know what that’s supposed to mean, but it’s a happier thought that it probably should be.

Some weeks are better than others. I suppose that’s equally true of days and even years, too. For whatever reason, this one has decided to be a real whore, though. I’ve been cautioned against wishing my life away, but I’d be ok with this next few days passing on with all possible speed as I’ve accepted that no good is going to come between now and close of business on Friday.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Date night. Ever been on a date where you spend the entire time waiting for a polite interval to pass so you can extract yourself from what was clearly one of the more serious mistakes you’ve made in months without seeming like a total ass? Because I have. It’s the kind of experience that makes me a) appreciate the quiet companionship of a good dog; b) regret missing the first half of Maryland Farm and Harvest on public television; and c) wish I hadn’t worried about seeming like an ass and saved the cost of the drinks for better purpose – like setting the cash aflame or throwing it directly into the Elk River. Every single time I leave the house I’m just that little bit more sure that I should do it as little as humanly possible.

2. Leaving the country. For my entire adult life I’ve heard people bitch and complain and definitively assure the world around them that “if that happens I’ll leave the country.” If your love of country is made of such delicate stuff, then I urge you to go now, pack a bag, and enjoy your trip. I’m comfortable telling you that it is entirely possible to love your country without loving its leaders – or even most of the people in it. At any given time half the country is going to viscerally loath the person we elect in November. That’s the nature of the politics we’ve made for ourselves. People who would never dare speak a civil word of President Bush are the same ones who immediate condemn even the slightest criticism of President Obama. Likewise, those who long ago supported President Bush turn almost the exact tired arguments against President Obama. There’s plenty enough reasons to dislike all of these people without falling back into a trap where the world can only exist in black and white – or where the only acceptable outcomes are total victory or taking your ball and going (to a new) home. We should be smarter than that. America is my country – it’s yours too – even when she’s being a bit bi-polar, but if it’s all too much for you to bear, I urge you to go ahead and run off to join the foreign legion at the first available opportunity. Perhaps your exit can help free up some space for those with a thicker skin.

3. Raise. After a pay freeze that lasted for about a quarter of my career, it’s safe to say I was underwhelmed with the prospect of the whopping 1% raise we received this year. The actual cash value, after taxes, fees, and insurance premiums, works out to a staggering $55.30 a month or something like $.32 an hour. I get to keep a whole 47.3% of this new found windfall. I’ll try not to spend it all in one place, but if I go anywhere other than the Dollar Tree that goal could prove seriously difficult to achieve.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Other duties as assigned. I can do my job – the heavy analytical lifting – or I can do the other duties as assigned – issuing keys, setting up new employees with laptops, filing, hole punching, and flipping slides. However, I lack the gift of being in two places at once so you’re going to have to pick between those so I know what you actually want me to spend time tending. I’m good either way, but choose one and you’ll get a seriously good analyst, close the other and you have a spectacularly overpriced secretary. The choice is utterly yours.

2. Being other than on time. Although I’ve been doing it nearly every working day since January 2003, people always seem surprised when I shutdown and head for the doors on time. You may work for love. You may work for pride. You may even work to give your short time on this rock a sense of purpose. I’m a simpler animal. I work for money because I know my time isn’t free or limitless. Think of it what you will, but you can always be assured that when I’m “on,” you’ll get the best product I can manage, but I will be equally dedicated to preserving my personal time at almost any cost.

3. Free stuff. My news feeds and the media channels have been filled with talk of everyone who wants “free” stuff these last few days. They want a $15/hour paycheck guarantee for entry-level unskilled labor – essentially a request for “free” money since their economic activity doesn’t command such price in the marketplace already. They want “free” higher education. They want “free” healthcare. They want “free” housing and “free” food and maybe even a “free” phone. I may be a poor simple hillbilly from Western Maryland, but it strikes me that what the most recent round of protestors really mean is they want the stuff and they want other people to pay the bill. Precious little in life comes for “free.” Someone, somewhere, has to pick up the check. It’s not presently the popular thing to say, but in my mind being a grown ass adult mostly means being able to make your own way in the world, paying your bills, and being a responsible and productive member of society… or maybe I missed a memo somewhere. In that case, where’s my free shit?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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I’m starting to wonder if perhaps I’ve reached the end of having interesting things to say. These posts get harder and harder to finish. In truth they get harder and harder to start too. For a guy who generally likes to use his words, that’s something of a problem.

Fact is, you’d probably be surprised by the sheer amount of energy that goes into dreaming up a fresh new post five times a week, trying to be at least marginally entertaining (or at least informative), and do it before my eyes go hopelessly crossed from too much staring at a monitor over the course of a typical weekday. Add in the mostly undeniable fact that I’ve been mentally and intellectual bankrupt by the time I back up the driveway these last few weeks and you’ve got a healthy part of the recipe for really bad writing… or at least really forced writing. Those two things don’t always arrive together, but they’re often found as two sides of the same coin.

I take great solace in the fact that the shitshow at the center of my current state of mental decrepitude will be at an end by this time next week. At which time I’m quite confident I’ll “lay me down and bleed a while, and then rise up to fight again.” Until then, I’m almost certain to remain nearly unable to string two reasonably coherent sentences together or really make a decent point of any kind.

And that, friends, is What Annoys Jeff this Week.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Bikers. Not the ones on motorcycles. The ones who put on brightly colored spandex and take their peddle bikes for a ride at 6:30 AM. On a narrow, winding country road. When the rest of us are trying to get to work and do something productive with our day. Yeah. Those guys are a real pain in the ass. Sure, technically they’re legally entitled to use the road, but really if your vehicle of choice can’t manage to make at least the posted speed limit I think your decision to do so is suspect at best. Someone driving their car uphill at six miles an hour would be considered a hazard to traffic, I don’t have any earthly idea why peddle pushers doing exactly that aren’t lumped into the same category.

2. The week. I can’t remember the last week that has left me so utterly tired as it draws towards its conclusion. Suddenly everything is busy. Quitting time sneaks up on me at work, catching me unaware – that almost never happens. The nights at home stream away like we were dealing with minutes instead of hours. Despite all the motion, there isn’t feel like there’s all that much to show for it. Maybe that’s the real source of frustration. I don’t mind being bone tired when I know what I’m getting for the trouble, but when there’s no apparent reason, well, that’s just obnoxious.

3. Presidential politics. Here it is, more than a year before the next president is elected and the two hardest charging candidates are an avowed socialist and Donald Trump. Do I even need to explain why this might be considered annoying in some circles? It’s also why I try not to pay much attention to what’s going on this early in primary season… But Sanders and Trump. Sweet lord, this can’t be real life can it?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Everything being bad for you. Sunscreen is bad for you. Sun burns are bad for you. GMO crops feed the world, but they’ll make your kid grow a tail. Egg whites are ok. Egg yellows steal your soul or some such foolishness. As much as I appreciate living in an age of seemingly limitless information, I need to break down one cold, simple truth: We’re all going to die. Some will die young. Some will die old. It’s been that way forever and there’s no current way around it. Everything is bad for you. Everything in the world is trying to make you sick and speed you to your grave… As much as I appreciate people who honestly want to live a healthy lifestyle I just don’t have the mental energy to worry about whether the tomatoes at the Amish market was raised without pesticides or antibiotics in a free range, organic environment. Maybe it should concern me more, but it really, really doesn’t.

2. Delmarva Power. Yes I know I can save money on “peak savings” days by turning off my air conditioner between the hours of 2PM and 8PM when demand is highest. No, I’m not going to do that, though. Your job is to produce and distribute power to satisfy demand – yes even on the hot days – so no I won’t be sweating my ass off in my own home on the next 97 degree day so you can avoid lighting off the last few boilers or skip buying energy from a 3rd party producer. I’ll keep doing my job so I can pay the bills, you go ahead and do yours so we don’t unexpectedly plunge back into the 1870s.

3. Manual signature required. We’re in the year AD 2015. It defies imagination that there is still a situation where I would have to print something out, sign it with a pen, scan it, and then send it back to someone in order for something to be “official.” It’s even more fanciful when we decide to send the same document around for electronic signature “so we have both on file.” Two exact copies of the same document. One signed by pen and then sent back electronically, the other signed by ID card and then sent back electronically… both then printed out and stuffed into a manila folder to be deposited in a file drawer and then not to see the light of day for potentially a decade or more. The fact that this is still how we do things is, sadly, not at all a cause for surprise.

The route to my salvation…

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Four years ago at this time I was sitting in a very empty house wondering if I had lost my mind for accepting a demotion and dragging all my worldly possessions a third of the way across the country to start a job with an outfit I didn’t know anything about. Anyone who was following along back in 2011 knows I wasn’t quite so much running towards this new life as I was running away from the one in Memphis that seemed to implode at every turn. I was following that most basic of animal instincts: Home = Safety. Now of course I was never in any real physical danger, but mentally I knew my position was untenable. Stay put and I was going to slowly (or not so slowly) come unglued.

Interstate 40 to I-81 to 70 was the route to my salvation. It was the route home. With every mile West Tennessee dropped behind me the more like myself I felt. The last four years have had their own set of issues, of course, but none of them have ever felt existential in the way they were before. I was correcting my Great Mistake and my psyche knew it.

Sitting here now, in a different house, looking out at the last of the day’s sun streaming through the towering oaks and maples, brightening the stark white mountain laurel blooms, I think that listless, wandering part of life is finally behind me. Maybe I haven’t found enlightenment, but finding a sense of place seem to be just as important.

Living the dream…

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Picture it. Appalachia. 1984. If you asked the average five or six year old in that time and place what he or she wanted to be when grown, the answers you’d hear would probably be something like fireman, cop, nurse, baseball player, a teacher, or vet. My answer was pretty much always that I wanted to be a senator when I grew up. Even from a young age I had a sense that high office was pretty damned good work if you could get it.

Today, by contrast, I wouldn’t want to be a senator for 10 times the salary. I’m not sure I could spend the day dealing with sycophants and lobbyists, the right wing crackpots like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, or left wing ideologues like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t know that any amount of senatorial decorum could stop me from carrying out my deep desire to heave the whole lot of them into the Potomac. At least now I know what I don’t want to do.

What I do want to do – what I’d consider my dream job today – is a little harder to pin down. I know I’d want to write, but not all day every day. I’d like to have an unlimited amount of time to sit on a sunny porch in the morning and drink good coffee. I’d like to walk through the woods, ride 4-wheelers, and shoot guns. I’d like to really take the time to learn how to brew beer and distill whiskey.

As far as I can tell, my dream job is essentially being a PowerBall jackpot winner and having the financial freedom to pursue whatever happens to interest me in the moment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m compensated well for the time I spend in the office, but it doesn’t take too many days of playing “Who Has the Key to the Mysterious Locked Equipment Room” or “1001 Ways to Make Your PowerPoint Better” to make a guy wonder if there’s something more out there.

I’m not Thoreau and this place certainly isn’t Walden, but it keeps me off the streets. That’s probably as much as a reasonable person could want… but I’ve never claimed to be the model of reasonableness. So the answer to the “dream job” question really is, “it depends.” It depends on the day and hour you ask. For me it’s always been something of a moving target.

This is the second of three answers “By Request.” Thanks, Chrissie!

A better place…

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I don’t think I’ve ever really understood people who don’t like dogs. I understand people are allergic and that makes dogs somewhat problematic for them, but the ones who just downright don’t enjoy the company of a dog are an utter mystery to me. The one thing I don’t think these non-dog people fully understand is just how much individual personality these creatures have. I’m always a little surprised when I hear comments that “dogs do this” or “This breed behaves like that.” While of course there are certain shared characteristic of all dogs and other characteristics shared by a specific breed, like the stock market, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

What I’ve most recently been struck with is just how different my two are from one another. They’re the same basic age, have had the same basic life experiences, but there are decided differences that I’m not sure can be attributed to their type. Winston is my cat. He wants attention purely on his terms and otherwise is happy to find a comfy spot, preferably somewhere in the sun, and keep an eye on everything from a distance. Maggie, by contrast is my needful thing. While I’m getting ready for the day she is never more than three steps from me. Every morning – and I mean every single morning – when I sit down to pull on my shoes, she bounds back onto the bed and tucks herself under my left arm insisting on a few minutes of chin rubs and belly scratches before heading outside. It’s my absolute favorite part of the day and as much a part of my morning routine as the first cup of coffee. Winston on the other hand doesn’t seem to be interested in much else in the morning than getting outside, having breakfast, and then putting himself back to bed. Like I said, basically a cat.

For their differences I wouldn’t want either of them to be any different – and I certainly wouldn’t want them to be the same. If anything, I’d like to see the folks who don’t like dogs act a little more like the critters they try to avoid. I’m not going to offer them belly rubs, but I still think it would make the world a better place.

Research…

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There’s always a fine line when a project starts between wanting to just do the work quietly and wanting to blog about every step along the way. In the interest of not giving away the store before it’s even written, I’ll try to keep my discussion points fairly general in terms of the next product in the jeffreytharp.com pipeline. Suffice to say it’s not going to be quite like any of my previous efforts.

I haven’t set down to a writing effort yet that didn’t start off with research… and that’s where the lion’s share of my self-imposed writing time is allocated at the moment. I’m doing my best to spend an hour a day sourcing background information in the hope that once I have a stack of notes, I’ll actually be ready to sit down and put words on the page.

What I supposed you need to know now is there is a fresh work in progress. What I hope you’re going to see at the end of this trail is a deeply personnel (and intensely sarcastic) look at my relationship with life, work, and social media. It may not be of interest to anyone. It may not sell a single copy. But from the preliminary research I’ve done so far, I’m wholly fascinated by the ground this effort will end up covering.