Alecto's Ophelia

Alecto's Excutive Summary - For Russ

"Let's face it, I'm tired!"

NaNo finished last night. I even managed to, um, wrap it up, more or less. It ends with Kate driving back into the driveway at the end of a twelve year day only the car doesn't smell like feet anymore and she stands in the driveway looking into the forest... and you'll just have to wait until I publish the book(bwahahahha) Book? What book? There's no book.  I'll go back and look in a week.

My friend Russ over at R a d h o l e did what I would call an executive summary on himself. Russ is pretty cool and I love going to his site, he often makes my day. So Russ was asking who and where I was and I realized that while I'd been introduced to Russ through Amy's NaBloWriMo site in October he might not actually have a clue who I was so instead of answering in email I'll put it here:

Alecto's Executive Summary (hold the snarkiness until it's over)

I am a forty-three year old professional mother of three. That sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? That's because I have a very schizophrenic relationship with my self the creative programming junkie and myself the mother. Myself the creative programming junkie is very important to me. Myself the mother is a given. Sorry, ladies, but that's a fact. I've had to work harder to be taken seriously in the work environment than I have in motherhood. Sad, but true. And whether you share my values or not, understand that to me, the me that is outside of mother is just as important as the me who delivered those squishy bundles 21, 16 and 7 years ago. Yeah, I have a 21 year old son. How cool is that? I also have a 16 year old daughter and that's cool too right up until it's not. The 7 year old saves my sanity.

In writing the story of Kate during November I had to come nose to nose with some very painful pieces of my past. So here it is. I am a corporate fast track executive washout. I made it seven years in a technology corporation on the fast track to SVP of a major profit center and then who knows what else when I fell so hard from grace that I could not bear to go back in for another round. It's not that I did bad, it's that I lost my stomach for it. That embarrasses me more than I can tell you. If I was a man I would be shamed into oblivion for not picking up and going on. As a woman I have been given a buy and this is what shames me more than anything. I hang my head but know the truth.

So where was I? 43 year old mother of three, divorced twice, married three times, I might be the bravest person I know. Or most stupid, jury's still out. I receive no alimony and no child support from the father of my first two. The father of my third is a bit better and I got smarter. I am hard core mother, that's a fact. I am an application programmer and business analyst. I look at numbers and tell you, more from my gut than not, what a particular market is doing. For me it's in paper and printing at the moment but I'm pretty good at it. I work with databases and system architecture. I am the person you call when it all goes to hell. I don't have the answers but I'm the one who will work it out because I believe the buck stops in my lap, even when it doesn't. This is a not an attribute.

I care more about the food my children eat than the state of my databases. This causes daily angst as I try to wrap up in time to get home and feed them something organic and appropriate before they need to go to bed. The S on my chest is for Sucker and I'm finally OK with that.

I like to write, a lot. I recently wrote a 50,000 word book in 27 days. I am nuts.

I paint, mostly in watercolors but when I was younger in acrylics all over my bedroom walls. My mother was very good to me. I grew up with horses, sort of. From the time I was twelve years old I leased a pony or a horse so I could ride. I did the family laundry and a whole lot of other things to support this habit. It was never for free. I was very good, good enough to do things but I didn't care, so I hacked instead and was happier that way. I had a farm with horses during my first marriage. The horses have all gone back to my mother in Ohio, I'm OK with that.

I would like to have chickens in my backyard again. I might just do that. Even though it's going to piss off my neighbors so bad I won't be able to stand it.

I read a lot, almost anything except chick lit and romance, can't stomach the stuff. I like Mark Helprin and Stephen King. My favorite book is Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. It's about magic, and cloudbanks the structural integrity of bridges and New York City before and after the turn of the century.

I live in a part of the country that is unbelievably privileged. I worked very fucking hard to get here. I am a high school drop out. I was raped on the floor of my living room at 17. The evidence of my case was hosed by the over zealous detectives, he is still out there. My parents emotionally abandoned me at 17 and then completely at 18. I cleaned houses to put myself through college. It was not so easy. I had a baby and a husband too, that part was OK. I am privileged but I have a really, really hard time acknowledging that. I am angry and that embarrasses me. 

I love music. I don't listen to nearly enough since I split with husband number two, who has a real knack for picking up the esoteric and eclectic. Lately I listen to almost nothing but what's over on Madeline's site or what's on WFUV, which is basically public radio.

OK, that's not exactly an executive summary, is it? I'm babbling. But there you go, that's me, precariously balanced and doing my damn best to have it all.

(p.s. I'm also a happy person. Because I want to be and that is all.)

(p.p.s. I just wrote 1,100 words like it was nothing. Damn. Look what happened? Maybe I can do this after all)

None of this is going to make any sense at all

NaNo stats - 42,010 and I pretty much want Kate dead but can't see a way to kill her off without being accused of gratuitous violence. Does writer rage count? Kate will have to live through at least 8,000 more words and then maybe I'll lock her in a closet and forget for awhile.

I think a lot of the pain was in writing about events that occurred while trying to tell another kind of story all together. My brother accused me of writing a posthumous journal, as it were, but that's about as far from the truth as I could get, a journal would have been simple reporting and I could have given you 50,000 reporting words in two weeks or less.

I'm telling a story about a young woman in her early thirties who walks out the door one day, pretty much worry free short of working out how to pay her rent and turns into something else entirely by way of life simply happening. I used a good chunk of my life to build the context but wrote a story I wasn't particularly familiar with. And it hurt, a lot, because I had to do some pretty serious soul searching in the interest of honest introspection. Maybe that's journalism but it sure didn't feel like it.

I don't know where I'm going with this, I've run out of coherent brain cells, can you tell?

So, new subject. I was reading the Style section of the New York Times in bed this morning and was struck upside the head. I refer to the Style section as the women's sport section because it contains the wedding announcements. NoMans likes these a lot, he likes to analyze who is in and why. The Style section is also an advertisement for conspicuous consumption. I don't even register it anymore but I know it's there. Well, this week the front page article was on the Green Grinch, or something like that. The overall theme was that we give up giving all together. No presents, no Christmas cards, no nothing but traded services. All this for a page and a half surrounded by advertisements for ten carat diamond rings and $600 sandals and fur, fur, fur (I got Nothin' against fur but I'm not sure a new couple of coats a year make a lot of sense however you slice it off the rodent).

It got me thinking. I don't ever ask for or receive a pair of Jimmy Choo Shoes for Christmas. I'd like to just to see the look on NoMan's face if I actually did but I don't because the wanting doesn't occur to me. What I really want is a twelve quart stock pot so that I can make bigger soups and I want a better camera because the old one is getting close to death and technology's come a long way in a couple of years. So do I tell NoMans not to buy the stock pot and I'll do without? Or do I buy the stock pot the next time it's on sale? Have we gone too far? Is this what it looks like when the pendulum finally swings the other way? I am scratching my head but that's OK too.

Licking the Paint off the Hood

I wrote 6,000 words today. I wrote that many words because I haven't written a NaNo word since, um, erm, Wednesday afternoon and then I only wrote about 400 of them. During NaNo there is no excuse for distraction, you write when you say you'll write no matter what or you pay the price on the back end. I paid it today. No problem except now I officially hate my story. I hate it so much that I'd print out all 75 pages and burn them in the driveway and then delete every back up I've got except for one thing - IT'S A RACE!!!! So I don't quit, that's the way of it. By the way, Ridgewalker hit his 50,000 sometime this week. I'm unbearably proud of him and you should be too. It took a lot to keep going and he did it muse or no muse.

Anyway, that's not what I came here to write about at the end of a 6,000 word day. I came here to write about buying a car. A week before NoMans lost the truck he said he wanted a new car. He said it in one of those slightly whiny petulant voices we use in the sanctity of our bedrooms with a spouse who loves and understands us catching the emotional fallout. Wanting a new car was a metaphor but he put it out there. And then I had that dream and then we were truckless and then, well, and then we were faced with these choices.

For starters, we need either all wheel or four wheel drive or we need to not drive in the snow. It's that simple where we live. We have family in the hills and we live in a very hilly snow belt and that's the way of it. Secondly, unless it's an econobox I don't believe in buying new vehicles, you loose way too much equity when you drive off the lot. I do, by the way, truly believe in the econobox, you can make those buggers go hundreds of thousands of miles if you treat them right and don't let anybody ram you up the butt at a traffic light. And lastly, I did not want another truck. It's not that I didn't love the truck, I adored the truck. It's that the truck got horrendous gas mileage and it was getting worse as it aged.

We looked at hybrids but I'm still not sold. Electricity is still energy and until somebody proves to me that it's actually more efficient overall, I'm not coughing up another 25% of the purchase price to drive one. We googled and researched and read and digested and I looked at my husband and said the word. Subaru. He crawled under the bed and refused to come out.

Now listen, sometimes you've got to let a guy have his stuff. God knows he lets me have more than my share of stuff but the man simply did not want to drive a Subaru. I have nothing against Subarus, but he does. So we researched some more and I came up with a very surprising solution. A solution so stunning it left me reeling because I have something against labels - they piss me off for multiple reasons. The BMW X3 off lease, dealer certified and cleaned up, sells for less than most truck replacements and gets significantly better gas mileage. I think this is so because it doesn't have a lot of cachet. It's too small, it looks like a glorified station wagon, it doesn't roar, it doesn't tower over anything but a VW Bug. It does, however, have tremendous cabin capacity for it's size. Not a lot of storage but we travel light and we do own a Thule box.

So yesterday we went to Ridgefield European Motors and we test drove one. That's the place to test drive, the roads are wide and open and the traffic is minimal. Then we looked at the sticker price and we left. The cute little sales guy just wasn't up to the selling and NoMans comes from South Jersey; apparently he needs a fight before he feels good. We came home, I made bagels and in the mean time talked the man off his ledge. He wanted to go to Bridgeport but I wasn't interested in a large dealer lot; I don't know enough about the car to fight my way through the bullshit. We researched some more and called Greenwich. Now, my experience with buying cars in Greenwich has altered somewhat over the years. It used to be a genteel kind of transaction but has reduced itself to biting, clawing, scratching sleaze. I cannot stand it. Tell me your best price and I will either give you money or I will not. If you stick me in a room with a finance guy who wants to do unspeakable things to my nether regions I will  promptly feed him his tongue. None of us will be happy with the results.

So with some trepidation we went to Greenwich BMW to see the, ah hem, 'certified pre-own veeehicals' gasp giggle choke. We really did. We met Ernie and Ernie was currently busy with an irritable pregnant couple scraping about over an actual BMW station wagon (it was cute as hell too). Ernie made a copy of NoMan's license and sent us out on our own. I've never seen anything like it. Ernie put us in a six speed standard transmission in a state where 95% of the drivers have never seen a stick shift and let us leave the lot. Damn, they must have some killer insurance. We drove through traffic and then took it out on the highway and opened it up. The little beastie performed brilliantly. We brought it back and sat with Ernie and our internet printouts of the current nationwide fair market value, in, um, er, Greenwich, Connecticut where you might as well mark it all up forty percent and be done with it. I was prepared to call my mother in Ohio and have her hunt us down a bargain but NoMans did it. He did it with sulking petulance. It got so bad I actually kicked him under the table. What clinched the deal was simply my attempt to save Ernie from NoMans. I suggested it might be time to go home. Ernie met us half way and NoMans was damn near ecstatic. I was mortified. We went home alternately happy and marginally embarrassed. All night long NoMans dreamed of falling off a cliff.

In the morning we got up and headed off to therapy. We played a game with Little Girl and her shrink and talked about our feelings. I did nothing bad and everybody left in one piece. We drove to Greenwich to get the car. We pulled into the dealership and parked. We got out of the car. We went in the building. We, Cletus and I, left NoMans to deal with the paperwork and went outside. There we did stand in front of something called a BMW M3 Coupe and there I did stand, doing everything in my power not to lick the paint off the hood. It looked like this:

Oh how I do so lust. Oh how I made a complete ass of myself nearly throwing my body prostate across the hood with only Cletus to catch me by my belt loops and avoid accidentally owning it by imprinting the shape of my body into it's metal. Oh how my husband saw me and nearly ditched the reasonable vehicle in exchange for the two seated high performance vehicle that he knows perfectly well he'd have to pry my cold dead body from just to get it out of the drivers seat.

Oh how hard it was to drive off the lot in the rental vehicle and go home until I could get a grip on myself. I'm still twitching. I'm no longer frothing at the mouth but can you feel it too? Can you look at that thing and NOT want to lick the paint off the hood? I wanted to open the hood and snort up the engine. Maybe someday I might. A girl can dream.

Kate Speaks - Day 18

Nano words - 30,135. Strangely, I am finding it much harder to write during the weekend. Not sure what that's all about but I definitely make more headway during the structured and already over packed week.

Kate Speaks ---

As the year moved into summer, Gretchen’s lunacy rose to new heights and exaggerations and most of the department hid in their offices whenever possible. In July another ten percent of the department was eliminated, most of it coming from Kate’s group. The San Francisco training center was shut down with the two problem trainers eliminated and the remainder sent to work from home or from the Sunnyvale satellite office. All pretenses at pulling the team together and leading to a glorious finish was dropped like a bowl of slugs into a garbage disposal.

Human Resources launched an official investigation following an anonymous complaint from one of Gretchen’s direct reports. No one knew for sure who said what or what exactly was communicated to Gretchen but it was not good. Maybe The Yap knew but he wasn’t talking. One night Gretchen took The Yap, Kate and Elliott to the local watering hole and they sat in a line at the small bar slurping up spirits and attempting to maintain some level of dignity. The Yap directed the conversation to the current state of Gretchen’s well being and described, as vaguely as possible, the meeting between Gretchen and human resources relating to her management style and a complaint lodged by a direct report.

Kate’s lungs, liver and spleen collapsed, her eyeballs exploded covering the small bar in vitreous gobs and drooling chunks. Her sinuses flared and swelled and her eardrums gave birth to ten thousand wasps. The soles of her feet were on fire and her blouse instantly soaked front and back. Luckily for Kate, everybody was drunk and since her spine stayed straight, the bar was dark and The Yap simultaneously let out an enormous brain clearing sneeze the vitreous fluids were associated with the contents of his nasal passages. Kate took a deep breath and hoped nobody could smell her, the stench of fear instantly recognizable to any hopped up lizard brain within twenty yards. Since all four were equally well versed in the various scents of fear it passed unremarked.

Kate speaks, mostly day 14

Nano - 24,104 and I'm not done for the night either but last night when I didn't post until I was done I found that I was incapable of making the posting process occur. So there you have it, a word count and an excerpt:

Meanwhile back at the Gretchen ranch, accumulated crap was coming to a slow boil, the crust of discontent and neglect breaking up on the surface and sinking back into the mix like a mild stimulant or small death. Everything that made Kate likeable or even tolerable to those not so inclined to fall under her ether had nearly vanished. She was angry, bitter and wired six ways to hell every single day. The small filter she’d worked at was stripped away from her mouth allowing everything she thought or felt to tumble roughshod into the world. People bled in her presence whether she meant them to or not. Gretchen wasn’t much better.

No one died and the car is fine.

NaNo Stats: so far tonight I am at 16,387 and have 1,950 to go before I can hang it up for the night. Yup, Alecto is behind (I'm OK with that, I'll catch up). However, I do need to note that Ridgewalker is at 25,000 the last time I looked! How cool is that? The man is on fire.  I can't wait to read the final results (even if he did kill me off early) There will be a short excerpt after I tell about Cletus and Psycho-mommy today.

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Today I put Cletus Marie behind the wheel of a 2003 Mazda6, 5 speed transmission on a deserted gravel parking lot in the woods. She has only once ever been behind the wheel of a moving vehicle; it was an aging automatic and nearly seatless minivan my mother uses to transport bulldogs and such to dog shows and she drove it around the circle of the paddock one time before my mother recalled her two previous experiences with adolescent drivers and made her stop so that she could get out and vomit between her legs.

I set Cletus up, I did. I had her depress the clutch, put it in first, start the engine and then take her foot off the clutch.  I didn't tell her anything else and the car did what you'd expect it to, it bucked and stalled. What a look that child gave me, but she understood. When she started again she took off at a reasonable speed and without a hitch. It was stunning. As we neared the turn I suggested she depress the clutch as an aid until she understood the turn and she made that corner like butter. Around and around the gravel circle we went until I suggested she might want to introduce herself to second gear. What a look that child gave me!

Eventually Cletus managed to upshift and downshift between first and second, come to a complete stop without stalling and avoid the grassy areas in the parking area.  She got the thing into reverse and backed up the entire length of the parking lot in a straight line. She came nowhere near hitting anything at any point during her thirty minutes behind the wheel .  My blood pressure remained absolutely stable. It was almost as if she'd medicated my tea before we left the house. She did take one corner on two wheels and I started calling her Mario but she appeared to be in control of the vehicle at all times.  Baby smiled. A lot.

I had her drive up toward the main road and onto pavement which she pronounced nifty.  She came to a stop without stalling, noted that the car was damn near out of gas, turned off the engine, leaving it in first, set the parking brake and handed me the keys.  I drove her home.

When we pulled onto our circle I asked if she'd like to take it around once. She did want to and so I pulled into our driveway, turned the car around. I'm not ready to have my light post knocked over again. Not yet, at any rate.

Before she even got behind the wheel she had attended three driver's education classes, passed the test for her permit, watched her brother completely wreck multiple vehicles and be taken to court once for rear-ending a man in traffic while he played with his contacts. She grew up with a father who makes most road rage look tame. We live in a town that puts so much emphasis on drunk driving and drug use that they have one day in school every year where they stage mock deaths and selected students don death masks, remain silent for the day and attend their own funerals. Before she got behind the wheel she got the accountability lecture from her mother which was prefaced with "The only appropriate response to what I'm about to tell you, other than questions, is 'OK'. Do you understand me completely?"

So when she sat poised at the edge of the driveway in first gear, ready to turn onto our circle the statement "there will be children and other vehicles around every blind corner and hill' landed squarely between her eyes". She was terrified and drove brilliantly between 15 and 25 miles per hour. She did not stall on a hill (we haven't even covered that little doozy yet), she did not drive over any curbs, she did not hit any mailboxes and no cars or pedestrians appeared. Until we got to the bottom of the hill and she stopped at the first of two stop signs. She stalled the car.

A youngish blond woman in a black SUV with it's own zip code pulled up behind us and honked. She honked her horn in a residential neighborhood and Psycho-mommy Got. Out. Of. The. Car.

Getting out of your vehicle when you have been honked at is probably one of the most overtly aggressive acts you will ever witness in this part of the country. In some cases, you can reasonably assume it will be accompanied by a fire arm or a baseball bat. I should have stopped there. I did not. I proceeded to shut my door, come around the passenger side and yell at the top of my voice.  I'm sure she didn't hear a word I yelled behind those bullet proof glass windows but she read the body language. The body language said, I am coming straight through your window and I am going to eat your heart while it still beats and you watch. I'm quite certain that's what she heard. She also heard, go around idiot, student driver and so she did. Very, very slowly and carefully. Two more vehicles came down the hill and we motioned from within the car for them to go around. They did.

When the coast was clear, Cletus put the car in gear, stalled it two more times, and then took off grinding the gears only a little. She stalled at the next stop sign, made it up the hill and pulled into our driveway narrowly missing our neighbor's mailbox. She parked to the left of the truck as instructed. At an angle.

Over all Cletus and I did very well today. No one died and the car is fine.

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To give Joe credit, he exercised his rights to the letter. He eliminated all three of the designated trainers in his group post haste and according to the guidelines.  He then packed the personal contents of his office and exited to the parking lot. During the one hundred and eighteen minutes that he remained in the building he managed to exude a stench of malice and rancor so thick it grayed the air. Surviving trainers, writers, developers, support staff and managers fashioned gas masks and eye covers out of a discarded roll of cheesecloth fortuitously located in a supply closet. Multiple personnel rushed for the centrally located bathrooms and voided conspicuously and often publicly. Facilities were contacted by multiple mid-tier managers with requests that the attic fan be turned on and left on until further notice. Directors and Senior Directors huddled in corner offices and the VPs barricaded themselves in their suites. By end of day the air had cleared and ten percent of the staff had vanished into the ether.  Parking spaces became available within twenty yards of the building. Kate came out of her office, red eyed and guilty, and walked the halls in search of the living.

Kate Speaks - Day 7

Nano words - 11,749

Kate also had the opportunity to get cozy again with Butch. In the good old days, when Beth and Kate were still starring writers, Kate shared an office with Butch.  Butch wrote standard classroom documentation which was the stuff that Kate and Beth so gloriously bastardized and edited and chopped up and regurgitated into mostly mediocre custom hack jobs but occasionally awesome strokes of genius; either way, immensely profitable. Butch was old enough and seasoned enough to take Kate as she was. He admired her openly and silently cursed the flaying of his very carefully crafted technical prose. It was no secret that custom doc held standard doc in the utmost and highest contempt. Standard doc sucked it up and mostly tolerated the sexy upstarts. After all, standard doc was a cost center and custom doc was a very profitable whore. Even if she was pretty, she was still a whore and it was still his baby she was wearing across her perky little tits.

Kate Speaks - Day 6

10,045 Nano Words.

In Miami Gretchen gathered Larry, Butch and Kate together in the bar to celebrate. Kate had a wine spritzer and a cigarette and asked “what are we celebrating?” Larry and Butch smiled knowing smiles. Kate suddenly wanted a shot of tequila and a whole PACK of smokes. “What have you done?!” she asked them collectively. Meanwhile thinking, ‘what in God’s name have you done and what am I going to have to contend with now?’ It seems that Gretchen had procured the three of them, collectively, promotions to Director.

Director was a big deal at this company. Director meant leadership of multiple business units and budgetary control of both revenue and expense lines. None of these three had more than a single department. Larry and Kate were clearly front line managers of single departments and did indeed have budget responsibilities, but they didn’t sign off on it. Butch was a sales guy.  He was a very pretty sales guy and good at sucking Gretchen’s butt, but that’s what sales guys do, they suck the appropriate butt. This did not necessarily make them leadership material and it surely did not make them Directors. Suddenly, in the bar off the lobby of the Fontainebleau, Kate, Larry and Butch were Directors. Larry and Butch raised their collusive glasses and toasted with Gretchen. Kate sat there holding her spritzer and thought, what the hell has been going on these last few months over there in the other building while I was tripling my business? That question, in multiple forms, ricocheted off the inside of Kate’s brain for the next two years.

Two weeks later Kate packed up her sun filled office in the middle of the training department and moved to the forth floor of the executive building into the little corner office Gretchen vacated for the VP suite.  Life changes, sometimes in chunks and without warning and often the best we can do is step left and choose.

Kate Speaks - Day five

Here is a longer excerpt. And let me tell you, it ain't even SLIGHTLY edited. God my head hurts. I think I'm in the middle of a five day, once in every seven years, migraine and I'd just as soon take the hose than not at this point.  But I made my quota! Word count 8468.

Kate has never had to deal with subterfuge or outright guile as it pertains to herself directly. In short, no one has ever tried to kill her. She’s got a good spidey sense though, and she knows that something is not right, she just can’t corner it. There are data points after the missed conference, none of them all that alarming on their own.  In retrospect she thinks she might have paid a little more attention to the reports back from other line managers about Geoffrey’s exuberance at the booth.  She chalks it up to Geoffrey loving the stage. At some point in time Geoffrey misbehaves and Kate fires off an email that contains a colloquialism suggesting that one remove one’s head from one’s anal cavity sooner rather than later. It’s all part of the Kate and Geoffrey interplay. Except now it’s not. She receives a reply very unlike Geoffrey. He professes hurt, shock and outrage at her words.  He has also copied human resources. Kate’s head reels. This is not her Geoffrey in the very next office.  Her Geoffrey would have barged around the corner doing his best Linda Austin routine and demanded that she let him off the hook.

Kate sits stunned at her desk and thinks. OK, this is it for sure, the guy just took a shot at your jugular. This is what Gavin was talking about.  This is what happens in this world and you can make one of two choices.  This is it, this is your nexus. You can either grovel and make nice and hope that does it while your career and choices and life bubble down the drain and he steps into your skin or you can go to battle because this surely was an attempt on your life. In the process she is heart broken. Kate loves Geoffrey. Geoffrey loves Kate. Oh fuck, oh man, oh no, oh why? Oh crap. OK, fine. Kate picks up the phone and calls Gretchen.  She explains all of it. Gretchen knows exactly what she’s witnessing; baby corporate gladiators having their first death match. Kate wants to barf her tuna wrap with too much mustard into the garbage. Gretchen wants the hand played.

Kate will play the hand. She never has a moment of doubt, just a sickness in her gut and an extreme distaste for the drama. Kate is also aware that Gretchen thinks the jury is still out.  This pisses Kate off for a lot of reasons starting with the demise of Beth; shouldn’t that have been enough?  Hell no, apparently.  It will always be a testosterone battle and we will always be proving our youth and vigor and our willingness to fight. This is the nature of man and communities and leadership since the dawn of time. This is the way it is.

In the end the drama was spectacular. Kate is privately so embarrassed she can’t speak of it. Publicly Kate is a WARRIOR and when this is over, ain’t nobody going to question Kate without thought. In the end there are meetings with human resources and management discussions and Gretchen respects Kate’s decision to eliminate Geoffrey. Human resources recognizes this as well and the dance is danced. It must be done.  A performance improvement plan is created. Kate has fantasies that he will go quiet into that dark night same as George even though she knows better.

Geoffrey cracks under pressure one day and throws a chair at another project manager. Kate is in the waiting room at the obstetrician’s office waiting for her monthly fetus check. Her human resource contact calls her THERE, not on her cell phone but THERE because it is so extreme. The police have been called.  Kate walks out of her appointment and goes back to the office where she is met in the parking lot by Gretchen and Walter. Kate is shaking so badly she cannot enter the building.  They get into Gretchen’s car and drive back to nearly the exact same location as the missed baby appointment and have a lunch that Kate can barely get past her lips.

There is one final meeting between Kate, Kate’s human resources contact, the senior human resources VP and Geoffrey during which Geoffrey accuses Kate of ‘Gas Lighting’ him and Kate just blinks in his general direction. Her legs shake like Diane Keaton’s in the movie Baby Boom.  But like Diane’s, they are under the table and the final hand of death blow poker is played to the finish.

Years later Geoffrey dropped dead of a heart attack in his bathroom while a car service waited in his driveway to whisk him away to another job. At the funeral, which Kate had the good sense not to attend; Geoffrey’s lover asked one of the project managers if Kate was sorry now. Kate was always sorry but Kate is sorrier that Geoffrey’s lover didn’t know enough to afford him the respect of a Warrior’s death. Kate wished him off to Valhalla instead and misses his sorry ass presence in the world to this day.

Kate Speaks - day four

Word count - 6672 - what a migraine I wrote through tonight! Thanks for the pep talk, RW, it worked and I can go to sleep righteous, or something like that.

Pregnancy changes a girl, alters her moods, perceptions and desires.  It makes us paranoid, reflective and neurotic; it changes everything whether we like it or not.

(that's an exerpt. If I was actually pregnant again I'd be throwing myself out a window, or something like that)