fairness

On my way to meet my friend for lunch on Tuesday, as I rushed my face off because I had totally spaced and the only thing that got me away from my computer was her phone call at 12:15, asking me where I was, and did she have the wrong day? 

As an aside can I just say right here and now that I can’t believe I’ve turned into THAT girl—the one who forgets about plans because she’s chasing a dangling participle around a particular paragraph, or worse yet—she gets sucked into a FaceTime vortex that morphs time and spits her out somewhere inappropriate. And late.
Lord. Have. Mercy!

Anywaaaaaaaaayyyyyy…
I was traversing a crowded parking lot when I observed with my own two eyes, something so perverse it filled me with rage.

I saw two millennial men, strolling to their car(s) eating ice cream cones! On a random Tuesday! In broad daylight! 

It wasn’t National Ice Cream Day (I, of all peole would have known) so I had trouble wrapping my brain around what I’d just witnessed. 
Here is just a snippet of my internal dialogue —aka—food rage (maybe you can relate):

Me: Huh. Must be nice. Look at them, they probably think by walking to their car they’re working off the calories.
Men.
I’d have to walk to Nebraska and back just to justify the sugar cone. 
I wonder who’s idea that was? Did one guy say ”Gee, let’s get an ice-cream cone,” and the other guy said “okay” without any argument? Without reciting all of the reasons why that was a bad idea? What are they, nine?
Women don’t do shit like that! We insist we’re full when in reality we’d trade our first-born child for an ice cream cone. Everyone knows women don’t do spontaneous dessert! We have to have an excuse! Like a bad break-up or being on vacation. And even then we feign disinterest.
Me: “Oh, look, a new ice cream shop. Should we go check it out?”
Everybody’s Fucking friend Sheila: “Oh, I don’t know, ice cream, really, we just had lunch.”
Me: “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking,” I say, wishing a car would jump the curb right then and put us both out of our misery.
But not these guys! They’re clearly making no excuses!
And it’s obscene the way they’re flaunting it! Strolling like that! Like they’re in some fucking piazza in Tuscany! They have some nerve!!

As much as I wanted to, I could not become the better version of myself. Things started to snowball downhill to a bad place. I wanted to trip them both for acting so carefree, sending their cones splatting onto the pavement. Nobody needs to see that shit out in the open! All it does is makes us feel bad about ourselves! Or better yet, I wanted to accidentally stick my face, tongue extended, into their cones, you know, for quality control purposes…That’s when I almost got hit by a car which pulled me out of my food rage because that’s what happens when a woman of a certain age spirals out of control on account of ice cream. 

Question: Can anyone relate to this or is it just me who’s carrying this deeply buried, unexpressed dessert rage?

Carry on,
xox 

Is this creepy? It feels a little creepy to me. 

Oldie but goodie…and it feels even more apropos in these crazy-ass times. Maybe because the antics we are seeing played out daily in our political discourse are extremely familiar if you grew up with a family or you know, interacted with anybody who didn’t necessarily have your best interests at heart. 

Stay strong out there!

xox

Judgment alert! There may be some judgment leveled here. Hey, I’m no saint.

How come the crazy ones never lose any sleep?
Is it their complete lack of a conscience that causes them to appear so slick, smug and impossibly fresh?

Not a hair out-of-place.
Barely a hint of the devil that lies within.

While those of us that have the misfortune to find ourselves in their orbit are sleep deprived, disheveled, walking disasters.

The fact that people who operate outside the constructs of polite society can close their eyes at night and sleep the uninterrupted, peaceful sleep of the just.

That will always bother me.

Why is that?
How can it be?

Case in point: The night before an arbitration with the attorneys for DWP to discuss the fact that their one-hundred-year-old water main had burst and turned my store into an aquarium, I tossed and turned until the sheets were knotted up around my head and neck, fashioned into some kind of an unattractive turban/noose—and I ground my teeth down to tiny, baby, Chicklets. This left me the next morning gumming my toast, with a foggy brain and pronounced sheet marks on my face that didn’t fade until after lunch.

Once at the courthouse, the team of He, She and It, who represented the water company, entered the room laughing. Uproariously.
Like Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon had driven carpool.

I felt at a distinct disadvantage. Out of the loop, like the funniest joke ever told was completely lost on me. Was that their plan?

Upon closer inspection, they were meticulously coiffed and groomed, cool as the proverbial cucumbers, while I was permanently wrinkled, drenched in flop sweat, and frantically struggling to remove a poppy-seed from between my two front teeth with my tongue.

Note to self: Don’t accept half a poppy-seed bagel when you’re out of coffee. And you forgot your water.
You’re going to need something to rinse your mouth with when the Big Guns enter the room.

If I’d had more sleep I would have remembered that.

They all seemed so nice, so genuinely happy to meet me; that is until the bell rang and we went to our respective corners. Then the gloves came off and the crazy started to show.

They gaslighted. They made shit up. Their entire alibi was jack-crap.
With graphs, documents and flow charts they made a pretty compelling case. Listen, if you show me a flow chart, I’ll believe almost anything. Somehow they double teamed my attorney and me, and in the most well crafted, legal babbley, thinly veiled insulting way, they pinned the whole thing on me! They made the accidental, midnight break of their water main seem like MY fault!

It was 2009. Business was slow, debt was high, banks were failing left and right and I needed out—only I was too stupid to commit arson.

I know, crazy, right? But when we broke for lunch even I wanted to throw the book at me.

The picture they painted of me was that of a sad-sack, loser of a businesswoman, which was exactly how I felt at the time.
I think my lawyer drank the Kool-Aid too—they were that convincing. She wouldn’t make eye contact, skulking into the corner on her phone, and then disappearing for the entire lunch break.

But you wanna know what trumps sleep deprivation? Rage. That’s what.
It also instantly removes sheet marks from your face.

It also over-rides all victim-hood.

Crazy and Rage are curious dance partners and they should never be left alone in a room together.
Let me tell you why. Crazy is so put together, so charming and unflappable that she never breaks a sweat. And that bitch looooooves a victim, she gets off on them—they get her panties wet.

Rage is no victim, he’s a gangster. He’s raw, he’s greasy and he talks real dirty. He wears a wife beater t-shirt and too much Aramis; and he has only one thing in his crosshairs—Crazy.

Crazy gets high on Rage and it quickly becomes a street-brawl.

But let me tell you something, Rage is better than Sad, which is where I’d pitched my tent for eighteen months. Some say you can get caught in anger and never feel despair. The opposite had been true for me.
And sad victimhood? Well, that’s like chum in the water to Crazy.

So Rage felt better. It felt…empowering. If sadness felt like quick-sand, Rage, like solid ground.

It got my attention and cleared my vision, so I could finally see the truth and it kicked Sad’s ass to the curb.

I locked myself in a public bathroom stall and kick-boxed the toilet-tissue dispenser for nearly an hour before taking a walk around the building, coming to my senses, and finding my courage.

I knew my opponent. I was very familiar with Crazy.
You see, I had met her as a teenager in the form of my father’s second wife. I had witnessed her devour her victims whole and I was smart enough to remember that Rage threw her into a sort of drunken frenzy.

I also remembered that there is no reasoning with Crazy, and nothing can get to her.  Nothing touches her heart. There is no sympathy, empathy or compassion and absolutely nothing is open for discussion.

She acts as your judge, jury, and executioner.

And the more they sense is at stake, the faster and louder the accusations come. Their aim is to keep you off-balance, on the ropes.

Remember, Crazy is rested, ready and strong after her peaceful night’s sleep. How is that fair?
Because Crazy get a buzz off this shit and she doesn’t care about anything other than winning.

I sure wasn’t feeling sad anymore, Rage had taken over and hatched a plan but I knew better than to let it enter that arbitration room. I could hear the team of Crazy, Crazier, and Craziest, whopping it up inside so I waited outside until I saw my attorney exit the elevator.

“You handle this, I’m leaving” I announced. I had her by the arm and was walking her back down a long hallway of endless doors, out of earshot of the hyenas.

“What?” she looked surprised.

“You don’t need me here. They can smell my fear and sadness, and well, their offer is beyond ridiculous. See what happens when they can’t focus on me. When they have to deal with you and only the facts.” We had walked in a circle making our way back toward the bank of elevators.

She reached into her bag for paper and a pen. “Give me the number you’ll you settle at,” she asked. She seemed relieved like the day could be salvaged. Like it could go back to a language she understood—the law.

I wrote a figure down. She looked and nodded in agreement, folding the paper into a small square and tucking into her suit-jacket pocket. Just then the elevator chimed, opening right on cue. People were packed in like sardines, but as I stepped inside she grabbed my purse strap, turning me around. “This could end today,” she said with a hint of a smile, letting go of my purse as the doors closed.

A hairy mystery hand reached around me and pushed the button for LOBBY, getting me the hell out of that DWP building. I know it was Rage. I could smell his Aramis. But I made sure I left him behind, losing him in the crowd.

*I got the call a couple of hours later that they’d settled on the figure I’d written down. “Piece of cake” I remember her saying in a distracted voice, she was already on to her next case.

I feel safe in saying that we all slept well that night.

Maybe some of you guys needed to hear this,
Carry on,
xox

*And don’t get your panties in a bunch if I anthropomorphize emotions. We all know crazy is not female and rage is not male, so calm the fuck down. 

If I can say one thing with conviction, it is that those ink cartridges for your printer ALWAYS run out when you need them the most.

Case in point: The other morning while I was at the gym (trying to find my abs), my husband was in his office busily preparing invoices on his computer for the five or six different jobs he’s working on right now.

We like invoices. Invoices are check magnets. Checks allow us to eat. And we love to eat, so there you go.

Anyhow, when I returned he was circling the printer, cursing a blue streak. It seems his printer had run out of black ink and subsequently had refused to print the invoices. “I thought I had another black cartridge in here”, he grumbled through gritted teeth while rummaging through a cabinet like a bear searching for a baloney sandwich. Slamming the door shut, he slumped in his chair. “Great. Now I can’t print these today.”

What? No money—No food. I could barely hear him over the growling of my stomach.

You’ve gotta know a thing about my husband. He is very old school. Not only does he email his invoices, he prints up hard copies for his files along with copies for his clients to hold in their hot little hands. He has found that these same hands are much more likely to write checks when they’ve just held one of his carefully prepared, itemized invoices. Nobody gives a shit when you email them a bill so basically, paper wins over technology every time.

This stopped me in my tracks. “What? I mean, what about the color cartridge? You could print them in blue or purple?”

He shot me a look that straightened even my pubic hair.

“Listen”, I said, remaining calm. “You aren’t dressed yet, but I am, I’ll make a quick run to Staples and get you a black cartridge. I’ll be back before you’re out of the shower.”

After presenting a few lame protests, he agreed, so off I went.

As I closed the door I heard him offer to give me some cash. “I’ve got it!” I replied, sprinting to the car. I remembered having about $50 in my wallet, I mean, how much could it be?

Not fifty dollars I can tell you that! Not sixty-dollars either. That fucker was SEVENTY-DOLLARS!
PLUS TAX!

“Whyyyyy?” I whined, waving the cartridge at the boy stocking the printer paper. He just shook his head, avoiding direct eye-contact.

“Why is this so expensive?” I hissed, interrogating the check-out girl. “It’s a tablespoon of ink in three dollars of plastic!”Without even looking at me she offered a rebate. A $2 rebate that takes eight weeks to take the two dollars off my SEVENTY DOLLAR printer ink purchase.

“People pay this? This is extortion!” I yelled as the manager walked up. He seemed hardened to this argument. He had talking points. “You save when you order in bulk”, he said, motioning to alert the three-hundred-pound security guard. I knew that guy would understand my plight. We needed to invoice! We needed to eat!

“Ha!” I guffawed loudly, a little bit of spit landing on my chin.

Embarrassed, I mumbled under my breath while handing the cashier my debit card “Bulk? You’ve gotta be kidding me. A bulk order of this ink is equal to a car payment.” I grabbed my cartridge made of gold—and the receipt with the fucking rebate to fill out and mail in. I wasn’t giving them that extra $2 godammit!

“What a racket.” Were my parting words as I passed the bemused security guard. He nodded in agreement even though I’m relatively sure he had no idea what I was talking about.

This whole thing really pissed me off. Our immediate need for this overpriced product stripped away any and all negotiation power leaving me with no options. My husband needed to print invoices. Today.

I opened all the cars windows on the way home, hoping the cool, fresh air would change my mood. It was a beautiful morning. I had already accrued my ten thousand steps. The invoices would be printed and we would live to eat another day.

“Let it go, Janet,” I said to myself. “This is how they’re able to sell printers so cheap.” 

Then I started to think about the other NECESSITIES in our lives where they have us over a barrel.

Epipens came to mind. Raising their price 400% is just a crime. Plain and simple.

And Razor blades. Have you purchased a pack of razor blades lately? They’re so valuable people steal them. (Like saffron at the supermarket and Sudafed at the drug store.) You have to ask for them up at the register at Target.

Tell me why? They’re three, one-inch blades of steel, encased in fifty cents of plastic!

That got me thinking, maybe the razor blade price gouging started this beard phenomenon we’re experiencing. Maybe men just threw up their hands and said: “Fuck it!” I can eat or I can shave. (Everything comes down to eating with me.)

BTW: I was wondering who to blame. Not every man looks good in a beard you know.

So the moral of this story is: It’s the principal of the thing. Even if I can afford it, I don’t like being taken advantage of for no good reason.

I know I’m not alone here. Tell me what gets your blood boiling.

Carry on,
xox

Oh, Billy Bush.

I recently saw an interview with you on one of the morning shows.

You looked remorseful and you sounded truly humbled. And while my inner feminist still wants to punch you in the face for giggling like a hormonal adolescent at Trump and goading him into hugging that soap star, I have to admit that you took the brunt of this debacle.

You got fired while the other guy, the guy who uttered all the misogynist crap, he became the leader of the free world and that’s not fair. You have a conscience. You had to face your own teenage daughter asked you why you laughed because “It wasn’t funny, dad.”

I bet walking across hot coals was probably easier than living thru that moment.

Speaking of hot coals, I heard that you used this seven months off to self-reflect, do yoga and attend a Tony Robbins seminar. You told the interviewer how Tony had pointed you out in front of 9000 attendees and said, “One moment in your life does not define who you are.”

Wow. How incredibly profound is that? One shitty moment does not define a person.

Oh, Lord have mercy because I’ve had my share of “those moments.” But then again, who hasn’t?

I cringe when I think of all the times I laughed at inappropriate innuendo.
Or the times my big mouth said something thoughtless.
The judgmental, snarky remarks.
The clumsy responses; wanting to be funny or sound smart or be liked.

Uh oh, that’s more than one moment, isn’t it?
But wait, this is about you, Billy.

As outraged as I was last October I realize now that you were just trying to stay in someone’s good graces.
Someone who at the time was at the height of their fame, who was powerful and well-connected and lived to be a provocateur.

It takes guts to speak truth to power. We are witness to that every day with the same man and the high-powered people who surround him in Washington. What did we expect from a celebrity reporter?

I try to be a better person every damn day and I have to assume you do too, Billy.

My wish for you is that the public has a short memory and that they practice compassion where your next career move is concerned.

Listen, I don’t know if you’re taking suggestions but I think covering politics might be your next step. I’m not saying that you might have a score to settle, I’m just suggesting that after everything you’ve learned you could be the perfect person to speak some truth to this kind of abuse of power.

Carry on,
xox

Tony Robbins Quotes

This is a Flashback from a couple of years ago that I was telling a friend about just the other day. Her husband has to fly up to the Bay area in a couple of weeks for a mediation on a lawsuit that is one of the bat-shit craziest wastes of time you could ever imagine. I can SO relate and it’s easier for me to repost this than to tell them the story—and I figure maybe a few of you might need to read this too.
Big love to HT & CT.

Carry on,
xox

“Anger is just Sad’s bodyguard… and Shame’s too, I think.”

Someone tell me, how come the crazy ones never lose any sleep?
Is it their complete lack of a conscience that causes them to appear so slick, smug and impossibly fresh?

Not a hair out-of-place.
Barely a hint of the devil that lies within.

While those of us that possess a moral compass and have the misfortune to find ourselves in their orbit are sleep deprived, disheveled, walking disasters.

That will always bother me.

The fact that people who operate outside the constructs of polite society close their eyes at night and sleep the uninterrupted, peaceful sleep of the just.

Why is that?
How can it be?

The night before an arbitration with the attorneys for DWP to discuss the fact that their one-hundred-year-old water main had burst and turned my store into an aquarium; I tossed and turned until the sheets were knotted up around my head and neck, fashioned into an unattractive turban/noose—and I ground my teeth down to nubs. Which left me the next morning gumming my toast, with a foggy brain and pronounced sheet marks on my face that didn’t fade until after lunch.

The team of He, She and It, that represented the water company, entered the room that morning laughing.
Uproariously.
Like they’d all participated in a hilarious episode of Carpool Karaoke on their way to work.

I felt at a distinct disadvantage. Out of the loop, like the punchline to the funniest joke ever told was lost on me. Was that their plan?

They were meticulously coiffed and groomed, cool as the proverbial cucumbers, while I was drenched in flop sweat, permanently wrinkled and frantically struggling to remove a poppy-seed from between my two front teeth with my tongue.

Note to self: Don’t accept half a poppy-seed bagel when you’re out of coffee. And you forgot your water.
You’re going to need something to rinse your mouth with when the big guns enter the room.

If I’d had more sleep I would have remembered that.

They all seemed so nice, so genuinely happy to meet me; that is until the bell rang and we went to our respective corners. Then the gloves came off and the crazy started to show.

They made shit up. Their entire alibi was jack-crap.
With graphs, documents and flow charts. Listen, if you show me a flow chart, I’ll believe anything…almost.
Somehow they double teamed my attorney and me. In the most well crafted, legal babbly, thinly veiled insulting way, they pinned the whole thing on me.
ME!
They made the accidental, midnight break of their water main seem like MY fault.

Business was slow, debt was high, it was 2009, and I need out—only I was too stupid to commit arson.

Seems bat-shit crazy, right?

When we broke for lunch even I wanted to throw the book at me.
The picture they painted of me was that of a sad-sack, loser of a business woman. Which was exactly how I felt at the time. I think my lawyer drank the Kool-Aid too—they were that convincing. She wouldn’t make eye contact, skulking in the corner on her phone, and then disappearing for the entire lunch break.

But you wanna know what trumps sleep deprivation? Rage. That’s what.
It also instantly removes sheet marks from your face.

It also overrides all shame and victim-hood.

Crazy and Rage are curious dance partners and they should never be left alone in a room together.
Let me tell you why. Crazy is so put together, so charming, pretty, and unflappable. Crazy looooooves a victim, she gets off on them, they get her panties wet.

Rage is no victim, he’s a gangster. He’s raw, he’s greasy and he talks real dirty. He wears a wife beater t-shirt and too much Aramis; and he has only one thing in his crosshairs—Crazy.

Crazy gets high on Rage and it quickly becomes a street-brawl.

But Rage is better than Sad, which is where I’d pitched my tent for eighteen months. Some say you can get caught in anger and never feel despair. The opposite had been true for me.
Sad victimhood covered in shame is like chum in the water to Crazy.

So Rage felt better. It felt…empowering. Sadness felt like quick-sand—Rage, like solid ground.

It got my attention and cleared my vision, so I could finally see the truth and it kicked Sad’s ass to the curb.

I locked myself in a public bathroom stall kicking, screaming, and raging for nearly an hour before taking a walk around the building to help me come to my senses—and find my courage.

I knew my opponent. I was very familiar with Crazy.
You see, I had met her as a teenager in the form of my father’s second wife. I had witnessed her devouring her victims and I was smart enough to remember that Rage threw her into a sort of drunken feeding frenzy.

I also remembered that nothing can get to Crazy. Nothing touches their heart. There is no reasoning with Crazy. There is no sympathy, empathy or compassion and absolutely nothing is open for discussion.

They act as your judge, jury, and executioner.

And the more they sense is at stake; the faster and louder the accusations come. Their aim is to keep you off-balance, on the ropes.

Remember they are rested, ready and strong after their peaceful night’s sleep.

How is that fair?
Because they get a buzz off this shit and they don’t care about anything other than winning. So it’s not.

I sure wasn’t feeling sad anymore, Rage had hatched a plan but I knew better than to let it enter that room. I waited outside the double doors of the conference room until I saw my attorney exit the elevator. I could hear the team of Crazy, Crazier, and Craziest, whopping it up inside.

“You handle this, I’m leaving” I announced. I had her by the arm and was walking her back down a long hallway of endless doors, out of earshot of the hyenas.

“What?” she asked, looking surprised.

“You don’t need me here. They can smell my fear and sadness, and well, their offer is beyond ridiculous. See what happens when they can’t focus on me. When they have to deal with you and only the facts.”  We had walked in a circle making our way back toward the bank of elevators.

“Give me a number you’ll you settle at”, she asked as she reached into her bag for paper and a pen. She actually seemed relieved, like the day could be salvaged. Like it could go back to a language she understood—the law.

I wrote a figure down. She looked and nodded in agreement, folding the paper into a small square and tucking into her suit-jacket pocket.

The elevator chimed, opening right on cue. People were packed in like sardines, but as I stepped inside she grabbed my purse strap, making me turn around. “This could end today”, she said with a hint of a smile, letting me go as the doors slowly closed.

A hairy mystery hand reached around me and pushed the button for LOBBY, getting me the hell out of that DWP building. I know it was Rage. I could smell his Aramis. But I made sure I left him behind, losing him in the crowd.

*I got the call a couple of hours later that they’d settled on the figure I’d written down. “Piece of cake”, I remember her saying in a distracted voice; she was already on to her next case.

We all slept well that night.

I know some of you guys needed to hear this,
Carry on,
xox

I’ve been in a sort of pickle these past few days. Not quite a dilemma—I suppose you could call it a quandary.

Yeah, that’s it—I’ve been in a quandary as to how to handle all this hubbub around the two essays I wrote for The Huffington Post regarding my divorce—and the quandary is this: There are two sides to every story.

He said—she said.

Suddenly my side, which after over thirty years decided to show up in my rear view mirror and then be published not once, but in two different essays, with an interview today on Huffington Post Live, is starting to make me a tad uncomfortable.

With all the distance, and water under the bridge; the fact that both my ex and me have gone on to find love again and lead perfectly lovely lives; and the fact that we are…friendly—has helped me approach the telling of the story of our divorce and the subsequent years afterward with a light touch.
With humor and gratitude, unicorns and love letters.

Now here’s the rub. I’m not so sure he sees things that way.

I haven’t actually had a conversation with him about our divorce in over twenty years, and I have no intention of re-opening that subject with him now, that is not an easy topic for us and last we spoke I can guarantee you—there were no unicorns or love letters mentioned.

You see, back in 1984 I left the marriage and he was not happy about it.
He swears he never saw it coming which always makes me shake my head in disbelief (I’m doing it right now), so I’m sure his story would read more like this: Blindsided great guy (he really was) gets the heave-ho from totally ditzy, hopelessly romantic and seriously deluded first wife.

True or not, that is probably his take on a difficult and painful situation from his past—and the problem is —no one will ever hear about it.

Since my side(s) of the story have gotten more traction, I’ve been dialing down the social media blitz that comes with having your articles reach outside of your comfortable circle of friends and family. Strangers are reading it and weighing in and THAT feels weird somehow.

I know my ex peruses my personal Facebook page so I’ve left both articles off of it, hoping for the best.

That’s the thing. One person talking about their experience as half of a partnership, a union, a collaboration—or a relationship—is missing a very important element—the other side of the story.

Liz Gilbert wrote about her difficult and emotionally wrenching divorce in Eat,Pray,Love,and the world sympathized—which eventually compelled her ex-husband to write a book about HIS experience inside of the same situation.

The Oscar-nominated screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, wrote Heartburn in 1983. The book was inspired by the events of her break-up with her second husband, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, whom she discovered was having an affair with British politician Margaret Jay while Ephron was pregnant with their son Max. While it may seem as if he wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on in the court of public opinion, Bernstein did threaten legal action for how he was portrayed.

All I know you guys, is that I‘m not so sure I’d like to read about what any of my ex’s thought about our relationship on Facebook or in The Huffington Post.

Even if they were kind about it, (which I made sure to be), I’m certain I’d disagree with all, most, some of what they had to say.

It’s too late. The genie is out of the bottle.
I have a blog where I talk about all aspects of my life—from my perspective—no holds barred—hoping to share the common thread that runs between all of us, and I can’t start being worried about what someone will think about it now.

I get to have “my view of the facts” as a friend said to me today, but remember—true or not—completely accurate or not—everything you ever read is just one person’s View of the Facts.

I often forget that, falling under the assumption that it’s the whole story.

What do you guys think?

Carry on,
xox

Judgement alert! There may be some judgment leveled here. Hey, I’m no saint.

How come the crazy one’s never loose any sleep?
Is it their complete lack of a conscience that causes them to appear so slick, smug and impossibly fresh?

Not a hair out of place.
Barely a hint of the devil that lies within.

While those of us that have the misfortune to find ourselves in their orbit are sleep deprived, disheveled, walking disasters.

That will always bother me.

The fact that people who operate outside the constructs of polite society close their eyes at night and sleep the uninterrupted, peaceful sleep of the just.

Why is that?
How can it be?

The night before an arbitration with the attorneys for DWP to discuss the fact that their one hundred year old water main had burst and turned my store into an aquarium; I tossed and turned until the sheets were knotted up around my head and neck, fashioned into an unattractive turban/noose—and I ground my teeth down to nubs. Which left me the next morning gumming my toast, with a foggy brain and pronounced sheet marks on my face that didn’t fade until after lunch.

The team of He, She and It, that represented the water company, entered the room that morning laughing. Uproariously.
Like Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon had driven carpool. I felt at a distinct disadvantage. Out of the loop, like the funniest joke ever told was lost on me. Was that their plan?

They were meticulously coiffed and groomed, cool as the proverbial cucumbers, while I was drenched in flop sweat, permanently wrinkled and frantically struggling to remove a poppy-seed from between my two front teeth with my tongue.

Note to self: Don’t accept half a poppy-seed bagel when you’re out of coffee. And you forgot your water.
You’re going to need something to rinse your mouth with when the big guns enter the room.

If I’d had more sleep I would have remembered that.

They all seemed so nice, so genuinely happy to meet me; that is until the bell rang and we went to our respective corners. Then the gloves came off and the crazy started to show.

They made shit up. Their entire alibi was jack-crap.
With graphs, documents and flow charts. Listen, if you show me a flow chart, I’ll believe anything…almost.
Somehow they double teamed my attorney and me. In the most well crafted, legal babbly, thinly veiled insulting way, they pinned the whole thing on me. They made the accidental, midnight break of their trunk line water main seem like MY fault.

Business was slow, debt was high, it was 2009, and I need out—only I was too stupid to commit arson.

I know, crazy, right?

When we broke for lunch even I wanted to throw the book at me.
The picture they painted of me was that of a sad-sack, loser of a business woman. Which was exactly how I felt at the time.
I think my lawyer drank the Kool-Aid too—they were that convincing. She wouldn’t make eye contact, skulking in the corner on her phone, and then disappearing for the entire lunch break.

But you wanna know what trumps sleep deprivation? Rage. That’s what.
It also instantly removes sheet marks from your face.

It also over-rides all victim-hood.

Crazy and Rage are curious dance partners and they should never be left alone in a room together.
Let me tell you why. Crazy is so put together, so charming, pretty, and unflappable. Crazy looooooves a victim, she gets off on them, they get her panties wet.

Rage is no victim, he’s a gangster. He’s raw, he’s greasy and he talks real dirty. He wears a wife beater t-shirt and too much Aramis; and he has only one thing in his crosshairs—Crazy.

Crazy gets high on Rage and it quickly becomes a street-brawl.

But Rage is better than Sad, which is where I’d pitched my tent for eighteen months. Some say you can get caught in anger and never feel despair. The opposite had been true for me.
Sad victimhood. It’s like chum in the water to Crazy.

So Rage felt better. It felt…empowering. Sadness felt like quick-sand, Rage, like solid ground.

It got my attention and cleared my vision, so I could finally see the truth and it kicked Sad’s ass to the curb.

I locked myself in a public bathroom stall and raged for an hour before taking a walk around the building, coming to my senses, and finding my courage.

I knew my opponent. I was very familiar with Crazy.
You see, I had met her as a teenager in the form of my father’s second wife. I had witnessed her devour her victims and I was smart enough to remember that Rage threw her into a sort of drunken frenzy.

I also remembered that nothing can get to Crazy. Nothing touches their heart. There is no reasoning with Crazy. There is no sympathy, empathy or compassion and absolutely nothing is open for discussion.

They act as your judge, jury and executioner.

And the more they sense is at stake, the faster and louder the accusations come. Their aim is to keep you off-balance, on the ropes.

Remember they are rested, ready and strong after their peaceful nights sleep. How is that fair?
Because they get a buzz off this shit and they don’t care about anything other than winning.

I sure wasn’t feeling sad anymore, Rage had hatched a plan but I knew better than to let it enter that room. I waited outside the double doors of the conference room until I saw my attorney exit the elevator. I could hear the team of Crazy, Crazier and Craziest, whopping it up inside.

“You handle this, I’m leaving” I announced. I had her by the arm and was walking her back down a long hallway of endless doors, out of earshot of the hyenas.

“What?” she looked surprised.

“You don’t need me here. They can smell my fear and sadness, and well, their offer is beyond ridiculous. See what happens when they can’t focus on me. When they have to deal with you and only the facts.” We had walked in a circle making our way back toward the bank of elevators.

“Give me a number you’ll you settle at” she asked as she reached into her bag for paper and a pen. She seemed relieved, like the day could be salvaged. Like it could go back to a language she understood—the law.

I wrote a figure down. She looked and nodded in agreement, folding the paper into a small square and tucking into her suit-jacket pocket.

The elevator chimed, opening right on cue. People were packed like sardines, but as I stepped inside she grabbed my purse strap, making me turn around. “This could end today” she said with a hint of a smile, letting go as the doors closed.

A hairy mystery hand reached around me and pushed the button for LOBBY, getting me the hell out of that DWP building. I know it was Rage. I could smell his Aramis. But I made sure I left him behind, losing him in the crowd.

*I got the call a couple of hours later that they’d settled on the figure I’d written down. “Piece of cake” I remember her saying in a distracted voice, (yeah, once the chum had left the building), she was already on to her next case.

We all slept well that night.

I know some of you guys needed to hear this,
Carry on,
xox

Tit for tat – short for this for that. A fair exchange. Quid pro quo, Latin for something for something. A favor for a favor.

How do we feel about that inside of relationships?

I’ve always hated it, because it involves keeping score.
And while some people are brilliant at it, running a metal tally sheet – I suck at keeping score.

I remember being blindsided inside of relationships by brilliant score keepers who insisted that I had fallen behind in the favor department. Apparently not enough tits for all their tats.

“You drive! I’ve driven us around the last three weekends, do you realize how expensive gas is?”

“We always see the movies YOU want to see. Have I told you lately how much I hate science fiction? You OWE me!”

“It seems like it has been all about Janet lately, when is it ever going to be about me?” Ouch.

Some even got sexual depending on the fight. Actual tits for tat. Others were about family, garbage take-out, even food.
WTF?

All of those declarations caught me off guard. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize we were keeping score.”
I was sure that when I had signed the agreement after reading the very thick dating manual, that I must have missed the fact that everything was subject to become a line item on a debit sheet, and furthermore, I myself, had neglected to keep score.

DOH!

“You have me at a dis-advantage” I tried to plead my case, sure that I could come up with some outstanding infractions on their part – but I couldn’t – I just thought we were being a couple, doing nice things for each other – not making deals.

Someone told me this story the other day, about going to their therapist loaded down with resentment toward their spouse.
Eventually, after several months of couple’s therapy with her husband, the therapist confronted her and said: “You think you are giving gifts. But you are making deals.”

She was struck dumb. What?????
“A deal is when there is a mutual agreement, an expectation. A gift is given.”

She admitted that their therapist gave her a gift that has lasted a lifetime.

My husband tried ONCE to keep score, reminding me of something he did that he felt wasn’t “repaid”.
“We don’t tit for tat in this relationship,” I snapped, trying not to yell. “Speak up in the moment if you don’t like something, don’t keep score, it isn’t fair unless we both agree to do that – which I will NEVER agree to. Do something nice because you want to, because you love me, or don’t do it at all, and for Godsakes, don’t hold it against me! Some days I will be selfish, some days I’ll be freaking Mother Theresa, some days a warrior, other days needy, don’t take score – deal with it!” Okay, maybe I was yelling.

You see it’s been my experience that on occasion, relationships can feel lopsided. No one promised us equality. That word wasn’t in my vows.
But it’s also been proven to me that the scales do even out…eventually.

It may take a while, but the weekends alone with all the kids, the late nights at the hospital, the hard talks about money, and the times you agreed to sex when you were too tired to think, the Thanksgivings spent with horrible Bonnie and crazy Uncle Ned, summers at the Cape being eaten by mosquitos, early morning carpool, working two jobs to keep things afloat, numerous bad choices, mistakes and failures – they all come back around.

So don’t be so quick to keep score.

Give your love with no expectations – open-hearted, as a gift, and you know what? It will come back to you ten-fold. I promise.

Carry on,
xox