I really love my garden. I think plants are pretty amazing. I mean, take a couple of dried up corn kernals, put them into the dirt, add water. Voila, magically, a few weeks later there are wiast high or chin high rippled grass stalks adorning your formerly barren patch of dirt, seemingly out of nowhere. And in a few more weeks, they’re growing cobs of corn you can actually eat. Most plants require very little maintenance. The cucumbers and squash seem to thrive on little more than the rain and a few good thoughts I push in their direction. Why can’t life be more like that? Stand in the shower, think good thoughts about the job and the life that you want, and voila in a couple of weeks it shows up on your doorstep. Like it was sitting on the porch the whole time, just waiting for you.
I have read books that claim that this is the case. I have yet to see it really work, without some work and effort on your part.
A seed contains within itself everything it needs to grow and produce and be fruitful, minus some water and basic nutrients that are generally readily available. They’re programmed to grow.
I guess we’re supposed to be the same way. We have everything inside of us that we need to succeed. Right? Where is it that we start floundering? Plants don’t need money and big screen tvs, they don’t need friends, except the bees, they don’t need cool clothes and jobs. A raspberry knows it’s a raspberry. A pepper plant knows it’s a pepper plant and that hence it’s supposed to produce peppers. And it will, left entirely to it’s own devices. When we’re left to our own devices we seem to stagnate. We lack direction.
Water and good intentions alone don’t make us successful. Maybe they do for some people? I’ve heard it said that the right attitude can accomplish anything, that a positive outlook will bring success to you. Still it seems like the only thing humans are really programmed to so is want.

So I had my second sewing class this week. I’m paying $150 to basically teach myself to sew. The instructor is this older New Yorker woman with a prety heavy NY accent and dyed red hair blowdried out to about a 4 inch circumference around her head. She used to be a designer. She teaches all the sewing and design courses at the visual arts center. Which is a shame. I’m sure she’s a very nice person and a talented seamstress, she just can’t teach. She has the verbal ADD. I don’t think she finished a single sentence in the 2 and a half hour class. She’d say things like “ great, ok, so look at this fabric, I got his from a clearance when I was in New York – anyway- it was on sale – I haven’t made any – I was planning on making a - well – some kind – of – anyway – this is the type of fabric we’re gonna use for this proj – but be careful cause the thing you really don’t want to do is – oh look, this is the ruler I was telling you about before – I couldn’t find it but”

And I’m thinking, - wait! What is it that we really don’t want to do ? go back! Sometimes she goes off on tangents, sometimes about sewing, but since none of us in the class have any idea how to sew we never know what she’s talking about, sowe just sit there on our metal stools and stare at her, waiting for some kind of cue that she’s going to go back to something relevant that we need to know. This past week we got our fabric and started pinning and cutting our patterns. The girl across the table from my sister and I was looking sympathetic. Occassionally we would motuh to one another “do you know what she’s talking about?” … “No”. Eventually Clare and I decided to just start working on ours and figure out as we went. I guess there’s something to be said for learning to teach yourself. In the meantime after the teacher finished cutting out the first part of her own garment, another girl in the class who had bought a different pattern from everyone else, asked for her help and the instructor ended up spending the next hour figuring out the girl’s patter and helping her get it all setup. Talk about monopolization, Finally, it occurred to her to ask if anyone else had any questions. When Clare and I said that we sis, she went right back to what she was doing for aboutanother 15 minutes before responding. The rest of the class was trying to figure out how to lay out their material and get started, when there were only two tables for 9 people and the teacher and the monopoly girl were taking up one whole table. In the end for the 2.5 hour class Clare and I together managed to cut out half of one pattern. The teacher told us to get everything cut and pinned at home for next week. I’m not really sure what the point of the class is. I guess just the moral support from your peers, and the motivation of the $150 non-refundable, non-transferrable fee.

Venting

Paula, my friendly cubicle co-worker, is getting crazier by the day. She said herself just yesterday that she might be getting 'the dementia'. At least her epic three week long phone battle with Hawaiian Airlines over her incorrect frequent flyer miles seems to have been resolved, or at least given up on. So, now we've moved on to the hourly updates on her apparent menopause symptoms. Mainly she whines about them to Flo, who is a remarkably good sport about it. But she has to stand up and lean over the cubicle wall, hands on hips, and talk really really loudly, so that everyone around has to hear about her hot flashes, hunger pains, and sudden memory loss, amongst other things. She asks at least 5 times a day if there isn't some drugs the dcotor could give her. In fact, yesterday she spent a good 15 minutes on the phone with some clinic trying to convince them she was in real need of medication.

She's also been regaling me mercilessly with cat stories. I guess she plays hide and seek with the one cat, now that the other cat is dead. She also enjoys telling me stories of how she stereotypes people at her security check job at King's Dominion theme park. Although, she claims it's also largely her special 'sixth sense'.

Right now, she's making sure she isn't required to help the woman she's on the phone with, cause the woman is asking for info about a county park. She is very pleased to discover that it's not in her job brief that she has to help her or give her any info, even though it would be simple enough to do. This has freed her up to go back into a description of her sleep problems. It must be real tiring to be a hypochondriac.

Yesterday she poked her head up over the cubicle wall and asked very suspiciously if I had seen anyone poking around her desk when she wasn't there. Of course, I said no. On account of I haven't. Most people here wouldn't be caught dead in there. She asked if I was sure, because somehow her timesheet keeps disappearing from the folder she thinks she's been saving it to on the computer. This is the third time I've talked her thru how to find it and save it to the desktop.

I'm really not a judgemental, impatient person, like I'm sure this blog makes me look, but somedays having that incredibly loud, uneducated, red neck voice in my ear for 8 hours really starts to grate on my nerves. I don't even know what to say to most of it, just smile and nod and hope for an incoming call. I've honestly never seen someone work so hard at finding ways to not help people.

She's getting paranoid. She claims she's having memory loss, and she just can't handle dealing with people, and she's having hot flashes. When Flo suggested she try some natural herbal supplements she scoffed and said no way, she doesn't need to get cancer.

Oh, god. Now she's looking at me. Now she's popping over the cubicle wall to interrogate me about my lamaze class, and 'when is you gonna hae dis child.' I really wish I could tape some of the things she says and play them on here, just so you all could share in the experience.

One of these days she's going to be standing in the lunch room staring at you with those dull eyes and giant gums and suddenly sway forward and attack you with a plastic knife, and try really hard to do some damage while you just stand there and ask her what the hell she's doing. Just wait for it.

Pass the rolls, and the porn

I don’t remember how the conversation got started, but it was somewhere between passing the rolls and passing the omega-3 infused light margarine. Somehow the subject of soft core porn versus hard core porn was on the table. My mom felt that hard core porn wasn’t really attractive or a turn on. My brother-in-law to be, Anthony, felt that soft core porn was pointless. Tori, my little sister’s friend who’s been living with us for about a year, observed that this conversation would never happen in a million years at her family’s dinner table. My mom’s husband just laughed at the whole thing. It moved on from there to the ever interesting subject of whether or not all guys would universally give themselves oral sex if they were physically capable of doing so. Anthony felt that it would be kind of gross. Everybody else felt that guys will be guys, and they’d totally do it. This channeled us to a more general discussion of fellatio which even my younger sister, Clare, gave some input on.
It’s never a dull moment at our house.
For Anthony’s birthday yesterday we went out to the Olive Garden for dinner. It always amazes me how that restaurant is so big and always mostly full, even on a Monday night. Especially since I don’t think it’s all that good. My mom and her husband came, Clare and Anthony of course, my brother-in-law, Izzet, (my sister Jami is away at Yoga camp in Yogaville, VA), myself, and we even invited Randy (estranged boyfriend who now wants to settle down and be a family). It was one of those dinners where there are 3 or 4 conversations going on at once and never one unifying one that everyone is involved in. But inevitably someone isn’t being talked to. But it was alright. Poor Anthony even had to endure being sung at by a chorus of olive garden staff. I think we ate our weight in breadsticks.
After dinner Randy and I went to the mall to walk around (this is supposed to help bring on labor and get the baby in the right position). We walked at the mall because it was late, but also still really humid and about 90 out. We encountered an entire subculture of mall walkers. I wanted to ask one of the larger groups if we could join in with them. They were older and all kind of egg shaped, wearing brigth white sneakers, pumping their arms and rolling their hips, probably discussing retirement savings plans and golf carts. But they were pretty fast, I think they got a little irritated when they lapped us and had to try to get around us, walking at our leisurely pace – amateurs.
Randy and I made the usual small talk for a while. I know we have serious and unpleasant stuff to discuss, but neither of us is ever ready to be the one to broach the subject, so instead we talk about what’s going on in the family, and at work, and what good restaurants we’ve eaten at lately. Finally I broke the ice and said we should talk about the serious stuff. But that just led to some pouting on his part and some arguing. I came damn close to leaving his butt at the mall with the barracuda mall walkers.
It’s really hard to know if I’m doing the right thing. I can see how the people around me think that starting a relationship back up with him is a bad idea. He hasn’t shown a lot of compatibility with me in the past 2 years, and walking out on the whole pregnancy bit doesn’t score in the plus column either. And ultimately I think I may end up wanting someone I have a little more in common with, who can be the decision maker and who I can learn from, and they can learn from me and we make each other better, and more well rounded. But on the other hand, growing up in a broken home I can also see the value of providing a normal family life and the value of a partner who may not be perfect, cause no one is, but who is at least there and supportive. But there is a whole wide world out there.

Other than that I’ve just been working and gardening. We have serrano peppers and lemon cucumbers and bell peppers now. The tomatoes and tomatillos are starting to ripen, and the corn has tassles. We even have a couple baby watermelons. It’s very exciting. The two sunflowers that survived have reached epic proportions. The larger of the two is gargantuan, like Jack and the bean stalk. It’s taller than me, with leaves bigger than my head and a stalk about 3 inches in diameter. The runner beans are also very good producers, but the damned Japanese beetles are eating all the leaves.
Now that Clare’s friend Tori has actually been at the house for a length of time we’ve also been having rounds of late night card tournaments and cookie baking, which has been really fun.